OPINION:
Nine months into the Joe Biden presidency, radical left Democrats are using their newfound power to persecute average Americans whose only crime is daring to think for themselves.
Consider the events of just the past few weeks.
After the president announced an unconstitutional, nationwide mandate for the COVID-19 vaccine, thousands of American workers have lost their jobs for refusing to take the shot. To make matters worse, many of the newly jobless will likely be denied unemployment benefits.
“When you see headlines and reports of mass firings and hundreds of people losing their jobs, look at the bigger story,” President Biden said recently. And indeed, we should – because mass firings are only the beginning of the misery that awaits those who oppose the president’s edicts.
For example, hospitals have announced that unvaccinated patients will be denied life-saving organ transplants. “Healthcare is a human right” used to be the rallying cry of progressive Democrats – now, it seems, health care is a right reserved only for those who submit to the ruling elite’s demands.
Or consider Democrats’ plans to weaponize the IRS. The Biden administration has proposed allowing the IRS to monitor the private bank accounts of millions of law-abiding American citizens. The ostensible purpose is to catch tax cheats – but how long will it be before the IRS uses its newfound power to resume persecution of conservative groups and individuals, as it notoriously did under the Obama-Biden administration?
But perhaps most concerning are the recent threats issued by Biden’s Department of Justice against patriotic parents who object to the constant barrage of left-wing propaganda their children are subjected to in public schools.
Attorney General Merrick Garland instructed the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Attorneys to develop a strategy to address what he called “threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”
Garland’s memo came in response to a demand by the National School Boards Association, which called on the Biden administration to determine if parents protesting Critical Race Theory in education could be guilty of “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
Critical Race Theory is, in fact, nothing more than state-sponsored racism. Only in Joe Biden’s America could opposition to racism make one guilty of a “hate crime.”
Last week, former Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, the principal author of the Patriot Act, lamented that he found it necessary to “remind the Biden administration that the Patriot Act doesn’t apply to parents’ behavior at school board meetings.”
Parents are understandably upset and frustrated after the challenging year we’ve all endured. More than anything else, they just want life to get back to normal. Instead, parents and students are forced to deal with pointless mask mandates, shuttered classrooms, needlessly canceled sporting events, and teachers unions making absurd demands. Parents send their children to school to learn reading, writing, science, and math – instead, many are being taught to hate their country and the color of their own skin.
Even if local school board meetings are getting heated – or God forbid, someone commits an actual crime – involving federal law enforcement in the matter is totally unjustified. Nowhere in the country has anyone even alleged that a federal offense has been committed at a school board meeting.
Yet thousands of federal offenses are committed daily along our southern border. Every month, more than 200,000 illegal aliens pour across our border due to Joe Biden’s border crisis. Murders are up 30 percent nationwide and climbing even higher in some large cities. Doesn’t federal law enforcement have anything better to do than harass justifiably angry soccer moms?
Americans should never back down from bureaucratic bullies. If you’ve never been to a local school board meeting, now is a perfect time. Even if you don’t have kids, go. Be polite, be firm, but most of all, make your voice heard.
Mr. Biden is rapidly mobilizing the entire federal government against any who refuse to prostrate themselves before the altar of the radical left agenda. If conservatives don’t use their First Amendment rights today, the day will come when we won’t be able to.
• Former Vice President Mike Pence is Chairman of Advancing American Freedom and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Scholar at Young America’s Foundation.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.