On March 9, 2023, WBEZ published a story about upcoming school board elections, noting that “In Illinois and around the country, groups of conservative candidates are banding together in an attempt to get elected to their local school boards.”

WBEZ focused primarily on a slate of three conservative candidates — Leonard Munson, Katey Baldassano, and Matt Sheriff — running for open seats on the Barrington 220 School Board, which serves the pre-K-12 district. According to WBEZ, concerns of the three conservative candidates include test scores, spending, and ideologically shaped curricula saturated with leftist theories on sex, gender, and race.

Finally, conservatives are getting their act together to restore decency and ideological equity to curricula while loosening the white-knuckled / brass-knuckled grip of leftists on taxpayer-subsidized schools.

Silent Too Long

While leftists have spent decades banding together as they march through all cultural institutions — especially government schools — embedding their destructive theories on sex, “gender,” race, American history, and psychology (through “social and emotional learning”) in curricula, conservatives have remained largely silent.

The relatively few conservative parents with the wisdom and spine to challenge obscene novels, plays, adult comic books, and ideas derived from Critical Race Theory and Howard Zinn have been effectively marginalized by leftists through mockery — the last refuge of ideological scoundrels.

According to WBEZ,

Democratic Party of Illinois Executive Director Ben Hardin said the party has identified just over 60 school districts with what he calls ‘fringe candidates’ who are either connected to outside conservative groups or support their agendas.

Decent People Pushed to the Fringes

By “fringe,” Hardin means not leftist. In leftist Newspeak, opposition to obscene and racist “anti-racist” material constitutes “fringe.” Hardin may be on to something. When supporters of porn for minors, co-ed locker rooms and anti-white racism move to the center, rational, decent people are pushed to the fringes of society.

To paraphrase Yeats, the center cannot hold, things are falling apart and anarchy is being loosed upon America.

WBEZ reports that “In Barrington and a few other suburban districts, [conservative candidates] also have the support of well-funded political action committees with multiple contributions of over $1,000.”

Elaborate Plots to Hoodwink Parents

If the conservative candidates in Barrington have solicited support from only Illinoisans, they may want to get some fundraising tips from the master of garnering out-of-district support: Township High School District 211 Board Member Kim Cavill about whose byzantine plot to subvert an election I wrote several years ago.

In the spring of 2017, three exceptionally well-qualified candidates who opposed co-ed private spaces for minors in public schools were running against three people who supported co-ed private spaces for minors.

On March 22, 2017, just 13 days before the 2017 election, Chicagoan LaSaia Wade and Daye Pope, another biological male who masquerades as a woman, set up a Super PAC called Trans United Fund Illinois. Pope is the organizing director for a 501(c)(3) called Trans United Fund.

Just two days later, on March 24, 2017 — 11 days before the 2017 election — [current D211 School Board Member] Kim Cavill and her sister Lindsay Christensen also set up a Super PAC called Parents and Neighbors for Quality Education (PNQE).

Money from The Matrix

Just days after the founding of Trans United Fund Illinois, some surprising donations came pouring in from people outside of District 211:

• Matrix Director “Lana” Wachowski, a biological man who pretends to be a woman and lives with his dominatrix wife in Chicago, donated a whopping $10,000.
• Far left former Illinois State Senator Heather Steans (D-Chicago), who has a son who pretends to be a woman, also donated $10,000.
• Homosexual Clark Pellet, a retired attorney and development chair for the “LGBTQ” Center on Halsted who lives in Chicago, donated $5,000.
• Executive director of Gender Rights Maryland, Dana Beyer, a man who pretends to be a woman and lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, donated $1,000.
• Eliza Byard, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), who lives in Brooklyn, New York, donated $500.
• Homosexual Douglas Hattaway, president, and CEO of a Washington D.C. strategic communications firm who lives in D.C., donated $500.
• Architect “Kira” Kinsman, a biological man formerly known as Kyle Kinsman who lives in Wilkes Barre, PA, donated $250.

The more than $26, 000 in donations for a school board election from donors who don’t live in District 211 then went to — you guessed it — Cavill’s Parents and Neighbors for Quality Education.

Lipstick on a Pig

Inquiring minds may wonder why Cavill and her sister set up PNQE, since Trans United Fund Illinois was already established. Why the extra step to fund the defeat of conservatives? The answer to that question might be found in mailers and yard signs.

State law requires that campaign mailers and yard signs identify the groups that pay for them. Signs must say “Approved by ….” Which sounds better — and by “better” I mean less likely to arouse suspicion — “Approved by Trans United Fund Illinois” or “Approved by Parents and Neighbors for Quality Education”?

Flush with filthy lucre, the sisters got busy smearing good people with nary a backward glance.

As reported by the “LGBTQ” newspaper Windy City Times, a local mom (Who could that have been?) reached out to Trans United Fund, “a national trans-led advocacy group,” who agreed to help them defeat the three candidates who supported single-sex locker rooms:

Trans United Fund (TUF) and a group of local parents, youth, and allies, worked together to launch the first trans-led, trans-focused independent expenditure in history. TUF assembled a powerful team of thoughtful allies to quickly build and execute a research-informed and strategic plan to help the parents and youth get their message out. TUF supported the parents’ efforts through digital, mail, phone banking and helping to train volunteers to reach their neighbors at the door.

The WBEZ story also highlights the point at which conservatives found their missing spines:

In the three years since the pandemic began, school board races across the country have become ideological battlegrounds, with fights over masking morphing into divisive conflicts over book bans, critical race theory and sex ed.

We Need to Beat Them at Their Own Game

During the pandemic, conservatives learned the ugly truth that through the divisive politicization of curricula, leftists were transforming children into an army of leftist activists. In the summer of 2020, Americans witnessed those creatures — socially constructed by Frankensteinian “educators” whose jobs are subsidized by the public — rampaging through our streets in mostly violent riots.

WBEZ reports that the “priorities” of Barrington 200’s leftist incumbents, Barry Altshuler and Leah Collister-Lazzari, “include more diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives,” and that “progressive” parents “have focused on guerilla opposition research of candidates they oppose, hoping to turn off moderate voters.”

Yikes.

“Tolerance,” “safety,” “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusivity” and “anti-racism” are the rhetorical weapons leftists wield to spread arguable theories throughout society like a lethal virus, using children as the vehicles of transmission.

“Bigot,” “racist,” “homophobe,” “transphobe” and “hater” are the weapons propagandists use to crush dissent. No need for engagement with ideas, no need for debate, no need for logic or evidence when name-calling is so effective.

How did we arrive at a place where leftist ideologies dominate curricula? Could part of the reason be that many school boards — like faculties — have for years lacked ideological diversity? If so, then surely all those who claim to “honor all voices” and to be committed to diversity and inclusivity will welcome efforts to diversify school boards.

This column originally appeared at Breakthrough with Jeanne Ives, and is reprinted by permission of the author.