The American right’s entire agenda now is driven by a singular narrative: Liberals are evil. Not merely bad, but beyond-the-pale foul and unholy, demonically possessed and intent on destroying the nation. So all of their talking points and conspiracy theories revolve around generating fresh iterations of this narrative, whether it’s the QAnon claims that a cabal of globalists are abducting children and draining them of blood, or the more mainstream Fox News hysteria about (to use the most recent instances) “critical race theory,” or LGBTQ “groomers,” or children’s hospitals “mutilating” trans youth.
And because they believe in the “greater truth” of their narrative, they have no compunction about lying in the service of spreading it. Baldfacedly. Take for instance the latest utterly fake scandal generated by the Christopher Rufo-to-Libs of TikTok-to-Fox News pipeline, claiming that Idaho’s public schools are teaching “porn literacy” to kids. It’s just a flat-out naked lie.
The false claim originated—as do so many of the far-right smears in Idaho these days—with the extremist-friendly Idaho Freedom Foundation (IFF), which posted an article and Twitter video by writer Anna K. Miller on Tuesday claiming that “Idaho’s government offers ‘porn literacy’ to students, planned parenthood curriculum and advocates for abortion,” adding: “If this can happen in Idaho, it can happen anywhere.”
The piece focused on sex-ed material used by Idaho created by a well-regarded (and politically neutral) organization called Education, Training, and Research. Miller and her coauthor, Boise State professor Scott Tenor, said the “porn literacy” material “involves instruction on ‘kink and power, pleasure, sexual identity, sexual acts, and sexual exploration in relation to pornography’.”
“For ETR, pornography consumption is a ‘required topic’ in sex education,” they claimed. “Though, as ETR admits, ‘the evidence is largely unclear whether sexually explicit media use influences future sexual health among adolescents.’ Introducing graphic sexual content into elementary schools creates opens minds and prepares students for sexual activity.”
In short order, the right-wing hysteria mill went to work. Rufo, the right-wing “think tank” guru who largely concocted the CRT scare, tweeted out to his 400,000-plus followers: “The Idaho state government is now training students in ‘porn literacy,’ teaching how pornography can ‘sexually excite and create fantasy’ for children.”
Rufo added: “It's time to break the state-run education monopoly and provide families with universal school choice.”
His tweets and Miller’s were promptly picked up on Wednesday by Chaya Raichik at Libs of TikTok, which has built a record of inspiring threats and extremist violence against the people it targets. After repeating the IFF’s claims in her first tweet, she amplified the story further, claiming: “Idaho state is using tax dollars to teach 8-year-olds ‘porn literacy’.”
So on Wednesday evening, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham—who has a record of promoting groundless claims about “grooming” in education, including a mid-pandemic theory in 2020 that online learning was making children vulnerable to “sexual predators”—devoted a segment of her nightly show to regurgitating the phony claims:
In Idaho, mothers and fathers were shocked this week to discover that the state’s Department of Health and Welfare is implementing a sex-ed curriculum endorsed by Planned Parenthood! And the training materials for this comes from a left-wing group with an innocuous name, Education, Training, and Research, or ETR. And that promotes what they call the “queering of education” and normalizing the consumption of pornography.
Ingraham thanked the IFF for “exposing what’s happening in Idaho schools.”
The problem, of course, is that none of this is happening in Idaho schools—which anyone familiar with its famously conservative public education system would probably already know. Certainly, common sense would suggest that if Idaho students were in fact being shown porn in their classrooms, word of the practice would have been already widely spread well before an anti-public-education organization like the IFF dug up some obscure training videos that have nothing to do with Idaho.
The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (IDHW) promptly issued a statement making clear that it was not indulging in “porn literacy” sessions for children (particularly not, as Raichik claimed, 8-year-olds).
DHW does not support or fund any "porn literacy" for children in Idaho. DHW provides evidence-based, optional sex education curriculum, called Reducing the Risk, for Idaho schools. Reducing the Risk does not discuss porn literacy, and it is not a subject taught in the curriculum DHW provides. DHW does not collaborate with or seek the endorsement of Planned Parenthood for sex education curriculum.
Schools that choose to offer Reducing the Risk do so with parental consent. They offer opt-in or opt-out for parents, in accordance with school district policies and Idaho Code.
ETR’s Reducing the Risk training is geared toward kids ages 14 to 18 years old, not third-graders. It focuses entirely on topics fully in favor with the state’s conservative populace: saying “no” to sex and abstinence planning, and encouraging students to talk to their parents about sex and their own values.
ETR does offer a program called “3 in 30” that provides porn-literacy training—but it’s only offered to adults, primarily parents and teachers. And IDHW does not include it in their offerings.
Nonetheless, Miller tried to rebut the statement by posting a tweet saying, “We have the receipts.” However, her post featured a spreadsheet that only demonstrated that IDHW had purchased “specific use supplies” from ETR.
Indeed, as Daniel Walters noted in his Inlander piece debunking the false claims, the IFF failed anywhere in any of its smear propaganda “didn't have a single example of a single Idaho school actually teaching ‘porn literacy’.” And not one of the smear artists attempted to reach either ETR or IDHW for comment or explanation before publishing their bullshit claims.
As Walters observed:
Imagine the state of Idaho buying a bunch of pencils and backpacks for students at Walmart and then a bunch of bloggers writing "IDAHO BUYS GUNS FOR CHILDREN" because Walmart also sells guns.
That’s how the right-wing hate machine operates—all in the name of convincing the world that no matter how bad conservatives and MAGA extremists get, they’re not as thoroughly evil as liberals. Who cares if you have to lie to do it?
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
