I’m gonna excise the name of the town and state from the excerpt, just as a tease. See if you can guess where it might be.

School boards have always attracted their share of controversies: disagreements over curriculum, bitter election fights, and personality clashes. But in recent months, as parents express their frustration over Covid lockdowns, mask mandates, and critical race theory, local school districts and federal law enforcement have upped the ante by monitoring parents, requesting undercover agents at school board meetings, and even arresting parents who attend board meetings to express dissent.

The latest and most egregious example comes from ******, ****. In a series of school board meetings this fall, two fathers—a minister named Jeremy Story and a retired Army captain named Dustin Clark—spoke out against alleged corruption and school officials’ hostility toward parents. Journalist Pedro Gonzalez reported that at an August meeting, Story had calmly “produced evidence that the board had covered up an alleged assault by the superintendent, Hafedh Azaiez, against a mistress.” The superintendent and school board president cut him off midsentence and ordered officers to remove him from the premises.

At the next meeting, in September, with the district’s controversial mask mandate on the agenda, the school board locked the majority of parents out of the room, preventing them from speaking. Clark and other frustrated parents asked the board to open the nearly empty room to the public. Instead, school board president Amy Weir directed officers to remove Clark from school property. As he was dragged out by two officers, Clark shouted to the audience: “It’s an open meeting! Shame on you. Communist! Communist! Let the public in!”

A few days later, the school district, in coordination with law enforcement, sent police officers to the homes of both men, arrested them, and put them in jail on charges of “disorderly conduct with intent to disrupt a meeting.” Families and supporters of Story and Clark held an all-night protest outside the jail, until the men were released the following morning. They are now raising funds for their legal defense.

The school board was able to do this because the ****** Independent School District has its own police force, with a three-layer chain of command, patrol units, school resource officers, a detective, and a K-9 unit. The department serves under the authority of the board and, through coordination with other agencies, apparently has the power to order the arrest of citizens in their homes. For many parents, the school board is sending a message: if you speak out against us, we will turn you into criminals. When reached for comment, the school district’s police department confirmed that it initiated the investigation and that “one board member requested details from the ****** Police” prior to the criminal referral.

Bill makes one of the most cogent points, but I can easily think of several more:

A little something for those naifs who still think that the coppers will form a Thin Blue Line of constitutional protection between the public and the ruling class that pays their salaries.

Hate to say it, but I don’t expect it to be much different when the military is sent in to round up Real Americans and shut them down, gulag style. Yes, there are still good cops, just as there are good soldiers—sober, thoughtful men who take the oath they swore to the US Constitution seriously, and who find themselves at an extremely troubling moral crossroads now. I’ve heard from some of them as this bizarre (un)American inversion has played out over the last nigh-on two years, have spoken at length with some who live around here—people I’ve known since I was but a wee lad, a couple of them. The prospect of being given such outrageous orders is causing them true anguish, calling into question the core ideals and beliefs they’ve lived by their entire adult lives, making them wonder what all those years of sacrifice, hardship, and extreme risk were for, if anything.

Ahh, but did you guess where this jackbooted trampling of so many Constitutional principles and “protections” it actually, physically pains me to think about it actually went down?

It was in Round Rock, Texas.

That would be TEXAS, people. TEXAS. With a capital T-E-X-A-S.

What. The. Actual. FUCK.

If this sort of thing starts happening in Florida, may Almighty God forbid it, it’ll be proof positive that our problems are even bigger than we realized.

Update! Cold comfort.

Round Rock is a city in the U.S. state of Texas, in Williamson County (with a small part in Travis County), which is a part of the Greater Austin metropolitan area. Its population was 99,887 at the 2010 census.

The city straddles the Balcones Escarpment, a fault line in which the areas roughly east of Interstate 35 are flat and characterized by having black, fertile soils of the Blackland Prairie, and the west side of the Escarpment, which consists mostly of hilly, karst-like terrain with little topsoil and higher elevations and which is part of the Texas Hill Country. Located about 20 miles (32 km) north of downtown Austin, Round Rock shares a common border with Austin at Texas State Highway 45.

In August 2008, Money named Round Rock as the seventh-best American small city in which to live. Round Rock was the only Texas city to make the Top 10. In a CNN article dated July 1, 2009, Round Rock was listed as the second-fastest-growing city in the country, with a population growth of 8.2% in the preceding year.

Round Rock is perhaps best known as the international headquarters of Dell Technologies, which employs about 16,000 people at its Round Rock facilities. The presence of Dell along with other major employers, an economic development program, major retailers such as IKEA, a Premium Outlet Mall, and the mixed-use La Frontera center, have changed Round Rock from a sleepy bedroom community into its own self-contained “super suburb”.

All that being so, the bolded bits in particular, I suppose the real shock is that there were any dissenting parents there in the first place. The tell-tale signs of a sudden shitlib-locust infestation are all right there, easy to see for anybody who’s experienced one of these tragic invasions up close and personal.

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