The political-organizing campaign conducted in Loudoun County by Prior and the other conservative activists has been skillful. According to Serotkin, it began last spring, amid general conservative fears about the teaching of critical race theory in schools, when members of the public began to ask the school board whether anything like this was happening in Loudoun County. Several members of the school board, Serotkin among them, belonged to a Facebook group called Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County (the sort of identification that became much more common after Charlottesville). After conservative activists discovered that some members of that group had been making a list of the names of people asking questions about C.R.T., they launched recall campaigns against the school-board members who belonged to it. (One member resigned; the other four, including Serotkin, face recall petitions.) Loudoun County school-board meetings grew louder and more contentious, especially as the board considered a measure that would allow transgender students access to activities and facilities that match their gender identity. At a meeting in June, a fight broke out; police arrested two conservative activists and broke up the meeting, declaring it an unlawful assembly.

Prior, who had served as deputy director of public affairs in the Trump Justice Department, was good on TV and good with a sound bite. In the spring, he told Fox News that he’d been targeted by a “chardonnay Antifa” for pushing the case against critical race theory, and then that an “army of moms” was leading the conservative campaign in Loudoun County. In August, he claimed on the network that more than a thousand Loudoun County students had transferred to private schools since 2020 because of the school board’s progressive agenda. (The decline has been more general than he suggested; public-school enrollment dropped by three per cent nationally in 2020, a change that was generally attributed to the pandemic, not politics.) At a press conference this fall, Prior argued that conservatives were being belittled in the county, in a way that might have invited sympathy from Fox News viewers. “We’ve been met with silence, mockery, claims of engaging in dog-whistle politics, and attacked as racists, bigots, facists—pretty much anything that ends with ‘-ist.’ ” In August, as Prior’s campaign was mounting, a forty-eight-year-old man named Scott Smith, who had been arrested at the June school-board meeting, claimed that his daughter had been raped in a girls’ bathroom at Stone Bridge High School by a boy wearing a skirt. (The boy was eventually found guilty of sexual assault by a juvenile-court judge.) Some of the politically relevant facts of the case remain unclear—whether the trans-access policy, which had not yet been adopted, had anything to do with the attack, or what the assailant’s gender identity is—but it served a particular purpose, emphasizing that there was an acute danger in liberal leadership of public schools.