Isaac Butler

Meeting the students where they are, helping them use the materials of their own life to connect to the stories and whatnot.

There was one member of the school board who was

an evangelical Christian, the wife of a minister, a former minister, and she had gotten elected specifically on an anti-sex ed platform.

And she led this fight against adopting the curriculum that I think even she would say rapidly spun out of control, right?

So it started with, hey, let's delay these books.

And, you know, months later,

Thousands of minors are going on wildcat strikes.

Every grocery store in the county is closed down.

People are shooting at cars.

I mean, it really, schools get bombed.

I mean, it really spirals out of control.

And it's a fascinating, fascinating story in its own right.

Why I was interested in it is it brings together a lot of the players that are going to show up later in the book.

Various evangelical leaders, the Heritage Foundation goes down there, which is a new organization at this point, to help out.

And there is this playbook that has to do with using selective and sometimes completely dishonest quotations from larger works to inflame an audience, hyping up, I would say, exaggerated sense of grievance and persecution offensively.

often from actually quite powerful people, you know, and then capturing the supposedly mostly nonpartisan expert boards that are supposed to be making these kinds of decisions in our society, capturing them so that they can then advance your ideology.

You know, it's moves like that, which really find their apotheosis in the second Trump administration.

I think that's pretty clear.

And then on the left side, you know, we often try this playbook of like,

well, let's just give them a little bit of what they want, and then they'll go away.