U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, is facing backlash for comparing dissenting parents to the violent Jan. 6th rioters.
He offered the ludicrous comparison during a committee hearing Wednesday about House Resolution 1238, a GOP-proposed bill that’d forced the Biden administration to answer certain questions about its efforts to rein in dissenting parents.
“January 6, 2021, will never be forgotten. An infamous day in American history. MAGA Republicans descended upon the Capitol, engaged in an insurrection. They occupied the Capitol. Five people were killed. Hundreds injured, including hundreds of Capitol Hill police officers attacked and bludgeoned. It was a day that we’ll never forget,” he said.
“And people at the local level at affected school board meetings, they won’t forget the MAGA Republicans descending on their school board meetings after January 6th like Jan. 6th, disrupting meetings. It was a ‘coordinated attack happening across the country.’ Americans won’t forget about it. School board members, teachers, administrators subjected to violence, threats of violence, harassment, intimidation.”
He continued, “And in response to that, the National School Board Association sent a letter to the Biden administration seeking federal help. Things had gotten so far out of hand. And by the way, there’s not one scintilla of evidence — either direct or indirect — that there was any coordination between the Biden administration and the National School Board Association that caused that letter to be sent seeking federal assistance.”
There’s a lot to unpack there …
First, recall that after the National School Board Association demanded last year that the administration begin reining in dissenting parents, the Department of Justice began investigating said parents as potential terrorists.
🚨 Merrick Garland admits that he started targeting parents for “possible domestic terrorism” because the NSBA sent a letter pic.twitter.com/xMkQ1yattc
— Conservative News (@BIZPACReview) October 21, 2021
Yet all these parents ever did was show up to school board hearings to voice their concerns about curricula, bad behavior, and about a number of topics.
One such parent, Scott Smith of Loudoun County, showed up for an even more understandable reason: To raise concerns about his daughter’s bathroom rape by a gender-fluid boy who’d been wearing a skirt.
Yet Smith was forcibly subdued, handcuffed, arrested, and then portrayed by the NSBA and its allies as some sort of domestic terror threat.
Other parents were treated similarly for speaking out against the teaching of racial essentialism and radical LGBT ideology.
The point is that these parents did nothing wrong. Yet Johnson had the nerve to compare them to violent rioters?
The public isn’t standing for the false comparison:
School parent extremists??? Would that include the Loudoun County father arrrested in a board meeting as he complained about the way the sexual assault attack on his daughter was handled??? Would you consider that an extremist? You are on the wrong side of this issue.
— LGriffin (@LGriffi54430016) September 15, 2022
@RepHankJohnson “Democrat Hank Johnson Alleges American Parents Descended on School Board Meetings Like January 6 Protesters” Liar! Not one parent had done what you accused them of. All of you lying Democrats are disgusting and evil! Someday you will stand before God. 😈🤡
— Lynne M (@LynneM54909830) September 15, 2022
@RepHankJohnson School board/parents/Jan. 6th
You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Are you a God fearing man?
Why have you bought into your party’s lies?Someone MUST stand up for righteousness.
— EB (@met0531) September 15, 2022
@RepHankJohnson So you label parents that don’t want their CHILDREN looking at PORNOGRAPHY that they check out of the school library as TERRORISTS?? That makes you a PEDOPHILE.
— dpfromtx (@dpfromtx) September 15, 2022
You are a clown for trying to smear the names of parents standing up to communist propaganda in their children’s learning.
CRT is racist indoctrination.
We will vote you out. You are a disgrace to this nation.
— 🤡 🌏 Liberal World Order 🌎 🤡 (@order_liberal) September 15, 2022
@RepHankJohnson comparing concerned parents to Jan 6th participants shows how ignorant you really are…….
— Andy Anderson (@AndyAnd21696305) September 15, 2022
Note also what Johnson said about there not being “one scintilla of evidence — either direct or indirect — that there was any coordination between the Biden administration and the National School Board Association.”
Fact-check: FALSE.
“The country’s largest school board association collaborated with the Biden White House before sending a controversial letter calling on the FBI to investigate parents as potential domestic terrorists, according to previously unreported emails,” the Washington Free Beacon reported in October of 2021.
“The emails, obtained by Parents Defending Education through public records requests … reveal that the National School Board Association’s president and CEO sent the letter to Biden on Sept. 29 without approval from the organization’s board. The letter said that the acts of some parents at school board meetings across the country could be considered ‘a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.'”
“The emails also show that the White House asked the association for examples of threats against school board members days before Attorney General Merrick Garland created a task force of officials from the FBI and the Justice Department to determine how to prosecute alleged crimes at school board meetings.”
Read this, @RepHankJohnson. https://t.co/pXnjiaWh95
— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) September 14, 2022
In other words, the White House knew about the NSBA’s efforts to label dissenting parents domestic terrorist threats, and that’s a fact.
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