Many Americans are understandably stunned by the Biden administration’s plot to deploy FBI agents to muzzle parents from speaking their minds at school board meetings.
As Indiana’s attorney general, I regularly defend our citizens’ liberties against the creeping overreach of the left-wing radicals who control much of our nation’s federal government. Nonetheless, even I was surprised by the sheer audacity of the White House scheme in this instance.
This blatant assault on the First Amendment is exactly the sort of occasion that requires all liberty-loving citizens to rise to the challenge of preserving the things we hold most precious.
That’s why I acted immediately — organizing several other like-minded attorneys general — to insist that the Biden administration rescind an Oct. 4 U.S. Department of Justice memo proposing the increased surveillance of parents by federal authorities. Our strongly worded letters to President Joe Biden and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland are matters of public record.
At the same time, our allies in Congress and elsewhere have contributed their own positive efforts to pressure the administration to reverse this egregious flirtation with tyranny.
This episode should remind all Americans of the extreme tactics that far-left socialists are willing to employ in order to control our lives, and it should provoke all Americans to resist such intrusions with staunch determination.
In this instance, the spark that kindled the left-wing establishment’s angst was the uprising of parents protesting one of the socialists’ most sacred undertakings — the use of public schools to indoctrinate young minds into the rites and rituals of their own preferred groupthink.
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Converting oncoming generations to their cause, after all, is the means by which the socialists intend to remake America in their own image. Too often, to these radicals’ way of thinking, the active involvement of caring mothers and fathers has interfered with the socialist mission to brainwash children into hating America and its founding principles.
In congressional testimony this past Wednesday (Oct. 27), U.S. Attorney General Garland tried to assure the nation there was no smoking gun.
“We did not sic the FBI on parents,” he said. “That’s not what this memorandum is about.”
Sorry, Judge Garland, but we’re not buying it.
Let us review the sequence of events.
On Sept. 29, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent a letter to President Biden complaining (without evidence) that school officials are facing “growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation.” The letter lamented the rise of parents pushing back against divisive ideologies, including critical race theory (CRT). The NSBA letter raised the specter of local protests rising to the level of "domestic terrorism.”
On Oct. 4, Attorney General Garland issued the infamous DOJ memo calling for the FBI to get involved in tracking the activities of all the supposedly troublemaking parents of schoolchildren.
On Oct. 18, I led a 17-state coalition of attorneys general in a letter to President Biden and Attorney General Garland expressing our deep concern over both the NSBA’s letter and the follow-up DOJ memo, which we further demanded that the Biden administration rescind.
On Oct. 22, the NSBA — under pressure from state affiliates — apologized for its letter and admitted there was “no justification” for using language comparing parents to terrorists.
Meanwhile, the country has further learned there was collusion between the Biden administration and the NSBA in crafting the organization’s letter to the White House in the first place — all to help fabricate a pretext for weaponizing the FBI against parents.
Obviously, actual episodes of violence against school officials are deplorable and intolerable. But there is no surging epidemic of such episodes rising beyond levels quite manageable by local sheriffs’ departments and police agencies.
That’s just a myth created by President Biden’s minions as they set out to frighten and intimidate parents who otherwise might exercise their God-given rights to free speech. Students of the Constitution call it creating a “chilling effect.”
Ronald Reagan warned us long ago: “It is no accident that every totalitarian movement of the 20th century has tried to destroy the family. The essence of modern totalitarianism has been to substitute the power of the State for the rights, responsibilities, and authority of the family.”
Indeed, to implement ever-more-stringent centralized control, the socialists must erode the traditional American beliefs in capitalism, free enterprise and individual liberty — which run so counter to the Marxist mantra, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
To achieve their dreams, the socialists also must diminish religious faith as a driving force in American life so that citizens become more willing to depend on government rather than on God.
And finally, as Reagan said, to effectuate a greater role for government in the upbringing of children, the socialists must minimize the role of the nuclear family — a necessary step in breaking the cycle of passing traditional American values from one generation to the next.
At least the NSBA has apologized for its own part in demeaning the roles of parents. It’s only right at this point that President Joe Biden do the same — and renounce and withdraw the DOJ’s inexcusable missive against the heroic mothers and father’s raising the next generation.
Oh — and call off the FBI.
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