It’s not news that Facebook is a key organizing tool for angry conservatives, but the scope of it is still dizzying. Media Matters has identified “at least 860 right-wing parents and school-related groups that are active, with at least 717,000 combined members,” with topics ranging from “critical race theory” (read: any teaching that could be interpreted as anti-racist) to mask and vaccine mandates to the whole cocktail of right-wing positions on schools.

The 860 groups Media Matters found include six networks with anywhere from 23 to 135 groups each, many of them private. When you’ve got networks running dozens of groups apiece, that’s a sign that something is going on beyond an organic uprising of frustrated parents. It’s not the first sign of that, of course, with other little hints including the Fox News full-court press to create school-related culture wars, statements from Republican politicians doing the same, Glenn Youngkin’s entire campaign for governor in Virginia, and books being pulled from school libraries around the country.

But the Facebook groups help show how the organized, top-down right-wing campaign reaches hundreds of thousands of people and mobilizes them to show up at school board meetings to yell and scream or complain about books in school libraries. Media Matters found:

125 anti-mask groups.
116 groups opposing critical race theory.
34 anti-vaccine groups.
21 groups opposing vaccine mandates.
17 groups opposing comprehensive sex education.
13 groups that were focused on reopening schools.

While those may be the organizing principles of the groups, there’s a lot of crossover. Media Matters found numerous cases of anti-mask, anti-vaccine, and anti-sex ed posts on Parents Against Critical Race Theory, for instance, as well as anti-CRT posts in groups officially dedicated to opposition to masks or vaccines.

For Republicans, these issues are connected to a broader attack on public schools as a public good. It’s not just about masks or vaccines, or anti-racism. It’s not even just about getting Republican voters worked up about those things, using the culture war angle to get them to the polls. It’s about saying that public schools should be subservient to the whims of individual parents rather than serving all children equally. That there should not be a baseline of safe, healthy education that all kids have access to, but rather a fragmented system in which funding goes via vouchers to private and in many cases religious schools, or to charter schools that can siphon off private profit from public education money. That the government has no interest in the education of the population of the United States. That the education kids get should be directly related to their families’ access to resources and entirely constrained by what their parents are willing for them to learn—and that public schools should be forced into following the most restrictive demands of any parents. Or at least, any conservative white parents who start shouting.

And, of course, Facebook is all too happy to provide these organized groups with a platform to spread racism and anti-vaccine messaging.