I was filmed several times for this project and lived through this story.
Bucks County was my home for 40 years.
It’s a beautiful place that I love deeply and where my husband and I were raising our family.
And the came COVID-19.
Secretary of Health Rachel Levine imposed some of the harshest COVID-19 mitigation in the nation in Pennsylvania.
In Bucks County we had a health director who wrote school health guidance in JUNE 2020 recommending kids return to school—saying it was safe and best for the well-being of kids (yes—JUNE 2020!).
His reward for practicing actual science was to be attacked by the teachers union, Democrats, and the community, until his medical license was placed under investigation (I have FOIA emails showing this).
I become a local advocate for school reopening. I learned how to file public records requests in March 2021 and started going to public meetings in August 2021. I was focused on one thing: a return to normal school.
For that, I was attacked by community members, elected officials (I was assaulted by a township supervisor with a masks save lives sign) and our local government—the Bucks County Commissioners.
The Democrat commissioners illegally blocked my phone number, harassed me at public meetings, published a made up defamatory story about me in the local paper, and sued me 5 times to withhold public records I’d won on appeal.
After 3 years of litigation, a judge ruled they’d acted in bad faith—a big story in more normal times.
I was just a mom—a concerned citizen wanting answers who had nothing to gain and a lot to lose.
It’s hard to describe how unnerving it is to be attacked and bullied by your own government and how their actions encouraged further attack from the community.
In 2022, I started putting my newfound FOIA skills to use and began uncovering the harms of transgender medicine—which only put a bigger target on my back.
I still stand on my two points of advocacy:
1. Schools closures harmed children.
2. You cannot change your sex—transgender medicine is extremely harmful.
I haven’t seen the series yet so I can’t comment on its merits—but I have been curious about it since 2022. I will be watching.
And Bucks County, PA, will always be my home—no matter where I live. I miss it everyday.
We provided funding for a documentary series titled Bucks County, USA, that follows several families navigating the tensions that have come to define our politics.
At the center of the story are two teenage girls whose parents have become bitterly divided over their kids’ education.
The adults disagree about nearly everything, but the kids have figured out something many of us seem to have forgotten: you can disagree profoundly with someone and still care about them, listen to them, and remain friends.
We can and must learn from our children.
It starts streaming tomorrow, Sept 20th, on
PBS.org and then on public television stations across the country. Join the conversation
@BucksCountyUSA #BucksCountyUSA
Don’t miss it.