Why don’t parents have rights when it comes to bringing up their children. There’s this new controversy started by the National School Board Association, asking the Department of Justice that parent protests at school board meetings be treated as possible acts of domestic terrorism.

So let me get this right. Parent protests at this enormous leftward swing in our culture and particularly what the left-wing teachers’ unions are teaching their kids in school is a bad thing? I’m not buying it. And this business about “threats” is also nonsense.

For one thing, any physical threats to teachers or school board members or anybody else involved in public schooling is already against the law. Actual violence is miniscule. Certainly nothing compared to the violent protests we’ve seen over the last couple of years in our nation’s cities organized by left-wing groups.

And we know who they are. Yet they seem to never get prosecuted. The vast overwhelming majority of parents are law abiding persons who don’t like the direction public schools are going.

Now, today, Attorney General Merrick Garland in a Senate hearing announced that the Justice Department will be holding “strategy sessions” in the next 30-days on how to deal with these alleged threats to school boards and teachers and others. Mr. Garland is bringing in, among others, United States Attorneys and the FBI.

I think this is President Biden and General Garland simply weaponizing the Justice Department against parents. Not all parents, mind you. Just parents who object to the teachings of Critical Race Theory and other interpretations of American history that have been proven time and again to be factually wrong.

And I’ll tell you what, I think the minority groups in the classroom hearing this stuff suffer as much or more as the kids who are being targeted. It tells these minority youngsters that they are victims, that they are no good, that they can’t succeed, or climb the ladder of opportunity because of their skin color.

These teachers are spreading crazy left-wing ideologies that will do great harm to minority students.

It is divisive. It’s a bunch of dumb finger pointing. And most of all, it’s not teaching all the kids reading, writing, and arithmetic, to re-coin an old phrase. Fostering racial divisions in the classroom is nothing but poison. It’s lose-lose. During the pandemic, as kids stayed home, their parents watched zoom — saw what was going on in these classrooms — and didn’t like it one bit.

So when the pandemic started to clear up, parents started to show up at school board meetings. Good for them. Any sane person, of any color, would be justified in doing it. It sounds like school board members forget that they are elected by the community. Including, most of all, parents. So they should heed the idea that democracy requires the consent of the governed.

Government is never all powerful in our system. Now, the teachers and others are playing a cat-and-mouse game.

We don’t teach Critical Race Theory, they say. And they hide behind a hundred different excuses. Which is just a cover to dodge the truth. Parents have watched the zoom classes, and know otherwise.

The National School Board Association and the National Education Association — one of the two largest teachers’ unions — call this parental criticism “propaganda.” However, careful research shows, that CRT racism is alive and well inside the teachers’ union and classroom instruction. At the NEA annual meeting in June this year, key resolutions adopting CRT and worse were mysteriously scrubbed from their website.

Again careful research has found in at least two cases on the “New Business Agenda Item A,” which was adopted: “Supporting and leading campaigns that… result in increasing the implementation of culturally responsive education, critical race theory, and ethnic Studies curriculum in pre- K-12 and higher education.”

Then there was “New Business Agenda Item 39,” which was adopted as modified. It instructs teachers to provide already created in-depth study that “critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, capitalism”and quote “other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.”

So make their own judgment about the appropriateness of this kind of teaching in today’s classrooms. And, the appropriateness of parents of all races to step in and stop this nonsense. America has its flaws, but America’s long history of freedom and democracy and market-oriented prosperity is unparalleled in history. These teachers are not teaching that. And if parents don’t object, who will?

________

From Mr. Kudlow’s broadcast on Fox News.