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A DOJ unit focusing on hate crimes reportedly set its sights on Moms for Liberty. Why was the DOJ targeting innocent conservative groups?

From The Daily Wire. A Department of Justice unit dedicated to “preventing and responding to” “hate crimes” tracked the conservative education policy group Moms for Liberty in the same manner it tracked the Ku Klux Klan, according to internal emails obtained by The Daily Wire.

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Moms For Liberty was tracked by the DOJ’s Community Relations Service (CRS) alongside symbols such as the noose, the Confederate flag, and the swastika. The only other groups whose movements were similarly tracked, the emails show, were the Ku Klux Klan, a second KKK-style group, and the Oath Keepers.

The DOJ concealed the records from the public by ignoring a Freedom of Information Act request, but released them pursuant to a lawsuit filed by America First Legal on behalf of The Daily Wire. They show the Community Relations Service, which says its role is “preventing and responding to community tensions and hate crimes, bias, bullying, and discrimination,” tracked targets like Moms for Liberty through Google and LexisNexis alerts.

The DOJ did not return a request for comment on why it was tracking Moms for Liberty. It appears to have used its tracking of Moms for Liberty to identify school boards considering enacting conservative-leaning education policy. It then pressured school boards to defer to the DOJ to resolve the differences of opinion between duly-elected conservative officials and leftist activists, instead of enacting platforms they won elections on. …

On July 20, 2023, a Google Alert set for ”‘moms for liberty’ virginia” turned up an article that said that the “Virginia Department of Education releases new policies for transgender students.” Days later, Levine wrote to school board members in Roanoke County, Virginia, to “offer our services in conflict resolution.”

“CRS is aware of ongoing community tensions in Roanoke County following the release of the new model policies for transgender students. I’d like to connect to see if we might be able to offer support and services as you work to manage conflict within the community related to this,” she wrote in an email that was first reported by The Daily Wire last August.

Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin had drafted a “model” policy that would prevent schools from gender-transitioning children without their parents’ consent, which school boards had the option to adopt. In deep-red Roanoke County, Youngkin won twice as many votes as his Democratic opponent, with similar results down-ballot.

In a democracy, that meant that the locality had chosen to implement conservative policy. In the United States, schools are locally controlled. Yet CRS seemed to ask local school board members to defer to CRS because of “tensions” between the elected leaders who had an overwhelming mandate, and a tiny band of leftist agitators. …

There is no evidence that Moms for Liberty or elected officials in Roanoke were committing hate crimes.

Instead, DOJ seemed to be operating on the premise that either the Republican governor’s proposed policy was itself “hate,” or that lawless leftist activists created “tensions,” which opened the door to federal intervention designed to diffuse the tensions by appeasing them. …

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(Excerpt from The Daily Wire. Photo Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)