The Hoff Time Report

In a weak attempt to appease Idaho leftists on Tuesday, Gov. Brad Little called for a special legislative session to provide modest tax cuts and dump buckets of new money into Idaho’s broken government school system.

At the press conference, Little urged action to help Idaho’s families deal with the effects of inflation. That’s a noble aim, but the governor’s proposal falls woefully short. He and lawmakers should return to the drawing board and come up with some far better solutions for families.

Little’s plan, the only bill lawmakers can consider at the September 1 special session, represents a full and complete surrender to Luke Mayville and his socialist activists at Reclaim Idaho. Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin joins IFF President to break it down. 

This morning, IFF rolled out its Liberty in Education and Academic Development Map to the world. This project, months in the works, shows how schools fail and indoctrinates students. The map allows families to enter their home address and found out the local district’s test scores, as well as any social justice incidents in the district. IFF researcher Kaitlyn Shepherd talks to Wayne about the map and details how parents can use it to educate themselves about local school districts. 

If you have a youngster in Idaho’s government-run schools, now would be a good time to either start demanding answers from state and local education officials or reconsider your schooling options.

The latest in a long string of disappointments comes in the form of Gov. Brad Little’s decision to sidestep the Legislature and order $30 million for COVID-19 testing for the state’s public schools.

Idaho has a supermajority Republican Legislature, with Democrats comprising less than 20% of the seats in the House and Senate. Republicans have held the state’s top executive positions for a quarter century, yet Idaho has had a penchant for embracing socialism, government control, and special interest collectivist causes.

This is at the heart of what I expect will shape conversations and debates leading up to the 2022 elections, especially for the Republican primary; it’s already shaping up to be the case in the nascent contests for governor and lieutenant governor. Expect that to be true in many legislative races.

It should be obvious that Boise State University’s “independent” investigation into problems with the school’s mandatory racism and intolerance class known as University Foundations 200 was just a public relations ploy.

Launching the investigation got lawmakers temporarily off BSU’s back while the school’s budget was under review. Releasing a summary of the investigation’s findings last week was just clever enough for an inept state press corps to conclude that BSU is doing nothing relative to critical race theory and social justice indoctrination. In that regard, it was more than BSU President Marlene Tromp and her team could have hoped for.

It appears that Boise State University President Marlene Tromp still has not gotten the message that Idahoans are tired of the school’s indoctrinating social justice programs. In public and in private, Tromp has recently struck a tone that suggests little will change at BSU despite the Legislature’s restrictions on critical race theory (CRT) and $1.5 million in cuts aimed at the school’s social justice programs.

During an online meeting with faculty and staff, also attended by Democrat Sen. Melissa Wintow, Tromp’s team could be heard plotting ways to allow professors to keep shoveling historically-bogus CRT into students’ brains without getting sideways with a new anti-CRT law. When a faculty member claimed Tromp was the victim of “sexist, racist, personal attack(s),” she validated the belief by saying that the University of Idaho had been spared scrutiny because the school is run by a man who happens to be from Idaho.

Yes, the legislative session is over, but the fight to fix what’s gone wrong with the government education system is not. That work is just getting warmed up.

Right away, the State Board of Education needs to get its house in order. The board added to the state teacher certification standards a requirement that educators rely on so-called culturally responsive teaching. This is just another example of critical race theory being put into practice in our state’s K-12 education system. The board should vote this summer to eliminate that requirement.

If there’s one thing to remember from the 2021 legislative session, it’s that the Idaho Legislature became the first legislative body in the country to successfully push back against the Marxist indoctrination happening in primary, secondary, and higher education.

The Legislature rejected a $6 million federal grant for pre-kindergarten, a grant that would have given the Biden administration direct control over the education of babies and toddlers. It also would have given significant power to the Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children and its openly leftist national umbrella organization, the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

The Legislature also passed a bill, signed grudgingly by Gov. Brad Little, to prevent teachers in our K-12 and university system from “compelling students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere” to racist programs and ideologies that divide students and adults into victims and oppressors according to race and gender. Idaho became the first state in the country to take a stand against the hate mongering that is central to “critical race theory.”

Idaho education officials are being dishonest when they say there’s no evidence of leftist indoctrination in our public schools and universities. They’re also being dishonest when they claim that the newly-signed House Bill 377 prevents critical race theory from being taught.

The legislation is certainly helpful. It says that students can no longer be compelled to “personally affirm, adopt, or adhere” to a doctrine of hate that is embodied in critical race theory. Despite media reports to the contrary, the new law does not ban teaching CRT, nor does it ban teachers from being trained in how to treat some students as victims of systemic racism.

Idaho has the most conservative House of Representatives it has ever seen. That is not the doing of House Speaker Scott Bedke. Bedke hasn’t changed at all, clocking in at 66 percent right now on the Idaho Freedom Index.

Throughout the country, leftist activists have successfully infiltrated all aspects of government, media, and business with claims that America is irredeemably racist, and such racism is baked into our political and economic systems. These extremists believe that to combat this “systemic” racism, American systems and ideals must be scrutinized and dismantled.

This dismantling includes the elimination of private property, capitalism, and the curtailment of freedom of speech. It means replacing our free society with socialism. Of course, the radical Left and their allies in the media don’t portray it this way; they instead rant and rave about “diversity and inclusion,” believing somewhat accurately that it’s hard to argue with such happy sounding words.

Special interest groups including big labor unions like the Idaho Education Association seem to be winning the day at the state Legislature, thanks to liberal Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Education Committee.

First, members of the committee rejected a simple House-approved measure to let school boards opt-out of collective bargaining. House Bill 174 would have given locally-elected school boards the ability to decide whether they wanted to negotiate with labor unions. If a union behaves badly, as happened last year when the West Ada Education Association staged a sick-out, the school board would not be compelled to sit at the bargaining table with them, as they are presently under Idaho law.

Idaho’s legislative budget writers are being dishonest when they say a proposed higher education budget combats the leftist indoctrination happening on college and university campuses. It does not. Not even close.

It is true that the Legislature’s budget committee voted to restrict the use of state funds for social justice. But that prohibition does not preclude the schools from accessing other pools of public money to keep funding such programs, rendering the restriction wholly meaningless.

It’s hard to believe this, but several lawmakers have confirmed for me that there’s a plan to raise gas taxes on Idahoans during this legislative session. The word is that the proposal is to raise the tax by as much as 10 percent on the state’s already-high assessment of 32 cents per gallon.

The good news though, is that raising gas taxes has never been particularly popular at the Legislature. An effort to raise fuel taxes in 2009 failed so spectacularly, it took another six years for lawmakers or the governor to bring the issue up again. When it did come up, lawmakers wound up passing the bill in the dead of night. The optics for a tax increase this year are not so fantastic given all the other promises lawmakers have made and haven’t been able to follow through on.

Idaho lawmakers have only one job each and every year: deciding how much money to take out of the economy to run whatever government program they decide to fund. Media distractions to the contrary, this is the job, and lawmakers aren’t very good at it. They’re focused on evading responsibility so they upset no one – or at least, none of their donors. So when public money is spent against Idahoans’ interests, lawmakers can claim plausible deniability and say they’re not responsible.

Case in point: Idahoans are deeply concerned that they’re the ones funding the instrument of our country’s demise. We are the ones on the hook because we’re paying taxes and fees to indoctrinate young minds at Idaho’s public colleges and universities. But chairmen of the House and Senate education committees didn’t bring up the issue when they met recently with the Legislature’s budget panel, JFAC.