LOUDOUN COUNTY, Va. — NBC “Nightly News” finally acknowledged the fight going on here in Loudoun County between the lockdown-mongering, critical race theory-obsessed school board that covers up sexual assault, and the parents who are fed up with it. But NBC couldn’t get through the segment without casting doubt and criticism on parents’ efforts and then bringing up a failed school board candidate and a left-wing teacher to confirm the spin.
“Some in the school community say the voices at board meetings don’t speak for the majority of parents and that some may be trying to sway the governor’s race,” said correspondent Catie Beck. She then brought on a former candidate who claimed the uprising of parents frustrated with their school district was “created chaos. I think it’s been created.”
“One Loudoun teacher saying, while there should be accountability on the assaults, she questions the timing,” Beck said, setting up a teacher who spoke at the school board meeting on Tuesday night.
“It all came about all at once,” the unidentified teacher said. “It exploded when all of the election’s so close.”
NBC’s framing comes after similarly dismissive comments from former President Barack Obama. “We don’t have time to be wasted on these phony trumped-up culture wars, this fake outrage,” Obama said in a speech to support Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe. “Instead of stoking anger aimed at school boards and administrators, who are just trying to keep our kids safe … we should be making it easier for teachers and schools to give our kids the world-class education they deserve.”
NBC even played the first part of Obama’s clip in its segment, right before Beck asked parent activist Ian Prior the loaded question: “Do you think this is a politically motivated minority?”
“What I’ve seen is that parents, they go out there; they are fired up. They’re defending their kids,” Prior responded.
I was there at the school board meeting Tuesday night that Beck reported from. Everyone I spoke with — parents, students, public commenters, Democrat feminists who drove in from New York and Washington, D.C. to stand for keeping boys out of girls’ spaces — seemed genuinely concerned. Parents were worried about their kids’ safety, like one mom whose eighth-grade daughter plans to start public school next year.
“When the sexual assaults came out now every day I think … do I have to worry about her safety?” she told me.
Students Nick and Crunchy expressed the simple, righteous indignation that only children can. “We’re here to support the cause against them,” Nick told me, gesturing to the school board’s building. “Especially Ziegler,” Crunchy piped in, referring to Loudoun County Public Schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler. “Especially against Ziegler, because he knew about that rape charge,” Nick finished. Neither can vote in next week’s gubernatorial election, but both boys know that rape is wrong and that people who enable such actions should be called to account.
Anthony Mace identified himself as an independent and said he had moved to Loudoun County from Fairfax County last year because Fairfax was “getting a little out of control.” But now Loudoun County Public Schools, where his son is a senior, “is even more ridiculous,” he said, before calling on the “criminal” school board to resign.
Kara Dansky and the roughly six other women with her told me they came “because we are on the political left and we stand in support of female-only spaces.”
Anyone who thinks the outrage is just a pop-up ruse to push Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin forward also clearly hasn’t been listening to parents for the past year and a half. “I stood on these grounds 20 months ago and fought to get our schools open,” Erin Roselle Poe, a mother of a fifth-grader and a 10th-grader, told me.
Parent Chuck Izzo, who said his daughter participated in the walkouts that happened around Loudoun County schools on Tuesday before the board meeting, said the first things that brought the school board’s failure to his attention were attempts to doxx parents who criticized the board, and then the school district’s punishment of gym teacher Tanner Cross, who refused to use pronouns contrary to a student’s sex and then spoke up about it at a school board meeting.
“I’ve been fighting to get a voice heard with the LCPS for over a year now,” said another protester, Erin Smith. “It started back last year when they promised to open schools and didn’t. It’s been a snowball effect ever since.”
No, this isn’t “fake outrage.” It’s not “created chaos,” unless by created it’s meant that the radical policies and actions of the Loudoun County School Board brought a firestorm upon its own head by pushing closed schools, critical race theory, radical transgender ideology, anti-parent tactics, and sexual assault cover-ups on the families and children they’re supposed to be serving.
It takes a considerable lack of soul to look parents concerned for their children’s bodily safety in the eye, and shrug them off as some contrived electoral tactic. That cold indifference to the well-being of children being platformed by NBC is exactly what the Loudoun County School Board put on display when it covered up the rape of a 14-year-old girl and lied about it.
