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More on the DOJ’s war against protesting parents – and on fighting back — 43 Comments

1. Solas is very brave indeed, as is Asra Nomani, born in India of Muslim parents and a fierce and relentless critic (nor is she a conservative) of the totalitarian madness emanating from the ghastly Garland at the Department of (In)Justice (see the recent piece in the NYPost entitled “Parents Take a Stand Against FBI Crackdown”, which mentions both women). No intelligent and rational person could possibly deny that this illegitimate administration, hostile not only to the Constitution but to all traditional citizens, will make use of any and all means, legal or not, in order to crush any voices daring to dissent from these brazen and brutal attempts intended solely to ensure permanent one-party control over our rapidly-decaying republic.

2. TommyJay’s comment on the Open Thread, in re the unmandated vaccination mandates, also illustrates how the Biden administration works around the laws instead of with them, as Obama was their exemplar with his phone, pen, and Dear Colleague letters.

   https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/10/08/open-thread-10-8-21/#comment-2581511

   [Frank on October 8, 2021 at 12:45 pm said:] “We [Biden admin.] didn’t actually publish any regulations forcing you to do this.”

   That’s just unbelievable. I presume the logical progression of the tactic would be: We issue a verbal threat (vax or lose fed. funding); those failing to comply lose fed. funding; then those who have lost fed. funding can’t sue because they can’t prove why they lost fed. funding?

   On the other hand, recall that under Trump court cases were decided based on off-hand campaign comments Trump made. So surely official comments by President Biden are actionable in a court of law. No wait, … I forgot we have a double standards justice system now.

   Actually, we’ve had a double standards justice system for quite some time; we are only just now getting the curtains ripped away.

   “Let’s go, Biden!”

3. Neo, You say “AG Horowitz” near the top. Should be AG Garland? Apologies if I missed something.

4. TommyJay:

   Thanks – it’s a typo. I meant IG Horowitz. Inspector General. I’ll fix it.

5. The administration seems to be behaving awfuly brazenly (or brazenly awful) for a president with such evidently low approval ratings. I guess they don’t care that so many people hate them? They just keep doubling down. They’ve all but openly declared war on American citizens. It’s surreal.

6. Nonapod:

   They don’t care for several reasons.

   The first is that they learned from Obamacare that if they push through an unpopular program by hook or crook, it becomes very hard to dislodge. So they will push through programs they think benefit and enhance their own power, whether the people want them or don’t want them. It is all about power.

   The second is that they think they have control of all the institutions, and that their propaganda machines will be able to calm down enough people that they can continue with their power grabs.

   The third is that they think they can control the voting process in their favor. There are many many avenues for this. One is of course propaganda, another is the control of social media (see for example this recent announcement about Google and YouTube). Another is weaponizing the DOJ and lawfare, as in the subject matter of this post. Another is the ability to win elections by fraud.

7. I couldn’t place the name Horowitz as a gov. official. How quickly the memory fades.

   Am I correct in understanding that the American First Legal org. has considerable inside the White House and DOJ information regarding all this? Are there upset DOJ personnel leaking information?

8. TommyJay:

   That’s what I’m assuming is the way this information got to AFL in the first place. That’s why I wrote on the post:

   …it also appears that someone in the DOJ and/or the Biden administration isn’t altogether happy with the program. This person (or persons) hasn’t quit, but has decided it might be more helpful to leak.

   I conclude that they even leaked the names and perhaps other specific info as well such as emails, although the people are referred to by “Doe” designations in the letter.

9. I guess the usual method of, paying some “outside” activist group to sue the Dept., putting up no real defense against the suit, having the court order the Dept. to do what the activists sued over, was too lengthy a process so they just cut the whole court thing out of it and had the activists just write a letter.

10. Neo, Sorry about my thick headedness.

    This whole case ranks near or at the top of the list of incredibly appalling government overreach by the Biden administration. But I think the case of the leaker or leakers is going to be one to watch. I recall one commentator claimed that the Obama admin. was the most aggressive in prosecuting unfavorable government leakers in recent history. We’ll see if that carries over to Biden.

11. Of course they’re doubling down, the tyrannically inclined are cognitively incapable of any other response to resistance.

    Arresting and prosecuting parents concerned about ongoing racist indoctrination of their children… is a mugging that liberal parents are not going to forget.

    Will “social services” take away these “domestic terrorist’s” children?

    At what point does “just following orders” by the government’s enforcers become complicity?

    I think when they violate the Constitutional liberties of those they offend, as enforcing the law cannot be reconciled with violating the principles the law is formulated to protect.

12. The AFL. This is genuine news to me, this and their inside sourcing.

    Thanks, neo. At 3:56 you RepubloCRATS “ Nonapod:
    They don’t care for several reasons.”

    Indeed they don’t. You’re three points are salient and extremely important to spread widely. We don’t get to vote out of this fascism. The only other blogger so Frank about this who I’ve followed is Sarah Hoyt (at accordingtohoyt.com).

    With the March of authoritarianism and its new totalitarian tools, apart from kinetic or mass resistance, the only sure tools are competition and voting with our feet and our money.

    These can all work. But without freedom of expression? Our future is gloamed with evil.

13. Note to TJ: geoffb and I tracked down the article on transgenderism you were looking for– geoffb posted a direct link to it over on the Jan Morris thread.

14. C. Bradley Thompson, who calls himself the Redneck Intellectual, has posted an essay on the silencing of parental dissent about school matters over at Substack. He says, “In light of the Biden Administration’s unprecedented actions in recent days to silence parental dissent against what’s happening in America’s government schools, I have decided to make this essay open to the public. . . . This is one of the most important essays I’ve ever written. Please share it.”

    So I’m sharing it: https://cbradleythompson.substack.com/p/a-declaration-of-war

    The “declaration of war” in the title refers to Merrick Garland’s memorandum of October 4: “Merrick Garland’s directive may very well be the single most disturbing abuse of government power in American history since the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. It is, in effect, a declaration of war against the American people.”

15. @ PA Cat –
    I read Thompson’s substack essay and it’s probably the best take-down of the Garland Memo so far. I followed links back from there to his new website dedicated solely to education and schools. Thompson is a professor of political science, and he has definitely gone from theory and analysis to practice – which may be more informative than the random offerings on the webz.
    His format is “Instapunditry” – mostly links to other content with some commentary, and a few long-form posts.
    In particular, he has added more information to the substack essay’s content, and some graphics.

    Very much worth a visit.
    https://edwatchdaily.com/

16. This is Thompson’s expanded post on “A Declaration of War”

    https://edwatchdaily.com/big-drop-coming/
    “THE POLICE STATE COMES TO K-12 EDUCATION”

17. AesopFan–

    Thank you– I just bookmarked the site.

18. Another Thompson post to share, because it illustrates some of the reasons why the Deep Swamp of Dark Elites feels so comfortable dropping the hammer on the Deplorables, although there is a mixed bag there, as some of the Suburban Moms aka Domestic Terrorists (an irony that the feminists won’t find amusing) are also from the Elite classes (or at least among their erstwhile allies).

    The two Americas are not divided the way most people suggest.
    https://cbradleythompson.substack.com/p/college-move-in-day-army-style

    Caveat the First: my own college move-in day at a Texas university in 1970 was not nearly as glitzy as Thompson describes, even for the students who were clearly more upper-class than I was. In the 1990s, also in Texas, my own kids’ experiences were closer to mine than to Thompson’s observations, but the richer kids were more upscale than my cohort, which I think owes more to the relaxation of the former in loco parentis orientation of dormitory living, and the greater availability of luxury goods.

    Caveat the Second: while rightly extolling the Army’s maturing effect on callow youths, Thompson omits to mention that they are also getting fed the woke propaganda, although the indoctrination may not be as effective as at the colleges; however, that may also be changing.

19. AesopFan–

    Thank you for the link to the “Army-style move-in” essay. I have to say that my college move-in day in 1966 was not particularly glitzy either, but IIRC, most people then tended to drive older cars and make them last rather than trading in their cars every two years. It was a different mindset. My stepfather (my dad had died suddenly at the end of my sophomore year of high school– my mother married my stepfather exactly five days before they took me to college) had a white van (the boxy type that people called a plumber’s van) that he used to deliver the chocolates he made in his small factory, and that was what he drove to deliver me to college. The van was neither new nor fancy, and nobody seemed to think it was odd for a family to use a practical work-related vehicle like that to move a kid into their freshman dorm. There were other families in the parking lot who had used vans or pickup trucks to “git ‘er done.”

    There was one aspect of that particular move-in day that hung over the new students– it had been only a month since Charles Whitman had carried out his sniper attack from the tower of the University of Texas. Now my campus was nowhere near Texas, and it was a small school in a small town, but college no longer seemed like a sheltered crime-free environment. My college years were also punctuated by the assassinations of MLK and RFK as well as protests against the Vietnam War; there wasn’t much interest in glitz or academic pomp and circumstance. My parents were just glad that my college didn’t have its commencement canceled when I graduated in 1970.

    Apropos of moving-in Army style, I wonder what it was like during WWII, when the Army underwent a drastic expansion and inducted men from different age groups as well as from different economic backgrounds. My dad was 29 when Uncle Sam came calling in early 1942; the guy who became his closest buddy was 31. Both were married at the time but childless, so were considered acceptable for service. I have a feeling– though my dad never said anything about it– that the older soldiers and the teenagers likely formed separate groups.

20. In a comment a while back I pointed to a 1972 piece in Commentary about how the “New Left” took over the Democrats. What they did was impose quotas for representation in the Party based on identity. This was to drive out the influence of those representing working class who of course were not working class because politics requires time to engage in. The identities they chose were blacks, women, and youths.

    The women who would represent all women had to be those who had the free time and resources to do politics and were then the very suburban moms they are now attacking. Just as they attacked the working class and blacks with, among other things, illegal immigration, rotten schools, job outsourcing. That leaves youth as next in line, but of course they are already getting indoctrinated and finding they owe their souls to the company [government] store.

21. You knew this was coming.
    https://babylonbee.com/news/terrorists-released-from-guantanamo-bay-to-make-room-for-parents-who-protested-school-board-meetings

22. @ PA Cat > “There was one aspect of that particular move-in day that hung over the new students– it had been only a month since Charles Whitman had carried out his sniper attack from the tower of the University of Texas. ”

    I went to graduate school at UT-Austin 1974-1976. At that time, they had re-opened the tower, although the deck at the top was closed off, and IIRC remains so.
    However, grad students had stack privileges, and I spent many hours in the dusty rooms – which were not very big, but there were a LOT of them – hoovering up obscure books from rickety wooden shelves.
    FWIW, my MA is in Political Science, but I ended up as a computer programmer instead, and never reached Thompson’s level – so I appreciate his insights.

    I’m retrieving the career I never had by commenting at Neo’s Salon. 😉

23. One more reason why the Biden admin is moving so aggressively in the face of unpopularity:

    It’s the beginning of Biden’s four years. (Or Harris’s. Just not a Republican’s.) They’re fairly certain they’re going to lose the House or the Senate anyway, and so they’re not going to be getting much done after the next Congressional election, but Biden will still be the prez and so, while they won’t be able to pass anything, he can still veto everything, making his last two+ years a nullity, but at least not a negative, and they’ll have already accomplished much.

    And, if you do all the hated stuff early, you have time to work on the fickle public’s opinions, and you might still pull it off and keep Congress in one or the presidency in three.

24. The totalitarian state is closing in, so what are we going to do about it?

25. Diversity [dogma], inequity, and exclusion. Throw another baby on the barbie, it’s over.

26. Mac Siccar question answered: organise to resist them at every level. Fortify the right at every local level.

    Save and spend your money where you’re treated best. Prepare to move to wherever you’re treated better (eg, physicsguy moves from heinous Connecticut to the freer state of Florida).

    Vote with your feet to show you contempt: force the pols to recognise reality, despite the citizens decreasing leverage. Bypass and reroute around every Educrat Dogmatist and authoritarian.

    Most of all, widen every avenue for freer expression, ease of organization, and mock the Evil But Incompetent Fascists! They cannot win anymore than Jimmy Carter Redux can win.

    Left leaning Quinnipiac poll finds Xidan approval sinking to 38%. Steve Hayward notes that it took Jimmy Carter two years in office to get there.
    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/10/ruling-class-in-free-fall.php

    He adds that Gallup records Americans’ distrust in media as the second lowest in record (2016 setting the record low).

    ==========

    PA + Cat
    Note to TJ: geoffb and I tracked down the article on transgenderism you were looking for– geoffb posted a direct link to it over on the Jan Morris thread.

    Immense thanks!
    Off hand not: how much is transgender neuritis defined by or constrained by childhood or “infantile amnesia?” The forgetting of early mrmories

27. @PA+Cat

    “The van was neither new nor fancy, and nobody seemed to think it was odd for a family to use a practical work-related vehicle like that to move a kid into their freshman dorm.”

    A while back, I read a comment somewhere about the move-in-day vehicles from the 60s/70s compared to the ‘aughts. Even the extremely well-heeled used the Ford wagon they had for going to ‘the lake’. Somehow, that got turned into a status game, and an M-B Panzerwagen is now required. There’s probably an interesting essay in there somewhere.

28. Clearly, teachers unions are corrupting school boards, overturning the Will of the people. In the past decade in Colorado, this was witnessed in struggles in Douglas and Jefferson Counties, both right leaning places surrounding Denver, city and county. (How much is this yet another Soros projest? Or a leftist gangster proruption?)

    Are teachers unions also corrupting the universities? Yes says the recently resigned philosophy professor in New York City, Biondi

    Hersey: What role do teachers’ unions play in the broader politicization of universities?
    Biondi: Well, thankfully, I had to participate in a union for only four years [at John Jay College]. But from my experience—and from what I’ve researched and heard from other college professors—teachers’ unions play a huge role in politicizing campuses. They use teachers’ union dues to engage in political activism and to leverage bargaining positions with the administration.

    They always pit the faculty against the administration and threaten teacher walkouts if their demands are not met. They know that parents don’t want faculty walking out on their students when they’re paying all that tuition. So, they threaten walkouts as a bargaining chip.

    They would also use the union dues to support various political positions. For instance, when I was at John Jay College, they lobbied the state of New York or the city of New York to spend more tax dollars on higher ed. If I recall correctly, they also lobbied for student debt forgiveness, which I deeply oppose.

    I thought it was immoral for them to take my money and use it for political causes, especially ones I disagreed with. But it was a condition of employment that I be part of the teachers’ union.

    So, yes. Teachers’ unions definitely instigate the politicization of campuses.

    Hersey: Do you know what Marymount Manhattan College [from which Biondi resigned in 2020 after 25 years of teaching] was looking for with the plan to vet teachers’ syllabi?

    Biondi: They expected even nonpolitical courses to serve a political agenda. One phrase that stands out in my memory was their aim to “de-center a Eurocentric curriculum.” All faculty were expected to meet a certain quota of “diversity,” according to their conception of “diversity.”

    I had an incredible diversity of ideas in my courses. No matter what topic I taught, I always presented a range of clashing perspectives. Most of the ideas I presented or had my students read, I personally didn’t agree with. Agreement with the ideas in the material one teaches is largely irrelevant to teaching well, as far as I’m concerned. So, my students would encounter a wide variety of ideas. We would give them a full-throated, fair hearing, and I expected students to come to their own conclusions about whether these positions were good or bad and had strong or weak evidence in support of them.

    But this isn’t what the administration meant by “diversity.” It was not about diversity of ideas, but “diversity” according to some politicized benchmarks….

    “ Why I Left America’s Failing Universities: An Interview with Carrie-Ann Biondi” The Objective Standard, October 1, 2021
    https://archive.is/2021.10.03-020258/https://theobjectivestandard.com/2021/10/why-i-left-americas-failing-universities-an-interview-with-carrie-ann-biondi/#selection-801.0-821.275

    Of interest, is her testimony of how the campus politicization accelerated in 2016, and after the death of Saint George Floyd last year.

    Biondi: “My shift in this direction [of addressing the complete corruption of education] was accelerated beginning in 2016. Although academia always had a bit of a political undercurrent, especially in large urban colleges, I think most were still largely devoted to education. Students were seeking an education, and faculty were there to provide it.

    “But after the 2016 election, things became highly politicized at Marymount Manhattan, where I was then teaching. Throughout my career, there had always been a small percentage of faculty and students who wanted to politicize the classroom, to make it less about learning and more about political activism. But after the election, many students and faculty flipped out. That’s the only way I can think to describe it; they became deranged, politically, and wanted to push to a much wider agenda.

    “I’m not merely talking about some of the more radical Marxist-oriented professors. A lot more students wanted other professors—who were not seeking to politicize their classrooms—to make political activism part of their projects. And that’s something I resisted. They thought that they weren’t really learning something unless they could use it for social or political activism. They wanted course credit for activism-related projects in lieu of actual academic projects related to courses. A question I started hearing increasingly was, ‘How is this course relevant to what’s going on today?’ If we were studying ancient Greek philosophy, and we were learning about the pre-Socratics, students would want to know, ‘How is this relevant to fighting for social justice?’

    “In essence, they wanted to be fed what to say to win a particular political debate, to learn talking points that would help them take down opponents. And many students thought that pushing back on course material with questions like that would get me to change the course.

    “My response, in effect, was, I’m here to educate, not indoctrinate. You don’t need to know where I stand on certain issues. I’m not here to help you learn what to think but how to think for yourself about anything. You can hold your own political views, and you can come to whatever conclusions you see fit. But my classes are not to be politicized. Students, however, pushed more and more toward more indoctrination, which I deeply opposed.

    “Well, come 2020, the week of the riots after George Floyd’s death, everything changed. The college administration became overtly political. They crossed the line, traipsing on academic freedom. They said, in effect, ‘We’re going to vet your syllabi to make sure that certain viewpoints are embodied in them.’ These viewpoints were highly political and highly controversial, and I was not going to be party to that.

    “So, I knew it was time for me to leave academia. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I realized that I was not going to be able to pursue the values that, for twenty-five years, I had worked toward. I wouldn’t be able to cultivate independent thinking in my classrooms.

    “So, you can see there were those two strands: the epistemological problem and the political one.”

    Bracing yet predictably depressing.

    Teachers unions have everywhere become a Marxist tool for indoctrination. The undermining of the family, of the Rule of Law, American exceptionalism and European exceptionalism and our culture of competition and merit are all targeted by defeat by Marxist teachers unions.

    Any Wmerican Great Republic is threatened so long as teachers unions are in power

29. “I mean, do we really want to destroy the country?”

    Yes. That’s exactly what they want. It’s been obvious to anyone with open eyes since before obama was elected. And if people are dim enough to keep voting for democrats, they’ll succeed. They might anyway given how spineless the repub party is.

30. Bullfrog,

    “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” – Barack Hussein Obama, October 30, 2008

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32. This post got linked by Roger Kimball at American Greatness.

    “Another thing I didn’t know when I first wrote about this story was that the pas-de-deux between the National School Boards Association and the attorney general was not fortuitous. On the contrary, as the always interesting “Neo” reports, it was more in the way of being a coordinated effort, what just a few years ago might have been denominated “collusion.” I’m not sure into which folder we ought to put that detail. ”

    https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/09/garland-just-tipped-over-the-dominos/

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34. @ TJ > “Clearly, teachers unions are corrupting school boards, overturning the Will of the people. In the past decade in Colorado, this was witnessed in struggles in Douglas and Jefferson Counties, both right leaning places surrounding Denver, city and county.”

    I was a witness in Jeffco. We had elected, about 2 years ago IIRC, a center-conservative board (not even Qanons!) and within just months, the Left sponsored a recall election to take back control. Published figures afterwards showed they had a 10-to-1 monetary advantage, which funded lots of “grassroots” sign wavers on the street corners, flyers full of great sounding but misleading rhetoric, and GOTV drives.
    No way the conservatives (just plain old citizens and parents) could compete.

    We are sliding down the slope, although we haven’t hit bottom yet.
    My grandchildren have been taught the phrases to listen for and report to their parents, and we are prepare to yank them and home-school if (when) needed.

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