Book Banning, Teacher Snitches, and Election Police
Who says Republicans don’t have an agenda?
President Biden did just that during his press conference last week. Obviously frustrated at the complete refusal of Republicans to engage on policy matters, he said:
"One thing I haven't been able to do so far is get my Republican friends to get in the game at making things better in this country," Biden said.
"I did not anticipate that there would be such a stalwart effort to make sure that the most important thing was that President Biden didn't get anything done."
"Think about this. What are Republicans for? What are they for?"
The President is mostly correct when it comes to dealings on Capitol Hill. I’m glad he’s on to Newt Gingrich’s “kill, kill and be mean” legacy.
The timing couldn’t be better since the “Angry Little Attack Muffin” (hat tip to columnist Peggy Noonan for the nickname) is now floating the idea of jailing members of Congress involved in investigating January 6.
The action for Republicans who aren’t busy obstructing stuff is at the state level these days. Along with dubious ploys for attention, like making the Bible the official state book in Oklahoma, those Republican Governors and legislators have settled on three areas of policy as their claim to fame:
Banning books (or burning them if needed)
Purging teachers who fail to meet ideological standards
Creating armed law enforcement agencies to search for voter fraud.
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So-called grassroots advocacy groups, funded by the likes of the Koch family and prominent GOP donor Dick Uihlein, are carrying out campaigns to ban books from school and public libraries.
The groups have innocuous sounding names, like Moms for Liberty, Parents Defending Education, No Left Turn in Education, with leadership connections to right wing groups like Independent Women’s Forum, the Cato Institute, and the Federalist Society. Lawyers affiliated with the Liberty Justice Center and Pacific Legal Foundation have provided free legal representation for parents wishing to challenge school districts.
Parents Defending Education has a curated list of books it deems problematic on its website, all of which contain materials about race and gender. No Left Turn’s list of more than 60 books it deems inappropriate also includes books they’ve decided are anti-police.
Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, says her group documented 156 book challenges – an attempt to remove or restrict one or more books – in 2020. In the last three months of 2021 alone, the organization saw 330 book challenges.
Schools in Texas, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming have all removed books and other media in recent months in response to pressure from these groups.
Texas state representative Matt Krause sent a list of 850 books to school districts last fall, asking that they report how many copies they have of each title and how much had been spent on those books. Among the titles to be investigated were William Styron’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Middlesex.”
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Conservatives have taken to calling public schools “government schools,” implying that somehow the American tradition dating back two centuries is a bad thing.
Having rid those institutions of curricula they consider offensive, the next logical step is to defame the teachers one-by-one, since blanket efforts blaming unionization for education’s ills haven’t had much success. (And –gasp!--even charter schools are unionizing.)
In 2021 Republican state legislators succeeded in enacting ten bills restricting what teachers can say in their classrooms. And wait until you see what’s cooking for this year…
Here’s a snip from Judd Legum’s invaluable newsletter, Popular Information:
A new report by PEN America found that in the first three weeks of 2022 "71 bills have been introduced or prefiled in state legislatures across the country" to restrict the speech of teachers.
These bills were put together hastily and it shows. In Virginia, a Republican legislator introduced a bill requiring school boards to ensure students understand "the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass." (Lincoln actually debated Stephen Douglas, a very different person.) Other bills contain "contradictory language" or leave "important terms undefined." Nevertheless, 55% "include some kind of mandatory punishment for violators."
"This is about putting the fear of God into teachers and administrators,” Jeffrey Sachs, the author of the PEN America report, told columnist Greg Sargent. “Teachers are going to avoid discussing certain topics altogether — topics related to race, sex and American history that as a society we might want to discuss."
A particularly aggressive government effort to limit speech is underway in Florida, led by Governor Ron DeSantis (R). A bill championed by DeSantis prohibits any school or private business from engaging in instruction or training that makes anyone "feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress" on account of their race.
Needless to say, the one topic mentioned in most of these bills is racism. As Paul Krugman pointed out in the New York Times, once that threshold gets crossed others become easier to include:
Then there’s the teaching of science. Most high schools do teach the theory of evolution, but leading Republican politicians are either evasive or actively deny the scientific consensus, presumably reflecting the G.O.P. base’s discomfort with the concept. Once the Florida standard takes hold, how long will teaching of evolution survive?
Geology, by the way, has the same problem. I’ve been on nature tours where the guides refuse to talk about the origins of rock formations, saying that they’ve had problems with some religious guests.
Oh, and given the growing importance of anti-vaccination posturing as a badge of conservative allegiance, how long before basic epidemiology — maybe even the germ theory of disease — gets the critical race theory treatment?
And then there’s economics, which these days is widely taught at the high school level. (Full disclosure: Many high schools use an adapted version of the principles text I co-author.) Given the long history of politically driven attempts to prevent the teaching of Keynesian economics, what do you think the Florida standard would do to teaching in my home field?
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who’s trying to position himself as more Maga-ty than the Former Guy, has drawn up the Stop Woke Act, which copies the bounties offered under Texas’ new anti-abortion law, empowers parents to sue school districts alleging that CRT is being taught and offers up lawyers fees to winning cases.
New elected Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin went on a right wing talk radio show this week to brag about his tip line for parents to report on teachers admitting racism exists.
Youngkin, a Republican, has signed an executive order banning the teaching of “inherently divisive concepts,” such as “critical race theory and its progeny,” a set of terms so broad as to be meaningless in themselves. The meaning comes in the context: He means anything that upsets white parents. And, in his interview with John Fredericks, he offered up an invitation.
We’re asking for folks to send us reports and observations,” Youngkin said. “Help us be aware of … their child being denied their rights that parents have in Virginia, and we’re going to make sure we catalog it all. … And that gives us further, further ability to make sure we’re rooting it out.”
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Last, but not least, in today’s cavalcade of Republican policy priorities are states competing to see who can be first out of the box with creation of an armed bureaucracy to investigate voter fraud.
Florida, whose governor claimed they had the cleanest elections ever in 2020, is going to spend $6 million for an election police force. That works out to about $1.5 million per fraudulent ballot cast, most of which were seniors trying to vote for Donald Trump in both Florida and their chillier home state.
Republican gubernatorial candidate David Perdue has called for creation of an election police unit in Georgia.
Perdue's plan would create "an Election Law Enforcement Division in the State of Georgia" that would "be charged with enforcing election laws, investigating election crimes and fraud, and arresting those who commit these offenses," according to a release from his campaign. Perdue's plan also called for "election results to be independently audited before certification."
I can’t wait for the made-for-TV version of this farce.
Former President Donald J. Trump’s number one Arizona fangirl, State Senator Wendy Rogers, has filed legislation to establish a $5 million “bureau of elections” in the governor’s office with the power to subpoena witnesses and impound election equipment.
Given how the first two examples of GOP policy ideas have spread so rapidly, it’s safe to say there will be examples of this completely unnecessary exercise before the year is out.
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Finally, a reminder of our nation’s original election police (since it won’t be taught in classrooms), namely the Ku Klux Klan.
Via the Daily Beast (there’s lots more at the link)
The Klan, the White League, and other domestic terrorist groups in the South, collaborated with “Redeemer” politicians and law enforcement to undermine American democracy and help Americans who opposed the expansion of voting rights win elections and maintain power. Sometimes, voter suppression would be enough for a Confederate sympathizer to win an election, but when that failed, America’s white terrorists would launch coups d’état claiming voter fraud and that the election had been stolen from them.
On Sept. 14, 1874, near the end of Reconstruction, the White League attacked the Louisiana state house, then in New Orleans, and took control of the government for three days after they refused to admit defeat in the 1872 gubernatorial elections where pro-voting rights Republican politician William Kellogg defeated the Redeemer-Democrat John McEnery, and a Black man, Caesar Carpentier Antoine, was elected lieutenant governor. Federal troops were forced to intervene to reclaim control and defeat the White League.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com