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How Moms for Liberty and a notorious English teacher exploited a high school student Judd Legum
On October 25, as Popular Information previously reported, two members of Moms for Liberty went to the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office in Florida and accused public school librarians of felonies, alleging they were distributing pornography to minors. The basis of the complaint was the popular young adult novel Storm and Fury. Tom Gurski, one of the Moms for Liberty members, said the book was checked out of Jay High School “by a 17-year-old, which is important because she is a minor.” Gurski and the other Moms for Liberty member, school board candidate Jennifer Tapley, brought the Jay High School library’s copy of Storm and Fury to the Sheriff’s Office, with the offending passages marked with orange sticky notes.
When the deputy sheriff asked how the pair had obtained the book, Gurski and Tapley were coy. They confirmed Storm and Fury was not checked out by their own children or a student they knew personally. The real story of how Storm and Fury made its way to the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office shows the lengths that Moms for Liberty and its allies will go to persecute public school librarians.
On November 9, WEAR, Pensacola’s ABC News affiliate, ran a segment on the Storm and Fury controversy, which featured an interview with the mother of the 17-year-old student who checked out the book from Jay High School. “I’m very angry that my daughter was used to do someone else’s dirty work,” said the mother, who was not identified by name. According to the mother, neither she nor her daughter were informed that Storm and Fury would be turned over to the police, and everything was done “without…permission.” The mother said Storm and Fury “has never been read by my daughter,” and Moms for Liberty “should not use children that they are supposedly trying to protect.”
According to WEAR, Gurski told its reporter that “a teacher asked the student to check out the book [and] that teacher then gave the book to a member of Moms for Liberty, who gave it to Gurski.” A spokesperson for Santa Rosa County School District told Popular Information that “the request for the student to check the book out was from a ‘teacher’ who is neither a teacher at Jay High School nor in Santa Rosa County.”
A source familiar with the matter told Popular Information that the teacher who requested the 17-year-old student to check out Storm and Fury was Vicki Baggett, who teaches English in neighboring Escambia County. Baggett is notorious for challenging hundreds of books in Escambia and Santa Rosa Counties; many of those books discuss racial discrimination or include LGBTQ characters. Popular Information reported in January that several of Baggett’s current and former students at Northview High School allege that she “openly promoted racist and homophobic beliefs in class.”
For example, four former students — including three who spoke to Popular Information on the record — recalled an incident during class where Baggett claimed that “it is a sin for races to mix together and that whites are meant to be with whites and blacks are meant to be with blacks.”
Popular Information has obtained screenshots from the private Santa Rosa County Moms for Liberty Facebook group. In messages sent to the group at the start of the school year, Gurski and Baggett discuss filing reports with law enforcement about public library books.
Baggett has successfully convinced Escambia County School District, where she teaches, to remove most of the books she believes are “pornographic” or otherwise inappropriate. As a result, Escambia County is now facing a federal lawsuit, alleging that the school board’s actions violate the United States Constitution. The lawsuit alleges that the school board banned and restricted books “based on their disagreement with the ideas expressed in those books.” In so doing, the school board has “prescribed an orthodoxy of opinion that violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”
Public records obtained by Popular Information reveal that, for months, Baggett has engaged in an aggressive campaign to pressure Santa Rosa County schools to follow suit. Baggett did not respond to a request for comment.
Baggett’s relentless campaign for book censorship
The Florida Freedom to Read Project requested recent correspondence between Baggett and Santa Rosa County schools. In response, the organization received hundreds of pages of emails and other documents, which the group shared with Popular Information. The records reveal that Baggett engaged in a relentless and frequently hostile effort to force Santa Rosa County to remove books from school libraries. The emails also show Baggett coordinating directly with Mariya Calkins, the Chairwoman of the Santa Rosa County Chapter of Moms for Liberty.
On April 25, 2023, Baggett, using her official Escambia County School District account, emailed Ruth Witter, Santa Rosa County’s head librarian, and asked for a list of books that were currently being challenged in Santa Rosa County. Baggett also advised Witter to simply remove any book she had challenged in Escambia County to avoid “some major challenges.” A few days later, when Witter responded that no books had been challenged in Santa Rosa County, Baggett asked Witter if Santa Rosa had “closed down your libraries to clean out some of the books.”
On June 13, 2023, Baggett sent an email from her Escambia County School District account to Witter and Karen Barber, Santa Rosa County’s superintendent, copying Governor Ron DeSantis (R) and Education Commissioner Manny Diaz (R). In the email, she accused Witter of violating the state’s pornography laws because there was a Steven King novel in Santa Rosa school libraries.
Baggett soon began submitting numerous requests for books to be removed from Santa Rosa County schools, always copying DeSantis and other state officials. Baggett ran into an issue when she was informed over the summer that, since she is not a resident of Santa Rosa County, she is not permitted to challenge books in the county’s public school libraries.
Baggett did not accept the county’s rule but instead spent weeks arguing with the school board’s attorney, Terry Harmon, about how to apply school board policy. In an August 11 email to Harmon, again copying DeSantis and many others, Baggett said the Santa Rosa County School district’s “attempt to silence me… is unspeakable.” She said that she was “saddened and shocked you are more interested in making me go away than protecting the minds, hearts, and eyes of the minor children with whom you have been entrusted.” She informed Harmon that she would ignore the school board’s rules and continue to submit challenges to books in Santa Rosa County anyway, claiming she was entitled to do so under “STATE authority.” She also said that she is “certain my requests will be considered and perhaps even welcomed, since this board and its superintendent are 100% liable for anything made available to minor children, even in the library.”
In a September 22 email, Baggett warned Witter and other school officials of “potential felonies from the public regarding sexually inappropriate material in the schools.”
On October 13, Baggett obtained a power of attorney from a county parent to submit book challenges on her behalf. The document, signed by Sharon Regan, declares that Regan has “personally seen [books] listed as available in our Santa Rosa School District [that] contain, in my opinion, utter pornography.” Regan also declares that “it is clearly a CRIMINAL ACT to make these books and media available to Children or to expose Children to their heinously violent or pornographic content.”
The document grants Baggett “retroactive to June 1, 2023, and thereafter” the ability “to determine, in her absolute discretion, Inappropriate Material and to file forms of challenges on my behalf.” It also grants Baggett the ability to speak on Regan’s behalf at board meetings and “Send and Reply to any and all correspondence or communications with the school district in my name.”
Baggett sent the document to Santa Rosa County school officials, so there is no “confusion on my ability to submit porno books” for removal.
Last month, Baggett submitted a form seeking to remove The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold from a Santa Rosa school library, alleging the book was pornographic. On October 25, the librarian from Milton High School reached out to Baggett and said the first step in the challenge process was to have a meeting at the school to discuss her concerns. Baggett responded that she would not participate in a meeting and warned the librarian of “the legalities that could arise if this book remains accessible to minors.”
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Seven Objects—And What They Say About the Election The Editors
The most physically imposing picture of Donald Trump is the one he almost didn’t survive. You’ve seen it: The former president stands silhouetted against the sky, fist pumped, jaw jutted, bright red blood streaked across his face like war paint. The blood is from a bullet that missed its mark; the blood means that Trump should be dead, but isn’t. He’s still standing, all six-plus feet and 200 pounds of him, in the flesh, as corporeal as it gets.
In the wake of the assassination attempt, many commentators declared the election over. That raised fist, that frayed ear, the way Trump’s top teeth bore down on his lower lip as he shouted his defiance: It was powerful. It was undeniable. You’d never see Joe Biden standing up like that after taking a bullet in front of a crowd of thousands.
The image of Trump was symbolic, iconic, and instantly viral. Within 24 hours, it had appeared on the front page of virtually every newspaper in the world—by which time millions of people had made it their social media avatars and memed it into oblivion. It adorned miniskirts, coffee cups, and balaclavas; supporters displayed it in their homes and tattooed it onto their bodies. Most importantly, the assassination attempt caused a bump for Trump in swing states; if he wins the presidency, it will be at least in part because of that photograph.
But while that image of Trump may be the most powerful symbol of this insane race, it’s not the only one. Like the coconut emoji that became synonymous with Kamala Harris’s campaign. Or the cats beloved by liberal women (or, allegedly, eaten by immigrant hordes). These and more have been nominated by our staff as symbols of the 2024 election. Read on for the list of (mostly) inanimate objects that we’ll never see the same way again. —The Editors
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November 2, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
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November 3, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
I’m home tonight to stay for a bit, after being on the road for thirteen months and traveling through 32 states. I am beyond tired but profoundly grateful for the chance to meet so many wonderful people and for the welcome you have given me to your towns and your homes.
I know people are on edge, and there is maybe one last thing I can offer before this election. Every place I stopped, worried people asked me how I have maintained a sense of hope through the past fraught years. The answer—inevitably for me, I suppose—is in our history.
If you had been alive in 1853, you would have thought the elite enslavers had become America’s rulers. They were only a small minority of the U.S. population, but by controlling the Democratic Party, they had managed to take control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They used that power to stop the northerners who wanted the government to clear the rivers and harbors of snags, for example, or to fund public colleges for ordinary people, from getting any such legislation through Congress. But at least they could not use the government to spread their system of human enslavement across the country, because the much larger population in the North held control of the House of Representatives.
Then in 1854, with the help of Democratic president Franklin Pierce, elite enslavers pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through the House. That law overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept Black enslavement out of the American West since 1820. Because the Constitution guarantees the protection of property—and enslaved Americans were considered property—the expansion of slavery into those territories would mean the new states there would become slave states. Their representatives would work together with those of the southern slave states to outvote the northern free labor advocates in Congress. Together, they would make enslavement national.
America would become a slaveholding nation.
Enslavers were quite clear that this was their goal.
South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explicitly rejected “as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’” He explained to his Senate colleagues that the world was made up of two classes of people. The “Mudsills” were dull drudges whose work produced the food and products that made society function. On them rested the superior class of people, who took the capital the mudsills produced and used it to move the economy, and even civilization itself, forward. The world could not survive without the inferior mudsills, but the superior class had the right—and even the duty—to rule over them.
But that’s not how it played out.
As soon as it became clear that Congress would pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Representative Israel Washburn of Maine called a meeting of thirty congressmen in Washington, D.C., to figure out how they could fight back against the Slave Power that had commandeered the government to spread the South’s system of human enslavement. The men met in the rooms of Representative Edward Dickinson of Massachusetts—whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poems—and while they came to the meeting from all different political parties, often bitterly divided over specific policies, they left with one sole purpose: to stop the overthrow of American democracy.
The men scattered back to their homes across the North for the summer, sharing their conviction that a new party must rise to stand against the Slave Power. They found “anti-Nebraska” sentiment sweeping their towns; a young lawyer from Illinois later recalled how ordinary people came together: “[W]e rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.” In the next set of midterm elections, those calling themselves “anti-Nebraska” candidates swept into both national and state office across the North, and by 1856, opponents of the Slave Power had become a new political party: the Republicans.
But the game wasn’t over. In 1857, the Supreme Court tried to take away Republicans’ power to stop the spread of slavery to the West by declaring in the infamous Dred Scott decision that Congress had no power to legislate in the territories. This made the Missouri Compromise that had kept enslavement out of the land above Missouri unconstitutional. The next day, Republican editor of the New York Tribune Horace Greeley wrote that the decision was “entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.”
By 1858 the party had a new rising star, the young lawyer from Illinois who had talked about everyone reaching for tools to combat the Kansas-Nebraska Act: Abraham Lincoln. Pro-slavery Democrats called the Republicans radicals for their determination to stop the expansion of slavery, but Lincoln countered that the Republicans were the country’s true conservatives, for they were the ones standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. The enslavers rejecting the Founders’ principles were the radicals.
The next year, Lincoln articulated an ideology for the party, defining it as the party of ordinary Americans defending the democratic idea that all men are created equal against those determined to overthrow democracy with their own oligarchy.
In 1860, at a time when voting was almost entirely limited to white men, voters put Abraham Lincoln into the White House. Furious, southern leaders took their states out of the Union and launched the Civil War.
By January 1863, Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending the American system of human enslavement in lands still controlled by the Confederacy. By November 1863 he had delivered the Gettysburg Address, firmly rooting the United States of America in the Declaration of Independence.
In that speech, Lincoln charged Americans to rededicate themselves to the unfinished work for which so many had given their lives. He urged them to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
In less than ten years the country went from a government dominated by a few fabulously wealthy men who rejected the idea that human beings are created equal and who believed they had the right to rule over the masses, to a defense of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and to leaders who called for a new birth of freedom. But Lincoln did not do any of this alone: always, he depended on the votes of ordinary people determined to have a say in the government under which they lived.
In the 1860s the work of those people established freedom and democracy as the bedrock of the United States of America, but the structure itself remained unfinished. In the 1890s and then again in the 1930s, Americans had to fight to preserve democracy against those who would destroy it for their own greed and power. Each time, thanks to ordinary Americans, democracy won.
Now it is our turn.
In our era the same struggle has resurfaced. A small group of leaders has rejected the idea that all people are created equal and seeks to destroy our democracy in order to install themselves into permanent power.
And just as our forebears did, Americans have reached for whatever tools we have at hand to build new coalitions across the nation to push back. After decades in which ordinary people had come to believe they had little political power, they have mobilized to defend American democracy and—with an electorate that now includes women and Black Americans and Brown Americans—have discovered they are strong.
On November 5 we will find out just how strong we are. We will each choose on which side of the historical ledger to record our names. On the one hand, we can stand with those throughout our history who maintained that some people were better than others and had the right to rule; on the other, we can list our names on the side of those from our past who defended democracy and, by doing so, guarantee that American democracy reaches into the future.
I have had hope in these dark days because I look around at the extraordinary movement that has built in this country over the past several years, and it looks to me like the revolution of the 1850s that gave America a new birth of freedom.
As always, the outcome is in our hands.
“Fellow-citizens,” Lincoln reminded his colleagues, “we cannot escape history. We…will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”
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Notes:
James Henry Hammond, Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond, of South Carolina (New York: John F. Trow and Company, 1866), 126.
https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm
New York Tribune, March 7, 1857, p. 4.
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