The meeting was over, the parking lot empty but for a few lingering news cameras. They’d wrapped on the acutely Florida headline of the night: School board member embroiled in sex scandal refuses to resign.

Somewhere in suburban Sarasota, I sat in the drive-thru of a Taco Bell.

Idling in the dark, I allowed in the conspiratorial thoughts that are symptomatic of exposure to prolonged political sideshows. The kind of thoughts that come after hours of purse cashews in the media pen. After activists hoisted posters about hypocrisy and passed around popcorn. After the masses lined up to speak in Mickey Mouse ears and rainbow stickers and Infowars shirts, both sides quoting from the Bible. After the meeting ended with much of the board’s official business reduced to a blip.

One fourth grader said he didn’t understand what was happening that night, but “all I know is, my education is at risk.”

Had I just witnessed the crumbling sandcastle of culture wars, or had the curious case of the Zieglers been a stray comma in a deep playbook to dismantle public schools? What I mean is, how many more meetings could unravel like this before parents tapped out? How long until public education was no longer the vision the founders intended, but an every-man-for-himself game sponsored by Amazon or Koch Industries?

The drive-thru cashier asked, “Would you like to round up for children’s education?”

• • •

I won’t rehash the meeting. If you want a hot take about Bridget Ziegler, the Sarasota School Board member and Moms for Liberty co-founder who admitted to a threesome with a woman after working to impede LGBTQ+ representation in schools, they exist by the dozen. Same goes for Christian Ziegler, the state’s kneecapped GOP leader accused of rape by the same woman.

The melee in Sarasota was, however, representative of 2023, when chaos lapped like whitecaps over Florida school boards. These chambers should be so boring you want to pluck your eyes out, because that’s how important work gets done. Instead, school boards have often been transformed into pedagogical fight clubs.

It’s apt that the year’s most salacious saga — and Florida had a grab bag — would read like a Google Trends report: Moms for Liberty, Don’t Say Gay, Disney, DeSantis.

But December offers a chance for reflection. We brace, stuck in the deepest mud, to climb out.

Two days after the Sarasota circus, a new review board from Pinellas County Schools was scheduled to meet. They would decide the fate of “The Lovely Bones,” the latest book placed by Moms for Liberty on the sacrificial altar.

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After a year of following Florida’s record-setting book bans, watching public schools thrown off balance by joyful warriors in logo tees, meeting librarians hiding novels in their offices in case a student might need to seek their essence in the pages, I planned to attend. I found myself expecting the worst but still holding out hope that another story would not be lost.

• • •

The phrase “parental rights” is seductive, common sense for busy caretakers, for anyone who has ever been frustrated with the shortcomings of their public school. Anyone who has butted heads with a teacher, who has fretted about screens and the internet. Anyone who has felt a terrifying loss of control as a child grows up.

In short, any parent.

But how had Moms for Liberty and likeminded groups gone from being a relative novelty to commandeering school boards in less than three years?

This winter, I started watching a certain milieu of training videos, almost 10 hours’ worth. The online presentations were free via the Leadership Institute, a nonprofit that trains conservative leaders. Bridget Ziegler resigned recently as a vice president for the group.

It would be tempting to joke about masochism. Actually, I learned a ton about budgets, agendas, Robert’s Rules of Order. About the techniques being deployed so effectively across America.

Their mission? Empower parents, even those with zero political experience, to get involved. To run for office. To confront bureaucracy. To ramp up the campaign against what they see as an infringement on their rights and bar certain discussions of race and sexuality from classrooms.

“The Republican Party in Florida, they are very, very organized,” said Manny Lopez, a Democrat running for the U.S. House in Florida who had handed me his phone and asked for a photo next to a protester in Sarasota. “They train, they develop and they put in (candidates) at a low level, and they work them up.” Harnessing that success, he said, comes down to money.

The Leadership Institute, which did not respond to an interview request, was formed in 1979 to train conservative activists. The nonprofit’s founder has ties to the influential and secretive Council for National Policy. It has been a top sponsor of Moms for Liberty, including the group’s first summit in Tampa last year. There, DeSantis called the crowd “the most powerful political force in the country: mama bears.”

Watching these trainings post-scandal, it’s hard not to see them through a darkly ironic lens.

“Everything you say, imagine it on the front page of the newspaper,” Christian Ziegler says in one video.

But broader themes emerged as parents traded anxieties over Zoom.

Your kids are only with you for a short time, these videos stress. Are you going to sit around and do nothing as a socialist curriculum convinces them to hate the country and change genders? Are you going to blindly trust educators, or are you going to trust yourself?

• • •

Razzing Moms for Liberty is seizing low-hanging fruit. Since Tina Descovich, Tiffany Justice and Bridget Ziegler incorporated the organization in January of 2021, they have been called everything from the Minivan Taliban to A–holes With Casseroles. Open a Zeigler-related social media thread today and brace for an onslaught of sophomoric sex jokes.

Co-founder Tiffany Justice, a former Indian River County School Board member in Vero Beach, talked to me on the phone for 40 minutes while helping her kids with breakfast.

The conversation started out hot. When I told Justice that our views didn’t necessarily align, she began grilling me about when I thought books depicting sex were appropriate for schools. As we talked, the exchange mellowed.

Justice was frustrated with the group’s portrayal. Moms for Liberty claims to have 130,000 members, with 32 chapters in Florida, the most of any state. She called herself a social moderate and said Moms for Liberty has a diverse base; one of the group’s directors is a Black lesbian living in Florida.

Treating the Moms as a laughing matter is a mistake, but treating the group as an unstoppable force doesn’t feel right either. School board candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty and the similar 1776 PAC lost 70% of 2023 elections, a teachers union analysis found.

“I feel good for the future,” Justice said. “We have had tremendous success. It’s not without its bumps in the road.”

Conservative women have organized in the Jim Crow era, in the Cold War era, in the Civil Rights era, on the heels of women’s liberation and sexual freedom and LGBTQ+ rights, always emerging through the cracks of changing social mores.

I was fascinated to learn about a mother named Alice Moore who, in the 1970s, was elected to a school board in West Virginia. She challenged a textbook, in part over its use of nonstandard English and Black vernacular. She lost, but her community cleaved; one protest resulted in a shooting. Violence is something I think about every time people yell into megaphones in Florida parking lots.

Moms for Liberty did not look to former mom activists for lessons, Justice said. Instead, they channeled the power of teachers unions in matching shirts, speaking en masse.

“When you’re just one parent, when you’re considered to be a problem parent, they make you go away,” she said. “If you’re unified … they have to listen to you.”

To understand why this movement caught fire, cast back to the crises of COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd. Battles over masking, vaccines and racism poured into classrooms. Parents stuck with kids in quarantine got an up-close view on Zoom.

And outrage wins attention.

Enter Christopher Rufo, the activist Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed to the board of Sarasota’s New College as part of this year’s takeover. He maintained the high-level academic framework known as critical race theory was being passed through public schools to make children hate America.

In a 2022 speech, Rufo said, “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of public school distrust.” He told the New York Times, “I’ve unlocked a new terrain in the culture war.”

Those dark thoughts of mine in the Taco Bell drive-thru? They’re not really that conspiratorial. At a Moms for Liberty summit this year, Oklahoma’s top education officer called for the destruction of the Department of Education, to applause. Former President Donald Trump echoed similar notions.

Moms for Liberty members are concerned, Justice said, about the Biden administration’s proposed changes to Title IX that would make it illegal to bar trans students from sports teams that don’t align with their gender identity. Words like “abolish” sound good onstage, she said, but reality is more complicated. Still, she said, the Department of Education needs “to be curtailed.”

In Florida, the “siege to the institutions,” as Rufo put it, has produced a parade of shameful headlines. Florida leads the nation in book bans, the majority instigated by a few people. Florida has scrutinized everything from the works of Shakespeare to the anatomy on Michelangelo’s David. Fed-up teachers have decamped entirely.

The dramatics have frustrated school board members who would rather keep the lens trained on the work. Pinellas County School Board Chairperson Laura Hine talked with me about field trips, college and career centers, teacher salaries, budgets, literacy, grades. Those aren’t the topics drawing crowds to board meetings. But they’re what make schools run.

“Public education should be nonpartisan,” Hine said. “It should not be subject to political whims.”

Justice said she didn’t believe school boards should be partisan or politicized but that they already essentially are.

Via Fox News in February, DeSantis presented a list of 14 board members in Florida he would target in the 2024 election, including Hine and three more from Tampa Bay. He drew up the list with top Republican lawmakers and Moms for Liberty.

Bridget Ziegler, who Moms for Liberty say left their group a month after its inception, has spent nearly a decade on the Sarasota board. She’s been credited with a role in drafting the Parental Rights in Education Act, which critics call Don’t Say Gay.

Last year, Ziegler welcomed two new allies endorsed by DeSantis, and the board flipped to a conservative majority. Its first order of business was to force the resignation of their highly rated superintendent, who led the district through both Hurricane Ian and the pandemic.

On his way out, Brennan Asplen lambasted the board for manufacturing disarray: “I spend more time on politics and nonsense than anything else.”

• • •

The parking lot in Largo was still. No megaphones or posters. Inside the Pinellas County School Board chambers, 15 people from the community gathered.

The county had a healthy share of book-ban drama in 2023, starting in January when the district temporarily pulled Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” out of schools after a lone parent complaint.

Since then, challenges have persisted. Board member Stephanie Meyer, who has been backed by Moms for Liberty, proposed 28 books to be removed. That included “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold, in which a 14-year-old girl narrates her family’s story from heaven after being raped and murdered.

But this meeting had the potential to represent a tide change. Members aligned with Moms for Liberty wanted the board to be responsible for making decisions on books. Others disagreed.

The process they designed was this: The superintendent would appoint a committee of educators and parents. The public could weigh in. And the committee, with input from media specialists, would make the call.

The night of December 14, Angela Dubach, president of the county’s chapter of Moms for Liberty, approached the podium in a jacket embroidered with Lady Liberty. Dubach had filed a formal complaint against the novel in August, calling for its removal.

At the microphone, she clarified that she didn’t want it banned, but restricted to grades 10 and up.

“Books like this have zero educational value,” she told the committee. “If I were to hand this book to a minor in a public building, in a public park, I could be arrested. Why is it OK in the schools?”

I looked on as the committee read district librarian reviews, as some asked questions and offered thoughts.

While the world has many dangers, books are not among them … College level materials need to be available … Safe place to explore … “The Lovely Bones” continues to meet the needs of our readers.

In that staid room, I listened to what felt like a gift in Florida in 2023 — a measured discussion of literary merits and a keen plumbing of the deeper issues. The committee members held fast that teachers weren’t trying to hurt or groom anyone. That parents already had rights, that they could opt their kids out of books and monitor their child’s library activity. One mother on the panel implored those who spend time trying to discredit public schools to “please think about who benefits from your labor.”

The committee was unanimous. The book stayed.

After the meeting, I approached Dubach. She said Moms for Liberty would seek a clearer definition of the Miller Test, which the U.S. Supreme Court uses to determine obscene speech.

What would she say to those who insist Moms For Liberty is part of a bigger political machine?

“I do all this for free,” she said. “I know the media has grabbed onto that, that we have all this dark money or something floating around. I literally volunteer my time.”

I asked about the argument that parental rights activists are in turn taking rights from others. This question had been vexing me all year. How can folks so politically active, who advocate and lobby for legislation that undeniably impacts the rights of fellow parents, say they don’t co-parent with the government? Dubach didn’t really answer this. When I asked Justice, she said, “You should work to change the law if you feel like the law needs to be changed.”

Back in the winter night, I decided to allow in positive thoughts.

Maybe the public school system, while not perfect by any stretch, had the tools to wiggle out of this morass. Maybe the tools looked exactly like this: dry meetings with procedure, a timer and a lawyer in the back. A coalescing of teachers and parents with calm heads, all being heard. Maybe some Floridians would grow tired of funneling tax dollars into political performance art. Maybe instead of pulling their kids out of class and allowing pillars of democracy to erode, they would put their heads in the game, too. Maybe they’d watch a few training videos. You know. For tips.

I walked past the district’s Little Free Library box. It was brimming with books.