My nemesis invited me to Tim Pool's show

What was I thinking when I agreed to go deep in the woods with people who want my neck?

Last Monday, I got a private message in my Twitter DMs that was allegedly from Tim Pool's staff.

Here is the message:

April 12th, The Culture War is having Corey DeAngelis come on to talk about school choice. Any chance you would be interested in joining him? We film live from Tim's Knoxville MD studio from 10am-12pm and would arrange your travel. Please let me know if you are interested.

I say "allegedly" because Tim Pool has a giant media platform on YouTube with 1.3 million followers and enough paying - primarily conservative - subscribers to make him a millionaire. He's among the most successful culture warriors that many of you outside of the right-wing media bubble have never heard of.

I am a recently blue-pilled ex-libertarian who advocates our county's most unsexy issue: education.

Why on Earth would they invite me?

I agreed to join them without thinking about it. Tim’s team quickly arranged travel, ground transportation, and lodging in a part of the country I'd never heard of.

My mind was preoccupied during the week with the details of an important board meeting so my cognitive load was too full to think about the appearance on Tim's show until I was on my way there on Thursday. Then I got nervous. Not only was I unprepared, but I also had a sinking feeling that I could be walking into an ambush.

The other guest, Corey DeAngelis, was a school choice evangelist with the American Federation of Children. Corey and I were once very closely aligned in our politics—we were school choice bros. I always saw him as a likable and talented guy—a real star in our league.

We broke company after a private phone conversation regarding the backroom plan to sell choice as a solution for white suburban moms to get their kids away from the diversity of public schools. Back then, he assured me he was still down with promoting a neutral version of school choice, but a few FOX News appearances changed that. Suddenly, he was going for the throat of "wokeness."

We haven't been friendly since.

Another reason to worry it was a trap: I've been the target of an active cancellation campaign since I've become more critical of the Education Savings Account (ESA) programs emerging in red states. I was dropped from advisory boards, uninvited to meetings and events, removed from chat threads, taken off panels, denied membership in supposedly neutral organizations, and cut off even by the OBEs (One Black Employee) of the "choice" organizations who tweet out glossy memes of happy black parents. At the same time, they're on their way to all-white meetings with people crafting laws to stop black kids from reading black books.

There is a price to pay for moral growth. I don’t mind paying.

Enter Tim Pool's Compound

The compound where Tim records and streams is so far in the woods that no airport is nearby. They sent a driver who picked me up and drove me through Virginia and Maryland's areas lined with charming little brick houses (and some big ones) built in the 1700s. When I told the driver this looked like the beginning of a horror movie - think, "Get Out" - he said, "Or a Hallmark movie. It looked like both. It could be the scene of a romance or a crime.

There were few signs of life near the Travelodge where they booked my room. Being out there, alone, Black, and uncertain about the terrain, was eery. There was no lobby or front desk. Check-in was in the diner connected to the hotel. My first impression was a good one. It was an old-fashioned diner with everything you might expect on a diner menu. When it came to my room, I thought my bougie alarms would go off, but my room was spotless and comfortable. The place was nice.

Corey was in the car with his wife when the driver picked me up the next morning. There was zero animosity. It was chill. We’ve had terse Twitter exchanges, so this was cool. I congratulated team DeAngelis on their marriage, and they hit me with the news that they were expecting their first baby. The quickest way to disarm me is to tell me that. Knowing that you are in that life-changing stage melts my exterior completely. I sometimes like the photos of my biggest enemies when they post baby pictures on social media because ill-will is no match for that blessing.

The four of us rode together through narrow, curvy roads with mature trees and rural-ish properties until we reached Tim's farm-style campus. The recording studio is the ultimate man cave, with a bar, lounging areas, a pro poker table, and lots of skater and video game artifacts. We had to sign a waiver because, among other liabilities, there is a skate park in the basement.

I was impressed on many levels. This is what success looks like. You know your audience-building and social media game is good when you can afford to build a substantial base camp like theirs.

Lights, cameras, talking points

Once we got into the studio, Tim was polite but brisk. We needed to catch up on getting the stream going. Corey and I took our seats and readied for a two-hour conversation. When the lights went on, we slid into our personas and started chopping it up. I knew little about Tim, but he was a high school dropout who found school tortuous and boring—his time in a Chicago Catholic school somehow left a mark on him that shaped his views about Chicago youth and public schools. I sympathize because I had similar experiences growing up.

Tim gave a damning opening statement about how bad public education is and then asked me point blank if I agreed that public schools "suck."

I said no. He and Corey looked at me like I had just said the Earth isn't round. Of course, we all know "government schools" are terrible.

That was interesting given that according to Wikipedia, Tim never attended public school, and Corey has had a successful public school education from kindergarten to Ph.D.

Of the three of us, I’m the only parent in the room directly connected to the realities of public schools. It’s weird how often I’m arguing about schools with people who are either childless or have kids in well-resourced public schools.

My kids go to conventional district schools, and our experience is closer to the one that produced Corey than Tim. Our public schools are well-appointed with electives and opportunities, including everything from alpine skiing to e-sports, theater and dance, lacrosse and gymnastics, soccer, swimming, and more.

Here’s a quick look:

Before you say my experience is rare in public schools, I’d ask if you honestly believe that. Are people moving to cities, suburbs, and towns with pricey mortgages suffering in education ghettos?

When we attend dance competitions or games, my family gets a look into competing districts. So many are better than ours. If you want, you can pretend all of America attends schools like those in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, but that isn’t the reality for millions of families.

Many of Tim’s followers accused me of being naive. I’m not. I know better than anyone that pro-choice talking points about "the system" and “government schools” are weapons to sell a disaster story about public schools. I used to call them starter prisons. I once said that public schools are so bad that sending kids home with an iPad would teach them more. Then COVID kept our kids at home, and no one trumpeted the need to get kids back in public schools more than conservatives and Republicans.

To be clear, I agree that the quality of our public schools is uneven, stellar in some places, and abysmal in others. Too many children, especially those marginalized by race, poverty, disabilities, and family structure, are too often the victims of malpractice and neglect. Yet, no education sector is untouched by that problem. Every sector has schools that are at the top of the key and others that are below hell.

Our differing opinions on public education

I’ll summarize our positions as follows:

Tim said public schools suck because of his bad experience with them, and this is obviously what most people believe, as evidenced by the number of television shows with bad public schools as a theme.

My point was that my schooling experiences sucked, but in my three decades as a parent, I have kids in a range of schools that weren't perfect but weren't nearly as dire as Tim says. Also, we may think public schools suck, but, there is zero evidence that transferring a bunch of kids into a quality-blind, accountability-free private "market" where anti-CRT folk rule the roost will improve results.

Corey's answer is how giving families complete control over public education funds for their children would solve all our problems. School choice is the best form of accountability and the surest path to the measurements that matter—parent satisfaction. He also showered me with research studies (mostly done by him and the school choice lobby) that show the positive benefits of vouchers and ESAs. However, a fairer reading of the research says academic outcomes are worse under the school choice programs my friends are pushing. Not only that, as currently configured, ESA program data will be purposefully obscured by law, and public money will go to private entities with zero public oversight.

What the educational "freedom" folks are selling us is the Florida model. It’s built on large-scale school choice programs coupled with anti-black, anti-minority educational censorship laws and academic fascism.

If we are serious, we will avoid that culture claptrap and focus on how teaching, learning, curriculum, standards, and data form a coherent education philosophy that can be tracked and improved over time. That’s the real work smart people need to do if the goal is to educate more of America’s children.

I wish we had spent more on-air talking about the apolitical nuts and bolts of education. The culture war has done so much damage to the public debate that we can't be bothered by the science of schooling. Our discussion quickly veered away from talking about education to a bunch of loaded language and bad-faith arguments about trans people, supposedly anti-white racism, and how bad New York is for the country.

Leaving the lair

On Fridays, staff and guests eat together and play poker after Tim's shows. The spread was terrific: sushi plates in bright, beautiful colors, pad thai, fried rice, vegetable stir fry, and so on. Talking to Tim humanizes him. He's intense but funny and conversational. His staff are low-key, accommodating, and pleasant. I'm grateful for seeing the inside operation because I'd hate everything about Tim's politics and platform without an inside look.

Corey and I talked honestly about our differences. We are on different planets now. His is rising; mine is making a home in another galaxy. I think he's dangerous. He thinks I've gone soft. If we aren’t careful, our political objectives will tempt us to slide into hate and enemy imaging, seeing each other as our stereotypes rather than our humanity.

I hope that the arrival of his beautiful, healthy baby this summer expands his soul like it did for me. His wife shared with me a very cool name that they have reserved for the baby. I can’t share that with you, but it’s fantastic.

I'm home now. Tim's large following has savaged me in the comments. Corey has retweeted some of it. We are back in our roles.

It's business, not personal. I guess we all have to hate the sin and not the sinner.

---

Here’s the stream: