Activists’ attempts to impose critical race theory and gender ideology in public education have sparked a nationwide backlash.
In June 2021, videos of an incensed middle-aged white man getting dragged out of a Loudoun County Public Schools building in handcuffs, lips bleeding and belly exposed, played on repeat in the national media. Forty-eight-year-old Scott Smith, a Leesburg native, had attended the meeting, alongside hundreds of other parents, to protest the adoption of a new “transgender-affirming” policy proposal in the Northern Virginia school district. His arrest came to symbolize the angry, parent-led school board revolts about radical race and gender curricula sweeping the nation, though journalists typically told the story from the perspective of teachers and school administrators, not the mothers and fathers opposing them. “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.”
