If you haven’t heard, Kentucky was (and still is, due to contested results) the site of one of the nation’s most closely watched and contested elections this week. The incumbent, Republican Matt Bevin, won his seat in 2015 in a bit of a landslide, considering that his predecessor was a Democrat. The state was deeply in debt at the time, with teacher pension programs that were underfunded and in danger of collapsing, due to a failure of previous governors and general assemblies to properly fund the retirement system. Bevin ran on a promise to fix the system, and passed a bill that was designed to do just that—but the Kentucky Supreme Court overturned it.
Bevin made a mistake—well, it was a mistake in the sense that it prevented his certain re-election in a state that voted 65-35 for Donald Trump in 2016. He attacked the teachers in Kentucky, likening them to “thugs.” He blamed sexual abuse and shootings on them. When they called out sick en masse to protest him at the statehouse, he said they just wanted a day off.
So what did the teachers do? Well, they did they always do—they indoctrinated the children.