Are after-action “process stories” in high-profile news sites like Politico and Cal Matters being used to spread disinformation about AB 715 and California Jews?
It sure looks possible.
At least two recent process stories can be seen restating demonstrably false and misleading information fed to them through seductive quotes by opponents of Assembly Bill 715, the recently enacted California civil rights law requiring that Jewish students be protected in California K–12 public schools.
A charitable interpretation would be that reporters and editors are just busy people making ordinary human mistakes.
But a less credulous interpretation would be that they’re being manipulated in an effort to overturn the legislation.
You’ll have to judge this for yourself.
Two stories don’t make a trend, but when I started looking into the more outrageous claims in Politico’s and Cal Matters’ stories, I found such whoppers I decided to start fact-checking some of the other crazy claims being passed along to readers.
And good grief, Charlie Brown. It’s enough to drive a person to drink gin straight out of Snoopy’s supper bowl.
1. Questionable claims from Lara Kiswani /Arab Resource and Organizing Center
There were two questionable declarations made by Lara Kiswani, executive director of Arab Resource and Organizing Center, or AROC, in Politico’s recap story on the passage of AB 715. There, Kiswani states that she and her organization repeatedly tried but failed to obtain a meeting with the bill’s authors, claiming they were “given the runaround.” She also describes an attention-grabbing P.R. stunt she said AROC did, delivering little stuffed teddy bears to all the authors’ and co-authors’ offices with a guilt-inducing message around their little furry necks.
Kiswani is well-known in Sacramento, so the idea of legislators simply ignoring her seemed unlikely.
As executive director of the mysteriously well-funded AROC and its political lobbying arm, AROC Action, Lara Kiswani has become Politico’s go-to interview in its stories about antisemitism in California (spoiler alert: she’s in favor). She’s grown up in the public eye, from a poised young, self-professed campus “Jew-hater” (her own words) through her battles fighting any mention of Jews or our unbroken connection to our indigenous ancestral homeland in California’s K–12 ethnic studies curriculum, to her current role as a national leader in the campaign of societal subversion playing out through large-scale gatherings such as the People’s Conference for Palestine. She’s come a long way over the last two years since she coordinated her first campaign of antisemitic student rallies in San Francisco public high schools — just 11 days after the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel.
I reached out to the offices of all the bill’s authors to confirm her story. I was not surprised to learn that nothing in her quotes was verifiable.
No emails. No meeting requests. Also no teddy bears.
Why would Kiswani make up such an absurd and easily disproven statement to these reporters?
Whatever her reasoning, here’s what’s not in dispute.
On Sept. 10, Kiswani showed up at the Senate Education Committee hearing at the Capitol with a battalion of hundreds of uniformed and keffiyeh-clad combatants against AB 715. This mass mobilization clearly signaled an intent to menace and intimidate — and it worked.
Given her penchant for tall tales, you have to wonder why Politico keeps coming back to her for quotes.
2. An antisemitism coordinator would just be a secret puppet master, pulling strings outside of public view
The second and ugliest claim in the coverage of AB 715 is the notion that a statewide coordination in an Office of Civil Rights, together with other designated legal coordinators, would somehow advantage California’s Jewish students and put the state’s thumb on the scale for the Jews.
The only way to make this claim with a straight face is to avoid knowing the scale of the antisemitism crisis in California schools (and maybe to have avoided reading the text of the bill).
At this moment, the backlog of antisemitism cases being appealed at the California Department of Education (CDE) is so large they might never finish clearing it.
Some of the wildest reversals of district decisions can be read about here, here, here, and here, in case you’re wondering whether antisemitism is out of control in public schools.
Attorney General Rob Bonta’s 2025 annual Hate Crime in California Report provides the data.
As they show, religiously motivated hate crimes in California have risen dramatically over the last two years. Of these offenses, 76 percent have been anti-Jewish — almost 13 times the number of anti-Islamic (Muslim) hate crimes (which, by contrast, have dropped by 40 percent over the same period).
Tiny minority. Majority of hate crimes.
Unfortunately, school district investigators (even in diverse regions) have been ill-equipped and ill-supported to investigate antisemitism cases properly — hence, the avalanche of appeals at the CDE.
That’s why AB 715 creates an antisemitism coordinator (and other technical legal coordinators) who can advise and provide legal guidance to overworked school district investigators who lack familiarity with the nuances.
The idea that properly staffing the state to support school districts in combating antisemitism is simply more antisemitism.
3. But what about K–12 teachers’ “academic free speech rights”?
The third claim is in many ways the most disappointing given how clear the law is. It has to do with what reporters keep calling “academic free speech” in K–12 classrooms.
It’s disappointing because anybody with a passing familiarity with education law can see that these reporters are being played.
The silliest quote comes in the Cal Matters story from Assemblyman Robert Garcia, a freshman Democratic lawmaker from Rancho Cucamonga and a former teacher and school board member who really ought to have known better.
Why are leading publications repeating such absurd and easily disproven statements?
You can practically hear him bang his shoe on the podium. “In its current form, this bill only reinforces broader national trends of silencing constitutionally protected speech, erasing historically relevant curriculum, and persecuting anyone who expresses even the slightest opposition to the federal administration.”
Unfortunately, this position not only misrepresents what AB 715 actually requires, it also fails to grasp the difference between university-level free speech rights and K–12 public school teachers’ restrictions.
That’s because unlike college and university professors, public school teachers in California simply don’t have unlimited free speech rights in our classrooms.
K–12 teacher free speech? Not a thing.
As Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard C. Tallman puts it in his foundational opinion on the appeal in Johnson v. Poway Unified School District:
We consider whether a public school district infringes the First Amendment liberties of one of its teachers when it orders him not to use his public position as a pulpit from which to preach his own views … to the captive students in his … classroom. The answer is clear: it does not.
When … [a high school teacher] goes to work and performs the duties he is paid to perform, he speaks not as an individual, but as a public employee, and the school district is free to ‘take legitimate and appropriate steps to ensure that its message is neither garbled nor distorted.’ Rosenberger v. Rector & Visitors of the Univ. of Va., 515 U.S. 819, 833 (1995).
Just as the Constitution would not protect [the teacher] were he to decide that he no longer wished to teach math at all, preferring to discuss Shakespeare rather than Newton, it does not permit him to speak as freely at work in his role as a teacher … as he might on a sidewalk, in a park, at his dinner table, or in countless other locations.
How could this be any clearer? When teachers go to work, our speech is considered government speech and is therefore accorded no First Amendment protections.
Period.
If you’re not willing to accept these restrictions, then you shouldn’t accept a public school teaching job — not unless you’re willing to risk both your employment and your teaching license.
Imposing your own preferred narrative on captive students is not education, it’s indoctrination — a reality so obvious that even the members of their own movement can’t resist admitting it out loud at public meetings.
All three of these failures of fact-checking make it clear that we need stronger education reporting and less reflexive headline-chasing in the fourth-largest economy in the world.
AB 715 is breakthrough educational civil rights legislation. Educators who insist on secretly or selectively violating the civil rights of disfavored ethnic groups pose a threat to public education for everyone.
Through their failures of fact-checking, these stories also show why Jewish self-determination cannot be negotiated or reported from behind the scenes. And in their moral blind spots, these publications collude with the real existential threats democracy is facing — making them a dismal failure of our free press.