The New Republic has named Elon Musk its scoundrel of the year. Forbes Magazine just named him as the richest man in the world, with assets of more than $250 billion. Just goes to show, I suppose, that you can’t buy respect, although he could easily buy The New Republic and make Mark Zuckerberg the biggest scoundrel next year. Musk has welcomed all previously banned characters back to Twitter, be they fascists, Neo-Nazis, bigots, election-deniers, or COVID liars. So go to Twitter to read the latest thoughts of Alec Jones or Mr. MAGA. However, I will note with protest that my brother was banned from Twitter five years ago for writing an offensive tweet about Trump. When he read that Musk was allowing everyone back, he appealed to have his Twitter account restored, he was rejected. Alec Jones, ok; Donald Trump, ok; my brother, Sandy S., rejected.

Alex Shephard wrote in The New Republic:

In one sense, Elon Musk has gotten exactly what he wanted. For all his talk about free speech, his primary motivation for sinking $44 billion into buying Twitter last year was clearly an unquenchable desire to be the center of attention. After Donald Trump’s defenestration in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, there was a main-character-size hole on the social network: Enter Musk and his infantile need for validation.

That Twitter—now renamed X, for reasons only Musk really understands—is now teetering on the brink of collapse and worth less than half what the world’s second-richest man paid for it is funny. It elicits deserved schadenfreude. Musk entered Twitter’s office carrying a sink—a terrible joke, and one of his better ones—last fall and has subsequently made countless decisions, big and small, all of which have made the platform significantly less viable and less worth spending any amount of time on. It is hard to think of a billionaire who has done more to damage their own reputation in such a short period of time.

Not so long ago, Musk was seen by many as a good tech billionaire, if not the good tech billionaire. While others like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg built digital trinkets that actively made the world a worse place, Musk was something different: a visionary intent on building real things, whether they be electric cars or rockets, that were aimed at accelerating a Jetsons-like vision of the future. While rivals at Google and Facebook—and, for that matter, Twitter—were hauled before Congress to testify about the deleterious effects of their creations, Musk remained relatively unscathed. Now it is clear that he is not just more villainous than all of them but that he is also a deeply stupid and unserious person.

Elon Musk is evil. While he has mostly made headlines for his incompetence, he has unleashed and legitimized truly heinous forces on Twitter: He has welcomed back some of the world’s most toxic people—Alex Jones, Donald Trump, innumerable Nazis and bigots—and has gone out of his way, again and again, to validate them. That Musk would endorse a heinous antisemitic conspiracy theory, as he did last month, is both unsurprising and reprehensible. It is, more than anything else, a reflection of who he is: He may be fantastically wealthy, but he is also deeply hateful, someone who has decided to devote his fortune and his time to attacking diversity and progress on nearly every front.

Musk has insisted again that he bought Twitter to save it from itself—that the platform had become too restrictive and that, to become a true “digital town square” where the best ideas rise to the top, it needed to welcome everyone. It is now abundantly clear that Musk’s real intention is and always has been to put his thumb on the scale: to elevate his own hateful views about, in no particular order: liberals; the media; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; trans people; and liberal Jews. He sees Twitter as a weapon, a way to not only push his agenda but to sic his army of loyalist losers on anyone he deems an enemy.

For all of the talk about Musk being a “real life Tony Stark,” he has always been a deeply uncool person’s idea of a cool person: He is, in many ways, a sentient m’lady Reddit post circa 2011. It’s hard to think of a more pathetic figure now: someone scraping the internet for conspiracy theories and “jokes” aimed at affirming his status and influence. He has, again and again, done the opposite: Far from showing himself as a swaggering, popular figure, he has revealed himself to be a venal, thin-skinned moron. He may very well be the most unfunny person alive, a fact reified dozens of times a day.

This was most apparent late last month, when Musk appeared at The New York Times’ glitzy annual DealBook conference and delivered a near-perfect encapsulation of the particularly toxic mixture of megalomania and neediness that has defined nearly everything he does. Asked by Andrew Ross Sorkin about a wave of advertiser defections in the wake of Musk’s embrace of an antisemitic conspiracy theory—via a post on X, of course—that suggested that Jews were secretly working to bring in troves of minorities to dilute America’s white population, Musk recoiled.

Bob Iger, the chairman of Disney—one of many companies to cease advertising on X in the wake of Musk’s comments—could “go fuck himself,” Musk said. It was clearly a pre-planned moment: an instant that Musk thought would bring him a wave of adulation and support that would force Disney back to his precious platform. Iger would be faced with the massive mistake he was making and come crawling back. Instead, there were a few awkward laughs and audible rustling. This was not a triumphant moment but a sign of a meltdown: a fabulously wealthy adult behaving like a toddler. Musk responded by telling Iger to go fuck himself again—as if it would somehow work this time. It hasn’t. Of course it hasn’t: Musk may have immense wealth, but his time at Twitter is a reminder that even that has its limits. Iger is also very rich; Disney is worth nearly 10 times what X is. Disney doesn’t need X. It certainly doesn’t need Elon Musk. X and Elon Musk need Disney.

Twitter, for all of its many flaws, was once a vital breaking news service. It is not that now. It’s not entirely clear what it is, beyond a toxic cesspool increasingly made in the twisted image of its deeply unwell owner. Changes to its verified user system, Musk’s decision to open the floodgates to bigots and trolls, and his own presence on the site have destroyed any utility it once had. It is now a source of endless misinformation and propaganda, a place where a pro-Putin conspiracy theorist can become a widely read source for information on the Israel-Hamas war, and where Alex Jones can spew lies about children murdered in schools. This is by design. Musk hates the media, but he also hates the truth and would rather live in a fantasy world in which his many enemies are destroying the world around him. It is, it practically goes without saying, actually Musk who is making the world worse in innumerable ways.

X is hanging on by a thread. After waves of layoffs, there is seemingly almost no one left minding the store. Musk dismantled Twitter’s Trust and Safety team almost immediately. As a result, hateful content often stays up for days, if not longer. The wave of advertiser defections means that the platform is also peppered with advertisements for ridiculous companies and scams. If Musk is still in charge of the platform in a year, it would be a shock. If it exists in a year at all, it would be a surprise.

X features heavily in Musk’s year in review, if only because he has successfully used it as a vehicle to make himself inescapable. But it is not his only venture, and it is not the only reminder that he is actually a deeply stupid and incompetent person. Tesla, his main business, just recalled nearly all of its vehicles because its much-hyped self-driving feature keeps causing cars to crash into people and things. Its much-hyped Cybertruck is unbelievably dumb-lookingand pointless: It is bulletproof, for some reason—exactly the kind of silly detail on which Musk would fixate to look cool, even as his cars … keep killing people. The rockets from his rocket company, SpaceX, keep exploding. (Musk says this is a good thing.) Everywhere you look, there is more evidence that Elon Musk is an idiot.

Behind all of the bloviating and attention-seeking is a small man who is simply not very good at anything. Musk has long wanted to present himself as a world-historical genius—and was recently minted as such by world-historical genius-minter (and world-historical toady) Walter Isaacson—but the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. Musk was able to parlay early wealth (via a disastrous tenure at PayPal) and, perhaps more importantly, fantastically low interest rates, into seed capital for lots of silly ideas. But the bill came due in 2023. Musk’s self-image is in tatters. What’s left is what we saw at the DealBook conference: a puffy, pathetic man increasingly untethered from reality. This is funny, in many ways. It is certainly funnier than anything Musk has ever tweeted.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Disruption, Economy, Extremism

California: Federal Appeals Court Allows New Gun Law to Remain in Place

By dianeravitch

December 30, 2023 //

A few weeks ago, a federal district judge overturned California’s new law banning guns in many public places, saying that the law was “repugnant” and violated the Second Amendment. Today, a federal appeals court put the lower court ruling on hold, allowing the law to go into effect.

Reuters reported:

Dec 30 (Reuters) – A federal appeals court on Saturday cleared the way for a California law that bans the carrying of guns in most public places to take effect at the start of 2024, as the panel put hold a judge’s ruling declaring the measure unconstitutional.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals suspended a Dec. 20 injunction issued by a judge who concluded the Democratic-led state’s law violated the right of citizens to keep and bear arms under the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment.

The three-judge panel issued an administrative stay that temporarily put the injunction on hold until a different 9th Circuit panel could consider pausing the lower-court judge’s order for even longer while the litigation plays out.

“This ruling will allow California’s common-sense gun laws to remain in place while we appeal the district court’s dangerous ruling,” California Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said in a statement…

The measure, which is set to take effect on Monday after Newsom signed it into law in September, was enacted after a landmark ruling in June 2022 by the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court that expanded gun rights nationwide.

The Supreme Court in that case struck down New York’s strict gun permit regime and declared for the first time that the right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment protects a person’s right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense.

Under California’s new law, people could not carry concealed guns in 26 categories of “sensitive places” including hospitals, playgrounds, stadiums, zoos and places of worship, regardless of whether they had permits to carry concealed weapons.

The law, Senate Bill 2, also barred people from having concealed guns at privately owned commercial establishments that are open to the public, unless the business’s operator posts a sign allowing license holders to carry guns on their property.

Open the link to read the article in full.

Categories California, Guns

Eric Foner: Why the North Fought the Civil War

By dianeravitch

December 30, 2023 //

I stumbled serendipitously on a book review by Eric Foner, the pre-eminent scholar of the Recobstruction era. The review of a book by historian Gary W. Gallagher addressed the question: why did white northerners fight the South? Gallagher argues that the abolition of slavery was a byproduct of the war, not its primary goal. The primary goal, he says, was to save the union.

Foner writes:

Among the enduring mysteries of the American Civil War is why millions of Northerners were willing to fight to preserve the nation’s unity. It is not difficult to understand why the Southern states seceded in 1860 and 1861. As the Confederacy’s founders explained ad infinitum, they feared that Abraham Lincoln’s election as president placed the future of slavery in jeopardy. But why did so few Northerners echo the refrain of Horace Greeley, the editor of The New York Tribune: “Erring sisters, go in peace”?

The latest effort to explain this deep commitment to the nation’s survival comes from Gary W. Gallagher, the author of several highly regarded works on Civil War military history. In “The Union War,” Gallagher offers not so much a history of wartime patriotism as a series of meditations on the meaning of the Union to Northerners, the role of slavery in the conflict and how historians have interpreted (and in his view misinterpreted) these matters.

The Civil War, Gallagher announces at the outset, was “a war for Union that also killed slavery.” Emancipation was an outcome (an “astounding” outcome, Lincoln remarked in his second Inaugural Address) but, Gallagher insists, it always “took a back seat” to the paramount goal of saving the Union. Most Northerners, he says, remained indifferent to the plight of the slaves. They embraced emancipation only when they concluded it had become necessary to win the war. They fought because they regarded the United States as a unique experiment in democracy that guaranteed political liberty and economic opportunity in a world overrun by tyranny. Saving the Union, in the words of Secretary of State William H. Seward, meant “the saving of popular government for the world.”

At a time when only half the population bothers to vote and many Americans hold their elected representatives in contempt, Gallagher offers a salutary reminder of the power of democratic ideals not simply to Northerners in the era of the Civil War, but also to people in other nations, who celebrated the Union victory as a harbinger of greater rights for themselves. Imaginatively invoking sources neglected by other scholars — wartime songs, patriotic images on mailing envelopes and in illustrated publications, and regimental histories written during and immediately after the conflict — Gallagher gives a dramatic portrait of the power of wartime nationalism.

His emphasis on the preservation of democratic government and the opportunities of free labor as central to the patriotic outlook is hardly new — one need only read Lincoln’s wartime speeches to find eloquent expression of these themes. But instead of celebrating the greatness of American democracy, Gallagher claims, too many historians dwell on its limitations, notably the exclusion from participation of nonwhites and women. Moreover, perhaps because of recent abuses of American power in the name of freedom, scholars seem uncomfortable with robust expressions of patriotic sentiment, especially when wedded to military might. According to Gallagher, they denigrate nationalism and suggest that the war had no real justification other than the abolition of slavery. (Gallagher ignores a different interpretation of the Union war effort, emanating from neo-Confederates and the libertarian right, which portrays Lincoln as a tyrant who presided over the destruction of American freedom through creation of the leviathan national state, not to mention the dreaded income tax.)

Gallagher devotes many pages — too many in a book of modest length — to critiques of recent Civil War scholars, whom he accuses of exaggerating the importance of slavery in the conflict and the contribution of black soldiers to Union victory. Often, his complaint seems to be that another historian did not write the book he would have written…

Gallagher maintains that only failure on the battlefield, notably Gen. George B. McClellan’s inability to capture Richmond, the Confederate capital, in the spring of 1862, forced the administration to act against slavery. Yet the previous fall, before significant military encounters had taken place, Lincoln had already announced a plan for gradual emancipation. This hardly suggests that military necessity alone placed the slavery question on the national agenda. Early in the conflict, many Northerners, Lincoln included, realized that there was little point in fighting to restore a status quo that had produced war in the first place.

Many scholars have argued that the war brought into being a new conception of American nationhood. Gallagher argues, by contrast, that it solidified pre-existing patriotic values. Continuity, not change, marked Northern attitudes. Gallagher acknowledges that as the war progressed, “a struggle for a different kind of Union emerged.” Yet his theme of continuity seems inadequate to encompass the vast changes Americans experienced during the Civil War. Surely, he is correct that racism survived the war. Yet he fails to account for the surge of egalitarian sentiment that inspired the rewriting of the laws and Constitution to create, for the first time, a national citizenship enjoying equal rights not limited by race.

Before the war, slavery powerfully affected the concept of self-government. Large numbers of Americans identified democratic citizenship as a privilege of whites alone — a position embraced by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. Which is why the transformation wrought by the Civil War was so remarkable. As George William Curtis, the editor of Harper’s Weekly, observed in 1865, the war transformed a government “for white men” into one “for mankind.” That was something worth fighting for.

Categories Democracy, Extremism, Freedom

Heather Cox Richardson: Nikki Haley and the Death of the Republican Party

By dianeravitch

December 30, 2023 //

139

Heather Cox Richardson sees something more ominous in Nikki Haley’s failure to mention slavery as “a cause” or “the cause” of the Civil War. She sees the death of what were once Republican Party ideals and the emergence of new style of authoritarianism, closely linked to parties that have effectively squelched the rights of their people.

She writes:

When asked at a town hall on Wednesday to identify the cause of the United States Civil War, presidential candidate and former governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley answered that the cause “was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do…. I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are…. And I will always stand by the fact that, I think, government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people.”

Haley has correctly been lambasted for her rewriting of history. The vice president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, was quite clear about the cause of the Civil War. Stephens explicitly rejected the idea embraced by U.S. politicians from the revolutionary period onward that human enslavement was “wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.” Instead, he declared: “Our new government is founded upon…the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”

President Joe Biden put the cause of the Civil War even more succinctly: “It was about slavery.”

Haley has been backpedaling ever since—as well as suggesting that the question was somehow a “gotcha” question from a Democrat, as if it was a difficult question to answer—but her answer was not simply bad history or an unwillingness to offend potential voters, as some have suggested. It was the death knell of the Republican Party.

That party formed in the 1850s to stand against what was known as the Slave Power, a small group of elite enslavers who had come to dominate first the Democratic Party and then, through it, the presidency, Supreme Court, and Senate. When northern Democrats in the House of Representatives caved to pressure to allow enslavement into western lands from which it had been prohibited since 1820, northerners of all political stripes recognized that it was only a question of time until elite enslavers took over the West, joined with lawmakers from southern slave states, overwhelmed the northern free states in the House of Representatives, and made enslavement national.

So in 1854, after Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act that allowed the spread of enslavement into previously protected western lands, northerners abandoned their old parties and came together first as “anti-Nebraska” coalitions and then, by 1856, as the Republican Party.

At first their only goal was to stop the Slave Power, but in 1859, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln articulated an ideology for the new party. In contrast to southern Democrats, who insisted that a successful society required leaders to dominate workers and that the government must limit itself to defending those leaders because its only domestic role was the protection of property, Lincoln envisioned a new kind of government, based on a new economy.

Lincoln saw a society that moved forward thanks not to rich people, but to the innovation of men just starting out. Such men produced more than they and their families could consume, and their accumulated capital would employ shoemakers and storekeepers. Those businessmen, in turn, would support a few industrialists, who would begin the cycle again by hiring other men just starting out. Rather than remaining small and simply protecting property, Lincoln and his fellow Republicans argued, the government should clear the way for those at the bottom of the economy, making sure they had access to resources, education, and the internal improvements that would enable them to reach markets.

When the leaders of the Confederacy seceded to start their own nation based in their own hierarchical society, the Republicans in charge of the United States government were free to put their theory into practice. For a nominal fee, they sold farmers land that the government in the past would have sold to speculators; created state colleges, railroads, national money, and income taxes; and promoted immigration.

Finally, with the Civil War over and the Union restored on their terms, in 1865 they ended the institution of human enslavement except as punishment for crime (an important exception) and in 1868 they added the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to make clear that the federal government had power to override state laws that enforced inequality among different Americans. In 1870 they created the Department of Justice to ensure that all American citizens enjoyed the equal protection of the laws.

In the years after the Civil War, the Republican vision of a harmony of economic interest among all Americans quickly swung toward the idea of protecting those at the top of society, with the argument that industrial leaders were the ones who created jobs for urban workers. Ever since, the party has alternated between Lincoln’s theory that the government must work for those at the bottom and the theory of the so-called robber barons, who echoed the elite enslavers’ idea that the government must protect the wealthy.

During the Progressive Era, Theodore Roosevelt reclaimed Lincoln’s philosophy and argued for a strong government to rein in the industrialists and financiers who dominated society; a half-century later, Dwight Eisenhower followed the lead of Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and used the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights.

After each progressive president, the party swung toward protecting property. In the modern era the swing begun under Richard Nixon gained momentum with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Since then the party has focused on deregulation, tax cuts, privatization, and taking power away from the federal government and turning it back over to the states, while maintaining that market forces, rather than government policies, should drive society.

But those ideas were not generally popular, so to win elections, the party welcomed white evangelical Christians into a coalition, promising them legislation that would restore traditional society, relegating women and people of color back to the subservience the law enforced before the 1950s. But it seems they never really intended for that party base to gain control.

The small-government idea was the party’s philosophy when Donald Trump came down the escalator in June 2015 to announce he was running for president, and his 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy indicated he would follow in that vein. But his presidency quickly turned the Republican base into a right-wing movement loyal to Trump himself, and he was both eager to get away from legal trouble and impeachments and determined to exact revenge on those who did not do his bidding. The power in the party shifted from those trying to protect wealthy Americans to Trump, who increasingly aligned with foreign autocrats.

That realignment has taken off since Trump left office in 2021 and his base wrested power from the party’s former leaders. Leaders in Trump’s right-wing movement have increasingly embraced the concept of “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy” as articulated by Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin or Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has demolished Hungary’s democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship. On the campaign trail lately, Trump has taken to echoing Putin and Orbán directly.

Those leaders insist that the equality at the heart of democracy destroys a nation by welcoming immigrants, which undermines national purity, and by treating women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people as equal to white, heteronormative men. Their focus on what they call “traditional values” has won staunch supporters among the right-wing white evangelical community in the U.S.

Ironically, MAGA Republicans, whose name comes from Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again,” want the United States of America, one of the world’s great superpowers, to sign onto the program of a landlocked country of fewer than 10 million people in central Europe.

MAGA’s determination to impose white Christian nationalism on the United States of America is a rejection of the ideology of the Republican Party in all its phases. Rather than either an active government that defends equal rights and opportunity or a small government that protects property and relies on market forces, which Republicans stood for as recently as eight years ago, today’s Republicans advocate a strong government that imposes religious rules on society.

They back strict abortion bans, book bans, and attacks on minorities and LGBTQ+ people. Last year, Florida governor Ron DeSantis directly used the state government to threaten Disney into complying with his anti-LGBTQ+ stance rather than reacting to popular support for LGBTQ+ rights. Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey early this month used the government to go after political opposition, launching an investigation into Media Matters for America after the watchdog organization reported that the social media platform X was placing advertising next to antisemitic content. “I’m fighting to ensure progressive tyrants masquerading as news outlets cannot manipulate the marketplace in order to wipe out free speech,” Bailey said.

Domestically, the new ideology of MAGA means forcing the majority to live under the rules of a small minority; internationally, it means support for a global authoritarian movement. MAGA Republicans’ current refusal to fund Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression until the administration agrees to draconian immigration laws—which they are also refusing to participate in crafting—is not only a gift to Putin. It also suggests to any foreign government that U.S. foreign policy is changeable so long as a foreign government succeeds in influencing U.S. lawmakers. Under this system, American global leadership will no longer be viable.

When Nikki Haley said the cause of the Civil War “was how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do,” she did more than avoid the word “slavery” to pander to MAGA Republicans who refuse to recognize the role of race in shaping our history. She rejected the long and once grand history of the Republican Party and announced its death to the world.

—

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Fascism, Republicans

A Primer on The Lost Cause for Nikki Haley

By dianeravitch

December 30, 2023 //

Karen L. Cox wrote “Five Myths About the Lost Cause” in The Washington Post. For those who have not studied American history or don’t remember what they should have learned, this summary should be useful. Cox is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Cox wrote in 2021:

Some of the most enduring misconceptions around the Confederacy are part of a mythology, known as the Lost Cause, that developed after the Civil War. These ideas are generally understood as the means by which former Confederates came to terms with such a thoroughly crushing defeat. Over time, the narrative has expanded and been used to combat movements for racial justice, most recently Black Lives Matter and the calls for removal of Confederate monuments.

Here are some of the myths at the heart of the Lost Cause ethos.

Myth No. 1

The Civil War was not fought over slavery.

One of the most enduring ideas holds that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights. Confederate veterans were among the first to make this claim about “the rights of the States against the encroachments of the Federal power,” as one war vet wrote, and to this day, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) maintain this position.

Yet these original veterans and the SCV both engaged in a bit of historical amnesia, since documents about what led Southern states to secede are clear that the Civil War erupted over the issue of slavery. From Alexander Stephens’s 1861 “Cornerstone Speech” to state ordinances of secession, slavery was at the heart of their argument to leave the Union. Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, said that not only did slavery form the “cornerstone” of the foundation on which the new Confederate government was laid, but also that it was the “immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.” Mississippi’s declaration of secession, like those of other states, did not mince words: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.”

Myth No. 2

The South lost simply because the North had more resources.

In his speech at the unveiling of the Confederate monument in Augusta, Ga., in 1878, Charles Colcock Jones Jr. averred, “We were overborne by superior numbers and weightier munitions.” And in her “Catechism for Southern Children,” written in the early 20th century, Mrs. J.P. Allison of Concord, N.C., posed the question “If our cause was right why did we not succeed in gaining our independence?,” to which children were to respond, “The North overpowered us at last, with larger numbers.”

But the South’s military defeat was also driven by social and class divisions, as well as poor morale. As the war dragged on and losses stacked up, there were desertions and the emancipation of enslaved people — the primary source of labor supplying Confederate armies. Devotees of the Lost Cause tend to disregard these other factors.

Myth No. 3

Robert E. Lee abhorred slavery.

Some Americans point to the Confederacy’s most heralded military leader, Gen. Robert E. Lee, as an opponent of slavery. Conservative journalist Stephen Moore, once a Trump nominee to serve on the Federal Reserve Board, claimed that “Robert E. Lee hated slavery.” As recently as December, in response to the removal of Lee’s likeness from Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, Twitter users perpetuated the myth, including one who tweeted: “Lee abhorred slavery. . . . he also taught the slaves he inherited to read, which was illegal.”

In reality, Lee benefited from the institution of slavery through his marriage into one of the wealthiest slaveholding families in Virginia. He was also known to be a cruel master who not only beat people he owned but, like other enslavers, treated them as property — selling them and separating families. Even in the last year of the war, 1865, Lee wrote that “the relation of master and slave . . . is the best that can exist between the white & black races.” Such words and actions offer a vivid contrast to another myth, which asserts that Lee was a noble and kindly gentleman.

Myth No. 4

Confederate monuments only recently became controversial.

In the aftermath of the deadly violence in Charlottesville in 2017, when white nationalists descended on the city under the pretense of protesting the removal of a Lee statue, journalists spilled a lot of ink on what these monuments represented. They wondered why Americans “suddenly” cared about them or asked, as one did, “Why are they being targeted now?,” suggesting that this event, and the Charleston church massacre of 2015, marked the beginning of the controversy across the South.

The truth is that they have long been controversial and despised by Black Southerners, for whom these statues symbolized their second-class citizenship. In 1932, for example, when the leading African American newspaper, the Chicago Defender, asked its readers about their support for a federal law that would abolish Confederate monuments, the collective response was a resounding “yes.” As a reader from Nebraska wrote, “If those monuments weren’t standing, the white South wouldn’t be so encouraged to practice hate and discrimination against our people.” During the Jim Crow era, it was difficult for African Americans to publicly protest the monuments as they have in the past few years, out of fear for their lives, but they have long protested statues located in their communities, especially after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Myth No. 5

Removing a Confederate monument is erasing history.

After the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, President Trump said removing the Confederate monument to Lee, or any such statue, was “changing history.” And as Texans began to reexamine their state’s memorial landscape, Sen. Ted Cruz (R) weighed in to suggest that it was a bad idea to “go through and simply try to erase from history prior chapters, even if they were wrong.”

Removing a Confederate monument, of course, does not erase history. These statues, which have represented only one point of view (a revisionist narrative of the Confederacy) throughout their existence, have never taught the first history lesson, although they have been used to reemphasize the racial status quo. The vast majority are, simply put, artifacts of the Jim Crow era, when most of them were built. Their history, like that of the “Whites only” signs of segregation, has not been lost. We will always know the history of Confederate monuments through photographs, postcards, dedication speeches and, most important, books written by historians.

Five myths is a weekly feature challenging everything you think you know. You can check out previous myths, read more from Outlook or follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter.

Categories History

Joshua Zeitz: Why Nikki Haley Did Not Admit that Slavery Was a Leading Cause of the Civil War

By dianeravitch

December 30, 2023 //

Joshua Zeitz is a historian and contributor to Politico. He writes here about Nikki Haley’s failure to admit that slavery was a leading cause, maybe THE leading cause, of the Civil War.

Someone asked her the question at a New Hampshire town meeting. What caused the Civil War? She released a word salad about rights and freedoms but failed to memention the peculiar institution of slavery. The next day, she realized that her omission was a major gaffe, and she insisted that everyone knows that slavery was an important cause of the devastating war, implying that it was not worth mentioning what everyone knew.

Jacob Zeitz wrote an analysis of her omission. He believed she was echoing the “Lost Cause” nostalgia so beloved to sons and daughters of the Confederacy.

As a high school student in the 1950s in Houston, I recall that our American history textbook spouted “Lost Cause” propaganda. Slaves in the South were treated kindly, it said. Plantation owners never wanted to damage their expensive human property. The Civil War was about “states’ rights,” not slavery. Many years later, when visiting an ante-bellum mansion in Charleston, South Carolina, the docent said the slaves were content; she referred to the Civil Was as “the War of Northern Aggression.”

Nikki Haley echoed Lost Cause sentiment.

Zeitz wrote at Politico:

In William Faulkner’s novel, Sartoris, someone asks the title character, Colonel John Sartoris, why he had fought for the Confederacy so many decades before. “Damned if I ever did know,” replied the aging veteran, now a pillar of his community in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

Of course, we know why Colonel Sartoris raised arms against the United States. So does anyone with a high school diploma — assuming they used up-to-date textbooks. And so did Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, who in 1861 famously asserted that the “cornerstone” of the new Southern nation rested “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

All of which makes it disappointing, though not surprising, that at this late date — almost 160 years after the Civil War — Nikki Haley, a leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination, shares Colonel Sartoris’ selective amnesia on the topic. When asked a softball question this week about the causes of the Civil War, Haley, a former South Carolina governor, flubbed the answer, calling it a “difficult” question and mumbling on about “basically how government was going to run — the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”

This morning, Haley qualified the comment on a radio show called “The Pulse of New Hampshire,” and followed the clean-up job with a press release, stating: “Of course the Civil War was about slavery. We know that. That’s unquestioned, always the case. We know the Civil War was about slavery. But it was also more than that. It was about the freedoms of every individual. It was about the role of government.”

But as Haley must know — after all, as governor of South Carolina, she presided over the removal of Confederate flags from the Statehouse — many Americans do question the fundamental fact that slavery precipitated the Civil War, and her equivocation played into a long-standing agenda to rewrite American history. Haley was effectively parroting the Lost Cause mythology, a revisionist school of thought born in the war’s immediate aftermath, which whitewashed the Confederacy’s cornerstone interest in raising arms to preserve slavery. Instead, a generation of Lost Cause mythologists chalked the war up to a battle over political abstractions like states’ rights.

With red states doing battle with American history, seeking to erase the legacy of violence and inequality that counterbalance the great good also inherent in our national story, it’s worth revisiting the rise of the Lost Cause, not just to remember how damaging it was, but to confront just how damaging it still is.

In the immediate aftermath of the war,the work of interpreting the rebellion fell to a small group of unreconstructed rebels. The pioneers of Confederate revisionism included wealthy and influential veterans of the Confederacy like Jubal Early, B. T. Johnson, Fitz Lee and W. P. Johnson, who helped formulate the Lost Cause myth that would take hold by the 1880s.

The narrative strains were simple. They painted a picture of Southern chivalry — mint juleps, magnolias and moonlight — that stood in sharp contrast with the North, a region marked by avarice, grinding capitalism and poverty. The rebellion, by this rendering, had been a legal response to the North’s assault on states’ rights — not a violent insurrection to preserve chattel slavery. Even Confederate veterans like Hunter McGuire knew that to admit the war had been about slavery would “hold us degraded rather than worthy of honor … our children, instead of revering their fathers will be secretly, if not openly, ashamed.”

The myth gained steam by the end of the century, largely because of the work of organizations like the United Confederate Veterans (UCV), the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), groups that offered a compelling story that people could wrap their minds around — including many Northerners, who were eager to put the war behind them. Because the Lost Cause emphasized heroism and honor over slavery, it venerated military figures like Robert E. Lee and swept politicians like Jefferson Davis under the rug. So it was that in May 1890 over 100,000 citizens gathered in Richmond for the dedication of a statue of Lee.

The decade saw hundreds of towns across the former Confederacy raise similar monuments to their heroes and war dead. These marble and steel memorials were often planted in town squares and by county courthouses to help sanitize not only Confederate memory but the new Jim Crow order. After all, if secession had been a noble thing, so was the separation of the races.

The signs of revisionism ranged from subtle to clear. During the war, for instance, Confederate soldiers had keenly embraced the term “reb,” but the new gatekeepers of Southern memory abandoned the term. “Was your father a Rebel and a Traitor?” asked a typical leaflet. “Did he fight in the service of the Confederacy for the purpose of defeating the Union, or was he a Patriot, fighting for the liberties granted him under the Constitution, in defense of his native land, and for a cause he knew to be right?” Equally important was figuring out what to even call the war. It couldn’t be the “Civil War,” which sounded too revolutionary. It couldn’t be “the War of Rebellion” which smacked of treason. In the late 1880s, the UCV and UDC approved resolutions designating the conflict that killed 750,000 Americans the “War Between the States.” The term stuck for generations to come.

It wasn’t just Southerners who suffered willful memory loss in these years. Jaded by the experience of Reconstruction and in the thrall of rising scientific racism, many Northerners were equally eager to remember the war as a brothers’ quarrel over politics rather than a struggle over slavery and Black rights. The jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who began the war as a committed abolitionist, later erased the roots of the conflict and celebrated the battlefield valor of both Union and Confederate troops. “The faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty,” he said, “in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.”

Of course, historians agree that most Union troops did know why they were fighting. So did Holmes. But years after the fact, he was willing to forget. As were tens of thousands of veterans who attended Blue and Gray reunions well into the 20th century, including a massive camp gathering of 25,000 people who gathered at Crawfish Springs, Georgia, in 1889, near the Chickamauga Battlefield, for a picnic and public speeches. These mass spectacles helped Yankees and Confederates rewrite the history of the 1850s and 1860s, ostensibly in the service of national reunion and regeneration, but also in a way that fundamentally reinforced the emerging culture and politics of Jim Crow.

The Lost Cause mythology was more than bad history. It provided the intellectual justification for Jim Crow — not just in the former Confederacy, but everywhere systemic racism denied Black citizens equal citizenship and economic rights. Its dismantling began only in the 1960s when historians inspired by the modern Civil Rights Movement revisited the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, adopting the views of earlier Black scholars like W.E.B. DuBois and John Hope Franklin, who always knew what the war was about and had shined a spotlight on the agency of Black and white actors alike.

That’s why the recent retreat to Lost Cause mythos is troubling. One would think that a Republican candidate for the presidency might be proud of the party’s roots as a firmly antislavery organization that dismantled the “Peculiar Institution” and fomented a critical constitutional revolution during Reconstruction — one that truly made the country more free.

With GOP presidential candidates waffling on the Civil War, rejecting history curricula in their states and launching political fusillades against “woke” culture, it remains for the rest of us to reaffirm the wisdom of Frederick Douglass, who in the last years of his life stated: “Death has no power to change moral qualities. What was bad before the war, and during the war, has not been made good since the war. … Whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery.”

Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-president of the Confederacy, described the true purpose of the South’s secession: to preserve slavery. Read his famous Cornerstone speech here.

Here is the key section of his speech:

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails.

Categories Elections, Extremism, History, South Carolina

Russia Pounds Ukraine with Barrage of Missiles

By dianeravitch

December 29, 2023 //

Putin is determined to subdue and destroy Ukraine. He stepped up his ruthless offensive on the nation he claims to love, raining more death and destruction on the people who dare to defy his will. Putin continues to burn through his supply of weaponry and munitions.

The New York Times reported:

Russia targeted Ukrainian cities with more than 150 missiles and drones on Friday morning, in what Ukrainian officials said was one of the largest air assaults of the war. At least 30 people were killed, and more than 160 were wounded, according to the Ukrainian government, and critical infrastructure was damaged.

“This is the biggest attack since the counting began,” Yurii Ihnat, a Ukrainian Air Force spokesman, said in a brief telephone interview, adding that the military did not track air assaults in the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, which began in February 2022.

For several hours on Friday, missiles, drones and debris slammed into factories, hospitals and schools in cities across Ukraine, from Lviv in the west to Kharkiv in the east, straining the country’s air defenses and sending people scrambling for shelter.

Thanks to its powerful air defense systems, Ukraine has often been able to shoot down most, if not all, Russian weapons targeting cities in recent months. But on Friday the Ukrainian military said it had shot down only 114 missiles and drones out of a total of 158.

President Biden said in a statement that Friday’s attack — which he called the “largest aerial assault on Ukraine since this war began” — showed that after nearly two years of relentless fighting and huge numbers of casualties on both sides, President Vladimir Putin’s objectives in the war remain the same.

“He seeks to obliterate Ukraine and subjugate its people,” the president said. “He must be stopped.”

Oleksandr Musiienko, the head of the Kyiv-based Center for Military and Legal Studies, said that Russia’s complex barrage of weapons including hypersonic, cruise and air defense missiles on Friday was intended to overwhelm and confuse Ukrainian air defenses. “They’re changing the style of their attacks,” he said in an interview.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in a statement, “Today, Russia was fighting with almost everything it has in its arsenal…”

Ukraine has long been lobbying its Western allies for powerful air defense systems to repel Russian attacks. Kyiv received its first Patriot systems this year, and more of the sophisticated missile batteries have since been delivered, including one this month from Germany.

Yet Republican lawmakers in Congress have declined to pass a new $50 billion security package for Ukraine unless the law also imposes new restrictions on migrants trying to cross the southern U.S. border, and negotiations are continuing. Washington said on Wednesday that it was releasing the last Congress-approved package of military aid currently available to Kyiv.

Mr. Biden said on Friday that “unless Congress takes urgent action in the new year, we will not be able to continue sending the weapons and vital air defense systems Ukraine needs to protect its people.”

Ukraine’s supply of surface-to-air missiles — key ordnance needed to down incoming Russian missiles — is now running short, forcing Ukrainian troops to juggle resources between the front line and cities such as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro and Lviv.

Reacting to Friday’s attack, Grant Shapps, the British defense minister, said Britain would send “hundreds of air defense missiles” to replenish Ukraine’s stocks.

Categories Accountability, International

Ohio: Governor Vetoes Bill Banning Transgender Medical Care

By dianeravitch

December 29, 2023 //

Governor Mike DeWine vetoed a bill to ban medical treatment for transgender minors, an unusual move for a Republican governor. The legislature has the power to override his veto. The governor said that the decision about such care should be made by the people who love the child most: parents.

In addition to banning transition care for minors, the bill says medical professionals who provide the care could lose their licenses and be sued. It also prohibits transgender girls and women from playing on high school and college sports teams that correspond with their gender identity.

On Friday, Mr. DeWine said that if the bill were to become law, “Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows better what is medically best for a child than the two people who love that child the most, the parents.”

The governor reached his decision after visiting hospitals and meeting with families “both positively and negatively affected” by gender-affirming care last week, a spokesperson said…

This summer, the American Academy of Pediatrics commissioned a systematic review of medical research on the treatments, while still taking the position that they can be essential. Transgender adolescents have high rates of depression, suicidal thoughts and self-harm, and some evidence suggests that puberty blockers and hormones, in the short-term, could improve their mental health.

“The most harrowing part of my job is informing parents that their child died, especially when their death was from a preventable suicide,’’ Dr. Steve Davis, chief executive of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, told Ohio senators at a hearing on the bill. “You trust us on every other condition. Please, trust us on this one.’’

Categories Gender, Health, Ohio

The Republican Crack-Up

By dianeravitch

December 29, 2023 //

Amber Phillips of The Washington Post wrote about the fissures within the Republican Party, which have made incapable of putting forth a coherent agenda or passing any significant legislation. The heart of their disunity is the split between a dwindling number of reasonable Republicans—that is, those CD who are willling to engage in bipartisanship—and a growing number of extremists who abhor compromise, even with other Republicans.

Phillips wrote:

This week, we’re reviewing some of the most important political stories of 2023. Today: How — and why — Republicans are struggling to govern.

The Republicans’ struggles to be a cohesive party are probably most evident in their tumultuous year in the House of Representatives.

Republicans narrowly took over the majority of the House in the 2022 midterms, took days to elect a speaker, then careened toward legislative crisis after legislative crisis that would have hurt the economy (the debt ceiling showdown; government shutdown threats). They opened an impeachment inquiry into President Biden that has struggled to get off the ground with actual facts. They kicked out their speaker and froze the House for three weeks while they fought over choosing another. It ended up being one of the least-productive sessions of Congress in modern times.

Republican strategists I talked to agreed that something irreparable has happened to the party. Healthy parties don’t freeze an entire legislative chamber that they control.

“They fought so hard to be a governing majority,” said strategist Alice Stewart, referring to House Republicans, “and they can’t even agree among themselves. And that’s bad.”

Other Republicans say the House speaker drama reflects a broader problem for the party, one that has been metastasizing for decades. Depending on how you look at it, almost every Republican speaker since Newt Gingrich in the mid-1990s has been pushed out or has stepped down over deep ideological splits within the party between moderates and the hard right.Then there’s the Republican presidential primary, where the front-runner is a candidate who has been twice impeached (including with votes from members of his own party), is facing 91 criminal charges, could face jail time and has been ruled by the Colorado Supreme Court as ineligible to appear on that state’s primary ballot.

“The party has been damaged for years,” said one Republican strategist, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations with party leaders. “And it’s not recoverable.”

Historian Thomas Balcerski, at Eastern Connecticut State University, went as far as to write for CNN this fall that we could be witnessing “the possible collapse of the Republican Party as we know it.”

“A failure to reach a majority consensus signals the doom of an American political party,” he wrote.

Leaders don’t seem to have an answer on what to do next.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Republicans

How Idaho Moms Beat Back the Culture Warriors

By dianeravitch

December 29, 2023 //

One of the biggest obstacles to waking up the public is that most people have no knowledge of the privatization movement. They don’t understand that the attacks on teachers and public schools are part of a long-range plan to destroy public education as a community asset and turn it into an individual consumer choice, like choosing what kind of milk you want when you go grocery shopping (as Florida Governor Jeb Bush memorably said at the 2012 Republican Convention). The culture wars over LGBT issues, trans kids, and critical race theory are part of the same plan to sow distrust of a valued community institution.

This story appeared in Vanity Fair. It was written by Laura Pappano and produced by The Hechinger Report. It brings the controversy to an audience that is not immersed in education politics. Laura Pappano is the author of School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education, to be published by Beacon Press in January 2024. By the way, I just subscribed to a digital edition of Vanity Fair for only $1 a month. There is an educator price of only $8 a year. What a bargain for a publication with excellent content like this story.

Pappano writes:

In Priest River, Idaho, the moms seated at the conference table on Election Day were worried. They had good reason: Their poll watchers at voting sites—grange halls on dirt roads, community centers hardly larger than a bungalow—suggested things were not going their way.

There were no formal exit polls conducted in West Bonner County, where the school district covers 781 square miles over timbered hills and crystalline lakes in the north Idaho panhandle. But Dana Douglas, a fit and forceful blonde sipping on an Americano and a water bottle boosted with electrolytes (she was teaching spin at 6 p.m.) had been poll-watching at Edgemere Grange Hall, and she had her indicator for how voters were casting their ballots: “Anyone who said, ‘Hello, good morning’” was in their camp. “Anyone with a scowl” who would not look her in the eye was in the other.

“It’s going to be a battle,” she said at the table. Sitting beside her, Candy Turner, a retired elementary school teacher who had brought Ziploc bags of pear slices and dried cranberries for the hours ahead, agreed. “I think we are in trouble based on what I saw.”

After Election Day, headlines in key locales all around the country spoke of moms fighting extremists in local school board races and winning. But even as some celebrated “flipping” their school boards back, far-right groups like Moms for Liberty remain. As the organization declared in an email blast in which they claimed winning 50 new school board seats: “WE ARE JUST GETTING STARTED!”

Some people overlook school board skirmishes, seeing them as trivial. For Turner, Douglas, and many in the West Bonner County School District, they are anything but. It’s not about Democrats versus Republicans (Turner is a registered Democrat; Douglas is “a proud conservative Republican”). It’s about the viability of public education in their community.

This is not hyperbole. The national infection facing public schooling—the tug-of-war between education professionals and extremist culture warriors—has brought chaos and damage to West Bonner County. After this past school year ended, the superintendent acknowledged that 31% of teachers, counselors, and education leaders left the district, and scores of parents pulled their children, opting for homeschooling, online learning, or enrolling in another district. Buildings are infrequently cleaned; an elementary school principal reported at an October school board meeting that mice were running over children’s feet and hallways smelled of urine.

What has happened in West Bonner County offers a warning to public school supporters elsewhere. Douglas, Turner, and others are fighting to restore normalcy to an institution that should not be up for grabs—but is.

“We’ve been the canary in the coal mine,” Margaret Hall, the current school board chair who faced a far-right challenger, said on the eve of the November election. Hall, a soft-spoken but firm force, has served on the board for eight years, even through chemotherapy treatments for cancer. “What has to happen,” she said, “is people have to wake up and decide, ‘We don’t want someone to come in and tell us what we want. We want to decide ourselves.’”

Idaho is a conservative state and Bonner County is even more so, with registered Republicans outnumbering Democrats by almost seven to one (statewide it’s closer to five to one). Despite the nation’s bitter party politics, residents of this county have traditionally exercised a neighborly pragmatism in which the kids—or, as Douglas prefers, “our babies”—come first.

People filled in the gaps when it came to local needs, from sending groceries home with some children over weekends to teachers helping students brush their teeth or spending extra hours with struggling readers. But that spirit is now being tested by extremists who see a soft target in a stressed school district. Suddenly, the far-right’s anti-public-education catchphrases blared regularly on the national stage have become wedged into the local lexicon.

For example, “transgenderism” (described by one candidate as “boys in girls bathrooms, boys in girls sports, ‘gender-affirming care,’ and related absurdities”) became a top issue in this November’s school board race. One candidate for reelection, Troy Reinbold, a nonchalant figure who has attended meetings in cutoff shorts and exited mid-agenda without explanation, touted his work on “the strongest transgender policy in Idaho schools” and opposition to “social emotional learning,” which he called “a precursor to critical race theory.”

Hall, for her part, abstained in an August vote on a school district policy that would require teachers and staff to “refer to students by their biological sex” and students to use bathrooms and locker rooms corresponding to their genders assigned at birth, along with bar transgender girls from girls’ sports teams. She said it was confusing, poorly written, and not vetted by the board’s legal counsel (instead it was reviewed by the anti-LGBTQ Christian legal advocacy group, Alliance Defending Freedom). Hall’s campaign signs were later tagged with rainbow stickers. The policy ended up passing 4-0.

How a place that had long treated differences with a live-and-let-live ethos adopted the intolerant tone of national politics is anyone’s guess. Some blame an influx of newcomers. Bonner County, like the rest of Idaho, is growing, and over the past decade, the tally of registered voters has risen almost 50% to nearly 32,000.

But who they are and why some of them don’t support public education is a more complicated question. It’s possible that Idaho’s lax COVID-19 rules lured extremists, survivalists, and those lacking a communal impulse. There’s also a broader arc at play in a state economy that’s forced people to shift from work in local sawmills to commuter jobs that get them home later and leave them reliant on others to keep civic life running—a common pattern in 21st-century America. But Priest River, where the district is headquartered, is close-knit, populated by descendants of the six Naccarato brothers, who came from Italy to build the Great Northern Railroad in the late 1800s and stayed. That includes many mom organizers like Candy Naccarato Turner.

Priest River police chief Drew McLaindates the start of recent drama to the school board vote to rescind the English Language Arts curriculum from the well-established education publisher McGraw Hill. It had been swiftly and unanimously approved in June 2022 and was delivered to replace the curriculum that was out of print. But far-right activists objected, complaining that it included aspects of social emotional learning. Such instruction—on skills like “self-confidence, problem-solving, and pro-social behavior,” as McGraw Hill described the curriculum on its website—is a bugaboo for conservative ideologues. And on August 24 of last year, with one member missing, the board voted 3-1 to return the texts to the publisher.

The decision got the attention of moms like Douglas, Turner, and others. Whitney Hutchins,a new mother who graduated from West Bonner County schools in 2010 and whose family has operated a resort on Priest Lake for generations, started attending school board meetings. Ditto for Jessica Rogers, a mom of three daughters who had served on the curriculum committee and was upset by the reversal. Others, too, wondered what was happening.

After all, for years the meetings had been quiet affairs at the district’s storefront office on Main Street in a room with aged wood floors, folding chairs and tables, and a capacity of 34. By late 2022, such serenity was a thing of the past. People started lining up three to four hours in advance, which McLain said forced him to close Main Street for safety. Quickly, the gatherings got more and more unruly. First, McLain sent one officer, then several. At times, he called on the sheriff for backup.

Things escalated even further when Jackie Branum, who was hired as superintendent in the summer of 2022, proposed a supplemental levy, which sets a chosen amount as property tax to support local schools’ operating costs, and a four-day school week to address financial issues—then abruptly resigned. The board approved the shorter week, angering many parents. Then it appointed Susie Luckey, a popular elementary school principal, as interim superintendent until June. By May, the board had put a levy before voters that would provide roughly one-third of the district’s budget.

Supplemental levies in Idaho, which ranks 50th nationally in public school funding, had long been used for capital projects and are now essential for operations. But residents suddenly sorted into “for” and “against” factions. Signs sprouted along rural roads; arguments raged on Facebook. The levy failed by 105 votes out of 3,295 cast. Parents expressed concern at a public meeting that the district would cut sports and extracurricular activities; some worried about teacher retention. Not to mention: The district still had no permanent superintendent.

In a swift but puzzling process, the school board eventually announced two finalists for superintendent. One was Luckey. The other was a far-right former elected politician who worked for the Idaho Freedom Foundation by the name of Branden Durst. Durst was an unusual choice given his lack of school experience and the IFF’s hostility to public education. (In 2019, the president of the IFF called public schools “the most virulent form of socialism (and indoctrination thereto) in America today,” adding, “I don’t think government should be in the education business.”)

Then again, it wasn’t Durst’s first go-around: In 2022, the Democrat turned Republican ran for state superintendent of public instruction. He lost the GOP primary but in Bonner County beat his two challengers with 60% of the vote. Among the donors to his campaign were IFF leaders and a local resident who had opposed the McGraw Hill curriculum.

It is unclear how Durst, an abrasive outsider from 420 miles south in Boise, was so quickly ushered into contention. Jim Jones, former Idaho attorney general and a former justice of the Idaho Supreme Court, points to the IFF. He said the organization aims to “discredit and dismantle” public schools throughout the state, “starting with West Bonner County School District.”

Jones also credits the IFF for helping extremists Keith Rutledge and Susan Brown get elected to the West Bonner County School Board in November 2021 in a low-turnout race. It was a pivotal election—but people didn’t realize it then. In hindsight, Douglas said residents “got lazy and complacent and we didn’t get to the polls and put people in the district that valued public education.”

By early 2023, Rutledge and Brown—along with Reinbold, who revealed himself as a fellow extremist—had become a majority voting bloc on the five-person school board. Hall, the school board chair who works on climate change mitigation and who readily references the Idaho education code, and Carlyn Barton, a mother and teacher who describes herself as a “common sense constitutional conservative,” were at odds with the other three.

Durst’s candidacy earlier this year turned up the heat on divisions both on the board and in the community. School board meetings were packed. Militia started showing up. And while the Second Amendment is cherished in Idaho, residents were alarmed to find men donned in khaki with walkie-talkies—and presumably guns—present for conversations on children’s education.

“The militia should not be at school board meetings,” argued McLain, the police chief who claimed that one grandfather “was so pissed at the militia” that he arrived drunk with a rifle. “It’s been frustrating,” he added. “If you told me I had the choice of a school board meeting or a bank robbery, I would be way less stressed going to the bank robbery.”

Following multiple contentious meetings with Hall and Barton, who pressed board members to reconsider Durst’s candidacy, in late June, he was selected by a 3-2 vote. After his hiring was finalized, Barton charged that “the direction of our board has turned into a fascist dictatorship with an agenda which is far from our conservative point of view.”

From the moment he slid into the superintendent’s maroon Naugahyde-upholstered chair in the West Bonner County School District office, Durst seemed to relish his position of power. There was serious work to do—like negotiating a teacher contract—but he appeared far more interested in burnishing his reputation, describing his takeover as “a pilot” that others could learn from.

This was a chance, he told me in multiple interviews, to use the district to test his “ideas that are frankly unorthodox in education,” including some rooted in his Christian values. He wanted intelligent design taught alongside evolution in biology classes. He was working to have a Christian university offer an Old Testament course to high school students at a Baptist church near their school. He hoped the district would adopt curricula developed by the Christian conservative college Hillsdale in Michigan.

Durst also cast himself as a model for how non-educators could take charge of a school district. He boasted that national far-right figures were in touch and encouraged him not to “screw this up.” As he put it, “I broke into the club. I got a superintendency without having to go through the traditional process of doing it.” Indeed, he had not been a school principal, administrator, or classroom teacher.

That lack of process was a major problem for the state Board of Education, which in August gave the district notice it was not in compliance with Idaho law, a determination that jeopardized tax dollars critical for funding the schools. A letter sent to Rutledge, the chair at the time, cited budget irregularities, missed school bus inspections, concerns about discipline rates of special education students, and the failure to file forms to access federal funds. But the main issue, the state’s board said, was the district’s “decision to employ a non-certified individual as superintendent.” Durst had sought emergency certification but was rebuffed by the state.

All of the uncertainty and division grew so dire that teachers found themselves struggling to carry on, leaving many no choice but to give notice. “It breaks my heart that I had to leave,” Steph Eldore, a fixture at Priest Lake Elementary School for 26 years, told me over tears in late August. With her daughter starting high school, Eldore and her husband, Ken, who had been director of facilities and capital improvements for 16 years, quit the district, finding jobs and enrolling their daughter elsewhere.

By the end of summer, 27 teachers had retired or resigned, along with 19 other staff members, including the director of special education, a school principal, and three counselors. Families followed. By fall, school district enrollment was down to 1,005 students, 100 less than projected. Even McLain, the police chief, had rented a place in Sandpoint, about half an hour from Priest River, and enrolled his two high school–aged children there. “We call ourselves the Priest River refugees,” he said. Sergeant Chris Davis, the district’s school resource officer, similarly said his daughter has opted to finish high school online. All in all, the Lake Pend Oreille School District in Sandpoint, whose permanent levy offers steady funding, reported 43 student transfers from West Bonner County School District.

Others, of course, remained. As the school year began, the West Bonner County School District 83 (“Strive for Greatness”) Facebook page was active with notices of cross-country races, soccer games, and picture day. But behind the sheen of normalcy were problems. A shortage of bus drivers led the district to cancel or combine routes. Many students’ commute times doubled, upsetting parents whose young children got home after dark, while other students had no bus transportation at all. There were also issues with school cleanliness. Kylie Hoepfer, a mom of a fourth grader, took on cleaning mouse turds on the bleachers at her daughter’s volleyball game. “I had heard about the mice problem but sweeping it all up was pretty gross,” she recalled.

The biggest hurt for families, however, was the loss of seasoned teachers. The district hired new ones, but a number of them soon quit. Trinity Duquette, a 1997 graduate of the high school, said her 8th-grade daughter “is on her third language arts teacher this year,” each with different styles and expectations. “They have been assigned essays and had a turnover in the midst of the assignment.”

For Paul and Jessica Turco, who built strong bonds with their son’s special education teachers who have since left the district, the loss “was like breaking up a family.” They said it was weeks into the school year before the new teachers read their son’s Individualized Education Program, the written plan outlining his learning needs. “It was like he was starting from the very beginning rather than a stepping stone from where he left off the prior year,” said Jessica. And it’s showing. “We have been dealing with constant outbursts,” she added, and “when he comes home from school, he doesn’t want to talk about his day.”

While watching the disruption, Hutchins, the new mom whose soft features belie a fierce frankness, made a decision: She and her husband were moving to Spokane, Washington. “I’m not going to raise my daughter here,” she said, curling into a leather chair at her family’s resort. Hutchins’s brother is gay. Watching his experience in school had been painful, and the hostility toward LGBTQ+ students seemed to be growing worse. “This is horrible to say,” Hutchins said after Durst’s hiring, “but the right-wing extremists, they are taking over our community.”

She wasn’t the only one thinking that—but not everyone was in a position to leave. Rogers, the mom of three who was on the curriculum committee, and her husband had recently built a home with sweeping views of Chase Lake. There was no moving away. So, she got involved at the school, first as a volunteer, then as a paraprofessional, and, more recently, teaching technology. Initially, she hadn’t wanted to get political, but soon, it no longer felt like a choice.

Back in late 2022, after the school board rescinded the McGraw Hill curriculum and voted for a four-day week, parents like Paul and Jessica Turco reached out to Turner, the retired elementary school teacher, who dialed up Douglas, the Election Day poll-watcher. “I called Dana and said, ‘The kids want some help,’” Turner recalled.

Although Douglas grew up over the state line in Newport, Washington, she married her high school sweetheart from Priest River and now bled Spartan orange. They had built a thriving family business, sent two children through the local schools, and had grandchildren enrolled. She understood that what she saw happening was at odds with what she stood for.

“I am a Republican. I am a Christian conservative,” said Douglas. “But I am 100% pro–public education, and I am pro–every child, and I will do anything for this community to embrace everyone and to love everyone.”

She, Turner, and others, including Hutchins, Rogers, and the Turcos, began meeting. How to take back the district? It started with the school board and, said Douglas, included a notion that should seem obvious: “getting people who value public education” to serve.

By the summer of 2023, they had collected signatures for a recall vote of Rutledge and Brown, the board’s chair and vice chair respectively. The group’s slogan—“Recall, Replace, Rebuild”—blossomed on signs in downtown storefronts, in yards, and banners posted in fields. The group collected endorsements, video testimonials, and built a website. By the time they were days out from the August 29 vote, their numbers had swelled. Over 125 people gathered in the wood-beamed great room at the Priest Lake Event Center for what was part rally, part check-in: Who could pick up “WBCSD Strong” T-shirts? Who would hold signs at key spots ahead of the vote?

Recalls usually fail. But in West Bonner County, the result was resounding. With a 60.9% turnout, Rutledge and Brown were recalled by a wide margin. But then, after the election but before votes were officially certified, Rutledge and Brown posted notice of a board meeting for Friday, September 1, at 5 p.m., just before Labor Day weekend. The top agenda items—“Dissolve Current Board of Trustees” and “Turn Meeting Over to the Superintendent”—raised alarms.

“I read the agenda and I was irate,” said Katie Elsaesser, a mom of two and a lawyer whose office is near the school district office. “I immediately started calling people.” She texted her husband that she would miss their son’s soccer game, then drafted a complaint, finishing at 2 a.m. In the morning, she drove to the district court in Sandpoint. One hour and fifteen minutes before the meeting was to take place, Elsaesser got a ruling to halt it. McLain delivered the news to the crowd in the high school cafeteria. “You would think I scored a touchdown,” he said.

In another strange twist after the recall, the board could not hold several meetings because Reinbold failed to show. Without a quorum, which required three present members, business halted. Finally, after a former school board chair alerted county officials, the sheriff agreed to investigate. Reinbold reappeared, and in mid-October, the board finally filled the vacant seats with two people who supported the recall.

With his options running thin, on September 25, 2023, Durst announced plans for “an amicable and fair exit.” For the fourth time in less than two years—since a longtime superintendent retired in June 2022—the district was again seeking a new leader. Hall reached out to Joseph Kren, a former principal at the high school who had also served as superintendent in a nearby district. Kren was enjoying retirement—he got Hall’s call at 9:30 p.m. before he was to wake at 3:30 a.m. to go elk hunting. He would agree to a 90-day contract (the four-day week means it runs through March).

His appointment was greeted with relief. Kren, a serious-faced former wrestler, is religious but not ideological. On the sixth day of his new job, occupying the same spot Durst had just vacated, Kren showed me the silver-colored crucifix he had hung above his desk. Kren was clear that his faith “has guided [him]” but has “never gotten in the way.”

Growing up with a brother who was deaf, Kren said, has made him attuned to matters of inclusion and accommodation, which he called “a legal and moral responsibility.” His only agenda was to put things right. By Thanksgiving, he told me, the district had corrected state compliance issues, and he was working to add bus drivers. With so many turnovers, he acknowledged “disruptions can and do occur.” But his plan, he said, was steady: to “roll up [his] sleeves and work alongside” staff and to make “firm, consistent, morally sound decisions based in fact and the law.”

The November 2023 election would be pivotal. With the two school board replacements set—picked by the recall supporters who lived in the two school zones that had been represented by Rutledge and Brown—the other three zones’ seats were on the ballot. The pro-recall crowd wanted to boot Reinbold and reelect Hall and Barton. The election, in essence, would decide which side had a majority.

But each had challengers. Hall faced Alan Galloway, a sharp-jawed army veteran and cattle rancher who opposed “transgenderism,” efforts “to impose the outlawed teaching of CRT through SEL or any other ‘trojan horse’ scheme,” and a levy. He circulated a controversial letter with inflammatory claims, including that Hall had “failed our children by delaying action related to bullying, dress codes and Pornography within our schools.”

Barton faced Kathy Nash, who had pushed to rescind the curriculum, was treasurer of the Bonner County Republican Central Committee, and connected to far-right figures at the state level. Two of the far-right candidates shared a campaign treasurer and campaign finance reports show some of the same people donating to the three far-right candidates.

In other words, there were teams. Jim Kelly,Nash’s campaign manager, said Nash would bring scrutiny to school finances—and provide representation to those wounded by the recall. Kelly told me, “The big concern for Kathy, and for a lot of us, is that the school board is going to be 100% lopsided,” if the candidates he backed, whom many would consider far-right, were not elected. “People are objecting that there will not be a conservative voice.”

And yet, Nash’s opponent, Barton, was a conservative Christian. As was Reinbold’s challenger, Elizabeth Glazier, whose website described her as a “Proud Republican & Conservative Christian” who opposed the four-day week and the hiring of Durst. The race was not conservatives against liberals or Republicans against Democrats. It was, as locals told me, a referendum casting those who cared that students had books, buses, and teachers with a decent wage, against those who embraced extremist rhetoric.

At various polling places on Election Day, far-right campaign volunteers were overheard promising that Nash and Reinbold would keep boys out of girls’ bathrooms.

For parents who rely on the public schools, this kind of allegation was maddening. “It’s just paranoid bull honkey,” said Jacob Sateren, a father of eight (six in the schools). We met at a coffee shop across from the junior high on Election Day shortly after he had voted. Sateren, who’d turned a challenging childhood into a successful adulthood building pole barns, laughs when people call him “a woke liberal.” (His Facebook profile features an American flag emblazoned with the Second Amendment, he pointed out.)

He finds charges that schools are “indoctrinating” children absurd. “I haven’t had any of my kids come home and talk about any crazy weird stuff. And even if they did, if you are an involved parent, it doesn’t really matter. If teachers at the school are teaching my kids something I disagree with, it’s my job to be paying enough attention to catch it,” he said. “I don’t know why people get worked up. There is always going to be stuff you disagree with.”

On the day before the vote, under steady rainfall, Hutchins, Rogers, and another volunteer placed signs along Route 57 across from Priest Lake Elementary School, a polling station. Rogers’s youngest daughter skipped while twirling a child-sized umbrella. “A lot of people are very confident of Margy winning—we are not,” said Rogers, referring to Hall by her nickname.

There was good reason for concern. In the end, Hall did best Galloway by a 60-40 margin. But as Douglas and Turner had feared, Nash defeated Barton, and Reinbold won over Glazier. Retaking the district would not be quick or easy. Yet having a majority on the board offered relief. “We can rebuild,” said Douglas.

Hall, however, was concerned about the division that had eroded support for public education in the first place. The question on her mind was how to bring calm. On the eve of the election, she had made a soup with red lentils, ginger, and coconut milk, which she ladled into small ceramic bowls. As she sat at her dining table talking and eating, she rose periodically to let her dog, Cinco, outdoors, accompanying him with a flashlight. Because of a defect at birth, he now has only three legs; there were cougars and a pride of mountain lions in the dark woods.

Between trips, she shared her idea of creating random seating assignments at the round tables in the high school cafeteria where school board meetings were now held, a strategy for encouraging residents on each side to sit together and actually converse. “How tired are people of the fighting and name-calling and bashing?” There was much work to do—a new levy needed, a curriculum people agreed on, teacher contracts, luring families back—but she told me it started with “trying to work as a team, to balance perspectives.”

The day after the election, with the reality of the mixed board clear, Hall offered a sober assessment. “My work,” she said, “is definitely cut out for me.”

This story about West Bonner was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. Laura Pappano is the author of School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics and the Battle for Public Education, to be published by Beacon Press in January 2024.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Courage, Education Reform, Elections, Extremism, Idaho, Parents

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