In March, just days after the U.S. Department of Education announced the launch of its “End DEI” portal—a tattle site for parents, teachers, students, and community members to report “discrimination based on race or sex”—an opinion piece in The Detroit News reported that at least four complaints had already been filed against Michigan public school districts, including mid-Michigan’s Mount Pleasant School District. It was not hard for locals to figure out where that one complaint came from.
On Facebook, Bree Moeggenberg, the chair of the right-wing parents’ advocacy group Moms for Liberty in Isabella County, where Mount Pleasant is located, posted, “Oh Dear how does this happen,” with a flushed-face emoji, seeming to imply knowledge or responsibility for the complaint.
Moeggenberg’s post may have been silly, but the complaint was serious: If Mount Pleasant were found to violate an executive order signed on the first day of Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, it could lose federal funding.
By then, Moeggenberg, who declined to comment for this story, had spent years complaining to the school board, tried to sue Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and even self-published a children’s book called Pronouns. Pronouns. Pronouns. NOT SHMONOUNS. Locally, she was perhaps best-known for wearing a Wonder Woman costume to right-wing protests, LET’S GO BRANDON poster in hand.
Moeggenberg, in her gold tiara, might be the most visible representative of Mount Pleasant’s anti-woke cavalry, which has grown so fractious that the community’s Facebook page has splintered into at least six different groups. When she boasted about finally putting her local school district in the federal government’s crosshairs, local conservatives like her assumed they had already won: Trump was back in the White House; wokeness was in full retreat, and it seemed entirely plausible to suppose her district would soon be censured for its alleged DEI misdeeds. They were wrong.
Mount Pleasant, Michigan, is home to Central Michigan University, a public research institution whose faculty populate the college town. Students from the neighboring Saginaw Chippewa Tribal Nation attend the city schools. Generations back, their ancestors were forced into an Indian boarding school where over 200 children died. Today, nearly 39 percent of students are low-income; the majority are white. Harris won Mount Pleasant in 2024, but Trump won the county by over 2,000 votes. Mount Pleasant is as all-American as the culture wars, which brought recurrent waves of outrage to its school board meetings over recent years.
The small city’s persistent tumult would be familiar to many U.S. towns similarly split by disagreements over masking during the pandemic and diversity efforts still today. As part of a national strategy to energize voters, Republicans mobilized parents enraged over school board policies to try to reshape suburban school districts. In 2021, Ballotpedia counted 84 recall efforts against over 200 board members nationally. Two of those recall efforts were in Mount Pleasant, a city with a population of around 20,000.
The conflict here can be traced to July 2021, in the heart of the Covid pandemic, when Mount Pleasant surveyed the community about its views on masking; 68 percent said they wanted no mask mandate. After the survey, a Google poll that presumably attracted a far from representative survey, the school board voted in a way that appeared to contradict public will, requiring masks for students under 12, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Moeggenberg was outraged. “I am completely disgusted by the choice that you just made,” she said at a July 19 school board meeting. “These are our kids. They are not yours. They are not your responsibility,” Moeggenberg declared. “They are mine!”
She quoted Wonder Woman at a subsequent school board meeting, saying, “I will fight for those who cannot fight for themselves.” And fight she did. That spring, Moeggenberg had filed a claims case against Governor Whitmer and two health officials, representing herself, her family, and “supporting persons” in her community. Then an at-home day care operator, Moeggenberg advertised that there were “NO mandates” for the children she was tasked with caring for as she took on the school board.
The drumbeat of dissent was building. In the days before school started, protesters gathered, chalking the high school sidewalk and holding signs reading My Child, My Choice.
But in mid-August, the pendulum of civic outcry swung in the other direction. Supporters of the embroiled school board members showed up en masse to a meeting, in what local newspaper The Morning Sun called “a mirror image of the previous meeting.” People in face masks held signs expressing support; they applauded as the school board members walked through the rally. Moeggenberg, one of the recall’s organizers, was there only briefly. Soon after, conservative activists’ moral outrage pinballed to another outrage du jour: critical race theory.
By September, board superintendent Jennifer Verleger was being forced to clarify that critical race theory was not a pre-K-12 curriculum, and that Mount Pleasant schools followed the state’s curricula, which do not include CRT. Her pleas did nothing to calm the situation.
Instead, board meetings quickly devolved into an endless rotation of right-wing grievances against CRT, masking, and cancel culture. They were a reflection of the right itself, which was fractured into a litany of complaints and was no longer focused primarily on just one issue.
By the end of January 2022, the first petition for a recall election for two board members, over their alleged support for critical race theory and sexuality curriculum, had been rejected by the county election commission due to lack of signatures, and the second also failed when recall supporters did not submit enough signatures. Despite these failures, the citizens were undaunted, eager to use what they had learned from protesting mandates and CRT to make moves at the state level. What followed was a mess, a schism, a MAGA-ified telenovela.
The drama centered around an upset win by an election-fraud conspiracy theorist who beat out Trump’s pick for chairperson of the state Republican Party. Kristina Karamo, the winner, was the first Black person to hold the role. She believes abortion is a Satanic form of child sacrifice and campaigned saying her number one goal was to bring people to Christ. (Previously, Karamo was most famous for refusing to concede defeat in a 14-point loss for Michigan secretary of state.) Moeggenberg, who had been elected as a Republican state committee member in 2023, had been solidly behind Karamo during the election, but she soon became a force for her removal, blaming the chair for the fractiousness of the party and for driving away donors. Moeggenberg helped lead what was later referred to as a coup. In January 2023, GOP state committee members voted to remove Karamo from office. Predictably, Karamo refused to concede that she was properly voted out of office, even as courts ruled that she had been.
A bitter civil war began. Moeggenberg soon found herself under attack as several Karamo supporters and trolls fanned allegations that she was having an affair with failed Michigan House of Representatives candidate Andy Sebolt, Moeggenberg’s co-author of Pronouns. Pronouns. Pronouns. NOT SHMONOUNS.
The two denied the allegations. Sebolt’s wife, Jennifer, who reportedly supported Karamo, messaged Moeggenberg with allegations of an affair, then posted them on Facebook. According to a defamation suit later filed by Moeggenberg and Sebolt, a different Karamo supporter, Charles Ritchard, took it upon himself to spread the allegations. Ritchard made a steady stream of crass innuendos, claimed Moeggenberg had threatened him with a corncob, and accused the pair of “[c]avorting and hanging out with criminals.”
As Michigan’s conservative provocateurs got stuck in an ouroboric loop, devouring themselves, Trump returned to the White House, bringing with him sweeping executive orders that challenged protections for transgender and nonbinary students.
In March of this year, Trump’s executive order and a letter from the Department of Education called for compliance with his 2020 version of Title IX, which narrowed the law to only focus on discrimination based on biological sex. Mount Pleasant’s school board reviewed its policy of acknowledging and affirming students’ gender identity and its ban on bullying on the basis of gender identity. Legal counsel recommended the review. There was no precedent to refer to, no way of knowing if the district could lose federal funding if it kept its policy intact, especially considering Michigan has another law with which the district must also comply: the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, which covers all protected classes and extends to sex and gender identity.
During the public comment period, parents talked about how important it is to have safe and supportive schools for all the community’s kids. A father of a trans child stood and explained that if the district deleted its trans policy, allowing its other inclusion policies to serve as a cover, the district would be erasing transgender people, doing what the executive order wants, and indicating to trans kids that “they don’t exist.” One parent after another politely thanked the (unpaid) board members for their service through these hard years but also underscored the importance of taking a stand for trans kids. Community members appeared to have learned during the masking debate not to cede the floor to their louder, but numerically fewer, conservative neighbors. They had to show up, too.
The following school board meeting saw more of the same. By April, there had been legal challenges to the executive order. Although the lawyers had suggested rescinding the policy, the district decided to wait for further legal advice. As has become the common parlance, the board was not complying in advance.
At the end of June, school board member Jessica Jernigan told me, “We haven’t heard anything from anybody at the federal level about this complaint.” Not from the Department of Education, not the Office of Civil Rights. Previously, if someone made a civil rights complaint, there was a standard process. “The only thing we know is what we read in the Detroit News op-ed opinion piece.”
In the wake of all this turmoil, the district was also due for its review of its sex ed curriculum, resulting in more online tumult. Sex isn’t a school’s responsibility, some argued. Others pleaded for tolerance and decency. Moeggenberg showed up in the comments: “No surprise this takes place in MPPS. They breed groomers there and set our kids up to be groomed.”
On her own page, Moeggenberg posted an eggplant and peach emoji with a warning: “Want GENDER IDEOLOGY, anal sex, blow jobs, abortions, lube, pleasure, sex changes?” She encouraged locals to look into the sex ed curriculum and offered an alternative. If parents wanted to “help introduce sex education to your very young ones at home before they enter sexual indoctrination buildings,” they should order her book.
In the meantime, progressive parents have stayed active—which has helped keep right-wing activists like Moeggenberg at bay. They now have infrastructure to mobilize also: the Indivisible group, help from two local social justice–oriented churches, and All In for Isabella County (a collective whose website is hosted by Red, Wine & Blue, and for which Jernigan writes a newsletter). Hearings on the sex ed curriculum were scheduled—the sort of meeting that in many towns gets listed on an agenda and no one attends. Instead, 27 people showed up in a small lecture room. The group was handed an example from the fourth-grade curriculum, “Respecting Our Friends: Gender.” There were definitions of cisgender, transgender, and sex assigned at birth. Kids would learn respectful words and tone of voice when talking to their peers.
Public comment consisted of gratitude for the advisory board, volunteers who spent their time considering what might be best for the district. The onslaught of objectors never showed.
The story of Mount Pleasant offers a useful reminder for progressives everywhere: Grassroots activism gets results—whether the activists are on the right or left. While party Democrats have largely failed to respond adequately to the sweeping powers Trump keeps attempting to claim, millions of Americans have protested, individuals hoping to hold the line for the country they love. In Mount Pleasant, they are doing it one school board meeting at a time, prioritizing the protection of those who are imperiled.
The story of Mount Pleasant offers a useful reminder for progressives everywhere: Grassroots activism gets results—whether activists on the right or left.
Just months after serving as the regional director of “election integrity” for Trump’s Michigan team, Moeggenberg started a podcast called Daunting Discourse, an odd-couple pairing with a co-host, Karin Jenson, a former AI exec. It’s sold as a discussion show told “from opposite sides of many divides” but united by a “belief that connection is still possible in a fractured world.” It appeared to have paused after two episodes, the last of which was published in April.
The second sex ed curriculum hearing was similar to the first, and the curriculum was adopted without fanfare, by a school board just going about its work.
As of mid-July, the administration’s “End DEI” page was down. The error page appeared to indicate its security certificate had expired.
The post How a Group of Michigan Parents Defeated Anti-Trans MAGA Activists appeared first on New Republic.
