Moms For Liberty and the Classical School

By Chris Richards

The Nazis want to control American education, and it's scary. What's scarier is that the Nazis don't advertise themselves as Nazis. They advertise themselves as teachers, educators, parents, pastors, and intellectuals striving to connect your kids with the truth and beauty of Western civilization. They give their groups catchy names like "Moms for Liberty." In the end, however, they still want to segregate your kids' schools by race, economics, and religion. They want to promise you that your kids will grow up to be straight Christians and good citizens, not poor gay people in prison. They want you to believe this promise is something real, that they can deliver on, so that you help them spread their message to more communities.

This morning, while surfing some Substack headlines, I noticed the excellent journalists of Popular Information were reporting that a Moms for Liberty chapter in South Carolina has announced that they are opening the "Ashley River Classical School." It was the combination of "Moms for Liberty" and "Classical School" that particularly caught my attention because this reminded me of some research I started because of some OpEds praising Ron DeSantis back in 2023. I started a major project and started sharing what I was learning. Then the project went on hold because I was distracted by other things, but little things keep pulling me back.

The OpEd that got everyone's attention and briefly made cable news before disappearing, was credited to the byline "Cornel West and Jeremy Wayne Tate" in the pages of the Wall Street Journal*. The title of the OpEd, "DeSantis' Revolutionary Defense of the Classics," was very much in line with its content. The Washington Post, MSNBC, and the Guardian all carried commentary or journalism about the OpEd or the DeSantis policy inspiring the OpEd before the end of the year! Dr. West's name on the byline around the same time he was announcing that he was running for President was quite a big deal. The attention that Ron DeSantis's education policy had been getting in the media helped inspire Glenn Youngkin to run for Governor of Virginia in 2021 and fueled DeSantis's own presidential aspirations.

So who is Jeremy Wayne Tate?

Jeremy Wayne Tate is the CEO of Classics Learning Test, a company that publishes an alternative standardized test adopted by the state university system in Florida under Governor Ron DeSantis. The Guardian article references it directly and the company's public facing website includes a lot of information about who the organization is and what they want to achieve. He hosts the "Anchored" podcast, a show about education and culture that is strongly colored by Western chauvinism and conservative educational bias. He speaks at right wing educational conferences where keynote speakers are former Republican presidential candidates and religious zealots. In addition to Dr. West, the board of his organization includes  ultra-Catholic "American Solidarity Party" activist Patrick Deneen and professional queer-basher Christopher Rufo.

Most importantly for the purposes of the Popular Information news story, the board of CLT includes Moms for Liberty activist Erika Donalds. 

Mrs. Donalds is a former school board member from Naples, FL. She is the wife of Florida Congressman Byron Donalds, a vocal MAGA partisan openly aligned with Christian nationalists. She founded an organization for conservative school board members to provide an official sounding counterweight to the Florida School Boards Association. Most importantly, she is the CEO of the Optima Foundation... a non-profit that operates Christian charter schools as a franchise of pro-discrimination Christian institution Hillsdale College. Ron DeSantis appointed her to the board of trustees for Florida Gulf Coast University.

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So a prominent school choice activist affiliated with Moms for Liberty already owns a chain of schools in Florida. There are similar schools and organizations in other states. A friendly acquaintance who supported Dr. West when he was the only announced third party progressive in the race told me that I should take a closer look into the organization's president and that I might change my mind about the CLT being a right wing org.

It didn't. In fact, it scared me.

The board president, Dr. Angel Adams Parham, is the co-author of the sneakily titled "The Black American Intellectual Tradition." While the book does not use this language, instead using a lot of liberal language about Western culture and the education of great Black thinkers (who were grounded in "the classics") to essentially advance the argument that the Black American intellectual tradition is an outgrowth of the white American intellectual tradition. I can't accept that Black slaves in America learned the truth and beauty of Western civilization from their owners. While it is true that Black American thinkers were often very well educated in the classics, this was because the classics were the language of the white Academy. It is also true that it was necessary to refute classical arguments in defense of inequity and inequality with classical arguments for equality, equity, and democracy.

Yet I believe that it is wrong to accept the arguments of Dr. Adams Parham and her co-author (Dr. Anika Prather, who runs an online classical school herself) that Black and white intellectual traditions come from a shared culture. Black intellectuals were struggling against white academic culture to create an intellectual culture of their own. Is it accessible and understandable in a common language? Yes. However, the Black intellectual tradition in America is best understood (in my opinion) as an intellectual counter-culture in opposition to the white Academy. What we call "Western culture" was inherited from the Roman Empire by her bastard granddaughter, the Catholic Church, and grandma stole it from the Greeks in the first place. Yet the Greeks borrowed it from ancient Egypt and ancient Persia. So how "Western" is it?

Which brings us back to Erika Donalds. To her, "Western" means "Christian" in the sense of European Christendom. Which means it also means "white" because it is European. This is really just Enlightenment pan-Germanism (remember, the English and French are "German" too) cast in a new frame of reference for the 21st Century. It still leads to the same narrow set of liberal or reactionary conclusions. Unless one is willing to challenge it by studying its critics and rebels, the truth and beauty of Western civilization is where our crushing social and economic inequity come from.

The spirit of "Classical Education" is best exemplified by Plutarch's "Parallel Lives." Plutarch was writing short biographies of the "greatest" Greeks and Romans of history in which he included very pointed moral critiques.  He then had short passages comparing them to one another both morally and by terms of their accomplishments. Yet Plutarch's moral critique is very clearly biased on behalf of aristocratic republics as opposed to democracy, blaming democracy for tyranny and social disorder in an open manner. Plutarch would sympathize with Samuel Huntington's famous paper for the Tri-Lateral Commission, "The Crisis of Democracy," in which Huntington wrote that the Western crisis of democracy was that the West was too democratic to successfully compete with the Soviet "East."

Huntington was also a student of "the classics," after all.

The far right has a clear vision for an educational system they believe will unify us in happy obedience to the truth and beauty of capitalism and white supremacy. Moms for Liberty is selling that vision in a figurative sense, while Jeremy Wayne Tate is literally selling it. The problem is that too many stakeholders in our society are buying.

That's the problem with the marketplace of ideas. The market is regulated by the dictatorship of capital. It is not a "free market," just another liberal market.

* I apologize for the pay-walled link, it's WSJ content and I cannot currently find a free link to the full article. The WaPo op-ed by Karen Attiah is not pay-walled and its description of the article credited to West is accurate.

What Would A Just Peace In Palestine Look Like?

By Chris Richards

A meme on Twitter has been asking "Where do the Israeli Jews go?" as if this is the supreme gotcha and this question completely invalidates all discussion of Palestinian liberation, as if Palestinian self-determination automatically means rendering the entire population of Israel homeless and stateless. This ignores the fact that the mere creation of Israel resulted in 750,000 to 1,000,000 Palestinians becoming homeless refugees. This also ignores the fact that, unless they have been naturalized as citizens in another country or are recognized as citizens of Israel, all Palestinians are stateless and have been for generations. The idea that justice for Palestinians automatically results in massive injustice for Israelis ignores that fact that restorative justice is in fact, not injustice at all. People whose homes were actually stolen when they were terrorized into abandoning them deserve their homes back.

The ethical gotcha behind "Where do the Israeli Jews go?" is that it would be unjust to put Israeli settlers in the same circumstances in which the Palestinians find themselves. This renders the vast injustice done to the Palestinians as a fait accompli that cannot be undone because it would cause even more harm. This would automatically eliminate the two state solution that American idealists and Israeli moderates have somewhat unrealistically clung to despite the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the unwillingness of any Israeli prime minsters who succeeded Rabin to risk the same fate. US President Joe Biden has been brandishing a two state solution as the ultimate and necessary solution to the "war" between the settlers and the Palestinians. Unfortunately for Joe Biden, if it is ethically beyond the pale to displace Israelis in the name of Palestinian liberation then any Palestinian state formed will be hopelessly undermined by hostile communities of settlers who will still see themselves as Israelis and reject Palestinian sovereignty over their communities. 

Let me repeat, as I said above, restorative justice is not injustice. This is not a question of generational guilt or punishing people today for crimes committed generations ago. The crime is still being committed. The crime is ongoing. The children of the thieves are not only living in stolen homes, but declaring their right to those homes and supporting the displacement or killing of more Palestinians so that more settlers can have homes. Former Prime Minister of Israel Naftali Bennett is the son of Americans from San Francisco who settled in Haifa after the Six Day War. It is not a coincidence that he advocates strongly for military expansionism. He was raised on a narrative of conquest and Israeli triumphalism. Well before the Nakba, Haifa was the scene of intense settlement by the Jewish Agency. A city that had 20,000 residents (of whom 6,000 were Jewish) in 1922 had a population of over 97,000 in 1948 ,and that larger population was 96% Jewish. The replacement of the Palestinian population with settlers didn't start during the Nakba. Ethnic cleansing is much older.

When this historical context is correctly understood then the following becomes clear: the two state solution requires an understanding that the Palestinians will not seek restorative justice past a certain point. The scope of justice allowed must be set by the party that did the harm and must commit to making restoration for justice to be possible. This is a dangerous situation that requires a maintained relationship of settler dominance and Palestinian acquiescence. If Palestinians do not acquiesce then their refusal to acquiesce puts us back in the same circumstances in which we began. The settler movement would have us believe that this is something for which the Palestinians, and not the settlers, are to blame. This is objectively false in the context of Palestinian history. The Palestinians are defending themselves from ethnic cleansing. Only sustained self-defense has prevented ethnic cleansing and population replacement at a faster rate.

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There is, of course, another obstacle to the practicality of a two-state solution separate from the question of its justice. This is the Israelis themselves.

The alleged centrist who succeeded Naftali Bennett as Prime Minister as part of a bizarre power sharing agreement between the Israeli far right and the so-called "moderates" called for a two-state solution at the United Nations. To Yair Lapid, a two-state solution depends on a "peaceful Palestinian state that does not threaten Israel."  This has generally been interpreted in policy terms by the so-called Middle East experts as a "demilitarized Palestinian state."  This means that the proposed two-state  solution proposed by many experts is one that is unacceptable to Palestinians because they would still have the IDF as a neighbor and a significant population of settlers, with no means to defend themselves. How is this fundamentally different than the existing occupation of the West Bank and containment of Gaza? Yet the Israeli state has the power to set the terms of the existence of the Palestinian state and the Palestinian people are supposed to accept this as established fact. If they do not, it is their fault.

Once more, with feeling: restorative justice is not injustice.

A real two-state solution, with a Palestine equipped to defend itself, is a surrender to the settler fait accompli in the first place. It requires an act of acquiescence to happen. If the Palestinians are unwilling to acquiesce to only partial justice then it is impossible. These are objective facts. When the settler movement is so powerful that the Israeli state cannot even propose a true two-state solution, but must instead add impossible demands that only make Palestinian acceptance less likely then we must accept that the Israeli state is not serious about a two-state solution. A serious effort would involve every possible concession that would make acquiescence more acceptable to the Palestinians. The Israeli state has never engaged in such a peace process.

This brings us to the question I ask in the headline. What does a just peace look like?

It also brings us to the question of the meme and the settler movement. Where do the Israeli Jews go?

Only the Palestinians can answer the first question. I am a white American, which makes me a settler myself. I can't tell Palestinians what a just peace in Palestine looks like anymore than I can tell the Modoc what a just peace with the US government would really look like. That's why I support the land back movement and believe that the United States should be legally forced to honor its treaties with Indigenous nations. We should reject the arrogance that might lead us to suggest or force a solution to the question of Palestinian liberation. We should instead support the Palestinians in their struggle against the settler movement. Only the Palestinians can determine what a just peace would look like and what they are willing to acquiesce to short of "from the river to the sea." If they're not, only they can make that decision. We should still support them.

Once again, restorative justice is not injustice.

The settler movement's question remains. Where do the Israeli Jews go?

Only the Israeli Jews can answer that question, and their answer has no authority to determine whether or not the Palestinians should acquiesce to anything less than their full liberation. Most white Rhodesians chose to go to the UK, Australia, South Africa or Latin America when the Bush War ended and Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. Most white Kenyans stayed in Kenya after Kenyan independence, at one point the Black Kenyan government made white man Richard Leakey the cabinet secretary and head of the civil service. Most white South Africans remained in South Africa after the legal end of apartheid and the institution of formal legal equality and liberal democracy within the South African state. Far too many Israelis will choose to fight for the Israeli state, at least in the near future. What they do when the Palestinian struggle is won is up to them. If they commit crimes against the Palestinians that make them unwelcome, whose responsibility is that?

I still believe peace in the Middle East requires justice in the Middle East.

The Publishing Problem: Reading Between the Lines of Industry Self-Censorship

By Chris Richards

Republished from the author’s substack.

At first I didn’t know what to make of Judd Legum’s piece on what he calls “Scholastic’s Bigot Button.” It raises some interesting ideas about whether or not a publisher should pander to conservative political biases by allowing them to hide liberal titles. It shows how not offending certain kinds of white people continues to be an important cultural priority. It informs readers of a right wing pressure campaign against Scholastic Corporation, spearheaded by a conservative Christian publisher of children’s books called “Brave Books.” What it doesn’t really engage with is who Scholastic Corporation is and why the company has so much power.

This is important because who Scholastic is, what they do, and the power they have is central to the right wing pressure campaign to which Scholastic is capitulating. At the moment, Scholastic is selling at $37.48 a share. As Judd Legum points out in his article, it is a publicly traded company with more than a billion dollars of market capitalization. What that means in plain English is that Scholastic’s division Arthur A. Levine Books is the original US publisher of JK Rowling and Philip Pullman. Levine himself left Scholastic in 2019 to establish his own company, but Scholastic still handles the back catalog. That means Harry Potter and “The Golden Compass” are controlled by Scholastic here in the US. In addition, Scholastic itself is the publisher of Suzanne Collins. That’s a lot of Young Adult literary culture in one place.

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That’s just one of Scholastic’s four main business lines. Children’s and Young Adult publishing is big money as it is, but the media rights for those books is big money too. Which is why Scholastic Entertainment exists, to develop intellectual property from Clifford the Big Red Dog, to Harry Potter, the Hunger Games, and the Golden Compass, to Goosebumps. There’s a lot of money in this area too, and a lot of power, but this isn’t why Kirk Cameron’s publisher is going after Scholastic.

You see, Scholastic pretty much controls school book fairs. It turns out that schools don’t just hold book fair themselves using decorations made by teachers and librarians. They pay someone to run the book fair for them. Usually that someone is Scholastic Book Fairs. So nearly every time a public school holds a book fair, Scholastic makes a buck. Scholastic also has book fair packages designed to appeal to different schools as different markets. Here is where Brave Books and their pressure campaign targeting Scholastic comes in.

According to its website, Brave Books was founded by Trent Talbot. Dr. Trent Talbot was a practicing ophthalmologist who was so disgusted by “the inappropriate content being pushed upon children”that he just needed to found a right wing Christian kids’ book and YA publishing company to give parents and schools “a wholesome alternative.” So he naturally decided that Kevin Sorbo and Kirk Cameron were the people he should turn to for help. I think of “wholesome” and I immediately want Kevin Sorbo to teach my kids about masculinity, right?

Because being an obnoxious conservative bigot is a brand in today’s America, Brave Books opened its own book club and book fair divisions to compete with Scholastic and chose an openly confrontational marketing tactic. Brave decided to accuse Scholastic of advancing the LGBTQ+ agenda, because we all know that blatantly accusing your competition of wanting to groom parents’ kids is one way to stake out your own recognizable brand. It also makes it clear that you value the thoughts, feelings, and spending money of the Christian conservative market.

This is the basic background of the specific issue that Legum is writing about. I want to be clear about this background before touching on the specifics of his piece and the core problem left unaddressed by his piece. That core problem, imo, is more important than the immediate specifics of what Scholastic is doing under pressure from Brave. The problem is one of capitalism, and of how the fiduciary responsibilities of corporate officers are seen in the modern business culture.

The specifics of this news are simple. In the face of a marketing offensive from a competitor accusing Scholastic of marketing “inappropriate material” at book fairs, Scholastic has introduced an easy button that school employees planning a book fair can use to eliminate any “objectional content” from their school’s book fairs. Naturally the “objectional content” is all about racial inclusion, the lives of Black people like Ketanji Brown Jackson and John Lewis, and teaching kids that LGBTQ+ families are as valuable as traditional Christian families.

It’s important to keep this in the proper context and look at the material underpinnings of what is happening. This isn’t about Scholastic executives being afraid they will be censored by an out of control state governor like Ron DeSantis. This isn’t even about complaints being made by vigilante parents. This is about a corporate competitor of Scholastic choosing to compete by condemning the morality of Scholastic, as a company, in order to try to sell some schools Christian book fair packages. This is the business of capitalism as usual, with Brave Brooks choosing to brand themselves as the “choice for Christians who want their kids to be safe at the book fair.” It’s a marketing gimmick.

When Scholastic adds a button to their system to exclude liberal content to which conservatives might object, they aren’t knuckling under to any public censorship campaign. They aren’t bowing to the forces of a repressive state. No, it’s much simpler.

They are protecting their market share by giving conservative Christian school employees the easy and quick option to keep liberal material out of the book fair. They don’t want to lose market share because the school districts in Texas and Florida go with the conservative book fair option. So they are making sure their interface allows conservative Christian school employees to feel comfortable with their buying decisions.

There’s a conversation that we should be having about corporate control of our “public” education system that we’re not having.