The black bars obscuring children’s faces within the article were added by the author. The photos are otherwise untouched from the state they were discovered in.
For over a decade, one family has served as the default image for homeschooling in publications across the political spectrum. The most common photo, a mother homeschooling two of her children at the kitchen table, has been used as a banner in dozens of articles, with additional photos from the series appearing in outlets across the globe.
The photos originate from a 2011 MSNBC article, “Homeschoolers Emerge as Republican Foot Soldiers”, which profiled a collection of Iowa Homeschoolers and their intense support for competing Republican primary candidates. One family, their old school bus turned Ron Paul float, spent a day with a photographer, who captured their life as a homeschooling family in a series of candid photos.
That photographer, Brian C. Frank, told me that afterward he licensed the full series to Reuters, where the wire service’s subscribers could use the photos, with credit, in their publications. Homeschooling as a private enterprise by nature has little material available for newsrooms to represent the topic visually. This set of images has often been the de facto first stop for journalists in need of a cover photo for their homeschooling articles.
Ghosts in the Machine idk it’s a dogshit heading write your senator
After enough articles, I began to notice the repeating photos, and eventually put together that the children in them were from the same family. The outlets were printing a family frozen in time, but the father has been maintaining a website since the mid-2000s, a timeline for anyone with a passing curiosity to find.
The website was assembled in a mid-2000s site builder and never renovated from its mint-green background and hover-swap GIF buttons. But the homepage greeting visitors today doesn’t hide that something is wrong. An index on the side lists a page for each of the children and their father, David. In the center is a family portrait; his wife and one of ten kids are blurred away. A caption on the front page reads:
[Wife] and [Child] have requested their images be removed from this website. I have attempted to honor their request respectfully.
The site contains over 100 photos of the family, but in every one that includes his wife or their third child, their figures vanish into the background. On a page dedicated to the “Constitutional Coach” are photos of the family in front of the Ron Paul-themed bus, his wife and child’s presence evaporating above the torso.
“Our family has been heavily supportive of Dr. Paul and I will work as hard as practically possible to relay the foundational principals [sic] of constitutionally limited government and traditional family values as a means of restoring America,” said education choice advocate David [Lastname], father of eight homeschooled children and a “Homeschoolers for Ron Paul” national advisory board member.
According to the Wayback Machine, the caption on the homepage noting his wife’s and child’s request was added sometime between August 2018 and January 2021. However, the metadata embedded within every altered photo gives a nearly complete timeline of the day the website changed.
The free photo-editing software left a record of each file’s mutation as it occurred. On the morning of Monday, June 29, 2020, David sat down at a Windows computer, opened GIMP 2.10.20, and began scrubbing his wife and child from the website. At 10:28 they disappeared from the homepage portrait. At 10:32 he removed his wife from the couple’s portrait underneath. Two and a half hours later he began again, steadily cutting their shapes away over the next hour.
What was once a corny yet still charming relic of the early internet age has curdled into a shrine to the living. His youngest child is listed at six months old, placing the last update (besides the erasures) in early 2017. Four days after that Christmas his wife filed for divorce.1
A line on the homepage reads, “come back often to see any updates.”
Five months into the divorce, the proceedings still underway, David posted a celebration of their 25th wedding anniversary. A comment from one of the children’s partners reads:
If you count years of emotional and psychological abuse, manipulation, isolation, control, narcissistic tactics and cheating as “love” then yes job well done. How about an apology? To your wife? Who stood by you for years bearing your children and rising up as you tore her down every day with your words and actions. To your grown and younger sons? Who now have had the example you gave them for their own future families? How are they supposed to treat their wives and children? To your daughters? How are they supposed to know how to find a loving husband? You have successfully destroyed your marriage. So i don’t understand what you are calling “love”. All you need to be thinking about is how you bad you messed up and what you can be doing to make it better. Also, you’re not even trying to fix it. What kind of man lets his family fall apart and doesn’t try everything in his power to make it better?
David’s wife and two of their children endorsed the comment.2
Join the Ron Paul Revolution
Homeschool children are often unwitting advertisements for a movement that routinely attacks their very interests. As a movement, Homeschooling resists the intrusion of government into private life and the dependence it breeds. David knew both halves of that creed—the state as enemy to liberty, his wife and children her weapons.
I am 37 year old Christian husband and home school father of 8 children. We live on a small farm in Iowa. Doctor Paul cured my apathy. Now, our whole family greatly enjoys spreading the message of liberty and freedom through Constitutional government. Our older children make phone calls and pass out Ron Paul literature while the younger children help decorate, dress-up and ride in our parade floats for Ron Paul.
But David had known the intrusiveness of the state before the Paul campaign. Fifteen years before the Reuters photoshoot, the state of Iowa pursued David for reimbursement to its Family Investment Program (FIP).
For three months in 1995 he lived apart from his eldest child, during which the state supported the child on his behalf. If a child receives FIP benefits due to an absentee parent, the state requires the absent parent to repay that money. When David did not return the funds, the state sued, and later compelled him to turn over his financial records after he refused to do so. The judge eventually ordered him to repay the $802 in child support and $101 of court fees, and he cleared his debt over the next sixteen months.3
The family that lives on David’s website never existed, but he does not know that. In the end, his website became a reflection of the movement’s natural condition: when reality and the image invented in its head cannot be reconciled, those who compromise it are erased.∎
Iowa Courts Online, Electronic Docket Record - Warren County, Iowa
Trust me, bro
Iowa Courts Online, Electronic Docket Record - Dallas County, Iowa