MSNBC "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell" - Transcript Interview with Rep. Madeleine Dean

Interview

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At a recent meeting of the board, two police officers needed to be on site because of the harassment she faced from protesters. Heather Raymond told "The Boston Globe," "This is my fourth year on the board and this is the first time we needed to do this. It`s not good for our community. The proud boys started showing up at our meetings in June and then in July we had the NSC-131 group come. They are neo-Nazis and came in full regalia with swastikas on their arms."

It didn`t have to be this way. And you know what, it still shouldn`t. Joining us now is Heather Raymond, president of the school board in Nashua, New Hampshire and parent of a sixth grader and eighth grader, and Congresswoman Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania. And I`m just grateful to both of you for being here.

Congresswoman Dean, I`ll start with you. You started in local government and you ran for town commissioner, of course, and you were one of the women candidates who delivered the House for Nancy Pelosi and Democrats in 2018 in that huge wave. So, I`m really grateful to you tonight, you know, for this topic specifically.

What do you think about the way in which Donald Trump has created essentially a permission structure that has Nazis showing up at school board meetings?

REP. MADELEINE DEAN (D-PA): Well, you know what, Zerlina, let me say that as I prepared for this interview and I thought about what you wanted to focus on tonight, my thanks goes to you. Thank you for focusing on this. Thank you for talking about our heroic volunteer school board members whose focus is our children and their education. There couldn`t be anything more important.

I`ve talked to many school board members. And in fact if you don`t mind behind me I have here the map of my district and all the school districts within it. The school board members like who we see in front of us, Heather Raymond, and Jennifer Jenkins who you referenced, they`re heroes. They`re not in this for the glory. They are not in this for the money. They are in this for our children.

And what they have faced in the last 18 months and maybe even longer is threats, threats to their life, threats to their personal safety, and I just have to say you`re heroes, guys. I talked to a bunch of my school board members today in preparation. One school board member literally said to me, it`s been pretty unpleasant. I feel sick before every school board meeting, every single time.

I do everything I can in my power not to lash out. He said because I`m here for the kids. I`m here for the kids. So, you`re right. I had the chance to serve at the township level, at the state level as a state representative for six and a half years and now at the federal level.

But my champions are you, the school board members who are volunteers for our children and care about our children and they should not be subject to the horrendous threats that you`re absolutely right, are the ligaments of Donald Trump and those who support Donald Trump.

MAXWELL: You know, Heather, I honestly at any time know what NSC-131 was, like they had to tell me. I had to Google that. And it is the local`s national socialist club, aka Nazis. So, again, Nazis are showing up at your school board meetings. How does that make you feel?

HEATHER RAYMOND, SCHOOL BOARD PRESIDENT, NASHUA, NEW HAMPSHIRE: Well, first thank you so much for having me and including me in this conversation. It was pretty hairy there for a while. I didn`t think that our little community would have these kinds of events happening. So, it was scary. It was scary to see people outside our meetings chanting such hateful things. We`re a very diverse community and it just -- it doesn`t reflect who I thought we were.

MAXWELL: Attending a school board meeting is, you know, kind ever like local homework for kids and we don`t have civics in school, and we should. Heather are the kids aware of what is happening at the meetings that, you know, folks are coming and, you know, spewing violent rhetoric towards members?

RAYMOND: Yes, I think -- I think many, many students are aware. We -- I mean, this is New Hampshire. Everyone has a level of civic engagement. We even have two juniors on our school board as student representatives.

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So they`re aware of it. It makes them very uncomfortable. My own kids are aware of it. And they`re -- they get concerned about my safety and the safety of fellow board members. We are fortunate here in Nashua that we have a nationally ranked police force who have been there for the board members every step of the way, making sure that we`re insulated inside the board room and even creating paths to our cars after the board meetings sometimes.

MAXWELL: Congresswoman Dean, it`s just -- it`s so hard to hear this from local election officials because as I said they`re heroes of the community. They`re trying to do what`s right for their own kids but also the kids in their communities. What can be done about this?

I mean, is there any turning back from the normalization of this kind of behavior? I don`t think any parent out there wants their child to behave in this way. And so it`s so disturbing to see adults treating each other in this way in a school board setting.

DEAN: To your point, exactly, Zerlina. And the school board members I have talked to, each one of them has said to me the children have no problem with what is going on. They want to deal sensibly by way of the science with COVID. They have said we have no difficulty with students wearing masks.

So these folks, these adults, frankly, in the room who are not acting like adults, who come in in their anti-vax, their anti-mask, and they are causing all this stir, are really sapping the resources from our children who are way ahead of us. They said they`re not our problem. The children say we`ll wear the masks. We`ll protect ourselves. We`ll protect others.

But here is the other extraordinary grave loss. These folks, these people who run for public office to serve us on school boards throughout this country, as I said, a great risk to themselves now, at greater risk to themselves, at no pecuniary gain. This is all using of their own volunteer spirit and believing in our children and their future.

Their resources are sapped as they have to deal with these zappers, as they have to deal with these, literally, threats to their safety. I talked to a school board member today in one of my largest school districts. And they`re doing very, very well for the students. But he said, I felt bad for the districts that have very few resources and they`re dealing with the threats.

They`re not able to focus on the kid. They have to deal with the threats and the people right in front of them. And he said literally in August, as we put forward our plan for our children and the safety plan that we put forward, he said that meeting got so out of hand we had to go to a back room, sit in a band room locked in until the crowd could be -- the excited, very negative crowd could be dispersed and they could try to safely get to their cars to leave.

That is not what`s should be going on in America for our children. So I`ll go back to Heather to say thank you, please, god, and Jennifer Jenkins, and so many others including in my very own set of school districts, and many women by the way. And Zerlina, I know you were thinking about that as well.

Women public servants under attack, thank you for what you`re doing. Our children deserve you and do not deserve the vile attacks that are happening at you.

RAYMOND: Congresswoman is --

MAXWELL: Heather, what are you going to tell your children -- oh, go ahead? Go ahead.

RAYMOND: I was just going to say the congresswoman is absolutely correct. You know, many, many of our people who yell out during our meeting and disrupt our meeting are people who are against masking, and some of them are parents who have been led astray by disinformation. But many are people who travel from place to place specifically to disrupt these meetings.

And if you ask our student members of the board or really any students, they don`t have a problem with our requirements that students and staff wear masks. They would rather be in school wearing a mask than risk getting COVID and having us shut down.

And, you know, when we talk about women in local government, our board is the most female in the state of New Hampshire. We have eight of our nine members are women. And so I don`t know how that played into various hate groups targeting our board, you know, specifically as opposed to other districts.

DAEN: Zerlina can I tell you one other thing --

MAXWELL: Oh, yes, go ahead. Go ahead.

DAEN: What is baffling to me is the dark money that has now filtered into this.

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We have a PAC that has generated out of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which is the county directly to the north of what I represent, Montgomery and Berks County, $500,000 PAC where this gentleman is pouring $10,000 per candidate for school board. If you ever run for local office, $10,000 is a whole lot of money.

This is dark money trying to radicalize, frankly, school boards, trying to defeat candidates like the people we`re talking about right now, whether it`s Heather or Jennifer, Tina in my district and Jen and many other men as well.

This -- there is a very cynical thing going on here in terms of dark money trying to indoctrinate school board members toward the very, very far right and toward this, sadly, I think, anti-children, anti-public health, anti- science set of rhetoric.

MAXWELL: Heather in the last few minutes here, do you get the sense that this is an orchestrated thing that this isn`t a random thing where, you know, a group of people in your community are showing up that it`s organized in some way by some of these groups?

RAYMOND: I think it`s both. So, in my community we definitely have impassioned parents and I have so much compassion for them and I will never interfere with their ability to speak during the public comments period. But we also have some very anti-government libertarian groups operating here in New Hampshire and they have absolutely been to my school board meetings.

And the congressman was mentioning -- congresswoman was mentioning money in local school board races. You know, I`m running for office again this year and I typically raise about $1,000. And that`s enough to, you know, purchase signs, and a little bit of literature. But we see people in this race raising tens of thousands of dollars.

So they`re not getting these little, you know, $10 and $25 donations from local people in the community. And as of yet, I don`t know where their money is coming from. I haven`t seen any reporting in our filing period with the city was last week to report our donations. So, it will be interesting to me to see what has been reported when that becomes publicly available.

MAXWELL: Well we should definitely all pay very close attention to that, because I do believe some of these divisions are being exacerbated by outside forces with -- with an agenda. And it`s not just some naturally occurring thing. Although Donald Trump, I believe, was the catalyst. Congresswoman Madeleine Dean and Heather Raymond, thank you for being here tonight. It was a great conversation. Very important. Please stay safe.

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