School Boards: Front Lines of an American Counterrevolution

BUCK: People are recognizing that the fight over school boards and what’s going on, what’s being taught to your children, is a critical front right now in what could be called an American counterrevolution. Just by way of quick review, you had the Maoist cultural revolution in China in the sixties, stretching into the seventies. For about a decade, there was an effort by the Communist Party in China to completely remake, to undo the past and remake the present of China a vicious and thuggish campaign where lots of people were killed, people were persecuted, it was horrible.

And just as we should always look to those who have fled tyranny and come to America as reminders of why this place is so great, here is a parent, and she’s gone viral, and this was up on Fox News, this was the main story on FoxNews.com this morning, a parent who has gone viral because she’s saying that the Department of Justice putting out an email notification warning from the attorney general’s office saying that they’re gonna start looking at parents who speak up at meetings, this is a major concern and should put people on edge because of the very clear comparisons with some of the rhetoric of the cultural revolution, the attacks on people, the divisiveness. Here’s what she said.

XI VAN FLEET: When I was in China I spent my entire school years in the Chinese cultural revolution. So I’m very, very familiar with the communist tactics of how to divide people, how they cancel the Chinese traditional culture and destroy our heritage, and all this is happening here in America. Now, they are labeling parents and concerned citizens like me as domestic terrorists. What that can do. You lose your freedom. I do have a question. What’s the next step? Is the Tiananmen Square crackdown the next? Will the parents one day risk their lives just to speak out for the children? That’s why I’m here.

BUCK: What is the next step, Clay?

CLAY: Well, I think the next steep needs to be Glenn Youngkin needs to win in Virginia because I think that would be a major punch back against the idea of Critical Race Theory. And for people who missed it, we had Glenn Youngkin on yesterday, and I believe what has become the most essential detail, the most essential battleground in his race against Terry McAuliffe for that Virginia gullibility seat which will be decided next month. It’s over schools. It’s over what kids are being taught. It’s over who has the right to look and debate about what is being taught.

Buck, this idea that the Department of Justice is looking into what parents say at school boards, I appreciate what that woman said in her statement. The people who understand how scary this is are oftentimes not Americans, Buck. They’re people who have lived and seen what happens when the government starts to clamp down on what opinions are allowed and what opinions are not. And I say this, Buck, as a parent who went to one of those school board meetings that the president has referenced many times as being unacceptable. And I just gotta tell you, I left that school board meeting, and I told you this, and I told you on the air, more happy, more optimistic about what was going on in the country than I have been in a very long time because what we need is not DOJ investigating so-called domestic terrorists at school boards. We need more people out there at the absolute grassroots level getting involved and fighting back against the idea that America is an evil place, which is what is being inculcated in our kids right now.

Not to say America is perfect. It isn’t. Nothing created by man has ever been perfect. But America is the greatest country to ever be created in the history of the world. And that used to be a uniting theory that everybody in America shared. Now we don’t, and that is a designed attempt to destroy the legitimacy of this country’s backbone and I think we’ve got take up arms against it in an aggressive way, and the best way to do that is for parents to show up and speak out and pay attention to who’s on the school boards and who’s at these lower level positions. And I think it’s gonna be a major point of failure for the Democrats ’cause I think they’re gonna lose the Virginia election over this.

BUCK: Speaking of the school board meetings, Scott Smith was a parent who went to one of these meetings, and there is an excellent story, in-depth story by the Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak on this. I’ll be talking to Luke later on today on TV on this. Luke, he’s gone deep into this story. And when you read the details of this, it’s honestly enraging. There are some stories you read and you get angry as you go through it and this all centers around a school board meeting. Clay, on June 22nd, Scott Smith in Loudoun County, which we know is the front line of this, Loudoun County, Virginia, he was at a school board meeting which was “deemed an unlawful assembly,” as Rosiak writes in the piece here.

And what people didn’t realize, and as Smith was arrested at this meeting, he was a concerned parent arrested, was that he was there because one of the topics was about transgender students, male transgender students using the female bathroom. His ninth grade daughter had been sexually assaulted by a transgender student in a Loudoun County public school mere weeks before. Activists said that he was lying when he tried to raise this. Police wrestled him to the ground, his pants got pulled down, his face was bloodied, and he was treated like, essentially, a domestic terrorist or somebody who was an insurrectionist or whatever the rhetoric is that they want to use.

And Smith then for the left was held up — I know he was on Laura’s show last night on Fox News and people are now finally hearing his story. He was held up as an example of the scary, angry parents at the school board, completely ignoring the fact that this is a guy whose teenage daughter was assaulted by a male student who likes to wear a skirt sometimes in the, ladies room, the girl’s bathroom weeks before at the school, and the school said they were handling it in house. They tried to cover it up. He went to the sheriff’s department, fortunately, they did take it seriously, there was a rape kit given to this girl, they did get information that can be used in a criminal proceeding. Now, we’re talking about minors here so everything is sealed, there’s a lot that’s not out there.

But it’s really, truly unsettling. It’s kind of frightening that this concerned father who’s angry about his daughter being sexually assaulted in her high school tries to talk about this at a school board meeting and the cops plant him on the ground face first, his pants are pulled down, his mocked and ridiculed on video, and he’s I guess what Merrick Garland, the attorney general, is talking about is a insurrectionist domestic terrorist parent? It’s outrageous.

CLAY: It’s also outrageous that if you share a story like this, it’s as if it isn’t allowed to be discussed. This is the fear, right, when you have anybody who wants to use any bathroom that they could, that you could have biological teenage boys — right? We’ve been, Buck, biological teenage boys. We oftentimes, I always say, the dumbest human beings on the planet are 14 and 15 and 16-year-old boys, right? And the other thing I always say is there’s never very often a girl whose final two words are “watch this.” And yet there are all these stupid teenage boys doing all sorts of stupid things. And it’s imminently foreseeable that if you just allow people to decide what gender they are and you’re going to allow them to go any private place inside of a school, that issues like this could arise. And that should be a big part of the debate when you try to make decisions such as these.

So the idea that you would not allow a parent to speak out and share why he is opposing a policy and that you would demonize him based on sharing that story is evidence, Buck, of narrative trumping reality, narrative trumping everything. If you are willing to speak out in a way that challenges the prevailing liberal narrative, you will be attacked, and people will try to end you. They’ll try to cancel you, Buck.

BUCK: It gets worse, Clay, I mean, we’ll have to come back and tell people about how did the school principal and school officials react to the father showing up to the school when he found out that his ninth grade daughter had been sexually assaulted bay a trans student is in the bathroom? How did the prosecutor — remember people think — Loudoun County, just so everybody knows it’s a high per capita income county with a lot of Democrats. This is not some super red county so you do have, for example, the prosecutor is a progressive. And how the prosecutor — who’d the prosecutor want to send to prison? I can tell you so far not the sexual assault — by the way, two sexual assaults allegedly committed by the transgender student. The first one and then I second one happened in October according to this Rosiak piece in the Daily Wire.

So there’s more details here. People need to know about this. People know you can’t trust the school board in some of these places, you can’t trust the principals, the administrators, the prosecutors. I will say the only people who look with some seriousness in this like they were doing their jobs, sheriff’s department, law enforcement took the allegations seriously. They acted. Everybody else, Clay, in the bureaucracy tried to cover for what they feel like would be a blow to the trans agenda, essentially, ’cause that was all of us a topic at the school board meeting.

CLAY: Compare that, by the way, Buck, to the way that they would have reacted if a trans student had claimed that they were being assaulted because they were trans.

BUCK: That would be a national news story that CNN would run for days and days on the front page of CNN.com and, you know, as a top story and there would be panels and there would be a law probably named in order to prevent it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: One of the big challenges, Buck, is the idea of narrative over facts. And I feel in many ways that we live in a post-fact era because what matters is not what’s occurring; it’s how the individual story plays into the prevailing narrative. And the prevailing narrative is, if you say anything other than transgender people are the greatest humans who have ever existed, effectively, if you raise any issues about transgender athletes competing in women’s sports and winning — we had Olympians who used to be men that became women, we’ve got state high school champions who are men competing as women, we’ve got bathrooms where you’re not allowed to say, hey, let’s, in a high school, require that people go to the bathroom of their respective gender because these are private spaces and there may be in possible cases some danger associated with allowing people of opposite genders to be using the same bathrooms in public high schools. Like, this is not a crazy idea, right? Anybody who has ever been in a high school can imagine how a dangerous situation could arise like that.

So, Buck, what is the latest procedural posture here? Because it seems quite clear to me that what occurred was the fact pattern didn’t fit the narrative; so instead of the fact pattern being examined in a rigorous way which is what the judicial system’s job is, instead the dad here became the target of derision and attack.

BUCK: Yeah, the father was held up here, Scott Smith was held up as the exemplar, if you will, of the angry parent at the school board meeting who poses a threat to public safety and order. And what you find is that, first of all, because in part there was an effort within the school to keep the first sexual assault of Smith’s daughter — remember the people involved here both the assailant and the victim are minors so everything is sealed, their names are not in the public domain. But the first sexual assault was kept quiet. There was a second sexual assault, and The Daily Wire and Luke Rosiak, big hat hip to him for this story, has confirmed that the same name has been attached at least behind closed doors to both of these sexual assaults.

CLAY: Two different girls or the same girl, do we know?

BUCK: Different girls, transgender guy assaulting two different girls. Scott Smith he was on Laura Ingraham’s show last night on Fox News, I know that he talked about the situation; but Scott Smith was arrested, he was arrested school board meeting. When he came to the school initially, they called the police on him, the principal put out a statement saying there was a disturbance at the school and Smith was the bad guy. There was no talk about the threat to public safety from a student who had sexually assaulted another student in the bathroom using this trans policy — allegedly that’s how this whole thing got going because he was in the girls bathroom and, you know, this is — these are the facts of the case as we know them. But they went after the parent. And then the progressive prosecutor wanted to throw a number of charges at him and make him serve the father jail time, real jail time, a couple weeks in jail. This is a prosecutor, Clay, who ran on an end mass incarceration platform.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: But a threat to the trans agenda in this case of bathroom policy, and he’s a bad guy, according to the left. That’s what happened.

CLAY: And again this is I think going become significant because as you said in Loudoun County this is the flash point, I believe, that may well decide the Virginia gubernatorial election, not just this particular incident, as described in the Daily Wire but the larger battles over CRT, over masking students, over the way that kids are being treated in public schools in Virginia. And the fact that Terry McAuliffe, the former governor, came out and said that parents didn’t have a right to decide what their kids were gonna be taught in school. And so this is the major flash point right now.