Why Banning TikTok Might Backfire. Plus, a History of Book-Banning Moms
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The House passed a bill that could ban TikTok in the U.S. unless it separates from its Chinese parent company. Why in the hell would we want and allow the Chinese Communist Party to have access to our private data? A moment of unity in an era of dysfunction and discord?

From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Olinger. Fears around TikTok abound, but would forcing a sale really protect our data? The reality is that TikTok, as far as most people can tell, collects pretty much the same types of data that every other app on your phone collects. Also on the show, after failing to gain any seats in the last midterms, the press all but sounded the death knell for the

book banning group Moms for Liberty. But Moms for Liberty is really part of a broader ecosystem that's aimed at sowing distrust in our public schools. It's all coming up after this.

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Hello again, WNYC. It's Andrea Bernstein. I co-hosted the podcast Trump Inc. This August, I'm guest hosting The Law According to Trump, a special series on amicus from Slate. Long before this year's historic Supreme Court term, Donald Trump created a blueprint for shielding himself from legal accountability on everything from taxes to fraud to discrimination. Listen now on amicus as we explore Trump's history of bending the law to his will. Search amicus wherever you're listening.

From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Ellinger. Well, they finally did it. Sort of. The House has voted to pass a bipartisan bill that could lead to a nationwide ban of TikTok. If the bill becomes law, it would give TikTok's Chinese-based parent company ByteDance six months to sell the video sharing app or

it would be removed from app stores and web hosting services here in the U.S. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle worry that TikTok poses a national security threat because it's owned by a company based in China. You wouldn't allow a radio tower owned by the Chinese to be put up right in the middle of Washington, D.C., and then allow it to just

put out Chinese propaganda. That's exactly what TikTok can be used for. The question is, how much of this concern is fact-based and how much exaggerated? There's no disputing that TikTok has had its problems. And according to a new article in the Washington Post, if you're in China and you go on TikTok,

You can't find anything about the Hong Kong protests that continue. What appears to be a beauty lesson is actually 17-year-old Feroza Aziz trying to raise awareness about the detention of Uyghur Muslims in China. This is another Holocaust, yet no one is talking about it. Following the posting of her three-part tutorial, the American teen's TikTok account was suspended.

ByteDance, the Beijing-based owner of TikTok, apologized for the suspension, blaming a human moderation error. The spread of false COVID-19 vaccine claims is going viral on TikTok, according to a new study. Those videos have over 20 million unique views and over 1.6 million likes. This is not a ban on TikTok.

I understand the entertainment value, the educational value, the communication value, the business value. Nancy Pelosi this week responding to criticism of the bill, including its apparent threat to free speech. Its attempt to make TikTok better. Tic-tac-toe. A winner. President Biden has said he would sign the bill into law if and when it passes the Senate.

But writing in The New York Times this week, tech journalist Julia Angwin, founder of the new outlet Proof News, argued this legislation wouldn't really address concerns around misinformation, national security or data privacy. And in fact, she doesn't find claims about TikTok's unique power as a propaganda tool all that convincing. The office of the director of national intelligence put out a threat assessment report in February saying,

and said that TikTok accounts run by a Chinese propaganda arm were targeting candidates from both political parties during the U.S. midterm election cycle in 2022. Now, it sounds a little bit scary, but the reality is that anyone can set up an account on TikTok to, quote, target a candidate. This is exactly what the Russians did in 2016 when they set up accounts on Facebook to try to influence the U.S. elections.

And they didn't have to buy Facebook to do that, right? They actually paid in rubles. Facebook didn't notice. And it's also worth noting that that threat assessment from the National Intelligence Director does not say that TikTok's algorithm promoted those accounts. I'm guessing that if they had evidence of that, they would have stated it.

So I think the thing that we basically can learn from this is that whatever evidence they have, they're not sharing it or they don't have it. Say more about the data privacy concern. What are they collecting? How could it be misused? Has it already been misused?

TikTok, as far as most people can tell, collects pretty much the same types of data that every other app on your phone collects, which is where you are, what kind of device you're accessing it from, how often you're using it for how long you're on. And then while you're in the app, what kind of content you're looking at. There have been data abuses at all of these companies.

Both Microsoft and Google have been found to promote their own products over those of their competitors. Employees have actually gone in, looked at personal data and tried to figure out things about their ex-girlfriends or whatever, as we all know from looking at the privacy policies themselves.

Basically, all of them say we can do whatever we want with your data. So we don't really know what is going to happen with our user data. You've pointed out that even if TikTok is sharing data from American users with the Chinese government, which the company says it's not, the data might not be as consequential as its critics fear.

What's interesting about TikTok is they don't actually have as much as maybe a Facebook or Google because they don't actually have a lot of personal information on your friends. Usually people don't upload their address book. It really is about what video you watch and how long you watch it for. Well, what does TikTok know about you? Well, TikTok knows, unfortunately, that I watch too many cooking videos and too many makeup tutorials. They're going to take you down. So...

And so it's possible that this is one reason I'm not that worried because I'm just like, you know what? Good luck. I don't know what you're going to do with this information about my love of cheesecakes. And as you've pointed out, even if TikTok, let's say, just vanished from the app stores overnight, China or anyone for that matter could buy oodles of pretty granular personal data that are routinely hoovered up by American tech companies and then sold into the data broker marketplace. Yeah.

Yeah, you can buy all sorts of things. There was a really shocking story about a Muslim prayer app. It turns out the Defense Department was buying the data from that app in order to track the location of Muslims in the United States. So we have definitely seen governments, not just China, using these data brokers to get information that they would otherwise have a hard time getting a hold of.

Can you give us a laundry list of some of the abhorrent practices from social media companies just to help us understand who TikTok's peers are? Yeah, I'll start with genocide. Facebook was accused of enabling a genocide in Myanmar where the government essentially blanketed Facebook with lies about a minority population and incited violence against them.

We have seen Facebook enabling just hate speech. I wrote a story years ago about how Facebook had a category that advertisers could choose from called Jew haters, where you could just literally target your ad to people who hate Jews. Anyone who opens up the website formerly known as Twitter, now X, you're going to see a lot of people who are just like,

can see all sorts of examples of misinformation and disinformation sometimes being promoted by the owner of the site. So, you know, it goes on and on. It's a cesspool is what I'm saying. Okay, but there are real concerns with TikTok too, right?

Right? A couple of years back, there was an allegation that TikTok had not been showing Chinese dissident information and they apologized. But we really don't have a lot of evidence of how often this might be happening. TikTok's probably a little bit less transparent than most of the other social media platforms.

largely because it's newer. It took a long time, I think, to force Facebook into the level of transparency that it has now. And it's still not perfect. When it comes to TikTok, lawmakers are using national security to justify the bill. But there are other concerns in the background. This week, Mike Pence wrote a Fox News op-ed urging Congress to act because the app is, quote, digital-based.

fentanyl. We've been hearing this phrase a lot from right wing officials over the past couple of years. Speaking from the House floor this week, Republican Mike Gallagher, who's one of the bill's sponsors, emphasized its popularity among young people. Foreign adversary control of what is becoming the dominant news platform for Americans under 30.

This particular concern that TikTok is unique in its harmfulness to young people has been buoyed in part by the tech whistleblower Tristan Harris, who on 60 Minutes made a point that's been kind of floating around social media in recent weeks. Harris says the version that served to Chinese consumers called Douyin is very different from the one available in the West.

In their version of TikTok, if you're under 14 years old, they show you science experiments you can do at home, museum exhibits, patriotism videos, and educational videos.

So it's almost like they recognize that technology is influencing kids' development, and they make their domestic version a spinach version of TikTok, while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world. But you have to think about that in the context of China. China is very much about controlling speech, and they want to control it so that kids are focused on educational goals, right?

That is just not how the United States views speech, right? We are very much in favor of free speech. The idea that we would limit kids from seeing certain things, I mean, we haven't done it on any front.

And so just in general, we have had a very different approach to how we treat youth and their access to information. As The Washington Post observed, members of Congress and the Biden administration have put out pretty conflicting messaging on what the real goal of this bill is.

For instance, Republican Representative Dan Crenshaw posted on X that this bill really is a ban. But then he backtracked that recently. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, on the other hand, said that what this bill is about is really pushing a sale. But you don't think forcing a sale is a good idea either.

So it gets rid of China's direct access to user data, for sure. But basically, there's only a few people who can buy TikTok because it's huge. When you say huge, you're saying, you know, in the ballpark of $84 billion. Yeah. Really, we're going to be looking at buyers like Meta, Google, Weibo.

maybe Microsoft, you know, the big tech firms. Because they're the people who could afford it. And also they're the people who are interested in it, right? TikTok really created this short form vertical format video that has been just incredibly popular. YouTube has tried to copy it. Instagram has tried to copy it, but no one's really succeeded. Those are the ones who are going to want to buy it, right? So then what you're going to have is a TikTok that's owned by one of those giants, right?

And all the data will be used and monetized for whatever reasons they want. Sold to anyone they want it to be sold to. These are all the same problems we have. Would that even be legal? I mean, the antitrust implications seem pretty bad.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's also antitrust hurdles to any of those acquisitions. But if the U.S. government is forcing the sale, then maybe they would also say, like, we'll give an exemption, you know? And then also maybe they'll have some other buyers who step up. Steven Mnuchin, he announced that he wants to buy TikTok. Steven Mnuchin, who is the former Treasury Secretary. Yes, yes.

And I think it doesn't even prevent China from being manipulative, Associated Press found. China's setting up influencers on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram to promote the Chinese agenda. So it's not like they're not acting on other platforms. I just am not entirely sure that we have done that much by forcing TikTok to a sale to one of these other tech companies that's entirely unregulated.

So what do meaningful regulations for TikTok and meta and X and the like look like? So luckily, since the U.S. is so late to the game on privacy regulations, we have a lot of models to choose from. Nearly every country in the world has a federal baseline privacy law. Probably the most obvious model for us to work from is the EU, which passed the Digital Services Act in

So the companies themselves have to say, what are the risks that my algorithm is creating towards, for instance, youth and mental health or towards democracy? And then they have to publish these reports and the EU government will actually audit them and see if their risk is being assessed correctly. And also the public will get to see what those risks look like.

I think this is a really interesting approach because regulating algorithms is something that's difficult. We don't have a lot of experience with it, but it is in most ways the most important piece of this. In Europe, you have a right to see the data that's held against you. You have a right to ask for it to be deleted. There's limits on third-party sales of data. There's restrictions. You can only use data for the purpose for which it was collected. How has the EU been enforcing these regulations and have we seen tangible results?

We've already seen, for instance, like the TikTok podcast.

published a transparency report that shows just in Europe what ads are appearing on its platform, which is something really helpful to see. We've also seen that the EU is already investigating ex-formerly Twitter for not meeting its requirements of transparency and responsiveness to content moderation requests. This all sounds pretty good, pretty common sense. Why have we not done something similar in the U.S.?

I just am amazed at how far behind we are in even passing a bare minimum federal privacy bill. We got really close in the last session of Congress, but because there's no federal law, several states have started passing their own laws. The goal right now with the tech companies is actually to get all these state-level laws passed, basically that they've written themselves. And so then those states are actually opposed to the federal law because it would gut their law.

In your New York Times piece, you cited polling that shows that only 31% of Americans favor a nationwide ban on TikTok. So if most Americans aren't behind it, why are lawmakers behind it?

I mean, unfortunately, the gap between where Americans are and where lawmakers are is wide on a lot of issues. 72% of Americans want more government regulation of what companies can do with their data. That hasn't spurred Congress to act. There's wide popular support for gun control, abortion access, etc. that remain unaddressed at the federal level. Government policies in the U.S. are increasingly not reflective of public opinion, unfortunately.

I think one thing that's happening right now is that people were not kind of aware this was coming. And so it passed really quickly and constituents didn't have a chance to mobilize. But now people are aware and are mobilizing. And so I think the Senate offices are going to get flooded with a lot of really angry people because the reality is it's a real marketplace of spooks.

And so I think it will be interesting to see if the Senate passes it, because I think it actually could be politically unwise in an election year to piss off this many constituents. Julia, thank you very much. Thank you. Julia Anglin is the founder, CEO and editor in chief of Proof News, a nonprofit news organization, which you can find at proofnews.org. Thank you.

Coming up, the conservative movement gets a lot of mileage out of motherhood. This is On The Media. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

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Hello again, WNYC. It's Andrea Bernstein, a co-host of the podcast Trump, Inc. This August, I'm guest hosting The Law According to Trump, a special series on amicus from Slate.

Long before this year's historic Supreme Court term, Donald Trump created a blueprint for shielding himself from legal accountability on everything from taxes to fraud to discrimination. Listen now on Amicus as we explore Trump's history of bending the law to his will. Search Amicus wherever you're listening.

This is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last week, when Alabama Senator Katie Britt delivered the Republican response to Biden's State of the Union address from her kitchen table, many found it a trifle intense. I want to make a direct appeal to the parents out there, and in particular to my fellow moms.

many of whom I know will be up tossing and turning at 2 a.m., wondering how you're going to be in three places at once and then somehow still get dinner on the table.

As we know, Britt was excoriated both for her overwrought performance and her misleading content. But it was the constant reference to her mommitude that stuck in the craw of many a mom, as Scarlett Johansson spoofed on Saturday Night Live. Good evening, America. My name is Katie Britt, and I have the honor of...

serving the great people of Alabama. But tonight, I'll be auditioning for the part of Scary Mom. You see, I'm not just a senator. I'm a wife, a mother, and the craziest b**** in the Target parking lot.

The conservative movement has capitalized on the power of motherhood for many a year, but especially lately, advocating and agitating in the name of parental rights, as when some moms protested against school closings back during the pandemic. Your job is to find a proper place for them to have their education. Get back in your lane and let me be the parent. And argued over trans students' use of bathrooms.

Ask yourselves if you're willing to pay the litigation costs that will be brought by every family in this district whose rights are being infringed upon and forgotten about while you stomp on the graves of our founding fathers.

And pushed to take books out of schools. What ideology are the children being indoctrinated into? What is your fear? I think parents' fears are realized. They're looking at these books where sexual discussions are happening with their children at younger and younger ages. That's Scott Pelley speaking with Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Deskovich in a fiery 60-minute segment earlier this month.

Tiffany Justice read from sexually explicit books written for older teens, but found in a few lower schools. Most people wouldn't want them in a lower school. But in a tactic of outrage politics, Moms for Liberty takes a kernel of truth and concludes these examples are not rare mistakes,

but a plot to sexualize children. Framing their book-banning efforts as a fight for parental rights, Moms for Liberty candidates have been running for school boards and local elections, with some success, as happened last week. There were too many surprises in last night's primary, with one big exception. The incumbent in the race for superintendent of public instruction lost to a political newcomer.

Michelle Murrow, a far-right Moms for Liberty-backed candidate with no public education experience, won the primary for North Carolina's top school job. On paper, she didn't look like an election day threat. She didn't have a career in education. The homeschool mom also spoke out against public schools, calling them, quote, socialism centers and indoctrination centers. But the movement has also seen big losses at the ballot box.

as in the 2023 midterms. In Iowa, 12 of the 13 candidates backed by Moms for Liberty were wiped out. In Pennsylvania, Democrats won against at least 11 candidates aligned with the Moms for Liberty platform. And in Virginia, three Moms for Liberty candidates lost by a lot. Book banning is unpopular. Who knew?

Well, historians who follow what happens to conservative women's groups like Moms for Liberty would know there's a century-long track record. It's almost eerie how similar the claims are. Adam Latz, a professor of education and history at Binghamton University, from a conversation we had in December. From the 1920s on, there's been a call campaigning on the platform of parents' rights, that parents should have the ultimate right

not just to approve of what goes on in public schools, but also to veto what could go on in public schools. And that's been Moms for Liberty repeating this long pattern. Let's pursue the pattern and start with Alice Moore. She was a leader of one of these movements that bubbled up in the 70s in West Virginia. Her claim was that she was just a mom.

Over and over, especially conservative women who have exerted a lot of influence, like Phyllis Schlafly and Alice Moore and the Moms for Liberty. They say, hey, don't worry. We're just moms. Alice Moore took that line, although when she ran for school board to take charge of what she saw as a too progressive school board in Charleston, West Virginia, she had been an engaged conservative activist for years. And her...

platform was blocking books and fighting for parents' rights. What did she end up getting done?

Well, Alice Moore was in a minority. She got outvoted to block the books. So other conservatives in the area said, well, if the books are going in, our kids are staying out. For about three weeks, maybe longer, it looked as if, and this is what the New York Times called it, as if Alice Moore had flipped the script for the entire nation in terms of what would go on in public schools.

Because she had taken on these national textbook publishers and groups like the Heritage Foundation, which was just starting at the time, called it finally what conservatives have been waiting for. We're taking schools back over. Moore warned that she was fighting for

books that would force white kids into feeling guilt and anguish about America's racism. This was back in 74. She railed against public schools' alleged progressive agenda, destroying our children's patriotism, trusted God, respect for authority, confidence in their parents. I mean, deja vu all over again. And

She was inspired by another activist 10 years prior, someone named Norma Gabler. Mel and Norma Gabler. Norma was the powerhouse, but again, she pretended she wasn't. She always referred to herself as just a housewife. She was a full-time activist with eight employees running these textbook inspections.

She brought the school publishing industry to their knees by exploiting one of Texas's rules. Texas had a rule that they had a board to approve textbooks, but had to be open to public comment without limit of time. So Norma did her homework, read textbooks that no one else had really read. And the textbook publishers sought meetings with Norma Gabler of Longview, Texas, and said, what do we have to do to get your thumbs up on these books? What was she objecting to?

She thought the textbooks had an anti-American slant. Why? They said in 1961, their son was doing his homework and he said, hey, my textbook says that the people who wrote the Constitution didn't get rid of slavery because some of them were slave owners.

They thought that their son and America's sons and daughters, if they read the simple facts about America's founding, that would make them anti-American. I know from my own past reporting that textbooks that are influenced by

by activists in Texas can change the books for the entire rest of the country because it's such a big market. It's not quite as true now, but certainly in the early 1960s when Norma Gabler was beginning her campaign, it was absolutely true. Texas and California together would determine what publishers would make available for the entire country because publishing technology was such that it was

prohibitively expensive for them to make different books for different regions. Certainly when Norma Gabler was able to sit at one committee meeting in Texas, one person was able to simply put her thumb on this chokehold of the entire American educational system.

Okay, so in our backwards trek through the history of these movements, let's go to the 1920s, the Daughters of the American Revolution. They directly, you say, inspired the advocacy of Norma Gabler. Their campaign was to keep America's public schools fundamentally Anglo-Saxon, and didn't they claim back then almost everything?

200,000 members? Yeah. So in the 20s, the national leadership were fervent anti-communist activists, and they took their primary role as education.

I was struck by a leader of the group in the 20s, Ann Rogers Minor. She said that we want no teachers who say there are two sides to every question. Right. The Daughters of the American Revolution line was that the purpose for public schools was to take every single student of whatever background, put them through a very structured coursework.

course in what they called patriotic education. You needed to actively teach kids that America was the best country on earth, and it had always been the best country on earth, and its system, capitalism, was the best on earth.

They were behind the book bannings between the 20s and the 50s. You wrote that the organization spiraled wildly out of control of its national leaders and led to its ultimate loss of power, and it had something to do with a baby squirrel. It did. The Daughters for American Revolution didn't have a ton of control over local members, and one

One member from the Mississippi state chapter infamously objected to a children's book that had been used for a while in Mississippi public schools about bunnies and kittens and squirrels. And the squirrel story was what this daughter of the American Revolution objected to. In the book, the squirrel asks for a nut and it gets a nut.

The Mississippi Daughters of the American Revolution insisted that this book be banned because it was sneakily teaching children to be communists that welfare was something to rely on instead of your own labor. It just became this laughingstock.

Yeah. And Brooke, so for example, I don't know if you've ever read And Tango Makes Three. No. It's a picture book for kids, two male penguins who have adopted a baby penguin at a zoo. But because it's two male penguins, this is one of the books that groups like Moms for Liberty insists is not safe for children.

And I think it's the same kind of thing where it's like, if the kids can't read adorable stories about baby animals, it causes the deflation of the brand of groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution or Moms for Liberty. I just wonder how these groups initially so successful lose control. Pulling a fire alarm in a crowded theater, it works. Everyone runs, but it's dangerous. Once people say, well, why did you pull the fire alarm?

Alice Moore kept saying, I'm not racist, but I don't like these books with black authors. When she talked about the dangers of black authors, the Ku Klux Klan shows up in West Virginia to support Alice Moore's mission, and she didn't want their support.

There were protests in the street and people were holding signs up, "We don't want those N-word books." You say you're not being racist, but the people who are supporting you are certainly racist. It didn't end with signs though, did it? Oh no, no. The dangers of saying that people are after your children can get out of hand really quickly. The school board building got bombed. The school board members got beat up during a meeting.

The school superintendent, he moved his family out of town and he slept in a different place every night. He had received so many death threats.

Two people were shot. One person was pushed down a set of stairs. Elementary schools were firebombed. No one was hurt. But still, to firebomb an elementary school, I don't think it's fair for the Alice Moores or the Moms for Liberty to say, hey, we told people not to be violent. If you're calling teachers groomers, telling people that these textbooks are going to hurt children,

It's predictable that people are going to react with violence. And you noted that the Klan's local leader, he used the same words as Moore. He promised to return patriotism and Christianity to our schools. And she may have denounced it, but the damage was done. How does all this history help us better understand the trajectory of Moms for Liberty? What's the lesson here?

It's difficult for people trying to build their brands or ambitious politicians or even journalists to resist this low-hanging fruit of school politics because it's easy to get people motivated with these kind of scare tactics. And then what happens? You sort of force-feed this politics of fear into headlines, and it terrifies people.

But after people have enough time to evaluate these charges and to see what goes on in their actual schools that their kids actually attend, the charges are false. They pulled the fire alarm, but there wasn't a fire. And then what happens is you've discredited your organization. Also, it's hard to control the message and it's hard to duck embarrassment.

The rapid growth, you have Moms for Liberty in different chapters doing things that humiliate the rest of the organization, like famously quoting Hitler on their newsletter. What was Hitler saying that they felt the need to share with the rest of us? Something along the lines of whoever controls the children controls the nation or something like that. They were trying to say, hey, we're fighting against ideas like this, against progressive control of our children.

Another way in which Moms for Liberty seems to echo the history of other groups is that it attracts bad actors. In the case of Moms for Liberty, they were backed up by ranks of Proud Boys. You know, I see Proud Boys and other right-wing militias showing up at school board meetings and exerting a very menacing presence, standing with sunglasses in the back of the room.

When you look at the history of groups like the Ku Klux Klan showing up to support Alice Moore, the Ku Klux Klan showing up to support the Daughters of the American Revolution in the 20s, over and over again, it's irresponsible to say that people out there, including teachers, are trying to hurt children. And then when violent groups show up to stop the harm, it's not a legitimate position to say, we didn't tell anyone to harm anyone.

So are you saying that the steam has gotten out of the public school poses a danger to your child movement? The steam will never go out of the idea that public school is a danger to your child. There's always going to be this low-hanging fruit in the culture wars to say, the schools are dangerous, it's all connected, and if you vote for me or if you click like and subscribe...

I can explain it all to you in one word. That claim has for 100 years driven school politics and it will continue to do so. And you say this is a chronic condition in the U.S. Why? It comes down for school politics to a question of pronouns, not he and her, but...

but we and they. The United States has always relegated these unsolved questions about who we are to schools and to teachers to answer because the rest of society doesn't have a clear answer. You mean we don't have a defined sense of our collective identity? We don't. So people like Alice Moore, Norma Gabler, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Moms for Liberty, they're able to say schools...

have to tell America that America is the greatest. That's the job of schools. Under the guidance of groups like Moms for Liberty, they have taken on the mantle of determining what our identity is. They have. They feel they deserve the right to do so. The rest of us, however, just don't agree.

Thank you very much, Adam. Yeah, it's been a pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for calling. Adam Lotz, professor of education and history at Binghamton University. Coming up, it's not really about books. It's not really about school boards. It's about something a whole lot bigger. This is On The Media. On The Media.

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Hello again, WNYC. It's Andrea Bernstein, a co-host of the podcast Trump, Inc. This August, I'm guest hosting The Law According to Trump, a special series on amicus from Slate.

Long before this year's historic Supreme Court term, Donald Trump created a blueprint for shielding himself from legal accountability on everything from taxes to fraud to discrimination. Listen now on Amicus as we explore Trump's history of bending the law to his will. Search Amicus wherever you're listening.

This is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Moms for Liberty is currently on a downswing. For one thing, the losses in school board elections are piling up. For another, one of the founders is embroiled in a sex scandal involving her husband, a local politician.

But last winter, when I spoke to Jennifer Berkshire, a lecturer at Yale's Education Studies Department, she said she's wary of writing the group off because these moms have a purpose far bigger than the banner issue they've run on, which...

Let's face it, it's kind of a dud. We know from polls that there is almost no single issue that unites people across party lines in opposition, like book banning.

But you still see all kinds of efforts at the state and local level to limit access to particular books. And right now, the kind of organized efforts is to have parents show up at school board meetings and read passages from books and then demand that the books be pulled off of shelves right away. Yeah.

Even though Moms for Liberty's preferred candidates lost in November and the press sees a dim future for the group, you think the obits are premature. Why? Because we are judging the success or failure of Moms for Liberty by the wrong metric.

We're looking at how they fared in school board elections and saying, hey, look, their candidates keep losing. That means they're a dud. But what my co-author and I argue is that Moms for Liberty is really part of a broader ecosystem that's aimed at sowing distrust.

in our public schools. And that effort has had enormous success. And I would point you to something like recent Gallup polling. We know it's no secret that American trust in institutions has plummeted across the board, but something like only 26% of Americans say that they have faith in public schools. And among Republicans, it's even lower. It's 14%. Groups like Moms for Liberty have played a huge part

part in exacerbating the erosion of that trust. And in fact, you've observed that even their electoral losses have an upside because every time there's a headline like progressives sweep to power in school board elections, it suggests that public schools are partisan institutions. And

And that's really the goal in these campaigns is to send a message that we cannot agree on anything anymore and that that's reflected at every level of what our schools teach. And so let's go with school privatization, with school vouchers, with what are called education savings account. I'll go to my red school, you go to your blue school, and we'll just live our separate lives. And so the

The more we see the headlines and the constant fighting over what gets taught and who gets to decide, the more it plays into this larger narrative that schools have become partisan and that the goal is actually to take them back and make them partisan in a different direction.

Okay, here's what partly confuses me. You have these electoral losses, but you have Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, recently saying that they're just getting started, the group's ramping up for 2024. Well...

they're not losing all of their elections. They're still winning a quarter of a time. But if you are on the right, you are fed a steady diet of school-related outrage stories. I'm on mailing lists for a number of these publications. And so all day long, I get alerts. It

It could be about, you know, oppression Olympics or some teacher refusing to let parents know about pronouns. Now it's about the Middle East. You have this really, really energized base for whom these issues are a priority. Mm-hmm.

And so in many ways, the Moms for Liberty dilemma reflects the larger dilemma within the Republican Party, right? Election cycle after election cycle, the issues that animate the base are not faring well in swing states. In fact, they seem to be animating opposition to the extent that their candidates are losing. But as long as these are the issues that animate the base, the groups are responding to that, right? Right.

But in terms of the larger project then, where's the money coming from? Who's behind the wheel?

The Heritage Foundation has been an early and very loud backer of Moms for Liberty. And there, I think it's really instructive to see that they are the leader of the Project 2025 that's laying out the agenda for a next Trump administration. You can look at their education platform. It is not about taking back school boards.

It's about dismantling public education entirely. A heritage scholar penned a very influential op-ed last year in which he made the case to really lean into the culture war, that this was the greatest opportunity that proponents of things like school vouchers and education savings accounts have ever had.

And so I think it's really important to understand Moms for Liberty as part of that larger ecosystem.

In 2021, Christopher Ruffo gave a really influential speech at Hillsdale College in Michigan called Laying Siege to the Institutions. Christopher Ruffo is of the Conservative Manhattan Institute and is also credited with popularizing the notion of critical race theory as a pernicious influence in education. That's correct.

And he was arguing that basically beginning in the 60s that all of our major institutions, including higher education, corporations like Disney and K-12 education have been captured by the left and that the right has to lay siege to them.

arguing for what he calls universal school choice. And he makes the case that really the only way we're ever going to get to that policy goal is by sowing universal public school distrust. He absolutely put his finger on what we're seeing right now.

We now have 10 states and more are coming where these sweeping universal school choice policies have been enacted. And that basically means that instead of kids going to traditional public schools, the funding goes directly to parents, no matter how wealthy those parents are. And then they decide not just where kids go to school. Is it going to be a private religious school, some kind of independent school, but

it's up to them to define what school is, period, right? It can just be purchasing things on Amazon. And what we're seeing in all of these states is that the families who are taking advantage of these sweeping new programs are affluent families who

who are now getting their private school tuition paid for. Wasn't this voucher money supposed to go to low-income kids, to marginalized kids? You're saying that the money is going to the wealthiest people in the state? How do you know? What we're seeing in state after state is that in the early phases of these new programs, that the parents who are most likely to take advantage of them are not...

the parents of low-income and minority kids in the public schools, despite that being the big sales pitch, that instead they are affluent parents whose kids already attended private school. What's the incentive behind tearing down the public school system? Because it's expensive?

Well, there are some people who have never liked the idea of public education because it's sort of the most socialist thing that we do in this country. We tax ourselves to pay for it and everybody gets to access it. That's not a very American thing to do.

Then you have conservative religious activists. They see a real opening, thanks to a whole string of Supreme Court cases, to use public dollars to fund religious education. And then, you know, you have people who don't believe in public education for other reasons. Education is the single largest budget item in most states.

And if your goal is to cut taxes way back, if your goal is to give a handout to the wealthiest people in your state, spending less on education is going to be an absolute requirement. If you look at states like Iowa and Arkansas, they've ushered in huge unemployment.

tax cuts for their wealthiest residents. And that means that within the next few years, there will no longer be enough funds available to fund their public schools, even at a time when they have effectively picked up the tap for affluent residents of the state who already send their kids to private schools. So what's going to happen?

we're going to see more and more of an effort to shift the burden of paying for education onto the shoulders of the quote-unquote consumers. That's the parents. Think about the way we pay for higher ed. We treat it as a private good, and its users are expected to pay for it themselves. I think that's where we're headed with K-12 education.

You mentioned earlier how it's just like socialism to some people, that it's not very American, which suggests that the hostility to public school may have something to do with the ethos behind public education, which is to create an educated electorate and to advance the common collective good. I think that's such a key observation, and

There's a great book that came out recently. It's called The Big Myth by Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway. And I know you interviewed them on this show. And one of the arguments that they make is that the original parents' rights crusade in the U.S. was actually in opposition to the effort to ban child labor. The groups really driving that opposition, like the National Association of Manufacturers, these conservative industry groups...

what they were opposed to was an effort to sort of muck up what they saw as the natural state of affairs. That would be inequality. This is all happening at the same time that we have new laws on the state books basically requiring parents to send their kids to public schools. And these industry leaders look around and they think, you know, there are some kids who just...

are meant to work in factories or they're meant to work in mines. And if you're going to say that everybody has to get an education, you're getting in the way of that natural order. And I think what is so striking today is how much of that kind of thinking you hear coming back to the fore. How do you think journalists can more responsibly report on this story today?

of Moms for Liberty, and the larger effort to deep six public education. I think this is a tough topic for journalists for a couple of reasons. One is that education journalism tends to be a world unto itself.

The people who live there and report on it have been tasked with covering schools really over the past 20, 30 years in a very particular way. And that is to judge their success and their failure by how they do in terms of raising standardized test scores. Now, suddenly, we're seeing a fundamental shift, basically a values argument from the right.

that we're not going to care so much about standardized tests anymore. We're going to care about things like religion and what parents want. As customers, they can vote with their feet. And so you have education journalists who are suddenly in this brave new world of ideology and politics, and they're really uncomfortable with it. And then you have the reporters who are comfortable in that world, but...

of politics and understand the right, but to them, education is a mystery. And I think that in many ways, this explains why the coverage of a topic like Moms for Liberty has so often been lacking. You know, we heard over and over again stories about these candidates running, but much less about how poorly they fared and why. And I'll give you a specific example. ProPublica did an amazing piece about

A DEI director for a Georgia school district who was basically hounded out of her job before she even started by angry white parents. Well, some of those parents then ran for school board. And what we never heard about was that locals overwhelmingly rejected them.

And to me, that indicates that there is some fundamental part of this story that we have not been told. But what about the coverage of the larger goal, the larger project? I understand why it was perhaps for the National Association of Manufacturers. They were going to lose free labor and a system of inequality that made that labor forever abundantly available. But why now?

For people who have been opposed to public education, sometimes dating back decades, the fallout from the pandemic and the culture wars have really created an opening to push through policies aimed at dismantling public schools that are actually really unpopular with the public.

And, you know, as long as the coverage and the focus remains on things like book banning and trans athletes and bathrooms and pronouns, the fact that people are losing this institution, a pillar of our democracy, just remains out of view. Jennifer, thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me.

Jennifer Berkshire is a lecturer at Yale's Education Studies Department and author of the forthcoming book, The Education Wars, a Citizen's Guide and Defense Manual. We spoke in December.

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondio, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Calendar, and Candice Wong, with help from Sean Merchant. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Ellinger.

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