Old Dominion News

An angry Progressive activist follows a sitting United States senator into a public restroom. With the cell phone video trained on a stall, she berates the senator for refusing to vote for the mega trillion-dollar spending bill, then continues to harass and video as the senator washes her hands. The posted video goes viral.

Outraged, Attorney General Merrick Garland issues a memo to the FBI saying such behavior “runs counter to the nation’s values” and promises investigation of any future “efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views.” The U.S. president backs him fully. 

At the same time, angry parents at school board meetings across the country protest what they see as extreme social engineering in public school curriculum and policies that would have been labeled “insane” five years ago. 

Both the U.S. attorney general and President Biden laud parents as exercising their First Amendment rights.

Wait! That is the Fractured Fairy Tales version of the stories. 

Actually, the president laughed about the bathroom incident, calling it “part of the process.” In truth, AG Garland’s FBI memorandum was issued to blast and intimidate concerned parents protesting radical social school curriculum that, among other woke ideas, indoctrinates school children to believe people are automatically racist because of their skin color. 

But the Biden activist who followed Arizona Democrat Senator Kristyn Sinema into a university restroom and posted the video? No problem there, just democracy at work.

On the surface, Americans seem to be living through a Seinfeld-esque “Bizarro World” where everything is turned upside down. But a deeper dive into the AG’s memo reveals two even more disturbing ideas in his words: “…threats of violence against school administrators [and] board members” is detrimental to “our nation’s core values.”

First, in focusing on “threats of violence,” Garland ignores the 99.5% legitimately incensed yet mostly civil parents who find pure dreck in what the Left are shoving into today’s public schools. He expresses no consolidation with the values of such parents, but instead spotlights the perhaps .05% of people whose anger crossed the line into threats. 

Beyond that, by invoking “our nation’s core values,” he reveals his ignorance of the most salient truth of our day: We no longer share appreciable core values.

It’s ironic Garland’s intimidation of parents came the same week in which Democrat icon and Clinton Political Machine engineer Terry McAuliffe uttered insults to the same group of people—parents. In a Virginia gubernatorial debate, McAuliffe addressed the controversy over school boards’ social policy and sexually explicit books in the library by stating: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” 

McAuliffe, when he was Virginia governor the first time around, vetoed the bill that would have informed parents about those books in schools. Parents, in his view, have no right even to know.

He obviously agrees with Merrick Garland’s intimidation of parents with threat of FBI investigations. Both men have their heads in the Playbook of Democrat Elitist Orthodoxy: When it comes to the current goal of indoctrination, parents must turn their children over to the State. 

McAuliffe is saying Parents, shut up—plain and simple. Garland is saying If you speak up, we’ll investigate you as a domestic terrorist. Both incidents show how far Liberals have separated from previously held values concerning the rights of parents: to control, among other things, sexual content in curriculum; to insist restrooms be labeled by biological gender; and, as Martin Luther King said, to expect that kids be taught character has nothing to do with the color of skin.

Pollster Frank Luntz, a master observer of language and trends in society, in a recent Time Magazine piece observed that Americans are so divided we can no longer agree on the meaning of basic words. “Our greatest strength historically—that ‘We the People’ share a common goal, idea, and even a national dream—is now a glaring weakness, as we cheerfully slice the ties that once bound us together,” he said.

A country with no core values is a divided country. Abraham Lincoln agreed with none other than Jesus on this concept, who said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” 

The lack of shared values is one of the key reasons couples divorce. And right now, America sits in divorce court. We can agree only on what we disagree on, and those suffering most are American children.

But this is far from a “no fault” divorce. The radical Progressives moved away from what held us together. Republicans sitting on the Senate Judiciary Committee sent words of warning to Garland that deserve a read. Those who label themselves Progressives are busy squeezing every last drop of what used to be shared values from the nation’s core of principles. 

Merrick Garland and Terry McAuliffe’s utterances last week remind us that, at present, Americans share a geography, but not really any values. 

Half of the nation is shocked by activists in bathrooms with cell phones; meanwhile, the President chuckles. We can’t even agree on what’s funny.

Marilyn Quigley is a professor emerita at Evangel University in Springfield, Missouri. She is an author and commentator.