President Biden declared this week that not only can U.S. Senators be harassed by demented leftists while doing their “business” in public bathrooms, but parents who protest too passionately at public school board meetings about how their children are being indoctrinated in classrooms will be investigated as “domestic terrorists” by the Department of Justice and a politically weaponized FBI, which seems to have morphed into America’s version of Nazi Germany’s Gestapo.
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s ham-fisted plan to engage federal, state, and local law enforcement to intimidate parents who protest the actions of leftist school boards is a direct assault on our First Amendment right to free speech.
It is nothing more than an attempt to silence constitutionally protected grievances about brainwashing children with Marxist Critical Race Theory.
In a memorandum announcing the crackdown on parents, Garland said there has been a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”
Garland added that he is directing the FBI to work with each U.S. attorney and leaders “in each federal judicial district” to discuss strategies to address threats and the rise in criminal conduct toward school personnel. The memorandum did not specify what it classifies as a crime.
A DOJ press release said Garland plans to “create specialized training and guidance for local school boards and school administrators. This training will help school board members and other potential victims understand the type of behavior that constitutes threats, how to report threatening conduct to the appropriate law enforcement agencies, and how to capture and preserve evidence of threatening conduct to aid in the investigation and prosecution of these crimes.”
The Biden administration’s blatant attempt to shut down protests from parents is not just at the federal level. In the hotly-contested Virginia gubernatorial race, the two candidates debated the issue last week and the incumbent Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe agreed with Garland’s intimidation tactics.
“Parents should have no say in how their children are educated,” Virginia’s McAuliffe, argued. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should and should not teach.”
Really?
His Republican challenger, Glenn Youngkin, begged to differ, as I suspect do millions upon millions of American parents.
“What we’ve seen over the course of this last 20 months is our school systems refusing to engage with parents,” Youngkin said. “In fact, in Fairfax County this past week, we watched parents so upset because there was such sexually explicit material in the library they had never seen, it was shocking. I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.”
There is little doubt that Youngkin’s view is in the majority throughout the nation as parents angry about Marxist political indoctrination and overly-explicit sexual instruction provided to children as young as five engage with school boards.
Reaction to the federal government overreach has been swift and vocal.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis lambasted Garland for “weaponizing the DOJ by using the FBI to pursue concerned parents and silence them through threats and intimidation. Florida will defend the free speech rights of its citizens and will not allow federal agents to squelch dissent.”
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley agreed, calling Garland’s plan a “dangerous abuse of power.”
“Now Joe Biden is deploying the FBI against parents who have concerns about Critical Race Theory being taught to their children,” Hawley said in the Senate earlier this week “This is a remarkable and dangerous abuse of power. I just asked the Biden DOJ to name one instance in American history when the FBI has been directed to go after parents attending school board meetings to express their views. There isn’t one. Biden’s latest offensive against parents is shocking, unprecedented, and wrong.”
Indeed. The First Amendment protects all speech unless it explicitly calls for the use of force that the speaker clearly intends and the likelihood of violence is real and imminent. Even actual “threats of violence” are not actionable unless they meet this high threshold.
In 1783 George Washington, who Garland and Biden along with their socialist and Marxist friends, clearly loathe, articulated some prophetic words about free speech.
“For if men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences, that can invite the consideration of Mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of Speech may be taken away, and, dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.”
That is apparently what Garland and Biden have in mind for angry and outspoken parents.
I predict that the DOJ and the FBI will make an example of a couple of the more vociferous and angry parents in the hopes of silencing hundreds of thousands of others.
I also predict that ploy will backfire on the Biden administration when more and more parents refuse to be gagged and silenced.
Apparently, the Biden administration wants America transformed into a police state and we seem to be heading in that direction.
Nicole Neily is one parent who is not backing down.
“It is shameful that activists are weaponizing the U.S. Department of Justice against parents,” Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, said in response to the memorandum. “This is a coordinated attempt to intimidate dissenting voices in the debates surrounding America’s underperforming K-12 education—and it will not succeed. We will not be silenced.”
John Stuart Mill may have said it best back in 1859 when he said:
“Strange it is that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free speech but object to their being ‘pushed to an extreme,’ not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.”
Amen to that.
