Similarities? Undeniable!

School Board Protests Are Not Grassroots Movement, Are Not Spontaneous

Conservatives are disrupting school board meetings by shouting, using Nazi salutes, and even physically assaulting anyone they disagree with. But these attacks are anything but spontaneous.

Most school board members are part-time elected officials who must slog through countless meetings and voluminous reports before facing the public once or twice per month, usually for very minimal compensation; they are no match for the kind of violence-prone tactics we’ve seen at board meetings of late, nor should they be.

But this is not a joke. Members of the Proud Boys are showing up to school board meetings across the country. This is extremism; this is hate. “These conflicts attract more violent elements of the far-right, which often put students, teachers, and school board members at risk.”

What’s also at risk is the viability of our democracy and the public education system that can either support, uphold, and strengthen it, or be destroyed through the carefully orchestrated, deep-pocketed campaign we are now witnessing.

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How Democracy Dies

Fanatics, incited by the propaganda of the (Nazi) Party and of a myriad of smaller, less prominent right-wing groups, took the law into their own hands.

That such lawlessness was on the increase was due in no small measure to the attitude of the German judiciary. Most of the higher magistrates were holdovers from the imperial regime.

The establishment of the republic failed to effect their deep-rooted monarchist sympathies.

They disliked liberals and radicals and looked with thinly veiled approval on the machinations of the anti-republic elements. They had a double standard for political crimes.

When the offenders were to the left of the center, they could expect and received little mercy. When they belonged to right-wing organizations, they were generally treated with marked leniency.

This encouraged the reactionary enemies of the republic to continue their vendetta. **

** from: GERMANY TRIED DEMOCRACY: A Political History of the Reich from 1918 to 1933. S. William Halperin. New York, 1946.