“They’ve been after your kids for a long time. Now, if you dare to push back, they are going to come after you.”
–William Wolfe
On October 4, the Biden Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ), led by Attorney General Merrick Garland, issued a memo directing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to begin law enforcement efforts to “to address threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” The nature of these threats is vague at best. The memo cites concerns about a “spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, [and] staff,” but fails to provide any substantial evidence.
Let’s put this bureaucratic jargon in simple, stark terms: Biden’s DOJ is about to start treating concerned public school parents like potential domestic terrorists.
To have our nation’s highest law enforcement official — the Attorney General — tell our nation’s highest domestic law enforcement agency — the FBI — to begin targeting, monitoring, and even possibly prosecuting parents who are simply trying to be more involved in their children’s education is chilling. It’s shocking.
The FBI doesn’t exist to police school board meetings. In fact, it has no authority to do so. It exists to keep our law-abiding citizens safe from serious domestic threats to the homeland, like drug smugglers, sex traffickers, and actual terrorists. So why are they coming after parents?
Five days before the memo was issued, the National School Board Association (NSBA) sent a letter to Biden’s DOJ begging them to intervene against parents who are organizing against one-size-fits-all mask mandates and Critical Race Theory (CRT) curriculum in schools. The letter offered sparse evidence of any real threats but instead complained about incidents like prank calls and hate mail. Of course, anyone who has actually committed violence against school boards should be arrested and prosecuted. But that’s the job of local law enforcement, not the FBI. That’s not the real purpose of the letter, though. Here, the NSBA is trying to get the FBI to do its dirty work of silencing parents who are pushing back on far-left policies in their local school districts by accusing them of “violence.” It’s a move to squash their perceived political opposition — organized parents standing up to the system.
It’s worth noting that this is the very same NSBA that, in 2019, hosted Angela Davis as a keynote speaker for its annual conference. And that would be the very same Angela Davis who “bought and allegedly supplied the shotgun used by her Black Panther lover to kidnap and murder a judge. Davis’ letters to her lover expressing unequivocal solidarity with his commitment to political violence (i.e., “domestic terrorism”) are a matter of well-established public record.”
Apparently, the DOJ was more than happy to accommodate this outlandish request for federal intervention, and thus the memo was issued. What’s said in public can’t be taken back. It’s out there for everyone to see: The DOJ and the FBI are about to treat concerned parents like potential domestic terrorists.
As you may have seen, a growing number of public school parents have become increasingly aware of — and opposed to — the radical and divisive ideologies (like CRT or CRT-adjacent ideas) being pushed on their kids, as early as elementary school. For example, here is a video of one black father standing up to Illinois’ District 87 School Board:
He is not harassing them, or threatening them, but he is forcefully stating that he does not want CRT or CRT-infected ideology being taught to his kids. He says, “When you talk about Critical Race Theory, which is pretty much going to be teaching kids how to hate each other, how to dislike each other…you’re going to deliberately teach kids, ‘This white kid right here got it better than you because he’s white,’ and you’re gonna tell a white kid, ‘The Black people are all down and suppressed.’ How do I have two medical degrees if I’m sitting here oppressed?”
While some try to argue that CRT is not being taught in public schools, the evidence that CRT-infected ideas are being taught is overwhelming. Independent journalist Christopher Rufo has done excellent work documenting how and where it is happening. And the Washington Examiner reported that, “In Cupertino, California, an elementary school required third graders to rank themselves according to the ‘power and privilege’ associated with their ethnicities.” And if that wasn’t enough, the nation’s largest teacher’s union has publicly, explicitly endorsed teaching CRT to students. The evidence of radical CRT or CRT-like ideology being promoted in our public schools is nationwide. One black mother in Atlanta, in fact, was so upset at what her daughter was experiencing that she filed a civil rights lawsuit, alleging that the local elementary school was segregating students based on race.
Just as bad, if not worse, parents have started to realize — and speak out against — the fact that local public schools are also indoctrinating young children with shockingly explicit sexual and pro-LGBT propaganda. This, too, has prompted protests and petitions to the school boards, an exercise protected by the First Amendment. For example, parents confronted the Lake Travis Independent School District School Board in Texas with obscene references in a book available for middle school students, and the board subsequently removed the book.
In Matthew 18:6, Jesus teaches, “If anyone causes one of these little ones — those who believe in me — to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” Thus, Christians across our country should be supportive of parental efforts to remove poisonous ideology and sexually immoral content from public school curriculums.
My first response when I saw this news was, “Those are KGB-style tactics.” Indeed, this is our government using the coercive power of the threat of force, even if they aren’t going to take hard actions (and let’s not bet that they won’t). Andy McCarthy, legal scholar and former prosecutor for the DOJ, has an excellent article explaining how this is an effort to “silence constitutionally protected complaints about school policy by raising the specter of government retaliation.” McCarthy goes on to argue that:
“The Biden Justice Department is just a continuation of the Obama Justice Department, which was the most politicized in American history. The Obama/Biden administration modus operandi was to make the process the penalty — in this case, the investigative process, coupled with the threat of Justice Department criminal or civil prosecution, no matter how invalid… That is what progressives do when they’re in power: They use demagogic rhetoric to defame constitutionally protected dissent and threaten government retaliation — with its portents of investigative harassment and ruinous legal costs — to extort compliance.”
The point of this memo was to scare parents into doing exactly what the NSBA wants them to do: Sit down, shut up, and get with the program. If you love your kids, you know that’s not an option.
Christians in America should speak truth to power, calling out government abuses of power and jurisdictional transgressions like this. Romans 13:3-4 teaches that “rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good.” This memo violates both of these basic principles: 1) that government shouldn’t threaten those who do right, and 2) that they exist to secure our “good.” Treating engaged, even protesting, parents like domestic terrorists turns these principles on their head. This memo threatens those who are doing good and uses the coercive force of the fear of federal law enforcement for evil purposes.
Thankfully, other national leaders recognize this for what is: a baseless scare tactic and power play. The Attorney General of Missouri, Eric Schmitt, sent a letter to the DOJ, denouncing their actions. He wrote, “Biden is weaponizing his DOJ and using the FBI to pursue parents advocating for their kids at school board meetings. It’s meant to quell dissent and intimidate. It’s dangerous and they have no jurisdiction. Not in Missouri. Not in any state.”
Concerned Christians should side with McCarthy and Schmitt on this issue and demand that Biden’s DOJ back down.
The blaringly loud subtext of the NSBA letter, and the response from the DOJ, makes one thing crystal clear: These people view parents as part of the problem, not part of the process, when it comes to the education system. Look at how the letter is worded. The NSBA “believes immediate assistance is required to protect our students, school board members, and educators…” Who isn’t in that equation? The parents. Why? Because to school boards, informed and engaged parents who stand against leftist brainwashing are not voices worth hearing but dissidents who need to be silenced. You see the same paradigm in the wording of the DOJ memo. It’s the mentality of “us” — the enlightened bureaucrats — vs. “them” — those backwards parents.
It reveals what many in our government and public education have long thought regarding who is the primary caregiver and executive of your children — and it’s not you. No, this is what they think: when it comes to education, your children are wards of the state. Once you drop them off at school, they belong to the government. They aren’t your students anymore, they are “our students,” comrade.
But — and this is important to understand, because so many on the progressive left really do believe your children are also “children of the state” — they fundamentally oppose parental oversight and involvement. They want to continue with their social engineering — unimpeded by parents trying to hold them accountable.
Don’t believe me? Maybe you missed it when former governor of Virginia and current progressive Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe recently said the quiet part out loud. In a debate between McAuliffe and his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, the discussion turned to the news that parents in Virginia had discovered books promoting pedophilia in the school library and those parents (rightly) told their school board to remove them. In response, McAuliffe amazingly, candidly, blurted out, “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decision…I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
When these people tell us who they are — people who believe that the government, not parents, should decide what gets taught to children — we should believe them. And when our government threatens to treat concerned parents like potential domestic terrorists, we should stand up for parental rights and for our First Amendment freedoms. Let this be a wake-up call for Christians who have their kids in our public school systems. They’ve been after your kids for a long time. Now, if you dare to push back, they are going to come after you.
So, stand on biblical truth. Love good and hate what is evil. Don’t give into fear — even fear that the feds might start stalking your PTA meetings. Stand in solidarity with other parents. The well-being of your children — and the future of America — is at stake.
