It Could Happen Here - School Boards: The New Fashy Frontline, Part 1

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

School boards have quickly become one of the main frontlines for pushing far-right ideas into the zeitgeist. This episode we discuss how online organizing is accelerating the acceptance of violence at these meetings. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's critical? My race theories. Well, all right. That's not a great introduction, but it's not a great time in America. I'm Robert Evans. This is It Could Happen Here. With me tonight, as often but not always, is Garrison Davis and our good friend Christopher Wong.

talk about a bunch of stuff. Largely, we're talking about the increasing and escalating attacks on school boards and attempts to take over and dominate school boards 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 or like fascist syncretism. together like a good gumbo or like fascist syncretism. One of the things I would say 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 increasingly obvious that Terry McAuliffe has lost his reelection bid and the new governor of Virginia will be a Republican who, among other things, has like promised and based a huge amount of his campaign on banning critical race theory and specifically like banning books and shit from being taught in Virginia schools. result of a pretty far-reaching um and and complex and honestly pretty pretty scary uh campaign and we're going to talk about that tonight garrison do you want to uh do you want to 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 decided we needed to do an episode on this sooner than later when a few weeks ago a large number of anti-vax and anti-mask protesters took over a school board meeting in 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 the fact that they were able to overwhelm and shut down an entire school board meeting with hundreds of people inv invading this building um and shutting this down with just the sheer amount 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 uh through an organization run by the bundies um and there were some direct ties and they 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 residents but they were showing up and were able to effectively like take over and dominate a portland school board meeting um in part because uh law enforcement is never ever willing to do anything against yeah there's there's a there's a lot of a lot of points

here so like yeah one of it being is of it being these big mobs are definitely able to benefit from being white, mostly middle class parents and stuff. Or maybe not even parents. They can just be white middle class. Which means they can storm buildings and shut stuff down without any real consequence.

Because police and security aren't really going to get involved that much. And the libs are not going to really be pushing back on this in any kind of meaningful way. No, they'll just make fun of these people if they misspell something on a sign. Yeah. So basically the idea for this episode is 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 cultural zeitgeist 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 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 note which will come up later in the telegram stuff is that in i think it was when was it it? It was late September. The National School Boards Association,

so like the National School Board Union, put in a request for federal assistance to stop ongoing threats and acts of violence against school boards, like meeting members and people present at school boards, because this has been ramping up. This was happening the last school season as well, but really the past few months, the prevalence and the number of these types of mobs

overtaking these school boards has become so much more common that the school board union sent a letter directly to the president saying, hey, we kind of need help here. So it's not just, 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. This is becoming like unsafe to hold school board meetings. And whether or not you like our modern school system or not, the resulting effect of this is that it's going to be hurting kids.

Whether it be through COVID, whether it be through teaching them racist curriculums, or whether it be to making trans kids make their lives a whole lot harder, right? All of this kind of stuff is going to be worse by this happening, so it is something definitely worth caring about. Yeah, it's worth caring about.

It's clearly an attempt in order to arrest the kind of progressive tilt that society has gone through. All of this is a reaction both to, I mean, the religious right was initially more than anything a reaction to desegregation and the women's liberation movement. And what we're seeing now is a reaction to primarily the gains that LGBT people have made in the last like 20 years, including the legalization of gay marriage. is to stop progress towards racial justice, to roll back gay rights, to enshrine white supremacy using violence. And that's why all of these different school board meetings, like the threat of violence from these people is a constant factor.

There's regular discussion of it. There's like, I mean, that's why the Proud Boys are showing up, is to be a a 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 ideology it's working because a lot of these school boards are getting these school board meetings are just getting shut down.

They just can't have them in person, or sometimes not at all because they'll Zoom bomb. They're just shutting down so they cannot take place. School board members are afraid to go out in public because these people are going to hurt them. And this is like... A lot of people involved in this are maybe not themselves like Proud Boys.

They're not super – they're individually are more kind of regular Republicans in these states. But the reason why it gets so extreme and it accelerates so quickly is mostly because of how these organizing efforts take place and also because of stuff like Fox News and Newsmax and OAN, like pushing people further right the past few years. But like specifically the method of organizing on apps like Telegram and Facebook groups, this is the thing common on the internet, but like it rewards accelerationism. It rewards the most extreme takes. Those are the ones that get shared the most. So even if, you know, this is just some mom in her 40s who's not a proud boy by any means. She still poses a threat in this way

because she's boosting this same rhetoric and is part of these same organizing channels that are full of actual fascists. 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'll get to that kind of stuff shortly so

there Robert do you want to start on the telegram with the 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 and because of how telegram works this channel

gets shared around a lot in other much bigger channels yeah and just so you know so the way telegram works if you're a 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 a perfectly normal social media network but for the most part in the united states it's used by fascists and weirdos. 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. 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 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 this.

Or the other thing that happens is that these channels that are getting big and 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 changed 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 just regular Trump voters. Yeah, that is the other thing that happens all the time. And one of the main channels that we'll be talking about today is 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 in general general. Yeah, and it's, I don't know, I'm just going to 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. Chris. Products and services. That's right. Welcome.

I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, my God. We are just having a great time here. So let's talk about Stand for Students, which is the Telegram channel that Garrison pointed out to me, and I spent more time than I really wanted to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's never a good idea.

So the stuff in here, this is number 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 black people or something like that. The stuff in here runs the gamut from like,

one of the first things I found was a clip from Jesse Ventura, a wrestler, a predator star and a 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 Bilderberg group and stuff. So I found that in there, which is like pretty garden variety, like early 2000s conspiracy nonsense.

Definitely like, oh yeah, these are like older people. Like I don't think quite mostly boomers, but definitely like Gen X and stuff, like folks who were in like their 40s and 50s. This is the kind of shit that they would have been like exposed to in their late 20s and whatnot. One of the posters i found uh commenting on that video said quote aired on tv in 2009 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 80s and i refused their vaxes way back then unfortunately one of them is now a late 30 CNN-jabbed zombie and has infected my grandkids with this experimental treatment. I'm done. Which is silly, but it also keys you into, like, these are—it's what you see a lot with QAnon, right? It's these folks who are— Yeah, it sucks that they're getting brought in onto Telegram. 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 50s 60s yeah about my parents age so boomer um is on telegram which two years ago even was the only americans you were fine were like extremely online nazi weirdos um yeah i remember doing like old trainings like yeah it

was like over over two years ago and telegram was nowhere near this prevalent for like regular organizing no and this is a result of um of the de-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 going to guess everyone here is kind of late 30s to maybe 60s, 50s, 60s. 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 community self 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 by these people, 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 in 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 channels that are straight up nazis and so you can you can see already this like lady in her 60s who's probably was some pretty normal boomer three years ago is now two steps away from Atomwaffen type motherfuckers.

That's just the way Telegram works. 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 got to get all these parents together and take action in the real world. And that's going to go towards taking action against the people you don't want showing up in your school, meaning like black children and gay children and trans kids.

Yes, yes. That's what that means. Yeah, community self-defense is great, but also it really depends on what community is defending itself from what. So that's a we'll we'll 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. that was claimed to be an ad. It was, in fact, an ad that Comcast had refused to air. And the video, this unaired ad, claimed that it was telling the story of a 13-year-old girl, Maddie DeGaray, who was vaccinated. She was part of a Pfizer trial and had, she claims, like a disastrously bad reaction. An ad about her situation was rejected by Comcast.

And this girl has done the whole right wing in her, I'm guessing her parents are the drivers, done the whole right wing media kind of circuit at this point. The fact that Comcast banned the ad is what the people in this Telegram channel were yelling about. And I want to actually quote from 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 substantiation 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. And pulse, muscle spasms, muscle tremors, headaches, brain fog, mixing up words, and the inability to walk and cough. So you've got this case where, number one, there's graphic images. 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 they're suppressing their information yeah 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 yourselves, people. Also, I want to point out just the spelling and the emojis in this. Yeah. Incredible. There is an upsetting amount of emojis.

Yeah. Honestly, I couldn't care less. Never two with one O late to educate your space selves uh it's just again and now i'm doing the you're doing the thing i'm doing the thing i tried not to i did try to give it a straight read through um it can be challenging when it is like a good it's very funny it's it's very funny yeah but but i think you know this this is this this goes back to the whole point about how this radicalization works, right? Which is, you know, you have, especially with anti-vax stuff that has this sort of larger base from just like regular pure like hard right 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, it's hard to like say like these are all extremists because like they themselves aren't extremists. They're just surrounded by so much content that is made by extremists that it's making them do these things, which is how extremism works, right? Yeah. But 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 yeah 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 grandkid 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 a present 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 the the logistics of what is happening here are much more dangerous than a grandma got

radicalized into national socialism anyway another meme i found it was a screen grab from fucking um shawshank redemption with uh 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 up at a school board meeting which you see a lot of stuff like this the idea that they're going to jail they're going to get raided by the fbi because they're like showing up at school boards to protest vaccine mandates and mask mandates and then like in the middle of all this stuff, mostly talking about like anti-vax 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 it. The book she's reading is a queer memoir. And it's about like- I'll talk about this more at the end, but you could definitely mention it here it comes up a lot it's a gay coming of age story and as a result there's a couple of semi-graphic scenes in it and she gets up in front of the school board and reads this and argues that it's basically

pornography for children they think it's child pornography that's what they're marketing it as mistaking what child pornography is 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 in all of these channels yes and it's one of the main things that links someone from like a sod on red channel to a channel like this this is like one of the main

things they've been using the past few weeks like all else is like current this is like and and this is this though has been going on for a while. You've seen a lot of them, like the Libertarian right wing, a lot of kill your local pedophile shirts. Because who's going to – and most people don't think who's going to defend a pedophile. They're not talking about actual pedophiles. Yeah, the proud boy at the Portland school board who was standing and ready to fight the security guards and stuff, he was wearing a kill your local pedophile baseball cap. Yeah, and this is the thing the right wing figured out, and they figured this out a long time ago, which is that,

okay, if you want to get a bunch of people who are vaguely normal to do absolutely horrible violence, the way you do it is to tell them that they're threatening kids. Yep. And it doesn't matter what- That's why QAnon works so well. Yeah it's in the q anon yeah yeah and you know and this once and what once you've convinced you know like this 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 ideally hit them in the head with a stick yeah like 99.9 of the time that person is like about to try to convince you that like you need to like we need to murder the gays 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. Just like I – that's not even really hyperbole. It's a tried 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 shit. And 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. You know who else protects children, Robert? Protecting children. You know who else protects children, Robert? Definitely not the advertisers of this show, 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 technical, 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 a missile. Okay, here's some ads. Check it out. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal tales from the shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast all right we're back still talking about this uh yeah so last segment for this episode as we as we

as i was talking about there's a post that and the post is a video of a woman from a different school board meeting reading out a graphic graphic ish sex scene from this queer memoir and ranting about how 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 required. It's not even required reading. They could request it from the library. It's just a book that's available. It's sent 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 i'll talk about this more in the next episode tied to the overarching anti anti queer anti-trans anti-gay school board yeah side of things and of course other things i found there's like video of them celebrating capital rioters celebrating josh hawley 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,000 to 3,000 views. Here's one. I'm considered a domestic terrorist if I tell a school board that I don't want my 8-year-old daughter watching sex videos in her third grade classroom.

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 grab from a Twitter account for a guy who calls himself Murray Rothbard 1776. The FBI didn't raid Epstein Island or protect hundreds of young female gymnasts from being sexually assaulted for years, but they'll raid your PTA meetings when you question the curriculum and unscientific mask mandates in their indoctrination camps. I mean public schools. And, of course, this from a 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 Merrick Gardland as attorney general. And then it's a list of Republican senators. Also, Emerald Robinson is the White House correspondent for Newsmax. Republican also Emerald Emerald Robinson is the White House correspondent for Newsmax oh right oh my god yep you're right uh-huh yep great great so I don't know that's probably all I should get into uh well no there's no we can we can go for one more thing yeah so Oscar's

Midnight Rider which was shared in in that uh that school board channel took me to the Western 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 shit another post was uh 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 that post from murder the media was national school board association apology letter for calling you domestic terrorist it was we'll talk about this later but the comment in the western

chauvinist was like we don't apologize for being what like for being domestic terrorists like yeah yeah we're we think it's rad that they called us domestic terrorists because we are chauvinist channel by the way has over 50 000 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 yeah um and they are really good at creating propaganda that appeals to trump voters while slipping in a lot of accelerationist talking points yeah um to slowly lead people on that breadcrumb trail to make them be okay with mass violence there was a comment in there uh forwarded from uh another from the telegram account of a guy named Eric Stryker. And this was a post Stryker made commenting on a video of a father being dragged out of a quote woke school board meeting for complaining and complaining about this kind of shit. kind of shit. The post from Eric Stryker, 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. Send 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 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 least expect it and we will be too powerful to stop. And that's probably where we should end for today. Yep. That's a good

part one, motherfuckers. Good sad intro into the current problem of school board meetings. We'll get into a lot more like accelerating rhetoric in the next bit and then talk about kind of where this stuff originated from and the other side of things beyond just like the CRT and mask stuff because it branches out into a lot of other side of things beyond just like the crt and uh and mask stuff because

it branches out into a lot of other kind of um adjacent culture war bullshit issues um anyway yeah we'll do that tomorrow um you can follow the show on twitter and instagram it happened here pod and cool zone media if you want to be on those apps which i don't know why you would yeah don't be on those apps get you know i just found out you would. Yeah, don't be on those apps. You know, I just found out they'll deliver skinned gators to your door. Get into cooking gators. That's what I plan to do. Getting off Twitter and I'm gator is the

new social network. So gator. Gator. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com.

Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Brass. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of riot. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.