The aide to a Northern Virginia school board chairman, a Satanist, a campaign staffer for a Soros-backed prosecutor, a consultant for a Democrat sheriff candidate, and a local reporter were part of a secret clique that plotted to shield Democrats from backlash over the school system’s coverup of a transgender rape, The Daily Wire has learned.
A member of the Loudoun County group also made a handwritten dossier listing the names of 115 Virginia residents, mostly private citizens, who were described collectively as “bigots,” according to photographs reviewed by The Daily Wire. The list of names included additional descriptions such as “pedophile,” “psychopath,” and “antichrist.”
Rhetoric in the group’s chatroom was far more incendiary than anything cited by the National School Board Association when it pushed for domestic terrorism statutes to be invoked against conservative parents and other concerned citizens. The Biden Department of Justice used the association’s plea as the basis for a memo decrying a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators [and] board members.” But messages reviewed by The Daily Wire show that in the case of Loudoun County, it was leftists who espoused violence and hate, which they directed at concerned parents.
The Daily Wire reported Wednesday that private chats in the group called “Loudoun Love Warriors” included threats against parents opposed to the school district’s embrace of a radical transgender agenda.
“Someone gonna get hurt on their side and I hope I get to do it;” read one post. “I’m sooo ready to show up with guns lol,” read another. “If he had said that s*** about black kids or autistic kids I would shoot him,” read yet another.
The primary purpose of the group appeared to be to prevent Democrat incumbents in Loudoun County, a community just west of Washington, D.C., from being blamed for the rape cover-up and to target allies of the rape victim’s family for destruction.
“It’s going to be extremely difficult for these [school board] members to hang in,” group member Kristen Gorczyk, who is employed by the school board as an aide to Chair Ian Serotkin, advised. “We really need to hold the line.”
The group sought to destroy Elizabeth Lancaster, the lawyer who represented the ninth-grade rape victim, obsessing about her to the point of tracking her ex-husband and brother.
“They call us socialist, leftists, marxists, progressives,” Heather Gottlieb, who spends time regularly with Loudoun County Prosecutor Buta Biberaj as part of her “Justice Academy,” wrote.
Tori Truesdale, an organizer with Students Demand Action, responded: “Yep. I’m all of those. She about to lose her job [Elizabeth].”
Lancaster is a lifelong Democrat and former public defender who decided to run against Biberaj in the Democratic primary for prosecutor after the superintendent lied about a ninth-grade girl’s rape and the George Soros-backed prosecutor personally tried to put the rape victim’s father in jail. But Karen Jimmerson, a former town council member and a consultant for Democrat Craig Buckley, who is running for sheriff against incumbent Republican Mike Chapman, descended into conspiracies, saying someone had altered a database to falsely show that Lancaster had a long history as a Democrat.
After even Democrats on the Board of Supervisors (except perhaps its most far-Left member, Juli Briskman) demanded that their school board colleagues release an internal report on the rape that the district had kept secret, the group rebelled. “How long are we going to let the BoS (minus Juli) f*** our party?” Andrew Pihonak, a campaign staffer for Biberaj, wrote.
“There’s no pro to releasing the report,” Gottlieb wrote. “There’s no way it doesn’t reflect poorly on them.”
Jan Mercker, a reporter for Loudoun Now, said the superintendent should have adopted the dress of the rapist, writing “he should have [worn] a f—ing skirt lol. It makes me like him more.”
The group struggled to find a way to blame the rape scandal on the Republican sheriff, with Gottlieb writing, “it appears this would be able to be blamed on someone other than Chapman. He’s a slithery f***ing snake.” Pihonak referred to the sheriff using graphic sexual terms.
Superintendent Scott Ziegler was ultimately indicted for allegedly lying about the rape. He later appeared at court wearing nail polish and an earring. But Jan Mercker, a reporter for Loudoun Now and other publications, said he should have adopted the dress of the rapist, writing “he should have [worn] a f***ing skirt lol. It makes me like him more.”
School board members also filled in the group on their strategy. Group administrator Amanda Bean wrote that a board member tipped her off to the chair’s strategy regarding conservative member Tiffany Polifko, who group members referred to using sexual and misogynistic slurs.
The group was a who’s who of Loudoun organizations that project a welcoming tone, but privately took a dark and cynical approach toward coordinating their activities.
After courting publicity for a demand that the school board cut off any speakers who engaged in “hate speech,” Pihonak repeatedly told fellow Love Warriors that he had not received any threats from conservatives, but Jimmerson provided media strategy consulting, saying it was “time to be a victim” and to tell the media that he was being harassed by “horrible hate messaging” and that the Bible “teaches love.”
But privately, Pihonak said that he “literally could not give a singular f*** about the bible.” Amanda Pettis, a self-proclaimed Satanist, called concerned parents “special needs parents ie righties with pearls and Jesus,” said “all religions are invisible anus,” and likened different faiths to “strains” of a disease.
Mercker offered Pihonak advice heading into an interview with Loudoun Now.
The group repeatedly sought to get Scott Mineo, a parent who filed Freedom of Information Act requests in an effort to expose malfeasance by the district and the local NAACP chapter, fired from his job in IT. Mercker wrote that she considered assaulting Mineo: “It might be worth an assault charge to f***ing slap that guy next time I see him,” she wrote.
In February, Mineo was summoned to a meeting with his employer’s ethics department about the complaints and dismissed as part of a workforce reduction that same week. “I believe it had an impact,” he told The Daily Wire.
Mercker told The Daily Wire “I get the sense that you do not know Loudoun very well if at all and are ignorant of the great sense of harmony that can and does exist among people with different political perspectives in our community,” adding that the person she mentioned slapping — in jest, she said — was a “white supremacist.”
“I think our theme song needs to be that ‘you about to lose yo job’ remix,” said Meredith Ray, a board member of the pro-gay group Loudoun 4 All who was a frequent participant in the chats.
The group reveled in severing relationships with neighbors and even family over politics. Mercker wrote: “I unfriended all my extended family in Iowa.” Jimmerson said she “cut all ties” with a “long time friend” and “blocked her number” after discovering she donated to a group representing concerned Loudoun parents.
The Loudoun County Democratic Committee told The Daily Wire it would respond on behalf of all of the many Loudoun officials tied to group members.
“Those that use this kind of dangerous rhetoric should not be welcome in the public square,” spokesman John Block said in a statement. “We have seen too many times how violent rhetoric ignites violent actions that hurt and kill people.” School board chair Serotkin did not say whether he would continue to employ Gorczyk.
But it is not the first time that Loudoun officials have attempted to silence opponents. In March 2021, the Minority Student Achievement Advisory Council — which the Love Warriors frequently discussed — said “we can and will silence the opposition.”
That occurred soon after The Daily Wire revealed the existence of a similar group in which public officials, including Biberaj, appeared to be members. Then-school board member Beth Barts and a constellation of woke housewives took part in a secret Facebook group called “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun.” The group made a list of parents who the group believed to be insufficiently committed to equity and pledged to “infiltrate,” use “hackers” to silence them, and “expose these people publicly.”
Barts later resigned from the school board, though she and others said at the time, including to police who investigated the group, that it was all a misunderstanding. (Police declined charges, saying “asking to hack someone is not illegal.”) But many of the participants then moved to a closer-knit group that followed through on some of those promises.
The Daily Wire obtained the new messages through a Loudoun mother who befriended local leftists and was invited into the Anti-Racist Parents group and then its successor. The whistleblower, who The Daily Wire is not naming, provided the messages to this outlet as well as local TV station WJLA.
“I can say this definitively because I had the benefit of seeing both sides,” she told The Daily Wire. “I’ve never seen any [conservative] parents say anything nearly as bad as what they say.”
The Love Warriors mocked Elicia Brand, a sexual assault survivor who demanded justice for the ninth-grade rape victim and founded a group called Army of Parents. “Please leave me in a room alone with Elicia,” Pettis, the Satanist, wrote. “She is so lucky that there are laws, because she would be curbstomped.”
Brand told The Daily Wire that by targeting neighbors for destruction, the group was fulfilling the promise its members made two years ago. “They said they were going to do this, and then they did it,” she said.
She noted that the letter used by the Department of Justice to justify putting activist parents in the crosshairs of the FBI cited the father of the Loudoun rape victim as a chief example, based on the fact that Biberaj prosecuted him for disorderly conduct.
“[Attorney General] Merrick Garland said he was going to send the FBI after parents who were domestic terrorists. What is he going to do about the parents who do this?” Brand asked.