A Virginia mother who’s a survivor of Mao’s brutal “Cultural Revolution” in China is speaking out about the methods used by the National School Boards Association and the Biden Justice Department to silence parents.
She said the actions being taken right now in the U.S. are similar to the efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to stop parents from speaking out.
“When I was in China, I spent my entire school years in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, so I’m very, very familiar with the communist tactics of how to divide people, how they canceled the Chinese traditional culture and destroyed our heritage,” Xi Van Fleet told Fox News. “All this is happening here in America.”
“They call(ed) them racists for a long time, but that did not work,” Van Fleet said, referring to the parents who have spoken out about critical race theory. “So, they have to upgrade to ‘domestic terrorists’.”
As CBN News reported last week, the National School Boards Association (NSBA)asked Biden to classify school protests by parents and other concerned citizens as “domestic terrorism” and “hate crimes.” The NSBA even called for the president to use the USA Patriot Act against the protesters.
Shortly after that, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI to work with law enforcement to investigate the highly charged parent protests at school board meetings, citing a need to protect board members, teachers, and other public school employees.
In his memo to the FBI and U.S. attorneys, Garland said there has been “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools.”
“I have to say, this will backfire. If intimidation works, America has fallen a long time ago,” Van Fleet told Fox News.
She has joined parents in nearby Fairfax County who are criticizing the DOJ’s efforts to cause a chilling effect against parents’ free speech rights.
Harry Jackson, a Fairfax County, Virginia, parent and president of the Thomas Jefferson High School Parent Teacher Student Association, told Fox News that parents in his community were scared after the announcement.
“I can understand parents not wanting to speak in front of the school board members of their concerns, because now there is a fear,” Jackson said.
“They have instilled fear within the parents,” he continued. “They created fear amongst the community in which you’re supposed to service and support.”
Van Fleet said parents shouldn’t let the DOJ or anyone else intimidate them, because this fight is for the future.
“This is about your children,” she said. “For me, I’m fighting it because it is about our future. The future of this country. So we cannot be intimidated.”
As CBN’s Faithwire reported last June, Van Fleet made headlines when she addressed a meeting of the Loudoun Country School Board about Critical Race Theory.
“I’ve been very alarmed at what’s going on in our school,” Van Fleet told the school board. “You are now training our children to be social justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history. Growing up in Mao’s China, all of this seems very familiar.”
According to Van Fleet, she fled China when she was 26 and her son graduated from Loudoun back in 2015. She issued a chilling warning about the similarities she sees in critical race theory and what she saw in the oppressive tenure of Mao Zedong.
“The communist regime used the same critical theory to divide people, the only difference is they used class instead of race. During the cultural revolution I witnessed students and teachers turned against each other, we changed school names to be politically correct. We were taught to denounce our heritage. The red guards destroyed anything that was not communist. Old statues, books and anything else.”
Over the past year, countless statues depicting U.S. history have been torn down or vandalized by BLM or Antifa rioters, and numerous schools renamed.
Van Fleet told Fox it’s “heartbreaking” to see communist ideas and values taking root in the land of the free.
“I felt like it’s such a free country, meaning I have free access to all sorts of information – books on both sides of the issues. I can’t really just say what I mean, even though the other side can say whatever. To me, and to a lot of Chinese, it is heartbreaking that we escaped communism and now we experience communism here.”
***Please sign up for CBN Newsletters and download the CBN News app to ensure you keep receiving the latest news from a distinctly Christian perspective.***
The remainder of this article is available in its entirety at CBN