By Stephen Combs.
“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is robbing the human race,” John Stuart Mill wrote in his 1859 essay “On Liberty.” It robs “those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it.”
It is difficult to believe that anyone could be unaware of the all-out war on our republic waged by the Attorney General of the United States, Merrick Garland, who has turned the FBI into a political and paramilitary arm of the Democrat Party. To use one of the Left’s favorite terms, Merrick Garland is an existential threat to the United States.
If you’ve been away from the planet recently, this story is about Garland’s ordering the FBI to investigate and arrest parents who aggressively object to local school boards over their mask requirements and the teaching of critical race theory. Garland has labeled these parents domestic terrorists because they “harass and intimidate” school board members.
The least important part of this story is Garland’s corruption. His daughter is married to the co-founder of Panorama Education, which received $16 million from a Mark Zuckerberg non-profit organization. Panorama has multi-million-dollar contracts with school boards across the nation to develop programs that involve collecting confidential student data.
Panorama has a $2 million contract with Fairfax County, Virginia, Public Schools to monitor the social and emotional learning of its students. It’s part of a $78.8 million contract to help the school board develop a “welcoming” and “culturally responsive” environment for students, Sam Dorman writes at Fox News.
Skeptics say it’s a scheme to teach critical race theory and other leftist dogma. Put the pieces together, and one thesis is that Merrick Garland doesn’t want parents nosing around in the family business.
The more important part of this story is the obvious: the accelerating repeal – by fiat, not by legislation – of our constitutional rights. The federal government has precisely zero authority over public education at any level, and it doesn’t take a constitutional scholar to know this.
We can continue to put up with leftist school board members financed by George Soros, or we can replace them with parents and other patriotic citizens who aren’t intimated by the teacher unions. As Newt Gingrich explained this week, the choice is pretty simple. It’s not about Republican or Democrat. It’s about whether we want to live under tyranny or in freedom.
Merrick Garland, who takes his orders from Susan Rice and perhaps others in the White House cabal, doesn’t want parents to have a say in how their children are educated (even though they pay for it). Like Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s Democrat candidate for governor, he believes the state owns the rights to our children, and anyone who objects is an enemy of the state.
“By liberty,” John Stuart Mill wrote, “was meant protection against the tyranny of the political rulers,” people he described as “in a necessarily antagonistic position to the people whom they ruled.” The rulers of old acquired their authority by inheritance or conquest, people, Mill said, who “did not hold it at the pleasure of the governed.” Those who rule from the White House, whoever they are, certainly appear to long for those days.
“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground,” Thomas Jefferson said. Reversing the natural progress is a national imperative that requires every one of us to get up and do something about it. Time is of the essence. The bird is on the wing.
Excerpted from the Friday Letter, published at stephencombs.substack.com