This week, the San Francisco School Board of Education voted 6 to 1 to proceed with a plan to rename 44 of the city's currently shuttered schools, wiping away notables like Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Paul Revere, Robert Louis Stevenson and even Dianne Feinstein, California's senior senator, for various forms of cooperation with white supremacy and patriarchy. After the vote, I spent some time reading the Google spreadsheet helpfully compiled by the renaming effort, which listed the justification for each erasure: for Washington, slave-owning; for Revere, helping to command a doomed Revolutionary War military operation on the Maine coast that nonetheless supposedly contributed to the "colonization" of the Penobscot tribe; for Stevenson, writing a "cringeworthy poem" that includes words like "Eskimo" and "Japanee." (It may not surprise you that some of these justifications, often pulled from Wikipedia, included significant errors of historical fact.) As interesting as the spreadsheet, in its way, was the displeased statement from San Francisco's mayor, London Breed. Though there was liberal opposition to the renaming project, the pressures of the mayor's position apparently made it impossible for her to argue straightforwardly that Abraham Lincoln still deserves to have a school named after him. Instead, her ire focused on the fact that the school board is busy renaming schools when it hasn't actually found a way to open them: "What I cannot understand is why the School Board is advancing a plan to have all these schools renamed by April, when there isn't a plan to have our kids back in the classroom by then." On one level, this objection is reasonable; on another, though, it misses what's been happening in America over the last year. It is precisely because the city's public school classrooms are closed, precisely because normal educational tasks and interactions have been suspended, that radical projects find themselves more easily and naturally fast-tracked. If there's anything we've learned about pandemic life, it's that suspense of ordinary life creates a vacuum that ideology rushes in to fill. For the last month, we've been focused on the particularly poisonous way that's happened on the American right: how the online drama of QAnon and its stepchild #StoptheSteal became powerful enough and immersive enough to help inspire a riot at the U.S. Capitol. Yes, QAnon predated the pandemic and Trump would have claimed voter fraud no matter what.