Hey, remember when that national school board group issued a letter to the Biden administration strongly suggesting that all those parents who get together to protest X-rated sex ed and critical race theory at school board meetings are domestic terrorists?
About that.
Turns out, according to an email exchange obtained by a parents’ rights group, that the controversial letter, which caused the National School Board Association to hemorrhage state members, was written at the behest of the Biden administration’s secretary of education.
Yup.
The group Parents Defending Education obtained emails between NSBA board members Marnie Maraldo and Kristi Swett in which the latter said the letter was written “from a request” by Secretary Miguel Cardona.
Swett, who is currently serving as the group’s secretary-treasurer, wrote that Chip Slaven, the interim executive director at the time, had “told the officers he was writing a letter to provide information to the White House, from a request by Secretary Cordona [sic].”
The letter, issued on Sept. 29 by NSBA president Viola Garcia, called “for federal law enforcement and other assistance to deal with the growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation.”
The part of the missive that received the most attention, however, is as follows (emphasis mine): “As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
The NSBA also accused “extremist hate organizations” of “inciting chaos” at school board meetings and concerned parents of “spreading misinformation.”
The letter has been deleted from the NSBA’s website, as the Daily Caller reported in November.
One of the scant examples the group gave of “violence” against school board members or teachers involved a man whose daughter had been raped in a girl’s bathroom at her high school in Loudoun County, Virginia, where many of the highest-profile school board protests have occurred.
Nonetheless, the Biden administration heeded the call, and Attorney General Merrick Garland established a task force to address what Garland called the “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.”
As The Washington Free Beacon has reported, previous emails from NSBA members revealed that the group was in contact with the White House as well as the Department of Education prior to publishing the letter. In October, Garcia wrote that officers had been communicating with the administration for “several weeks.”
Oh, and by the way, Cardona also selected Garcia to serve on the National Assessment Governing Board around the same time. Hmm.
“It is unclear why Cardona requested the letter from the National School Boards Association rather than communicate concerns to the White House himself,” the Beacon noted.
Indeed.
Could it be, perhaps, that the intended recipient was not President Joe Biden, but the American public?
This whole situation reeks of corruption. A Biden administration official was reportedly working behind the scenes with the nation’s top school board organization to characterize American parents as terrorists because the parents are displeased with how their children are being treated and what they’re being taught.
The left has long played up isolated incidents of violence or extremism, like the clash in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and the Capitol incursion last year, to slander a wide array of non-progressives, conditioning the public to think of conservatives and Trump supporters or simply Biden critics as “domestic terrorists.”
This explosive revelation about the NSBA’s attack on the newly invigorated parents’ rights movement amid rising frustrations with teachers unions, pandemic policies and hyper-ideological school curricula shows just how far the establishment is willing to go to undermine popular opposition.
Mind you, this also comes as the Justice Department has established a new unit to combat domestic terrorism — having already established that it’s open to investigating parents protesting at local school board meetings as domestic terrorists in response to a letter that was apparently written at the request of the head of another Biden administration agency.
Let that sink in.
A terrorist, by the way — in case the word has become so diluted by left-wing hyperbole that you need a refresher — is someone who commits acts of violence in the name of a political or ideological cause. You know, like the IRA or the Islamic State group (or antifa, if you’d like to get a bit closer to home).
So the term “terrorist” is decidedly not applicable to the overwhelmingly peaceful but admittedly angry parents who object to unnecessary school lockdowns or overt racism in the classroom.
Do you know who characterizes peaceful opposition groups and political critics as “domestic terrorists”?
Dictators. That’s who.
I’d say I hate to be dramatic, but this is really just a simple statement of fact now: If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance the Biden administration is working very hard to connect values that you hold dear to radical insurgency and domestic terrorism.
What else has the administration been doing to collude with the people spinning the narrative?
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
