A teacher on the outskirts of Cincinnati is recovering from brain surgery after a student violently attacked her earlier this month. The 60-year-old teacher was harmed so severely by a teenager that doctors had to remove part of her skull to help manage swelling in her brain.
Last spring, a Tennessee teenager pepper-sprayed a teacher for confiscating her phone. Also last year, a Texas administrator was beaten to the ground by a group of students.
As school choice expands across the country, millions more parents have the chance to send their children to schools that best meet their needs. They are eager to flee schools that foster poor behavior. Parents know their children best, and they know a child’s best educational fit is based on more than only test scores and graduation rates. Academic performance is critically important, but so too are intangible factors that shape a child’s educational experience. It is no surprise that school culture is one of the top factors parents consider in choosing where to send their kids to school.
The most recent Parent Involvement in Education survey, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2019, found that 71 percent of parents who considered sending their children to a school other than their government-assigned one rated “safety, including school discipline” as “very important.” Only 53 percent ranked “academic performance of students (e.g. test scores, dropout rates)” the same way.
This concern for discipline and safety is not surprising. No parents want to send their children somewhere unsafe. Sadly, many schools tolerate bad behavior and thus foster more of it, creating an environment where teachers can hardly teach, and students can hardly learn.
School violence is on the rise for several reasons, two of which can be tied directly to policies pushed by teachers’ unions and fringe civil rights groups and accepted as gospel by many in the public education establishment. The first is prolonged school closures resulting in a steep decline in good behavior by students.
The Student Pulse Panel, a study conducted by the Institute of Education Sciences, found that 38 percent of public schools saw an increase in physical altercations between students following the pandemic. (Less than 10 percent saw a decrease.) More than half of public schools saw an increase in threats of physical altercations between students. The damage is not just physical. More than half of public schools reported an increase in “student acts of disrespect [towards staff] other than verbal abuse.”
The study says, “More than 8 in 10 public schools have seen stunted behavioral and socioemotional development in their students because of the COVID-19 pandemic.” But Covid did not cause student behavior to circle the drain. Prolonged school closures, driven by teachers’ unions and their political allies, meant that students forgot how to behave at school.
The second culprit is “restorative justice,” a so-called “disciplinary” model embraced by teachers unions and administered by school systems across the country. This harmful practice is by no means restricted to blue states, nor is it a post-Covid phenomenon. Leading into the pandemic, 21 states and D.C. had laws on the books supporting the use of restorative justice in schools. Among those states are Texas, Florida, and Utah, far from the usual suspects when it comes to educational malpractice.
Under restorative justice, suspending and expelling a student is to be avoided at all costs. Real consequences are replaced by “healing circles.” School resource officers are sidelined, and teachers lose control of their classrooms.
Every single one of the violent incidents noted above happened in a school or school district that has embraced restorative justice policies. The teacher near Cincinnati taught at a school that advised a “verbal warning using restorative practices and affective language” when students are disruptive. The school district in Tennessee is the home of a “restorative practice program,” and the Texas school had moved to adopt more restorative practices in its Campus Improvement Plan.
Education freedom can help solve this problem. Several studies have demonstrated that school choice leads to safer schools.
But a school culture need not be violent to be rotten. There is a reason “Mean Girls” resonates across generations. Bullying is real, it can be severe, and parents deserve the right to decide if and when their child needs a fresh start at a new school. No children should have to risk their mental health and emotional development because they can’t choose another school and get a fresh start.
A good school, the kind of school parents seek out for their kids when they have school choice, is one that not only excels academically but maintains high standards of behavior. Such schools excel academically in no small part because they maintain high standards of behavior. Test scores are only one piece of the education freedom puzzle. Parents see the full picture, and education leaders would do well to follow suit.
Angela Morabito is the spokesperson at the Defense of Freedom Institute, a former U.S. Department of Education press secretary, and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
Democrats’ open border is turning the entire United States into a refugee camp. The record-breaking numbers of foreigners allowed to break U.S. border laws are most heavily affecting large and sanctuary cities like New York City, but the numbers are so high they can’t help but affect cities across America as well.
Yesterday, a Brooklyn high school informed parents their children will be
getting low-quality remote instruction because their school is being turned into a refugee camp. The 4,000 students are being displaced on behalf of approximately 1,900 foreign lawbreakers. In spring 2023, city officials also occupied school gyms with migrants, prompting safety concerns from parents about unvetted, military-age male foreigners sharing buildings with their kids.
As the “Louder with Crowder” blog notes, “Brooklyn went 74%-25% to Joe Biden, whose policies started the current border crisis. Also, pro-illegal immigration Governor Kathy Hochul won Brooklyn 72% to 28%.”
BREAKING: Buses are now pulling up to @JMHSBklyn and dropping off illegals. School is closed tomorrow because illegals will be sleeping in the school’s gym. This is disgraceful! NYC is prioritizing illegals over Americans. pic.twitter.com/2jmKXfRTHXhttps://t.co/ViZiWlqTX5
This is just a stark illustration of a phenomenon affecting the 50 million American K-12 kids still
seriously struggling to recover from three years of lockdown learning damage. Just as they’ve gotten back into schools, American kids everywhere are being placed in classrooms with even more illegal migrant kids who don’t speak the language, don’t share our customs, are in high-risk
circumstances linked with bad classroom behavior, and whose trafficking into America is swelling the fortunes of evil cartels.
A slightly earlier mass influx of foreigners, mostly Somalis, to the Midwestern Twin Cities has helped turn parts of the city and its schools into no-go zones. A majority of staff feel unsafe in high-violence St. Paul schools, and only one in five students in that district are meeting math and reading benchmarks. Foreign-born English language learners are the least proficient in reading, with aggregate scores even lower than those of homeless kids.
Statewide, Minnesota kids’ latest reading and math scores are the lowest on record. Kids don’t learn anything in those schools except violence-justifying racial grievance ideology. At this point, they’re not actually schools; they’re juvenile detention centers. A key factor making them juvenile detention centers is Democrats’ influx of illegally present foreign-born kids.
It’s completely impossible for a teacher to help kids seriously learn when several in a classroom don’t even speak English and arrive with little foundation for learning. Creating this situation is stiffing all the kids already here, who in cities like Minneapolis already enter school struggling. Further stretching already broken public institutions is not charity — it’s avoiding existing responsibilities.
The open border is rapidly replicating these circumstances across the country. The Biden administration is depositing pockets of “refugees” and fraudulent asylum seekers in flyover cities, making the border problem national. An Afghan “refugee” relocated to Billings, Montana was quickly charged with rape, which some Islamists consider a form of jihad. In Europe, “refugee” influxes have accompanied dramatic increases in rape. The Billings migrants also enter a city with already overcrowded schools.
Sioux City, Iowa schools are majority-minority, a dramatic and quick change. The district pays for services that help translate English into more than 150 languages. Most kids in the district are under the federal poverty level, qualifying them for multiple welfare programs and subsidies.
The same is true in Chicago, Boston, Denver, Washington D.C., and smaller cities across the American heartland. Des Moines, Omaha, Kansas City, Wichita, and St. Louis all dramatically increased in foreign-born residents from 2010 to 2019 by 10 to 50 percent, and given border data since Biden took office, it’s certain that has seen yet another spike.
All these school districts were lower-performing than the rest of their states even before lockdowns and migrant dropoffs. Those two have made things even worse for everyone in town and everyone across the nation funding this national self-destruction. Admitting illegal border crossers to public schools violates American citizen children’s rights, secured in most state constitutions, to an effective education.
It is not the American government’s job to teach every poor kid in the world English, give them breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and provide their housing and health care. It sounds charitable, but it’s really an abdication of the government’s core duty to secure the rights of its own citizens. It is logistically impossible and existentially destructive for American taxpayers and communities to be forced to accept massive numbers of people whom our social institutions radicalize against this country rather than assimilate.
It’s ridiculous to think Americans should tolerate our libraries, schools, public parks, shopping malls, and every other public area made completely inhospitable by people breaking our laws and stealing our peace. This is our home, and we have a right to evict all trespassers who exploit our goodwill and generosity. Nobody would tolerate squatters in his living room because that violates Americans’ natural rights to affirmatively consent to those who would join our communities, as well as to property and safety.
New York City residents are dying in the streets in droves. Native kids in their schools can hardly read and write by eighth grade. It’s utterly ridiculous to think that city or any other should be doing anything for random foreigners when it cannot keep its own people from dying in their bodily excretions on the curb. The solution to refugee camps is not to make them cover the entire country.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
The mother of a Virginia teensex-trafficked twice after her school concealed her newly asserted gender identity has filed a groundbreaking lawsuit against school staff and a Maryland public defender who alleged parental “misgendering” and abuse. The complaint was filed Aug. 22 in the Western District of Virginia court on behalf of Michele Blair by the Child and Parental Rights Campaign (CPRC) with support from the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR).
It alleges that the defendants’ actions—first in withholding vital information about the girl’s gender identification and related assault in the boys’ bathroom, then later by falsely alleging abuse to deprive her mother of custody—resulted in the child’s ordeal at the hands of sexual predators not once, but twice. Blair v. Appomattoxet al. will set critical precedents in two areas of roiling national debate: parental notification of gender transition in schools and parental custody relating to gender identity.
Public Schools Hide Kids’ Dysphoria
More than 10 million children this fall returned to public schools that conceal kids’ transgender identities from parents. A California case recently settled for $100,000 is one of several lawsuits filed by parents whose children were secretly transitioned in school.
The Blair suit, however, is groundbreaking for displaying the liability schools risk when secret-keeping results in tragedy. Safely back in her loving home for more than a year now, Sage still suffers persistent nightmares and panic attacks. She is receiving intensive therapy for complexPTSD, her mother reports, a diagnosis related to prolonged helplessness amid extreme trauma.
The reason for the secrecy that prefaced her ordeal no longer exists: Sage has embraced her sex, reflecting in hindsight that she had “just wanted to make friends” at her new school by claiming to be a boy.
How gender identity relates to “abuse” is fiercely debated nationwide. In some states including California, pending legislation categorizes parental non-affirmation of gender dysphoria as abuse. The political cost of angering parents of all backgrounds has begun to affect 2024 campaigns, as demonstrated by California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s unexpected veto of one of these bills.
In 2023, Virginia lawmakers debated “Sage’s Law,” requiring parental notification in schools and clarifying that raising a child according to his or her sex may not be considered abuse. Virginia Senate Democrats killed Sage’s Law, and it has become a campaignissue. In fact, the transgender delegate who vehemently opposed House Bill 2432 is now facing a veteran anti-traffickingleader championing the bill.
“Sage’s story is an absolute tragedy that no child should ever have to endure. But what is even worse is that it was entirely preventable,” said attorney Vernadette Broyles in announcing the lawsuit. “School administrators and public officials alike decided that their authority superseded that of her parents…This is about who has the best interests of the child at heart, who knows that child better than anyone else, and ultimately who must make important personal decisions for a child.”
An ‘Entirely Preventable’ Nightmare
Sage’s heartbreaking story was documented in The Federalist last winter, when Delegate Dave LaRock introduced Sage’s Law in the Virginia General Assembly. She was a 14-year-old freshman at Appomattox County High School in 2021 when her school allegedly reinforced her claim to be male and concealed it from her parents. She was severely bullied, then assaulted in the male bathroom school employees told her to use, according to the complaint.
Sage ran away, leaving a note expressing fear of further violence. She was caught by a predator who drugged and raped her, then drove her into Washington, DC, where other men sex-trafficked her into Maryland.
When the FBI rescued Sage in Baltimore eight days later, a public defender alleged “misgendering” and abuse at home, so a judge withheld custody from Sage’s loving parents for more than two months. Instead, the judge ordered Sage to a Maryland state home in male quarters, where she was assaulted again, the lawsuit says. Sage fled and was once again caught by a predator and raped, drugged, starved, and tortured, this time for months before law enforcement found her in Texas.
Seeking Justice for Sage
The 55-page complaint lays out nine causes of action, seeking “compensatory and punitive damages” plus court costs for “tortious interference with the parent-child relationship, conspiracy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, professional malpractice, and other rights” resulting in extreme harm to Sage and her mother. The first four causes of action target Appomattox County High School counselors Dena Olsen and Avery Via, Superintendent Annette Bennett, and the school board.
The remaining causes contain shocking charges against Maryland public defender Aneesa Khan and the school counselors of malpractice, perjury, and conspiracy “aimed at depriving Mrs. Blair of custody of her daughter and keeping [Sage] in Maryland to be affirmed in a male identity.”The complaint alleges the trio knowingly presented false testimony of abuse to Judge Robert Kershaw, and that their success in convincing him to keep Sage from her parents resulted in her subsequent abuse in a state home and in her second, months-long victimization.
Lawsuit: Hiding Info Led to Sex Trafficking
The Appomattox defendants, contends the lawsuit, concealed both the school’s unauthorized “mental health intervention” affirming Sage as male and the resultant student “bullying, verbal, physical and sexual assault.” It alleges they failed to take corrective action or to initiate a Title IX sexual harassment investigation, instead directing the girl into the male bathroom, where she was assaulted.
Among the most damning allegations is the counselors’ egregious disregard for Sage’s history of trauma and mental health concerns. Michele had provided these to the school expecting they would work closely with her like Sage’s previous school had, she described in testimony to Virginia’s legislature.
Sage lost her father as a baby and had been through six foster homes by age two when Michele, her biological grandmother, adopted her. Michele recalls Sage’s unusual silence as a child: she had learned not to cry because adults didn’t respond.
With years of love, she developed into a happy child. Then a wave of mental health issues emerged with puberty, compounded by Covid isolation. As a trained Virginia Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA), Michele sought professional help for Sage, including hospitalization the summer before she entered high school.
Despite this known vulnerability, contends the lawsuit, Appomattox kept Sage’s parents in the dark even once reports surfaced of assault in the boys’ bathroom. School personnel met repeatedly with Sage alone, culminating in an emotional session on August 25, 2021 where they threatened she could be sued if she made false allegations against the boys, the lawsuit says. Sage suffered a “psychotic break,” alleges the lawsuit, and ran away that night into the nightmare that followed.
Counselors, Public Defender ‘Conspired’
The night Sage was rescued in Baltimore, she spent hours alone at the hospital undergoing a difficult rape exam into the wee hours of the morning. As she was being driven to a detention center afterward, the complaint alleges, Sage asked that her mother be called to take her home. This request was denied and she was locked in solitary detention. Later that day, Khan was claiming in court that the Blairs were abusive and Sage did not want to go home.
Among the disturbing facts alleged are sudden, mysterious phone calls originating from self-described “mandated reporters” to the Appomattox County child abuse hotline hours after Sage was found on September 3, “before her rescue and location were known to anyone but law enforcement, Mrs. Blair and Ms. Khan.”
Other reports followed, claiming Michele had subjected Sage to “‘conversion therapy’ aimed at changing [Sage’s] gender identity.” This was “factually impossible,” as Michele allegedly only became aware of the gender identity shift the night Sage ran away. In fact, asserts the complaint, Khan conspired with Olsen and Via to “facilitat[e] the initiation of child protective services investigations in Virginia and Maryland.”
There are further allegations of grievous cruelty to a traumatized young rape victim: Sage was never informed her parents were waiting for her right outside the jail; Khan convinced Sage to lie to the court that her parents had abused her; Khan told the child her mother no longer wanted her, and withheld all the gifts and loving letters Michele sent to Sage at the Maryland children’s home.
These “extreme and outrageous actions intentionally aimed at harming…Mrs. Blair’s parental relationship with [Sage]” were allegedly “all because Ms. Khan believed that [Sage] must be affirmed as male,” the lawsuit says. According to a text from Sage to a friend, Khan had the stated ambition of taking her case to the Supreme Court.
Ideology Trumps Care for Trauma
Broylesstated to The Federalist Radio Hour that “ideology overwhelmed everything we know about trauma, about sex abuse victims, about children needing their parents and how they should be restored [to them] immediately…unless there’s actual proof of…abuse.” Instead, a 100-pound, deeply wounded girl with no criminal record was jailed for several days, then housed with troubled teenage boys, “where she was exposed to drugs, further sexual harassment and assault.”
Broyles reasoned Sage was treated “as if she’s a juvenile delinquent…in order to maintain control.” The legal maneuvering in Maryland lasted more than two months, with Judge Kershaw holding multiple hearings that delayed Sage’s return to Virginia required under the Interstate Compact for Juveniles (ICJ).
Khan’s alleged narrative of abandonment fell on receptive ground: Sage told Michele months later how much she’d missed her, but tried not to, because she “knew” Michele didn’t want her. The shame and unworthiness felt by victims of sexual exploitation is well-documented. “Trauma-related shame is an irrational and biological response…connected to the specific reactions of denial, hiding, and running away,” explains one study.
A Critical Precedent on School Secrecy
The school secrecy that allegedly facilitated Sage’s ordeal is an intense national debate. In Virginia, leftist school boards like FairfaxCounty’s are defying Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s new model policies requiring parental notification and use of privacy facilities by sex, not gender identity. California and New Jersey are suing their own constituents, at constituent expense, for the right to deceive them about their own children.
Significantly, records indicate Appomattox staff followed the same principle of instant, uncritical, and secret affirmation dictated by LGBT activist–craftedmodel policies that have infiltrated thousands of schools. The “Schools in Transition” model policy insists “affirming a child’s gender identity is in a child’s best interest,” and that school personnel have “unique insight into the student’s needs without the biases parents can or are perceived to have.”
An Essential Precedent on Children’s Rights
This raises the critical question: does refusal to affirm a child as the opposite sex constitute “abuse” and grounds for removal from parental custody, as Khan advocated in court? Activists are training legalofficials and law students that it does.
A bill California’s legislature passed would transfer children to state custody where, as Sage experienced, the risk of actual abuse skyrockets. Simultaneously, by dictating that foster parents “affirm” kids’ sexual identities, California is reducing the homes available to needy foster kids.
In some states, family custody is alreadydecided on this basis. While all 50 states are bound by the ICJ governing the return of runaway minors, some have passed “refuge” laws preventing the return of children who have run or been taken across state lines for “gender-affirming care.”
The fundamental question in Blair v. Appomattox et al. is whether fit parents or the state rightfully decide a child’s best interests. Sage’s story as described in the complaint shows the devastating potential harm to children when ideologically captured institutions wrest control of a child’s life from parents. While the case will set critical precedents in schools and courts, it also highlights the pressing need for laws reinforcing the right of parents to protect their children from state overreach.
Michele says she’s filing this lawsuit in the “hope…that no parent ever has to go through what [she] did to protect their child.”
Laura Bryant Hanford is a mother of five and is actively involved in school policy and religious freedom issues in Virginia, where she lives with her family. She served from 2015 to 2018 on Fairfax County Public Schools’ Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee. She was the lead congressional staff drafter of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. She also served at the U.S. Embassy in Romania as the officer in charge of human rights, focusing on ethnic minorities, women, and refugees. She is a graduate of Princeton University.
Public schools across the country are using politically one-sided questions to ideologically screen potential teachers, according to a survey of nearly 70 public schools by the National Opportunity Project (NOP). Instead of merely selecting the most qualified candidates, these discriminatory hiring practices evaluate would-be teachers by their alignment with so-called “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) goals.
Documents obtained by NOP show public schools advertised ideological requirements in their job postings with coded language seeking “equity-literate educator[s]” who will work at “dismantling systemic racism” with a “commitment to social justice.” Denver Public Schools dictated that applicants should “have an anti-racist mindset and will work to dismantle systems of oppression and inequity in our community.”
These standards invite educators of a particular ideological affiliation to pursue jobs in public schools while deterring other candidates. “They position teachers as soldiers who share responsibility for upending societal barriers,” the report noted. “Their message to applicants is clear: Be prepared to join our crusade, or don’t apply.”
Kristen Williamson, communications director at the National Opportunity Project, told The Federalist schools are “possibly breaking the law” by ideologically filtering potential teachers.
The vetting continues in the interview process, in which candidates may be asked “loaded and presumptive” questions. Some of the questions NOP uncovered asked applicants how they would lead conversations about race in the classroom and incorporate unscientific fads like “gender diversity.”
“Perspectives that diverge from or fail to mesh with the district’s views on equity” are “judged poorly,” NOP concluded.
According to a Fairfax County Public Schools screening rubric, an “outstanding candidate” is someone who “provides concrete examples of strategies of their commitment to serve to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and understands “their role in breaking down barriers.”
One prompt from City Schools of Decatur in Georgia asks how applicants would shut down parents who object to their racially divisive curricula:
An upset parent emails you regarding a classroom discussion with your students about Critical Race Theory. They accuse you (the teacher) of anti-Americanism, changing ‘real history,’ and of making White children feel marginalized and attacked. Please discuss your course of action and draft a response to this parent.
The hiring team then must ensure “that there is at least one person of color and one woman or gender-fluid person” involved in scoring the response. NOP uncovered several other identity quotes for hiring panels and committees like this one.
“The effect of these policies is that teachers in many of the country’s K-12 schools are selected partly based on subjective, quasi-political, and sometimes illegal criteria that have nothing to do with reading, writing, and math,” Williamson said, noting that these teachers are “handpicked based at least in part on their acceptance and evangelism of one side’s political and social orthodoxy.”
Sometimes applicants aren’t just filtered by their beliefs, but by their physical characteristics. Hinsdale Township High School District 86 in Illinois insists that employees reflect the student body in terms of “race, cultural background, linguistic skill, physical abilities, and disabilities, sex, and sexual identity.”
“Parents and taxpayers must hold school districts accountable regarding teacher hiring standards,” Williamson said. “Ultimately, these same teachers are recruited to be partisan political activists for teachers unions, forcing policies they teach in the classroom on the rest of the country through strikes, lobbying, and electioneering.”
Meet DeDe Duffy. A preschool teacher in Cape Coral, FL. She says she teaches her students that if they don’t like their parents, they can find another family.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
ROCKVILLE, Md.—Here at the crossroads of Mannakee Street and College Drive in the suburbs of the nation’s capital, woke intersectionalism came to die.
Outside the headquarters of Montgomery County Public Schools, a cleric at a local Ethiopian Orthodox church stood in a white turban, gold-colored robe, and church insignia. Like Seyouman Getahun was in an interfaith crowd of about 1,000 parents, students, and community members. The crowd of largely “brown and black” people, as equity warriors so often colorize minorities, rallied for the right of parents to opt children out of age-inappropriate sex education in local public schools.
Meet Like Seyouman Getahun, a cleric at a local Ethiopian Orthodox Church. He told me why he was at the Montgomery County MD rally. I am putting 7 minutes of our chat here so you can hear from people in the trenches. Watch his reactions to Gay BCs and Gender Queer at the end! pic.twitter.com/SoCLuFlqrF
Co-organized by a new group called Coalition of Virtue, these parents are the “intersectional” answer to the Woke Army. The Woke Army are the leftist activists who exploit “black, indigenous, people of color” (BIPOC) to put children in the crosshairs of the “rainbow mafia” in K-12 schools. These parents who defy their stereotypes are the Woke Army’s worst nightmare.
Hundreds of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians from an estimated 40 local churches, including Getahun’s, rallied beside Muslim immigrant families from a dozen mosques and other area community members. Their ranks included a Filipino-Puerto Rican-American Christian dad and a Peruvian-American Catholic mother.
All were here to protest the refusal of the local school board, all affiliated at some point with Democratic Party politics, to allow parents to opt their kids out of sex ed that includes an introduction to homosexual behavior and gender identities that contradict one’s natural sex.
“This hill is where the democrats have chosen [to] die. Bizarre. Totally bizarre,” said a Twitter user.
Today, at the corner of Campus Drive and Mannakee Street, in Montgomery County, Maryland, woke intersectionalism came to die.
Today, June 27, about 1,000 Arab Muslims, Ethiopian Christians, Peruvian Catholics and so many other brown and black immigrant families outflanked the… pic.twitter.com/G623Q6Sw7x
From Rockville to Glendale, Calif., where Armenian American parents oppose school board indoctrination, a new “intersectional” rejection of wokeism includes voters up for grabs by Republican politicians and efforts like No Labels, which may advocate for a third-party presidential candidate in 2024.
“Vote them out!” the Rockville crowd chanted, packed shoulder to shoulder.
The protestors’ demands were simple enough: “Protect families’ rights!” “What do we want? Opt out! When do we want it? Now!” “We want freedom! We want rights!”
Across the parking lot, about a dozen all-white leftist activists stood, chatting with each other. They looked awkward and out of place, with rainbow umbrellas over their heads but no rain yet and soap bubbles from a party machine streaming by.
Later, inside for public comments at a school board meeting, local activist Laura Stewart complained about a video I had posted from a protest of Muslim parents early last month. She objected that it “was retweeted by Elon Musk,” the owner of Twitter.
In video testimony, Stewart omitted a critical detail from her resume: she has been an officer and leader in the Montgomery County Women’s Democratic Club. She has also been vice president of advocacy for the Montgomery County Council of Parent-Teacher Associations and just received the “National PTA Lifetime Achievement Award” from the local council.
The rallying parents are mostly new American citizens. Their lifetime achievement is immigration, acculturation, employment, and parenthood in a new nation where they enjoyed no legacy, no property, no bank account, and no “privilege,” except the inherited grit to navigate a new society with a new language and culture.
If you can believe it, the night before this rally filled with immigrants, the Montgomery County Women’s Democratic Club issued a statement with a newly formed group, “Coalition for Inclusive Schools” that Stewart now leads. It condemned “outside influences” seeking to opt-out children from age-inappropriate sex ed.
The #WokeArmy is dealt a lethal blow. The battlefront: Montgomery County, Maryland. TODAY. The hard-left came after the kids and Muslim parents aren’t having it. 🧵
Montgomery County Public Schools recently refused to allow parents to opt out of indoctrination that relates to… pic.twitter.com/KIMTI1fAIM
This multicultural crowd was anything but “outside influences.” It was filled with recent immigrants who live locally. These parents made an argument that parent groups are increasingly expressing around the country and in Canada, asserting religious freedom rights.
“Our beliefs! Our choice! Religious freedom, raise your voice,” they chanted.
Peruvian-American mother Norma Margulies carried a handmade sign that read: “Respetemos el derecho de las familias a compartir su cultura y religión con sus hijos e hijas!” “Respect the rights of families to share their culture and religion with their children, sons and daughters,” she translated, adding, “It’s a basic right.”
Margulies joined the protest from her home in nearby Fairfax County, Va., with a friend, Tony Sabio. He’s the son of parents from the Philippines and Puerto Rico and a military veteran who rescued a boy from Ukraine.
Sabio said he is running for school board in Fairfax County because of the disenfranchisement of parents. “I’m here for these parents,” Sabio said over the crowd’s chants as he carried the American flag over his shoulders.
In recent years, woke activists have exploited “intersectionality.” That’s a concept critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw invented in 1989 to look at injustices through the prism of an “intersectionality” of various allegedly oppressed social identities. While the idea had some merits, far-left activists and politicians have weaponized it.
In recent days, Maryland and Virginia parents have held sign-making events and parent educational seminars at local places of worship including mosques like the Islamic Center of Maryland and affiliates of the Medhanialem Orthodox Church. Holding signs that read “Respect Our Values” and “Parents Know Best,” they voiced concerns about the sex curriculum being taught to their children.
Across the street from the school system’s offices, a strip of locally owned storefronts showcased the diversity in this suburb community. On Hungerford Drive, an Ethiopian restaurant sits beside Island Pride Jamaican Restaurant, Yunnan Rice Noodle, Aria Halal Supermarket, and 5-10 Quick Mart.
In the crowd, Getahun, the Ethiopian Orthodox cleric, told me he was there to support parental rights as enshrined in the 14th Amendment and the U.S. Constitution. He flipped through copies of the books “The Gay BCs” and “Gender Queer” tucked in my “Mary Poppins” bag of inappropriate books in public schools and furrowed his brow at the images.
“T is for TRANS,” he read, not the usual “trains” in most books teaching the ABCs. “It’s a brave step to take,” he continued, “to take to live as the gender you know is innate.”
The book is meant for toddlers, as young as three.
While the rally primarily focused on the right to opt out of sex curriculum, the attendees also saw the school board’s refusal to address their concerns as an infringement on their religious freedom.
Nearby a rally organizer, Ismail Royer, a director of Islam and religious freedom at the Religious Freedom Institute based in Washington, D.C., said: “This is the intersection, this is the alliance that really matters. This is the moral consensus that is at the heart of the American moral tradition and virtue tradition.”
By about 5 p.m., the rally ended, with Getahun among the last leaving the rally off Mannakee Street and College Drive, as members of this new intersectional alliance chanted, “We will prevail!”
Asra Nomani is a senior contributor at The Federalist. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, she is also the author of “Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance Destroying America’s Freedom.” She is a senior fellow in the practice of journalism at Independent Women’s Network. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com or @AsraNomani on Twitter.
The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss is at it again: amplifying far-left partisans in their war on quality education for American kids. On June 8, she wrote about a report claiming schools that use a classics-based curriculum are vanguards of “right-wing Christian nationalism.”
Schools that emphasize personal virtue, English grammar, classic literature, patriotism, original source-based history, traditional and rigorous math and science, and classical artistic training are “designed to attract Christian nationalists with specific imagery and curriculum,” Strauss slanderously claims. I’m not making this up: She and the report claim the American colors of “red, white, and blue” and pictures of the American founders are racist dog whistles.
Such imagery on the schools’ websites is “designed to attract White conservative families,” Strauss says, citing the report. The implicit bigotry is appalling — assuming some people wouldn’t be interested in patriotic ideas simply because of their skin color. Who’s the racist: people who think American patriotism has a skin color or people who don’t?
Strauss and the report she’s citing also attack schools that promote virtuous behavior to their students, because “values” and “virtues” “stand as shorthand for quoted scripture.” We can’t have kids learning about the deep religious beliefs that created their unprecedented equality, liberty, and opportunity, now, could we? That would be horrible! They might, you know, shovel driveways for the elderly, stay faithful to their spouses, and donate their time and money to charity!
According to these anti-American, anti-Christian partisans, who clearly reject the founding American statesmen’s views about the purpose of public education, there’s absolutely no room for teaching children virtue, morality, or religion in public schools. What an interesting message to Christian parents from the people who control public education.
The report makes sure to target highly successful networks of classical schools, including those run by parents trained at and given free curriculum from Hillsdale College (my alma mater), the Great Hearts Academies, and Liberty Common in Fort Collins, Colorado, a model for many other classical schools. Strauss paints it as nefarious that a guy who wrote in The Federalist noticed such schools exist for the “purpose of forming young minds,” as if every single school in existence doesn’t form the minds who enter.
What she really means is that only the left should be allowed to shape people’s minds. That’s what this report and article are really about: boxing out of public education anyone who doesn’t think exactly like politically extremist teachers union leaders do.
This is another illustration of the reality that today’s left doesn’t believe in sharing the public square, public funds, or anything else with people who don’t parrot their views. This is why leftist-run schools don’t educate, they indoctrinate: You can’t educate without conversation.
Monologues are not conversation. Conversation is not shouting down ideas, banning them, or slandering them. That’s why suddenly conservatives are the only ones who believe in free speech, honoring our country’s fathers and mothers, and educating without indoctrinating: The left has abandoned these common goods in the pursuit of political power.
This report is the work product of the Network for Public Education (NPE), founded by Diane Ravitch, who used to believe in educating kids about their American heritage with original source documents. I’d bet you her U.S. history book is on the shelf in many of the schools this report targets because it is in my kids’ Christian classical school.
But Ravitch has subjugated herself to leftist ideology as she’s become more professionally dependent on corrupt teachers unions. She now seeks to foist a similar intellectual degradation on innocent kids. It’s a shame.
Given this connection, it’s no surprise NPE is financially, ideologically, and professionally connected to the nation’s largest teachers unions, which are gigantic, far-left political operations. The Chicago Teachers Union gave NPE and its political action fund, Network for Public Education Action, a series of grants that look like a startup endowment, according to CTU’s own website and its tax forms. From 2014 to 2016, the union’s foundation gave NPE $265,000, according to its tax forms.
CTU is a large affiliate of the massive national American Federation of Teachers union. It is notorious for extremist behavior, including shutting down Chicago schools in 2022 in defiance of elected officials’ decision to restart school post-Covid.
CTU takes in $32 million a year, and the AFT takes in more than $200 million a year, according to their public tax forms. CTU has something like $60 million in assets, and AFT has $140 million. Each has multiple other arms that also rake in millions each, as well as functioning as distributing houses for all the public money they collect.
The NEA, by the way, takes in $600 million a year, and has more than $450 million in assets, according to its tax records. Teachers unions are essentially giant political money laundering operations and among the top donors to the Democrat Party.
NPE says it has also received money more recently from the Schott Foundation for Public Education, which Peter Cook says received more than $1.3 million from unions between 2011 and 2019, according to their disclosures to the U.S. Department of Labor. Schott itself discloses AFT and National Education Association union funding on its website.
Like teacher’s unions, which strongly support political extremism such as teaching small children about gay sex and hiding kids’ gender struggles from their parents, NPE is an ideologically far-left organization. A conference attendee noted the organization considered canceling or moving its 2016 conference in North Carolina after the state passed a law requiring men to stay out of women’s bathrooms. The report’s retired journalist coauthor is a longtime school choice opponent and teachers union mouthpiece.
So, it’s quite rich for an organization connected to some of the biggest leftist political organizing operations in the United States to complain about politics in public education. What they’re really complaining about is competition, which is gaining steam because of how badly these far-left union activists are mangling public schools.
Union money goes all across the country to target any education innovations that threaten their control of the system. Classical schools are one of those threats.
Lots of parents aren’t happy with the current results of unions’ giant political influence operations masquerading as public education. Instead of responding to parents’ concerns about the lack of quality in their kids’ schools and the proliferation of extremist politics, the interest groups making billions off public education belittle concerned parents as Nazis. (Obviously, “white Christian nationalism” is to them a synonym for “Nazi,” a deeply offensive slander that is somehow OK for the left to throw at anyone who disagrees with their politics.)
“[T]he classical/right-wing sector is rapidly growing. Forty-seven percent of the schools we identified opened since the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017,” the report says. It includes zero reflection about how the rise in leftist extremism since Trump’s tenure may have contributed to this rapid exodus of parents from conventional public schools.
If more parents get better schools that don’t happen to force teachers to launder billions of dollars to the Democrat Party through mandatory union dues, this entire multibillion-dollar power-mongering racket is in danger. This is not at all about the best education for kids; it’s about money and power.
Last month, in a shocking display of mob violence, hundreds of teenagers took to the streets in Chicago, smashing car windows, firing guns, and even assaulting innocent bystanders. It’s a scene that has become all too familiar throughout the country in recent months amid a youth crime wave that has devastated families and communities and revealed a stunning lack of moral foundation in our youngest generation.
While many Americans are rightfully demanding that political leaders do more to end the lawlessness and punish offenders – including ending the war on police – city halls and state legislatures can only put a Band-Aid on a much deeper problem. When it comes to youth crime, if we want to end the violence in our streets, we must start raising the standards in our schools.
There is no denying that the American education system is failing students – especially students in low-income, urban areas. In Chicago, 18 schools had zero students who rated as proficient in either math or reading in 2022. In Baltimore City Public Schools, 90% of students are not proficient in math, and 80% of elementary students are not proficient in English. The graduation rate is just 69%.
Some districts have given up entirely on improving learning outcomes. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, teachers are simply handing out higher grades even as fewer and fewer students meet state testing standards.
Frederick Douglas High School in Baltimore. Nearly half of the high school students in Baltimore City Public Schools earned below a 1.0 GPA during the first three quarters of the 2020-2021 school year. (Baltimore City Public Schools)
Politicians, especially on the left, have been quick to blame pandemic for these alarming figures. But the hard truth is our schools were failing long before COVID-19. In 2019, prior to the lockdowns, just 37% and 32% of students rated as proficient in reading and math, respectively, across all of Illinois. In 2018, 140 New York City schools had at least one grade where more than 90% of students failed state competency tests.
It’s not a question of funding, either. Baltimore City Public Schools ranks fourth nationally in funding on a per-student basis. The New York City education budget was 89% above the national average last year – $37,000 per student. In total, the federal government distributed $190 billion to schools in COVID-19 relief funds.
So why is student achievement continuing to slip, going hand-in-hand with a precipitous rise in violence both in and out of classrooms?
One big reason is that schools have stopped teaching hard skills like reading and math and are instead peddling left-wing grievance politics like critical race theory and radical gender theory. CRT teaches kids – especially Black kids – that racial minorities are marginalized in this country, and that lashing out in acts of violence and looting are ways of “leveling the playing field.”
The so-called “equity” agenda is a particularly sinister aspect of this worldview. In schools, “equity” means lowering the bar for all students in order to manufacture the same outcome for everyone, destroying merit and any incentive for high achievement along the way.
CRT and “equity” training teach kids the lie that concepts like rationality and hard work, rather than forming the bedrock of a happy and prosperous life, are “racist” and don’t matter anyway because success or failure is pre-determined by skin color, gender, and sexual orientation.
This lie is especially harmful for Black and low-income kids, who are the primary targets of the far left’s classroom indoctrination campaign.
Many such students often lack a stable family life, and in particular a father in the home – another major driver of poor academic performance and lawless children. Without the solid moral grounding that strong families provide, kids in the school system are at the complete mercy of evil and twisted ideologies that encourage division and violence along racial and class lines.
One big reason is that schools have stopped teaching hard skills like reading and math and are instead peddling left-wing grievance politics like critical race theory and radical gender theory.
This has predictably led to the complete erosion of any form of discipline in our schools, and by extension our streets. If Black students believe that they are doomed to be victims of an irredeemably racist and corrupt society, is it any surprise that they have no interest in school and are prone to acts of destruction and violence?
Meanwhile, school staff and even law enforcement officials have been effectively neutered by liberal politicians who view punishment for wrongdoing as just another relic of a “systemically racist” society.
The results of this moral corruption of an entire generation of kids are truly tragic – even more so because they were avoidable. Last year, nine kids under 17 were killed between 2 and 5 p.m. on school days in Chicago. In New York City, 124 kids under 18 committed shootings in 2022. Other crimes like carjackings are also on the rise among young people, while violence inside of schools is at an all-time high.
Addressing these problems starts first and foremost in the home. We desperately need to change the culture of fatherlessness in this country, particularly in the Black community, and return faith to a central place in our lives.
We also need to purge our schools of the divisive ideologies that are seeding resentment and self-loathing in our young people. Groups like 1776 Action, which I am proud to work alongside, are doing heroic work to achieve this goal, and their Parent Power Pledge is helping voters know which politicians will fight for change once elected.
As I have seen in my own ministry and outreach, there is hope for the future. With the right approach, we can still save many young people from destroying themselves and their communities. But it’s going to take bold leadership, accountability for failing officials, and a commitment to education, not indoctrination, in our schools.
Pastor John K. Amanchukwu Sr. is an influential preacher, author and activist who spreads God’s truth zealously and without fear. He is a senior fellow at 1776 Action and author. See www.ERACEDBOOK.COM.
This April marks 40 years since my therapist told me a “sex change” was the only answer to my persistent mental difficulties. Unfortunately, I followed his advice, obtained cross-sex hormones, and underwent surgery. As I learned through my painful experience, “gender-affirming treatment” (GAT), also known as “gender-affirming care,” is medical fraud and malpractice.
A person’s sex cannot be changed. I know. I lived and identified as a woman for eight years. Hormones and surgery didn’t change my sex. I was a man before surgery, and I remained a man after surgery, illustrating the truth of God’s perfect design — two separate and distinct sexes, male and female, innate and unchangeable.
Every step I took to identify as a female did not make me a female but devaluated me as a man, father, and husband. Each step dehumanized my male body and identity. So-called gender-affirming treatment destroyed my life and relationships, as well as those of my family.
The same thing is happening to people today, except at younger ages. I know. I get their emails.
In the decades following my surgery, instead of the “gender” industry dying out, it has run rampant — devaluing, dehumanizing, and destroying thousands of lives. When I fell for the scam, the patients were exclusively adult men. Today, the industry targets vulnerable adolescents of both sexes influenced by the emotional and physical throes of puberty, who can’t be expected to grasp the long-term consequences, such as infertility, bone density loss, and heart problems.
Parents are told their child will die by suicide if the child is denied medicalization, but it’s a myth. The Child and Parental Rights Campaign gathered the scientific evidence: “[T]here is no long-term evidence that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or ‘transition’ surgeries prevent suicide. On the contrary, the best long-term research shows that individuals who do go through medical transition kill themselves at a rate 19 times greater than the general population.”
A Path to Sterilization
GAT includes many destructive and devaluing procedures. With social transition, a person adopts a new name and pronouns that erase his original identity. Puberty blockers — drugs with severe, well-known side-effects that stop normal growth and maturation — are administered.
Those are followed by cross-sex hormones — powerful drugs with destructive, known medical side-effects that impose a cross-sex appearance. The final step is surgeries — invasive, destructive procedures to remove healthy breasts and wombs in girls and healthy genitalia in boys.
It’s a path to sterilization. Sperm and eggs don’t mature without going through puberty. When puberty blockers are followed by cross-sex hormones, the teen is permanently sterilized. Some refer to this as chemical castration. Furthermore, to state the obvious, surgically removing testicles or wombs ends any possibility of having biological children.
Affirming a child in the opposite sex is emotional and psychological child abuse. Experimenting on healthy children with powerful drugs and sterilizing surgery is the epitome of medical malpractice and horribly barbaric.
‘Regret Is Rare’
After living eight years identifying as a woman, I still experienced extreme emotional distress and made the decision to detransition, i.e., to go back to living and presenting as the man I am. When I told my gender therapist and sex change surgeon, they assured me I was the only one they had ever heard of who went back.
Curious how I could be the only case in which “sex change” failed to fix gender issues, I launched a website, SexChangeRegret.com, to reach out to others. It turns out my experience wasn’t rare. Over the last ten years, I have heard from hundreds, maybe thousands, of people like me who found that GAT wasn’t the answer.
Research tells a similar story. Regrettable outcomes made the headlines almost 20 years ago. In July 2004, The Guardian reported the results of a review of 100 medical studies in an article tellingly headlined “Sex Changes are Not Effective, Say Researchers.” The article summarized the findings: “There is no conclusive evidence that sex change operations improve the lives of transsexuals, with many people remaining severely distressed and even suicidal after the operation.”
A 2011 long-term follow-up study in Sweden concurs. People who underwent GAT were 19 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population.
Undeterred by the lack of evidence of benefits, enthusiastic “gender experts” in Europe and the United States expanded the dangerous practice to children and adolescents. Pediatric gender clinics sprang up, ignoring evidence that showed most children, if not affirmed as the opposite sex, reconciled their sex with biological reality by the time they reached adulthood. Instead, clinics promoted and offered only GAT.
Finally, in 2022, pediatric gender clinics in Sweden, Finland, and the UK objectively reviewed the evidence. They found the risks outweighed the potential benefits and officially ended the practice of GAT for minors, replacing it with good psychosocial care. Recently, Norway did the same.
Why the U.S. Continues as Others Stop
But in the United States, it’s a different story. The legacy medical establishment pushes radical, risky medicalization, sterilization, and removal of healthy body parts as the only effective treatment for youth — no counseling, no diagnosis and treatment of co-existing disorders, little discussion of the risks and harms, no waiting, no alternatives.
Hospitals apparently salivate over the money to be made by gender clinics, as seen in the video from Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Pediatric Transgender Clinic in Nashville, Tennessee, in which a doctor describes the surgeries as a “huge money maker” for the hospital.
Recently, a selfless whistleblower from Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital blew the cover off the lack of established protocols and frequency of harm, saying, “what is happening to them [children] is morally and medically appalling.”
Children and their parents need protection from this medical quackery, and they need it now. That’s why lawmakers in several states are pursuing legislation to protect children from harmful medicalization. Arkansas, Arizona, Alabama, Florida, and Texas enacted protections, and several other states are in process: Missouri, Utah, Montana, South Carolina, South Dakota, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Oklahoma.
The state of Florida commissioned a comprehensive evaluation of the benefits and harms of GAT for minors in 2022. The scientifically stringent review exposed a lack of quality evidence showing any benefit, and ample proof of harm. The analysis prompted the Florida medical boards to act and limit the widespread use of hormonal and surgical interventions for youth.
Encouraging Me to Cross-Dress Was Child Abuse
As a child, I was encouraged and affirmed by my grandmother to cross-dress in women’s clothing. She made me a purple chiffon evening dress when I was four years old. It was our secret, she said. Her repeated affirming and loving response to me in the dress proved devastating. It implanted the damaging idea that something must be wrong with me as a boy.
Think of the parallels to today. The public-school environment fosters the same perverse practice on children by teaching students (beginning in kindergarten) a disturbing curriculum that confuses children about their innate identity. Public schools have become indoctrination centers for “gender change” and de facto satellite gender clinics that practice medicine without training, a license, or, in many cases, parental permission.
“The public-school environment fosters the same perverse practice on children by teaching students (beginning in kindergarten) a disturbing curriculum that confuses children about their innate identity. Public schools have become indoctrination centers for “gender change” and de facto satellite gender clinics that practice medicine without training, a license, or, in many cases, parental permission.”
Teachers groom children as early as kindergarten or first grade to think that “there are many genders” and they can choose one. When children seem upset or perplexed about whether they are a girl or a boy, school counselors and teachers stand ready to inappropriately diagnose them as trans and encourage them to take the next step: “Choose a new name and wardrobe for use at school. We’ll keep it a secret from your parents.” Unbeknownst to parents, many school districts prohibit staff from informing parents.
Protect your children from being corrupted and “transitioned.” Take them out of the public school system.
Trans Kids and Parents
As I discovered in my own life, and in the lives of parents and the detransitioners I have had the pleasure to work with, gender distress is a symptom, not a diagnosis. There are many factors driving youth to identify as trans, such as indoctrination and enabling in public schools, local peer group influence and social contagion, and autism or mental disorders.
Other factors are social media apps such as TikTok, sexually charged transgender gaming, and anime. Lastly, there are adverse childhood experiences, such as sexual abuse, emotional abuse, divorce of parents, exposure to pornography, bullying, and other perceived trauma.
Kids don’t need a “gender” therapist or hormones or to cut off healthy body parts. They need parents to shelter them from school indoctrination and peer group and social media influences. They may need a trauma therapist who can help them unearth and address underlying adverse childhood experiences or mental disorders.
My Adverse Childhood Experiences
I can only speculate as to why I wanted to cross-dress and pretend I was a girl. Certainly, my grandma’s obvious delight in me as a girl in the purple dress, not as the scruffy boy in blue jeans, damaged my male identity. Another leading contender was my relationship with my mother.
I never felt my mom, a young 20-year-old at my birth, ever wanted me, loved me, or accepted me. The feeling was confirmed years later, after I detransitioned, when she shared an alarming story with a friend of mine.
Without any shame or remorse, she revealed how she would grab my wrists and yank me up off the floor with one arm and hit my dangling body with a frying pan with the other. I have no memory of this. I must have been very young to be suspended with one hand.
I never hated my mom. I was always trying to win her approval and get her to love me. The sad truth is, at no time in my mom’s lifetime did she ever talk about how much she loved me. Shortly before she died, she revealed to me and my wife that when I was a toddler, she almost killed me by shaking me very hard.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to guess that a four-year-old boy would prefer being loved and appreciated at grandma’s wearing the purple dress than being yanked up by one arm and hit with a frying pan by an angry mom. My grandma’s affirming me as a girl started my overwhelming desire to change into a female, a longing reinforced by subsequent physical and sexual mistreatment.
The psychological and emotional abuse perpetrated on me as a child was so devaluing and so dehumanizing, I was convinced as an adult by doctors that the only way to heal was to load up on female hormones and let surgeons slice up my body and declare I was now a female. That was 40 years ago. Today, “gender-affirming care” for children is lucrative medical abuse that devalues, destroys, and dehumanizes boys and girls.
Sweden and other countries examined the evidence and ended it. Florida reviewed the high-quality evidence and as a result, Florida medical associations stopped it. The U.K. court reviewed evidence provided by the Tavistock clinic and called it experimental and not suitable for children.
Children need love, real care, and good psychosocial counseling, not a change of identity.
Walt Heyer is an accomplished author and public speaker with a passion for mentoring individuals whose lives have been torn apart by unnecessary gender-change surgery.
Regular viewers know that I am sicken by what is happening to America’s children. I have been asking for a long time, “Why is the political Left so hyper about transgenderism, and mutilating children?” I think I might have some (certainly not all) answers.
Could it be motivated by the “Over-Population” cabal?
The Democrat Party, and the rest of the whacky Left, have always embraced Margaret Sanger and her beliefs that the world is overpopulated. She fought for euthanizing certain people groups, especially black people. She wrote how she was a student of how Hitler killed the Jews.
The Left certainly knows that children that have these cross-sex hormones, surgeries, et., al., CANNOT REPRODUCE. (They also know the alarming amount of people, especially young people, are dying from Fentanyl poisoning, yet won’t close the southern border).
History is full of their manipulative means to control Americans. Could this be one more manipulation?
Reports of book banning have proliferated throughout the media. Understandably, such claims should raise concern among free speech advocates. The ability to freely disseminate knowledge and challenge the status quo is a fundamental pillar of a free society. An illiberal act such as a book ban should be met with scorn by those who truly care about advancing society. However, behind claims of rampantly spreading censorship, a key question has been left unanswered. What’s a book ban?
The word ban is generally understood to mean a prohibition of a certain behavior, substance, or object. However, due to First Amendment constitutional protections and corresponding case law, it’s illegal for any government entity to outlaw the possession of a book. With very rare exceptions, there are no penalties for owning, buying, and selling books in America.
Yet media reports claim book bans are spreading like wildfires in states such as Florida and Texas. So how can that be?
Which Books Are Banned?
The issue is primarily a cultural tug-of-war taking place in public school libraries. The discovery of sexually explicit books on school bookshelves nationwide has sparked controversy.
Pen America is easily the most cited organization when it comes to book bans. The self-proclaimed “free speech” advocacy group is mentioned in almost every media report on the subject. Yet few Americans understand the very expansive definition of a “book ban” utilized by the organization. Pen America considers books “challenged for review,” but still available for student use, as “banned” even if the books haven’t been removed from the library. Pen America considers any book that’s available but age-restricted as “banned.” Moreover, several school districts have refuted the popular book ban list produced by Pen America, claiming the list contained books that were never removed from circulation in their respective libraries.
An expansive view of “book bans” creates a few problems. There’s an assumption that the government has a responsibility to produce and distribute every book in existence to school children free of charge. This may sound great until you consider that books often contain inaccurate, poorly sourced, or controversial information. I doubt anyone of reason would consider the exclusion of books such as Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” (a Nazi manifesto), “The Anarchist Cookbook” (a bomb-building guide), and “The Turner Diaries” (a white supremacy recruitment novel) from our public K-12 libraries to be an illiberal attempt to suppress free speech.
Does Ideology Influence Book Selection?
Nonetheless, there’s reason to believe some librarians have injected their own bias into the procurement process. Writer Kirk Cameron has had his Christian children’s books rejected by publicly funded libraries that openly embrace drag queen story hours featuring pro-transgender book titles. At the time of writing, Pen America’s website produced nothing on the aforementioned controversies surrounding the rejection of conservative-themed books.
Additionally, the American Association of School Librarians grants an annual “Social Justice” award of $2,000 to librarians and $5,000 for new books to school librarians for devising a “program, unit, or event in support of social justice using resources of the school library.” Although one may agree with the decisions of a publicly funded library to promote or demote a certain viewpoint, it requires a substantial degree of denialism to pretend viewpoint discrimination isn’t happening.
Who Should Pick the Books?
A 5-4 Supreme Court Decision in Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico (1982) restricts school boards from removing books on the basis of subject matter, recognizing school libraries as special free speech zones. However, the dissenting justices argued that, because books can be obtained outside the school library and school board officials are democratically elected to handle affairs related to the management of the school, there are no First Amendment implications concerning the exclusion of certain materials. Furthermore, the view of school libraries as being crucial free speech zones seems antiquated in the age of social media and smartphones.
Maybe it’s time to question the idea that a government agency refusing to disseminate a book constitutes a ban of any sort. Public school libraries are taxpayer-funded entities. In our democratic society, we vote for policies that reflect our values and preferences. These voter preferences should manifest as we set priorities in public school education.
Just as many jurisdictions may refuse to provide bomb-building instruction, gunsmithing guides, and white supremacy manifestos to their students, school boards everywhere should be allowed to make reasonable value judgments concerning objectionable content.
Educators and librarians are humans with biases and policy preferences just like the rest of us. Deferring to them with no community oversight doesn’t prevent viewpoint discrimination; it just ensures it goes unchallenged.
Raheem Williams is a policy analyst at the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE). He has worked for several liberty-based academic research centers and think tanks. He received his B.A. in economics from Florida International University and his M.A. in financial economics from the University of Detroit Mercy.
My daughter ‘was terribly bullied, but no one told me. … Please don’t let ideology harm another child,’ pleaded the mother of a 14-year-old girl who was isolated from her parents by school and court authorities and sex-trafficked twice.
A subcommittee in the Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill on Monday that mandates public educators notify parents if their child “self-identifies” as something other than his or her natural sex. Introduced by Republican Dels. Dave LaRock, Tara Durant, and John McGuire, the measure (HB 2432) would provide parents with greater oversight into their children’s lives at school and increase transparency in public education. According to a summary of the legislation, if a school official “has reason to believe” that a student “is self-identifying as a gender different from the student’s biological sex,” said official is required “to contact as soon as practicable at least one of such student’s parents to ask whether such parent is aware of the student’s mental state and whether the parent wishes to obtain or has already obtained counseling for such student.”
Under the bill, school officials, such as counselors and clinical social workers, are barred from “encouraging or coercing a minor to withhold from the minor’s parent the fact that the minor’s perception of his or her gender or sex is inconsistent with the minor’s biological sex” or “withholding from a minor’s parent information relating to the minor’s perception that his or her gender or sex is inconsistent with the minor’s biological sex.”
Monday’s subcommittee vote came along party lines, with five Republicans voting in favor and three Democrats opposing.
Known as Sage’s Law, HB 2432 was introduced after it was revealed that a then-14-year-old Virginia girl ended up in the hands of sexual predators after her school failed to disclose her gender dysphoria to her mother. As The Federalist previously reported, the chain of events began in August 2021 when Sage began identifying as a boy and suffered intense bullying and harassment at school. Eventually, Sage ran away and was “found nine days later in Maryland, a victim of sexual assault.”
Appomattox County High School, which affirmed Sage’s new “identity” without notifying her mother, was following model guidelines issued by then-Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration on so-called gender affirmation. Such guidance has since been terminated by current GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Throughout Monday’s hearing on Sage’s Law, witnesses supporting the bill discussed its importance in keeping parents involved in their children’s livelihoods, especially in the school classroom. During her testimony, Sage’s mother Michele called on the subcommittee to put commonsense before ideology.
“If I had known [what was going on], this would be a much different story. [Sage] was terribly bullied, but no one told me,” Michele said. “Please don’t let ideology harm another child. Let parents do our jobs. We know our children best and we love them a million times more.”
Also called to testify at the hearing was Dr. Erin Brewer, a former “trans kid” who spoke about the importance of schools helping children through their gender dysphoria without affirming such confusion or concealing it from parents.
“I was insistent that I was a boy when I started first grade after a brutal sexual assault. If I had been affirmed by my teachers, it would have allowed me to completely dissociate from myself as a girl and create a new persona who could pretend that the horrible trauma that triggered my gender dysphoria hadn’t happened to me,” she said. “Instead of encouraging my confusion and hiding it from my mother, the school contacted my mother, got permission for me to be assessed by the school psychologist, and they came up with a comprehensive program to help me resolve my gender dysphoria. … I [one] hundred percent support this legislation.”
Erin Friday, a lifelong Democrat and co-founder of Our Duty, a national and international parent and child advocacy group, also spoke in support of Sage’s Law. Throughout her remarks, Friday noted her personal experiences with a gender-dysphoric daughter and stated that “schools should never keep secrets from parents.”
Opponents to Sage’s Law also spoke at the hearing, with one man claiming to be a “trans woman” arguing that such legislation is “ridiculous” and that schools should be able to conceal a child’s gender dysphoria from that child’s parents.
“It should be that child’s own choice,” he said. “If we wanna tell who we wanna tell, like, that’s on us.”
Despite leftists’ support for deceptively-termed “gender affirmation” and the “transitioning” of children, research has shown that “upwards of 80 percent of gender dysphoric childrenembrace their sex as they emerge from puberty” and that “children who are ‘affirmed’ as the opposite sex … particularly if puberty blockers are used, consistently go on to further medicalization.” Children who undergo such protocols are subjected to lifelong damage to their bodies. The practices are so horrific that nations around the world, such as England, have ended the disfiguring practices that are falsely labeled as “gender-affirming care” for minors.
“Parents should never be the last to know [about what’s going on in their children’s lives],” said Durant during the subcommittee meeting. “It’s a very strange, strange place to me that we’re in now where parents are being told to step aside, to sit down, that ‘we as educators, as counselors know better [for] your own child’ — and that’s just simply not true.”
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
On Tuesday, Iowa became the second state in the country to pass universal school choice, directly providing families with funds to support their children’s education. Arizona was the trendsetter for this new wave of educational freedom after Gov. Doug Ducey signed universal school choice into law on July 7, 2022.
Now the race is on to advance educational freedom, with several red states looking to follow suit. The significance of these developments can hardly be overstated. What was once a pipe dream for many education reformers — the enabling of school choice at scale during their lifetimes — is now becoming a reality.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, true to her word, wasted no time in the 2023 legislative session by introducing the Students First Act in her Condition of the State address on Jan. 10. Within two weeks, the bill was signed into law. It took less than 24 hours for debate in the House and Senate, followed by Reynolds’ signing. The education savings account (ESA) program will provide parents with approximately $7,600 annually to allocate toward approved educational avenues. Most families are eligible in years one and two, and the benefit will be extended to all families statewide in year three.
Of course, powers beholden to leftist teachers unions should not be expected to go down without a fight. Even in pioneering state Arizona, new Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs seeks to undo its universal school voucher expansion law in her 2023 budget proposal. With Republicans controlling both state legislative bodies, her proposal will likely go down with the same fate as her massively failed veto referendum that sought to stop the law from taking effect while she was secretary of state last fall. For a politician, Hobbs is remarkably insensitive to the views of Arizona voters, 67 percent of whom support the state’s ESA program (the number jumps to 77 percent of Arizona parents of school-aged children).
States with a Republican governor and GOP majorities in both their House and Senate, on the other hand, are leading the charge across the United States to empower parents with options. The goal is universal school choice — through ESAs — to provide flexibility for families to select their desired educational avenue. Funds can be spent on school tuition, homeschool expenses, online learning, tutoring, special needs therapy, learning materials, and other education-related expenses.
ESA programs not only afford parents options outside of government-run, union-controlled public schools, but they save the state money because typically only a portion of the student state funding is provided. For example, in Arizona, instead of upwards of $12,000 spent per student within the public system, the ESA provided to families is only $7,000.
As the race to pass universal school choice picks up speed, several states could be heading to the home stretch in the coming weeks and months.
Utah is positioned extremely well to join the universal school choice ranks as the House and Senate have both passed the “Utah Fits All Act” as of January 26. If signed into law by Gov. Spencer Cox, families would have access to roughly $8,000 each year for educational expenses.
Florida is historically a national leader in school choice, with almost half its students learning in an option outside of their assigned traditional public school. Current legislation is calling for universal school choice. With Republican lawmakers holding supermajorities in both the House and Senate, and Gov. Ron DeSantis at the helm, it’s only a matter of time.
Oklahoma is a contender in the educational freedom race. The Education Freedom Act is currently in the Senate, which has a 40-8 Republican supermajority. The House has an 81-20 supermajority. Once the bill hits educational freedom champion Gov. Kevin Stitt’s desk, it will be signed into law. It will grant all families statewide access to an ESA based on the state’s per-pupil education expense. State Superintendent Ryan Walters is a fierce supporter of empowering Oklahoma families with educational freedom to select the schools that will best serve their children.
Texas, traditionally lagging behind other red states on school choice, is not to be counted out this session in advancing ESAs. In May 2022, Gov. Greg Abbott urged lawmakers to empower parents through state funding following students. As the months passed, the groundwork was laid, including debunking the notion that school choice does not benefit rural areas or that it hurts rural school districts.
West Virginia was the national leader prior to Arizona passing universal school choice in 2022. In West Virginia, roughly 93 percent of students have access to the Hope Scholarship to date. There is the possibility to expand it to 100 percent of the state’s children within the next three years. Despite the state’s families having negligible educational freedom options until 2019, West Virginia is now among the leaders.
Indiana has efforts underway to expand the state’s existing ESA program to all students statewide while also increasing the grant amount from 90 percent of the per-student state funding to 100 percent. That would translate to an average of $7,500 allocated per student for educational expenses of the parents’ choosing.
Arkansas shouldn’t be overlooked this session. Newly elected Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has stated her support for plans to “empower parents with more choices … so no child is ever trapped in a failing school.”
The tide is turning, and the implications are tremendous. No longer will families be at the mercy of government-run, union-controlled traditional public schools. Parents in an increasing number of states will be empowered as decision-makers in their children’s education.
The question is: Which state will be next to achieve universal educational freedom?
Dr. Keri D. Ingraham is a Fellow at Discovery Institute, Director of the American Center for Transforming Education, and a Visiting Fellow at Independent Women’s Forum.
After the 14-year-old was found being sexually assaulted in another state, a judge kept her from loving parents because they questioned her transgender identity. Then she was trafficked again.
In August 2021, by concealing a teen’s newly asserted transgender identity from her parents, Virginia’s Appomattox County High School participated in a chain of events that led to that girl falling into the hands of sexual predators not once, but twice.
When the FBI found Sage (last name of the family withheld for privacy) in Maryland, where she was victimized by a sexual predator, a judge refused to return her to her parents on the grounds they were abusing her in not affirming her as male. Housed in the boys’ quarters of a children’s home away from her parents, she told her mother, she was assaulted again. The girl soon fled, then was brutally sex-trafficked again until her rescue in Texas by law enforcement.
Sage’s Law, or the Child Protection Act, is being introduced this week in the Virginia House of Delegates by Delegate Dave LaRock in honor of this young teen from Appomattox County, Virginia. Sage hopes sharing her story will help protect others from the abuse she suffered at the hands of predators, precipitated in part by the very institutions that should have protected her.
School policies and state laws that encourage concealing information from parents’ purport to protect vulnerable minors. In practice, as tragically demonstrated by Sage’s case, such policies open the door to predators by removing children’s greatest protection from their lives.
Sage’s Law aims to shut that door in three ways. It would require schools to notify parents if their child asserts a gender different from his or her sex; it prevents school counselors from withholding or encouraging minors to withhold information about a child’s gender identity; and it clarifies that raising a child according to his or her biological sex, including decisions about a child’s mental and physical health, may not be construed as abuse.
Sage’s story, compiled from months of interviews, reports, and records, has been lived by countless other families torn apart in the name of gender ideology by activist schools, judges, anddoctors. This is a story of the unbearable cost of parent-exclusion policies, but also of a mother’s love and relentless determination to save her child.
Institutions that Should Protect Endanger Instead
Sage is a slight, pretty, 15-year-old girl with elfin features and an edgy style. Recently, reflecting back on her transgender identification, she told her mom: “I don’t know who I was. I’m a totally different person now. I never was a boy. Everybody was doing it, I just wanted to have friends.”
That self-reflection is consistent with the research showing that upwards of 80 percent of gender dysphoric childrenembrace their sex as they emerge from puberty. Children who are “affirmed” as the opposite sex, however, particularly if puberty blockers are used, consistently go on to further medicalization. Sage’s comment also reflects the reality of social contagion, fueled by social media and increasingly recognized internationally as a factor in the exponential rise in the number of children identifying as transgender.
Yet states such as California allow children as young as 12 to make their own health-care decisions, without their parents but under the authority of the state. In January, Virginia delegates Candi Mundon King, Nadarius Clark, Michelle Maldonado, Sam Rasoul, and Marcus Simon filed a similar bill authorizing courts, social workers, and medical professionals to withhold information from parents and consent to medical procedures for “mature” minors.
The consequences for children and families in states such as California that construe not “affirming” as abuse are particularly dire. In October, progressive Virginia Delegate Elizabeth Guzman announced she would reintroduce her 2020 bill to criminalize parents who do not affirm their child’s transgender identity as guilty of abuse, potentially resulting in the loss of custody.
School Policies Endangering Students
Michele adopted Sage, her biological granddaughter, after the death of her son. Like many gender-dysphoric children, Sage has a history of trauma from that early childhood loss. Related health problems became severe at times, requiring therapy and medical treatment. Her daughter’s previous schools notified Michele when concerns arose, she said, enabling her to have Sage’s treatment adjusted. But when her daughter entered Appomattox County High School in early August 2021, Michele says she was cut out of the loop.
Unbeknownst to Michele, her then-14-year-old’s taste at the time for boys’ clothing, which she described to her mother as simply “dressing emo,” was accompanied by her assertion at school that she was a transgender boy. School records, shared by the family, indicate school staff were calling Sage by her chosen male name and pronouns and at her request concealing this from her parents. Sage recalls her school counselor telling her during the first week of school that since she identified as male she could use the boys’ bathroom.
School records also indicate bullying, although they do not capture the severity of what Sage eventually told her mom: boys were following behind her in a group, touching her, threatening her with knife violence and rape, and even shoving her up against the hallway wall. On Aug. 23, according to school notes, reports were received from students and teachers that Sage had used a boys’ bathroom and encountered hostile boys there. The school counselor met with Sage the next day to direct her to use the nurses’ bathroom for safety reasons.
Sage’s statement that “all the boys at this school are rapists” prompted the school to review hallway footage outside the bathroom, showing that several boys had entered while she was inside. On Wednesday, Aug. 25, the counselor and school resource officer called Sage into a meeting, where she became so emotional that the counselor recorded concern Sage might be “a risk to herself due to being so upset when leaving school.”
Only at this point — after meeting alone with her daughter, after two days had passed and knowledge of the incident had reached all the way to the superintendent, according to the school records — did the school finally contact Michele, she said, still without revealing the male identity her daughter was asserting.
Michele recalls finding a school hall pass labeled with a new name that August evening and Sage telling her for the first time that she was identifying as a boy at school. As Michele sat with her on the floor, Sage tried to stop the tears as she told her mother a group of male students had “jacked” her up against the wall of the boys’ bathroom and threatened her with violence, and that she was terrified of what they would do. Michele tried to comfort her, assuring her she could stay home while they figured out how to handle the bullying.
That night, Sage disappeared. She was found nine days later in Maryland, a victim of sexual assault. That was just the beginning of her family’s ordeal.
Excluding Parents Invites Predators
As Michele’s case illustrates, school policies that exclude parents from critical knowledge of their child’s mental health remove a child’s greatest safeguard from his or her life. While this author could find no such policy posted on the Appomattox High School or school board websites, the school’s actions to “affirm” Sage’s stated gender, name, and pronouns and to permit access to bathrooms of the opposite sex are all consistent with the directives of former Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s 2021 model policies. So is the choice to deceive parents.
In fact, the Northam policies direct that an entire gender transition team and plan be set up for such a child, all in secret from the parents if the child so wishes. This guidance was revoked in 2022 by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, but Virginia Democrats and LGBT groups are fiercely contesting the transparency and parental consent required by the new proposed guidance.
Yet school counselors, unlike parents, have at best an extremely limited knowledge of a child’s mental, emotional, and physical needs. They also have neither the constitutional authority nor the expertise to determine a child’s best interests.
Children who identify as transgender have well-documented mental health co-morbidities and rates of adverse psychiatric events. Even Dr. Erica Anderson, former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), has raised alarm at the “pitched battle” engendered by professionals who “triangulate” or set children in opposition to their parents.
In Sage’s case, by withholding information about her daughter’s gender identity and related issues, including the severe bullying related to Sage’s transgender exploration, the school destroyed vital opportunities for Michele to discern warning signs in time to assess and respond before tragedy struck.
Predators know transgender kids are vulnerable prey. Sage told Michele months later that some of the transgender websites to which a school counselor referred her linked to “creepy” older men and pornography.
One mother told this author that as soon as her daughter identified online as “female to male,” multiple suspicious “sugar daddy” accounts reached out to her on social media. Roblox, the wildly popular children’s gaming site, has transgender chat rooms with a panic button to “hide your screen from your parents.” Sage, her mother says, was lured to meet sex traffickers by online predators posing as friends.
A Court-Enabled Tragedy
The first call from the FBI came late at night on Sept. 2, her mother recounts: Sage had been found. Michele says investigators told her Sage had been trafficked into Washington, D.C. and then Maryland for nine days of horrific, brutal sexual abuse.
Driving through the night, their backseat full of stuffed animals and cozy blankets, Michele and her husband Roger arrived early the next morning at the Baltimore Courthouse. They were stunned to hear that their child, who had just survived unspeakable trauma, was being held in a juvenile detention cell and that they were being summoned to a hearing late that afternoon before Judge Robert Kershaw. When they entered the courtroom, Sage appeared from the penitentiary remotely, on screen, with only court-appointed attorney Aneesa Khan, an assistant public defender, present in person. “I love you, baby!” Michele cried to her daughter, who responded “I love you too, Nana.” To their shock, Khan spoke up and alleged on Sage’s behalf that she did not wish to return home and had been “both emotionally and physically abused by his parents in connection with [his] expressed male gender identity and desire to live as a trans male.”
Michele had only found out about this claimed male identity the night her daughter disappeared. Yet Michele was willing to use any name or pronoun to bring her home. Sage later told her, Michele says, that Khan “told me to tell the judge my parents hit me, starved me.” Sage also told Michele that Khan “didn’t care how much [Sage] had to lie…but they were going to win this case” to remove Sage from her parents’ custody and place her in a Maryland foster home that would affirm her as male.
Michele is a Virginia Court-Appointed Child Advocate (CASA) with years of experience supporting troubled teens, and she and Roger were quickly cleared of abuse charges. But the allegations were used to take custody of their daughter and bar them from seeing her.
The Cruelty of Ideology
Rather than treat Sage as a victim of horrific sex trafficking and return her to her family, the court dealt with her as a runaway, providing grounds for temporary custody in Maryland. Significantly, under the Interstate Juvenile Compact, even if allegations of abuse are made, juveniles are to be returned to their home state, which is presumed to better be able to assess the child’s needs. Judge Kershaw delayed this return for two months, which led to Sage’s next trafficking episode.
Instead of receiving treatment for her profound physical and emotional trauma, Sage was kept for days in solitary detention as a runaway, then transferred to the Catonsville Children’s Home. Per Judge Kershaw’s order, she was housed according to her “expressed male gender.” Michele says she eventually learned from Sage that she was the only girl in male quarters and that she had been repeatedly assaulted there.
Kershaw held multiple hearings focusing on Sage’s claimed male identity and Khan’s efforts to demonstrate gender identity abuse, including calling two Appomattox school counselors to testify against Sage’s parents. While his final ruling on Nov. 10, 2021, reluctantly conceded lawful custody to the parents, Kershaw opined at length that “more likely than not” Sage had “endured emotional abuse and neglect by his parents,” including “misgendering” and “misnaming.” Astonishingly, Kershaw cited as evidence of parental abuse “running away from Virginia to Maryland,” when in fact Sage was abducted, raped, and trafficked across state lines.
While Sage was in The Children’s Home, Michele says she sent letters and cards multiple times a week and tried countless times to reach her by phone, especially on Sage’s 15th birthday. Months later, Sage commented: “I missed you so much, but I tried not to because you didn’t want me back.” Horrified, her mother asked what she meant. She learned from Sage that Khan had told her that, because she was transgender, Michele didn’t want her anymore — and that not one of her cards or messages had ever reached her daughter.
Sage also eventually told her mother that, while living at the foster home, she skipped classes every day and would “smoke weed and do drugs” with kids she had met. Sage also relayed later that Khan had told her “I don’t give a sh-t if you do drugs, I just want to win this case.” Sage also said Khan had visited the home of one of Sage’s Maryland school friends to enlist her support in contacting Sage, claiming Khan had won the case and resulting in knowledge of Sage’s case spreading around the school.
In a text to a friend at the time, Sage referenced Khan’s intent: “going to the court of appeals, and the supreme court.” It is difficult to avoid Michele’s conclusion that “[t]he only best interest [Sage’s] attorney had was for herself. To put my traumatized child on center stage to push her political or gender agenda!”
Michele begged the court to provide treatment for the trauma Sage had endured and had found placement for her by mid-October, approved by Virginia social services, in Youth for Tomorrow’s program for young victims of sexual exploitation. The judge rejected it because they would treat Sage as a girl.
Not until Nov. 10 did Judge Kershaw approve placement in North Spring, a residential treatment facility that would affirm her claimed male identity. Frightened of being locked in the facility and believing her mother no longer wanted her, Sage texted a friend, “im gonna dip” (leave). On Nov. 12, 2021, Sage says, she cut off her court-required GPS monitor and ran away to meet an online “friend” in Texas she thought was 16.
Once more, the unspeakable happened. Sage fell into the hands of a predator who, police told Michele, raped, starved, drugged, and brutalized her. This time she disappeared for months. For the second time in less than four months, Michele had no way of knowing if her daughter was even alive. But Michele never stopped searching. Finally, a tip she discovered on social media led Texas marshals to her daughter’s rescue in Dallas on Jan. 24, 2022.
For the first time since that conversation on the floor of Sage’s bedroom on Aug. 25 the year before, mother and daughter were able to talk. On the plane ride home, Michele listened as Sage began to unburden her heart, grieving over what she learned but overcome with gratitude that her daughter was alive and restored to her.
Affirmation by Intimidation
Upon her return to Virginia, Sage entered North Spring, the lock-down facility negotiated by the court, with Michele driving four hours each way for her weekly allotted visit. Sage was heavily medicated, suffering from constant nightmares, and fearful of both residents and doctors. Sage told her mother that her counselor also pressured Sage to tell Michele she wanted a “gender-affirming” mastectomy.
Yet, during one of Michele’s visits, Sage asked if her mother could secretly take her to buy girls’ clothes, stating she didn’t want to be a boy anymore, but she was scared to tell the doctors. Pressured by North Spring to let them treat her daughter, Michele reached out to Josh Hetzler, an attorney with Richmond-based Founding Freedoms Law Center, who secured her daughter’s return. After nearly a year of horror, she was finally home safely.
The road ahead is a long one of healing both physically and emotionally. There are confusing lapses in concentration and persistent, terrifying nightmares. In a safe, loving home, surrounded by her pets and easing into at-home learning and therapy sessions, the painful recollections emerge unpredictably, as do the panic attacks. Michele doesn’t press, letting Sage open up at her pace, whether to her or to her beloved uncle Cory, who has moved home to support her.
As she begins to process her ordeal, Sage now desires to protect others from the horrors she experienced. Michele’s heroic, unrelenting determination to save her daughter has turned not only to helping her heal but to preserving other families from what hers endured. Advocates have rallied to help fund legal action through The Gavel Project, and to craft policies that will help protect others.
Sage’s Law
Many children never escape the clutches of sex traffickers. Had it not been for her mother’s relentless love and determination, Sage might never have been found. Michele calls it a miracle. In the starkest of contrasts, the actions of ideologues played a part — twice — in her daughter falling into the traffickers’ hands.
Sage’s public school could have been transparent to Michele about her daughter’s struggles. The court could have returned her to Virginia without furthering a quest to make legal history. The children’s home could have protected her from assault and access to drugs. And doctors could have treated trauma, not pressed living as the opposite sex and mutilative surgery on a victim of sexual abuse. All along, it was her mother who truly had Sage’s best interest at heart.
Sage was failed by adults who thought they were helping but were blinded to their own cruelty by their ideology. Michele tells of countless parents who have reached out to her with their own stories of families and bodies destroyed by school counselors, courts, and doctors who may spend minutes with a child, but assert they have the expertise and authority to usurp decisions from parents who have poured a lifetime into their care.
Sage has shown great courage in sharing her story, and it is time for lawmakers to take a stand for her and many other children by passing Sage’s Law. There is only one acceptable response to her story: never again.
Laura Bryant Hanford is a mother of five and is actively involved in school policy and religious freedom issues in Virginia, where she lives with her family. She served from 2015 to 2018 on Fairfax County Public Schools’ Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee. She was the lead congressional staff drafter of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. She also served at the U.S. Embassy in Romania as the officer in charge of human rights, focusing on ethnic minorities, women, and refugees. She is a graduate of Princeton University.
One of the things I get asked from time to time by readers is, what can ordinary people on the right, Christians and conservatives, do to help save the country — besides voting on Election Day?
It’s a good question, and it comes from the very understandable feeling of helplessness many people feel about the direction of the country and, let’s be honest, the collapse of Western civilization that’s now well underway. It’s especially easy to get frustrated after an election cycle like the one we just had, in which Republican leaders thoroughly botched it and left things more or less where they were before the voting. Put another way, if voting doesn’t really change anything in our so-called democracy, what will?
There’s an answer to this question, but you’re not going to like it. The plain truth is this: You’re going to have to save the country yourselves. Donald Trump isn’t going to save it. Ron DeSantis isn’t going to save it. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that a GOP majority in Congress is going to save it.
By all means, keep voting in national elections. Keep making your voices heard at the ballot box. But salvation won’t come from Washington, D.C. If America is going to be saved, or even just parts of it are to be saved, then ordinary men and women, God-fearing patriots all across the country, are going to have to do it themselves, one town at a time. And they will have to do it the old-fashioned and unglamorous way, by taking over the local institutions of civic life, organizing and winning elections for city council and school board, finding reliable and competent people willing to be candidates and staff and volunteers.
It’s going to be a long, thankless slog, but there’s no other way. Neither is there any guarantee of success. I speak here only of towns and suburbs, not of cities, many of which have become unlivable after decades of failed Democrat governance and leftist policies. Conservatives who can manage it should move to places where they can join with other like-minded Americans to take back their communities and instill a civic culture that reflects their beliefs.
We got into this situation through passivity, and only a sustained effort at the local level will get us out. For decades, conservatives did nothing while the left marched through academia — and then kept right on marching, down from their ivory tower and into the public square, into the schools, the libraries, corporate boardrooms, local police and fire departments, even the churches. These people have radical views far outside the American mainstream but nevertheless control all our institutions. If you want them back, you’ll have to take them back, post by post.
This is not the kind of thing the right likes to hear. By temperament and principle, conservatives would rather be left alone to run their businesses, raise their families, worship in their churches, and build up their charities and local communities. Unlike liberals and leftists, they tend not to be ideologues. They are not trying to fundamentally change the country. They mostly want to be left alone.
But of course, they will never be left alone. The woke radicals will never stop — until someone stops them. A kind of conservative radicalism, or at least activism, is going to be required to accomplish that.
A good example of what I’m talking about is playing out in the small central Texas town of Taylor, population about 17,000. Taylor, some 35 miles north of Austin, is a rather conservative place of the sort you can find all over the country. It recently made national headlines over its traditional Christmas parade; a longstanding town tradition organized by a coalition of local churches. Last year, organizers accidentally approved a parade float for a group calling itself Taylor Pride, which the parade committee naively mistook for the name of a group that was just proud of their town. What they got instead was a float featuring two men dressed in drag, dancing suggestively in what paradegoers assumed was going to be a family-friendly event.
Parents and attendees were understandably perturbed. To ensure it didn’t happen again, the consortium of local churches that runs the parade sensibly decided that this year, parade floats must be consistent with traditional biblical and family values. The point wasn’t to exclude any individuals or groups from attending or even participating, but to ensure the floats were family-friendly and not — like the Taylor Pride drag queen float — contrary to Christian teachings.
The City of Taylor responded by announcing it would stage its own separate LGBT-friendly “holiday” parade, on the same night as the traditional Christmas parade, on the same route, following right behind it. The decision was made not by the elected members of the city council, who are accountable to voters, but by the municipal staff who actually run things. There was no public notice or deliberation and no consultation beforehand with members of the city council. The municipal bureaucracy acted on its own authority to use (or rather misuse) public funds and resources to sponsor a parade that was wildly out of step with the community at large.
Kevin Stuart, a Taylor resident and assistant professor of political science at the University of St. Thomas, wrote about all this recently in The Wall Street Journal, noting that the problem in Taylor has deep historical roots. The outsourcing of decision-making to so-called experts has been happening in American towns and cities for more than a century, such that professional bureaucrats now run small towns across America like “ideological colonizers.”
“There is now a yawning ideological gap between the people who live in American towns and the professionalized cadre of city staff who pass through those towns on their way up the career ladder,” writes Stuart. He goes on to argue that residents of towns like Taylor are partly to blame for ceding too much political power to an expert class whose interests and values don’t align with the people they’re supposed to serve.
He’s right about that — and also about how “communities can’t remain strong if they are unwilling to defend common sense and get involved in the political process.” The lesson of Taylor’s dueling Christmas parades is that even in small, conservative towns in deep-red states like Texas, conservatives can’t be complacent. As I wrote last month about the Taylor fracas, there’s nowhere Christians can run and hide from the left. They have to stand and fight.
In Taylor, that means residents who until now might have never been involved in local politics will have to roll up their sleeves, give up some weekday evenings, and get involved. They will have to put up their own conservative candidates and vote out of office the city councilors who empowered a woke municipal bureaucracy. They will have to fire the cadre of leftist bureaucrats who run things and replace them with their own people. They might even have to change the city charter so that elected members of the city council actually do the work of the public in City Hall, not an unelected city manager who sees the job as merely a steppingstone to a bigger city.
The same goes for the library, the school board, and every other local institution in every American town like Taylor. Conservatives have to take them over if they can. To answer the question we began with, that is what ordinary people can do. And they have to start now. No one is coming to help, and time is running out.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Anew survey shows that after schools arbitrarily shut down for several consecutive months, parents of all political backgrounds continue to take on the rigors and responsibilities of homeschooling long after schools have reopened.
Educators in both public and private schools should be asking why this is. Why would parents decline the services of certified professionals running various curricular and extracurricular programs at an operational, fully equipped campus just down the road? Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars go into these schools, which not only educate children but serve as the cultural center of most localities. By homeschooling, parents are saying no to all that — along with the lifestyle they could have without kids at home — and instead shouldering the burdens of pedagogy, instructional materials, scheduling, behavioral management, and socializing their kids throughout their academic careers.
Not only this, but why would parents on the left who agreed with lockdowns and are largely sympathetic to public schools opt to homeschool? According to the survey, “47% of new homeschoolers skewed leftof center self-reporting as either progressive or liberal (vs. 32% pre-Covid homeschoolers).”
Educators need to investigate this, but rather than confront the glaring problems of schooling — low standards, chaotic classes, corrupt bureaucracies, rampant tech addiction, and leftist propaganda — or do the slightest bit of soul-searching, nearly all administrators and educators have dismissed these concerns and now pretend that the last two years never happened, except when they need to make excuses to the communities they serve. The monopoly on public education has afforded them the luxury to forget everything and learn absolutely nothing.
Nowhere is this complacency better illustrated than in the recent book “Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children’s Lives, and Where We Go Now” by Anya Kamenetz. Despite devoting more than 300 pages to the mistakes made by public school leaders and education unions during Covid, Kamenetz never thought to question the general mediocrity of these institutions. Instead, she wholeheartedly supports them and advocates for more funding. How exactly will more money make up for the learning loss and the psychological damage done by derelict school systems? Kamenetz never says, but she does find time to attack President Trump.
This leaves parents of all political persuasions to determine what they can do to save their kids. Sure, some may fight the good fight and send their kids to public schools, be more vocal at school board meetings, and keep a close ear to what’s happening in their children’s classes. Others may be blessed with a classical school that recreates the old-fashioned learning experience that prevailed in the West before things got so bad. And some may simply hold their noses and think happy thoughts as they drink the Kool-Aid, convincing themselves that everything will be fine and that their clinically depressed and gender-confused child who spends xir days binging on violent anime and #neurodivergent TikTok videos is simply going through a phase and will learn to read and do math eventually.
Or they can try homeschooling. It may be a huge commitment of time and energy, but it’s also the only real way to protect kids from bad kids, bad teachers, and bad ideas.
Although Covid has exacerbated the situation, the rationale for homeschooling isn’t all that new. What’s notable is how homeschooling today appeals to conservatives and leftists alike. While conservatives have always liked the option of homeschooling as a means of safeguarding their values and avoiding the harms of government incompetence and modern decadence, leftists generally paid lip service to public schools (while sending their kids to private schools) and looked down on the homeschooling crowd as fundamentalist crackpots doomed to being unsuccessful losers.
This has changed in recent years. Now it’s leftists who want to safeguard their values and circumvent the problems of formal schooling. Ironically, their reasons for doing this are the exact opposite of why conservative parents homeschool. These parents actually believe that schools are way too traditional in their values and instruction, don’t offer enough accommodations to suit their children’s learning style, and still do too little about Covid. They fear their child will be bullied, receive bad grades, and be red-pilled by that one Christian conservative teacher they have for English.
Despite certain school boards and superintendents doing their utmost to adhere to liberal orthodoxy, this does little to change the conservative nature of their actual schools. As Robert Pondiscio argues in Newsweek, the very concept of formal schooling is inherently conservative: “Kids sit at desks, teachers stand in front of the room and the academic diet leans heavily on the best that has been discovered, thought and created: our language, literature, history, scientific discoveries and artistic achievements. This default mode is by definition culturally ‘conservative.’” This is often a big turnoff for leftist parents, many of whom insist on a “progressive learning” experience. Many want something student-centered, self-paced, relevant to current times, less judgmental (i.e., no grades or assessments), and altogether open and undefined — something only achievable through homeschooling.
The mutual disdain for formal schools from both the left and the right perfectly illustrates the “horseshoe theory,” in which opposing sides of an ideological spectrum come closer together as they become more extreme. So while the reason for homeschooling may be different to the point of incompatibility, the outcome is the same: Parents aren’t happy with their public schools, so they seek out alternatives.
Whether this leads to a renaissance or decline in education is anyone’s guess, though I’m pessimistic about rebirth if homeschooling becomes a leftist trend. Without a neighborhood school to provide some kind of personal stability and connection to the greater world for these families, it’s difficult to see how this benefits anyone. Conservatives usually have a church and extended family and abide by a clear set of principles; most leftists lack these foundations, so it’s difficult to see how they could make homeschooling work. More likely, they will become the “unschooled” crackpots on the margins, unable to function in society whom they have derided for so long.
The atomization of America and the epidemic of loneliness will likely get worse if too many families opt out of formal schooling. Covid demonstrated that most families need their schools, and even if schools refuse to see it, it’s also true that they need families.
Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.
Last Thursday afternoon, time expired for parents to provide comments on proposed changes to sex education in Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), one of the largest school districts in the country, with a population of about 180,000 students. As The Federalist reported last week, the proposal includes labeling boys and girls, respectively, as “assigned” males and females “at birth.” It also includes curricula on “sexual orientation and gender identity” that involves watching a pro-transgender PBS video telling kids they can have “intermediate” private parts.
If you think FCPS officials will carefully consider comments and complaints from parents worried about exposing their prepubescent children to transgender ideology, and perhaps even rethink their plans, I have some swampland in Florida I’d like to sell you. As we have seen from earlier examples of Fairfax County “welcoming comments” on proposed changes to road names, this public survey is nothing more than an empty, perfunctory bureaucratic procedure aimed at pretending that parents have a say regarding what happens during the school day.
Yet even more saliently, FCPS’s willingness to embrace this radical gender ideology and foist it upon thousands of Northern Virginia youth provokes a more important question: If our public schools can’t differentiate boys from girls, what wisdom and knowledge can they impart?
Ignoring Basic Biology in Favor of Gender Studies
I confess a certain embarrassment to be the one writing on this. When I worked in FCPS, I taught high-school history, not science. Years before that, I earned a respectable but certainly not impressive “B” in my ninth-grade FCPS honors biology class. But I’d like to think the lessons my teacher offered on the rudimentary realities of male and female biology — which of course apply not only to humans but the entirety of the natural order — are still in effect, even if it’s been 24 years since the last time I took a test on stamens, pistils, and gametes. I can still remember us boys immaturely chuckling when our teacher discussed ova and sperm.
But this is no laughing matter. School administrators and educators across the country have dispensed with these basic truths of biology in favor of the latest “findings” from politicized university sociology and “gender studies” departments. Schools take their directives not from biology — or, God forbid, classical philosophy and its articulation of the teleological nature of the human body, oriented, as ova and sperm are, toward the creation of new life — but from politically motivated journalists who attack the few teacherscourageous enough to take a stand.
The new FCPS directive — which other school districts will undoubtedly follow — rejects stable and universal distinctions between large and small gametes and the fact that sexes can now also be determined at conception through the SRY gene (resulting in male gametes), or its absence (female gametes). They expound endlessly on “intersex” persons who supposedly undermine “binary norms,” neglecting to note that such persons are incredibly rare: Sex is readily recognizable at birth for 99.98 percent of humans. Of the 3.6 million babies born in America in 2021, there was some manner of sex-related deformity or irregularity in about 750 of them, according to Abigail Favale’s book “The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory.” But to the ideologues, a trait found in .02 percent of people isn’t a biological deformity, but a new “gender.”
The Casualties of the Curriculum
The FCPS directive can only further intensify the casualties from confused gender ideology, well documented in Abigail Shrier’s recent popular book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.” Little girls have been exhorted to go on puberty blockers, causing all kinds of permanent harm, from sterility to arrested brain and bone development. As I noted in a Federalist article earlier this year, a recent Heritage study observed that “easing access to cross-sex treatments without parental consent significantly increases suicide rates.” And a 2016 report found that “a large percentage of adolescents referred for gender dysphoria have a substantial co-occurring history of psychosocial and psychological vulnerability.” A growing body of research indicates that promoting transgenderism in youth increasesmental illness.
Professor John S. Grabowski’s in his recent book “Unraveling Gender: The Battle Over Sexual Difference,” notes that “significant evidence reveals that aggressive hormonal and surgical transitioning procedures do not improve mental health outcomes for people who undergo them — even in ostensibly LGBTQ+ friendly cultures.” Moreover, postoperative transsexuals experience higher rates for psychiatric hospitalization, criminal conviction, and suicide, not to mention higher risk of mortality. In other words, confusing prepubescent fourth-graders or hormonal eighth-graders about their gender and sexuality may very well have lifelong detrimental effects on their emotional, psychological, and physical well-being.
It’s Not Just Biology, but English, Social Studies, Libraries…
If only it were in science classes that children are catechized in errant ideologies. An FCPS English teacher earlier this year read 10th-grade students a poem about masturbation (my 10th-grade FCPS English class, by comparison, read “Brave New World,” “1984,” “Lord of the Flies,” and “Antigone”). School libraries promote trans content for elementary schoolers, including in picture books. FCPS prides itself on its libraries’ queer book selection.
And, of course, we cannot forget social studies, whose curricula have become beholden to racial ideologies pushed by the 1619 Project and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Many Virginia schools have embraced the SPLC’s “Teaching Hard History” curriculum, while school districts across the country are using the 1619 Project’s social studies curriculum. That New York Times-originating project believes that America was “founded … on an ideal and a lie” as a “slavocracy,” and that “anti-blackness” is “at the core of so many of our institutions and really our society itself.”
It depresses me to see what has happened in FCPS, and so many other school districts across the country. I am a product of FCPS, as are many of my extended family members. My mother and I worked in FCPS. It was once an impressive school system, one my parents trusted to offer me a solid, if secular, education. Now its leadership can’t even tell boys from girls. On what grounds should we trust them regarding anything else?
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.
Americans ages 11 to 18 play online for an average of 10 hours per day, according to a study out today by a research team that includes psychologist Jean Twenge, author of “iGen” and “Generation Me.”
The researchers surveyed 1,600 Americans ages 11 to 18 in May 2022. On average, the study participants reported using digital media an average of 10 hours and four minutes per day, on such entertainment activities as social media, video chat, texting, shopping, and gaming.
That’s a total of 70 hours per week spent online, approximately double the average time spent in school. If teens were suddenly banned from screen time, they could use the time freed from solely that to instead hold down both a full-time and a part-time job. Some of this average may include multitasking, such as texting while scrolling Instagram, the study said, but this total of 70 hours per week spent on screens also did not include time spent watching TV.
Low-Class Behavior Rampant in Middle Class
The researchers say their Institute for Family Studies and Wheatley Institute study is the first to examine the effects of family structure on young people’s screen time. They found that teens living with their own biological and married parents still spent an astonishing amount of time on screens, at an average of nine hours per day. Still, that was nearly two hours fewer per day, on average, than children living without a biological parent, who spent an average of 11 hours per day online.
“The adolescents most likely to be depressed, lonely, and dissatisfied with life are heavy digital media users in stepparent, single-parent, or other non-intact families,” write study authors Twenge, Wendy Wang, Jenet Erickson, and Brad Wilcox. “The link between excessive technology use and poor mental health is larger for youth in non-intact families compared to those in intact families.”
So, according to this study’s findings, children in intact families spend an average of 63 hours per week amusing themselves online, while children in broken families spend an average of 77 hours per week amusing themselves online. The study discovered “especially large differences by family structure in youth time spent on gaming and texting. For example, youth in stepfamilies report spending about 50 minutes a day more texting than youth in intact families.”
Other studies on children’s screen use reinforce this finding — that America’s young people are wasting almost all of their waking free time on entertainment instead of personal growth or service to others. As this IFS/Wheatley study points out, this shift has happened extremely quickly, and it’s not all because of the 2020-2022 Covid lockdowns that also arrested American children’s development. Between 2009 and 2017, “the time high school students spent online doubled.”
The study points out that high screen time for adolescents is correlated with depression, loneliness, lack of sleep, and negative body image. It does not mention the opportunity cost of diverting young people’s free time to entertainment consumption instead of personal development that benefits others, such as learning to repair bicycles, playing outside, testing out jobs through work and internships, or working to save for college or marriage.
The study recommends that parents keep electronic devices out of kids’ bedrooms at night, limit screen time to a few hours per day, delay smartphone access to age 16 or 18, keep kids off social media as long as possible, and arrange for their kids to make friends with kids in families with similar boundaries about tech use to help their children socialize with people instead of robots.
Unchallenged mass tech addiction is one more way our morally bankrupt ruling class incentivizes destructive lower-class behaviors instead of encouraging lower classes to raise their standards. This works to erase the middle class by indulging laziness, like the shameful “quiet quitting” PR campaign. This is another form of societal suicide. Laziness cannot maintain, let alone keep advancing, the United States’ world-class level of scientific and cultural advancement.
Nothing worth having comes without strenuous and sustained effort. Internet addictions erase not only willpower but also self-discipline, excellence, and the communication skills needed to work with others and sustain key relationships such as marriages, as Twenge and others’ academic work shows.
This Is a National Crisis
If a child played with Legos for 10 hours a day, every day, his parents or teacher would have him screened for autism and developmental delays. If a child played pretend for 10 hours a day, at any age, he’d be sent to the school psychologist.
If your child did anything for 10 hours a day, you’d be worried about him and work strenuously to bring some balance to his life, for his own good. Parents need to man up and do the hard work of tightly restricting the addictive side of the internet from their kids, for not only their own good but for the sake of our country. Even 30 hours of screen time a week is obviously excessive for kids. Seventy hours of screen time a week is completely out of control, the willful destruction of our future.
“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war,” wrote the National Commission on Excellence in Education in the famous 1983 report, “A Nation At Risk.” “As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.”
The same sentiment applies to today’s American youth, but in a far more advanced condition. If a foreign nation had imposed on Americans the destruction of our mental and moral capacity that results from such rampant internet addiction as this study explores, we’d consider it an act of war. In fact, it’s pretty clear that our top foreign adversary created an addictive social media app for the same reason it helps Mexican drug cartels ship fentanyl across our border: because China knows that if they destroy America’s future, they rule the world.
The only thing standing between them and your kids is you, parents. Maybe a few elected officials could stand with us and take down these internet monopolies that make bank strip-mining our future, or at least require real proof of parental consent for children to use addictive tech products, such as a tiny credit card payment. But don’t wait for others to do your job for you. Put down your phone, grab your kids, and make your family motto the title of one of my childhood books: “Do Something Besides Watching TV.”
If your children enter adulthood having done nothing with 25,000 hours of their lives they can never get back, and with their brains destroyed by internet slot machines, that’s on you. You’re the one paying for their phone and letting them self-destruct. Tell them to get a job or read some books or do anything but sabotage themselves and our society. If you don’t, you deserve to be judged the same way as moms who put Mountain Dew in their babies’ bottles.
The Pentagon’s investigation into the U.S. military in 2021 found about 100 individuals engaged in extremist activities out of a force of 2 million. It appears investigators were looking in the wrong place. The search for extremists might have yielded better results had they examined the Department of Defense Education Activity (DODEA), the government agency that administers K-12 education to the children of military personnel.
The Claremont Institute’s recently released report“Grooming Future Revolutionaries” describes shocking indoctrination taking place at overseas schools. It is a must-read, especially for military parents of the nearly 70,000 children in these schools.
I am a military spouse and the mother of a former DODEA student. The particular teacher training that was the focus of Claremont’s report is the reason, in part, why I lost all trust in the system.
In May 2021, I saw that DODEA would be holding an “Equity and Access Summit” for teachers and administrators. Knowing that “equity” means different things to different people, I wanted to get a sense of what it meant at DODEA. When I managed to gain access to the recordings, I was absolutely floored by what I saw and heard.
As the Claremont report shows, the summit featured hours of teacher training steeped in critical race and gender identity theories.
Claremont released a video of summit clips in which a principal talks about a student who felt like he’d done something wrong because he’s a “young, white male.” The teacher said she didn’t know what to tell him — but she seemed pleased with the breakthrough. Perhaps she was just following the lead of DODEA’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) chief Kelisa Wing, who is currently under investigation by DOD for a history of disparaging comments toward white people.
Video Evidence of Teachers Pushing CRT
The report also highlights literature teacher Gregory DeJardin’s presentation called “Combating 1- Sided Narratives (Decolonize the Curriculum).” DeJardin insists teachers become social activists and interviewed several students in his class at Vicenza High School in Italy about their difficulties with “majority culture.” It was painfully apparent in their answers that they were parroting his dogma, as one student said: “[School] is getting better about being more diverse and not taking a very normative perspective but there are definitely issues and I feel like it is still incredibly skewed to the white, male, heterosexual and Protestant gaze.”
Betty Roberts, an educator at Robinson Barracks Elementary School in Germany, talked about critical literacy. She wants her students to look deeply into textbook versions of events to find hidden biases. She asks her students questions like: “Is the American Revolution still being fought today?” She presses further and asks if the American Revolution was just a “transition from one group of rich white men to another group of rich white men.” Roberts goes on to express her gratefulness to the teachers’ union for its training on white fragility because she recognized her need for cultural humility.
Normalizing Transgenderism
Aside from the relentless instruction on anti-racism and white privilege, a clear effort was underway to normalize transgender identities and the notion of a gender spectrum. Genevieve Chavez and Lindsey Bagnaschi, presenters of “Ally 101 — Creating an Inclusive Classroom for LGBTQ+ Students,” talked about gender transitions they have facilitated for students at their schools in Spain and Germany, respectively — sometimes without parental knowledge or consent.
And many LGBT educators apparently belong to a system-wide resource-sharing group on Schoology curated by a DODEA educator. Chavez recommends resources from the group such as “Teaching with Mx. T” and “Teaching Outside the Binary.” But there is another similar group that’s passcode protected — and it’s for students. Teachers can add students to their own LGBT chat rooms in Schoology, and parents are not invited.
If teachers run out of content from people like “Mx. T,” they can use Discovery Education, which many recommended during the summit. One of the programs is “Speak Truth to Power.” This program offers lesson plans that are “flexible, standards-aligned digital resources, designed to educate, engage and inspire the next generation of human rights defenders.” Sounds good, doesn’t it — until you see that transgender activist Jazz Jennings is one of those human rights defenders. But Discovery Education is password-protected, with one portal for students and another for teachers, so we really have no idea what’s being promoted to our children via third-party content creators who can update information in real-time.
Congress Needs to Do More
Our children deserve to learn in an environment free from divisive ideologies, and thankfully, DODEA’s activism has not gone unnoticed by Congress. Rep. Vicky Hartzler, R-Mo., wrote a letter to DOD asking why teachers are being trained to secretly “transition” children at overseas schools. After a year, she still had not received an answer. She also introduced H.R. 4764, the No CRT for our Military Kids Act.
In the Senate, Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., offered an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2023 to prevent DODEA schools from hiding important medical information from parents — but it was voted down.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., introduced a Servicemember Parents Bill of Rights amendment to the NDAA to provide for more transparency and accountability in DODEA schools. It was adopted in committee with bipartisan support by a vote of 39-19 and is in the House-passed NDAA.
But Congress needs to do much more to ensure the safety of our military children and also that of any DODEA educator who is being intimidated into conformity. It will likely take years to sort out the mess at DODEA, so in the meantime, Congress could consider extending the military’s Non-DOD Schools Program to all students instead of only to those who are not in close proximity to a DODEA school.
Whatever the case, it looks like an extremist stand down is in order for DODEA, and it just might net more than the .005 percent found among our uniformed force.
Amy Haywood is a former senior legislative assistant for a U.S. House representative and an educator with years of experience working in a research-based program to help third culture kids adjust to life overseas. She holds a master’s degree in national security and strategic studies from the U.S. Naval War College.
The full 77-minute video has been released from the day 19 children and two teachers were killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The full video, which includes a hallway surveillance camera and a bodycam from one officer, was obtained by the Austin American-Statesman. The outlet posted the four-minute edited collection of excerpts on its website. It posted the full video on its YouTube page.
The edited video begins with the gunman crashing the pickup truck he was driving, and then moving to the school after shooting at witnesses across the street and firing shots in the school parking lot.
WARNING: The following video contains images and audio that viewers will find disturbing.
“The video tells in real time the brutal story of how heavily armed officers failed to immediately launch a cohesive and aggressive response to stop the shooter and save more children if possible. And it reinforces the trauma of those parents, friends and bystanders who were outside the school and pleaded with police to do something, and for those survivors who quietly called 911 from inside the classroom to beg for help,” Statesman reporter Tony Plohetski wrote.
“The kids are running,” a woman calls out during the video in a 911 call, adding “Oh my God.”
Panic-stricken screams are heard as a woman orders children into their rooms.
The excerpt then continues with the shooter entering the school, peering around a corner to rooms 111 and 112, before sauntering down the hallway holding his rifle. The video captures one boy emerging from a bathroom. The boy peers around the corner and looks at the shooter, who is farther down the hall, before running away upon hearing the first shots.
Officials have said in the next two and a half minutes, about 100 rounds were fired, according to the Daily Mail.
Gunfire continues.
A few moments later, the first officers arrive.
Three officers approach the classroom warily with drawn weapons. A burst of gunfire erupts, sending the officers running. One officer holds his head as if he was struck.
The clip video then cuts to 19 minutes later, then 31 minutes later, as more officers with guns and a ballistic shield arrive. Officers continue to wait. Four shots are heard.
“They’re making entry,” an officer says, but nothing happens.
At 12:30 p.m. local time, an officer squirts hand sanitizer from a wall-mounted dispenser and rubs his hands together. Officers appear to be discussing alternate ways to enter the classroom.
At 12:50, officers breach the classroom, killing the gunman.
NEW: Recently, I viewed the hallway video from Robb Elementary School and I'm equally as haunted today as I have been. As journalists, we argue for transparency, but rest assured that once it is finally released, it is as wrenching as it seems. https://t.co/M49gOQGLmt
Religious devotion, the keystone of ordered liberty in the West, has been under systematic assault by anti-religious forces Barr called an ‘atheocracy.’
The West is facing its deepest civilizational crisis since Jesus Christ resurrected, and addressing the crisis requires removing militant secularists’ monopoly on education, former U.S. attorney general William Barr told a packed Christian conference in Chicago, Ill. on Saturday.
“We are going through a fateful crisis in western civilization. This is the deepest crisis we’ve faced in my mind since Christ,” Barr said. “That’s because our whole civilization is based on the Judeo-Christian tradition and that tradition is under sustained attack by increasingly militant secular forces.”
In a reprise of a 2019 speech at Notre Dame University that met massive corporate media backlash, Barr told the audience U.S. public schools have become hostile to traditional religion while wresting control of American children’s upbringing from their parents. This is a threat to the entire Western order, Barr said, because the unique American system of self-government cannot exist without a citizenry that is committed to traditional religion.
That’s because there are only two ways to restrain people from following disordered passions, Barr said: internal restraints, which are largely provided by one’s beliefs; and external restraints, which are typically provided by government. So, in order to have a limited government, Barr noted in an explicit echo of the American Founders, citizens must practice self-restraint. Such self-restraint is primarily developed through religious devotion, he said. But religious observance, the keystone of ordered liberty in the West, has been under systematic assault by anti-religious forces Barr called an “atheocracy,” his amalgam of the words “atheist theocracy.” These anti-religious forces now control the minds of American kids due to their monopoly on U.S. education institutions.
“The threat today is not that religious people are about to establish a theocracy in the United States, it is that militant secularists are trying to establish an atheocracy,” Barr said. Barr also spoke to The Federalist about the asymmetric justice being carried out under Joe Biden by the agency he has led twice, the U.S. Department of Justice.
In a 2021 interview with the legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, Barr said anti-religion leftists have effectively turned public schools into “secular-progressive madrassas.” In his Chicago speech on Saturday, the nation’s former top lawyer told the audience this state of affairs is likely a violation of the Constitution’s ban on government establishment of one religion over others, as well as a violation of the Free Exercise Clause that forbids the government from interfering with Americans’ religious obligations.
“What we’re living through is not a situation where religion is intruding into the government’s rightful arena, it’s exactly the opposite: It’s that government and politics is usurping the role of religion,” Barr said.
Barr told the sold-out Chicago audience at the 2022 conference of the Christian radio show “Issues, Etc.” that American politics now aligns with religious beliefs. The dichotomy in American life is no longer about prudential issues but religious ones: whether one acknowledges an objective, external, unchanging reality ordered by a transcendent deity or whether one insists the material world is all there is, which makes one’s god the self.
This anti-God materialism now maps onto and fuels political leftism, Barr said:
When a purely materialist worldview takes hold in society, it’s drawn to a messianic utopianism. Its adherents become enthralled with the idea that the meaning of life, what gives them purpose and meaning, is to be found in the quest for a perfect earthly society. The manipulation of the material world to achieve some form of nirvana here on earth. And the means used is achieving political power.
The main obstacle to this earthly paradise is the existing structure, conventions and superstitions like religion. Any obstacle to our earthly paradise has to be torn down.
These ideas are represented by the progressive movement in the United States. It basically is an ersatz religion that gives them a sort of truncated version of the place filled by religion in people’s lives. It also explains the bitterness in our politics today. Because once you adopt this view, then your political opponents aren’t just disagreeing with you, they’re evil. They are standing in the way of the salvation of mankind.
…Another part of this revolutionary era and the consequences we have been witnessing over the last couple of hundred years is a worldview that boils questions of morality solely down to an individual’s internal feelings. And their interior sense of pleasure and satisfaction. That’s how we gauge acts, whether people feel internally satisfied. And anything that advances that feeling is good, and anything that constrains or restricts that feeling is bad. This is a fundamental change in the worldview of the West.
Because the U.S. Supreme Court and other American political institutions have turned public schools from essentially Christian schools into essentially anti-Christian schools, Barr said, the U.S. school system has been erasing the faith required to sustain limited government. Multiple studies provide evidence this is true.
Banning Christianity from education created a moral vacuum that has ultimately been filled badly with political leftism. This has not only increasingly turned younger American generations against their own faith, families, and country, it has turned public schools into indoctrination camps.
“Personal and civic moral systems don’t just sort of hover in the air,” Barr explained. “They have to rest on an explanatory foundation, a metaphysical foundation. When people tell you to do something, you ask ‘Why?’ Why is it necessary to be good and what is it that consists of being good? So, the extent to which an education seeks to contribute to a student’s moral formation, it necessarily invades the space of religion when explaining what the moral values are and how they should be inherited.”
Thanks to the current Supreme Court’s adherence to the original Constitution as written, Barr said he thinks this is an opportune moment for both court and legislative work to address this existential national crisis.
“Public education was established as a melting pot that would establish a common American identity. How are the public schools doing on that front?” Barr asked, at which the audience burst into laughter. He continued: “The curriculum is now attacking the fundamental legitimacy of our form of government and our founding documents. That’s no way to bring us together as a nation.”
The most direct way to resolve this constitutional and existential crisis in American education is to end the government monopoly over the provision of education, Barr said, with full school choice. (The form of school choice that offers the fewest opportunities for hostile bureaucrats to interfere with parent choices, by the way, is education savings accounts.)
“The variety of American beliefs now makes a monopoly on education untenable,” Barr said. “You can’t finesse it anymore. You can’t pretend what’s being taught in schools is compatible with traditional religion, nor can you pretend schools are neutral anymore.”
Because anti-religious public schools hold a monopoly on public education funds, Barr noted, parents are forced to fight mostly ineffectively over what public schools teach, such as transgender ideology to kindergarteners and anti-white racism. Allowing parents to take their children’s public education dollars to institutions that match their beliefs will end such culture wars, he said, as well as help families more effectively pass their republic-sustaining faith on to their children.
This alone can’t solve the entire existential crisis of the West, Barr conceded: “It’s not a panacea, but I cannot see a way out for us and the way for Christian citizens to live in peace in this republic until we address the educational system.”
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
A new report says that the Texas school shooter told fourth graders what was coming after he shot his way into their classroom Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. The report from KENS-TV was based on the account of a fourth-grade pupil it did not name. The gunman killed 19 children and two adults before he was killed in a shootout with law enforcement. The fourth grader explained that the ordeal began with a gunshot.
“He shot the next person’s door, and then, we have a door in the middle, and he opened it. And then he came in. He crouched a little bit, and he said, ‘It’s time to die,’” the boy said.
The boy was doing all he could to survive.
“When I heard the shooting through the door, I told my friend to hide under something, so he won’t find us. I was hiding hard. And I was telling my friend to not talk because he is going to hear us.”
Four boys hid with the child who spoke to KENS, partially shielded by a tablecloth. The boy recounted a harrowing moment near the end of the ordeal.
“When the cops came, the cop said, ‘Yell if you need help!’ And then one of the persons in my class said ‘help.’ The guy overheard, and he came in and shot her,” the boy said.
“The cop barged into that classroom, and the guy shot the cops. And the cops just started shooting,” he said.
Then came silence.
“I just opened the curtain. And I just put my hand out,” he said. “I got out with my friend. I knew it was the police when I saw the armor and the shield.”
The boy recalled the actions of his slain teachers, Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles.
“We were scared, and the teacher started telling us we can pray,” Timothy Silva, 8, told CBS.
His second-grade teacher alerted the students, he said.
“She started yelling, and I didn’t think it was a drill because they would have announced it. The teacher just went out there and started yanking on our door to go hide.”
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis once again led the way in protecting parental rights in education last week when he signed into law a bill that prohibits age-inappropriate “classroom instruction” on “sexual orientation and gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade. The legislation also requires parental consent for any health care services offered at school, and school districts “may not prohibit or discourage parental notification of or involvement in critical decisions affecting a student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being.”
Contrary to the fear-mongering, there is nothing “controversial” about this law. Yet it certainly does throw a spanner in the works for the radicals, neurotics, and degenerates in control of corporate America, the establishmentmedia, and Hollywood, who are evidently on board with schools serving as platforms for perverts, predators, and groomers. The obscene obsession with hypersexualizing children that exploded about two years ago needs to be understood in the context of the left’s wider agenda to promote moral relativism and sexual deviance, a campaign they have been gaslighting Americans into accepting as “progressive.” Decades ago, Marxists ditched class warfare and economics in favor of sexual politics and culture as a vehicle for executing revolution. Ever since, they have been shrewdly redefining marriage, family, sexuality, and gender, to the point where “tolerance” and “diversity” now means foisting porn, perversion, and predators on our families. Those who won’t stand for it are cunningly condemned as bigots.
Although the tactics have changed, the underlying objective is no different from the philosophy of their ideological forebears in Communist hellholes like the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: the fundamental transformation of society by co-opting and perverting the nuclear family, the most influential societal unit, and the bedrock of Judeo-Christian values.
A Nationwide Trend
Brainwashing school-aged children as young as five into becoming transgender-affirming disruptors of the nuclear family is not just a thing happening out west in crazy California, Oregon, Colorado, and Washington State. In Virginia, Michigan, and Texas, parents have expressed disgust and outrage over sexually explicit materials in school libraries. In Connecticut, eighth graders were given a foul school assignment asking them to share their sexual desires in the form of pizza toppings. A couple in Florida accused their 12-year-old daughter’s elementary school of covertly coaching her in gender confusion, which they believe led to her suicide attempt.
After last year’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, Democrat Terry McAuliffe learned the hard way that parents don’t want this trash for their kids. It turns out white suburban women don’t take kindly to school boards covering up the brutal rape of a 14-year-old girl by a “gender-fluid” student. Then there’s the Wisconsin teacher who apparently used a link in her email signature block to redirect students to an LGBT resource site and sex toy shop, and the Missouri teacher charged with sending dozens of nude photos and videos of himself to students, including a girl under 15.
Against this stunning backdrop, the U.S. Senate is poised to confirm the catastrophic Biden administration’s Supreme Court nominee, a radical judge with a 25-year career history of leniency toward individuals convicted of possessing or distributing child pornography. The left-wing media was quick to normalize and defend this disturbing trend, while endeavoring to humanize the depraved pedophiles in question.
A recent op-ed in The Hill spelled out the horrific reality behind the euphemistic phrase “child pornography.” It is the recording of violent acts of torture committed against terrified, defenseless pre-pubescent children and even infants by adult men, and distributed for the sadistic pleasure of the sickos who consume it, perpetuating a fiendish and expanding industry.
The Shift to Cultural Marxism
From the classroom floor to the Senate floor, none of this is a coincidence. Over the course of the 20th century, cultural Marxists realized that the class warfare narrative was never going to lure enough Americans to achieve a fundamental transformation of this nation. Despite the Soviet Union directing and subsidizing communist infiltration of U.S. government agencies, trade and teachers’ unions, and even churches and seminaries beginning in the 1930s, classical Marxism proved a flop. The left’s tactical response was two-fold:
Firstly, in reimagining Marxism in terms of sex and culture, they used maneuver warfare to simply attack the hill from a more advantageous position.
Secondly, pushing the falsehood that the Red Scare was just a conspiracy of the early 1950s deluded Americans into thinking the communist threat was a hoax when, in truth, it never went away.
Meanwhile, whether the battleground is economics or culture, the greatest threat to the twisted Marxist ideology has always been the Christian family. Christians know, as St. Paul writes, that every family in heaven and on earth receives its true name, not from the state, or a party, or society, or some fanciful “village,” but from God the Father. Hence the repression of religious families, the laicization of schools, and the prohibition of religious education that began with the Bolsheviks. In the 1950s, under the Khrushchev regime, Nikolai Ilyachev, the chief ideologist for a reinvigorated antireligious propaganda blitz, summed it up well when he stated that “in Soviet society, a family is a cell of Communist education or a refuge of backward conceptions.” The left’s contempt for those who remain faithful to God’s commandments and the truth revealed by Christ has never changed.
With Your Eyes Clear, Stand Up and Fight
Resisting the soul-destroying lies being force-fed to innocent children means supporting candidates who fear God more than some punk journalist, and who are bold enough, DeSantis style, to stand up to the Marxist schemers waging this cultural revolution. The politically suicidal Republicans and moderate Democratsflirting with the idea of supporting a historically unpopular Biden administration’s pedo-lenient Supreme Court pick might want to simultaneously start researching their post-political career options.
Most importantly, we must return to Christ. He is the only remedy for the sickness and squalor rotting this country from within. So read the Bible, pray, catechize your children, go to church, and yank your kids out of the rainbow-parading, gender expansive-promoting indoctrination camps posing as schools.
Every communist who has ever haunted the earth understands that to control society, you must control the family. They ironically possess a deeper, albeit disordered, appreciation of the mustard seed principle than do many Christians. The nuclear family, the smallest societal unit, has the potential for the most profound cultural influence. As Pope Leo XIII explained, family life is “the cornerstone of all society and government.” It’s time to reinvigorate our Judeo-Christian heritage and start using the Marxists’ tactics against them.
Carina Benton is a dual citizen of Australia and Italy and a permanent resident of the United States. A recent West Coast émigré, she is now helping to repopulate the country’s interior. She holds a master’s degree in education and has taught languages, literature, and writing for many years in Catholic and Christian, as well as secular institutions. She is a practicing Catholic and a mother of two young children.
A parent can look at the label on a juice box to decide what ingredients to allow into her child’s body. He should also be able to decide what ingredients a teacher puts into his child’s mind, but that isn’t the case in a growing number of public schools.
When Covid-19 brought the classroom into the kitchen, parents’ eyes were opened to some unsettling revelations, including that their children are being indoctrinated into critical race theory, and that some schools are secretly treating girls as boys and vice-versa.
Food labeling helps parents make informed decisions about what their children eat. In the same way, transparency helps parents make informed decisions about what their children learn. Yet some schools are resisting calls for transparency. Corporate media and teachers’ unions have inaccurately disparaged parents, but these critics are wrong. Here are three reasons why.
1. Children belong to their parents, not to the ‘community’ or the state.
Former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry infamously called on her viewers to “break through our kind of private idea that ‘kids belong to their parents,’. . . and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.” Her pitch was strikingly similar to that of Terry McAuliffe, former Virginia governor and chair of the Democratic National Committee, who said parents shouldn’t be telling schools what to teach.
This view of parental rights is at odds with parents’ fundamental right to direct the education and upbringing of their children. The U.S. Supreme Court recognized this in 1925 in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, stating, “The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”
As Professor Melissa Moschella writes, parental rights stem from the uniquely intimate relationship between parents and children. Children belong to their families, which are headed by their parents. Therefore, parents have the most direct obligation and authority to care for children until they are mature enough to direct their own lives. Until then, parents mediate a child’s relationship to the larger political community.
The failure to recognize that the family is distinct and relatively independent from the political community, and that parental rights are pre-political and natural rights, is not just wrong, but dangerous. Moschella notes Hannah Arendt’s observation that eliminating the intermediary structures between the individual and the state — namely the family and the church — is the essence of totalitarianism.
2. More schools are crossing the boundary line between education and indoctrination.
If schools just taught the “three Rs” (reading, writing, and arithmetic), parents would not suspect schools were undermining their values, beliefs, and authority. But, as parents in Albemarle County, Virginia, recently learned, some schools are indoctrinating students with so-called “anti-racism” ideology.
Instead of condemning all racism, “anti-racism” replaces one form of racism with another. Following “anti-racist” logic, Albemarle County schools used race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity to label students as “dominate” or “subordinate.”
Parents from five families of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds challenged the policy. The school undermined what these parents believe and teach their children — that all people are created equal and should be treated as such. The school even threatened to punish students for not supporting the policy.
Yet, as Judge James C. Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit wrote in Oliver v. Arnold, “Schools should educate—not indoctrinate. Teachers can teach. And teachers can test. But teachers cannot require students to endorse a particular political viewpoint.”
Parental rights don’t end at the schoolhouse gate. Parents must be able to protect their children from policies that place burdens and privileges on them according to their immutable characteristics.
3. Backed by the Biden administration, schools are even engaging in unauthorized treatment of students’ mental health.
The U.S. Department of Education has promoted “gender support plans.” An official fact sheet instructs schools to maintain “confidentiality” for students who identify as transgender at school by not using the student’s birth name or “sex assigned at birth if the student wishes to keep this information private.” But there is no mention of notifying, much less involving, parents in such a consequential decision to adopt a new name and pronouns that correspond to the opposite sex.
The agency tells schools to support a student’s gender transition by using “a checklist of issues to discuss with the student or their family” (emphasis added). Without an explicit requirement that schools inform and obtain parental consent to treat the child as a member of the opposite sex, it is reasonable to assume that notification to parents is optional. The schools may also perceive parental notification as a matter that depends on whether the child views their parents as “affirming” of gender transition.
Schools’ use of “gender support plans,” like those recommended by the Biden administration, have shocked parents around the country. After learning that schools sought to hide their children’s emotional distress from them, they challenged these policies in Wisconsin, Florida, and California courts.
Alliance Defending Freedom recently informed Virginia’s Harrisonburg City School District that its policy of using different names and pronouns amounts to “a psychosocial treatment that will increase the odds of long-term persistence,” according to Dr. Kenneth Zucker, an expert in treating gender dysphoria in children. Up to 90 percent of children with gender dysphoria eventually become comfortable with their bodies if they aren’t encouraged to live as the opposite sex. Schools should not endanger students by hiding information from parents about their mental health or engage in unauthorized treatment of gender dysphoria.
Lockdowns allowed many parents to see the ingredients inside their children’s education. That prompted them to support laws that provide more transparency into curriculum and policies. Parents should be able to decide on the education that best suits their child and their family’s beliefs.
Too many schools are hiding crucial information. They must be held accountable through policies that require transparency, so parents won’t receive more nasty surprises.
Emilie Kao is senior counsel and vice president of advocacy strategy with Alliance Defending Freedom.
Madison, Wis. — Parents are “not entitled” to know their kids’ gender identity, according to a recent training session in Wisconsin’s Eau Claire Area School District.
Empower Wisconsin obtained a copy of a training slide from a late February staff development session. The 2021-22 Equity session on Safe Spaces reminds teachers that “parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned.”
“Teachers are often straddling this complex situation. In ECASD, our priority is supporting the student,” the professional development facilitator guide states. Teachers were encouraged to “Talk amongst yourselves!”
The lesson — that teachers know better than parents about what is best for their kids — is not sitting well with some community members.
“We are appalled that ECASD would display such blatant disregard for the parents and guardians of our community’s children. We are equally dismayed that current school district leadership would pressure teachers into breaking a social contract that we all know and understand—that parents and guardians hold primary responsibility and decision making for the welfare and care of their children,” said parents and school board candidates Nicole Everson, Corey Cronrath, and Melissa Winter in a joint statement.
The district’s training session is also legally suspect. A district court in 2020 issued a partial injunction against Madison Metropolitan School District’s policy allowing children of any age to transition to a different gender identity at school — without parental consent. The full case is now before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed the lawsuit on behalf of a group of parents challenging the gender identity policy “that violates the rights of parents to make important healthcare decisions on their children’s behalf.” The policy includes the following provisions:
Children of any age can transition to a different gender identity at school, by changing their name and pronouns, without parental notice or consent.
District employees are prohibited from notifying parents, without the child’s consent, that their child has or wants to change gender identity at school, or that their child may be dealing with gender dysphoria.
District employees are even instructed to deceive parents by using the child’s legal name and pronouns with family, while using the different name and pronouns adopted by the child in the school setting.
It’s not clear whether the Eau Claire Area School District has a similar policy.
The school board candidates are demanding district administrators issue an apology to teachers for “placing them at odds with families and also to parents and guardians for breaking the trust and partnership that is critical for thriving students and a stellar school district.”
An apology doesn’t appear to be forthcoming. ECASD Superintendent Michael Johnson issued a statement to Empower Wisconsin asserting the district is upholding its responsibility to maintain an educational environment that is “equitable, safe and inclusive for all students.”
“Our staff often find themselves in positions of trust with our students. The staff development presentation shared extensive data and information to assist our staff members in our ongoing efforts to create a safe and supportive learning environment for all students,” Johnson said in the statement. “The ECASD prides itself on being a school district that makes all students feel welcome and safe in our schools.”
The superintendent said the staff training focused on data showing students who identify as non-heterosexual have a higher incidence rate of mental health issues than heterosexual students. But critics say a school’s commitment to “equity and inclusiveness” does not give license to educators to hide important information from parents and guardians.
Cronrath, Everson, and Winter are among seven candidates, including two incumbents, running for three open seats on the school board next month. The three jumped into the race because they were concerned about the eroding of parental rights in the district. They say Eau Claire schools’ “blatant disregard for parental rights and responsibilities” has been creeping into the district’s classrooms. The latest training session sends three very dangerous messages to parents and the wider community, the candidates assert.
1. Schools are in control of children, not parents and families—When you entrust your child into the walls of ECASD, you no longer have the right as a parent to be informed of major developments in your child’s school life. In fact, you must ‘earn it.’
2. Current Leadership is willing to pit teachers against parents—Open communication between the classroom and home has always been critical to healthy school communities and student development. ECASD is putting teachers in a difficult and dishonest position by instructing them to actively withhold information from parents.
3. What goes on in the walls of ECASD is privileged information—By indicating that information about your child is ‘knowledge that must be earned,’ ECASD is setting a dangerous precedent. If identity questions for your child can be hidden from you, is diet, curriculum, healthcare, inappropriate relationships, mental health concerns, etc. also no longer the business of parents? Just what are parents and guardians allowed to know and when?
The Republican-led state legislature passed a Parental Bill of Rights that would prohibit school policies that infringe on a parent’s or guardian’s role as the primary caregiver of their child. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat and the former state superintendent, is likely to veto the bill.
Eau Claire Area School District has a history of overreach. Last fall, school officials worked with the local health czar in removing a 14-year-old girl from school after someone in her class tested positive for Covid-19. The girl and her mom resisted, accusing authorities of abusing their powers. The county health director then sought a court order to have the girl forcibly removed from school.
This article features explicit material unsuitable for all readers.
Coaxing 10-year-old girls away from their parents, promising a fun and safe environment, and then forcing them to sleep in the same room as grown men is the kind of behavior you’d expect from a sexual predator. It’s child endangerment at best and traumatizing abuse at worst. Yet that’s exactly what California’s Los Alamitos Unified School District forced little girls at a school-organized science camp to do for three nights in San Bernardino, according to outraged parents.
“No parent should feel the way I feel after knowing what could have happened to my daughter,” parent Suzy Johnson told local news. “If I was aware of it and I had initialed something saying this was going to be done at this outdoor science camp, I would have kept my children home.”
When confronted about the sleeping arrangements, the camp’s defense was, “Per California law, we place staff in cabins they identify with,” and the two men refer to themselves as “they/them.”
While the science camp incident is enraging, it’s far from the first or only indication that government schools likely harm children more than they benefit them. Before entrusting their kids to a behemoth that has repeatedly subjected children to abuse, parents should demand proof that schools are trustworthy — and assume they aren’t until proven otherwise.
Public schools’ insane obsession with the transgender agenda has physically endangered young girls before. Just look to Loudoun County, where a boy in a skirt raped a young lady in the women’s bathroom and the school board covered it up to keep the incident from sinking their transgender bathroom policy. What else don’t parents know about?
When these far-left pipe dreams about erasing sex don’t subject kids to physical abuse, they often inflict mental abuse. Even in a red state like Idaho, a report earlier this month found that “School administrators in Coeur d’Alene manipulated an 11-year-old girl into believing she was a boy and should undergo gender transition surgery” behind her parents’ backs. “The elementary school counselor had coached the young girl into believing she was transsexual and instructed her how to tell her parents about her new identity,” the Idaho Freedom Foundation reported.
In Virginia, a public school made kindergarteners sit and listen to a “transgender rights advocate” — a man dressed as a woman who goes by “Sarah” — read them a book about a transgender teen.
In Iowa, a school district used the “Black Lives Matter at School Guiding Principles” to teach kids as young as four years old to “free[] ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking,” “dismantle cis-gender privilege,” and “disrupt[] the Western prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.”
A school in a small Colorado town outside of Boulder showed elementary students a play about a transgender raven, accompanied by videos like “He, She, and They – What is Gender” and “No More Gender Roles.” The videos include conversations with a gender-confused teddy bear that conclude gender roles are “mean, they are not fun and they are big problems.” One parent of a first-grader reported that, after showing one of the videos, his daughter’s teacher paired kids up to talk about their preferred pronouns.
Leaked audio from a conference of California’s largest teachers union revealed teachers being instructed on how to stalk middle schoolers and coax them into LGBT groups behind their parents’ backs. “Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents,” Abigail Shrier reported.
School libraries like the one at Baird Middle School in Massachusetts feature sexually explicit books like “Sex Is A Funny Word” by Cory Silverberg. Not only does the book cover “subjects of transgender identity, intersex conditions, and masturbation,” its author is a sex shop owner who specifically targets kids.
A Rhode Island mom filed a police report over a local high school’s promotion of a gay porn book to minors in its library. The book “features discussion of gay sexual fantasies and is incredibly graphic, including scenes of gay men having sex and a scene of one man performing oral sex on another.”
These examples are only some of the incidents that have been brought to light — and they merely scratch the surface. Exposing vulnerable children to sexually explicit material and indoctrinating them to question their own identities, often against their parents’ wishes, is nothing less than mental abuse and exploitation.
A Harvard study in 2015 found youth who identified as transgender were at more than double risk for depression, anxiety, attempted suicide, and self-harm. Last year, Forbes reported that more than half — 52 percent — “of all transgender and nonbinary young people in the U.S. seriously contemplated killing themselves in 2020.” Even aside from students’ exposure to the trans agenda, the toxic environment of public schools has tragically been linked to child suicides, which have escalated in recent years.
This isn’t to say every student in the public school system will be tempted to suicide, subject to pornography, placed in danger of sexual assault, or mentally abused. There are wonderful, truth-loving teachers out there who remain in the system to do as much good as they can for children they care deeply about. I know several. But the examples from all across the country, from known crazies in California to small-town red state school districts, should be enough to convince parents to be wary. Especially of what schools don’t tell them.
Nothing should be more paramount for parents than protecting their children. If a stranger offers to babysit your child, you don’t accept the offer with the rationale that your child might be fine. You expect anyone to whom you entrust your child to first prove he is worthy of stewarding your most sacred possession. Public schools are no different, and the repeated instances proving their abuses should drive your trust even further away. Maybe, like many Americans, you don’t feel you have what you think are feasible alternatives. Or maybe your local school district is sheltered from some of the most radical exploitation. But it behooves you to verify that first before betting your child on it.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
For almost as long as Covid-19’s been around, parent anger at local school boards over this or that issue has been a reoccurring major news story. We’ve all seen the viral social media videos and Facebook posts of parents skewering their local elected school boards over critical race theory, unscientific and abusive mask mandates, maddening repeat quarantines of healthy children, and other educational corruption that wrecks children’s ability to learn.
We’ve also seen those viral videos have little effect on what the school board or state board of education subsequently decides. So parents have filed lawsuits and are mounting primary and general election challenges, all of which are great and a healthy part of self-government.
What these strategies don’t do is provide immediate relief to children, whom parents claim are being abused, taught racism, and denied their right to an education. They require children to continue to be abused at least until the next election cycle or until three or five or more years when lawsuits finally reach the highest court that will hear them. That’s a third of a child’s education years.
These strategies also are predicated on the assumption that the people who have created these outrageously irrational and abusive school climates should continue to be trusted to run schools. The entire leadership teams of most schools, school districts, and state education bureaucracies have disqualified themselves from leading any children at all by the kinds of abuses parents charge, but just filing a lawsuit or kicking a few school board members out of office will still leave almost all corrupt educators controlling millions of kids in perpetuity.
If you can’t trust a principal or superintendent to keep teachers from teaching racism and to accurately assess children’s needs and vulnerabilities through Covid even though the data on that is plentiful and clear, how can you trust any other of such persons’ judgment calls?
More than being restrained by a lucky court order merely from putting toddlers in masks, a person whose judgment is so corrupt shouldn’t be making any decisions about children. A person who puts a toddler in a mask, or allows teachers to shame children based on their skin color, cannot be trusted to do just about anything else important and needs to find a new and more productive line of work. Errors this bad are completely disqualifying, and they will not be rectified by merely changing a few surface policies such as the quarantining of healthy kids.
The fact that parents keep their children in schools they charge are teaching racism or delaying crucial development with Covid irrationality gives the schools all they need to keep ignoring the parents. Parents are saying one thing while doing another. They are voting with their feet, and their feet are voting for what they themselves acknowledge is oppression.
So it’s no surprise that school boards, principals, and other entities disregard what the parents say. What the parents say has no, or no immediate, enforcement. And therefore it really isn’t credible. No wonder the school districts don’t take them seriously.
If the parents wanted to be truly effective — as well as truly honest — they would pull their children from schools en masse until problems of such serious magnitude were resolved favorably. Sickouts and mass protests are highly effective forms of warfare on children waged by teachers unions all the time. But parents so far haven’t responded in kind.
Why is that? Why are parents all bark and no bite with their school complaints? Possibly they don’t know how to be effective. And possibly, many aren’t willing to make the big sacrifices required to enforce their beliefs. They can see that something very serious is wrong, but they aren’t willing or able to fix it. They’re still waiting on others to fix things for them.
They, and their children, will wait a very long time for that. They will certainly wait long past Covidtide. And that’s why public schools are as bad as they are — the people who are supposed to hold them accountable refuse to do exactly that even while claiming to.
In the end, schools and parents are basically fighting over something underneath all these disputes that almost nobody mentions: money. Schools get public education money, not parents. It gives them the power to abuse children while parents complain yet keep putting that mask on their kindergartener every single day, even after he throws up in it at school or it prevents him from being able to read or speak properly.
School boards don’t care about complaints. They care about money. As long as they have it, and parents don’t take it, schools will continue to do whatever they want to children. And American children will continue to be unhappy, uneducated, and unprepared for life while everyone pretends it’s someone else’s fault.
It’s clear that American parents have a codependent relationship with the schools they claim to despise. They are in fact enabling the very abuse they complain about. So while it is entirely legitimate to go yell at school boards and vote bad people out of office, it’s also time for parents to engage in some critical thinking about their own choices that enable this situation. As long as public schools continue to get money no matter what they do, this situation will continue, no matter how many uncomfortable meetings and lawsuits parents instigate.
If state legislatures do not yank money from America’s abusive public school systems, parents must yank their kids. Trust, me, it will work. It might already be happening.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Sign up here to get early access to her next book, “How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
Davis Joint Unified School District in Davis, California, pushed leftwing distortions of gender and critical race theory through its Office of School Climate, which taught staff that “gender is a scam” and advertises the White Privilege Conference on March 9-12, 2022. The office is “responsible for supporting district staff and recommending and piloting ways to address structural oppression and to enhance school climate, equity, diversity, and inclusion,” according to their website.
The district, which includes approximately 8,500 TK-12 students throughout 16 different schools, also recently voted to adopt an Ethnic Studies requirement, which a press release notes will “explore issues of identity, analyze systems of power” and “examine social movements.”
Distortions Of Gender
The district’s site features a number of different resources that pushed radical leftwing distortions of gender. One presentation called “Supporting LGBTQ+ Students and Staff” was given to staff members at Harper Junior High School in May 2021 by two of the school’s teachers, both of whom use “they/them” pronouns. One also uses the abbreviation “Mx.” in lieu of Mr., Ms., or Mrs.
One slide bore a pride flag with transgender colors and black and brown stripes, both of which “sought to further represent the queer and trans identities of black and brown people.” Another one linked to a video titled “Gender is a Scam,” which compels audiences to “decolonize their language,” while a linked article called “15 Things LGBTQ people of colour want you to know” tells you “Why you might be guilty of white fragility.”
The slideshow instructed staff to use the pronouns they/them until someone says his pronouns and told them that “Posters/flags that support LGBTQ+ people are just the beginning” before going on to ask, “does your curriculum center primarily white/cis/straight voices?” The same slide warns against using medical and scientifically accurate terminology in regard to gender.
Meanwhile on the office’s LGBTQIA+ Supports page, a link to the activist group Human Rights Campaign promoted “LGBTQ+ Inclusive Picture and Middle School Books,” some of which are even aimed at children in pre-k. A link to the USC Rossier School of Education’s site “Students and Gender Identity Guide for Schools” also features a “Gender Identity Glossary for Schools” with woke vocabulary terms like “deadnaming,” “gender expansive,” “polygender,” “third-gender,” and “two spirit.”
Critical Race Theory and the White Privilege Conference
The office also promotes a trove of critical race theory resources intended for students, families, staff, teachers, and administrators under the subheading “Anti-Bias and Racial Justice.” The site opens by promoting free webinars from Embrace Race, a left-wing organization aimed at young children. Their webinars bear titles like “Addressing Racial Injustice with Young Children” and “RaceTalk among White Families Post-Floyd. Now What?”
The White Privilege Conference, a project of The Privilege Institute, is also promoted to staff members. The annual conference, not to be confused with the institute’s similarly named White Privilege Symposium, intends to provide “an opportunity for participants to discuss how white privilege, white supremacy, and oppression affects daily life while giving strategies for addressing issues of privilege and oppression and advancing social and economic justice.”
Last year’s conference hosted Robin DiAngelo, who discussed the subject of her latest book “nice racism,” which condemned all white people, including the far-left white people who comprise her audience, as definitionally racist.
The conference featured myriad workshops each day, which boasted titles like “Critical Race Theory/Critical Race Feminism: Creating a Plan of Action during the Biden-Harris era,” “A Good Womyn is Hard to Find,” and “The Making & Remaking of Whiteness.” The institute also hosts the Youth Action Project, with one-day institutes geared towards middle schoolers and high school students.
The district’s office also advertises the 1619 Project curriculum alongside a site called Learning for Justice, which they note “offers excellent, teacher-developed classroom curriculum.”
‘Dismantle White Supremacy’
Included under the heading “For Teachers, Staff, and Administrators” are K-12 frameworks for anti-bias and social justice education from Learning for Justice, a project of the extremist Southern Poverty Law Center whose mission is to “dismantle white supremacy” and “strengthen intersectional movements” by pushing critical race theory into schools.
One such video from The New York Times titled “A Conversation with White People on Race” features white people expressing guilt over their alleged privilege, with one person remarking “We’re all implicated in a racist system, and I play my part in it as a white person.”
The office adds that they have a library of books and videos for staff, including one titled “Cracking the Codes and Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible.”
Meanwhile, students and families are also directed to a number of critical race theory-inspired resources, including one link to a site titled “100 Race-Conscious Things You Can Say To Your Child To Advance Racial Justice,” which includes quotes of things parents have told their children when discussing race. Particularly striking is number 53, which makes the claim that “if you are White and you commit a crime … police might say ‘that was wrong, don’t do that again,’ and that’s all…but if you are Black and commit the same crime, they might arrest you and you might go to prison.” One quote under the subtitle “police violence” discusses black victims of police brutality, writing“The man who killed them didn’t like brown skin. He had white skin like us.”
The list isn’t exclusively focused on race, however, also promoting left-wing distortions of sex with quotes like“You know, some people are born with penises but feel like girls on the inside and some people are born with vaginas but feel like boys on the inside. We can’t always tell if someone is a boy or a girl just by looking at them and that’s okay.”
“Guidelines for Strong White Allies” is also included on the district’s list. Among the guidelines were requests for “resources,” “money,” and even “your body on the line.” Author Paul Kivel also told “white allies” to “understand and learn from the history of whiteness and racism” and to “assume racism is everywhere, every day.”
An anti-racist book list for children promoted by the district explains how parents can ease children into CRT by first starting “very gently” with entirely unobjectionable books that “just show kids that racial diversity exists.” The goal, however, is to eventually employ books that discuss “racial privilege, colorism, and the subtle tools that uphold white supremacy, such as white fragility and respectability politics.”
The district’s previous superintendent John Bowes signaled his belief in the leftist claim that America is fundamentally racist when, after the conviction of Derek Chauvin, he sent out a message explaining that he was reminded of the need to “rid our country of the systemic bias and institutional racism that exists in all parts of our society.” He went on to explain that “public education, including DJUSD schools, are part of the solution.”
Davis Joint Unified School District’s promotion of both critical race theory and leftist distortions of sex are part of a broader leftwing push in K-12 institutions throughout the country. In California alone, other districts have lied about teaching CRT, hosted LGBT clubs for four-year-olds, paid extremist organizations to “disrupt whiteness,” and promoted material that tells students to use witchcraft against those who say “all lives matter.”
The politicized nature of California’s government schools, along with general concerns regarding quality of education, may lead some to support a recently launched bipartisan campaign to pass a school choice initiative in the golden state.
Neither Superintendent Matt Best nor Climate Coordinator Kate Snow responded to The Federalist’s request for comment.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
Americans are starting to feel the increasing collateral damage from our unprecedented, ineffective, and ill-advised Covid lockdowns. It was known before March 2020 that lockdowns would cause lifelong and avoidable damage to billions, yet the world’s ruling classes who claim to have earned their place atop a “meritocracy” strenuously demanded such damage be inflicted especially on children and other vulnerable people.
This ruling class used all their massive financial, communications, and government powers to ensure these tragic outcomes, even though anyone who was an actual expert—or, like me, just someone who reads and has common sense—predicted this false “cure” would hurt worse than the disease.
Now that people are beginning to more deeply feel the foreseeable evil consequences of ruling class responses to a novel virus, that ruling class is pulling what propaganda experts call a “limited hangout.” That’s admitting to bits of the truth in order to re-establish yourself as a credible authority while attempting to keep the whole truth hidden.
Why are they all of the sudden simultaneously changing the narrative, and effectively admitting that they have been over-counting Covid hospitalizations? Why is it so coordinated and simultaneous? pic.twitter.com/CXpqY2G0nT
So we have outlets such as The Atlantic and The New York Times, which have throughout the Covid era worked as government butt-coverers, now publishing articles admitting that lockdowns and continued rolling blackouts of school instruction is irrevocably damaging Americans, especially children and even more especially the poorest. The kids, as I pointed out in April 2020 and numerous times thereafter, will never as a generation recover.
Now that the damage is done, major corporate media organizations have decided to pivot to acknowledge just enough of the truth to cover their complicity. The Atlantic, for example, last week published an article titled “America’s Covid Rules Are A Dumpster Fire” (It took you two years to figure out what was apparent within the first month?).
CNN’s Brian Stelter recently did a segment acknowledging the foreseeable “mental health crisis” from lockdowns that is causing suicides, ruining marriages, putting formerly perfectly normal kids into rocking fetal positions, and erasing the credibility of formerly mostly ignored “public health experts” at institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Stelter made multiple statements that have gotten numerous conservatives punished by and erased from social media, such as that “Covid zero is…an impossibility” and “the CDC has turned into a punchline.”
CNN’s Brian Stelter: “It’s so sad, but it’s true, the CDC has turned into a punchline.”
Where was Stelter a year and a half ago, when data reflecting the exact same outcomes were also plentiful? Heck, Stelter was still legitimizing Covid panic one month ago, when CNN and other news organizations reinstituted lockdown measures amid omicron panic they helped inflame. Six months ago, Stelter was indicating Fox News had “blood on its hands” for reporting less hysterically than all the other major media organizations about Covid.
Clearly, Democrats are becoming ensnared by their own trap, and they’re trying to get out with this public reversal of their messaging. The limited hangout is afoot.
Brave NYT truth-teller David Leonhardt also recently published an article and an accompanying tweetstorm on the topic.
“The number of E.R. visits for suspected suicide attempts by 12- to 17-year-old girls rose by 51 percent from early 2019 to early 2021, according to the CDC,” he tweeted.
“Data now suggest that many changes to school routines are of questionable value in controlling the virus’s spread. Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. Other interventions, like forcing students to sit apart from their friends at lunch, may also have little benefit,” he noted in the article.
No sh-t, Sherlock. So why did The New York Times run hit pieces on Trump medical advisor Scott Atlas for being one of the few scientists courageous enough to point this long-ago known data out more than a year ago, when the damage could have been mitigated? Why did Stanford University colleagues and formerly respected medical journals, boosted by corporate media attack campaigns, try to discredit Atlas and colleagues such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for saying things The New York Times, Atlantic, and CNN are admitting now?
Why did the CDC punish world-renowned vaccine scientist Dr. Martin Kulldorff for publicly disagreeing with them on vaccine safety? Why does Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook shadowban nearly every Federalist article on anything touching Covid-19, and why did they spend two years on massive information suppression campaigns against scientists, politicians, podcasters, and just ordinary citizens who had some questions, contrary data, and objections to elites’ demanded Covid response?
Because it was politically expedient to sacrifice science, Americans’ civil rights, human lives, and the world’s future then, and it is not politically expedient to face the consequences for that choice now. And they think nobody can or will hold them accountable for their deadly and despicable lies.
All the misery these too-late admittals underscore appears to be true, but it also could have been prevented. CNN and The New York Times not only did nothing to help prevent this kind of irreversible damage, they willingly, even gleefully, participated in this completely unwarranted mass abuse of Americans. The left lied, children committed suicide.
The corporate left’s morally abominable Covid propaganda operation demands justice. The people who could and should have known, and in fact likely did know, that lockdowns would harm millions of innocents while not protecting the vulnerable can never be trusted again.
Did any of these people tell the truth back when it could have saved the generation that comprises the world’s future? Nope. They not only watched it happen, they cheered it on and viciously ostracized all who told the truth.
All these people have erased all their moral authority and their claims to expertise. The same goes for all the education “experts” and “leaders” who didn’t spend the last two years screaming at the top of their lungs that school shutdowns are a stupid, scientifically unwarranted, and evil idea. Yes, that’s basically all of them.
Experts who knowingly allow mass child abuse because they don’t want to harm their careers are not experts, they are cowards. They deserve not one ounce of public trust or even to retain their jobs. They certainly should have no public funds nor authority over any portion of the upbringing of American children.
Not one parent or elected official should give these education and public health “experts” the time of day. In a time of dire need, these keepers of the nation’s children and controllers of billions in public funds piled American children on a funeral pyre, lit it on fire, and cheered as it burned. Requiring that they find a more honest line of work would be an act of mercy.
These “experts” and “leaders” have shown themselves to be grossly incompetent at discharging their crucial public trust and duties. They should be relieved of those duties as soon as possible. If state lawmakers will not do it, citizens must. If they do not, they are also complicit cowards and also deserve to be sanctioned and socially shamed for their willingness to sacrifice the most vulnerable for their personal comfort.
For a long time now, American parents have registered deep dissatisfaction with the public schools they feel forced to stick their kids in. Even before lockdowns, unscientific and education-damaging forced masking in schools, ridiculous repeated quarantines of healthy kids, and rolling “brownouts” of in-person schooling, polling shows most American parents wish they didn’t feel like the public schools in their ZIP code were their only option.
After all this incompetence-imposed life chaos, the current surge of parent outrage at local school board meetings is only the tip of the spear. As more evidence emerges of the unnecessary harms we knew beforehand would result from lockdowns, public anger will only grow. It won’t be limited to schools, either.
If more exciting school board meetings, primaries for craven politicians, and parents yanking funding from schools that don’t serve them are what it takes to run every one of these moral cretins out of every position of power they’ve abused throughout their careers, then go, Americans, go. Do it for the kids. Our future will remember who stood up for the truth, lives, and liberties, and who made billions of precious humans needlessly suffer.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Sign up here to get early access to her next book, “How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
The woke-o-meter in public schools is about to ramp up. Parents who think they don’t have time to homeschool may soon realize that, compared to the effort involved in monitoring and countering the nonsense from leftist classrooms, homeschooling is the relaxing alternative. Not all teachers buy into the leftist narrative of race-obsessed anti-Americanism. But leftist K-12 administrators want to ensure that, eventually, all teachers will present only approved ideas and counter any wrongthink children are taught at home. Many of these educrats are now embracing a technological fix.
Trade publication Education Week recently reported that about 500 school districts around the country are rating teacher applicants according to their “cultural competency,” another code for “wokeness.” Many of these districts are contracting with a teacher-hiring company called Nimble, which uses artificial intelligence to examine applications and interview answers to determine which candidates harbor the correct political and cultural attitudes.
A central concern of Nimble and its leftist clients is mindsets about race. The goal is to hire only teachers who are “anti-racist” activists, who will reject equal treatment of all students in favor of discrimination against some (whites) for the supposed benefit of others (racial minorities). Note that under this rubric, Asian students, who as a group work hard and consequently excel, don’t qualify as an oppressed racial minority.
“Now that we’ve become a little more aware of the concept of anti-racism and maybe a little more woke as a culture, I do think that districts have started to emphasize these questions a little bit more,” Nimble CEO Lauren Dachille told EdWeek. “They might be more common, they might be more explicit.”
Anti-racism as a motivating societal force was popularized by Ibram X. Kendi, who along with other savvy race grifters is profiting handsomely from the concept. Getting points for honesty if not integrity, Kendi teaches that discrimination against white people is a positive good, and indeed necessary to establish the “equity” of equal outcomes for all regardless of intelligence or effort. This is what is meant by anti-racism: “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist.”
Note the racism inherent in anti-racism. “Anti-racists” assume that black and brown children are “less than” white or Asian kids—they can’t excel in academics, they can’t follow basic rules of personal conduct. It’s necessary to change all standards to accommodate these presumed “inferior” beings. Such a theory ensures minority kids will never overcome personal obstacles because they’re told they don’t have to. This is the system that, with Nimble’s help, many schools are trying to establish and perpetuate.
EdWeek identified a Boston elementary school principal who “will tell candidates the school’s priorities around anti-racism and ask them to respond.” To make crystal clear the political attitudes expected from successful candidates, “she will ask them what they’ve done personally or professionally to be more anti-racist.” Presumably, getting arrested at a Black Lives Matter riot would be, as Rush Limbaugh used to say, a resume enhancement.
Applicants in Indianapolis may be asked “how [they would] ensure that student outcomes are not predictable by race, ethnicity, culture, gender, or sexual orientation.” Of course, there’s only one way to ensure such an outcome: manipulate it to guarantee that all students end up at the same low level. Any students who threaten the leveling by working too hard or achieving too much will have to be brought to heel—at least, if they’re the “wrong” race.
Indianapolis teaching applicants may also be asked, “Why do you think that low-income students predictably perform lower on standardized tests than their more-affluent peers?” One would be pretty safe to assume a preferred answer would be “because of systemic racism,” not “because those students, largely due to decades of misguided government policies, are more likely to come from fatherless families and grow up in a dysfunctional environment.”
Throughout the article, district officials emphasize the importance of hiring teachers who are amenable to the schools’ “priorities” and “values.” But how is it appropriate for a public institution, funded by taxpayers who hold a wide range of political opinions, to institutionalize one set of those opinions? Even worse, how is it appropriate for the institution to guarantee the propagation of those opinions by limiting hires to candidates who agree with them?
These questions illustrate the bubble mentality of the left. Leftists are so certain of the objective correctness of all their views that they cannot conceive of any person of goodwill taking a different position. In the leftist mind, anyone not willing to engage in discrimination against whites or Asians in the name of “equity” is the moral equivalent of a Klansman. And who would object to screening out Klansmen from the teacher corps?
Parents who hope the public schools are still salvageable might want to reconsider. The skyrocketing wokeness of administrators who control teacher hiring will ensure that all classrooms are increasingly devoted to indoctrination rather than education.
How exhausting it is for parents to constantly monitor what their children are being fed in every class and then try to repair the intellectual and moral damage at home. Viewed in this light, does choosing another schooling arrangement really seem so hard?
Jane Robbins is an attorney and a retired senior fellow with the American Principles Project in Washington DC. In that position she crafted federal and state legislation designed to restore the constitutional autonomy of states and parents in education policy, and to protect the rights of religious freedom and conscience. She is a graduate of Clemson University and the Harvard Law School.
The Los Angeles Unified School District Office of Human Relations, Diversity & Equity prepared a presentation that told students critical race theory isn’t being taught in schools while the district made presentations that did precisely that. The district also mandated that teachers take an “antiracism” course taught by a known critical race theorist who told them to “challenge whiteness.”
LAUSD Lies, Denies That Critical Race Theory Is Being Taught In Schools
A LAUSD presentation titled “Critical Race Theory and Racism in K-12 Education” starts out by defining the theory as a “Theoretical Framework through which researchers and scholars try to understand how structural and racial inequities exist and endure in our society.”
The PowerPoint implores students to rename a headline referring to critical race theory, “since we now understand that Critical Race Theory is not taught in schools.” A separate document, which claims “there is no evidence that CRT is widespread in K-12 education,” is also listed on LAUSD’s website.
Although administrators at LAUSD claim CRT isn’t taught in their schools, the district created lesson plans that embed the corrosive theory in their very own classrooms, all after the district brought in a critical race theorist to tell teachers how to “challenge whiteness.”
K-12 Students Subjected To Critical Race Theory By Diversity And Equity Team
The LAUSD Office of Human Relations, Diversity and Equity introduces its advisory lessons by highlighting their desire to speak with students “about power, privilege, oppression, and resistance.” The section of the website labeled “Human Relations, Diversity & Equity” lists several critical race theory-inspired presentations, including slideshows that teach Thanksgiving is evil and propose an alternative holiday.
One presentation told students to check their privilege and included a video called “What is Privilege.” It shows people engaging in a privilege walk, an activity that I had to do six years ago as a freshman at my California high school. In it, people line up and take steps forward or backward depending on their answer to a series of questions. It is incredibly easy to manipulate the results through selective questioning in order to make people believe CRT’s sweeping claims of privilege and oppression based on skin color.
The presentation claims that white people, among others, are uniquely privileged, before telling students how to become an ally of left wing social justice movements. There’s also a slideshow about the Black Lives Matter movement that includes a note signed by the LAUSD Human Relations, Diversity and Equity team. The presentation mocks the phrase “all lives matter” in a comic.
It also includes the infamous tagline “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family” and featured a grab bag of intersectional insanity, imploring students to “celebrate queer people,” “dismantle patriarchal practices,” and undermine “hetero normative thinking.” One graphic demanded that our society “fund counselors not cops” and “mandate black history and ethnic studies.”
The presentation discussed white supremacy, which it defined as “The belief that white people are better than other races” and claimed that “Some systems, like schools and jails, have white supremacy built into them because white people have had so much power for so long.”
The administrators are evidently not fazed by the irony of peddling the conspiracy theory that America’s schools are fundamentally controlled by hegemonic white supremacy while they, as influential members of the nation’s second-largest school district, engender animosity against their white students by offering a state-sponsored crash course on racial identity politics.
A wide variety of other presentations also peddled the same themes and pushed for CRT.
Teaching critical race theory and then lying about its presence in schools isn’t new. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, has claimed CRT isn’t taught in schools after her organization boasted of teaching it on national television.
LAUSD Enshrines Core Tenets of Critical Race Theory
One slideshow focused on the Cleveland Indians changing their name, claiming that various teams were named after racial slurs and that Native Americans are the only people group whose identity has been turned into a mascot, conveniently forgetting about teams such as the Minnesota Vikings, Boston Celtics, and Notre Dame Fighting Irish.
A whole section on the LAUSD website is dedicated to “Election, Insurrection, and More.” One slideshow focused on “domestic terrorism,” invoking Jan. 6, 2020. It also features discussion of white supremacist domestic terrorism, while making no mention of Black Lives Matter riots or the rape and murder-infested Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
When asked why the Human Relations, Diversity and Equity team told students that CRT is not being taught in schools despite teaching it themselves, the team’s coordinator Judy Chiasson avoided the issue, responding, “We encourage students to hear different perspectives, become critical thinkers, and build camaraderie across identities so they may become the leaders of tomorrow.”
LAUSD Brings In Known Critical Race Theorist
Lest you believe these presentations were simply the handiwork of a rogue team of far left administrators, turn your attention to this memorandum from the LAUSD that mandates that teachers take a course dubbed the “Anti-Racist Journey.”
During the training, Howard tells teachers to “celebrate people of color,” and then discusses the need to “challenge whiteness,” which he bizarrely connects to ideas of merit and individualism. As Howard and one facilitator guide notes, “Whiteness’ … does not mean an indictment of white people and refers to a majority perspective and construct.”
But critical race theorists frequently use the term to secure this indictment. Psychoanalyst Donald Moss published an article claiming that whiteness is a “parasitic condition” without a “permanent cure,” while Noel Ignatiev, the communist and Harvard lecturer who founded the journal “Race Traitor” and claimed that “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity,” argued that “abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists.”
Yet we’re somehow expected to believe that these critical race advocates are just trying to end racism. They’re not being anti-white. They’ve simply constructed an ideology around attributing some of the worst evils to “whiteness.”
In the face of the district’s lies, there might be reason to rejoice. It might be an indicator that even school districts in incredibly far-left areas have realized just how quickly they’re losing ground on the issue among decent people of all races. By lying, LAUSD might’ve accidentally admitted a greater truth about critical race theory: that parents and voters can stop it.
Howard, the LAUSD School Board, and Superintendent Reilly did not respond to requests for comment.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial win in Virginia sent a clear message to government bureaucrats: treat parents with more respect. Parents are paramount to their kids’ welfare and education, and they have a right to be angry when treated otherwise. Yet parents should also reflect on how we got here and consider how they share at least some of the blame.
For decades, public schools have encroached on some basic parental responsibilities — from feeding kids to health care to helping with homework. Is it any wonder school officials view themselves as the leading authorities on your children?
Consider that, today, a huge number of kids are dropped off at schools before the classes even begin, as early as 6:30 a.m. Kids are watched and fed a simple breakfast. This program, known as “before care,” allows parents to head to work early, which may be necessary for parents who work an early shift. Yet it’s also used by parents who want an early start to the day and a hassle- and kid-free morning.
Many parents also seem happy to let schools feed their kids. The school lunch program, originally designed to help low-income families, is now feeding any child, regardless of need. In fact, according to the School Lunch Association, 7.7 million students paid full price for a school lunch in 2019, meaning the child’s family did not qualify for a reduced or free school lunch.
The full price for a school lunch varies but it averages at about $2.48 for elementary school and $2.74 for high school. Even with rising inflation, that’s enough to make a simple meal for a child. Yet so many parents who could easily do this themselves instead opt to let the school feed their kids because it’s convenient.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture also funds weekend, holiday, and summer meal programs. This is on top of the generous food assistance that’s already provided to needy families through various programs. During the COVID shutdown of schools, even wealthy moms partook of these free food giveaways, since the USDA waived all requirements to show enrollment in the school meal program.
Working late? No sweat! Like the “before care” program, most schools now offer “after care” programs so that parents can work late. Participating students are typically assisted with their homework and fed. Not having to do homework with your kid sounds nice, but it also robs parents of knowing what is being taught and how their kid is doing with his or her schoolwork.
Students are even able to seek medical treatment without their parents’ consent. In Alexandria, Virginia, the high school’s “Teen Wellness Center” will alert parents if a child is seen for a cold, acne, or a few other minor illnesses. But parents are not informed if their child is there for a pregnancy test, diagnosis, and treatment of a sexually transmitted disease (including HIV), a prescription for birth control, “behavior change counseling,” mental health counseling, or substance abuse counseling. These services are all offered free of charge, so at no point would a student need to inform a parent.
Those who advocate for keeping children’s medical care private from parents often cite concerns about abuse arising from a parent finding out about their child’s sexual activity or its consequences. Yet school officials seem less concerned about the harms that could result from letting a child navigate these traumatic and potentially life-altering health conditions without assistance from their parents.
As for discipline, parents rarely have a place at the table. While schools used to be willing to contact parents, share information, and work as partners in setting kids on a better path, today, restorative justice programs cut out parents (and law enforcement), and reduce discipline to a performative joke.
If parents want to be respected by school officials, they need to stop ceding parenting basics to others. By placing these duties in the hands of teachers and school officials, parents have weakened their case that they are the primary caregivers for their children. I’m glad parents are fighting for their rights, but they should never have given up so much authority over their children’s upbringing in the first place.
Julie Gunlock directs the Independent Women’s Network and its Center for Progress and Innovation. She is the author of “From Cupcakes to Chemicals: How the Culture of Alarmism Makes Us Afraid of Everything and How to Fight Back.”
Americans have two political parties, both of which we loathe. We take turns punishing one by rewarding the other. Our political elites depend on this vicious cycle, and it’s why the only thing both parties ever seem to agree on is screwing ordinary Americans like a two-headed weasel in heat.
It’s easy to think it’s merely that vicious cycle at work in Virginia’s recent election upset: Democrats came out hard in favor of enabling bathroom rape, teaching kids that white skin is evil, and alerting the FBI about parents who expressed concern over such things.
So they got punished for it, and now Republicans have a new opportunity to squander. After that, Americans would normally punish the GOP for failing their mandate by reelecting Democrats who finally rediscovered how to shut up about their true intentions for five minutes.
But the opportunity presented to Virginia Republicans goes beyond another chance for the GOP to suckle on a fresh serving of voters’ goodwill. The massive rightward shift in Virginia wasn’t just business as usual. It was driven by a growing number of parents choosing to reclaim their authority over their households.
Parents Awaken to Their Responsibilities
Providence has given parents the awesome responsibility to raise and provide for the well-being of their children. Like any true responsibility, it comes with the authority to carry it out. When parents are unable to fulfill those responsibilities alone, they delegate.
For example, if parents cannot reliably protect their household from murderers, rapists, and robbers, they collaborate with institutions that can. If they cannot adequately educate their children alone, they enlist the help of teachers. This delegation is ultimately why any and every government institution exists: to assist families in some way or another.
It is precisely this authority Democrat Terry McAuliffe openly tried to usurp. As a result, the election became a referendum on whether children belong to the state. Enough parents were willing to say “no” that a blue state turned red overnight.
Parents can be tricked into delegating their authority to the unfit if they can plausibly tell themselves their children will be fine. The public school system is proof enough of that.
But the past couple of years have rapidly eroded that plausibility. We’ve seen schools forcibly cover children’s faces and isolate them from friends over an illness that poses virtually no threat to them. Remote learning also exposed their curriculum to an extent most parents had never witnessed before. The promotion of sexual degeneracy by schools is likewise coming home to roost more and more often.
Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied
It’s also not just Virginia and not just the schools. Our state and federal governments have spent two years devastating our economy, stripping our stores bare, and inflating our currency, making it harder than ever to care for our children. Our media has spent even longer lying to us about all this and more, and it is only doubling down on censorship for the sake of our elites. Worst of all, the Biden-Harris administration has tried to threaten our families with destitution unless we submit to vaccines whose risks often far outstrip any potential benefit.
These are not things parents will forget—especially when committed by those to whom we delegated our authority for the sake of our children. There are also limits to how long any parent is willing to simply wait and hope for improvement before taking action for our children’s sake.
This reclamation of authority by parents is still a work in progress, certainly—McAuliffe only lost by two points, after all. But it is in progress, and it’s not easily reversible.
Once a parent realizes someone has threatened his child, he will never trust that person again. If parents cannot disassociate the people threatening them from the institutions these people run, then they will not trust the institutions either.
Nobody who’s gotten a good look at the true face of progressivism is going to forget it anytime soon. This new dynamic is not stopping. It is accelerating.
If Republicans Don’t Use Their Power, They’re Toast
That brings us to the opportunity for Republicans. I’ve seen a lot of people are calling this a seismic shift in government. But the only reason parents voted for Republicans is that they still hold out hope that the GOP might willingly serve on their behalf.
Should that hope prove false, parents won’t stop trying to reclaim their authority; they will just start doing so in even more earth-shaking ways. One way or another, America’s vicious two-party cycle is not going to persist for much longer. This is the bare minimum Republican office-holders need to do to keep that hope alive.
First, education needs to be addressed, and a few token policy changes aren’t going to cut it. Those faculty and administrators who betrayed parents’ trust need to be removed.
The person who was distributing pornography to your children in school, for example, won’t suddenly become trustworthy because someone makes a rule. The same is true of teachers and administrators who hate your child because of her skin tone. Those people need to go—some fired, some even prosecuted.
Public universities that train teachers to act this way likewise need to be addressed. No program peddling degeneracy and critical race theory to aspiring educators should receive any state funding.
To the timid who complain, “But that’s cancel culture!” I simply respond, “Yes.” If someone starts shooting at your children, you aren’t “sinking to their level” by returning fire. It is parents’ moral obligation to fight back. Leftist institutions chose to escalate to this level of aggression, and they can choke on the consequences.
Yes, this will certainly be a long and difficult battle, which is why parents should immediately be given school choice until it’s resolved. Let parents take their tax dollars away from these errant institutions so they can enlist the help of real schools instead.
Faith In Election Integrity Must Be Restored
Republicans’ second job should be to decisively end voter fraud in their municipalities so parents are guaranteed a voice in their government. There is no point in winning votes if we lose on counting votes.
Do a full forensic investigation of elections you won whether you think there was fraud or not. Prosecute every violation you find whether it made a difference in the outcome or not. And after the investigation, enact common-sense fraud control to address everything you found.
Americans deserve to have confidence in their elections, and parents need to know they still have a say. Republicans need to teach by example that any state or municipality that refuses to transparently ensure the fairness of its elections is doing so because they have something to hide.
Third, Republicans need to use their state and local offices to protect people against the corporations and the federal government that are actively attacking families. Ban corporate mask and vaccine mandates. Provide compensation and other assistance for people being fired for their consciences. Enact laws explicitly holding corporations responsible for the side-effects of any medical treatment they mandate. And, of course, prevent schools from forcing vaccines and other procedures on students—or encouraging such things behind their backs.
Sanctuary States for Right Voters
Now that federal officials are trying to classify outspoken parents as domestic terrorists, states and municipalities will also need to protect their people from those agencies. Republicans should be as diligent about creating sanctuary cities for their own people as the Democrats are about creating sanctuaries for illegal aliens.
Republicans and other conservatives have been great at making careers out of complaining about the left, but that isn’t going to cut it anymore. Parents are finally acting like parents again and taking back their God-given authority. They are offering Republicans a chance to assist them. They aren’t going to stop taking action just because Republicans fail yet again.
The left can complain about white women voting for white kids all they want, but mothers and fathers are almost always going to vote for their children—not because they’re white, but because they’re their children. No adequate parent really cares about someone’s motive for viciously attacking his family; parents are still going to defend their kids no matter what it takes.
Matthew’s writing may be found at The 96th Thesis. You can also follow him on Twitter @matt_e_cochran or subscribe to his YouTube Channel, Lutheran in a Strange Land. He holds an MA from Concordia Theological Seminary.
If there’s one lesson to be learned from the red sweep in Virginia this week, it’s that politicians, schools boards, and education administrators shouldn’t mess with parents, especially on the well-being of their children. Many more school districts across other states still have to learn this lesson, and to that end, one Wisconsin parent is enlisting the help of attorneys to go after her son’s public school.
On Wednesday, counsel for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) sent a letter to the school district of Kenosha, the scene of violent riots last summer and the site of the ongoing trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, threatening legal action if the Kenosha Unified School District does not allow a concerned parent to observe her son’s class as required by federal law.
It started when the mother of a student at the Kenosha School of Technology Enhanced Curriculum, a public charter school, became concerned about her son’s dropping grades. According to WILL, the student had reported a bevy of classroom disruptions that contributed to his struggle, including fighting, profanities, racial epithets, and property damage, as well as a new math curriculum that does not involve homework nor a textbook.
In September, the mom decided to take action, figuring the best way to help her son succeed would be to observe and understand his learning environment. She requested access to see his classroom for herself, but both the school district and the school reportedly denied her requests multiple times, giving her inconsistent rationale as to why she couldn’t enter.
For instance, Bill Haithcock, the chief of school leadership for the district, allegedly told the mother that an in-person observation by her would serve “no educational program,” ignoring the school’s charter contract, which says, “Parents are important partners in the educational program at KTEC.” Haithcock reportedly further noted that he didn’t think it was the “best idea right now” to “expos[e] the class to an outside visitor.”
However, as the WILL letter notes, the district’s policies and social media pages indicate that many other types of visitors such as mentors, chaperones, and nonprofits are welcomed.
Other times, the school district allegedly told the mother that as a parent, she was “not connected to the educational curriculum” and that allowing her to visit the classroom would open the floodgates of other parents wanting to observe. WILL hopes Kenosha schools change course and “view parents as partners in the education of children.”
According to federal law signed by the Obama administration in 2015, these denials are illegal, as WILL argues in its letter. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, public schools must have systems in place that involve parents in educational settings, meaning the Kenosha district must have a policy that grants parents the “observation of classroom activities.”
This is just the tip of the iceberg of parents’ rights in their children’s education. They also have a right to access curriculum, see progress reports, engage in communication with staff, schedule yearly parent-teacher conferences, and participate in their kid’s classes.
The Kenosha school district does have policies in place for parent involvement and “classroom visits,” yet it has so far stonewalled this concerned parent.
In response to The Federalist’s request for comment, the Kenosha Unified School District’s Chief Communications Officer Tanya Ruder said, “KUSD is aware of the WILL letter and is working with legal counsel to review the matter at hand.” The Kenosha School of Technology Enhanced Curriculum did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
WILL said it hopes Kenosha schools change course and “view parents as partners in the education of children.”
“Public school classrooms should not be a ‘black box.’ Parents have the right to know what is being taught in classrooms,” said WILL Deputy Counsel Dan Lennington.
This controversy over whether parents are partners in their children’s education or whether they should be staying out of schools has shown to have remarkable electoral significance this week, especially in the Virginia gubernatorial race. After candidate and former governor Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” and doubled down on keeping parental involvement out of public schools, Republican candidate and parent advocate Glenn Youngkin won the race in the same state President Joe Biden won by 10+ points just one year ago.
“Federal and state laws impose simple and straightforward transparency requirements on public schools such as allowing parents to sit in on classes and the right to view curriculum,” Lennington told The Federalist. “But if public schools continue to treat parents as adversaries by concealing what’s going on inside school buildings, they face the real risk of an electoral backlash, like we just saw in Virginia.”
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
The Oshkosh Area School District in Oshkosh, Wis. will no longer inform parents if their children identify as transgender while at school.
“The Oshkosh Area School District is committed to fostering a safe, supportive and inclusive learning environment for all students,” Matthew Kaemmerer, the district’s director of pupil services, said in a recent memo to staff. “District staff members are no longer required to seek parental consent prior to honoring student requests to be called by their preferred name and/or pronouns.”
To officially change their names in the district’s computer system, students will still need to provide documentation of a legal name change. However, the new policy allows teachers and other district employees to treat students as members of the opposite sex without ever informing their parents that they are doing so.
“This change only impacts how a student who is transgender or gender nonconforming is referred to (name and/or pronouns) during school and school activities,”Kaemmerer explained in an email to parents. “District staff will continue to work directly with students who are transgender and gender nonconforming and their families to maintain ongoing communication.”
“This is outrageous,” said one Oshkosh parent. “So, if my son starts identifying as a girl at school but hides it from me, I will never know about it?”
Oshkosh is not a major urban area, where many people might expect to find far-left policies like this. It is a modest-sized Wisconsin town of 67,000 people. The school district oversees nearly 10,000 students, according to federal data. While the city of Oshkosh voted for Joe Biden in 2020, the surrounding county voted for Donald Trump by four points. The area is represented by Republicans and Democrats in state offices.
Last year, the Madison Metropolitan School District announced a nearly identical policy change and faced an immediate lawsuit from parents. A Dane County Circuit Court judge issued an injunction barring the district from enforcing its policy “in any manner that allows or requires District staff to conceal information or to answer untruthfully in response to any question that parents ask about their child at school, including information about the name and pronouns being used to address their child at school.” A final decision on the merits of the lawsuit is still pending, but in both Wisconsin courts and the federal judiciary, the right of parents to have a significant say in the education of their children is well-established.
In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court in Meyer v. Nebraska struck down a law prohibiting the teaching of foreign languages in school. The court did so in large measure because the Nebraska legislature “has attempted materially to interfere with the calling of modern language teachers, with the opportunities of pupils to acquire knowledge, and with the power of parents to control the education of their own.” This concept of a fundamental right of parents to exercise control over the education of their children was affirmed two years later when the Supreme Court held in Pierce v. Society of Sisters that parents reserved the right to send their children to parochial schools.
“The child is not the mere creature of the state,” the high court explained. “Those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right and the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”
As recently as 2000, the Supreme Court in Troxel v. Granville upheld this right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children, declaring definitively that “the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause has a substantive component that provides heightened protection against government interference with certain fundamental rights and liberty interests, including parents’ fundamental right to make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children.”
To make such decisions, parents obviously need to be informed of what their children are doing at school, and thus the Oshkosh Area School District’s deliberate attempt to withhold such pertinent information as the sex with which a child identifies represents a clear infringement of parents’ 14th Amendment rights. It also clearly violates the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which requires that “parents or eligible students have the right to inspect and review the student’s education records maintained by the school.”
In spite of this, the Oshkosh Area School District’s new policy is just the latest in a disturbing trend of districts willfully keeping students’ transgender status from parents. Montgomery County Public Schools in Montgomery, Md. announced in 2019 it would no longer disclose to parents the sex with which their children identify at school, prompting a lawsuit from parents. As far back as 2016, the National Education Association’s Legal Guidance on Transgender Students’ Rights instructed teachers and school administrators to “not disclose a student’s actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to others, including other students, parents or guardians…unless required to do so by law or unless the student has agreed.”
This guidance isn’t just erroneous; it is patently unlawful and unconstitutional. Parents have a deep-rooted right to control and direct their children’s education, and in order to exercise this right, they must know information as fundamental as the sex their children assume while at school.
Dan O’Donnell is a talk show host with News/Talk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee, Wis. and 1310 WIBA in Madison, Wis., and a columnist for the John K. MacIver Institute.
For the past year and a half, those of us who have felt the pandemic was being used as a tool to manipulate people have been labeled conspiracy theorists by the establishment media and leftist elites. As time goes on, more evidence emerges that seems to suggest we were right all along.
According to the Post Millennial, students at Eatonville High School in Washington were forced to wear ankle monitors in order to participate in athletics.
An anonymous mother who spoke to the outlet said she received a text from her 15-year-old daughter saying she was asked to wear a monitor at a school volleyball practice. When her daughter did not answer her subsequent texts and calls and no one at the school was able to answer her questions, the mother eventually drove to the school’s campus.
School employees told her that a meeting had been held the prior week to discuss the implementation of a monitoring program. It was “allegedly designed for contact tracing in the event of a positive COVID test of a student,” the Post Millennial reported.
Both unvaccinated and vaccinated students were reportedly told to wear ankle monitors. If someone tested positive for COVID-19, unvaccinated students who were identified as close contacts would be required to quarantine for 14 days, while vaccinated students would not.
The device is called TraceTag and is manufactured by a company called Triax, according to the Post Millennial.
“Being able to properly comply with social distancing guidelines is critical to containing and slowing the spread of COVID-19,” the company says in its description of the product.
“Additionally, having a log of all worker interactions for contact tracing, in the event that a worker is diagnosed with COVID-19, will help to accelerate the process for further containment and isolation.”
See, it’s no big deal. Why would you even have an issue with being forced to wear a tracking device? It’s for your own good.
The device also emits “a visual and audible alarm, so individuals know when to adjust their current distance to a proper social distance.” In other words, don’t get too close to someone if you don’t want your ankle monitor to sound the alarm.
Forcing students to wear these devices is a ludicrous idea on its face. Ankle monitors are meant for prisoners, not minors just trying to play school sports.
To make matters worse, the mother said she was never contacted about the program. The school’s head football coach told her forms were provided at the aforementioned meeting for those who wanted to opt out of the program, but the mother said she was never even informed that the meeting was taking place.
According to the Post Millennial, the school’s athletic director “acknowledged the error and apologized for the ‘slip up’ of not getting her consent.”
This was not just an innocent “slip-up.” It’s a symptom of the growing assumption that people should be forced to give up any number of basic rights in the name of “public health.”
For months, the establishment media has been telling people they essentially have no right to choose whether they want certain substances injected into their bodies. If public and private employers are allowed to tell their workers what to put in their bodies, why wouldn’t school administrators be allowed to tell students what to attach to them?
The reality is that students in Washington state are being forced to wear ankle monitors. That is not a conspiracy theory — it’s real life. If we don’t stop this kind of invasive behavior now, there is no telling how far it will go.
Grant is a graduate of Virginia Tech with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He has five years of writing experience with various outlets and enjoys covering politics and sports.
And listen for the “Tsk, tsk, you don’t really understand what we’re about, dear.” That’s how it will be in Minnesota and probably elsewhere if a leftist teachers union can spread its ideas on how to respond to its promotion of critical race theory.
Before reading the following, you might want to take a deep breath and exhale or whatever it is you do to reduce stress. You might have to do that after reading it, too.
Education Minnesota is trying to counter growing community pushback against CRT around the state, so it has published a guide on how teachers should respond, a copy of which was obtained by Powerline and publicized by Minnesota’s Alpha News. First of all, the union tells teachers not to call what they’re teaching critical race theory. They know parents are catching on. And the guide presents buckets of mush designed to obscure the issue and talk down to critics.
It’s a classic snow job using the special language of “educanto,” a term coined by the late Paul Greenberg, public school critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning Arkansas newspaper editor. Education Minnesota tells teachers that when asked why they teach kids that all white people are racist, they should give the following response:
“First off, I’m thrilled you’re taking such a deep interest in how and what our kids are taught, a conversation that I feel is long overdue.
“What I know most Americans believe is that we expect our students — whatever their color or background — to be able to learn hard truths and handle honest history and civics.”
May I pat your head?
“I believe in children’s potential to meet new challenges and have an honest reckoning, and when we try to edit and distort our history, we are doing them, and our future, a disservice. My loyalty is to children and who and what they can become.”
That’s how teachers should respond to your question about their “evil white people” push. And, of course, as the left always says: It’s for the children.
Education Minnesota does more than purr in its teacher voice. In its guide for its union members, it provides does some hard-knuckle political messaging against CRT critics by presenting “Key Concepts for Responding.”
Here are excerpts:
“Seize the moral high ground and engage on our terms. With attention on education, let’s talk about the teaching and curricula we support and communicate how it benefits all students.”
“Ascribe motivations to the opposition. Instead of reflexively repeating the opposition’s claims to dispel them (e.g. ‘we are not teaching grade schoolers about XYZ’) talk about why they’re attacking standards, equity and classroom educators.”
“Bring the conversation back to what we want. Don’t stay on defense.”
“Avoid the academic term ‘critical race theory. This phrase, unfamiliar to most audiences, has been redefined by the political right as an all-purpose racial dog whistle. Talk instead about the more honest and more complete education our students deserve.”
“[I]t is so disappointing to see that a few billionaires, and the promoters and talking heads they pay for, have launched a national campaign to mislead Americans about the lessons educators teach about history, culture, gender and politics.”
“Once again, they’re trying to distract and divide us so we don’t demand the richest 1 percent and the largest corporations pay what they owe for what our communities need, like affordable health care for all.”
Leftist educators try to hide what they’re teaching, but word is getting out. The Center for the American Experiment has been monitoring CRT in Minnesota and produced a video noting instances of it. It found that in Burnsville, fourth-graders were reading a book that said police officers were “mean to black people but nice to white people” and deliberately shot black men.
The video cited officials in the Minneapolis suburb of Hopkins as saying school operations were built on “white supremacy” values of logic, linear thinking, perfectionism, objectivity and “requiring black students to turn in assignments on time.” Letter grades are gone since they are part of “a dominant white culture.”
White Bear Lake sixth-graders were divided into groups based on race, sex, religion and place of birth and told to address issues of oppression and privilege.
Edina kindergarteners through second-graders did an exercise on how to identify themselves by their skin color. Kindergarten through second grade!
St. Louis Park scrapped the gifted and talented program, opening it to everyone and focusing on “anti-racist talent development.”
Minnesota teachers are taking anti-racism training, which, in effect, advocates new forms of racial discrimination, according to the video.
It’s not known if Minnesota schoolchildren are learning, like first- and second-graders in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, that “whiteness is a bad deal” and that if you are white, you essentially are a devil oppressing people of color, as reported Wednesday in a RealClear Policy piece that included shocking curriculum photos.
Education Minnesota defines CRT as “an academic framework that is more than 40 years old and is centered on the idea that racism is systemic, not just a product of individual bias or prejudice, and embedded in our policies legal structure.”
Indeed, CRT came from legal theorists during the 1970s and ’80s. The problem is it left the campus, and no matter how groups like Education Minnesota try to hide it, it is gumming up primary and secondary education.
Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist scholar and social commentator whose gravitas stems from also having been a farmer, points out a problem with woke nonsense being dreamed up on the college campus. College professors, Hansen has said, were once like court jesters of old. They could say all kinds of crazy things and no one was offended, not even the king, because everyone knew professors, like jesters, had no real power. Now, according to Hansen, crazy ideas have escaped the campus and are setting public policy.
Classic Marxism may have hit some resistance since its call for dividing people by income and class could be hindered by the relative affluence of most of the U.S. population, at least by world standards. But for sure, today’s Marxists are focused on dividing by race and gender to class. And critical race theory fits right in.
There’s a lot to process here: lying teachers, overt racism, emotional oppression upon very young children. You might want to take that deep breath.
Mike Landry, PhD, is a retired business professor. He has been a journalist, broadcaster and church pastor. He writes from Northwest Arkansas on current events and business history.
If there’s one good thing that came out of school closures, it’s that parents finally had a window into what their kids were being exposed to in the classroom — and many were horrified by what they saw.
That’s exactly what happened in Carmel, Indiana, where parents learned the full scope of the perversion being peddled to their children. The school libraries there are filled with storybooks pushing radical transgender ideology, lessons on masturbation for middle schoolers, and novels with explicit sexual scenes including one describing a bloody rape.
At a meeting of the Carmel Clay School Board on Monday, outraged parents took turns reading excerpts from these materials. They are so objectionable that it’s necessary to issue more than our usual warning of graphic content. Watch at your own risk — but keep in mind, this smut is being made available to schoolchildren.
WARNING: The following video contains graphic language that some viewers will find offensive.
One parent spoke out against the “global campaign to promote sexualized material to grade school children which is heralded by the UN, championed by Planned Parenthood and is now making its way into the Carmel schools.”
She noted some of the titles available at elementary schools, including “Introducing Teddy: A Gentle Story About Gender and Friendship,” which uses a teddy bear to teach kids that gender isn’t determined by biology. There is also “Sparkle Boy,” about a toddler’s cross-dressing tendencies, and “Call Me Max,” in which a kindergarten girl gets a teacher to call her by a boy’s name.
(Whatever happened to reading Dr. Seuss books to schoolchildren? Oh, right — canceled by the woke mob.)
Another parent read from a novel available to Carmel high schoolers that includes a pornographic scene explicitly describing characters engaged in various sex acts. It’s too obscene to even summarize.
A third parent read from the book “It’s Perfectly Normal,” which is available to middle school children and promoted by Planned Parenthood. It teaches kids how to masturbate and is filled with nitty-gritty details.
A book called “Crank” details a disturbing rape that transpires when a young couple goes into the woods to get drunk and high on meth.
“If I had known you were just going to lay there, I wouldn’t have bothered,” the rapist tells his victim on the car ride home.
The video of Monday’s school board meeting was uploaded to YouTube by the group Unify Carmel, which is raising the alarm on the wokeism pervading the city’s public schools.
Alvin Lui, a parent activist, told WIBC in May that he fled California to escape radical leftist ideology — only to find it in his new home in Indiana.
“If I [raised] my daughter in California, the schools and the culture there would teach her that her two most important things in life [are] that she’s Asian and she’s female,” he said.
Lui said he began to worry about his daughter’s new school when he saw ideas like critical race theory make their way into the curriculum, a change that no doubt came about when the district hired its first “diversity, equity and inclusion officer” in January.
“We saw a lot of little things before other people saw it because we’ve lived through it previously,” Lui said. “So for my wife and I, it kind of feels like we’re living through that same nightmare all over again except in the very beginning.”
Parents have already begun pushing back against other items on the woke agenda, but Monday’s meeting in Carmel revealed the sexual indecency introduced to children in public schools.
“If I were to read it to you, you wouldn’t be able to air it because it would be against FCC obscenity laws,” Lui told WXIN-TV. “Everyone was uncomfortable, and these are adults.”
To his credit, Carmel Clay Superintendent Dr. Michael Beresford said he wasn’t aware of the books until the meeting and pledged to look into them. Carmel certainly isn’t the only place where so-called educators are sexualizing children — leftists are hard at work across the country. They know that sexually active kids make great abortion clients for Planned Parenthood and turn into Democratic voters when they become impoverished single parents.
Transgender advocates know that if they can get a hold of kindergarten minds, they can recruit a generation of confused children. The doctors who prescribe the puberty blockers and perform the “transition” surgeries can get that much richer.
Beyond the political sphere, what we have here is a battle for the hearts and souls of American children. This perversion tailored to kids stems from a diabolical determination to spoil their innocence and set them up for a life of servitude to sin. Whether they know it or not, the teachers giving smut to their students are cooperating with the dark powers that would turn us away from God by shackling us to our basest desires. There’s no surer way to do that than to expose children to this filth early and often.
Americans now have the opportunity to see and hear exactly what’s going on in public schools — and it’s our job to do exactly what these parents did on Monday.
Christine earned her bachelor’s degree from Seton Hall University, where she studied communications and Latin. She left her career in the insurance industry to become a freelance writer and stay-at-home mother.@CFavocciFacebook
One brave girl from Fishers, Indiana, had some important questions for members of her local school board last week. Fighting back tears, the girl explained to the board members how they have “failed [her] as a student.” Her comments can be seen starting around the 41:57 mark in a video on the Hamilton Southeastern Schools website.
“I have been in counseling as long as I can remember because I was adopted from foster care at age 4,” she said at the school board meeting on Wednesday.
“The things I’ve learned along the way are being challenged now when my science or math teacher is trying to teach me how to be emotionally — and why are they teaching me about sexuality and how to identity?” the girl said.
“I don’t want to hear about sexuality during class in front of other students because that should be a private thing. This should be left in the homes and between students and counselors or one-on-one conversations.‘
“This has been a very traumatic part of my past, and the more that the school focuses on sexuality, the more it affects me and my anxiety.”
Following that, she revealed that she had been accused of having “white privilege” by school staff members.
“I was told I have white privilege. How can a child born in an abusive, drug and alcohol abuse home who lost her entire biological family, that has experienced all forms of abuse and neglect, be privileged?” the girl asked.
“If you found a child at 15 months in a home with holes in the floor eating cat poop, would you consider them privileged? Just asking, because when I was told that, I was upset and cried myself to sleep.”
A quick look at the website of the girl’s school district confirms that far-left “equity and inclusion” propaganda is being disseminated to students. Just as she said, this propaganda focuses on sexuality and anti-racism (which teaches about the supposed prevalence of “white privilege”).
An “Equity and Inclusion”web page on the district’s website offers various “Anti-Racism/Bias Resources,” presumably for teachers, students and parents to use for educational purposes.One resource recommended by the district encourages educators to read a book by Ibram X. Kendi, a controversial scholar known for pushing the philosophy of “anti-racism.” According to Kendi, you are either an anti-racist — a progressive political activist who agrees with Kendi’s vague redefinition of racism — or a racist. In his view, there is no in-between.
“What’s the problem with being ‘not racist?’” Kendi wrote. “It is a claim that signifies neutrality: ‘I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.’ … One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist.”
In other words, vote for Democrats and radical socialist policies such as welfare redistribution — the very same policies that have impoverished the African-American community for decades — or you are a racist. These are the sorts of ideas that Hamilton Southeastern officials push on their students.
Another resource offered by the district links to a video defending the political goal of equity, also known as equality of outcomes.
In its argumentation for the necessity of equity policies, the video uses a popular meme that supposedly shows how equality, or treating people as equals, is not good enough to address supposed systemic inequity. Instead, the proponents of equity argue, in order to reach true equality of outcomes, minorities must be afforded special privileges in order to address the unique disadvantages they face.
Not only is such thinking illogical, but it is also deeply racist due to the fact that it treats minorities as helpless children in need of government aid. Moreover, as conservative commentator Ben Shapiro explained in a Feb. 2 Op-Ed, such reasoning is faulty because it fails to take into account group differences.
“This philosophy is both idiotic and perverse. It’s idiotic because all human groupings — literally all of them — will result in differential outcomes. Draw a line down the middle of any room in random fashion and the result will be unequal income distribution, criminal records, educational histories,” Shapiro wrote.
“When culture takes a hand, disparities can be more deeply rooted than random chance. Discrimination would still not be the cause of such disparity. As a basic logical matter, discrimination is not the cause of all disparity.’
“This philosophy is perverse because it attributes malice to those who have none; it fosters policy that actively discriminates, supposedly in order to alleviate unproven discrimination.”
Indeed, when it comes to the Hamilton Southeastern Schools, this philosophy certainly attributed “malice” to someone who has none.
A girl who has suffered abuse and neglect was called “privileged” just for being white.
Michael Austin joined The Western Journal as a staff reporter in 2020. Since then, he has authored hundreds of stories, including several original reports. He also co-hosts the outlet’s video podcast, “WJ Live.”@mikeswriting
Students seen in a high school classroom. | Reuters/Stephane Mahe
Christians must “change their strategy”to keep graphic sex materials out of public schools, an expert has advised, following reports that an Ohio public high school has assigned freshman students to read a slam poetry book about a girl who liberates herself by abandoning her Christian faith and engaging in sexual promiscuity.
According to The Daily Wire, Hilliard Bradley High School, located near Columbus, the state’s capital, has assigned ninth-grade English students to read a poetry book titled, “The Poet X,” in which the main character, named Xiomara, rejects her faith and engages in sexual activities at school as a minor.
Parents of students enrolled at Hilliard Bradley High School must ask their children to “opt-out”of reading the assigned book if they’re opposed to the “graphic content,”DW added.
“In the first two pages of the assigned poetry, the underaged main character Xiomara addresses drug dealers who cat-call her. At one point the drug dealer says that ‘church girls are all freaks.’”
The book also reveals that Xiomara is pressured to send nude photos of herself to boys.
One of the poems in the book, by Elizabeth Acevedo, a National Poetry Slam Champion, is titled, “I Think the Story of Genesis Is Mad Stupid.” The book also features descriptions of graphic sex acts, including a poem titled “Fingers,” which describes masturbation. Another poem, titled “Hands,” describes Xiomara touching her love interest in a classroom setting. Yet another poem describes the main character and her love interest preparing to have sex.
Aaron Baer, president of the Columbus-based Center for Christian Virtue, said Christians and social conservatives who routinely object to this kind of thing have to change their strategy because as soon as they manage to make a school stop doing something objectionable, like teaching sexually explicit content, they’ll find another way to do it.
“The reality is that public schools have no meaningful accountability measures in place to stop the sexualization and harm to children,” Baer said in a phone interview with The Christian Post on Wednesday. “When a public school is failing and ignoring parents, they get more money from the taxpayers and government. So there is no incentive structure to stop schools from doing this level of harm to children.”
This is happening in public schools everywhere — in inner cities, suburbs and rural areas, he stressed. Teachers and administrators have been emboldened to teach such political and sexual curriculum to young people. He believes none of this will stop until universal school choice is a reality nationwide.
“I don’t care how many people launch campaigns to replace the school board or how many outrage campaigns there are … until the parents can say, ‘I don’t like what you’re doing and if you don’t stop, I’m taking my kid out and you’re going to lose the money for them,’ this will not change,” Baer said.
“There are no market forces on public schools to make them change. They have no incentive to listen to parents other than to maybe make them go away. What inevitably happens every single time we have a situation like this is, if we’re able to get the school to stop, within a few years, those parents move on and the school does it again.”
The same Columbus-area school district had, in recent weeks, ordered teachers to have students lobby for a sexual orientation and gender identity bill at the state capitol building. “We got them to stop, and now there’s this [sexually graphic poetry],”Baer added.
“They’re not going to stop because there are so many teachers and so many bureaucrats and so many political forces inside the school that until the parents are able to hold the school accountable, it’s not going to get better. Christians and social conservatives broadly have, for too long, lived in this bubble thinking … ‘Well, if we could only just take over the school board and fight the curriculum, we could stop this.’
“We’ve done that for 50 years, and we’re now teaching that Christianity is evil and that boys can become girls. We have failed. We have to go for universal school choice. Anything else is a cop-out.”
CP reached out to the Hilliard school district’s communications director for comment on this article but did not receive a response by press time.
Donna Senchesak, the director of the Parents for Educational Rights chapter in Ohio and a Hilliard Bradley parent, said in an interview with The Daily Wire that the district’s goal was to provide poetry written by non-white authors, though she was confused why the school opted for the graphic content. She withdrew her daughter from the class that was reading the book and said she will continue pushing back against the district on behalf of other parents and students.
“I am still fighting for these students and parents even though my daughter does not have to read it anymore,” she said.
“I am concerned for kids … that they can’t handle it.”
The past nine months have seen more than a quarter-million Americans die from the coronavirus. Each and every death represents a tragedy — a life cut short, an empty place at the family table this holiday season, children mourning their parents, even parents mourning their children.
But a separate and ongoing tragedy has also struck at countless more than another quarter-million Americans: Children who have disappeared from school following last spring’s COVID-19 closures.A survey conducted by CBS’s “60 Minutes” found that among 78 of the largest school districts in the country, at least 240,000 students remained unaccounted for when school resumed, in many cases virtually, this fall. This number doesn’t, of course, include the many other children schools have lost in other districts.
Each and every one of those cases also represents a tragedy. Indeed, it’s a slow-moving crisis. Every child who doesn’t return to school to complete his or her education represents dreams unfulfilled. It means diminished career prospects, lower earnings, an increased risk of trouble with law enforcement or substance misuse, more expense to society through the criminal justice and welfare systems, and on, and on, and on.
Just as these students have fallen through the proverbial cracks, however, policymakers do not seem to be doing nearly enough to solve the problem.
Obstacles to Online Learning
In their reporting on these missing children, “60 Minutes” spoke with one of them, a high school senior in Tampa, Fla. named Kiara. Kiara said she had moved around town eight or nine times since elementary school; her stepfather lost her job when the pandemic hit, and she was currently living in a motel.
A school district administrator said Kiara had been a good student before the pandemic but started failing classes when learning went virtual. Listening to her describe her situation, it’s not hard to figure out why her performance suffered:
Not having that teacher to really talk to was kinda difficult and just me not having a laptop at the time was difficult doing it on my phone. Just such a small screen. …
[Doing virtual learning via her phone] was very difficult because my phone is really skinny. At the time, I didn’t have glasses so I’d have to, like, slide to the left and slide to the right and slide up. So it was just really iffy. …
Definitely, I definitely come outside [to escape her crowded motel room]. I’ll sit here and study. But sometimes, you know, the mosquitoes are coming, you know. It’s hard.
At times, Kiara would walk a mile to a nearby park to get some peace and quiet to complete her work — but the park didn’t have WiFi or an electrical outlet. She said she would “try to make it work as best I could,” but it doesn’t take a doctorate in education to realize why any student’s performance would suffer in that environment.
In some respects, Kiara represents one of the luckier victims of the school shutdowns. She has big dreams — she wants to become a dental hygienist, and eventually a dentist — and fought through the obstacles the COVID-19 closures put in her path. But it’s sadly understandable to see how some families and some children would just give up.
Enrollment Down, and It’s Not All Homeschooling
Across the country, public school enrollment has declined for the current academic year. Outside D.C., Montgomery County, Maryland’s public school enrollment declined by 3,300, or about 2 percent, this fall; on the other side of the Potomac River, Fairfax County, Virginia’s enrollment declined by nearly 5 percent. In Missouri, public school enrollment dropped 3.2 percent statewide, with a 31 percent drop in preschool enrollment and a nearly 10 percent decline in kindergarten enrollment.
These changes represent two distinct trends — both ends of the proverbial barbell. In Montgomery County, Fairfax County, and other wealthy enclaves, the enrollment declines come from affluent families enrolling their children in private schools to escape another year of virtual or hybrid learning in public education. At the other end of the spectrum, children like Kiara in families facing financial and other logistical difficulties dropped out of virtual learning entirely.
Open the Schools
The chaos children like Kiara continue to face with virtual learning — a national scandal if there ever was one — argues for a major expansion of school choice, so that no child faces these kinds of obstacles again. Thankfully, Ohio just enacted a major expansion of school choice, giving students an early Christmas present; other states should follow suit (in the interests of full disclosure, I have worked on a variety of projects advocating for school choice; however, no clients had input into this article).
Until every parent has access to school choice, school districts should start taking steps to reopen their classrooms to in-person instruction. There are fine and valid disagreements to be had over the necessity of business closures during the pandemic, but the idea that bars should remain open yet schools remain closed runs counter to any sense of logic, not to mention good public policy.
The future of hundreds of thousands of children lies in the hands of policymakers and school officials coming up with a plan to open their doors as soon as possible, and keep them open. Kiara and students like her deserve far better than what they have received during the past nine months — and they deserve it now.
The United Teachers Los Angeles has released a list of demands that it argues must be met before schools can reopen in America’s second-largest city. While some of the proposals might seem reasonable in light of the coronavirus pandemic, others sound like they were crafted by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Members of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s teachers union apparently have adapted Rahm Emanuel’s phrase “never let a good crisis go to waste” as their slogan. At the very least, the policy paper put together by the United Teachers Los Angeles containing its insane demands illustrates just how political teachers unions have become.
The 35,000-member teachers union sees the coronavirus as a perfect opportunity to demand the enactment of a far-left agenda that it supported long before COVID-19 arrived in America. According to the political activists at the helm of UTLA, “The Safe and Equitable Conditions for Starting LAUSD in 2020-21” include;
the defunding of police,
a federal bailout of LA schools and
the abolition of charter schools.
While the document acknowledged that “the CARES and HEROES Acts provided funding for K-12,” it complained that the district still needed more money. In addition, the section on the desired “Federal Support” for reopening LAUSD schools included a demand for “Medicare for All.”
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As for the section on “State Support,”the document calls on the state of California to implement a “millionaire’s tax” and a “wealth tax.” While the teachers seem quite confident that the massive redistribution of wealth would result in much-desired revenue, they failed to take into account the fact that many millionaires would flee the state the second the higher taxes were imposed.
The most ridiculous demands came in the section on “Local Support.”Calling on local leaders to “defund police,” the brains behind the left-wing wish list urged elected officials to “shift the astronomical amount of money devoted to policing, to education and other essential needs such as housing and public health.”
Apparently, the people behind the UTLA paper aren’t bothered by the fact that homicides in their city rose by 250 percent in the first week of June as anti-law enforcement sentiment first swept through major American cities.
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This shouldn’t come as much of a shock. Last month, Cecily Myart-Cruz, the union’s president, described the police as a symbol of “white supremacy” that needed to be dismantled.
Not surprisingly, the document had few kind words for charter schools, which teachers unions see as an enormous threat to their monopolistic power. UTLA said it wants a “charter moratorium,” but this radical list of demands should make Los Angeles parents who do not subscribe to the dictates of cultural marxism want to send their children to charter schools more than ever.
No document filled with left-wing demands would be complete without a call for “Financial Support for Undocumented Students and Families.”
It looks like President Donald Trump had it right when he declared that “the Democrats don’t want to open schools in the Fall for political reasons.”
This document should make Americans eternally grateful for the 2018 Janus decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that “public employees will no longer be required to pay involuntary agency fees to special-interest groups.” Nothing epitomizes the phrase “special-interest group” like a teachers union, which uses those agency fees to fund far-left groups such as the Center for American Progress and Media Matters.
The release of the UTLA demands comes just weeks before school is set to resume in Los Angeles on Aug. 18.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has made it clear to the nation’s governors that at the beginning of the next school year, “School must reopen, they must be fully operational.” For the most part, she is right. Schools should reopen in the fall.
However, in a place like Los Angeles, where advancing a political agenda is more important to the teachers than educating the next generation, parents should seriously consider homeschooling or sending their children to a charter or private school. Only then will liberal activists moonlighting as teachers in Los Angeles and other parts of the country get the message that many Americans do not support the push among some schools to reject “objectivity” in favor of indoctrinating America’s students with left-wing propaganda.
Ryan holds a bachelor of arts in political science from Rhode Island College. In addition to participating in the National Journalism Center’s internship program, he has written for several conservative publications.
Tiffany Riley, the principal of Windsor High School in Windsor, Vermont, faced the wrath of the PC police after failing to fully and unequivocally endorse Black Lives Matter in a Facebook post earlier this month. The backlash was so severe that she ended up losing her job.
According to the Valley News, Riley’s post June 10 made it clear that she believes that “black lives matter,” but she added a caveat that caught the ire of the leftist mob: “I DO NOT agree with coercive measures taken to get this point across; some of which are falsified in an attempt to prove a point.”
“I do not think that people should be made to feel they have to choose black race over human race,” Riley wrote, adding: “While I understand the urgency to feel compelled to advocate for black lives, what about our law enforcement?”
She also declared that “just because I don’t walk around with a BLM sign should not mean I’m a racist.”
Sadly, according to many in Windsor, including the school board, her failure to “walk around with a BLM sign” does make her a racist.
The Mount Ascutney School Board, “uniformly appalled” by her words, voted unanimously to place Riley on paid leave June 14.
The district’s superintendent, David Becker, said the district will work to put together a “mutually agreed upon severance package” with Riley and justified the decision to let her go by saying, “It’s clear that the community has lost faith in her ability to lead.”
Ridiculously, Becker said he thought Riley’s Facebook page was hacked and indicated that he fully agreed with the criticism that her post was “racist.”
“I felt like a post like that, with those kinds of racial overtones and what I define as pretty much outright racist in my values system, she would have never posted that,” he said.
The fact that Riley’s community would take such umbrage at her comments should not come as a surprise. Windsor County supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by a 2-1 ratio in 2016, and the state as a whole keeps electing democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders.
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In an era when American education has become just another arm of the left, Riley’s circumstances are hardly unique. Eric Thompson, a professor who taught at Moreno Valley College in California, was dismissed from his position after daring to sympathize with traditional viewpoints on marriage, gender and sexuality.
In addition to causing professors to lose their jobs, holding conservative positions can also have consequences for students who hold prominent positions on campus. Earlier this month, the president of the Florida State University Student Senate was removed from his post after daring to criticize Black Lives Matter and other liberal organizations deemed heroic by the radical left.
Despite the fact that Riley went out of her way to empathize with the point of view of her opponents and offered analysis consistent with the views of many Americans, she lost her job. What happened to Riley could have a chilling effect that will cause many people to think twice about posting anything critical of Black Lives Matter — a leftist movement dressed up as opposition to racism.
That’s the whole goal.
With Riley’s firing, diversity of opinion in education continues to shrink. According to a 2016 study from Econ Journal Watch, liberal professors outnumber their conservative counterparts by a ratio of 11.5-1 in the departments of economics, history, journalism, law and psychology at “40 leading U.S. universities.”
This liberal uniformity extends into K-12 education, with research conducted by Verdant Labs finding that “there are 97 Democrats for every three Republicans” teaching English and “87 Democrats for every 13 Republicans” among math and science teachers.
Riley’s situation is saddening but not surprising. Hopefully, what happened to her will launch a renewed movement to ensure freedom of speech in education for teachers and students alike, from kindergarten through college.
Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager’s documentary“No Safe Spaces” is definitely a good start.
Ryan holds a bachelor of arts in political science from Rhode Island College. In addition to participating in the National Journalism Center’s internship program, he has written for several conservative publications.
A federal judge is allowing a lawsuit against transgender facilities in a school district to proceed, but warned the student-plaintiffs that, if the government allows boys who claim to be female to use the girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms, then the girls have no right to “visual bodily privacy.”
Judge Jorge Alonso of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division is allowing a lawsuit to proceed against the school district that adopted the Obama-era transgender policy permitting boys claiming to be female to use the girls’ bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms.
However, the judge informed the girls, represented by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), that, “[s]o far, the right not to be seen unclothed by the opposite sex is not on the Supreme Court’s list.”
The crux of this suit is that defendants seek to affirm the claimed genders of students by allowing male students who claim female gender to use privacy facilities (i.e., bathrooms and locker rooms) designated for use by the female sex and female students who claim male gender to use privacy facilities designated for the male sex … District 211 adopted the policy solely to affirm the claimed genders of those students claiming a gender different from their sex at birth.
Alonso continued, saying the school district has adopted the policy of allowing all transgender students to use the restrooms, locker rooms, and showers of their choice, while it insists all other students “must use the restrooms and locker rooms designated for their sex.”
“Before adopting the policy, District 211 did not investigate the reliability of the science underlying gender-affirmation treatments,” the judge wrote. “Nor did it make any effort to understand the impacts such a policy would have on students exposed to opposite-sex, same-gendered students in locker rooms and restrooms.”
The judge acknowledged the school district’s enforcement of the transgender policy has caused the students “embarrassment, humiliation, anxiety, fear, apprehension, stress, degradation and loss of dignity.”
The students “are at continual risk of encountering (and sometimes do encounter), without their consent, members of the opposite sex while disrobing, showering, urinating, defecating and while changing tampons and feminine napkins,” he added.
Christiana Holcomb, ADF legal counsel, said, “a compassionate approach to protecting students’ privacy” is needed.
“We welcome the court’s decision to allow key claims to move forward,” she added in a statement. “The district officially authorizes opposite-sex use of school privacy facilities, and that violates Title IX. Letting boys into girls’ showers, restrooms, and locker rooms is sexual harassment. Students should be confident that their school will protect their privacy and dignity. So far, this school district has failed to do so.”
Alonso did not allow all the claims of the plaintiffs to move forward. He threw out the students’ argument made in the case that they have the right to “bodily privacy,” saying that right refers to physically being touched by others, “not visual bodily privacy.”
Additionally, the judge dismissed the students’ claim that parents’ right to direct their children’s education applies in this case. Alonso said that right refers only to parents’ choice of type of education or schooling.
As Breitbart News reported in 2016, the district opened its schools’ bathrooms to boys claiming to be female without informing parents. Later, it allowed a boy claiming to be transgender into the girls’ locker room after the Obama administration’s Department of Education threatened the district’s federal funding in the amount of $6 million. Initially, the school district arranged for a private dressing area in the girls’ locker room for the boy, but federal officials complained the arrangement stigmatized the student. Consequently, the district allowed the boy to use the girls’ locker room openly as if he were a biological girl.
The Trump administration has rescinded the Obama administration’s policy and restored Title IX to the understanding that “sex” means biological sex – male or female – rather than perceptions or beliefs about one’s gender.
Since Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, former President Barack Obama admitted his unpopular transgender policy helped to defeat Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton.
As the College Fixreported, Tom Petersen, director of community relations for the school district, said, “The District will continue to defend our practices that affirm and support the identity of all our students.”
In a “backgrounder” on the case, ADF wrote, “If our government is powerful enough to command innocent school children to disrobe in the presence of opposite-sex classmates, then there will be little it will not be powerful enough to do.”
“The restroom policy and locker room agreement thus threaten our very liberty to live our lives in accordance with the most basic expectations of common decency, dignity, and privacy in our bodies,” the law firm added.
A widely respected teacher in Virginia is out of a job and his family now has no income after he committed the gravest of politically-incorrect sins: He used the word “she” to refer to a girl.
On Thursday, Peter Vlaming was released from his teaching position at West Point High School after all five board members voted that his objection to using male pronouns for a female student was a fireable offense.
According to WRIC News, a girl at that school decided that she is transgender, and insisted that everyone call her by a new name. Vlaming had no problem with this, but drew the line at saying “him” and “his” to refer to a student who is biologically female. The teacher and students who know him explained that this wasn’t about purposely insulting the transgender person, but rather about being honest and true to his personal beliefs.
“My religious faith dictates that I am to love and respect everyone, whether I agree with them or not. Because we are all made in God’s image,” Vlaming said in an opening statement at the board meeting which decided his fate.
“I am also aware of, and agree, with speech limits that are placed on public school teachers, concerning matters of religious faith,”the teacher continued. “However, we are here today because a specific worldview is being imposed upon me.”
By all accounts, the teacher tried to accommodate the trans student in many ways but does not believe his faith or personal code permits him to pretend that a girl is now a boy.
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“I won’t use male pronouns with a female student that now identifies as a male though I did agree to use the new masculine name but avoid female pronouns,”Vlaming said, according to an online petition that circulated to protect his job. Over 2,500 people sided with him.
“Administration is requiring that I use masculine pronouns in any and every context at school. I was informed that any further instances of using female pronouns would be grounds for termination,” the teacher continued.
For their part, the school is claiming that it’s an issue of tolerance … yet they seem to be demonstrating intolerance themselves.
“We do not and cannot tolerate discrimination in any form, or actions that create a hostile environment for any member of our school family,”declared the school board.
It apparently didn’t dawn on them that firing a member of their “school family” for his personal views was fairly hostile.
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“What could be worse for your family than being fired from your job for not lying and violating conscience?” wondered Robert A. J. Gagnon, a Harvard-educated theology expert who is following the controversy.
A large number of students and parents apparently agree. “The public hearing was held in the Chorus Room, only allowing 38 members of the public to sit in on the meeting,”explained The Family Foundation.
“There were well over a hundred people who tried to attend the meeting in the middle of a Thursday afternoon. Students and parents sat in the hallway watching a live-stream of the hearing when they learned they could not get into the room,”the pro-family group continued.
Here’s the bottom line: Schools are supposed to be places where facts, reality, and critical thinking are held up as high standards. Young and often rebellious students should have a voice, but they are not the ones who run our schools.
The female student can still be treated with respect, as this teacher reportedly tried to do. She can still choose for herself how she wants to live outside of the school and make choices for herself when she’s an adult graduate.
But the reality is that this student is biologically a female, try as she might to pretend otherwise. Forcing the rest of the school and society as a whole to bend to her whims is not only contradicting scientific facts, it imposes her views onto other people. In a word, it’s dishonest.
Benjamin Arie is an independent journalist and writer. He has personally covered everything ranging from local crime to the U.S. president as a reporter in Michigan, before focusing on national politics. Ben frequently travels to Latin America and has spent years living in Mexico. Follow Benjamin on Facebook
The group started an online petition, “Tell Fort Worth ISD To Stop Hiding Transgender Curriculum From Parents,” on Thursday. It already has over 250 signatures.
“Children are being taught — at age 12 under the guise of abstinence — about same-sex attraction, gender identity and gender expression,”said Zeb Pent, a spokesman for Stand for Fort Worth.
Forth Worth 2016 guidelines allow students identifying as transgender to use whatever restroom corresponds with their gender identity. Sex-ed programs in other states have also been causing chaos. A California school district told parents in February they can’t opt their kids out of a new sex education course covering abortion, homosexuality and transgender issues.
Despite California’s 2015 Healthy Youth Act, which lets parents opt their children out of sex-ed classes, the Orange County Board of Education decided parents don’t have that right.
Delaware is considering adopting a policy allowing young students to choose whatever name, gender or race they want under a veil of school protection mandating the parents not be informed of these decisions unless the student explicitly wishes the parent be included.
A similar set of guidelines from Chicago Public Schools instructs staff to not tell parents about their child’s gender transition without the child’s permission.
Policy guidance from the Massachusetts Department of Education also instructs school personnel to speak with students first before discussing their gender nonconformity or transgender status with the student’s parent or guardian.
President Obama did a lot of bad things, but pound for pound, one of the worst was the January 2014 “Dear Colleague”letter sent jointly by his Education and Justice Departments to all public schools threatening lawsuits over racial discrimination in student discipline. The letter came after years of his administration browbeating schools for their failure to discipline every race of student at the same rate.
As the Huffington Post put it: “American Schools Are STILL Racist, Government Report Finds.”The evidence? “Five percent of white students were suspended annually, compared with 16 percent of black students, according to the report.”Q.E.D. According to theory, there’s NO WAY blacks and Hispanics are doing things that require more school discipline than whites or Asians. So if more black students are expelled than Asians, well, gentlemen, we have our proof of racism. To comply, schools would have to stop suspending black kids for breaking a teacher’s jaw, but suspend Asians for dropping an eraser.
Using the same logic, I could close the achievement gap between blacks and Asians in a single day by going to every principal’s office in the country and burning the transcripts. (Liberalsare saying, “You know, that’s not a bad idea.”)
The “school-to-prison pipeline” argument for racial quotas in discipline was hatched in education schools and black studies departments. What I want to know is: How did they test the idea?
To validate the theory that recording students’ criminal behavior produces students with criminal records, we divided students into two groups. Group A we continued to suspend when they acted up; Group B we would not suspend no matter what — even when they engaged in their little mischief, like cracking heads with crowbars, dropping teachers off buildings, using a switchblade to cut other students’ eyes out.
RESULT: At the end of the year, Group B had better records.
Were the researchers really in suspense about how the experiment was going to turn out? I could have told them at the beginning that their odds of success were tremendous — unless they forgot halfway through and began accidentally suspending students in Group B. But the Obama administration said: Wow! That’s amazing. Do you think other schools could replicate those results?
One of the administration’s models was Broward County, Florida. Which is kind of important, now that we know that it was Broward’s official policy to make it impossible to arrest students like Nikolas Cruz, thus allowing him to amass a cache of firearms, walk into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and murder 17 people.
The “school-to-prison pipeline”nonsense may not be the explanation for every school shooting, but it is absolutely the explanation for THIS school shooting.No matter what Cruz did, no matter how many times his crimes were reported to the sheriff or school officials, there was no way a lad with a name like “Nikolas Cruz” was ever going to leave school with a record.
Broward County’s innovative idea of eliminating school discipline captivated Obama’s Department of Education. It was expressly cited by the department’s Civil Rights Division with the notation: “New model for other jurisdictions?”
Last October — nearly a year into the Trump administration — Broward Schools Superintendent Robert W. Runcie humbly noted that the district was receiving “invitations from around the country, including from The White House and Federal Office of Civil Rights, to share details about the historic reforms”on school discipline. Either: Liberals truly believe that all races commit crimes at exactly the same level, frequency and intensity; OR they are willing to have people die for their political agenda.
Conservatives didn’t pick this school shooting as the test case for gun control. It was liberals who were going to ride the Parkland shooting all the way to the midterms. They thought they had a beautiful story about the evil NRA.
Not the mass shooting in Orlando — because of the obvious immigration angle. Not San Bernardino — for the same reason. Not Las Vegas — probably for the same reason, but we’ll never know because law enforcement has issued only lies and nonsense about that shooting.
The media did all the hard work of making sure Parkland was the only topic on anyone’s mind, with everyone demanding that we “do something!”
And then we got the facts. Cruz’s criminal acts were intentionally ignored by law enforcement on account of Broward’s much-celebrated “school-to-prison pipeline”reforms.
Thank God for the internet, or we’d never have known the truth.
Admittedly, most of the harm done by the policy that enabled Cruz is not usually a mass shooting. The main damage done by the “school-to-prison pipeline” idiocy is: broken bones, smashed teeth, traumatized students, making it impossible for other students to learn, having a bad influence on marginal students and teachers sinking into depression.
Check at your local school for the full results. Thanks to the Obama administration, this crackpot theory is sweeping school districts across the nation! The next time Democrats control Congress and the presidency, we will have racial quotas for prisons, too. When that happens, you better hope the government hasn’t taken your guns.
As California lawmakers continue their track-record of controversial decisions, one announcement in particular has caused an outcry for its overreaching presumption: that all homeschoolers must also be child abusers.
According to The Washington Examiner, the plan set out by lawmakers would be to force parents into proving to the government that they are, in fact, fit to be a parent. The homeschooling parent — per legal requirement — would have to meet the government’s required checklist via home visits, interviews, and other oversights, effectively increasing the burden on the parent to prove themselves parentally fit.
And many have expressed concern over stripping away the legally protected option of homeschooling and deeming it as absurdly unconstitutional.
The decision seems to be in light of the horrifying case of David and Louise Turpin who were registered as homeschoolers to the 13 children that authorities found chained, malnourished and abused. Setting logic aside, lawmakers have set their emotions to focus on the sole aspect of the couple being homeschooling parents, rather than the fact that there were psychological issues at play long before the couple even conceived.
It’s an extreme example to try and bolster the controversial plan to increase government regulations when it comes to children and their education, yet data about the benefits of homeschooling may work against them. A recent piece by Chris Weller for Business Insider gives five strong reasons why kids in today’s world of technology, online classes and apps might actually be better-off than their publicly educated peers.
“Homeschooled kids have the same access to online learning, friendships, and extracurricular activities as the typical public school student,” Weller summarizes. “But without many of the drawbacks, like standardized lesson plans and bullying.”
Furthermore, there is little to no data that proves — or suggests — that homeschooled kids are abused by their parents or even at greater risk of being a victim of parental abuse, yet standardized lesson plans have routinely been called out by parents nationwide.
Lawmakers continue to use extreme cases like the Turpins and veiled data to prove their point, pushing out an agenda that criminalizes homeschooling — just one agenda among many which American citizens seem to be blind to.
“I’m routinely astounded by the degree to which Americans will be outraged by government abuses that take place in far-off lands, while remaining uninterested in similar abuses right here in their very midst,” wrote senior editorial writer Steven Greenhut for Foundation for Economic Education.
Greenhut’s article was one of many that chronicled the outrageous attempt at the liberal state to strip away fundamental basic rights, including that of every parent: to educate their own child as they see fit. Though there are current laws that protect those parents, Greenhut cautioned America to take a closer look at just how far lawmakers will go to invade the privacy of a household, likening it to totalitarian countries where “anything not expressly allowed is forbidden.”
“Only someone with an ideological axe to grind could find illegality in the practice of homeschooling.”
First lady Melania Trump — joined by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — paid a visit to a school in Detroit on Monday afternoon to spend some time speaking with the children.
According to Politico, Trump spoke to the students about identifying and guarding against the act of bullying, and urged them “be yourself” while also making sure to treat each other with “respect and compassion.”
On top of that, she also urged the children to always say “no” to alcohol, cigarettes and drugs, and joined the students in the cafeteria to promote her “No One Eats Alone” campaign that encourages students to take it upon themselves to join others sitting alone at a table at lunch time.
While the visit went quite well and Trump was well-received by the children — with whom she is obviously at ease — one particular student garnered some attention for the shirt that he was wearing during the visit, according to Independent Journal Review.
The young boy was wearing what appeared to be a Nike T-shirt bearing the words “Destroy Excuses,” a message likely intended as a challenge for those pushing to improve themselves in their workouts or athletics, but one that can also be applied to just about every other aspect of life.
To be sure, that message needs to be heard by failed Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, who can’t seem to come up with enough excuses as to why she lost the 2016 election, as well as the rest of her Democrat Party, which always seem able to find an excuse for bad behavior from anybody … provided they share the same liberal ideology.
The “Destroy Excuses” message also needs to be taken to heart by the Republican Party, which for years have begged and pleaded with voters to grant them more control and power to push forward their agenda — yet have done next to nothing but offer up excuses now that they hold the House, Senate, and the presidency.
In the rest of the non-politicized world (or what little that’s left of it), the message of destroying excuses can be applied to one’s job, studies, relationships or virtually any other of life’s endeavors in which obstacles need to be overcome, not excused and allowed to persist.
This young student’s T-shirt bore a message that exemplifies the attitude of Trump and his supporters, one of taking responsibility, assigning accountability and persevering towards victory no matter what. It is a message we all should adopt and hold dear.
Part of being the president is hosting all sorts of visitors to the White House. President Donald Trump appeared to have had a blast doing just that with a group of North Carolina students. The high-schoolers, preparing for a national rocketry competition, stopped by to show off their competition-winning rocket that they named after the president himself.
Trump and students from Victory Christian Center School in Charlotte met in the Oval Office on May 12 to discuss the Team America Rocketry Challenge.
“Guess what the name of the rocket is?”Trump said to gathered reporters. “It’s called ‘Trump.’”
“It better work well!” he joked to the students.
When Trump asked why they had named their rocket after him, one student replied, “Simply because it conquers all.”
The media did show the meeting in the Oval Office, albeit quite briefly, and most certainly didn’t dwell on it.
The media also didn’t dwell on another important fact: the students were minorities who had been saved from their wretched public schools by a special voucher program in North Carolina that helps low- and moderate-income families afford private school tuition, according toThe Charlotte Observer.
Trump has made it quite clear, both through his own words and the appointment ofBetsy DeVosto serve as Education Secretary, that he is in favor of voucher programs like the North Carolina Opportunity Scholarships and other programs like charter schools that help break up the failing public school monopolies that trap many low-income students in terrible schools that prevent them from fully realizing their full potential.
Further debunking the media narratives surrounding Trump, watch the video again and take note of how happy and excited most of the students appeared to be to meet with the president, despite constant suggestions from the media that Trump hates minorities and poor people.
A year ago, a new phrase was coined to describe much of the hypocritical attitudes and actions taking place in America. The phrase is ‘selective allowable discrimination’, defined as the practice of allowing discrimination of a selective group while banning discrimination of opposite groups.
For the past fifty years, any semblance of Christianity is discriminated against if it involves any government person or agency.Courts have said that you can’t have schools involved in reading the Bible or praying because someone was or could be offended.
Yet in many of the same schools that actively ban all references to the Bible and Christianity are now reading and teaching the Quran, reciting the Islamic call to prayer, have students reciting that Allah is God, and allowing Muslim students to roll out their prayer rugs and pray to Mecca during school hours. No concern is given to the fact that many non-Muslims are offended.
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Schools are not allowed to hold a Baccalaureate service for graduating seniors because it’s a Christian based service because non-Christian students might be offended. However, public high schools in Michigan have been allowed to hold girl only proms for their Muslim students caring not if any non-Muslim students are offended.
Many of our military personnel have been ordered to remove any symbols of Christianity from their person or their offices and work stations, especially those stationed in the Middle East. They’re not allowed to wear a cross around their neck or as earrings, nor are they allowed to have a Bible on their desks as it will offend Muslims, yet Muslim members of the military are allowed to have Islamic items out in the open, caring not that it offends non-Muslims.
Anyone can go on most social media or mainstream media and say anything they want about Christianity and Christians. You can portray an image of Jesus in a jar of urine and it’s okay, but draw a cartoon about Islam and you best go into hiding. However, if you say or post anything against Islam and Muslims, you can find yourself banned from the social media site, like Facebook. Say anything against Muslims in general on the mainstream media and you will more than likely be suspended or fired.
Today, we see another example of ‘selective allowable discrimination’ in the public schools of New Jersey and a growing number of parents are upset over it. The issue is the teaching of Islam as part of the normal classroom curriculum while at the same time, the teaching of Christianity is illegal.
“Parents of students at Chatham Middle School are calling on the board of education to eliminate lessons on Islam from the 7th grade social studies curriculum they believe proselytizes the religion.”
“Several parents attended a board meeting Monday to take aim at materials distributed to students through a ‘World Cultures and Geography’ class they believe cross the line, Tap into Chatham reports.”
“The parents emailed board members copies of the lessons they believe violate the district’s policy that ‘no religious beliefs be promoted or disparaged’ and handed copies to others in attendance at the meeting, as well.”
“‘In the Middle East and North Africa unit of the class students are taught about the five pillars of Islam in great detail, there are two videos on it, a 20-page PowerPoint presentation, class work, homework, and testing,’ parent Libby Hilsenrath told the board. “In this unit, there is no mention of any other religion or teaching of it.”
“‘… When it comes to teaching other religions at this level, it’s not done,’ she said.”
“Hilsenrath went over many of the objectionable homework assignments with board members in detail, including lessons that require students to memorize and write the Islamic conversion prayer.”
Where are the atheists who file lawsuits against everything that hints of Christianity in public schools? Atheists have even tried to stop non-school religious clubs and groups. One Christian group met off campus and offered free donuts for students who joined their Bible study and prayer group, and atheists tried to stop them. So where are these same atheist groups when it comes to teaching and promoting Islam in public schools?
Are atheists silent because they fear retribution from Muslims but have never feared any retribution from Christians. Is that further proof that another major difference between Christianity and Islam is that Christianity is the real religion of peace and Islam is not?
Surely, selective allowable discrimination is alive and well in New Jersey public schools. Parents and students have every right to be angry.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dave Jolly
R.L. David Jolly holds a B.S. in Wildlife Biology and an M.S. in Biology – Population Genetics. He has worked in a number of fields, giving him a broad perspective on life, business, economics and politics. He is a very conservative Christian, husband, father and grandfather who cares deeply for his Savior, family and the future of our troubled nation.
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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