The Biden administration is making clear once again whom it fears the most. It is not China, Russia, or, needless to say, Republicans. No.
Enemy No. 1 is America’s mothers and fathers. They stand athwart the administration’s mad dash to remake America, yelling, “Stop!”
This much can be gleaned from recent events. First is last week’s announcement that Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was appointed to a Department of Homeland Security school advisory board. That board will, among other things, make recommendations on “safety and security” measures.
Outraged parents groups and members of Congress rightly pointed out that this was akin to putting a rabid fox in charge of watching the hatching incubator.
Weingarten particularly is blamed by parents for keeping schools closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, a policy that later was amply shown to have been ineffective and deleterious to children.
“Most parents believe you were the tip of the spear of school closures,” CNN political commentator Scott Jennings berated the union boss in an April exchange that went viral. “There are numerous statements you made over the summer of ’20 scaring people to death about the possibility of opening schools, and I hear no remorse whatsoever about the generational damage that’s been done to these kids.”
Consider another piece of evidence demonstrating that the Biden team sees parents groups, especially Parents Defending Education, as the greatest obstacle to its campaign to deprogram the minds of children and adults alike.
It now appears, as predicted, that it was probably the Biden administration that asked the Southern Poverty Law Center to put several parental rights groups, including Parents Defending Education and Moms For Liberty, on its “hate map.”
The SPLC is an especially oleaginous member of the Left’s large web of unctuous groups. Its main function is to put groups in the crosshairs of real domestic terrorists by adding them to its hate maps.
As my Heritage Foundation colleague Tyler O’Neil, who wrote the book “Making Hate Pay” about the corruption that always has surrounded the Southern Poverty Law Center, has documented, the White House and the SPLC appear to have coordinated the hit on parents.
The main author of the SPLC’s hit, Susan Corke, met at the White House in January with John Picarelli, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism director. Picarelli also spoke, alongside members of the SPLC, at an “Eradicate Hate Global Summit” in April.
And two days after the SPLC released its latest hate map, the White House suddenly released a strategy “to Protect LGBTQI+ Communities.” The White House said it had “monitoring” evidence that members of the LGBT groups face threats “increasingly tied to hate groups and domestic violent extremists.”
Just excellent timing?
Anything is possible, but Congress ought to investigate if there indeed was a collaboration between the corrupt SPLC and the White House. Such coordination would not be new.
In its first year in office, the Biden administration requested that the National School Boards Association ask the Justice Department to treat parents who stood in the way of its agenda as “domestic terrorists.” The strategy blew apart when the collaboration was revealed, and the NSBA recanted its action.
Deprogramming is at the heart of this agenda. Gone must be any vestigial sense of patriotism, fondness for the family (sorry, “patriarchy”), or appreciation for the free-market system. Once this is accomplished, the strategy is to reprogram American brains with the outlandish fabrication that America is systemically racist and oppressive. Parents Defending Education (on whose board of advisers I proudly sit) and Moms for Liberty (with whom I have gladly collaborated) stand in the way of all that.
Moms for Liberty does a lot of important work: The group supports candidates vying to flip school boards (during the 2022 Florida midterm elections, a remarkable 61% of its endorsed candidates won), has engaged parents in making sure that books accessible by children in school libraries are age-appropriate, and has educated parents on proposed legislation in several states. No wonder the Biden team fears it.
Ditto for Parents Defending Education. It actually played the lead role in exposing the administration’s National School Boards Association scam, emailing every single state school board association to ask if they’d been involved with the letter or supported it.
It turned out that in many cases, the answer was a resounding no. Twenty-one state NSBA affiliates left the association, while many of the remaining ones distanced themselves.
Parents Defending Education also has succeeded with a raft of legislation that helps parental rights.
We can see why the White House wants to sic law enforcement on them. As a conservative James Carville might say: “It’s the moms, stupid.”
This commentary was first published by the Washington Examiner.
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