ROGER KIMBALL: Garland Just Tipped Over the Dominos.

Because parents across the country have suddenly woken up to the wokeness haunting their schools and poisoning the minds of their children. The school boards, many of which are staffed by leftists, are pushing the Marxist ideology of critical race theory, virtue-signaling mask mandates, and forcing noisome gender identity politics on primary and secondary school students.

Most parents don’t like that. They pay for the schools. The school board (in theory) works for them, and they, the parents, have been vocal in making their displeasure known. A left-wing lobbying group called the National School Boards Association complained to the Biden Administration that “Public Schoolchildren, Public School Board Members, and Other Public School District Officials and Educators” were subjected to “Threats and Acts of Violence” by parents whose actions “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” Note the surreal accusation that schoolchildren were being harmed by “threats and acts of violence,” which, if you look at the actual instances adduced, turn out to be people arguing against the insinuation of radical, politically charged ideas into the the curriculum.

Garland’s response was to threaten to unleash the law enforcement apparatus of the state against parents by forging a “Partnership among federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement to address threats against school administrators, board members, teachers and staff.” What threats?

When I first wrote about this, I was unaware that Garland’s daughter Rebecca is married to Xan Tanner, the founder and president of Panorama, a multimillion-dollar company that sells CRT and related ESG materials to schools around the country. File that in the folder marked “optics” if not the one labeled “conflict of interest.”

Read the whole thing.