Indiana AG Todd Rokita Leading 17 State Effort to Protect Parents From Biden, Garland Intimidation
“The Biden administration and its special-interest allies need to dial down the rhetoric and respect the rights of parents to be heard.”
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokit and AGs from 16 other states have come together to protect parents from intimidation from Biden and his AG Garland.
Garland threatened to sic the FBI and DOJ on parents protesting radical agendas and stupid mandates at their child’s school after the National School Boards Association (NSBA) asked him to label them “domestic terrorists.”
Garland said it only applies to those who threaten, harass, or intimidate school board members.
However, Garland never provided examples or cases so yeah.
“Concerned parents passionate about their kids’ education are not terrorists,” Rokita stated in his press release. “The Biden administration and its special-interest allies need to dial down the rhetoric and respect the rights of parents to be heard.”
The other 16 states are:
- Alabama
- Arizona
- Arkansas
- Georgia
- Kansas
- Louisiana
- Mississippi
- Missouri
- Montana
- Ohio
- Oklahoma
- South Carolina
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Utah
“Over the last year, as legal officers, we have advised our constituencies of their constitutional right to free speech and encouraged public engagement to voice their opinions on important issues affecting their country, state, and communities, especially parents who have concerns about their children’s education,” the AGs wrote in their letter. “Your recent action seeks to chill lawful dissent by parents voiced during local school board meetings by characterizing them as unlawful and threatening.”
The AGs cited three reasons why Garland’s memo is unnecessary:
1. Are based upon a flawed premise, i.e. that there has been a nationwide spike in “threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff”;
2. Violate the First Amendment rights of parents to address school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff on educational matters by seeking to criminalize lawful dissent and intimidate parents into silence; and The AGs also pointed out that the NSBA and Garland did not “document a single legitimate instance of violence.”
3. Intrude on the well-recognized First and Fourteenth Amendment rights of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of their children by intimidating parents away from raising concerns about the education of their children.
The letter also pointed out that the NSBA did not “document a single legitimate instance of violence.” They reminded Biden and Garland that all 50 states and territories have “sufficient criminal and civil remedies” to handle the situations.
The NSBA only provided examples “about disruptions,” which local police handled right away.
Instead, the NSBA seemed to care more about shutting up the parents than anything else: “For example, it notes that it is concerned that ‘[o]ther groups are posting watchlists against school boards and spreading misinformation that boards are adopting critical race theory curriculum and working to maintain online learning by haphazardly attributing it to COVID-19.'”
We know the DOJ wants SCOTUS to protect a woman’s supposed constitutional right to murder her unborn child. They do not care that SCOTUS has already ruled many times that task forces like the one Garland formed in his memo “intimidate citizens into foregoing their First Amendment rights”:
“[W]hen a State attempts to make inquiries about a person’s beliefs or associations, its power is limited by the First Amendment. Broad and sweeping state inquiries into these protected areas. . . discourage citizens from exercising rights protected by the Constitution.” Baird v. State Bar of Ariz., 401 U.S. 1, 6 (1971) (citing Shelton v. Tucker, supra; Gibson v. Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, 372 U.S. 539 (1963); Cf. Speiser v. Randall, 357 U.S. 513 (1958)).
Just three months ago the Supreme Court reaffirmed the chilling nature that actions of this kind have on Americans’ exercise of their First Amendment rights: “When it comes to ‘a person’s beliefs and associations,’ ‘[b]road and sweeping state inquiries into these protected areas …discourage citizens from exercising rights protected by the Constitution.’” Americans for Prosperity Found. v. Bonta, 141 S. Ct. 2373, 2384 (2021) (citing Baird v. State Bar of Ariz., 401 U.S. 1, 6 (1971).
The school boards associations in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Virginia denounced and slammed the NSBA over its language and demands to treat concerned parents as domestic terrorists.
Louisiana and Pennsylvania voted to withdraw from the NSBA.
Fuzzy blogged that Florida’s school board association also condemned the letter, but has not decided on its membership.
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Comments
They are conducting psychological warfare against our children and grandchildren, attempting to stop them from achieving their potential. Their actions are violence on white children.
Let’s go Garland!
At least his great aunt was a pretty good singer.
Garland doing “a heck of a job” (in the Katrina sense of the phrase)
Let’s Go Brandon !
Once upon a time parents’ associations had the reputation as bluenoses for demanding the removal of novels deemed “offensive.” This reputation was a broad generality based on a few notorious instances and they still crop up from time to time: parents worried about the fragile eggshell minds of their coddled spawn and all that.
Now that public school administrators are products of the social justice activist movement promulgated in American universities among schools of education and other branches of the “humanities” who revere hive-minded simps like Paolo Friere and his “pedagogy of the oppressed,” parents groups have the moral high ground and they are acting on it.
It’s no wonder school boards want to oust dissident teachers. They reject what the boards have been taught, so anyone bucking their neo-racist method is obviously racist and anti-progress.
Good.
The problem with adopting an “opposite day” worldview, as progressives do, is that every so often you have to do two “opposite day” things at once, they cancel out, and reality bleeds embarrassingly through.
NC Lt. Gov. Robinson was in the news recently for condemning LGBTQ books in primacy schools as filth. Cue outrage from the broadcast chattering classes and magenta-haired cat ladies in the statehouse..
So Robinson gives another presser, where he projects pages from these books onto a large screen. The MSM covers the presser, and then blurs the material on the screen (at 1:55) as unfit to be aired.
Woops!
Why is it only 17 states pushing back. Why isn’t it 50 ?
Does free speech mean nothing in the other 33 states ?