Embarrassing Receipts. Tim Sandefur Talks to A&G

going after parents of thirteen year old. Well, attacking school board members has always been illegal. But anyway, the the battle between parents and school boards and teachers and kids and everything, it just keeps getting hotter and hotter and hotter. It seems. Rhetoric certainly gets hotter. Indeed. Yeah, and the Goldwater Institute has entered the fray. Tim Sanderford, Tim the lawyer vice president for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute, joins this.

Tim is the author of many fine tombs, including The Right Turn of Living, The Permission Society, and many other fine things. Tim, how are you, sir? I'm great, Thanks for having me back. Oh, it's always a pleasure. So heard you. I heard George will mention you on the podcast the other day, So congratulations on that. That was very cool. Thanks. He's always been very kind about my work. He called himself a student of yours. I mean, come on,

it was that that blew me away. I admit I had to text my mom when I heard how would you not George, Well, wouldn't mention me unless I rear ended his car? Wild texting I'm not going to happen. So Tim, tell us about this case. How do you come to be involved in the whole of Fairfax School District versus mom's situation? Well, it happened with here was these two mothers in Fairfax County, Virginia filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get information about how the

school board was spending money on lawyers. They think that the school boards spent too much money on legal representation, so they just asked for to see the receipts, and the government turned over the receipts, and then it realized

that they were a little embarrassing. And by that time, these two mothers, Callie and Ebra Kelly, had published this information on her website, so the school board sued her, demanding that she deleted from her website and not disseminate the information contained in the documents that they lawfully acquired,

which is a blatant violation of the First Amendment. So they called us, and we filed a motion just yesterday asking the court to throw their lawsuit out and to allow them to publish information that the First Amendment allows them to publish. Now, clarify a couple of things, as I understand that there were no kids names involved, was was there a sensitive personnel information of all the names

and addresses or anything. Well, some of the documents that the school board turned over, yeah, they had failed to redact some of this information. Calling then went and redacted it and posted it on her website. And the school board does not claim otherwise their lawsuits. They do not actually say that she published any kind of sensitive confidential

information or anything like that. They've put that in their press releases because they're trying to smear her, But in fact, she did not do that, and they don't claim that she did. Instead, what they say is this information is our information, and we want you to return it. They say return, which I think is so bizarre because there

are no physical documents. These are just computer file. I don't know how you return a computer file, but anyway, So the court has ordered them not to disclose the information in these receipts that shows how much the school board is spending on its legal representation, which again is totally unconstitutional. The Supreme Court in the in the Pentagon Papers case said that the nation's leading newspapers had a First Amendment right to publish stolen military documents in the

time of war. Well, certainly, my clients have the right to published information that they legally obtained from the school district that are just government documents. Well, I find myself wondering, and I know, you know, badmounting judges isn't really cool if you're you know, having a case before them. But what the hell was that judge thinking? Well, a lot of the time, judges want to hold things still until they get a chance to hear the arguments of both

sides and things like that. So they and that's really unfortunate because it is unconstitutional to forbid Kelly from publishing this information. So we've asked the court to reverse that, and we're gonna have some briefing on that going forward.

But this is just another example what you said at the beginning of the segment that this is a trend of school boards bullying parents and trying to intimidate them when they stand up to either challenge what's going on in the classrooms that their tax dollars pay for, or in this case, just ask questions that they're legally allowed to ask. Now, that's what I was gonna ask you about.

And I didn't know if you know, since you're actually involved in the case, if you're willing to go kind of mackerel on this, but you just did on what is going on nationwide? Is it because it's the first time in so long that parents have mobilized and challenged these people and they're not liking it. I think that's

exactly what it is, and we are. We're doing another case, similar case in Rhode Island where a parent asked for information and the teacher union sued her for simply filing the re west and that case is still going on. So yeah, I think what's happening is that, especially the unions, especially the teachers unions, they see government schools as their fiefdom, as their domain. And how dare we mere citizens, mere taxpayers, try to control how our tax dollars are being spent

and what is being propagandized in the government classroom. Well, what's that that Canadas? It's likely to win governor over there in Virginia who said in one of the debates here to Night, we can't have a system where the parents are deciding what we teach in schools. Terry Terry mccauliffe. Yeah, yeah,

the whole vision. You know, the public school system as we know it today is largely the creation of the progressive movement of the early twentieth century that designed the current public school system as a means of instilling in children what the government thinks children ought to think and believe. As Woodrow Wilson once said, the schools exist to make

the children as unlike the parents as possible. And and I think a lot of public school teachers and the teachers unions really take that seriously, and they really don't like the idea that parents might be interfering with the education of their own children. It's it's really a shocking way of of abusing power. But that's what's going on. And it's worth pointing out that the teachers unions are

extremely effective at getting sympathetic school board members elected. So many many school boards are are leaning way that way you sent toward progressive causes and philosophies. You you saying that, tim makes me want to ask you what is your feeling about the public school system in general? I mean, I know you're adamantly not going to have kids, but if you had kids, would you put them in public

school or not? Oh? Absolutely not, absolutely not and and uh and in a lot of the school districts in this country, I think the best thing you could possibly do for your family is to withdraw your children from the government school district. The government schools exist largely to propagandize to children what the government thinks they ought to know.

And although there was at one time a standard of quality be that you could find in some government schools, I think that standard has just totally collapsed, no matter how much money we throw at it. And that's always the argument, and they said, oh, we don't get enough money. When you actually look at the amount of money it's in the public school system, yeah, oh yeah, And it's multiples what private schools UH spend to achieve better educational outcomes.

And we're able to stay open during the pandemic with much less money, right, I think it's absolutely tragic and heartbreaking New York City schools which have systematically lowered standards and past kids head, particularly poor kids, kids of color who can't read and write. They've now eliminated their programs for gifted and talented education. Now we have completely well, New York is completely eliminated the idea of some kids who are very bright need to be challenged more. I

think it's disgusting. I've said I've said before on the show that government people think government is our parent, and it's not. Government is our child. We pay its bill,

it's our job to discipline it. And yet we think somehow it's okay to turn over to the government our youngest citizens, that our future citizens and future generations to be taught by the state about what to desire and not desire, what to think and not think about our past, about economics, about you know that, all the big questions. Is it any wonder that so many of them graduate thinking that the government is right and and the the

only solution to our problems as a government. I think it's a terrible idea in any democracy to turn over the minds of our young would be citizens to the hands of the state. Yeah, I don't want to get too far off track, and we can get back to your specific case if you want to in a second.

But the podcast as referring to the other day where George will of the Washington Post was being interviewed about his book when he invoked you, was when he was talking about this new move towards equity as opposed to equality, and he said, this is the most radical thing that has happened in two hundred and forty years of this country's history, that we're moving toward wanting equal outcomes for everybody.

And uh, you know, and that's the sort of thing you're obviously teaching in schools, and so forty years ago, the big debate among philosophers was what is justice? Does justice mean equal outcomes or does it mean the ability to pursue your unhappiness and attain it? And nowadays we

just skipped over that argument entirely. And it says if we just assumed that justice means equal outcomes, and so we're just going to pursue equity, which means taking away from those who have more in giving to those who do not, and judging people on the basis of color because their ancestors are discriminated against and so forth and so on in order to equalize outcomes, because we just assume that ask justice. Well, that's not justice, it's injustice.

Tim Sanderford is on the line, vice president for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute. Tim, I want to turn back to the topic of schools, at least for a minute. The infamous Merrick Garland memo of the other day, in which he made it clear that the Justice Department would be looking into and it was it was a very wishy wash a Lee worded the memo, but in essence, any sort of freakas at school board meetings nationwide. What do you think of my My test case yesterday was

I get a little out of hat. I'm piste off. I'm at a school board meeting. I get mad and I say to somebody who tried to shut me down, one of the school board members, somebody ought to kick your ass. Do you think the FBI ought to be involved in that? You know, the vagueness of the memo is the goal, because it is true that there have been a few incidents of parents going too far and actually you know, threatening or or even harassing or intimidating

school board members. And of course that's illegal and wrong. But the way this memo is written is to allow people in the government to smear those who simply, you know, get angry or are really passionate about something, to smear them as if they're engaged in some kind of violence. And we know this has been the rhetorical trick in the past couple of years to use words like violence or or safety in ways that don't make any sense.

If you disagree with somebody, now all of a sudden, that's an act of violence, and you're you're harming their safety and so forth and so on, And that's what this meant. That's why the memo is written vaguely in order to use it as a club against people who simply get angry at the way their school boards are

misspending their money and mishandling their responsibility. You know, Tim, you for me, are one of the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawned or say a commonplace thing. I thought I'd hit you with a little caro wack poem basically tweet what's going on here? What the hell? Are you two up to Yes, I can, I can.

I can do without the Beat Generation. You know, there's a Quilette article out saying the Beat Generations about to be canceled, and Tim retweeted that and said, I don't think that necessarily be a bad thing. As a fan of Jack Caro Wack poetry and Tim being a published poet, I thought they'd be a good thing to throw in there. I have a book of poetry coming out next spring, and guarantee we will love to have you on to talk about that. Fantastic all right, And I didn't see

that coming. Tim the lawyer, Tim Tim Santa for Vice President for Litigation of the Goldwater Institute. We will, Uh, you know, we need to post a list of Tim's books, although if you know how Google works you can find them because they're terrific. Tim. We appreciate the time. Thanks a million, thanks. All right. You got Tim, as a real high falutint poet is not a fan of Beat Generation poetry. I got to admit that the Ginsburg Howl I've read a hundred times and I don't get at all.

I don't understand why it's a masterpiece. That doesn't mean it's not, but I don't get it at all. If the proverbial infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters cranked out something and I read one of them at random, it would make as much sense to me as that thing did. Or William Burrow's Naked Lunch, which I've attempted to read many times and can't get more

than four pages in. But some of the Jack Carouac poetry about walking the streets of San Francisco in the middle of the night, going from dive bar dive bar, as a guy who's done that a thousand times, I thought was absolutely just brilliant stuff. The legend Verry Third and Howard And if I get drunk, I get. I mean, there's some good stuff in there, I think. And if you've never checked out Carouac reading those poems with Steve Allen playing the piano on the Tonight Show, it's really

sounds like verbal pornography for drunkards to me. I don't approve it. It might be I won't have it. It might be actually, um, that was good stuff right there from Tim And if you just caught the tail end of it on the podcast, you can catch it. Just go to Armstrong and Getty dot com art