Tim McDonnell: Every country on earth yesterday agreed to transition away from fossil fuels by 2050.

Brooke Gladstone: It was good news from the COP 28 Climate Summit. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Those words stated at the world's largest climate conference were unprecedented, but what exactly did they mean?

Michael Mann: I liken it to, you're diagnosed with diabetes and you tell your doctor, "No worries, doctor. I will transition away from eating donuts." That's not the way it works. We have to bring carbon emissions down dramatically. 50%.

Brooke Gladstone: Also this week, after failing to gain any seats in recent midterms, the press all but sounded the death nail 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. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week the United Nations' largest annual conference on climate change called COP 28 came to a close. The gathering at times boasting nearly 70,000 attendees took place in Dubai with both location and leadership raising quite a few eyebrows.

Speaker 5: The president of COP 28 President Sultan Al Jaber is also the head of the UAE's State Oil company. Two roles some critics have said are incompatible.

Speaker 6: It was a controversial decision to appoint the CEO of a national oil company. Normally, a government official, such as a minister of environment or some minister of foreign affairs is placed in this role.

Brooke Gladstone: In itself, Sultan Al Jaber's appointment prompted plenty of concern, not to mention a BBC investigation of leaked documents suggesting that the United Arab Emirates was going to use the conference as a venue to make some oil deals. Then as the summit got underway, Al Jaber's public statements only added fuel.

Sultan Al Jaber: Show me a roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development. Unless you want to take the world back into caves. There is no science out there or no scenario out there that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what's going to achieve 1.5.

Brooke Gladstone: Al Jabar was referring to a global temperature increase of one and a half degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. The internationally agreed-upon limit that the Earth's temperature should rise. It's a rise proven to be driven by fossil fuels and a limit many climate scientists fear will blow right by in the next decade. Still, world leaders, politicians, activists, and private sector reps struggled to craft a goal every country in attendance could agree on. The first efforts flopped.

Speaker 8: The latest drop totally dropped language to phase down or phase out the use of fossil fuels. It just said countries should take action that could include reducing their production and consumption of fossil fuels. Now this is a major blow to those who expected ambitious action to slow global warming.

Brooke Gladstone: On the final day of the conference, a deal was struck.

Speaker 9: The COP 28 President Sultan Al Jaber described the deal as historic.

Sultan Al Jaber: We have confronted realities and we have set the world in the right direction.

Tim McDonnell: I think it's worth giving credit in this COP to some of the elements that really were historic and unprecedented.

Brooke Gladstone: Tim McDonnell covers energy and climate for Semafor. He attended COP 28.

Tim McDonnell: Every country on Earth agreed to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly, and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade so as to achieve net zero by 2050. We've been having these climate negotiations for almost 30 years. This is the first time that every country has actually specifically called out the main cause of climate change, which is burning fossil fuels, and made a commitment to stop doing that at some point in the future.

Brooke Gladstone: While it may be unprecedented, many are underwhelmed. Some media outlets dubbed it landmark and historic, but some prominent climate scientists, reports the Guardian, called it devastating and dangerous in its ambiguity.

Tim McDonnell: There's a few clauses that give some escape hatches for the fossil fuel industry using natural gas to replace coal in the power sector or allowing room for this carbon capture technology that's controversial.

Brooke Gladstone: One of the major escape hatches was buried within the language of the agreement itself. The phrases phase down and transition away from instead of phase out.

Michael Mann: There was no language committing to phase out fossil fuels.

Brooke Gladstone: They did have transition away.

Michael Mann: Yes, transition away.

Brooke Gladstone: Michael Mann is a climate scientist and geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Michael Mann: I likened it to you're diagnosed with diabetes, you tell your doctor, "No worries, doctor. I will transition away from eating donuts." That's not the way it works. We have to bring carbon emissions down dramatically. We need to decrease them 50% this decade and down to zero by mid-century if there's going to be any hope of keeping warming below a catastrophic three degrees Fahrenheit.

Brooke Gladstone: Mann says the window of opportunity to avert catastrophe is closing fast.

Tim McDonnell: I don't despair.

Brooke Gladstone: Semafor's Tim McDonnell.

Tim McDonnell: I do think that the actions we're seeing are genuinely meaningful and will make a difference in the long term and every little bit really makes a huge difference in the way that this affects people's lives. It's not moving fast enough, it's not enough but these baby steps do add up actually.

Michael Mann: There were some baby steps, but what we need right now are herculean leaps.

Brooke Gladstone: Outside the fierce debates world leaders conduct each year at COP, climate scientist Michael Mann has been waging his own battle against the disinformation campaigns that have plagued him and his research for decades. For years, outright climate denial was the name of the game. He's noticed more and more that straightforward climate denial has been morphing into something called delayism.

Michael Mann: We've seen this transition away from outright denial by polluters because it's just impossible to deny something that people can see with their own two eyes. That doesn't mean polluters have given in, instead, they've turned to these other tactics.

Brooke Gladstone: What is delayism in this context? People simply saying, "We don't have an urgent need to act precipitously?"

Michael Mann: Delay in this context was the promise of future technology that cannot be deployed at scale today, but it's promised as something that will be delivered in the future. That's the delayism. "Oh, don't worry, we'll solve this problem down the road with carbon capture or geo-engineering as a way of justifying business as usual today."

Brooke Gladstone: Geoengineering like shooting chemicals into clouds or things like that.

Michael Mann: Yes. Shooting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to form a blanket to reflect sunlight. These fanciful schemes, they're almost the stuff of science fiction or they sound that way and they are rife with the principle of unintended consequences. Many of these interventions could leave us even worse off if we implemented them. It's a dangerous gambit in my view and it has been used along with carbon capture as a crutch. Carbon capture, the idea that we could capture massive amounts of carbon pollution and bury it beneath the surface of the ground. We'll continue to burn coal, but we'll capture the carbon or we'll try to capture the carbon.

Brooke Gladstone: It serves the forces of inaction or as you say, the inactivists.

Michael Mann: Absolutely, yes it does.

Brooke Gladstone: You've outlined a variety of D words. Let's go to the two terms that go hand in hand. Deflection and division.

Michael Mann: Deflection is deflecting our attention away from the needed policies, carbon pricing, clean energy portfolio standard, policies that the fossil fuel industry doesn't want because it'll hurt their bottom line. They would rather steer our attention towards--

Brooke Gladstone: Personal behavior.

Michael Mann: Exactly. It's not a coincidence that British Petroleum, BP, gave us the first widely used individual carbon footprint calculator because they wanted us so preoccupied with our own individual carbon footprints that we were not looking at their much larger carbon footprint. The carbon footprint of the fossil fuel industry. That's deflection.

Brooke Gladstone: Now division, which is about getting people engaged in climate activism to fight each other so they don't take the fight to the enemy.

Michael Mann: That's exactly right. We know that petro states like Saudi Arabia and Russia use troll armies on social media as a propaganda tool. They try to generate conflict among climate advocates, getting them fighting with each other. One of the ways to do that, ironically, is to get them to argue about their individual behavior. Do you eat meat? Do you fly? We were just talking about that in the context of deflection, but it also comes into the issue of division. What could be more divisive than being criticized for your lifestyle?

Brooke Gladstone: What about the last one? The idea that you should just give up because there's not much you can do anyway. Doomism. I see it all the time. I see it, especially among young people who are wondering whether or not they should have kids.

Michael Mann: They've bought into some of the most extreme and misleading rhetoric that's out there, that's there to convince them it's too late because if you believe it's too late to do anything, it potentially leads you down that same path of disengagement as outright denial.

Brooke Gladstone: That's another D-word.

Michael Mann: [chuckles] Absolutely. That's all polluters care about. They don't care about the path you take, they just care about the destination. They want you disengaged and convincing climate advocates that it's too late is one way of doing that. A lot of good people, especially young folks, as you say Gen Zers, there is this sense of doom and dread. We call it climate anxiety. Some of it is justified, but the extreme view of it where you come to believe there's nothing you can do, that's not justified by the science. That's actually the main message of my latest book, Our Fragile Moment. If you look at past earth history, that tells us it's not too late to prevent the worst consequences of climate change, but it could become too late if we buy into the defeatist rhetoric.

Brooke Gladstone: What are the stories, the narratives we are told that it's too late to do anything?

Michael Mann: One of the things that climate doomers, those who are convinced it's too late will point to are some of the past geological extinction events. They'll say, "Those were examples of runaway warming driven by the release of methane and it's unstoppable and it's happening now."

Brooke Gladstone: It's happening now, then because of volcanic events.

Michael Mann: That's exactly right. The warming was driven by the release of carbon dioxide from intense episodes of volcanic activity, but the argument is that what really drove the extinctions was that that initial warming caused the release of methane. It was a runaway effect, unstoppable, and led to mass extinctions. The argument then goes, "And we know that that's what's happening today." Both are wrong. That's not happening today. There is an increase in the concentration of methane, mostly from natural gas extraction.

Brooke Gladstone: The great dying 250 million years ago when 90% of all species died out because of a massive release of carbon into the atmosphere because of volcanoes, they say, "That's what's happening today. There's no difference." You say there is a difference. The principle one being humans are directly causing this, not volcanoes.

Michael Mann: There are two things going on here. The first is that there wasn't a rapid release of methane. The data doesn't show that. This idea of runaway methane, it's not supported when you actually look at what happened, it's not happening today. It didn't happen back then. What did happen back then, as you say, was the massive release of carbon dioxide. In that case, it was from a period of very intense volcanic activity. There's nothing we could have done about that if we lived back then, but today it's from the burning of fossil fuels and we absolutely can do something about it.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's circle back to delayism. Last year The Intercept called it, denial's hipper, more dangerous cousin kind of, "What? Me worry? The nerds will save us."

Michael Mann: Absolutely. In fact, the bottom line is polluters want us to remain addicted to fossil fuels. They don't care about the reason for it. That's the end. Every year that they can delay the transition away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy is another year where they make record profits, and that's what it's about at this point because they know the fossil fuel age won't end for want of fossil fuels. It'll end because we know that something better has come along, renewable energy. They just want to slow down that transition. We can't afford for them to slow down that transition because we will blow through our carbon budget for keeping warming below a catastrophic three degrees Fahrenheit.

Brooke Gladstone: How do you think one can battle against tactics like delayism now creeping into international climate negotiations in comparison to say denialism, because denialism is easy to fight these days. How do you fight delayism?

Michael Mann: There's a wealth of information out there and so you can arm yourself with the facts. Skeptical Science is a great website that has all of the leading climate denier claims and the actual responses to those. You can follow actual climate scientists or climate advocates on social media. Arm yourself with facts and resources, educate those around you. Most important of all today, make sure to communicate both the urgency but the agency, the fact that it's not too late. That is so important, especially among younger folks who have fallen victim to this doom and despair, climate anxiety. We have to help them out of that dark valley and get them back out there advocating for change.

Brooke Gladstone: Michael Mann, thank you very much.

Michael Mann: Thank you. It was a pleasure talking with you.

Brooke Gladstone: Michael Mann is a climate scientist and geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania. Coming up, how does a powerful movement of conservative women suddenly go poof, or did it? This is On The Media. This is On The Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Thursday, Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts introduced a bill called The Books Save Lives Act.

Ayanna Pressley: Let me make it plain, book bans are discriminatory and harmful and Congress must unite against them. As a child who endured sexual abuse, when I read Maya Angelou's, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, it was the first time in my life I knew I was not alone and it helped me move forward. When I say the books save lives, I mean that.

Brooke Gladstone: It came on the back of a similar bill introduced to Congress last week by Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland and two Florida Democrats, Florida Congressman Maxwell Frost.

Maxwell Frost: I'm proud to introduce the Fight Book Bans Act legislation that will help our school boards and school districts overcome these relentless attacks on our civil rights and civil liberties and academic freedom.

Brooke Gladstone: His state is in the vanguard of those seeking to remove books that address American identity and inequality from school library shelves.

Speaker 5: Florida makes up 40% of book bans in the country last year according to Penn America. The recently released report shows a 33% increase in book bans this past school year compared to the year before.

Brooke Gladstone: The proposed legislation would provide funding to local school boards to help them fight the cascade of challenges to the considered choices of school Librarians. These challenges to make some books inaccessible is the predominant definition of book banning, but those advocating for the bans claim they're doing nothing of the sort.

Speaker 6: Conservative groups are on record saying that the term banned books is being tossed around too loosely saying that the number of books being taken off shelves is being exaggerated.

Tiffany Justice: No one is looking to ban books. The Moms for Liberty certainly isn't.

Brooke Gladstone: Tiffany Justice, a founder of Moms for Liberty, the most high profile of those conservative groups.

Tiffany Justice: You should write the book, you should print the book, you should publish the book, you should sell the book. The book should go to the public library in your community if taxpayers want to pay for it. We're not advocating for banning anything. Just because a book is printed doesn't mean that it belongs in a children's library.

Brooke Gladstone: Moms for Liberty has been framing their book-banning efforts as a fight for parental rights, a rallying cry that's gained traction among some conservative lawmakers and candidates.

Speaker 8: The conservative group Moms for Liberty held a summit in Philadelphia with speakers ranging from former President Donald Trump to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The parental rights group wants to flip school boards across the country and elect far-right candidates. When it launched during the Pandemic, Moms for Liberty was billed as a grassroots organization, but they've become a national player in Republican politics.

Brooke Gladstone: When put to voters at the polls about a month ago, what seemed like a winning issue for culture Warriors turned out to be not that.

Speaker 9: Moms for Liberty-backed candidates across Iowa and the country performed poorly in school board elections.

Speaker 10: All four candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty in one Minnesota district lost to Democrats. 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.

Speaker 11: Book-banning is unpopular. Who knew?

Brooke Gladstone: Well, a historian who happens to follow what happens to conservative women's groups like Moms for Liberty would've known. There's a century-long track record.

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

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

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, and 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. 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.

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, 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 schools' 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: 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 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 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.

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, and 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.

[laughter]

Yes. Brooke, 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 to fire firebomb an elementary school, I don't think it's fair for the Alice Moore's 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 McClan'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 a 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 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 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 Liberties 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. 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, who recently wrote in Slate, Moms for Liberty is riding high. It should be aware of what comes next. Coming up, it's not really about the books, it's not really about the school boards, it's about something a whole lot bigger. This is On The Media. This is On The Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. Moms for Liberty may be on the wane. Jennifer Berkshire, a lecturer at Yale's Education Studies Department is wary of writing the group off because these moms have a purpose far bigger than the banner issue it's run on, which is notably 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. That it is incredibly unpopular, and at a time when we don't really agree on anything, that's pretty remarkable. I do think that that has had an effect. I'll give you an example. When a parent's bill of rights came up in Congress earlier this summer, you saw congressional Republicans racing to get away from the idea that it was basically an embrace of 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: Because we are judging the success or failure of Moms for Liberty by the wrong metric. We're looking at how they faired in school board elections and saying, "Hey, look, their candidates keep losing. That means they're a dud." What my co-author and I argue, is that Moms for Liberty is really part of a broader ecosystem that's aimed at sewing 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 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, and that that's reflected at every level of what our schools teach. 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 group's ramping up for 2024.

Jennifer Berkshire: 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, 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 fairing 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's 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, and 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 sewing 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. 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: As unregulated as these programs are, that minimal data is something we have access to. There's been great coverage of this, including a recent story in The Wall Street Journal by an education reporter named Matt Barnum, that 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. When lawmakers are making the case for these programs, they are making the Moms for Liberty arguments.

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.

The same states that are enacting these sweeping school voucher programs, 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 tab 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 K12 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, and 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. I think what is so striking today is how much of that kind of thinking you hear coming back to the fore.

Brooke Gladstone: If you never believed in promoting equality, then you'd want to return to the original educational model which we had, where rich people paid for it themselves. In this particular case, is there inequality in the fact that both rich and poor are getting vouchers to choose their place of education?

Jennifer Berkshire: I think to answer that question, we have to predict what the future is going to look like. I was mentioning a little bit ago that these same states that have enacted these big programs have also cut taxes.

Brooke Gladstone: Right. We're talking about Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, Arizona, North Carolina.

Jennifer Berksh: The more parents are expected to shoulder the burden of paying for schools themselves, the more we're going to see inequality explode. I'll give you an example, in addition to the research that shows us that the parents who are taking advantage of these programs are affluent parents who already sent their kids to private schools, another thing we're finding out is that schools in these states are now raising tuition. They look at their customer base and think, "Well, if somebody was paying $11,000 before they got the voucher, they're not going to have any trouble paying an additional, say, $5,000." That is guaranteed to explode inequality.

Brooke Gladstone: How do you think journalists can more responsibly report on the 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 lectures at Yale's Education Studies Department, and she co-hosts the Education podcast, Have You Heard? That's the show. On the Media is produced by Micah Loewinger, Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang with help from Shaan Merchant. Our technical director, Jennifer Munson. Our engineers this week were Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

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