Paul Thomas sees the ugly implications of the Idaho flap over a teacher’s classroom poster. Reposted with permission.
It seems not just a different time, a naive time, but an entirely different world—the conservative backlash against “Black Lives Matter” spawning the “All Lives Matter” response.
Even the “Blue Lives Matter” companion backlash now feels far less sinister than at the time.
But many of us always knew these conservative slogans were insincere, masking a much more insidious intent.
Now that we have allowed Trump 2.0 and the full rise of the MAGA movement (recall when people believed that Project 2025 wasn’t part of the Trump 2.0 plan?), the veneer has been dropped.
A teacher in Idaho has been told to take down her “Everyone Is Welcome Here” signs. But the most disturbing aspect of this event is the explanation:
In emails shared by the district with the Idaho Statesman, Marcus Myers, the district’s chief academic officer, told Inama to remove the signs because they violated Idaho’s Dignity and Nondiscrimination in Public Education Act, as well as school policy, which requires signs to be “content neutral and conducive to a positive learning environment.”
The district also mentioned to the Statesman that, if it is enacted into law this legislative term, House Bill 41 will force schools to comply with a measure that bans “flags or banners that present political, religious, or ideological views, including but not limited to political parties, race, gender, sexual orientation, or political ideologies.”…
When discussing the “Everyone is welcome here” sign, the district told the Statesman that it was not the message that was at issue, but rather the hands of different skin tones on the poster.”
While ‘Everyone is welcome here’ is a general statement of being welcoming, concerns arose around the specific visual presentation of the signs in question and whether they aligned with district policies on classroom displays,” Scheppers said in an email.
A visual representation of different races now breaks the law in public schools serving the children of this country.
Public schools serving a population of students who themselves are different races.
Those of us warning about the racism and the rise of white Christian nationalism in the Republican party have been rejected, marginalized, and even attacked for decades now.
Not Reagan.
Not Bush One.
Not W. Bush.
And Trump 1.0 was just a buffoon, a clown.
The veneer mostly worked across mainstream America, and anyone seeing behind the facade was the enemy. The problem with this country.
At the end of Trump 1.0, the veil was pulled back as the attacks on CRT ramped up in his last months in office.
Regretfully, the Biden respite allowed mainstream apathy to win out. Again.
Statistically, almost no one in the US is trans, and certainly, almost no athletes are trans in high school and college sports.
But the outsized rage over a minority group tells a story that we cannot ignore. Or we can ignore, but it will be to the peril of everyone.
Because everyone is not welcome here.
MAGA is a people obsessed with other people’s lives and not their own. MAGA is driven by hate, fear, and spite for other people’s happiness because MAGA believe they are safely the “normal” people and they are simply demanding everyone else be normal too.
This is the essential problem with “normal,” since it almost always becomes “right” and then a way to weaponize political power.
History and diversity are being attacked and erased to create a white nationalist state in the US.
Anyone now seeing that claim as extreme is simply being willfully ignorant of the gears of history grinding over a nation that never achieved the freedom it espoused, but until recently seemed mostly committed to that aspiration.
Denying rights and deporting human beings are now the American values replacing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
“Black Lives Matter” was never an offensive or divisive slogan.
“Everyone Is Welcome Here” is not offensive either; in fact, it could have easily stood as the central belief of our once-free country:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
My cynical self believes this was always a lie, an aspiration for humans that was beyond our capacity as a species.
The same sort of lie by those shouting the US is a Christian nation.
My cynical self comes back to this again and again, an eerily relevant warning about our current second coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The worst are winning.
The worst may have already won.