MSNBC Warns Parents Pushing Back Are Mentally Ill, White Nationalists

Deadline: White House

10/6/21

JASON JOHNSON: Now after the National School Board Association had to ask the president for help investigating and stopping threats over policies like mask mandates. Attorney General Merrick Garland is stepping in, marshaling the FBI in response to what he called a, quote, disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence. Garland directing federal authorities to hold strategy sessions in the next 30 days with law enforcement to confront the scourge. Joyce Vance, former U.S. Attorney and now law professor at the university of Alabama, and an MSNBC legal analyst, is here. Lucky for us, Clint Watts is also back. Clint, I got to start with this. To me, this sort of rise in violence that we’re seeing in schools, it’s just a reflection of a rise in violence that we’re seeing all over the country. We’re seeing it in schools. We’re seeing it in grocery stores. We’re seeing it on airplanes. To me, is this really about people being upset about mask mandates or are there sort of underlying disruptive forces, white nationalists, anarchists, whatever, in this country, that are using mask mandates and a public health crisis to sort of wage chaos? 

CLINT WATTS: Jason, a year ago, I think we started talking about mobilizations to polling places and primarily we were worried about local polling locations, and we did see sort of vigilante poll monitoring, you know, surface after the election. We saw people show up at election recounts, and that’s only continued for about ten months now, and it really encapsulates every single issue. It is masks. It is vaccines. It’s vaccine mandates. It is anything involving the local level, and if I can say anything since January 6th, the protests and the mobilizations to violence have gone from national to local. It is really school boards, health officials, election officials that are facing a lot of the toughest challenges and threats to violence and there are no resources and very limited sort of intelligence to preempt this. That’s what’s so difficult about this. It’s a capacity issue. And one where you’re seeing kind of these national movements mobilize on very local locations.

JOHNSON: Joyce, you and I are both educators. You know, you are a law professor, I’m a professor at Morgan state university and I’m old enough to remember where the only thing you really had to worry about in an academic environment was a mass shooter, which is bad enough as it is, but speak a little bit to this idea of what does it mean that something that is generally boring and neutral, like a school board meeting, has become a locus for violence. How does that end up trickling down to what is and is not taught and possibly trickling up to higher level educators like yourself? 

JOYCE VANCE:  Well, the focus that this brings to education is something that we’re not used to having. I think you’re absolutely right about that, Jason. And one has to wonder how this trickles out. Will school boards become far more careful, far more hesitant to do things that are brave and bold in terms of education initiatives? Right now, we’re talking about issues that involve school boards and how they’re competing in this new marketplace of ideas that exists after the Trump administration, but that could have far-reaching implications. It certainly has spun out in some areas with bans on teaching critical race theory, which of course impacts the work that both you and I do and helps us understand how policy developed in the wake of American racism and what we can do to improve policy in the future as school boards are challenged, for instance, over issues of whether critical race theory can be taught in our schools. 

That, too, becomes a flash point, and I would add to what Clint says. The fact that we’re living in the middle of a perfect storm. We have not only this eruption, this not so much an eruption but a normalization of some of the white supremacist ideology that we’ve seen emerging and some of the conspiracy theories that we’ve seen emerging, we also have a country that, to be honest, is not at its best mental health-wise, 18 months into a pandemic, and those issues are crashing together now. That’s very much what we’re seeing. We’re going to have to have some form of a national health restorative mission in this country to right size things and get them back to normal. 

JOHNSON: I want to get a little nostalgic for a minute. I never watched the west wing but the closest thing for me might be the Obama years. I want to play some video from arguments in local town halls during the debate over the Affordable Care Act. [plays clip of town hall meeting from 2009]

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JOHNSON:  Now, Clint, I’m the person — look, I believe in a rowdy public. I don’t care if you want to protest outside Mitch McConnell’s house, confront somebody at a restaurant, you know, follow senators, okay, those things are fine. But as angry as the public was about getting free healthcare 12 years ago, we’ve never seen anything like we’re seeing at the school board meetings now. What on Earth has happened in this country in the last 11, 12 years that has normalized a level of anger and violence that would have been bizarre just 11 years ago?

WATTS: Two things, Jason. One, elected leaders and candidates essentially using the language of violence and mobilization, that that is the best way to handle issues. It’s not to have public debate or discourse, not to have a discussion. It is to immediately go into confrontation and if you went to Steve Bannon’s war room, and is called a war room after all, any given day and you watch what that conversation is about and how it extends out to Fox News, it’s very much about confrontation and combat and it’s bizarre. The second part is, look, social media, we were talking about it in the last panel. That video there, those videos of combat and conflict that you see at a lot of these local places go viral very quickly so it gives a lot of people who are maybe considering conducting those sorts of acts more ammunition or more belief that they should do it too. It is the copycat phenomenon that we see in social media today. So, it’s one part the way our rhetoric has changed in this country and what our elected leaders will say and the other part being aware of a nationwide sort of push around every single issue that ultimately falls under the Trump banner.