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Corruption Education Opinion Reprints from others.

School board meetings show only that freedom is messy.

Original Washington Examiner can be found here.

 

More and more school boards are defying the voters who put them in. Also we see that many of the board members don’t have children in the school systems. So what’s the answer?

Twenty years ago, Paul Carson said he never would have hesitated speaking out at a school board meeting about any issue affecting his children’s education.

But one day, that changed. “I just don’t do it,” Carson told me. A physician who practices medicine in an urban Pittsburgh hospital, Carson said it has nothing to do with his being 20 years older. “It has everything to do with the culture we are navigating.”

Anyone, he said, can take a video of what you say, edit it to his or her advantage, then post it on social media. Or they can just simply claim on social media that you are a racist or extremist because you express an opinion outside the sensitivities of the cultural curators who define what is acceptable and what is not in our country.

When Carson used a media platform in discussions about school district issues , as he did last year when the children in the Pittsburgh Public Schools went for months without in-person education, he said he had to be “profoundly cautious” in expressing his views.

AG Garland is now using the FBI against parents on the grounds that school board members feel threatened. But what does “threatened” look like? Is it someone yelling at you? Disagreeing with you? Holding an opposing opinion? Who is defining those threats?

This memo wasn’t just designed to target those who would commit violence. It was also clearly designed to stop regular people with real concerns from voicing those concerns because of the fear anything they say will deem them a domestic terrorist, an event that would destroy their personal, community, and professional lives.

It is downright chilling to think that there are parents out there who are worried that they are going to end up on a government list or under some type of government scrutiny if they decide to go into a school board meeting to give a public comment on an issue.

It is inconceivable that the federal government today wants to squash that freedom through vague rules and intimidation. Garland seems to be making the calculation that the parents of this world will cower under the concern the government is watching them. Edited.

In the beginning, maybe they will. But in the long run, the air of intimidation probably won’t last. There comes a point when those feeling the threat go from being on the fringe of society to being the majority.

By MC

Master of Truth. A writer who has captured the imagination of many.