One of the first things that I did was go to sign up for the first Poms for Liberty Summit in Tampa in June 2022. And I signed up using my name. And but I, you know, I did wear a red blazer with an American flag pinched into the lapel. And it was interesting when I checked into the hotel. The woman at the desk immediately said, Oh, I'm really
with you guys. I'm upgrading you all to a high floor. And so suddenly I'm up way up high with a water view just because I was perceived as being with the Moms for Liberty team. And at the same time, there was a, it was right next to the Tampa Convention Center where Metricon was being held. And Metricon was like build as Florida's largest anime gathering. So you're out on the streets right out
side of the Moms for Liberty. And even in the lobby. And there are people with horns and spandex and glitter and colonial garb. And I was thinking to myself, what a beautiful clash of cultures. You know, I'm in the elevator wearing my land yearning all my stuff. And I go up and and three kind of Metricon goers step at the elevator. And I could just see them like looking at me like, Oh my God.
You're like, I'm a reporter. I'm a reporter. But it was really, it was really interesting because you could just feel a certain vibe. This is the Culture Study podcast. And I'm Anne Helen Peterson. And I'm Laura Papano. I am author of school moms, parent activism, partisan politics and the battle for public education. And I've been in education journalists for over 30 years. Wow. It's just pronouncing parent activism, partisan politics and the battle for public education. That's a real feat.
Well, I mean, with the title of school moms, we kind of have to explain what you're talking about because so many moms are involved in schools on both sides of the issue these days. So your book came out January 30th. And I would love to hear, especially given your history and what you've been writing about for decades, who is mom's really really why you came to focus on them, the process of writing the book.
So I didn't only focus on moms for liberty, but certainly that was some of the early reporting that I did. And as I say at the beginning of the book, I didn't plan to write this. I didn't want to write this book. I felt compelled to write this book because what I saw happening around the country, much of it led by moms for liberty was really not about education.
Public schools have for years and years and years been the place where people came together in common cause. As a mom, as a PTO mom in schools, as just a regular mom of kids in school, I never knew what people's politics were. That wasn't the point of schools.
Schools were a community where we all came together. We did whatever tasks we did, bringing tissues and markers and baking things for the teacher appreciation breakfast or whatever it was we were doing. We were doing it not for some goal, but other than to support our school community.
And what I saw happening was that the far right and moms for liberty in particular saw this as a political opportunity and decided to insert into what was a nonpartisan space, a very partisan goal, which was to use schools as a vehicle for gaining political power.
So a lot of our listenership is very familiar with moms for liberty because they have kids in school and have encountered their presence in various school board races and school board meetings, all sorts of things. But if you are not in that orbit, I think that there.
You might have heard of them, you might understand them as part of this larger constellation of organizations that is involved in the quote unquote culture wars, but you might not know exactly who they are. I was actually I was explaining to my mom yesterday, who used to be a school board member. And I was like, mom, a lot of these people are home schoolers, they don't even have kids in the school.
She said, why do they care? Well, that's a good question. But so I would love for our listeners who are maybe a little bit less familiar. If you could give us just a quick little overview of who moms for liberty are where they get their money. I know that's a complicated question. But that is a very complicated question.
So moms for liberty, you know, started in 2021 after Tina Deskovich lost her school board race in Brevard County to Jennifer Jenkins. And, you know, a lot of the issue in that race was around masking, which, which kind of, you know, as we all saw at that time, the kind of masking, no masking rules were what really set off a lot of the protest at school boards.
And interestingly, what happened at those school board meetings was that people found each other. And that was a way it ended up being kind of a, you know, an organizer to gather people. But moms for liberty started their three co founders, you know, Tina Tiffany justice and bridge zeagler. So Tiffany and Tina have been like the most visible leaders. And it really was just it's a far right white Christian nationalist message of fear, you know, your children are risk. This is dangerous.
We have to counter what's happening in the public school, a lot of anti teaching about race, anti gender anti LBG BQ claiming that the libraries collect pornography, which they do not. Just a lot of things really to whip up the fear. And what's interesting is that that was precise. It's as if the moms for liberty were the answer to a problem that a lot of far right organizations had been looking for.
Meaning if you look at when a lot of these groups like the Leadership Institute, the Heritage Foundation, a lot of these far right very well funded groups started in the 1970s. And they had been, you know, somewhat successful. But when moms suddenly arrive with the very message that kind of mobilized just, I mean, you saw on TV at school board, they mobilized people in ways that these far right groups had been unable to do.
And so it was a very natural alliance. What I noticed was interesting is at the first mom for liberty summit in June 2022, their main sponsor was the Leadership Institute, which, you know, has been training conservatives for, you know, since the late 1970s.
And there were only a few tables. I mean, you could walk out of the ballroom and there is six, seven, and just a handful of tables. When I went to the moms for liberty summit in Philly this past July, their main sponsor was Patriot mobile action. And we can talk about Patriot mobile in a minute, but they were corridors and corridors and corridors of far right groups with tables set up to, you know, attract cater involved the moms.
At that first conference, I remember having a conversation with the leader of the NOAA Webster Institute, which is, you know, one of these conservative groups that had just decided to offer school board training online. And was, he was so excited that he had had a couple of hundred people sign up. So it says, if all of these organizations, in that same summer, the Leadership Institute started online school board training.
It's as if school boards had for a long time by the far right just been overlooked as trivial offices because they, you know, it was something it was education. It was women. It was moms and, you know, moms have been very invisible in terms of power.
But these far right organizations in essence saw just a wonderful natural constituency at that first summit. Ronda Santis stood up and announced that he had endorsed for the first time ever school board candidates. And he had everyone who was running stand up. Now, the women who were standing up and the women all around were just so impressed that someone, the governor, Florida, Ronda Santis, would dain to endorse school board candidates.
What he was doing, I realized, as I was sitting there, was basically feeding a ground game. So it wasn't as if he was doing them a big favor as they felt. They were doing him a big favor. Yeah. And that's really how this system has played out.
So I grew up in Idaho and I did a lot of reporting there over the last five, six, seven years. And I'm very familiar with how the far right works there and the entire movement for, or like part of the mechanism, the recruiting mechanism for people to move to Idaho to be part of whether it's the American readout, which is a not really a place.
But like sort of a place in North Idaho, Eastern Washington, Western Montana. But like part of it is we have educational freedom here. Right. So a lot of these ideas are very familiar to me. And I've seen them in action for for a long time and and watching as essentially other organizations figure out, oh, like here's how we can infiltrate every single corner of the legal system, the educational system.
The ideological playing ground basically in a place like that's what's happened already in North Idaho and now they're trying to duplicate that playbook and other places. Okay. We got some really great questions from our listeners and we're going to start with the how and the why of moms for liberty. This first question comes from Hannah and Melody's going to read it.
I'm wondering about why I'm seeing so much of their organizing at the school board level like targeting school board policies, speaking at meetings or running for school boards. Why this institution particularly our school boards uniquely susceptible to this kind of right wing takeover. So I think like even the idea that school board members are elected like that is really interesting to me and that you do not have to be a parent of a student or even participate in the public school system.
Besides obviously paying your taxes in order to take this role. So what do you think it is about the way that we have organized school boards that make it susceptible to this sort of ideological takeover. So firstly school boards have been much overlooked for a very long time as someone who's covered education for decades and decades until I was working on this book and watched hours and hours and hours of school board meetings.
I had not really attended many school board meetings. I was a school board rep in high school and as I admitted in the book would often fall asleep after you know sports practice and homework and everything to the drone of adult voices like debating you know school bus routes.
So what I do is that school boards actually are very flexible in what they have as far as control. Yeah. I know very why someone you know that I interviewed in the book is a long time trusty and upper Dublin school district in Pennsylvania.
We take a very hands off approach. We don't control curriculum. We hire people. We let the professionals run it. But that is certainly not in the case and we have so many examples now of where you get a far right school board and the school board is suddenly meddling in issues from curriculum to bathroom use to what teachers can hang on their doors or their walls.
School boards are very kind of malleable way to gain power to gain cultural and social power in a district. What's interesting is that because they are often overlooked races voter turnout and some of the races that I followed was lowest 10%. So it doesn't there are people who are losing by a few votes in north Idaho. I did a story for Hacking to report in vanity fair recently. And you know one race that turned the school board to the far right was lost by eight votes.
And the person who lost said everyone just assumed I was going to win. So what you have happened is you have school boards having you know this this power over the functioning of rules of schools and I'll give you an example of in Keller Texas. The school board was flipped to far right they suddenly changed the whole way the books were purchased for libraries and then instead of librarians who are exquisitely trained to curate collections that suit their communities.
Suddenly the school board set up new rules you know with a whole matrix of what couldn't couldn't appear in books and they a process by which books needed a 30 day review of the public and then each book purchase had to be approved by the school board. So I watched one of these five and a half hour long meetings where middle school librarian in the district came up to the mic and basically said we cannot buy we cannot obtain it of timely manner books on camels or squirrels or football.
We cannot get the latest Guinness book of world records or the Diary of Web went be kid and she said kids who read a lot are coming up to me and saying where all the new books and she said I don't tell them the truth which is that it's political. There's an example of how you flip a school board and suddenly kids can't get books about camels and squirrels and football in a timely manner.
So there are real consequences to this and there's a financial aspect all of us to right yes so one of the reasons why these school boards can be flipped and is because it used to be that people would run for school board maybe spend a couple hundred dollars maybe a thousand dollars zero
zerox things and their friends would help them what you had happened in Texas is that Patriot mobile in with Patriot mobile for those who don't know and I did not before it started doing this research is a Christian cell phone company in Texas and they donate 5% of their profits to far right causes and they list them right on their website. And in January 2022 they started a political action committee a super PAC called Patriot mobile action.
There were 11 school board races in four districts in north Texas that spring spring of 2022 that they poured in over four hundred thousand dollars to those races because they were super PAC they couldn't donate directly to the candidates but then through
different local packs that were said education packs that were said to support the far right candidates and I you know looked at all you know I was looking a lot of campaign finance reports and looking at where the spending was happening and a lot of spending was happening on behalf of these candidates at axiom strategies which is a national
political strategy group based in Kansas City Missouri and happens to also do a lot of work for Ted Cruz ronda santa's for national political candidates so what you have then is you have a national level strategist and marketing people producing materials for local school board races. Patriot mobile supported those 11 candidates through their super PAC they claimed credit for it and they won all those races and they flipped for those school boards to far right school boards.
I think we'll get to this later I think but at least the goal and Idaho some people say like it's just making the school so bad it's part of the point. Oh they don't want public schools. Yes exactly. I know like they really they wanted dismantle the public school system and turn it into a voucher system for private schools or for you know a place where you can homeschool and have complete control over everything that you're that your student consumes.
But okay we'll table that for now because we have a great history question that's next this is from john. It seems like groups such as moms for liberty pop up every 10 to 20 years or so book banning and conservative attacks on public schools and curriculum or nothing new and thinking especially about Alice more in the 1970s and West Virginia.
That's before I was born but there's been a lot of great reporting on this lately what is different new or novel about moms for liberty compared to past groups and how is a current environment impacting their tactics versus these past groups. I love this question because there is such a history of wielding moms is like this apolitical like it's just moms looking out for their kids like nothing nefarious going on here so I'm wondering if you can just root us a little bit historically here.
And talk about what's different so it's referring to Connoi County in West Virginia and I included this in the book because it actually fed into the paikl versus the island trees school district in long island which was kind of one of the key school censorship cases but the West Virginia case.
When I dug into it what I did is I looked at newspaper archives and stories of the time and what was so interesting about that was to discover that the Heritage Foundation was on the ground down there and that the one of their experts speakers that was there to kind of get everybody all lathered up and angry about the textbooks in schools.
It was from upstate New York and was leading anti sex education and anti busing efforts up there in the 1970s and you know what Alice more did was really just a version of what we are seeing now which was you know object to certain materials that were part of the curriculum and present them in such a kind of frightening light that people.
We're very upset there was one pastor down there who said who wanted to people to boycott the schools that said be better to not go to school at all then to go to these schools. Unfortunately what happened to Connoi County is it got very violent there are two people who were killed there were bombs.
It was just a really really distressing situation but in a reminder of what we see now it based on emotion you know people get very very riled up about that you know their children especially if they believe that they're dangerous and some of the dangers are of what they're exposed to and I think they're textbook crusaders who were opposing readings that involved.
You know kind of Janice joblin and Bob Dylan you know that these we should be talking about our you know our heroes from the revolutionary period not these kind of modern rascals so it's which is kind of what we hear now and I it's just they weren't using the term woke they just were like they're they call him hippies.
I just I love the idea of like I feel like parents now would also object to Bob Dylan in the schools or Janice joblin in the schools and some capacity like if you were studying those lyrics are thinking about it but also the point that you made about how like the person who came down to West Virginia how that person had been involved in like anti sex ed stuff but also anti busing which I think is important through line rate like this isn't just about.
Yeah it's also about segregation yeah yes it's also about preserving waitness yes and yes and that's always like you said at the beginning and this is something that I've talked about with lots of other authors about white Christian nationalism like this is not just about Christian values it's about white nationalist Christian values and one of the things I've been asked you know why do you use the term far right in your book and I say precisely because this we're talking about extremism the nature of public schools that they gather every
time and that means gathering people from a wide spectrum of views but extremism is different extremism is about destroying public schools it's not about being part of the conversation and to your point about what's different now I would say speed and money the kind of rapidity of messaging video things that can be shared clipped moved changed recast to be you know endlessly persuasive.
Right is you know creates a very dangerous situation which people believe things that are not true in that I go I went to school board censorship issue when they were pulling books in the library and banning them the school board just insisted upon it they removed 11 books and one of them was slaughterhouse five by kerbana and their strategy similar to the strategy we see now at school boards
is people would read objectionable sections of the book allowed and so I remember one of the objections to slaughterhouse five was it Jesus was called a bomb and in this member said you know I don't care if the rest of the story is good you know that's not for me to just to exclude it so that seems kind of very mild to us now but it's but maybe in another
couple decades this will seem pretty mild but but yes this stuff comes around and around again because people find that schools and curriculum and books are way of imposing values and political will I think with the mom moms for liberty in particular got a head start in a pandemic gave people
head start on that right so our next question takes us back to something that we've discussed a little bit already and it's all about parental rights this is from Bethany I live in Ohio and I've heard the phrase parental rights come up often in the recent passing of legislation against transgender youth receiving gender
affirming care sometimes in conjunction with moms of liberty how did parental rights become such a rallying point for conservatives what do they really mean by this idea seems like a thinly veiled attempt at control tactics to me yes so this is about parental rights for people who want only a specific types of parental rights right like not for parents who want you know affirming health care for their trans kids or parents who want their kids to have sex education
so those people don't have parental rights it's only the people who want a different sort of parental rights so is this the first time that this phrase has been used like who came up with it where did you first encounter it let's talk more
well I first encountered as a journalist back in the 90s in Newton Massachusetts when there was a plan for a sex ed pilot and you have to understand that this was you know after aids you know aids really changed how school thought of their job relative to sex education
and that it was important to have conversations that they hadn't had before for student safety and so there was this pilot that was planned but then there was a small but very vocal resistance that I ended up writing about and they claimed not to be involved with the Christian coalition but it
look I found a lot of connections between this you know local group and ironically enough the leader of that local group in Walthamast now leads a national anti-LGBTQ group but it was at those school board meetings and they were packed there are cameras to overflow with people standing in the parking lot just to kind of hear this and that I heard that phrase come up you know these are parental rights we have the right to not have homosexuality mentioned or you know sex education
now parents have always been allowed to opt their kids out of things right and decide that you know they didn't want that for their child what's frustrating and sticky about parental rights is that it's really an imposing your set of what you think parental rights mean on everyone else it's meant to look at like we're just protecting
our own children but it's actually quite the opposite it's like let us dictate for everyone's children what should be the standard and what was interesting going back to Idaho for a second is when I was there actually on election day this past fall I met with a father of eight who had six children in the public schools
and he was conservative he you know his Facebook pages he pointed out has the American flag in the second amendment and yet he said this kind of presumption of you know that our kids are being indoctrinated that is he said paranoid bull honky which I love to know it very I know and he said he said I have my children and he said if I cannot as a parent challenge something they might have heard or be involved or know what they're thinking or learning in school that I'm not doing my job
he said I of course they're going to hear things that I disagree with that's the nature of the world but it's my job as a parent to really counter that and to discuss that with them and I thought what a refreshing way of thinking about it because it's absolutely 100% right the parental rights sounds like it's this you know big endowment of you know parenting roles where it's a really very
productive act of let me try to impose my set of parent rights my view of parenting and we know if we get you know if you get 20 parents in room everybody does it a little bit differently you know can you have a sleepover can you not have a sleepover you have to finish your dinner can you leave the table do you have to eat as a family there are so many things that we are
that we have different rules about the idea that we should be able to impose a set of universal parental rights on schools is absurd so I will say that the one thing that I think a lot of more progressive people might struggle to understand is that I listen to this conversation I'm like absolutely parenting you know this is the way that we equip our kids with the tools to be discerning
and no book can change a kid single handedly right they can introduce them to ideas but then they have to figure out if they like those ideas what they believe about those ideas
right like it's a very sophisticated understanding of of child agency as well and what I think sometimes that we miss is that a lot of people who believe otherwise they really do think that this book is the work of the devil and the devil is the sneaky asshole so like he like he uses a book and can be so powerful through that book to infect a kid right
and that to me like from my vantage point I'm like that's ridiculous right but if you have been surrounded by that belief your entire life that like the devil is so powerful and will undo our most art and work then that that at least helps me understand how what I understand is irrational why they believe it does that make sense
well yeah but also and I think also one of the things that were that were skipping over here is the idea that you know I read gender queer and I thought it was it was the first time that I ever kind of understood that you know non binary what that felt like the confusion the frustration
do I think second graders should read no but the author said I imagine this for high school and older and what we're forgetting is that the job of librarians is about curating and selecting and choosing and placing and we are taking that away from them and they're doing that job all of the time no not every book is perfect for every child every age and you know and it's not even an age thing you know some kids are more mature than other kids
what that's why we need professionals and what this whole crusade is doing is undercutting the professionalism of librarians and teachers and people who work with children every single day and not just your child but lots of different children that's such a good point and I we have a lot of librarians and educators in our listener audience so I know that they will appreciate that as well so our next question is about the who and also the how and this is from Laura
I'm a late Gen X am I know you're an elder millennial these women are our contemporaries what in the world happened banning books in the age of the internet such deep homophobia Relatedly can you pull the threads on some of the astroturfing origins of this group? So we've talked a little bit about the astroturfing so I think we can direct this person back to that section but the profile of the typical moms for liberty person like is it a
upper mental class suburban woman is it more like the people that I knew growing up in Idaho who are very much involved in like the more white nationalist parts of this like is it that there there's a certain leaders and then people kind of get
grouped into it because they agree with the phrase like it's gotten to woken schools like what is what's going on what the fuck is going on Well I can tell you that my first reaction the first moms for liberty conference was that she's I should have brought my high heels because it was a very kind of well-quaffed in like you know southern audience and it was a lot of people from Florida the one in Philly was a little different
who are these people it's I mean a lot of them are suburban for sure but there are a lot of also moms for liberty adjacent groups that draw in people of all ages fear speaks to people at all ages there is this prototype of them of the moms for liberty for sure it is very white but it's not only white
but there are a whole range of people right I don't think it's just one single demographic so Laura's question was about why there's this sort of regression and like this is not new right like the 1960s were yeah it maybe you understand that is the time of like cultural rebellion I personally understand it is like the birth of the modern conservative movement right
like like there's all these things that there's always this counterweight that's happening particularly in America we people are angry there's a lot there's a lot of unhappiness right now and it's it's like who can capture that unhappiness best and fastest and most consistently and over and over
and I think what you see is that the messaging is not very deep it's just really hitting particular emotional tones and you know millennials Gen Xers moms are busy people parents are busy people there's a lot being asked of them and there's a lot of uncertainty
and if you can kind of rally all your uncertainty around the one problem of protecting your children against you know evil threats that may not be real but are there's a whole team there that will support you in doing that I mean it's not that different than you know team sports it's not that different than the NFL I mean it's about teams and I think that that's one of the real important tasks for people who care about public education is okay let's break this down
because I am as a journalist who's covered education for decades and decades I'm not going to say that there are problems I mean my main job as a journalist was to look at the problems look at what people are doing and ask hard questions does that really work is that making a difference
and that's not the conversation that we're having right now we need to get back and because there are legitimate real problems and we're not going to solve them if we're just fighting over you know what books we have in the library
okay so our next question is all about pushing back against this sort of activism we got a lot of questions about this because I think people are genuinely you know they're curious about what moms for Liberty is and why it works the way that it does but they also want to fight that want to fight them in their communities so this question is from Caitlin what is moms for Liberty doing that moms demand action isn't and what can other groups learn from the quote success of moms for Liberty
like truly how are we having serious conversations and seeing actual policy change about young adult novels but not automatic weapons alright so moms demand action was founded in 2012 also has significant financial backing from bloomberg and emails from them every day and specifically about gun policy so
right are these similar groups is a fair to compare them like how do we think about it and then the other thing that I that I feel like we have to mention is that like in the 2023 election cycle so many moms for Liberty candidates lost like they might be successful in bringing these these issues
to the forefront but I also think that they are not as successful as their public profile might suggest I think both of those things are true in terms of the push back in a Caitlin great question I think that you know moms for Liberty has been successful
and I think there are some people who align with them who are not officially moms for Liberty moms for Liberty has effectively defined a kind of language for talking about things that scare people so they have a very effective kind of playbook that way but people are fighting back and and actually very effectively and I think we saw some of that in November red wine and blue is one organization that was started by Katie Parish
she was a you know a DC political operative involved move to Ohio and said she imagined herself living in a kind of interesting purple state and when she saw you know kind of things happening there realize that she wanted to do something about it and went around and was having conversations with women she said often over glass of wine so it's called red wine and blue not that you have to have wine but it's fine and
but the point of it was that it was social and to engage people not just like sign them up to do tasks but to create a community around pushing back and organizing and if you look at that strategy that approach is actually what you see in a lot of places you have stop moms for Liberty so that started in Brevard County
by Liz McIntyre and what was interesting is that I was talking with her recently and she said we when when mom's for Liberty first started in Brevard County she said we just didn't even take it seriously because their claims are so absurd and she was a 24 or 26 year veteran teacher and she said we were in the schools we knew that their claims were not accurate we didn't think they would catch on now they have 46 chapters around the country
so and there are a lot of local groups that are pushing back in their communities and I think of in Buck County, Pennsylvania as one great example that was where you had a far right school board but then you had a mom you had Kate Nazemmi and a retired English teacher and they started advocates for inclusive education and that brought in teachers parents community members and has just done the hard work
of detailing every you know policy comes up what does it mean what are the implications what are the results of this policy educating people bringing people together and I actually talked with Kate actually last week and I said you know everyone's been really cheering the results in Pennsylvania and the moms for Liberty just being kind of turned back and I said you know are you guys done she goes oh no not at all she said we already know that they are plotting to retake this in the next round
so she said we have to be really vigilant I'm on their email is going to email today about a turnout for you know there are three meetings try to attend one of these there's like school board and finance and another committee meeting just really keeping people informed but also building a sense of community around schools and she said we do these community events we have ice cream socials and she said we started doing some there's really effective she said candle making
it brought swath of people for around their district would come and do candle making she said when people are doing crafts they kind of settle in and start talking and she said we have hard discussions but there's a kind of feeling that we're all doing this together and I actually think what a brilliant way of rebuilding some of what is getting lost
in the kind of NFL style our team fighting that's going on so building community we don't all have to agree on everything but we have to agree that our children matter that they deserve an excellent public education and that that involves professionals it doesn't involve parents with an agenda meddling in whatever teacher says whatever books whatever's on the way it should not involve that level of parental oversight
I also think about the comparison between moms going up against the gun lobby which is so entrenched in so many ways and you know at the very top right like all the way that presidential candidates all the way down versus a group of people going up against a librarian
who can be more readily delegitimized even though they have so much training like they they know how to do their job but one thing that we often do with feminized professions like librarians and say like oh it's a job that anyone could do right like all you have to do is love books
which is a ridiculous thing to say or to understand about the work that librarians do but it's easy to say like oh well you know as we talked about earlier here we can come up with better standards on how we can get books into the school
you know to think that like the incredible humor of that to think that you could you could do that yourself and I think that is part of why there has been more success quote unquote success for groups on the far right like moms for liberty then moms demand action
well you know also gun laws are like the third rail of American politics right I mean and and the truth is that a gun in rural Idaho for hunting is different than a gun in New York City or it and how people feel about them in the role they play in their lives
you're right about the hubris people think they can do that and as part of doing this research I actually interviewed quite a number of librarians and there was someone said I said just walk me through what's required walk me through the process of how you choose and you realize it is extremely complicated every school library is different from every other school library and the books must be you know practices that you curate the books that reflect your community
and you weed books I never knew about weeding books that if books you don't want books to be in libraries that are so old as to have inaccurate information or to be out of date so students are using them for reports or tests or research
they're not useful so there's a lot of attention that needs to be paid and librarians take these jobs extremely seriously and they apply a lot of expertise I mean to be a librarian you need advanced degrees in which you have studied library sciences there's a lot to learn
this is great great setup for last question which is from a librarian and this is from Brooke I work as a public librarian and fighting this group on a national level is important but even more important is effectively working against them locally what are the best ways to combat this insanity at a local level especially when local politicians are happy to do the work for them
so I loved our discussion about like creating community around public schools and places where people can have these conversations that are a little bit less fraught within the meetings themselves but what are the other strategies particularly for people like librarians people who are closer to the public school system and doing that work
well back to Bucks County when I was doing some reporting there I was there on band books week and there was a part of the event that I went to one evening was one in which people showed up and wrote postcards of encouragement to librarians just to let them know that they were you know that you're taking a lot of harassment publicly but that you also have a lot of support
you know that strategy of constantly letting people know that you have their back that you are supporting what they're doing that you know that you're recognizing the expertise and the skill they're bringing and I think that going forward is more of a conversation that we need to be happening on a local level is instead of just complaining about this you know what you see so often is people take a broad national kind of set of grievances
and just use them on the local level but I think on the local level we need to be talking about what our librarians are actually doing what our teachers actually doing what is happening in the schools what are the projects kids are working on where the idea is they're sharing because there's a lot of great stuff that happens in schools
there are a lot of wonderful moments I mean I you know run the school newspaper and you haven't connected it and for the kids in grades three through eight oh my gosh they are so smart they have such interesting insights about the world and let's celebrate that let's celebrate and and I don't mean celebrate in some trivial way I mean let's talk about it let's remind people of the details of what is actually happening in the being accomplished
because I think we've just we've given up that territory too quickly and put ourselves on the defensive part of it is the vacuum right like when you don't know what is going on in the schools you can map any sort of things on to it and you're like oh my gosh they're talking about George Floyd what they're they're making everyone feel bad about being white or they're making the white kids feel bad about being white
or you know whatever they can imagine their worst understanding the worst faith understanding of what a teacher is doing and personally and I imagine you probably feel the same like I think the lack of like a robust press is part of this this problem I remember growing up the newspaper was at our school or at our school all the time just taking pictures of kids like doing kids stuff at the school and then you also have all the tension that's paid to sports in various capacities
but I think that it helped fill in that imagination of like what are kids doing at our schools with visuals and then also with little stories and now if Facebook's the only thing that's filling that thing and it's all this these negative understandings of what your kids are doing or like your friend of a friend saying like I've heard this my grandparents like a grandparents friend said that all the kids in the schools now are trans
that's sort of just like fear mongering there's nothing to be afraid of if a kid is trans clearly not like we can agree on that but that idea that somehow the schools are turning kids trans which is not how it works anyway what's interesting that you bring that up because in 2021 the Heritage Foundation was concerned about this and they commissioned a nationally representative survey of political opinions of K-12 teachers
and not surprisingly they found that teachers tended to be more liberal not kind of way left but what they did discover and what they found and announced in their reporting was that that didn't necessarily impact children and this is a quote from the report it says we find little evidence that a large percentage of teachers are systemically imposing a radical political agenda in K-12 classrooms that's the Heritage Foundation so the Heritage Foundation is just for the Heritage Foundation
and the Heritage Foundation is one of the you know far right organizations founded in the 70s who is actually there on the ground in Kanawa, West Virginia but has been a big far right supporter so what's interesting is that just a few years ago they were perfectly willing to say that teachers might be more left leaning than the population
but the teachers view their jobs as being teachers they're trying to teach the math they're trying to teach them reading they're really not ideologically imposing their views on students and we have to remember that because what we hear now is something different and we're hearing something different not because anything's changed but because it's politically expedient to claim that that's what's happening
this has been such a great conversation it's pissed me off it's made me hopeful I think you know that's kind of how I feel about the far right whenever I talk about them at least in terms of the hope comes from like what we can do and how we can move forward if people want to find more of you where can where can they look?
Well LauraPopano.com I have all my articles from I mean they don't go back 30 years because the internet didn't happen but yes there's a lot of stories there's other things there links to events and podcasts will put this up there
and you know I'm also on I'm on Twitter and I'm a Facebook page and I did start an Instagram at the urging of my children so as I go around do these conversation different places I'm gonna put a little bit up there Awesome thank you again so much this has been a really great conversation Thank you
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