We’re now waiting to see when — almost certainly when — the Supreme Court will take up ex-President Trump’s appeal of Colorado’s decision to strike his name from the presidential ballot. As we’ve noted, there are many unknowns about just how the Court might respond, though it seems almost inconceivable that the Court won’t make a decision which forces Trump’s name back on the ballot.

But let’s at least consider the possibility that it doesn’t, that the Court allows Colorado and presumably Maine to keep Trump off the ballot. What then? Does this really have practical significance for the 2024 election?

I’ve been making my way through your emails about school board activism in your various necks of the woods. And I have to say, keep them coming, if for no other reason than the immense entertainment value. But seriously, for many other reasons too. I’m digging into them and trying to figure out which ones to report out first. But there are a few points that stand out in advance of that.

One of those points is something I’m half being reminded of, half learning, which is that there was a pretty big backlash against “anti-woke” school boards in 2023. It’s not universal, certainly. But it’s not just the story out of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, I’ve been telling you about for the last few days. There are examples all over the country. (I’ll be coming back to Bucks. Holy Crap, there’s a lot.) This morning I’ve just been reading up on one in a very backwoods part of Idaho, the West Bonner County School District. A lot of the same stuff: a bunch of freaks get washed in in 2021. They do all the anti-woke stuff and other stuff that’s more about just being against public education generally. There’s a successful recall, but not before the board brings in a new superintendent who is a former state legislator whose career went south when it turned out he might not actually live in the state. (Really.) The bigger problem is that Branden Durst had no background in education and didn’t even have the minimal accreditation the state requires for superintendents. He hung on for like three months before he had to resign. That was back in September.

As you can see, I’ve become very interested in the crazy story of “Cool Mom” Clarice Schillinger who seems to have been both a big time anti-woke/protect the kids activist while also hosting teen keggers on the side and sometimes going off and beating the crap out of the kids. But as I’ve learned over the last few days, there’s a fascinating and, from what I can tell, wildly crooked story about the Central Bucks School Board that goes way beyond her.

First, a bit of background detail: Doylestown is the metropolis of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and some of my interest in the story is that I know the place. Between vacations and summers and random stints I probably spent the better part of 4 to 6 months there during and after college. Or, to be super precise, in Furlong, Pennsylvania, an incorporated something-or-other right next to Doylestown. Also, in yesterday’s post I said that Aarati Martino, the wife of Paul Martino, the VC who has funded a lot of school board activism in Pennsylvania, had lost her school board seat in the Dem backlash in 2023. Not so. She lost her election. She was one of the anti-wokist candidates. But she wasn’t an incumbent — just a candidate.

Now let’s get down to business and discuss the super sleazy sweetheart deal, shall we? Excellent.

I wanted to catch you up on some new news about Clarice Schillinger, the anti-woke mom activist at the heart of a lot of school board pressure campaigns in Pennsylvania, especially in Bucks County, which is north of Philadelphia. On Sunday I flagged this totally over-the-top story about how Schillinger, her then-boyfriend and her mom had all been charged with beating the crap out of various teenagers they’d served alcohol to at a boozy birthday party she threw for her seventeen-year-old daughter. Schillinger allegedly punched one sixteen year old in the face three times as he and his friends were trying to leave the party and Schillinger was ordering them to stay. There are reportedly at least two cell phone videos of the assaults, one of which shows Schillinger lunging toward a group of teens and having to be restrained as the teens flee the home.

Now it turns out it wasn’t the first time cops had been called out to one of Schillinger’s teen keggers.