The Biden administration — operating through Attorney General Merrick Garland — has issued a declaration of war against the American people. It's quite serious. As we all know, they have been targeting these January 6 protestors. First, it was Trump, then it was the "Trumpsters" who showed up in D.C., and we've always had the sense that they have wanted to broaden the attack to include everybody. Everybody who's a political dissident. They're basically going full Soviet on us, and this has come to pass now with parents who oppose racial indoctrination.
There's a parents mobilization going on in this country, and by and large, it focuses on three issues. One is the mask and vaccine mandates — parents are irate about this, they believe it's an assault on their control over their own kids, they believe it's bad for their kids — and so there's a kind of social movement to oppose all this.
Number two, critical race theory. Parents have discovered, contrary to the dishonest denials by teachers unions and by left-wing activists, critical race theory and the nostrums of critical race theory – namely, America's a bad country, all whites are racist, all this kind of nonsense that people who did nothing wrong, five-year-olds, should feel guilty because of what their great ancestors did. This polarization and division of kids are preventing the normal social bonds developing between them, and you can see why parents are up in arms.
And finally, all of this trans propaganda that is being pushed on young people at very young ages. "Do you know if you're a boy or girl? Have you ever thought about it? Ever had any doubts? Want to see a counselor? Don't tell your parents."
This parental mobilization is one of the more hopeful things, and it's, by the way, an exercise of democracy in the very sense that Tocqueville observed 150 years ago. In other words, it's activism at the local level, motivated — not by some theoretical concerns — but by the actual beliefs of parents that their own values are being attacked and being attacked in the very public schools that they, through their tax system, pay for.
Now, the National School Board Association (very left-wing) has sent a kind of emergency appeal to the Biden administration. Dear Mr. President, "there's a growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation" against apparently, they say, teachers and school boards. So what they're doing is they're pulling out all the stops. They want the government to invoke the PATRIOT Act, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the Gun-Free School Zones Act, and they're calling on the Department of Justice, the FBI, Homeland Security, the Secret Service, to all mobilize together against who? Against apparently these really scary parents.
Where are the incidents where parents have actually done anything to anybody? Well, there are none. There's not a single one mentioned in these memos. But sure enough, as if on cue, Merrick Garland issues a kind of order, and he calls upon all these departments of the government to have a meeting in 30 days and figure out a strategy for how to deal with this "serious problem" of threats.
He does say that there is a legitimate right to speak up and a right to participate, but he goes on to say that this can cross the line into threats and intimidation. Apparently, he's looking to create a kind of task force against what, parental extremism? The idea here, by the way, is it's not so much that they're going to effectively be able to go after parents, but what they want is to scare them. What they want is to deter them. They're basically saying, "Hey listen, you saw what happened to those January 6 guys, they too thought that they were just exercising their voice, they too thought that they were merely standing up for what they believed in, but there can be consequences, don't cross the line."
Sen. Josh Hawley raises a good point: Is there any instance in American history where essentially the martial power of the U.S. government, through all these police agencies, was summoned up to deal with school board meetings getting "out of hand"? This is really an unprecedented escalation.
Essentially what the Biden administration is doing is classifying noisily expressed dissent as A) disinformation and B) domestic terrorism. They want a society in which there is no such dissent or at least no such effective dissent.
The bad news is that, when we look back, look at all these Republicans who voted to confirm this guy Merrick Garland. I don't know if they did it out of guilt because the guy didn't get on the Supreme Court — in fact, we're very thankful now that Sen. McConnell did not let this extremist fanatic get on the Supreme Court — but McConnell voted for his confirmation, and so did many other people including a bunch of good guys. They too went along: Lindsey Graham went along, John Cornyn went along, Burr went along, Thune went along, Tillis. All of this shows that the Republican Party is not awake to the seriousness of the threat that it faces.
If there's a silver lining in this, it's simply this: The Left has realized that they're in trouble. Their ideas are not winning; nobody believes their nonsense — this critical propaganda — they have to deny they're even doing it. If it was so smart, if it was so sensible, so obvious, the best they can do is say things like "surveys show parents want their kids to learn about slavery." Of course, they do. "Parents want their kids to learn about the Civil Rights Movement." Of course, they do.
The issue here is how is this propaganda being taught. Because after all, what seems to be going on is essentially the replacement of knowledge and discussion and fairness and balance with this kind of hard-edged ideological indoctrination backed up, as in this case, by the police power of the state.