ABRES LOS OJOS:

A GOP Texas school board member campaigned against schools indoctrinating kids. Then she read the curriculum (JEREMY SCHWARTZ, THE TEXAS TRIBUNE AND PROPUBLICA, MAY 15, 2024, Texas Tribune)

[Courtney] Gore, the co-host of a far-right online talk show, had promised that she would be a strong Republican voice on the nonpartisan school board. Citing “small town, conservative Christian values,” she pledged to inspect educational materials for inappropriate messages about sexuality and race and remove them from every campus in the 7,700-student Granbury Independent School District, an hour southwest of Fort Worth. “Over the years our American Education System has been hijacked by Leftists looking to indoctrinate our kids into the ‘progressive’ way of thinking, and yes, they’ve tried to do this in Granbury ISD,” she wrote in a September 2021 Facebook post, two months before the election. “I cannot sit by and watch their twisted worldview infiltrate Granbury ISD.”

But after taking office and examining hundreds of pages of curriculum, Gore was shocked by what she found — and didn’t find.

The pervasive indoctrination she had railed against simply did not exist. Children were not being sexualized, and she could find no examples of critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. She’d examined curriculum related to social-emotional learning, which has come under attack by Christian conservatives who say it encourages children to question gender roles and prioritizes feelings over biblical teachings. Instead, Gore found the materials taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.”

Gore rushed to share the news with the hard-liners who had encouraged her to run for the seat. She expected them to be as relieved and excited as she had been. But she said they were indifferent, even dismissive, because “it didn’t fit the narrative that they were trying to push.”

The Culture Wars are a rout.

“FOR YOUR FREEDOM AND OURS”:

Winning for democracy: In Poland, Donald Tusk shows how to reach voters tempted by authoritarians (JOHN AUSTIN, LUCAS KREUZER AND KAMIL LUNGU 15 MAY 2024, Inside Story)

In the United States, Europe and beyond, there is a lot of unease about the future of democracy. Will Donald Trump regain the White House? Will the Republican congressional minority, enthralled by Trump, imperil democratic Europe and possibly NATO itself, despite a recent vote for Ukraine aid? Will France or Germany fall to ethnonationalists and fascists?

Against this backdrop, Poland’s parliamentary elections and the selection of Donald Tusk as prime minister last October offered a hopeful counterpoint. Voters embraced Europe and the world to rebuild democratic institutions torn apart by ten years of right-wing populist rule under Jarosław Kaczyński and his Polish Law and Justice Party.

A new analysis offers encouraging details. A larger-than-normal turnout, driven partly by a motivated cohort of younger voters, was a triumph for democracy. The analysis comes from two of the authors of this piece, Lucas Kreuzer and Kamil Lungu, graduates of Georgetown University’s BMW Center for German and European Affairs. The Polish election recommitted the country to tolerance, democracy and Europe after a decade of right-wing, populist rule that had sought to dismantle democratic institutions and stigmatise marginalised communities.