Lori McRoberts was a handpicked audience member at the GOP’s carefully staged rollout of its post-midterm elections roadmap for America.
The event, structured as a townhall with audience members asking GOP politicians questions, was held at a sheet metal plant in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, on Friday, September 23, 2022 (details here).
McRoberts, self-described as a “mama bear” mother of three teenagers, read a litany of grievances from a typewritten script. Not missing from her rant were false claims about what the Biden administration is doing to families like hers, such as labeling parents “domestic terrorists” merely for speaking at school board meetings, a hysterical overreaction that McCarthy himself has repeated.
(This is going off half-cocked; to read what really happened, go here. A federal judge dismissed a parents’ lawsuit accusing the Attorney General “of stifling their free speech” saying they misunderstood a DOJ memo about harassment against schools; see that story here.)
After ranting against Covid-19 school safety measures like masks and social distancing, which she described as “propaganda,” she said, “There are many other public education issues, concerning parents like myself.” She then called diversity and anti-bullying programs “Marxist-style programs targeting our children.” McCarthy sat there nodding his head in apparent agreement. (Read story here.)
It’s a moment reminiscent of a GOP-staged March 2015 townhall in South Carolina where a woman in the audience, repeating a debunked conspiracy theory (details here), claimed “communist dictator” President Obama had ordered the Pentagon to explode a nuclear weapon in Charleston Harbor as part of a “false flag” operation, and then-Sen. Rick Santorum stood frozen at the podium like a deer in headlights (see story and video here).
In the cacophony of free speech circulating among America’s 330 million inhabitants, there’s bound to be a large volume of falsehoods and nonsensical thinking. But isn’t part of leaders’ jobs getting facts straight, then guiding followers toward constructive thinking, instead of encouraging intellectual failure?
It comes down to this: We can’t let people like this run our country, because facts matter, and public policies driven by lies, baseless fears, and paranoia harm rather than promote the successful functioning of our society. And politicians who fail to stand up against such nonsense, or actively encourage it, can’t be trusted with lawmaking responsibilities.
Republicans, and their crazy supporters, are attacking our public schools. Our kids and grandkids attend those schools, too, and will be impacted by what Republicans are trying to do to schools if they’re allowed to. Public education belongs to all of us, not just them; our taxes pay for it, and what kids learn — or don’t learn — will affect them for the rest of their lives.
There were 28 Republican members of Congress at that event, listening to McRoberts speak, and not one of them corrected her when she called school anti-bullying programs “Marxist.” That’s not a party you can trust with the responsibility of making school policies.