It was the weekend that changed politics in Southlake, Texas, forever.

At the end of July last year, word began to spread of a quiet effort by the school board to pass a so-called Cultural Competence Action Plan, a critical race theory-inspired effort to ingrain woke racial politics in the town’s schools.

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The outrage was instant and, as it turns out, highly consequential. Opponents of the plan eventually swept the school-board races last month, garnering national attention and giving opponents of critical race theory a signature victory at the local level.

Tim O’Hare, a former chairman of the Tarrant County Republican Party who would be at the center of opposition to the plan, together with his friend and long-time political organizer and activist Leigh Wambsganss, remembers being in Montana when he heard of the impending vote. . . .

An affluent suburb of Dallas-Fort Worth in Tarrant County that votes Republican and is known for its excellent schools, Southlake wouldn’t seem a natural front in a fight over critical race theory — it’d seem one of the last places activists would target, rather than one of the first. . . .

Cam Bryan, who ended up running for school board on the conservative slate, says everyone realized “if they can take Southlake, they can take any place.”

Of course, they didn’t. It’s worth delving in detail into Southlake’s successful pushback because it should be a model for conservative parents confronted by the similar situations around the country. . . .

The Southlake opposition was spontaneous and genuinely grassroots, but not the least bit amateurish. While there’s no substitute for having inflamed public opinion on your side, it has to be appropriately channeled. The Southlake opposition was unified, was carefully organized, and never took its eye off the ball.

It was also fearless, remaining outspoken and resolute despite harassment and efforts to get its supporters fired by their employers.

In short, its stupendous victory wasn’t something that just happened. As Leigh Wambsganss puts it, “The one who works the hardest wins, and we had an army.” . . .

The stars aligned in Southlake — the side pushing a radical “anti-racist” agenda had written it down in extensive detail so there was no mistaking what they were about, local public opinion swung hard against the plan, and skilled organizers in the opposition executed flawlessly.

If that’s going to be hard to replicate everywhere, there are a number of notable takeaways.

“I would say number one,” O’Hare observes, “perhaps the single most important position in all of politics is the school board. And that has so much influence on what our kids grow up to believe and what they think of our country. It’s generally viewed, I think, as the lowest-level election as well as office — it very well may be the most important one.”

As Wambsganss puts it, “Traditionally, no one thought of school boards as sexy. But now, with critical race theory, I think that’s changing, and people are going to realize that this is really a momentous fight.”

Getting out the word is key — using freedom-of-information requests to find out what’s happening in the schools, disseminating it widely, and explaining it to parents. “Making parents aware is step one,” says Wambsganss, “because people who have never been vocal, people who’ve been terrified of speaking at a public meeting before, they’re realizing the danger to their kids and they’re coming forward.”

Getting organized is obviously essential, as is dividing up responsibilities to be able to fight on multiple fronts.

Cam Bryan says that knowing that a substantial organization was supporting the cause was indispensable for the campaigns that he and Hannah Smith ran. Knowing, as he puts it, that a formal group had their backs “allowed me and Hannah to say, ‘Okay, we can run unafraid because we have thousands of people behind us.’”

There’s also no substitute for being absolutely committed to seeing through the fight despite the flak. “We were not afraid,” Wambsganss notes. “We kept going, and these parents were not afraid. And they were getting threats, and their companies were all getting called, and their jobs were being threatened.”

Relatedly, O’Hare warns against the attitude that says, “We go fight in this election and then, ‘Okay, now we rest.’” Instead, he thinks ceaseless vigilance and activism is necessary. “They never rest,” he says of the Left, “and if we want to save our country then we have to be the same. We never stop fighting. We never rest. There is always a battle to fight.”

In sum, says O’Hare, “Conservatives in Southlake fell asleep, but they’re awake now.”

And they have a remarkable victory to show for it — one that should inspire conservatives around the country and give them a working template for fights to come.

Let us know your thoughts and prayers below in the comments!

(Excerpt from National Review. Article by Rich Lowry. Photo by Getty Images)