Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.
Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds has won the culture war.
In so-doing, Reynolds has dug the state into a deep, deep hole largely by rallying voters to reject allegedly naughty books and keeping them (us) embroiled in one-after-another pieces of nonsense legislation.
And by gifting a minority of parents, her allies, with the unquestioned right to enroll their kids, at taxpayer’s expense, in any church-affiliated school, academy, or charter of their choice. And, in the face of all these new budget-busting costs, cutting taxes and swaying otherwise public minded voters to doubt the effectiveness of their kids’ local schools. It’s plain sinful.
The budget Iowa lawmakers approved before adjourning on May 3 would spend more than $9.6 billion in the coming fiscal year, which would leave a $1.2 billion gap between spending and revenues.
Republicans plan to make up the difference by drawing money from Iowa’s Taxpayer Relief Fund, which holds about $4 billion. The revenue drop is caused primarily by the state’s recent income tax cuts, and Republicans maintain that they’ve always intended to use the fund to supplement the budget until revenues recover.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
A new governor can stop the digging. But it will take a new legislative majority to refill the crater. Plan your vote now. Help educate voters.
The Culture War—Books
In February 2023, just after the legislature passed and Reynolds signed her new “education savings account” (ESA) or school voucher bill, she spoke at a confab of Moms for Liberty held in Des Moines.
Reynolds was giddy over her last election win and her ESA bill passing. Being among friends, she spoke freely and disparagingly about public education and educators. Her initial target was “pornography” and “pornographers” in schools, i.e., in library books she felt inappropriate and teachers who stocked them. She had the right audience.
As part of a January 2022 televised interview about books in schools, Reynolds had read aloud a couple paragraphs of a memoir All Boys aren’t Blue by a Black writer whose essay vividly and artistically described a same-sex encounter he’d had when he was a young teenager. He spoke from the heart. The author said his book was written for young adults who may be questioning their sexual orientation.
For Reynolds, the paragraphs were the sum of the whole book and, by implication, the sum of all public school library books or potentially so. An average viewer might have written the interview off as the ramblings of an hysterical person.
But of course, she was the governor, and her audience was the conservative parent who might be organized to protest public schools or, maybe, become a new MAGA voter.
In fact, when Iowa’s school book ban was pending in the legislature in March 2023, a gaggle of Moms for Liberty devotees packed a hearing room where lawmakers on a subcommittee were taking “testimony” and discussing the educative value (or lack) of several specific titles. The more they discussed, the more any LBGTQ-affirming book became unacceptable, characterized as “indoctrination.”
Iowa Public Radio reported at the time that an Urbandale parent brought up a House Government Oversight hearing where school officials defended their decisions to keep books that were challenged as obscene, because obscenity law requires a book to be judged as a whole, not on its most graphic passages.
“Essentially what we heard was that it will be nearly impossible to find a book which they would remove from the school library due to the definition of obscenity given in Iowa code 728,” the parent said. “It proved that the process is flawed and it does not work. I’m concerned this bill isn’t a solution.”
Members of Moms for Liberty told the subcommittee told the (book review) bill didn’t go far enough to punish schools where books are found that are not age-appropriate.
Conservatives have long used books as a political wedge issue, railing against an occasional purchase of an age-inappropriate book—among the thousands librarians buy each year. Traditionally, these books are easily flagged and, if an elected school board agrees with a parent’s objection, removed from the stacks.
The Culture War—Parental Rights
At the Moms for Liberty event, Reynolds didn’t stop with books. She said, “They’re coming for our kids.” That’s code for public educators are enticing youngsters into LBGTQ lifestyles, i.e. grooming, a term of derision popular among the right wing.
Reynolds also referred to a Cedar Rapids-area school board member who had courageously and truthfully said that the traditional purpose of public education is to serve the needs of the society, not those of an individual or religiously conservative parents. For ten years, Reynolds has increasingly nodded toward her friends in the religiously conservative community. This must end.
Remember, Iowa and other states had just come through the COVID-19 pandemic, where mask wearing, vaccinations, school closings, and awkwardly delivered online teaching were fresh on everyone’s minds. All COVID-related public health recommendations or requirements became polarized.
And, expert recommendations were mocked, as was the nation’s foremost immunologist, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Conservatives felt they were winning these battles, which were really part of a culture war, not health care. It became a habit.
Anyway, the claim about purposes played into Reynolds’ hands. She distilled all the attributes of “purpose” down to the words “parental rights,” which (for her and her allies) meant that parent’s preferences and individual choices (as opposed to “needs of the community”) should be the governing principle of public education, not what the greater society felt was needed for youngsters to be contributing members of a democratic society.
On this subject, Jamelle Bouie, a New York Times Opinion columnist, wrote on March 28, 2023:
The reality of the “parents’ rights” movement is that it is meant to empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents to dictate education and curriculums to the rest of the community. It is, in essence, an institutionalization of the heckler’s veto, in which a single parent — or any individual, really — can remove hundreds of books or shut down lessons on the basis of that one person’s political discomfort. “Parents’ rights,” in other words, is when some parents have the right to dominate all the others.
And, of course, the point of this movement — the point of creating this state-sanctioned heckler’s veto — is to undermine public education through a thousand little cuts, each meant to weaken public support for teachers and public schools, and to open the floodgates to policies that siphon funds and resources from public institutions and pump them into private ones. The Texas bill I mentioned, for instance, would give taxpayer dollars to parents who choose to opt out of public schools for private schools or even home-schooling. […]
Ultimately, then, the “parents’ rights” movement is not about parents at all; it’s about whether this country will continue to strive for a more equitable and democratic system of education, or whether we’ll let a reactionary minority drag us as far from that goal as possible, in favor of something even more unequal and hierarchical than what we already have.
Let me repeat, a thousand little cuts, like every one of the governor’s culture-war obsessions, are each meant to weaken public support for teachers and public schools, and to open the floodgates to policies that siphon funds and resources from public institutions and pump them into private ones. That’s what’s happened in Iowa under the Reynolds administration.
The Culture War—LBGTQ, CRT, and DEI
On his first day back in the White House (January 20, 2025) President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) programs illegal and immoral. The government canceled grants that included, even in small part, a DEI goal, and fired workers involved in DEI initiatives. It launched investigations of universities thought to be using race in admissions or scholarships.
Students who study the interconnections between race and law, like in the Dred Scott Case (1857) have touched on critical race theory (CRT) without using the term. In Dred Scott, the U.S. Supreme Court’s majority determined an enslaved person was not a U.S. citizen and could not sue in federal court. It took a civil war to change direction.
Among its many variables, race vis-a-vis law is the content of such studies—as are, for example, the universal repudiation of the N-word and the potential societal punishments for its use.
Fear of drawing the government’s ire has made professors reluctant to teach concepts that Trump’s allies, like Governor Reynolds, might contest. The New York Times reported on January 24, 2026,
Researchers have grown wary that a single word or comment could prompt federal penalties against their universities. Campuses, which regarded themselves as incubators of critical thought and freedom of expression crucial to a healthy democracy, have been reined in, with administrators and students alike on edge.
Reynolds and her buddies in the legislature have encircled public education with barbed restraints. A “more equitable and democratic system of education,” was not in their sights. They’ve tightened their chokehold by attacking library books in general, especially LBGTQ-affirming books, and content like CRT and DEI or SEL (social-emotional learning) training. All while delivering funding that is well below the operating costs for public schools.
Each year, CRT and DEI have been revisited until any off-handed criticism of a DEI prohibition can become a cause for discipline or termination. Like a red-face governor might say of any mention, in a Facebook post or elsewhere, that the world will be just fine without the Charlie Kirks of the world or their theocratic foundations. It’s all the same.
Policy enforcement turns comic. In August 2025, Fox News published a story based on what it called an “undercover video,” which showed a woman identified as an assistant director for leadership at the University of Iowa, saying, “On behalf of my office, we’re still going to talk about DEI, we’re still going to do all the DEI things.”
Iowa Board of Regents and University of Iowa officials said at the time that they were investigating the Fox News video.
Who would have ever thought the Board of Regents would hire a special sleuth to “investigate” university professors for utterances thought to be unappreciative of university policy? Not me, in a hundred years.
In response to the video, Reynolds filed a complaint with the state attorney general’s office against the university. In a statement, the governor said she was “appalled” by the remarks, which she said, “blatantly admits to defying DEI restrictions I signed into law.”
According to the Cedar Rapids Gazette, the Iowa Board of Regents engaged an outside law firm (Consovoy McCarthy) in September 2025 to assist in conducting not only a phase-one review of the (secret) videos (of staff allegedly mocking the new policy. Board of Regents counsel Aimee Claeys said Consovoy McCarthy would determine “if there’s any potential violations of law or institutional or board policies.”
Long story short: The investigators found the young woman guilty of mocking board policy. After months of paid administrative leave, the university recalled and reinstated her, but with a pay cut.
I would have thought the university faculty union would have raised holy hell.
But no big protests, no whistles were handed out, no cameras pointed at members at the Regents Board meetings.
An opinion columnist at the University of Iowa student newspaper, The Daily Iowan, however, wrote a scathing editorial in the December 16, 2025, issue saying, the new regents president Robert Cramer “couldn’t be further from what Iowa needs.”
The Iowa Board of Regents doesn’t need another walking mouthpiece for the GOP or any mainstream political party, and certainly doesn’t need a businessman who cares only for profit.
It needs someone who’s actually prepared to defend diversity and respect, the things that make this campus great, and is prepared to spend to do so.
The columnist pointed out that Cramer had been a leader of The Family Leader, a statewide organization of Christian conservatives supporting “policies that strengthen biblical marriages and oppose anything that undermines God’s design for human sexuality, including fornication, pornography, homosexuality, and transgenderism.”
The student publication “The Journal of Gender, Race & Justice at the University of Iowa tried to fight back, as the journal’s mission statement states, that the publication “is not for the weak of heart or the timid in spirit. Feminist inquiry and critical race analysis are the touchstones of our endeavor. Our building blocks are new forms of analysis that reach beyond traditional conceptions of legal thought.”
In the March 26, 2025, issue, an article entitled “DEI Makes America Great; Iowa Universities Are on the Wrong Track,” also scorched the governor’s decision.
Grace Jobgen, then a final-year law student, wrote,
Further, the dismantling of DEI programs at the university will negatively impact students. Students come to college seeking a well-rounded education. They expect to grow not only as students, but as people. A large part of the college experience is meeting people who are different and experiencing different ways of life. Without these experiences, Iowa students will not be well-rounded like students from other universities.
She continued,
The University of Iowa has previously boasted a reputation of graduating students that think critically of what they are taught and come out better for it. The University has produced many students who were simultaneously proud of and galvanized by the University’s legacy of being “a pioneer in ‘firsts,’ . . . for human rights.”[xv] Now, however, the University of Iowa is likely to find its students far less inclined to view its legacy favorably, especially as it remains complicit in disenfranchising many of them and providing its student population with homogenized and noncomplex educational settings.
Ms. Jobgen should be governor.
The Culture War—Attack the teachers’ union and minorities
The governor has also attacked teachers’ authority, their unions, and discounted minority students and their needs.
And most tragically, she has demeaned the very worth of public education vis-a-vis the alleged superiority of private schools. Most recently, Republican lawmakers approved a bill this year allowing unaccountable instructors to offer classes for credit in charter schools or the basements of any neighborhood mom’s home. Mother Mary-the-Instructor could issue a diploma that public universities must accept as bona fide college preparation.
This Des Moines Register article has more details about House File 2754, the charter school bill now sitting on Reynolds’ desk.
The Culture War—Anti-implicit bias prevention training
At the end of this year’s session, the legislature again pulled out the beads and re-polished them by excluding law enforcement from implicit bias prevention training (don’t use the N-word, etc.), something the public had demanded after protesters were forcefully restrained. House File 2711, now awaiting the governor’s signature, would reverse part of a law that the Iowa House and Senate unanimously approved in June 2020.
The bill passed quickly soon after white police officers murdered George Floyd — a Black man — in Minneapolis. The killing sparked a nationwide reckoning with racial injustice.
The Des Moines Register reported,
Requirements that law officers undergo annual implicit bias prevention training would be repealed under a bill headed to Gov. Kim Reynolds‘ desk as GOP lawmakers move to scale back part of Iowa’s landmark law addressing police misconduct.
Senate Republicans passed House File 2711 to eliminate longstanding affirmative action plans across state agencies over Democrats’ objections that it would undermine community trust and deepen disparities facing underrepresented communities.
The bill passed in a 31-15 party-line vote on Wednesday, April 29, adding to Republicans’ comprehensive steps to ban diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across Iowa.
The Culture War—The Center for Intellectual Freedom
Last year, the new House Higher Education Committee had passed House File 437, which created the Center for Intellectual Freedom. Reynolds signed that bill in June 2025.
The Iowa Board of Regents held the inaugural meeting of the new center in early December 2025. Regent Christine Hensley is on the center’s advisory board, and Luciano I. de Castro, a professor in the University of Iowa’s school of business, is interim director. The Cedar Rapids Gazette and the Iowa Capital Dispatch covered the conclave expensively.
Last December, de Castro and Hensley appeared on the Iowa PBS program “Iowa Press.” Without being too catty, the interview confirmed The Des Moines Register’s editorial board’s observation that Iowa’s Center for Intellectual Freedom got off to a shaky start.
When asked about the goal of the new center, Professor de Castro told reporter Erin Murphy, “So the (center) was created by legislators … and signed by the governor with the purpose of offering courses and developing research on topic of American history and American culture, constitutional values, and create the students of Iowa. … We are (striving) for, to create academic excellence for students.”
For her part, Hensley said, “You know I echo what Luciano was saying, but I’d add just a little bit more information. As you talk with alumni, significant donors and parents of students, there is a feeling that there’s not enough balance. … not having open dialog, diverse discussion about freedom, civics, and American history.”
Nothing I read in the original descriptions acknowledges the fact that the center will sit next to a world-class research institution.
The Register also carried an essay by Christopher Rufo who was paid $35,000 to be the keynote speaker at the Center’s kickoff even. Rufo’s name should be associated with critical race theory (CRT) as a moniker for the right wing’s ballyhooed disdain for anti-racism training or teaching about slavery in U.S. history.
About Rufo’s credentials, I rely on a long-form essay that Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote for The New Yorker in June 2021. The article is entitled “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory: To Christopher Rufo, a term for a school of legal scholarship looked like the perfect weapon.” Wallace-Wells shines a brightlight on Rufo as a blinkered con who, but for Trump’s affection for him, would still be in Seattle hoping to sell the short documentary videos he’d been making.
We need serious people running our government
Electing a new governor may stop the digging, but it will take a new majority in both houses of the Iowa legislature to begin to refill the ditch the Republicans have driven us into.
The problem is that many Iowa voters have been fooled for over ten years. Shame on the Iowa Republican Party. The party seems intent on nominating another culture warrior for governor.
The Des Moines Register recently published a video story tracking comments from the five Republican candidates for governor about “school choice.”
The candidates were speaking to an audience of around 1,000 people at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition event. Members believe America is a Christian nation and the biblical precepts should guide the state’s government and public schools.
Peter Smith reported for the Associated Press recently about the debate over whether the U.S. is a Christian nation.
“Most — nearly all — serious historians agree that America was not founded as a Christian nation in any meaningful legal, philosophical, or constitutional sense,” says the group Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It decries efforts “to redefine America according to the Christian Nationalist disinformation and then reshape our law accordingly.” […]
The founders, [historian Gregg] Frazer says, did not create a Christian republic. Several key founders either rejected core Christian doctrines or were vague enough to keep historians debating. For Frazer, that often disappoints audiences of his fellow Christians. […]
“Neither side really wants to hear what I say,” says Frazer, a professor of history and political studies at The Master’s University, a Christian school in Santa Clarita, California. […]
They believed that faith was important in forming moral, responsible citizens of the new republic. They promoted “toleration without eliminating the importance of real religious commitment on the part of differing adherents,” Frazer wrote in his book, “The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders.”
If Iowa voters are fooled again in this November’s election, shame on them.
We need a mass movement
David Brooks wrote in the November 2025 issue of the Atlantic that without a mass movement, “America may sink into autocracy for decades.” The special issue of the magazine was meant to be a companion to Ken Burns’ PBS series, The American Revolution. That’s still available online and is worth watching.
If voters could set aside the huge number of culture war pieces of legislation and the animosity and vitriol they’ve caused, including the school voucher law, Reynolds tenure wouldn’t have amounted to much. As said, a new governor can stop the digging. But it will take a new legislative majority to refill the hole.
If you’re reading this and want to resurrect Iowa from this unnatural cataclysm, get your whole clan registered and organized to vote blue in November.