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Phyllis Schlafly, whose drives against abortion and female equality galvanised conservatives and helped reshape America, used to compare political campaigns to an iceberg with eight-ninths under the surface. Her army was invisible until it was required. Then it would appear out of thin air when a crucial vote was to take place, armed with horror stories about what the passage of a progressive change would entail. Ms Schlaflys rhetorical tactic was to remain reasonable-sounding, despite peddling alarming arguments, until an exasperated adversary lost their sang-froid in response. It is a playbook now, alas, being deployed against the National Trust, which looks after scores of the countrys historic houses, gardens and landscapes. After a year of weathering unfounded attacks, the charity this week broke cover to say it was facing an ideological campaign from a little-known group that it claims is trying to sow division.

Its hard to disagree. A slate of conservatives, backed by an organisation called Restore Trust (RT), is running for election for six vacant seats on the charitys 36-strong consultative council. One candidate supported by RT Stephen Green vows to take the trust back to its founding principles ... and to end its promotion of fashionable woke causes. The council is the National Trusts guardian spirit, with a say over trustee appointments. Mr Green is the leader of a Christian fundamentalist lobby group, who accuses the trusts leadership of being obsessed with LGBT issues. The vote takes place at the trusts AGM this month.

While rightwing Christianity might lend a grassroots flavour to the campaign, theres also a feel of astroturf. RTs directors include a financier who has backed a leading climate-sceptic lobby group and chairs another. It is also supported by rightwing Tory MPs. The communications strategy appears to amplify political information through confusion, and manufacture the illusion of popularity. RT claimed this year to have toppled the trusts chairman after saying that he was too woke. In fact, its motion of no confidence received just 50 signatures from the trusts 6 million members. The chair was already on his way out. The purpose appears to have been to create a bandwagon effect and the more people jump on, the harder to slow it down.

While being firm in rebutting overblown complaints, the National Trust must not lose its cool. The charity became a target after its report last year detailed the links between historic slavery and colonialism in 90 properties. The report was timely, sober and academic. It was meant to provoke discussion, but instead generated waves of often unreasonable media and political attacks. One RT-promoted council candidate complains about the trust expending energy on colonialism and the slave trade. The Conservatives have reasons to stir the pot. Voters who turned to the Tories for the first time in 2019 and more traditional Conservative voters agree on little apart from culture wars. The term culture war is too often employed when describing a campaign of racism or climate denial. But here it really does apply. The Conservatives and their allies are targeting soft-power centres to push a reactionary agenda. Its an advance that needs to be resisted.

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The Guardian view on the National Trust: battleground for a culture war - The Guardian

Review of Imperial Nostalgia: How the British Conquered Themselves by Peter Mitchell (Manchester University Press, 2021)

On June 13 this year, GB News aired for the first time on British television. The presenter of the channels first broadcast was former BBC anchor Andrew Neil. Several of Neils interviews with politicians and public figures have gone viral in the past, with liberals and conservatives alike lauding the avowed Thatcherite and former editor of the Sunday Times as a paragon of journalistic integrity. A pliant political and media class has rarely interrogated his ongoing chairmanship of the Spectator magazine, one of the most hospitable outlets for far-right ideas in the UK.

The new channels backers envisaged GB News tapping into a demographic they saw as underserved by a liberal drift on the part of publicly funded media, especially the BBC. They positioned GB News as the UKs first avowedly anti-woke television channel, a direct response to social justice movements in particular, Black Lives Matter (BLM), the struggle for trans rights, and feminism.

The launch came just over a year after there were protests throughout Britain in solidarity with the global BLM movement in the wake of George Floyds murder. After the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, a long-standing cause of resentment and disgust for many Bristolians, a series of counterprotests met BLM demonstrators in towns across the country.

Hastily formed groups of patriots and defenders mobilized with the vague remit of protecting statues from desecration or direct action, despite the scant evidence that the protesters were planning any such thing. What the counterprotesters shared with GB News and its target audience was an intense resistance to the notion of decolonization, and a sense of comfort and pride in Britains imperial past. Several of these counterprotests attracted far-right political activists and resulted in violence.

Just a few months later, Andrew Neil quit the nascent channel as its ratings hit rock bottom. It would be easy to label the whole project as a flop, but wider efforts to promote such reactionary politics in Britain, with the empire as a symbol of anti-wokeness, only seem to be intensifying.

These events appeared to confirm a reading of contemporary Britain favored by the commentariat namely, that the country has become profoundly divided in terms of social attitudes, especially since the Brexit referendum of 2016. The existence of the divide is undeniable. However, there has been a spate of academically questionable work from leading political-science academics, such as Matthew Goodwin, who claim that the only way to resolve this situation is to pander to the forces of reaction.

This builds on years of faux concern in public discourse about Britains white working class. Such commentary presents the inhabitants of left behind (nearly always Northern English) postindustrial towns and cities as a homogenous block of nationalists and social reactionaries with conservative views on immigration, gender, and sexuality. Adherents of the Right and center in British politics both agree that Labours crushing 2019 election defeat in its former heartlands was confirmation of these prejudices.

The current phase of the UKs culture wars increasingly flattens out the complexities and contradictions of social class and culture in the service of rehabilitating British imperialism and its colonial endeavors. Into this ferment arrives Peter Mitchells book Imperial Nostalgia.

Mitchell draws upon his previous participation in an academic project that analyzed the everyday activities of the British Empire as a geographical assemblage in this case a vast and intricate structure of steamships, jails, territory, grammar books, memoranda, people, ideology, laws, food, files and violence. This familiarity with the administrative and cultural output of high imperialism enables Mitchell to scrutinize a series of thematic and ideological preoccupations that define the concept of imperial nostalgia.

Mitchell belongs to a cohort of left-wing authors from the northeast of England, including figures like Joe Kennedy and Alex Niven, who have sought to challenge recent depictions of the region as being irrevocably mired in the values of old-school nationalism and intolerance. Such stereotypes jump out from the work of Guardian columnist John Harris, whose insubstantial travelogues from the postindustrial North gravitate with depressing predictability toward caricatures of Northern parochialism that comfortable liberal Southerners find most appealing.

The opening chapters of the book address and define the concepts of empire and nostalgia, setting a template for the following sections, in which Mitchell returns to the contemporary terrain of traditionalist indignation in response to calls for greater diversity and equality. He refers to Svetlana Boyms excavation of the seventeenth-century Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer, whose writings diagnosed nostalgia as a medical ailment and presented it as a form of melancholy. As Boym summarizes Hofers analysis:

Nostalgia operates by an associationist magic, by means of which all aspects of everyday life related to one single obsession. In this respect nostalgia was akin to paranoia, only instead of a persecution mania, the nostalgic was possessed by a mania of longing . . . rustic mothers soups, thick village milk and the folk melodies of Alpine valleys were particularly conducive to triggering a nostalgic reaction in Swiss soldiers. . . . Scots, particularly Highlanders, were known to succumb to incapacitating nostalgia when hearing the sound of the bagpipes.

Mitchells study of the theorists of nostalgia provides his baseline conception: the Greek term nostos can be read as both the physical location of a homeland and the process and journey of homecoming itself. The relationship to the past is a potential site of mourning and nostalgia, always multivocal and always messy. For Mitchell, this approach insists that the past is alive, not as a living and complex part of an ongoing present but as the only possible guide to it a fair and concise summary of British political discourse today.

This interweaving of mourning and nostalgia is one of the main drivers behind the opposition of a small number of academics in elite institutions to social justice movements on campus. They present universities as being rife with anti-British propaganda and censorious woke students. As the historian Evan Smith has pointed out, the so-called free speech crisis in universities has been a preoccupation of right-wingers for decades.

Mitchell takes on the mildly preposterous but influential figure of Nigel Biggar, who has made a name for himself as a virulent defender of Britains imperial past. Biggar is not a historian by academic training but rather a professor of moral and pastoral theology. His apologist position is rooted in deference toward the ruling-class academic institutions that he serves. Britains elite universities, after all, have historically acted as finishing schools for imperial adventurers and pipelines to government.

Biggar sees the call of the marginalized for greater recognition and representation as an existential threat to the institutions that have for so long provided a safe haven for historical and political orthodoxies. The implication is that movements for decolonization, in tandem with the influence of humanities departments supposedly overrun with Marxist academics, constitute foreign imports in both the geographical and ideological sense.

Biggar and his supporters present the firm but unfailingly calm responses of his colleagues challenging his unhistorical reading of empire as a form of bullying and as somehow uncivil. This allows the imperial nostalgists to cast themselves as the truly marginalized figures in modern life. As Mitchell notes, this rhetorical technique is as cowardly as it is transparent.

One illuminating chapter looks at Rory Stewart, a former Conservative MP who has sought to present himself as the new face of muscularly liberal, one-nation conservatism. Stewarts imperial archetype is that of the gentleman colonizer and the patrician Orientalist. He is the kind of Tory who considers his more populist contemporaries to be impossibly gauche and unbecoming. For Mitchell, he embodies the figure of the Imperial wonder boy.

A former MP for the Cumbrian constituency of Penrith and the Borders, Stewart, the son of an imperial officer, was born in colonial Hong Kong. After the United StatesUK invasion of Iraq in 2003, he served as a deputy governor in a southern Iraqi district, having completed a thirty-six-day walk across Afghanistan the previous year an episode that Stewart frequently recalls and which forms the basis of his public image as a somewhat quixotic adventurer.

Mitchell highlights an anecdote from Stewarts memoirs in which he claims that a worried Afghan acquaintance mistook him for an Arab and attempted to warn him of the danger of the oncoming Anglo-American occupying forces. This was the ultimate accolade for Stewart, confirming his self-perception as a modern embodiment of the patrician imperialist tradition personified by the likes of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) a vital cog in the everyday functioning of the extractive empire, yet one who deflects criticism through a patronizing fetishization of indigenous cultures and languages.

During Stewarts bid for the Conservative leadership in 2019, he engaged in a series of filmed treks to promote his candidacy, bringing his imperial-wonder-boy persona to various locations across Britain itself, and often staying overnight in peoples homes. Sold as an effort to read the political pulse of the nation, it was a shallow performance indeed. Mitchell contrasts this carefully crafted public image with a revealing moment when Stewart referred to a house that had sheltered him, located in a traditionally working-class area of the northeast, as a crack den.

Mitchell mentions Ireland, one of Britains earliest colonies, several times throughout the book, drawing out the eugenicist underpinnings of anti-Irish bigotry and the primacy of exploited Irish labor in the construction of industry, domesticity, and empire. It is somewhat surprising, then, that he makes no mention of the long-running conflict in the North of Ireland.

The aftermath of that conflict has shown us that the core repressive institutions of British imperialism remain deeply resistant to acknowledging their historical wrongdoing, especially when it comes to the actions of the British military and the record of security-force collusion with loyalist paramilitaries. In 2021 alone, we have seen another refusal to hold a public inquiry into the 1989 murder of Pat Finucane and the breakdown of trials of British soldiers charged with historic crimes, including the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1972. The role that imperial nostalgia plays in contemporary Anglo-Irish relations could have made for a fascinating case study.

The fact that the Conservative government now feels emboldened to impose a statute of limitations on atrocities committed during the Troubles is linked to the growing militarization of British public life. Military involvement in sporting ceremonies, ahistorical attempts to rebrand World War I as a noble and necessary sacrifice, and the annual public meltdown around the subject of poppy-wearing in the buildup to Remembrance Sunday all serve to reinforce a culture of regressive nationalism.

Mitchell does touch on this phenomenon in the books introduction, picking up on the increasingly breathless and bizarre treatment of Captain Tom Moore, the war-veteran pensioner who undertook laps of his back garden to raise money for the National Health Service (NHS) in the early stages of the pandemic. The health service itself became the object of a kind of recuperative imperial nostalgia, with its centenarian fundraiser used to promote all kinds of mawkish nationalist sentiment.

In the books closing chapters, Mitchell builds on the work of Joe Kennedy and his concept of authentocracy to analyze the language of class and its relation to empire. There is a fascinating overview of historical projects that sought to categorize and map the working class of Britain, generally possessing the same air of detached fascination and barely disguised repulsion as comparable surveys of British colonial outposts at the height of empire.

Mitchell includes a priceless reference to a London evangelical philanthropist, Thomas Barnardo. Barnardos efforts to warn the great unwashed of the perils of drink and idleness met with derision from a gang of youths, who pelted him with human feces the kind of fate one might wish on Barnardos latter-day equivalents.

How can we escape from the seemingly endless feedback loops fueled by strident apologists for our imperial past? While much of Imperial Nostalgia makes for bleak reading, Mitchell does allow himself a qualified crumb of optimism in the books conclusion, which sees the pandemic as a potential blow against received notions of British exceptionalism and postwar anti-collectivism. As imperial nostalgia collides with the reality of an NHS that has not yet been fully subsumed into right-wing conceptions of nationalism, and which is sustained by the labor and sacrifice of ethnic-minority and immigrant workers, one such avenue for shifting the conversation about identity may emerge.

Throughout the book, Mitchell writes with eloquence, unsparing contempt for reactionary charlatanism, and a commitment to historical rigor that the objects of his most incisive criticism could learn from (but wont). All of which make this book one of the more perceptive and vital interventions that have emerged from an otherwise reductive and inadequate discourse surrounding Britains imperial past.

Read more:
Britain's Imperial Heyday Is Nothing to Be Nostalgic For - Jacobin magazine

Image Source: RottenTomatoes

America's tedious and exhausting culture war has been fought on many fronts over the years; Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates movie and television reviews, is apparently the newest one. Right-wingers have noticed that there is a difference between reviews by professional critics and self-reported ones by audience members. This has never happened before.

Rotten Tomatoes has been a useful resource for moviegoers since 1998, when it launched. Initially it indexed reviews from professional critics at a wide variety of outlets, expressing them as a score ranging from "Fresh" to "Rotten." The site now also allows users to leave their own reviews, which are expressed on the same scale.

Over the past few years, this has attracted political actorsespecially right-wing onesto the site to review big pop culture events like Marvel movies. This is a part of a broader cottage industry. Weirdos on YouTube, for example, make dozens of videos about the box office numbers of Marvel movies with non-white, non-male leads in order to make a central point about how being "woke"i.e. making movies starring people who aren't white menleads to poor box office numbers. (This is not consistently true.)

This week, that cultural miasma has spilled out beyond just the nerd sphere, as Fox News and The Federalist have both noted that there are big differences between the professional and amateur reviews of two recent productions. Fox notes that although the critics aggregated on Rotten Tomatoes do not like Dave Chapelle's new special The Closer, "more than 1,000 ratings collected by the site have given it a 96% audience score." The Federalist's target is a National Geographic documentary about Dr. Anthony Fauci. The publication, previously noted for allowing an unlicensed dermatologist to suggest people throw coronavirus parties, says that "the Tomatometer, expressing the views of ordained critics, offers a 94 percent positive rating compared to just 2 percent of the general audience who gave similar praise."

Something being popular with critics and not popular with audiences is not news. Critics love the nearly three-hour long Soviet film Stalker, while most other people in the world haven't heard of it. The idea that critics live in a bubble that puts them out of touch with real, salt of the earth folk is not only an obvious and not very interesting truismmost people don't watch movies for a livingbut has also been brought up over and over and over again, often by critics themselves. Just like your stance on The Last Jedi, making a big thing of this mostly signals your political allegiance rather than your taste.

What Fox and the Federalistand others, like the Spectatorneglect to note is that the audience scores are in part artifacts of campaigns aimed at producing exactly the kind of coverage Fox and the Federalist are providing. Right-wing users are boosting Chappelle's special precisely because the aged comedian's tasteless jokes about trans people play into a broader grievance campaign about "cancel culture." Fauciwhich, to be fair, looks lousyalso appears to be getting a slew of negative reviews from people who think the public-health official loosed COVID-19 on an unsuspecting world and/or is microchipping the world's citizens. This is called "review bombing"a practice where large numbers of people leave negative or positive reviews en masse in order to change the average scoreand has been around since the first fish crawled out of the sea.

In 2019, Rotten Tomatoes said that it would be working on making changes to how audience scores are aggregated because it knows that the platform is vulnerable to review bombing. It specifically cited issues with negative review bombs for movies like Captain Marvel, Black Panther, and the all-female reboot of Ghostbusters.

What's missing from the Fox News and Federalist analyses is the most basic thing anyone needs to know about this: The numbers. On the Rotten Tomatoes page for The Closer, there are seven reviews from professional critics and over 2,500 reviews from audience members. Netflix shows, first, don't usually draw this kind of reaction from the publicSquid Game, the most popular show in the service's history, has just over 1,500 reviewswhich shows that this is not simply about the masses loving Chappelle's show. Past that is a much simpler question: Why does the average differ between those two numbers? It's basic math. If you look at the actual reviews from critics, you can see that three of the seven reviewers liked the speciala little under half. When put that way, it doesn't seem like critics are so out of touch with even an army of partisans after all.

Read the rest here:
Rotten Tomatoes Reviews Are the Culture Wars New Battlefield - VICE

Im sympathetic to Oliver Dowdens formula for defusing culture-war disputes about statues of controversial historic figures: retain and explain. That is, dont pull statues down, but make it clear that their remaining in place doesnt signify approval of everything the people they represent did. Provide the public with a helpful summary of their lives and works, the good as well as the bad, so we can make a rounded assessment and, hopefully, judge them by the standards of their times as well as of our own.

Unfortunately, the explanatory panel that has just appeared beneath the statue of Cecil Rhodes on the facade of Oriel college falls somewhat short of this ideal. It describes him as a committed British colonialist who obtained his fortune through exploitation of minerals, land, and peoples of southern Africa. In case youre in any doubt about how terrible he was, it adds: Some of his activities led to great loss of life and attracted criticism in his day and ever since.

The problem with this summary isnt that its historically inaccurate, but that its too one-sided. Yes, Rhodes was a committed colonialist, but he also campaigned against withholding voting rights from the indigenous peoples of the Cape Colony provided they met the same eligibility criteria as whites. He funded a newspaper, Izwi labantu, aimed at an African readership and which, after his death, played a pivotal role in the formation of the African National Congress. Most significantly, he inserted a clause in his will making it clear that the scholarships bearing his name should be awarded without regard to race. For staunch defenders of imperialism, that was tantamount to heresy.

No doubt there wasnt room on the panel to include the case for the defence as well as the prosecution and, to be fair, it includes a QR code directing you to a page on Oriels website that offers a slightly more nuanced discussion of Rhodess shortcomings and includes a dissenting opinion by Professor Nigel Biggar. But whats lacking is any sense that the college subscribes to the retain and explain principle. On the contrary, reading the plaques damning summary would leave any casual passer-by puzzled as to why the statue hasnt been pulled down. (According to the Cambridge historian David Abulafia, the summary of the message is: This is a statue of the devil incarnate.) Indeed, the college makes it clear that this is what it wanted, but that it has been frustrated in its desire to erase Rhodes from history. The final sentence reads: In June 2020, Oriel college declared its wish to remove the statue but is not doing so following legal and regulatory advice.

Isnt that a tad irresponsible in light of what happened to the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol last year? The plaque reads like a gold-embossed invitation to Rhodes Must Fall protestors to take matters into their own hands. Wed like nothing more than to tear the statue down, it seems to say. But we cant because the pesky authorities wont let us. Student activists, over to you.

Maybe Im being too harsh. I daresay the colleges governing body doesnt actually want protestors to vandalise their building, and the reason they havent a word to say in favour of Rhodes is that they dont want to be accused of making excuses for colonialism. To suggest that the British empire did some good in the world as well as bad, or that some imperialists were well-intentioned Christians rather than rapacious capitalists, is verboten in contemporary academia. When Nigel Biggar said those things four years ago he was immediately denounced in open letters by his colleagues. The words on the Rhodes plaque merely reflect the fact that what was once a safe haven for maverick historians is now an ideological minefield in which anyone who challenges the orthodoxy risks blowing up their career.

This points to a wider difficulty with the retain and explain approach: its a compromise that hasnt been accepted by the would-be -cleansers of Britains colonial past. If the government forces the custodians of statues and monuments to keep them against their will, whether by threatening to withdraw funding or pointing out the legal and regulatory complexities of removing them, those custodians will retain and denounce rather than make a good-faith effort to contextualise the historical figure in question. Its preferable to throwing the statue of Rhodes into the river Cherwell, I suppose, but it does little to reduce hostilities in the culture war.

Originally posted here:
'Retain and Explain' won't end the culture wars - Spectator.co.uk

In a world where politics have infiltrated seemingly every aspect of daily life, what would be another dull School Board election in Durango this fall has instead entered the fray of culture wars plaguing the nation.

Across the country, local schools have become ground zero for battles over how children should be taught sensitive issues such as race and gender, and whether districts should mandate COVID protocols like masks or vaccines.

In many communities, these tensions have erupted into shouting matches at school board meetings, harassment of board members and staff, and in extreme cases, violent clashes that lead to arrests. Just this past month, the National School Board Association asked for the FBIs and DOJs help to address the increase in incidents of violence and intimidation against its members.

In a number of these incidents, the disrupters are part of a nationwide movement, mostly led by conservative groups, who view school boards as the new frontline in the culture war over social issues regarded by some as the Tea Party 2.0 movement. In recent weeks, conservative think-tanks have even released blueprints for ousting school board members they see as too progressive.

In Durango, tensions within the school district have not reached heights seen elsewhere, but thats not to say the friction isnt there. In August, for instance, a Durango School District 9-R meeting had to be shut down and police were called after an unruly crowd showed up and refused to wear masks and follow capacity restrictions. As a result, the meetings are now held online, yet angry people have called in to accuse the district of silencing free speech and threatened legal action.

Now, the upcoming Nov. 2 School Board election, which has seven candidates vying for three open seats, has put the spotlight on a slate of candidates accused of pushing this ultra conservative agenda.

Three newcomer candidates Donna Gulec, Richard Dean Hill and Kristine Paslay who have seemingly banded together to run as a three-piece ticket under the group name, Building Durangos Future, acknowledge they have conservative leanings. But, they are adamantly against the idea they are part of a larger national effort to take over school boards.

Being portrayed as extremists is absolutely unfair, Gulec said. Im just a normal person. I dont go around screaming and yelling my ideas, which are not extreme in any way. I dont know where they get that from.

Swirling hot mess

So how did school boards, previously a place for mundane budget talks and staffing issues, become the epicenter for political fervor and ideologies?

Generally speaking, tensions started flaring this spring and summer as schools started to plan reopening to in-person learning, sparking debates between those for and against COVID-19 protocols such as mask and vaccine mandates. Tensions further escalated once the concept of Critical Race Theory (CRT) splashed onto the scene, intensifying talks on how schools should teach race.

CRT is a concept from the 1970/80s, mostly taught in universities, examining the impacts of systemic racism on American institutions and laws. Opponents, however, see CRT as a way to negatively impress upon students that America is racist at its core, and to view the world as oppressors vs. the oppressed. 9-R, it should be noted, does not teach CRT.

As the 2021-22 school year approached, things got nasty as citizens would disrupt school board meetings across the country with protests and threats against district officials. As tensions heightened, people were arrested. In some instances, school board members (and sometimes entire boards) were recalled, which historically never happened. And these incidents werent limited to red or blue districts; it was happening across the country, with many efforts funded by national conservative organizations such as No Left Turn in Education.

In trying to understand why school boards were the new cultural war zones, Adam Laats, professor of education at Binghamton University, N.Y., wrote in a September column for The Washington Post that whenever America has taken a progressive turn (such as electing President Joe Biden), conservatives have consistently blamed public schools for indoctrinating youth with radical ideas. School boards, quite simply, are easy scapegoats.

Most meetings are open to the public, in local town halls or school-district offices; their members are local volunteers, who usually have no campaign war chests or partisan election support, Laats wrote. School boards are viewed as winnable battlegrounds that activists can turn into islands of the real America, in a rising sea of cultural change.

Though discord within 9-R hasnt reached the toxic levels of other American school districts, incidents such as the aforementioned August meeting have sown seeds of concern. Its very reflective of whats going on around the country, and its not just conservative groups, its progressive groups too, Stephanie Moran, who served on the 9-R school board from 2012-18, said. Thats why its so heated, these conflicting points of view. Its a swirling hot mess right now.

Candidates under fire

All three candidates with Building Durangos Future have children or grandchildren who are attending or have graduated 9-R schools. But Hill, who is now a pastor at Pine Valley Church, is the only one with previous experience in education, having worked as a teacher, dean of students and superintendent. Gulec is the vice president of Destinations Coupons, and Paslay has been a hair dresser for nearly four decades. For most of the election, they have called 9-R out for lack of transparency and said addressing poor student performance is atop their priorities if elected.

All three denied being part of any organized, nationwide movement to take over the 9-R School Board. But they did say they fall on the conservative side of certain topics and believe schools are not the place to teach children about race, sexuality and gender, or religion.

Its the parents right to teach their children (those issues), Gulec said. Its not the schools ability to do that.

The three candidates have also made public comments opposing any mask or vaccine mandates. (The current board voted unanimously in August to require masks indoors). People want to say, Its my body, my choice, with abortion, Hill said. Well its my body, my choice on whether to have a vaccination or wear a mask.

Hill in recent days has also received flak for a video posted in which hes seen giving a sermon where he says the Bible is the best guide to raise children and calls the idea of a separation of church and state a lie. Hill said in an interview with The Durango Telegraph this week the comments were taken out of context. Regardless, Hill said the criticism is hypocritical.

They dont want my worldview to come into my decision-making process, yet they feel comfortable for their worldview to be the filter for their decision-making process, Hill said.

Hills time as Bayfield School District superintendent has also come under scrutiny. Hill started the job in July 2009, but left abruptly in February 2011, in the middle of the school year. While he didnt want to go into the details, Hill did say his departure was the result of differences with the school board. It was my errors, and I take responsibility for those, he said.

On top of ideological differences, there have also been questions over the three candidates campaign finances. In financial reports to the state on Oct. 5, Gulec, Hill and Paslay reported they raised about $2,000 each from individual, private donors. Yet, the candidates did not disclose virtually any spending, despite the fact they have yard signs, flyers and a campaign website.

Gulec, for her part, said it was a clerical error. Paslay said it was her understanding the filing reports were in compliance. The three candidates have hired Marge Klein, Rep. Lauren Boeberts treasurer, as their filing agent. Klein on Monday said she was unaware of the problem.

9-R, we have a problem

During this campaign cycle, Gulec, Hill and Paslay have cited 9-Rs supposed falling test scores and student performance as one of the main reasons why they wanted to run for the School Board.

Breaking down some of the numbers the candidates point to, however, reveals some inaccuracies. The candidates say 9-R has a one in four dropout rate. But Julie Popp, 9-R spokeswoman, said Durango High Schools graduation rate is 92%. But the districts overall numbers are influenced by Big Picture High School, which serves students who have challenges with traditional education models and has a graduate rate of 50%, as well as Colorado Connections Academy statewide online schools 55% graduation rate.

But struggles do exist: an estimated 60% of K-8 students were below grade level for reading, and 55% of students in grades 9-12. On math, 67% of K-8 students were below grade level and 39% of 9-12 students. Though 9-R is working to improve student achievement, Popp said the scores are similar to state and national averages. Numbers were based on CMAS test scores from the end of the 2020-21 school year.

While having to hold classes online likely affected performance, Gulec and Hill said another reason the districts numbers are low is because the school focuses on talking to kids about gender and race, subjects better suited for conversations with parents at home, and as a result, instruction time is diverted from the core educational staples like reading and math.

How much time is being spent on fringe curriculum may be interfering with time that could be spent on true academic achievements in core areas, Hill said. We only have a small amount of time to be able to provide competency for those kids to move forward and be successful.

Paslay said because of COVID-19 protocols, parents arent allowed in the classroom, and its harder for them to know what their children are being taught. (Parents could previously sign up to be volunteers to support activities in the classroom). They need basic education, she said. But theyre not teaching math, reading and English.

Not being allowed or limited on school campuses are just other ways parents feel like 9-R is not being transparent, Paslay said. With board meetings online only, many parents feel like they are not being heard. And in some cases, the audio is so bad, they literally cant be heard.

Shutting parents out isnt going to resolve it, its just going to make the divide even wider, Paslay said. The best way to deal with people when theyre upset is hear them out. Who cares if theyre yelling at you? Youre a public servant.

Maintain the peace

School boards, its worth noting, dont set curriculum. But they do have sway over who is hired and can affect policy, which can affect curriculum. 9-Rs Board consists of five members. Erika Brown and Andrea Parmenter (running against Paslay and Gulec, respectively) are both incumbents. Catherine Mewmaw, a former teacher, is also running in Brown and Paslays district.

Brown said it used to be the district would have trouble finding candidates to run. During the last School Board election in 2019, just 37% of voters turned in a ballot. But now, given the current political fracas, more people are running and the tenor has changed.

Two years ago, no one ran in one of our districts, Brown said. But now its changed with the politicization of COVID and masks. And its happening all over the place.

Rick Petersen (challenging Hill) reiterated CRT is not a component of 9-Rs curriculum, but he believes history should be taught accurately and honestly, even if some parts of Americas history is dark and uncomfortable. And he has taken issue with the conservative candidates not being forthright with their stances on issues in previous public comments and on their website, which may have an impact on the casual voter.

That group of three is not being transparent in what they believe and what they stand for, Petersen said. I want voters to have the information they need to vote, but at this point, they just dont.

Building Durangos Future candidates, of course, disagree. Other than the hot topic issues, Gulec said its important to offer vocational training for kids who dont want to go to college. She also said the district could do away with social programs to better fund teachers.

And, there is some common ground. All candidates have voiced support for new superintendent Karen Cheser, who was hired this year, and acknowledge 9-Rs student performance must be addressed, as well as larger issues like teacher salaries. How we get there, it seems, is where the ideological differences come into play. Durango, so far, has avoided the toxic fever pitch, and many hope it stays that way.

One of the great things about Durango is our schools, Erica Max, who had two kids graduate from 9-R schools and is now involved in the district, said. And the School Board function is mostly budgeting and policy governance its boring as hell, which is why no one usually wants to run. But suddenly theres this activism thats rising up. The norms no longer exist.

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The new frontlines National culture wars take center stage in 9-R election - Durango Telegraph