The war against school boards is taking on a new and potentially scary dimension in North Carolina and around the country. A right-wing activist is encouraging her followers to file claims against school board members’ surety bonds and liability insurance packages in order to force boards to drop mask mandates. In so doing, they’re relying on a tactic that is straight out of the sovereign citizen movement, whose members are known to slap bogus liens against government officials.
In some states, school boards and superintendents are required to purchase surety bonds in order to guarantee that they carry out their legal duties. In other states, school boards are covered by their district’s liability insurance. North Carolina-based activist Miki Klann saw this as a way to bludgeon school boards into dropping mask mandates and other measures intended to slow the spread of COVID-19. She recently launched a site called “Bonds for the Win” that helps anti-mask parents turn up the heat on school officials by hitting them in the wallet. Unfortunately, a number of parents across the country—including here in North Carolina—have taken up the cry, and it’s very likely more will follow.
Klann’s site provides sample intent letters to parents arguing that mask mandates violate a host of state and federal laws, as well as international law. If the school boards don’t comply, the parents then file claims against their surety bonds. Ironically, North Carolina doesn’t require surety bonds for school boards and superintendents, so Klann’s North Carolina followers file claims against their district’s liability insurance.
In late January, several parents in Wake County, home to the state capital of Raleigh, followed Klann’s advice in a bid to shake down the Wake County school board. From The (Raleigh) News & Observer:
Katie Long, the mother of two Wake students, received advice from Bonds For The Win before she served papers at the Jan. 18 Wake County school board meeting. She crossed under a security barrier to deliver the papers after the law enforcement officer at the meeting declined to serve them. [...]
“If you cause wrong or harm, we the people have a recourse and can hold you accountable,” Long told the board. “You have violated your oath of office.”
When the 72-hour deadline passed, Long and at least six other parents filed $1 million claims against the board’s liability insurance policy with Liberty Mutual. The board intends to “vigorously defend” itself against these parents’ claims. For its part, Liberty Mutual considers the claims to be improper.
A similar scene played out in Johnston County, east of Raleigh. Even though that school board intends to make masks optional starting next week, a gaggle of parents filed liability insurance claims because—horrors!—the board hasn’t ruled out ordering the masks back on if case counts spike up. And in Iredell County, north of my home in Charlotte, dozens of people tried to take over the board room in an effort to “serve” the board with liability insurance claims.
Deplorables in Iowa have tried this as well. It’s led Iowa State political science professor and self-identified conservative Kelly Shaw to note, in a classic understatement, that these people are engaged in “a desperate attempt to get one’s way through intimidation.”
As unnerving as this is in and of itself, Bonds for the Win has unmistakable ties to QAnon. The site has numerous links to QAnon shibboleths like mass arrests of child traffickers, as well as claims that John F. Kennedy Jr. is still alive. Klann herself is a full-on QNut; she also helps run the QAnon YouTube channel Our Great Awakening, and has promoted Bonds for the Win on several Our Great Awakening videos.
This isn’t all that surprising, given that the QAnon and sovereign citizen movements have been growing closer together for some time. A lot of QAnon followers, such as rabid Trumpvangelical false prophet Johnny Enlow, believed that Trump would return to the White House in March as its first lawful occupant since Ulysses S. Grant. They have adopted a longstanding sovereign citizen claim that the United States was secretly and illegally turned into a corporation in 1871. While Joe Biden was sworn in as president of the “corporation,” Trump restored the “republic” in 2017 and still presides over it. And now it looks like a QNut has put a twist on another sovereign citizen tactic.
When I first saw this, I immediately thought of a longtime friend of mine who serves on a school board in a deep red Midwestern state. If they haven’t tried this out her way—and elsewhere across the country—it’s only a matter of time before they do so.