Debunking Sarah Huckabee Sanders

My chance encounter at a right-wing conference

Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ rant Tuesday night (dropping endless right-wing code rather than appealing to a wider audience) has been panned by commentators across the spectrum.

But given a scene I stumbled into a few years back, there was one line that really stuck out: “we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn't start.”

So what did I witness a few years back that so debunks that claim?

Summer of 2021. My wife Alana and I took our two boys Jack and Charlie on a short trip to Utah—our first post-COVID escape.

One evening, as we arrived at a mountainside hotel for an early dinner, I immediately saw that it was the site of a Republican Attorney General Association conference (RAGA was one of the organizations involved in the planning and funding January 6).

This sign, typo and all, was my first clue:

So, I admit, I got nosey.

I looked around to see if I could spot any AGs I knew of…and even ran into Ohio’s AG Dave Yost (we once ran against one another for Auditor) and introduced him to my family. We had a friendly exchange.

But to cut to the chase, as a former candidate myself, I enjoyed the site of one candidate in particular huddling with a group of (potential) supporters he was trying to court.

And looking for their support, what did he tell them his plan to run for AG the next year was? How did he try to impress them?

“I’m going to run on CRT,” he said loudly enough for me to overhear.

That’s right, amid opioid crises and consumer fraud and public safety problems and other challenges an Attorney General can do so much about, his plan to run for Attorney General of a state was to focus on Critical Race Theory, an upper-level law school approach/field.

But it wasn’t just that that was his focus that stuck out. It was that he used the acronym…and didn’t feel the need to explain the term at all.

That’s right, more than a year before the election, to a group of non-legal scholars, he dropped the term knowing full well THEY knew what he was talking about.

And of course, they nodded along, fully understanding. They too had gotten the memo.

Within months, we all started to see “CRT” emerge as a hot-button campaign issue across the nation, thrust into campaigns for offices up and down ballots. And now we’re seeing it broaden into a nationwide censorship and book-banning frenzy. Downright disturbing.

Folks, this entire narrative was cooked up in a right-wing messaging lab somewhere, and disseminated in the right-wing ecosystem (including conferences like that one in Utah) well in advance. It’s yet another proactive, divide-and-conquer campaign strategy of a party mired in anti-mainstream extremism that needs to divide America and enrage its far-right base to have any chance to win.

That’s all it is.

The fact that Sanders had to refer to those same tired talking points Tuesay night shows that they really have nothing else to offer at this point.

And her line about being stuck in a culture war “we didn't start” could not have been more disingenuous. Disinformation, really.

After all, I witnessed first-hand one of their candidates brag about instigating that “culture war” as his primary campaign strategy.