Fight over California school board member’s Instagram ‘likes’ escalates into Nazi name-calling

A school board meeting in Redlands, California, devolved into name-calling and Nazi comparisons this week amid a heated argument over a board member’s social media activity.

Candy Olson — part of the board’s conservative-voting majority — has hit “like” on Instagram carousels of images that include racist and antisemitic memes, according to screenshots collected by a group of parents. More than 1,500 people have written to the board as part of a campaign by a local activist group, Together for Redlands, calling for Olson’s resignation.

“We have real problems in our district, and instead of focusing on them, she is liking and sharing the most horrifying content I’ve seen in a long time,” said Samantha Trad, a parent and one of the leaders of Together for Redlands. “A person like that is unfit to serve the district.”

Olson, who declined interview requests, has said she intended to like some of the more apolitical images in the Instagram carousels instead — like a meme showing a chicken dressed in high heels — and has unfollowed the account because she does not agree with the more inflammatory images it posted. The carousels she liked included a picture of Adolf Hitler and Jesus apparently commiserating about Jewish people; an image of Ned Flanders, a character on “The Simpsons,” dressed in a Nazi uniform; and a meme that appeared to joke about hitting an LGBTQ Pride parade with a car.

“Just because I like one slide out of a deck of 18 does not mean I like all slides,” Olson said at the end of Tuesday night’s board meeting. She added, “This all happened because the radical progressives in this town don’t agree with the policies I’m working towards.”

The divisions in Redlands run deeper than one board member’s social media activity, showing how political differences about what children should learn are continuing to roil communities, years after the initial backlash to mask mandates and so-called critical race theory turned school boards into battlegrounds.

In California, many districts and Democratic state leaders have spent the first months of the Trump administration defending the types of policies the president has attacked, including those supporting transgender students. But these views are far from uniform, and recent battles in Redlands and several other California communities show how culture wars in education are still simmering — and occasionally boiling over — at the local level.

Hundreds of protesters showed up at a board meeting in Lucia Mar, along the Central Coast, in May, speaking for and against rules accommodating transgender students. In Pajaro Valley, south of the Bay Area, board meetings have attracted sharp debate over a contract for teacher training on “fostering civil discourse” and “racial ideologies in the U.S. education system.” Several districts faced protests and lawsuits over ethnic studies graduation requirements.

In Redlands, Olson was elected last fall along with an allied candidate, tilting the five-member board in a conservative direction. They quickly set about enacting their vision for the 19,000-student Redlands Unified School District, where the majority of students are Latino. The middle-class community is located in San Bernardino County, which is generally considered reliably Republican, though it went for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by just 2 percentage points last fall.

As the newly elected Redlands school board members proposed changes to the district’s anti-racism resolution and a new process to pull “blasphemous” library books from shelves, meetings this year grew increasingly contentious, often lasting late into the evening. In April, after a six-hour meeting, the board passed a resolution expressing opposition to transgender athletes competing on teams that match their gender identity, though it did not change any rules. In July, the board banned all flags from classrooms other than the American and California flags and military flags, which critics saw as an attack on LGBTQ pride banners.

The Redlands conservative school board slate had support from local right-wing organizations, including Inland Empire Family PAC, a political group that has backed school board candidates in several California districts. The group held a fundraiser last year attended by Eric Trump, the president’s son; Kash Patel, who is now FBI director; and Alina Habba, who was Donald Trump’s personal attorney and is now the acting U.S. Attorney in New Jersey.

Critics of the Redlands board’s new direction see the focus on culture war issues as a distraction and say the board should instead direct energy toward challenges like declining enrollment and funding cuts. The district is also facing rare heightened monitoring by the California Department of Justice for its mishandling of sexual abuse and misconduct cases.

A district spokesperson said in a statement that the school board members “are elected officials who are not subject to the same policies and regulations that govern district employees.”

Over the past two weeks, as Together for Redlands released screenshots of Olson’s social media activity, the rhetoric around it has heated up, both online and offline. On Reddit and Instagram, posts accused her of endorsing Nazi hate speech.

In an email to NBC News, Olson called the campaign a hit job by a group that “has lost much local credibility” and said that she won’t “cater to the LGBTQ group demands to elevate them above all others.”

“I’m a Christian who supports Israel with Jewish friends and family, yet somehow I’m claimed to be a Nazi,” she said. “It never makes sense.”

Among several dozen speakers during public comment sessions Tuesday night, a handful defended Olson, some adding incendiary commentary.

One man in a Trump hat said people who want her to resign should move to Europe, where “you can be as gay or trans as you want until a Muslim migrant throws you off a roof and sets you on fire.”

Another, Arthur Schaper, an organizer with the far-right activist group MassResistance, said he was “proud” of the conservative board members, and that parents protesting Olson were behaving the way Nazis treated their political opponents “before they started pushing people into ovens.” Schaper said in an email that he was invited to speak at the meeting by parents in the district who wanted “help to stand up to the bullying and cancel culture efforts from these LGBT activists in the community and surrounding areas.”

A district spokesperson said it is up to the presiding officer, in this case the board’s president, to address “speech that is obscene, threatening, or that disrupts the orderly conduct of the meeting” during public comments.

The vast majority of students, parents and teachers who spoke amid hoots and hollers at the meeting said Olson’s social media posts were just the latest affront amid months of the board adopting policies they disagreed with. One woman called Olson “trash” before blowing kisses and flipping her off, and another said she was a “hateful bigoted person.” A young man said she behaved like “a 16-year-old on 4chan liking neo-Nazi posts.”

Pat Molnar, a teacher in the district, spoke directly to the conservative board members.

“History will not judge you kindly because the arc of the moral universe is bending towards justice — but right now you guys are pushing pretty hard the other way,” Molnar said. “You guys are an embarrassment.”

Michele Rendler, president of the Redlands school board, who tends to vote with Olson and another conservative member, did not respond to requests for comment.

Quinn, 13, a student in the district who uses they/them pronouns, has spoken regularly at board meetings against the conservative agenda, and on Tuesday night joined those who said Olson should resign.

“She needs to get off that board,” Quinn said afterward in an interview. “She doesn’t even need to be related with the district for every single thing she’s done, against the kids and against the LGBTQ plus community.”