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School Dissent: A Federal Crime?


Muda69

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https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/criminalizing-federalizing-dissent-justice-department-school-boards/

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Parents protesting school boards that force Critical Race Theory on students have been having some success lately. Time, then, for the Biden administration to put the FBI on them. The Attorney General issued this today:

FA5DmpnVIAccqZm-e1633393986831.jpg

Chris Rufo, the leading crusader against CRT indoctrination, comments:

Screen-Shot-2021-10-04-at-7.37.19-PM-e16

Well, it’s more complicated than that. The National School Board Association, in its long letter asking Biden to get the feds involved, listed some specific attacks. I don’t doubt that there really have been completely inexcusable, even violent, incidents directed at school boards by angry parents. But I also have deep suspicion about the Biden administration’s apparent eagerness to slot dissenters into the “domestic terrorists” category. Some of these school board meetings have been quite contentious, with justifiably outraged parents reading obnoxious, and in some cases extremely sexualized, content aloud — content that had been assigned to their children. Of course school boards don’t want to hear that! But they have to hear it. It is not the job of parents to sit quietly while these people indoctrinate students on the public dime.

Take a look at how one local TV station in Washington, DC, construed a story to make a group of white parents out to be the villains at a contentious school board meeting. James Lindsay has it all on this Twitter thread. 

In this tweet in the series, a camera catches a black woman, Tonya James, who is head of the county’s Democratic Party, tearing into the whites in the crowd, who had just sung the National Anthem:

4/After ranting, she continues yelling at others “you didn’t really serve in Iraq. I was shot at…..F**K YOU and F**K YOU.” Leaning into man behind her with “Go to Hell!” she then yells at crowd about not really serving then pointing “F**K You and F**K You!” pic.twitter.com/q9nI7czm7A

— James Lindsay, Nut Up CEO (@ConceptualJames) October 4, 2021

 

6/ABC NEWS version and 3rd video implying parents were out of control. This is a total distortion of what happened with the media doing a willful coverup of James’ provocation, used to scapegoat parents.https://t.co/NyCklCOjvT

— James Lindsay, Nut Up CEO (@ConceptualJames) October 4, 2021

 

7/ABC News reporter in 2nd video capturing rant. He knew the truth and misled viewers. These are the games these people are playing to craft a bogus narrative against the American people and parents who care about their kids and education. pic.twitter.com/02CcKVtthS

— James Lindsay, Nut Up CEO (@ConceptualJames) October 4, 2021

 

8/With the ideas laundered by ABC, local news continues misreporting facts, covering up for Democrat Chair. “Unruly crowd” is blamed for her unnecessary and rude provocation.https://t.co/EZPyzcVLzt

— James Lindsay, Nut Up CEO (@ConceptualJames) October 4, 2021

 

I watched the local ABC report, and it is entirely possible that some of these white parents behaved badly without excuse. But it completely ignores the foul-mouthed provocations of the black Democratic official. You’d get the idea from the ABC report that the problem was entirely one caused by hotheaded white people. There is no indication that a black Democratic party official stood and screamed curses at the white parents. Hey, they might even be “domestic terrorists”! Joe Biden’s Justice Department is on the case.

Violence — real or threatened — in school board meetings is unacceptable. But here’s the thing: why federalize this? Why isn’t local law enforcement capable of handling these cases? Why involve the Justice Department? One wonders if the Left is not trying to deploy the same strategy the FBI used against the KKK during the Civil Rights era against parents today who dissent from CRT and/or gender ideology taught to their kids, and vaccine policies. How many parents will be willing to show up at all at school board meetings to object if they fear that in so doing, they will become ensnared with the FBI?

Perhaps this is the point.

You bet that is the point.  Keep the dissenters away so the "new normal" can be established and maintained.

 

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On 10/5/2021 at 9:47 AM, Muda69 said:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/criminalizing-federalizing-dissent-justice-department-school-boards/

You bet that is the point.  Keep the dissenters away so the "new normal" can be established and maintained.

 

Just think - This "non-partisan" AG was nominated and almost a Supreme Court Justice......

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1 hour ago, DanteEstonia said:

I like my school board meetings to be free from screaming people and hooligans, so I'm going to to with the AG on this one. 

So you believe the FBI being involved in "screaming people and hooligans" at local school board meetings is a legitimate function of the federal government.  

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Feds Undermine Themselves by Targeting Parents Who Criticize School Officials

https://reason.com/2021/10/13/feds-undermine-themselves-by-targeting-parents-who-criticize-school-officials/

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Plenty of people point out that Attorney General Merrick Garland's decision to deploy federal law enforcement against families protesting public school policies is an abuse of power that threatens civil liberties. Worth adding to the objections, though, is the important point that treating parents who object to school board decisions about masking and curricula as terrorists can only further turn them against the powers-that-be. Garland and other officials are setting up a cycle of reaction and repression that can only destroy the institutions they claim to protect.

"Citing an increase in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school board members, teachers and workers in our nation's public schools, today Attorney General Merrick B. Garland directed the FBI and U.S. Attorneys' Offices to meet in the next 30 days with federal, state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement leaders to discuss strategies for addressing this disturbing trend," the U.S. Department of Justice announced on October 4.

 

The federal move came in response to a hysterical letter from the National School Boards Association demanding officialdom respond to the protests with the full force of "the Gun-Free School Zones Act, the PATRIOT Act in regards to domestic terrorism, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the Violent Interference with Federally Protected Rights statute, the Conspiracy Against Rights statute," and other legal powers disproportionate to the "threat" posed by parents offended by what and how their children are taught.

For those who avoided headlines in recent months (and who can blame you?) school board meetings around the country have featured vigorous protests over COVID policies—mask mandates for students, in particular—and racially charged lessons incorporating elements from controversial Critical Race Theory/anti-racism sources. The disagreements are more confrontational than in the past, but you could say that about pretty much any difference of opinion in this era of national fracture. Some protests have turned violent, but such unfortunate incidents are already addressed by state laws. Mostly, though, the protests feature strong views, loud voices, and discomfort for public officials, which is just part of the job when you're in a position to impose your decisions on those who disagree.

Much of the of the pushback to Garland's deployment of the FBI against pissed-off moms and dads rightly emphasizes the threat his order poses to legitimate expressions of free speech.

"You may disagree with parents like me who do not want our children indoctrinated with Critical Race Theory, masked during recess, or told that their biological sex is not real," writes Maud Maron, a New York City mother, lawyer, and city council candidate who, in the past, served as a school board member on the receiving end of criticism. "But in a free society, we don't call the feds to police our fellow Americans because we don't share their politics."

 

It's true that government repression of dissent threatens the status of a "free society." It also is bound to further erode trust in that government and people's willingness to work with officials.

"Trust in government has been identified as one of the most important foundations upon which the legitimacy and sustainability of political systems are built," noted a 2013 OECD paper that addressed the implications of collapsing trust in government in the wake of the Great Recession. "Trust is essential for social cohesion and well-being as it affects governments' ability to govern and enables them to act without having to resort to coercion." (Emphasis in the original.)

The authors fretted that declining trust would "lead to lower rates of compliance."

Similarly, an article last December in Norway's BI Business Review on pandemic policy pointed out that "positive role models and experts—not coercion—are the most important factors in influencing behavior. Coercion may terminate trust that is needed to facilitate anti Covid-19 strategies."

"Use of coercion, threats, punishment and restrictions as an influence strategy may have the opposite effect of what is intended," the authors added. "Our studies suggest that the use of 'coercive power' often leads to 'counteracting power' that creates conflict and eliminates trust and consensus—thereby reducing the shared responsibility and duty that we need now."

"One of the phenomena that interests me about institutional irrationality is the way that as an institution suffers a loss of trust it turns to coercion, which only increases distrust," economist Arnold Kling observes with specific reference to school board protests. "I refer to this as shifting from a prestige hierarchy to a dominance hierarchy. Public schools appear to be going through this process."

It's not like governing institutions have a big reservoir of good will to burn, right now. "Americans' trust in many aspects of government in the U.S. is low," Gallup reported just two weeks ago. "Only about one-quarter of Americans say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right 'just about always' (2%) or 'most of the time' (22%)," according to a May Pew Research report.

State and local governments, which shoulder most of the responsibility for public schools, tend to fare better than their federal counterparts. But "as much as 67% of trust in government can be explained by customer experience," according to researchers. That "customer experience" is going to be pretty negative if it involves investigations by already-despised federal goons of parents who criticize thin-skinned local officials. 

Maybe that's for the best. It's long past time for more Americans to learn that the government-run institutions for which their taxes pay are often awful and even malevolent. A wake-up call that pushes them to abandon those institutions could well be a good thing, and the schools that teach our children are a better place to start than most. Families would be well-served to leave school boards to preside over hollow shells while children are educated via alternatives chosen by their families.

But, if the road to realistic assessments of government flaws and failures is lined with FBI agents and invocations of the Patriot Act, people will suffer unnecessarily. It would be easier on everybody involved if Merrick Garland and the federal government just left parents and local functionaries alone to hash out their differences, even if that makes some folks uncomfortable. A little official restraint might even slow the erosion of trust in public institutions.

 

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https://nypost.com/2021/10/13/dad-arrested-at-school-board-meeting-rips-ag-merrick-garland/

A Virginia father who was arrested at a school board meeting has ripped Attorney General Merrick Garland for painting him as a domestic terrorist — saying he’d just been trying to raise the alarm about his daughter getting “sexually assaulted” in a school bathroom.

Scott Smith, 48, became a symbol of angry parents confronting school officials when he went viral at a June 22 meeting of the Loudoun County School Board as he was wrestled to the floor and arrested.

But on Tuesday, Smith told Fox News that he had been trying to raise the alarm about his daughter’s sexual assault — and only flipped out when officials and then another parent denied it.

It appears to be backed up by video of an arrest, which captured his wife shouting, “My child was raped at school and this is what happens!”

Smith told Laura Ingraham that he finally decided to speak publicly about his daughter’s ordeal because he says the same alleged attacker was charged with another similar attack — and because the AG suggested angry parents like him were “domestic terrorists.”

“This DoJ thing — that’s scary,” Smith said.

So this man's daughter had been raped, and his reaction to being called a liar resulted in his beating and arrest in front of the school board......... I know a guy, that if this were him being treated this way after his daughter had been raped, this school board meeting wouldn't have ended this well........A school board, just like every other form of government works for us, not the other way around.

 

 

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