When MAGA attacks
By 
Heather Alberda ran a very effective sex education program in Ottawa County, MI:
In her 21 years at the health department, the county’s teen pregnancy rate had decreased by 76 percent and is the fourth-lowest among Michigan’s 83 counties. The abortion rate for Ottawa County during the same period fell by 18 percent, according to state data.
None of this matters, needless to say, when the local government is taken over by hardcore MAGA cranks and you’ve been targeted by Libs of Tik Tok:
In Ottawa County, a fast-growing community of 300,000, the GOP’s focus on religion, sex and morality was increasingly consuming the essential and often unremarkable work of county government.
Few felt the sting of this shift as acutely as Alberda. Her bosses had tried to protect her by scaling back her sex education work, but the change just felt like punishment. Her job, which she had described as her “passion,” was quickly becoming a source of mental anguish.
[…]
y early July, Alberda’s supervisors at the health department had largely shut down her work as a sexuality educator and assigned her new, bureaucratic tasks that mostly kept her confined to her office cubicle.
Public school health teachers were still teaching sex-ed classes, but Alberda was no longer allowed to talk to their students about birth control or sexually transmitted disease. Alberda’s Wear One condom program was still running, but she was told not to add any new locations. Her parent guide, which had drawn the scorn of Libs of TikTok, had been taken down months earlier. Initially, her supervisors said they would review it and put it back online. It still hasn’t returned.
“It feels like I don’t even exist anymore,” she said. “Twenty years of what I worked so hard to build literally was in one instant destroyed.”
I strongly recommend reading the whole thing, which among many other details discusses the role that COVID played in radicalizing local Republicans. There is, alas, no happy ending here:
The service had ended and people were drifting toward the doors. Alberda couldn’t stop thinking about the people in the county who had never met her but still seemed to hate her. The intrusive thoughts would lead her a few days later to take a leave from work and check herself into a faith-based, outpatient psychiatric facility. She had never felt more anxious and lost. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do.
The brain drain from Republican counties is only going to accelerate, and non-MAGA educators that choose to stay are only going to see their lives become more miserable.