Announcing to the world what’s happening at your school will put necessary pressure on them.
Woke activists have taken hold of the English language and are using them to manipulate parents and citizens to believe that what they are doing is either benign or admirable. The words you have heard most are – inclusion, equity, justice. I mean, how can you argue with those great words and with what you think they mean. Unfortunately, the woke activists have hijacked these words to enable practices in schools that are divisive, toxic, and extreme.
Don’t be fooled by the creative use of language. Get familiar with the code language in order to protect your children. Click here to read a simple guide to understanding woke jargon.
The bottom line is that we need to demand transparency and hold our administrations and board accountable to not treating groups of people differently.
One way to do this is to create a social media page for your school and invite people to document examples of woke indoctrination. Putting indisputable facts in one place for your community and for the world to see is enormously powerful.
Start by using Instagram. Setting up an account is fast and easy, but best of all it is anonymous. Instagram has created their platform to be easy to find and easy to share. It is a great way to create a network of like-minded individuals and to create a depository of documentation.
Thank you to our friends at Parents Defending Education who put together the step by step instructions below on how to create an Instagram account that will help you to create your network and build your repository.
Here is how to set up your Instagram page:
- Use Gmail to create a brand new email address that you will use for all of the social media platforms that will use for your efforts.
Make sure the name of the address does not give away any personal identifying information. You should use Gmail because you will also be creating an anonymous Google Form. For added security, enable two-step verification for this Gmail account, as well as a password generator to create strong (and different) passwords for all your accounts.
- Use your new Gmail address to create a new Instagram account. Many have used the “Woke At” formulation for their names, and we recommend doing this as it helps show we’re building a powerful local-national movement.
For the “full name” field, use “Woke at [school name].” For the “username” field, use “wokeat[school name].” You should also use the two-step verification for this account as well - Write a short and concise bio to describe your organization in the Instagram bio statement section. Make sure to stay dignified and respectful. For example: We are committed to protecting all students by documenting harmful practices, divisive curricula, extremism, or radicalism within our schools in the interest of transparency and raising awareness in the community. You can look at some of the Instagram pages linked below for examples. At the end of your bio, post the Gmail address you created in Step 1 so that people can get in touch with you.
- Now you can set up a Google Form, and paste the link to it in your Instagram bio. This Form is where you can post a longer statement that is a little longer than in the bio statement, if you wish, about your goals, what’s happening at your school, and your invitation to like-minded parents, students, and teachers to join you.
Crucially, the Google Form allows you to receive anonymous tips and testimonials from students, parents, and teachers. Giving people a way to tell their stories safely and anonymously is incredibly important given how angry and retaliatory many woke activists get when criticized. Submissions are truly anonymous – you, the site owner, won’t know who’s contacting you – so people can be assured that they can speak freely and safely. Don’t be surprised when woke activists use the form to send you nasty messages. - Once you’ve got all this set up – it shouldn’t take longer than an hour – you can discreetly tell friends about it, or use your new Gmail account to anonymously tip off people in your community who you think would be interested in contributing. In the beginning, you will need to build a network of contributors and tipsters – like minded parents, teachers, and students – to submit information and stories. Once people start finding out about your page, contributions will start coming in on their own. Use your judgment about how open or secretive you wish to be, but we recommend erring on the side of secrecy. Secrecy also helps keep the focus on the information you’re revealing, not on the identity of who’s revealing it.
- We suggest following other Woke At pages, school accounts, and accounts relevant to the problem we’re confronting. The accounts you follow are publicly viewable – so if you follow a bunch of your friends after you form the page, it will quickly become pretty obvious who’s behind it.
What should you post?
- You can find a lot of good material to use on your school’s website. Some outrageous materials are posted out in the open, in course descriptions, posts about curriculum, school board hearings, etc – you just have to look for it. Doing this research is a great way of learning more about the issues and it can also be delegated to members of your coalition.
- Look at the social media pages of teachers and administrators at your school. They are often quite proud of what they’re doing and sometimes post incriminating statements or materials.
- It’s fine to post emails so long as they were sent to a large group where the sender has no expectation of privacy – such as a school-wide email or an email to a class. We suggest blocking out any identifying information, such as names of students and teachers.
- You and your partners should keep an eye on homework assignments and what’s taught in class, especially when it comes to issues of politics, activism, race, gender, and the like.
What shouldn’t you post?
- As important as it is to show what’s really happening at your school, there are some vital guidelines to follow. You don’t want to give your school and any activists who work there an opening to play victim, credibly accuse you of unethical behavior, or dismiss you as an extremist.
- Absolutely no doxxing, no posting names of students, and where possible avoid posting names of teachers. We think school officials, like principals and administrators, are fair game. But never post images or documents that contain email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, or identifying information. It’s easy to block or strip out this kind of identifying information before posting.
- Avoid partisan politics, insults, rants, personal feuds, or vendettas. Keep your page focused on the real mission: showing your community and the world what’s going on at your school.
- Don’t post petty or insignificant items. Go for quality over quantity. You want each post to convey something meaningful about the climate in the school.
- In your posts, avoid exaggeration and always be truthful. Unlike the woke activists, we don’t need to lie or obfuscate – we only need to tell the truth. It’s fine to include a short commentary with your post, and it’s fine to express yourself sharply – but keep it respectful.
- It’s up to you to include materials and messages against wokeism, but the main focus of the page should be informing your community about what’s happening at school
- Don’t assume that everyone reading your page and who shares your concern about schools agrees with your political views on other issues, so try to use language that doesn’t polarize.
A few technical tips on using Instagram:
- Use your computer’s screenshot feature to capture images of things you want to post. Save everything you post in a folder, just in case one day your account gets suspended or shut down by Instagram (we don’t anticipate this being a problem, but better to be prepared).
- Instagram likes square-shaped images. It’s easiest to crop your images square from the start.
- For written testimonials, paste them into Word or an email and screenshot them. You’ll have to create narrow margins so your text fits in a box shape, rather than a rectangle.
- You’ll meet a lot of interesting people – supporters and critics alike – through Direct Messages. Don’t forget to check your DM’s, and especially the “message requests” inbox – this is where most of your messages will arrive.
Tips on the Google form:
- It is truly anonymous, so you will not receive any information identifying submissions.
- You must use your judgment when deciding what to post and what not to post. You should feel no obligation to post submissions that are inappropriate, frivolous, and so on.
- You may receive submissions from critics outraged that you are drawing attention to their activities at your school. Woke activists typically do not believe that anyone has a right to disagree with or question them, so they often have strong reactions to exposure. Sometimes this will just be insults or a rant, but we know of instances when critics have submitted testimonials designed to trick you into posting false information. Usually these are easy to spot, but occasionally they are clever. In journalism, it’s known as a story that’s “too good to check.” It’s important to be on the lookout and use your judgment to avoid posting something that hands your detractors an embarrassing victory.
- It’s fine to lightly edit submissions for length, clarity, grammar, and to remove personal or identifying information. But you must be careful not to alter a submission’s meaning. The power of testimonials is their authenticity, and you do not want someone accusing your page of changing the meaning of submissions.
