That was the context surrounding Smith’s appearance at the June school board meeting. 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. 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. ![]() 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. “But it is motivated by the same desire to protect whiteness, its stature, and the privilege it bestows.”īut Smith was no crazed white supremacist. “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. The conventional wisdom among elites-embraced by mainstream journalists, teachers’ unions, and Democratic politicians-held that bigotry and white rage drove the parental protests. Smith, a plumber, was the perfect foil for the media narrative about the grassroots parents’ movement. “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. 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. ![]() 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. 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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |