Tucker: Biden abusing DOJ power to brand parents domestic terrorists
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host blasts the Justice Department for targeting powerless parents
If you lived in this country 15 years ago and you have a good memory, you may remember the creation of something called the National Security Division at the Department of Justice. It was created back in 2005 when they re-upped the Patriot Act. The point of the National Security Division, we were told at the time, was to conduct "counterterrorism and counterespionage" operations against foreign adversaries. This was the big stuff. Mostly it was Islamic terror, which was the primary threat at that time, but these were also the people in charge of busting the Chinese spies who try to steal our nuclear secrets. They stop the suicide bombers and the hijackings. Not small stuff. Crimes that threatened the nation. That was then.
Then Joe Biden became president in January, and the entire mission of the United States government changed and turned inward, against you. A few days ago, the Department of Justice, under the radical Attorney General Merrick Garland, announced that the National Security Division has a new domestic mission. According to Garland, effective immediately, the National Security Division is handling the investigation of "harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school board members, teachers and workers in our nation’s public schools."
The question is: who is threatening these teachers and school board members? Is it Al Qaeda? Is it the Russian government? Is it ISIS-K? No. It’s parents. Parents are angry about what’s happening in schools. Why are they angry?
Take a look at the people Joe Biden has been nominating to senior leadership positions in the Department of Education. Take a look at YouTube videos at school board meetings across the country over the past year, and you will know exactly why parents are mad. Parents who believe in things like biological sex, and who oppose radical ideas like racial hierarchies in pre-kindergarten classrooms. Teaching kids to hate their parents. Those are the threat, according to the Biden administration.
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You’ll notice if you look closely that nowhere in Merrick Garland's recent order, or the DOJ's press release, is any explanation of these "threats of violence." What threats of violence? Has violence occurred at these school board meetings? No. Look closer, and you’ll find this line: "The Justice Department will also create specialized training and guidance [that] will help school board members ... understand the type of behavior that constitutes threats."
Oh. So it’s a propaganda operation, funded by you out of the Department of so-called Justice designed to tell teachers and school board members that when parents complain, it’s domestic terrorism. It’s not the first amendment in progress. It’s not your constituents voicing legitimate complaints. It’s essentially a foreign adversary trying to kill you.
The Biden administration is trying to tell school board members, using the Department of Justice, that they are in physical danger from parents, and those parents are national security threats. Once again, nothing like this has ever happened in this country. It is an utter perversion of the mission and the power of the United States Department of Justice. It is almost impossible to overstate how sinister and crazy this is.
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We almost never play the equivalence game because it’s tiresome, but in this case, it’s hard to resist. Imagine if Donald Trump’s DOJ designated, say, CNN anchors as domestic terrorists, put it in writing, and then told men with guns to enforce the law. How would that go over? We, for one, would be outraged by it. All decent Americans would. And it would, in fact, be less of a stretch than this order. A lot of CNN anchors made excuses for violence during the riots last year. But the media aren’t upset about this. When powerless suburban parents resist having nihilistic ruling class ideology imposed on their children, our media seem to believe it's perfectly ok to designate them terrorists and threaten them with firearms.
JASON JOHNSON, MSNBC: In a version of America where school board meetings have become the new culture war battleground with children caught in the crosshairs – sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively.
KRISTOFER GOLDSMITH, INTEL EXPERT: Right now everyone from the Proud Boys to the Oath Keepers to QAnon influencers are trying to encourage their members to maniacs to show up at school board meetings
GEOFF BENNETT, MSNBC: Some behavior is so bad, it’s being compared to domestic terrorism.
FRANK FIGLIUZZI, MSNBC: This becomes a security crisis in a sense for the nation
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC: How one republican senator is pretending school board harassment and intimidation aren’t off the charts.
BETSY WOODRUFF: Similar tactics to what happened on January 6th that are now being turned against school boards nationwide in a trend that is really disturbing and sinister
JOY REID: Conservatives manufactured outrage over masks and history lessons, took our school boards hostage like a bunch of screaming maniacs.
So, the federal government has designated American parents who are unhappy with the education their children are receiving as domestic terrorists, and the media are defending it. This is so shameful, it’s hard to describe. The whole point of a free press is to protect the weak from the strong. But as usual, and more flagrantly every day, our media does exactly the opposite. They slobber over billionaires, they defend the powerful, they call you a bigot if you challenge George Soros, and on the other hand, they clap like seals as working-class people go to jail for thought crimes.
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They're trying to pretend that's not what they’re doing, that they’re not sucking up to power, that they’re not a Pretorian guard for the Biden administration, but they are. They’re telling you this is about "domestic terrorism," they’re repeating Merrick Garland’s own words. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech.
On MSNBC this week, the daughter of U.S. Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey -- one of the Biden administration's chief allies in the Senate -- promised that she would air definitive proof that parents who dare to challenge the Biden administration's orthodoxy are, in reality, a grave threat to national security. She would show us the proof that the National Security Division needs to investigate these parents, treat them like criminals, for daring to speak up at their own school board meetings, before members of the school board they elected, to run schools they pay for, that educate their children. Here’s the evidence she presented:
ALICIA MELENDEZ: I want to play some sound from these school board meetings so we can get a sense for how out of control some of these are getting. Take a listen.
MOM: Don’t put masks on our kids anymore. I’m telling you what, I’m a mom who is fearless. I will come after you.
MOM: You’re allowing child abuse, you’re allowing child abuse, you’re allowing child abuse, you’re allowing child abuse.
ALICIA MELENDEZ: Things have been so scary at these meetings that the organization representing school boards across the country is asking the federal government to help. Arguing that the classification of these actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism.
So mothers stand up before a school board, which is their constitutional right, in fact, their duty as parents, to say they believe, based on a lot of scientific evidence, that their children are being hurt by a policy that makes no sense. Imagine looking at that tape, and blaming the moms. And suggesting their behavior is "scary," and their terrorists and the FBI should show up at their house and hassle them, like they’re Al Qaeda or ISIS-K, assuming that even exists.
What did they say? "Don't put masks on kids anymore. It's child abuse." Well, actually that’s true. And anyone who has looked at the data knows it is true. Belgian pediatricians and the Belgian Academy for Medicine just issued this assessment, for example. "Testing children, imposing mouth masks and quarantine goes against the principle of ‘primum non nocere’ (first, do no harm) which is included in the Hippocratic Oath that doctors took. ... These drastic actions do much more damage to the children in the short and long term than going through the infection itself."
That’s not some angry mom from Laguna Beach. Those are physicians saying that. And if you look around, and you should, you will not find a single scientific study anywhere in the world that fundamentally contradicts that assessment. There is no science, none, behind these mask mandates for children. In fact, just days ago, Joe Biden's Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, tried to cite a study to back the administration's forced masking of children, which is a total outrage. And when he used this study to justify a political decision, the senior author of the study, Tracey Hoeg, said Cardona had no idea what he was talking about and had completely misrepresented her research, which, by the way, had no control group, so by definition, doesn’t prove anything.
But don’t bother. Don’t even bother getting rational on this subject. If you dare to cite scientific conclusions out loud, you're a domestic extremist and the media will demand you be investigated by the FBI. They're justifying it the same way the Chinese government explained away murders it committed in Tiananmen Square. They're accusing people who have been completely wronged by the government of undermining domestic stability by complaining about it. What used to be called legitimate civic disagreement is now a threat to the nation.
JASON JOHNSON: Is this really about people being upset about mask mandates or are there sort of underlying disruptive forces, white nationalists, anarchists, whatever, in this country, that are using mask mandates and a public health crisis to sort of wage chaos?
Get that moron off television. That’s hurting the country. They're racist now? They’re racist because they don’t want their kids to be masked? Imagine saying something like that. There are "underlying forces at work." Secret forces you can’t see. Must be Qanon or White supremacists. There are no organized White supremacist forces in this country. We have a lot of problems. That’s not one of them. The point is: we don’t like their politics, therefore they don’t deserve civil liberties. That’s what they’re saying. That’s what they believe.
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You have to wonder if any of these people have seen a school board meeting, or if they're just repeating what they're told. It's not the parents who are causing chaos, they didn’t start this. They had a totally ordinary and justified expectation that their kids would be educated, as kids have been educated in this country for more than 100 years in public schools. The schools themselves changed, and parents slowly woke up to this fact. Their kids are being taught racism in the schools, they’re being hurt. What the hell are you doing?
So parents go to meetings to voice objections to teachers who are advocating racial segregation and book burning, and they’re doing it on camera, they’re not doing it in secret, they’re not plotting, this isn’t the Qanon army, these are just normal Americans. This is what happened in Virginia back in May.
RIVER BEND MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHER ANDREA WEISKOPF: It’s funny how they are so afraid of having their children seeing another view of sexuality, gender or religion. … If you want to talk about books that are assigned, let’s read "To Kill a Mockingbird" together. If you aren’t able to consider the racial trauma this assigned book causes Black children with its White saviorism, then you have no business discussing any books.
Well exactly. If you’re telling kids that Dr. Seuss and "To Kill a Mockingbird," both of which are explicitly anti-racist, and were so before that was even a term thought up by some grafter at Boston University, if you really believe that, you're a lunatic. Say that out loud: you’re a lunatic.
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And if you’re complaining about it, you're not the one waging chaos. Look around on cable news, and you won't find anyone explaining what’s actually going on. Instead, you'll find people like Nicolle Wallace barking about how people who don’t agree with her don’t deserve civil liberties. We almost never use her name on the air. Nicolle Wallace is the physical embodiment of virtually everything that’s wrong with this country. She is, in a word, loathsome.
But let’s be completely honest: if the federal government ever declared Nicolle Wallace a terrorist for her political opinions, we’d unhesitatingly leap to her defense with maximum vehemence. We’d do it instantly, and we wouldn’t stop. Because we believe in civil liberties.
Would she do the same for us? Of course not. If the entire staff of this show was arrested tomorrow for our beliefs, Nicolle Wallace would celebrate. That’s the difference. We believe in civil liberties, and they don’t.
And how can you tell? Has Nicolle Wallace or anyone else at MSNBC said a word about the federal government spying on people's Google searches? That’s happening. Accidentally, the feds just unsealed court documents showing that the DOJ under Joe Biden has been obtaining sensitive, private information from anyone who typed in certain keywords into a Google search. A Minnesota judge recently approved a secret warrant requiring Google to provide tracking information on, "any user within the city of Edina who searched a fraud victim’s name." Is it a stretch to think this could be extended to ideological crimes, which are the crimes the Biden administration really cares about? No, it’s not a stretch at all. Of course, it’s happening. And no one on television even mentions it. Because they think you deserve it. Because they don’t think you have civil liberties. Because they don’t believe in God, therefore they don’t think you got those rights from God. They thought you got them from the government, and they can be taken away because you’ve been naughty, and so they applaud when they’ve been taken away. Google collects a lot of tracking information on its users, including their names, home addresses, and browsing history going back decades.
That's a story you'd expect a lot of people on the left to be concerned about. If it was 20 years ago, they would be concerned about it. The ACLU would be all over it. It’s proof, once again, the government has too much surveillance power over American citizens, and they're abusing it to spy on people who did nothing wrong. But none of the national security experts on MSNBC or CNN will even mention it. Why is that? Because their job isn’t to protect you or civil liberties but to protect the party in power.
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That could be why they won't tell you about Merrick Garland's personal stake in prosecuting people who challenge the insanity that we're seeing from school boards across the country. Turns out, Merrick Garland's daughter is married to a man who is the co-founder of an "education service company" called Panorama Education, which, you will not be surprised to learn, provides materials on critical race theory to school districts – including dismantling "unconscious bias and systemic racism in schools."
Oh, so the thing that parents are complaining about, is the thing that Merrick Garland’s family is getting rich from. Two days ago, Merrick Garland made it a crime to complain about the beliefs that are enriching his family. Does this make sense?
This specific company has raised a ton of money from Mark Zuckerberg's foundation. Fairfax County Public Schools just signed a $1.8 million contract with Panorama to conduct a multi-year "social and emotional learning screener," giving them the right to collect "psychometrics" on the school district’s students. Do you realize they’re collecting psychometrics on your kids? What is a psychometric anyway? Some of the questions ask whether students are "sad" or "gender fluid." It’s all making Merrick Garland’s family rich.
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This is horrifying. It's also potentially illegal. According to the DOJ's own conflict of interest policy, all of this raises serious ethical issues. The DOJ's rules require employees to seek official guidance before, "participating in any matter in which his or her impartiality could be questioned." That includes situations in which matters can "Affect the financial interests" of a "relative with whom a [DOJ] employee has a close relationship."
That would probably include your daughter, Merrick Garland. Did you do that? You can be assured that no one at the DOJ's "National Security Division" is investigating that question tonight. Instead, they're promising to go after people and designate them domestic terrorists.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the Oct. 6, 2021, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."