What This Mom Learned about Leftist Bully Tactics at School Board Meetings

Kalyn Foggy, Woman of Action defending families in the Washington School District

Kalyn Foggy, a West Valley parent, writes our guest blog this week. She’s a perfect example of a normal, busy woman (young mom) who pays attention and saw the damage that leftist ideology is doing to kids in schools. So, she decided to DO something about it.

She started going to school board meetings, learned a lot, and now she’s involved in the movement to recall a school board member who was sued for religious discrimination. If you’d like to help gather signatures in the Washington Elementary District, whether you live there, or not, please contact the parent group. Her story is inspiring, and reminds us that every one of us has a way to make a big difference! All we need is to pay attention, get informed, get connected and show up for simple action.

Thank you, Kalyn Foggy, for equipping more of us to show up to school board meetings, being more effective at helping kids, families and good teachers! ~ Kim 

“Before 2020, I was one of those people who had her head buried in the sand when it came to politics. I was so uninformed I couldn’t keep straight which side was Republican and which side was Democrat. At the time, my life was pretty unaffected by politics, so it wasn’t important to me to be very involved. That changed dramatically since the start of the pandemic. 

Since diving in head first, I’ve learned a lot along the way--about who I am, my own convictions, how to conduct myself as someone who deeply cares about politics now, and also just how manipulative the left can be. Over the last three years, I’ve had many personal experiences with leftist parents and activists, and approximately zero of them have been enjoyable. And that’s because of certain tactics that leftists employ. 

I want to start talking about these tactics because it’s important to start calling them out. 

It’s no great secret that the right has been asleep at the wheel for a bit, but it’s high-time we start taking a proactive approach. Let’s start calling leftists out on their tactics instead of simply trying to engage in them.

The first one is probably the most prevalent and the most harmful. 1) The left loves to gaslight. In case you don’t know, gaslighting is when an individual attempts to get you to question your reality or the conclusions you reach. Gaslighting is abusive - plain and simple.

For example, when the Washington Elementary School District canceled their contract with Arizona Christian University (ACU) because of ACU’s website claiming that marriage is between one man and one woman (thereby discriminating against Christians), the board and their supporters began their gaslighting tactics. Instead of listening to the Christian community about the impact the board had on their own community, the board insisted that their decision wasn’t actually religious discrimination.

Of course it was religious discrimination. To refuse to work with someone based on their religious beliefs is the very definition of religious discrimination. Claiming otherwise is, at best, completely dishonest and, at worst, an attempt to further abuse that community.

The second thing I’ve noticed: 2) Leftists place the onus for peace and unity onto the right. Whenever a right-leaning community pushes back against leftist policies in their community, you will almost always hear leftists claim that Republicans are causing division.

Leftists never place the onus for peace and unity onto Democrat policy makers. Their cries of peace and unity are never given as a cautionary warning to fellow leftists who are ripping communities apart. 

Instead, they use this tactic in an attempt to convince well-meaning Republicans that they are the ones ripping their community apart with their response to leftist policies. Essentially, ‘If you would quit ripping our communities apart with your push back, then our leftist policies can go through unopposed and that will bring peace and unity’. 

These next two tactics are heavily entangled: 3) The left wants you to think that because you aren’t an ‘expert’ in a given field, then you have no right to form your own opinion. If you aren’t a doctor, how dare you have the audacity to make your own medical choices. And to further the insanity: 4) Leftists claim that experts can’t be biased in their research and methods. 

Leftists fully believe that only people who are ‘experts’ in their fields have the authority to develop opinions, procedures and policies. Since others haven’t dedicated their lives to these fields like the ‘experts’, no one else has any ground to stand on. However, they aren’t consistent.  

We witnessed this during the pandemic, when leftists acted like there was a consensus among doctors on how to best treat patients. Leftists only listened to certain doctors and dismissed the rest. So, not only do we need to exclusively listen to experts, but specifically the experts who agree with leftists. We saw this play out with social media platforms, such as Twitter, censoring doctors who disagreed with the COVID-19 narrative. Doctors from Harvard, Stanford, and other renowned schools were censored heavily.

Furthermore, the belief that experts cannot be biased is not rooted in reality. The reality is that all humans are cut from the same cloth, so to speak. There is no better, superior, or more moral cloth that these ‘experts’ are cut from. There is no type of person more impervious to bias than others. Everyone is capable of being biased, especially people whose livelihoods or entire life’s work are at stake, or when money has been exchanged.

And lastly, the final tactic: 5) Leftists refuse to engage in civil conversation. They will stonewall you, scream over you, rip things out of your hands, ignore you, and assassinate your character, but they will not present a coherent argument. 

In my experience, this is because they cannot answer simple questions about their views. They’ll claim they want to enter into a dialog, but the minute you bring up any valid question that they cannot reconcile with their view, they shut down. They begin looking for any escape to the conversation.

I have experienced this pattern many times. Just recently, a woman refused to sign our recall petition for our school board president because she’s ‘seen what we’ve said about teachers, and she’ll never sign anything from us’. That was very confusing because all we’ve done is advocate for teachers. Some of us are teachers, and some of us are married to teachers. When we offered to have a discussion, she absolutely refused, put her head phones back in and walked away. She was happy to believe false information and didn’t want anyone to correct her. 

When you’re convinced that people who believe differently are useless and you cannot learn anything from them, it halts all conversation and progress. 

Another experience was when a woman showed up outside my church to collect petition signatures to protect women’s right to abortion if Roe v Wade was overturned. She was an older woman - I believe she said she was in high school when the ruling passed - so she had memories of pre-Roe v Wade times. The way she was talking about it was as if teenagers pregnant from rape were everywhere in her time. When I shared with her that rape is the reason given in less than 1% of abortions, she got very flustered, told me I didn’t care about women, and shouted at me that my dress was too short as I walked back to my church. 

She was unable to reconcile the statistics with her deeply held views. So, instead of reevaluating her views, she opted to shout and insult me instead. 

As someone who just got involved in politics not long ago, and solely because I’m concerned about the future for my children, it has been a whirlwind. There’s been a steep learning curve, and it’s been even harder to accept the fact that most political opponents I’ve come across are often disrespectful, rude, and are fully willing to accuse me of evil acts like racism, with zero evidence. 

However, taking a moment to examine the leftist tactics used to manipulate the conversation has been refreshing. It saves me the headache of engaging in these toxic tactics, and instead redirects the conversation back to the issues at hand.”

~ Kalyn Foggy

Thanks again for this advice at school board meetings, Kalyn! (Another help is this video by PragerU on combatting the bully tactics in schools: Have You Been Cancelled at Your Kids’ School?) 

We hope to hear YOUR story, too. Tell us: How are YOU taking action in schools or anywhere in your community to Revive the American Dream of Strong Families, Safe Cities, & Thriving Kids? We’re helping hundreds of you to plug in and make an even bigger impact, and we want to tell more of your stories!