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Remember when political debates were the highlight of the political year, like boxing matches, everyone would watch them. It doesn't happen anymore. The ratings for the last presidential debates were terrible, and there's a reason for that. They're boring. Everything is scripted. You know what they're going to say before they say it. But if you keep watching the lower tier, the debates lower on the fight card, sometimes you see something interesting and happens invariably by accident. But it reveals a lot about the country and the people who are trying to lead it. 

That just happened last month in Virginia during a governor's debate. Terry McAuliffe was the governor of Virginia. He gravely damaged the state. He's the career Clinton operative who you may remember from his many brushes with apparent indictment. The Washington Post is always telling you he was about to get indicted. He never was. Instead, he ran in Virginia, and he ran it into the ground, and now he wants to hurt it even more so he wants to be reelected. 

And at the debate last month, Terry McAuliffe announced what just kind of welled up within him, and he told us that parents no longer have a say in their own children's education. The one that they pay for. Instead, Terry McAuliffe informed the state of Virginia, the government is in charge of your child, period. 

TERRY MCAULIFFE: I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach. I get really tired of everybody running down teachers. I love our teachers and what they've done through COVID, these are real heroes who deserve our respect.

He's a hack, a liar and a demagogue, but ignore the second part of the sentence. "I don't think parents have any right telling teachers what to teach." Really? So parents don't control their own kids. Do you have a right to tell the pediatrician what kind of medical treatment your kids should get? No. This is the new rule. The government makes all key decisions about your children. That's not just true in the state of Virginia. It is now orthodoxy throughout the entire Democratic Party. And as of yesterday, this idea, unprecedented in the history of America, has the full backing of the Biden administration, in other words, of the entire federal government. 

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And if you disagree with that, if you're one of those troglodytes who think you should have some say in what your children are taught in the schools that you pay for, you should know the Biden administration now views you as a domestic terrorist, and they are fully willing to used armed agents of the state to compel you to shut up. Joe Biden's Justice Department has made that very, very clear. 

Attorney General Merrick Garland, remember, the moderate, soft-spoken, one to turn out to be not moderate at all, but a wild-eyed, radical crazy person – He's now the attorney general. He issued a memorandum yesterday calling on the FBI to crack down on parents who complain about their school board. 

Now, keep in mind at this exact moment that Garland wrote that, we learned that murders in the United States since the advent of Black Lives Matter have gone up 30%. So that's thousands more dead people. This is the attorney general, our chief law enforcement officer. He did not issue a memo about that. He issued instead a memo about people who are committing wrongthink. Garland directed, "federal, state, tribal, territorial and local law enforcement leaders to discuss strategies for addressing this disturbing trend." This disturbing trend being parents complaining. 

"In the coming days," Garland wrote, "The department will announce a series of measures designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel." 

Criminal conduct. What does that consist of? Bombings, assaults? No, complaining. It is now criminal to disagree with your kid’s school. What have we learned from this? Well, among other things, we've learned the Biden administration no longer believes in the most basic precepts of liberal democracy. Among them, your freedom of speech should never be abridged, The government must convince you, not compel you almost always, and you and not the government is in charge of your children. 

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Merrick Garland did not give birth to your kids. They're yours, not his. But they don't acknowledge that anymore. So they're happy to used armed agents of the state to enforce their ideology. And they have to, because that ideology is deeply unpopular with most Americans. 

Now, why did the DOJ issue this letter? Well, because they'd received a complaint from the National School Boards Association. Huge donors, of course, to the Democratic Party. And that complaint cited citizens who were upset over the teachings of critical race theory and masking of children, which is medically unnecessary. 

So the group wrote to the Biden administration and said that some of the actions against school boards "could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes." 

Oh, so school administrators are now a protected group. If you disagree with them, you're committing a hate crime, not voicing an opinion that is constitutionally protected. No, it's an act of violence to disagree with them. Let's get specific: 

According to the National School Boards Association, it's things like this: "Earlier this month, a student in Tennessee was mocked during a board meeting for advocating masks in schools after testifying that his grandmother, who was an educator, died because of COVID-19."

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Now, the association went on to say that the feds should use The Patriot Act, created after 9/11 to the regret of most thinking people, and that postal inspectors should probe the "cyberbullying" school board members claim they have faced. 

So where does this leave us? Really simple. Mocking someone who calls for medically unnecessary mask mandates is now domestic terrorism and a chief concern of the FBI. 

What you're not allowed to do going forward because it's a hate crime is point out that children and teens actually aren't dying from COVID, they're dying from a lot of things, but not from COVID. 

A lot of kids are dying of a lot of different things. Drowning, as always, is at the top of the list. Car crashes, too. But you'll notice that more students are dying from suicide, in some cases, directly traceable to these policies, than are dying from COVID

So that is a national crisis. It's completely unaddressed by the Department of Justice or anyone else in our government. All that's addressed are the ideological crimes: people disagreeing. 

Now, for a long time, school boards have tried to shut up anyone who challenges their orthodoxy on COVID or anything else. In May, in Loudoun County, Virginia, the newly-radical Loudoun County, the school board used mask mandates as justification to silence a parent who complained they were indoctrinating his child. 

BRANDON MICHON: I’m gonna read an excerpt from a freshman honors English class in Stone Bridge. "She’s a hoe just like her sister – f---ing every dude on the courts." It’s time for LCPS to get their house in order. The curtain has been pulled back and people can now see the deficient leadership in this country. My 5-year-old is being peddled transgender books in her library, teenagers are being served pornography under the guise of literature. … Do something! Be a leader! The citizens of this country deserve better. 

SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER: Can you please cover your nose with your mask? 

BRANDON MICHON: You’re all vaccinated! What the f--- What the freak?! Give me 10 seconds back. 

SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER: You know the rules. Thank you. 

It's unbelievable. So they cut his mic. "You're violating COVID law." No, they just didn't want to hear him. That's a parent who's paying for the school, whose 5-year-old is in the care of these lunatics. So they just cut his mic. 

Now they've upped the ante. They can throw you in jail if you point out that what they're doing is hurting your children. By that standard, we're in trouble, a whole lot more conduct is about to become criminal in the eyes of the Department of Justice. Remember all those parents from school board meetings this summer? Presumably, Merrick Garland is going to investigate them too. 

WOMAN AT SCHOOL BOARD MEETING: In March, my child had to watch a TED talk in English class – not on anything related to English but oppression and acknowledging privilege. Any parent with a pulse knows that this is wrong. 

WOMAN AT SCHOOL BOARD MEETING: Why has public school become to mired in extremist politics and a permissive culture that seems to celebrate the latest fads like gender fluidity?

WOMAN AT SCHOOL BOARD MEETING: And we oppose your efforts to impose critical race theory – an overtly racist doctrine that teaches our children to judge others solely on the color of their skin 

MAN AT SCHOOL BOARD MEETING: Their job is to teach our kids math, science, biology and literature. That’s it. Not ideology. 

WOMAN AT SCHOOL BOARD MEETING: I equally dislike all of you. You’ve all done an equally bad job. Maybe it’s a good time to change something. Maybe start right now. 

Some of those, you may have noticed, are immigrant parents who moved here because of our famously good education system, only to find out that was a lie. It's the worst.

Now for a lot of parents, the answer is going to be really simple in coming years. Pull away, leave, home school, start your own school. Parents won't put up with this. It's their children who are being hurt by it. 

On the other hand, you have to ask yourself, why let the lunatics take control of the system they didn't build? It's not theirs. They don't get to wreck it. Maybe we should stay and fight and take back the schools which belong to us. They're ours. They don't belong to the teachers union or the National Association of School Boards, much less Merrick Garland, whoever that is. They belong to us, American citizens. 

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Now, the backdrop to all of this is the people you just saw are now designated as criminals by the Biden administration, by the Department of Justice, so-called. But at the very same time, criminality – actual criminality, actual violence, actual murders, not metaphorical violence, hate crimes, but real violence, where people shoot each other and die – is rising dramatically faster than it ever has in American history. What's the Biden administration doing about this? Nothing. Because a lot of these people are their voters, their political allies. And speaking of political allies, the administration has no problem when its political allies terrorize sitting U.S. senators in bathrooms. 

AGITATOR TO SEN. SINEMA: We knocked down doors for you. 

AGITATOR TO SEN. SINEMA: As workers, we need solutions, to Build Back Better plan, need has the solutions that we need. 

AGITATOR TO SEN. SINEMA: We knocked down doors for you to get you elected. And just how we got you elected we can get you out of office if you don’t support what you promised us. 

AGITATOR TO SEN. SINEMA: I’m a survivor of human trafficking and it is because of lack of worker protections that we don’t have in the gig economy. I need you to stand by workers, lots of people who are like me.

It is not normal to harass someone in a ladies' room, period. It's not acceptable. Joe Biden has no problem with it, he said that yesterday, but you should have a huge problem with it. This is the path to chaos and violence, clearly. 

But again, the DOJ has no problem with that whatsoever. They have a problem with you. The person who pays taxes, sends your child to public school. They're telling you you have no right to be outraged, and the school teaches your children they can change their gender at will and that White people are evil. There's not a problem at all. The problem is you complaining about it, and if you do, the DOJ will target you like a domestic terrorist using the Patriot Act. 

And yet, if you come to this country illegally like the woman you just saw taking that video in the ladies' room, and harass a United States senator in the bathroom for not voting the way you think she should, you face no consequences at all. And by the way, it's not just illegal aliens who get a pass on this stuff. We told you actual crime is being ignored: yeah it is, at scale. 

Here's one example: Prosecutors in Chicago just rejected charges against five men involved in a shootout in the middle of the morning. The shootout killed one man and sent two others to the hospital. But no big deal because prosecutors in Chicago said these were, "mutual combatants." Huh? Gang members shooting each other – it's not really our concern. A guy died. 

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Last week, prosecutors in Chicago announced they wouldn't pursue murder charges because a teenager who was stabbed to death was, they said, engaging in "mutual combat." Again, it’s totally fine. Some kid got stabbed to death. Not a big deal. That's nothing like disagreeing with a school board. 

And on some level, it's not. Gang members can shoot each other, they can stab children to death, but that's not the same as challenging Joe Biden's authority to document your children. That's what they fear.

This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the Oct. 5, 2021, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."