San Francisco voters recall 3 school board members: 'This is a revolution'
As outrage over the presence of sexually explicit material and the embrace of “woke” ideology in public schools continues to influence American politics, voters in one of the most progressive cities in the United States have decided to oust three of their school board members.
A recall election took place in San Francisco on Tuesday, where the overwhelming majority of voters supported recall efforts against three of the seven school board members in the San Francisco Unified School District: School Board President Gabriela Lopez, former School Board Vice President Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga.
When asked if they wanted to remove the board members from office, nearly 79% of San Francisco voters supported the recall effort against Collins, followed by 75% for Lopez and 72% for Moliga.
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Supporters of the recall effort point to actions taken by the school board during the coronavirus pandemic as the cause of their frustration. Specifically, the “Recall SF School Board” website alleges that “our school board wasted time renaming schools instead of reopening them.” As explained in a New Yorker article, during the pandemic, “San Francisco’s Board of Education voted, 6-1, to change the names of forty-four schools, including schools named after Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.”
A committee formed by the school board following the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 called for the renaming of schools named after individuals who “engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those among us to the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
“Washington’s name was struck because he held slaves, Lincoln’s because of his policies toward Native Americans. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s name will be removed from a school, owing to the decision, when she was San Francisco’s mayor, in the 1980s, to replace a Confederate flag that was part of a Civic Center display and had been taken down by a protester.”
In addition to accusations of misplaced priorities, outrage over one of its members’ tweets also plagued the school board. Collins, the board member who the greatest number of San Francisco residents voted to recall, sent out tweets following the 2016 presidential election seeking “news stories highlighting hate speech or bullying of Asian students” because she was “looking to combat anti-black racism in the Asian community at my daughter’s mostly Asian Am school.”
30 REASONS TO RECALL THE SF SCHOOL BOARD
— Recall SF School Board (@recallsfboe) March 19, 2021
19. Commissioner Collins appears biased against Asian Americanshttps://t.co/lX2Q0IhFywpic.twitter.com/LyAe6gty13
Collins went on to say that “many Asian [students] and [teachers] I know won’t engage in critical race convos unless they see how they are impacted by white supremacy.” Collins also implied that “Many Asian Am. believe they benefit from the ‘model minority’ BS” before insisting that “many Asian American [teachers], [students], and [parents]” use “white supremacist thinking to get ahead.”
The school board member lamented that more Asians were not “speaking up against Trump,” and asked, “Don’t Asian Americans know they are on his list as well?”
“Do they think they won’t be deported? Profiled? Beaten? Being a house n----- is still being a n-----. You’re still considered the help.”
Ryan Girdusky, the founder of the 1776 Project PAC that supports school board candidates opposed to critical race theory and “woke” ideology, appeared on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Wednesday to elaborate on the criticism of the school board. He reported that “they were talking about abolishing the gifted and talented program” and “they refused to have one gay dad with a bi-racial daughter speak at a public school event because he ‘wasn’t diverse enough’ because he was white.”
.@RyanGirdusky Joins Tucker Carlson To Discuss His @1776ProjectPac's Plan To Get CRT Out Of The Classrooms Through School Board Elections
— The Columbia Bugle ???????? (@ColumbiaBugle) February 17, 2022
Ryan: "I think we can flip 300 school board elections easily this year." pic.twitter.com/XmIs51e37e
The result of the recall vote is especially significant because San Francisco is a liberal bastion that gave more than 85% of the vote to the Democratic presidential ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2020 presidential election. According to Rhodes Cook, a senior columnist at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, San Francisco gave the Democrats the sixth highest vote share in the 2020 presidential election out of all the more than 3,100 counties and county-equivalents in the U.S.
In terms of raw votes, San Francisco gave the Republican ticket of Donald Trump and Mike Pence less than 60,000 votes in the 2020 election. More than 100,000 San Francisco voters supported ousting Collins, while more than 95,000 supported removing Lopez from office and more than 90,000 voted in favor of ousting Moliga.
The success of the recall in a very liberal city did not go unnoticed by the 1776 Project PAC. On Tuesday, the group took to Twitter to declare “this is a revolution.” During his appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Wednesday, Girdusky predicted, “I think we can flip 300 school board elections easily this year.”
Even in the progressive stronghold of San Francisco, school board members are being recalled.
— 1776 Project Pac (@1776ProjectPac) February 16, 2022
This is a revolution. pic.twitter.com/iRjcVYj9hM
Concerns about the direction of American education are not limited to San Francisco. Parents and community members across the U.S. have descended on school board meetings to express displeasure with the inclusion of sexually explicit material in school libraries and as part of the curriculum.
Last fall, a parent in Fairfax County, Virginia, has condemned the presence of the books Gender Queer and Lawn Boy in high school libraries, which she likened to “pornography” and promotions of pedophilia. At around the same time, the mayor of Hudson, Ohio, called on the members of his city’s school board to resign for allowing a book containing sexually explicit writing prompts to make it into the curriculum of a college-level English class offered at the district’s high school.
The recall of the San Francisco school board members comes less than four months before a recall of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is scheduled to take place. Boudin has faced criticism for taking actions that critics maintain have “upended” San Francisco’s criminal justice system.
“Criminals are emboldened due to a lack of accountability; those perpetrators arrested are simply let go, commit more crimes, and unfortunately, many are deadly,” the Recall Chesa Boudin website states. “Our beloved city has seen an astronomical increase in violent crime, home invasions, shops looted, car-jackings, rampant and unchecked drug dealing and business property theft, even under Covid-19 restrictions.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: [email protected]
