WORLD Radio Rewind

PAUL BUTLER: This is WORLD Radio Rewind: a 10-minute review of our news coverage and features from the past week on WORLD Radio. I’m Paul Butler.

Up first, school boards are getting an earful from parents concerned over curriculum choices. Some aren’t just speaking up at open meetings, a handful are actually suing school boards and officials.

During Monday’s Legal Docket, Mary Reichard spoke with a lawyer representing some of these parents across the country...

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Stacy Deemar of Evanston, Illinois, sued her school district for violating both the equal protection clause of the Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Deemar is a drama teacher there.

Her lawyer is Braden Boucek.

BOUCEK: After an 18 month investigation, that the Office of Civil Rights found in her favor, and that the district was engaged in a pattern and practice of racial discrimination.

But then the Biden administration withdrew those findings, just three days after taking office.

That’s when Deemar and Boucek picked up the case.

I asked Boucek for specifics. He referred me to the complaint filed in the case.

BOUCEK: Right on the front of it, we have a picture of a children's book that has a literal white devil holding up a contract that binds you with whiteness. And the contract binding you with whiteness gets you stolen land, stolen goods, stolen money, all you have to do is sign over your soul. And underneath, it has got a caption that says, whiteness is a bad deal, and it always has been.

I contacted each of the schools to give them a chance to tell their side of the story. Each declined to comment for this story or ignored my request altogether.

But other news sources reported that Loudoun County’s interim superintendent Scott Ziegler denies his school is teaching CRT.

At a school board meeting, Ziegler said the school is trying to respond to reports of widespread racism. He says it's reasonable to use racial equity to address that concern.

Lawyer Boucek has qualms with that.

BOUCEK: They're radically different concepts, because equity must come at the expense of equality. Equity is a license to punish Americans for their skin color. It means you have to treat individual Americans differently to try and achieve sameness among different groups. And that's the way that when we say equity, we're actually sacrificing equality, which is a constitutional mandate.

For a broader view, I contacted Joshua Dunn, a political scientist and education policy researcher at the University of Colorado.

Dunn predicts that as parents stand up against CRT in the schools, school boards will start to retreat.

DUNN: So just again, reverse the racial categories or the identities you know, or make it a female student and say that they force them to say something, that there's something inherently negative about being female? Would that ever survive legal scrutiny under Title IX? If it doesn't, if you don't think it would, I think then you probably have a problem if you're trying to defend the schools in these other cases.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

PB: Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee released a report this week that identifies a Chinese lab leak as the probable cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. Once formerly skeptical politicians are taking notice and beginning to change their tune.

Host Mary Reichard spoke with Dean Cheng. He studies Chinese political and security affairs at The Heritage Foundation.

MARY REICHARD: Even the director-general of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus conceded that a W-H-O team that traveled to China earlier this year … was premature in trying to rule out a lab leak. That was surprising because the W-H-O has shown great deference to Beijing. What did you make of the director-general’s reversal on a possible lab leak?

CHENG: Well, I think that several factors were in play. First, the report looked more and more, like at best a fig leaf and potentially a whitewash. Second of all, is that at least some of the who members were themselves problematic in particular, Dr. Peter Dasha, who it turns out, had worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If you want an unimpeachable objective look, you probably don't want somebody who's been in business with the people, you're investigating part of your investigating team.

MR: What’s next for the W-H-O investigation? Is there any chance of getting to the truth in China?

CHENG: The longer that we get away from patient zero from where and how this started, the more obstacles that are between the analysts and the actual evidence. I think that Beijing is going to work very hard to try and make sure that whatever conclusion is reached, they, in particular the CCP, are not held responsible, that will make determining what actually happened very difficult. That being said, the Soviet Union was the same way. But at the end of the day, the anthrax outbreak in the Soviet Union, which at the time was also claimed to be purely natural, and certainly wasn't from any kind of lab, was found to be, in fact, an accident at a Soviet lab. And the truth did emerge.

MR: Dean Cheng with the Heritage Foundation has been our guest. Dean, thanks so much!

PB: Next, we return to Thursday’s program. Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives currently have a slim, six-vote majority. Pundits argue it wouldn’t take much of a shift in party loyalty to tilt the balance of power in the upcoming midterm elections. One reason is the changing landscape of Hispanic voters.

WORLD’s Bonnie Pritchett spoke to Republican party organizers in South Texas to get their perspective.

FEMALE REPORTER: In Texas there is still a Republican governor, a Republican Senate and a Republican House. The state did not flip for former vice president Joe Biden...

REPORTER, BONNIE PRITCHETT: It came as little surprise that Donald Trump won Texas in the 2020 Presidential election. He did so without the support of the consistently blue urban areas and the more sparsely populated counties lining the state’s southern border.

But what did surprise Republicans—and concern some Democrats—was the margin by which Trump lost in those border districts.

Granted, losing is losing. But conservative Hispanic voters in the region see decreasing margins of Democrat victories in some counties as a trend, not a fluke.

JENNIFER THATCHER: It's been going on for years already. That, you know, the Latin community has become disenchanted with the Democratic Party…

That’s Jennifer Thatcher. She’s among those optimistic Republicans. The 44-year-old Thatcher was born and raised in Zapata, Texas. She didn’t pay much attention to politics until she had kids. Now she chairs the newly established Zapata County Republican Party.

JENNIFER THATCHER: It's just they've taken advantage of the fact that we've been Democratic for so many years that they didn't think that people were going to have a change of heart…

Hispanics represent 84 percent of the population in South Texas. Four of the five U.S. congressional districts that span the Texas-Mexico border consistently elect Democrats—from the presidential candidate all the way down the ballot. So entrenched is the Democrat Party in South Texas that some years, elections for local or state offices don’t include a Republican on the ballot.

That may be changing.

In 2016 Trump lost Zapata County to Hillary Clinton by 33 percent. In 2020 Trump won the county by 3 points. That prompted state Republican Party officials to establish a county office and appoint Thatcher as its chairwoman.

THATCHER: Fifty-two percent of our population flipped the county. So, you know, we got it, it's there. And we keep we keep on trucking no matter what happens… We do have support. They're coming out little by little and that's what makes us happy.

PB: Finally today, a profile from Thursday’s program of Tik-Tok trick shot artist Michael Shields. Here’s WORLD Reporter Sarah Schweinsberg.

SARAH SCHWEINSBERG, REPORTER: Shields was a financial adviser by day. And became a trickshot artist by night. He began posting up to five videos a week. Throwing bread over his head into a toaster, stacking golf balls, and throwing disks into a Wii console from 24 feet away.

Sometimes his wife jumps in to participate. In one video, they try to throw magic markers into the top of a glass coke bottle. Markers cover the floor… evidence of hundreds of misses until…. Yep.

Michael Shields often shows a lot of misses in his videos before the one that works. That’s intentional. First, it builds suspense for the make. But it also shows how many failures he has before a victory.

SHIELDS: I get a ton of messages, especially from younger kids...They're saying, man, I love what you do. You really inspire me to, you know, to never give up. I love how you never give up.

Followers and views help him generate ad dollars and sponsorships. But Shield’s also wants his page to be about more than money and personal fame.

At around 50,000 followers, he decided to let his audience know what was most important to him. He put “Jesus Saves” in his bio.

SHIELDS: I realized, you know, this could turn into something bigger and, and I want it to be something bigger than me, you know, something bigger than myself…There have been a few instances where I've gotten to share Jesus with people and explain why I believe what I believe. I mean, that's, that's worth everything that I've done.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Sarah Schweinsberg.

PB: That’s it for this week’s WORLD Radio Rewind. If you’d like to hear the complete stories we featured today, we’ve included links in our transcript. You can find that on our website: wng.org.

Check in each day for the latest news, features, and commentary from WORLD Newsgroup. Again that address is wng.org. For WORLD Radio, I’m Paul Butler.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.