"It's basic demagoguery—a blood libel to get people out with pitchforks." After VA students' walk out last week, the right is targeting its organizers with a new narrative: that LGBTQ people aren’t just "grooming" kids but "kidnapping" them too. New @Salon salon.com/2022/10/06/fro… @Salon Last week 12K students left school to protest new guidelines that would bar trans students from using bathrooms that align w their gender, forbid teachers from using kids' preferred pronouns w/o parents' permission & compel schools to disclose info about LGBTQ students to parents

"It's a very serious mistake & the result will be that, within a decade, Arizona will have a very, very poorly educated population. Maybe that's the game." How AZ's new universal school voucher plan may fatally undermine public education. New story @Salon: salon.com/2022/07/01/sch… @Salon Last Friday, AZ passed the most expansive school privatization plan in the country, allowing any family to opt kids out of public school in exchange for a roughly $7K voucher they can use for private or religious schools, homeschooling, microschools or just about anything else.

Heckuva day for Hillsdale College. First @MiamiHerald reports how Hillsdale helped craft a revisionist Christian nationalist civics training for FL teachers. Now @NC5PhilWilliams reports Hillsdale pres Larry Arnn slurred public school teachers while TN Gov Bill Lee stayed silent.

https://twitter.com/NC5PhilWilliams/status/1542573965956235264

@MiamiHerald @NC5PhilWilliams Here's the Herald's excellent report today: miamiherald.com/news/local/edu…

In April, anti-CRT crusader Chris Rufo called on conservative lawmakers to create standalone academic centers in flagship public universities as “a separate patronage system” for the right. Turns out that project is already well underway. My latest @Salon: salon.com/2022/05/31/exc… @Salon At a number of U.S. colleges & universities conservatives are creating new centers dedicated to conservative ideology or laissez-faire economics, often wrapped in the language of classical education, civics or freedom.

"Teaching is our trade; also, I confess, it's our weapon." Today part 1 of my 3-part investigative series went up @Salon, focused on Hillsdale College, a private Christian school playing an outsized role in nearly all our current fights about education: salon.com/2022/03/15/how… @Salon Hillsdale functioned as a “feeder school” for the Trump administration, its leadership directed Trump’s “patriotic education” 1776 Commission & its lecture series & related magazine are the place where right-wing politicians and thinkers go to pilot their most ambitious ideas…

Scoop: The OK bill to track anyone considering abortion is just 1 of 7 pieces of identical or similar state legislation under consideration, on its way or already passed. Repro rights advocates warn they may supercharge CPC surveillance in a post-Roe world
salon.com/2022/02/12/ant… Five are based on CPC-drafted model legislation called “Every Mother Matters Acts,” which require abortion-seekers to call a contractor-run state hotline, receive a unique ID # that’s kept for years & enables private citizens to sue providers they think violate the law

Anyone who thinks adoption is an easy solution to lack of abortion access has never spoken with--or actually listened to--those most affected by that decision. Continuing a pregnancy is a wholly separate decision from relinquishing parental rights. And the emotional fallout from the latter, in even the best of circumstances, is intense and lifelong. Read The Girls Who Went Away. Read God and Jetfire. Talk to adoptees and first families. Learn about the Baby Scoop Era.

Thread: Yesterday, Arizona attorney Paul Petersen, who is also the elected Republican assessor of Maricopa County, was federally indicted for his involvement in a human trafficking adoption scheme. His involvement dates back years and spans three states.
abcnews.go.com/Health/wireSto… Four years ago, I reported on Petersen in my first @newrepublic story (with ed @ChloeSchama), as part of an investigation on a grossly unethical adoption operation in northwest Arkansas, involving the large Marshallese diaspora community who live there.
newrepublic.com/article/121556…

There’s a @DavidAFrench piece @TheAtlantic that cites my adoption work alongside some stomach-turning racist attacks, made on his family by the Alt Right since 2015, and particularly after French’s criticism of Donald Trump in the election 1/a bunch theatlantic.com/family/archive… 1. I don’t do Twitter fights as a general rule. 2. I’m disgusted (but sadly not surprised) by the racism directed at French’s daughter and family, which included photoshopping his daughter, born in Ethiopia, into gas chamber or slave plantation pictures. That’s vile and atrocious