Anti-DEI/CRT Hits Peak Stupidity (So Far)
From Kansas Universities to Idaho Middle Schools, it's just Wolves and Sheep
Up in Idaho, since February, there’s been drama in a middle school.
Yeah, I know—that’s the most “dog bites man” lede ever written.
But I’m talking about West Ada Middle School teacher Sarah Inama’s benign classroom poster pictured above.
You can read about it at The Idaho Statesman. Please do. But I’ll excerpt chunks of it below.
Why? Because, having wasted my time trying—and failing—to build a bridge between the divine in me and the divine in Kansas Representative Steven Howe, I think it’s important to illustrate just how perfectly the Idaho predicament of a decent middle school teacher illustrates the evil stupidity of the Kansas legislature when it climbed on board the Trump train in 2024 and went anti-woke and anti-DEI on Kansas higher education: which was Steven Howe’s big win in 2024.
So here’s the sitch…
Kakistocracy: Government by the Least Suitable or Competent Citizens of a State
Inama has had the above-pictured poster on her sixth-grade classroom wall for four years. But the dumbasses in the Idaho legislature decided to follow the bad-faith advice of Christopher Rufo to manufacture a slanderous moral panic around Critical Race Theory in schools.
Per the Statesman:
The changes to West Ada’s classroom display policy were proposed after Idaho lawmakers passed a state law that barred public schools from compelling students to believe that members of a certain race “are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past” by members of that same race, the Statesman previously reported.
It added a new section to Idaho code stating that critical race theory, a study that emphasizes slavery’s impact on society today, divides people and is “contrary to the unity of the nation and the well-being of the state of Idaho.” No state funding can go toward these prohibited teachings, the law says.
Discussions around changing West Ada’s classroom display policy in 2022 were informed by this new law, with content neutrality seen as a way to prevent bias — or accusations of bias — in schools.
“This policy is about creating the best environment possible for student learning and is consistent across our school district,” a district spokesperson said at the time.
So this is what happens when your legislators are idiots and fools.
Obeying in Advance
Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
—Timothy Snyder
Nobody complained about Inama’s sign. But in theory, somebody could have, you see, so the watchful paranoids concerned with legal liability under the new regime sent out ideological apparatchiks to canvas the campus for badthink imagery:
The policy lays out a process for handling complaints, allows district administrators to implement the policy and directs questions about it to the superintendent.
“Our board of trustees wanted a policy that removes distractions, or perceived distractions, from the classroom,” West Ada spokesperson Niki Scheppers told the Statesman in a phone interview. “So they felt it necessary or deemed it appropriate to create a policy that guided staff in creating content-neutral classrooms, not only for their own protection from parent complaints … (but) from removing political discourse from the classroom so that our teachers could focus on instruction.”
Myers told The Ranch Podcast that the decision to remove the poster wasn’t in response to any complaint. He said district administrators in January instructed school principals — including Lewis and Clark Middle School’s Monty Hyde — to “go out into classrooms, go out into hallways … and just open your eyes to what’s hanging on the walls.”
This “proactive” and district-wide approach, Myers said, surfaced concerns about the poster, which were then addressed by a “team of district administrators” through discussions with Hyde, legal counsel, Inama, and a representative from West Ada’s teachers union.
Perceived distractions?
Distractions? Like anodyne signs depicting children’s hands raised—in a school setting—under text that says everyone’s welcome?
This kinda stuff is classroom wallpaper for Pete’s sake.
It might be distracting or indoctrinating if it were the only thing on the wall at all, in, like, a brutalist, gray-painted classroom made of concrete and despair, blown up four times the size like Big Brother’s countenance and centered behind the stern matronly teacher brandishing her instructional pointer like a stun-baton.
But the only things on the wall of a classroom that consistently draw the eye and the longing of a middle schooler are the too-slow-moving hands of the clock.
And perceived by whom? By the middles schoolers, those pre-pubescent news-junkies with their fingers on the pulse of each and every diktat of the Idaho legislature and savvy enough to interpret a banner as coded CRT indoctrination?
By middle schoolers’ parents? More plausible, but still, there were no complaints, over what, three years between the law’s passage and the school’s order to take down the sign. How many parent-teacher conferences had Sarah Inama hosted in that time without incident?
Ah…perceived by administrators and lawyers looking for anything that might conceivably get them in trouble!
Thank heavens for their precognitive vigilance. Now that they’ve imagined into existence a problematic interpretation for the poster and tried to ban it … now that the teacher has rightly replied, “WTF? No, dude, I’m not gonna remove the sign” … now that the matter has gone national … they have beautifully succeeded in creating a “distraction” and inserting “political discourse” into the classroom where there had been none previously.
What Exactly IS the Issue?
Short answer? White supremacy and intimidation.
Days after news broke that a Meridian teacher was told to take down a poster in her classroom, West Ada School District administrators stood firm on their statement that the sign — which displays an array of hands with different skin tones, below the words “everyone is welcome here” — violated the district’s policy on content-neutral displays.
“At the end of the day, we have to adhere to policy,” Marcus Myers, the district’s chief academic officer, told The Ranch Podcast on Friday, after not responding to multiple interview requests with local news outlets including the Idaho Statesman.
Myers told Sarah Inama, a world civilization teacher at Lewis and Clark Middle School in Meridian, to remove the sign in February because it violated district policy that requires classroom displays to be “content neutral and conducive to a positive learning environment,” according to previous Statesman reporting. The policy he referenced dates back to 2022, when the school board approved changes to West Ada’s policy on classroom displays.
…Inama said she was also asked to remove a second sign, which reads, “In this room, everyone is welcome, important, accepted, respected, encouraged, valued,” with each word highlighted in a different color. Myers said on The Ranch Podcast that Inama was approached about that sign by her principal. The district confirmed that account, but did not respond to follow-up questions about whether the second sign violated its policy.
[West Ada spokesperson] Scheppers acknowledged to the Statesman that “political climates change.” She emphasized that the district’s issue with the sign wasn’t its message but the imagery of the different colors in the word “everyone” and the hands with different skin tones.
“While the ‘everyone is welcome here’ poster conveys a message of openness, its imagery aligns with themes commonly associated with DEI initiatives,” Scheppers said in an email, in reference to diversity, equity and inclusion.
“What it means to have different color hands open might have been something different when I was younger, and now they represent different political movements,” she added by phone.
In follow-up communications, Scheppers clarified that the “presence alone” of different skin tones in an image “does not inherently define or categorize a message as DEI-related.”
“The meaning of any visual element depends on context, intent and audience interpretation,” she said.
[District chief academic officer] Myers told The Ranch Podcast that he believed the poster would have been acceptable had it included only the words “everyone is welcome here” without any imagery of hands with different skin tones. He also said the poster violated school policy on content-neutral classrooms because it did not have “curricular ties.”1
When the Statesman asked Scheppers whether the sign would be acceptable if it had included images of only white hands, or of hands of another color not associated with skin tones, Scheppers said it wasn’t “fair to speculate.”
In response to questions about the poster’s removal, Scheppers also referenced an Idaho bill that would ban displays that “present political, religious or ideological views” in public schools and an executive order by President Donald Trump that requires schools to end “racial indoctrination” relating to DEI initiatives. The Idaho bill hasn’t become law. The executive order in reference does not require action from schools on public displays.
Connecting the Dots
So let’s recap and spell things out for the clueless or the heartless, by which I mean the legislators in Red States like Idaho and Kansas.
You get elected on the strength of being regular morons who own local gentry businesses or work in good-ol’ boy professions. You have little to no background in anything outside what passes for “common sense” in the slowly up-ratcheting reactionary grievance culture of your enclaves. You spent your lives listening to demonizing messages about “the libs” and the “Demonrats” wanting to destroy everything you hold dear in America, and you bought it. You stew in information bubbles and echo chambers, be they online or in your country clubs or Chambers of Commerce.
So now you’re a state legislator, and moral panic marching orders come down from Tucker Carlson, or Hannity, or insta-frauds like Chris Rufo, maybe even more vile YouTubers, and amplified by Trump, and all the big national pols are going along, getting on board, giving you permission to say increasingly unhinged things with zero humility. There’s real glee in sticking it to your lifelong hated enemies.
Maybe you know there’s nothing behind the CRT or DEI bullshit, but it hits like gangbusters with the base, so it practically guarantees primary immunity and re-election, enabling you to cut more taxes for medium-rich guys like yourself or even richer guys like your clients and customers and donors.
Or maybe you actually buy into the conspiracy nonsense—I don’t know which is worse.
Either way, you vote for measures that criminalize and ban these shadowy, ill-defined things like CRT and DEI. You call them “ideologies.” You claim they are infiltrating public institutions and colonizing the minds of bureaucrats, like sixth grade teachers or university HR departments. You insist they constitute some new McCarthyism that must be resisted in the name of “academic freedom” or “free speech” or the first amendment. You flatly ignore what the established meanings of CRT and DEI are in the fields where they are used, how they are used, and where, and for what purpose. Instead, you insinuate that they mean something different—”reverse racism and discrimination!”—and insist that your definition carry the day over and against all objective evidence and reality.
So you ban a nightmare of your imagining. And because you’ve banned a phantasm, no one can tell whether or not what they do will run afoul of your ban. You’ve criminalized magic spells, in effect, and now everyone’s afraid that what they’re doing might be construed as having the aura of evil magic spellwork around it.
So they try to inhabit your broken mindset, your deluded crazy-brain. They don your cuckoo-glasses and look at the world that had been functioning normally, placidly, without complaint, with normal problems and issues (like, Johnny forgot his pencil today, or Mary is a week late with that assignment again), and they go searching for faeries and gremlins.
And since you have the power of law and punishment, they are motivated to do this, as stupid as the work may be. So they scour normalcy to find anything that might bring down your hammer. They find something anodyne and try to get rid of it, to cover their backsides lest your crusade against figments deals them a lawsuit, a fine, or a scandal.
And someone—in this case, a sixth-grade teacher—stands up and says, “This is completely insane.” True emperor-has-no-clothes truth telling. Because someone this low on the ladder isn’t concerned primarily with covering her butt, or her next promotion, or the re-election imperative. No, she’s primarily concerned with her students, the example she sets, and the truth and integrity of the message she sends.
Every excuse her supervisors try to give to justify their interpretation of your new rules falls apart because one cannot justify the unreal and untrue unless one is a practiced politician with the power and ability to dodge constituents and deny follow-ups from the press.
In Kansas, we saw every part of this play out at a more complex and abstract level thanks to Rep. Steven Howe and his allies in the state GOP when they passed an anti-DEI law against our Regents institutions. It was more complicated and abstract because it focused on college instead of middle school and on “DEI statements” instead of their boiled-down translation (How will you help convey that “Everyone is Welcome Here”?).
But it’s the same. exact. thing. otherwise.
Universities say, “We believe in inclusion and diversity: that’s our public mission and the kind of environment we want to foster on our campuses.”
The right-wing says, “That’s brainwashing and discriminatory.” Against whom exactly? Well, they don’t spell it out, but by definition, discriminatory against people who want public education to be exclusive and monocultural, ethnically and ideologically homogenous.
So the right-wing prohibits “DEI” at universities under penalty of fines. Now universities have to choose to hire and promote or admit folks who make their campuses hostile environments for anyone deemed less-than … or end-run the law … or fight back openly. And we know they did not fight back openly.
Since DEI is never defined, merely asserted as a nefarious “ideology” with no parameters or content, it’s anyone’s guess what might be deemed to run afoul of the law, placing everyone in hypervigilance mode about the most innocent and decent signs of human sociability.
Pair this with the war on DEI from the federal government under Trump, and we get a stronger picture of what sorts of things are now verboten in research, in scholarship, in programming: anything LGBTQIA+, anything Black, anything Indigenous, anything to do with women, and a lot of collateral damage from Ctrl-F searches for keywords that trigger anti-wokesters without a clue that words can have apolitical, field-specific meanings in academia.
It all comes down to the question the West Ada spokesperson realizes she cannot answer out loud, despite everything pointing to the natural conclusion:
When the Statesman asked Scheppers whether the sign would be acceptable if it had included images of only white hands, or of hands of another color not associated with skin tones, Scheppers said it wasn’t “fair to speculate.”
If there were a way to depict “gay hands” or “disabled hands,” “trans hands” or “girl hands”, “non-Christian Nationalist hands” or “dissenting hands,” those would be insufficiently “content neutral” as well. They, too, would be too touchy to “welcome” openly in public, taxpayer-funded schools today.
Why? Because we’ve decided to elect Wolves into power, and our institutional leaders are, at best, Sheep.
But “motivational” posters don’t have “curricular ties,” yet they are acceptable. The American flag has no “curricular ties” to, say, math, but it’s acceptable. And pretty much everything we know about effective teaching and learning and engagement and retention and motivation tells us that relationships between kids and teachers are absolutely key, so kids knowing that their teachers view them as “welcome” and valued members of the classroom community directly impacts on everything about education and achievement.
The [content-neutral, positive learning environment classroom display] policy lists signs allowed in classrooms, including the Idaho state flag, banners connected with student work and “motivational posters,” though the policy emphasized that teachers are not limited to what’s listed. It also said the district believes the American flag should be displayed in every classroom, the Statesman reported in 2022.