Anti-Mask PA GOP Jackass Looking For A Few Good Men To Bully School Board Members
How do people like this sleep at night?
Shouty conservatives are more upset than usual with their local school boards because their kids are learning American history and wearing facial coverings to protect against COVID-19. After a school board meeting a few weeks ago in well-off Franklin, Tennessee, deranged parents threatened medical professionals who suggested taking radical methods to keep students alive through winter — you know, like a mask.
Republican Steve Lynch, who's running for Northampton County Executive in Pennsylvania, channeled more of this unhinged rage at a National Freedom Rally Sunday in front of the State Capitol. The current officeholder is Democrat Lamont McClure, who based on our extensive research from reading this linked article seems sane and rational, but if you're in the market for a county executive who foams excessively at the mouth, here's what Lynch had to say this weekend:
LYNCH: Men, where are you? Make men great again. Make men men again. When we walk into those school boards, we're gonna have everything we need to do to go in there with those 9-0 school boards that voted to put these masks back on children with no scientific — it's done! Giving them the research and the data. Do you understand that? Forget into these school boards with frigging data. You go into school boards to remove 'em! That's what you do! They don't follow the law! You go in and you remove 'em. I'm going in there with 20 strong men, I'm going to speak to the school board and I'm going to give them an option. They can leave or they can be removed.
First off, can angry white guys please consider ditching the last name “Lynch"? Jewish people often changed their perfectly fine surnames, none of which were also terms for extrajudicial murders.
"I'm going in there with 20 strong men, I'm going to speak to the school board and I'm going to give them an option… https: //t.co/Gie7iGdBiQ
— Scootercaster (@Scootercaster) 1630287754.0
It's tiresome to note (repeatedly) that the science does support mask wearing as protection against COVID-19. However, chauvinistic appeals for making “men men again" are rarely rooted in actual science but caveman-style persuasion with blunt objects.
The National Freedom Rally was packed with fools waving US flags but not wearing masks. They're probably not vaccinated, either. It's as if 2022 is shaping up to become the 2010 Tea Party reprise but these geniuses are demanding death panels. They are convinced that school boards are enforcing mask mandates as part of some vast conspiracy to help people sell arty facial coverings on etsy.
There is a preening entitlement among anti-maskers, who consider themselves part of a new Civil Rights Movement, but instead of the peaceful “we shall overcome," they ominously declare “we shall come for you." The increasingly heated rhetoric has many people reconsidering the glamorous life of local school board member.
A Nevada school board member said he had thoughts of suicide before stepping down amid threats and harassment. In Virginia, a board member resigned over what she saw as politics driving decisions on masks. The vitriol at board meetings in Wisconsin had one member fearing he would find his tires slashed.
School board members aren't paid enough for this crap ... or at all, actually. Most are former educators and parents who volunteer their time. They help shape school policy but not because they're power mad despots.
In Vail, Arizona, speakers at a recent meeting took turns blasting school board members over masks, vaccines and discussions of race in schools — even though the board had no plans to act on, or even discuss, any of those topics. "It's my constitutional right to be as mean as I want to you guys," one woman said.
It's true. There's no law against being an asshole but there's also no asshole mandate.
Lynch doesn't care if decent people feel terrorized by the willfully ignorant. He'll just happily fan the flames for perceived political gain. Let's hope his craven opportunism fails miserably.
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When are you going to wake up? This isn’t new behavior from the right wing white supremacist fascists. What they can’t accomplish legally by passing unjust laws they will force upon us by any nefarious means at their disposal. Listening to Grievance Peddler Lynch stir up chauvinist violence reminded me of the 1898 Wilmington Massacre. It’s a long quote but I defy you to read it (and the entire Wikipedia entry I sourced it from) without a gasp of recognition:
“Democrats [who today would be called “Republicans”] developed a plan to reverse "home rule", meaning local officials would no longer be elected but rather appointed by the state. They began circumventing legislation by taking over the state's judiciary, and adopted 30 amendments to the state constitution, which effected widespread policy changes, including lowering the number of judges on the North Carolina Supreme Court, putting the lower courts and local governments under the control of the state legislature, rescinding the votes of certain types of criminals, mandating segregated public schools, outlawing interracial relationships, and granting the General Assembly the power to modify or nullify any local government.[19] By adopting these elements, the Democrats became identified as would-be bastions for white Americans.[19] However, their control was largely limited to the western part of the state, within counties where, demographically, there were relatively few black Americans.[19]”
“Back the hell off coronavirus! I have a gun and I know how to shoot at viruses with it!”