How To Report Subversive Books And Teachers in YOUR School

A guide for concerned white parents to keep education away from their children

Last week, Virginia’s newly-elected Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin told a local conservative radio station that he had set up a tip line where concerned parents could report incidents of “Critical Race Theory” being taught in schools. One precipitating incident was a classroom game in Fairfax, Virginia, called “privilege bingo,” in which a teacher encouraged students to recognize forms of privilege invisible to them, such as never having suffered from food insecurity, being able-bodied, never having lost a loved one, and having their own bedroom. Naturally, this set off an extended and disingenuous furor in the right-wing press and gave Youngkin an excuse to fulfill a campaign promise—the choking of education in Virginia.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin, man of the people (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

The email address, helpeducation@governor.virginia.gov—again, that’s helpeducation@governor.virginia.gov, a publicly accessible email address, which is helpeducation@governor.virginia.gov—will be used to further the anti-intellectual, red-baiting and plain old racist moral panic sweeping the conservative world. “Concerned parents”—the primary force behind the decade-long blockade of public schools in Virginia after the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling—are now newly empowered to create an atmosphere of reactionary surveillance, complete with book bannings and the vengeful apparatus of the right-wing propaganda sphere breathing hotly down teachers’ necks. In New Hampshire, a proposed GOP bill would outright forbid the teaching of any “negative” portrayal of U.S. history. This is the white, frothy cresting of a wave that began in 2020, with a faux moral panic over “Critical Race Theory” deliberately sown by longtime conservative operative Christopher Rufo; spread by the ever-eager network of right-wing media; and which has metastasized into local extremist groups like the many-tentacled Moms for Liberty, who are always ready to show up at school boards and shrill their ire at harried public servants, over “subversive” books and mask mandates alike.

Materially, this censorious environment has mainly affected Black authors, dozens of whom have had books banned from schools across the country. The American Library Association reported 270 separate books being affected by bans or restrictions in 2020. In recent months, The Story of Ruby Bridges, a picture book about the life of the young Black schoolgirl who was the first to integrate a public elementary school in the past; Brown Girl Dreaming, a memoir in verse by Jacqueline Woodson; and YA smash hit The Hate U Give, about the aftermath of a Black teenager’s murder by police, have been banned or challenged in schools across the country, as well as a range of books addressing LGBTQ identities and topics. A school board in Tennessee voted last week to ban Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic-novel masterwork about his father surviving the Holocaust, on the spurious grounds that it contained profanity and (nonsexual, cartoon-mouse) nudity.

Naturally, I couldn’t wait to help participate in this flood of racist censorship, and ensure the tip-line email is unclogged and usable for the shittiest people imaginable to send mewling complaints about books by nonwhite and gay people. I’m not even the first to suggest throwing the tipline wide open for any fleeting suspicion you may have that your precious white child is being taught about the actual horrors of the past! So I emailed a few helpful tips to helpeducation@governor.virginia.gov, using guerillamail.com—which allows you to send unlimited emails from a range of custom addresses along with attachments that showcase contemptible and seditious materials—in order to make sure each arrived with the swiftness and security it deserved. I encourage you to also report anti-American subversion, ensure the patriotic loyalty of our schoolteachers, and the existence of nonwhite and gay people along with me!

British soldiers burning books at the U.S. Library of Congress, circa 1814. (Kean Collection/Getty Images)

To Sir Governor,

I sawe my Daughter’s Teachere Mrs. Johnson in a Conference with the Devyl and Many Demones and Karl Marxe was There and He Spoke Of Lascivious Thynges and Seizing The Means of Productyn As Well As Bottoms and Bosomes. I saw Beelzebub Himself and He Laughed At the Proceedings and Ate All The Dodgeballs For Gym Class. Please Burne Mrs. Johnson to Deathe for Her Wytchcraft, She Teaches Social Studies. 

Yourse,
Mrs. Verna Brixton Blormton Barbon
Dungannon, VA

---

Dear Mr. Youngkin,
My son’s exposure to Critical Race Theory made him eat forty-seven jumbo sized bags of Doritos yesterday and now my bathroom is covered in orange diarrhea, because of Critical Race Theory. Please send a cleaning crew and also have all his teachers shot by firing squad. 

Yours truly,
Verdure P. Horger
Gretna, VA

---

Dear Governor,

Crows keep flying past my window cawing dour warnings about the local high school’s history class, which I am told by the crows includes a nuanced portrayal of Black resistance to enslavement and involves three months on the Civil Rights Movement! The crows are never wrong, and they bring me shiny gifts as well as useful information. I am enclosing several crows with this letter, may they espy many calumnies for you, bring you valuable gold, and gouge out the eyes of your enemies, as my now-blinded neighbor Grethers may tell you they can do with satisfying swiftness.

Respectfully,
James Crow
Capron, VA

---

The Sword and the Sandwich is a newsletter about serious extremism and equally serious sandwiches. Please consider supporting this work with a paid subscription:

---

To whom it may concern,

A teacher I am pretty sure is a Marxist—his name is “Sam” which he uses in lieu of a proper title, and he wears altogether too much red to be decent in a young man, which surely is some sort of coded message—brought in vegan pepperoni as a snack for the class. It’s going to make my son Snimbley gay, and I won’t stand for him eating soy at his young age. Please imprison the teacher for the rest of his natural life.

Yours truly,
Ham J. Crimpleborg
Bloxom, VA

---

Dear Gubernatorial Task Force,

I saw C.R.T. himself stalking the halls of Wilberforth Jerg High School in the form of a ram, and the ram had black horns, and the ram spoke in a voice of dark music about throwing off the shackles of the patriarchy, and the ram’s breath was warm and smelled of apples, and the ram seduced the students into following him, and the ram made them all transgender, and then he flew away in a cloud of black and sulfurous smoke. Please send 10,000 policemen.

Yours Truly,
Genicle F. Harmblag
Iron Gate, VA

---

Dear Mr. Youngkin,

I’m concerned about what they’re serving in the cafeteria these days at my son’s school, Jefferson Davis Elementary in Christiansburg. Not a whiff of sensible milk or Jell-O or Salisbury steak, just newfangled dishes with more than a whiff of foreign influence, like “French” Toast or “Italian” spaghetti. I wonder what can be done about this—would it be possible that they could follow your very own diet and simply eat shit all day?

Yours truly,
Slabhorn P. Carhorn
Dillwyn, VA

(Photo by Reg Innell/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

To whom it may concern,

I saw the ghost of Toni Morrison whispering sedition into the ears of my precious child Champers. His delicate white ears almost scorched off from the force of it, and he has been abed with the vapors for days. You must do something!!!!!! Perhaps an exorcism? I can recommend several deliverance ministries in the area.

Yours truly,

Sally-Anne Hormsley
Appomattox, VA

---

Dear Governor,

I am certain one of my son Hertforb’s teachers is a transgender gay Marxist who believes in Critical Race Theory. I know because I watched her drinking from the water fountain and she drank with the moist parted lips of unholy thirst and the unwelcome fire in my loins could only be the result of the corrupting forces of liberalism, which must be kept from my precious white child Hertforb at all costs. Please set up a stockade in the town square to keep her in, and rend her clothes while you are at it, but not in a creepy way, just in a kind of suggestive way. It would calm my mind and loins.

Yours truly,
Brick Gerberflang
Roanoke, VA

---

To the Hon. Glenn A. Youngkin,

As a proud member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, I believe it is time to stop teaching the false narrative that the “South” “lost.” In fact, Jefferson Davis is still alive, he lives in my kitchen annex, he has presided over a thriving slave empire for the last two hundred years, the Confederate States hosted a moderately successful Summer Olympics with a very amusing table-tennis exhibition, and our money, the Confederollar, is far more highly valued than the euro. Dear old Jefferson frequently has his compatriot Stonewall Jackson over to tea and we sip together and laugh about how wonderful everything is in the Confederate States of America, in which we all live. Yet so much falsehood and calumny is taught about our brave boys in gray! Please amend this, sir.

Yours truly,
Virginia F. Goodbody
Richmond, VA

---

Dear Mr. Youngkin And All Who Are As Concerned As I Am,

On the very first day of school after the CHRISTMAS (NOT HOLIDAY) break my son’s teacher Mrs. Pinkerbloom (a Jew) showed them THIS to teach them about “GENDER PRESENTATION”! IS IT NOT INDECENT?

Yours IN DISGUST,
Samwise Grimpwise
Fincastle, VA

---

Hey Glenn,

Thanks for your time.

Keepin’ it 100% certified kosher,

Talia