The Biden Administration’s Greatest Foe? “It’s the Moms, Stupid”

COMMENTARY Civil Society

The Biden Administration’s Greatest Foe? “It’s the Moms, Stupid”

Jun 27, 2023 3 min read
COMMENTARY BY
Mike Gonzalez

Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow

Mike is the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
Parents and counterprotestors face off in front of Saticoy Elementary School, as parents protest the planned Gay Pride and Rainbow Day assembly on June 2, 2023. Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times / Getty Images

Key Takeaways

It was probably the Biden administration that asked the Southern Poverty Law Center to put several parental rights groups...on its “hate map.”

The Biden administration requested that the NSBA ask the Justice Department to treat parents who stood in the way of its agenda as “domestic terrorists.”

PDE has also succeeded with a raft of legislation that helps parental rights. We can see why the White House wants to sic law enforcement on them.

The Biden administration is making clear once again whom it fears the most. It is not China, Russia, or, needless to say, Republicans. No. Enemy No. 1 is America’s mothers and fathers. They stand athwart the administration’s mad dash to remake America, yelling, “Stop!”

This much can be gleaned from recent events. First is this week’s announcement that Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, was appointed to a Department of Homeland Security school advisory board. It will, among other things, make recommendations on “safety and security” measures. Outraged parents groups and members of Congress rightly pointed out that this was akin to putting a rabid fox in charge of watching the hatching incubator.

Weingarten is particularly blamed by parents for keeping schools closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, a policy that later was amply shown to have been ineffective and deleterious to children. “Most parents believe you were the tip of the spear of school closures,” CNN political commentator Scott Jennings berated the union boss in an April exchange that went viral. “There are numerous statements you made over the summer of ’20 scaring people to death about the possibility of opening schools, and I hear no remorse whatsoever about the generational damage that’s been done to these kids.”

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Consider another piece of evidence demonstrating that the Biden team sees parents groups, especially Parents Defending Education, as the greatest obstacle to its campaign to deprogram the minds of children and adults alike. It now appears, as predicted, that it was probably the Biden administration that asked the Southern Poverty Law Center to put several parental rights groups, including PDE and Moms For Liberty, or M4L, on its “hate map.” The SPLC is an especially oleaginous member of the Left’s large web of unctuous groups. Its main function is to put groups in the crosshairs of real domestic terrorists by adding them to its hate maps.

As my Heritage colleague Tyler O’Neil, who wrote “Making Hate Pay” about the corruption that has always surrounded the SPLC, has documented, the White House and the SPLC appear to have coordinated the hit on the parents. The main author of the SPLC’s hit, Susan Corke, met at the White House in January with John Picarelli, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism director. Picarelli also spoke, alongside members of the SPLC, at an “Eradicate Hate Global Summit" in April. And two days after the SPLC released its hate map, the White House suddenly released a strategy “to Protect LGBTQI+ Communities.” It said it had “monitoring" evidence that members of the LGBT groups face threats "increasingly tied to hate groups and domestic violent extremists.” Just excellent timing?

Anything is possible, but Congress ought to investigate if there indeed was a collaboration between the corrupt SPLC and the White House. Such coordination would not be new.

In its first year in office, the Biden administration requested that the National School Boards Association ask the Justice Department to treat parents who stood in the way of its agenda as “domestic terrorists.” The stratagem blew apart when the collaboration was revealed, and the NSBA recanted its action. Deprogramming is at the heart of this agenda. Gone must be any vestigial sense of patriotism, fondness for the family (sorry, “patriarchy”, or appreciation for the free-market system. Once this is accomplished, the strategy is to reprogram American brains with the outlandish fabrication that America is systemically racist and oppressive. PDE (on whose board of advisers I proudly sit) and M4L (with whom I have gladly collaborated) stand in the way of all that.

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M4L does a lot of important work: It supports candidates vying to flip school boards (during the 2022 Florida midterm elections, a remarkable 61% of their endorsed candidates won), has engaged parents in making sure that books accessible by children in school libraries are age-appropriate, and has educated parents on proposed legislation in several states. No wonder the Biden team fears them. Ditto for PDE. It actually played the lead role in exposing the NSBA scam, emailing every single state school board association to ask if they’d been involved with the letter or supported it. It turned out that in many cases, the answer was a resounding no. Twenty-one state NSBA affiliates left the national NSBA, while many of the remaining ones distanced themselves. PDE has also succeeded with a raft of legislation that helps parental rights.

We can see why the White House wants to sic law enforcement on them. As a conservative James Carville might say, “It’s the moms, stupid.”

This piece originally appeared in Restoring America by the Washington Examiner