Tom Richey, a teacher in Anderson, S.C., is hesitant to call the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol an insurrection when he’s in his classroom.
“If a teacher were to come into a mostly Republican community talking about the January 6 insurrection, that’s a politically charged term,” Richey says, though the 2023 report by the bipartisan House Select Committee charged with investigating the violence refers to it as such. “I don’t approve of anything that happened on January 6, but I think for a teacher to use in a classroom setting would be unnecessarily partisan and inappropriate.”
