School Boards: The New Fashy Frontline, Part 1

by far right activists. And a lot of this is centered around critical race theory, a lot of it centered around vaccine mandates. It all kind of blends together like a good gumbo um or like fascist syncretism UM. One of the things I would say that's that's kind of

most relevant right now as we're recording this. I don't think the race has been officially called, but it's become an increasingly obvious that Uh, Terry mccaulliffe has lost his re election bid and the new governor of Virginia will be a Republican who, among other things, as like promised and based a huge amount of his campaign on banning critical race theory and specifically like banning books and ship

from being taught in Virginia schools UM. And this is all the result of a pretty far reaching UM and and complex and honestly pretty pretty scary campaign. And we're gonna talk about that tonight, Garrison. Do you wanna do you wanna take it from here? Yeah? Yeah, I'll do a little bit then we can move over to telegram. But yeah, you like the getty lee of this. So

so this is your drum solo time. Yeah, we we decided we needed to do an episode on this, Sinnon And later when a few weeks ago, a large number of of of of anti vacts and anti mask protesters UM took over a school board meeting in uh Portland. And the reason why that is special in and of itself because this has been happening across the country for

a long time. But that but the fact that they were able to overwhelm and shut down an entire school board meeting with hundreds of people like invading this building, UM and shutting this down with just the shurement of like power that the people had there was it was It's notable because it's like it's it's a liberal ish city, right, It's that's generally how people view it as. And you know, we're used to this happening, you know, more like southern

states and states that are more like overwhelmingly conservative. But when like a Portland school board meeting get shut down, people were like, oh wow, this is like extra important because this is showing that it's not this isn't isolated to like quote unquote red states, right, this can this can spread out everywhere now, you know. With Portland it was it was a mix of like hippie types who are like anti vax, but there was a good deal

of like actual proud boys there as well. Yes, and it was partly organized through an organization run by the Bundies UM, and there were some direct ties and they helped to advertise it. So it's there's a lot of UM. I mean, one of the things that was so unsettling is that a lot of these people were not Portland's residents, but they were showing up and we're able to effectively like take over and dominate a Portland's school board meeting.

UM in part because law enforcement is never ever willing to do anything against there's there's a there's a lot of a lot of points here so like, yeah, one of it being is like these like these big mobs are definitely able to benefit from being you know, white, mostly middle class like parents and stuff, or maybe not

maybe not not even parents. They're gonna be a white middle class um, which means they can like storm buildings and shut stuff down without any real consequence because police aren't police and security aren't really going to get involved that much, and the like the libs are not gonna like really be pushing back on this in any kind of make fun of these people if they misspell something

on a sign. Yeah. So, like basically the idea for this episode as we want to talk about why and how school boards have become kind of the new front lines for pushing far right stuff into the culturals like guist, because they've really become the new, the new, the new like space that people on the right are able to push things that are that are more that are more extreme, and push things that are gonna you know, hurt you know,

kids mostly m hmm. So looking for this, we put together a decent amount of stuff from organizing chats for how basically the right is talking about these things and

how they're trying to organize it. UM. And one really interesting kind of thing of not which will come up later in the telegram stuff, is that in I think it was when was it it was late September, UM, the National school Boards Associations like that the National school Board Union UM put in a request for federal assistance to stop um ongoing threats and acts of violence against UH school boards like meeting members and people president at

school boards because this has been ramping up. You know this that this was happening the last last school season as well, but really the past few months, the the prevalence and the number of these types of like mobs based overtaking these school boards has become so much more common UM that the school Board Union put in like sent like a letter directly to the president saying, hey,

we kind of need help here. UM. So it's it's not just it's this is this is a problem that's recognized widely even among people like on school boards, because yeah, they're getting like harassed, they're getting death threats. UM. This

is becoming like unsafe to hold school board meetings. UM. And whether or not you like our modern school system or not, the resulting effect of this is that it's gonna be hurting like kids, like like, it's a good whether it be through like COVID, whether it be through teaching them racist like curriculums, or whether it be to you know, making trans kids make their lives a whole lot harder. Right, all of this kind of stuff is gonna be worse by this happening. So it is something

definitely worth caring about. Yeah, it's worth caring about. All It's clearly an attempt in order to to to arrest the kind of progressive tilt that that society has gone through. All of this is a reaction both too. I mean, the religious right was initially, more than anything, a reaction to desegregation and the women's liberation movement UM. And what we're seeing now is a reaction to primarily the gains that LGBT people have made in the last like twenty years,

including the legalization of gay marriage UM. And so the ultimate goal of all of this is to stop progress towards racial justice, to roll back gay rights, UM, to enshrine white supremacy using violence. And that's why, I that's why all of these different school board meanings, like the threat of violence from these people is a constant factor. UM. There's regular discussion of it. There's like, I mean, that's why the Proud Boys are showing up. Is to be a of like is to be a death squad, um,

you know, a little precursor death squad. They're not quite willing to start start pulling triggers yet, but they want people to know that it's possible. They want to scare people away from getting involved in local politics unless they adhere to a very specific far right political ideas. It's working because a lot of these school boards are getting these school meanings are just getting shut down, like they just can't have them in person or sometimes not at

all because they'll just they'll like zoom bam. Like it's not like they're just shutting down so they cannot take place or at school by members are afraid to go out in public because these people are are going to hurt them. Um. And this is like a lot of people involved in this are maybe not themselves like Proud Boys like they they're they're they're they're not super like their individual lee are more kind of regular Republicans in

these states. But the reason why it gets so extreme and accelerate so quickly is mostly because of how these organizing efforts take place, and also because of stuff like Fox News and News Marx and on it and O A N like pushing people further right in the past few years, but like specifically the method of organizing on apps like Telegram and Facebook groups. This this is, this is the thing common on the Internet, but like it rewards accelerationism, it rewards the most extreme, takes those the

ones to get shared the most. So even if you know this is just some mom and her forties who's not a proud boy by any means, she's she still poses a threat in this in this way because she's who boosting this same rhetoric and as part of these same organizing channels that are full of like actual fascists. Uh, there's a decent amount of very popular posts from very popular channels I pulled that talks about the Jews in the school boards and we we'll get to that kind

of stuff shortly. Um So there, Robert, do you wanna start on the telegram with the whole the whole school board Telegram channel that is popped up by no means the most popular Telegram channel for organizing, but it is specifically dedicated to school boards because of how Telegram works. This channel gets shared around a lot in other much

bigger channels. Yeah, and and just so you know, So the way Telegram works, if you're a decent person, um and you don't live in a country where Telegram is a legitimately good choice for you, there's some areas where it's perfectly normal social media network, but for the most part in the United States it's used by fascists and weirdos um. So if you're fortunate enough to not use Telegram, the way it works is you have open groups and

closed groups. Open groups are anyone can view them, Uh, you don't expose yourself by looking at them, and people largely just kind of post images, memes, videos and then can comment on them. And a lot of what's posted in any given Telegram channel is shared from another Telegram channel.

So for people like Garrison and I who research extremism, one of the uses of telegram is that by looking at what's being shared in one group from other groups, you can actually start to build networks and see, oh,

there's affinity between these two groups. Because this group may claim that they're just concerned conservatives, but they're sharing all of this, all of this content from this far right you know Pepe group that's also sharing a lot of neo Nazi content, and you can see there's a lot of affinity between the other thing that happens is that these channels that are getting big and being you and you are being used for this kind of like right

wing organizing who present themselves as more just like regular conservative channels. If you I've been in this channel for like years at this point, and this channel used to be a like proud Boy channel. They just change their name. Like It's like that happens all the time, where a lot of the big organizing channels used to be like openly violent organizing, like for different mobs to go beat up people, and now they've rebranded to make them appeal

more to like regular Trump voters. That is the other thing that happens all the time. And one of the main channels that we're talking about today is one of these one of these channels that used to be a proud Boy thing and is now just kind of right wing organizing a general Yeah, and it's um, I don't know, I'm just gonna get into it. So actually you know what I'm going to get into before I start talking about fascists on telegram trying to destroy the concept of democracy.

You know what else is trying to destroy the concept of democracy? That's right, Chris, products and services, that's right. Oh my god, we are just having a great time here. So let's talk about Stand for Students, which is a telegram channel that Garrison pointed out to me, and I spent more time than I really wanted to. Yeah, that's never, never, never a good idea. So the stuff in here, this is no umber one on the surface, a much more

moderate group. These people are not ranting about like Jews destroying civilization or the need to like execute uh black people or something like that. Um, the stuff in here runs the gamut from like one of the first things I found was a clip from Jesse Ventura, wrestler, predator star and former governor once had a conspiracy TV show. There's a popular clip in anti vaccine circles from it where he's talking with Alex Jones about the Builderberg group

and stuff. So I found that in there, which is like pretty garden variety, like early two thousands conspiracy nonsense. Definitely like, oh yeah, these are like older people, like I don't think mostly boomers, but definitely like gen X and stuff, like folks who were in like their forties and fifties. Um, this is the kind of ship that they would have been like exposed to in their late

twenties and whatnot. Um. One of the posters I found commenting on that video said quote aired onto TV into this and nine about a plan for depopulation through a virus and injections. Too much of a coincidence, and another responded to this. I was never a huge Alex Jones fan, but he was right all along. My kids were born in the early eighties and I refused their vaxes way back then. Unfortunately, one of them is now a late thirties CNN jabbed zombie and has infected my grandkids with

this inspiric experimental treatment. I'm done, um, which is silly, but it also keys you and like these are it's it's what you see a lot with Q and on right. It's these folks who are getting brought in onto telegram. Yeah, it's great. It's terrible that this person, this lady who has to be what in her fifties sixties my parents age, the boomer um is on telegram which two years ago even was the only Americans you were fine, We're fine,

were like extremely online Nazi weirdos. Um. Yeah, I remember doing like old trainings like yeah, it was over over two years ago, and telegram was nowhere near the prevalent for like regular organizing now. And this is a result of of the d platforming of folks in the wake

of the capital attack. But anyway, we don't need to get too much into that right now, So I want to talk a little bit more about some of the things folks are sharing in this in this channel, which is again kind of like I'm gonna guess everyone here is kind of late thirties to maybe sixties, fifties, sixties.

There's one local story that it was actually very popular among a lot of like lefty folks on Twitter of this like group of dads who showed up to stop there's like an epidemic of fighting in their school or something, and they showed up to do like a community policing or a community self defense sort of thing. It was celebrated by a lot of folks because it was like, oh, hey, this is you know, a way that communities can protect themselves without cops. YadA, YadA, YadA. Which is a nice

thing to see. It was also celebrated um by these people, um, by by people in this channel, and specifically the clip of the news story covering this I found was from the Pepe Lives Matter channel, which is, um, you know,

an alt right channel like it. Again, as we were talking about earlier, the Pepe Lives isn't all like the way full Nazi pilled stuff, um, but it shares a lot of stuff from the channels that are straight up Nazis, And so you can you can see already this like lady in her sixties who's probably with some pretty normal boomer three years ago, is now two steps away from Adam often type motherfucker's that's just the way telegram works, um,

And they're all kind of bonding. Over again, this is not a bad story what these local dads did, but it very much ties into this idea of like we gotta get all these parents together and take action in the real world, like and that's gonna that's gonna go towards taking action against the people you don't want showing up in your school, meaning like black children and like children. Yes, yes,

that's yeah, yeah, yeah. Community self defense is great, but also It really depends on what community is defending itself from what. UM. So that's all probably have to talk about that more at some point in the future. But yeah, another thing I found on that channel was video this. This I dug into a bit. So there was this video that was claimed to be an ad. It was, in fact an ad that Comcast had refused to air. UM and the video this, this unaired ad claimed that

it was about. It was telling the story of a thirteen year old girl, Maddie de Garay Um, who was vaccinated. She was part of a FASER trial and had she claims like a disastrously bad reaction. UM. An ad about her situation was rejected by Comcast. UM and this girl like has done the whole right wing in her I'm I'm guessing her parents are the driver's done the whole right wing media kind of circuit at this point. UM. The fact that Comcast banned the ad is what the

people in this telegram channel were yelling about. UM. And I want to actually quote from the an article about why Comcast rejected it, because it makes clear what's actually happening here. Comcast is said to have told the ads buyer it was rejected because it needed substantial creation and

all graphic images needed to be removed. Documents reportedly submitted for substantiation included the girl's complete medical records, which are said to have outlined symptoms such as erratic blood pressure and pulse, muscle spasms, muscle tremors, headaches, brain fog, mixing

up words, and the inability to walk and cough. Um. So you've got this case where number one there's graphic images, um, and number two there's documentations that this girl has symptoms, but there's not documentation that they're tied in any way to the vaccine, Like it's just one of these the comcast is being careful to not spread unsubstantiated shit about vaccine reactions and stuff. Um. But within the telegram channel, the focus is entirely on like how this is evidence

of this conspiracy there suppressing information and suppressing information. Um. One response was, why in Heaven's name don't these parents do their research before having their kids vaccinated? My heart goes out to the precious child and family. What a lesson to learn for so many parents. Never too late to educate your selves. People. Also, I want to point

it just that the spelling and the are incredible. There's an upsetting amount of emojis that Yeah, honestly, I couldn't never never two with one oh late to educate your space selves. Uh, it's just again and now I'm doing they're doing the thing. I'm doing the thing I tried not to. I did try to give it a straight read through. You can be challenging with It's like it's

very funny content. It's it's very funny. Yeah, but but but I think you know this, this is this goes back to the whole point about how this pradicalization works, right, which is, you know you have, especially with anti vax stuff that has this sort of larger base from just like regular peer like hardwright Nazi stuff. You get to see people who you know, otherwise probably would be a vaguely normal person, very very quickly get all this stuff

and very quickly just go off the deep end. They're not. Yeah, these it is it's hard to say like these are

all extremists because like they are themselves aren't extremists. There's surrounded by so much content that is made by extremists that it's making them do these things, which is how, which is how extremism works right, but it's it's challenging because like when you try to explain this to someone, you're like, no, this is obviously just like a regular grandma or something, right, And it's hard to explain to them how fast this thing can move to the point

where they're showing up at a school board with their grand killed children yelling at like teachers and stuff. Yeah, and it's not that this lady is a Nazi. It's that this lady can be, through the process you just outlined, convinced to stand up next to a Nazi and like, uh,

defend his his right to do violence to people. She has been convinced are president a threat to the lives of her, her grandchildren, which is people may say, like the whole like, oh, it's not worth parsing out that much if you're standing next to a Nazi or a Nazi, but like I would argue, no, what's actually the logistics of what is happening here are much more dangerous than

a grandma radicalized into national socialism. Anyway. Another meme I found it was a screen grab from fucking um Shawshank Redemption with Morgan Freeman and I don't know whatever one of the white dudes in that movie in prison jumpsuits, sitting next to each other, and it's the text on

it is what are you in for? I spoke of at a school board meeting, which you she see a lot of stuff like this, the idea that they're going to jail, they're going to get rated by the FBI because they're like showing up at school boards to protest

vaccine mandates and mask mandates. Um. And then like in the middle of all this stuff mostly talking about like anti vac shit, there's also this post talking about how this post that's a video of a woman at a school board talking about how a book needed to be banned, and she's reading. The book she's reading is a queer memoir, um, and it's about I'll talk about this more at the end, but you can definitely mention it here because it gets

up a lot. It's it's a gay it's a gay coming of age story, right, And as a result, there's a couple of of semi graphic scenes in it. And she like gets up in front of the school board and reads this and argues that it's basically like pornography. The children. They think it's child pornography. Yeah, that's what they're marching mistaken what child pornography is. They're trying to they're trying to get all the people at the school board either killed or arrested over this. That is that

is their goal. And I'll talk about this specific instance later because it keeps coming up with all of these channels, and it's one of the main things that links someone from like a sodden red channel to a channel like this. This is like one of the main things they've been using the past few weeks, like this is the current, this is like the past, and and this is this

though has been going on for a while. You've seen a lot of like the libertarian right wing, a lot of like kill your local pedophile shirts because who's gonna and most people don't think, like, who's going to defend a pedophile about pedophiles? Yeah, the proud boy at the Portland school Board who was standing and ready to fight, the ready to fight scared guards and stuff, he was wearing a killer local pedophile. Uh, it's this is this is the thing. This is the thing the right wing

figured out. And if they figured this out a long time ago, which is that Okay, if if you want to get a bunch of people who are vaguely normal

to do like absolutely horrible violence. The way you do it is to tell them that they're threatening kids and it doesn't matter what yeah, yeah, yeah, and you know and this once and what once you've convinced you know, like this, this is this is just a very I think a very important thing about media messaging in general is that the literally the instant someone says think of the children, you need to stop and you need to

disregard everything they're about to say after that stick. Yeah, Like of the time that person is like about to try to convince you that like you need to like we need to murder the gauge or something like that. Like that's that. That's the thing that follows from I feel confident saying no one has ever advocated thinking of the children and meant anything, but I want to kill this specific group of people. Um, just like I that's

not even really hyperbole. It's it's a a trite and true organizing tactic for these people, and it's part of the reason why, like the famous white nationalist catchphrase is focused around we need to secure a future for white children, right, Like that's what they're always talking about with all of this ship and it's it's about being able to demonize a group in a way that they can't be defended. It's about ending any sort of debate or conversation, and

it's about justifying thoughtless violence because it's you're protecting children. Um. You know who else protects children, Robert, definitely not the advertisers of this show, um, because we are sponsored by raytheon brand school bus seeking missiles. The only missiles that only seek school buses. You cannot shoot them at a tank, at a at a technical at a at a terrorist training camp. They go right for school buses no matter

where you aim them. So in that way, they're a fire and forget kind of weapon as long as you're willing to forget anything but hitting a child's school bus with the with the missile. Okay, here's here's some as check it out. All right, we have we're back still talking about this. Uh so last segment for this episode.

As we as we as I was talking about that, there's a post and in the post is a video of a woman from a different school board meeting reading out a graphics graphic ish sex scene from this queer memoir and ranting about how it's it's child pornography. Comments include fucking monsters running these schools, satanic and disgusting an elementary school. Unreal. Why aren't charges brought against the school for distributing pornography to minors? It's not even read they

can It's just available from some other library. It's like, because you can request a lot of books at libraries in all caps, where's the sheriffs, where are the city, county, state, and federal task forces? And uh yeah, it's It'll talk about this more in the next episode. Tied to the overarching anti anti queer, anti trans, anti gay school board side of things, and of course other things I found. There's like video of them celebrating Capital rioters, celebrating Josh

Holly for defending Capital rioters. Um. I went into some other channels that were adjacent that I saw shared, you know, in this channel. One of them was Oscar's midnight writer Patriot Post channel, which actually has thousands and thousands of followers. Average post would get two to three thousand views. Um, here's one. I'm considered a domestic terrorist if I tell a school board that I don't want my eight year old daughter watching sex videos in her third grade classroom. Um,

and that post was right above this post. The constitution actually says you can legally overthrow your government if they

are tyrannical. And that post was right above this post, which was a screen which was a screen grab from a Twitter account for a guy who calls himself Murray Rothbard seventeen seventies X. The FBI didn't rate Epstein Island or protect hundreds of young female gymnasts from being sexually assaulted for years, but they'll raid your PTA meetings when you questioned the curriculum and on scientific mask mandates and their indoctrination camps, I mean public schools. And of course

this from Twitter user named Emerald Robinson. And again this is all shared in that channel. It's like a screen grab from Twitter. When the FBI starts arresting parents at school board meetings, just remember the GOP senators who made it happen by confirming Merritt Gardland as Attorney general. And then it's a list of Republican u Emerald Emarad Robinson is the White House correspondent for news Max. Oh right, oh my god, yeah, you're right. Uh huh great, great,

So I don't know. That's probably all I should get into. Uh well, no, there's we can more things. So Oscar's Midnight Writer, which was shared in in that uh that school board channel took me to the Western Chauvinist school Board Channel, which took me to a post which with a video UM with a link to a video. The text with the video was woman at school board meeting calls out Jewish power by name um and it's a woman ranting about how the Jews are behind all of

the critical race theory in schools UM. So again not hard to get to this kind of ship. Another post was it was in the Western Chauvinist Telegram. It was sharing a post from the Murder the Media telegram who were part of the Capital riot. UM. That post from Murder the Media was National school Board Association apology letter

for calling you domestic terrorists. It was we'll talk about this later, but the comment in the Western Chauvinist was like, we don't apologize for being like for being domestic terrorists. Like we're yeah, we we think it's rad that they called us domestic terrorists. Because Javinist channel, by the way, has over fifty subscribers UM and used to be a proud Boy channel, which is now just a general kind of farther right wing organizing channel that it's probably it's

one of the most shared Telegram channels in this whole network. UM, and they are really good at creating propaganda that appeals to Trump voters while slipping in a lot of accelerationist talking points UM to slowly lead people on that breadcrumb trail to make them be okay with mass violence. There was a comment in there, forwarded from another from the

telegram account of a guy named Eric Striker. UM and this was a post Striker made commenting on a video of a father being dragged out of a quote woke school board meeting. UM for uh complaining of complaining about this kind of ship UM. The post from Eric Striker I think is worth reading, and I'm going to read it now. For now, all we can do is impotently

watch injustices like this unfold. This is really upsetting. We must build our political organization to the point where we can rapidly mobilize to defend this man, including physical demonstrations, sent him free legal support, and make people realize that the time of fucking with whites is over. We need our own media, civil society groups and activists. We need money and volunteers. It's not the Republican Party or anything in the conservative movement. It never or will be. We

need to build it from scratch. We are well underway National Justice Party. We must quietly and patiently build. Eventually we will have the capacity to come on the scene when they at least expect it and will be and we will be too powerful to stop. And that's probably where we should end for today. Yep. That that's a good part, good sad intro into the current problem of

schoolboard meetings. We'll get into a lot more like accelerating rhetoric in the next bit and then talk about kind of where the stuff originated from and the other other side of things beyond just like the CRT and UH and and mask stuff, because it branches out into a lot of other kind of adjacent cultural war bullshit issues. Um. Anyway, yeah, we'll do that tomorrow. Um. You can follow the show on Twitter and Instagram, it happen here, pod and cool zone Media if you want to be on those apps,

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