When it comes to conflicts of interest, Attorney General Merrick Garland appears to have a huge one.

Merrick's daughter, Rebecca Garland, is married to the co-founder of an education resource company that pushes critical race theory - which angry parents across the country are protesting. Taking matters into his own hands, AG Garland tapped the FBI on Monday to huddle with local leaders to address a "disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence" against teachers and school board members.

As the Conservative Treehouse writes:

Well, well, well… This is interesting. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland recently instructed the FBI to begin investigating parents who confront school board administrators over Critical Race Theory indoctrination material. The U.S. Department of Justice issued a memorandum to the FBI instructing them to initiate investigations of any parent attending a local school board meeting who might be viewed as confrontational, intimidating or harassing.

Attorney General Merrick Garland’s daughter is Rebecca Garland. In 2018 Rebecca Garland married Xan Tanner [LINK]. Mr. Xan Tanner is the current co-founder of a controversial education service company called Panorama Education. [LINK and LINK] Panorama Education is the “social learning” resource material provider to school districts and teachers that teach Critical Race Theory.

Conflict of interest much?

Yes, the Attorney General is instructing the FBI to investigate parents who might pose a financial threat to the business of his daughter’s husband.

In June, several meeting attendees and newly elected board members at the Moore County School District in North Carolina pushed back against continuing their contract with Panorama - with one calling it an "indoctrination platform" which aims to mold students into "social justice warriors."

Those claims are based more on the company’s webinars and virtual workshops for teachers than the surveys Moore County Schools plans to conduct over the three-year term of the contract. The district would pay $184,300 for Panorama’s services over that time period.

Before starting in on their business agenda Monday night, the board heard from about 10 speakers who opposed the contract extension. At the core of the debate is resistance to the idea that public schools might teach Critical Race Theory: in short, the hypothesis that racism has persisted in American institutions throughout history to the detriment of minorities and still does.

Board members Robert Levy and David Hensley pointed to one of the company’s leaders having done economic development work in Cuba, and online webinars dealing with things like “equity, care, and connection” and “dismantling white supremacy” to suggest that Panorama is a vehicle for what Levy termed “really hardcore Critical Race Theory.” -The Pilot

In May, the Johnston County Report - a local North Carolina outlet - did a deep dive on Panorama in an article entitled "Activists In Our Schools: Big Data" in which they described Panorama as a "Big Data company that collects and performs analytics. Data Analytics takes in raw data and formulates it to make process decisions."

I came across a Twitter post from Johnston County Public School (JCPS) Student Service Counseling Office – Social Emotional Learning (SEL). It was a graphic with a bunch of buzzwords like Restorative Justice, Adult SEL, Staff Equity Committees, and Panorama. All of the terms were familiar to me, but not Panorama. I had no idea what it meant or just how deep the well would go with that one word.

Examples of @JCPS_NC SEL in Action. #SELday #jcpsselday @JcpsSel #SEL pic.twitter.com/DUmRVzOvUE
— JCPS SEL (@JcpsSel) March 26, 2021

...

From a 2013 interview in Inc. “Feuer says it was the promise of Panorama’s social impact, not its financial return, that first caught Zuckerberg’s eye.” Zuckerberg’s foundation called Startup:Education infused $4 million dollars into Panorama in 2013. Panorama has found multiple social change and educational technology equity partners including; Spark Capital a San Francisco Bay area company- capital funders behind Twitter and Tumblr, Emerson Collective a Palo Alto company self described as a social change organization, and Owl Ventures, the world’s largest holder of education technology with $1.2 billion in assets- based out of Silicon Valley founded in 2014. By 2017 Panorama Education had raised $32 million in venture capital to data mine children and implement social transformation into schools.

The rolling out of Panorama as an educational tool that measured feelings, observable behaviors, and thought perception was timed perfectly with the implementation of the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) which replaced No Child Left Behind. The Obama era Act gave a new opening to measure emotions as an academic category. Under ESSA federal public school funding was more able to be funneled directly to school counseling programs. The schools had money and Panorama was ready to provide service.

Panorama charges between $500 to $3,000 per school for their basic data tools and Playbook. Just the annual survey screener for the Chapel Hill- Carrboro City Schools was $29,000 for a one year contract. Through a records request it was disclosed in 2020-2021 JCPS paid $214,000 for a one year contract with Panorama Education.

Meanwhile, Panorama officially took a 'stand against systemic racism' in the wake of the George Floyd murder - in which they say "Decisively: Black people matter. Black students matter. Black educators matter. Black teammates matter. Black lives matter."

"We attack racism, discrimination, and oppression, and work towards justice, equality, and opportunity," the statement continues.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/conflict-interest-ag-garlands-family-getting-rich-selling-critical-race-theory-materials

A profound demographic shift is taking place in American society. The gradual loss of the dominant position of the white majority in the racial-ethnic structure of the U.S. population and the rapid increase in the proportion of Americans of Hispanic and African-American and Asian origin predetermine the growing severity of the debate about the identity and the future of the American civilization type. These debates took a pronounced political direction with the accession to power of the first black president in the history of the country, B. Obama.

It is accepted to think that the historical victory of Obama became possible because of two remarkable events in the history of the United States that took place in the middle of the last century: the revolutionary struggle for civil rights and the Immigration Act that was passed in 1965. The civil rights movement has had the effect of dismantling the Jim Crow laws, which allowed the black Americans to participate in the political process, to join the army and the middle class, and to engage in the American culture. The https://writemyessay.nyc website has an interesting article on this topic. The Immigration Act set in motion powerful demographic and social processes that radically changed the racial-ethnic composition of the country.

However, it was after the 1960s that the complex and intricate process of gradually replacing "class political mobilization" based on the economic division of labor with the stimulation of political activism based on racial, gender and demographic traits and characteristics gradually began to gain momentum in the United States. This process began with the decline of trade unionism among various segments and groups of American workers. The model of political mobilization based on the labor-capital dichotomy essentially proceeded from the growing leveling of constitutive attributes of nationality, gender, and age. Within this model, different social groups were supposed to have and build their actions and their system of value orientations around common economic interests. Thus, the male and female labor force, the young and old cohorts of workers and employees, and the various racial-ethnic groupings in the labor market were to strive to unite their efforts in the struggle against "abstract Capital" in order to ensure a greater redistribution of the "economic pie" in their favor through their combined efforts.

Why, you may ask, did I write all this? It's important to understand that racism has not gone away, and the Floyd story is evidence of that, as evidenced by the words of the mayor of New York. The mayor of New York City spoke out against systemic racism in the killing of George Floyd, the first black man to be killed by a police officer in the line of duty since Emmett Till in 2015. Speaking to the City Council Thursday, Bill de Blasio said the killing of Floyd, who was shot at point-blank range by an NYPD officer in Brooklyn Wednesday afternoon, showed that racism "is still very much a part of our society" and that "we need to talk about it honestly and openly." These comments marked the most explicit public condemnation of racism, which many believe has long pervaded American law enforcement, by a major American politician.