Soon after the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent a controversial letter to the Biden administration which asked for federal law enforcement to be leveraged against protesting parents — who were also compared to domestic terrorists — the National Education Association (NEA) sent a similar letter to social media companies.
In this letter, the NEA urged these companies to “prioritize the safety of people over profits” by stifling “propaganda” on the subject of Critical Race Theory (CRT) which supposedly stoked the “alarming” growth of “a small but violent group of radicalized” parents.
“Following recent revelations that the White House actually helped draft the NSBA letter and claims that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona solicited the letter (a claim a Department of Education spokesperson has denied), critics have suggested that the NEA letter represents yet more coordination between government and interest groups to silence parents,” Fox News reported.
“This looks like a concerted effort between the federal government and outside groups like the NEA and NSBA to interfere with the First Amendment rights of parents,” Ian Prior, father and executive director at Fight for Schools, told Fox News Digital on Wednesday.
On the subject of the allegations that the Biden administration solicited the first letter from the NSBA, Prior said that “it doesn’t stretch the imagination to believe that the federal government was also involved in the NEA letter.”
“Senate and House Republicans should do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of it,” Prior said.
The NSBA sent its letter on September 29, which claimed that school boards across the country were facing “physical threats” from those opposed to issues like CRT and COVID-19 policies. Following the Department of Justice’s release of a memorandum on October 4 that mirrored the language of the NSBA’s letter, the NEA sent its letter on Oct. 8.
Prior described the NEA letter as “ironic.”
“It’s ironic that the NEA would reference ‘radicalized parents’ who falsely believe that critical race theory is anything but a graduate level course. It was the NEA that introduced measures this summer to support the implantation of critical race theory in K-12,” he said.
Laura Zorc, executive director of Building Education for Students Together (BEST), argued that the NEA should apologize.
“The NEA owes concerned parents an apology for accusing them of being violent, ‘radicalized,’ and controlled by ‘conspiracy theories,’” Zorc told Fox News Digital. “Through BEST [an organization that helps train people to run for school boards and combat issues like COVID-19 closures and CRT] I helped train more than 1,000 parent activists in 2021, and I can tell you that this is not what I saw.”
“Creating a scary strawman while failing to address the actual worries of parents is a typical tactic for these special interest groups,” Zorc added. “Social media platforms are key for parents who are trying to organize resistance to the NEA’s agenda — the NEA’s call for suppressing so-called misinformation sounds like another name for censorship.”
Ian Haworth is an Editor and Writer for The Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter at @ighaworth.