Shiva Rajbhandari, the former Boise High School student who received nationwide recognition for winning a seat on the Boise School Board in 2022, was tackled by security when he rushed the stage during a Ron DeSantis campaign event in Iowa on Thursday, January 11:
Rajbhandari remained on the Boise School Board despite enrolling at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last summer. He indicated his intention to finish out his term, which ends in September 2024.
This is not the young man’s first brush with controversy. Last April, Rajbhandari tweeted several profane statements at Governor Brad Little after the governor signed H71, banning gender mutilation surgery for minors:
In September, Rajbhandari was arrested for blocking traffic and disobeying law enforcement during a climate protest at the Federal Reserve building in New York. On his shirt was the logo of the Sunrise Movement, a radical climate organization that also claimed credit for disrupting DeSantis’ speech on Thursday.
When Rajbhandari rushed the stage he unfurled a banner that read: “DESANTIS: CLIMATE CRIMINAL”. In a sympathetic interview with KIVITV News Channel 6, Rajbhandari said “playing by the rules hasn’t worked.” While these antics seem absurd to most people — DeSantis remarked that the incident represented “what’s wrong with our college system” — this is how left wing activists gain clout within their circles.
Even in high school, Rajbhandari was involved with radical climate organizations that believe so-called “direct action” — protesting, blocking streets, vandalism, or rushing stages during campaign events — is necessary to call attention to what they consider the dire state of our ecology.
In an interview with The Guardian following his school board race, Rajbhandari explained where his activism began:
In seventh grade, I learned about climate change. And I was super lucky to attend a school where it was taught because at the time, in Idaho K-12 schools, climate change was not part of our science curriculum standards. But at the same time, I really felt this anxiety and isolation.
Then in ninth grade, I attended a climate strike that was organized by local students. That’s when my sense of isolation turned into a sense of empowerment. I started an Extinction Rebellion youth chapter. I joined the Idaho Climate Justice League, and we delivered the largest petition the school district had ever received, asking the district to make a 10-year sustainability plan.
Radical activists like Rajbhandari are convinced that the world is going to end at any moment and that it’s all your fault. It’s laughable, but if they ever got real political power they would make the Khmer Rouge look like a Kindergarten play. DeSantis is correct that this is a symptom of what is wrong with higher education in America today. Rather than turning out people with critical thinking skills, our universities are creating armies of activists who use any issue — climate, gender, race relations, firearms, etc. — to wage a Marxist revolution.
When you consider how the radical Marxists of the 1960s started with direct action and ended up as respected professors and authors, it would be wise not to underestimate young radicals like Shiva Rajbhandari. He has successfully parlayed his school board run into a national profile, and is now using antics like these to gain credibility with his fellow travelers.
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