As we previously reported, the NSBA apologized last night for a letter they had written to Joe Biden implying that parents could be “domestic terrorists.” That letter was then used by Attorney General Merrick Garland to justify a coordinated federal law enforcement effort to address “threats” against school boards, an effort which people feared was really to chill speech from parents upset about the politicized agenda being pitched to their kids in school, particularly in regard to Critical Race Theory.

Breaking: In the wake of yesterday's @FreeBeacon report, National School Board Association announces "we regret and apologize for the letter" to Biden admin characterizing concerned parents as potentially domestic terrorists pic.twitter.com/3RBufvWqAN

— Noah Pollak (@NoahPollak) October 23, 2021

The letter is astounding. I do give them some credit for putting it out there and now pulling back from the issue.

But there are a couple of other things about the NSBA apology letter that I’d like to note.

First of all, the apology isn’t to the parents that they so effectively tried to smear with that letter. The letter is written to their members – school board members. It’s a letter apologizing to school board members for leaving them out on the limb with what CEO and president said and putting those school board members in a bad position with their parents and the public.

When you specifically suggest that parents could be “domestic terrorists” based on no such actions, I’d like to see a specific apology for those words to the actual people you smeared.

Second, the reason the NSBA is doing this at this point is because of the emails that leaked about their coordination with the White House for weeks on the issue. So it wasn’t just a brief bad characterization in a letter that was the problem. The letter was itself part of a coordinated effort planned with the White House.

The emails said that the White House asked them to list threats which even with that prompt were seriously lacking in the letter. The NSBA is trying to deflect from all that. I want to know more about what was going on there. Who we should be hearing another apology from is the White House who was ultimately behind this. The “unifier,” Joe Biden, or his mouthpiece, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki should explain what was going on here and why they were improperly inserting themselves in this way to prompt action by the DOJ. Because it sure looks like they were targeting parents because the parents objected to the politicized agenda with which the White House agrees.

Third, this apology letter means that NSBA is getting a huge backlash to their actions and that’s why they wrote it, it wasn’t just because they suddenly thought better of it. That shows once again where Americans are standing on this issue and pro-tip to the White House? It’s not with you. As I noted yesterday, a significant majority of Americans who were aware of the situation opposed such actions by Merrick Garland.

Finally, if their original letter is wrong – and it most assuredly was – then the investigation kicked off by Garland based on this letter is wrong. Garland needs to stop what he’s doing, as in yesterday, and drop this political effort against parents. Garland had directed the FBI, in concert with each U.S. Attorney, to “convene meetings with federal, state, [and] local” officials “within 30 days of the issuance” of his memo to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff, and will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”

Not only is this highly coordinated response not justified in relation to the scarcity of actual crimes/threats, what’s missing in this whole effort is why any possible threats can’t be handled by local law enforcement. There’s no need for any federal action and there never was. But once again, we see the heavy hand of the Biden team trying to control everything.