I’ve been making my way through your emails about school board activism in your various necks of the woods. And I have to say, keep them coming, if for no other reason than the immense entertainment value. But seriously, for many other reasons too. I’m digging into them and trying to figure out which ones to report out first. But there are a few points that stand out in advance of that.

One of those points is something I’m half being reminded of, half learning, which is that there was a pretty big backlash against “anti-woke” school boards in 2023. It’s not universal, certainly. But it’s not just the story out of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, I’ve been telling you about for the last few days. There are examples all over the country. (I’ll be coming back to Bucks. Holy Crap, there’s a lot.) This morning I’ve just been reading up on one in a very backwoods part of Idaho, the West Bonner County School District. A lot of the same stuff: a bunch of freaks get washed in in 2021. They do all the anti-woke stuff and other stuff that’s more about just being against public education generally. There’s a successful recall, but not before the board brings in a new superintendent who is a former state legislator whose career went south when it turned out he might not actually live in the state. (Really.) The bigger problem is that Branden Durst had no background in education and didn’t even have the minimal accreditation the state requires for superintendents. He hung on for like three months before he had to resign. That was back in September.

As you can see, I’ve become very interested in the crazy story of “Cool Mom” Clarice Schillinger who seems to have been both a big time anti-woke/protect the kids activist while also hosting teen keggers on the side and sometimes going off and beating the crap out of the kids. But as I’ve learned over the last few days, there’s a fascinating and, from what I can tell, wildly crooked story about the Central Bucks School Board that goes way beyond her.

First, a bit of background detail: Doylestown is the metropolis of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and some of my interest in the story is that I know the place. Between vacations and summers and random stints I probably spent the better part of 4 to 6 months there during and after college. Or, to be super precise, in Furlong, Pennsylvania, an incorporated something-or-other right next to Doylestown. Also, in yesterday’s post I said that Aarati Martino, the wife of Paul Martino, the VC who has funded a lot of school board activism in Pennsylvania, had lost her school board seat in the Dem backlash in 2023. Not so. She lost her election. She was one of the anti-wokist candidates. But she wasn’t an incumbent — just a candidate.

Now let’s get down to business and discuss the super sleazy sweetheart deal, shall we? Excellent.

I wanted to catch you up on some new news about Clarice Schillinger, the anti-woke mom activist at the heart of a lot of school board pressure campaigns in Pennsylvania, especially in Bucks County, which is north of Philadelphia. On Sunday I flagged this totally over-the-top story about how Schillinger, her then-boyfriend and her mom had all been charged with beating the crap out of various teenagers they’d served alcohol to at a boozy birthday party she threw for her seventeen-year-old daughter. Schillinger allegedly punched one sixteen year old in the face three times as he and his friends were trying to leave the party and Schillinger was ordering them to stay. There are reportedly at least two cell phone videos of the assaults, one of which shows Schillinger lunging toward a group of teens and having to be restrained as the teens flee the home.

Now it turns out it wasn’t the first time cops had been called out to one of Schillinger’s teen keggers.

Since this will be the final Backchannel of 2023, I want to devote it to a note of thanks as we go into the new year. 2023 was the first full year of The Backchannel. We launched it at the end of 2022, and it is a members-only newsletter. So I’m writing to you as the members who make TPM not only possible but vital: Thank you.

I noted on Tuesday that, for whatever reason, I’m feeling a relative optimism about the 2024 election. That leads me to speculate: what happens after Trump? I don’t think I’m getting ahead of myself. The question is important and illuminating even if Trump isn’t done with us. Because it goes to the heart of what exactly the Republican Party is today.

It is a commonplace and an accurate one to say that the Republican Party is Donald Trump. When we referenced this yesterday while recording our podcast, Kate Riga reminded us of the party’s 2020 decision to scrap its entire party platform and replace it with, simply, whatever Donald Trump wants. It made sense: the party is Donald Trump. The rest is just fine print, which Trump can make up or change whenever he wants.

I’ve reading up on those end-of-the-year “what the year meant” columns. 2023 was the year of this; 2023 was the year when that happened. You know the genre. It’s a silly exercise since years aren’t about anything. Or to the extent they are it’s all but impossible for those of us living through them to make any sense of what it might be. But it’s still an interesting canvas onto which people paint an experienced moment. To me it was the year when people seemed to settle into, get comfy with the idea that our present is one of never-ending terribles. Put differently, it was the year that many of you decided that the annus horribilis of 2016 was not a comically bad demolition derby of years or a bad year with several relatedly bad years following it but simply the arrival of a new normal.

(Don’t worry. This post gets better! Follow me after the jump.)

We’ve been around the block many times on this question of why Joe Biden is unpopular, whether he’s a weak candidate, whether some other Democrat should replace him, etc. My general take has been that we should be clear with ourselves that it is basically an academic point because Biden will be the nominee. Recently, one of the numbers analysts I follow on Twitter, Lakshya Jain, pointed me to the actual poll data showing that none of the apparently attractive national Democratic possibilities do any better than Biden. Indeed, he seems to do a bit better, if not by a huge amount.

Over the last three months many Democrats have gotten accustomed to seeing absolutely abysmal presidential poll numbers and reacting in one of two ways. Either they slip into despair or they wall off the information on the reasoning that we’re almost a year out from the election and the numbers have limited meaning so far in advance. There was a period in the middle months of the year when Biden was a bit ahead of Trump or the two were roughly tied and then starting in the fall Trump appeared to move meaningfully, though still only marginally, ahead. But something odd happened this week. It illustrated a few points about the ways in which polls operate, how they’re interpreted and what meaning we can draw from them.

Let me briefly address this Colorado disqualification issue. Does it apply and should it apply to ex-President Donald Trump, disqualifying him from serving again as President?

Before delving into the constitutional text, let’s discuss how we should think about this issue, because there’s a lot going on here besides the plain text of the 14th Amendment. Criticisms that I hear are that barring Trump from the ballot is simply undemocratic. Trump has many supporters and they should be allowed to vote for him. At least in the abstract, good point. Another is that attempting to disqualify Trump and barring him from the ballot may actually help him, allowing him to play the victim and, perversely, to wear the mantle of democratic legitimacy.

In yesterday’s Backchannel I wrote about the three Israeli hostages shot and killed by members of the IDF in Gaza and some more general observations about the IDF and the situation in Gaza. I’d now like to dig on in the fate of the remaining hostages.

Put simply, I’m pessimistic about any more deals to release hostages currently being held by Hamas. It’s very unlikely they will all be released as part of any deal. I base this on the totality of information I’ve learned since October 7th.

Here’s why.