Hornbeck is a postdoctoral research fellow of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas at Arlington.
When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision that struck down segregated public schooling, white Southern politicians responded to the decision with ferocity.
Although preservation of states' rights was at the heart of their resistance claims, it was the racist practice of segregation that they sought to uphold.
Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia declared the ruling "the most serious blow that has yet been struck against the rights of the states." Thomas P. Brady, Mississippi circuit judge and future state Supreme Court justice, called the day of the ruling "Black Monday." Brady also claimed that racial integration was a communist plot to unify the country around one common culture.
Over 100 Southern House and Senate members signed a Southern Manifesto, vowing to stop school integration in what Byrd called a "massive resistance." The governor of Virginia, Thomas Manley, appointed a commission to explore legal options in the wake of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. The Gray Commission, as it was known, recommended that no child in Virginia "be required to attend a school wherein both white and colored children are taught."
I don't bring up this Southern resistance to federal mandates that affect U.S. schools merely to recount history. As a researcher who focuses on the role of federalism in U.S. education, I believe this resistance helps shine light on why several Southern states today are pushing back against federal guidance for teachers and students to wear masks in schools to lessen the risks of contracting the more dangerous delta variant of Covid-19.
Defiance in spite of risks
In late July 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and President Biden recommended students wear masks in schools to protect themselves and others from Covid-19.
Subsequently, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order that banned schools in the state from requiring masks, claiming that the masks are unproven to be effective and might cause harm to children. The governors of Texas and Arizona took similar measures, leaving schools, concerned parents, teachers and vulnerable students few options and with little time before the school year began to decide how to respond. The Texas legislature is considering legislation that would make public mask requirements illegal.
A history of resistance
Southern states ignoring federal educational guidance is not new.
For instance, rather than integrate schools, Virginia elected to close many school districts and instead offer white students vouchers to attend private schools. The state legislature enabled this in 1956, when it passed laws that stripped local school boards of their power and put it in the hands of committees appointed by the governor.
When Lindsey Almond took over as governor of Virginia in 1957, he warned that integrated schools would lead to the "livid stench of sadism, sex, immorality, and juvenile pregnancy" that he claimed existed in nearby Washington's integrated school system.
Other acts of resistance
In Mississippi, things were little different than in Virginia. Gov. Hugh White thought that he might avoid integration by convincing Black residents to voluntarily agree to continue segregation. He promised more money for schools. He met with 90 Black leaders and asked for voluntary segregation. The plan failed when only one person at the meeting agreed to the proposal. As a result, the governor called a special session of the state legislature.
The legislature passed a bill that led to the closure of public schools in the state. Public schools would be mostly private and segregated. It took 16 years for Mississippi schools to comply with the Brown decision and fully integrate.
Other states resisted integration in similar ways, with various policies that privatized public schools, leading to the modern civil rights movement. The civil rights movement opened the door for a larger federal government role in educational policy. The Justice Department has the authority to investigate and prosecute schools under the Title IX provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that mandates civil rights protection for students.
Fight against federal government continues
Fast forward to 2021 and governors and lawmakers in states such as Florida, Texas and Arizona are clamoring with a similar states' rights argument as their predecessors.
Like Virginia and Mississippi in the 1950s, these states are attempting to undermine federal intervention in schools. The U.S. Constitution creates a federal system where the national government shares power with states. Any power not explicitly listed in the Constitution is left to the states, per the 10th Amendment. As a result, educational policy is largely left to the states, so long as civil rights are protected.
Within states, power is shared with local governments in whatever way state constitutions and law decide. DeSantis has threatened retaliation against schools who defy his order by cutting superintendent salaries. Yet, a state judge stopped his order. DeSantis claims that he will win on appeal.
Texas and Arizona officials have threatened consequences, such as loss of funding and lawsuits, to school districts that mandate masks. Threatening localities with retaliation did not prevent the eventual integration of schools in the South. Considering that local school districts are following federal health guidance, threats from governors to browbeat localities into submission have stirred community outrage from parents and lawsuits from concerned citizens.
Nevertheless, federalism makes power-sharing between the states and federal government complicated. The Constitution gives states the power to create their own educational and health policies, but the federal government can enforce civil rights laws in schools, making educational policy political whether people like it or not.
This is why, on Aug. 30, 2021, the U.S. Department of Education announced that it would investigate whether statewide mask bans deny civil rights to students with disabilities.
Like school integration in the past, policies that require or encourage masks have become the new arena for the ongoing American argument about Southern states' rights.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.