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Brooke Gladstone: The House passed a bill that could ban TikTok in the US unless it separates from its Chinese parent company.

Rep. Kat Cammack: Why in the hell would we want and allow the Chinese Communist Party to have access to our private data?

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Fears around TikTok abound, but would forcing a sale really protect our data?

Julia Angwin: 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

Brooke Gladstone: Also on the show, after failing to gain any seats in the last midterms, the press all but sounded the death nail for the book-banning group, Moms for Liberty.

Jennifer Berkshire: Moms for Liberty is really part of a broader ecosystem that's aimed at sowing distrust in our public schools.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Well, they finally did it, sort of.

News clip: The House has voted to pass a bipartisan bill that could lead to a nationwide ban of TikTok.

News clip: 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 US.

News clip: 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.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw: You wouldn't allow a radio tower owned by the Chinese to be put upright in the middle of Washington DC and then allow it to just put out Chinese propaganda. That's exactly what TikTok can be used for.

Micah Loewinger: 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.

News clip: 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.

News clip: 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.

TikTok clip: This is another Holocaust, yet no one is talking about it.

News clip: Following the posting of her three-part tutorial, the American Teen TikTok account was suspended. ByteDance, the Beijing-based owner of TikTok apologized for the suspension blaming a human moderation error.

News clip: 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.

Nancy Pelosi: This is not a ban on TikTok. I understand the entertainment value, the educational value, the communication value, the business value for some businesses--

Micah Loewinger: Nancy Pelosi, this week responding to criticism of the bill, including its apparent threat to free speech.

Nancy Pelosi: It's attempt to make TikTok better. Tic-tac-toe a winner.

Micah Loewinger: 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,

Julia Angwin: The office of the director of National Intelligence put out a threat assessment report in February and said that TikTok accounts run by a Chinese propaganda arm were targeting candidates from both political parties during the US midterm election cycle in 2022. Now, it sounds a little bit scary, but the reality is that anyone can set up account on TikTok to "target a candidate." This is exactly what the Russians did in 2016 when they set up accounts on Facebook to try to influence the US elections.

They didn't have to buy Facebook to do that. They actually paid in rubles. Facebook didn't notice. 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've stated it. 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.

Micah Loewinger: Say more about the data privacy concern. What are they collecting? How could it be misused? Has it already been misused?

Julia Angwin: 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 the looking at the privacy policies, 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.

Micah Loewinger: 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.

Julia Angwin: 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.

Micah Loewinger: What does TikTok know about you?

Julia Angwin: Well, TikTok knows, unfortunately, that I watch too many cooking videos and too many makeup tutorials.

Micah Loewinger: They're going to take you down.

Julia Angwin: [laughs] It's possible that this is one reason I'm not that worried because I'm just like, "Good luck." I don't know what you're going to do with this information about my love of cheesecakes.

Micah Loewinger: 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.

Julia Angwin: Yes, 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. We have definitely seen governments, not just China, using these data brokers to get information that they would otherwise have a hard time getting hold of.

Micah Loewinger: 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?

Julia Angwin: Yes. 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 could see all sorts of examples of misinformation and disinformation sometimes being promoted by the owner of the site. It goes on and on. [laughs] It's a cesspool is what I'm saying.

Micah Loewinger: There are real concerns with TikTok too, right?

Julia Angwin: A couple 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 is probably a little bit less transparent than most of the other social media platforms, largely because it's newer. It took a long time to force Facebook into the level of transparency that it has now, and it's still not perfect.

Micah Loewinger: 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 "digital fentanyl." We've been hearing this phrase a lot from right-wing officials over the past couple 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.

Mike Gallagher: Foreign adversary control of what is becoming the dominant news platform for Americans under 30.

Micah Loewinger: 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.

News clip: Harris says, the version that served to Chinese consumers called Douyin is very different from the one available in the West.

Tristan Harris: 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. 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've shipped the opium version to the rest of the world.

Julia Angwin: 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. That is just not how the United States views speech. We are very much in favor of free speech. The idea that we would limit kids from seeing certain things. We haven't done it on any front. It's just in general, we have had a very different approach to how we treat youth and their access to information.

Micah Loewinger: 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.

Julia Angwin: 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.

Micah Loewinger: When you say huge, you're saying in the ballpark of $84 billion.

Julia Angwin: Yes. Really, we're going to be looking at buyers like Meta, Google, maybe Microsoft, the big tech firms.

Micah Loewinger: Because they're the people who could afford it.

Julia Angwin: Also, they're the people who are interested in it. 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. Then what you're going to have is a TikTok that's owned by one of those giants, 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.

Micah Loewinger: Would that even be legal? The antitrust implications seem pretty bad.

Julia Angwin: I think there's also antitrust hurdles to any of those acquisitions, but if the US government is forcing the sale, then maybe they would also say, we'll give an exemption? [chuckles] Then also maybe they'll have some other buyers who step up. Steven Mnuchin, he announced that he wants to buy TikTok.

Micah Loewinger: Steven Mnuchin, who is the former Treasury Secretary.

Julia Angwin: Yes. I think it doesn't even prevent China from being manipulative, Associated Press found. China is setting up influencers on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram to promote the Chinese agenda. 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.

Micah Loewinger: What do meaningful regulations for TikTok and Meta and X and the like look like?

Julia Angwin: Luckily, since the US is so late to the game on privacy regulations, we have a lot of models to choose from. [chuckles] 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. 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? Then they have to publish these reports and the EU government will actually audit them and see if their risk is being assessed correctly. 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.

Micah Loewinger: How has the EU been enforcing these regulations and have we seen tangible results?

Julia Angwin: We've already seen, for instance, like the TikTok 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 X, formerly Twitter, for not meeting its requirements of transparency and responsiveness to content moderation requests.

Micah Loewinger: This all sounds pretty good, pretty common sense. Why have we not done something similar in the US?

Julia Angwin: 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 get all these state-level laws passed, basically that they've written themselves. Then those states are actually opposed to the federal law because it would gut their law.

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

Julia Angwin: 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, et cetera, that remain unaddressed. At the federal level, government policies in the US are increasingly not reflective of public opinion, unfortunately.

I think one thing that's happening right now is that people were not 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 small businesses. 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.

Micah Loewinger: Julia, thank you very much.

Julia Angwin: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Julia Angwin is the founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief of Proof News, a non-profit news organization, which you can find at proofnews.org.

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Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, the conservative movement gets a lot of mileage out of motherhood.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Katie Britt: 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 2:00 AM wondering how you're going to be in three places at once and then somehow still get dinner on the table.

Brooke Gladstone: As we know, Britt was excoriated both for her overwrought performance and her misleading content, but it was the constant reference to her momitude that stuck in the craw of many a mom as Scarlett Johansson spoofed on Saturday Night Live.

Scarlett Johansson: Good evening America, my name is Katie Britt and I have the honor of [chuckles] 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 bitch in the Target parking lot.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

News clip: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Argued over trans students' use of bathrooms.

News clip: Ask yourself 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 sop on the graves of our founding fathers.

Brooke Gladstone: Pushed to take books out of schools.

News clip: What ideology are the children being indoctrinated into? What is your fear?

Tiffany Justice: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: That's Scott Pelley speaking with Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich in a fiery 60 Minute segment earlier this month.

Scott Pelley: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

News clip: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

News clip: 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 "socialism centers and indoctrination centers."

Brooke Gladstone: The movement has also seen big losses at the ballot box, as in the 2023 midterms.

News clip: 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. In Virginia, three Moms for Liberty candidates lost by a lot.

News clip: Book banning is unpopular. Who knew?

Brooke Gladstone: Well, historians who follow what happens to conservative women's groups like Moms for Liberty would know there's a century-long track record.

Adam Laats: It's almost eerie how similar the claims are.

Brooke Gladstone: Adam Laats, a professor of education and history at Binghamton University from a conversation we had in December.

Adam Laats: 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. That's been Moms for Liberty, repeating this long pattern.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Adam Laats: 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 two-progressive school board in Charleston West Virginia, she had been an engaged conservative activist for years.

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

Adam Laats: Well, Alice Moore was in a minority. She got outvoted to block the books. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Moore warned that she was fighting books that would force white kids into feeling guilt and anguish about America's racism. This was back in '74. She railed against public school's alleged progressive agenda, destroying our children's patriotism, trust in God, respect for authority, confidence in their parents, déjà vu all over again. She was inspired by another activist 10 years prior, someone named Norma Gabler.

Adam Laats: 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 and without limit of time. 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?"

Brooke Gladstone: What was she objecting to?

Adam Laats: She thought the textbooks had an anti-American slant.

Brooke Gladstone: Why?

Adam Laats: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: I know from my own past reporting that textbooks that are influenced by activists in Texas can change the books for the entire rest of the country because it's such a big market.

Adam Laats: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Okay. 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. Didn't they claim back then almost 200,000 members?

Adam Laats: Yes. In the '20s, the national leadership were fervent anti-communist activists, and they took their primary role as education.

Brooke Gladstone: I was struck by a leader of the group in the '20s, Anne Rogers Minor. She said that we want no teachers who say there are two sides to every question.

Adam Laats: Right. The Daughter 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 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 of capitalism was the best on earth.

Brooke Gladstone: 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. It had something to do with a baby squirrel.

Adam Laats: [laughs]It did. The Daughters for American Revolution didn't have a ton of control over local members, and 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. 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 laughing stock. Brooke, so for example, I don't know if you've ever read And Tango Makes Three.

Brooke Gladstone: No.

Adam Laats: 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: I just wonder how these groups initially so successful lose control.

Adam Laats: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: It didn't end with signs though, did it?

Adam Laats: 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 firebombed an elementary school. I don't think it's fair for the Alice Moore or the Moms for Liberty to say, "Hey, we told people not to be violent." If you are calling teachers groomers, telling people that these textbooks are going to hurt children, it's predictable that people are going to react with violence.

Brooke Gladstone: You noted that 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?

Adam Laats: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Then what happens?

Adam Laats: You 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. Then what happens is you've discredited your organization.

Brooke Gladstone: Also, it's hard to control the message and it's hard to duck embarrassment.

Adam Laats: The rapid growth you have in Moms for Liberty in different chapters doing things that humiliate the rest of the organization like famously quoting Hitler on their newsletter.

Brooke Gladstone: What was Hitler saying that they felt the need to share with the rest of us?

Adam Laats: 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."

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Adam Laats: 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."

Brooke Gladstone: Are you saying that the steam has gotten out of the public school poses a danger to your child movement?

Adam Laats: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: You say this is a chronic condition in the US. Why?

Adam Laats: It comes down, for school politics, to a question of pronouns. Not he and her, 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.

Brooke Gladstone: You mean we don't have a defined sense of our collective identity?

Adam Laats: We don't. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Under the guidance of groups like Moms for Liberty, they have taken on the mantle of determining what our identity is.

Adam Laats: They have. They feel they deserve the right to do so. The rest of us, however, just don't agree.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you very much, Adam.

Adam Laats: It's been a pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for calling.

Brooke Gladstone: Adam Laats, professor of education and history at Binghamton University.

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Micah Loewinger: Coming up, it's not really about books, it's not really about school boards, it's about something a whole lot bigger.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

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Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: 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. 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, is a dud.

Jennifer Berkshire: 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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?

Jennifer Berkshire: 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." What my coauthor 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. That effort has had enormous success.

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

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Jennifer Berkshire: That's really the goal in these campaigns, is to send a message that we cannot agree on anything anymore. That's reflected at every level of what our schools teach, 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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 groups are ramping up for 2024.

Jennifer Berkshire: Well, they're not losing all of their elections. They're still winning a quarter of a time. 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 could be about 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.

In many ways, the Moms for Liberty dilemma reflects the larger dilemma within the Republican party. 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. As long as these are the issues that animate the base, the groups are responding to that.

Brooke Gladstone: In terms of the larger project then, where is the money coming from? Who's behind the wheel?

Jennifer Berkshire: The Heritage Foundation has been an early and very loud backer of Moms for Liberty. 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. I think it's really important to understand Moms for Liberty as part of that larger ecosystem. In 2021, Christopher Rufo gave a really influential speech at Hillsdale College in Michigan called Laying Siege to the Institutions.

Brooke Gladstone: Christopher Rufo is of the Conservative Manhattan Institute and is also credited with popularizing the notion of critical race theory as a pernicious influence in education.

Jennifer Berkshire: That's correct. 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. That the right has to lay siege to them arguing for what he calls universal school choice. 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.

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. 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. It can just be purchasing things on Amazon. 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 are now getting their private school tuition paid for.

Brooke Gladstone: 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?

Jennifer Berkshire: What we are 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.

Brooke Gladstone: What's the incentive behind tearing down the public school system? Because it's expensive?

Jennifer Berkshire: Well, there are some people who have never liked the idea of public education because it's 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. Then you have people who don't believe in public education for other reasons. Education is the single largest budget item in most states.

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 tax cuts for their wealthiest residents. 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.

What's going to happen? We are going to see more and more of an effort to shift the burden of paying for education onto the shoulders of the "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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Jennifer Berkshire: I think that's such a key observation. There's a great book that came out recently, it's called The Big Myth, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, and I know you interviewed them on this show. One of the arguments that they make is that the original parents' rights crusade in the us 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 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. These industry leaders look around and they think there are some kids who just are meant to work in factories or they're meant to work in mines. If you're going to say that everybody has to get an education, you are 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.

Brooke Gladstone: How do you think journalists can more responsibly report on this story of Moms for Liberty and the larger effort to deep-six public education?

Jennifer Berkshire: 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. That is to judge their success and their failure by how they do in terms of raising standardized test scores.

Now suddenly we are 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. You have education journalists who are suddenly in this brave new world of ideology and politics and they're really uncomfortable with it.

Then you have the reporters who are comfortable in that world of politics and understand the right, but to them, education is a mystery. I think that in many ways this explains why the coverage of a topic like Moms for Liberty has so often been lacking. 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. What we never heard about was that locals overwhelmingly rejected them. To me, that indicates that there is some fundamental part of this story that we have not been told.

Brooke Gladstone: 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?

Jennifer Berkshire: 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Jennifer, thank you very much.

Jennifer Berkshire: Thank you so much for having me.

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

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Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang. With help from Shaan Merchant.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week are Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

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