Attorney General Merrick Garland appeared before a congressional committee last month to give a reassuring answer to a question no one should have had to ask.
“Like you, I can’t imagine any circumstance in which the PATRIOT Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children,” Garland testified, “nor can I imagine a circumstance where they would be labeled as domestic terrorism.”
It has emerged this week that Garland’s testimony was false. Proof comes in an email from FBI Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Timothy Langan describing how the FBI uses “threat tags” to monitor threats against school board members, teachers, and other staffers. “The purpose of the threat tag,” Langan writes, “is to help scope this threat on a national level and provide an opportunity for comprehensive analysis of the threat picture for effective engagement with law enforcement partners at all levels.”
As bizarre as it seems, the FBI now snoops on angry parents, despite a total lack of evidence that any parent has posed a credible terrorist threat in this context.
The remaining question is whether Garland knowingly gave false testimony.
The idea that the FBI would interfere in local school board controversies is extraordinary and requires explanation. It is not the way our government is supposed to work.
Garland’s Oct. 4 memo ordering FBI involvement was the product of the Biden White House’s secretive, deceptive collaboration with the National School Boards Association. The apparent goal was to deceive the public by creating the appearance of a problem that would justify an authoritarian federal response.
The NSBA letter, at the urging of Biden staffers, asked Garland to use the USA PATRIOT Act and other anti-terrorist measures against parents who misbehaved at school board meetings or threatened administrators.
Note that although it is often a crime to threaten school officials, it is almost never an FBI matter, nor an example of terrorism.
President Joe Biden’s officials and the NSBA knew exactly what they were doing. They were trying to intimidate parents who raise their voices against toxic ideologies in public schools. There is grim humor in the fact that the Left praises activism, even violence such as assault and arson, when it is perpetrated for a cause they support but seeks to persecute activists it dislikes as terrorists because they kick against the leftist agenda.
Many parents discovered for the first time during the pandemic that their children were being indoctrinated in the postmodern racialist ideology known as critical race theory. Among its tenets are assertions that the goal of “racial equality” is a white supremacist idea and that freedom of speech must be limited to minimize white people’s inalienable racism. Parents were unhappy, to put it no more strongly, to learn that their children were being taught explicitly to judge others by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.
Still, other parents, especially in Washington’s northern Virginia suburbs, saw that their grade school sons and daughters were being exposed to explicit pedophilic pornography in school libraries and that schools were covering up rapes to protect their transgender agenda. A father trying to prevent such a cover-up of his daughter’s rape was arrested this summer, hauled out of a school board meeting, and prosecuted. Was it a preview of the FBI’s new role as an educational secret police?
Parents should not feel intimidated by Garland or the FBI. They should keep showing up at school board meetings to demand accountability.
As for Garland, he should resign. He is either a make-weight figurehead unfitted for the job, willing to do whatever his ideological masters instruct him to do. Or else, he is a willing participant in a disgraceful charade designed improperly to intimidate parents and then deceive Congress about it. Either way, he should quit the office he has held with such lack of distinction only since March.
