Loudoun County officials call concerned parents 'alt-right'
Loudoun County parents Fred Rege and Jessica Mendez on being called alt-right.
Loudoun County parents appeared on Fox News Tuesday to push back against the official who called them "alt-right."
Juli Briskman, a member of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, defined a group of concerned parents who challenged school board members as "alt-right," even though the group includes Black and Jewish parents.
"No, I’m not alt-right, I’m not a white nationalist. I’m a concerned parent. Concerned about what’s going on in our schools, I try to hold our school board accountable," Fight for Schools member Joe Mobley told "Fox & Friends."
Loudoun County parent Jessica Mendez said that the "Fight for Schools" organization has two Democrats on their board and many more who are volunteers. She said the fact that they are having Briskman, a board of supervisors member, call the group white supremacist, is "outrageous."
"You know, it just goes to show that some of these Loudoun County politicians haven’t learned a thing. We are seeking the removal of school board members who were in a private Facebook group that we're targeting parents and calling them racist. We are seeking their removal because they violated laws and their own code of conduct which is exactly what Juli Briskman just did. She violated her own code of conduct. She attacked her own constituents."
LOUDOUN COUNTY OFFICIAL BRANDS NON-PARTISAN CONCERNED PARENTS GROUP 'ALT-RIGHT'
The parent organization Fight for Schools recently obtained enough signatures to challenge all the remaining school board members who were in the private Facebook group that launched a campaign against parents who oppose critical race theory in the classroom. Fight for Schools filed the petitions against the school board chair last week. Briskman made her claim in a tweet responding to those petitions.
"[Thank you, Loudoun for All] for a factual & thorough debunking of the alt-right FFS petitions," Briskman tweeted on Thursday. "If they want to fight for schools they should support teacher pay increases, more mental health resources and ending the school to prison pipeline."
Merriam-Webster defines "alt-right" as "a right-wing, primarily online political movement or grouping based in the U.S. whose members reject mainstream conservative politics and espouse extremist beliefs and policies typically centered on ideas of white nationalism."
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Earlier on "Fox & Friends First," Loudoun County parents Joe Mobley and his fellow "Fight for Schools" member Elicia Brand pushed back on being called "alt-right."
"I try not to politicize everything but, unfortunately, in these circumstances they truly do, meaning far left, radical leftists have a playbook and they only say lines from the playbook. White supremacy, white nationalism, those are the lines in the playbook despite any facts that stand in their way. Facts like Alicia, facts like me, when people see me they can obviously tell that I am Black, they can obviously tell that I’m not a white supremacist but they got that 1984 doublethink in their mind so they are saying these two things are true. I can see that he is Black but he is also an alt-right white nationalist," Mobley said.
Mendez is Jewish.
"There is no way that a Jewish person can be alt-right because by definition the alt-right does not think that conservatives are anti-Semitic enough. I am certainly not anti-Semitic as a Jewish-American," Mendez said.
Fox News' Tyler O'Neil contributed to this report.
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