That’s not new, though… it was the strategy deployed by Don Black in the 1990s (maybe earlier) - get candidates friendly to the far right cause to run for local boards… use that to infiltrate the GOP more broadly. I suspect the fascists aligned with Black also had ties to the anti-tax tea party that got hijacked by anti-Obama extremists in 2008.
It’s part of why Trump had some built in support already when he ran in 2016 - because some of the local GOP had already been taken over by fascists.
This is the other side of the coin. Elect fascists, and drive anyone else out of office. They don’t even have to really win, if they can make it so no one will run against them due to threats against candidates or their children. Very few people are willing to put themselves, or more especially their kids, in harm’s way for a pretty piss poor job. And, of course, asking the police for help in these situations run up against the fact that way too many of them actually support this shit.
Yeah, to me that’s the thing that’s been changing in recent years. They’ve been trying to get far-right candidates into local office for a while now (as @Mindysan33 notes) but it seems like these days they’ve really been doubling down on the strategy to make sure the environment at local board meetings is so toxic no ordinary person would even want the job.
Yeah, and I think that’s because the underground “movements” that people like Don Black represents have come to be more “respectable” in more recent years, as more the GOP embraces extremist views. Trump did move it even further to the mainstream. That scum Richard Spencer wasn’t wrong when he intimated that Trump was “their” guy… So, the extremists feel safer being out in the open about their awful views…
It’s frustrating to say the least.
First of all, you don’t know where the organizing and financial support is coming from. No other protest like this has been a true ‘grassroots’ protest, so it’s likely there are machinations going on that we’re not yet aware of, stoking the hatred in local parents.
Secondly, the superintendent of the school, the one supporting LGBTQIA+ students and the state-mandated lesson plans on the subject, is also part of that same Armenian community. Whatever heritage you’re from, it’s probably true that traditionally they were prejudiced against LGBTQIA+ folks too. That doesn’t mean we can assume and argue that therefore all people from a given heritage are prejudiced.
You sure love to blame whatever you can on people from the Middle East, don’t you? Of course always regrettably following some weird evidence you found, it’s not like you’re a bigot or anything. 
I’m reminded of this:
Relevant bit, first five minutes.
Relevant quote:
“I cannot forma coherent worldview out of the things you say.”
There is a side fighting a culture war, and it cares not who it radicalizes to later discard.
This is not an isolated incident.
Facism is as facism does.
From a short interview with Historian Peter Fritzsche about the book “Between two homelands, letters across the borders of Nazi Germany” which gathers the correspondence of a single family before and after WWII.
To what extent do you believe Germans were seduced by Hitler and the Nazis? Or did they make more of a conscious choice?
Germans after World War I were highly politicized. That is why we think of the Weimar Republic as a time of political turbulence and unrest. The active descriptions of politics before 1933, the year Hitler came to power, undermine notions of seduction or brainwashing in the years after. It is not possible to explain the demise of all sorts of political institutions before Hitler in one way, and to explain the power of the Nazis after that in another way.
Germans constantly deliberated questions of race, authority and loyalty. Only a minority became full-fledged Nazis, but most accepted the basic premises of the regime, including the isolation of German Jews. While most Germans had at least a vague idea of the Holocaust, they almost certainly did not endorse mass murder, which is not to say they were not complicit in the persecution of their neighbors along the way to the “final solution.”
I do not accept that these people are Armenian based on you saying their names are Armenian, but granting that is true, are these people Armenian and not American because they are homophobic?
(It’s not just the name is it, please tell me it’s not JUST the name) Because the violence, conflict, target and rhetoric we are seeing here is very much a part of the playbook of American bigots.
That it is repeated by people from different demographics is more, not less proof of a concerted effort by organized hate groups to drive wedges against those who would be allies.
To say that their intolerance is unrelated to other groups exact same intolerance is just a way to scapegoat and dog whistle at the same time.
Edit:
Making it clear about who I was referring to.
Just a “spontaneous demonstration”, eh? Perhaps the Proud Boys who showed up to start a brawl were just expressing “economic anxiety” too.
Others have addressed your willful blindness to the far right’s strategy re: school boards, so I’ll leave it there.
Armenians Who Live in Armenia: “It was those goddamned Americans ruining our elections.” 
Well, honestly, they are not wrong… We tend to export most of our worst things.
“The card says Moops!” - bad faith summed up in a nutshell.
It’s rather odd how some folks here constantly try to ‘Costanza’ damn near every discussion they engage in, especially those regarding fascism, racism and bigotry in general…
Thanks so much for that YouTube video. I hadn’t seen it in a while and it was great to watch it again. That guy gets it so so much.
This. It’s these outside groups that travel all over the country in order to stir up shit and cause problems…not in the name of justice, but in the name of fascism.
How many thousands of hours of national and international news has been trained on Portland and the instigation of violence by Proud Boys from elsewhere? And still people haven’t figured this out?
In 30-40 years, a lot of these people are going to be asking themselves, “Why do my children and grandchildren never call or visit?”
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