Thread by @lara_putnam

This👇 by @ed_kilgore is both worth reading in itself, & mentions a precedent that has been on my mind, & that I've come think is important, even crucial.

We should start to recognize the anti-CRT push as the Swiftboating of youth-led antiracism. [a🧵] nymag.com/intelligencer/…

The key dynamic in the original swiftboat smear was it took something that Dems had (appropriately!) anticipated as an authentic source of strength—their candidate's record of military service in Vietnam—& made it so toxic that any effort to draw strength from it was neutralized

.@holden has been writing brilliantly re the importance of a "field of evidence" for participatory propaganda, & the insight fits more broadly. Where is the field of provocations that get spun up as "CRT" in local schoolboard after schoolboard coming from? hapgood.us/2021/06/12/par…

Conveniently I don't have to compile the answer myself: the good folks at "DefendingPublicEd" have already created an IndoctriNation map taking submissions defendinged.org/map/
Oh, ofc: making local "evidence" conveniently visible is part of the participatory infrastructure

So of course I immediately zoom in on SWPA: & see Shaler Area School District placed on the hot seat for...🧐 a purely affirming statement on ways to fight racism issued in June 2020 (eg "Be secure...Knowing your own strengths will also help you to see strengths in others")

So was this June 2020 SASD statement driven by some kind of DiAngelo/Kendi/RadicalLegalScholar-driven takeover?
Um, no. It was sparked by local highschool kids, who came forward to talk about their lives & how to support each other. Here as so many places

... including more than 230 towns in PA alone as we documented here. Again & again local teens: students of color telling their stories, white kids, queer kids, more—both led the protests & followed thru, seeking to make change where they were: in school washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/…

Here's a vivid write up of what that looked like eg in North Allegheny school district: with local teenagers taking the lead, asking for thoughtful changes to make the school district one that embraced all of them pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/at-…

& here is the local Republican cttee Fb page in April & May: "Have you heard of Critical Race Theory? If you haven’t you will. It’s coming to a high school, college or workplace diversity training session near you. What do you need to know about it, & what can you do to stop it?"

... leading to highly contentious scenes at the North Allegheny School Board at the end of May, where a never-would-have-been-controversial inclusion & empowerment curriculum passed by just one vote post-gazette.com/news/education…

In this case the student-led @NAforChange is #onhere themselves, so I can point you to the fruit of their hard organizing: 31 speakers in favor of the initiative, only 7 against. (go team hands-on civic engagement: no hobbyists here @eitanhersh!)

So to me the real shock of the anti-CRT push is that RW voices have managed to make [distant elite&...Black] academics the public face of a hyped-up threat whose occasions for local action are in reality led by idealistic+local suburban teens, white Asian AfricanAmerican together

Note I am *not* saying the anti-CRT push is somehow mere astroturf or media hype. On the contrary it is absolutely driving genuine local engagement. In fact, offering a master class relational infrastructure-building, if anyone's interested in learning?

So, eg see the multiple modalities of engagement DefendingEd offers: you can become an individual 'member' sure (get ready for those fundraising emails), or report an incident (add to that "field")—but also, you can submit *your existing organization* defendinged.org/join-the-movem…

Meanwhile, No Left Turn in Education not only got a big initial push from an appearance by the founder on Tuckr Carlson's show👇... washingtonpost.com/politics/tucke…

... but chose to leap not only into creating place-specific Fb groups, but *concrete local chapters* with their leaders' names publicly visible, optimal for outreach, growth, & action noleftturn.us/state-informat…

It's worth checking out the tabs & the kinds of ancillary place-based info being provided, from state homeschooling rules to👇, under "anti police": portal to a map by Mvmnt for Safe&Just Schools. Again, that jujitsu of flipping local youth-led civic action into fodder/accusation

I'm also interested in the "NLTE Website Group" generated for each chapter, accessed via sign-up: a space for internal chapter communication complementary to Facebook's publicly-visible "private group" architecture on which they are also relying

I keep arguing that "message" success (or failures) are really just visible froth driven by more fundamental infrastructural strengths (& weakness): incl on the "supply side" where political actors+their language is shaped, & delivery side, thru which they reach people (or don't)

I can tell you've jumped ahead to the obvious Q. Surely since the anti-CRT push is targeting exactly the [note: largely white suburbs] where local youth-led anti-racism has been active, the Dem-side is relying on (& strengthening) its own local infrastructure in response?
Surely?

Gotta run off & be a mom for the rest of the day, so The Answer Will Shock You part will have to wait until I return.
Go enjoy Sunday!🌞
[ok, ominous foreshadowing👇]

Okay, I'm back. & yes the 9 yr old loved her day🎢🌞

In watching Dem-side national groups/leaders respond to the anti-CRT onslaught, I’m struck by how much of the response is focused on message—What should we say?—rather than relational infrastructure—Who can talk, to whom, how?

Now of course maybe conversations with that focus are happening, just in backrooms I’m not privy to. I hope so! Effective politics needs lots of semi-overlapping backrooms, hopefully adding up to a functional system. (good backrooms are part of that supply-side infrastructure)

But here’s the thing: what I *am* pretty tapped into are multiple concentric circles of communication to+among the born-as-anti-Trump grassroots: from public email lists to public Fb groups to private Fb groups to group leader slack channels &c. I'm not everywhere! but I'm around

Any strategic Dem-side response to the anti-CRT surge—which is targettng suburbs where local kids have pushed antiracism—shld see the suburban grassroots activists reached thru these comms spaces as critical assets: the frontlines of *developing* as well as *delivering* responses

👇👇 The other obvious messengers/ties to be strengthening & supporting are *local kids themselves*. Both for the appropriate optics ("why are you attacking us?"): & bc all organizing is reorganizing, & these kids have networks to kids (& parents) you need

Not just big suburb but *small town* progressive youth activism has swelled over the past 4 ys: that's what created the breadth of targets for the anti "CRT" swiftboating that's underway. BLM solidarity events in 2020 built on gun-safety walkouts in 2018 washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/…

If the Koch network had seen a similar surge of locally authentic new youth activists deep in the heartland of the opposing party's support, can you imagine how fast they'd have set up networks of fellowships, conclaves, travel funding etc to begin forging them into future power?

Actually you don't have to imagine: that's pretty much the story of Generation Joshua, which for nearly 2 decades now has been extremely effective in forging homeschooled kids + families into a wellspring of Christian conservative civic & political action generationjoshua.org/GenJ/programs/…

It says alot re systemic blindspots & incentive structures in Dem-side natl funding that 2020's surge of youth anti-racism action in new places (small towns, white exurbs, Black+Latino neighborhoods in small cities) was *not* followed up by intensive outreach to the kids who led

In a way, the missed opportunity echoed the moment in 2017 when in place after place, new would-be activists showed up looking for their local Democratic parties: & heard crickets (or wagons circling) in response democracyjournal.org/arguments/midd…

...with the difference that the 2017 grassroots surge was anchored among a demographic who had the free time, financial resources, social connections & lifetime experience needed to power forward with new political organizing as a near full-time job anyway democracyjournal.org/magazine/57/ru…

So while there were some valuable regional efforts to connect up leaders, most natl Dem-side attention followed FOX lockstep into hyperfocusing on one "message"—Defund—while both caricaturing+ignoring the very diverse (by region class ideology more) new youth activists themselves

It's not that the 2020 anti-racist youth leaders withered away w/o support fr above. On the contrary, as noted above in many places they've followed thru making change where they are: leading to the kinds of school initiatives that now serve as the "field" for anti-"CRT" attacks

& there are other local reverberations as well. I'd love to see more reporting on this, but I've been struck by just how many small, conservative places in PA saw local young people organize public Pride celebrations for the first time in 2021 👇triblive.com/local/westmore…

Lititz Somerset Johnstown Shamokin: these are *not* the places people expect to be at the forefront of teen activism🏳️‍🌈 Again, any far-thinking Demside strategy wld see capacity- & lateral-connection-bldng among these self-volunteered leaders as future gold dailyitem.com/news/pride-eve…

If you step back fr the specific content of anti-CRT hoopla what you see is a systemic disparity. OTOH, a RW infrastructure that is very effective in combining national megaphone w/support+capacity-building channeled to empower local folks who pull friends&neighbors into action👇

Note details. The mtg was held at a local church (I covered name). "CRT" as supposed enemy Christianity is at the fore in the discussion there. Each of the 250+ attendees heads out the door a messenger, w/ a message honed organically to be optimized for their personal networks

Plus there's a local media outlet echoing the natl RW media frame👇. & now locally recruited candidates for council+school board. & organized faithful who believe they're under assault, urging each other to public action.
This is how last-mile political message delivery is forged

(On the Dem-side's systematic last-mile communications problem, see this thread👇 eg)

More last-mile messaging: someone in Quaker Valley School District took the initiative to create an anti-CRT flyer combining detailed (inflammatory) talking points + *all the school board members' contact info* & post it on the local grocery store's community event info board

So on the Right: not just $$/media noise fr above, but infrastructure that relies on local folks to pull local folks into groups, where they hone national narratives into locally resonant word+action: & spur candidates for local office, who rely on—& spread further—those frames

& on the Demside.... ??

The long report I shared above about the anti-CRT church mtg came to me (w/permission) fr a 1000+ person Fb private group of political progressives in a conservative rural county in central PA.

Yes you read that right. I know. 🤯

if this☝️ locus of potential progressive grassroots action in rural ctral PA was unknown to me, *who tweets obsessively on this very topic & lives more or less next door*, how invisible do you think it is to natl Demside funders & strategists etc, who just spent the last 12 mo

in a endless Kabuki brawl centered on Defund & caricatured "activists"
... that has done nothing to address the infrastructural failures that mean "messaging" trainwrecks somehow Just Keep Happening