In 2021 and 2022, at the height of my run for the state legislature, we were living in the pitched culture wars intensified by Covid.

Covid was all we heard. It was everywhere. Keeping spare masks and travel bottles of hand sanitizer close by. Getting familiarized with online grocery shopping and Instacart delivery.

The isolation and anxiety. The late-night tossing and turning, doom-scrolling all those YouTube videos about washing your groceries.

I remember, over one week in March, I had to figure out how to do online teaching, complete with video and audio recording, set up a Zoom classroom, and then be responsible for all the post-production editing. In fact, I was scheduled to teach another remote online class in the fall semester of 2020, and they gave us the unusual option of not teaching if we weren’t comfortable.

I declined—too much work.

So, I sympathized with those elementary and secondary school teachers who had to learn to teach all over again, if not with training wheels, then among those who’d very recently graduated from training wheels. And all this they had to do, dressed in scuba gear and sanitized with a crop-duster-load of disinfectant.

Of course, all these safety precautions infuriated that part of the country that seemed adamant that no disease is too deadly a risk if the alternative is another day spent at the kitchen table trying to make sure kids aren’t playing Fortnite or mainlining TikTok videos during a Google Classroom lecture on the life cycle of indigenous hammerhead bats.

We had “anti-maskers” and “Anti-vaxxers.” What am I saying? We still do, right?

After a year or so of fighting about sending kids to school during a pandemic, many of these same parents suddenly saw a segment on Sean Hannity, or Tucker Carlson, or Ren and Stimpy about an obscure law school heuristic meant to uncover systemic disparities when it comes to race. Critical Race Theory.

Remember that?

CRT is a way of looking at society through the lens of race and power. It suggests that racism isn’t just about people’s attitudes but is also baked into laws and systems. It’s about understanding how these laws and systems can keep racial issues going, and it pushes back against the idea that racial problems can be fixed just by changing how individuals think and act.

Think of it as peering through a race-and-power kaleidoscope to make sense of our societal patterns. It’s not just about shifting the attitudes in people’s heads but more like sifting through the ingrained recipes in our laws and systems. CRT is like this savvy detective, uncovering how these systems keep the wheels of racial issues churning—without needing any individual to feel like a racist. It boldly challenges the notion that simply tweaking individual mindsets and behaviors is the magic wand to solve racial disparities.

But I don’t want to focus on the science of conspiracy theories or the brazen dishonesty of telling parents that Ms. Coleman, little Tiffany’s 3rd-grade teacher, is busy indoctrinating kids, telling them about all the giant stains on our national history.

Some parents were furious, demanding “parental rights.” They protested at PTA meetings and made considerable noise at state capitols across the country. They objected to the teaching of things that are demonstrably true historically. These parents didn’t want their kids being taught that things like the institution of slavery was a bad thing or, that our treatment of Native Americans was greedy and cruel, or that libraries stocked with books like To Kill A Mockingbird or Harry Potter would warp children’s minds beyond Franklin Graham’s ability to repair them.

What I found so difficult to come to terms with during that time became a critical focus of my campaign.

Freedom.

Yep. Freedom. Of course, that’s not terribly original in the realm of politics. I mean, who’s against freedom, right?

Everybody loves it. But not everybody means the same thing when they’re cheerleading for it, do they?

Freedom shouldn’t be a controversial topic in a culture that takes reflexive pride every time a nine-year-old fist-shakingly—and, in perhaps, an ironic and potentially disturbing preview of their golden years—intones: “It’s a free country, isn’t it?”

We celebrate our freedom, yet recently, we’ve seen that politicians, despite their claims of enthusiastically supporting it, often make policy that contradicts such declarations. The meaning of ‘freedom’ varies significantly in our country–just in case you haven’t been following along that closely. You can see a pretty marked difference between people’s definition of freedom that appears to be primarily influenced as much by which cable news sources they get their information from as by any commitment to theological or democratic ideals.