Depressing but not surprising:
Greg Cruey thought he knew how to walk students through a presidential election. The social studies teacher has been working inside public-school classrooms for about two decades, guiding children through history-making 2008, as well as tumultuous 2016.
But 2020 shocked him.
Never before, Cruey said, has he seen such a high level of emotion from children — such blind devotion to their preferred candidate, most often Donald Trump. Nor has he seen anything like this level of mistrust, which he said is persisting among students weeks after the results of the election supposedly were finalized.
“I still get the kid that wants to know if it’s true that 100,000 dead people voted in Michigan, or if a computer stole our votes,” Cruey said. “The majority are uncomfortable or unhappy with the election. Many of them think there’s something fishy behind it.”
Teachers are always on the front lines of the fight against misinformation. But this election year poses extra challenges: For one thing, conspiracy theories — some of them promoted by the president — are running rampant on social media sites favored by young people.AD
For another, given that most schools are operating fully or partly online because of the coronavirus pandemic, teachers have fewer resources and less ability to reach the children they’re meant to be guiding through a world filled with misleading or false information.
“In the virtual world, you’re basically speaking through a microphone into people’s homes, so you might have 20 kids but actually 60 people listening to you,” Cruey said. “You don’t really know what’s going on.”
The 60-year-old educator is in a sticky position.
He teaches middle-schoolers in West Virginia’s deep-red McDowell County, where some 80 percent of the votes went to Trump in the November election. He is an outlier, one of the few people in his neighborhood — 30 minutes away in another county that is just as red as McDowell — to keep Joe Biden signs on their lawns.AD
The students he teaches, and their parents, can easily figure out his political views. All they need do is check the Internet, where a clip of him interviewing and praising then-candidate Hillary Clinton in November 2015 still circulates. So Cruey has developed a strategy for dealing with those who discover his Democratic leanings.
“I tell kids on a regular basis there’s no one out there that fully represents me or my political views,” Cruey said. “And the same parents that know I have a Biden sign also know I’m a church musician, [and] that my wife and I work at a Christian camp in the summer. [So] they reserve judgment.”
As Trump continues to promote baseless claims of sweeping voter fraud and to contest the fact of his election loss, tens of millions of Americans have come to doubt President-elect Biden’s legitimacy, as well as the stability and fidelity of the nation’s democratic process. Opinion splits sharply along partisan lines: 70 percent of Republicans say the election was unfair, according to a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll, and 90 percent of Democrats say it was both fair and free.AD
Now, Trump’s campaign of misinformation is affecting the nation’s youngest, too.
Cruey teaches roughly 95 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders in McDowell County Schools, which enrolls 2,600 and is offering a mix of in-person and online learning. Until recently, when he was forced to enter quarantine after a fellow employee tested positive for the coronavirus, Cruey reported to his classroom five days a week, where he led social studies and West Virginia studies for the 40 percent of the group that had chosen face-to-face instruction. The rest followed the lessons online.
For all three grades, according to state standards, Cruey is supposed to teach “who our leaders are and how we got them,” he said. So, in the weeks before the 2020 election, he offered lessons on the electoral college. He gave kids a “Campaign Issues Worksheet” that asked their views on subjects including red-flag gun laws (provisions by which courts can order someone’s firearms taken away temporarily if the person is deemed a danger to self or others) and whether police officers should wear body cameras. And he answered election questions — the most popular query was whether the rapper Kanye West was actually a candidate (yes).AD
It quickly emerged that the views in Cruey’s classroom mirrored the political breakdown of McDowell County, which sits at the southernmost edge of West Virginia and is home to roughly 18,000 people, 90 percent of whom are White. In Cruey’s classrooms, informal polls — “Who do you guys want to be president?” — revealed that about 85 percent of children preferred the Republican incumbent.
That didn’t surprise Cruey, who remembers teaching the 2016 election in McDowell. The first hint that this year would prove extra challenging came when a sixth-grader, who was learning from home, messaged mid-class: “What has Joe Biden done in 46 years to make him worth electing president?”
Cruey thought to himself: That’s not something an 11-year-old would say.
“I know the family, they’re very right-wing, so I know the parents are sitting there watching,” Cruey said. But what could he do? “The grown-ups who are stomping their feet and gritting their teeth as I teach — that’s their right.”
He kept going, moving on to the next topic and set of facts as quickly as he could: a battle-tested tactic for avoiding conflict that he’s developed over years of teaching.AD
But he was less successful Nov. 9, the Monday after the election.
He began that lesson by explaining the Associated Press’s long history of calling presidential elections. He showed the students a BBC article debunking the QAnon-promoted conspiracy theory that Dominion Voting Systems election software caused President Trump’s defeat.
Forty minutes in, he shared a video of Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris and Biden giving their acceptance speeches. And that’s when Facebook messenger pinged.
“This parent sent me a message to say her child was not going to be listening to this stuff about Biden and Harris,” Cruey said. “Then she just disconnected her kid.”
I know I don’t have to tell any of you that this is all wrong. It’s going to take a lot of effort to unwind this level of brainwashing.
I grew up in a conservative household. And I’m sure that as a little kid I probably assumed the right wing talking points of my parents. But the counter culture was very strong and penetrated from a very early age and I was a liberal hippie from at least the age of 12 or so. I have a sneaking suspicion the same thing will happen with a lot of these kids. And there are many more entrance points to liberal and progressive culture than there used to be, from online gathering places like Twitch and TikTok to movement politics that appeal to young people like Black Lives Matter, climate change and gun safety. Not all of these red state kids will go that way (they didn’t back in the day either) but I would guess that quite a few will. The world has changed a lot since I was young, but rebelling against your parents is perennial.
If you missed Chris Krebs, the lifelong Republican and director of US cyber agency, who Trump fired, his assessment in unequivocal. one would think he’d be a good validator of the integrity of this election. Unfortunately, most of the right wingers will never hear him because he isn’t appearing on OAN, Newmax and Fox.