A member of the Fairfax County School Board gave an extremely woke commencement speech last week in which she told students they were “stepping in” to a world of white supremacy, racism, and all the usual so-called progressive tropes.

In front of an audience of mostly minority students, Abrar Omeish gave the keynote address for Justice High School in Falls Church, Virginia last week. During her speech, she stated that the graduates were going into a world rife with “racism, extreme versions of individualism and capitalism, [and] white supremacy.”

The school board member/activist urged the audience to “acknowledge the stolen land of the Manahoac people,” in a reference to the Virginia native American tribe, and defended comments she made in a recent tweet in which she claimed Israel is a colonizing state that “desecrates the Holy Land” and “kills Palestinians.”

The Daily Wire noted that Omeish received “tepid criticism” over her remarks about Israel but that she told the graduating students not to allow this type of pushback to deter them.

“The world may try to quiet you by deciding for you what’s cool, what’s weird, what is or isn’t objective. It may try to convince you that what you hold dear is too different to be accepted. But who gets to decide? You are walking into a world that will be uncomfortable when you seek to cause good trouble. And that may seek to intimidate you or make you think the truth is controversial,” she intoned.

She continued: “Every part of your being may scream in rage at the ways others have wronged you,” but “let compassion for your fellow human beings, not anger or rage — and believe me this is hard to do — fuel you.”

“No matter how many haters emerge, I’m sure you’ve encountered them yourselves, and believe me they’re a sign you’re unsettling the status quo towards justice. Just consider them your cheerleaders of another breed,” she added.

Before Omeish’s speech, the president of the student government introduced her, touting her campaign work for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Her father, Esam Omeish was a board member of the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center which is “the namesake of a mosque attended by two 9/11 hijackers in 2001, and the radical imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, and Nidal Hasan, the 2009 Fort Hood shooter,” according to Fox News.

This story presents yet another reason for conservatives to increase their focus on local politics. It’s easy to get caught up in the news over President Biden’s latest memory lapse or the ridiculous policies that Democrats are trying to ram through Congress. However, while these issues are important, we must also pay more attention to what the hard left is doing at the local level.

With the ongoing debate over critical race theory and whether it should be taught in schools, one can easily see how important it is for conservative Americans to have influence in our cities’ school boards, legislative entities, and other areas of local governance. People like Omeish exert a disturbing level of influence over the material that is being taught to America’s children. Without conservatives in these positions to stop them, the hard left will continue indoctrinating the nation’s children.