By Rachel Monroe | The New Yorker
Amanda Wray was cleaning her Airbnb property, a mountain cabin two hours north of her home in Scottsdale, Arizona, when a friend texted her a link to a folder on someone’s Google Drive. There, among a jumble of documents, were folders labelled with her name. “I saw hundreds of files,” she told me. “Pictures of my kids, pictures of my friends’ kids, pictures of the house I was standing in. I just started to feel like someone was watching me—irrationally. But I saw the amount of hours that somebody had spent stalking me, and it made me physically ill.” She updated her Twitter bio to reflect her discovery: “Public school mom, doxxed, harassed and stalked by the Scottsdale Unified School District Board President.”
Within a week, the Google Drive folder, now deemed a “secret dossier,” was international news. In 2022, Arizona will hold elections for senator and governor; in the dossier, Republican political aspirants saw an opportunity for outrage. “Parents are NOT the enemy!” Jim Lamon, a Republican hoping to win the Democrat Mark Kelly’s Senate seat, wrote on his Web site. “As a father and grandfather, I am outraged to learn that this kind of harassment is occurring right here in Scottsdale, Arizona! Brave parents like Amanda Wray are the VICTIMS of this lunacy.” Right-wing pundits seized on the story: “An Arizona school-board president is under major fire for creating a dossier with information on parents who oppose C.R.T. and woke ideologies being taught in their kids’ classrooms,” a One America News anchor intoned. Invoking the Virginia governor’s race, in which a suburban school district’s antiracist efforts became a statewide issue that may have turned the tide in favor of Republicans, Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, called the debacle Loudoun County 2.0.
