There’s good news from Idaho! Boise-based computer chip manufacturer Micron Technology announced this month it’s opening a new memory chip design center that will create 500 new high-paying jobs.

There’s bad news for Idaho, too. The jobs will be in Atlanta, Georgia. Micron told AP the design center will give it an opportunity to attract technical talent from a large and diverse student population in Atlanta.

Meanwhile a powerful right-wing lobbying group revealed plans to cut $20 million in 2022 from Idaho’s higher education budget. “Our public schools are grotesque and adding more money is not going to solve the problem,” said Idaho Freedom Foundation president Wayne Hoffman in a speech early this month.

Actually, more money may help. Idaho pays its teachers poorly compared to surrounding states, and teacher starting pay is rising only slowly here.

Hoffman’s pronouncement is no empty threat, though. A dozen of his most ardent supporters convinced a narrow majority of House members to vote down Idaho’s education budget this year. They were swayed by a lie, a false claim that at Boise State University a professor was discussing with students a controversial intellectual movement that seeks to explain why racial injustice persists in America.

That deception by far-right conservatives managed to hold the entire legislature hostage and delay adjournment this year, at your expense, by the way, until a bill was passed making it illegal to even discuss in a classroom what wasn’t being taught at BSU.

The rest of the ransom for the right-wing was that Idaho’s higher education budget was slashed by $2.5 million.

The lie was started when the Idaho House took up a bill to accept a $6 million grant from the Trump administration to increase early childhood education in this state. Legislators were told a lie that pre-kindergarten students were being brainwashed in their public school pre-K classes. That’s all it took for the House to vote to refuse the money.

Eventually cooler heads prevailed and the $6 million grant was accepted. The damage, though, had been done. A false message that Idaho education is really publicly funded indoctrination stuck.

From Micron’s perspective, “A well-funded educational system is essential to maintaining our workforce and necessary to our team members and their families,” executive April Arnzen told the Associated Press (AP) this month. Micron has close links to educational programs for business and economics and for materials research at Boise State University. “Continued attacks on our universities and community colleges make it harder to develop an effective workforce pipeline,” said Arnzen.

An Idaho business group group told AP lack of support for education by the Idaho legislature is “very discouraging.” Rod Gramer, president of the advocacy group Idaho Business for Education said, “I think it’s very harmful to our state. Not just our business community, but for our future as a state and our economy and our quality of life.”

Will the IFF lackeys come out of the chute spouting some new bunch of malarkey to seek headlines and deter progress in the legislature during the session that starts in January? That’s hard to say. That it will be an election year and that free publicity will be a goal are certain, though.

It’s unlikely that the attack on early childhood education and the cut to funding at BSU were spontaneous operations. They had all the appearances of strategies carefully planned in advance.

The important question is what will the far-right assault on public education look like in Boise in 2022?

Dave Finkelnburg is a long-time Idahoan, a former newspaper journalist, and is currently semi-retired from an engineering career.