Legitimating the National School Board Association’s (NSBA) call to pursue such parents as domestic terrorists betrays the ruling regime’s thuggish, totalitarian core.
Totalitarian regimes classify dissent as domestic extremism and, under the guise of public health and/or public safety, hunt the dissenters with the full power of the national security apparatus.
The national security apparatus acts as a defender of the ruling regime, rather than as a defender of the people from whom, in a free society, the law derives its just authority.
This is the way it works in Communist China. The “People’s Liberation Army” is the Chinese Communist Party’s military, not the military of the people.
This is increasingly the way it works in America under President Joe Biden, Ruling Class avatar. The Biden administration has turned the national security apparatus against citizens who question everything from draconian coronavirus policies to election integrity to, now, CRT. It increasingly exists to protect the Biden administration, not our liberty and justice.
Critics are treated as a threat to “our democracy,” a euphemism for the regime that it invokes to justify its own rule. By a threat to democracy, the regime means a threat to its control over virtually every aspect of society under the guise of a pandemic; to its control over the voting system; to its control over what your children learn in school. Critics therefore must be intimidated into silence.
The Ruling Class has resorted to using force over persuasion because it suffered something in its collective conscience approximating a near-death experience. Tens of millions of Americans demonstrated that they rejected the Ruling Class’s orthodoxy, and questioned its legitimacy, by voting for Donald Trump—twice.
These Wrongthinkers who had the gall to challenge their betters’ power, privilege and prestige could no longer be humored or reasoned with.
They had to be brought to heel. The executive branch that had once trained its sights on Trump would now turn to targeting those he represented.
For several years, the national security and law enforcement establishment had hyped up the idea that racially- or ethnically-motivated—or “anti-government/anti-authority”—“domestic violent extremists” posed a dire threat to the homeland.
These terms were always nebulous and ill-defined. The size, scope and strength of the threat was rarely, if ever, detailed.
Illiberal actors would define domestic extremism liberally.
For a progressive Democratic Party that sees conservatives as violent bigots, and for its national security apparatus that sees violent bigots as the greatest domestic terror threat, January 6 provided the imagery to justify the idea that there was a hateful, troglodytic, MAGA monster personifying this threat, and that the threat had to be slain.
The deplorables’ ideas now were not merely dangerous. The deplorables themselves were dangerous. The violent cadre of Capitol breachers, branded as insurrectionists, seditionists and domestic terrorists—a small fraction of the generally peaceful thousands who had come to Washington to make their voices heard that day—would be treated as representative of the 74 million Trump voters nationwide.
January 6 would prove the seminal event used to justify the Biden administration’s whole-of-society War on Wrongthink via its National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.
As noted in a prior piece in these pages, the strategy itself makes applied CRT an integral part of that counterterrorism strategy. “[T]ackling the threat posed by domestic terrorism over the long term,” the National Strategy document reads, “demands…prioritizing efforts to ensure that every component of the government has a role to play in rooting out racism and advancing equity.” Of course, then, this would include rooting out anti-CRT efforts in our schools, as a matter of national security.
Why would parents challenging the teaching of the regime’s favored ideology in public schools expect to be spared from this purge?
These parents constitute a threat not because they are violent, but because schools are the mechanism by which the regime creates its next generation of voters. Greater involvement of parents in curriculum-setting threatens that project. Greater involvement, period, threatens that project—G-d forbid we know what is going on in our schools.
There is also the matter of politics. CRT has spawned a backlash, resulting in anti-CRT legislation and a voter awakening. This cannot be tolerated by the regime—one helmed no less by an attorney general, in Merrick Garland, who appears to have a possibly major conflict of interest. The NSBA’s letter provided the regime a pretext to intimidate dissenters from its chosen curriculum into silence and, ultimately, submission.
We know that the threat of violence is overhyped by dint of the NSBA’s letter itself. The FBI lists zero examples of the “harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” to which it is responding, but as the American Enterprise Institute’s Max Eden chronicles at Newsweek, the NSBA flags incidents including prank calls, disruptions of meetings and groups “spreading misinformation” regarding CRT and COVID-19 policies.
The NSBA cites all of two arrests to justify calling for assistance from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and Secret Service—to name just a few agencies—to pursue threats under the PATRIOT Act and a slew of other laws: One in which an Illinois man reportedly engaged in disorderly conduct at a meeting and, while school officials tried to escort him out, struck an official; and another in which a Virginia man reportedly physically threatened someone and then “continued to be disorderly with the deputy” and resisted arrest.
This is domestic terrorism worthy of pursuing with the full force of the federal government—two arrests evincing the kind of conduct one might encounter among overzealous parents at a Little League baseball game?
In this, there is a parallel to January 6, which was used to justify the overall onslaught against dissenters from the ruling regime—under which this latest effort seems to fall.
January 6 has been pursued as domestic terrorism on similarly shaky grounds.
The authorities told us the Capitol breach was a murderous, coordinated, armed “insurrection.”
That narrative has collapsed, and prosecutors have strained to make their cases—cases overwhelmingly consisting of trumped-up trespassing charges. No one was murdered by a protester on January 6—the only person killed during the breach was Ashli Babbitt, a protester who was shot dead by a Capitol cop. There was no plan to storm the Capitol, the FBI has suggested, consistent with the disclosures of at least one of its informants. None of the Capitol Riot defendants have been charged with carrying a firearm during the Capitol breach. Neither charges of insurrection nor sedition have been slapped on any of the defendants, either.
This justified one of the largest and most complex cases in the history of the Justice Department—and the pre-trial detention of largely non-criminals reportedly held in solitary confinement, and some allegedly abused, on charges not previously applied in cases like theirs?
By contrast, the George Floyd rioters during the summer of 2020 inflicted death, damage and destruction massively dwarfing that which was inflicted on January 6.
Over the last two years, we have seen a historic increase in homicides, occurring disproportionately in progressive cities. Thousands have been killed, with the FBI remaining largely silent.
These are real dangers our country has faced, resulting in tangible devastation, at the same time authorities hype up threats that have not materialized to anything like this degree—such as the purportedly greatest domestic terror threat of white supremacism.
The domestic terror on America’s streets has gone often unprosecuted, and ignored, by the law-enforcement agencies pursuing the likes of QAnon Shaman, and now threatening to pursue your next-door neighbor to the ends of the Earth.
Violence of any kind cannot be tolerated in America. But neither can the selective application of justice on political grounds or, still worse, its weaponization against political opponents.
That the Biden administration is engaging in the latter proves once again the projection of our Ruling Class, which shrieked of authoritarianism for four years while acting in ever-more totalitarian ways once again fully wielding the levers of power.
Ben Weingarten is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, fellow at the Claremont Institute and senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party (Bombardier, 2020). Ben is the founder and CEO of ChangeUp Media LLC, a media consulting and production company. Subscribe to his newsletter at bit.ly/bhwnews, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
