QAnon-linked group embraces 'paper terrorism' tactics to intimidate school officials: report

More and more school districts across the country are seeing conservative parents-turned-activists who are bombarding them with questionable legal diatribes designed to forced schools to implement policy changes, NBC News reports. The tactics are well known to law enforcement and extremism experts who deal with "sovereign citizen" movements.

"The parents’ strategy is simple: Try to use obscure and often inapplicable legal claims to force a school district to make a policy change. And while the claims have no legal standing, they have been effective at spreading confusion and wasting school districts’ resources, even though the paperwork doesn’t require a formal legal response," reports NBC News. "The parents and activists have organized through a new group called Bonds for the Win, which is named for a financial instrument at the heart of the pseudo-legal effort. The group’s members have spent the past two months bombarding school administrators with meritless claims over Covid policies and diversity initiatives. These claims allege that districts have broken the law and therefore owe parents money through what are called surety bonds, which government agencies often carry as liability insurance."

While Bonds for the Win hasn't won any court battles, they've celebrated successes in overwhelming school districts with legal paperwork, which The Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League calls “paper terrorism.”

READ: Things go 'terribly awry' after Rudy Giuliani runs into Michael Cohen at ritzy NY restaurant: report

“There is a lot of misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the purpose of a local school governing board,” said Julie Cieniawski, president of the Scottsdale Unified Governing Board in Arizona, which was one of Bonds for the Win’s first targets. “I do believe it has kind of become a central meeting point for people to share their grievances and not specifically about our district. It’s almost like living in a reality TV show when you’re experiencing it.”

At least 14 states have had their school districts inundated with sham paperwork. As misinformation about the strategy's success circulates, the number of people joining the cause grows.

Bonds for the Win was founded by Arizona QAnon adherent Miki Klann, who also believes the earth is flat and AIDS is a hoax.

“We’re hoping that the parents start standing up and calling these people out for the crimes against humanity that they’ve been coerced to commit,” Klann said in a recent video uploaded to BitChute. “We want the people to understand their sovereignty.”

Earlier this year, the Anti-Defamation League warned that QAnon adherents were increasingly adopting the ideology of sovereign citizens, which the organization described as "anti-government movement whose adherents believe in a conspiracy theory that in the 19th century, a shadowy group of conspirators began infiltrating the original, lawful government and subverted it into an illegitimate and tyrannical de facto government that’s been using secret contracts to enslave all Americans."

The sovereign citizen movement was reportedly responsible for inspiring the QAnon belief that Donald Trump would be re-inaugurated on March 4, 2021.

Read the full report over at NBC News.