Facebook and its Mark Zuckerberg are in the news again. First came whistleblower Frances Haugen, then the mysterious outage, and now Fox News is reporting about ties that Attorney General Merrick Garland has to the beleaguered CEO of the social media giant.
Technically it is the AG’s indirect ties to a company that promotes the type of content parents are opposing in their ongoing battle with local school boards – a hot-button issue that Garland has recently targeted for investigation at the national level.
“Merrick Garland has declared a war on parents,” Asra Nomani of Parents Defending Education (PDE) tweeted Tuesday. “His daughter is married to the co-founder of @PanoramaEd, which is under fire for its multimillion contracts with school boards. At @DefendingEd, parents sent us tips. We raised the alarm. Now Garland is trying to silence parents.”
As she noted, The New York Times reported in 2018 that Garland’s daughter Rebecca had married Panorama co-founder Xan Tanner. Panorama’s ties to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have also inspired skepticism as his company has come under fire for the way it uses data and impacts users’ psychological health -particularly that of young girls.
Garland announced Monday that he would coordinate an investigation of purported threats and acts of violence against school boards across the US that occurred after a controversial letter in which the National School Boards Association (NSBA) suggested to the Biden administration that parents were engaging in domestic terrorism.
For months, parents have been fighting what they describe as “woke” indoctrination in schools and purported attempts to fuel that at the administrative level. Nomani’s group worries that Panorama Education – the consultancy founded by Tanner – is using data collection as a pretext for school officials to push controversial ideas about race, identity, and sexuality.
The most egregious example occurred in Fairfax County, VA, where Panorama received a $2 million contract to conduct social and emotional learning (SEL) monitoring in Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) which included data collection on students.
“Social and emotional learning” (SEL) and “culturally responsive” training have become seemingly innocuous buzzwords in Virginia education, but we know better, such training more often than not serves as conduits for left-wing ideas about race and identity.
As to Panorama’s connection to Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg’s charitable foundation – dubbed the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative – was listed in 2017 as one of several organizations that gave a collective $16 million to Panorama, which would use that for “social-emotional efforts.” A press release read, “Panorama Education will use the funding to expand its tools that help school districts develop students’ social and emotional skills, promote family engagement with school, and increase college readiness.”
“[I]t’s outrageous Fairfax County Public Schools is collaborating with a for-profit company funded by Mark Zuckerberg,” Nomani, whose son previously attended an FCPS school, told Fox News. “In 2012, Zuckerberg admitted to performing ’emotional manipulation’ studies on Facebook users without their consent or knowledge. His involvement today with surveys examining students’ mental health is beyond the pale. Schools must stop trying to manipulate students and focus instead on educating students.”
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