The Parents Revolt | City Journal
School board meetings, usually one of the most mundane examples of local democracy in action, have exploded with vitriol across the country in recent months, NPR reported gravely. School leaders are scared.
Smith, a plumber, was the perfect foil for the media narrative about the grassroots parents movement. The conventional wisdom among elites embraced by mainstream journalists, teachers unions, and Democratic politicians held that bigotry and white rage drove the parental protests. A white parent shouting at a school-board meeting because they don t want their child learning the truth about racial inequality isn t as blatant as the violence carried out by the Klan, Slate s Julia Craven complained. But it is motivated by the same desire to protect whiteness, its stature, and the privilege it bestows.
But Smith was no crazed white supremacist. He leaned conservative, but he and his wife were gay- and lesbian-friendly and didn t really follow politics until the last few years, he told the Daily Wire in October. His fury at the June school board meeting was personal: on May 28, his 15-year-old daughter had been raped in a girls bathroom at the school by a boy who entered it wearing a dress. School officials assured parents that the allegations which included two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of forcible fellatio, and were corroborated by evidence from a rape kit would be handled internally. What that meant was that the offender was moved to a different school, where he proceeded to assault another girl.
That was the context surrounding Smith s appearance at the June school board meeting. To Smith s dismay, the same administrators who had buried his daughter s assault were pressing for a rights of transgender and gender-expansive students policy that would mandate access to school bathrooms based on gender identity, not biological sex. And when the bathroom rape was raised at the meeting, the Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) superintendent rubbed salt on Smith s wound: We have no records of any assaults occurring in our restrooms, he insisted, waving away the allegation as a red herring. We ve heard it several times tonight from our public speakers, but the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.
In a horrendous inversion of justice, Smith wound up prosecuted as a criminal himself. When, in a moment of emotion, he verbally berated an activist in the crowd a woman who had approached him during the meeting, saying that she was going to ruin your business on social media as retribution for his allegations about his daughter s assault he was arrested and banned from the school board building. (Police had earlier detained Smith for making a scene at the school the day that his daughter was raped; when he yelled at the principal for insisting on handling the assault in-house, six cop cars arrived to remove him from school premises.) Soon after, the county s top prosecutor a George Soros funded district attorney with close ties to the progressives on the Loudoun County school board showed up in court to try to put Smith behind bars for his misdemeanor disorderly conduct charge. It was unprecedented. It is incredibly unusual for a disorderly conduct case to even go forward, Smith s attorney told the Daily Wire. The idea that they would actually be seeking jail time, I d guess in my 15 years the number of times I ve seen that happen would be zero.
This story still makes me ill. A man’s daughter was raped; the miscreant who did it was a transgender person or posing as one using his new-found access to a high school’s girls’ room; the politically motivated cover-up; the media enthusiastically toeing the Democratic line; the personal devastation of the girl who was the victim and her family, the exacerbation of the whole awful thing by the *father’s* political prosecution. And one could go on. Just put this in your pipe and smoke it for awhile if you want to understand people’s rage. And ask yourself, is the uprising against this sort of thing really “anti-democratic?”