News/Commentary

Top House Dem compares parent-protesters of school boards to ‘MAGA’ Jan 6 rioters, calls it a ‘coordinated attack’

September 15, 2022 | | Print Article

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.

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:

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.”

In other words, the White House knew about the NSBA’s efforts to label dissenting parents domestic terrorist threats, and that’s a fact.

Vivek Saxena
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