AWARE is supposed to stand for Agenda Watch, Alert, Response, and Engage. Sure. M4L itself announced "school boards put on notice," as if school boards do not already operate under laws that require transparency, including things like publishing the agendas of future meetings.
Co-founder and CEO Tina Descovich handled the rollout herself. Co-founder Tiffany Justice recently finished her brief fling with the Heritage Foundation; her linkedin now says she's self-employed as a "conservative activist, strategist, and donor advisor," so I guess the "ordinary mom at the kitchen table selling t-shirts" mask is fully off now. Meanwhile, co-founder Bridget Ziegler hasn't been very busy since her own bi-sex scandal (other than suing the city) and chose not to run for re-election to the Sarasota School Board this year (her husband was booted from his party chairmanship gig).
There was a time when, if you squinted hard, M4L looked like a conservative parental activism group. These days they're just an unabashed estrogen wing of MAGA. So of course Descovich, when rolling out the new surveillance AI, invoked Joe Biden. "The Biden admin targeted our parents for showing up to school board meetings," Descovich claimed, echoing a new report from Trump's Weaponization Working Group, part of Dear Leaders use of the Department of Justice to target and push back on anyone who was ever mean to him or his allies. Back in 2022, when M4L and other MAGAs were aggressively attacking school boards, the National School Board Association asked law enforcement at every level for some help for its members and used the phrase "equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism" in their letter, which has been a PR gift to the MAGA crowd ever since.
M4L's AI agent will, apparently, scan school board agendas looking for any particular words or phrases that indicate Naughty Policies "buried deep within school board agendas." Because "it's incredibly time-consuming to sift through thousands of pages in agendas each week," says Descovich, "and school districts count on that." Because school boards are the enemy. Do any school boards have thousand-page agendas? Or is it the main M4L office that's scanning them, in which case, can't local M4L chapters scan local agendas? Is this initiative lazy, or is it trying to weaponize roving bands of MAGA moms to be deployed to whatever district the AI says needs spanking?
Using AI to track down objectionable DEI stuff (plus anything else these snowflakes think might harm them) has certainly been tried before. ChatGPT has become a popular tool for generating book banning lists, even as it puts books on the list that make no sense (The Life of Fredrick Dounglass? Les Miserables?) And DOGE famously tried this on a large scale to find spending cuts, like cutting HVAC replacement as DEI and just generally doing such a bad job that the courts reprimanded them. In Texas, university professors must now submit course content for AI scanning.
So MALAWARE promises at least some instances of a bunch of angry MAGAs showing up to protest a high school auto shop unit on transmissions because ChatGPT reported a lesson on trans stuff, which would be entertaining if anyone in MAGA world was capable of saying, "Ooops, we made a mistake" and not "Let's just keep repeating our original story even though it has no more evidence than the stories about litter boxes in schools."
Maybe the main idea here is to use technology to make up for M4L's flagging membership in some areas.
At any rate, one more way for MAGA moms to agitate the base while facilitating the harassment of school boards across the country, whose members are elected from their own communities and, in most cases, paid little or nothing for their trouble. Look, I'm all for local taxpayers speaking up about the actions of their school boards, but there is something lazy about this approach, which does not encourage people to pay attention to what their school board is doing all the time, but to wake up and squawk only when the AI tells them something is happening they might not like, with no context or background provided. MALAWARE is not here to facilitate involvement-- just attacks. Not involvement or engagement— just intimidation and undermining.
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