After Jan. 6, 2021, Darren Laustsen felt something shift in the political atmosphere of his Bucks County town.
Laustsen, a Democrat, had never paid much attention to local politics. But in the weeks after a mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election, the fallout reached Laustsen’s Pennridge School District.
Then-vice president of the board, Republican Joan Cullen, had been in D.C. for a pro-Trump rally held earlier that day. There was no sign she had done anything illegal, but people were, Laustsen says, “not happy about her involvement.”
Cullen had been controversial in Pennridge before Jan. 6, but Laustsen says the conflicts escalated post-insurrection. Critics piled on, and supporters then defended her vociferously.
“It really kind of garnered her a lot of political power and a lot of capital among certain sections of the community who looked up to the stand that she was taking,” Laustsen said. “I think that’s when it started to become a political proxy war in the school board, and things just kind of got weird from there.”
The conflicts have gone beyond Jan. 6. School districts in the county have been in the spotlight for debates over COVID-19 school closures and mask mandates, in addition to those over when and how students should learn about institutional racism. Board elections late last year were historically expensive and acrimonious.
Cullen, now president of the Pennridge School Board, declined to comment. But in the year since the insurrection put her in the crosshairs of her more liberal critics, she has been defiant. Over the summer, she spearheaded an effort to pause Pennridge’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion initiatives. More recently, the district limited students’ access to library books that address gender identity.
“I thought that things would die down kind of after [the recent municipal elections] were over, but I think things have actually gotten even more heated,” said Laustsen, whose wife, Kelly Laustsen, recently ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Perkasie.
“I don’t see any benefit for these people to moderate at this point, because I feel like the farther right they go, the more support they get, and the more they become kind of heroes.”
Over the past year, stories like these — in which simmering political conflicts and resentments boiled over in the wake of Jan. 6 — have cropped up repeatedly in Pennsylvania, resulting in lasting schisms.
It’s a closely divided state that often reflects national politics in miniature, and it had among the most people arrested for storming the Capitol. George Washington University, which tracks these federal cases, has counted 63 Pennsylvanians facing charges for their role in the insurrection.
Politically moderate, relatively affluent, Philadelphia-bordering Bucks County had more arrests than any other county in the state: six.
That tally puts Bucks County within the top 10 nationally, with three of those arrested so far pleading guilty to misdemeanor charges that could carry prison terms of up to six months.
Attempts to interview those arrested were unsuccessful.
Some of Pennsylvania’s leading state Republicans had been casting doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and many who went to Washington D.C. that day believed them. Ahead of the 2020 election certification, top GOP leaders in Pennsylvania’s House and Senate sent letters urging Congress to delay certifying the election due to “inconsistencies.”
A year later, many mainstream conservatives downplay the entire episode.
In Bucks, Pat Poprik, the longtime chair of the county GOP, dismisses any suggestion that the insurrection has had a lasting impact on county politics.
“It doesn’t come up much in any conversation I have with anybody,” she said. “It just doesn’t come up. It’s, you know, playing its own way through the courts.”