From the dais, school board member Beth Barts painted such concerns as paranoia and prejudice. “Our students do not need to be protected, and they are not in danger,” she said. “Do we have assaults in our bathrooms or locker rooms regularly?” (source)

Board chair Brenda Sheridan asked, “Have we had any issues involving transgender students in our bathrooms or locker rooms?”

Ziegler answered:

Time Magazine in 2016 called that a red herring, that the data was simply not playing out that transgender students were more likely to assault cisgender students in restrooms than were other students. In fact, regardless of the gender identity of the student, if a crime or violation of the rules were committed, that would be investigated and dealt with to the full extent of the rules or the law. …

I think it’s important to keep our perspective on this, we’ve heard it several times tonight from our public speakers but the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.

Smith tried to contain himself as activists who prioritize “lived experience” and “believe women” ignored his daughter. (source)

After another speaker blasted the school board for suspending a teacher named Tanner Cross for speaking in opposition to a transgender proposal during the public comment portion of a previous meeting, the crowd cheered, and the board shut the meeting down. (Two courts later ruled that Cross must be reinstated.)

The response – a public body censoring the public as a direct result of it complaining about earlier censorship – was typical of what has made Loudoun County an avatar of the social instability brought by the politicization of schools. (source)

Barts was elected in 2019, she lashed out at parents who disagreed with progressive – and teachers union-backed policies so often and with such vitriol that her peers – most of whom agreed with her views – censured her and stripped her of her committee assignments.
[...]

Barts retreated to a Facebook group, officially known as the Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County and later known to critics as Chardonnay Antifa, populated by other progressive government officials, teachers, and a small but highly engaged faction of activist-minded community members: “I’m losing any hope that remaining civil towards these people changes anything,” one member wrote. “Avoiding these people isn’t enough to stop the spread of their evil rhetoric.”

Barts told the group that ethics rules were making it difficult for her to identify and call out such parents by name, and asked for help. The group took the hint and took up the banner.

They responded enthusiastically to a call to “hack” parents who questioned school board policies and “expose these people publicly.” They set out making lists of parents who posed a risk to their school policy agenda, replete with their spouse’s names, areas of residence, and employers.

Less understood, until now, is that these initiatives were not necessarily limited to behind a keyboard.

A frequent participant in the group was a woman named Jackie Schworm.

“Does anyone have a list of the parents who organized against the diversity library books?” Schworm posted, according to records subpoenaed from Facebook pursuant to a sheriff’s criminal investigation into the group.

Schworm volunteered to help Hilary Hultman-Lee, a former teacher-turned-ringleader of the crusade, to find information about parents who disagreed with school policies, writing of one, “I’ll see what I can find out. She blocked me a while ago.”

One member wrote that a conservative school board member, John Beatty, had once spoken to parents at a church and told attendees they “should tell the schools what they wanted taught.” Another member replied with an idea to convince the Southern Poverty Law Center to list disfavored local groups as “hate groups,” then cite that designation to give ammunition for the school board to “have them banned from speaking publicly at meetings.”

Schworm responded, apparently regarding Beatty: “He’s truly scary… Have seen him ‘around’ and he makes Michelle Leffler [a conservative mom who has called attention to sexual assault in LCPS] look sane.”

Schworm was at the June 22 school board meeting, wearing a shirt with a rainbow heart on it. As a Girl Scout troop leader, Jess had mentored Schworm’s daughter. Smith and Jess said Schworm sought them out in the crowd, demanded to know which side they were on, then berated them that they were wrong. “Jess, who is this?” Smith asked his wife.

“I thought she was my friend,” Jess replied.

Smith tried to tell her what happened to his daughter, he said. “And she looks me dead in the eyes and says ‘that’s not what happened.’”

Schworm noticed that Smith was wearing a shirt with the name of his plumbing business on it, “And she goes ‘Oh… I’m going to ruin your business on social media,’” he said.

“You’re a bitch,” Smith replied, in a confrontation captured on video. A police officer monitoring the tension-filled exchange pulled on Smith’s arm, he yanked it away, and soon, Smith and the officer were wrestling. Other officers pinned Smith to the ground, bloodying his lip in the process, as Smith uttered, “I can’t breathe.”

Jess cried out, in words lost in the chaos: “My child was raped at school, and this is what happens!”

Smith was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

[...]

The overweight white plumber in handcuffs has served as a two-dimensional caricature for a variety of ideologues all over the world for three months. No one knew what happened – but they were sure they knew exactly who he was anyway, and they hated it so badly that one suburb’s town hall became an international media event.

Smith had to put up temporary fencing around his house for three days to keep the media out. “The radio and TV people were coming for days,” he said. When he arrives at people’s homes for early-morning plumbing jobs, he has a habit of bringing customers’ newspaper in from the driveway for them, but for days, every newspaper he picked up had his bloodied face on it. When he finally laid in bed with his wife to get some rest, he turned on the TV and inevitably saw himself.

The body-positive crowd humiliated him for his looks. They mocked his inadvertent near-nudity, with one activist heckling online, “his gender pronoun is almost showing.” The National School Boards Association cited Scott’s arrest as an example of the sort of incidents that, they said, might justify invoking the anti-terrorism PATRIOT Act on U.S. citizens.

[...] Biberaj, the prosecutor, was elected by a 1% margin after George Soros paid $845,000 to support her bid. Her opponent, the Republican incumbent, spent $113,000 altogether, a more typical sum for a local race.

[...]

Biberaj is known for leniency and alternatives to incarceration. On July 30, Peter J. Lollobrigido was released from jail on a $5,000 unsecured bond while facing charges of strangulation, abduction and assault on a family member. On September 19, he allegedly returned to finish the job, killing his wife with a hammer. A few days after Lollobrigido was released, on August 17, Smith faced court for two misdemeanors, disorderly conduct and obstruction of justice (resisting arrest), for the school board incident.

Lancaster, the Smith family’s attorney, was sure the charges would be dropped. Instead, Biberaj – the top law enforcement officer in a county of 400,000 residents – showed up to personally try the misdemeanor case.

Lancaster explained in court that her client was angry after his daughter was sexually assaulted in a bathroom by a person identifying as “gender fluid,” and reminded her that prosecutors had substantiated the assault and chosen to bring charges. But Biberaj sought jail time against Smith.

“It is incredibly unusual for a disorderly conduct case to even go forward. The idea that they would actually be seeking jail time, I’d guess in my 15 years the number of times I’ve seen that happen would be zero,” Lancaster told The Daily Wire. “It would be completely unheard of for the prosecutor to handle a misdemeanor.”

Biberaj was not just the top prosecutor. She was the prosecutor who had run on a platform of not jailing people for minor crimes, and for using alternate approaches like restorative justice.

“The idea that this is a person who we need to put in a cage was astounding to me given the social justice reform she was pushing. I was blown away,” Lancaster said.

[...] The charges against Smith were so minor that there was no option to have a jury trial, which Smith believes he would have won. That option is available only through an appeal, which will cost him more than the thousands of dollars he has already spent on legal fees.

On August 11, the school board voted to approve the transgender policy. Smith could not sign up to speak so that policymakers could make their decision with knowledge of the Stone Bridge incident: Days before it, he received a letter informing him he is banned from the school board building. (source)

In August, Smith was sentenced for the altercation with officers to 10 days in jail, all suspended, contingent on a year of good behavior. Images of Smith in handcuffs, his face covered with blood and his belly popping from under a T-shirt, made him a symbol of anti-trans bigotry in the eyes of the liberal media. (source)