10 September 5 - 11, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents The July 28 edition that showed the two taking in the MLB All-Star Game festivities together, along with Gruber, was especially heartwarming, as baseball had always been the topic the former co-stars seemed to bond over the most before their fantastic ra- dio run ended. So, what changed? After years apart, how did this reunion come about in time to help propel YDC? “There’s one thing you should know about me, and maybe it’s the one thing that is the key ingredient to all this,” Rhyner said. “As much as I may huff and puff and try to blow your house down, give me a little time and it’ll all be fixed. I’m just not real good with grudges. There are other people in my past where something’s happened and we got over it and we went down the road and that’s what happened here.” Rhyner adds that he didn’t restart YDC just so he and Williams could reunite more regularly. And he admits that he under- stands whom he “is dealing with” and will continue to keep his “guard up with him.” A s was the case when he sneaked away from The Ticket more than four years ago, Rhyner isn’t saying he’ll never return to radio, even though he’s immersed in podcasting now. But at the same time, he doesn’t think there’s a place in radio anymore “for a guy like [him].” He has a long list of wants and needs that would have to be perfectly aligned for him to even consider a radio job offer, and he’s pretty sure no one’s going to go that far to make him budge. Overall now, he likes being involved with one of the forces that has come to be a chief disruptor of traditional radio. In his radio days, Rhyner knew that suc- cess was measured by ratings, plain and simple. He was at The Ticket for 26 years thanks to high ratings, and he was at the Freak for less than two because of low rat- ings. But that was the old way, which has little to do with the world where Rhyner now works. Measuring success as the founder of a new podcast company isn’t so black and white. “In the beginning we did say, ‘OK, if we can pay the bills without us having to make more capital contributions, then we’re win- ning,’” Rhyner says. “But I don’t really know how successful this is defined right now. I will tell you this, though, I have enough peo- ple coming up to me and telling me they dig what we’re doing. That lets me know we’re on a good path.” ▼ EDUCATION CRITICAL RACE CRITIC RIGHT-WING GROUP TARGETS NORTH TEXAS EDUCATORS. BY EMMA RUBY A dam Guillette stands in front of an elementary school in Coppell wear- ing a gray suit and a wine-red tie. His hand is clenched around a microphone, his hair is slicked back and the tendons of his neck bulge as he approaches the camera and warns of a conspiracy that is bringing racism and antisemitism into the classrooms of North Texas: critical race theory. As Guillette, followed by a wobbly cam- eraman, approaches parents arriving at their children’s schools for meet-the-teacher night, he is shooed away by administrators. “Hey, good afternoon. A Coppell school district administrator was captured on hid- den camera bragging about deceiving par- ents,” Guillette says to a parent outside of Denton Creek Elementary School, who re- sponds that the claim is “awful.” Guillette is president of the conservative watchdog group Accuracy in Media, whose website claims to use “investigative journal- ism and cultural activism to expose corrup- tion and hold bad public policy actors accountable.” On the media bias tracking website AllSides, Accuracy in Media is iden- tified as being right-leaning. A look at Accuracy in Media’s financial benefactors shows the group shares several donors with the right-wing political initia- tive Project 2025, an effort the American Civil Liberties Union describes as “a federal policy agenda and blueprint for a radical re- structuring of the executive branch au- thored and published by former Trump administration officials in partnership with The Heritage Foundation, a longstanding conservative think tank that opposes abor- tion and reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights, and racial equity.” Another one of Accuracy in Media’s sup- porters has contributed $10 million to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s war chest. And each party involved shares a similar desire to implement conservative ideologies into education. In a video released by Accuracy in Me- dia, Guillette claims that critical race theory curriculums are leading to divisiveness, and that the solution is the controversial school choice plan applauded by Republicans. A website listed at the end of the video directs viewers to a prewritten email that auto- blasts to elected officials in North Texas. “Public school administrators have been caught on tape bragging about how they in- doctrinate children with the principles of Critical Race Theory. These radicals think they’re above the law,” the email reads. “The only solution is Arizona-style school choice.” When the Observer requested an inter- view with Guillette, a media coordinator said he would reach out to us, but he never did. Guillette has traversed Coppell ISD with a bus carrying an electronic billboard that shows the faces and names of Dallas-area educators who he believes are not comply- ing with the state’s critical race theory ban. In 2021, Texas became one of several states to outlaw critical race theory — an ac- ademic framework that ties the history of race and racism in the United States to cur- rent social and political structures — in K-12 classrooms. Texas’ ban on critical race the- ory outlaws the teaching of The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which examines the roots of slavery in the U.S., and creates guidelines for how teachers can, and can’t, talk about current events and the history of racism in their classrooms. Debates over critical race theory in Dallas’ suburban school districts is nothing new. In 2021, after the Southlake Carroll school dis- trict proposed implementing a 34-page Cul- tural Competence Action Plan that would require educators and students to undergo di- versity training, a well-funded, conservative organization called Southlake Families PAC swung the district’s school board election and killed the proposal. Conservatives have only strengthened their grip on the district since. Now, Southlake’s neighbor, Coppell, seems to be a target. Last year, Guillette visited schools across North Texas under the guise of a potential parent looking to enroll his child. Fitted with a hidden camera, he asked school lead- ers loaded questions about their schools’ standards. “Whatever stuff [the state Legislature] did might have appeased constituents or whatever, but in practicality it’s not going to mess with education?” He asks a social stud- ies teacher in Richardson ISD, who was not aware she was being filmed. She hesitates, tilts her head from side to side, then answers, “Right.” Guillette collected similar videos in Plano ISD, Mesquite ISD, Carrollton-Farm- ers Branch ISD, McKinney ISD, Keller ISD, Saginaw ISD and Coppell ISD. Stitched to- gether, they flash across his bus under the label “The most deceptive educators in Texas.” He seems to believe they are evi- dence of an inter-district conspiracy to sub- vert the governor himself. Coppell ISD is the only district Guillette and his bus have visited, and he is focusing heavily on a video in which Evan Whitfield, Coppell ISD’s director of science, tells Guil- lette that the district is “doing the right thing” by teaching curriculum that aligns with the national Next Generation Science Standards. Texas is one of only six states whose state curriculum does not align with NGSS. “If I were to say that Coppell ISD is teaching the NGSS science standards … if I was to publish that on our website, that’s where we would get a call from [the Texas Education Agency],” Whitfield told Guil- lette. “But are we still teaching NGSS-ish? Absolutely.” Coppell ISD declined the Observer’s re- quest for comment. Whitfield also declined to be interviewed, but said having his face and name posted on a bus that has been driven around campuses in his district has been a “very frustrating situation.” “It’s very intimidating for any teacher to have their face on a billboard with whatever campaign call to action that these people are trying to push,” Will Ragland, vice president of research, outreach and advocacy for the Center of American Progress, told the Ob- server. “Intimidation is part of the tactics be- ing deployed here, and across Project 2025, to make sure people fall in line.” Ragland, who worked for the U.S. Depart- ment of Education under the Obama admin- istration and has spent the year studying the potential effect that Project 2025 would have on America’s systems, thinks the Coppell bill- board is “weak sauce” designed to “get par- ents riled up.” But the display is also symptomatic of a larger pattern of conserva- tive groups “taking a wrecking ball” to schools, he said. Last fall, Guillette and his bus visited several elite college campuses to call for the resignation of university presidents embroiled in the congressional hearing on campus antisemitism. The group’s methods were criticized after the bus began releasing the names, images and personal information of students and faculty involved in organizations that signed a Palestinian solidarity statement. When it comes to the North Texas cam- paign, Ragland doesn’t believe Guillette is motivated by legitimate curriculum-related concerns. Instead, he believes Accuracy in Media is using words like “antisemitism” and “racism” as buzzwords to pad its claims. “Whether it’s Project 2025 or these more localized efforts with schools, [the right- wing] goals are very similar. They want to tear down institutions that we’ve relied on for decades, tear down the trust in schools and the federal government, and rebuild them in a new image with people that are more willing to push forward and implement policies that are in line with the Christian na- tionalist way of thinking,” Ragland said. According to a mistakenly filed tax return that lists the financial donations received by Accuracy in Media between May 2022 and April 2023, the nonprofit shares several benefactors with the conservative playbook Project 2025. Accuracy in Media told CNBC that the return was filed incorrectly by the group’s accountant but the company did not dispute the accuracy of 25 of the 26 con- tributions listed. Marrio31/Getty Images North Texas Educators are being called out by name for being inclusive in their teaching. Unfair Park from p8
