Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) President Rick Esenberg at a news conference at the Statehouse in Madison, Wis., Wednesday, July 31, 2019. (AP Photo/Scott Bauer)

The city of Kiel is in one of the more conservative parts of the state of Wisconsin. The roughly 4,000-person city is located in the area east of Lake Winnebago, about a 30 to 40-minute drive to cities like Sheboygan, Manitowoc or Fond du Lac. There’s a lot of cheese production in this part of the state. 

As of late, though, Kiel has been home to one of the most heated culture wars in the political hotbed of Wisconsin. But it appears the fever might be starting to break. 

Flash back to last spring, when news of a Title IX investigation at Kiel Middle School made shockwaves. It ripped through conservative media, igniting a massive controversy that eventually led to the school closing in-person classes for the final weeks of the school year and the city canceling its Memorial Day Parade. There were six bomb threats in nine days at several local institutions in Kiel. A man was arrested for threatening to kill a staff member at the school. This was really, really bad.

The investigation that sparked the chaos was said to be over claims of sexual harassment, specifically, over three boys who are students using the wrong pronouns when addressing a transgender student who uses they/them pronouns. 

You can guess how that was received on the right. 

But the story being told through conservative media was a distorted depiction, a clear misinformation campaign. An incomplete narrative about this controversial investigation was built and pushed to conservative media by the hyper-litigious far-right group, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL). 

Reporter Mario Koran of Wisconsin Watch has exhaustively detailed what happened in Kiel. And in an in-depth report published in July 2022, attorney Luke Berg of WILL admitted on the record that their group had withheld details of the investigation when the narrative of the story was pushed to conservative media outlets like Newsmax and Laura Ingraham of Fox News. 

Berg and WILL’s president, Rick Esenberg, even penned an op-ed on the matter for the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, with the headline, “The Progressive Pronoun Police Come for Middle Schoolers.” In the piece, they threatened a federal lawsuit if the boys they were representing were punished by the school. 

The story blew up. Libs of TikTok got into the mix. Things spiraled into those death threats and bomb threats and cancellations and chaos. One parent told Koran, “It feels like we’ve been hijacked by something bigger than Kiel.”

But that something bigger that hijacked Kiel was not based on the full story. The misgendering was only part of what led to the investigation. Here’s what Koran later reported for Wisconsin Watch:

“A Kiel music teacher’s report flagged four or five incidents between the boys and the transgender student, Berg said. Rose Rabidoux, the mother of one of the accused boys, added that the teacher documented incidents across multiple days, not an isolated conversation in class. She acknowledged that one of the boys once “lashed out” and threw food at the transgender student — none of which was revealed in initial media interviews.”

Clearly, there was much more to this investigation than a single instance of a few boys being jerks and misgendering a fellow student. There was a pattern of harassment that seems to have warranted an investigation from the school (an investigation that was eventually shut down in the wake of the controversy). 

WILL’s incomplete narrative about this incident should call into question the legitimacy of any argument pushed by this ubiquitous conservative organization, and others like them. At the very least, it should certainly call into question the validity of the broader anti-transgender effort in Wisconsin that WILL is at the center of, and that is permeating state after state. 

We can now see that it WILL that actively fueled an anti-trans panic that brought chaos to this small Wisconsin city. They are responsible for starting this culture war fire. 

But now, in 2023, things appear to be shifting once again. This latest chapter in the saga unfolding in Kiel is a story of a community that has just had it with the conservative culture war in their schools. 

Koran’s latest Wisconsin Watch report, first published on Jan. 24, details a tense situation where right-wing members of the Kiel School Board — associated with a group called Tri-County Citizens for Education, which had pushed back against school programs on racial equity and LGBTQ+ rights in recent years, eventually flipping the majority of board — tried to oust the superintendent, Brad Ebert. 

But instead of capitulating to the whims of this group, members of the community pushed back. Dozens of residents spoke out in favor of the superintendent, and the meeting ended with Ebert keeping his job and two board members aligned with Tri-County Citizens for Education resigning. 

One parent who spoke in favor of the superintendent told Koran, “I can say without hesitation I am one of many who would have remained quiet if these extremists hadn’t started spewing defamatory filth against our teachers and librarians.”

People are growing tired of the culture war. Even in a conservative community like Kiel, there is such a thing as going too far. They went too far here. 

WILL deserves more scrutiny than it has received over this ordeal. What it did was frighteningly reckless. The panic they sparked in Kiel should be held up as a cautionary tale of what happens when the right takes the culture war far too far. People need to remember this affair the next time WILL, or a group like them, makes claims like this.

And the right at large is simply going too far in their targeting of marginalized people and in their anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and actions. It’s beyond unacceptable. Their specific targeting of transgender individuals is sickening. People deserve to be safe and respected for simply being themselves. 

There’s a lesson to be learned from what happened here. Things got too real for people in Kiel. The teachers and librarians being attacked weren’t abstractions conjured up by a hateful conservative media. They were people in their community living their lives and doing their best. 

There are real-life consequences to fueling an out-of-control culture war. 

“We hope Kiel is an outlier, but it may not be,” Esenberg and Berg wrote in their WSJ op-ed. Let’s hope they, and the groups like them, don’t make it so that what happened in Kiel is commonplace.

Dan Shafer is a journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle Business Magazine, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and BizTimes Milwaukee. He’s also written for The Daily Beast, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He’s won 13 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.