National organizations of parents are expressing outrage over the Biden Department of Justice’s (DOJ) intention to direct the FBI to mobilize against parents who oppose CRT and mask mandates in K-12 schools and speak out about their concerns.
Parents Defending Education is urging Americans to email the U.S. Justice Department and express opposition to the creation of a “’task force’ to silence parents who are non-violently speaking out for their children at school board meetings.”
The national organization noted the DOJ’s memorandum announcing its new initiative to address “harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” against school officials and school board members was released just days after a letter to President Joe Biden from the National School Board Association (NSBA) sought federal law enforcement help to cope with frustrated and concerned parents the group likened to “domestic terrorists.”
Parents Defending Education continued:
This choreography makes one thing very clear: there is a coordinated campaign to intimidate American citizens into silence – and the Department of Justice is complicit.
Parents, grandparents, and taxpayers have been routinely ignored, disrespected, and dismissed by their school board members, administrators, and teachers – all for the “offense” of expressing well-founded concerns about the quality of taxpayer-funded education in 2021.
“We do not, have not, and will not advocate violence,” the parents’ group stated. “Over the past year, thousands of Americans have petitioned their elected officials for a redress of grievances – as is their right, guaranteed by the First Amendment – and they will continue to do so.”
In a statement sent to Breitbart News, U.S. Parents Involved in Education (USPIE) asserted “parents are systematically being pushed out of the decision-making role despite the fact most states have laws ensuring parental authority over their children.”
“School districts,” USPIE added, “are lying to parents and the community.”
The national group provided some examples of its view of the lies school districts are spreading, including:
– Children being taught about gender alternatives and being encouraged to claim a gender counter to reality without parental notification.
– Children being frightened about dying from COVID, told to wear a mask to avoid death and punished if their mask falls off or is removed.
– Schools incorporating Critical Theory, including Critical Race Theory, Critical Gender Theory and Critical Feminist Theory, as well as Marxist Theory, into school lessons without sharing the information with parents and lying about its inclusion.
USPIE asserted that NSBA, in its call for federal oversight of parents, has “proven its allegiance to leftist pedagogy at all costs.”
The group asserted it “does not condone violence, but shouting at a school board meeting is not violence,” and added:
Shouting may be the most appropriate response when the school board arbitrarily cuts off community comments. Threats of physical harm are also inappropriate, but threats to remove people from office or threats of mass exodus from the school are not acts of violence. Nor is protesting in public spaces with signs. If some people become concerned or feel unsafe, local law enforcement is best equipped to respond.
The Heritage Foundation’s top scholars on Critical Race Theory released a statement Wednesday in which they “condemn[ed] in the strongest possible terms the U.S. Justice Department’s decision to intimidate parents attending school board meetings to advocate on behalf of their children and to push back against poisonous concepts like critical race theory being forced on them in the classroom.”
“This is nothing less than an attempt to chill debate using the muscle of an increasingly politicized federal law enforcement apparatus,” said Heritage fellows Mike Gonzalez and Jonathan Butcher.
“School board members should not presume to operate without consent from the governed,” they added. “American parents are now demanding that school boards listen to their views. Parents’ involvement in their communities is a sign that our decentralized system of governance is functioning as our Founders intended. The Biden administration has no place interfering in these local issues.”
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