TENNESSEE- Outside a school board meeting in Franklin, Tennessee on Tuesday night, a crowd gathered around masked meeting-goers as they exited the building. “You are child abusers!” one member of the crowd shouted. “There’s a bad place in hell and everybody’s taking notes, buddy!”
“We will find you and we know who you are!” another shouted through a mask-wearing man’s car window.
An hour away, in Nashville, similar tensions were simmering at another school board meeting, where a conservative commentator—who does not have children enrolled in that school district—criticized masks as “child abuse.” Days earlier, in North Carolina, a school board meeting over masking devolved into chaos after attendees attempted to “overthrow” the officials and install themselves as a new board. And members of the far-right paramilitary group the Proud Boys have attended contentious school board meetings about masking in Florida and New Hampshire.
In Buncombe County, North Carolina last week, a rowdy anti-mask group caused school board members to end a meeting early. The group reportedly booed a lone parent who spoke up in favor of masks, with one member stating that she looked forward to seeing a school board member behind bars. After the school board members ended the meeting early, some 30 anti-mask participants attempted to “overthrow” the board, the Asheville Citizen Times reported. The group signed a loose-leaf sheet of paper declaring themselves witnesses to the formation of a new, anti-mask school board.
Multiple Florida schools have also seen an influx in outsiders crashing their meetings on masking. Last month, a group of men with Proud Boy uniforms and anti-masking signs attended a Palm Beach County, Florida school board meeting, CBS12 reported. Members of the group sat inside the meeting, and stood on a street corner with a banner bedecked in the Proud Boys logo and the slogan “unmask the children.”
That same month, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio attended a school board meeting in Florida’s Miami-Dade County. Tarrio told WPLG Local 10 News that members of his group were there to speak against masks, vaccine requirements, and “critical race theory.”
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