Joy Reid: Conservatives 'took our school boards hostage like a bunch of screaming maniacs'

 Some MSNBC hosts and guests have run with the narrative that parents angered over coronavirus guidelines and new teaching techniques are dangerous and even racist.

The National School Board Association called on the Department of Justice this week to investigate what it deemed possible "domestic terrorism" over "acts of malice," violence and threats against school boards across the country, leading to criticism from nonviolent parents that their free speech was being threatened.

Attorney General Merrick Garland's order for the FBI to confront the situation, and media outlets like MSNBC have emphasized incidents of parents yelling at school boards over mask mandates and critical race theory teachings.

Far-left MSNBC fill-in anchor Jason Johnson wondered Wednesday if White nationalism played into some of the angry scenes Americans are seeing play out across the nation.

"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?" Johnson asked.

MSNBC analyst Clint Watts agreed and sought to connect the images of unrest with the January 6 Capitol riot.

"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," Watts said.

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance said the school board protests were a result of "White supremacist ideology."

Far-left host Joy Reid, in a nightly segment called "The Absolute Worst," railed this week against conservatives who "manufactured outrage over masks and history lessons" and "took our school boards hostage like a bunch of screaming maniacs."

MSNBC host Chris Hayes said it was delusional to say "school board harassment and intimidation" weren't "off the charts," while dayside anchor Geoff Bennett noted some behavior, which has included protesting outside school board member homes, was "so bad, it's being compared to domestic terrorism."

Host Alicia Menendez – the daughter of Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J. – played two clips of parents Sunday criticizing mask mandates at a school board meeting, with one woman saying, "I will come after you," and another saying the board was allowing "child abuse." The relatively innocuous clips were, to Menendez, proof of how "out of control" things had gotten.

"Things have become so scary that the organization representing school boards is asking the federal government to help, arguing these actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism," she said, after earlier playing other clips of 

Former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi said, "It is a high-threat environment we're in."