Mark Twain famously said, “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.” If you ever doubted the wisdom of this observation, the conduct of the Loudoun County School Board, the National School Boards Association, and Attorney General Merrick Garland should put paid to your skepticism. A more patent a collection of idiots it would be hard to find.

The heroes in this story are Scott Smith, father of a young girl who had been sexually assaulted in a Loudoun County school bathroom by a “gender fluid” boy wearing a skirt, with an assist from the America First Legal Foundation (AFL), and the thousands of concerned parents of public school children around the country.

Attorney General Garland Sics the FBI on Parents

We were puzzled by Garland’s preposterous memorandum ordering the FBI to investigate angry parents showing up at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists,” but AFL, in a letter to Inspector General Michael Horowitz, makes a credible series of factual assertions about the genesis of this outrageous order. The AFL correctly reminds that the “Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized ”parents’ right to control and direct the education of their own children.” They note the large, ongoing protests by parents against Critical Race Theory indoctrination, “anti-religious and anti-family gender ideology,” and forced masking and online education mandates.

The genesis of the Garland memorandum in AFL’s telling was an effort of Biden-supporting outfits, including the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, to intimidate dissenting parents. Senior administration officials met with such groups expressing concern “regarding the potential partisan political impact of parent mobilization and organization around school issues in the upcoming midterm elections” and on the “express direction” or “consent” of such officials decided to use an outside organization as a pretext for clamping down on parents’ constitutional rights and privileges.

Inside the Department of Justice, staff raised concerns about legal and constitutional authority to interfere with parent protests. The outside group chosen to provide a colorable nexus for interfering with those rights was the National School Boards Association, which wrote to Garland citing the Patriot Act and demanding federal aid. Within days, on October 4, Garland made public his memorandum. One day later, on October 5, administration public and career officials briefed those involved, apparently “to evade public scrutiny of these Biden administration activities.”

AFL concludes that it needs Horowitz to investigate “whether the Attorney General’s memorandum was formulated and issued based upon improper considerations. At this point, the dangers inherent in the undue politicization of the department's criminal and civil law enforcement authorities and in the corruption of the department's standard order and process, should be evident.” Congress has to call Garland on the carpet about this as well, and explore the serious charges AFL has made.

Not far from Garland’s office, in nearby Northern Virginia’s Loudoun County, the political consequences of overweening school board officials trying to prevent criticism of their failings was made crystal clear in the arrest at a meeting of Scott Smith, an arrest which was outrageous and exposed the county educational establishment’s incompetence, tyranny, and corruption -- an outrage which I predict will cost the county and the Democrats dearly. The fear of the Garland-NSBA-teachers unions-Biden administration cabal of an impact on the midterms was not baseless. Once cover was stripped, parents saw the harm the left's educational policies are creating, the emasculation of parents' voices, the tyranny of Democratic officials.

There was no factual basis for the NSBA’s stated fear of terrorism. Four of the members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights wrote to Garland, stating in relevant part:

“We have combed the internet for signs that parents petitioning school boards are anything approaching a national problem: Nearly all of what we have seen so far makes us proud to be Americans: Parents care about the education of their children, and they are not willing to allow them to be indoctrinated into a radical ideology.”

NSBA has not escaped scrutiny either. Its officers are closely linked to the Democratic Party and education unions.  “State school board association also rebuked the National School Boards Association, complaining that they weren’t consulted and in some cases calling its letter to Biden inflammatory. The Florida School Boards Association said it would not continue to pay dues to the national group because of this and other disagreements; school board associations from Virginia, Montana, Louisiana and Mississippi also issued statements condemning the national organization’s letter to Biden.”

The letter also caused the Pennsylvania School Boards Association to withdraw from the organization. It’s nice to see an ostensibly nonpartisan “public interest” outfit finally caught with its leftist pants down.

It looks, as well, as if the Loudon County School Board just tied a large albatross around Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s neck and may cost him his opportunity of a second term as Virginia governor.

The Loudoun County Case

As elsewhere (see Parkland school where the superintendent finally came clean) Loudoun seems to follow Obama era (non) disciplinary measures against violent students, sheltering them while endangering the rest of the students. Additionally, the left's nonsensical coddling of gender fluid and trans children (a very small percentage) has allowed them to use the restrooms of either sex as they choose with predictable results. 

Over a four-year period Loudoun county schools failed to report multiple school rapes and sexual assaults despite state law requiring they do so.

On May 28 Scott Smith’s daughter was sexually assaulted in a school restroom by a boy wearing a skirt. The boy was transferred to another school where he committed yet another assault on another student. The only police action was against Scott Smith when, in June at a school board meeting, he was protesting the lack of action on this matter and parents raised objections to the Critical Race Theory curriculum; the school board called the police, who proceeded to make multiple arrests. Smith was dragged out of the meeting with his pants around his ankles. 

Smith was given a no-trespassing order prior to the meeting that forbids him from telling his story. This was all part of an elaborative cover-up by the school district to not publicize the rape of his daughter. In fact, when Smith showed up at the school to complain about what had happened, they essentially accused him of lying and called the police, not on the transgender rapist, but on Smith himself for causing a scene. Luckily, he was able to get his daughter a rape kit that evening that confirmed the crime.

Further, moments before Smith’s arrest, the school board announced that they had no record of any rape regarding their transgender policies at their schools. That is what set the desperate father off. He had an Antifa “anti-racist” activist at the meeting claim his daughter was lying. When an argument ensued, police grabbed his arm. When he pulled his arm away, he was assaulted and thrown to the ground, handcuffed, and drug out of the room.

And while the far-left prosecutor’s office, which would eventually try to throw the book at Smith over his arrest at the school board meeting, insisted they were taking the rape case seriously, the same boy was let back into the school system. Within months, he had committed another rape.

But while it is clear the local school board put children at risk in order to cover for their own demented ideology, things didn’t stop there. Smith’s case was actually cited by the DOJ in their letter warning of “domestic terrorism” at school board meetings. AG Merrick Garland had to have been apprised of the details of the case, yet he chose to obfuscate and pretend Smith was a terrorist threat anyway.

The local fallout is substantial. The county superintendent has apologized, and the most leftist member of the board, a staunch advocate of Critical Race Theory, has resigned. The school superintendent has issued an apology:

On Friday, Ziegler said the school system is pursuing changes that would remove or erode these barriers to swift discipline of a student charged with sexual assault, including by lobbying for revisions to Title IX that would better protect victims. Ziegler said he spoke Friday morning about these changes with Virginia Secretary of Education Atif Qarni, as well as with the office of U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.

In the meantime, Ziegler said, “to the extent we are legally permitted to do so, we will begin disciplinary action at the time of the incident, rather than suspending that action until the end of the Title IX or criminal investigation.”

He added that, while continuing to obey Title IX, Loudoun will take steps “to separate alleged offenders from the general student body.” He said he will recommend changes to school policy to ensure that this separation takes place. Additionally, he said, he has directed his deputy superintendent to fast-track the debut of “alternative placement” options for students involved in serious disciplinary actions.

Smith and his family are suing the school district. The Smiths contend:

The sexual assault on our daughter and the subsequent sexual assault by the same individual were both predictable and preventable, Subsequent to the sexual assault on our daughter, Loudoun Country Public Schools formalized a policy regarding restroom use that was easily exploitable by a potential sexual assailant. Because of poor planning and misguided policies, Loudon schools failed to institute even minimal safeguards to protect students from sexual assaults. And contrary to statements from the Loudoun County Commonwealth Attorney’s office our family was never informed that the student who sexually assaulted our daughter was being returned to the schools. Had we been informed, we would have been outraged.

The facts are that a male student claiming to be ‘gender fluid’ was permitted to enter the girls’ bathroom on May 28 and sexually assault our daughter. Making matters worse, the school system repeatedly failed to protect her thereafter. Then they concealed the sexual assault from the public while considering formalizing a bathroom access policy that would have--and now has--increased the likelihood of sexual assaults like these.”

Northern Virginia suburbs have increasingly turned Democratic as federal workers and contractors have moved there, but I think the Loudoun case which exposed how little the Democrat officials care for the law, the constitutional rights of parents, the protection of students and their right to an education free of left-wing propaganda may have ignited a rebellion. McAuliffe lied when he said Critical Race Theory is not being taught in Virginia schools; nevertheless, it is telling that the candidate who in the most recent debate said parents had no right to determine curriculum was forced to lie to hide the curriculum parents abhor. 

He’s in an unexpectedly tight race for the governorship. The plotters in the administration who wanted to intimidate parents from objecting to the nonsense being propagated by idiot school boards were not wrong -- it will adversely affect Democrats in the midterms, I predict. It’s just that their overreach will multiply that consequence.

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