Members of the queer Armenian community in Glendale and their friends are bracing for another onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ smear tactics and misinformation campaigns ahead of the Glendale school district’s election and the March 5 primary.
Violence erupted in June outside a Glendale Unified School District board meeting when anti-LGBTQ+ extremists confronted LGBTQ+ supporters and community members. Many agitators wore matching white T-shirts with the slogan “Leave our kids alone,” and trucks with giant “Leave our kids alone” banners circled the neighborhood.
A few days before targeting the Glendale school district, many of the same extremists demonstrated at Saticoy Elementary in North Hollywood. During both protests, Erik Adamian, executive director of Galas, the LGBTQ+ Aremenian Society, told The Guardian that right wing activists who had been prominent at previous pro-Trump and anti-vaccine rallies across the region – people with documented connections to the Proud Boys and the January 6 insurrection – were in attendance.
Glendale community members, including teachers, students, parents, and elected officials, held a rally on the steps of Glendale City Hall Thursday to confront the rise in extremism and hate groups in the city.
Organizers warned that the hate groups and their candidates want to erase any mention of LGBTQ+ and gender identity from books and materials in Glendale schools and force the LGBTQ+ community back into the closet.
“Our community is for everyone,” they chanted at the rally.
They also held signs in English, Korean, Tagalog, Armenian, and Spanish reading “Our community is for everyone.”
Jordan Henry and Aneta Krypekyan, two ultra-right conservatives and darlings of extremist activists, are candidates for open seats on the Glendale school board.
Both candidates have said their campaigns are about “parental rights,” but that phrase is a dog whistle for anti-LGBTQ+ extremists. It was used by activists at the June 6 protest at the Glendale school board meeting and has been used by anti-LGBTQ+ school board members in Chino Valley, Temecula, and Murrietta.
Krypekyan is endorsed by gsud_parents_voices, an anonymous public Instagram account. It’s filled with misinformation and anti-LGBTQ+ rants.
On Henry’s Instagram account, where he aligns himself with Krypekyan, he goes on an anti-trans rant about the school district.
On Monday, The Guardian published an in-depth article about the “chaos campaigns” in Glendale. It spotlighted the right wing playbook used by the anti-LGBTQ+ activists and how protests quickly escalated.
The reporter shows how these protests are not isolated, but a strategic development with the goal of a “deliberate divide and conquer strategy” by white conservative activists.
And school boards are the pathway for conservatives to trumpet their agenda.
For example, former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon said on a May 2021 podcast, “The path to save the nation is very simple – it’s going to go through the school boards.”
The first wave of Republican school board organizing had focused on opposition to discussions of racism and discrimination, often presented as an attack on “critical race theory,” an area of legal scholarship that is not typically taught outside of college. In Glendale, several parents and educators said, an anti-critical race theory campaign never really took off. But when local activists had begun raising concerns about the district’s policies regarding transgender kids, gender identity, and discussions of LGBTQ+ identity in elementary schools, they’d hit on a topic that resonated with parts of the community.
Adamian, who’s also a Glendale resident, provides essential context to what’s happening on the ground in Glendale.
Galas had been talking to educators about the hostile climate in the school board meetings throughout 2022 and 2023, Adamian said. But when activists from the organization came to offer support during the volatile protests in June 2023, they were alarmed not only by the hundreds of angry demonstrators and fistfights in the streets, but at the way the battles were being portrayed in the local media as a fight between LGBTQ+ people and Armenian parents – as if queer Armenians simply did not exist.
Even some LGBTQ+ activists had adopted that framing, reacting to the protests as if the Armenian community was one large anti-gay monolith.
John Rogers, a UCLA education professor who has been studying school district “conflict campaigns” nationwide since 2021, told The Guardian that school districts have been achieved real social change about policies on how to treat trans and nonbinary kids, and how to support LGBTQ+ students, and those policies have been on the books for years without much objection.
Only after the school board campaigns became part of the national political agenda did they suddenly become controversial among parents.
“Nothing was dramatically new, except for the misinformation that was being put into play,” he said.
Artineh Samkian, a USC education professor who is also a Glendale public school parent, told The Guardian that sees the “chaos campaigns” targeting Glendale and other public schools broadly as “an attempt to dismantle trust in public education, and, by extension, dismantle public education.”