By John Kass

Wasn’t it just yesterday that the corporate, legacy media was busy gaslighting parents about racist Critical Race Theory being taught in taxpayer funded government (public) schools?

Angry parents were told they were fools for objecting, that CRT was just a fever dream of the right. And, if CRT did exist, it was just some obscure, dusty stuff locked away in a few law schools and college graduate courses.

But this week President Joe Biden picked up that federal hammer of his named Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Garland’s  job? To use reports of threats at angry school board meetings as a means to silence those dissenting parents into silence. The parents were likened to domestic terrorists.

Parents had opened the rotten Trojan Horse in their children’s schools during the pandemic, when they looked inside the classrooms, at those laptop screens on the kitchen table, when their kids were engaged in at-home remote learning. They could see what was burrowing into young minds in schools they paid for.

Those who objected to their kids’ wearing those flimsy masks that don’t work, or to children being separated by race into groups of oppressors and oppressed,  brought their grievances to meetings of elected local school boards. They brought passion, because the minds of their children, and the nation, were at stake.

Naturally, given the stakes, some school board meetings became quite heated. For decades educators have been asking parents to become more involved.  So, they involved themselves on CRT and masks.

Parents who dared object publicly to their children being treated differently based on race or who dared complain about kids in masks—even those special needs children who, like all kids need to see faces to learn—now have a public response from the Biden White House:

They see their own federal agencies weaponized against them. To the White House, objecting parents are likened to violent actors, perhaps even Isis Terrorists, and as such, they are to be threatened into silence before the 2022 mid-term Congressional elections.

If they attend their next school board meeting–and dare wave that Connor Skelding story in The New York Post about “U.S. mask guidance for kids is the strictest across the world”– will the FBI knock on their doors?

If they dare quote Christopher Rufo’s prolific work on CRT and state-sponsored racism in American classrooms, will they be questioned about their heretical political beliefs?

Yes, some school board meetings have been loud and angry. Spittle has flown from enraged mouths. Yes. But do you blame them? I don’t.

 I never advocate violence or threats of violence, or silencing anyone. For example, I don’t think the left should be silenced just because some leftist madman from Illinois tried to massacre Republican lawmakers at a Congressional baseball practice and shot House Republican Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana.

All cancel culture does is stop the steam from being released, which is necessary for the health of the republic. Cancel culture in the private sector, on social media that amplifies the barking Jacobin pack is one thing. But when silencing is backed by the U.S. Department of Justice, it is quite another.

 Garland, responding to complaints by school board groups about those troublesome parents—some of whom have acted out, while others have made threats–got busy with the hammer. But involving himself is not his job. It is a job for local police, for state courts if needed, not a federal culture wars busybody.

So much for Biden’s empty promise of unity when he took office. Now the president and his attorney general drive dangerously, recklessly, forcing Americans to steer deeper into tribal camps.

Inclusion and equal opportunity, the common ideals that liberals and conservatives once held dear–the building blocks of citizenship–are breaking upon the deconstructionist rocks of the left, and with Biden’s help.

As I sat down to look over my notes for this column, I listened to “The Morning Answer,” the Chicago radio program hosted by Dan Proft and Amy Jacobson.

Proft’s is a welcome, albeit lonely conservative voice in broadcast media. But the voice is clear enough in a Chicago radio sea of lukewarm liberal milk. Full disclosure: He’s a friend. I sometimes guest host on his show. He’s recently picked up fly fishing, and I’ve asked him to write a guest fishing column for my website.

One guest was the scholar Victor Davis Hanson. Another was Paul Rossi, a math teacher at the prestigious and pricey Grace Lutheran School in New York. Many of you know Hanson, the distinguished military historian, classicist and author of many fine books, including his latest “The Dying Citizen.”

But do you know about Rossi? He’s a citizen, and very much alive.

Rossi had the audacity to speak out against CRT and refused to treat his students differently based on the color of their skin. For the subversive, revolutionary act of objecting to racism, Rossi was relieved of his teaching duties.

I’m linking Rossi’s interview on “The Morning Answer” here, hoping you’ll listen for yourself.

Rossi discussed what he calls “the Diversity and Equity Industrial Complex” and how CRT and like minded state-sponsored Orwellian malevolence aim to shape the American future, by shaping young  minds.

Dividing students by race is racist. If that angers you, and threatens your politics, well, too bad. It is what it is. CRT demonizes white kids and weakens minority children. What’s even more dangerous, is that such political indoctrination denies the young what many of us had when we were in school–a formal, guided invitation to question all things and a pathway to begin thinking critically.

If all you want out of the next generation is a herd of submissive livestock ready for the voting chutes, then you’ve already got that now in many of the government and private schools. But not all of us want that for the young.  We want Americans who don’t judge others by race, Americans who prize liberty and don’t kneel meekly to authority.

CRT and its offshoots “really goes against the essence of citizenship in our country, and fairness, and the Enlightenment values of universal human dignity,” said Rossi.

Bingo.

Proft argues that many parents, concerned about losing social status, stay silent rather than object and risk being ostracized. Rossi agreed. Some children are encouraged to just up to get good grades in the mistaken belief that later in life they’ll have a chance to think freely at university. But a human mind is like a growing tree that can be warped. And university faculty—just like some American newsrooms–are just as woke, the inhabitants as vengeful as political operatives.

“This is the opposite of what schools are supposed to be about: Curiosity, open inquiry, and discovery,” Rossi said.

Children are adaptable and some stick to the script.

“And on the other side, other students that really buy into this, they adopt the mentality of child soldiers, They take it as a moral imperative that certain beliefs are true, and that there’s a moral superiority to certain groups and a moral degradation to other groups, and that’s a different kind of scary.”

Those who kneel don’t want to see themselves as craven. They hope to see themselves as heroes, as virtuous, and so they cling to the new order with the zeal of the convert. Some parents like it that way. But some don’t. And the new establishment believes that those who object are a problem.

Virginia Democrat Terry McAuliffe, running for governor in that hotly contested race, said he doesn’t want parents getting involved and mouthing off at school board meetings.

“I’m not going to let parents come into schools and take books out and make their own decision,” McAuliffe said in a debate with Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, giving Youngkin a free deck of trump cards. “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Oh?

What do Biden, McAuliffe and woke educationists want parents to do, exactly? Just shut up, pay taxes without complaint, and bake more banana nut bread for the PTA bake-sale?

McAuliffe’s statement was revealing, as were his later comments delivered in panic about Biden’s poll numbers tanking in Democratic Virginia. The commonwealth is home to many federal bureaucrats, and these include liberals who believe in the primacy of government. Perhaps faith in the state has its limits.

“We are facing a lot of headwinds from Washington as you know,” McAuliffe was quoted as saying in a Zoom fundraiser.  “The president is unpopular today, unfortunately, here in Virginia, so we’ve got to plow through.”

Good luck with the plowing, Terry.

My father, not exactly a child of white privilege, didn’t receive much of an education. Hunger, poverty and WWII got in the way. But he knew how to plow. He plowed his fields outside the village with a mean, big-headed mule named Truman.

The notion of the federal hammer used to threaten parents who have concerns about what their children are being taught in schools is  fundamentally un-American. But now it’s being excused by many, the same crowd that shrieked about the dangers of an orange autocracy (that didn’t exist) and find nothing wrong with authoritarianism.

Parents who stood up to object to CRT were mocked by pundits of the Idiocracy, from juvenile spewers of pre-masticated cant, to the Washington establishment chin-strokers, those elite media high priests who pose as serious thinkers.

And the parents are portrayed as tin foil hat wearing fools, ignorant, and deplorably Republican, even if they happen to be political independents, or black Democrats who haven’t forgotten Brown vs. The Board of Education, or  those few liberals who haven’t yet been eaten by the Chardonnay ANTIFA in their leafy suburbs.

They are shunned, and all but denied fire, food and water as they’re marched into social exile on the Mom and Dad Walk of Atonement. And their children are watching.

But something is happening, which is why the Biden White House felt compelled to reach for that federal hammer. Americans are beginning to remember liberty, and how they once felt when they could freely speak their minds to elected officials, even elected local school board members.

The shamed and the shunned have an option that does not involve threats of violence. They can vote. Come November 2022, they’ll vote.

And then the woke will be awakened.

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(Copyright 2021 John Kass)