ICYMI: Education gag orders (aka "anti-CRT bills") around the country increasingly include a private right of action. In eight separate bills, as well as one law(!), private citizens have the right to sue a school for discussing race or sex the wrong way.
Some of the bills limit suits to parties directly "injured" by a school. In others, any resident of a state or even the country would be eligible to sue. And the amount of money that courts would be permitted to award can be staggering.
All of which creates some very perverse incentives. After New Hampshire passed its education gag order last June, the conservative group Moms for Liberty announced it would pay a $500 bounty for information leading to a successful suit.
In response, Gov. Sununu condemned the group and stated that "any sort of financial incentive is wholly inappropriate and has no place." But what did he think would happen? Dangle a pot of cash in front of people's faces and this is what you get.
I couldn't even fit all the examples in this article. For instance, this Oklahoma bill would let parents sue a school for stocking certain books about sex and sexuality, with potential awards of $10k+ per day.
Madness. A madness that, at is core, is about putting the paralyzing fear of god into teachers, school districts, and local officials. It's also about transforming schools into regimes of round-the-clock surveillance.
Come the new year, a wave of such bills will crash into state legislatures across the country. Many present themselves in the guise of so-called "Parents' Bills of Rights", but don't be fooled. They are about fear.
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It’s a little thing, but she has him dead to rights and he doesn’t even see it. Why not? He’s a smart guy and it’s not complicated. But contempt can make a smart person dumb.
People like GG and Taibbi are okay in my book. They do more good than harm and there are plenty of other people I’d like to see disappear first. But their only way of dealing with a critic is to attack and it’s made them so sloppy. GG especially (Taibbi less so).
Also, on the actual underlying issue, please bear in mind that one of the most powerful activist groups in the country on this stuff has some very extreme beliefs.
I have a lack of political imagination, and it’s hobbled how I make sense of the education culture war. I simply cannot reconcile the anger and frustration over this…
You couldn’t dream up a more pure and unforced expression of PMC contempt than that. Whatever the woke version of is, you can be sure if a leftie said it, this site would go nuclear. But that’s the power of framing and narrative. Of political imagination. I just don’t get it.
In recent days, there's been a flurry of articles by cons seeking to set some guardrails on how states go about banning "CRT" and related books. They support the bans in principle, but for strategic reasons, worry that they might be going too far.
They are right to be worried.
E.g. Max Eden dismisses leftwing critics of these bills as witless hysterics, but then concedes that Tennessee's law, which bans the *inclusion* of certain concepts, might be a smidge of an over-reaction.
He can add Oklahoma's to that list too, since it has the exact same defect. Also ND's, which was signed into law last month. Maybe not such witless hysterics after all.
If only someone had tried to warn them way back in June that this might be a problem!
Kurtz is right. The book bans are a terrible look for the anti-CRT crowd and a potential political liability. But they'll also be hard to stop. That's why you don't partner with bigots or zealots. It's why you use careful and moderate language. Oops.
Maybe I'll be proved wrong about this, but I doubt there's going to be any easy way to get this genie back in the bottle. And on top of the book bans, some of the legislation coming down the pike take a sledgehammer to academic freedom. It's bad.
Whatever control Kurtz, Rufo, etc. think they have over this process, they're wrong. Too many state legislators have too strong an incentive to race toward the craziest extreme. It's popular. That's all there really is to it.
People regularly overestimate the extent of legal accountability for Germans after the war, in Nuremberg or just in general. The vast majority at all ranks went unpunished. They got away with it.
In rare circumstances, but the real reason is much worse. Most prosecutable under GDR or FRG law lived out there days in Germany, unmolested and unconcerned. Cases from victims usually faced massive official resistance.
@WillatFIRE He also links to this good one from @powellnyt on what's going on in Texas. There's no soft-peddling this one. What's happening there is genuinely terrifying.