The Mind Virus Mutates!

The Heritage Foundation, Oran P. Smith, and Pro-Voucher Rhetoric

Those of us who are parents know that feeling in your gut— every time you drop your child off at school, it’s an act of faith. You trust a group of people – the principal, the teachers, even the janitors, with the most precious thing in your life – your children. And you just want what’s best for them. So as my wife often reminds me, sometimes my heart disengages from my head and I say something I shouldn’t – and that’s what happened yesterday. I clearly said something as a dad that I just shouldn’t have said. And I apologize.

-Former South Carolina Senator/ former Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, 2010 (in response to calls for an apology for saying that gay people and unmarried pregnant women should not be allowed to teach)

What I actually said was, “Given how understandably agitated he was, I applaud this father for making the right choice to write an email instead of pick up a gun”.

-Charleston County School Board member Ed Kelley, 2023 (on the allegation that he said he would shoot a teacher who came out as transgender)

The Heritage Foundation is now concerned that something called the “trans mind-virus” (which seems to share some DNA with that “woke mind virus” about which you probably keep seeing panicky memes) is “mutating”… or something. (I’ll give you three guesses as to how they’ve responded to a non-metaphorical, real-life mutating virus that has killed seven million people.)

The Heritage Foundation was once headed by former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, the guy who once loudly opined that gay teachers should be fired. The organization has opposed same-sex marriage and the Supreme Court decision protecting it. (Education writer Peter Green wrote a good piece on some of Heritage’s latest nonsense here.) So it shouldn’t be shocking that the organization has worn its transphobia (not to mention its dog whistle racism) more and more openly as the culture war heats up.

And it shouldn’t be surprising that South Carolina has used language from DeMint’s former “think tank” in bills designed to limit what information students in public schools can receive (even as we barrel ever further into another DeMint pet project: handing over mountains of cash to private schools which can more or less teach anything they want to whichever students they choose to accept).

And it also shouldn’t be surprising that Jim DeMint’s protégé, Ellen Weaver, is now superintendent of education in South Carolina. Weaver just signed on to a letter with SC Attorney General Alan Wilson that villanizes transgender student athletes, conveninently ignoring that the number of transgender students who have sought to play sports in South Carolina is vanishingly small

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, and also ignoring the real harm that comes from singling out these students, who already feel disproportionately excluded in school, for even more exclusion. (While South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster has already signed a law excluding transgender students, Weaver and Wilson’s letter seems to be mainly an attention-seeking effort to publicly slam the Biden administration.)

And it really shouldn’t be surprising that a senior fellow at Weaver’s Jim DeMint- founded “think tank,” Oran P. Smith, is up for a higher education post which he already lost once because he once edited a neo-Confederate, white-supremacist-conspiracy-theory-promoting rag called The Southern Partisan. According to The State, “The magazine’s promotion of a ‘white genocide’ conspiracy theory was cited by Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015, according to The Atlantic.” “White genocide”/ “Great Replacement” theory

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is especially frightening when we consider that the majority of US “extremism-related murders” are committed by white supremacists

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. Smith also lent his imprimatur to a weird “dossier” of dog whistle anti-labor, anti-teacher conspiracy theories published by Palmetto Promise a few months ago.

Image of the May 9, 2023, SC Senate Education Committee agenda, showing plans to discuss the appointments of Smith and former SC Superintendent of Education Mick Zais to the Higher Education Commission.

South Carolina, after all, has a complex history with education. The state is arguably the birthplace of constitutionally-mandated public education, but also the birthplace of the “independent school” movement as a vehicle for school segregation. Michael Harriot wrote a series of essays about how SC’s history has led the state to embrace the “anti-CRT” culture war sweeping the nation. The first essay can in the series be found here.

To see where we are headed now, we need only look at the states which have already accomplished the goals South Carolina’s ruling class is pushing us towards. In those states, we see the predictable results of bills that generally find flimsy loopholes in constitutional language prohibiting public funding of private schools, and do so in a way that generally prevents any state oversight of how those funds are used. Generally speaking, many of those programs are:

• Unaccountable. Iowa’s private school voucher program, like many others in the nation, allows schools to “spend public money however they like”. Rather than making private schools more accessible, the program has resulted instead in increased tuition for many schools that are taking public funds.

• Discriminatory. In Florida, at least $129 million went to private schools which rejected LGBTQ students and students from families with LGBTQ members.

• Expensive. One of South Carolina’s two new scholarship bills is predicted to cost $90 million per year by 2026, in a state which currently underfunds its public schools around $500 million per year (as defined by law). That $90 million is expected to subsidize tuition for 15,000 students; roughly 800,000 students are served by public schools.

As Kat Low, a Lowcountry teacher and a fierce advocate for teachers and students, put it on Twitter, in response to a tweet from book-banning activist group Moms 4 Liberty, “This is the game plan. 1. Take over the school boards promising better. 2. Sandbag those same schools by doing nothing about the workforce shortage that impacts kids now. 3. Say those schools are failures and profit off of vouchers. Wash, rinse, repeat.”

But no matter how transparent that game plan is, its brutal efficacy is frightening. The imaginary “mind virus” is probably exacerbating the real teacher shortage in ways that play into the pro-voucher dreams of a few while imperiling the public school infrastructure that most families rely upon. Discriminatory book and content bans— the majority of which have been driven by eleven people nationwide— have disproportionately targeted the representation of LGBTQ+ students and students of color. Stochastic terrorists have gone to war on beer companies and Target in a way that might seem funny if it didn’t represent an escalating threat to the physical safety and emotional well-being of some our most vulnerable neighbors.

Heritage Foundation, and its ilk, may very well not believe in the QAnon-style conspiracy theories (such as the “adrenochrome” theory that falsely promotes the idea— with origins in antisemitic “blood libel” propaganda— that children are being terrorized and murdered for their adrenaline by “groomers”) they encourage with phrases like “trans mind virus”. To them, and to other political nihilists, it may be a kind of realpolitik, where the ends—whipping up the base with baseless and frightening conspiratorial thinking— justify the means— gaining power for favored policies like tax avoidance and defunding schools and social programs. But once that genie is out of the bottle, it often takes on a life of its own.

Those who support the infrastructure of public education, the safety of our children and neighbors, and the protection of basic civil liberties can’t fall into the trap of thinking this dangerous rhetoric will go away on it’s own, or that it is self-evidently silly to most people.

I also wrote about conspiracy theories here:

I also make music (check it out here).

1. According to The State, “Since 2016, only five transgender athletes have applied for waivers to participate in high school sports, according to the South Carolina High School League. The High School League has dealt with those requests on a case-by-case basis, approving the participation of one transgender female high school student and three transgender male high schools students.”

2. According to Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative, “The white genocide conspiracy theory is the belief that immigration by people of color, falling white birth rates, and the promotion of multiculturalism are all part of a deliberate plot to destroy the ‘white race.’ It is espoused by many white nationalist and white supremacist individuals and organizations, who often conflate or combine it with the similar “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.”

3. According to Reuters, “White supremacists commit the highest number of domestic extremist-related murders in most years, but in 2022 the percentage was unusually high: 21 of the 25 murders were linked to white supremacists, according to the ADL report.”