School Boards and Idiots

American Thinker:

By Clarice Feldman

Mark Twain famously said, “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.” If you ever doubted the wisdom of this observation, the conduct of the Loudoun County School Board, the National School Boards Association, and Attorney General Merrick Garland should put paid to your skepticism. A more patent a collection of idiots it would be hard to find.

The heroes in this story are Scott Smith, father of a young girl who had been sexually assaulted in a Loudoun County school bathroom by a “gender fluid” boy wearing a skirt, with an assist from the America First Legal Foundation (AFL), and the thousands of concerned parents of public school children around the country.

Attorney General Garland Sics the FBI on Parents

We were puzzled by Garland’s preposterous memorandum ordering the FBI to investigate angry parents showing up at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists,” but AFL, in a letter to Inspector General Michael Horowitz, makes a credible series of factual assertions about the genesis of this outrageous order. The AFL correctly reminds that the “Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized ”parents’ right to control and direct the education of their own children.” They note the large, ongoing protests by parents against Critical Race Theory indoctrination, “anti-religious and anti-family gender ideology,” and forced masking and online education mandates.

The genesis of the Garland memorandum in AFL’s telling was an effort of Biden-supporting outfits, including the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, to intimidate dissenting parents. Senior administration officials met with such groups expressing concern “regarding the potential partisan political impact of parent mobilization and organization around school issues in the upcoming midterm elections” and on the “express direction” or “consent” of such officials decided to use an outside organization as a pretext for clamping down on parents’ constitutional rights and privileges.

Inside the Department of Justice, staff raised concerns about legal and constitutional authority to interfere with parent protests. The outside group chosen to provide a colorable nexus for interfering with those rights was the National School Boards Association, which wrote to Garland citing the Patriot Act and demanding federal aid. Within days, on October 4, Garland made public his memorandum. One day later, on October 5, administration public and career officials briefed those involved, apparently “to evade public scrutiny of these Biden administration activities.”

AFL concludes that it needs Horowitz to investigate “whether the Attorney General’s memorandum was formulated and issued based upon improper considerations. At this point, the dangers inherent in the undue politicization of the department’s criminal and civil law enforcement authorities and in the corruption of the department’s standard order and process, should be evident.” Congress has to call Garland on the carpet about this as well, and explore the serious charges AFL has made. more here

h/t NAAC