After Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona vowed to shut down Grand Canyon University (GCU), the largest Christian university in the U.S., GCU officials are pushing back, telling Fox News Digital the crackdown stems from “deeply held bias.”
Cardona made comments during a House Appropriations Committee hearing about cracking down on GCU and other universities like it on April 10. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., asked Cardona how the administration is working to shut down GCU, which she called “a predatory for-profit school.” Cardona openly embraced their enforcement methods, declaring “we are cracking down not only to shut them down, but to send a message to not prey on students.”
Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., asked Cardona how the administration is working to shut down “GCU, a predatory for-profit school.” (House Appropriations Committee)
‘PREDATORY FOR-PROFIT COLLEGE’
“Last year, your department took action against Grand Canyon University, a predatory for-profit college, over the school’s failure to accurately disclose its cost to students, driving up the true cost for those students requiring for them to pay for continuation courses before they would graduate – scam courses added about $10,000 or more to the cost of education to these kids,” DeLauro said.
“Going after predatory schools preying on first generation students. They have flashy marketing materials, but the product is not worth the paper it is printed on. Increased enforcement budget to go after these folks and crack down. Levied largest fine in history against a school that lied about costs and terminated a school from Title IV. We are cracking down not only to shut them down, but to send a message not to prey on students,” Cardona responded.
GCU appealed a $37.7 million fine imposed by the department in November on allegations that the Arizona-based higher learning institution misled students about the cost of its doctoral programs over several years.
Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona vowed to crack down on the largest Christian university in the U.S. (House Appropriations Committee)
The fine is much larger than what the Department of Education previously gave to schools like Penn State ($2.4 million) and Michigan State ($4.5 million) for failing to address Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar’s crimes, respectively.
The department said in an October press release that an investigation conducted by the office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) found GCU “lied” to over 7,500 former and current students about the cost of its doctoral programs. The release also said GCU “falsely advertises” a lower cost for its doctoral programs, adding that about 98% of students ended up paying more than the advertised cost.
The university was given a 20-day deadline to request a hearing with the ED’s Office of Hearings and Appeals or file a response to the FSA to explain why the fine should not be imposed. The Department also imposed specific conditions on the school to continue participating in the federal student aid programs.
A GCU spokesperson told Fox News Digital that they do not expect a hearing to take place until January.
“Our next recourse after that decision would be another appeal within the Department, this time directly to the Secretary of Education,” the GCU official said.
Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona vowed to shut Grand Canyon University down.
‘HOLDING HIGHER EDUCATION ACCOUNTABLE’
“This is far from being a few rotten apples in the bunch. Predatory for-profit colleges have engaged in a range of deceptions designed to increase enrollment and student costs to drive more revenue for owners and shareholders,” DeLauro said during the April 10 hearing. “How are you and your agency committing to increased oversight of these institutions and are there any way in which we can shut these folks down?”
Cardona said that the agency employed “multiple strategies” to crack down on for-profit universities, such as “borrower defense, debt discharge, holding colleges more accountable, and holding higher education institutions more accountable.”
In regard to borrower defense, Cardona added that for-profit colleges were “preying on first-generation students.”
“You have a shiny brochure and a great commercial. But the product is not worth the paper it’s written on. We have students graduating 60K to 70K dollars in debt, only eligible for jobs making under 30K–that to me is unacceptable.”
In response to Cardona’s comment about shutting down universities like GCU, a GCU spokesperson told Fox News Digital that “officials continue to make derogatory and inflammatory public statements that are legally and factually incorrect and not shared by any of the other 26 regulatory and accrediting bodies that oversee GCU.”
“The Secretary’s comments to the House Appropriations Committee were so reckless that GCU is demanding an immediate retraction, as they do not reflect the factual record in this case. He is either confused, misinformed or does not understand the actions taken by his own agency,” the spokesperson added.
The president of GCU previously expressed to Fox News Digital sentiments of being “unfairly targeted.”
The president of Grand Canyon University told FOX News Digital that the university is being targeted by the Department of Education.
Cardona’s comments came after the announcement of a petition to “protect Christian colleges,” launched by the American Principles Project (APP). The petition was launched in “light of the Biden administration’s unprecedented attacks on our nation’s largest Christian colleges” and demands that “the administration halt their crusade and let students choose the schools that fit their values.”
“The federal government’s education agenda is punishing schools that do not conform to their progressive ideology. It’s time we take a stand against this egregious abuse of power,” APP Policy Director Jon Schweppe said. “The scrutinize-and-penalize campaign against faith-based institutions is not about students’ interests or well-being. Rather, it’s part of a concerted effort to snuff out education choice and promote far-left values. It’s critical that Americans be aware of this shameful campaign and that we do all we can to put a stop to it.”
In response to APP’s efforts, GCU officials told Fox News Digital that the “American people are losing confidence in the federal government to be fair and objective in their operations.”
President Biden with Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. (Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images | Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
“There are clearly no checks and balances to prevent this type of behavior from the Department of Education,” they added. “We support any organization that is willing to shed light on the federal government’s unwarranted and targeted actions taken against GCU. If they can make these claims against the largest Christian university in the country, other faith-based organizations could be next.”
Additionally, the Goldwater Institute sued ED in February in federal court for “refusing to turn over public records” related to its $37.7 million fine against GCU. They claimed that the records specifically may inform the public about coordination between various federal agencies in what appears to be the “intentional targeting of a successful university based on extraordinarily thin allegations.”
The Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Joshua Q. Nelson is a reporter for Fox News Digital.
Joshua focuses on politics, education policy ranging from the local to the federal level, and the parental uprising in education.
Joining Fox News Digital in 2019, he previously graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in Political Science and is an alum of the National Journalism Center and the Heritage Foundation’s Young Leaders Program.
Story tips can be sent to joshua.nelson@fox.com and Joshua can be followed on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Cornell Professor Randy O. Wayne has filed a criminal complaint against Monica Cornejo, an assistant professor of interpersonal communication, for her disruption of the recent speech by conservative commentator Ann Coulter. As we discussed, Cornell Provost Michael Kotlikoff extended the invitation after an earlier event was interrupted by protesters and declared that the university would not allow the exercise of free speech to be blocked by activists. In defiance of that policy, Cornejo proceeded to interrupt the event with heckling and profanities.
In an email, Professor Wayne confirmed that on Wednesday April 17, the day after the event, he filed a criminal complaint with the Cornell University Police. The listed offense was disorderly conduct. While this was filed with the university police, the state definition of disorderly conduct under § 240.20 states:
A person is guilty of disorderly conduct when, with intent to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof:
1. He engages in fighting or in violent, tumultuous or threatening behavior; or
2. He makes unreasonable noise; or
3. In a public place, he uses abusive or obscene language, or makes an obscene gesture; or
4. Without lawful authority, he disturbs any lawful assembly or meeting of persons; or
5. He obstructs vehicular or pedestrian traffic; or
6. He congregates with other persons in a public place and refuses to comply with a lawful order of the police to disperse; or
7. He creates a hazardous or physically offensive condition by any act which serves no legitimate purpose.
Disorderly conduct is a violation.
Cornejo is accused of repeatedly interrupting and making an obscene gesture at the event before being forced to leave. It is not clear if the university also filed a complaint, but none was listed. Indeed, at the time of this posting, Wayne’s complaint was not listed on the university police website.
Cornejo is described in media reports as “one of the first undocumented tenure-track faculty members at Cornell.” She was interrupting a speech by Coulter titled “Immigration: The Conspiracy to End America.”
In a 36-second video posted by The College Fix officers indicate that she is under arrest for “disorderly conduct.” According to the site, she repeatedly responded, “don’t touch me — do not touch me,” and tells them “I am a faculty member.” (I could not make out the last reported statement on the tape itself).
Putting the criminal charges aside, the question is what Cornell will do about a faculty member who openly defied the free speech policies of the university and sought to prevent others from hearing opposing views. As I discussed in the earlier column, she is just the latest faculty member to engage in such anti-free speech conduct on campuses. Why should students heed the warnings of Cornell when their own faculty show contempt for these protections?
Randy Wayne had a critical role in arranging the visit by Coulter. We have also previously discussed his challenging of universities policies and actions in the past.
A free speech panel is scheduled to be a held on campus on April 23.
Another state university system is moving to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) requirements and roles from its campuses, as part of a growing backlash to DEI ideology in schools across the country.
The University of North Carolina (UNC) board of governors committee voted in less than four minutes on Wednesday to repeal and replace the system’s existing diversity and inclusion policy and replace it with a different policy, The Associated Press reported.
Seventeen college campuses within the UNC system could be affected by the decision.
The proposed policy indicates that DEI roles held by senior administration officials would be eliminated, as they also have been at state universities in Florida and Texas.
A UNC university governance committee will vote Wednesday on whether to eliminate and replace its current DEI policy. (iStock)
Under the old policy, each school must have senior-level officials as its System Office D&I Liaison, Institutional D&I Officer, and an Institutional Inclusion Executive. These roles may go to the same person or be assigned separately. However, these roles are not included under the new policy that was voted on Wednesday.
While maintaining UNC’s commitment to nondiscrimination, the new policy emphasizes maintaining “academic freedom,” “institutional neutrality,” “free speech and expression,” and “equality of all persons and viewpoints.”
The new proposed policy states each school must give a report by September 1 certifying that it has fully complied “with the University’s commitment to institutional neutrality and nondiscrimination required by law and this policy and shall describe in substance the actions taken to achieve compliance.”
“The chancellors’ certifications shall also include a report on reductions in force and spending, along with changes to job titles and position descriptions, undertaken as a result of implementing this policy and how those savings achieved from these actions can be redirected to initiatives related to student success and well-being,” it continues.
The new policy will now go before the Republican-majority board of governors in May. If approved, the school’s DEI policy could be fully repealed.
The University of North Carolina took steps to ban DEI statements from its admission and hiring practices in February. (Eros Hoagland/Getty Images)
The university has already taken steps to cut DEI from its campuses.
Fox News Digital previously reported that the school voted to ban DEI statements and compelled speech from admission, hiring, promotion and tenure in February.
If the policy is fully repealed, UNC will follow the lead of Texas and Florida, where DEI positions were slashed from public universities to comply with state laws.
In March, the University of Florida fired all employees and administrative appointments for its DEI offices. Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who championed eliminating DEI from public institutions in his state, said he hoped others would follow Florida’s example.
“DEI is toxic and has no place in our public universities. I’m glad that Florida was the first state to eliminate DEI and I hope more states follow suit,” DeSantis said.
The article was updated with the vote the University of North Carolina (UNC) board of governors committee.
Fox News’ Kendall Tietz and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Kristine Parks is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. Read more.
Monica Cornejo, an assistant professor of interpersonal communication, was forcibly removed from a Cornell University event this week after disrupting a speech by conservative commentator Ann Coulter. She is only the latest faculty member to seek to prevent others from hearing opposing views. The question now is what Cornell will do about her conduct.
To its credit, Cornell resolved to reinvite Coulter to speak after a prior event was disrupted by protesters. On March 13, Cornell Provost Michael Kotlikoff stated that:
“Having been deeply troubled by an invited speaker at Cornell (any speaker) being shouted down and unable to present their views, I agreed that there could be few more powerful demonstrations of Cornell’s commitment to free expression than to have Ms. Coulter return to campus and present her views.”
Kotlikoff should be commended for taking a principled stance in favor of free speech.
The question, however, is how he will handle Cornejo. In a 36-second video posted by The College Fix officers indicate that she is under arrest for “disorderly conduct.” According to the site, she repeatedly responded“don’t touch me — do not touch me,” and tells them “I am a faculty member.” (I could not make out the last reported statement on the tape itself).
WATCH: Police forcibly remove an outraged 'undocumented' Cornell professor who repeatedly disrupted Ann Coulter's talk titled 'Immigration: The Conspiracy to End America'
Cornejo is described in media reports as “one of the first undocumented tenure-track faculty members at Cornell.” She was interrupting a speech by Coulter titled “Immigration: The Conspiracy To End America.”
“Dr. Monica Cornejo is an Assistant Professor in Interpersonal Communication in the Department of Communication at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Dr. Cornejo’s research uses qualitative and quantitative methodologies to examine the structural barriers that lead to inequities among undocumented immigrants, how undocumented immigrants draw on communication identity management and advocacy strategies to challenge those barriers, and how those strategies relate to undocumented immigrants’ health and wellbeing.
…Dr. Cornejo focuses on teaching students about different ways in which interpersonal communication can reduce or create disparities and inequities in the United States (e.g., discrimination towards sexual orientation minorities and immigrant communities), as well as the strategies members of minoritized communities (and allies, co-conspirators, families) utilize to challenge the disparities and inequities that position minoritized group members in a second-class position.”
I have previously written that universities must draw a clear distinction between free speech and this type of disruptive conduct. Cornejo has every right to protest outside of the event. However, preventing others from speaking or hearing opposing views is not free speech. It is the antithesis of free speech. It will continue until universities show the courage to discipline faculty or students engaging in such conduct.
The removal of Cornejo showed a commitment to free speech by the school. Often schools remain passive or enforce a heckler’s veto in such cases.
Yet, removal alone is not sufficient. Protesters will often plan a series of disruptions to effectively shutdown an event. Moreover, the university stated publicly that it wanted to show that such an event could occur on campus without disruption. This faculty member defied that policy and elected to heckle and disrupt the event.
At Hunter College in New York, Professor Shellyne Rodríguez was shown trashing a pro-life display of students.
She was captured on a videotape telling the students that “you’re not educating s–t […] This is f–king propaganda. What are you going to do, like, anti-trans next? This is bulls–t. This is violent. You’re triggering my students.”
Unlike the professor, the students remained calm and respectful. One even said “sorry” to the accusation that being pro-life was triggering for her students.
Rodríguez continued to rave, stating, “No you’re not — because you can’t even have a f–king baby. So, you don’t even know what that is. Get this s–t the f–k out of here.” In an Instagram post, she is then shown trashing the table.
Another recent example comes from the State University of New York at Albany, where sociology professor Renee Overdyke shut down a pro-life display and then resisted arrest. One student is heard screaming, “She’s a [expletive] professor.”
That of course is the point. She is a professor and was teaching these students that they do not have to allow others to speak if they oppose their viewpoints.
In watching their faculty engage in such conduct, one can understand why students believe that they have license to prevent others from speaking on campus. The only way to change that view is to suspend, fire, or expel those who seek to prevent others hearing opposing views by disrupting events. Again, the universities must show equal commitment in protecting their right to protest outside of events. Yet, disrupting a class or event from within these spaces is a denial of the essential commitment of higher education to the free exchange of ideas.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday overturned a West Virginia law that prohibited transgender girls from competing against biological girls in sports. The 2-1 ruling came from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The ruling found the law violated Title IX – in favor of the American Civil Liberties Union, its West Virginia chapter and Lambda Legal.
A federal appeals court struck down West Virginia’s transgender sports ban. (ALLISON DINNER/AFP via Getty Images)
The court said the law cannot be applied to Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 13-year-old girl who had been taking puberty blockers and has identified as a girl since the third grade.
“This is a tremendous victory for our client, transgender West Virginians, and the freedom of all youth to play as who they are,” ACLU West Virginia attorney Joshua Block said.
West Virginia’s “Save Women’s Sports Act” was signed into law in 2021. The law ordered student-athletes to compete and play against those of their biological gender. Lawyers for the girl originally had sued the school board after Gov. Jim Justice signed the bill into law, claiming it violated the 14th Amendment and protections under Title IX.
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice signed the bill in 2021. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, File)
U.S. District Judge Joseph Goodwin ruled against the transgender girl in January 2023 and also ruled the laws did not violate Title IX protections. However, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 to reinstate a preliminary injunction.
The Supreme Court ruled last April that the transgender girl could compete with biological girls on the middle school’s girls’ sports teams. Supreme Court justices refused to disturb an appeals court order that made it possible for the girl to continue playing on her school’s track and cross-country teams. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from the decision.
West Virginia was one of at least 24 states that had laws barring transgender women and girls from competing against the gender they identify as.
“I will keep fighting to safeguard Title IX. We must keep working to protect women’s sports so that women’s safety is secured and girls have a truly fair playing field,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said. “We know the law is correct and will use every available tool to defend it.”
A student’s father sues California’s Berkeley Unified School District, accusing it of hiding pro-Hamas “history” lessons at Berkeley High School from parents. (Photo: Berkeley Unified School District)
A California public school district that attempted to hide pro-Hamas course material from parents now faces legal action. The Deborah Project, which describes itself as “a public interest law firm that defends the civil rights of Jews in education,” filed suit April 8 against the Berkeley Unified School District, accusing it of “intentionally trying to prevent parents from knowing what their kids are learning.”
The lawsuit, filed in Alameda County Superior Court, also accuses the school system of “teaching kids mendacious and malicious lies about [Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel] that are grossly inaccurate and, on the basis of this false information, fomenting hatred against the Jewish State.”
The Deborah Project went to court on behalf of a parent in the Berkeley school district, Yossi Fendel, who says he was delayed and denied information about his child’s curriculum after a social studies teacher, Alex Day, announced at a school board meeting in November that he was going to incorporate lessons about “Palestine.” Day also stated at the school board meeting that he wouldn’t be “censored” from lecturing his students about “colonialism.” Day is a ninth-grade social studies teacher at Berkeley High School, according to the school system’s website.
Fendel repeatedly attempted to gain information about Day’s course material, but was obstructed constantly “for months” by rescheduling, cancellations, and other delays by Berkeley High School and district staff, The Deborah Project said in a press release. The lawsuit asserts that Day cast Jews as abusive, land-stealing colonizers, ignoring thousands of years of history to make a political assertion, while soft-pedaling the Hamas terrorist organization. Day explicitly refrained from describing as “terrorism” Hamas’ Oct. 7 rape and murder of over 1,200 in southern Israel and its kidnapping of over 200 civilians, according to the lawsuit.
The suit adds:
We seek as well to learn how it came to be that [Berkeley Unified School District]—in violation of California law—inexcusably but intentionally delayed access to the curriculum, ensuring that parents could not learn what was being fed their kids until after a stream of antisemitic falsehoods had already been planted not only in Mr. Fendel’s son’s mind, but in the minds of all his classmates.
According to slides for Day’s lessons obtained by The Daily Signal, the teacher used one slide and half of another to describe Hamas’ massacre of civilians in Israel, and 43 slides to describe what he called Israel’s “all out assault on Gaza.”
Hamas, which is known for using civilians as shields for its military operations, has been the elected government of the Gaza Strip since 2006.
In my analysis as a former teacher and curriculum developer, Day’s slides are absolutely riddled with leading questions and weighted comparisons, in what appears to be an attempt to paint Gazans as the victims of unwarranted colonial aggression. Day makes a comparison on slide 14, titled “Consequences of War,” that dishonestly portrays Israeli citizens as only having to postpone funerals and weddings while Gazans have “no food, no water, no electricity,” and “humanitarian aid was/is being blocked.” (The teacher doesn’t specify who blocked aid.)
The repeated rocket strikes and other horrors Israeli civilians have faced during the war, and for decades before, are not mentioned in Day’s slideshow.
Although the teacher claims in slide 29 that “we take care of each other,” his slides decidedly paint Israelis and Republicans in America as unfeeling and uncompassionate. The slides ask loaded questions such as: “Why do you think there aren’t more politicians calling for a ceasefire?” Day’s slides include quotes only from, and photos of, Democrats.
Day included several questions asking students what they thought about Israeli actions toward “Palestinians,” but didn’t ask a single question about what students thought of Hamas’ actions, media coverage, or related U.N. resolutions. For example, question 10 asks, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “Do you think that Netanyahu’s directions to the Palestinians are fair? Why or why not?”
Outside of a brief reference to Oct. 7, Day’s slides don’t mention Hamas at all, nor is its leader, Ismail Haniyeh. Students aren’t asked whether Haniyeh’s actions toward Israelis “are fair.”
Both questions 6 and 7 ask students how they feel “about lives lost or damage done to Gaza’s infrastructure,” but no question asks students about Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.
California State Standards require history teachers to point out “bias and prejudice” in historical interpretations, but the slides in Day’s presentation don’t mention the blatant antisemitism of Hamas or other Iranian proxy groups.
Not referenced a single time: the tens of thousands of social media posts, press releases, recordings of public chants, and other blatant expressions around the world in support of Hamas that call for the death of all Jews.
The Berkeley school district didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request that it confirm the authenticity of Day’s slides by time of publication. However, hyperlinks in the slides link to electronic forms hosted by the school district’s official internet domain.
If the Berkeley Unified School District attempted to hide or delay access to this information, it wouldn’t be the first time a public school district was caught trying to keep parents from seeing disturbing or controversial curriculum or pedagogy. Hundreds of public school districts around the country have attempted to hide racially discriminatory and sexually explicit curriculum from parents, as confirmed by Freedom of Information Act requests, recorded admissions by school administrators, and dozens of whistleblowers.
Berkeley Unified wouldn’t be California’s first public school district to protect antisemitic actions within its schools.
Within weeks after the Hamas attack in Israel, the Manhattan Beach Unified School District forced a gag order on four 11-year-olds so they wouldn’t talk about the antisemitic death threats other students made against them.
An elementary school in the state of Washington denied an 11-year-old student’s request to start an interfaith prayer club. (Photo Illustration: Valerii Apetroaiei/Getty Images)
In 2015, religious freedom seemed compromised when a Washington high school football coach was fired for praying with his team after a game. Joe Kennedy waited roughly six years for the Supreme Court to hear the oral arguments for his case. He was represented by a Christian nonprofit legal organization, First Liberty Institute, which took the position that “no teacher or coach should lose their job for simply expressing their faith while in public.” This was a notable case in 2022, and recent events have caused the issue to resurface.
Earlier this year, Laura, an 11-year-old girl who attends Creekside Elementary in Washington state, requested to start an interfaith prayer club at her school. But her request was denied. When Laura and her mom approached the principal about the matter in February, they were informed that the school’s budget for clubs had been finalized in October. And according to a spokesperson for Issaquah School District, “[C]lubs offered are student-interest driven and meet outside of the school day. At the elementary level, participation in a club also requires parent permission. Once the school year begins, the building budget is set, and additional clubs are usually not added until the following school year.”
But the story doesn’t end here.
Laura’s group, which she hoped to start with her friend, was meant to include people of all different religious backgrounds. She shared with Fox News that she was feeling alone, and that she thought this would be a good idea to bring students together. “I think that this is something that I am very passionate about,” she added. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t really want to make this happen, if I didn’t think that it would be a great opportunity for everyone.”
It was later discovered that an LGBT club was approved only a week prior to Laura’s club request being denied, which has caused spectators to raise their eyebrows. As a result of this alleged hypocrisy, Laura filed a lawsuit on the grounds of religious discrimination with the help of First Liberty Institute.
Attorneys pointed out in a letter to the school, “The First Amendment ‘doubly protects religious speech.’ These First Amendment protections extend to elementary school students expressing their sincere religious beliefs through voluntary clubs. Yet the school district flouted its First Amendment obligations when they refused to allow a student-led interfaith prayer club. Its unlawful action violates both the Free Exercise Clause and the Free Speech Clause.”
Kayla Toney, associate counsel at First Liberty Institute, explained, “Denying the formation of a religious student club while allowing other clubs violates the Constitution,” drawing attention to the fact that the similar case with Coach Kennedy occurred “just a short drive away” from Laura’s elementary school.
And in comments to The Washington Stand, Arielle Del Turco, Family Research Council’s director of the Center for Religious Liberty, said, “The fact that Creekside Elementary denied a religious club the same month that it approved a pride club reveals a lot about American culture right now.”
She continued, “Sadly, the promotion of LGBT identities is held sacred while religion is sidelined and marginalized. It’s heartbreaking that Laura, a fifth-grade student, felt alone at school as a religious believer and that she knew other students who felt the same way. She reacted in exactly the right way by making an effort to build community with religious students.”
Del Turco went on to emphasize that, “Oftentimes, when people seek to prevent religious expression in government venues, they will use the excuse that they don’t want to imply that the government favors one religion over another.” However, when it comes to Laura’s case, she pointed out that “the school doesn’t even have that flimsy excuse because the students were seeking to start a … club that would be open to students of different faiths.”
Ultimately, “Any school that allows other clubs while specifically denying religious clubs is acting in a discriminatory manner and violating the First Amendment, which protects freedom of expression and the free exercise of religion.”
Del Turco concluded, “Christian fifth graders shouldn’t face viewpoint discrimination from their school leadership. It shouldn’t have had to come to this, but I fully expect this injustice to be rectified in the courts.”
UC Berkeley’s law school dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, and his wife, law professor Catherine Fisk, faced a bizarre scene this week when third-year students invited into their home for a dinner held a disruptive protest and refused to leave. The students accused Fisk of assault after she tried to pull a microphone from the hands of Malak Afaneh, leader of Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine.
Afaneh has been featured by Berkeley on its website discussing how “As a proud Muslim immigrant, a first gen, low income student, and a survivor, I know exactly what it feels like to not have anyone in your corner.” She added:
“As leaders at Berkeley Law, we have the privilege of being in spaces where we can gain access surrounding the U.S. legal system, information that is gatekept and withheld from the very communities that often need it the most.”
It appears that one of those privileged spaces was the Dean’s home. Chemerinsky was warned that protests might be held at his home. Moreover, flyers appeared around campus opposing the dinners. Chemerinsky discussed this threat in a statement to the school:
“The students responsible for this had the leaders of our student government tell me that if we did not cancel the dinners, they would protest at them. I was sad to hear this but made clear that we would not be intimidated and that the dinners would go forward for those who wanted to attend. I said that I assumed that any protest would not be disruptive.”
The Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine depicted Dean Chemerinsky in a cartoon with a bloody knife and fork, which were denounced as anti-Semitic and raised images of the ancient blood libel against Jews.
Others attacks Chemerinsky as effectively a Zionist operative.
Once at the dinner, Afaneh and others began their protest. She started by saying “as-salamu alaykum” — or peace and blessings to you — when Fisk took hold of her and tried to take away her microphone.
There are already petitions to seek punishment for the “assault.” One petition states:
“On the last day of Ramadan, UC Berkeley Law Professor Catherine Fisk, and Dean Chemerinsky’s wife, assaulted a Palestinian Muslim hijabi law student that was exercising her First Amendment rights to draw attention to UC complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people. Fisk and Chemerinsky would rather resort to violently assaulting one of their students than face the truth of their support for genocide.”
The suggestion is that you have a First Amendment right to enter a private residence, stage a loud protest, refuse to leave, and prevent others from associating.
Technically there was physical contact but no police complaint has been filed. Even under torts, there is a notion of molliter manus imposuit or “he gently laid hands upon.” The doctrine is used as a defense for using limited, reasonable force to keep the peace or respond to trespass to land or chattel.
Both Fisk and Chemerinsky can be heard saying that this is their home and that the protest must stop. Eventually, Afaneh and ten other students left the dinner.
“The dinner, which was meant to celebrate graduating students, was obviously disrupted and disturbed. I am enormously sad that we have students who are so rude as to come into my home, in my backyard, and use this social occasion for their political agenda.”
The problem is that these students have been told for years that deplatforming and disrupting events are forms of free speech. This has been an issue of contention with some academics who believe that free speech includes the right to silence others. Student newspapers have declared opposing speech to be outside of the protections of free speech. Academics and deans have said that there is no free speech protection for offensive or “disingenuous” speech. CUNY Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek showed how far this trend has gone. When conservative law professor Josh Blackman was stopped from speaking about “the importance of free speech,” Bilek insisted that disrupting the speech on free speech was free speech. (Bilek later cancelled herself and resigned after she made a single analogy to acting like a “slaveholder” as a self-criticism for failing to achieve equity and reparations for black faculty and students). Berkeley has lost cases in court over its failure to protect free speech.
Many faculty and deans remained quiet for years as conservatives, libertarians, and dissenters were cancelled on campus or deplatformed. It is only recently that some have become openly alarmed over the anti-free speech movement that they have fostered either directly or through their silence. In this case, the students felt justified to stop a dinner event in a private home. They also showed little fear that they would face any repercussions for their actions.
Ironically, I raise this very hypothetical in my torts classes each year. I also invite my students to my house for dinners. When we get to trespass, I present the hypothetical of what would occur if some of them refused to leave and what my options might be. The Chemerinsky home just became that very hypothetical.
For many of us, the lack of civility and respect by the students is disturbing but hardly surprising. There are many students who feel enabled for years by administrators and faculty at schools like Berkeley.
Dean Chemerinsky can be criticized for fueling this rage by denouncing conservative justices as “partisan hacks” simply because he disagrees with their jurisprudential views. Nevertheless, Chemerinsky has had a long and widely respected career as a scholar and administrator.
Clearly, neither Chemerinsky nor Professor Fisk deserved this disruption or the lack of respect. They refused to yield to the threats over this dinner and I respect them for that. Chemerinsky has tried to navigate the tensions on campus while supporting free speech rights. Chemerinsky and Fisk open their home to hold these dinners and most students clearly value and respect their gracious hospitality.
I also would not fault the Dean for declining to pursue discipline over the incident since this occurred in a private residence. However, I take a harsher view of disruptions of classes and public events. The protesters can demonstrate outside of a room or a hall to express their opposition to a speaker. What they cannot do is prevent others from speaking or hearing opposing views. Those responsible for such disruptions should be suspended or, for repeat offenders, expelled.
Regrettably, the scene that unfolded at the home of Dean Chemerinsky will be viewed by many as a triumph rather than an embarrassment for their cause. Disruption has become the touchstone of protests in higher education. At the same time, schools like UCLA have paid “activists-in-residence” or now bestow degrees in activism.
We now have a culture of disruption that has been consistently fostered by academics and administrators on our campuses. When asked “why the home of a dean?”, these students would likely shrug and answer “why not?”
In that sense, this is the ultimate example of the chickens literally coming home to roost. These students have been enabled for years into believing that such acts of disruption are commendable and that others must yield in the cancellation of events. For weeks, they demanded that these dinners be halted despite other students wanting to attend. In that sense, the appearance in an actual home is alarming, but hardly unexpected in our current environment.
For students such as Afaneh, it is just part of “the privilege of being in spaces” to continue one’s activism.
There has been much discussion about the controversial mandatory lecture for first-year medical students at the University of California Los Angeles from a pro-Palestinian speaker accused of anti-Semitic postings and racist rhetoric. However, there is less attention to the fact that Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia was appearing because she is one of UCLA’s paid Activists-in-Residence.
Gray-Garica is described by UCLA as “a formerly unhoused and incarcerated poverty scholar who prefers to keep their face covered in public.”
UCLA also faced a controversy this week over a scheduled lecture by Dr. Helena Hansen titled “Beyond Magic Bullets: Whiteness as a Structural Driver of the Opioid Crisis.” Hansen blames whiteness for the recent opioid crisis. She is also the author of “Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America. The Hansen lecture was reportedly changes without any comment from UCLA.”
In her two-hour lecture, Gray-Garcia dismissed modern medicine as “white science” and told the medical students to engage in a prayer to “mama Earth.” Students were expected to pray and affirm that “Mama Earth was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped or played.”
It was part of what was billed as a talk on “Housing (In)justice in LA: Addressing Unhousing and Practicing Solidarity.”
A complaint filed after the lecture alleges that students were expected to chant “Free, free Palestine” and when one student refused to stand during one prayer, an unidentified UCLA faculty member asked for the pupil’s name. The complaint alleges that students were concerned that they would face repercussions if they did not chant and pray on command.
In the lecture, posted online, Gray-Garcia keeps her face covered with a keffiyeh while veering off into a diatribe over the Gaza Strip. She also attacked the concept and defense of private property as “crapitalist lies” that kill “black, brown and houseless people.”
On the video, she exclaims “Not only are our bodies considered unclean in public, not only are our lives criminalized for being outside without a roof, but politricksters use us for their campaigns.”
Gray-Garcia was undeterred by the complaint or the criticism, posting on X the next day: “As we hold our relatives in Occupied Palestine, and all of Mama Earth in prayer and love, we need to make connections.”
There have been ample objections to this indoctrination session at UCLA, but the school has been criticized for years for its viewpoint intolerance and orthodoxy. However, what is most disturbing is the decision of the university that higher education should have paid “activists-in-residence.” At a school notorious for excluding conservative and libertarian voices, it is doubtful that it would embrace a pro-life or anti-transgender activist in residence. Instead, the faculty can enlist the support of activists to push an ideological agenda in mandatory sessions like this one.
UCLA Luskin Professor Ananya Roy, who created the residency program, heralded how the activists-in-residence is part of “our effort to turn the university inside out.” Roy added that “at the Institute, we organize knowledge within, against and beyond the university. The Activist-in-Residence program brings to the university the movement scholars and public intellectuals who are teachers and guides for this praxis.”
The faculty, including Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris who is the Interim Dean of the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA, obviously support this view of higher education.
The question is why taxpayers and donors should support such school-sponsored activism. I previously wrote about the “radical chic” of academia as well as the new focus on “activism” as a field of study.
Arizona State University offers a BA program entirely on “community advocacy and social policy” that focuses on “historically under-served individuals, families and communities.” Students “complete courses in two core areas: diversity and oppressed populations and social issues and interventions.” Many schools offer “advocacy and social justice studies.” At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, students are offered the opportunity to “study social justice with distinguished instructors from a wide range of academic departments, from Afro-American Studies to Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies.”
Camden County College offers a diversity and social justice degree based on the advocacy work of the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic, which “revealed the depth of social inequality and its life-or-death consequences.” Others offer “a certificate of proficiency in social justice and an A.S. degree in Human Services, Social Justice Advocacy.”
Many of us encourage political activism and engagement of our students. They need to bring their passion and voices to the debates today over issues ranging from abortion to the environment to wars. We have long benefited from intellectual activists in our country, but they were intellectuals first and activists second. They were thought-leaders who used classic education to advance societal change.
Gray-Garcia embodies how academics are destroying the very intellectual foundation for higher education. Incorporating such “activists-in-residence” are extremely popular moves for faculty at schools like UCLA. However, they are hijacking higher education for their own political and professional purposes. The problem is that few have the courage to oppose such programs out of fear that they will be the next to be targeted in a cancel campaign or university investigation. Most remain in cringing silence as bizarre scenes like the one at UCLA play out on campus.
The one UCLA student who refused to pray on command was a courageous exception. However, we should all pray for the future of American higher education if Gray-Garcia is the measure of American intellectual thought.
I have been a criminal defense attorney for my entire career, but there is a case out of Berkeley, California that is a real head scratcher. David Xu was the chief metallurgist for a company called Berkeley Engineering and Research (BEAR) and was caught on tape trying to poison a colleague. His actions are blamed for not only causing harm to Rong Yuan, but her parents. After spending only 10 days in jail, Alameda County prosecutors and a judge signed off on a probation deal in the case.
Xu was arrested back in 2019 after Yuan became suspicious that her illness (which she thought might be cancer) might be related to a water bottle that she used at work. When her parents used the bottle to cook, they also became ill. She set up a spy camera at work and caught David Xu tampering with the water bottle. It was tested and found to contain “extraordinarily high levels of cadmium, a poisonous heavy metal.”
That seems a pretty strong case for two counts of poisoning and an attempted murder prosecution. Yet, the prosecutors dropped the attempted murder charge and accepted a plea on the two poisoning counts. Then a probation officer recommended no jail time. The officer wrote that
“The defendant is highly educated and living at home with his wife and children. He is employed and earning a stable income. Although this matter represents the first and only offense, it was serious in nature and could have resulted in death or serious illness of the victims…. It is the hopes of this deputy that the defendant will take advantage of this second chance and can satisfactorily complete this probation.”
Alameda County DA Pamela Price
Even on the two poisoning counts, one would expect some jail time. This man hurt three people and could have killed a colleague. Yet, Alameda County DA Pamela Price signed off on letting Xu spend less than two weeks in jail for his crimes.
It is not clear what it takes to get actual jYet, Alameda County DA Pamela Price signed off on letting Xu spend less than two weeks in jail for his crimes. ail time in Alameda County under Price. The San Francisco Chronicle was unable to get sentencing data from her office and Price is the subject of a recall campaign over her lax enforcement record.
The Arizona Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the state can enforce its long-dormant law criminalizing all abortions except when a mother’s life is at stake.
The case examined whether the state is still subject to a law that predates Arizona’s statehood. The 1864 law provides no exceptions for rape or incest but allows abortions if a mother’s life is in danger. The state’s high court ruling reviewed a 2022 decision by the state Court of Appeals that said doctors couldn’t be charged for performing the procedure in the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.
An older court decision blocked enforcing the 1864 law shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court issued the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing a constitutional right to an abortion. After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, then state Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, persuaded a state judge in Tucson to lift the block on enforcing the 1864 law. Brnovich’s Democratic successor, Attorney General Kris Mayes, had urged the state’s high court to side with the Court of Appeals and hold the 1864 law in abeyance.
“Today’s decision to reimpose a law from a time when Arizona wasn’t a state, the Civil War was raging, and women couldn’t even vote will go down in history as a stain on our state,” Mayes said Tuesday.
The justices said the state can start enforcing the law in 14 days.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
For years, we have discussed the failure of universities to take actions against faculty and students shutting down events or acting unlawfully, including faculty guilty of criminal assault. Now, Vanderbilt has expelled three students after anti-Israel protests, including Jack Petocz, a political activist recognized by the White House and featured prominently in the New York Times and other news outlets.
“I did not touch a community service officer, nor am I anywhere near the individual in the video. I’d implore you to trust a student activist over rich, powerful, white men, but that’s your choice.”
He insisted that he and the other students were only “peacefully protesting the genocide in Palestine.”
Petocz’s activism, including opposing the Florida parental rights law, has been widely celebrated in the media including an article that featured him in a January 2022 front story on fighting conservative school boards. President Biden invited him to the White House for a bill signing and took a picture with him in the Oval Office.
Hi! My name is Jack Petocz, I’m the 17-year-old student activist who led nationwide walkouts against the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Through being kicked out of school, harassed in public and doxxed, this moment was truly special to me. I’ll keep fighting ❤️ pic.twitter.com/DGksCMTWHS
“These actions are actively destructive of the values that underpin our community. Any participants in today’s events … who turn out to be Pomona students, are subject to immediate suspension. Students from the other Claremont Colleges will be banned from Pomona’s campus and subject to discipline on their own campuses.”
The actions of the university have led to protests on campus and calls for the student board to reverse that suspensions.
Exchanging biology-based sex education in our schools for woke-appeasing LGBTQ+ pandering will only hurt kids. (Photo: Miguel Sotomayor/ Getty Images)
As suicide rates, sexual assaults, mass depression, and anxiety grip America’s youth, the Biden administration, state legislatures, and public school districts have begun usurping science education with “transgender and gender-nonconforming” curriculum.
Students in over a dozen states no longer have access to biologically based sex education; that’s been replaced by liberal laws and policies requiring classrooms to exchange biologically proven facts with pseudo-scientific advocacy of gender fluidity.
Despite the claims of the U.S. Department of Education, no quantitative studies show gender transition or “gender nonconformity” is a healthy or normal part of human development.
These child-targeted policy prescriptions are often sweetened artificially by using comfortable terminology, such as “comprehensive,” “inclusive,” and “gender affirming” to paint those who disagree with the unscientific, immoral content aimed at minors as bigoted and heartless. If parents respond negatively to the content of these postmodern sex-education revisions, news outlets (which may claim to be unbiased) use those gaslighting terms in their coverage of the outrage.
This effectively gatekeeps any debate about negative consequences by portraying dissidents as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. After all, what kind of monster wouldn’t be inclusive and affirming?
The most recent and flagrant example of this has been seen in Arizona’s Flagstaff Unified School District. Local parents obtained a video of school district staff discussing changes to the sex-ed curriculum that included removing the boy/girl binary.
When parents shared their concerns at the next school board meeting, board President Christine Fredericks responded: “I will never apologize for being inclusive.”
So far, liberals’ strategy of dismissing any commonsense concerns with moral scolding straight out of a 1990s anti-bullying commercial has been effective. Parents who expressed concern about teenage boys pretending to be girls to gain access to girls’ locker rooms were disregarded as backward, uninformed, and unfeeling. When tragedy struck, in part due to these policies and worldviews—as in the sexual assault by a “gender-nonconforming” boy in a girls’ restroom of Virginia’s Loudoun County Public Schools—parents were scolded again and charged with being bigoted opportunists.
Similarly, after the shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School, in which a transgender assailant slaughtered three 9-year-old students and three staff members at the private Christian school, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded by suggesting that “transphobia” was the true danger.
An LGBTQ+ activist organization called The Trevor Project has intimated repeatedly that the near 40% suicide rate for transgender individuals isn’t due to mental illness and toxic prescriptions. Instead, it’s the result of “bullying,” which also has been redefined to mean “anyone who doesn’t passionately support the child’s transition.” The assertion has been echoed consistently without question by federally funded media outlets such as PBS.
This quantitatively unverified accusation is a key rationale from the Left in why updating sex education curriculum is essential for them. After all, the point of sex ed is to answer students’ questions concerning physiological and reproductive development. These answers in biology-based sex education clearly differentiate men and women, not just in external sexual organs but in development rate, hormone production and balance, and higher susceptibility to certain diseases and conditions.
A postmodern, “inclusive” approach as outlined by LGBTQ+ advocacy groups, teachers unions, and massive grants from the Biden administration removes that differentiation altogether.
Separating sex and gender as physicality and mentality, therefore disconnecting behavior from sex by suggesting that your sex comprises your organs whereas your gender is all in your mind, is heinously distant from reality. Naturally produced hormones based on sex govern anatomical systems, behavior, immune response, and reproduction.
The additional foolishness of encouraging minors that changing external appendages somehow certifies a gender change only adds insult to the injury of what was historically a scientifically sound subject.
Although biological sex education warned boys and girls of their higher likelihood of developing cancerous tumors in certain sex-specific organs and advised them to watch for signs at different ages, the new “gender affirming” sex ed does nothing to warn students about the carcinogenic danger of “hormonal treatments” in gender transitions.
The human endocrine system is incredibly fragile; tampering with it can be perilous. Women who seek hormonal treatment for menopause are required to be warned that doing so quadruples their risk of developing cancer. Although the same hormones are injected in transgender treatments, no such carcinogen warning is required or offered in any current “gender affirming” sex-ed curriculum.
None of the biology, anatomy, and physiology, or developmental psychology texts from which I’ve taught have ever provided a shred of evidence justifying the omission or twisting of critical information when instructing students. At that point, you’re no longer a teacher, you’re a sleazy salesman for a pyramid scheme.
The misnamed “sex education” that the Department of Education describes as “safe and supported” is in reality temporal, shallow, and dangerous. As other nations ban transgender experiments on minors, President Joe Biden’s administration has put American children in danger via woke dictate, bastardizing health education into its antithesis.
Sex education in the U.S. is quickly becoming a sick joke, and permanent damage to American children is the punchline.
University of Maryland President Darryll Pines has joined the ignoble line of educators and administrators enabling the growing anti-free speech movement on our campuses. Pines has defended the shouting down of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md). as exercising free speech as hecklers. He is dead wrong, and the Board of Directors should address his inimical view of free speech in higher education. As for Raskin, it is an ironic but telling moment from a member of Congress who has supported censorship and consistently opposed efforts to investigate the silencing of those with opposing views.
I have been highly critical of Rep. Raskin on a number of issues, particularly his efforts to thwart investigations into censorship.
Pines terminated the event after protesters repeatedly interrupted his speach as the Irving and Renee Milchberg Endowed Lecture, titled “Democracy, Autocracy and the Threat to Reason in the 21st Century.”
According to the Maryland Reporter, the protesters accused the Jewish legislator of being “complicit in genocide” and rebuffed his efforts to engage them in a dialogue on the issue. After efforts to resume his remarks, Pines finally ended the event early.
Rather than protect the right of Raskin to speak and others to hear his views, Pines offered only a mild criticism of the protesters as needing to be more civil but then insisted “what you saw play out actually was democracy and free speech and academic freedom.” He added that, “from our perspective as a university, these are the difficult conversations that we should be having.”
No it is not as difficult as you suggest. These protesters stopped the free exchange of ideas in a university event. They prevented opposing views from being spoken or heard. In so doing, they blocked the critical condition needed for higher education in allowing an exchange of ideas. Heckling is an effort to stop discussion, not to engage in discussion.
Clearly, the “difficult conversation” for Pines is to enforce university policies and protections for free speech. It takes courage and principle. It requires administrators to have the commitment to suspend or expel students who disrupt classes or events. They have every right to protest outside or to ask difficult questions. They do not have a right to prevent speech.
As for Raskin, he is now the victim of the anti-free speech movement that he has helped fuel in Congress. In my forthcoming book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, I discuss this pattern as the anti-free speech movement turns on politicians and professors who once supported them. Others spent years in conspicuous silence as others were targeted, but now have grown alarmed as their own views are declared “harmful” and “triggering.”
As discussed today in relation to a controversy at Tulane, universities continue enable this movement by failing to enforce policies at events or refusing to punish those responsible. Pines is not alone in his view that this is just an exercise of free speech. Academics and deans have said that there is no free speech protection for offensive or “disingenuous” speech. CUNY Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek showed how far this trend has gone. When conservative law professor Josh Blackman was stopped from speaking about “the importance of free speech,” Bilek insisted that disrupting the speech on free speech was free speech.
In the incident last year of a federal judge being shouted down at Stanford Law School, Dean Jenny Martinez later apologized and then released a letter with Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne that reaffirmed the commitment to free speech, but did not commit to holding the students accountable for their disruption.
Dean Martinez later issued another letter with a strong defense of free speech and declared that all students (including the victims of the disruption) would be required to attend a free speech appreciation session. However, she declined any action against the students responsible for the disruption. That is a familiar pattern at universities.
The question is whether the Board of Regents for the Maryland system will call Pines to account for his view of free speech.
The Mississippi state Capitol in downtown Jackson is seen here in April 2019. Reports from Jackson and elsewhere in Mississippi demonstrate why parents there are increasingly skeptical about K-12 education and why the state Legislature needs to enact a parental bill of rights. (Photo: C. Robertson/ iStock/Getty Images)
Some school officials in Mississippi seem determined to keep parents out of their child’s education. But state lawmakers have a chance to join about two dozen other states that have prevented that from happening.
Mississippi legislators are considering a proposal that would create a parental bill of rights, reinforcing parents’ authority even when a child is on school grounds. The proposal is simple, but powerful: Public employees, such as teachers and school administrators, cannot substantially burden a parent’s right to direct a child’s upbringing and health care.
What does this look like in practice?
When children start the school year, moms and dads typically have to sign forms stating a child’s allergies, directing the school to administer painkillers if a child is injured at recess, and consenting to basic medical treatment if a child is in need.
In today’s upside-down culture, however, school officials are allowing minor-age children to “change” their name and whether they want to be addressed as a boy or girl, regardless of his or her sex, while at school.
In some states, teachers do not have to tell parents that a child is making these choices during the school day.
What results is “social affirmation,” in which adults tell a child that yes, the child was born in the wrong body and should act as if they are someone they are not. That can foster a child’s desire to seek medical interventions, such as puberty blockers and hormone treatments and perhaps even surgeries that will damage their reproductive organs.
An exaggeration? Whistleblowers have exposed centers such as the St. Louis Children’s Hospital for prescribing children as young as 11 to take puberty-blocking drugs.
The results were horrific in some cases: Young women would return to the hospital bleeding through their clothes because testosterone treatments thin the vaginal wall, and the wall can then tear open. Some males experienced liver toxicity after taking drugs to make them appear more feminine.
In the U.K., England’s National Health Service has recommended that doctors not encourage young people to assume a different “gender” because autism and anxiety and depression were often found in children expressing confusion over their sex. And research finds that this confusion resolves on its own as children progress into adulthood in 80% to 95% of cases, which means watchful waiting is far healthier for children than social affirmation.
Yet some Mississippi educators are still pushing the dangerous “gender” agenda.
Parents Defending Education, an advocacy organization,
uncovered that a school in Jackson received a grant to promote gender ideology. Oxford School District officials surveyed students and asked children if they identified as queer or “trans.”
In Tupelo, teachers were trained to allow students to change their name and pronouns.
Educators were instructed to call the child by his or her given name and pronouns when talking to parents unless the child gave a teacher permission to tell parents that the child had assumed a different gender—a secretive technique that hides information from families.
When a child is confused about their sex, social affirmation can have lasting consequences. Some medical treatments are irreversible and can lead to sterility and other complications. For at least these reasons, school personnel should not be allowed to keep parents in the dark about what is happening to their young children in the classroom.
STERILIZING OUR CHILDREN
State legislators can help. For more than a decade, state lawmakers around the country have been adopting parental bills of rights similar to the proposal before Mississippi lawmakers. Legislators should state plainly that parents are a child’s primary caregivers and that public officials cannot burden, or obstruct, a parent’s role. Teachers have a responsibility to report abuse or neglect, but that does not mean educators should accept a child’s self-diagnosis that he or she needs drugs to alter their body chemistry.
The reports from Jackson, Tupelo, and elsewhere demonstrate why Americans are increasingly skeptical about K-12 education. Mississippi officials should increase academic transparency and strengthen parental rights, restoring a civic value in short supply today between local communities and their schools—specifically, public trust.
“Too often today when we talk about criminal justice reform, when we talk about criminal justice issues, there’s no accountability for people who break the law,” Heritage Foundation legal fellow Zack Smith tells conferees in Berkeley, California. Pictured: A customer, his face blurred, makes a choice after a Target employee unlocks merchandise in a theft-proof cabinet at a store in Queens, New York. (Photo: Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group/ Getty Images)
BERKELEY, Calif.—When scholars from the Right and Left recently met at UC Berkeley School of Law to debate what to do about surging crime, the event provided a rare opportunity to identify key philosophical and policy fault lines as Americans ponder policing and criminal justice. The conference, sponsored by Berkeley Law and The Heritage Foundation, featured not only scholars from across the political spectrum but district attorneys and former district attorneys—including San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin, now a professor at the law school and director of Berkeley’s Criminal Law & Justice Center. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
What became apparent throughout the conference is the stark contrast between each side’s view of human nature. Although both sides said they want fewer crimes, a wide and seemingly intractable gulf appeared to loom between the methods the Left and Right would use to achieve that end.
Zack Smith, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, led off with a speech about the necessity of the discussion—especially considering demands for reduced sentencing and other criminal justice reforms that have coincided with increases in crime. In 2014, California adopted Proposition 47, a ballot initiative that reduced penalties for many crimes and led to the early release of many prisoners. The change led to a series of similar laws around the country.
“Too often today when we talk about criminal justice reform, when we talk about criminal justice issues, there’s no accountability for people who break the law,” Smith told conferees.
Smith said it was a myth that first-time drug offenders, for instance, spend time behind bars.
“Most people in prison today are committing violent crimes like rape, robbery, and murder, so whenever you hear panelists today or elsewhere talk about reducing the prison population by 50%, 75%, even 80% in some cases, that necessarily means releasing some repeat, violent offenders back into our communities,” the Heritage scholar said.
A panel on policing and public safety at the conference demonstrated the sharpest conflict of visions—as commentator Thomas Sowell has put it—between the Left and Right on crime. On the Right, the focus is on targeted policing in high- crime areas and stricter sentencing laws for those who commit crimes. On the Left, so-called prison abolitionists focus on structural forces and “root causes” to explain crime and blame more policing for creating more crime.
Jamelia Morgan, a professor at the Center for Racial and Disability Justice at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, argued for more “soft police” to take the place of traditional policing. Essentially, that means more social workers instead of police officers. Morgan pointed to the writings of Mariame Kaba, who is at the forefront of those who want to abolish police and prison. The law professor quoted from Kaba’s 2020 New York Times article, published just as the George Floyd protests and riots were beginning.
Morgan said, quoting Kaba:
As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm. People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation.
Kaba advocates spending more taxpayer money on housing, food, and education as an answer to problems of safety and justice.
Many U.S. cities defunded police departments in 2020 and 2021, after Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis. The murder rate jumped by 30% from 2019 to 2020 according to the FBI, the largest single-year jump in recorded U.S. history.
Rafael Mangual, the Nick Ohnell fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said police are an essential element of promoting justice and protecting citizens in a free society. Police perform two broad roles, Mangual said, specifying that “one is to detect violations of the law, the other is to prevent violations of the law.” Often, just the presence of police is enough to deter crime, according to research, he said.
The second way to stop crime is to remove criminals from the street, the Manhattan Institute scholar said, noting crime statistics that show how investing in police led to sharp reductions in crime and other costs to the city and community.
“If a police officer makes an arrest and removes an active offender from the street, if that’s someone who was committing 10, 20, 30 felonies a year, that individual being in custody spares the community the crimes that would have otherwise been committed,” Mangual said.
The main thing driving recent spikes in crime is the problem of repeat offenders, he said. The same individuals often commit crimes over and over because the justice system puts them back on the street.
“In the city of Chicago, the typical homicide suspect has 12 prior arrests,” Mangual said. “One in five [homicide suspects], 20 prior arrests, these are not just individuals who are being locked up for the first offense and having the key thrown away.”
The problem of crime always will be with us, whether we like it or not, the Manhattan Institute scholar said.
“No one has ever been able to figure out how to eliminate poverty; no one has ever figured out how to eliminate inequality; no one has ever figured out how to eliminate crime or predation. It is part of the human condition,” Mangual said.
Taking away policing, which has proved to be effective in reducing crime and violence, is “irresponsible,” he concluded.
This enunciation of the constrained view of human nature provoked a response from representatives of the Left on the panel. Shakeer Rahman, an attorney for the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and Los Angeles Community Action Network, appeared incredulous that Mangual said crime and inequality always will be with us.
“Abolitionists are the hopeful ones, because we believe that a world without poverty is possible, that that can be built and that’s at least worth prioritizing,” Rahman said.
Rahman said that this leads to the problem of racial disparities in incarceration. Factors such as structural racism led to this disparity, he said.
Mangual interjected at this point, saying he believes some structural factors drive crime. It isn’t because something is wrong with people like himself who have African roots, he said. Instead, the issue is the breakdown of families, Mangual argued. The disintegration of the family—especially black families—has created childhood disorders that lead to longer-term behavioral issues, he said.
Rahman responded that the U.S. criminal justice system has broken up black families, to which Mangual replied that research suggests that the prevalence of family members who engage in criminal activities is an even bigger driver of crime than fathers who are absent from the home.
Crime Surge a Hoax, the Left Says
According to a recent Gallup poll, the number of Americans—both Republicans and Democrats—who say they consider crime a “serious problem” is at the highest point since the polling firm began recording it in 2000. But many left-wing speakers at the conference said the widespread perception that crime has become a serious problem is based on media propaganda and is false.
USC Gould School of Law Professor Jody Armour, who focuses on critical race theory scholarship, said the perception that crime is increasing is just a “moral panic.”
One of the biggest points of contention at the Berkeley Law School conference was whether there is a spike in crime at all. On a panel about crime trends, civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis said that media reporting on crime is the issue, not the crimes themselves.
Although many crime statistics are “true facts,” Karakatsanis said, they are used “to deceive people in profound ways.” He blamed the media for creating the impression that crime is up.
The civil rights lawyer pointed to a brazen theft at a San Francisco Walgreens that received widespread media coverage. The incident was real, he said, but it created a “false impression” that shoplifting is increasing when shoplifting is down.
Reported shoplifting incidents were down slightly in San Francisco in 2023 compared to the previous year, but the latest numbers are still much higher compared to 2019. Walgreens and other retail stores throughout the Bay Area often take extreme actions to prevent widespread retail theft, such as putting locks on freezers and shelves. One Walgreens location in Richmond, California—a city close to San Francisco—put chewing gum behind glass, The San Francisco Standard reported. Many Walgreens locations have closed down because the drug store chain says they no longer are profitable.
Talking about crime comes down to “framing,” Karakatsanis said, and “most people in society have utterly lost their way when they think about what public safety means.” The problem with looking at crime, he said, is that most people look at so-called index crimes such as homicide, assault, and property theft. Most crimes, he argued, aren’t reported as crimes. He pointed to tax evasion, “wage theft,” and corporate fraud.
A System Focused on Equity, Not Preventing Crime
Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald said she isn’t optimistic about criminal justice trends. MacDonald spoke about how many cities signal that crimes simply won’t be punished. So, she said, criminals became more brazen and the commission of many kinds of crimes exploded. She focused on the increase in retail crimes that the left-wing scholars dismissed.
“Our criminal justice elites have decided that they would rather subject the property of honest businessmen to mass expropriation than to apprehend and punish looters, because doing so has a disparate impact on minority criminals,” MacDonald said.
These are “not crimes of necessity, they are crimes of opportunity,” she said.
MacDonald drove home the point that the rise in retail and property crimes is not being driven by poverty or economic hardship. Many of those committing retail thefts record the act on a smartphone and post the videos on social media, she said.
“No one who has a smartphone is poor,” MacDonald said. “No one engaged in these crimes is unable to eat. Rather, predatory theft comes from a sense of entitlement. If others have something I don’t have, I’m entitled to take it.”
The Manhattan Institute scholar said society shouldn’t have to be conditioned to assume that the trivial items of life—such as shampoo—need to be locked up at retail stores.
“This is not a normal state,” MacDonald said. “It is due to a failure of will. The will to enforce the values of civilized society.”
Passage of California’s Prop 47, MacDonald said, launched a wave of similar decriminalization measures around the country. Reclassifying many property and drug felonies as misdemeanors, she said, has resulted in hardcore criminals remaining on the street.
“It is not a ‘moral panic’ to be concerned about the lawlessness that has broken out since 2020, it is realism,” MacDonald said, referring to Armour’s use of the term.
This week, parents of students at the University of California at Berkeley took the extreme step of hiring private security to protect their children at the school after years of complaints over rising crime and anti-police policies. The university, however, is focused this week on another threat that has led students to object that they no longer feel safe on campus: the dating advice offered by Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Professor Jonathan Shewchuk in response to a query from a student.
Professor Shewchuk is known as a bit of a quirky character at the school, as illustrated by his long maintaining that he identifies as a “Smith & Wesson 460XVR .45 caliber revolver.” He has also suggested pronouns for himself that are a bit unconventional: “death/deathem/deathself.”
None of that has endeared the tenured professor with the far left faculty and students at Berkeley.
Recently, however, this all came to a head after a student asked for advice on both the inability to find a date in the Bay Area and the fears of finding work in computer science. On the dating question, Shewchuk pointed the student to prospects “out of the Bay Area.” He explained that “you’ll be shocked by the stark differences in behavior of women in places where women are plentiful versus their behavior within artillery distance of San Jose and San Francisco.’
That comment was immediately declared offensive and “blatantly misogynistic.” CS 189 student Rebecca Dang was interviewed and reportedly said that she felt unsafe on campus due to the advice.
The university quickly condemned the comment as “threatening” to students and women. UC Berkeley spokesperson Roqua Montez declared “We want to be absolutely clear that the offensive content of the original post goes against the values and Principles of Community we adhere to at UC Berkeley. The comment was hurtful and threatening to students – particularly women – in his class and beyond.”
Shewchuk removed the posting and apologized to the school. He has previously won teaching awards at the school. However, many want him fired as a threat to students.
Junior Noemi Chulo has reportedly begun the process of drafting grievances on behalf of Academic Student Employees through the local UAW 4811 against UC Berkeley, as creating a hostile work environment by employing Shewchuk.
Shewchuk’s own teaching assistant Lydia Ignatova denounced him as furthering discrimination against women and nonbinary people in EECS.
I can certainly see why the comment was offensive to many. However, the call to fire the professor stands in sharp contrast to how controversial comments on the left are often handled in higher education, including in the California system.
Berkeley has a long history of treating liberal and conservative speakers and academics differently in such controversies. The blog is replete with examples of the intolerance and bias at Berkeley. It has lost major court rulings due to its unconstitutional treatment of conservative speakers. Nevertheless, student groups at Berkeley have pledged to block pro-Israel speakers for years as threatening to many on campus. Even liberal speakers with pro-Israeli views have been cancelled at Berkeley.
We previously discussed how a Berkeley physicist resigned after faculty and students opposed a presentation by a UChicago physicist due to his questioning the impact of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs. The school has long employed faculty with radical left ideologies, including professors like Professor Zeus Leonardo who has discussed the need “to abolish whiteness.” That is not viewed as making white students feel unsafe. Conservative sites have previously criticized Leonardo for inflammatory statements, including a guest lecture at George Washington University where I teach. At GWU, Leonardo argued that children are born “human” and then are “bullied” into becoming white: “They were born human. Little by little, they have to be abused into becoming white humans. This abuse is sometimes physical … such as being bullied into whiteness. But also it’s psychological and cultural.”
None of this means that comments from conservative or libertarian faculty are not worthy of criticism, but the response to such comments appears far more pronounced in controversies involving conservative, libertarian, or contrarian faculty.
Critics of “book bans” tend to speak as though no book chosen by a school librarian is ever inappropriate for kids. That’s preposterous on its face. (Photo: Jose Luis Pelaez Inc./Digital Vision/Getty Images)
Our English teachers taught us to use extreme caution before writing a word such as “always” or “never.”
Such totalizing words are rarely accurate, since most principles have exceptions. But you won’t see this advice applied by critics of “book bans,” who tend to speak as though no book chosen by a school librarian is ever inappropriate for kids.
My colleagues at The Heritage Foundation found that about three-fourths of books on lists of “banned books” are actually still in the libraries where the books were challenged. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Many of the rest are indeed inappropriate for children. They contain “images of people engaged in sex acts or graphic descriptions of those acts.” The material is so graphic, in fact, that it’s censored on broadcasts to avoid Federal Communications Commission fines. Moreover, movies and TV shows have ratings. Anyway, none of the books is “banned.” Kids generally can bring their own copies to school or buy them at a bookstore.
Since 1982, the Supreme Court has made it clear that while books may not be removed from school libraries to suppress ideas, there are legitimate reasons to remove books. Those reasons include when a book is obscene in general or is obscene as to minors, and when a book is inappropriate for the age, grade, or developmental level of students. When a book is inappropriate for the curriculum, it also can be removed from classrooms.
That point should be obvious. After all, the Supreme Court also has permitted censorship of school newspapers. The high court also has permitted punishment of students who held a banner reading “bong hits for Jesus.” In that case, the school argued successfully that it could in fact suppress an idea if that idea were about promoting the use of illegal drugs.
And the court has permitted punishment of a student who used pervasively vulgar language at a school assembly.
Adults really do, it turns out, have a role in determining what expression is acceptable for kids at school. And some of the same schools that resist book challenges have speech codes. They unconstitutionally ban “hate speech” and “misgendering,” but if the same language is in a book, they think nobody ought to challenge it.
Next week, I will be making these points at a private school, where “book banning” is the conference topic. I will note that the school’s libraries use the term “age-appropriate” to describe their book curation. Do librarians never make mistakes?
I also will tell the students that a complete opposition to book challenges is unlikely to express their true position.
Do the kids really think they were ready for the sexual, violent, gory, or scary content of any book when they were in the first grade? Do they think their younger siblings should be able to access all of that at school?
Do the kids really think it would be appropriate for the school librarian to advertise to first graders a book making the case against the existence of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy?
More likely, kids still believe that preserving innocence is one of their values. That argument should hold for most adults, too.
Probably no one is arguing that every challenged book is inappropriate for kids. Just as librarians can err in adding a book to the library, schools can err in removing them. The key is to develop a review process that puts the most knowledgeable people in charge—parents and, secondarily, teachers know the kids best—and makes the fewest mistakes.
For those critics of “book bans” who are unwilling to admit that even one book could ever be bad enough to remove from a school library, it’s time to mature and acknowledge that unlike the printed page, life is not black and white. Then we can have the important discussion of how to properly protect kids.
Does your children’s school take tips on hate from the Southern Poverty Law Center? The SPLC frames all responses to the border crisis as rooted in hate. (Photo: Getty Images)
When concerned mom Nicole Solas requested all emails from her Rhode Island school district to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the request turned up more than 8,000 pages of communications, and the district told her it would cost $6,629.25 for it to process the SPLC documents.
A brief refresher: The SPLC began as a civil rights nonprofit but has morphed into a far-left fundraising machine and smear factory. As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” it weaponized its history of suing KKK groups into bankruptcy to smear its political and ideological opponents, placing mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” alongside Klan chapters.
Solas, a Rhode Island mother, had briefly enrolled her daughter in kindergarten in the South Kingstown School District. She withdrew her daughter after the school district sued her on account of Solas’ multiple public records requests to reveal whether the district taught kids the principles of critical race theory, a lens that teaches kids to view white people as oppressors and black people as oppressed.
Solas told The Daily Signal that she requested “emails sent by [South Kingstown School District] employees” to “weed out spam emails automatically sent by SPLC to schools.”
There are 8,859 pages of emails sent by my school district to Southern Poverty Law Center, who thinks moms are "hate groups."
— Nicole Solas, Sued by the Teachers Union (@Nicoletta0602) March 1, 2024
The SPLC runs an education program long known as “Teaching Tolerance.” In 2021, after the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis, the SPLC apparently decided that “tolerance” wasn’t woke enough, so it rebranded the program to “Learning for Justice.” The program has advocated for lessons that inculcate critical race theory, transgender identity, and pornographic books in schools. Last year, the SPLC added parental rights groups, including Moms for Liberty, to its “hate map,” in part demonizing those groups for opposing sexually explicit books in school libraries.
The SPLC has bragged that it sent “over 400,000 educators” the “Teaching Tolerance” magazine, “reaching nearly every school in the country.” This language disappeared from the website, however, as more Americans look critically at the SPLC.
The SPLC hides its radical agenda behind benign-sounding initiatives such as celebrating diversity and inclusion. Many on the Left have adopted its rhetoric.
The SPLC’s “hate map” has caused real-world harm. In 2012, a terrorist targeted the Family Research Council for a mass shooting using the “hate map.” He told the FBI he aimed to kill everyone in the building, but the building manager prevented the slaughter, in the process sustaining bullet wounds. The shooter pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence.
Early in the 2000s, the SPLC began branding some activist groups that opposed illegal immigration “anti-immigrant hate groups” and putting them on the “hate map.” The SPLC maintains that hatred drives the movement calling for the enforcement of immigration laws, even as the Biden administration sets new records for the number of illegal aliens encountered at the southern border.
In the past two weeks, the SPLC has demonized Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, for attempting to close the border when the Biden administration refuses to do so. Abbott is attempting to enforce federal laws that Biden will not enforce, yet the SPLC claims Abbott is seeking to establish “state supremacy over the border.” The SPLC noted Abbott’s attempts to install razor wire between Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, and the southern border, the Biden administration’s decision to cut the wire, and the Supreme Court ruling allowing the Biden administration access.
“This is part of Abbott’s broader anti-immigrant agenda, which includes an attempt to stop a supposed ‘invasion’ of Texas by migrants,” SPLC’s Caleb Kieffer and Rachel Goldwasser wrote. “Claims of ‘invasion’ have become a trope among right-wing lawmakers and the hard right despite dangerous similarities to the racist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory.”
The SPLC did not acknowledge that border agents encountered a record 3.2 million illegal aliens in fiscal year 2023 (a number larger than the combined populations of Hawaii, Alaska, and Vermont), nor that Democratic mayors are requesting help to deal with the large numbers of aliens in the country. This isn’t a “great replacement conspiracy theory”; it is a blatantly obvious fact that millions of illegals are taking root in the U.S., and the SPLC’s move to dismiss critics as racist in the face of that fact should set off alarm bells across America. PLEASE SEE https://wordpress.com/post/whatdidyousay.org/88628
The SPLC also demonized the effort to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for failing to enforce immigration law and prevent mass hordes of aliens from entering the country. In an article focused on a militia group’s efforts to take border enforcement into its own hands, Goldwasser claims the militia’s action represents “a product of the anti-immigrant environment produced by the xenophobic posturing of hate groups and politicians, and the controversial impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, the first Latinx and immigrant to lead the Department of Homeland Security.”
Goldwasser suggested that Mayorkas faces an impeachment effort not because he has failed to enforce immigration law and prevent the border crisis, but because he is the first Latino to head the Department of Homeland Security. She used “Latinx,” a transgender neologism, in order to avoid the clear masculine ending in Spanish for “Latino.”
The SPLC did not reserve all its vitriol for Republicans, however. Kieffer and Goldwasser noted that President Joe Biden has supported a Senate bill that included minor border security measures and changes to the asylum process in exchange for funding to Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion.
“The bill worried immigration advocates, who viewed it as being extremely harsh and out of step for the needs of border communities,” they wrote. “The Senate relief package debacle shows the same anti-immigrant animus undergirding impeachment of Mayorkas and the standoff in Eagle Pass.”
It seems the SPLC’s partisan attacks against pro-enforcement groups have so unmoored the organization from reality that it is unwilling to accept the blatantly obvious truth. Recent polls have showed former President Donald Trump, who currently leads in the Republican presidential nominating proces, ahead of Biden in key swing states. Americans give Biden poor marks on the border, which helps explain the president’s belated support for some immigration restrictions. Biden knows he has to make up ground on this issue, and he’s furiously working to make it seem like the border crisis is Republicans’ fault.
Yet the SPLC hasn’t gotten the memo. It’s so focused on branding as “hateful” anyone who dares to speak the plain truth about the border crisis that it turns against Biden, the very president the SPLC brags about influencing and with whom SPLC leaders have met at least six times personally.
The SPLC’s radical agenda of critical race theory, transgender lessons, and apparent hatred for the very idea of national borders has no place in America’s classrooms. Solas is right to demand answers from her Rhode Island school district, and parents across the country should be on the lookout for the SPLC’s influence in schools.
ERA would create a ‘blank check’ to discriminate against people of faith, expert warns.
ERA would create ‘blank check’ to discriminate against people of faith, expert warns. The proposed amendment does not include any protections against religious discrimination.
The Minnesota Queer Caucus held a press conference Thursday to reaffirm their support for the so-called “Equal Rights Amendment” (ERA). Attempting to enshrine abortion and gender identity into Minnesota’s constitution, the ERA is a major priority for the Democratic majorities in Minnesota’s state legislature.
“We are going to pass the most inclusive, comprehensive ERA off the floor that we can this year,” said Rep. Leigh Finke, a transgender legislator and chair of the Queer Caucus. READ MORE…
Washington D.C. seems to be more concerned with Ukraine’s borders than the millions invading their own U.S. borders from countries around the world with military-age men, crime, Fentanyl killing our kids, human trafficking, and Terrorism threats. Nor are they troubled by the $33 trillion debt that has grown out of control.
Biden Border Crisis: Military-Age Syrian Men Illegally Cross Into San Diego (VIDEO)
Three Syrian men were encountered by Griff Jenkins of Fox News at the southern border. The invasion of illegals has spiked in Jacumba (east San Diego County) since Texas has locked up the border.
“Where are you from?” Griff Jenkins asked. “From Syria,” the illegal said. Syria is a country known for its ties to terrorism yet military-age men from this region are pouring over the border on Joe Biden’s open border invitation. San Diego County has seen an increase of illegals coming through the southern border. TGP previously reported that in one week’s time illegals from 73 different countries were reported in San Diego. READ MORE.
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.
A private grant for K-5 pilot programs in civics education in California, Georgia, Missouri, New York, and Wisconsin promotes a radical agenda, including ideological “action civics” as a substitute for the traditional approach. (Photo illustration: skynesher/Getty Images)
Everyone agrees that American students need better civics education.
Civic knowledge in America is abysmal. Fewer than half of American adults can name the three branches of government—and a quarter can’t name any branch at all.
Likewise, a quarter of Americans couldn’t name any of the five freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment.
That’s why supporters of civics education might be inclined to celebrate the recent announcement that a private initiative called Educating for American Democracy would award $600,000 in grants for K-5 pilot implementation projects to applicants from California, Georgia, Missouri, New York, and Wisconsin.
But for supporters of true civics education, popping the champagne in this case would be a grave mistake.
“EAD is a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” warns Mark Bauerlein, a professor emeritus at Emory University. In his telling, the seemingly innocuous goals of Educating for American Democracy, such as inculcating an “inquisitive mindset towards civics and history,” mask a more radical agenda. As Bauerlein explains:
Yes, [Educating for American Democracy] contains a few traditionalist elements that deflect the charge of anti-conservatism. Overall, however, the EAD Roadmap circumscribes those elements with identity politics that left-wing teachers can plunder all year long. Here is what EAD really means by ‘inquisitive mindset’: a takedown of heroes, emphasis on victims (women and racial minorities), denial of American exceptionalism, and a focus on the failings of the founding.
According to David Randall, director of research at the National Association of Scholars, Educating for American Democracy is among the worst civics education resources.
Why the poor grade? Randall said EAD is “the central political-administrative push to reshape American civics education into a radical mold,” with the goal “to get every state civics education standard aligned for action civics and abbreviating as much as possible traditional civics education.”
What is “action civics”? According to the Pedagogy Companion to the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy, it is “a specialized form of project-based learning that emphasizes youth voice and expertise based on their own capabilities and experience, learning by direct engagement with a democratic system and institutions, and reflection on impact.”
If you’re still confused, that’s because, as Randall observes, the proponents of action civics and other radical pedagogies use “impenetrable, jargon-heavy terms” to mask their true agenda.
In his report, Randall explains what action civics really entails:
What this means is that in ‘action civics’ history and government classes, students spend class time and receive class credit for work with ‘nongovernmental community organizations.’ This substitution degrades teachers’ and students’ esteem for classroom instruction, which is deemed not to have sufficient civic purpose in itself. It reduces the scarce time available for students actually to learn about the history of their country and the nature of their republic.
Most importantly, it introduces a pedagogy that facilitates teachers’ ability to impose their personal predilections on their students, by influencing the process by which students choose ‘community partners’ with which to work. It also facilitates the ability of peer pressure to impose group predilections on individual, dissenting students. We may note that the advocates of ‘action civics’ explicitly distinguish this activity from volunteering: action civics is meant to change the political system, not to support civil society.
In other words, Randall explains, in place of real civics, action civics “substitutes radical progressive pedagogy as a vocational training for activism.”
In action civics courses, students get class credit for attending protests or supporting progressive organizations. The EAD website’s “Educator Resources” includes links to resources from left-wing organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose “Learning for Justice” curriculum provides lessons on the “concepts of intersectionality, privilege and oppression.”
Instead of inculcating students with a Madisonian appreciation for our constitutional order, EAD-backed action civics programs train Alinskyite activists.
It’s easy to see why the Democrat-controlled Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction and public school districts in Los Angeles and New York are excited to accept EAD funds. What’s harder to understand is why the Georgia Department of Education would be.
Georgia’s superintendent of schools, Richard Woods, is a Republican who previously wrote that the “ideology of Critical Race Theory (CRT) has no place in our schools and classrooms” and cautioned that “[w]e must be vigilant against embracing polarizing practices that only seek to divide us.”
Vigilance against embracing radical and polarizing practices in education is certainly necessary. Georgia policymakers should start by exercising greater vigilance over the grants they accept to further civics education.
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.
Francine Champagne was elected to her local school board in Canada in November 2022. By November 2023, she had been fired from her university teaching job and suspended from Winnipeg’s Louis Riel School Division (LRSD) board so many times — without pay — and with endless suspensions in sight, that she was forced to resign as a trustee of the board.
Champagne’s “crime”? A few posts she made on her personal Facebook page. One said, “Make men masculine again, make women feminine again, make children innocent again.” Another read, “To identify is to live a lie.” The third post was a link to the Stop the World Control website, which, Champagne explained, “included information on the sexualization and grooming of children, the United Nations’ agenda and the WHO’s ‘educational’ material.”
It’s important to remember that Champagne was elected to her position. She beat out an incumbent candidate who’d been on the board for decades and received votes from 2,817 people who determined she was the best voice to represent them and oversee the education of their children. What’s more, freedom of speech is enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
According to Champagne, her first six months on the LRSD board were positive. She visited numerous schools, attended district events, and built “an excellent rapport” with administrators, teachers, and the community. But then she ventured to ask that the board discuss a statement the board chairwoman, Sandy Nemeth, had posted on LRSD’s social media platforms declaring that LRSD fully supports LGBT resources in their schools.
“I simply asked during one of our meetings if we could talk about the stance of each trustee, because we never had addressed the issue,” said Champagne. “[Nemeth] immediately shut me down and told me harshly that she made the decision to emit a statement on behalf of the trustees, and that the diversity policy was not up for discussion. That was the end of that.”
It was, indeed, the beginning of the end for Champagne. Shortly after the dust-up with the board chair, Nemeth herself informed Champagne — during “Pride Month,” of course — that she had breached the LRSD code of conduct for her “hateful” posts that didn’t align with LRSD’s diversity policy.
Phony pretext in hand, the witch hunters set to work destroying Champagne’s life, starting, predictably, by attacking her in the press. Just five days after Nemeth’s confrontation, screenshots of the “hateful” posts appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press alongside an article about Champagne being “anti-trans” and “anti-LGBTQ.”
The next day, the LRSD board suspended Champagne for three months, and that same week, she lost her job.
The nightmare had just begun. Nemeth told the CBC that the decision to suspend Champagne “came after the realization of some incredibly unfortunate — and I will define unfortunate to mean disrespectful, hateful — comments on her Facebook page specifically indicating transphobia, homophobia, and just a general complete lack of [respect] for the LGBTQ community.”
“Because Champagne was democratically elected by the community, there is no provision within the Public Schools Act for the board to remove her,” Nemeth added. “However, the board can and will continue to suspend Champagne if she fails to sign and uphold the code of conduct.”
The board continued to issue suspension after suspension and went so far as to ban friends and supporters who showed up to board meetings to defend Champagne permanently from LRSD property. One community member noted in a letter to the LRSD board, “You are doing to her what you accuse her of doing to you, and that is bullying and discrimination.”
Champagne is a devout Catholic who expressed having “no fear” during her ordeal. “People are constantly calling me, emailing me, praying for me,” she said. “And I feel very peaceful inside just knowing that I’m standing on God’s truth.”
After determining that the LRSD work environment had “become unbearable” and that “it would be unsafe and unhealthy to work in an environment where intolerance reigns,” Champagne issued a statement of resignation and told her side of the story the media had largely ignored.
“I was no longer able to afford the legal fees towards the appeal process and other matters,” she said. “I surely did not become a school trustee with the intention of entering a legal battle. My objective was to focus on education (the 3Rs) and the molding of healthy minds, but political activism seems to take precedence. For all the reasons listed above, I will be forced to leave the board, and not of my own volition.”
Responding to Champagne’s letter of resignation, the LRSD board danced on her grave with nauseating sanctimony.
“Since June 6, 2023, the school board has endeavoured to hold a colleague accountable for words and deeds that caused great harm to students, staff, and members of our community while also working to reassure our community of our commitment to safe and caring working and learning environments,” they wrote. “The board extends appreciation to everyone in LRSD and beyond for their messages and demonstrations of support. We want to reassure you that actions and language that cause harm will never be tolerated, and decisive action will always be taken against anyone who attempts to spread baseless, malicious, deceitful and vengeful lies about our students, staff, and families.”
“The board accuses me of being harmful for trying to protect the children from all of this,” Champagne said. “In psychology, this is called gaslighting or projection. Unreal! The board has made its intentions clear: traditional views will not be tolerated.”
As Champagne’s martyrdom testifies to the power of the woke mob, Monique LaGrange continues to fight. Like Champagne, LaGrange was democratically elected and expelled as a trustee for refusing to apologize for posting a meme to her Facebook page or to undergo sensitivity training.
According to The Democracy Fund which is representing LaGrange in a lawsuit against the Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools, the meme “depicted two side-by-side photographs, one of children holding swastika flags and the other of children holding pride progress flags. The meme … included a caption stating, ‘brainwashing is brainwashing.’”
“I was elected to stand up and protect our children, and that is what I am doing,” LaGrange said.
“Our society is messed up, but God will fix this,” concluded Champagne, “all in His perfect timing.”
Teresa Mull is an assistant editor of the Spectator World, a policy adviser for education at the Heartland Institute, and author of “Woke-Proof Your Life.”
Members of the pro-family group Moms For Liberty—seen here attendng an event in Vero Beach, Florida, on Oct. 16, 2022—hosted a forum on the many failures of the New York City school system on Thursday night. (Photo: Giorgio Viera/AFP/Getty Images)
Moms for Liberty held an event in New York City on Thursday night to discuss and diagnose the woeful state of education in the Big Apple. Residents and local representatives were invited to take part in the education organization’s town hall on the Upper East Side and the follow-up discussion.
Moms for Liberty has been treated with hostility by left-wing groups in the city, so it was a full house for the event—not just inside the building, but outside, too.
A gaggle of protesters showed up to crowd the front of the building and chant slogans. The New York Police Department kept watch at the entrance and helpfully guided me to the door. The protesters held up a large sign “Keep NYC Fascist-Free!” as they blockaded the door and yelled at the people going inside.
As is its reflexive habit, the Left brands anyone who opposes their agenda as “fascist,” in this case Moms for Liberty. (Photo: Jarrett Stepman/The Daily Signal)
“This group is anti-LGBTQ, supports book bans, harasses teachers & school librarians, and has been labeled by [the Southern Poverty Law Center] a ‘far-right extremist organization,’” Levine wrote in a statement before the event took place.
#NOW Manhattan president @MarkLevineNYC joins protest against 'Moms for Liberty' townhall on the UES in NYC – "Exhibit A right here of what we are up against" he addressed the crowd outside. "Get Out of here!" an attendee of the event shouts in response. pic.twitter.com/pUCQYYx2KJ
As I left the event, one of the demonstrators—in a pink unicorn costume—followed me down the street. I was able to snap a picture of this person when I stopped and she/he/they/them—or whatever it was—said, “We don’t like you. You smell.” Needless to say, this was not the beginning of a Socratic dialogue.
As I left the @Moms4Liberty townhall I was approached by this furry, whose comment was “we don’t like you, you smell.” Some high minded rhetoric right there. The picture is very close up because she was right in my face https://t.co/o7hDdqtJC6pic.twitter.com/ogVn9GeGyR
I live in New York, so I’ve definitely been followed by much worse, but all I could think was: “That’s the best line you could come up with?”
For what it’s worth, the person in the pink unicorn costume was apparently not a “furry,” according to internet trolls. My apologies for not knowing the difference.
As for the actual event, the following are some of my takeaways from a panel discussion about the problems with New York City schools.
Poor Return on Education Investment
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice led a panel discussion about how New York City schools have failed children and parents alike.
“A third of the kids in the United States are reading on grade level. That’s atrocious, but here in New York City, where you spend about $40,000 a year on each child’s education, only a quarter of the children are reading on grade level,” she said in opening remarks.
Justice said that in New York, black and Hispanic students are particularly struggling, as only 13 in 100 are proficient in reading. That’s despite the New York City school district spending the most money per student compared with any other district in the nation.
Justice contrasted New York City’s record against that of Miami, which spends $11,000 per student, yet “40 out of 100 fourth graders are reading and math proficient.” She said that’s nothing to brag about, “but for heaven’s sake, right?”
The Moms for Liberty co-founder said that the results in New York City schools were declining even before the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, but there was a complete collapse during and afterward.
Misguided Focus on Identity Over Merit
Wai Wah Chin of the Chinese Americans Citizens Alliance of Greater New York spoke about how a focus on “equity” has moved the school system away from evaluating the individual skills and talents of students.
“Our schools should be providing the best education for the children as they are, and that means you cannot dispel and get rid of merit,” she said. “Merit must exist, because if you do not have merit, you do not have good education.”
Chin explained that she was referring specifically to academic merit—“reading, writing and arithmetic.”
“If you can’t do that, you’ve failed as a school,” she said.
Teaching students to be activists first before teaching students to think—Chin cited the people protesting outside—is a failure of education, she added.
“If you do not respect facts, and you do not respect logic, you are not capable of making the decisions that are important for yourself in life and in the world,” she continued. “And that’s what our schools must do: Provide that kind of environment so that you have facts and not ideology.”
Paul Rossi, a New York City teacher, followed up on Chin’s comments about ideology in the school system. He spoke about his previous teaching experience at Grace Church School, an elite New York private school. He said that the school pushes ideas such as “anti-racism, critical race theory, gender ideology, these progressive beliefs, which have really come through the universities and dominated education, because most of the people who go through the [education] schools and teachers are inculcated in these ideas.”
Rossi said that he teaches math, but that the ideology that dominates in schools denies that objectivity exists and calls objectivity an element of white supremacy. He said that he has seen a shift away from building character to a focus on group identity.
‘Fund Students, Not Systems’
Corey DeAngelis, the executive director of the Education Freedom Institute, spoke about policy solutions that could improve education in New York City. He explained that New York has a cap on the largely successful charter schools because “the Democratic Party is owned by the teachers unions. It’s that simple.”
Almost all the political campaign contributions from teachers unions go to Democrats, DeAngelis said, and that constitutes a “nonstop money-laundering operation.” He said that while New York is dominated by this political dynamic, there’s been a sea change in other states because teachers unions have overplayed their hand and “awakened a sleeping giant” of parents.
That has led to parents pulling money out of failing public schools and creating school choice programs, he explained. “We should fund students, not systems,” he said.
The education scholar spoke about how states such as Arizona have created Education Savings Accounts and other programs that have allowed parents to directly pay for the education they want for their child, whether that be a public school, a private school, a charter school, or a home-based education.
“The money follows the child,” he explained.
It’s Worse Than You Think
Nicholas Giordano, a professor of political science at Suffolk County Community College, spoke about how the education system has been transformed and how “it’s 10 times worse” than what most people think. He said that in his two decades of teaching, he’s noticed a pattern that students increasingly don’t have the knowledge they need when they enter higher education.
He said that he began instituting a citizenship exam on basic civics and history questions when students took his classes. He said that very few pass it.
“Students aren’t learning. They are simply being cycled through the system,” he said.
Giordano said that, according to national assessments, only 13% of students are proficient in history and just 23% are proficient in civics. He said that this failure has been the product of two main problems. The first is that parents became less involved in their children’s education. In many cases, both parents are working or the child comes from a single-parent household. He said that began to change during the COVID-19 lockdowns when the “veil” was lifted, and parents saw what was being taught in classrooms as a result of the switch to online instruction. Many people saw for the first time the “anti-Americanism” that has crept into K-12 instruction, he said.
That’s a huge problem, Giordano said, because as the Founding Fathers insisted, our “small-r” republican institutions must be nourished by an education grounded in furthering those institutions.
“Our education system should be linking us together. Instead, it divides us,” he said.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt—seen here addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference-Texas on Aug. 5, 2022, in Dallas—issued an executive order in December that said executive state agencies may not use taxpayer funds to “grant or support diversity, equity, or inclusion provisions, departments, activities, procedures, or programs” that treat people differently based on race or color or national origin. (Photo: Lev Radin/Pacific Press/Light Rocket/Getty Images)
State lawmakers continue to unravel the thread of discrimination leading to university bureaucracies committed to diversity, equity and inclusion.
This spring, prepare for more legislators to cobble together provisions that protect students and college employees from DEI’s racial bias.
Last year, public officials in five states—Florida, Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma and Wisconsin—adopted proposals that put university systems on notice that DEI departments’ discriminatory activities would be shut down.
Florida
After Florida lawmakers adopted proposals in May calling for an end to DEI on college campuses, the state university governing board voted in November to prohibit universities from using taxpayer funds on DEI.
Texas
In Texas, a new state law requires state university administrators to begin shutting down campus DEI offices this year.
State legislators in most states returned to session earlier this month, and DEI is at the top of the agenda for many.
Utah
In Utah, lawmakers are considering a proposal that prohibits mandatory DEI trainings that advocate for racial preferences or “promotes the differential treatment of an individual” based on race. The proposal also says universities cannot operate programs that assert “directly or indirectly that an individual should be discriminated against, receive adverse treatment, be advanced, or receive beneficial treatment because of the individual’s personal identity characteristics.”
Utah State University operates a DEI office that, among other pledges to the woke orthodoxy, provides a “land acknowledgement statement” on its website. Universities use these statements as a guilt offering, as though by saying the school was not the first to use the property on which the college sits, they absolve themselves of historical events the school had nothing to do with. No word on whether the school intends to give the land back.
The University of Utah also has a DEI office that will host an event in February on “Lunar Perspectives: Moonlight Dialogue with Black Queer Voices.” DEI offices often host events such as these, and parents and taxpayers should wonder how such DEI programs improve student achievement or prepare students to be better engineers, medical professionals, educators or even astronomers when they graduate.
South Carolina
In South Carolina, lawmakers have introduced a proposal that would prohibit colleges from “establishing or maintaining an office or division or other unit by any name whose purpose, in whole or in part, is the promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion.” To the university’s credit, the University of South Carolina renamed its DEI office last year and added civil rights to the new office’s title, though Clemson University still operates a DEI office.
Oklahoma
In Oklahoma, state lawmakers have introduced four proposals to enforce Gov. Kevin Stitt’s executive order from last December that said executive state agencies may not use taxpayer funds to “grant or support diversity, equity or inclusion provisions, departments, activities, procedures or programs” that treat people differently based on race or color or national origin.
Both the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University have DEI offices, and the Oklahoma Council for Public Affairs found that the University of Oklahoma spent more than $83 million on DEI activities over the past 10 years. Last year, school officials spent $56,000 on drag queen shows alone.
Whether state officials will identify DEI offices as discriminatory—and document how these departments do nothing to advance racial or intellectual diversity—will be key measures of success for state lawmakers this legislative session.
DEI offices and training programs advocate for racial preferences and other slippery components of Marxist critical theory, such as so-called microaggressions and implicit bias.
Legislative proposals also should prevent college administrators from requiring job applicants to write DEI statements as a condition of applying for a position.
West Virginia
West Virginia lawmakers are considering a new proposal that bans these loyalty oaths, saying, “No diversity statement shall ever be required or solicited as part of an admissions process, employment application process, hiring process, contract renewal process or promotion process.”
For proposals to deal effectively with the bias inherent in DEI, lawmakers should directly state that colleges and universities cannot use taxpayer funds to create or operate DEI offices.
Public officials in five states are freeing their states’ campuses from DEI’s discrimination—and there are more to come.
The U.S. Department of State reportedly hired German censors to train American teachers on how to facilitate so-called anti-disinformation efforts in the classroom.
Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the Media Research Center (MRC) and shared exclusively with The Daily Wire reveal that the State Department paid for trainings for hundreds of teachers “created mostly by German ‘disinformation’ activists.” The “Medialogues on Propaganda,” which featured 11 online training meetings between June 2021 and April 2022 and was attended by some 700 teachers, was funded by a grant from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin.
“The intent was to train teachers to ‘inoculate’ students against disinformation that train them in ‘media literacy,’” The Daily Wire reported. “The State Department sessions were used by its activist organizers to promote products from their for-profit ‘partner,’ Ad Fontes, as well as NewsGuard.”
Ad Fontes is a for-profit firm founded in 2018 that advises advertisers, online platforms, and educators about which websites to either boycott or censor. While the company claims to be impartial, its recommendations show otherwiseby disproportionately targeting conservative media as outlets for clients to avoid.
NewsGuard is a similar “disinformation” group backed by federal grant money. It operates as a browser extension that rates the credibility of news organizations and has been deployed in classrooms. A study published last month by the Media Research Center shows NewsGuard’s credibility ratings “overwhelmingly favored left-leaning outlets over right-leaning ones.” Prominent examples of NewsGuard’s biased ratings include perfect grades for legacy outlets that botched the Hunter Biden laptop story while giving failing grades to conservative websites that got it right.
The federal government’s use of taxpayer funds to back NewsGuard is the subject of a lawsuit from The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas, which are collectively suing the State Department to stop “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history.” The case exposes federal censorship efforts beyond the dramatic discoveries in the pending Supreme Court case of Murthy v. Missouri (also known as Missouri v. Biden).
The State Department did not respond to The Federalist’s repeated inquiries about why the agency did not shut down the propagandist trainings by German censors.
The government trainings were reportedly run by Germany’s University of Würzburg’s Media Education & Educational Technology Lab and the University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab with Media Literacy Now (MLN), a non-profit group.
“MLN lobbies for mandatory training in schools to fight ‘misinformation’ and ‘online radicalization,’ boasting that it has helped convince 18 states to make laws on media literacy training,” the Daily Wire reported. “And while the Rhode Island Lab wrote an entire report on the importance of ‘media literacy’ without ever defining it, MLN had spoken more clearly, calling it a ‘tool to create the society we all deserve: one that nurtures racial equity, social justice, and true democracy. Media literacy equals cultural change.’”
University of Rhode Island Communications Professor Renee Hobbs is an MLN advisory board member and the founder of the Rhode Island Lab. According to the Daily Wire, Hobbs previously pressed for $60 million in subsidies for “anti-disinformation work like hers — legislation whose momentum rested on the idea that Russians caused Trump to win in 2016, itself a conspiracy.”
Hobbs played host to the state-sponsored “disinformation” seminars while also serving as chair of a National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) group encouraging teachers to shift their focus to “consumerism and economic injustice.” Hobbs’ Rhode Island Lab also once used a fake, satirical Lego set to encourage teachers to hold student discussions about the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
“When asked why the State Department would fund a propaganda seminar aimed at Americans,” the Wire reported, “the State Department told The Daily Wire that with its $30,000 grant to Media Literacy Now, ‘the U.S. Embassy in Germany supported the participation of German participants in the media literacy program you are inquiring about.’”
The current U.S. ambassador to Germany, Amy Gutmann, was sworn in back in April 2022, just as the State Department trainings were purportedly ending. Before becoming Biden’s ambassador in Berlin, however, Gutmann was president of the University of Pennsylvania since 2004. The Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement was established under Gutmann’s tenure, where about ten classified documents were discovered from Biden’s time as vice president that included “top-secret material.” Biden was paid a nearly seven-figure salary from the Ivy League university despite rare school appearances.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL: Joe and Serena Wailes revealed last month that their 11-year-old daughter was assigned to share a bed with a boy who identifies as a transgender girl on an overnight school trip. Their story has led to more parents coming forward with similar allegations, according to a new demand letter first obtained by The Daily Signal.
“There has been an outpouring of support for the Waileses from the Jefferson County community,” writes Katherine Anderson, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom and director of ADF’s Center for Parental Rights. “We have been approached by many parents who are similarly concerned about your current policy and practice. We also discovered that what happened to the Wailes family was not an isolated incident within your district.”
“In fact,” she continues, “we have spoken with other families whose children were placed in the same room with children of the opposite sex at Outdoor Lab.”
Outdoor Lab is an outdoor education program in the Western United States where “students are immersed in an outdoor academic setting where they spend their time learning about themselves and how they fit into the world around them,” according to the program’s website.
The program, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Daily Signal, is “a distinct program within Jeffco Public Schools,” and engages about 5,000 sixth-grade students every year.
“As you know,” writes Anderson, “Outdoor Lab is a longstanding, highly anticipated, and required component of the sixth-grade curricula in JCPS.”
Anderson then revealed that ADF has received reports of sixth graders of the opposite sex being placed in the same cabin, as well as a high school counselor being placed in the same cabin as children of the opposite sex.
ADF shared with The Daily Signal that in the first scenario, sixth grade girls were placed in the same room as a sixth grade boy who identifies as a transgender girl. In the second scenario, an 18-year-old high school girl who identifies as a transgender boy was placed in the same room as sixth grade boys.
This incident involving the 18-year-old is particularly concerning, Anderson indicated, since “in addition to staying in the same cabin as sixth graders, counselors at Outdoor Lab are also in charge of supervising showers to ensure students do not take too long.”
Families are specifically asked not to visit their children during the week while they attend Outdoor Lab, according to the organization’s “Parent Packet & Packing List” materials, since this may contribute to homesickness.
Students also “do not have phone privileges,” the guidance notes.
Anderson highlighted this fact in the letter to the school district, saying: “Considering that students at Outdoor Lab cannot contact their parents during the trip, it would be up to an eleven-year-old to face this invasion of privacy alone.”
“Here,” she added, referencing the situation in which the 18-year-old biologically female counselor stayed in a cabin with sixth grade boys, “the child did not feel comfortable speaking up during the trip, and the parents did not discover this invasion of their child’s privacy until the trip ended. This cannot be the ‘individualized arrangement’ your policy envisions.”
In the Waileses’ case, their daughter was able to call her mother from the hotel bathroom to share that her bedmate was, in fact, a boy.
The Wailes family had called on the Colorado-based Jefferson County School Board and Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Tracy Dorland in early December to clarify “whether JCPS will continue this practice of intentionally withholding information about rooming accommodations from parents like the Waileses, who object to their children rooming with a student of the opposite sex, regardless of the other student’s gender identity.”
WATCH:
This practice renders it impossible for these parents to make informed decisions about their children’s privacy, upbringing, and participation in school-sponsored programs,” reads their December demand letter, which The Daily Signal previously reported.
“Additionally, our clients request information related to JB R-1 and the ability to opt out of this rooming policy for all future school trips.”
The Waileses describe how their daughter, who is in fifth grade, went on a JCPS-sponsored trip to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., in June 2023. JCPS had repeatedly told parents that the boys and girls on the trip would be roomed on different floors—and chaperones told the students that boys would not even be allowed to visit the girls’ floor, as well as vice versa, according to the letter.
Serena Wailes also went on the trip, though she was not a chaperone.
The Waileses’ 11-year-old daughter, who is identified in the letter as “D.W.,” was assigned to a room with three other students, according to the demand letter. Two of these students were girls from her school, and the third student was a boy who identified as a girl (named in the letter as “K.E.M.”) who went to a different school.
D.W. and K.E.M were told that they would share a bed, and that evening, when the students were in their room together, K.E.M. reportedly revealed to the girls that he is a boy who identified as a girl.
“We were definitely not aware of that before we went on the trip,” Serena Wailes told The Daily Signal. The mother shared that this young boy was presenting as a girl, wearing girls’ clothing, and had longer hair.
Uncomfortable at the thought of sharing both a room and her bed with a boy, D.W. snuck into the bathroom and called her mother. Then she went downstairs and met her mom in the lobby to discuss the matter.
School chaperones called one of the trip leaders, Principal Ryan Lucas, who called the boy’s parents, according to the letter. “K.E.M.’s parents confirmed their child’s transgender gender identity and that K.E.M. was to be in ‘stealth mode,’ meaning students on the trip would not know about their child’s transgender status,” the letter reads.
After a good deal of trouble, chaperones finally agreed to move the male student, with a different female student, to another room.
“Throughout the entire evening, K.E.M.’s privacy and feelings were always the primary concern of JCPS employees,” the letter states. “After JCPS disregarded D.W.’s privacy and the Waileses’ parental rights, JCPS then silenced D.W., thus infringing on her freedom of speech, when a JCPS teacher told the three girls that they were not allowed to tell anyone that K.E.M. was transgender, even though K.E.M. voluntarily chose to share this information.”
According to the demand letter, the school district’s policy is, “in most cases,” to room students based on the gender they identify as, rather than their sex.
The Wailes parents have two fourth-grade children registered to attend a trip to New York, Washington, and Philadelphia in 2024, and they emphasize in their letter that the district must clarify its policies for room assignments for students, as well as parental ability to opt children out of sharing rooms with children of the opposite sex.
WATCH:
NEW: This week we sat down with Joe + Serena Wailes, the parents of an 11-year-old girl shocked to discover on her school trip that she had been assigned to share a bed with a boy who identified as a trans girl.
In the Thursday demand letter, ADF expresses concerns that the school district failed to state whether parents can opt their children out of any policy that rooms children by their gender identity rather than their biological sex.
Jeffco Public Schools had responded to ADF on Dec. 21, according to a letter reviewed by The Daily Signal, claiming that neither the supervising chaperones nor the private tour operator knew that the student in question was a boy who identified as a transgender girl.
ADF responds by asserting, “That’s not the relevant question here. This was a Jefferson County-sponsored trip, so the district’s knowledge, rather than that of the individual teachers on the trip, is pertinent.”
“Policy JB-R requires that the ‘school shall maintain a mandatory permanent student record that includes a student’s legal name and legal gender,’” ADF continues. “Therefore, even if the student ‘enrolled for the trip as a female,’ the district’s permanent record still reflects the student’s male sex. The district knew about the student’s sex and allowed the student’s parents to choose whether their child was roomed with male or female students. Our clients are merely asking for similar treatment. They would like the same opportunity to decide whether their daughter is roomed with male or female students.”
“Your stated policy allowed one family to make an informed decision beforehand, while the Waileses were not given that consideration,” the letter continues.
In just three years, all 50 states saw significant declines in K-12 student academic achievement. The declines in math scores in Minnesota were among the 10 worst.
“THE SPRING 2022 NATIONAL ASSESSMENT OF EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS RESULTS RELEASED MONDAY, OCT. 24, SHOW MINNESOTA EIGHTH-GRADERS’ MATH TEST SCORES DROPPED BY 11 POINTS FROM 2019, PLACING THE STATE AMONG THE 10 BIGGEST DROPS IN THAT AGE GROUP NATIONALLY. NO STATE REPORTED GAINS IN MATH PERFORMANCE FOR FOURTH- AND EIGHTH-GRADERS SINCE THE LAST ASSESSMENT, AND NEARLY ALL STATES, INCLUDING MINNESOTA, SAW READING SCORES DROP.”
In just three years, all 50 states saw significant declines in K-12 student academic achievement. The declines in math scores in Minnesota were among the 10 worst. The results indicate a catastrophic reduction in the academic achievement of Minnesota school children. While everyone is right to sound the alarm about these results, the numbers show academic achievement was declining well …READ MORE…
Big Government has been pushing corporate America to do its bidding covertly behind the scenes. Big Tech, Wall Street, and Big Pharma are all guilty of falling in line with DEI, Vaccine, and quarantine mandates pushed by a tyrannical unconstitutional government, mainly the Democrat party which has entrenched itself into the bureaucracy at every level.
Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy
Former Department of Defense Chief of Staff and Deputy Director of National Intelligence under President Trump, Kash Patel, spoke to The Gateway Pundit about his new book, “Government Gangsters,” which is set to finally be released after the federal government delayed it for nine months and Patel had to file a lawsuit for security clearance.
Kash Patel told The Gateway Pundit they are trying to “bury” the story “because the book exposes, by name and agency, every corrupt actor I encountered, puts them on blast, and tells the world how we remove them from power and restore our agencies to work for the … READ MORE…
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.
Harvard President Claudine Gay said she would resign from her position on Tuesday, after her first months in the role were rocked by her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus and allegations of plagiarism.
Gay had faced pressure to resign from Harvard’s Jewish community and some members of Congress over her comments at the Dec. 5 congressional hearing, and she has also faced several allegations of plagiarism for her academic work in recent months.
In a letter to the Harvard community, Gay said her decision to step down had been “difficult beyond words.”
“After consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.”
The Harvard Corporation, the university’s 11-member governing body, said in an email to the community that its members had accepted Gay’s resignation “with sorrow.”
Gay, former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee on Dec. 5 about a rise in antisemitism on college campuses following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October.
The trio declined to give a definitive “yes” or “no” answer to Republican Representative Elise Stefanik’s question as to whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ codes of conduct regarding bullying and harassment, saying they had to balance it against free speech protections.
More than 70 U.S. lawmakers signed a letter demanding that the governing boards of the three universities remove the presidents, citing dissatisfaction with their testimony.
Magill resigned after receiving backlash for her comments.
“Harvard knows that this long overdue forced resignation of the antisemitic plagiarist president is just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history,” Representative Stefanik said in a statement on Tuesday.
‘RACIST VITRIOL’
Despite the controversy ensnaring Gay, the Harvard Corporation last month reaffirmed its confidence that she could lead the school through a period of high tension over the war in the Middle East. It also said an independent review of Gay’s academic work found she had not committed research misconduct. She has submitted several corrections for citation errors in recent weeks.
Gay, who became the university’s first Black president six months ago, and the members of the Harvard Corporation said in their letters to the community on Tuesday that she had been subject to racist attacks.
Some of Gay’s critics, including billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, have argued that she was chosen for the role as part of the school’s effort to promote diversity rather than for her qualifications.
Ackman could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday. He reposted the Harvard Crimson’s story about Gay’s resignation on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
“It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” Gay said in her statement.
The Harvard Corporation wrote that she had been subjected to “deeply personal and sustained attacks” that included “racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls.”
With legislative battles heating up, detransitioners fighting back, and families openly sharing their heartbreaking plights, the transgender battle is entering some startling — and perhaps encouraging — new phases. As these changes unfold, “Generation Indoctrination” host Brandon Showalter is back with a new season of his eye-opening documentary podcast series, providing a unique lens into this diabolical issue.
WARNING: Adult themes and discussions are present in this series. This is not appropriate for children.
This past year was unlike any before it in terms of visible opposition to trans policies, particularly the experimental medicalization of gender confusion via puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and the performing of irreversible surgeries on gender-confused minors.
Across the U.S. South and Midwest, 17 state legislatures implemented bans on gender medicalization on youth and, as of this episode’s publication, a bill that would do so is sitting on the desk of the governor of Ohio, which will become the 18th state this year if the legislation if enacted into law. The state-level legislative push is perhaps the greatest indicator that public awareness has reached a point where the issue cannot be ignored nationally and it is likely to be discussed in the context of the 2024 presidential election (hear more about this on the premier episode).
In this inaugural episode of the third season of “Generation Indoctrination,” The Christian Post engages lawmakers who have been instrumental at the state level to protect children from irreversible medical harm in addition to public policy experts and leaders working to address these and related issues on the national scene, including a left-wing radical feminist activist and author who has been resisting gender identity ideology and policies for nearly a decade.
The mob’s stranglehold of speech on college campuses may be beginning to loosen thanks to legal challenges aimed at strengthening the free-speech rights of college professors and students. Just look at Western Michigan University. In 2021, WMU fired adjunct music professor Daniel Mattson solely for writing about his religious views off-campus on his own time. After a remarkably short seven months of litigation, Mattson was vindicated this year on Oct. 31.
Mattson, a professional symphony trombonist, had worked for WMU’s School of Music since 1999. He performed in the university’s Western Brass Quintet, comprised of School of Music faculty members. As part of his duties, Mattson also performed with the Western Winds, a student-faculty ensemble.
In 2009, Mattson returned to Catholicism and left behind his prior homosexual lifestyle. For several years, he wrote articles and spoke at public events explaining how the church should engage with people who experience same-sex attraction. All the while, Mattson strictly compartmentalized his religious activity from his work at WMU. He never initiated a discussion about his religious beliefs or views concerning sexuality with students.
Punished for Christian Ideas
In 2017, Mattson’s writing culminated in Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay: How I Reclaimed My Sexual Reality and Found Peace — an autobiographical account of his experience with same-sex attraction. He advocated that the church should sympathetically engage people who experience same-sex attraction while offering Catholicism as a better way.
In October 2021, Mattson agreed to perform as a guest artist at the School of Music. A recently appointed faculty member and LGBT activist discovered Mattson’s writings on his experiences with homosexuality and his recommitment to the Catholic faith. She launched a campaign to cancel Mattson’s planned events. As she posted to Twitter: “I won’t be going to any recitals by ex-gay activists, thanks.” She engaged students, faculty members, and DEI administrators in this effort. In the weeks leading up to the recital, there was extensive discussion over email and on social media among faculty and students, many of whom expressed support for the idea that Mattson’s presence on campus was “harmful” to students who identify as LGBT.
The administration’s response to the outcry over Mattson’s religious speech was swift and harsh. Matson was first stripped of his core duties, hindered in important school activities, and finally, WMU refused to renew his teaching contract.
Mattson refused to allow activists to cancel him without a fight. He challenged WMU’s forcing him to choose between earning a livelihood as a world-class artist and mentor for aspiring musicians on campus and his life as a religious believer and witness for conflicted Catholics off-campus.
Violations of Free Speech and Religion
In March 2023, Mattson, represented by the Center for Individual Rights, a nonprofit public interest law firm, filed a federal lawsuit on Mattson’s behalf challenging his firing as a violation of his rights to free exercise of religion and freedom of speech under the First and 14th Amendments.
WMU’s efforts to cancel Mattson ran afoul of both recent and longstanding Supreme Court precedent guaranteeing the right to religious free speech. Just last year, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Supreme Court reaffirmed a longstanding rule that government action that burdens a sincere religious practice in a manner that is not “neutral” must be justified by a compelling government interest and must be narrowly tailored to that interest.
In the 2018 decision Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the court found that a plaintiff may also prove a free exercise violation by showing evidence of government hostility to religion. Here, the school administration had made its views clear in an email sent to the entire school community. “Mr. Mattson is also a high-visibility advocate for the position that homosexuality is a chosen lifestyle that is to be avoided. He has stated his position strongly and widely. While he is free to express his beliefs, we cannot ignore the fact that they are harmful to members of our LGBTQ community, particularly our students.”
Another body of law going back to the 1960s prohibits retaliation by a public employer against an employee on the basis of protected speech by the employee, where that speech was directed to an issue of public concern and was not made as part of the employee’s official duties.
Confronted with the controlling legal authority in Mattson’s suit and his refusal to let WMU cancel him so cavalierly, WMU was again swift to respond. Rather than attempting to defend its sectarian or viewpoint-based punishment in a court of law, less than seven months after Mattson filed suit, WMU settled the case and agreed to pay Mattson substantial damages and attorney’s fees.
These are the workings of the leftist cancel mob. Instead of a wholly government-controlled censorship regime, militant activist mobs have informally coordinated with DEI bureaucrats. Together, they have cowed administrators to censor, punish, expel, and fire students and professors who contradicted leftist orthodoxies about skin color and sex. These radicals have met the slightest deviations from DEI orthodoxy with draconian punishments, and sincere religious believers have suddenly been at risk of losing their livelihoods.
Even more rewarding than the financial compensation for Mattson is the vindication in standing up for the rights of all individuals to religious expression regardless of what others think. As more victories like this pile up, we may hope that we’re reaching a turning point in the battle against cancel culture.
J. Robert Renner is the Deputy General Counsel of the Center for Individual Rights and counsel of record for Mr. Mattson.
Parents Joe and Serena Wailes were horrified to discover that their 11-year-old daughter had been assigned to not only room with, but also to share a bed with, a boy on her school trip. (Photo: Screenshot/YouTube)
DENVER—Parents Joe and Serena Wailes were shocked and horrified to discover that their 11-year-old daughter had been assigned to not only room with, but also share a bed with, a boy on her school trip. That boy identified as a transgender girl, the Wailes say, and his parents had allegedly told the school district that he was operating under “stealth mode”—meaning that his gender identity was to be kept secret.
In an interview with The Daily Signal earlier this month, the Wailes shared their experience in detail—how their daughter felt, how the school trip chaperones handled the matter, and what they want from the school district moving forward.
Represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, the Waileses are calling on the Colorado-based Jefferson County Board of Education and Jefferson County Public Schools to clarify “whether JCPS will continue this practice of intentionally withholding information about rooming accommodations from parents like the Waileses, who object to their children rooming with a student of the opposite sex, regardless of the other student’s gender identity.”
UCLA’s Jessie Smith looks on in a women’s beach volleyball match against Cal Poly on the campus of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California, on April 16, 2022. Now, another Californian, this one a teen boy who identifies as a girl might win a girls’ volleyball scholarship at the University of Washington, depriving a deserving girl of the award. (Photo: Erick Rasco/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images)
A California transgender volleyball player may become the first biological male recipient of a collegiate Division 1 athletic scholarship designated for women. Tate Drageset, 17, verbally committed to the University of Washington, where Drageset is poised to claim one of 12 Division 1 volleyball scholarships designated for female players, Reduxx first reported on Dec. 13.
A class of 2025 volleyball commitments Twitter page announced Drageset’s intention to play as an outside hitter at the University of Washington.
— Class of 2025 Volleyball Commits (@classof2025vb) June 27, 2023
In high school, Drageset earned MVP honors at the Girls Junior National Championships and was named the California Interscholastic Federation’s Division 5 Player of the Year for 2022-23.
The NCAA needs to prevent players like Drageset from taking scholarships from females, former Division 1 volleyball player and now Independent Women’s Forum spokeswoman Adriana McLamb told The Daily Signal.
“As a former Division 1 NCAA volleyball athlete and current recruiting coordinator, I know and see the uphill battle athletes are facing and will face by competing against a male for roster spots and scholarships designated for women,” McLamb said. “The sad truth is that schools will inevitably recruit the stronger, faster male athlete because the NCAA allows it.”
“The root of this issue is the NCAA, because they have outright refused to set parameters that safeguard their female athletes,” said McLamb, who now coaches aspiring collegiate female volleyball players.
In September 2022, another biological male identifying as a girl spiked the ball in the face of female high school volleyball player Payton McNabb in North Carolina, leaving her with severe head and neck injuries resulting in long-term concussion symptoms.
University of Washington Assistant Director of Athletic Communications Michael Bruscas declined to comment on Drageset.
“NCAA rules prohibit universities from commenting on any student-athlete who has not signed a letter of intent, regardless of whether they are being actively recruited or not, even in instances where media reports are claiming that a verbal commitment has been made,” he told The Daily Signal.
Drageset currently plays on the highest-level team at a Santa Monica, California, volleyball club. According to Drageset’s Hudl account, an online platform for coaches to review player performance, the athlete is 6 feet tall.
An anonymous source identified by Reduxx as the parent of a minor player in the Southern California Volleyball Association community revealed concerns about “the steady escalation of Drageset’s participation in women’s volleyball,” Reduxx reported.
The source said every parent in the volleyball association was aware of Drageset’s participation, but they were afraid to discuss it.
“Everyone is scared of how their child will be treated if they speak up,” the parent told Reduxx. “The stealing of positions and opportunities has been infuriating, and so sad, when you see how it affects the girls. There is no concern for their mental health or safety after being replaced.”
“Stealing the already few opportunities for women at the collegiate level,” Gaines wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “How can he be proud?”
Male takes women's volleyball scholarship at @UW … a soon-to-be Big 10 school
Stealing the already few opportunities for women at the collegiate level. How can he be proud?@UWVolleyball should rescind the scholarship if they really care about women. He can play with the men. pic.twitter.com/Dj7VcDWlW4
A recently elected Pennsylvania school board president made his priorities clear this month when she was sworn in using controversial books, including sexually explicit material.
On Dec. 4, Karen Smith, a Democrat who was elected to lead the state’s third-largest school district in November, was sworn in with a stack of books, including sexually explicit material.
“Thank you for your trust in me, I do not take this hand lightly,” Smith said when she became president of the Central Bucks County School Board. “To my supporters, I am so very thankful. To those of you who have challenged me, I will do all I can to hear your voices and concerns.”
However, based on the books upon which she swore an oath, Smith’s pledge to keep an open mind to parental concerns was hardly austere. According to Fox News, one of the books used in the swearing ceremony included Flamer, by Mike Curato, published in 2020.
“[Flamer] tells the story of a character who is bullied at a Boy Scouts summer camp for ‘acting in a manner considered stereotypical of gay men,’” Fox News reported. “The graphic novel includes characters discussing pornography, erections, masturbation, penis size, and an illustration that depicts naked teenage boys.”
Other books included in the stack upon which she was sworn in were Night, by Elie Wiesel; The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison; and All Boys Aren’t Blue, by George M. Johnson. At least three of the books Smith was sworn in on were listed in the top 5 of the American Library Association’s (ALA) “most challenged books” of 2022. The national library group’s activism promoting these books in local curriculums has led conservative policymakers in at least nine states to begin severing ties with the ALA. Last week, Texas, which ended its tax-subsidized affiliation with the ALA in August, passed new rules to keep “sexually explicit” books out of school libraries.
Smith’s decision to use material endorsed by far-left activists to infiltrate classrooms illustrates how identity politics has become embraced as a cynical, secular religion. Had Smith been genuine with a pledge to hear district parents’ concerns, she might have chosen different material to be sworn in on.
Silvi Haldipur, a mom of two boys in Bucks County schools, said she was previously “horrified” by LGBT and antisemitic remarks in the boardroom of the east Pennsylvania district. However, parents in this district could have more difficulty being involved in their children’s education moving forward. The school board’s new Democrat majority immediately voted to “freeze two policies related to library books that passed last year along with other policies.” This includes halting a previous update to the Library Materials policy that allowed parents to challenge certain books in the classroom.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
The Virginia Supreme Court unanimously voted Thursday to revive a lawsuit filed by a teacher who was terminated for declining to use male pronouns to refer to a female student.
In 2018, Peter Vlaming was fired from his job of seven years as a French teacher at West Point High School because he would not address a student by biologically inaccurate pronouns. Vlaming “told his superiors his Christian faith prevented him from using male pronouns” for the student. The student complained, leading to a four-hour hearing with the school board, which ultimately voted 5-0 to fire Vlaming for “discrimination.”
“That discrimination then leads to creating a hostile learning environment,” claimed West Point Schools Superintendent Laura Abel. “And the student had expressed that. The parent had expressed that. They felt disrespected.”
Vlaming sued the school board in 2019. After a circuit court judge dismissed the suit in 2021, the seven justices on the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that Vlaming’s case alleging that his rights to free religious exercise and free speech were violated deserves to move forward.
“Peter wasn’t fired for something he said; he was fired for something he couldn’t say,” said Chris Schandevel, a senior defense counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), who represents Vlaming. “The Virginia Supreme Court rightly agreed that Peter’s case against the school board for violating his rights under the Virginia Constitution and state law should proceed.”
In December last year, another teacher represented by ADF filed a lawsuit challenging her termination for refusing to refer to a student by inaccurate pronouns. Ohio middle school teacher Vivian Geraghty was fired over her religious objections to addressing two students by names and pronouns contradictory to their biology.
“Schools can’t force teachers to set their religious beliefs aside just to keep a job and they also can’t force teachers to say things that are untrue and harmful to students,” ADF legal counsel Logan Spena told the Daily Caller.
In California, a Christian teacher was let go for her refusal to conceal students’ attempts to dress and act as the opposite sex from parents. Jessica Tapia was a physical education teacher who would not permit male students to use women’s locker rooms and objected to district policy mandating that teachers hide students’ gender confusion from parents.
“[The district] called me back to work but presented me with various directives, to which I responded I would not be able to comply with some of them based on my beliefs, such as having to call students by their preferred gender/pronoun and withhold that information from their parents,” Tapia told the Daily Caller. “I believe God is love and the most loving thing we can do is affirm one another in who God made us to be.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Democrats’ Marxist takeover of America’s education system is rearing its ugly head on an almost daily basis, and the latest stories out of Illinois are further proof of it.
On Thursday, Parents Defending Education reported that students attending the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA) orchestrated a protest and walkout on Dec. 8 demanding harsh punishments for individuals who have “bias incident reports” filed against them. According to the academy’s website, anyone from IMSA students to alumni and visitors can file on-the-record or anonymous reports alleging incidents of “bias” committed by other IMSA community members. The reports are then investigated by school staff such as the chief human resources/equity officer and/or the director of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
IMSA students who participated in the Dec. 8 demonstration, however, are demanding the university take its leftist policies even further. Included in their list of demands are requests for the school to publicize a list of “possible consequences for students following a bias incident report,” including “detentions, removal from leadership positions, suspensions, expulsions, and notification to parents.”
But the students who chanted “Silence is complacence!” and “Why are our pronouns not used?” during the Dec. 8 demonstration didn’t stop there. They also want the university to notify any “potential future colleges” that offending students may consider transferring to or attending in the future, after they are presumably expelled for their supposed transgressions. In essence, the demonstrators want to destroy possible offenders’ future educational and career prospects based on potentially-anonymous reporting of “incidents” like not using a person’s preferred pronouns.
The list also includes a demand that possible consequences for offending faculty members be publicized, recommending punishments that “include, but go beyond only educational conversations and required training.”
Students at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA) — the top STEM school in the state — staged a sit-in and walkout last week over grievances related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
Meanwhile, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a far-left Democrat, announced plans this week to cripple the city’s “high-achieving selective-enrollment schools” in the name of so-called “equity.” During his mayoral campaign earlier this year, Johnson explicitly promised city residents his administration “would not end selective enrollment” at Chicago public schools.
According to The Daily Mail, the proposal put forward by Johnson’s education board would effectively “stop gifted children from lower income backgrounds from academically competing to get into high-performing schools.” Some of these schools are among the nation’s highest ranking high schools and offer children who grow up in difficult circumstances opportunities to further their academic careers.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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
The board of Harvard unanimously voted to retain the university’s president Claudine Gay despite her public refusal to say that calls for genocide of Jewish students would contradict Harvard’s code of conduct — and subsequent allegations of past plagiarism.
“Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing,” the Harvard Corporation announced in a statement on Tuesday.
Gay kept her position despite both credible allegations of plagiarism and an abysmal performance alongside other university presidents before the House Education and the Workforce Committee. On Capitol Hill last week, Gay along with the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania refused to testify that calls for Jewish genocide violate student codes of conduct — despite their schools’ histories of punishing students for conservative speech.
“We embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful,” Gay said. “It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment, intimidation.”
Gay’s peers offered lawmakers similar answers when it came to confronting students who called for the genocide of Jews at their respective schools. University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill resigned from her role on Saturday after donors responded to her disastrous testimony by pulling contributions. Ross Stevens, a hedge fund manager who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, threatened to withdraw a $100 million donation from his alma mater — and he was only one donor to threaten to pull funding.
Investor and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman claimed that Gay’s poor performance had cost Harvard more than a billion dollars. But somehow Gay survived both poor reactions from donors and allegations of plagiarism, a chief sin in academia — and it was likely not a coincidence.
Gay is the first black woman to run the university that is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious institutions in higher education.
“She assumed leadership with high expectations, but her tenure, which began this summer, has been mired in scandal,” Chris Rufo reported Monday in City Journal. “As dean and then as president, Gay has been accused of bullying colleagues, suppressing free speech, overseeing a racist admissions program, and, following the Hamas terror campaign against Israel, failing to stand up to rampant anti-Semitism on campus.” She landed the top job at Harvard despite having only authored 11 peer-reviewed articles, four of which have now come under allegations of plagiarism.
Gay, however, is among one of the most protected classes according to the left’s hierarchy of victimhood. Firing not just a woman but a black woman would be blasphemous against the religion of identity politics.
“A white male would probably already be gone,” observed Carol Swain, a retired professor from Vanderbilt and Princeton whose work was apparently plagiarized by Gay.
Swain, who is black, told Fox News that “obviously” Harvard “did not have the courage to fire its first black president.”
The New York Post reported Monday night that Harvard University even threatened the paper months ago over the Post’s own probe into Gay’s allegations of plagiarism. Yet, as dean, Gay reportedly forced “dozens” of students to leave campus over violations of academic integrity codes.
So-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives such as the programs endorsed by Gay, however, have begun to replace merit-based standards in academia, government, and business, with physical characteristics becoming a factor in employment eligibility. The vice president and a Supreme Court justice were both explicitly chosen based on their sex and skin color.
In the Soviet Union, residents needed a party card to guarantee their employment and other benefits unavailable to the rest of the country. In America today, special perks are now afforded to those who meet the criteria of preferred classes, from race to sexual orientation.
DEI is welfare for idiots who are unemployable in the absence of identity politics. In the Soviet Union, the party card was a guarantee of employment and perks unavailable to the unwashed masses. In America in 2023, identity politics serves the same purpose. With the right skin…
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Several elite American universities have recently been involved in increasingly dramatic debates over the meaning and value of free speech and intellectual diversity. Two weeks ago, the University of Virginia, my current home institution, was the site of an event sponsored by the state’s Department of Education called the “Higher Education Summit on Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity.” The summit generated pledges by the presidents of every state university in Virginia (and some private universities) to create “action plans” to advance the goals of free speech and intellectual diversity.
Last week, the presidents of Penn, Harvard, and MIT provided plenty of evidence on how they view these goals. They explained to Congress how their understanding of free speech and intellectual diversity did not allow them to protect their Jewish students from a range of actions taken in recent days by students and faculty on their campuses. The university presidents repeatedly hid behind the right to free speech, saying that the Constitution would not allow them to do more to suppress antisemitic advocacy on campus. Outraged by Penn President Liz Magill’s failure to more clearly and forcefully condemn antisemitism on its campus, several mega-donors to Penn announced they would not be giving any more money unless Magill was fired, and after one such donor effectively withdrew $100 million that had already been donated, Magill resigned this past weekend.
At the congressional hearing, Republican members of Congress such as Harvard alumna Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York asked the university administrators why it was unconstitutional for them to protect threatened Jewish students against antisemitic actions — including not just advocacy of intifada and Jewish genocide but targeted threats of violence, and in many cases the crimes of menacing and assault — but perfectly legal for them to have suppressed university professors’ views critical of affirmative action or transgenderism.
This question has an answer, but it is one that the testifying university presidents did not and perhaps could not provide. The answer is this: Free speech and intellectual diversity are inconsistent with the dominant ideology within the vast majority of contemporary American universities. This dominant ideology consists of a set of paired beliefs about the world and what should be done to change it. These beliefs, which I will call the progressive university party line, entail the even more significant and overarching belief that any disagreement with and dissent from core beliefs is a form of violence that must be suppressed.
Core Beliefs of Leftist Universities
The core beliefs of the progressive university party line include at least the following:
1. A system of oppression called systemic racism still permeates the United States. To redress such oppression, some number of people should be hired as faculty and staff and admitted as students because they belong to what are considered oppressed groups. And some such people should be given their positions even if they would be unqualified were they not members of the oppressed group.
2. Beyond its borders, the United States — like other developed countries, such as Israel — has waged a war of imperialist, colonial oppression against so-called people of color, a war in which a primary weapon has been the intellectual framework of the enlightenment, a framework whose purported objective search for truth is simply a façade used to devalue the alternative intellectual perspectives of oppressed people.
3. Without immediate and massive government intervention to stop fossil fuel producers from continuing their carbon emissions and to subsidize the development of wind and solar power, the Earth will suffer catastrophically harmful climate change.
4. The violent crime problem in America is due mostly to widespread legal gun ownership, so violent crime can be at least substantially reduced by severely restricting Americans from possessing firearms.
5. Any government restriction prohibiting a woman from aborting her child at any point after conception is an immoral, patriarchal infringement of her individual rights and liberty. Similarly, an individual’s freedom to use recreational drugs should not be restricted by the government.
6. The prevention of disease and illness justifies virtually any infringement of individual liberty ordered by the state or university.
It would be hard to argue that any of the beliefs listed are not part of the contemporary radical leftist university ideology. Huge and growing university bureaucracies — such as offices of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and sustainability — exist to pursue these policy goals and to ensure that only those people who support these beliefs are hired as faculty and staff.
Danger of Dissent
Paramount among the core beliefs is one that follows directly from those listed: that dissent from any of the core beliefs represents a form of violent oppression that cannot be tolerated within the university.
This danger of dissent is a logical and ineluctable consequence of the listed core beliefs. The danger of dissent holds that to critique any of the core beliefs and espouse a contrary, dissenting view is to inflict harm upon members of the university community. This cannot be overemphasized: Dissent from any of the core beliefs is violence.
To see why this is true, consider just two of the core beliefs. If one opposes government regulations and orders restricting individual liberty to prevent the spread of illness or disease, then obviously one supports the spread of illness and disease. If one opposes gun control measures, then since guns cause violent crime, opposition to gun control causes harm. And so on with all of the core beliefs.
If one holds to the danger of dissent, one cannot justify steps to allow true intellectual diversity and freedom of expression. To hire faculty or admit students who challenge any of the core beliefs is to include in the community people who are prepared to cause harm. And to let them express their dissenting views is to let them harm the community.
This explains why universities are so intolerant of dissent. From their point of view, Ohio Northern University law professor and legal historian Scott Gerber had to be physically removed by police from his classroom because he had publicly questioned that university’s DEI mandate. And Penn Law professor Amy Wax, who has for years publicly and repeatedly questioned whether affirmative action in law school admissions has actually helped the students it is supposed to be helping, must be banned from teaching first years and charged with “major infractions” of university standards — charges which if confirmed by a faculty senate hearing board would trigger “major sanctions” and may include Wax’s termination as a tenured professor of law.
Stopping Oppressors
However, removing dissenting voices from universities does not explain why voices of antisemitic hate, intolerance, and even imminently threatened violence must be tolerated and encouraged. To understand this, we need only to reflect on the core beliefs. Each of these posits that an oppressor group — white males, fossil fuel companies, religious opponents of abortion, gun manufacturers, colonial states such as Israel — is at this moment actively harming people in the oppressed group.
The oppressors are causing harm, and they must be stopped. There is no need to be worried about identifying precisely which oppressors are causing harm, for in the leftist view, responsibility and guilt are collective, not individual. There is also no halfway between opposing and supporting group oppression — one is either all in, working to expel and punish oppressors, or all out, effectively supporting oppression.
Given that it has defined itself around a set of core beliefs positing oppressor and oppressed classes, the contemporary leftist American university defines itself as a leader in a political and cultural war to stop ongoing harm and avenge wrongs suffered by oppressed groups. These universities are commanders in wars against racism, climate change, colonial oppression, and patriarchy. With this understanding, antisemitism is an attack on oppressors, and that is what the progressive university is all about.
Encouraging Analysis and Skepticism
These universities are not wrong in their belief that there is much that is evil and unjust in the world. But the goal of the university should not be to support highly politicized notions of precisely which problems are the most pressing and which policies should be adopted to address them. Instead, the university’s role is to guide students in acquiring the knowledge and analytical tools necessary to form their own beliefs about the world’s problems and potential solutions. Students should be encouraged to be skeptical of all accepted wisdom and to have the confidence and skills to independently advance the frontiers of knowledge.
The American university system is still the best in the world, and across our country, there remain many faculty and staff committed to the goals of guiding students in their acquisition of skills and knowledge. By jettisoning their political agenda, American universities will not only be able to see and respond to the present resurgence of antisemitism on campus, but they will also be able to realize their enormous potential for actually educating students for the future.
Jason Scott Johnston is a law professor at the University of Virginia.
The Left has created a hostile environment on college campuses for those of any color, race, or creed who dissent from its Orwellian groupthink. Pictured: A Jewish student watches a protest in support of Palestine and for free speech at Columbia University campus on Nov. 14. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Sara Garstka, a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation in 2023, received a bachelor’s degree in English in 2022 from Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia.
During a hearing this week on the rise in antisemitism on college campuses, Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., said a lack of ideological diversity contributed to the hateful educational environment endured by Jewish students since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel by Hamas.
He’s right.
A recent poll found that 73% of Jewish college students and about 44% of non-Jewish students have experienced or witnessed some form of antisemitism since the beginning of the 2023-24 school year.
“Since Oct. 7, students who have felt comfortable with others knowing they’re Jewish decreased significantly,” according to the poll results released jointly by the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish outreach organization Hillel International.
The poll found that, before Oct. 7, 63.7% of Jewish students surveyed said they “felt ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ comfortable, but now only 38.6% feel the same.”
Among those testifying Tuesday before the House Education and Workforce Committee was University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, who finds herself under increasing fire from critics. Penn is one of the Ivy League schools at the center of controversy over free speech on college campuses amid the troubling increase in antisemitism, especially since Hamas’ terrorist attacks in Israel.
Previously, the existence of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives at Penn and on other college campuses made it look like universities actively promote safe environments for minority groups such as Jews.
Magill’s DEI statement on the University of Pennsylvania’s website, for example, reads: “Penn is a place with deep-seated values that reflect respect for all and a sincere commitment to service, to diversity in all its forms, and to creating conditions where all can thrive so we can as a Penn community have our greatest impact on the world.”
‘Context-Dependent’
But antisemitic speech isn’t respectful of “diversity in all its forms,” nor does speech advocating genocide promote a safe environment for Jewish students.
Rep. Elise M. Stefanik, R-N.Y., pressed Magill at the hearing on whether “calling for the genocide of Jews violates Penn’s code of conduct when it comes to bullying and harassment.”
“If the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment,” Magill said, adding later: “It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.”
Stefanik told Magill that it was the easiest yes-or-no question to answer. But Magill didn’t say “yes.”
University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill listens during her testimony Tuesday before the House Education and Workforce Committee. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Following backlash for her testimony, on Thursday morning Magill posted a video statement on X stating her intention to clarify and evaluate campus policies on free speech. She didn’t apologize.
Penn donor Ross Stevens, founder and CEO of Stone Ridge Asset Management, later withdrew a $100 million donation to protest the university’s stance on antisemitism on campus and Magill’s congressional testimony, Fox Business reported.
“In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., asked Harvard President Claudine Gay during the hearing.
At Penn, a clear double standard exists for protecting free speech, alumnus Arjunan Gnanendran told The Daily Signal. Gnanendran said he spoke on behalf of a law professor, Amy Wax, during her examination by Penn’s Faculty Senate for allegedly creating a hostile classroom environment by the way she talked about affirmative action in her course, “Conservative Political & Legal Thought.”
“They’re defending the right of the pro-Palestine students to say things like ‘From the river to the sea’ and call for the genocide of Israelis,” Gnanendran said of university administrators.
“That’s free speech, [but] it’s not, you know, creating a hostile environment for Jewish students?” he argued.
“But then at the same time, they’re saying when Professor Wax talks about racial preferences in affirmative action, that creates a hostile environment for students of color and she should be stripped of tenure,” Gnanendran said. “So, there’s no free speech for Professor Wax, but there’s free speech for the pro-Palestine people who are harassing Jewish students.”
Like others interviewed for this article, Gnanendran is a fellow member of The Heritage Foundation’s internship program, called the Young Leaders Program. Their stories illustrate the existence of the ideological echo chambers at today’s colleges and universities. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
Antisemitism on campus is another form of cancel culture from the ideological echo chambers entrenched at today’s colleges and universities, something Grothman alluded to during the House hearing.
For many young conservatives on-campus intimidation for their beliefs can come from all angles: peers, professors, and administrators. It’s no wonder that a new unifying issue for the Left, the war between Israel and Hamas terrorists, could result in hateful speech and behavior toward Jewish students. It already was happening to conservatives.
When some speech is protected and other speech is not, colleges become echo chambers for left-leaning ideology, where “there are things that you are prohibited from speaking about,” Austin Gae said in an interview about the culture on his campus.
Cancel culture “is anything that represses free speech and open debate” and often is characterized by disrespect, said Gae, a senior at The George Washington University in the nation’s capital.
Indeed, cyberbullying, classroom censure, false narratives, administrative neglect, and social blacklists are all methods used on campus to discourage ideological diversity.
Peer-Pressured Into Silence
Gae said he became the target of cyberbullying in a class group chat after saying that then-President Donald Trump didn’t incite an “insurrection” by asking supporters at a rally near the White House to “peacefully and patriotically make their voices heard” at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
People who had never met him labeled him a racist homophobe during his freshman year at GWU for something that had nothing to do with race or sexuality, Gae said. The experience prompted him to go silent on his political beliefs for the remainder of his education.
“After that, I decided to not really talk to anyone on campus,” Gae said.
Unless a person can first get to know someone else, and share that he is “a kind, real person with manners and stuff like that,” he said, it’s hard to feel comfortable talking about politics on any level.
For Erin Leone, a junior at GWU, not even a history course on President Ronald Reagan was a safe space for conservative thought. Reagan’s famous 1964 speech, “A Time for Choosing,” was the subject of study for one lecture in which the professor filtered his analysis through a lens that saw the future president’s speech was “divisive and racist,” Leone told me in an interview for The Daily Signal. When she asked the professor for specific examples of racially divisive language in the speech, instead of answering the question, the professor called on three outspoken, left-leaning classmates to explain how Reagan’s words made others “afraid of black people,” Leone said.
“Does that answer your question?” the professor asked Leone after her three peers finished yelling at her, she recalled.
False Narratives
In another one of Leone’s history classes, she said, a professor claimed that Catholic missionaries in Mexico “made up the Our Lady of Guadalupe apparitions to trick the Mexicans into converting to Catholicism.”
Afterward, Leone approached the professor with concerns that the remarks were racist toward Mexican culture and openly anti-Catholic. The professor, she said, later denied making the remarks.
“If a professor said that about Islam or Judaism, they should be fired,” Leone contended.
In another situation at Penn, the student newspaper The Daily Pennsylvanian neglected to follow journalism ethics and reported allegations as fact to push a narrative that fraternities are places that harbor racism and should be removed from campus. The student newspaper claimed that a person of color was assaulted by a Penn student, Nicholas Hamilton, at a fraternity party. Hamilton had to go to court over the allegations and was found not guilty of assault in Philadelphia Municipal Court, the newspaper reported.
Administrative Neglect
At Nicholls State University in Louisiana, the Student Organizations and Activities Office neglected to process paperwork establishing a College Republicans chapter, former student Cooper Moore told The Daily Signal. This occurred despite the university’s having a chapter of College Democrats as well as a Democratic Socialist Club, Moore said. Moore served as vice president of College Republicans for the brief period the club was permitted to host activities on campus at Nicholls State. That ended, he said, when College Republicans’ “chalking campaign” during the 2020 presidential campaign resulted in a riot in which leftists called for his death and the banning of the club from campus.
On the campus quad, College Republicans chalked slogans such as “MAGA,” “Vote Trump,” and “Vote #1,” this last a reference to a pro-life amendment on the state ballot at that time, Moore said.
“None of it was bigoted,” he said. “None of it was derogatory toward the Democrats or Joe Biden or to liberal students.”
Yet the College Republicans’ chalk was washed away with mops and buckets by some of his peers, and the university hosted a town hall to discuss free speech on campus. In that forum, Nicholls State President Jay Clune neglected to take a clear stance on free speech, Moore said. Nicholls State implemented a policy prohibiting “political chalk” on campus, he said, although Democrat-affiliated clubs had been doing so with no push-back from administrators. The next day, Moore said, he had to be escorted from class by campus security because participants in a Black Lives Matter rally were yelling his name.
The university didn’t follow up to ask about his safety or mental health, Moore said. The only thing the school reached out about, he said, was to say that the College Republicans club was barred from campus because the necessary paperwork hadn’t been filed. But the club did file the paperwork and the school’s Activities Office was at fault for it not being processed, Moore said.
Free Speech at Stake
While she was at GWU, Leone said, two members of a Greek organization were shunned by their sorority sisters after someone found Instagram photos of them taken at a College Republicans event. “Nobody would be friends with them anymore,” Leone said of the two students, as if they were socially blacklisted for being conservative. It’s the same in other student organizations, she said.
“The rhetoric in the groups is that, if someone were to not agree with [liberal ideas], they’d be a horrible person,” Leone said.
The Left has created a hostile environment on campus for those of any color, race, or creed who dissent from its Orwellian groupthink. Since college and university administrators continue to discourage ideological diversity on campus, speech encouraging acts of genocide should come as no surprise. Unless free speech, including dissent from the Left’s doctrines, is encouraged on campuses, our educational institutions will continue to embolden hostility that endangers those with a different view who speak out.
Ignited by Hamas’ terrorist attack against Israel, divisive domestic conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have driven a new wave of campus censorship. But the problem of stifled speech on campus for both students and faculty has been around long before Oct. 7.
According to a forthcoming survey developed by our organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, about 1 in 10 college students say they have been threatened with disciplinary action – or worse, actually disciplined – for their speech.
Our 2022 survey of college faculty yields similarly depressing results. About one in six professors report that they have either been threatened with punishment or actually investigated for their academic freedom or free speech.
Students demonstrate in support of Palestinians and for free speech outside of the Columbia University campus on Nov. 15, 2023, in New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The common, but rarely discussed, thread linking this oppressive atmosphere on campus is college and university administrations. And as long as censorial administrators have disproportionate power over higher education, this problem will continue.
In the student survey, which was conducted by College Pulse between Sept. 5 and Oct. 20, students answered questions about their experiences with speech and the disciplinary process. Three percent said they had been punished for their speech, and 6% said they had been threatened with punishment.
Consider the scope of that number extended out to the larger student population. Given the total undergraduate population of the country, that’s well over a million students being threatened (or worse) by campus bureaucrats for their speech. It means a student is roughly as likely to face disciplinary censorship as they are likely to be left-handed.
And what kind of speech can get you investigated according to the study? For a New York University student, it was participation in a pro-Palestinian group. For a University of Pennsylvania student, it was expressing the opinion that the U.S. was right to have invaded Iraq. And for a Drake University student, it was simply being overheard by fellow students telling a professor about her mental health.
The survey also revealed that students should watch what they say in their most private of spaces. Of those who were threatened or disciplined, a quarter faced punishment for speech in their dorm room. That disturbing focus on living spaces isn’t unusual. For all of FIRE’s 24-year existence, “residential life” administrators who run the dorms have been major enforcers of university speech codes.
While the situation is clearly very bad for students, for professors it’s even worse. Given that faculty political diversity has never been lower, with some departments having left-leaning supermajorities and others having no conservative faculty at all, one would think that professors would not be targeted as often. And one would be wrong.
Since 2014, as Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott explain in their new book “The Canceling of the American Mind,” we know of over 1,000 attempts to get professors sanctioned for their speech or research.
About two-thirds of those attempts were successful, resulting in some form of punishment and almost 200 fired professors. This number dwarfs any period in U.S. higher education history since the early 1970s, when the Supreme Court cemented freedom of speech as a right on college campuses and academic freedom as a special concern within that right.
Facing a cancel culture that targets both students and faculty, how did administrators respond? With transparent political litmus tests that enable and encourage the purge.
More than half of the large universities in the country require “diversity, equity, and inclusion” statements, which are often vague and nebulously defined political litmus tests pressuring professors to adhere to the dominant ideology on campus. Wherever they appear, from student admission to faculty post-tenure review, these requirements reinforce the ideological status quo, suppress viewpoint diversity, and increase the risk that what passes for curriculum today will be dogma tomorrow.
One place those litmus tests appear is in the hiring of more administrators, and make no mistake: At most schools, administrators, not faculty, decide what happens, when it happens, and how much to spend in doing it.
Yale has a one-to-one ratio of administrators to students, with Harvard not far behind. At the U.S. News & World Report’s top 50 schools in the country, there are three times as many administrators and non-instructional staff as there are faculty, according to a recent report from the Progressive Policy Institute.
Once again, one might well think that hiring would slow down, giving the looming “enrollment cliff” – the demographic shift where the college-age population shrinks due to lower birth rates. But that’s never stopped colleges before. From 2015 to 2018, when enrollment and instructional employees declined, administrative staff grew over 6%. The surge in non-teaching positions is one of the primary reasons why the cost of educating a single student has gone up so dramatically over the past several decades.
Making matters worse, many of the new administrators consider policing the speech of students and faculty part of their job. Indeed, DEI administrators have been involved in some of the highest-profile cancellations, including federal Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford this year, Harvard professor Carole Hooven last year, and University of Central Florida professor Charles Negy in 2021.
And if administrators are part of the Bias Related Incident team at a particular college, part of their job is to police speech on campus, often investigating anonymous reports of students or professors engaging in allegedly offensive speech. A study released this year by North Dakota State University found that nearly two-thirds of students favored reporting professors who engaged in “offensive speech,” made up of statements of opinion – or even fact – the students didn’t like.
The situation for free speech on campus has gone from bad to grim over the last decade. It will be no easy task to fix it. But one of the first steps to both a freer and less expensive college experience is to dramatically decrease the campus bureaucracy, eliminate positions that exist to police speech, and make sure every university employee is informed that their job is to protect free speech and academic freedom, not to squelch it.
According to the corporate media, hundreds of high schoolers are taking it upon themselves to walk out of school to protest Israel’s right to defend itself. In New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and more, the nation’s budding humanitarians are banding together with the hope of ushering in a new era of peace, the stories say. As is the case with so many stories surrounding Palestinian terrorism and Israel’s response, the prevailing narrative is wrong.
These walkouts are not the result of well-meaning teenagers choosing to take a stand. These protests are being conceived of and then planned and executed by radical left-wing groups using children as political props.
The largest of these was the “#schools4Palestine” walkout, which disrupted learning in an estimated 100 New York City public schools on Nov. 9. A coalition of far-left groups, including New York Collective of Radical Educators, NYC Educators for Palestine, Palestinian Youth Movement, and Teachers Unite, authored a “toolkit” — a handbook aimed mainly at adults to show them how to turn students into pro-Hamas activists. The document purports to be for “students, teachers, and parents,” but its content is less relevant for students than for teachers who seek to influence them. Another far-left group in the San Francisco Bay Area created a toolkit of its own, full of the same hateful lies about Israel.
Though the New York City toolkit’s writers claimed, “High school students are organizing walkouts,” they don’t seem to believe their own words. The document, created by left-wing adults, provides a ready-made plan for students, with poster templates, instructions for identifying chant leaders, and even a sample schedule. The students are being organized by adults.
NYC high school students walking out from across the city in the hundreds today to demand a #CeasefireNow in Gaza!
They were showing up, at the behest of their teachers, to support a cause probably very few of them understand. The toolkit contained a sample script for teachers to encourage their students to participate, and it notes that teachers may “show support for their students … canceling tests or major paper deadlines or making the lesson more flexible to accommodate students who walk out.” Teachers who followed this advice placed their own radical politics ahead of learning and committed a major violation of professional ethics. They abused their positions of responsibility for the sake of their own agenda.
The toolkit put words in the mouths of children with a recommended chants list, including “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want Zionists here.” When they took to the streets, some of the students chanted, “F-ck the Jews,” thus flaunting their hatred and abandoning the façade that this protest was ever about peace.
Students Aren’t Being Taught the Truth
Students are being taught that it is good and noble to walk out in support of Hamas. What they are not being taught is that there was a ceasefire in place on Oct. 6, and it did not stop Hamas from slaughtering Israelis and taking hostages. They’re not teaching students that so many Palestinians live in poverty, not because of Israel, but because Hamas would rather spend money on rockets and tunnels and their own plush hideaways in Qatar than on basic infrastructure. They’re not teaching that supporting the Palestinian people means opposing Hamas, an enemy of peace and prosperity and the reason that Gazans are suffering today.
Some meager accountability for this indoctrination has come from parents who are angered about what their children are being taught. A principal in Montgomery County, Maryland, emailed the entire school community to “make them aware” of a walkout, noting that all absences due to the protest would be excused. Backlash was so swift and severe that the principal has since resigned.
These protests do not happen in a vacuum. In many schools, Jewish students are seeing their peers cheerlead for terrorism with their teachers’ encouragement. No student should be forced to face this kind of hostility and harassment. No parent should be forced to send his or her child to a school where this sort of teacher-sponsored bullying is allowed or encouraged.
As Hamas tightens its death grip on Gaza, pro-Hamas protesters will desperately attempt to appear thoughtful and mainstream. But not unlike the group these protesters are supporting, they’re experts at using children as pawns.
Angela Morabito is the spokesperson at the Defense of Freedom Institute and a former U.S. Department of Education press secretary.
A Chicago-area school district is attempting to boost academic achievement among black and Latino students by offering blacks-only and Latino-only classes. (Photo Illustration: Paul Bradbury/Getty Images)
Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand, contributing both news and commentary from a biblical worldview.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion policies have grown so diverse that they now include policies reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. A Chicago-area school district is attempting to boost academic achievement among black and Latino students by offering blacks-only and Latino-only classes. The segregated classes are called “affinity” classes, and they aim to reduce the so-called academic achievement gap by making black and Latino students feel more comfortable in class.
As Evanston, Illinois, School Board Vice President Monique Parsons described the problem this month, “Our black students are, for lack of a better word … at the bottom, consistently still. And they are being outperformed consistently.”
Evanston could have offered extra tutoring, parent engagement programs, or similar interventions. Instead, it offered special black-only classes taught by black teachers, on the theory that black students would learn better without white peers around.
Evanston is not the only community to offer race-segregated classrooms. Woke strongholds such as Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland have been offering race-specific high school electives focusing on subjects like African-American history since at least 2015. Evanston’s innovation was to expand the concept of race-segregated classrooms to math and English classes, such as Algebra 2 and AP Calculus.
Of course, federal nondiscrimination laws forbid school districts from separating students on the basis of race, but the Evanston school district attempts to sidestep these laws by making the classes voluntary. Is that acceptable? To answer that question, consider what would have happened if Arkansas high schools in the 1950s had offered voluntary, whites-only classes to make white students feel more comfortable.
“In this example, the school system is failing to educate a portion of students. Rather than blame themselves for failing to prepare students to advance academically, this school system asks students to segregate themselves based on race,” Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for education studies, told The Washington Stand. “The students must do it themselves so the school doesn’t violate civil rights laws that protect them from racial segregation.”
Fortunately, Evanston’s racial segregation scheme has not encountered universal participation. Approximately 200 of the high school’s 3,600 students (a little more than 5%) are attending race-segregated classes. About 25% of the student population is black, and about 20% is Latino, which comes out to about 1 in 9 black students and 1 in 7 Latino students attending the segregated classes. While not universal, these numbers still represent a sizable percentage of the school’s minority populations.
Regardless, the problem lies in the principle, not the implementation.
“We would all agree that it would be wrong if white people were looking to create spaces where everyone was white, but somehow the calculation is supposed to be different if black or brown people want to create spaces where no one is white,” Joseph Backholm, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for biblical worldview and strategic engagement, told The Washington Stand.
In August 2023, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (informed educators in a “Dear Colleague” letter, “OCR generally will open an investigation under Title VI [a civil rights nondiscrimination law] where there are allegations that the use of a curriculum or program separates students or otherwise treats them differently based on their race” (emphasis added). That is precisely what Evanston’s program does, even if it is voluntary.
“This is a great example of how wokeness changes our moral evaluations,” Backholm explained. “In wokelandia, a person labeled an oppressor can do exactly the same thing as one of the oppressed, but it is wrong for one and right for the other. It’s very bad moral reasoning.”
Evanston has distinguished itself in recent years for its zeal to address past discrimination through present discrimination. The city became the first in America to approve reparations payments for black Americans in 2021. In 2019, the City Council passed a resolution declaring Evanston “an anti-racist city” and “acknowledg[ing] that the trauma inflicted on people of color by persistent white supremacist ideology results in psychological harm affecting educational, economic, and social outcomes; and conjures painful memories of our City’s past … ”
Such self-abasement might be understandable if the city had been the site of some notorious lynching or a KKK hotbed. Instead, Evanston was founded by Methodists—the backbone of the abolition movement—and incorporated in 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation. The city’s zeal to apologize for racism seems to outpace its actual record of racial discrimination.
Countering racism infuses Evanston’s current policy of racially-segregated classes, too. “Equity guides many of the district’s decisions,” reported The Wall Street Journal, “embodied in a stated board goal: ‘Recognizing that racism is the most devastating factor contributing to the diminished achievement of students, ETHS will strive to eliminate the predictability of academic achievement based upon race.’”
Kilgannon said this “deeply troubling” goal “summarizes quite precisely the problem with ‘equity’ as a worldview-guiding policy.” She explained, “Student achievement has many factors. ‘Centering’ racism as the most devastating factor will not produce better academic outcomes and is likely to produce an even more toxic environment for children of every race.”
Indeed, students who choose to participate in the racially-segregated classes may have already bought into that woke indoctrination. By segregating themselves, they will miss out on the opportunity to learn and grow from interacting with people who are different from them. They will encounter expectations that don’t prepare them for the real world. They will accept the false premise that their skin color arbitrarily limits their potential academic success. Meanwhile, the students—white, black, and Latino—who stay behind in the mixed classes also miss out on interactions with their peers.
“In athletics, all play together. They don’t have a white team, a black team, and a Latino team,” argued Jay Sabatino, a former high school teacher, principal, and superintendent in Illinois public schools, who retired after 30 years in education. “They have one Evanston team. All contribute, and all make mistakes. If a student in class or on the basketball court feels unsafe because he made a mistake, the teacher should address that. A safe environment (physically and emotionally) is the result of an excellent school.”
“What I fear is happening is that these students are being given the impression that their skin color is the most important thing about them,” Backholm agreed, “and that they need protection from people who don’t look like them. If that’s the case, these segregated classrooms will end up giving them a much greater handicap in life than whatever math deficiencies they may have.”
“As long as the program is voluntary, I can accept it more than if it is ‘the way we do things,’” Sabatino told The Washington Stand. But he expressed concerns about the process, based upon The Wall Street Journal’s reporting that the school district was dodging media inquiries and had not published data on the program’s success over the past four years.
“Transparency in these decisions (at a district or school level) should be paramount. That Evanston would not respond to questions should throw up a red flag to the community.” Additionally, “Any district that does not look at the data critically and report out on them is not operating optimally. This isn’t an administrator’s school; it’s the community’s.”
“This example is one of the many reasons we encourage Christians to run for school board, and why we support in prayer Christians serving in schools as teachers and staff,” said Kilgannon. “Only a system devoid of God can produce this kind of situation. Christians are needed now more than ever in education of every kind.”
America’s educational establishment—such as national teachers unions and education training programs—is pushing schools to embed godless, toxic ideologies based on Marxism into curriculums, instruction, and every aspect of school life. It instructs students to classify everyone as either oppressor or oppressed, based not upon their individual behavior but upon their belonging to groups. Many of these groups, which determine someone’s moral standing according to woke ideology, are based upon unchangeable physical characteristics, such as a person’s skin color or ethnicity.
Creating special classes for certain “oppressed” groups (blacks and Latinos) to escape from the supposed “oppressors” (whites), as Evanston school district has done, is just another method for subtly advancing this radical indoctrination agenda. But will it actually help students learn better in AP calculus class? The case to make for it is not very persuasive.
Instead of imbibing untested racial ideology, there are time-tested methods for academic improvement which Evanston could try. Based on his 30 years of experience, Sabatino said, “I’ll always endorse this: Hard work and perseverance lead to success.”
A teacher allegedly attended a pro-Israel rally in Queens on Oct. 9. Students at the Hillcrest High School in Jamaica – where the teacher is employed – reportedly found out that the instructor participated in the pro-Israel demonstration. Someone purportedly found the teacher’s Facebook profile that had a photo of the instructor at a pro-Israel rally in Queens holding a sign that read: “I stand with Israel.”
Just after 11 a.m. on Monday, the students reportedly stormed the hallways of the school to protest the teacher having a pro-Israel viewpoint. The pre-planned protest allegedly deteriorated into a riot. The pro-Palestinian students reportedly attempted to barge into the teacher’s classroom despite school staffers guarding the room.
The New York Post reported, “School administrators and the NYPD, which responded to the school at about 11:20 a.m., got wind of their plans just in time to rush the teacher into an office and lock the door, another educator said.”
A senior told the outlet, “Everyone was yelling ‘Free Palestine!'”
A ninth-grader said, “Everyone was screaming ‘(The teacher) needs to go!’ They want her fired.”
A student said that teens had found out where the teacher lives, her phone number, and other personal information.
A video of the unrest at the school was posted on social media.
One comment on a TikTok video called the teacher “cracker ass bitch.”
The NYPD’s counterterrorism bureau was reportedly asked to investigate possible threats against the school.
City Councilman James Gennaro (D-Queens) said, “Whether it was one student or multiple students who did or said something, whatever the trigger was, something happened. And I know from my many years on the City Council that the counterterrorism task force is not engaged unless they believe it is potentially a serious situation.”
The teacher – who didn’t want to be identified for her own safety – told the New York Post, “I have been a teacher for 23 years in the New York City public school system — for the last seven at Hillcrest High School. I have worked hard to be supportive of our entire student body and an advocate for our community, and was shaken to my core by the calls to violence against me that occurred online and outside my classroom last week.”
The teacher added, “No one should ever feel unsafe at school — students and teachers alike.”
“It’s my hope in the days ahead we can find a way to have meaningful discussions about challenging topics with respect for each other’s diverse perspectives and shared humanity,” she continued. “Unless we can learn to see each other as people we will never be able to create a safe learning community.”
New York City Mayor reacted to the anti-Semitic unrest by saying:
The vile show of antisemitism at Hillcrest High School was motivated by ignorance-fueled hatred, plain and simple, and it will not be tolerated in any of our schools, let alone anywhere else in our city. We are better than this. NYC Schools is already conducting a full investigation into how this incident took place, and, this week, Project Pivot teams will begin outreach with students at Hillcrest to ensure they understand why this behavior was unacceptable. No student, teacher, or staff member should fear for their safety in our schools.
Democratic Councilman Robert Holden said, “I don’t know why these students are so misinformed, so intolerant and so radicalized. They don’t even know the history of the Middle East. They haven’t been taught that.”
(WARNING: Explicit language)
The scene at Hillcrest High School in Queens as a Jewish teacher hid in her locked office for hours while students demanded she be fired for attending a pro-Israel rally. pic.twitter.com/jzVCEofvJS
Minnesota Teachers Alliance candidates are getting big wins over Teachers Union candidates because MTA is focused on children’s education over teachers’ benefits. Minnesota Parents Alliance touts wins in key school board races.
Despite going up against one of the most powerful political organizations in the state, Minnesota Parents Alliance-backed school board candidates still claimed key victories in Tuesday night’s elections.
Minnesota Parents Alliance (MPA) caught Education Minnesota off guard last election cycle, according to Cristine Trooien, executive director of MPA. MPA-backed candidates won 49 school board seats statewide in 2022.
“They were ready for us this time, and we still won seats in key districts,” she said.
Systemic Racism is something you hear thrown around a lot lately, used mainly to bully society into subverting the Constitution and attacking meritocracy without little evidence that it actually exists.
A Black president elected twice, countless Black police officers and state and local Black officials hired across America beg to differ with that hypothesis.
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.
A teammate of the Massachusetts high school field hockey player who was hospitalized last week after a male opponent fired a high-powered shot into her face said it’s time for changes to rules that allow males to play on female teams, WFTX-TV reported.
Dighton-Rehoboth team captain Kelsey Bain wrote in a letter to the state’s lnterscholastic Athletic Association that “boys do not belong in girls’ sports,” the station said.
During Thursday’s playoff game against Swampscott High School, the male Swampscott player fired a shot toward the goal, but the ball instead hit a Dighton-Rehoboth player hard in her face. The ball ricocheted far from the point of impact, and the injured player fell to her knees and cried out — as did her teammates. A number of them turned their faces away after coming to her aid, and play was halted while the injured female player was treated.
It's reported that male player (#2 for Swampscott) knocked the teeth out of female player. Males are allowed to play on female teams in MA because of the "equal play act"
“The shrieks and screams of fear and pain that projected from her after being hit filled the stadium,” Bain added in her letter, according to WFTX. “The looks of horror and shock on the faces of the girls surrounding her were also chilling.”
Massachusetts scholastic rules allow males to play sports with females if there’s no male team for that sport available — and vice versa.
But Bain said enough is enough.
“We all witnessed the substantial damage that a male has the ability to cause against a female during a game,” she added in her letter, according to the station. “How much longer does the MIAA plan on using girls as statistical data points before they realize that boys do not belong in girls’ sports?”
The MIAA told WFTX it stands by the Equal Rights Amendment: “We respect and understand the complexity and concerns that exist regarding student safety. However, student safety has not been a successful defense to excluding students of one gender from participating on teams of the opposite gender.”
When play resumed following the injury to the Dighton-Rehoboth player, the male Swampscott player quickly scored a goal. In fact, he scored both goals for Swampscott, giving his team a 2-0 victory and eliminating Dighton-Rehoboth from the tournament.
It won’t come as a shock that the male Swampscott player is reportedly a Northeastern Conference All-Star. He’s also a four-year varsity player and team co-captain, WCVB-TV reported, citing Swampscott Public Schools Athletic Director Kelly Wolff.
Dighton-Rehoboth Superintendent Bill Runey said the injured female player was released from the hospital Friday but suffered “significant facial and dental injuries,” the Sun Chronicle reported.
Our failing public schools don’t need more hard-earned cash from taxpayers. They need a shake-up called education choice. (Photo illustration: damircudic/Getty Images)
A few days ago, I posed two questions to my two young children.
The first question: “What would you think about the government telling us which pediatrician to go to, based on where we live?”
The second: “What if a hailstorm damaged our roof, but we had to choose from a list of government-approved roofers based on where our house is located?”
Both of my children appeared to feel strongly that such scenarios would be wrong. Those are pretty big decisions, and we should get to choose things like that for our own family, my 8-year-old said.
Then I got to the crux of the issue: “What if the government tells you where to go to school simply because of your ZIP code or neighborhood? And what if that school is a place where the students aren’t actually learning how to read, write, or do math well? Or if that school isn’t safe? What if those kids aren’t being prepared for college or employment?”
The point is, even young children innately know that is wrong.
With education reforms being implemented all over the nation, chances are strong that you’re at least somewhat aware of the debate in Texas regarding education choice. A variety of terms are used in this debate—ESAs, vouchers, school choice, and so on. But Facebook memes can’t capture the essence of this issue, and neither can the one-sided, politically motivated emails recently sent out by the Fort Worth Independent School District, one of the largest school districts in Texas.
On Oct. 17, the Fort Worth school district sent out a supposedly impartial email, “to share some insights.” Sadly, the insights were simply political activists’ talking points designed to advocate preserving this failing public school system.
Let me preface my position by sharing that I’m a mother to children who attend schools in the Fort Worth district. My husband and I mostly have been happy with our school and have no intention of removing our children regardless of the outcome of the Texas Legislature’s current special session. Although we are fortunate to be zoned for a good public elementary school, that is sadly not the reality for most Fort Worth families (see school-based student outcomes). That being said, I’m a staunch advocate of education choice and am represented among the 73% of Texas school parents who supporteducation savings accounts, or ESAs.
Although the Fort Worth district’s email proudly asserts that its public schools are held to “high standards of accountability,” the evidence for these standards is lacking. In fact, the most recent data reveals that, districtwide, only 24% of students meet grade-level standards in math, 31% in reading, and a mere 19% in science. Anyone who sees this data knows that these outcomes are unacceptable and that fundamental change is needed.
The story that we’ve been told for years is that Texas public schools simply need more funding. But a look at the data proves that increased funding hasn’t improved student outcomes. Statewide, a 166% increase in funding per student, adjusted for inflation, occurred between 1970 and 2020. However, student outcomes continue declining, and the state of our public schools worsens.
According to the Nation’s Report Card, the proficiency of students in the Fort Worth district has steadily dropped in both math and reading between 2017 and 2022, and that was with higher annual budgets. The solution can’t be to continue increasing funding for another decade or two in the hopes that things eventually will improve. What our public schools need is not an injection of even more hard-earned cash from taxpayers. They need a shake-up of this failing system to make it better. That shake-up is called education choice.
Some of the more common arguments made by opponents of education savings accounts is that ESAs will “take money away from the public schools,” “only benefit the rich,” or “hurt public school education.”
The problem with these either/or fallacies is the availability of research and data from 31 states with some form of school choice, many for 20 years or more. So, what does years’ worth of data from numerous states show happens when parents are given a choice in how to educate their child? Public schools improve and students across all socioeconomic levels achieve substantial gains in academic success, both in the short and long term.
Here are a few examples.
When Florida implemented school choice in 2002, the state ranked 33rd in the nation for outcomes among low-income students. By 2019, Florida had risen to first in the nation.
Similarly, when Indiana implemented school choice in 2002, it was No. 22 in the nation for educating low-income students. By 2019, Indiana had risen to No. 3.
In Washington, D.C., a school choice program resulted in high school graduation rates improving from 70% to 82% of students, according to a 2010 study by the Department of Education.
Other examples abound, and the research is clear: Giving parents the opportunity to choose the educational path that is the best fit for their own child has positive, meaningful, and measurable effects.
The Fort Worth school district’s email assailing education choice encouraged parents by saying that our “voice is crucial in shaping the future of our community’s education system.”
So let my voice be clear as well: Our kids deserve better. We have the opportunity to support legislation that will give children in Texas better opportunities to learn and succeed. Your voice matters, too. Now is the time to stand up and speak out on behalf of our children and for the sake of the future of the great city of Fort Worth and the great state of Texas.
Lindsay Horton, a resident of Fort Worth, Texas, is the mother of three children. Her husband, J.B. Horton, is executive vice president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Tenth-graders at a Missouri high school last week had to watch a slideshow on “oppression and privilege” that may violate state law by using information from a Planned Parenthood affiliate that lists abortion clinics on its website.
The class of sophomores at Webster Groves High School near St. Louis watched a slideshow titled “Being an Ally,” which lists so-called oppression categories as “racial,” “class,” “gender,” “sexual orientation,” “religion,” and “immigration status.”
“It’s wrong to teach that different categories of human beings are either inherently oppressive or oppressed,” said the mother of one student, who provided a video of the presentation to The Daily Signal.
“This rhetoric is divisive in nature and creates undeserved mentalities of guilt or victimhood,” said the mother, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her child’s privacy.
In an apparent violation of Missouri state law by the Webster Groves School District, the end of the Oct. 18 slideshow included a barcode and link to the website for Teen Health Source, a subsidiary of Planned Parenthood Toronto.
Teen Health Source calls itself a “sexual health information service run for and by youth.” Categories listed on its website include “Birth Control,” “Gender Identity & Sexual Orientation,” “Pleasure,” “Pregnancy,” “Puberty & The Body,” “Sex,” and “STIs” [sexually transmitted infections].
The presentation to 10th-graders isn’t out of the ordinary for Webster Groves School District, which enrolls almost 4,500 students in the suburbs of St. Louis. Last September, a parent read the transgender-promoting children’s book “I Am Jazz” to a second-grade class without the school’s first informing other parents. Starting in kindergarten, students in the school district learn to “examine issues of social justice and equity within an anti-bias framework.”
Two school employees, counselor Carrie Aschinger and social worker Anne Gibbs, presented the “privilege and oppression” slideshow to the 10th-graders, a video of which later was uploaded to an online learning platform.
“Being an ally means using your privilege to help support people who are facing oppression that you might not experience yourself,” Aschinger told the 16- and 17-year-old students, according to the video.
The presentation included tips on listening to those who are oppressed by navigating factors such as “gender pronouns.” Gibbs told the students that “allies” need to go through “unlearning,” which “involves questioning and rejecting oppressive beliefs you might have held for a long time.”
“As you learn about your privilege as a non-oppressed person, try to be honest with yourself about how that privilege has affected your life and who you are,” Gibbs told students, according to the video posted below.
This is a direct attack on Christian homes. Jesus said (John 3:19-21) that human beings love the darkness, instead of the light, because they know their believe system, philosophy, theology, sociology, et., al., is wrong. Their real aim is to take young Christian students away from God and their parents upbringing.
Aschinger and Gibbs didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment for this report. The Webster Groves School District also didn’t respond.
The mother who leaked the video of the slideshow to The Daily Signal said a public school shouldn’t ask children to evaluate their privilege.
“The district knows that many parents disapprove and continues to push these lessons anyway,” she said.
The “About” page for Teen Health Source, linked in the presentation to the 10th-graders, says it is “non-judgmental, sex-positive, pro-choice, and inclusive.”
Missouri law requires school districts to notify parents of the “basic content of the district’s or school’s human sexuality instruction to be provided to the student.” It also specifies a “parent’s right to remove the student from any part of the district’s or school’s human sexuality instruction.” However, the school mom who saw and leaked the video of the slideshow said she wasn’t informed in advance.
In a letter to the state association of school boards, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey promoted a model resolution with which school districts could pledge to “uphold Missouri law on human sexuality instruction in public schools.”
Bailey’s draft resolution for the Missouri School Board Association notes that “issues of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression are inextricably intertwined with human sexuality.”
To enforce the laws as written and protect children across the state, I directed a letter to the Missouri School Board Association, urging them to call on their members to adopt a model resolution pledging to uphold Missouri law on human sexuality instruction in public schools. pic.twitter.com/kg5pzfotOO
— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) January 31, 2023
On its website, Teen Health Source defines abortion on its website as “a safe medical procedure that ends a pregnancy.” The website also says medical abortions “use medication to stop the growth of a pregnancy and then expel the pregnancy tissue from the uterus” and a surgical abortion “remove[s] the pregnancy tissue from the uterus.”
“Pregnancy tissue” apparently is a euphemism for “unborn baby” or “fetus,” words that don’t appear there in regard to abortion.
The Teen Health Source website has descriptions and links to abortion clinics in the Toronto area. It doesn’t list any pro-life pregnancy resource centers.
Teen Health Source also suggests “trangender care” clinics that offer minors sterilizing hormone therapy and referrals for transgender surgery. Other services listed include support for teenagers who want help “coming out” or are “questioning gender identity and/or sexual orientation.”
Some clinics recommended to Teen Health Source’s audience, which encompasses ages 13 through 19, provide HIV testing, birth control prescriptions, and abortion pills.
A section of the website, called “Navigating sex and gender dysphoria,” defines gender dysphoria as “a term for stress, conflict, or negative feelings people can feel in relation to their bodies, gender or how others perceive their gender.” It defines gender euphoria” as “a term for the joy, comfort or connection people can feel in relation to their bodies, gender or how others perceive their gender.”
A page on gender dysphoria advises teens who are questioning their gender on how to have “affirming sex” and remind themselves that their “body and gender is awesome and is the gender and sex that you say it is” [sic].
A post on “porn literacy” tells teenagers: “Porn can be good for inspiration.”
“Lots of people use and enjoy porn,” Teen Health Source’s post reads. “Some people are concerned about how they use it. They may worry that they’re using porn too much or that they’re addicted to it, but there’s no one ‘normal’ or ‘right’ amount to use porn.”
“Linking students to any website that publishes articles about gender identity, sexual pleasure, ‘porn literacy,’ and abortion should not occur without notifying parents,” the anonymous mother of a sophomore told The Daily Signal in an email. “They are sneaking in sexual education when some families may have opted out.”
A post on “Sex, Gender, and Sexuality” says: “Some people are transgender, which means their gender identity doesn’t align with their biological sex.”
“Your gender identity may be fluid and can change throughout your life,” the post reads.
Teen Health Source’s webpage titled “Hookups” describes what it calls “casual sex encounters.”
“Sex is not something that happens only when people are in committed relationships,” the post reads. “There are many different kinds of sexual relationships and sometimes it can be confusing to sort them all out.”
The slideshow presentation that refers to Teen Health Source makes her want to remove her child from the school district, the concerned mother told The Daily Signal.
“The decision-making by district administration and the Board of Education have become increasingly predictable and politically-driven,” she said in an email. “How can parents feel comfortable sending their children to school where they are fed a constant stream of one-sided political propaganda?”
The mother said she believes the Missouri school district violated state law by encouraging students to visit a website associated with Planned Parenthood that contains materials on sex education.
“I would really like to see Webster Groves School District drop the politics from their decision making and curriculum,” she said. “But unfortunately, I don’t see that happening, as they’ve been accelerating in the opposite direction.”
A Missouri law, passed in March, will allow students to transfer from their school district to eligible schools starting with the 2024-2025 school year.
“School choice is just around the corner in Missouri, and I think people will be shocked at the number of families who pull their children from the district, given that opportunity,” the mother said.
Oregon has removed reading and writing proficiency requirements for graduation. Had the Oregon Board of Education done 15 minutes of research, it would have found that relaxing academic performance standards has had drastic adverse consequences. (Photo: Boy Anupong/Getty Images)
The Oregon Board of Education on Thursday voted unanimously to remove requirements for students to be proficient in reading and writing in order to graduate—joining the long line of ill-advised moves to cut academic expectations for American students.
The Oregon Department of Education released a statement calling the reading and writing proficiency standards “burdensome to teachers and students.” Dan Farley, Oregon’s assistant superintendent of research, assessment, and data with the Education Department, said the standards simply “did not work.”
There’s no evidence that suspending those standards is going to improve the academic performance of any student—quite the contrary. Had the Oregon Board of Education done 15 minutes of research, it would have found that relaxing academic performance standards has had drastic adverse consequences.
Ohio tried the same strategy in 2020—and the results are already looking grim. Then-state Superintendent Paolo DeMaria reformed graduation requirements, abandoning “competency” in math and English. Since that decision, Ohio’s math proficiency has dropped.
An Ohio State University report on Ohio’s proficiencies in math and English describe middle- and high-school grades’ math performance decline as “substantial.” Since 2020, math performance in grades 3 through 10 has fallen between 1% and 4%—and shows no signs of improving.
Why would it? If math proficiency is no longer a requirement for graduation, why would schools devote the time to making sure students are proficient in it?
Public school districts in California, Michigan, New York, and South Carolina have tried similar approaches—lowering academic standards and expectations in the name of “racial equity.” The results are as you might expect: No district that has sought to cut academic standards has seen an improvement in academic performance.
Why would Oregon be any different?
Oregon’s Board of Education has not provided an alternative to the literacy graduation standards; therefore, we can and should expect the same results, ranging from mediocrity to abject failure, that other states and districts have suffered due to the embarrassingly poor decisions made by individuals who won’t suffer the consequences of illiteracy.
American education is rapidly becoming a toxic system of promoting the “good enough” benchmark to bolster self-esteem by pretending students’ failure is either nonexistent or not their responsibility.
As Daniel Buck, a former educator and fellow at the Fordham Institute, points out, grade point averages in the United States have risen considerably since 2010—while ACT testing scores have remained constant. Students’ performance, as measured by standardized testing, isn’t increasing—but their grades are still improving. How?
Standards are in sharp decline, and performance will follow.
Thankfully, some states are bucking this trend. Tennessee has begun requiring third grade students who don’t meet performance requirements on the annual state math test to take summer classes in an effort to close gaps.
Florida—which not only kept students in classrooms during the COVID-19 pandemic, but has also increased expectations for students in both math and English—has seen dividends in student performance. Florida’s reading and math average scores for grades 4, 8 and 12 have climbed year-over-year since 2020.
The lack of academic expectations has driven many parents to seek alternative education options for their children in the past decade—with STEM and classical education seeing the largest increases.
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics charter and private schools have become a common sight in cities across the country—promising a rigorous environment for students to stretch their academic muscles and prepare for challenging careers by carrying a hefty workload with intensive assessments.
Classical education, which throws pre-K through 12th grade students into classic works of literature, history, sciences, philosophy and theology, has also become quite popular—with organizations such as Classical Learning Test creating an alternative to the SAT and ACT, which many universities are beginning to prefer.
As for Oregon’s decision to abandon reading proficiency, the jury isn’t out; to the contrary, it’s quite in. Other states and schools have consistently proven that leaving standards and expectations behind for any reason will result in diminished returns in performance—and students will end up paying the price for the rest of their lives.
Regrettably, Oregon isn’t the first state, and it likely won’t be the last. Every department, board, administrator, and policymaker that withholds expectations from students is depriving them of the possibility of growth and achievement.
While American physical education programs demonstrably fail the nation’s K-12 students, Christian homeschoolers have found an alternative that’s proven far more effective. The result is that homeschooling is now a driving force behind one of the fastest-growing sports in America: Ninja Warrior.
Since 2009, NBC has broadcast a U.S. version of the Japanese sports reality show “Sasuke” as “American Ninja Warrior.” The dynamic obstacles require a level of skilled athleticism far beyond the basic programming of K-12 gymnasiums. The courses’ difficulties have made both the triumphs and the wipeouts award-winning television with 22 nominations to boast while inspiring a new generation of competitive athletes. Eighteen-year-old Elijah Browning of Tennessee is among them.
A three-time contestant on NBC’s program who nearly made it to the million-dollar rope climb in round four, Browning has been competing in obstacle courses since he was 10.
“I’d always grown up watching the show ever since I was 5, 6, 7 years old,” Browning said in a sitdown interview with The Federalist before another competition just south of Denver, Colorado. Then, “me and my mom started finding competitions all over the country for the leagues outside of Ninja Warrior.”
Browning started experimenting with ninja games when his grandfather constructed obstacles at a family farm. A builder for more than 40 years, his grandfather reconstructed common hurdles from the show that have become staples in the sport both on and off the airwaves — from the salmon ladder to the cliffhanger.
“Lucky for me,” said Browning with a smile between sips of coffee. “We started at his house because he had already built these like elaborate tree houses for me, so we were like, adding all these obstacles to the tree houses.”
Also lucky for Browning was his mom’s decision to choose homeschooling over public school, which allowed Browning and his 14-year-old brother, Julian, to take the sport seriously. Browning has now trained and competed in 136 ninja gyms across 35 states and three different countries.
“Most of those [contestants] that are really competitive and serious are homeschooled because you have to travel so much to compete,” Browning said. “You have to travel to stay relevant and compete, and you really can’t take a season off.”
The televised program films from March through May. But beyond the show are dozens of other leagues holding competitions throughout the year. Browning maintains a rigorous training schedule of two- to three-hour workouts six days a week. It’s a workout regimen that sets Browning far apart from the less than 1 in 4 U.S. high school students who are physically active for at least 60 minutes on a daily basis. It’s also a grueling regimen that Leila Smith’s two homeschooled Illinois teens are intimately familiar with.
Tyler Smith, 17, has been on the podium for ninja games at least 110 times, and his 14-year-old sister, Sydney, at least 62. To the family’s frustration, however, Tyler has yet to be on the show, and Sydney is still too young. NBC’s eligibility cutoff begins at 15. Sydney, their mother says, has a much better chance by virtue of her sex.
While Tyler has applied for the televised league twice, the reality is that NBC is still producing reality TV. Guests are featured with generous introductions, put together by producers, before they tackle the obstacles in front of millions watching at home. As a white, midwestern male in a male-dominated sport, Tyler has struggled to grab casting producers’ attention despite his record as one of the best teenage athletes in the sport. Ethan Swanson, a nine-time NBC contestant who now coaches other athletes on the outskirts of Chicago, says Tyler is “one of the most acclaimed” teenage ninjas in the country.
Tyler’s tough luck has led the family to prioritize outside leagues over legacy TV. At 17, Tyler was able to buy his first car outright after having made $20,000 from competitions. He bought an Audi A7 entirely with his prize cash. While it might seem like a large sum for a 17-year-old kid, Tyler’s $20,000 winnings reflect a sport that’s still growing. Obstacle course competitions are not yet commercialized with the support of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), so there are no six-figure scholarships to dish out to high-performing high schoolers. Tyler’s financial success, Swanson said, is by far the “high-water mark.” Even then, it’s no full-time salary after graduation.
Ninjas on a Mission
Christian homeschoolers are trailblazing the growth of competitive ninja leagues in the meantime. Browning’s mom, Renee, called the sport’s expansion “exponential.”
“The Christian homeschool community is always looking for outlets for their kids that are unique and uplifting and encouraging, and that is 100 percent what this sport is,” Renee said. “It’s not cutthroat and mean, like it’s all a bunch of incredible families, and I think that’s appealing to the Christian homeschooling world.”
Leila Smith offered a similar assessment about the sport’s popularity among Christian homeschoolers, calling the community “tight-knit” with a camaraderie of “ninja moms.”
“Knowing that there were Christian families kept us in the sport more,” she said.
Christian ninjas have congregated in Colorado Springs for the past two years to participate in “Warriors on a Mission.” The annual conference features a worship service, book signings, and speakers on how faith has guided athletes’ journey through obstacle courses.
The event is put on by Suzanne Himka, a 53-year-old grandmother who herself still trains and competes in obstacle races. Earlier this month, Himka captured the gold medal in the Mammoth Lakes Obstacle Course Racing World Championships in California. In Colorado Springs, she operates a faith-based gym called Lost Island Warrior where she coaches a team of about 50 competitive athletes and another team of exclusively homeschoolers. The annual conference is her way to “spread the gospel through ninja,” she told The Federalist.
“It’s more than ninja, it’s ministry,” Himka said.
Both Tyler Smith and Elijah Browning were speakers at this year’s conference in June. Next year, Himka plans to hold the conference in Anaheim, California, to coincide with the Ultimate Ninja Athlete Association World Championships so more athletes can attend.
“So many want to come out,” she said, but “it is a big cost.” Himka has spent upwards of $10,000 to help families cover flights and accommodations, but “it’s hard because I’m the only one doing it by myself.”
Himka said 50-85 kids have made professions of Christian faith at the camp every year, and she hopes to keep it running on an annual basis. She speaks regularly to her everyday students and those who come to camp about the analogies between the Bible and overcoming the sport’s obstacles.
“There’s so many analogies,” she said. For example, if kids spend their life looking downward and at a screen instead of upward and outward, “then you’re going to miss a lot of stuff.”
Ninja Inc.
Professional ninjas don’t make a living competing, but the proliferation of the sport has still led prior show contestants to open gyms of their own. The physical demands of the obstacle courses require a unique versatility that leads athletes to peak even earlier than in more popular sports, such as baseball and basketball.
Swanson opened his own gym, Big Time Ninja, in a Chicago suburb with Chris DiGangi, a 12-time contestant on NBC. The facility opened in February after the pair had already hit two dozen buzzers between them and have now chosen to coach the next generation of athletes.
Swanson told The Federalist the top athletes in the sport right now are between ages 16 and 22.
“I think that’s going to increase in the next five years,” he added, crediting advanced facilities such as Big Time Ninja “that offer way more to these kids coming up in the sport.” Swanson estimates the peak age range will shift upward to 17-25.
“All these kids that are learning have better coaches,” he said. “When I was training, I didn’t have a coach.”
But now, even the top teen athletes have begun their careers in coaching. Elijah Browning coaches other ninjas at a gym he launched in Tennessee called Overcome The World. He said about half of his students are homeschooled. Tyler Smith also coaches a team in Illinois on Wednesdays. In Colorado, however, the career of one full-time coach serves as inspiration for athletes who might think competing is beyond their reach.
Just east of Boulder, Nate Hansen, a five-time contestant on NBC, began working at “Ninja Nation” two years before his first invitation for the televised obstacle-course competition. Now known as “Gnarly Nate,” Hansen worked his way from birthday party host in 2018 to head coach at the facility today.
In 2020, Hansen smashed the buzzer on his first run through the course, fulfilling a lifelong mission.
“I was like, ‘This could be the peak of my life,’” Hansen recalled. Despite falling on the fourth obstacle the next day, “that season was definitely like one of the peak moments in my life because it was the time that I got to first execute my dream.”
AMERICAN NINJA WARRIOR | National Finals 3 | Episode 1412 | Pictured: Nate HansenIMAGE CREDITELIZABETH MORRIS/NBC
Yet by every measure, biology was stacked against him becoming a professional athlete. Hansen was born with growth hormone deficiency. Also known as dwarfism or pituitary dwarfism, GHD is a rare condition in which affected individuals develop shorter limbs and stature because the body fails to produce enough growth hormones.
“I’m at a severe disadvantage at times being only five-two,” Hansen explained. “I can’t jump as far as, you know, a six-foot-tall athlete.” At the same time, he added, “I honestly appreciate that I weigh less than most athletes.”
The wide variety of obstacles compel athletes to train for an entire range of possibilities on the course and often require just as much climbing as they do reaching. The variation in hurdles means a tall, heavy, athletic body-builder might find it easier to run up the warped wall but more difficult to hurl himself over. An athlete with a lighter stature, on the other hand, probably has an easier time lifting himself through the course.
Yet for all of the disadvantages handed to him by GHD, Hansen defied the odds “by the grace of God” to “show the talent that I’ve been gifted.”
Hansen was among the speakers at this year’s Christian ninja conference in Colorado Springs and credits his faith for carrying him through his athletic career.
“There’s been times where I’m on the Ninja Warrior course that I don’t feel the best or I feel sick, but I just ask that God carry me through and He does,” Hansen said. “Sometimes you fall and there’s lessons to be learned in that too. Sometimes God uses our faults and failures to teach us the most valuable lessons.”
Now Hansen coaches kids on obstacle courses north of Denver, including a handful of homeschoolers. He also has students who similarly struggle with GHD.
“That’s really cool because, you know, I wish I had a role model and a hero with what I had when I was growing up,” Hansen said. “I can kind of motivate and inspire them as young little kids, you know, and say, ‘Hey it’s OK. You’re going to get bullied. You’re going to get pushed down. But you can still do anything.’”
On to the Olympics
Kids who compete in ninja leagues today might even participate in the Olympics.
The 2028 summer games in Los Angeles are on track to feature the first-ever obstacle-course competition in the international series of tournaments.
Terry England, an obstacle-course coach based in New Orleans, told The Federalist the sport will likely be tested in Los Angeles as a replacement for equestrian in the modern pentathlon. The Paris games next summer will be the final year the modern pentathlon will be a five-event sport that includes fencing, swimming, horseback riding, pistol shooting, and running, which were selected to reflect the skills of 19th-century cavalry.
According to NBC, athletes will compete in 10 obstacles up to 100 meters long. Potential hurdles include a rope swing, monkey bars, a rings rig, and a balance beam.
England, which serves on the USA Ninjas Association, is on a committee trying to elevate the sport to Olympic status.
“What does that mean for teen ninjas?” England said. An 8-year-old who has a very good ninja background, he explained, might have a chance to compete on the world stage. “If this 8-year-old can run and swim, then they already have three of the disciplines that are learned to become a pentathlete.”
Exactly why equestrian will be replaced remains unclear, England said. But for ninja, “future Olympics can add events so that there can be longer races, different styles, and team relays in such that would branch out.”
The sport’s addition to the Olympic lineup might also open the door to the league being adopted by American universities. If viewership is good enough, obstacle-course racing may transform from a minor-league hobby with its own television show to a global sport backed by the NCAA. With that would come an even greater flood of interest and money into the sport, including the six-figure scholarships today’s top-tier ninja athletes currently miss out on.
The Olympics may help further popularize Ninja Warrior, but until then, Tyler Smith says he’s ready to compete for “as long as I can.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
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