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🌎 Moms for Liberty is a dumb name

🌎 Moms for Liberty is a dumb name

And we're going to beat them, this is how

Willow Beck & Quinn Emmett
September 28, 2023

Captured in a metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia primary school, was this grouping of four schoolboys, who were gathered at a brown paper-covered table, studying a stylized cartoon book to be used as reference material, for a drawing they were asked to create in the classroom. Each student was supplied with a piece of white drawing paper, a pencil, and a white tray of crayons, which was set atop the table on the left. It is important to know that these objects are known as fomites, and can act as transmitters of illnesses.

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

Hi Shit Givers!

We’ve got a very special edition to share with you today and TLDR; it involves you or someone you think is really, really rad running for your local school board.

Some reasons why school boards are important right now:

📚 So kids can read books about Black history and Indigenous history and LGBTQ+ characters
🥗 So kids have food to eat at school if they don’t have it to eat at home
🍆🍑 So kids can learn sex ed and about 🔥 💦 climate change
💨 So kids (and teachers) can breathe clean air inside and outside the classroom
🚌 So kids can ride electric school buses instead of incredibly toxic diesel ones

These all may seem obvious to you, Shit Giver, but thanks to some extremely well-funded hate groups cosplaying like it’s 1954, every single one of the gazillion school board seats up for election in the next couple years matters.

Like really fucking matters.

Great news.

Last week, our BEST FRIENDS at Run For Something formally announced their 50 State School Board Strategy, a $10 million program to recruit and support school board candidates in 2024 and 2025 (which can’t be a real year, can it?)

Anyways, here’s the details:

“This initial $3 million pilot program will position RFS to scale and fully implement a 50-state strategy in 2025 that will allow us to go head-to-head with Moms for Liberty and other far-right groups attacking education. In 2025, we will scale into a $7 million annual program to run through 2028.”

That’s the what.

Here’s the why, from RFS co-founder and two-time INI pod guest Amanda Litman:

“There are a lot of organizations that do legal fights…There are some organizations that show up at school and library board meetings to protest or speak up.

There are some that train volunteers.

There is no one actually asking people to run for school board and then helping them do that.”

Here’s where you come in:

These three things are simultaneously true:

There are more than 80,000 elected school board positions across the country
Elections for approximately 20-25% of them happen each year
More than 60% of school board races go uncontested

Moms for Liberty and 1776 PAC (both of which sound like shitty titles for George Washington fan-fic, btw) have a head start on us, but this shit stops now.

My grandparents would be livid to discover Nazis are back, and especially if they were taking charge of our kids education, so let’s keep Pop and Grammie happy in their graves and get to goddamn work.

Hit the Donate button below to support school board candidates who give a shit everywhere, and/or hit the Volunteer button to campaign for candidates in your area.

As always, thanks for giving a shit.

See you tomorrow,

Quinn

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