A Virginia mother said federal agents infiltrated her local school board meeting after she and other parents protested the Department of Justice for asking the FBI to go after people who disrupt school board meetings.
Acrimony between some parents and school officials in Washington DC’s affluent suburbs has been simmering since a parent was forcefully arrested in June after claiming inclusive school policies led to the rape of his daughter.
The tensions recently came to a boil when national school board leaders told the White House that disruptive parents should be treated as domestic terrorists, and the DOJ involved the FBI in the issue.
“Maybe he [Garland] should mobilize the FBI into who’s threatening my family,” mother Stacy Langton told Fox News Wednesday, after her viral anti-porn speech at a September Fairfax County School Board meeting further inflamed tensions.
In September, Langton criticized high school library books that contained sexual content involving children.
Langton’s mic was cut after she read graphic passages from the books and railed against board members, saying “pornography is offensive to all people, it is offensive to common decency,” clips of the exchange showed.
“There are children in the audience here,” one board member said.
“This board is in violation of the law … this board should be charged accordingly,” Langton shouted to rousing applause from many supporters in the audience, who then chanted “go to jail.” The district later said it would remove the books to assess their content.
The incident came three months after angry parent Scott Smith was charged with disorderly conduct at a Loudoun County School Board meeting after claiming his daughter was raped.
Smith was wrestled to the ground by police after arguing with another parent who accused him of fabricating the incident to instigate a culture war, footage of the incident showed.
Superintendent Scott Ziegler said at the meeting there were no records of “assaults occurring in our restrooms.”
A Sept. 30 letter
from the National School Boards Association to President Joe Biden suggested that parents who object to mask mandates and the imposition of critical race theory in classrooms are engaging in “a form of domestic terrorism.” The NSBA later disavowed the missive.
Earlier this month, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the FBI would take the lead on investigating “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”
“While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution, that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views,” Garland wrote in a memo to the feds.
On Oct. 17, Langton participated in a demonstration dubbed “Parents Are Not ‘Domestic Terrorists’ Rally,” in response to Garland’s memo to the FBI, according to the Daily Caller.
“They are forcing children to hate each other through [critical race theory] and they are also not listening to us when it comes to things like having porn in schools,” Brian Schultz, who now homeschools his kids instead of sending them to Fairfax County classrooms, told the outlet.
Langton has reportedly received “daily threats” since the protests, which she said she attended with about 45 other parents in her district.
The mother of six also reportedly said federal agents, including unmarked vehicles and a helicopter, were at the most recent Fairfax County School Board meeting, which was scheduled for Oct. 21, according to the district’s website.
“This is something that is incredible in America and it’s ridiculously un-American,” she said on “Fox and Friends.”
“I have threats against my children by name, I have been followed in my car with my children, they have my vehicle, they know where I live, and I don’t know who’s putting somebody up to this, but it’s obviously meant to intimidate me.”
On the same day of the school board meeting, Garland told the House Judiciary Committee that the FBI would not be attending meetings.
“Will FBI agents be attending local school board meetings?” asked Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican.
“No, FBI agents will not be attending local school board meetings and there’s nothing in this memo to suggest that,” Garland responded, according to CSPAN footage of the hearing.
“I’m not getting a lot of sleep right now, nobody’s sleeping in my house because we can’t be sure that we’re safe,” Langton told Fox.
With AP wires