The American political, cultural, and historical landscapes are riddled with holes dug by leftists burying inconvenient truths. Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers President, obscured her role pushing school closures when testifying to Congress a few months ago. CNN anchor Abby Phillip denied that college affirmative action policies lower admission standards. And who can forget the “The 1619 Project,” a debunked attempt to restate the founding principles of the United States of America?

At the state level, it’s clear progressives have no shortage of shovels. “Schoolyard Brawl,” an article in the North Carolina startup magazine, The Assembly, memory-holed local school vaccine mandates. Reporter Barry Yeoman billed his work as a researched expose' representing “the story of America today.” More accurately described as “the story of left-wing propaganda in America today,” the piece serves as another tool to discredit parents critical of activist school boards.

The article begins by recounting protests against the Orange County, NC School Board (OCS). Fashioning a narrative of imagined parental concerns triggering sweeping death threats, Yeoman wrote of one September 2021 protest, “They called for an end to COVID-19 vaccine mandates for students (although none existed) and masking rules, and for the deaths of those who disagreed.”

The death threats to which Yeoman refers (shouts of “Death to Tyrants!” and “Sic Semper Tyrannis!” from a Proud Boy protester) were not considered as such by the local sheriff’s department. Selective emphasis on Proud Boy melodrama diverts attention from controversial school board plans. Although Yeoman would have the reader believe otherwise, the school board passed a vaccine mandate in August 2021 while suppressing input from the community. Parent and student concerns were hardly fantastical.

One month prior, a Friday evening August 13 district email informed Orange County residents of a special meeting on COVID policies to be held Monday August 16. The agenda included the mandate:

All students… who directly support athletics, cheerleading, club sports, chorus, marching band, or theater who are eligible for a vaccine must be vaccinated in order to remain eligible to participate effective September 7, 2021 (at least first dose).

OCS held a so-called information session days after the meeting, but participants could only communicate via a virtual chat. By intentional exclusion of resident input, the school board escalated tensions with the community.

The vaccine mandate passed. The mandate included an ultimatum that if a student didn’t undergo vaccination, he or she would be subjected to invasive testing by a third party every two weeks (risking false positive tests and public exposure of personal medical decisions).

When I requested a correction to “Schoolyard Brawl,” both the reporter and his editor, Kate Sheppard, maintained a subjective definition of “mandate,” unsupported by years of published articles and court decisions dating back to 1905’s Jacobson vs Massachusetts. Sheppard, an adjunct instructor at UNC Hussman School of Journalism and former editor at HuffPost, claimed an “in-depth” review of my concerns. In my email, I discussed the “ultimatums” comprising the vaccine mandate. Sheppard’s response falsely stated I used the word “alternative” (a big difference): “Given that you state there is an alternative to vaccination -- testing -- I think we may just have different definitions of the word ‘mandate.’” There were no alternatives: either parents follow the mandate or the board disqualified their kids from sports.

The Assembly staff needs to upgrade from a shovel to a back-hoe. Sheppard should ask her former employer to change its headline to fit her preferred narrative. She also may want to advise the Supreme Court to modify its January 2022 ruling staying Biden vaccine mandates. The Supreme Court decision begins, “The Secretary of Labor, acting through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, recently enacted a vaccine mandate for much of the Nation’s work force.” The opinion subsequently embraces the testing ultimatum as a component of the vaccine mandate.

With one offhand parenthetical aside, The Assembly buried a local school board’s vaccine mandate. Other deceptive narratives characterized the article. Yeoman wrote that a parental rights group “claimed” former board chair, Hillary MacKenzie, “supported ‘indoctrinating kids in gender fluidity.’” What the group “claimed” was fact. MacKenzie emphatically expressed her desire to impose gender fluidity conversations on children during a recorded school board meeting.

Yeoman interviewed a parent who founded a Moms for Liberty chapter in Orange County. Sourcing an article that falsely asserts critical race theory isn’t taught in schools, he wrote, “The organization, known for its confrontational tactics, grew rapidly during the pandemic.” Also interviewed was an Orange County activist who founded Hate-Free Schools Coalition. While describing Hate-Free’s goals to ban Confederate symbols from schools, he ignored the “confrontational tactics” of this organization: online harassment of a qualified school board candidate over minor political donations to the point where the candidate quit the race.

Yeoman also broached the controversy over sexually explicit books in the school library. He highlighted unanimous school board votes to keep controversial books, describing the votes as “a display of common ground by a politically divided board.” Six of the seven members of the “politically divided board” were registered Democrats, one an unaffiliated voter with a history of social justice activism. Of the 18 full-color magazine photos accompanying “Schoolyard Brawl,” not one depicted the images in the books of detailed sexual acts objected to by an OCS parent interviewed for the article.

Some of the article’s other oversights include: a school board chair called police on a parent exercising non-threatening free speech rights on public property; the board changing meeting times and agendas at the last minute to frustrate parents who planned public comments; board members referred to parental concerns as “attempts at distraction.”

Attributing this storytelling to progressive bias misses the mark. As author and social critic Michael Malice states, “The corporate press has an agenda, not a bias, and thinks (correctly) that the populace has a short memory.” By portraying North Carolina parents as out-of-control partisans opposing a sensible, inclusive, politically diverse school board -- when there was considerable evidence to the contrary -- The Assembly acts with an outright agenda.

The Assembly reporter married his agenda with that of the Biden Department of Justice. Yeoman referenced Attorney General Merrick Garland’s October 4, 2021 memo that directed the FBI to investigate parents critical of school policy as “domestic terrorists,” writing that local behavior toward the school board “fits what the U.S. Department of Justice described in 2021…” Yeoman’s reporting “fits” with the Biden DoJ’s attempt to weaponize the government against American parents critical of progressive activism in education.

Are Americans waking up to the weaponization of journalism? A recent Reuters Institute report revealed the U.S. ranks last among 46 countries in media trust. The Assembly and its staff should take note and correct its errors. But given its obvious agenda, I’m not holding my breath.

Image: Library of Congress