The right is pushing to wreck U.S. public schools | Will Bunch Newsletter

Here we go again! A generation after plans to bring the Phillies into Center City fizzled, here come the 76ers with their scheme to move into a $1.3 billion pleasure palace at 11th and Market at the Shopping Venue Formerly Known as the Gallery in 2031 — assuming civilization lasts that long. I’m in, as long as they figure out how to keep SEPTA cars — the main way to get there — as clean as they once were pre-pandemic.

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It was 22 years ago, when the immigrant-bashing America Firster Pat Buchanan was forced to turn to the fringe Reform Party to chase his White House ambitions, that the Washington Post could run a profile mocking Buchanan’s running mate — a woman and member of the John Birch Society named Ezola Foster — for railing against “government schools.”

The “government schools” have become “socialist training camps,” Foster told Post reporter Peter Carlson (”government schools” is Bircher slang for what you or I would call a public school). The article treated her call for ending free school lunches — “next, it’s going to be dinner!” — as if she were insisting the moon is made of green cheese.

And why not, since as recently as 2000 — the year that the Buchanan-Foster ticket garnered a paltry 0.43% of the national popular vote — the notion of free K-12 public education as the engine of upward mobility was still as all-American as an Iowa corn dog. In fact, the man who (controversially) was elected president that fall, George W. Bush, made leaving no public-school child behind the cornerstone of his “compassionate conservatism.”

In 2022, conservative compassion is a dim memory, and the notion of killing off both the proverbial and actual free lunch of “government schools” is no laughing matter. That was driven home this weekend in a stunning CNN report about the rise of two overnight billionaires in the Texas fracking boom who are now spending tens of millions of dollars of that wealth pushing politics in the Lone Star State to the extreme right.

Until Sunday, most folks — even the politically obsessed — probably would have guessed that Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks are the hottest new duo in country music, and not two fossil-fuel magnates who with their spouses have invested a gob-smacking $29 million into Republican politicians, including Sen. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump but also a lot of obscure Texas lawmakers who are pushing America’s second-largest state toward theocracy.

“It is a Russian-style oligarchy, pure and simple,” a veteran GOP state senator who’s not on Team Dunn and Wilks told CNN. “Really, really wealthy people who are willing to spend a lot of money to get policy made the way they want it — and they get it.”

But oil billionaires buying politicians isn’t new. Remember the Koch brothers? What’s different here is the “want” that’s at the bottom of all this campaign cash from the two frackers: The end of public schools in Texas as we know them.

“The goal is to tear up, tear down public education to nothing and rebuild it,” Dorothy Burton, a former GOP activist and religious scholar who went on a speaking tour with Wilks, told CNN. “And rebuild it the way God intended education to be.”

In the last two years, we’ve seen growing assaults from conservatives around public education — particularly laws restricting teaching on race or LGBTQ matters, and increasing bans on certain books in school libraries. So-called “gag orders” on teachers in GOP-led states like Florida are causing thousands to consider leaving the profession. But increasingly these attack lines are morphing into a wider war on taxpayer spending on public schools.

At a Moms for Liberty confab in Florida earlier this month, former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said the large federal department she headed until just 18 months ago should be totally abolished. That’s supported by key GOP lawmakers in Washington like Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who said “unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development.”

Here in Pennsylvania, the Christian nationalist Republican nominee for governor, state Sen. Doug Mastriano, not only supports the usual array of measures to fight anti-racism education and make life more difficult for LGBTQ kids, but has said he’d like to cut state aid to public schools by more than half, with parents able to use those dollars for religious schools, or home-schooling.

The disdain for learning among the so-called “thought leaders” of the conservative movement is palpable. “Drop out of college,” the top Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson told a college-student interviewer this weekend. “College is ridiculous, unless you’re moving towards some very specialized degree that you can only get in college.” What’s changing now is that Republicans want to downgrade schooling well before freshman year.

Why? One factor is the shock value of the George Floyd protests in the spring of 2020, when even some smaller rural cities and towns that had voted for Trump saw large marches, often swelled by high school kids and their teachers. This push by students for diversity and racial justice seemed to convince many conservatives that their kids and their newfound tolerance needed to be cut off at the perceived source: the classroom.

At the same time, there seems a rising, unholy alliance between America’s conservative billionaire class, traditionally more libertarian, and the growing popularity of Christian nationalism in heartland communities. The Texas movement is unusual because the rich dudes are also Christian fundamentalists, but here in Pennsylvania the state’s richest citizen, Jeff Yass, is more than happy to aid Mastriano if this religious authoritarian will keep his taxes low. For somewhat different reasons, both billionaires and church-goers think they’re defending America against infidels — deeply invested in a status quo of white supremacy and inherited wealth.

Still, one has to wonder if wealthy One Percenters and their new friends in the religious radical right are getting a tad ahead of themselves here. Yes, Fox News and some GOP blowhards have made more parents uneasy about some things being taught in the classroom, but surveys show that most folks like their own kids’ school or teachers, and aren’t clamoring to end the American experiment in public schooling. In fact, the silent majority wants to see public schools get better, with more funding and support.

On the other hand, Mastriano’s ideas for gutting K-12 education in Pennsylvania haven’t stopped him from running within the margin of error against Democrat Josh Shapiro, the attorney general. And if the GOP extremist wins, lawmakers might not endorse his most radical school cuts but they’ll surely try to siphon away more dollars to religious or private schools through vouchers. Just because our public schools aren’t engulfed in flames — yet — doesn’t mean people should be running around with a book of matches.

Question: Do you think John Fetterman is really up to being PA senator in terms of health? (I certainly hope so.) How about President? — Via Armed Progressive @john_bertoglio on Twitter

Answer: I picked this one because Fetterman’s Democratic U.S. Senate campaign against the GOP’s Mehmet Oz — waged on social media, for now — has been one for the ages and deserves some attention and praise. His ability to troll the New Jersey carpetbagger — the shore banner plane, the Snooki video, the New Jersey Hall of Fame gambit — has made Oz a punchline, which is putting Fetterman in a position to go to D.C. next January and do things that actually matter, like raising the minimum wage or codifying abortion rights. He’s stayed off the campaign trail since his May stroke to rest and fully regain speaking fluidity. His health has improved to the point of giving interviews, and he’s about to start attending events like fundraisers. Pennsylvania doesn’t care if a senator stumbles over a word, if his heart is in the right place. But POTUS? One step at a time, people!

No one is immune from the epidemic of gun violence in America — including journalists. Several in my trade have been targeted in high-profile incidents, including the shocking moment that happened in August 2015 near Roanoke, Va., when a reporter for the local CBS affiliate, Alison Parker, and her cameraman Adam Ward were gunned down during an interview on live TV by a disgruntled ex-colleague from the station. Not only was the crime itself jarring, but the grisly images created by an on-air murder (which the killer also filmed on his phone and uploaded to the web before dying by suicide during a police chase) triggered an intense debate in the media world over many outlets that chose to show video or publish still photos of the violence. The slain reporter’s dad, Andy Parker, emerged in the immediate aftermath to battle on two fronts: Crusading for social-media sites like YouTube to take down videos of his daughter’s murder or the inevitable posts spreading hoax theories about the incident, while also lobbying for stricter gun-safety laws.

Seven years later, Andy Parker isn’t backing down. Indeed, at a moment when America’s rising gun-murder rate and mass shootings are a front-burner issue, the murder victim’s dad is intensifying his efforts. He flirted earlier this year with running for Congress in his Virginia district, but then shifted gears and this week launched what he hopes will be a high-profile political action committee called Andy’s Fight. What’s unique about Parker’s PAC is its dual focus: Supporting candidates willing to change the laws governing the internet to control the spread of disinformation, but also those who back aggressive gun control — particularly, a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. “Andy’s Fight won’t play nice with Pat Toomey, Susan Collins, or even Joe Manchin in the hope of bipartisan support for the measures we need,” Parker vowed. “If you’re failing to protect your constituents, we don’t care who likes you in Beltway circles, we’re going to tell people what you’re doing and how it is getting us killed.”