Chris Bray outlines one of the many (many) ways that elected officials are insulating themselves from the voters who elected them to ensure that they only hear what they want to hear from the public … and as little of it as they can get away with:
Wildly popular public sentiment is disorder, and has to be restrained. So here, let’s start with something vital and interesting, and then work our way through the process a local government is using to kill it. As always, the point about this local story isn’t just the local story, since versions of this are happening all over the country (and with federal assistance).
Early last year, an angry Virginia mom spoke to the Prince William County school board, blasting mask mandates in schools. Her fiery three-minute speech went viral, until YouTube, which now seems to mostly exist to prevent discussion, killed it:
It’s back, in a less-watched version that YouTube hasn’t gotten around to cancelling yet:
Here’s a version on Rumble, if you’d rather watch it there, but Substack doesn’t embed Rumble video.
The second thing to notice in that video, after you notice the clarity and strength of Merianne Jensen’s comments, is the response: an enormous audience of parents shouting and cheering in support as another parent sharply criticizes school district policy. The public is present for a government meeting, and the public is engaged. Citizens are participating, enthusiastically and in large numbers, which is supposed to be a thing we regard as an ideal.
[…]
Public comment is limited to one hour, full stop, no matter how many people wish to speak, and no matter how urgent a controversy before the board might be. The public — the entire public — gets an hour. But, second, that hour is alloted through an application process in which people who wish to speak to the school board fill out an online form that a clerk then evaluates and processes, deciding whether or not a request to speak will be granted. Detailed contact information is required before the school district will consider your request to speak, and national organizations and other outsiders have no right to speak at all, since public comment is limited to verified residents of the county. The form is a masterpiece of passive-aggressive nudging, communicating with great clarity that your desire to offer public comment is merely being tolerated. Read this carefully, because in a few minutes we’re going to get to the pernicious way this system is now being gamed:
This form does NOT confirm your request to be added to the list of speakers for Citizen Comment Time. You will receive a separate email indicating the status of your request. As a reminder, speakers are signed up to speak on a first-come, first-served basis.
Thank you again for your interest.
Citizens may sign up to be placed on the list of speakers for the citizen comment period starting at 8:00 a.m. on the Saturday immediately preceding the School Board meeting at which the citizen wishes to speak. Requests received prior to 8:00 a.m. on the Saturday immediately preceding the School Board meeting will not be honored. Speakers will be signed up on a first-come, first-served basis, ending at noon on the day of the meeting. The sign-up list will close once the number of total speakers who have signed up reaches twenty and there will be no sign-up thereafter, nor at the meeting.
That last sentence will become important: twenty commenters are signed up in advance, in the order in which they apply, and then the list for public comment is closed, the end. Can you see where this is going?
Before we get there, I’ll just note that a more detailed board policy on comments, available here, adds that the board chairman can end a public comment session, and ask school district security to remove speakers, if a commenter wanders into “inappropriate topics” or a tone the board regards as uncivil. You can feel the spontaneity and openness being drained.
