Tag Archives: education

“Threats of Violence”

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Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, under [last week’s Senate hearing’s] questioning from [Senator Josh, (R, MO)] Hawley, said the memo is only about violence and threats of violence, and it’s the role of the FBI address those threats.

And

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said in a separate hearing that the Justice Department does not see parents as a threat and that the attorney general’s memo is only focused on threats and intimidation.

The FBI’s claimed responsibility in this context is to

help protect you, your children, your communities, and your businesses from the most dangerous threats facing our nation—from international and domestic terrorists….

To help. Help whom? State and local police forces, acting within a State’s police powers, their authority to enforce law, are fully capable of handling “threats and intimidation;” they might need help only against domestic terrorism.

To help. Emphasis on “help.” The FBI’s claimed responsibility also is to help State and local law enforcement agencies deal with violence, not to do for the State and locals, or dictate to them, or to usurp their responsibilities.

But, if we can take Clarke’s and Monaco’s claims at face value, the only ones talking about domestic terrorism or domestic terrorists are the worthies of the National School Boards Association. Specifically, neither DoJ nor the FBI are talking about domestic terrorism, either in the Garland Memo or in those Senate hearing testimonies. Thus, there is no reason, by Garland’s own memo or those testimonies, for the FBI’s presence in these matters: with no domestic terrorism involved, there’s nothing for which the FBI need assist State and local law enforcement.

AG Merrick Garland’s memo is reprehensible, and dangerous to liberty, not because it focuses on threats of violence (which is bad enough FBI interference)—stipulate, arguendo, that that insistence is accurate—but because it exists.

Garland’s memo is reprehensible and dangerous to liberty because it is a naked attempt to usurp those States’ police powers and law enforcement capacities and arrogate them to the Federal government’s national police.

School Choice

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Two Ohio State legislators are taking this seriously.

The Ohio Backpack Bill, originally introduced in May and updated with a sub-bill to House Bill 290, would allow all parents to send their children to public school or establish an education savings account. The state would send the money earmarked for that student to the public school or into the parent’s account, allowing it to be used for private school tuition or other education expenses.

That’s all parents, for all children, not just parents of the few who win a lottery, as is the case in so many other jurisdictions. Ohio already has a means-tested criterion; this expands the right to choose, and it expands competition among schools and school systems, which can only improve school performance, including public schools, which in turn can only benefit the children.

Congressman Riordan McClain (R, Upper Sandusky):

It’s about students and increasing the education opportunities for all. This bill seeks to find the right educational opportunity for each of the children in Ohio. It creates a true money-follows-the-child program. Money goes to public school if parents want, and if a parent wants an educational scholarship account, then the state has to put that money in that account, which the parent can use for education expenses.

Stand by for the Keep Teachers Unions Featherbedded movement to crank up.

Domestic Terrorists

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They aren’t the parents who object, however vociferously, to the misbehaviors of school boards, even though the National School Boards Association and Biden-Harris’ Attorney General Merrick Garland overtly claim so.

On the contrary.

If Garland—and through him, President Joe Biden (D) and Kamala Harris (D) of the Biden-Harris administration—think mothers and fathers vociferously protesting the misbehaviors of school boards are domestic terrorists, then he needs, also, to investigate those school boards’ acts of terrorism.

The school boards’ terrorism of actively abusing children by demanding they wear masks all through the hours of school, which various pediatricians and child development experts have shown stunts those children’s development by strongly inhibiting their socialization and delays their ability to learn the nominal subjects of their lessons.

The school boards’ terrorism of forcing those children to hate themselves and each other over the color of their skin.

The school boards’ terrorism of actively abusing children by demanding they be injected with experimental and unapproved for routine use vaccines.

But, no, nor Garland nor Biden nor Harris have any interest in protecting the rights—or the obligations—of parents or of protecting those children.

Those Progressive-Democrats are interested only in extending their political power and stifling those with the impudence to demur from their abuses.

It’s a Start

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And it’s coming from a county school board in North Carolina.

A North Carolina county school board has passed a policy that will discipline or fire teachers who undermine the US Constitution, tell students that American historical figures weren’t heroes or portray racism as systemic in America.
The vote Friday by the Johnston County school board is part of a larger campaign to stamp out critical race theory from American schools.

This is a critical start, even if it did come only after the County’s Board of Commissioners had threatened to withhold $7.9 million until the school board acted.

The next step is to include in the curriculum an emphasis on a number of aspects of the shameful acts of our history that really did occur, unlike the…nonsense…in the 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory:

  • It was the Democratic Party that demanded slavery in one of “their” new States for every free State admitted to our nation during the run-up to our Civil War
  • It was the Democratic Party that took “their” States out of our nation and forced that Civil War
  • It was the Democratic Party that, in the aftermath of that Civil War, produced the KKK to keep freed blacks “in their place,” lynching and otherwise murdering those and their white supporters who didn’t “mind their place”
  • It was the Democratic Party that, in the aftermath of that Civil War, pushed for gun controls explicitly to keep freed blacks unarmed and helpless against their KKK
  • It was the Democratic Party that enacted Jim Crow laws to keep black Americans from being able to vote
  • It was the Democratic Party that pushed for, and enforced in “their” States, segregation
  • It was the Democratic Party that pushed for minimum wage laws in order to keep southern black Americans from moving north and earning a living by competing for jobs on the basis of the pay they’d require for their labor

In today’s current event lessons, it’s also necessary to emphasize continuing aspects of our history:

  • It’s today’s Progressive-Democrats that still push for gun controls, with those controls’ disparate impact on minorities’—blacks’ in particular—ability to defend themselves
  • It’s today’s Progressive-Democrats that push to defund police departments, so no one else—particularly government—can defend them, either
  • It’s today’s Progressive-Democrats that are reviving segregation by pushing identity politics
  • It’s today’s Progressive-Democrats that, in a back door Jim Crow move, are pushing to defeat or rescind already enacted voting laws that both make it easier to vote—particularly for minorities—and make the voting more secure

These aspects of our history, and the players involved, are too often glossed over in our grade school history lessons, in our junior high history and civics lessons, and in high school.

In Which I Disagree

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This time, I disagree with a Koch family and their Stand Together Foundation and their stance on teaching Critical Race Theory in our schools. They oppose the idea of government bans on speech in general, arguing that even unpopular speech must be protected.

Leaders inside the network of right-leaning organizations built up by the billionaire Koch family are saying they oppose government bans on the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools despite not agreeing with what is being taught.
Evan Feinberg, the executive director of Stand Together Foundation, a Koch-affiliated organization, said that “using government to ban ideas, even those we disagree with, is also counter to core American principles.”

Feinberg, et al., are right as far as they go, and it is difficult to draw a line between what is unpopular, even hateful, speech that must be protected, and speech that is plainly dishonestly done and so legitimately subject to ban. CRT, though, is so blatantly dishonest that it clearly is on the wrong side of that broad gray area.

CRT insists that America is inherently and inescapably racist and that blacks are intrinsically incapable of succeeding—they’re permanently victims, solely because they’re black—and that whites are never anything but oppressors, solely because they’re white. From that, CRT pushes the distinctly racist ideology of identity politics.

Teaching CRT is akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater when there is none, akin to committing slander, akin to lying in advertising or contracts. Those limits on free speech are properly applied, and so are the bans on teaching CRT.