On Wednesday, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent a letter to President Joe Biden calling on his administration to protect schools and education leaders from the increasingly unhinged threats from the right. Saying that American public schools are “under an immediate threat,” the NSBA called on the Biden administration to look at these partisan attacks on school boards as having devolved into a space where legally they “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”

The NSBA, an organization representing “90,000 elected school board officials around the U.S.”, points to the past few weeks of right-wing activism attacking local school boards making decisions on COVID-19 public safety precautions, such as mask requirements in school. These meetings have gotten progressively more tense and violent in their tenor, with the threats of violence literally being chanted at school board members in some cases. And while the right would like people to believe that these are grassroots, populist movements coming out of concerned parents’ rights groups, the reality is much more Machiavellian: More and more of these school board protests seem to be lead or attended by conservative celebrities and far-right militia groups like the Proud Boys, none of whom have children in the counties they are protesting.

The NSBA gives various examples of the threats of violence in its letter and charts what started as protests against public safety mandates as they have devolved into using school board meetings to air right-wing grievances about the world. The attacks on what has been called critical race theory (CRT) are simply the same thing we have seen before from conservative white supremacists for hundreds of years. When it’s not CRT, it’s an attack on LGBTQ+ students. But whether or not you want to have a discussion on these matters, the results that right-wing circus rallies—promoting mob mentality over discourse—are yielding are not good.

On top of this, state legislatures controlled by Republicans have very consciously turned these school board meetings into partisan political rallies to fundraise and campaign on. For example, in North Carolina, the GOP has made it law that while school boards may vote to require mask mandates, they have to do this every month. Besides being a waste of time and resources, the only reason to require a monthly vote is in order to be able to hold monthly GOP rallies at school board meetings. 

Meanwhile, so-called elite schools—the kinds of private institutions that right-wing operatives like Sen. Ted Cruz and disgraced former guy Trump send their kids to—have mask mandates. Unsurprisingly, they also have none of this terrorizing partisan grifter-activism going on. Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina isn’t showing up with an apparent knife tucked into his wheelchair at more tony schools that have mask requirements for their students and staff. But then again, as the NSBA’s letter reminds everyone, regardless of your feelings about race and masks, the heightened threat of violence at school board meetings is counterproductive to what everyone claims they want: better education.

The NSBA has been supportive of the Biden administration’s moves to protect the educational environment from the surging delta variant of the COVID-19 virus. But every step of the way, they have had to continuously release statements sounding the alarm that these astro-turfed conservative campaigns against schools and teachers and school board members are threatening the safety of not only the individuals being terrorized, it’s threatening the public welfare of everyone in these communities.

Related: Republican states Florida, Texas, Tennessee, and Georgia have dozens of dead teachers and staff

Related: In the anti-CRT backlash, Latinx communities hear echoes of the resistance to Chicano studies

Related: Maskless audience scolds masked dad after he’s attacked by unmasked man right in front of them