Last week, Scene published a piece of satire titled “Inside Jim Renacci’s Plan to Stop Wokeness in Ohio Schools and Make Kids Virtually Unemployable.”
In retrospect, there was something wrong: As usual, I was too wordy in the headline and should have listened to the author – Pete Kotz, former Scene editor and longtime contributor to the paper, whose recent articles have included “Ohio Legislature Worries It’s Not Cruel Enough” and “Gov Mike DeWine: So Here’s Why Everyone Now Has a Gun at Perkins” – and made it shorter; but such is life trying to serve the twin gods of SEO and decent prose. (Dammit, there I go again.)
Anyway.
Jim Renacci’s team had a different problem with the piece, which lampooned his career and new PAC (Save Our Schools Ohio) by way of jokes about the logical and illogical ends of the former congressman’s foray into education and stacking school boards with conservatives.
They thought the satirical piece – which included a joke in which Renacci claims that if he could become the “Ron DeSantis of Ohio, I’m perfectly happy to sacrifice thousands of children” and another that had him describe the future of education in the state as “somewhere between that Nazi homeschooling network and Season 1 of the Handmaid’s Tale” – sounded believable and would confuse readers.
A Renacci spokesperson got in touch first, demanding the piece be deleted for being “100% false, lies and misleading. If this is intended to be satire, huge fail as no body knows you to be a satire writer.” [sic]
I responded that it was both obvious satire on its face and labeled as such with an article tag, not to mention the work of an author who writes satire, but he was unconvinced.
“Please remove the story,” they wrote. “This is just a hit piece. We would love to avoid litigation please.”
A letter from a lawyer followed. (A copy of which is included to the right. Click to enlarge.)
This (again) despite the piece starting:
In what he’s calling “a desperate attempt to stay relevant by exploiting the culture wars,” Jim Renacci is launching a conservative takeover of Ohio schools. His goal: to keep the state from falling behind in the national race to stop the spread of knowledge.Save Our Schools Ohio, the former congressman’s new political action committee with the appropriate acronym of So-So, promises to bring heightened sophistication to electing uber-conservative school board members, “opening a brave new era of hindering our children’s education.”
Using advanced analytics, the PAC will comb the fringes of social media to identify candidates with no educational training whatsoever. Ideal recruits will include people who brag of owning pocket Constitutions, and those who are barred by court order from coming within 500 feet of their kids’ school due to previously stalking the faculty.
Sara Coulter, a fellow at the First Amendment Clinic at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, told Scene we were on very solid legal ground. (The clinic has previously represented Scene in our lawsuit against the city of Cleveland seeking the police department’s use of force records. We won.)
“The First Amendment’s protections for parody and satire are well-established, and protected speech cannot lead to defamation liability,” Coulter said. “Parody is still protected speech even if some people are confused by the content because parody is measured objectively, with courts considering whether a reasonable reader would understand the statements to be actual statements of fact rather than parody or satire. In fact, courts have recognized that the essence of parody is that it comes close enough to reality to spark a moment of doubt before a reader realizes the joke. Threatening defamation liability for parody just because someone might not get the joke chills legitimate criticism of public officials and is dangerous to free speech everywhere.”
Indeed, there’s a real worry that right-wing takeovers of school boards across the country and the war against “wokeness” in the classroom – the kind of efforts led by organizations such as Save Our Schools Ohio – will in fact chill free speech and crater education. Those fears are certainly not allayed by Jim Renacci’s actions here, what with the legal threats to a newspaper and the belief that a reader who sees a joke about Renacci creating an attack ad based on “something to do with lunch ladies and Chinese bioweapons” could possibly think it’s real.
Well, that last bit might say more about Renacci’s character than Ohioans’ reading comprehension.
The original satirical piece Renacci’s team doesn’t want you to read is below in full.
Vince Grzegorek
Editor-in-Chief, Cleveland Scene
Inside Jim Renacci’s Plan to Stop Wokeness in Ohio Schools and Make Kids Virtually Unemployable
By Pete Kotz
In what he’s calling “a desperate attempt to stay relevant by exploiting the culture wars,” Jim Renacci is launching a conservative takeover of Ohio schools. His goal: to keep the state from falling behind in the national race to stop the spread of knowledge.
Save Our Schools Ohio, the former congressman’s new political action committee with the appropriate acronym of So-So, promises to bring heightened sophistication to electing uber-conservative school board members, “opening a brave new era of hindering our children’s education.”
Using advanced analytics, the PAC will comb the fringes of social media to identify candidates with no educational training whatsoever. Ideal recruits will include people who brag of owning pocket Constitutions, and those who are barred by court order from coming within 500 feet of their kids’ school due to previously stalking the faculty.
“If they’re still returning my calls,” Renacci also plans to tap into his network of large donors. The money will finance individualized attack ads targeting incumbents. One will accuse them of putting litter boxes in school bathrooms for kids who identify as cats. The other will have “something to do with lunch ladies and Chinese bioweapons,” says Renacci. “We’re still workshopping the concept.”
The endgame is to defeat “woke policies” that teach kids thoughtfulness toward others. Among the curricula on the chopping block: health, history, civics, art, sex education, social studies, anything that hints of condoning the LGBTQ+ lifestyle, and everything acknowledging the world outside of America, such as learning French.
“Everything’s on the table,” says Renacci, “except detention and football, of course.”
As he envisions it, the new Ohio school will fall “somewhere between that Nazi homeschooling network and Season 1 of the Handmaid’s Tale.” At its center will be a “Constitutional curriculum” allowing students to learn in a way our Founding Fathers intended. They’ll receive practical instruction on how to churn butter, start their own cabbage farms, and how to use leeches to treat dysentery.
Yet critics say the plan will render kids all but unemployable. “Duh,” says Renacci, annoyed at such an obvious question. But if he can reverse his plunging career trajectory by becoming the “Ron DeSantis of Ohio, I’m perfectly happy to sacrifice thousands of children.”
Indeed, the Wadsworth pol has nowhere to go but up.
After spending eight years on the junior varsity in the U.S. House, Renacci threw it all away to challenge Democrat Sherrod Brown in the 2018 Senate race. He somehow managed to lose in a state that often confuses itself for Mississippi. He then took on RINO establishment Gov. Mike DeWine in last spring’s Republican gubernatorial primary, getting smoked by 20 points.
Renacci has since been reduced to chairman of the Medina County Republican Party, a post usually granted to whoever doesn’t call in fake-sick to the meetings. He now spends his days tweeting photos of gas stoves in awkward attempts to own the libs.
Renacci admits that destroying schools may be his last chance to reclaim the limelight. Yet he remains confident.
He sees Ohio as ripe for grandstanding. In Iowa, school board members post photos of bullets under the caption of “freedom seeds.” In Florida, they’re banning books about penguins due to homosexual content. Yet in Ohio, this mother lode of grandstanding opportunities is going to waste.
Yes, the state is driving away teachers at an alarming rate. And, yes, school board meetings are devolving into rousing sessions of runaway imbecility. “But everybody’s doing that,” Renacci whines. “You can’t make headlines by just threatening to kill a teacher’s dog anymore.”
He points to DeSantis, who’s turned the Florida governor’s office into a factory for exploiting the culture wars. Not a day goes by without a book on a baseball legend being banned. Or a teacher fired for tweeting photos of empty library shelves.
It’s proven so successful that intentionally making kids stupid is now the surest path to the Republican presidential nomination. And that has Renacci thinking big.
He foresees school board members brawling over what the Bible says about driver’s ed. Graduates only qualified to twirl signs outside phone stores. Entire districts wracked by diphtheria outbreaks after banning vaccines.
Renacci concedes his plan may prove costly to Ohio, driving families to Michigan and repelling businesses from locating here. Yet he believes voters are more than willing to sacrifice if it means rescuing a has-been congressman from hurtling toward obscurity.
Coming soon: Cleveland Scene Daily newsletter. We’ll send you a handful of interesting Cleveland stories every morning. Subscribe now to not miss a thing.
Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
This article appears in Mar 8-21, 2023.
