A wave of threatening, sometimes violent assaults is targeting public school boards and school personnel across the U.S.

These aren’t random outbursts by concerned or frustrated parents over grades or school discipline. They’re assaults by mobs whipped into a lunatic fascist frenzy, seething with violent hatred against schools implementing even basic mask regulations to prevent the deadly spread of COVID—to children! Or teaching some basic truths about the racist history of America past and present. Or offering transgender students the dignity and basic right to play sports or even use the bathroom. 

Here are just some examples:

• On June 22, in Loudon County, Virginia, school board members shut down their meeting after mobs of white supremacists and fascists disrupted the meeting in opposition to the teaching of what they called “critical race theory” and basic rights for transgender students. They chanted “Shame on you,” sang the National Anthem, and waved signs: “We the parents stand up," “Education not indoctrination,” and “There are two genders: male and female. Trust (teach) the science.” This after board members had previously received death threats and one gym teacher said he’d refuse to use transgender students' chosen pronouns. Scuffles broke out and one person was injured and one arrested.¹

• In Ohio, one school board member received a letter reading, "We are coming after you and all the members on the ... BoE [Board of Education].... You are forcing them to wear masks—for no reason in this world other than control. And for that you will pay dearly.²
• At a volatile meeting of the Birmingham, Michigan, school district unmasked anti-maskers repeated lunatic lies that masks were dangerous, mandates were equivalent to child abuse and children couldn’t spread COVID. One of them declared that God didn’t want people to wear masks: “Our children will never see the freedoms we enjoyed growing up,” she said. “They are not even free to breathe fresh air. If God wanted us to cover our mouth and nose, he would have made us that way.”

• Students who supported wearing masks were insulted and when a Black woman and Jewish woman expressed support for the mask mandate, an anti-masker gave a Nazi salute and said “Heil Hitler,” which was repeated by at least two others.³
• A CNN report tells of a number of violent assaults against teachers and school staff over wearing of masks in schools.

These assaults have become so ominous and dangerously threatening that on September 29, the National School Boards Association sent a letter to President Biden asking for federal law enforcement protection.⁴ The letter detailed how widespread these "heinous” attacks have become, disrupting school board meetings in California, Georgia, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming. It called these mob assaults “equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes."

Here are some further snapshots from “The Increasingly Wild World of School-Board Meetings” in the New Yorker, October 28, 2021:

• After a school board meeting in Williamson County, Tennessee, a group of protesters surrounded a doctor who had testified in favor of students wearing masks, shouting, “You’re a child abuser,” “We know who you are,” and “You’ll never be allowed in public again.”
• In San Diego County, California, in September, anti-mask protesters forced their way into a school board meeting and tried to swear themselves in as the new, unelected members.
• At a chaotic meeting in Buncombe, North Carolina, parents opposed to a mask mandate announced that they, too, had “overthrown” the school board.
• Members of the far-right Proud Boys showed up twice, faces covered, at school board meetings in Nashua, New Hampshire; in Vancouver, Oregon, Proud Boys gained access to school grounds during anti-mask protests, leading to a lockdown of the schools.
• At a Loudoun County, Virginia, school board meeting, which was considering the district’s policies for transgender students and racial equity, riled-up conservatives got so out of hand that the board chair halted the proceedings while the police cleared the room.
• In one notorious case, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, audience members laughed as a high school junior, Grady Knox, described losing his grandmother to COVID.

 In concert with attacks on school boards, fascist forces are attacking educators and students, as Rafael Kadaris details in the  revcom.us series “The Fight Against the White Supremacist Whitewash and Fascist Suppression of Historical Truth” (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). He reports, “A Black superintendent of two mostly white towns in Connecticut who had set up an anti-racist task force in the school district was forced to resign, citing the ‘emotional and personal toll to be a Black man doing this work and facing very blatant attacks.’” Students are being silenced as well. To cite one example, “After parents in Texas complained about a student-designed yearbook cover that included the words ‘science is real, Black lives matter, no human is illegal, love is love,’ an art teacher was put on leave.” 

Mob Assaults on School Boards—One Tip of the Fascist Iceberg

The mob assaults on school boards and school personnel have become a key front and battering ram in the Trump-Republican fascist movement’s campaign to seize power.

Schools and school boards across the U.S. are being turned into fascist battlegrounds—used to recruit new foot soldiers, and lynch mobs in training. They are being assiduously fueled, cultivated, and spread by Republican fascist operatives and organizations (such as the Heritage Foundation and Turning Point USA). For instance, at least 165 local and national groups have formed to shut down lessons on race and gender.

They’re closely linked to a massive, coordinated legislative campaign—at the federal, state, and local levels—targeting education: Twenty-eight states have proposed, and seven have already passed, anti-critical race theory (CRT) laws to control what can and can’t be taught about U.S. history and racism.

“In dozens of states across the U.S., fascist Republicans are pushing an unprecedented wave of discriminatory laws aimed at limiting the rights of transgender people and LGBTQ people overall,” revcom.us reported in April. “The organization Human Rights Campaign reported that as of March 13, 82 anti-transgender bills have been introduced in state legislatures this year.”⁵

Meanwhile fascist politicians and media mouthpieces are whipping supporters into a fury over any discussion of the actual history and reality of systemic racism against Black people and other people of color—which they claim is “divisive” and racist against white people. Fox News hosts and fascist parents’ groups have called for teachers to be monitored and policed with classroom cameras.

All this is part of a broader picture of escalating threats, bullying, and violence across society. Bob Avakian points out in This Is A Rare Time When Revolution Becomes Possible—Why That Is So, And How To Seize On This Rare Opportunity:

These Republicans have mobilized a significant section of people who believe, with an intense, irrational passion, that white supremacy, male supremacy, and other oppressive relations (as well as unrestrained plunder of the environment) must be firmly upheld and enforced. They have been driven to a state of vicious insanity, embracing all kinds of lunatic conspiracy theories, along with a crazed Christian fundamentalism, as a response to the threat they see to their entitled (or “god-ordained”) position and their insistence that further concessions to the struggle against oppression will destroy what has “made America great.”

The Democrats’ “Response”?

How have the Democrats and the administration they lead responded to this wave of reactionary violence, the threats to school boards, and the plea by the National School Boards Association? First, there has been no full-throated outcry from Biden, top administration officials, or leaders in Congress, much less arming the public with an actual understanding of the fascist danger overall. Second, on October 4, Attorney General Merrick Garland did respond to the NSBA request … with a call for meetings. He directed the FBI and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices “to meet in the next 30 days with federal, state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement leaders to discuss strategies for addressing this disturbing trend.”

Even this tepid response was immediately denounced by Republi-fascists in Congress, who claimed Garland’s memo was an effort to prevent “concerned parents” from exercising their First Amendment rights.

Taken together, all this is extremely ominous and is a major strand of fascist moves from inside—taking over institutions and branches of government, passing laws, including voter suppression, and enabling fascist forces to operate with impunity—and out—increasing independent formation of organized fascist mass mobs to intimidate people and dominate the public square… all being done with the aim of seizing power and locking down fascist rule.

This fascist assault on education is coming to a head now, at a moment of deep divisions and crisis for this system, with great dangers but also potential openings for revolution, IF revolutionaries seize the moment and organize. As Bob Avakian writes:

as “the normal way” society has been ruled is failing to hold things together—and society is increasingly being ripped apart—this can shake people’s belief that “the way things have always been” is the only way things can be. It can make people more open to questioning—in a real sense it can force people to question—the way things have been, and whether they have to stay that way. And this is all the more likely to happen if the revolutionary forces are out among the people shining a light on the deeper reality of what is happening, and why, and bringing out that there IS an alternative to living this way.