In his 1964 “The Speech,” as Ronald Reagan called it, he asked the American people: Are you satisfied with the “peace” we now enjoy? What he meant was: is today’s America good enough for you, or do you want to strive for something better? I’m reminded of that moment in history when I consider where we find ourselves today in Bucks County, fresh off the fall 2021 election cycle and approaching what may be the final stretch of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We are at a crossroads. Will we be defined by the impassioned division we’ve come to know over the past two years, or will we find a way to heal and move on? As life returns to normal, we are changed as individuals. Are we changed for the better?

When I wrote Stop the Bullying several months ago, I was beginning to think about this. I outlined five rules of engagement, number four of which was, “We should all use our real names and reject anonymous social media accounts.” In good faith, I attached my own name to the @ReOpenBucks twitter handle, and I made a promise that I’d always be clear about who was speaking and reject any appearance of anonymity. My reason for doing this was simple. As I said at the time, “By using your real name, you are forced to own not only the things you say, but also their impact.”

Meanwhile, there are some people in our community who have swung hard in the opposite direction. They’ve not only embraced anonymity, they seem to have become utterly obsessed with it. Rather than aiming to build up our community, they seek to “burn it all down.”

With the benefit of 10,000 sets of eyes and ears in the ReOpen Bucks community, I know who the worst offenders are, and I’m here to ask you to stop, starting with two people in particular: Diana Leygerman and Susana Ash.

Diana Leygerman uses two “real” twitter accounts that we are aware of: @dinachka82, which is her long-time personal account, and @DLeygerman, which is her campaign account for Central Bucks School Board (deleted just hours before publishing this article)

It’s important to call out, and we’ll come back to this later, that Mrs. Leygerman generally uses polished messaging on her real twitter accounts. That’s because her name is involved. That’s exactly what I meant in my article last October.

“We all should be free to discuss ideas, including using satire or any other literary form. But when we do so anonymously, we subconsciously allow ourselves to go a little bit further than we would if our real names were on the line.”

Joshua Hogan – Stop the Bullying (October 9, 2021)

Unfortunately, Mrs. Leygerman shows us how she really feels when she gets to be anonymous.

In 2021, Diana Leygerman ran for Central Bucks School Board Director in Region 9, and ultimately lost to her Republican opponent, Jim Pepper. Just days after the election, while votes were still being tabulated, Diana apparently decided that her next campaign would be that of scorched earth on social media. In November 2021 her twitter handle @ProllMindi was born, bearing only the name “Exposing GQP” and the description, “burn it all down.”

For the first month or so, she quietly retweeted, but then her fascination with anonymously naming and shaming began to grow. In early December, 2021, Mrs. Leygerman began using her @ProllMindi account to launch more personal attacks. Her first target was Plumstead GOP committeeman Howard Schargel, with whom she has had a long-standing public feud.

Obviously, we see right off the bat that anonymity is not something Diana Leygerman handles well. Unfortunately, this was only the beginning.

When school returned from holiday break, Central Bucks Superintendent Dr. Abe Lucabaugh sent out a district-wide communication emphasizing that school would be returning to normalcy. Mrs. Leygerman took issue with Dr. Lucabaugh’s letter, and went about attacking him in a manner that further illustrates the damage caused by anonymity.

Folks, what you are looking at right here is a major problem. Diana Leygerman was upset that Dr. Lucabaugh dared to move Central Bucks towards normalcy, so she decided that she would go after him by using his kids. That is disturbing enough, but the fact that she used her two “real” accounts to set the table for her anonymous account is heinous. She didn’t have the guts to say what she wanted to say using her real name, so she said it anonymously and then used her real accounts to act surprised when someone else on the internet (someone definitely, totally not her) brings Dr. Lucabaugh’s children into it. Shameful.

She even continued using the anonymous account to mention Dr. Lucabuagh’s kids, but didn’t say a peep more about it from either of her real accounts.

She also continued to use her various accounts, both real and fake, to interact with each other, including recently adding a newly-minted account to the mix, @qcounty1. When you step back and think about it all, it’s sad, really.

During her campaign for Central Bucks School Board, Diana Leygerman promised “I will be respectful and transparent”. Her full campaign slogan was “Civility, Stability, Integrity“.

Is it “civility” to anonymously say the awful things that you’d never say with your own voice?

Is it “stability” to use multiple twitter accounts, some real and some fake, in a convoluted effort to amplify your own mixed messages?

Ask yourself a very simple question: What if James Bender and Dan Ring were behaving this way in the wake of their election losses?

What do you think people would make of that?

Why do you think it is so easy for me to say that Mr. Bender and Mr. Ring would never act like this?

The fact is that people like Diana Leygerman have gotten away with this kind of behavior because nobody in the community has held them accountable. In some cases, they are even encouraged by their peers to behave this way. It’s reprehensible, and I am here to say to Mrs. Leygerman: Stop it. If you want to be vile, then be vile, but do it with your own name, for the whole world to see. I think you took a good step towards doing so with your latest attack on over a hundred 9th-graders who attend Tamanend Middle School.

Mrs. Leygerman is perfectly okay with this tweet going viral, and with it her insinuation that the entire decision was driven by just one single student (a board director’s child).

But according to the CDC, only 56% of our nation’s middle-school population is double-vaccinated. That means that Tamanend Middle School, with over 850 students, likely has well over 100 unvaccinated 9th-graders who are being protected by the Board’s vote. Also worth noting that the Board voted 7-1 against the trip, with Dr. Tabitha Dell’Angelo surprisingly breaking ranks to vote with the six Republicans.

Mrs. Leygerman wants so badly to attack the board director whose child is affected that she’s willing to throw into the fire 100+ affected students and her campaign running-mate Dr. Dell’Angelo. At least this time she did it with her real name, for once.

Of course, even when Mrs. Leygerman begins a topic with her real account, she still plays the “interact-with-myself” game to insert additional drama, such as yours truly, “Lord ReOpen. ” She would never just bring me up out of nowhere on her real account, as that would look improper. But if “someone else” brings me into the conversation, well then hey hey, let’s retweet away.

In fact, Mrs. Leygerman blocked me (@reopenbucks) with her @dinachka82 account, but she uses her @ProllMindi account to pester me all the time. Weird, right?

This deceptive behavior is a regular occurrence across all of her accounts. Seriously, go check out @dinachka82, @ProllMindi, and @DLeygerman (deleted) and you’ll see what I’m talking about. She does it all the time.

While I won’t be getting into any of the poor decisions that Mrs. Leygerman’s husband has made in his life, I will end with this gem that “he” tweeted following a public comment that evidently upset him. This comes from what the two of them seem to believe to be an anonymous account, but never forget: the community is watching and listening.

Again, what would you think if the spouses of James Bender or Dan Ring were behaving like this? Would that be acceptable?

One of the obvious reasons that a person might be afraid to use their real name is because they fear reprisal if they speak their beliefs. Even Diana Leygerman expressed this fear while she unashamedly accused others of using fake accounts.

Sadly, this fear is sometimes warranted. There are people in the community who seemingly make it their life’s work to “cancel” anyone they can. One such person is Susana Ash, who recently has decided to use anonymity as a way to escalate her favored “cancel culture” tactics.

Long before descending into the madness I’m about to show you, Susana Ash seems to have made it her mission to doxx and harass people by complaining about them to their place of work. I can safely say this, because I have spoken directly with multiple people who have been affected by Mrs. Ash’s actions. She has also published my own employment information publicly, and she celebrated when an anonymous twitter (sound familiar?) went after me in June 2020. I wonder how many other people she has done this to over the years?

In particular, Mrs. Ash has consistently exhibited a penchant for publicly announcing personal details about someone in a way that has nothing to do with the conversation at hand, but is designed to create a strong feeling of intimidation. The information that Mrs. Ash publicly posts about people has included employment information, place(s) of residence, names of family members, and even information about people’s children. If you’d like to see these screenshots, please DM me on Twitter or Facebook and I’ll send you a direct link. I will not be posting them here or sharing them with anyone whose identity I can’t confirm, as they contain personal information of Mrs. Ash’s targets.

The concept is always the same: she wants to intimidate the person that she is interacting with. It honestly feels to me like she enjoys it. Unfortunately for Mrs. Ash, she’s now going to get called out for it because she chose two targets who are not afraid of her one bit: Jamie Walker and me.

Allow me to immediately draw your attention to the fact that the bio in both parody accounts contains the number of children that Jamie and I each have. If Susana Ash has ever targeted you in public social media spaces, you know that this is her exact modus operandi. I assume she feels a bizarre sense of satisfaction when she can publicize little bits of private information like that to bother the intended target. This is sociopathic behavior, by every definition of the term (including the DSM).

While Mrs. Ash has been using the @NickAndrews2020 and @ConfusedJamie accounts (and others, including @FollowT32643302 and @PeaceOut3962) anonymously, the truth is that most of what she does with those accounts is pretty much the same thing she would do on her real accounts, both Twitter and Facebook. She isn’t using anonymous accounts to go further than she would with her real name. Mrs. Ash doesn’t seem to have the same sort of filter that someone like Diana Leygerman has — the filter that says “people will think less of me if they know that I treat others this way.“

Instead, Mrs. Ash uses anonymity to work around the fact that everyone she wants to bother already has her blocked. It’s hard to scratch an itch you can’t reach. Let me give you an example.

Twitter isn’t the only place where Susana Ash has used anonymous accounts to bypass being blocked. On Facebook she gets blocked more often than a defensive lineman (and deservedly so). Her recent workaround has apparently been to use an account named Monica Lahr to be able to interact with the Reopen Bucks squad. What’s interesting about this is that Facebook removes obvious fake accounts (as I learned in 2020), so Mrs. Ash needed to create a name that she could reasonably confirm if Facebook ever happened to challenge her. Monica is her real middle name.

Moving forward, I have a sneaking suspicion that both Mrs. Leygerman and Mrs. Ash will be unable to abandon their antics, bringing further harm and division to our community. I can’t control what they do from here, but I can ask them to stop.

Mrs. Leygerman and Mrs. Ash, please stop using anonymous social media accounts to intimidate and badger members of the community who you disagree with.

Let’s pay close attention to what each of them choose to do in response to this request. Do they deny? Double down? Or will they accept responsibility for the harm they’ve caused? Will they stop? I’m hopeful that they will. For my part, I can say that today’s “peace” is nowhere near good enough for Bucks County. I demand better of all of us.

I also want to make clear that, unfortunately, the actions I have outlined above only scratch the surface of how hateful and hurtful some of the statements from Mrs. Leygerman and Mrs. Ash have become. There’s more to say on that subject soon.