CV NEWS FEED // Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Monday that he will be sending Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and Department of Justice (DOJ) officers to “identify” and “prosecute” “threats” connected with protests against public school officials.
The move seems to be the Biden administration’s response to a recent letter from National School Boards Association which called for the Patriot Act to be enforced against those parents whom they apparently classified as terrorists. “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under immediate threat,” the letter stated.
“In recent months, there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools,” wrote Garland in a memo to the FBI director and the Department of Justice.
“Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety,” Garland stated. He also promised that the “Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate.” Garland did not name any actual “incidents” or “threats” in particular.
“In the coming days, the Department will announce a series of measures designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel,” he wrote. “Coordination and partnership with local law enforcement is critical to implementing these measures for the benefit of our nation’s nearly 14,000 public school districts.”
“To this end,” he continued:
I am directing the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working with each United States Attorney, to convene meetings with federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders in each federal judicial district within 30 days of the issuance of this memorandum. These meetings will facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff, and will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.
The DOJ issued a similar statement vowing to tackle “violent threats” against school officials.
For the past two years, American parents have been increasingly critical of the public education system, their local school boards, and teachers union officials. As CatholicVote has reported:
Parents’ rights has become a nationally explosive issue in the past year, with teachers unions and public education officials losing the support of many amid unpopular school lockdowns, masking mandates, and “virtual learning” curricula.
With more people working from home and more children learning virtually, many parents have also become more aware of controversial progressive educational materials such as Critical Race Theory and gender ideology — another mark against the status quo of America’s education system in the eyes of critics.
In addition, teachers unions have been embroiled in a number of scandals involving what appears to be backroom dealing with health officials. While parents clamored for schools to reopen, teachers unions went out of their way to keep them closed — even going so far as to meet with and pressure officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to alter public health guidelines.
Christopher Rufo, a leader in the growing movement against the current state of public education, took issue with Garland’s memo Monday, perceiving it as an unjust attempt to quell the democratic participation of parents in the education of their own children.
“The Biden administration is rapidly repurposing federal law enforcement to target political opposition,” Rufo wrote:
They want to reclassify dissent as “disinformation” and “domestic terrorism,” justifying an unprecedented intervention, both directly and in partnership with tech companies.
Neither the Attorney General’s memo nor the full Justice Department press release cites any significant, credible threat.
This is a blatant suppression tactic, designed to dissuade citizens from participating in the democratic process at school boards.
We must forcefully push back against the suppression of our basic rights and the criminalization of our politics.
“The Biden administration wants to apply the [January 6th] strategy to every expression of conservative speech and assembly,” Rufo concluded. “We must not let them.”
