The Bad Faith Does Not Get Badder Than This

It wasn’t my proudest moment, berating an older lady outside my polling place back in 2022. 

It was a confession, published in Bad Faith Times, that drew years of scorn from right wingers engaged in the most hilarious sort of performative outrage. After supporting an openly authoritarian political movement that threatened its opposition in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, using violence as a first-order political tactic, these folks worked up the energy to pretend to be apoplectic about me, a humble blogger, getting into a yelling match with a woman trying her best to trick people into voting for stealth far-right school board candidates in bright blue Montgomery County, Maryland. 

I appreciate their outrage, expressed in no uncertain terms via direct message on the X platform formerly known as Twitter and on Bluesky, where these very angry people have made hundreds of burner accounts to harass me about getting mad at a lady operating in bad faith. Their performative anger has been tremendous. 

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That blog post has been on my mind this week because Linda McMahon, the crass WWE lady who runs the U.S. Department of Education because she’s one of the three old women in the Trump universe, recently announced the federal government would strip funding from any public school that does not comply with the regime’s resegregation policies. The new edict from the Education Department – which no longer exists, I suppose – says public schools must banish all so-called DEI efforts or face the financial consequences. This comes after Elon Musk’s DOGE invaders advanced white supremacist government policies by canceling $373 million in pro-diversity Education Department initiatives. I’m going to grind my molars to dust. 

McMahon’s recent announcement comes directly from the authoritarian playbook and represents the ultimate victory for the blatantly fascist parental rights movement that took hold in 2020 when white parents learned their babies were sometimes learning about the legacy of slavery in America and Stevie Wonder. 

Public school programs that recognize historical events and contributions and promote awareness would not violate the illegal Trump policy “so long as they do not engage in racial exclusion or discrimination,” the department wrote. “However, schools must consider whether any school programming discourages members of all races from attending, either by excluding or discouraging students of a particular race or races, or by creating hostile environments based on race for students who do participate.”

DEI, Segregation, And The Bad Faith That Explains It All

Those on the right should not be allowed to sit behind the DEI shield any longer. If they won’t say what they mean, people should be told what they mean.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

The faith does not get worse than this. Again, as they have done throughout the five years since the radical justice protests of 2020, the right shamelessly co-opts the language of the Civil Rights movement to advance an explicitly white supremacist policy. Because they can’t say what they mean – McMahon is not going to tell reporters the president wants to erase the contributions of black and brown people from American history – they couch it in language that can be published in the newspaper and discussed on cable news without the goals sounding wretched and retrograde and, well, racist. Fascism has always operated with a powerful vagueness that nudges their awful ideas into mainstream discourse and tricks media and low-information voters into buying in and normalizing their bullshit. 

Reading about this command for public schools in the United States to pull the plug on diversity efforts brought me back to the polling place in June 2022, when my wife and I voted in Maryland’s Democratic primaries (the only elections that really matter in the only remaining good state in the union). The aforementioned bad-faith lady was handing out pamphlets to folks streaming into the polling place, a nearby elementary school. The campaign literature was all about “ending racism” in the county’s public schools, touting a slate of purportedly “nonpolitical” school board candidates, folks who, according to the lady, “spanned the political spectrum.” 

I Yelled At An Old Lady About Her Bad-Faith Politics

I didn’t plan on tearing into an elderly woman when I left the house Tuesday afternoon to vote in Maryland’s primary elections. The plan was to glide in and out of my local precinct, cast votes for the least detestable gubernatorial and state legislative and school board candidates, collect my

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

The literature promoted “no student group being favored over another,” parents “having a say” in their child's education, and an end to separating students according to identity. These all seem like reasonable goals. I could hear the dog whistle though. A few questions for the lady and it was all too clear what the platform actually promoted: An end to diversity efforts, parents being able to shield their kids from real American history, and doing away with LGBTQ groups. 

These school board candidates, I learned later, were members of an organization known as Educators United Against Racism. Again, a worthy goal. Uniting against racism is good! Until you do some cursory googling and find that Educators United Against Racism is affiliated with Help Save Maryland, a “nativist extremist” hate group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. These bad-faith school board candidates were concerned not with real racism and discrimination, but with policies that had eroded white supremacy in Montgomery County and Maryland at large. None of the folks arriving at their polling place that day, talking to a kindly old woman about an alternative slate of school board candidates, had any idea this was the case.

Linda McMahon: Understander of MLK, Jr. Quotes

In the third decade of the 21st century, you can’t come out and tell voters that your primary concern is upholding the white supremacist order by eliminating government efforts to promote equity and diversity among students and teachers and administrators at local schools. For all of the nasty language (I'm astounded Musk has brought the r-word slur back into fashion) and retrograde ideas the right wing has forced into the mainstream over the past decade, they still can’t really say what they mean to say, and what their goals really are. They know – as you know – a call to protect the white race from the invading hordes would be met with overwhelming revulsion from the voting public.

Normies, believe it or not, actually love woke shit and the corporate-approved multiculturalism that has defined American culture over at least the past two generations. Because most people aren't weird segregationist freaks.

Sometimes I find myself writing about the weaponization of bad faith politics to advance authoritarianism into the political mainstream without offering any thoughts about how to push back. I'm trying my best to avoid that doomer formula as we flounder in this competitive authoritarian hellscape. After all, way back in January – before the shocks were applied to us – I urged caring over dooming in 2025. I'm very much aware that I've drifted away from that ethos. Nevertheless, I persist.

In conversations about these heinous far-right educational policies, whether it's with a deranged, black-pilled family member or an apolitical friend, speak clearly about the real, actual goals of these policies that purport to fight against discrimination in American schools. That is not the intended purpose of these terrible little plans, and people should understand that. Sadly we can't depend on mainstream media outlets to expose the bad faith inherent in these policies. It's incumbent on us to hand people our bad faith decoder rings so they can finally see clearly the destruction being wrought by a regime that hates America and is bent on destroying it. As self serving as this is: Share BFT blog posts with your people, on your various social networks, anywhere a little clarity is needed. That is the ultimate goal of my humble little blog: To clarify shit in a time of mind-bending, algorithmically charged obfuscation.

Right wingers are prone to saying the quiet part out loud; they do this with all manner of pet issues like abortion rights and trans rights and, well, the rights of everyone they hate. But they can be very good at drenching their arguments in enough bad faith to make it go down easy with a population that is increasingly misinformed. They want us to believe that they care so much about the health and safety of American women that they have no choice but to shut down abortion clinics because a hallway was too narrow or a clinic entrance was too dirty. They expect us to believe their opposition to trans athletes competing against others of the same gender is based in their undying support and love of women's sports, which the right has tried to bury (unsuccessfully, so far) for fifty years.

And so millions of American voters go about their lives believing Republican elected officials care about pregnant women and women's sports. How are they to know otherwise? Until Bad Faith Times has 300 million subscribers, this problem will persist. We're almost there (we're not).

The hope would be that the coming challenges to this wildly illegal threat to strip funds from public schools for promoting diversity will force the regime to admit in a court of law what they mean when they tell schools to kill their DEI efforts. That's what often happens when the regime's lawyers have to defend the mad king's anti-constitutional executive orders before a judge who is not playing their game. They stumble and bumble, looking for some way to explain a policy without saying the regime's top officials despise a certain population. This happened with Trump's illegal executive order banning transgender people from the military: A federal judge ruled against it and said the order appeared to be crafted out of pure malice for trans service members, not some high-minded pursuit of a war-ready military force or whatever the fashy-tattooed Pete Hegseth says.

Anyone who stumbles across the New York Times piece above, the one outlining the broad strokes of the regime's plan to drain public schools of DEI initiatives, might come away thinking Linda McMahon – who has apparently never heard of artificial intelligence – and her fellow Education Department officials truly cares about equity and equality in American schools, that they really do intend on fighting back against "hostile environments based on race" in public schools. That WWE lady sure seems concerned with protecting kids from discrimination! She even quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. in her confirmation hearing. This is a worthy goal, they might think. I can get behind this.

This NYT reader would of course be thoroughly misinformed about what's going on here, and how it aligns with a fascist agenda meant to roll back decades of progress in making the US a multicultural democracy. If the newspaper won't call out the regime's bad faith bullshit, I guess that leaves you and me and whoever else can see through the right's clumsy use of Civil Rights language to devour the gains of the Civil Rights movement.

The faith is bad and it's getting worse. Spread the word.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.