GOP Ideologues Keep Flopping In Their Efforts To Take Over School Boards – By Jennifer Bendery (Huff Post) / May 20, 2022
“The attempt to cloak book bans and censorship as a parent issue is not working,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.
Conservative Republicans running for school boards in North Carolina and New York overwhelmingly lost their elections Tuesday night, the latest sign that the GOP’s effort to wage a sweeping anti-LGBTQ, anti-Black culture war on public schools is failing.
In North Carolina, a slate of five right-wing ideologues ran together in Durham’s nonpartisan school board election, under the phrase “Better Board, Better Schools, Better Futures.” All were hoping to unseat Democratic incumbents. All were defeated in a landslide.
These candidates included Joetta MacMiller, who attended the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in Washington, D.C.; Curtis Hrischuk, who spread anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about George Soros; and Gayathri Rajaraman, who told INDY Week that she didn’t think students should learn about topics like historical racism, gender identity or politics.
None of these five candidates got endorsements from Durham’s three most influential political action committees. And as INDY Week put it, this was likely because some of these people “might be best described with the letter Q followed by ‘Anon,’” a reference to the bonkers conspiracy theory about a shadow government of Democratic pedophiles being at war with former President Donald Trump.
