Hey, OC—let Mahopac be your warning
In a small town some 3,000 miles away, the corrosive impact of Moms for Liberty rears its ugly head.
Long before I was called toward the palm trees and sunshine of Southern California, my home was a town named Mahopac.
It’s a tiny spot in Putnam County, N.Y.—current population, 9,171. It boasts a gorgeous lake, spectacular fall foliage, a good number of top-level pizza joints and a high school baseball team that brought the world Dave Fleming, 17-game winner for the 1992 Seattle Mariners.
This week, however, Mahopac went nuts.
Wait.
Hold on.
Not Mahopac, per se—but the Mahopac Board of Education.
Nuttier than nuts.
And it relates very much to what’s going down here in Orange County.
So on Tuesday night, Christine Tona, the district’s superintendent and a woman boasting 33 years in education, stepped down after the Board of Education forced her out. Now, Mahopac has long been a conservative town. Hell, Putnam is the reddest county in New York State. But for my money, it was always fairly Reagan Republican-ish. Lower taxes. Less government intrusion. Salute the flag. That sorta stuff. Yet recently, the nine-member School Board was hijacked by five Moms for Liberty adherents—red hats and burning stakes and and Trump! Trump! Trump! After running on promises of transparency and fiscal responsibility, they held a bunch of secret sessions, then forced out Tona—who is under contract until 2027, and will be paid more than $500,000 to not work. Meanwhile, they secretly installed a 75-year-old former gym teacher/athletic director to hold the position on an interim basis, paying him (wait for it) $1,200 per day.
To be clear, Mahopac is not a wealthy district.
I bring this all up because, out here, much of the same shit is going down. Capo Unified, for example, was also hijacked by a bunch of Moms for Liberty cray-crays, led by a board president, Lisa Davis, who refuses to address the likely possibility of ICE agents coming after immigrant students and staffers this academic year. Capo Unified also includes a woman, Judy Bullockus, who drops the n-word in public meetings and another, Jennifer Adnams, who is a proud member of a freaky religious pyramid scheme. These people are not merely weird—they’re dangerous loons who regurgitate the MAGA talking points fed by their lord and savior. They’re mega-church funded, emboldened by a belief that God is on their side and rearing for a fight to privatize much of education and bring Jesus into public schools.
And it’s all over the place in Orange County. And spreading. And dangerous.
And it needs to stop.
We are not in Mahopac.
But we are very close to becoming Mahopac.
Thank you for shining a light on this public school takeover. We the people need to take action!! I wish some of these first time candidates for the CA40 Congress seat would run for school board or city council. It’s so frustrating to see the damage being done on a local level. I’m grateful you are sounding the alarm!! 🚨
I hate to break it to you, Jeff, OC in many ways is a bigger version of Mahopac. I grew up in this area (I left for college and then stayed gone for 16 years, but ended up coming back 10 years ago), and in the 80's an 90's it was also filled with the country-club Republican set. In so many ways, I have been shocked with how easily these former Reagan Republicans, who once espoused the benefits of cheap immigrant labor, have gone fully MAGA. It's like they became racist Dixiecrats overnight.
I think a lot of normal people just ceded ground to these crazies, especially on the local level. There was a concerted effort by groups like Moms for Liberty to run for local office that did not exist among moderates and progressives. Their nutty views were accelerated by the rise of social media. Until this last election, I really thought that most of these people were still quite fringe. Sure, you could get one or two on a school board, but cooler heads and reason would prevail. After the Capo Valley scandal, yeah, no. They are committed to lies, hostile to actual education, and even openly racist. Groups like Run for Something are trying to change that, but it will take time.