A Pattern of Manufactured Outrage

attention to actual, other important news that is happening. So I've decided to do the latter because I got to tell you that I am so fucking disgusted with the mainstream media. I'm so fucking disgusted with all NBC's, CBS, fucking MSNBC, CNN. All of them have learned absolutely nothing. There is no critical analysis that is happening right now. I hear people saying, oh my god, this is a

sad day for the nation. Tell me why. Tell me why it's a sad day for the nation for a white heterosis, wealthy, privileged, fucking entitled son of a bitch to actually face criminal charges. Tell me why that's a sad day. I did an entire TikTok yesterday talking about what actual sad days in America look like. The murder of George Floyd was a sad day. The release of George Zimmerman him being found not guilty after murdering a sixteen year old boy named Trey von Martin, that was

a fucking sad day. The Supreme Court that has been weaponized by the Republican Party overturning Roe v. Wade, that was a sad day in America. All of the criminalization and target of the trans community that is happening. Those are sad days in America. New Town, Columbine, Parkland, the Pol's nightclub shooting, Uvaldi, the Tennessee School, and so many others.

Those are sad days in America. A privileged, white, fucking hate filled blowhard twice in Peach stupid, stupid man being held to account for crimes that he has committed is not a sad day in our country. It is one where we should rejoice that the justice system is doing exactly what it was supposed to do in the first fucking place, which has hold all people to account that break the law and remind us as a nation that we are not yet a Banana republic. When the former

twice in peace. President of the United States can be brought in for an arraignment for over thirty counts of charges against him. That is a righteous day in America. The covering of Donald Trump's playing on the tarmac, the following of his motorcade, that's not news. That is sensationalistic bullshit that I for one, decided not to watch my What a nicer day you can have when you don't spend it plopped down in front of the television to

listen to people fill airtime. And I say that as somebody in the media, you know, NBCCBS and other the mainstream news outlets decided to cut their coverage right and just turn one hundred percent to Donald Trump. Nobody cut

their coverage. However, earlier in the week, when the state of Tennessee saw the largest walkout of students in its history, nobody cut from their regular coverage to show the faces of resistance are young children who are fighting for their lives because the adults that are in charge refuse to

do so. Nobody was showing what the Tennessee Republicans in the state House were doing by voting out three Democrats because they decided to side with their constituents to call for gun reform and now have lost their jobs, and those constituents in their districts have lost representation. No one cut their coverage. Then I am so sick and fucking

tired of the media in this country. So for those of you who support my podcasts here on Patreon, you know I appreciate you so very much because you are making a choice to resist, a choice to resist the ratings war, to resist right the herd, and to carve out and find the voices that you can trust and you can believe in. Who aren't just following somebody on high who was saying, Oh no, this is what we're going to cover and this is how we're going to

cover it. That's not what I do on Woke, if it's not what I do on The New Abnormal or on Democracy Ish. It is why I've chosen podcasting as opposed to going to chase the ever mighty dollar by trying to get my face right as an anchor or get my own show on TV, because I'd occurred to me a long time ago that then they get to own you, and they own your voice so that you can't call out the bullshit that they do because that's

who's right in your checks. So no, folks, we will cover Donald Trump the way that we cover everything else. But he ain't getting no special fucking coverage on woke AF that's for goddamn sure. The motherfucker was arraigned. Once we know the details of said arraignment and the charges that are being brought against him, then we will bring on our legal experts to do what it is that

we always do. But no, I'm not going to give Donald Trump twenty five thirty minutes of my good goddamn life to just pontificate on this white supremis piece of trash. And I hope that you all decided to save your emotional well being in health and avoid the TV, and if you live in New York, avoid the city and are staying safe. So coming up next my conversation with Joaquin Era, who is the director of the campaign for

Our Shared Future Action Fund. And in this conversation, Joaquin and I discuss school board elections and why they have become ground zero for the war against fascism. So that conversation and what is happening with our school systems is coming up next, folks. I am very happy to welcome to Woke a f daily the political director from Campaign for Our Shared Future Action Fund, Joaquin Gara. Joaquin, you know, we are living at a time that I got to

tell you, I wasn't expecting to be here. I wasn't expecting to be in a place where curriculums are being raised, where we're seeing school boards being taken over by radical right wing authoritarians, where books are being banned. Don't say gay, they don't say Gay bill that it was introduced and passed in Florida by Ronda Santis has now been reintroduced to go beyond the third grade and go to twelfth grade.

I just want to give you an opportunity as I lay out all of the assaults that we are experiencing, whether you are a black, Indigenous person of color, whether you're a member of the LGBTQ community, whether you you know like art, because apparently we're firing principles now for showing for an art teacher showing a picture of Michael Angelo's David in a sixth grade class in Tennessee has now been fired from a charter school. So talk to me about your organization and how you were taking on

this insidious campaign against freedom in education. Absolutely, Daniel, thanks so much for having me on so my organization, the Campaign for Our Shared Future Action Fund. We are the sister organization to our C three, the Campaign for Our Shared Future, And really we were born out of the response that we saw coming up starting in twenty twenty one, really the response to the pandemic as it related to public schools and the fact that school shut down, students

had to learn from home, attend virtual classes. We obviously, school systems across the country we're not set up for that. And you know, one of the things that we saw was Republicans and the conservative movement take advantage of, you know,

the pandemic and politicize it. H And one of the things that got politicized was not just the response to the pandemic masking as you know, the whole vaccination efforts, but because students were learning from home and because parents had lost whatever semblance of control that they had, the conservative movement took advantage of that and started to bring

all the culture war wedge issues into the fight. And we saw that play out in twenty twenty one in the Virginia guberdatorial election where Governor Glen Yngkin rode the coattails of cultural race theory, which is where we first saw it. We saw a little bit of a play out in twenty twenty, you know, in the presidential race, but then we really saw the actual politicization of it in the gibuatorial election that was credited as one of the things that helped Glenn young Can win the presidency.

But it really started in twenty in the spring of twenty twenty one, when Steve Bannon said on his pot on one of his episodes of his podcast that the path to Republicans returning to power in congresses to school board elections. And that's the one side of this story. This is a political strategy, and this is not a strategy that is anything new. We see this strategy play out in every single issue that is politicized and hysteria

is manufactured. You know, I'm forty seven years old. I feel like I've seen many of them from that I that I can remember, from the time that I was maybe like an early teenager until where I'm at now.

I remember when Tipper Goore was politicizing rock and roll, remember, and well, well, so it started with rock and roll, which really started back in the fifties and the forties, right, because you had Chuck Berry, right who you know who the godfather of rock and roll, and then Elvis Presley you know, took it mainstream, right, But you had a freak out around that because people were swaying their hips

and Dan seeing and all of that stuff. So we see the thread of that, you know, UM consistently you know, being used. It's like, how do you manufacture outrage? How do you manufacture history about hysteria around getting people um fired up and focused on this manufactured um issue when there's real problems still going on here. Right, So the flip side of this is that you know, we're in a pandemic. You know, should kids be in school without mask?

That's a legitimate question, you know that that that is like that that you know that is like a legitimate question, especially for parents to to wrestle with. But we ended up having a fight about whether whether or not that that fight became politicized between red and blue, right and left, and it was not about the issue. And like sa Chavis said, the fight is never about grapes or let us. It's always about people. And that's like fundamentally what is

going on here? Now? This fight has evolved even since twenty twenty one. It's our off of critical race theory as the umbrella for for for whatever, right, right, yep, Governor just scientists filed a supposed bill that was named the Stop Woke Act right in twenty twenty two in Florida. That past. One of the other bills that pass in Florida, as you know, is that don't say gay bill, you know, and and and while critical race theory has you don't hear that as much. Uh, it's now all about like

what is woke funny enough? Right, which they can't seem to explain either exactly because they still okay, so we're fighting over abstracts, you know, and and how do you can't when when when you can't even agree on the on what woke is? You know, we're finding about woke when at the same time schools are being defunded, at the same time when um uh students who are LGBTQ UM identifying are being marginalized and bullied. And that's the

other side of this of this strategy, right. It's like, in order to take power, you have to other people. You have to like dehumanize them. You have to, and the way that you do that is by creating this manufactured outrage and hysteria around issues that you know, nobody knew what the heck critical race theory was except for the academics who who taught it, who were learned and steeped in it, and had an intellectual analysis around that, and certainly reasonable people could have a debate over is

like what is critical race theory? But when it gets politicized and uses a political issue to other to divide and conquer, that's where we're at today. I mean, what you have laid out is just this what you've referred to as a pattern of manufactured outrage right over the fact that the reality is our country's demographics are shifting. The reality is is that, you know, a lot of what we've seen implemented in schools is to cater to

a diversified base of students, to a diversified population. We have different issues that young people are facing today than they were twenty years ago, or thirty years ago, or forty or fifty years ago. And the reality that because Democrats, in my humble opinion, did not have a response to Glenn Junkin's entrance into the quote unquote culture wars, turning critical race theory something that was never taught in K through twelve, wasn't ever taught in college. It was a

post secondary right field of study. Right, turn that into a quote unquote parental choice issue, and Democrats didn't have

a response to that. Now you've seen it morph into this christo fascist state that Ronda Santis is leading in Florida that we've seen in Texas, Texas being the state where you are, which is the largest manufacturer of guess what textbooks for public schools, that's right, right, that have basically turned the story of enslaved people into a unpaid internship, right that you know, we should all just kind of speed bump over as we're talking about America, So talk

to us about what your organization is tasked with doing. So absolutely I want to since you since you mentioned that I live in Texas and just the structural role that Texas plays, and I would also say Florida since it is one of the largest states in the country as well. We purchase a lot of textbooks. But as a Texan, two things that I want to share very quickly, and I'm going to get to your question about what we do. This really exemplifies what what we're fighting about here.

When you were a seventh grader in Texas, you take Texas history, right, as a Mexican American seventh grader in deep South Texas, we're learning about the Alamo. We're learning Texas history, the Formation history, we get to the Alamo, right. And one of the things that I'm not sure if this happens in every school district, in every seventh grade Texas history class in Texas, but we watched one of the Alamo movies and it was the John Wayne version of the Alamo. So it was a very glorified version

of the Alamo, of the Battle of the Alamo. You know, John Wayne, and you know was the hero, David Crockett, Daniel Boone, all of the main characters you know about the Alamo. I think as a seventh grader, you know, after watching that, you know, I had like this moment in the middle of it where wait a minute, I'm supposed to be charing the fact that these Texans are killing Mexicans and I wait a minute, I'm Mexican America. So it was like the formation of just like wait,

what going on here? And and and as a seventh grader, I wasn't sure you know what necessarily to do with that? Right? And I think that part of this goes to the age, to the age appropriateness of like, how do you teach slavery? Slavery happened, it was real, right. Connect that to what the fight at the Alamo about the Texas Revolution some people, you know, the Texas Revolution was fundamentally about two things.

That the two sides of it. The side that doesn't get talked about as much as that it was about slavery. The Texans that were moving to the people that were moving to Texas while Texas was still under Mexican control. It was it was Texas then was part of Mexico,

you know, forbade slavery. And you had all of these people moving to Texas that were coming from the South, you know who were who were farmers and establishing you know, their own farms, some established major farms, plantations, cotton growing all the crops, right, and what at those plantations and what did those forms depend on labor? And where did that labor come from? Slaves? So that's like one side of it, right, So to take it one step further.

Juneteenth another Texas, another thing that happened in Texas. If you know the history about Juneteenth, Juneteenth is about the celebration when African Americans in Texas found out two years later that they were free after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Why did it take so long? Why did it take two whole years? Why did it take a general, a US Army general, having to step foot on Galveston

Island on June nineteenth, eighteen sixty eight. If I'm not mistaken to proclaim that black folks were free, why because the farmers needed that labor, right, yeah, So it's complicated, right like, and I don't mean like it's complicated, like

you know, but like, history is full of nuance. And at the end of the day, what the Campaign for Our Shared Future is set up to do is to create the space for how do we have, um, how do we have a full and accurate teaching of what actually happened in this country, like our history as it relates to slavery. How do you teach, you know, what happened in World War Two as it related to like

the Holocaust in Germany? Right Like, now, these are complicated, you know, subjects, and certainly you can distill them down to a right and wrong, and that certainly is true. But there is a part of this that is like you have to like you have to pull apart all the different threads to get a full and complete picture of them and only once and one side wants to only tell their version of it. And history history history

does not work that way. Right. Certainly, you have, um, you have history being told from the from the side of who won a war or who has power? Right, But then you have other voices you know as part of that, you know that don't get told. And that's fundamentally that is what we are organized to set up and do. How do you for school boards, for state legislatures to create the space for the full and accurate

telling of history at an age appropriate level. I don't know how you teach the horrors of the Holocaust or slavery to a first grader, right, I don't know that. Right. That's why there we have experts, That's why we have academics. We have people who study these things and not politicians, right exactly. Well, that's the point. And so what we have is the reaction and to bring it back to you know what I said at the very beginning, Danielle. It's like when my father came and took away my

cassette tape collection of rock music. It was because of the satanic panic, right, And it's just like you know, and it's like I look back on and then you said earlier, and then there was the are on gangster ap that's absolutely right also, and it just keeps coming over and then it goes from the cultural issues like music and it morphs into the like the political issues where people's dignities is stripped away from them, right, the fact that black folks and white folks can't get married

in Virginia. Yeah, you know, it took a US Supreme Court case for that to happen. So it's like we see this play out over and over and over again. And essentially what we do at the Campaign for our Shared Future Action Fund is that we use school board elections as a strategy to endorse pro equity education candidates,

especially those who are running against anti equity candidates. And we you know, we assess races, we send out a candidate questionnaire, we endorse candidates who meet our standards, and then essentially we run independent expenditure campaigns to support their candidacies, to make sure that voters know that school board elections matter. You know that it may be the lowest, it may be the election at the bottom of the ballot in

some places, like in an even year election. Last year we had school board elections in a number of places like Florida, Michigan, Arizona. But you know, and some people just don't vote the whole ballot, you know. I mean, people just vote president or governor the executive offices and

then do you have ballot drop off. So we've we've worked to educate voters around the issues here, give them the information that they need so that they can make an informed choice and vote for the candidates who are for who are not for banning books, who are not

for censoring classroom discussion. Let me ask you this question, go ahead, how do you engage people, yeah, Joaquin, who don't have children right in the school this year, Because to me, that is part of the problem is like the people who are doing the voting are either people whose children have age out or don't have kids at all, so they're like, this doesn't affect me. So how do

you make the case that this actually affects everyone. Yeah, so you know, it really comes down to organizing, right, So for us, it is all about how are we working with and through other organizations on the ground that are organizing around public education UM and supporting complimenting the work that they do by providing them resources, whether it be messaging, pulling and pulling and research that uh to to contribute to having you know, good conversations and moving

people off of fighting over the definition of a word or an acronym and talking about do you want me to do? You know, talking about like what's really a stake as it relates to people who don't have children. I am one of those people. I don't I don't

have children. But you know why it's important to me, Danielle, because of exactly what I told you earlier about Like I was a seventh grader and I had to take Texas history right as and and and as I learned and as I went the public education system K through twelve, you learn about juneteenth also, and you're only taught one side of it. You're only taught like a very sanitized version of what something was really about. Right now, it's a cumbent upon me it's a cumbent upon parents to

um supplement the supplement, right, you know, asking questions. And part of like what we're dealing with here is like, you know what conservative what the what the conservative movement continues to like perpetuate is like just like this absolutism where there's only a right answer only they have like

the answer, and what is that? That's authoritarianism. And that's why public education is incredibly important because we need, you know, we need to give students, teachers, students, parents the tools that they need to be able to um become a UM, you know, to essentially become a well rounded student. Right now, it's not just the school's job. It's not just the teacher's job, right parents have a role to playing this also. So part of it is it's like that this is

where the organizing comes into place. And if you're only talking about the if you're if you're fighting over what CRT is, if you're fighting over what LGBTQ is right, and you're making that so incredibly scary. As a parent, I don't know this, but I have parents. As someone who has parents, I know that when my father took away my cassette tape collection of rock music. It really

came from a place of wanting to protect me. He may not like, he may not have had those words to to to explain that to me, right, but I know that's where it was coming from now, right. And that's what parents do. They protect their children. They they do whatever they can to set them up for success so that the next generation so that they can be more successful than they were. Right. And that's the that is the you know, that is what is being exploited here. Fear.

It always comes down to fear. How do you make people afraid of other people, whether it be by race, whether it be by the country that they come from. It's always sphere, yeah, one hundred percent. And I you know, I just want to remind folks just to echo what you said, Joaquin, which is that, regardless of whether or not you have kids that are in the school um districts wherever you live, the school board, the schools have

always been ground zero for equity and justice. Right. It is was the desegregation of schools that catapulted, you know, a movement right and brought us to the place that we are today. And so that the act, the fact that we would not then teach right about that process that this country went through to get to desegregation, right to get to a place of appeared equity is absolutely insane. UM waking. I appreciate the work that you're doing so much.

Please tell the listeners how they can get involved a totally UM. Please go to Campaign for Our Shared Future dot org and um uh you know to to learn more about like the work that we do UM the website for our website, UH you can be found there, you can, it's linked there. You can find out more about the work that we do both on the C three, the education side, and then on the C four you know, on the action fund side where we do work around

electoral elections. And then Danielle, can I share just one more anecdote? Do we have time? I don't want to, Okay, So in terms of connecting this back to like movement especially um uh to you know the work that organizers do around UM fighting for justice if you will. Right. Last year, the last scored election that we endorsed in

was an East Baton Rusual, Louisiana. We endorsed there was there was there were there was a five there were there were five candidates running in runoff elections or the general election, you know, for for Louisiana and UH in Louisiana, they have partners in school board elections, so you had

people that are running as Republicans and Democrats. When we were when I was assessing the races, there was only one race where the Republican running UM had a track record of saying of having a track record of being anti equity and really saying some really insensitive things as they're related to race UM. And this was the only rate race that we endorsed in. We endorsed Katie Kennison who won and beat a ten year incumbent and this

ten year incumbent UH. I want to give a shout out to Gary Chambers who ran for US Senate in Louisiana last year because Gary Chambers, after George Floyd was murdered, right, Gary Chambers and other people in East Baton Rouge were calling for the school district, for the East Bandon School District to change the name of schools Robert E. Lee High School, you know, to take down statues, you know, and this school board member, you know, this is where you know, she had just like a history of being

just incredibly insensitive saying some really problematic, you know, racist, adjacent, you know type things. Right. But we would not have defeated, We would not have been part of defeating this tenure incumbent if it not had been for the work of Gary Chambers and the organizers, the people on the ground and East Baton Rouge who were calling that school board member to be held accountable. They were calling for her resignation,

they were calling on her to step down. She did not, She did not wipe because she was running in a very very conservative Republican district. Now, the good people of East Beaton Rouge and District eight decided, you know what, enough's enough, We're going to vote that person out and they elected Katie Kennison to the school board. Now we didn't we were the only organization to endorse in that race.

Nobody touched this race. Right. But you know, when you provide people with the information, when you look at it from the state and you present it in a way that is non where you where you ship away the fear and you really talk about like what's really like at stake here as it relates to um setting children up for success and asking them, you know, questions that are legitimate questions and ask them to make a choice.

People will make the right decision. That's our hope, right, and and that's one of the reasons why I do the work that I do, especially you know, at the campaign for Our Shared Future actually fun because we didn't I didn't think that we were going to win. You know, this was both candidates really didn't have a campaign operation and weren't spending you know, thousands of dollars like in

their race. It was a it was a fifty, it was a it was a toin cost race, right, But we decided to put um, We decided to put some put a stake in the ground here because this is exactly why we exist. We had a candidate who was pro pro equity running, it gets a candidate who is

anti equity, and that's exactly why we exist. I'm proud that we were that we were able to have a small part in Katie Kennison's victory, But that victory would not have been possible if it would not have been for the work that Gary Chambers and his um UM and his fellow organizers and the people in the community had not started two years earlier. So that's how all

of this is connected, right, it doesn't. It's it's it's it's exactly to paraphrase I think everybody Butcher's mlk's quote about um uh pushing the arc of justice so that it bends, you know, towards justice. Yeah, and and that's exactly you know that that is that is the reason why we exist. Um And the last thing that I'll say is that you know, it's school board elections, especially in twenty twenty three, Danielle Um. You don't have any

other elections, with the exception of local races in most states. Virginia, Louisiana's gonna uh. Louisiana, Kentucky and Virginia are are a handful of states that have that have other elections up the ballot. But for the most part the country in twenty twenty three, it's about scholard and city council elections. Right, So it's even more important that we do our the work that we do and other organizations because it's not

just us. There's a whole bunch of other organizations besides us that are working to elect pro equity candidates to make sure that school boards don't get flipped by these reactionary anti equity candidates and forces and bring the culture wars to schools where it doesn't they don't need to be Yeah, waquin Gara, thank you so much for making the time for wokey F and also all of the work that you're doing. Folks, do make sure to check out Campaign for Our Shared Future and check out the

work that the Action Fund is doing. It is a way for you to get involved, and i'd encourage all your listeners also to go to the stuff to your website and to become a Patreon sponsor as well. You're very welcome. Thanks for all the work. J Janielle really enjoyed the conversation and thanks for having me on. I appreciate you. That is it for me today on woke F. As always, Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fun