The Southern Strategy II: The Fake Smoking Gun
The Southern Strategy II: The Fake Smoking Gun
In which “Freedom” and “Liberty” groups consolidate power by banning books and concepts they don’t like.
This piece is Part III in an ongoing series considering parallels between the “Southern Strategy” of 1960s American politics and the current manufactured war on race- and gender-related discussions and concepts. Part I is here. Part III is here.
Teiresias: I have much to tell you: listen to the prophet, Creon.
Creon: I am not aware that I have ever failed to listen.
-Antigone, Sophocles (translated by Fitts and Fitzgerald)
In the ancient Greek tragedy Antigone, the new king Creon receives a visit from one of Greek mythology’s main characters, the prophet Teiresias, a man wise enough that he has lived as a woman
(apologies if this newsletter causes extremists to try to cancel Classical literature) and will continue to be sought out for advice even after he is dead. Creon promises to listen to the prophet, and then immediately rejects his advice— and accuses him of selling out by collecting bribes— as soon as Teiresias warns him to change his course of action.Modern brain science supports Sophocles’ intuitive grasp of human decision-making. We often choose our beliefs emotionally—guided especially by powerful emotions like fear and anger— and then choose or reject evidence based on what allows us to hold onto those beliefs. This may be one reason that conspiracy theories and disinformation spread so easily, and why it is so difficult to have rational arguments, or to persuade others to adopt evidence-supported conclusions.
Philosopher Karl Popper, in The Open Society & Its Enemies, defined the “conspiracy theory of society” as “the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon (sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be revealed), and who have planned and conspired to bring it about”. This, to me, sums up the current “theories” behind the new Southern Strategy— “woke indoctrination” in schools, the conspiracy of “the Left” to harm white people by hurting their feelings through anti-racist discourse, etc.
As I wrote in my last piece, we’re seeing the history of “Southern Strategy” politics repeat themselves in real time, with rapid escalations since the election. And if you don’t subscribe to the conspiracy theory that schools are a hotbed of radical Leftist indoctrination, the evidence presented in this campaign can seem bafflingly thin and irrelevant. That makes it all the more frightening that political forces which have gained much of their powers from conspiratorial thinking have had so much success recently in states like South Carolina:
“Moms 4 Liberty” candidates have gained control or at least major influence in several South Carolina school districts, and in Berkeley County moved swiftly to consolidate power by unexpectedly— and perhaps illegally— firing the district superintendent on the same night they were sworn in. (Wear black on Fridays if you would like to show solidarity with teachers in that district.)
Affiliated legislators and groups in districts in Aiken, Greenville, Horry, Lexington, Pickens and Spartanburg counties have moved— sometimes without following district protocols— to ban several books from school libraries— often in likely violation of the First Amendment.
Ellen Weaver, who was endorsed by “Moms 4 Liberty,” and supported by both the school privatization lobby and by Proud Boy- adjacent extremists, will be SC’s new state superintendent of education, after running a campaign often fixated on the same unsubstantiated conspiracy theory of “woke indoctrination”.
And at the same time, according to this week’s CERRA Supply and Demand Report— a part of an annual series tracking teacher departures in SC— this year has seen the largest teacher shortage in the history of these reports. This is not surprising, but it should be setting off major alarm bells for our state leaders, instead of being moved to a far back burner in favor of a bunch of ginned up controversy and panicky conspiracy theories.
I intended to quit Twitter after the election— partly because of a general weariness with ginned up controversy and panicky conspiracy theories—and I am deactivating my account soon (if the platform doesn’t implode first). But while waiting for the ability to archive my account this past week, I got into a back-and-forth with South Carolina House member Adam Morgan after the club of white, “ultra conservative” Republicans to which he belongs (twelve men and two women who call themselves the “Freedom Caucus”) announced a publicity stunt lawsuit against Lexington School District One.
As the The State Newspaper’s Zak Koeske reported last week, the “Freedom Caucus” lawsuit is supposedly in response to a secret video created by a former Lexington One student teacher, of a conversation he had with an employee of a group that works with the district. Initially, the “Freedom Caucus” released an edited version with music, cuts that removed much of the context, and which they later admitted to editing.
When I expressed on Twitter that it was hard to square a scaremongering lawsuit against a public school district— especially one based on such thin evidence— with Morgan’s in-person assurances to me that he was concerned with teacher retention (when he visited my school last year), Morgan repeatedly asked me for my response to the edited video. In turn, I repeatedly asked for the unedited version, and eventually he shared a YouTube clip from the “Freedom Caucus” account with the title “CRT Exposed— RAW video”. To me, the way the title slots so easily into the YouTube clickbait edgelord format should tell you all you need to know about the group.
!["If you are engaged in partisan indoctrination on the taxpayer dime then you are a coconspirator [sic]. This isn't hard to understand" (tweet from Morgan)](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F08bea3cb-f141-4ab8-9b23-0cc1b38c7ba0_750x329.png "\"If you are engaged in partisan indoctrination on the taxpayer dime then you are a coconspirator [sic]. This isn't hard to understand\" (tweet from Morgan)")
Spoiler alert: very little, if any, Critical Race Theory was “Exposed,” but the video was very raw.
I don’t know whether the video Morgan shared is unedited or not. It has an in medias res opening behind the counter of a hotel where the “whistleblower,” who has identified himself as Adam Mahdavi, evidently works, and it ends fairly conveniently after his unwitting subject has said she “wouldn’t take that line” from an article about CRT “to your district”. (The hotel is presumably the downtown Columbia Hilton, where Mahdavi worked, according to this bio.) He tells the woman— who I am not going to name because she was made a part of this video without her consent— that he is “on break,” and sits down with her to eat a large plate of chicken wings— she is not eating— and to question her about the article.
Whether or not the video is complete, it is long, and it does prominently feature closeups of Mahdavi’s hands covered with wing sauce as he fumbles with a plate of wings, and lots of eating sounds that were hard for me to take. He repeatedly says he can’t touch the printout of the article (which he calls “some real goodies for ya”) because he has wing sauce on his hands, while trying to get the woman, who is not a district employee and who says she lives in Georgia, to give him examples of Critical Race Theory being taught in South Carolina schools, which she does not. Watch it at your own risk.
The article Mahdavi brought to the meeting appears to be “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education,” a 1995 journal article by Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate IV which uses the framework of CRT to understand inequities in the school system. In other words, the article is not a guide in how to teach students CRT, but a scholarly article that attempts to understand why demonstrable racial inequities persist in the school system, full of higher-level philosophical inquiries into concepts like “race as a social construct” and W.E.B. DuBois’ concept of “double consciousness”. This is not an article for kids, or a prescription for how to teach.
It’s unclear where Mahdavi encountered the article, but there isn’t any indication the woman in the video or her company provided the material to anyone in Lexington One. When, about twenty-seven minutes in, Mahdavi pushes for whether the Ladson-Billings’ ideas are informing school practice, it’s unclear whether the woman is simply stating that she personally agrees with the article, or whether it guides the practice of the company she works for, but she does not say CRT is being taught in schools.
I am not an expert in Critical Race Theory, the legal study Ladson-Billings and Tate used to try to understand systemic inequities in the 1990s-era school system (inequities which persist today). I don’t know if the woman who was filmed without her consent in the video is a legal scholar, but to my ears her patient explanations of the Ladson-Billings article— which, I can’t stress enough, she did not bring to the discussion— are pretty on point.
(“Freedom Caucus” has released an interview with Mahdavi on Facebook. In it, he suggests he was silenced by the University of South Carolina and not allowed to be a teacher in the district because of his brave stand against CRT, and expresses a desire to promote a “classical education,” which reads to me like code for a return to a mostly imaginary good old days of canonical texts
— which would presumably include good, clean, Classical readings like The Odyssey and Metamorphoses and at least one of those Shakespeare plays full of filthy double entendres and copious murders— and “reading and math,” without all of the feelings and acknowledgements of student diversity which seem to make folks like Representative Melissa Oremus and other members of the “Freedom Caucus” so uncomfortable.)As a graduate of the same USC education program as Mahdavi (albeit many years earlier), and having worked in recent years with several USC student teachers, his view of the institution—in which state standards are rejected in favor of CRT concepts— sounds like science fiction.)
Needless to say, the video did not strike me as the smoking gun Morgan and his bros desperately want it to be, and no matter how many times I asked Morgan for additional evidence to support the allegations in the suit, he would only say that “several” teachers, including two in his district, had complained about some kind of “Leftist” professional development they were forced to undergo. This, he suggested, without any attempt to grapple with the CERRA data, which I shared with him, was the real reason teachers are leaving the profession at an alarming rate. Having spoken with him in person about this issue, I am almost entirely certain he doesn’t believe this, but that’s the party line.
In a state with nearly 60,000 teachers and nearly 800,000 students, you may wonder why this handful of complaints is such a major concern for the “Freedom Caucus”. Morgan seemed interested in the narrative that anyone who was “okay” with what the woman in the video—not a district employee— was saying was endorsing “partisan indoctrination” of students. The content of the woman’s remarks in the video essentially boiled down to her patiently answering a series of leading questions from Mahdavi.
When I did watch the entire, excruciating twenty-eight minutes of the video and offered a fairly detailed response on Twitter, Morgan’s reply was simply “Of course that’s your take… [facepalm emoji].” I think that reply says a great deal about the extent to which Morgan and his associates are interested in seriously grappling with education policy and/ or issues of intellectual freedom.
I probably should have known this was the kind of response I’d get from Morgan, a guy who does seem like maybe he cares about public schools and teacher retention, but who cares a lot more about representing his club, and about coming up with pseudo-intellectual arguments to support his use of naked white grievance politics that would make Richard Nixon proud.
But what do we do about it? That’s a tough question.
Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance”
raised this problem eloquently, with Popper warning that in seeking to be open to all ideas and to promote ideals like free speech, an open (or democratic) society can create a situation where the intolerant exploit that very openness to create conditions that stifle it in the long term. To me, this is what the new Southern Strategy (and the original one) seek to do: allow pro-censorship, anti-equity forces to use, in bad faith, arguments against “partisanship” or “indoctrination” to actually support both partisanship and indoctrination. As many outlets, including Politico, reported last week, a Florida judge blocked— at least temporarily— the state’s “Stop W.O.K.E. Act”. In his decision, US District Judge Mark Walker wrote, in language that could be describing pro-censorship moves in South Carolina and elsewhere,The law officially bans professors from expressing disfavored viewpoints in university classrooms while permitting unfettered expression of the opposite viewpoints. Defendants argue that, under this Act, professors enjoy ‘academic freedom’ so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves. This is positively dystopian.
And as NPR reported this week,
The bill prohibits schools and workplaces from any instruction that suggests that any individual, by virtue of their race, color, sex or national origin, "bears responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress" on account of historical acts of racism. The bill also forbids education or training that says individuals are "privileged or oppressed" due to their race or sex.
Identical language, along with other similar language from sources like the Heritage Foundation and National Association of Scholars, appeared in the bills debated by the SC House Education and Public Works subcommittee (which featured Morgan) last session, and in the final bill they passed (it didn’t pass the Senate). Similar language appeared in a Budget Proviso this year, and is the basis for the “Freedom Caucus” suit. Crucially, Mahdavi’s video did not include any discussion, at least to my ears, of any of the forbidden concepts from that proviso, and although Morgan and his pals have argued the proviso outlaws the teaching of “CRT,” neither that acronym, nor the words “Critical Race Theory” appear in the proviso, and the concepts listed therein don’t match with any scholarly understanding of Critical Race Theory I’ve heard:
1.93. (SDE: Partisanship Curriculum) For the current fiscal year, of the funds allocated by the Department of Education to school districts, no monies shall be used by any school district or school to provide instruction in, to teach, instruct, or train any administrator, teacher, staff member, or employee to adopt or believe, or to approve for use, make use of, or carry out standards, curricula, lesson plans, textbooks, instructional materials, or instructional practices that serve to inculcate any of the following concepts: (1) one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex; (2) an individual, by virtue of his race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; (3) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his race or sex; (4) an individual's moral standing or worth is necessarily determined by his race or sex; (5) an individual, by virtue of his race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex; (6) an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his race or sex; (7) meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by members of a particular race to oppress members of another race; and (8) fault, blame, or bias should be assigned to a race or sex, or to members of a race or sex because of their race or sex. Nothing contained herein shall be construed as prohibiting any professional development training for teachers related to issues of addressing unconscious bias within the context of teaching certain literary or historical concepts or issues related to the impacts of historical or past discriminatory policies.
-SC Budget Proviso 1.93 from the 2021-22 Appropriations Act (the language in bold comes directly from this now-canceled Trump Executive Order, which, notably, had nothing to do with education and was intended to combat the supposed evils of diversity training for federal employees)
But that’s the point: folks like Morgan, the “Freedom Caucus,” and “Moms 4 Liberty” want to use the illusion of propriety to violate the spirit, and perhaps the letter, of the Constitution. They want to use the language of “freedom” and “liberty” to censor and to erase entire groups of people— particularly LGBTQ+ students— from public discussion and acknowledgement, despite ample evidence that doing so tangibly increases the risk of real physical and psychological harm to those students, who are already far more likely than their straight, cisgender peers to experience adverse mental and physical health outcomes, and who have been shown in study after study to be less likely to have these negative outcomes with access to gender-affirming care.
When Morgan visited my classroom, he tried very hard to frame his efforts as a way to protect children from partisanship of all kinds, but when he tried to defend the lawsuit to me this week, he framed it entirely in terms of how it impacted a small number (whatever “several” means) of teachers, with no mention of students, of parents, or of the many teachers who feel duty-bound (and research-supported) in their efforts to make schools safe places for all students, even those who offend the sensibilities of “conservative” groups. And whatever else the creepy video is supposed to reveal, one of the last things Mahdavi’s subject says is that she wants to create safe spaces for all students.
In Popper’s formulation, “suppressing” the intolerant is unwise, but he says it may be necessary to reserve “the right” to do so. (To put it in 21st century terms, I wonder if Popper would say that while censorship should be avoided whenever possible, if you use conspiracy theories to incite your followers to overthrow the country, perhaps its okay to take away your Twitter account.) Since most of us don’t have the power to determine who has a platform and who doesn’t, I believe we need to find solidarity in groups which value openness and tolerance, and to clearly, forcefully, and humanely call out intolerance, antisemitism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia.
Such efforts are, of course, in line with antiracism, a concept which the “Freedom Caucus” and its ilk have deliberately and in bad faith conflated with anti-White “racism,” and culturally responsive pedagogy— essentially, a system of practices that attempt to take into account students’ diverse experiences and backgrounds in order to teach all students effectively— with a nervous and uninformed fever dream of what “Critical Race Theory” might be. The argument— both nationally and in the particular case of the creepy Chicken Wing video— is that if a person is guided by the lens of Critical Race Theory, that theory will necessarily— and “illegally” make its way into the classroom, and that somehow at the same time rightwing ideologues can created “neutral” and “nonpartisan” educational decisions without their own lenses coloring them.
These lies are closely paraphrased from those which powered anti-Civil Rights backlash (which was the major engine of the Southern Strategy) in the 1960s. (For example, as Rick Perlstein writes in Nixonland, “The head of the nation’s leading association private schools released a statement [in 1966] worrying that ‘students have adopted ‘terrifying’ attitudes toward sex… for lack of a moral code.” Presumably the solution was more private schools.)
These lies must be countered at every turn, and must be called what they are: dangerous intolerance. But we must also give up any illusion that calling them out, alone, will change hearts and minds. I think we need to find solidarity and power to push for positive changes in our schools, but even more than that we have to provide an alternative to the idea— promoted for decades by liberals, conservatives, and moderates alike— that in order to be judged effective, schools must solve every social problem. Students (and adults, obviously) need mental health services, food services, health services, and access to fair wages, and schools cannot provide these— and even if they could provide them in part, the entire “Freedom Caucus”/ “Moms 4 Liberty”-style argument rests on the premise that parents, not schools, should be making all or most decisions about student well-being.
Only when we find the strength as a society to call for the long-term steps to mitigate systemic social problems will we perhaps be able to see these culture war glittering generalities and scare tactics for what they are: distractors, and deliberate means for elected officials to abdicate the responsibility to use taxpayer resources to benefit society as a whole, rather than small groups of tax-averse elites. Of course, the legal lens of Critical Race Theory is an attempt— certainly not the only attempt— to address these bigger social questions, and that is likely why those who would like to preserve the status quo are so afraid of it, and yet so unwillingly to engage in good faith with evidence-based explanations of their own for realities like redlining, mass incarceration of people of color, and disproportionate self-harm and suicide among LGBTQ+ youth.
We have to reject any ideology whose answer to these problems is to pretend that they don’t exist.
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“It happen'd once, within a shady wood,/ Two twisted snakes he in conjunction view'd,/ When with his staff their slimy folds he broke,/ And lost his manhood at the fatal stroke./But, after seven revolving years, he view'd/ The self-same serpents in the self-same wood:/ "And if," says he, "such virtue in you lye,/ That he who dares your slimy folds untie/ Must change his kind, a second stroke I'll try."/ Again he struck the snakes, and stood again/ New-sex'd, and strait recover'd into man” (Metamorphoses, Ovid (translated by Garth, Dryden, et al).
“I made a drink-offering to all the dead, first with honey and milk, then with wine, and thirdly with water, and I sprinkled white barley meal over the whole, praying earnestly to the poor feckless ghosts, and promising them that when I got back to Ithaca I would sacrifice a barren heifer for them, the best I had, and would load the pyre with good things. I also particularly promised that Teiresias should have a black sheep to himself, the best in all my flocks. When I had prayed sufficiently to the dead, I cut the throats of the two sheep and let the blood run into the trench, whereon the ghosts came trooping up from Erebus- brides, young bachelors, old men worn out with toil, maids who had been crossed in love, and brave men who had been killed in battle, with their armour still smirched with blood; they came from every quarter and flitted round the trench with a strange kind of screaming sound that made me turn pale with fear” (The Odyssey, Homer (translated by Samuel Butler).
I struggled with whether to include a link to the video, because I find it deeply creepy. While its creator and the “Freedom Caucus” really want it to seem like an underdog whistleblower standing up to power, what I see is a man filming a woman without her permission, during a meeting he called under false pretenses, in order to make her look bad. However, the “Freedom Caucus” edit of the video takes away so much context, and has been so widely seen, that I think it’s only fair that anyone interested in this fake controversy be able to see more of that context.
For more context on what this increasingly seems to mean, this piece gives some helpful about what a “classical education” means for those pushing restrictive, religiously-affiliated private school “choice” while also pushing restrictive, politically-driven censorship of public schools. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that a Hillsdale-affiliated charter is currently being proposed in SC.
“Less well-known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them” (The Open Society and Its Enemies, note 4 to Chapter 7, Karl Popper).