[sound of kids laughing and goofing around]


IMARA JONES, HOST: I’m sitting in the basement of a church where a group of queer youth have come together. It’s the Rainbow Room. This is a place these young people can be themselves. And it’s in Buck’s County Pennsylvania. 


STUDENT #1: Even in this, like super, like suburban rural area, like where you can feel like safe, like leaving your door unlocked. I just didn't feel safe, like, being who I was. 
JONES: I’m struck by the fact that while these kids can be themselves more than ever they are also under attack like never before. Especially in schools, which have become flashpoints over whether all kids have the right to learn and grow as themselves.


STUDENT #2: I'm hearing a lot of stereotypes, and it's very upsetting to hear people talk bad about things, especially the LGBTQ, considering I'm a part of it myself. And it makes me feel like it's unsafe. It's an unsafe environment
JONES: And this is even true at all levels of government, from local municipalities to the very top of the US government, which has trans kids squarely in its crosshairs…


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President Donald Trump: with a stroke of my pen on day one we’re going to stop the transgender lunacy. And I will sign executive orders to end child sexual mutilation, get transgender out of the military, and out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools. [cheers]


JONES: I’m Imara Jones. This is Season 4 of The Anti-Trans Hate Machine: A Plot Against Equality. This year, we’re taking you on our investigation of the Christian Nationalist and authoritarian movement’s successful infiltration of public schools.This fight over education has united multiple factions on the far right. Everyone from powerful Christian Nationalist advocacy groups, to extremist paramilitary organizations, conservative business groups, and billionaires are all coming together to undermine public education by attacking the rights of trans kids in schools. This network is behind bans on LGBTQ related books, penalizing teachers for standing up for trans kids, and preventing children from using the bathroom and playing sports in line with their gender. They have scored victories through President’ Trump’s Executive Orders which seek to prevent schools from keeping trans kids safe. And the Department of Education has even created a tipline to ensure compliance.  Taken together, these policies have created a hostile environment for teachers, students, and parents. And if that wasn’t enough, paramilitary groups like the proud boys have been targeting school boards. Now last season, we showed how the Proud Boys and others went after local events like drag story hours at public libraries. They’ve continued this trend of focusing on communities by taking an interest in school board meetings..


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SCHOOL BOARD MEETING: Your teacher’s there to teach my child and be a mentor, the example of what an adult should be. Men are to be men. Alpha males. Do you understand me? You have awakened the entire alpha male blood of this country with your leftist woke ideology you’re pushing in here.


JONES: And they’re getting behind local school board candidates. Now, because of all of this energy and activity, my team and I have been working to understand why an attack on education by using trans issues is the central focus for all these far-right actors. What we’ve found is that the anti-trans hate machine is targeting education to realize its ultimate goal of overturning democracy and establishing a Christian Nationalist and fascist state. They are using anti-trans hate as a tool to undermine trust in schools, tear communities apart, and control the future by limiting what information young people have access to. And by sowing all of this distrust in public education, this movement hopes to gut one of our nation’s last remaining public goods, our schools,  a service that is used by the vast majority of people. Because without public education, there can be no democracy. The stakes are dire. That’s why we’ve been traveling all over the country to report on this story. We’re starting out in the leafy suburbs of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Now the county has a number of school districts.  But we focus on two neighboring ones, where the school boards have become political battlefields. It’s here that a concerned parent and beloved middle school teacher help give me an inside look into the extremist forces that are trying to take over.


JONES: We head out to a part of Bucks County that’s about an hour drive from Philadelphia. Most of the small towns that make up this area were established in the 18th century. Doylestown there was even recognized as having one of the “best small-town cultural scenes” in America by USA Today. Here the main street is lined with charming Victorian homes. There’s an art deco movie theater, a quaint old candy shop, and a restaurant housed in a renovated inn. And the feeling of American history here in Bucks County is abundant. I mean — George Washington famously crossed the Delaware from here during the Revolutionary War. It’s a tight knit community, generations deep, with a sense of shared history. Buck’s County is about as Americana as it gets. It’s also the kind of place political strategists seek to influence—winning Bucks County is a meaningful stepping stone to winning national elections. Where Bucks County goes, the rest of the country is likely to follow. 


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FOXNEWS: In particular we’re watching Bucks County, the swingiest of swingy states as the governor called it. Joe Biden won by 4 points in 2020 and in 2016 Hilary Clinton won by .6 percentage points. That’s just how close it is there


JONES: And so, it’s perhaps no surprise that Bucks County has become a battlefront to take over public schools by using anti-trans hate to rupture the community. Purple counties like Bucks, you know that are neither fully Democratic or Republican, are hotbeds for political activity, which is increasingly making trans kids unsafe. To learn more about how Bucks County has become such a hostile place for trans youth, we meet with Laura Foster, a longtime resident of the area. Laura has deep roots in Bucks County, and her kids attend the same schools she originally went to. I meet her in her childhood home where antique furniture and old photos fill the halls, and the whole family was there to help out Laura’s mom.
LAURA FOSTER: Do you want to come meet my mom? Imara: Sure. OK. Laura: This is my husband
VARIOUS SPEAKERS: Mom, where are you putting people in? Nice to meet you. Josh, nice to meet. Hi Josh, how are you? Hi, how're you? Nice to see you. Nice to meet you. How's everything?
FOSTER: Mom is a former hippie and has a bit of activism work when she was stop you were literally just telling me that about some protests that you want to one. She definitely has had an influence on me and like, you do something if you see a problem, you don't just kind of sit by and let it happen.
JONES: Laura is the mom of 3. One of her kids is queer. And all of her children have attended Pennridge Public Schools in Bucks County. Laura’s not afraid to call things like she sees them. She’s witnessed first-hand how the anti-trans hate machine came into her community and tore it apart. But it didn’t start with book bans, or bathroom bills or any of the other anti-LGBTQ policies Laura’s school board would go on to adopt. It started with COVID. To understand what happened, we actually need to go back to 2021. That’s when the COVID pandemic is at its height. Schools have just reopened for in-person instruction. And the Pennridge School Board, like many school boards across the country, passes a masking requirement to protect students, teachers and families from the virus.
FOSTER: I remember my sister being like, you should go to school board meetings because there's some weird stuff that's happening.
JONES: Laura is a social worker and a therapist. From the start, she can tell something is very wrong. Normally school board meetings are boring affairs about minute budget adjustments, or standardized test implementation. But that’s not what Laura sees when she visits. People are showing up en-masse to protest the school board’s masking requirement. 


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SCHOOL BOARD MEETING: You need the courage to stand up against these mask mandates. You're violating constitutional rights for people to breathe. You know about George Floyd. Thousands of people are negatively affected by the masks. 


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SCHOOL BOARD MEETING: the vaccine has nothing to do with public health. Any doctor will tell you that the point of getting this vaccine is to reduce the severity of the disease. Thus, it should be a personal choice. These are our children. We should get to decide what is best for them. 


JONES: There’s a common theme to these comments: the threat of COVID is overblown. Not only that, but the mob showing up is arguing that mask mandates are a tool of authoritarian control. Some of them are even saying that the initial school closures were a mistake. Laura’s working on the front lines of the pandemic. And she’s completely baffled. 
FOSTER: You know, I'm running a f*cking crisis center and like have a patient that has cancer and gets COVID and dies. And I've like, you know, patients that get COVID and, you know, their psychosis goes through the wall. I'm like, it's befuddling to me, like how hard it was for those of us that worked in healthcare. 
JONES: The people showing up to the school board meeting seem to be living in a different reality. They’re pushing for policies that would put everyone in danger. This isn’t the Bucks County Laura’s always known. It doesn’t make any sense to her. What she doesn’t understand - at least not now - is that what’s happening in her community isn’t a grassroots phenomenon. It’s often part of a larger strategy from forces far beyond Bucks County. Their strategy: sow division and gain control. What’s more — the people showing up to protest masks are loud and effective. Eventually The Pennridge school board caves to the pressure. And masks become optional in public schools. But this is just the start…all of the forces working here have much more in store for Bucks County. 


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SCHOOL BOARD MEETING: our schools are supposed to be centers of knowledge not indoctrination centers


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SCHOOL BOARD MEETING: It is clear to most that the 'hate has no home here' slogan is favored by the political left as a means to perpetuate the lie that the community is hateful and racist. Anyone who opposes the narrative is deemed hateful, bigoted, transphobic, homophobic, etc


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SCHOOL BOARD MEETING: I’ve been pondering the compulsion of some adults to expose very young children to virtually every conceivable variation of adult behavior as soon as possible in the name of diversity and inclusion.


JONES: It wasn’t just Bucks County. What Laura saw was happening all over the country. 


ELIZA BYARD: All of the attacks on schools were basically tactical choices to achieve the same goal. Everything that's going on, whether it's about banning books, which books are being banned? Books about black and brown people, books about queer people. These are all fronts in the same battle.
JONES: That’s Eliza Byard. She’s the co-founder of Campaign for Our Shared Future, a group that works with local communities to oppose attacks on public schools. She’s been fighting back against a movement to  stack school boards with extremists and radically reshape public schools. It’s all part of a larger strategy to tear apart communities and destroy democracy.  
BYARD: So when you look at the attacks there is at their root a desire to eliminate the idea that there is room for everyone in our society and that our goal is to foster a healthy multiracial democracy. That's the goal. This provided extremists, anti-democratic extremists with a full portfolio of issues they could deploy depending on the nature of the community and the easiest way in.
JONES: One group stands at the center of the anti-democratic effort sweeping school boards across the country: Moms for Liberty. It became a powerful force seemingly overnight after its founding in 2021. Later in this series, we’ll do a deeper dive into Moms for Liberty.  
BYARD: I was distraught about the ability of this group to spread. Pretty vicious lies quickly and frustrated but understanding of how difficult it was for some school board members to know how to respond because you know school boards by and large school boards job is to manage the budget and try to make sure that good materials are coming into the building and that they're hiring good people. They hire and fire the superintendent. They're not built to be defenders of democracy. 
JONES: School boards are particularly vulnerable when it comes to bad actors. And COVID provided the perfect opportunity to exploit that.
BYARD: School board meetings were being held virtually, and school board meetings were being live streamed. So all of a sudden school board meetings were television. And what, how many school board officials have any media training? None. Exactly. So you also set up a situation where one, a determined advocate or an extremist who showed up at a school board meeting could have a very large remote audience and there is very little doubt that the people sitting behind the rostrum up there, very little doubts. That they would have a hard time handling a sudden onslaught of vicious criticism 
JONES: Suddenly, public schools became politicized. The last great public good in the United States connecting people from all backgrounds to each other and their communities became a point of controversy. 
BYARD: A basic problem of democracy is that it is much easier to break things than it is to build them. 
JONES: In Bucks County, the atmosphere just keeps getting worse. For Laura, it comes to a head when a controversy erupts over a simple elementary school bulletin board. It’s decorated with construction paper and cartoon drawings of children, celebrating upcoming events like the Puerto Rican Day Parade, Juneteenth, and Pride Month. And Laura says a firestorm erupts over, you guessed it, the Pride section with rainbow hearts. 


FOSTER: The poster said, love is love and love and love is code for, you know, being gay is okay.

JONES: Conservative protestors start coming to the school board meetings decrying the love is love message. They blame the infiltration of DEI in schools for the diversity cartoon cutouts.  As part of the backlash, the School Board disbands its own DEI committee. But they know that in a place like Bucks County, they can’t just pretend that issues around diversity don’t exist. So they invent a new group that will study whether DEI is even needed. It’s called the Pennridge Community Committee. And get this, they appoint a school board member who participated in the January 6 insurrection to sit on this committee. Not surprisingly Laura has little faith in what’s been created but she still decides to attend as a member of the public. She goes to support her friends Donte and Archie who are Black members on the newly formed committee.  And she can’t believe what she sees. Because Donte quickly becomes the target of a personal attack. 
FOSTER: At one of the meetings, this woman, who's the head of the local Pennridge GOP, Moms for Liberty, will wear a mom's liberty shirt like out at the farmer's market. Gets up and starts talking about how. Donte has a business in town which he is using to profit from DIY and like just went off on Donte
JONES: Several people at the meeting tell the woman to stop, noting that she’s violating the rules of decorum by launching a personal attack. Laura’s friend Archie, who serves with Donte on the committee is one of them. Even though he’s stunned by what happened, he speaks up. 

ARCHIE KNIGHT: I'm in awe, I am flabbergasted, like, again, and I turned to the guy who was running the meeting, I go, dude, are you going to let this happen, like this is crazy and I think there were probably three or four, maybe five other community members who had the same reaction I did, right, like it's like. Bro, what like what is this? What's going on here? This is unacceptable 
JONES: This meeting is starting to spiral out of control. And the tipping point comes when Archie is confronted with overt racism. 
FOSTER: Archie gets up like, you know, he's kind of like near me and he's like, saying the same thing that everyone else is. And there's a white guy. And he's like, Sit down, boy. So Archie's like, What? And so Archie's like, Do you want to, like, say this to my face? And it just like, blew up, blew up.
KNIGHT:I closed my book my notes my pen put my put my jacket on and I'm like, I'm out of here I don't I don't need this 
JONES: For Laura all of this personal nastiness and downright disrespect of her neighbors is crushing. It transforms the way she sees the place where she was born and raised.
JONES (IN INTERVIEW): When you left that, like, what did you think after your friend, you know, gets called boy and the meeting gets shut down, what did you leave there thinking? 
FOSTER: Disgusted. Like I like unbelievable that this is like happening. Like it was terrible. Like one of my kids was like crying. It was just like it was a mess, you know? It is not just that here is like a space where racism and homophobia and transphobia exist. It's also an area where it is open and that it is accepted 
JONES: And the situation keeps deteriorating. Around this time, in November 2021, the school board undergoes another shift. It goes from a majority right-wing board to a super majority one. 8 to 1. Laura can feel her community changing. It’s not the place she knew. So she decides to fight for the values of openness and acceptance. And starts working with others who feel the same.


FOSTER: We had a rally and a protest about like some some big issues that were happening in the school at that time in this extremist world. And it was wildly successful.


JONES: After the protest, Laura and her friends decide to keep the momentum going. They form a new group and call it the RIDGE Network and start working to unseat school board members who  they consider to be extremists. From the get-go, their efforts face an uphill battle because there’s always a new target. Because the school board doesn’t stop with removing the mask requirement or disbanding the DEI committee. Next up on their agenda: gender identity and expanding attacks on people of color. 

FOSTER: So it's book weeding. So this is removing books that how would they define a sexualized content? So these are books that are authored by LGBTQ Plus or Bipoc authors. One of the books that really, you know, I think kind of got people mobilized around this was that there's an elementary school book called Like Heather Has Two Mommies. Yeah. And so they're like, you know, this book, they're going to ban it. And then they're like, well, we'll just going to keep like, all the books in elementary that are, you know, have any references to like anything queer or trans in the guidance counselors office. So if a kid wants that book, they have to go ask the guidance counselor, which like, I mean, I know this or do this or whatever.


JONES: And the attacks become even more asinine.


FOSTER: The school board members say like, we don't want rainbow flags at our school and that's why they do this. So no rainbow flags, no safe spaces. They do a student expression policy where students are not allowed to pass out any materials in schools. So, I mean, it literally could be anything from like passing out Valentines to being like, hey, there's like a queer  pop prom at like the Rainbow Room, you know, you’re not allowed to pass it out unless you get approval by the school. 

JONES (IN INTERVIEW): What's the thing that happened in in your kid's school that really pushed you over the edge? 
FOSTER: It was when our school said that they were going to contract with Vermillion Education. 
JONES: Vermillion Education. It’s a brand new company that’s pushing revisionist American history. This consulting company is essentially one person: Jordan Adams. And the Pennridge school board hires Vermillion to revise the district’s educational curriculum. But he has no previous experience doing this kind of work. Here’s Jordan Adams responding to a question from a Pennridge School Board member.


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SCHOOL BOARD MEETING: Do you have previous public school experience … I think I’ve heard enough, thank you.


JONES: Now to grasp how harmful this new curriculum would be and where it’s really coming from, we have to understand where Jordan Adams went to college. 

FOSTER: Once you go down the rabbit hole of this, you find out there is a college in Michigan that’s deeply tied to this space called Hillsdale College.


JONES: You might not have heard of Hillsdale but it’s a touchstone for the biggest names on the right. People like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have all been given a platform at the college. Speeches given at Hillsdale are published in a journal that boasts more than 6 million subscribers. Here’s Clarence Thomas:


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CLARENCE THOMAS: This is Hillsdale College. And you are special, that shining city on a hill. 


JONES: Hillsdale is an ideas factory. So they launch something called the 1776 Curriculum.  This Curriculum attempts to counteract the educational and cultural impact of the Pulitzer-Prize winning 1619 Project, which explores the legacy of slavery and its contemporary impact as a central part of American History.  


FOSTER: And the curriculum at Hillsdale College is mostly focused in social studies. Is this classical what they deem classical – Very whitewashed curriculum.


JONES: Before founding Vermillion, Jordan Adams works at Hillsdale College— promoting this curriculum. It was designed to be implemented in private, religious schools. He eventually leaves Hillsdale, to start his own company, Vermillion.  Through Vermillion Adams pushes Hillsdale's approach to history to an even larger market: the nation’s public schools. Kathryn Joyce is a journalist who’s been reporting on the far-right’s efforts to rewrite history for years. She has lots to say about the 1776 curriculum.
KATHRYN JOYCE: It was garbage, historians went through it and, picked it apart for all of these different ways that it was. Misrepresenting things, kind of, you know, making the claim that aspects of the civil rights movement, like, segregated lunchroom boycotts that this was, counter to the founding ideas of America, you that Martin Luther King never wanted to rely on the law to enforce equality. 
JONES: It’s hard to overstate just how powerful this idea of whitewashing American history is on the Right.  And it has reached the very top of the American political system. In fact, Hillsdale’s President, Larry Arnn, is tapped by Trump to lead his 1776 Commission in 2020. 


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TRUMP: To combat the toxic left-wing propaganda in our schools, I am launching a new pro-American lesson plan for students called 1776 Commission. It's already done. 


JONES: With Trump’s return to power, the 1776 Commission is revived. And he makes the announcement early in his second term in an Executive Order called “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.” It’s the exact same executive order banning federal funds from being used for what the President calls “indoctrination in gender ideology.” And this combination of race and gender identity has its roots deep in Bucks County.  In fact, it is being used by outside groups there to undermine support for public education. 
FOSTER: So once we figured out that Hillsdale was coming, we're like, this is everything. This is going to just it's going to make our school like a Hillsdale school
JONES: And then Laura learns that Jordan Adams has ties to another group disrupting her community— Mom’s for Liberty. It’s the one that’s organizing people to show up and disrupt school board meetings. And Moms for Liberty is holding its big, annual summit nearby. One that draws some of the biggest names on the right including future presidential hopefuls like Ron Desantis and Nikki Haley.
FOSTER: And so Jordan Adams is slated as one of the speakers for the conference. 
JONES: Two of the people that Laura is working with in the RIDGE decide to go to the conference to see if they can learn anything. At the conference, Jordan Adams lays out the gameplan in his speech, which you’ll have to listen to closely:  


[ARCHIVAL] 
JORDAN ADAMS: If we don’t make the most of this chance, we’re not going to be at another one. It is very much within education….It’s a do-or-die kind of moment.


JONES: He explains the way Moms for Liberty is switching targets— from COVID, to DEI, to Critical Race theory, to gender identity. And that it’s actually a smart strategy.  It’s not random. And he details the psychology of it all for everyone at the conference.


[ARCHIVAL]
JORDAN ADAMS: The idea is that the other side, the powers that be, they cannot keep up with all of it. Oftentimes, they’ll be one small thing, one thing at a time and they can rally people around that. They can’t counter everything. Everything should be up for debate. We should be moving on multiple policy areas and it should be happening quickly and efficiently. 


JONES: He makes it clear that Moms for Liberty moving from issue to issue is intentional. And it is part of a plan by a national, well funded movement to overwhelm Laura’s community. It also has an extra added benefit of preventing Laura’s organization The RIDGE Network from effectively organizing against Moms for Liberty. Because it keeps them going from one thing to the next. But if this nationwide strategy wasn’t enough, it turns out that the local school board is also working to tear Bucks County apart from the inside out. Moms For Liberty aligned school board members were coordinating with a local conservative group called the Independence Law Center or the ILC.


FOSTER: So ILC before kind of getting involved in like school politics, were the ones that like, like fought against adoption for same sex couples in Philadelphia. You know, like, this is like their history is like, you know, preservation of whatever they think a family is. 


JONES: But the ILC isn’t what it seems –it’s linked to a much larger network pushing this agenda all over the country. The Independence Law Center is actually the legal arm of the Family Policy Alliance in Pennsylvania. Close listeners of our series may remember The Family Policy Alliance is one of the key pillars of the anti-trans hate machine that we investigated in Season 1. The Family Policy Alliance is the national organization which seeks to inject anti-trans ideas and policies into the nation’s legislative blood stream. And Laura’s school board has been working with this group to craft its harsh anti-trans and DEI rules — things like restricting the display of Pride flags and preventing trans kids from using their chosen bathrooms. But beyond banning specific actions and activities, these policies have a broader impact.  The relentless targeting of anything trans in the schools sends a signal.  It creates a permission structure which  says that it’s open season on trans and queer kids. And students across the district get the message: When the adults around are modeling queerphobia, kids become the unwitting footsoldiers of the anti-trans movement. Not surprisingly, bullying gets worse in Bucks County. And Laura’s daughter becomes a target. 
FOSTER: She had been around some other kids and they were making comments about her they're like looking at her and they like, yeah, if like my sister was gay, I would kill her. Like I would shoot her, like stuff like that.
JONES: It got so bad that Laura’s daughter started eating outside, even in the frigid winter months. 


FOSTER: Whole school year, they ate outside. If I don't take a breath of this, I'm just gonna lose it. I'm gonna start crying like, thinking like this is what happened to my kid. So Imara this why I am out there in this is because all of this stuff isn't just like my daughter or. It's like this, when it happens to my kid, it happens all of our kids. You gotta think this place of like, this is our community, right? And so I don' want any other parent to have to go through what our family went through and continues to go through. Cause this shit echoes through your life. It's not like, oh, fine now. It becomes you.


JONES: Now we reached out to the Pennridge school board, Jordan Adams, the Independence Law Center, Hillsdale College and Larry Arnn through various channels. None of them returned our multiple requests for comment. The hostile climate that had turned neighbor against neighbor, had trickled down to the students in the district.  But Bucks County for all of this, for a reason. It’s a so-called “purple” area. One that is neither deep Democratic Blue or Republican Red.  And purple counties play a decisive role in American politics right now, because elections at all levels are just so close. Here’s John Rogers.  He studies attacks on school boards as Director of the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at UCLA. 
JOHN ROGERS: And what we saw was that it was in those purple communities where the attacks were greatest, where it was most likely that the parents and community members were raising challenges about not just teaching about race and racism, but challenging policies and supports that were being provided to LGBTQ plus youth. And in the way we made sense of that is that there was a purposeful effort to try to build political power, to try to deepen and energize the base of support within those purple communities by amplifying attacks on queer youth educators who were supporting queer youth and on educators who were trying to teach the full history of our country.


JONES: And this galvanizing of the base has a strategy behind it to end democracy in America. 
ROGERS: That theory is grounded in statements that you see from people that indicate there was this purposeful effort to view attacks on public schools that were tied to these culturally divisive issues that were anti-democratic in intent and purpose.
JONES: But as John said public education isn’t just eroded by pitting parents, activists and school board members against each other.  An essential pillar of their plan is to undermine and attack teachers in order to sap even more support for public schools. And just five miles away, in a neighboring Bucks County school district this plays out in painful way. It's 2022 and in the Central Bucks School District, books with LGBTQ content are starting to become taboo under the leadership of a conservative school board. Over the course of the next year, trans kids won't be able to play sports aligned with their gender and pride flags will be prohibited. You know, the normal anti-trans hate machine suite of school policies. But teachers are also afraid. They are afraid to mention anything related to gender or sexual orientation.  And they begin to act on that fear.  Teachers pull books off their shelves and become extremely cautious about making references to queer topics in front of their classrooms.  This is stuff right out of a dystopian fascist novel. Andrew Burgess, who is a middle school social studies teacher, will soon find himself in the crosshairs of these attacks.  Now Andrew was bullied as a kid when he was a student in Bucks County in the 1990s.

ANDREW BURGESS: I had vivid memories of what it felt like to be in those moments where you are a younger person and having kind of no one there to be your advocate 

JONES: It impacted him a lot. So much so that part of the reason he decided to become a teacher was to prevent bullying 


BURGESS: Having that personal experience and being the victim of that kind of thing, I think it really helps you as a teacher try to be proactive about monitoring your building and monitoring your your classroom for that and being able to disrupt it through education through and through accountability for students if if you notice that it's happening.
JONES: So when he learns that one of his trans students is being bullied and deadnamed he knows he has to do something about it. 
BURGESS: It's a terrible feeling when you're a teacher in a classroom and you have a student who's in tears. because you're responsible for maintaining a safe environment in your room 
JONES: Now, as a teacher, Andrew finds himself in a position to prevent and address bullying. As a result of the anti-trans policies of the school board, the environment in Andrew’s middle school was downright hostile. And the trans student was struggling as a result. 


BURGESS: I don't know if I'm searching for the right word but when you're supervising students and you're trying to create an environment in your classroom of mutual respect and emotional safety and to just see how. How far away the reality was in that moment was very unsettling for me.
JONES: Based upon his personal experience and training as a teacher, Andrew knows that he must act. So he tries to work the problem from the inside, going through normal channels. 


BURGESS: A group of us were pushing to make sure we had a safe environment for students that identified as LGBTQ plus in our school specifically. And we were attempting to. Give students and the school and staff training specifically on how to be respectful to students who had transitioned. And that absent that training, we had an environment of ignorance and we had and environment where students were participating in bullying that was going unmitigated and unresolved.
JONES: But there’s a slew of anti-LGBTQ policies coming from the school board. And when Andrew goes to his school’s counselors and social workers for support to stop the bullying, they won’t help him.  


BURGESS: It started to become clear to me that that this student was being repeatedly targeted for who they were and that we were as a school not able to course correct in a way that allowed the student to have a dignified life inside our school 
JONES (IN INTERVIEW): How did that make you feel? Because one of the things you've spoken about is that having experienced bullying yourself and seen bullying and the detriment that it can do to people over the course of their life, that was something that you wanted to prevent.
BURGESS: It was heartbreaking. Um, and at this point it was hard for me to not feel complicit. Um, every day that I came to work, I felt, I was asking myself questions like, am I, am my part of like creating a future world where people can be free to be themselves or we have, we like abandoned this somehow. 
JONES: Despite the fact that school isn’t stepping in,  Andrew can’t just sit by and watch the bullying continue day after day 
BURGESS: This student needed an advocate now, not a five-year plan.
JONES: Eventually, after talking with colleagues, Andrew decides to report this issue to the Office of Civil Rights at the federal Department of Education. Maybe they could actually help.
BURGESS: I felt like given this school's lack of response, that to me qualified as discrimination. And for that reason, I thought it was a civil rights issue
JONES: So he gets permission from the student’s family and submits a report. After several weeks, the Office of Civil Rights gets back to him. They say “yes, we’ll look into this.” And the office schedules a call to learn what’s going on. But on the day of the call, something goes awry.  And it doesn’t go at all as planned.  Andrew’s attempt to have outside authorities intervene goes off the rails. Before his conversation with the Office of Civil Rights, Andrew sits down at his desk while his students complete their assignments. His classroom phone rings before his appointment time. It’s not the Department of Education. It’s the principal. He asks Andrew to come down to his office. When he arrives. It wasn’t just the principal.  It so happens that the school superintendent and the HR Director were there too. Andrew feels ambushed.  His heart begins to race because something feels very wrong about this.
BURGESS: I remember that the director of HR instructed me that I was not going to be allowed to speak at this meeting.
JONES: The school district’s HR Director hands Andrew a letter informing him that he’s being suspended from his job. On top of that they put a gag order on him— so he’s prohibited from talking to anyone about what’s going on. The reason they say that they are doing this.  Wait for it.  Failure to report bullying. Andrew is stunned.  But before he has any time to process what’s happening, they inform him that he has to leave school property immediately.  He has just enough time to grab his keys,
BURGESS: And I remember the door closed behind me it was raining and I had this piece of paper explaining about you know, being suspended that was like slowly getting wetter and wetter while I was looking at it. I remember getting in my car and and leaving campus and and that was the last you know the last time I taught at that school. 
JONES (IN INTERVIEW): How did you feel? 
BURGESS: Well, I think what was happening to my body was disassociation. I feel like I'm not sure if I have yet to feel the pain of this for me.
JONES: For Andrew this entire event is a deeply wrenching and traumatic episode. Everything that he has stood up for in his life feels like it’s blowing back on him. History is repeating itself. He himself was bullied as a student, and now, he’s trying to be the adult he needed as a kid. But he’s being bullied again for the same reason – for standing up for children. It makes no sense and the impact scars him. In fact he now suffers from symptoms of PTSD.  


[car sounds closing of door]


JONES (IN INTERVIEW): We're at this school where you were frog-marched out of, right here, is this the front door? [00:13:42][6.6]
BURGESS: Yeah, right that front door right there, it's funny because you remember strange things I remember what it smells like in there and I remember just the nuances of the building in the different The ways the rooms look, the dimensions of the rooms that I used to teach in, and I miss it. I miss that time, and feel like it was a different me.
JONES: But if the school board and school administrators aren't going to stand up for Andrew, his community decides that it will. They’re not letting his suspension happen without a fight. Kids, some as young as 11, rally and protest outside of their middle school on behalf of their teacher. They walk out of class, carrying pride flags and demand Andrew Burgess’s reinstatement. 


BURGESS: I don't have any words to describe what it felt like to be supported in that way by students. We shouldn't rely on youth for this, you know, for this level of leadership and to see them feeling empowered to stand up for themselves and to stand up for a school where they wanted to be able to belong in. I just have no words for it and I just feel like it really was what we needed in that moment and what I needed in the moment and I'll never be able fully express my gratitude to those students 
JONES: Andrew’s students and his immediate community are standing up for him. But these kids shouldn’t have to. They’re having to be the grown ups because of a political agenda targeting teachers who support the well being of all students. This is part of an agenda to undermine schools — where key democratic principals like pluralism, diversity and respect for everyone are taught.  If schools are no longer where we can learn about each other, including our culture and histories, then America becomes a much darker place. Andrew has experienced what this is like first hand.  And, despite the fact that he was ultimately reinstated, this whole affair still haunts him.  
JONES (IN INTERVIEW): Are you going to stay in this community?
BURGESS: I am not sure. I would, in a perfect world, I think that would be great because I think it would show that we had collectively the institutional courage that we need in this moment. But it is difficult
JONES: We reached out to Andrew’s school district for comment. A representative for Central Bucks Schools replied to our email, saying the district “strives to be a place free of discrimination” and is “committed to creating and maintaining safe and inclusive environments for all students, staff, and visitors.” Our team also tried to get comments from various conservative school board members in Andrew’s district. But these requests remain unanswered. While the forces working to undermine democracy by targeting gender identity were initially successful in Bucks County, that’s not where the story ends.  Because where people and communities get involved, change is possible. In fact, voters in the Central Bucks School District actually oust its conservative members in November 2023. And that same year, just minutes away over in the Pennridge School District, Laura and her community redouble their efforts to fight against the same powerful outside forces. If they can win back seats on the school board and push back against Moms for Liberty, maybe, just maybe, they can undo the damage that’s been done. It’s a true David vs Goliath moment…Against all odds, they are victorious.


[ARCHIVAL] 
6ABCNEWS: Voters in school boards throughout our area voted in new members yesterday, but in several districts, which were the focus of controversy this year, voters took a pretty dramatic step: They flipped the conservative majorities in favor of new members.


JONES: After facing defeat, in one of their last acts, the outgoing conservative school board cancels the rewrite of the district’s curriculum.  That’s what had animated Laura and the RIDGE network to galvanize their community.  By ending Jordan Adam’s contract and his push for the 1776 curriculum, the board acknowledges that their friends and neighbors were against right wing indoctrination of their kids. But, as with Andrew, the impact of these fights have stuck with Laura. And the full-range of anti-trans policies in her district have taken far longer to roll back than she thought. The anti-trans bathroom policy isn’t repealed until 2024, almost a full year after the new board was elected. And Laura knows that once unleashed, these divisions don’t necessarily heal and can be exploited at any moment. 
FOSTER: I got to say that the the narrative around like demonizing trans kids kind of worked in our community. Like, I mean, to this day, I think it works in our community. It's unfortunate because the GOP has taken this narrative around what it is to be trans and, you know, to equate to some fucking like mental health condition to, you know, is aberration and like human being. And it has stuck and the other side has not pushed back in a way that has been meaningful. You know, like our even our local Democrats would not make a stance on anything related to like the LGBTQ plus community.
JONES: And because using anti-trans issues works in schools , It will be deployed to threaten and undermine public education in deeper and more disturbing ways. And Mom’s for Liberty’s playbook will attract some of the darkest forces in America to its cause. We go deep on the group’s formation and impact next time, on The Anti-Trans Hate Machine: A Plot Against Equality 
LISA SCHURR: The extremists. The right wing extremist. Were there and they were in. Full bloom. Screaming, 
VIC MELLOR: They are pushing it everywhere, okay, but to me it's a weapon of, it's one of the weapons of war that we're in, it is a distraction.
LIZ BARKER: Really and truly, I would not be sitting here if it weren't for public schools and in particular, that school counselor who said, you know, absolutely not. You have a place in the world beyond just a wife and a mother.
CONNI BRUNI: We don't co-parent our children with the government. We don't. That is the crux of Moms For Liberty.