Marxists. Liberals. Redshirts. Progressives backed by the national teachers union and other far-left groups.
These are the terms of endearment used by Douglas County School Board President David Burns to describe two of his newest colleagues last May before they were elected in a landslide.
In a county where President-elect Donald Trump and Republican Rep. Mark Amodei received greater than 65 percent of the vote, a county where no Democrat received more than a third of the vote — a county where a majority of voters are actively registered as Republicans — Burns claimed he and his allies were the only force keeping the county’s schools from falling to the Red Menace.
That’s right. In Douglas County, communist plots hatched by Marxist members of the National Education Association were somehow turning the innocent God-fearing children of the majority-Republican county into — gasp! — slightly more moderate Republicans through the raw rhetorical power of diversity, equity and inclusion training and gender-neutral bathrooms.
Facetiousness aside, Douglas County voters rewarded Mr. Burns and his allies for sounding like overly enthusiastic consumers of desert AM radio in 2022 — that’s how he became board president in the first place. Why wouldn’t they reward him and his friends again for playing their greatest hits?
The answer, it turns out, is that it’s much easier for voters to agree with elected officials on what society’s problems might be than it is to find policy solutions voters are willing to accept.
Coming out of the pandemic, many Douglas County voters — an admittedly conservative lot — wanted to protest, object and fight against a variety of cultural and institutional changes they perceived were happening in public education. When Mr. Burns and his friends were first elected as board trustees in 2022, unseating a pair of incumbent trustees in the process, they did so by tapping into that anger and by promising they would do everything within their power to fight against those changes, at least within Douglas County.
Then the voters got exactly what they voted for, good and hard.
Mr. Burns and his friends decided the first change they had to stop was the potential presence of transgender students in girl’s locker rooms in Douglas County. When told by legal counsel and district staff that policies targeting transgender students would run afoul of Nevada law and regulations, Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association policy and recent U.S. Supreme Court precedent, they did the only sane and sensible thing they could think of.
What? No, they didn’t divert their attention back to the limited powers delegated by the Legislature to school boards. Are you kidding?
No, they fired their legal counsel and replaced them with Joey Gilbert — a personal injury lawyer and failed gubernatorial candidate. Then they fired the superintendent, changed their minds, accepted the superintendent’s resignation a few weeks later, paid the superintendent’s salary for another nine months after he resigned, nearly hired someone who had an extensive criminal history to replace him, then narrowly approved the hire of the current superintendent.
Oh, and those same trustees also more than tripled the district’s annual budget for legal fees — which, among other reasons, increased because the board stopped allowing district staff to respond to public records, choosing to route them through Gilbert’s office instead, while they simultaneously paid Gilbert to tweet during board meetings. They also repeatedly violated state public records and open meeting laws and called members of the public various slurs and expletives.
Despite it all, did Mr. Burns and his allies successfully pass their transgender student policy?
Of course not. Doing so was legally impossible the first time they tried and remains legally impossible today. The district will get sued the instant they try, just as the district’s previous superintendent and legal counsel warned them.
Did Mr. Burns and his allies successfully give Gilbert and his firm enough taxpayer money to cover Gilbert’s attorney fees after he tried to claim Gov. Joe Lombardo’s resounding victory over him in the 2022 Republican primary election was “mathematically impossible?”
With plenty of money to spare.
Two years later, the anger toward shifting cultural norms undoubtedly remains in Douglas County. Say what anyone might about our president-elect but he undeniably knows his conservative audience. Alongside that anger, however, is a clearer picture of what it will cost — what it’s already cost — to channel that anger directly through the county school system and through Mr. Burns’ friends.
It’s a price even Douglas County’s conservative voters aren’t willing to pay.
To Gilbert’s credit (there’s a phrase I’m unlikely to write again), he resigned from his position as the Douglas County School District’s legal counsel with considerably more class and considerably less reluctance than he demonstrated during the gubernatorial primary two years ago. This time around, he didn’t claim he was sabotaged by malicious computer programs. He didn’t even wait for the new trustees — who each ran as open skeptics of Gilbert’s services — to get sworn in before he moved on.
As the rest of us examine the flaming wreckage of Gilbert’s brief career as district legal counsel and the electoral shift against Mr. Burns and his allies, however, a question lingers.
Exit polls show Trump won his presidential election by tapping into concerns about inflation, the economy and immigration. More recent polling, however, shows increasing skepticism from voters on anything Trump’s proposed to do about any of those issues.
A recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found only 42 percent of voters support using the military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants — a policy that Gov. Lombardo has recently been expressing increased support for. That’s the same percentage Mr. Burns’ preferred trustee candidate, Antoinette Casselberry, received in her not particularly close loss to Melinda Gneiting — and it’s Trump’s most popular policy idea to date. According to a recent Quinnipiac University national poll, only 38 percent of voters support Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, while only 29 percent of voters think birthright citizenship should be abolished.
Scarcely a month after the election, voters almost certainly remain angry about immigration, inflation and the direction of the economy. Are they willing to accept what it might cost for Trump to soothe their anger?
Ask Mr. Burns.
David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a recurring opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at [email protected].
