The right-wing effort to target school boards.
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The big news in Tuesday’s elections were the results of the school board races in Mequon and Thiensville, two Milwaukee-area suburbs.
I’m kidding, of course.
The Trumper Republicans are all giddy over the governor’s race in Virginia where they won with a millionaire running against the millionaire former fundraiser for Bill Clinton.
Biden carried Virginia by ten points over Trump, so the Democrats definitely have something to worry about next year.
But what I find curious about the Virginia post mortem is the view that the Trumpers are winning back the suburbs that they lost in 2020.
For one thing, the shift of the suburbs to blue from red is not that those suburbanites changed their minds.
It’s the suburbanites that have changed. The suburbs have become home to more immigrants and Black and Brown voters.
The conventional wisdom is that the Republicans are riding a wave of parent revolt against mask and vaccine mandates.
I wouldn't take that premise to Vegas if I were them.
I just spent a week in rural Wisconsin. I am reminded that, like many states, Democratic strength is concentrated in the cities and college towns like Milwaukee and Madison.
Wisconsin is a swing state. But mask mandates don’t appear to be all that successful as a wedge issue.
Parents support the mandates. That is why the failed attempt to recall school board members in Mequon and Thiensville, Wisconsin over the mandates is worth noticing.
The Mequon-Thiensville School District, or MTSD, is one of 11 Wisconsin school districts that saw a recall attempt in 2021, according to Ballotpedia — and, so far, the only one that has garnered enough signatures to make it onto the ballot.
Mask mandates are not the only issue Republicans are counting on. They also hope that racism will work as it usually does.
They are actively seizing on the the imaginary issue of Critical Race Theory and the real issue of teaching the history of racism in public school classrooms.
Wisconsin has had the second most attempts at school board recalls after California.
All Wisconsin recalls have failed.
But not just Wisconsin.
In tiny Nemaha Central Unified School District in Kansas, board member Amy Sudbeck also beat back a recall attempt, launched this spring after she voted to continue the district’s mask mandate in school buildings.
Only 25 percent of voters supported the recall.
The problem for the GOP is that many of the parent groups opposed to mandates and truthful history curriculum are phony, astroturf organizations that are created and funded by big money.
A handful can turn out to protest at a local school board meeting.
But the groups are often run by political operatives and lawyers standing ready to amplify local disputes.
In Mequon-Thiensville it is a law firm heavily financed by a conservative foundation that has fought climate change mitigation and that has ties to former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
That’s who funded the recall of school board members, chiefly over the board’s hiring of a diversity consultant. A new national advocacy group, Parents Defending Education, promoted the Wisconsin parents’ tactics as a model.
Other funders include the Bradley Foundation, as well as Trump backer Richard Uihlein a Wisconsin-based shipping supply billionaire.
A Love Poem for My Country
for James
I have nothing to give you, but my anger
And the filaments of my hatred reach across the border
You, you have sold many and me to exile.
Now shorn of precious minds, you rely only on
What hands can grow to build your crumbling image.
Your streets are littered with handcuffed men
And the drums are thuds of the wardens' spiked boots.
You wriggle with agony as the terrible twins, law and order,
Call out the tune through the thick tunnel of barbed wire.
Here, week after week, the walls dissolve and are slim
The mist is clearing and we see you naked like
A body that is straining to find itself, but cannot
And our hearts thumping with pulses of desire or fear
And our dreams are charred chapters of your history.
My country, remember I neither blinked nor went to sleep
My country, I never let your life slide downhill
And passively watched you, like a recklessly driven car,
Hurrying to your crash while the driver leapt out.
The days have lost their song and salt
We feel bored without our free laughter and voice
Every day thinking the same and discarding our hopes.
Your days are loud with clanking cuffs
On men's arms as they are led away to decay.
I know a day will come and wash away my pain
And I will emerge from the night breaking into song
Like the sun, blowing out these evil stars.