In this episode, we discuss the FBI's interference in local school board meetings and the chilling effect it may be having on freedom of speech. We also hear from a former school board member who says he thinks the FBI is trying to silence parents who want to speak out about their children's education. And we hear from Sen. Josh Hawley, D-Missouri, who accuses the DOJ of weaponizing federal law enforcement against parents who love their kids and want to vote for their elected school board members. We'll have more on all of this and much more on this episode of the podcast in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for our special segments throughout the week. Special thanks to our sponsor, Caff Monster Energy Drink, for making great tasting beverages with twice the caffeine and fueling the energy in the airwaves. Enjoy and Retweet this episode! and spread the word to your friends about what's going on in the world of politics and government surveillance! -The Dark Side of the Deep State! Subscribe to our new podcast, The Dark Side Of Politics, wherever you get your news and information, and stay tuned for more stories like this and more! Tomahawkawk on all things politics and more. -Tomahawk Nation - Tomahawks! and The Deep State Watchdog is a new podcast that exposes the dark side of the deep state and exposes the government spying on American citizens everywhere. . The Deep state spying on their every right here at home and abroad. The deep state is spying on them! The Dark side of our own government, our own secret court system, and everywhere else, and they're spying on us, and we're watching us. And we're here to protect us, we're not safe, we can do it, we are watching them. , and we are here to make it. the whole truth, we know it, not they're watching it, right here, right? the truth, not them , right here in our own homes, right at home, right on our own, right now, and here, our phones are watching us, listening to us, our thoughts and our thoughts, right in the next stop, and so on it, our streets, and our own thoughts and ears, right there, everywhere and everywhere, right across the rest of the world, and all of it all, everywhere, everywhere .
00:00:03.000Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members in the entire Congress who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents.
00:00:10.000Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem in the Democratic Party.
00:00:13.000He could cause a lot of hiccups in passing the laws.
00:00:16.000So we're going to keep running those stories to keep hurting him.
00:00:20.000If you stand for the flag and kneel in prayer, if you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground, then welcome, my fellow patriots!
00:00:53.000Ms. Monaco, I want to come back to this extraordinary letter and memorandum that the Attorney General of the United States issued yesterday.
00:01:02.000Practically every day brings new reports about this administration weaponizing the federal bureaucracy to go after political opponents.
00:01:09.000Frankly, I don't think we've ever seen anything like it in American history.
00:01:12.000Is parents waiting sometimes for hours to speak at a local school board meeting to express concerns about critical race theory or the masking of their students, particularly young children?
00:01:24.000Is that, in and of itself, is that harassment and intimidation?
00:01:28.000Is waiting to express one's view at a school board meeting harassment and intimidation?
00:01:33.000As the Attorney General's memorandum made quite clear, spirited debate is welcome, is a hallmark of this country.
00:01:40.000It's something we all should engage in.
00:01:52.000I think we can agree that violence shouldn't be condoned or looked aside from in any way, swept under the rug at all.
00:01:59.000But harassment and intimidation, what did those terms mean in the context of a local school board meeting?
00:02:05.000I mean, this seems to, in the First Amendment context, we talk about the chill, the chill to speech.
00:02:09.000If this isn't a deliberate attempt to chill parents, From showing up at school board meetings for their elected school boards, I don't know what is.
00:02:19.000I mean, I'm not aware of anything like this in American history.
00:02:23.000We're talking about the FBI. You're using the FBI to intervene in school board meetings.
00:03:06.000That if they show up at a local school or board meeting, by the way, where they have the right to appear and be heard, where they have the right to say something about their children's education, where they have the right to vote, and you are attempting to intimidate them, you are attempting to silence them.
00:03:22.000You are attempting to interfere with their rights as parents, and yes, with their rights as voters.
00:03:30.000And I cannot believe that an Attorney General of the United States is engaging in this kind of conduct.
00:03:35.000And frankly, I can't believe that you are sitting here today defending it.
00:03:41.000That's firebrand Missouri United States Senator Josh Hawley going after the Department of Justice and the FBI for weaponizing federal law enforcement against parents who love their kids and show up to school board meetings.
00:03:55.000I've got an interview with a former school board member I know pretty well later in the show.
00:04:00.000But it begs the question, where has federal law enforcement gone astray?
00:04:43.000The greatest threat we face abroad is a rising, ambitious Chinese Communist Party.
00:04:49.000And we'll have upcoming episodes and segments about that in the very near future.
00:04:55.000Their hooks into our political, tech, and corporate elite will be exposed.
00:05:00.000But today, we will focus on the greatest domestic threat to America, and that is the weaponization of the national security state that has been directed inward against our American citizens, often for the preservation of corrupt institutions or the acquisition of political power.
00:05:22.000I made this point on Steve Bannon's War Room recently.
00:05:27.000I believe that there are people who under almost any other circumstance would be out on their own recognizance, but to make a political point are behind bars right now because the Biden administration, the intelligence community, they want to turn these exquisite authorities in the national security apparatus inward to the American people to hunt our people.
00:05:47.000Spying, lying, smearing, electioneering, melding the worlds of intelligence collection, criminal targeting and domestic political ambition.
00:05:59.000I grew up my entire life thinking the FBI were the good guys, always, top to bottom.
00:06:04.000They wanted justice, not success or failure for political movements.
00:06:09.000Frankly, the FBI was too cool for politics, I figured.
00:06:14.000That perspective informed my worldview until I was seated on the House Judiciary Committee in 2017. The Russia hoax was already in full swing by then.
00:06:31.000I saw clearly what was happening at a politicized FBI during this December 2017 interview with Fox News' Ed Henry.
00:06:40.000The problem is, in the swamp of Washington, D.C., the biggest alligator is a politicized FBI and Department of Justice.
00:06:47.000And that's why we're fighting hard to make sure that we've got a fair and equal opportunity for all sides to be heard, and that you don't have this pro-Hillary Clinton bias, anti-Donald Trump bias continue to infect our institutions and our systems that all Americans should be able to rely on.
00:07:04.000Even some Republicans we looked up to and trusted at the time, like Paul Ryan and Trey Gowdy, said we should trust the FBI and Robert Mueller.
00:07:14.000I told people at the time that Gowdy was wrong.
00:07:18.000The FBI was putting their thumb on the scale to try to nail Trump because the deep state despised him, even if our voters elected him.
00:07:27.000I made the case that Gowdy and Ryan blew it in this appearance on Sean Hannity.
00:07:32.000I'm glad you went through Trey Gowdy's exquisite questions in 2017 to these corrupt officials.
00:07:38.000I guess my question, Sean, would be why was it then in late May of 2018 that Trey Gowdy went on Martha McCallum's show and said that the FBI did exactly what all of our fellow Americans would have wanted them to do?
00:07:51.000And that it had nothing to do with Donald Trump.
00:07:53.000Both of those things have now been proven to be not true.
00:07:56.000And it seems that Gowdy's brilliant lawyering back in 2017 that we're only able to see now proves those two statements untrue.
00:08:03.000The number one question I get asked from Americans is why no one has gone to jail and been held accountable.
00:08:09.000Unfortunately, when Nunes and Meadows and Jordan and I wanted subpoena power, it was Paul Ryan and Trey Gowdy that wouldn't give us that subpoena power.
00:08:17.000Democrats sent out hundreds of subpoenas when we had control and could have run We made a mistake.
00:08:22.000We didn't send out a single subpoena, not one, and that's a failure of our Republican leadership.
00:08:27.000Jim Jordan, Ron DeSantis, Mark Meadows, Devin Nunes, we were all not deterred.
00:08:33.000We continued to push for investigations.
00:08:37.000Then we got a bombshell report from the Inspector General.
00:08:41.000In secret courts, our own government officials were doctoring evidence, lying on certifications, not supporting factual claims with required evidence, and violating the very procedures intended to preserve our delicate liberties.
00:09:01.000We should have been attacking the credibility of these corrupt investigations into Trump from the start.
00:09:07.000We should not have indulged them, even for one moment.
00:09:11.000But here is Gowdy in May of 2018, when we were in power.
00:09:16.000We could have actually done something.
00:09:18.000But Gowdy was just simping for the FBI. I am, I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
00:09:33.000After Gowdy made these statements, House Judiciary held a joint hearing with the Oversight and Government Reform and Accountability Committees, which Gowdy actually chairs OGR. And this happened.
00:09:45.000There is no member of Congress who holds the department and the bureau in higher esteem than I do.
00:09:51.000There are others who hold you in high esteem, but I would take second place to no one.
00:09:57.000And I have defended the Department and the Bureau when, frankly, it was pretty damn lonely to do so.
00:10:03.000When my Democrat friends were asking that Jim Comey be prosecuted for a Hatch Act violation about this time last year, they now want him canonized, but this time last year they wanted him prosecuted for a Hatch Act violation.
00:10:18.000When your predecessor sat right where you're sitting and was embroiled in a fight with this little tiny startup company called Apple, I was on the side of the Bureau.
00:10:29.000When there are calls for special counsel, even today, I reject them because I trust the women and men of the Department of Justice and the Bureau, the professionals that we hired, To do their job.
00:10:42.000Gowdy was spectacularly wrong about the FBI in the Russia investigation.
00:10:46.000To his credit, he admitted as much to Tucker Carlson after he left office and became a Fox News personality.
00:10:54.000That was, I made a lot of mistakes in life, relying on briefings and not insisting on the documents.
00:11:25.000Jim Jordan put it best, if they can do it to the President of the United States, Just imagine.
00:11:32.000And most importantly, this bill is an improvement over what currently exists, over the status quo.
00:11:37.000The legislation begins to address the problems that we saw with the FBI's illegal surveillance of Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
00:11:43.000On December 9th, 2019, the nonpartisan Justice Department inspector general released a 400-page report detailing the FBI's misconduct and the failures in its warrantless surveillance of Mr. Page.
00:11:57.000Congressman Meadows and I urged our Democrat chairman to hold hearings on this report, but they were not interested.
00:12:01.000Still, I hope all of my colleagues had a chance to read the inspector general's report because it should concern every single American.
00:12:10.000Remember, if our law enforcement agencies can do this to a president, imagine what they can do to you and I. They did it to President Trump.
00:12:18.000We caught them red-handed, so we demanded a broader review.
00:12:21.000Now we have those results, and they are truly terrifying.
00:12:26.000The failures that fueled the corruption of the Trump-Russia hoax are still happening today.
00:12:32.000Secret courts are operating in the United States, giving the FBI incredible powers to spy on US citizens.
00:12:41.000In 1978, the 95th Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and that they were able to get done with overwhelming support from a majority of the United States Senate, including then-Senator Joe Biden.
00:12:57.000Now, this provided a statutory framework for government agencies to obtain authorization for gathering foreign intelligence, And they did so through electronic surveillance, physical searches, pen registers, trap and trace devices, and the production of certain business records.
00:13:15.000The innocent intention of FISA was to create a check on the executive branch's authority to surveil anyone it deems a threat.
00:13:23.000FISA established the Independent Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and they claim that the FISC was supposed to protect liberty over this notion of an aggressive, nosy executive branch.
00:13:38.000In America, when law enforcement conducts a search, the Fourth Amendment requires that the search warrant is approved by a neutral magistrate, typically a federal judge.
00:13:49.000When the NSA and FBI want to eavesdrop on you, they obtain a secret warrant I can hear George Washington gasping from the grave.
00:14:18.000Today's data shows that the Fisk is little more than a rubber stamp.
00:14:22.000They approve over 75% of the warrants without any modification.
00:14:27.000And 99% of all requested warrants approved.
00:14:33.000The Fisk has morphed from a neutral arbiter, separate from the executive branch, into a partisan court, which directly threatens your civil liberties.
00:14:43.000They aren't partisan for Republicans or Democrats as much as they are partisan toward the government and against the rest of us.
00:14:54.000The days of Occupy, Wall Street, and anti-establishment are over in favor of allegiance to the state and big, woke corporations.
00:15:03.000All the powers that B had to do was cloak their regime in rainbow flags and BLM shirts, and the emotionally vulnerable and manipulatable left bent the knee.
00:15:13.000The left no longer serves as any type of threat to the regime, but the right is more objective, more aware, and less easily fooled.
00:15:22.000Excluding Paul Ryan and Trey Gowdy, of course.
00:15:26.000That means the only people fighting this corruption...
00:15:30.000It's you and me, America First conservatives.
00:15:34.000It's why we feel the deep state is typically targeting us, because they are.
00:15:38.000In the early 2000s, as a direct response to 9-11, we had the Bush administration enacting the Patriot Act, which presided over enhanced investigative tools.
00:15:50.000Justified by the notion of preventing future terrorist attacks.
00:15:54.000You wonder why they want to call everyone associated with January 6 a terrorist?
00:15:58.000It's because they want to use these tools.
00:16:00.000Even though some people pose no threat to the regime or the government, it's a basis to target a political movement.
00:16:08.000Now, Section 215 of the Patriot Act augmented FISA's ability to access business records, and that's what sparked the metadata collection debate of the 2000s.
00:16:20.000Remember the former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, testifying before Congress that there wasn't bulk collection of data?
00:16:26.000Turns out, there was bulk collection of data.
00:16:29.000I never understood why he wasn't arrested and charged for lying to Congress, like others might be.
00:16:35.000After the extreme criminal abuses of the FISA process during the Russia hoax, the Inspector General at the Department of Justice decided to audit a few cases at random.
00:16:46.000Take a look under the hood, peel back the layers of the onion, choose your metaphor.
00:16:52.000In the words of the Inspector General, quote,"...physical search and or electric surveillance pursuant to FISA is one of the DOJ's most intrusive investigative authorities." The IG looked at 29 cases.
00:17:09.000Keep in mind, the standards for these applications is one of, and I'm quoting directly from the regs here, scrupulous accuracy.
00:17:19.000Guess how many of those 29 files were noncompliant?
00:17:48.000Four out of 29. And the full review contained 209 errors.
00:17:54.000Some of them the Department of Justice deemed material errors.
00:17:58.000And in all 29 cases, a judge in a secret court authorized the spying.
00:18:06.000Often without the required legally supporting documentation.
00:18:11.000So, the Inspector General looked at even more cases, and now we have a fresh new report from the IG. September of this year, we found the same failures that allowed the Russia hoax to continue Well, they're still failing today.
00:19:29.000Over 40 corrective actions that go above and beyond the recommendations of the Inspector General's report, and those have been implemented.
00:19:36.000Those include everything from strengthening our procedures to ensure accuracy and completeness, to make sure the court gets all the information it's supposed to, changes in our protocols for CHSs, Confidential Human Sources, training changes.
00:19:52.000I created a new Office of Internal Audit They're specifically focused on FISA auditing.
00:19:59.000But according to the IG, what Ray says and what the FBI does are quite different.
00:20:08.000The FBI director publicly acknowledged the seriousness of the identified problems and announced numerous steps the FBI was undertaking to address them.
00:20:17.000However, we believe certain statements from the FBI failed to recognize the significant risks posed by systemic noncompliance with the Woods procedures.
00:20:28.000And during our audit, some FBI personnel minimalized the significance of Woods procedures noncompliance.
00:20:37.000In the words of the IG, these chronic failures, quote, can lead to faulty probable cause determinations and infringement of US persons' civil liberties.
00:20:53.000Even though the FBI apparently diminishes their violation of our American rights, these abuses and tortured interpretations of FISA over the past 43 years exemplifies well-intentioned policy morphing into a monster.
00:21:09.000Section 215 enabled the FBI to ask the FISA court to compel the sharing of books and business documents, tax records, library checkout lists, any other tangible thing as a part of a foreign intelligence or international terrorism investigation.
00:21:26.000The required material can include purely domestic records.
00:21:30.000Kind of makes you wonder why they're trying to label the political movement they don't like a terrorist movement when there are these tools that, even though they exist under something called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, can result in the production of so many records, so long as they just append a label of terrorism, whether it's appropriate or not.
00:21:50.000And so what do we say to those who just claim that FISA's errors are unintentional, in good faith, for the greater good?
00:21:58.000I'm not buying the BS. These errors were egregious and systemic and, I believe, possibly intentional.
00:22:10.000Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being tripped over.
00:22:16.000And folks, we have been getting roundhoused.
00:22:18.000After the Bush abuses of FISA came the Obama expansions and abuses of FISA. Can't say that I'm surprised.
00:22:26.000In fact, in 2008, Senator Obama voted for the Bush-sponsored Protect America Act, which extended the government's expanding spying powers for an additional four years.
00:22:39.000Bush, Cheney, Obama, Biden, they all hate your civil liberties.
00:22:45.000Trump was different precisely because he was targeted.
00:22:57.000Barack Obama spent a surprising amount of his presidency extending the Bush-era Patriot Act.
00:23:04.000In fact, in May of 2011, the Patriot Act was set to expire, and Obama was abroad.
00:23:09.000He cared so much about the government's wiretapping abilities, he became the first U.S. president in history to sign a bill into law using the auto pen.
00:23:37.000On a day-to-day basis, I'm not sure terrorists are as capable and dangerous to the American way of life as our own government.
00:23:47.000We must amend FISA. We must put a check on the NSA and FBI's ability to summon uncontested warrants through rubber-stamped secret courts.
00:23:58.000We can't stand by and watch as the deep state obfuscates the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, so many of the rights enshrined in our Constitution.
00:24:07.000And they're just picking who they're going to go after next.
00:24:11.000The only crime greater than international terrorism is enabling, promoting, and abusing a system where your fellow countrymen is blatantly surveilled by an oppressive government without the due process of law.
00:24:26.000Currently the system is in direct contrast to the principles that the United States of America was founded on.
00:24:35.000Don't get me wrong, FISA can still be used for its original purpose, to fight terrorism, to detect threats before they occur.
00:24:43.000That said, metadata collection is misaligned.
00:24:47.000And the current process that enables political witch hunts and law enforcement should be reformed.
00:24:53.000So let's look at a few of the ideas for reform.
00:24:55.000In 2019, Mark Meadows introduced H.R. 4046, the FISA Reform Act.
00:25:01.000That would have required periodic reports to Congress about FISA surveillance to include the identity of any individual who is targeted and associated with a presidential candidate of a major party.
00:25:13.000The Democrat Congress did nothing with this.
00:25:15.000In that same Congress, Representative Justin Amash introduced the FISA Oversight Correction Act, which would have authorized a court to disclose to a person information related to evidence collected about that person using certain foreign intelligence surveillance powers, if that disclosure would likely promote a more accurate determination of the legality of the surveillance.
00:25:40.000Tulsi Gabbard, another firebrand, she introduced the Protect Our Civil Liberties Act.
00:25:46.000Now that bill would have repealed the Patriot Act and certain FISA provisions.
00:25:50.000The legislation would have also prohibited the acquisition of information regarding U.S. persons if they were using Foreign intelligence tools to get that information without a warrant.
00:26:02.000That would have reset the balance of liberties.
00:26:05.000That would have been effective from a law enforcement standpoint and it wouldn't have created just an ecosystem allowing incredible fraud that was identified during the Russia hoax and which still has not been cured.
00:27:00.000I think there's a bigger problem in the Congress.
00:27:02.000We have to be able to rely on the Intelligence Committee and the leadership of that committee because as the American people know, every member of Congress does not see every piece of intelligence.
00:27:12.000I have filed legislation today sent to the House that Adam Schiff needs to be removed from the Intelligence Committee, because how are the rest of us supposed to be able to rely on a man who you just showed lied to the American people when he said that there wasn't spying, or when he lied and said there was actual evidence of collusion, or clear evidence of collusion?
00:27:29.000If Adam Schiff is able to review covert operations and intelligence, and if we have to be able to rely on his representations, our whole system is broken.
00:27:38.000I mean, it would be like putting Lori Loughlin in charge of the College Board.
00:27:42.000It would be like putting Jussie Smollett in charge of the hate crime division of the FBI. We have got to remove Adam Schiff from the intelligence.
00:27:49.000In 35 years of watching Congress, I've never seen a member of Congress with lower personal integrity than Adam Schiff.
00:27:54.000And it's shocking to me that he chairs that committee.
00:27:58.000Is there any hope of unseating him from that?
00:27:59.000I think that Nancy Pelosi and just your rank-and-file Democrats have to feel the pressure from this.
00:28:04.000Their constituents have to ask them, how are you going to be able to make decisions in the best interest of our country and our district if it's Adam Schiff that you're listening to to get characterizations and representations on the quality of the intelligence and whether or not it should justify congressional action?
00:28:19.000I want to just explain to our viewers we have on the screen the name of this act, the Pencil Act, Preventing Extreme Negligence with Classified Information Licenses.
00:28:30.000Congress must rein in FISA. And I'll work with anyone who believes in our Constitution and has the courage to stand up and fight back against the deep state.
00:28:42.000As I mentioned earlier, the Attorney General's recent memo weaponizes the FBI against parents who show up to school board meetings.
00:28:50.000Here's my interview with former Florida Senate President, former Florida Superintendent of Schools in Okaloosa County, and former school board member, my dad, Don Gates.
00:29:04.000Grabbing coffee here with my dad in our hometown in Iceville, Florida.
00:29:08.000And as I mentioned, my dad was an educational leader in this community for about 12 years, six years on the school board, six years as school superintendent.
00:29:16.000And I want to get your reaction to the melding of a school board mission and the FBI mission in just a moment.
00:29:24.000But dad, I got to tell you, Something special is going on this year with people's interest in the school board.
00:29:30.000Usually when I travel the country, I meet people who are running for Congress or Senate or Governor, but overwhelmingly the people I meet who are interested in politics now view the school board as the front line of the culture war.
00:29:44.000And I always give them advice kind of through the lens of your experience, which is if you run for school board, There's no time at night when your phone isn't going to be ringing because if people are contacting you about their kids, there is an intimacy and a passion and a devotion to that cause that is different than other parts of politics like our service in the legislature or my service in Congress.
00:30:10.000So before we get to the FBI injection into school board operations, What advice would you give to people who are out there who are interested in running for the school board?
00:30:22.000Well, I think it was Ronald Reagan who said that the future of our country will depend as much on who's on the school board as who's in Congress.
00:30:31.000And that's because at school board level, you're dealing with people's kids, you're dealing with their schools, and the greatest share of their local tax dollars.
00:30:40.000And that gets people worked up and gets some concern, particularly when it's involving your kids.
00:30:46.000So I would say to people who have Any interest in their children, their children's education, their community, the direction of this country, that the culture wars are being fought on the front lines of your local school board.
00:31:00.000That's where the 1619 Project is being discussed.
00:31:03.000That's where critical race theory is being discussed and in some cases pushed.
00:31:09.000That's where COVID mandates are really meeting the road.
00:31:13.000And if you want to be involved, be on the school board, And it's the greatest job you can ever have because you're involved in trying to help make things better for kids.
00:31:22.000Now, you interact with other education leaders around the country, and typically your school board members are former teachers, former school administrators.
00:31:32.000You took a business background onto the school board.
00:31:34.000And now what I see, a lot of the parents that want to run for school board across America, they didn't necessarily have that classroom experience, but they have the parenting experience, which oftentimes is, I think, diminished.
00:32:10.000Anything is better in a school district or in a community when parents are involved in what's going on in schools.
00:32:17.000And therefore, it's the right thing to do for activist parents, parents who care, parents who are concerned.
00:32:23.000I got on the school board and ran for the school board, as you might remember, because I was an angry parent.
00:32:29.000I couldn't understand why some things were going on that were going on, so I ran for the school board to fix it, and then ultimately wound up being elected superintendent.
00:32:39.000The stuff you are angry about, you are angry that the bus routes were inefficient, that the purchasing of supplies didn't make sense, that the teachers weren't being compensated to the same degree as administrators.
00:32:51.000And I mean, that stuff looks like A pretty easy circle to square compared to the mandates, the COVID restrictions, and the critical race theory that seems to have animated so many parents today.
00:33:04.000I mean, we're sitting here across the street from my high school, and you brought this district from...
00:33:09.000You know, 36th out of 67 counties to number one.
00:33:13.000And it seemed to me as an observer that parental involvement was the number one thing that brought a school from a C or a D school to an A or a B school.
00:33:24.000Do you observe what's happening now with school board meetings being filled with parents who at times are angry and accosted?
00:33:32.000Is that on balance a positive or an negative?
00:33:36.000I think that things start to get really better and by better I mean more responsive to the community, better for kids in schools when parents hit a pain threshold and say, you know, I don't understand why my kid can't read.
00:33:50.000I don't understand why my kid doesn't understand American history.
00:33:53.000I don't understand why my kid, you know, is not doing well in competition with other kids around the country or around the world.
00:34:00.000I don't understand why there are rules coming from the school or the school board that don't seem to make sense.
00:34:06.000When parents begin to question and even get angry, like I did, then I think things get better because school board members, and I was one, then have to be accountable and respond and dig down inside themselves and say, well, the reason we're doing this is because We've looked at the evidence and we're making the right decision.
00:34:27.000But you don't get that kind of interaction until you get people, citizens, saying, why are you doing this?
00:34:36.000And that means better schools and better communities.
00:34:39.000We see more and more parents who are in medicine, in science, who I think are unwilling to just accept What is put before them in the absence of analysis and rigor and the scientific method and a review of data.
00:34:56.000And as a consequence of that, we've seen this really chilling reaction from federal law enforcement.
00:35:05.000What was your reaction when you saw that the Attorney General had directed the head of the FBI to start analyzing the conduct of angry parents at school board meetings?
00:35:14.000Well, I have to tell you that you can certainly find some humor in that, but at the same time, it was reminiscent of some really bad things.
00:35:23.000That have happened in history when people from the federal government start showing up, folding their hands, standing in the back of public meetings and keeping track of who is saying what, or going back over the list of people who showed up in a meeting and who said what.
00:35:39.000You know, parents have to be really concerned to take time away from their jobs, from what goes on at home, from making dinner and everything else, to go to a school board meeting anyway.
00:35:51.000And sometimes parents are afraid of retaliation.
00:35:54.000On their kids, if they go to a school board meeting.
00:35:57.000When you throw on top of that, the FBI is maybe watching.
00:36:02.000That has a chilling effect on parental involvement in their children's schools and the issues that are involving their children, but it also has a chilling effect on free speech.
00:36:13.000You can't have people from the government standing in the back of a public meeting with their arms folded, keeping track of who's saying what.
00:36:22.000That's the kind of thing that our fathers and our grandfathers and our grandmothers and grandfathers fought against in two world wars.
00:36:32.000The National School Board Association requested this action.
00:36:37.000Did you have a perspective on that group when you were a school board member?
00:36:45.000I refused to pay dues, and I refused to have dues paid on my behalf.
00:36:49.000I mean, again, you know, I think it's good that we have people who have been in education, who want to serve on a school board, who want to continue to help.
00:36:58.000But if you have people who are basically a parrot chicks of the union, And they just continue to want to keep things the way they are.
00:37:06.000That creates a culture in the school board.
00:37:09.000And it creates a culture in school board associations.
00:37:12.000And I'm afraid that too many state and national school board associations are populated by people who don't want to make change, who don't want things to be better, who want things to be the same, and they want less time with kids and they want more money.
00:37:38.000But I do have concern about the chilling effect you mentioned.
00:37:44.000If the intent of this action was to discourage participation, based on your experience being on the front lines of a lot of these battles, do you think it'll work?
00:37:53.000Because I almost think it could backfire.
00:37:55.000I think as parents are really backed down by the federal government, they will become even more strident and even more active.
00:38:05.000It remains to be seen in the weeks and months ahead.
00:38:08.000Are the school board meetings going to go back to a dynamic with the tumbleweed rolling through?
00:38:13.000Or are these parents going to keep showing up?
00:38:15.000I just don't think that the FBI wants to pick a fight with tiger moms and tiger dads who love their kids.
00:38:24.000If the intent here is to chill participation, Do you think it'll work?
00:38:30.000Well, I think that at the school board level and many other levels, fierce debate, even angry debate at public meetings is kind of the steam release valve in a democracy.
00:38:44.000And if you tell people directly or implicitly that they shouldn't show up, they can't show up, they have to be careful what they say, they have to be careful who they sit next to, they have to be careful what kind of sign they bring to the meeting, if you keep saying that, that's not going to stop Americans from being angry or being concerned or wanting to change things.
00:39:06.000What it does is it promotes some other way that there can be an explosion, God forbid, of people's concerns.
00:39:15.000So that's why our forefathers said, you know, we're going to have free speech.
00:39:19.000We're going to have the public square be a place where even crazy people can shake their fists at each other and make speeches about things that don't matter.
00:39:26.000Because that's the safety valve in a democracy.
00:39:29.000And I've been on both sides of the school board table.
00:39:32.000I've been the angry parent shaking his fist at the school board, and I've been a school board member who've had people shake their fists at me.
00:39:39.000And I can tell you, that's what democracy looks like.
00:39:44.000And when you take away the town meeting, when you take away the dynamic of people caring about things enough to show up and speak fiercely, even angrily at each other, but then maybe afterwards go out and have a beer together, Then if you take that away, then you've really chilled democracy.
00:40:02.000In Florida, we actually passed a law, you voted for it, you were one of the big supporters of it, called the right to speak law.
00:40:09.000Because we had some school boards and some others in Florida who were saying, well, you don't need to speak, or we're only going to have one minute to speak, or you can speak at the end of the meeting, but not before we vote on this.
00:40:21.000So now before every single policy decision or appropriation decision is made, At a public meeting in Florida, whether it's the mosquito control board or the school board or any place else, if people want to speak, they have a right to stand up and speak their truth to the power that's in front of them.
00:40:40.000If we do that in Florida, we ought to do that in America.
00:40:43.000Yeah, Florida man does not abide being shut down from the opportunity to speak, and in a way that is democracy's karaoke.
00:40:52.000Everybody gets to kind of get up and sing their own song, and sometimes they're off tune or off pitch, and sometimes it's the kind of magical lyric that can bring people together or can lead to better solutions.
00:41:04.000I don't think our schools are going to be better if we drive parents out of them.
00:41:08.000I don't believe that education is best as a government-run monopoly, With so many regular folks, we do need public schools to help people move up in the world.
00:41:19.000I mean, that's how MOM became so successful, the great public schools here in our community.
00:41:25.000And I just have all the best well wishes to the great patriots around our country who love America and their families and their kids enough to step up and make their voices known to school board members, to run for school board.
00:41:38.000And my friend Jim Jordan often says that This is actually the bench we're building to take the country back and to take power back in 2024. That these moms and dads who are winning school board races now are going to be leaders in their community and they're going to be future leaders for the country.