Transgender flag. (Image via St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

It sounds too bizarre to be true. But it actually occurred in Loudoun County, Virginia. “A Satanist, the aide to the Loudoun school board chair, and a staffer of the prosecutor were part of a group whose members made a list of 115 neighbors–including a church–and attempted to destroy the lives of people who opposed leftism in schools.” So reports Luke Rosiak of the Daily Wire:

The aide to a Northern Virginia school board chairman, a Satanist, a campaign staffer for a Soros-backed prosecutor, a consultant for a Democrat sheriff candidate, and a local reporter were part of a secret clique that plotted to shield Democrats from backlash over the school system’s coverup of a…rape [committed by a boy wearing a skirt in the girls’ bathroom]…A member of the Loudoun County group also made a handwritten dossier listing the names of 115 Virginia residents, mostly private citizens, who were described collectively as “bigots”…The list of names included additional descriptions such as “pedophile,” “psychopath,” and “antichrist.”

Rhetoric in the group’s chatroom was far more incendiary than anything cited by the National School Board Association when it pushed for domestic terrorism statutes to be invoked against conservative parents and other concerned citizens. The Biden Department of Justice used the association’s plea as the basis for a memo decrying a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators [and] board members.” But messages reviewed by The Daily Wire show that in the case of Loudoun County, it was leftists who espoused violence and hate, which they directed at concerned parents.

The Daily Wire reported Wednesday that private chats in the group called “Loudoun Love Warriors” included threats against parents opposed to the school district’s embrace of a radical transgender agenda.

“Someone gonna get hurt on their side and I hope I get to do it;” read one post. “I’m sooo ready to show up with guns lol,” read another…..The primary purpose of the group appeared to be to prevent Democrat incumbents in Loudoun County, a community just west of Washington, D.C., from being blamed for the rape cover-up and to target allies of the rape victim’s family for destruction.

“It’s going to be extremely difficult for these [school board] members to hang in,” group member Kristen Gorczyk, who is employed by the school board as an aide to Chair Ian Serotkin, advised. “We really need to hold the line.”

The group sought to destroy Elizabeth Lancaster, the lawyer who represented the ninth-grade rape victim, obsessing about her to the point of tracking her ex-husband and brother.

“They call us socialist, leftists, marxists, progressives,” Heather Gottlieb, who spends time regularly with Loudoun County Prosecutor Buta Biberaj as part of her “Justice Academy,” wrote.

Tori Truesdale, an organizer with Students Demand Action, responded: “Yep. I’m all of those. She about to lose her job [Elizabeth].”

Lancaster is a lifelong Democrat and former public defender who decided to run against Biberaj in the Democratic primary for prosecutor after the superintendent lied about a ninth-grade girl’s rape and the George Soros-backed prosecutor personally tried to put the rape victim’s father in jail. But Karen Jimmerson, a former town council member and a consultant for Democrat Craig Buckley, who is running for sheriff against incumbent Republican Mike Chapman, descended into conspiracies, saying someone had altered a database to falsely show that Lancaster had a long history as a Democrat.

Earlier, the Daily Wire “published an intense investigative piece that exposes a deep rot in Virginia’s public school system — one that should force parents all over the country to question whether public school officials, both elected and unelected, care about their students at all,” noted the Washington Examiner.

It chronicled the arrest of a Virginia father who tried to protest transgender bathroom policies the Loudoun County School Board was planning to adopt at a June 22 meeting. Scott Smith was waiting to tell the school board that his daughter, a ninth-grader, had been raped in a girl’s bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt. A woman at the meeting, a progressive community activist, told Smith she didn’t believe his daughter. An angry Smith responded, a police officer stepped in and grabbed his arm, “Smith yanked it away, and then he was arrested.”

“More alarming than Smith’s arrest and subsequent prosecution, however, were the county’s attempts to hide what had happened to his daughter,” notes the Examiner. “At that same school board meeting, the county’s superintendent claimed concerns about transgender policies were unreasonable because the school system had no record of a sexual assault ever taking place in a school bathroom.” But a sexual assault had occurred.

School officials also “tried to avoid getting law enforcement involved…they transferred the assailant to a different school, where he went on to sexually assault another student just a few months later.”

As the Examiner observed, “This is truly outrageous. Loudoun County failed Smith, his daughter, and every single other parent who sends their children to its schools. School officials covered up what happened to Smith’s daughter so they could force through an unpopular and dangerous policy in the name of inclusion. When Smith tried to protest, they arrested him.”

As Rosiak points out, the local progressive prosecutor, known for usually being soft on criminals, went out of her way to seek jail time against Smith for daring to speak out about the rape of his daughter.

“How could Loudoun County parents possibly justify sending their children back to such schools as the ones these people run?,” asks the Examiner.

As Rosiak noted, “The National School Board Association included Scott Smith in its list used to deem parents ‘domestic terrorists,’” which it sent to the Attorney General. “Scott Smith became the poster parent for the National School Board Association after his arrest went viral.” In response, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Justice Department will investigate “harassment, intimidation, and threats” against school officials.

But Smith is no terrorist. “if someone would have sat and listened for thirty seconds to what Scott had to say, they would have been mortified and heartbroken,” Smith’s attorney said. She told The Daily Wire that the transgender boy “was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of forcible fellatio.”

The National School Boards Association asked for Justice Department intervention in response to what it called “threats and acts of violence,” in controversies about “critical race theory” and “masking requirements.”

But few of the acts it complained about actually were violent. As the Washington Examiner notes, key “examples” cited by the NSBA included “a man filming himself while calling school administrators and another man labeling a school board as ‘Marxist.’” The NSBA’s letter listed as an example of threatening or violent behavior the fact that “A resident in Alabama … has called school administrators while filming himself on Facebook Live.”

Filming yourself, or other people, is speech protected by the First Amendment, even if it makes them look bad, according to court rulings like Fields v. City of Philadelphia (2017).  You have the right to criticize people, even if it leads to them getting hate mail, according to court rulings like McAdams v. Marquette University (2018).

The NSBA complained about “cyberbullying,” but angry emails to public officials — such as about critical race theory or mask rules — are speech protected by the First Amendment, even when school board members get thousands of such emails, or get attacked on social media for their policies.

The NSBA letter falsely claimed that “critical race theory is not taught in public schools and remains a complex law school and graduate school subject well beyond the scope of a K–12 class.” In reality, 20% of urban school teachers have taught or discussed critical race theory with their K-12 students, along with 8% of teachers nationally, according to a survey by Education Week. These percentages are even higher in high schools, where books by critical race theorists are much more likely to be assigned to students than in elementary schools. The Loudoun County, Virginia public schools paid a contractor to train their staff in critical race theory, giving it $3,125 to conduct “Critical Race Theory Development.”