An image from a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools of North Carolina training presentation for faculty. | keepmyncsafe.com
Christian groups are urging parents to remove their children from a group of private schools after video footage revealed an effort to teach pre-k students about LGBT ideology.
Breitbart News obtained video footage from a National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) workshop in 2020. NAIS describes itself as a “nonprofit membership association that provides services to more than 1,900 schools and associations of schools in the United States and abroad, including more than 1,600 independent private K-12 schools in the U.S.”
At the training session, which took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, speakers addressed how to “prepare your PK-8 Students for Their World” through “the lens of gender, identity, and sexuality education.”
NAIS lauded the workshop for enabling Belmont Day School, a private school in Belmont, Massachusetts, to share its “comprehensive, dynamic, responsive Health and Wellness curriculum with a developmentally appropriate PK-8 Gender, Identity, and Sexuality strand.”
One speaker who presented at the workshop discussed how “with the younger children starting in pre-k, we talk about their bodies, about the parts that they were born with, about penises and vaginas and whether that makes somebody a boy or a girl.” The speaker explained that students as young as pre-k are asked, “What do they feel like inside? Do they feel like a boy or a girl? What does their head say? Does (sic) their head and their heart and their body match up?”
As the woman spoke, a picture of the “Every” Body Tool appeared on the screen. The image on the left side of the screen featured a human body with icons representing the brain, heart and DNA. A key on the side of the screen had the phrase “gender identity” next to the brain icon, the phrase “sexual orientation” beside the heart icon and the word “sex” alongside the DNA icon. A star appears in the middle of the diagram to represent “gender expression,” which is implied to be a sum of an individual’s gender identity, sexual orientation and sex.
In a statement to The Christian Post, Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for education studies at the Family Research Council, explained that because “parents with children in private schools do not enjoy basic civil rights protections that are afforded in public institutions,” “their recourse is to remove their child from the school since groups like NAIS are training private school teachers and administration to promote LGBT materials even to very young students.”
“Parents of children in private schools often have a false sense of security about the intellectual safety of their children from sexualized materials we see promoted in public schools,” she added. “Whether they are teaching in public or private schools, teachers and administrators are produced by the same university system that’s obsessed with queer theory and critical race theory. The post-Obergefell world is fraught for parents seeking to protect children from sexualized content or instill a worldview based on traditional sexual ethics.”
The 2015 Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Critics of the decision expressed concern that it would have negative implications for religious liberty and lead to schools promoting same-sex relationships as equally beneficial to children as the nuclear family.
“LGBT interest groups and advocates have significant influence in public education settings”, Kilgannon told CP. “Private institutions are the next step, to the degree some were not early adopters of sexualized identity trends in education. The HRC rating and scores for businesses can easily be applied to private schools.”
Kilgannon warned that “LGBT activists and advocates are ready to name and shame any organization that doesn’t go along with their demands for affirmation and applause, including private schools and the organizations that are part of the private educational infrastructure, like NAIS.”
The video footage of the NAIS conference reveals that the effort to expose young children to LGBT ideology continues throughout the elementary school years. Suggested reading material for first-grade students includes the book, What Makes a Baby, characterized by Amazon as a “twenty-first century children’s picture book about conception, gestation, and birth.”
Amazon’s summary of the book notes that the work “reflects the reality of our modern time by being inclusive of all kinds of kids, adults, and families, regardless of how many people were involved, their orientation, gender and other identity, or family composition.”
The summary also states that “the story doesn’t gender people or body parts, so most parents and families will find that it leaves room for them to educate their child without having to erase their own experience.”
Who Are You? The Kid’s Guide to Gender Identity is listed as recommended reading for second-graders. Second-grade students are taught about gender identity “in terms of your head and your heart and your body parts matching up” and asked, “Does that work for you?” and “What happens if it doesn’t?”
“The kids draw wonderful self-portraits … dealing with all aspects of their identity, including specifically, their gender identity,” the speaker explained. Under this curriculum, fifth-grade students are reintroduced to the “Every” Body tool and told that “hormones and chromosomes” are “something that you can only change with a whole lot of effort.”
The speaker suggested that fifth graders are told that “gender expression” is “something that you can change from day to day.”
Describing fifth grade as “our big year,” the speaker discussed the “Gender Unicorn,” where students are asked to check off their “gender identity” as either “female/woman/girl,” “male/man/boy” or “other genders.” Additionally, students have the option to check off their gender expression as “female,” “masculine” or “other,” their sex assigned at birth as “female,” “male” or “other/intersex” and indicate whether they were physically or emotionally attracted to “women,” “men” or “other gender(s).”
A Google drive account featuring “Workshop Resources”lists“Anything by Planned Parenthood, but especially their Sexuality Education Conference Series” as one of several “recommended resources” for NAIS schools looking to implement similar curriculum. Other recommended resources included the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Educators Network, an LGBT advocacy group.
Five pages of recommended reading for students and parents included books promoting transgenderism, such as Jacob’s New Dress and My Princess Boy, and books that promote same-sex relationships with titles like A Tale of Two Daddies and A Tale of Two Mommies. The list also featured a book titled Who Are You?: The Kid’s Guide to Gender Identity.
Another document outlines scenarios for teachers to respond to, including one where “a male kindergarten student wants to wear a princess costume in the Halloween parade” but “his parents have communicated with the homeroom teachers that they do not under any circumstances want their son wearing a princess costume.”
In another scenario, a student comes to the teacher saying that his parents refuse to let him participate in a gay pride parade the school is spearheading and uses “homophobic and transphobic language as well as perpetuating LGBTQ+ stereotypes.”
In each scenario, teachers are encouraged to consider guiding questions asking, “Who does this impact?” “Who do we need to respond to?” “How does the approach change for different constituents?” “What would I like to do vs. what would I probably do?” “Can you use this framework with other scenarios in your school” and “How do you move or encourage others to move from an accomplice to ally?”
Breitbart’s reporting about the NAIS workshop comes as many American families increasingly turn to private schools and other alternative methods of education due to dissatisfaction with the sexually charged curriculum their children are exposed to in public schools. The inclusion of the books Gender Queer and Lawn Boy, which critics liken to child pornography and a promotion of pedophilia, in school libraries has caused particular concern.
Illinois’ recently enacted sex education guidelines teaching children in grades as low as kindergarten about gender identity have also resulted in parental protest. Outrage over public schools’ embrace of critical race theory, “woke” ideology and sexually explicit curriculum has led to the rise of advocacy organizations such as Parents Defending Education and the 1776 Project PAC, which is working to elect school board candidates opposed to such ideology.
Breitbart credited the video footage and screenshots included in its reporting to tips from “Undercover Mother,” a group that describes itself as a “Mom Collective with children in independent schools” seeking to protect their children from “the abuse being inflicted by the schools and the cartels of the regional and National Association of Independent Schools.”
A sign outside a classroom taken in 2016. | REUTERS/Tami Chappell
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has released a formal opinion concluding that performing certain gender reassignment procedures on children constitutes child abuse under state law. In Opinion No. KP-0401, released last Friday, Paxton said that certain sex-change procedures and treatments “can legally constitute child abuse under several provisions of chapter 261 of the Texas Family Code.” Such procedures and treatments include castration, the removal of healthy body parts as well as the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs among others.
“Beyond the obvious harm of permanently sterilizing a child, these procedures and treatments can cause side effects and harms beyond permanent infertility,” the opinion states.
“The medical evidence does not demonstrate that children and adolescents benefit from engaging in these irreversible sterilization procedures.”
Paxton argued that such invasive gender reassignment procedures, like removing private parts, “would deprive the child of the fundamental right to procreate, which supports a finding of child abuse under the Family Code.”
“Because children are legally incompetent to consent to sterilization, procedures and treatments that result in a child’s sterilization are unauthorized and infringe on the child’s fundamental right to procreate,” the opinion continued.
“The lack of authority of a minor to consent to an irreversible sterilization procedure is consistent with other law. The federal Medicaid program does not allow for parental consent, has established a minimum age of 21 for consent to sterilization procedures, and imposes detailed requirements for obtaining that consent.”
In a statement Monday, Paxton said that there was “no doubt that these procedures are ‘abuse’ under Texas law, and thus must be halted.”
“The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) has a responsibility to act accordingly. I’ll do everything I can to protect against those who take advantage of and harm young Texans,” he added.
Last August, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Jamie Masters published a letter asserting that “genital mutilation of a child through reassignment surgery is child abuse, subject to all rules and procedures pertaining to child abuse.”
Masters’ letter came after Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott requested that the agency “issue a determination of whether genital mutilation of a child for purposes of gender transitioning through reassignment surgery constitutes child abuse.”
Last December, Paxton’s office announced an investigation into Endo Pharmaceuticals and AbbVie Inc. under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act due to the promotion of medications as puberty blockers. The Food and Drug Administration has not approved the use of puberty-blocking drugs for the sake of gender transition but has approved such medication for children who start puberty at a very young age. Some medical organizations, however, contend that puberty blockers and other gender transition procedures for minors can be beneficial to children suffering from gender dysphoria.
The American Medical Association, for example, released an open letter last April arguing that state governments should not prohibit gender reassignment procedures for youth.
“Such decisions must be sensitive to the child’s clinical situation, nurture the child’s short and long-term development, and balance the need to preserve the child’s opportunity to make important life choices autonomously in the future,” stated the AMA in a letter.
“We believe it is inappropriate and harmful for any state to legislatively dictate that certain transition-related services are never appropriate and limit the range of options physicians and families may consider when making decisions for pediatric patients.”
According to the Mayo Clinic, the benefits of puberty-blocking medicines for gender dysphoria “might” include reducing depression among youths and preventing the need for future surgery. Nevertheless, the clinic warns that taking puberty blockers remains a “big step” that can have a long-term impact on bodily growth, bone density and fertility.
“In addition, delaying puberty beyond one’s peers can be stressful,” the Mayo Clinic explained. “Your child might experience lower self-esteem.”
The conservative American College of Pediatricians, an association of physicians and healthcare professionals “dedicated to the health and well-being of children,” has long voiced its opposition to using puberty-blocking drugs on children with gender dysphoria.
“There is not a single long-term study to demonstrate the safety or efficacy of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for transgender-believing youth,” the association says in an online statement. “This means that youth transition is experimental, and therefore, parents cannot provide informed consent, nor can minors provide assent for these interventions. Moreover, the best long-term evidence we have among adults shows that medical intervention fails to reduce suicide.”
This article features explicit material unsuitable for all readers.
Coaxing 10-year-old girls away from their parents, promising a fun and safe environment, and then forcing them to sleep in the same room as grown men is the kind of behavior you’d expect from a sexual predator. It’s child endangerment at best and traumatizing abuse at worst. Yet that’s exactly what California’s Los Alamitos Unified School District forced little girls at a school-organized science camp to do for three nights in San Bernardino, according to outraged parents.
“No parent should feel the way I feel after knowing what could have happened to my daughter,” parent Suzy Johnson told local news. “If I was aware of it and I had initialed something saying this was going to be done at this outdoor science camp, I would have kept my children home.”
When confronted about the sleeping arrangements, the camp’s defense was, “Per California law, we place staff in cabins they identify with,” and the two men refer to themselves as “they/them.”
While the science camp incident is enraging, it’s far from the first or only indication that government schools likely harm children more than they benefit them. Before entrusting their kids to a behemoth that has repeatedly subjected children to abuse, parents should demand proof that schools are trustworthy — and assume they aren’t until proven otherwise.
Public schools’ insane obsession with the transgender agenda has physically endangered young girls before. Just look to Loudoun County, where a boy in a skirt raped a young lady in the women’s bathroom and the school board covered it up to keep the incident from sinking their transgender bathroom policy. What else don’t parents know about?
When these far-left pipe dreams about erasing sex don’t subject kids to physical abuse, they often inflict mental abuse. Even in a red state like Idaho, a report earlier this month found that “School administrators in Coeur d’Alene manipulated an 11-year-old girl into believing she was a boy and should undergo gender transition surgery” behind her parents’ backs. “The elementary school counselor had coached the young girl into believing she was transsexual and instructed her how to tell her parents about her new identity,” the Idaho Freedom Foundation reported.
In Virginia, a public school made kindergarteners sit and listen to a “transgender rights advocate” — a man dressed as a woman who goes by “Sarah” — read them a book about a transgender teen.
In Iowa, a school district used the “Black Lives Matter at School Guiding Principles” to teach kids as young as four years old to “free[] ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking,” “dismantle cis-gender privilege,” and “disrupt[] the Western prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.”
A school in a small Colorado town outside of Boulder showed elementary students a play about a transgender raven, accompanied by videos like “He, She, and They – What is Gender” and “No More Gender Roles.” The videos include conversations with a gender-confused teddy bear that conclude gender roles are “mean, they are not fun and they are big problems.” One parent of a first-grader reported that, after showing one of the videos, his daughter’s teacher paired kids up to talk about their preferred pronouns.
Leaked audio from a conference of California’s largest teachers union revealed teachers being instructed on how to stalk middle schoolers and coax them into LGBT groups behind their parents’ backs. “Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents,” Abigail Shrier reported.
School libraries like the one at Baird Middle School in Massachusetts feature sexually explicit books like “Sex Is A Funny Word” by Cory Silverberg. Not only does the book cover “subjects of transgender identity, intersex conditions, and masturbation,” its author is a sex shop owner who specifically targets kids.
A Rhode Island mom filed a police report over a local high school’s promotion of a gay porn book to minors in its library. The book “features discussion of gay sexual fantasies and is incredibly graphic, including scenes of gay men having sex and a scene of one man performing oral sex on another.”
These examples are only some of the incidents that have been brought to light — and they merely scratch the surface. Exposing vulnerable children to sexually explicit material and indoctrinating them to question their own identities, often against their parents’ wishes, is nothing less than mental abuse and exploitation.
A Harvard study in 2015 found youth who identified as transgender were at more than double risk for depression, anxiety, attempted suicide, and self-harm. Last year, Forbes reported that more than half — 52 percent — “of all transgender and nonbinary young people in the U.S. seriously contemplated killing themselves in 2020.” Even aside from students’ exposure to the trans agenda, the toxic environment of public schools has tragically been linked to child suicides, which have escalated in recent years.
This isn’t to say every student in the public school system will be tempted to suicide, subject to pornography, placed in danger of sexual assault, or mentally abused. There are wonderful, truth-loving teachers out there who remain in the system to do as much good as they can for children they care deeply about. I know several. But the examples from all across the country, from known crazies in California to small-town red state school districts, should be enough to convince parents to be wary. Especially of what schools don’t tell them.
Nothing should be more paramount for parents than protecting their children. If a stranger offers to babysit your child, you don’t accept the offer with the rationale that your child might be fine. You expect anyone to whom you entrust your child to first prove he is worthy of stewarding your most sacred possession. Public schools are no different, and the repeated instances proving their abuses should drive your trust even further away. Maybe, like many Americans, you don’t feel you have what you think are feasible alternatives. Or maybe your local school district is sheltered from some of the most radical exploitation. But it behooves you to verify that first before betting your child on it.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
As parents across the nation wake up to the threat that the American educational system poses to children, many have taken note of the sexually explicit, politically motivated literature that has made its way into public and school libraries.
In Wyoming, community members notified the police department about explicit books in the local library’s youth section. “Sex is a Funny Word,” written by Cory Silverberg and illustrated by Fiona Smyth, is one such book. It was placed on the American Library Association Reading List for 2016. Intended for those as young as 7-year-old second graders, the book has been featured in middle school libraries and discusses the “subjects of transgender identity, intersex conditions, and masturbation.” It also erroneously claims that “having a penis isn’t what makes you a boy. Having a vulva isn’t what makes you a girl. The truth is much more interesting than that!”
This type of propagandizing has become standard for the left-wing extremists embedded in our education system. But what makes it all the more astonishing is both the thoroughly unnerving — and previously unreported — history of this book’s author and the institutional support that’s propelled him to notoriety.
From Sex Shops To School Libraries
Cory Silverberg’s website links to the four books he’s written. Each one focuses on the same thing: sex. With the exception of “The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability,” which he coauthored with Miriam Kaufman and Fran Odette, the author’s work is aimed at children. His latest book, “You Know, Sex,” another collaboration with Smyth, is available for pre-order and discusses “pornography,” “stigma,” and “gender.” He calls the book “essential for kids.” His website bio states, “Cory’s life is full of kids. All of them know where babies come from. Some know more.”
Who is this man so intent on informing your children not only about sex, but about pornography, transsexuality, and masturbation? On his website, which advertises children’s books, the author cites himself as a “founding member of Come As You Are Co-operative,” an anti-capitalist sex shop in Toronto, which he also links to.
As the Toronto Star noted years ago, this isn’t just any sex shop. This is a “beginner’s sex store.” The outlet noted that the store hoped “to hold an off-site sex-education workshop for parents of children aged 7 to 12, one that will focus on more than reproduction.” The Star went on to quote Silverberg as saying, “Our overall focus is pleasure-based rather than fear-based.”
The shop’s website includes a section that catalogs the owners’ media appearances. One edition of Fab magazine, published on February 7, 2007, includes an article titled “Come As You Are Celebrates 10 Years.” It spares no details, highlighting a “Japanese rope bondage” workshop, while also graphically describing a real life, in-person “workshop” that featured sexual demonstrations from two naked men.
The disturbing focus on children that is so clear on Silverberg’s personal website is just as apparent on the sex shop’s website. Right next to ads for the exact type of products you’d expect a sex shop to sell, is a “Kids, Parents, and Teens Books” section. The section boasts “sex positive guides for younger folk.”
The kid’s section carries books like “Gender Creative Child,” a guide to masturbation, and “Woke Parenting,” which seeks to help readers “raise your kids to be feminist, anti-racist,” and “gender-inclusive.” Silverberg’s own books are also featured on the site.
Involvement In Curriculum Development
The author’s involvement in Ante Up reveals a conscious desire to embed his distorted worldview into schools. The organization advertises “socio-emotional learning” curriculum that “focuses on supporting educators of color and working-class educators in unlearning the white supremacist ableist heteropatriarchal ways of writing and educating others.”
The sex shop co-founder is joined by such esteemeed co-collaborators as Clarissa Francis, who cut squarely into the Babyon Bee’s marketshare when her bio explained that she “developed the Let Freedom C.U.M. Sexuality Workshop Series to equip Black sexuality professionals, and the aspiring sexually liberated, to recognize and utilize multi-disciplinary approaches to discussing Pleasure Activism as a tool for Black Sexual Liberation.”
The organization seems to have courted favor with various political bodies in New York. Ante Up’s founder Bianca Laureano “wrote the sexual and reproductive justice discussion guide for the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene,” according to her bio. Silverberg spoke on “Sex Is a Funny Word” for the NYC Department of Education’s Office of Curriculum, Instruction, and Professional Learning.
Institutional Support of Extremism
It isn’t a fluke that a leftwing sex shop founder has been propped up as an authority on sexuality, with direct access to children. Media and education institutions, alongside several leftwing activists, have helped mainstream such fringe beliefs. The author is praised because of, not in spite of, the extremism of his sexual worldview.
That “Sex is a Funny Word” was lauded by Kristin Russo on behalf of BuzzFeed as “revolutionary” tells you everything you need to know, but the outlet was one of many institutions to lend its support.
The book won the American Library Association’s Stonewall Award and was celebrated by the School Library Journal, which called the book “exceptional” specifically because of “its introduction of the subjects of transgender identity, intersex conditions, and masturbation.” The organization publishes roughly 6,000 book reviews every year and bills itself as “the premiere publication for librarians and information specialists who work with children and teens.”
Lambda Literary, which “nurtures and advocates for LGBTQ writers,”heaped praise on the book, noting that it took “his radical approach to sex education” featured in his first book even further. It goes on to discuss the role that the book can have in cementing cultural shifts. During an interview with the organization, the author pointed out that some of his critics believe that he is “warping people’s ideas of gender.” He flatly responded, “Maybe I am.”
Various activists, each of whom is committed to overthrowing healthy conceptions of sex, lauded the book alongside these institutions in reviews posted on Amazon.
Andee Hochman is an accomplished leftwing activist who wrote a book all about upending traditional notions of family. It was named “one of the 100 most important feminist books of the 20th century by Sojourner magazine.” Hochman celebrated“Sex Is a Funny Word’s”“radical and urgent message – sexuality with a side of social justice,” also expressing glee that one of the children in the book was portrayed as non-binary. Her lone critique? The text was too small.
Transgender activist and author of “My New Gender Workbook” Kate Bornstein was similarly impressed, writing a review that proposed the book as a viable alternative to college, graduate school, and even “years of therapy.” This is high praise, especially from an activist who wrote the “Step by-Step Guide to Achieving World Peace Through Gender Anarchy and Sex Positivity.”
Aidan Key, who leads trainings in schools, remarked that the book enables readers to “step out of today’s binary gender paradigm,” while Slate’s Rachelle Hampton lauded the book because it “humorously tackles topics from gender to masturbation” and was “leaps and bounds ahead” of other books “in terms of how progressive it is.”
But Huffington Post outdid both Slate and BuzzFeed years ago when they offered the author a platform and even hosted a symposium on reshaping America’s sexual norms with him and more established leftwing activists. The author’s extreme views were given the patina of normalcy through the presence of more mainstream activists like notable author Esther Perel and the widely published Ian Kerner, who talk less of childhood masturbation and more of feminism and relationships. They were also joined by academic Leonore Tiefer, who was involved in the leadership of an organization intent on keeping perversity like “Sex is a Funny Word” in school libraries. Tiefer won an award named after Alfred Kinsey, a hero of the pro-pedophile group NAMBLA.
What’s so telling isn’t the book itself, but that the beliefs behind it, undoubtedly considered reprehensible by massive swaths of the world, have been intentionally mainstreamed by both an activist base and an institutionally backed political movement that’s hostile to traditional notions of decency. No wonder parents are getting active.
Cory Silverberg did not respond to a request for comment.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at The Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
The response to Covid-19 has accelerated a growing divide between parents and schools, which is mostly to say between parents and teachers’ unions. From denying students the ability to learn in-person to forced masking to teaching divisive, historically inaccurate curriculum based on critical race theory (CRT), the trend has been to sideline parents from their children’s educations.
In response to this, states are taking action to ensure parents remain the primary decision-makers for their kids. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a parents’ bill of rights in June 2021. Missouri is considering a similar proposal and in Virginia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued 11 executive orders on his first day in office, two of which were related to education. Indiana is considering a parents’ bill of rights as part of a push to banish despicable materials that kids shouldn’t be taught.
At the national level, Sen. Josh Hawley has also proposed a Parents’ Bill of Rights, although so far it has not gained any traction. Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, now president of Young America’s Foundation, declared “2022 is the Year of the Parent.” In other words, there’s a growing appetite among parents to take a more active role in education, whether through supporting legislation to empower them or taking the initiative to join their local school boards.
On Thursday, January 20, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott added Texas to the list of states attempting to tackle the divide when he announced his own Parental Bill of Rights, which will be voted on and perhaps enshrined into Texas’ constitution in January 2023. The initiative consists of seven points clarifying the fact that parents, not school boards or unions, are in charge of their kids’ educations.
In announcing the proposal, Abbott said, “The role of parents is being diminished by government itself across the U.S. Parents are losing a voice when it comes to their children’s education and health matters. Many parents feel powerless to do anything about it. That must end … Under the Parental Bill of Rights, we will amend the Texas Constitution to reinforce that parents are the main decision-makers in all matters involving their children.”
A key point in Texas’ proposed amendment, which could serve as a model starting point for other states reads, “Expand parents’ rights to access course curriculum and all material that is available in any education setting for their student through online posting and other methods so parents know what topics will be taught.” While Texas parents can currently get those materials, it requires an information request rather than the click of a mouse.
Submitting an information request is an unnecessary burden, particularly in an age in which schools are teaching children to be racists, encouraging them to be climate change alarmists, and pushing ludicrous and dangerous ideas about changing your sex or being “two-spirit.” Granted, two of those occurrences are from California, a state parents should just move away from rather than attempt to reform.
Even in Texas, though, there are leftist salvos in the culture war. Just last October, a mom in Keller, who with her husband had moved their family from California to avoid such things, discovered their new town’s library was offering a book featuring graphic depictions of oral sex. Parents in Leander, a town north of Austin and part of its greater metropolitan area, also discovered books with depictions and illustrations they don’t want their children to have access to without their permission.
While all these initiatives are worthy ideas, and Abbott’s proposal is the strongest yet, the jury is still out on whether they will resolve the issues parents are seeing with schools.
For starters, parental bills of rights require parents to actually be involved, which doesn’t always happen, even in the age of Zoom schooling. As a result, these various bills, amendments, and executive orders could result in nothing more than “won’t somebody please think of the children” activity. As the great men’s basketball coach, known for also educating his players, John Wooden said, “Never mistake activity for achievement.”
Elected officials such as Abbott, DeSantis, and Youngkin may be leading the nation on this front, but they’re doing so in response to their constituents. Youngkin’s victory was likely sealed, in fact, when his opponent Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Given that Youngkin’s implicit message is “Stop messing with our kids, you freaks!,” the tide on parents shipping their kids off to school and hoping for the best seems to be turning.
Parents’ bills of rights could still turn out to be gimmicks, an activity that doesn’t lead to achievement, but our kids’ educations are not the government’s job. But at least for those of us who do send our kids to government-run or -funded schools, such measures offer us a way to take more charge and ensure that we approve of what’s being taught in the classroom and offer recourse for times when we have legitimate criticisms.
The work is still up to us parents, but governors and legislatures can give us the tools we need to do that work more effectively.
Richard Cromwell is a writer and senior contributor at The Federalist. He lives in Northwest Arkansas with his wife, three daughters, and two crazy dogs. Co-host of the podcast Coffee & Cochon, you can find him on Facebook and Twitter, though you should probably avoid using social media.
Demonstrators in Keene, New Hampshire, gather at a “Save the Children Rally” to protest child sex trafficking and pedophilia around the world, on September 19, 2020. | AFP via Getty Images/Joseph Prezioso
“I’m going to throw up. My stomach is literally twisting. God please help us!” That was the response of a viewer on my YouTube channel after watching video clips of two professors advocating adult-child sex — including coercive sex. Wanting to throw up is a very natural reaction.
To be sure, I’ve heard these arguments before. In fact, one of the most sickening chapters to write in my 2011 book A Queer Thing Happened to America was the chapter quoting pedophile advocates. NAMBLA (the North American Man Boy Love Association) has more advocates than we could care to imagine.
As quoted in A Queer Thing Happened to America (and cited from Louis Berman’s book, The Puzzle), “The Dutch lawyer Edward Brongersma wrote an article sympathetic to man-boy love. He cites (page 160) a report (Rossman, 1976) that ‘gives several examples of social workers achieving miracles with apparently incorrigible young delinquents — not by preaching to them, but by sleeping with them. Affection demonstrated by sexual arousal upon contact with the boy’s body, by obvious pleasure taken in giving pleasure to the boy, did far more good than years in reformatories.’ Brongersma (page 160) tells of an Amsterdam juvenile judge who in a public speech ‘openly advocated this form of social therapy.’ This is a sample of the persuasive case that man-boy lovers make to support their position.”
Anyone else feel like throwing up?
Yet these video clips are even more disturbing, featuring Professor Stephen Kershnar of the State University of New York at Fredonia and Professor Thaddeus Russell, who now associates with “Renegade University.”
The two professors are laughing about the subject of adult-child sex, with Russell commenting that he’s been advocating for this for more than 20 years in his classrooms. Twenty years! How on earth did he get away with this? (Russell is also an outspoken advocate of lowering the age of consent.)
And to be clear, they were not just talking about an adult having sex with a younger teenager (which they also endorse; the technical term is ephebophilia). Instead, they explicitly talk about adult-child sex in distinction from ephebophilia.
And these men are college professors? (Kershnar is listed by his school as a distinguished professor of philosophy.) These men have been influencing your children? These men have been speaking freely and openly about these subjects, and in some cases writing about them too, and they were never reported or disciplined? How can this be?
Read Kershnar’s words if you don’t believe me: “Imagine that an adult male wants to have sex with a 12-year-old girl. Imagine that she’s a willing participant. A very standard, very widely held view is that there’s something deeply wrong about this — and it’s wrong independent of it being criminalized.
“It’s not obvious to me that it’s in fact wrong. I think this is a mistake. And I think exploring that why it’s a mistake will tell us not only things about adult/sex and statutory rape and also fundamental principles of morality.”
Watching the videos, these professors are glib and flippant, incredulous that people could object to pedophilia. Really now, if there are good results from pedophilia, who are we to object to it?
Yet it gets worse.
These two men openly advocate for coercive adult-child sex. I kid you not. Watch the clips for yourself if you don’t believe me.
Yes, they explain, a child lives his or her entire life under adult coercion. To paraphrase, the parents tell their kids, “You go to sleep at this time. You go to the school to which we send you. You make your bed. You take piano lessons. You do what your parents tell you to do.”
Indeed, they argue, a child sometimes is required to do something simply for the pleasure of a parent. Why not sex? They actually compare it to being told you have to go your uncle’s funeral even though you don’t want to. How different is this from being forced to have sex?
What madness!
The good news is that Kershnar’s university has disavowed his comments, calling the video “reprehensible.” And he has now been “reassigned.” (Why not fired?)
The bad news is that his official bio page noted that, “Kershnar has written one hundred articles and book chapters on such diverse topics as abortion, adult-child sex, hell, most valuable player, pornography, punishment, sexual fantasies, slavery, and torture.”
This begs the question, were other professors totally unaware of his views? Did no administrators know about it? Did no students ever complain? Was the university totally in the dark?
What Kershnar and Russell advocate is monstrously evil. The fact that they could do it for decades as paid professors shaping the views of our children is mind-boggling and sickening.
May they find repentance before they face the one who said, “If anyone causes one of these little ones — those who believe in me — to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” And, “See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven” (the words of Jesus, Matthew 18:6, 10).
What a dreadful day that will be for those who support adult-child sex. (And let us never forget the children who have been brutally victimized!)
A private school in Providence, Rhode Island, recommended that students avoid giving their peers Valentine’s Day cards that portray “only white people,” according to the National Pulse.
In a letter to parents and students, Osvaldo Jose Marti, head of the Moses Brown Lower School, said, “As we approach the month of February, we are writing to share some guidelines for the selection and exchange of Valentines in the Lower School. If your child wishes to bring cards for classmates, please consider these recommendations, which we make in an effort to promote kindness and inclusivity within our community …”
“Please coach your child if purchasing commercially produced cards to select something that does not feel ‘gender normative,’” the letter said, “Also, consider talking to your child about avoiding cards that portray only White human characters. Representation matters and our students of color also deserve to see themselves in some of the cards they receive, unless we can find cards without people pictured at all.”
This is not the first time that Moses Brown embraced woke insanity. Parents have complained that the school has an “obsession” with “transgender themes” and encourages students to proclaim “it is ok to be Gay.”
One mother told a regional radio show in New England that a teacher explained to her four-year-old daughter that someday the child “might want to marry another girl.” Children enrolled in Moses Brown’s pre-primary education program are taught to announce their pronouns to their class.
According to the school’s website, Moses Brown’s Lower School — which looks after children starting with nursery care through the 4th grade — emphasizes “the importance of being responsible citizens, and caring for others and the world beyond their doorstep” and helping students “develop their talents in a way that is uniquely theirs, while appreciating and celebrating the different abilities of those around them.”
Moses Brown’s high school provides students with several “service/awareness” organizations to participate in. These include the Gender Sexuality Alliance Club where students are encouraged to “explore issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity/expression” and “Equal Voice,” which “focuses on issues of feminism and equality.”
Moses Brown is a Quaker school system. The school says that the “world needs ethical leadership” and its mission as a Quaker school “is to provide the rising generation with an ethical core, an unshakable foundation of integrity that fosters respect, non-violent resolution of conflict, and the desire to make a positive difference in the world.”
It’s been less than two months since an associate professor teamed up with a pro-pedophile organization in an attempt to normalize the most repugnant crimes imaginable. Now, yet another unhinged professor has been caught advocating for pedophilia, this time even more brazenly. Stephen Kershnar is a professor at State University of New York at Fredonia, and a pedophilia apologist. Here’s Kershnar on video saying that an adult male having sex with a 12-year-old girl is not obviously wrong, and that calling it wrong is a “mistake.” In the same clip, he refers to pedophilic rape as “adult-child sex,” another euphemism that, just like “minor-attracted person,” is being used in an attempt to run cover for evil.
It gets worse. Twelve isn’t young enough for Kershnar. He continues to defend pedophilia, remarking “The notion that it’s wrong even with a one-year-old is not quite obvious to me.” He goes on. “I don’t think it’s blanket wrong at any age.”
Kershnar even argues that children can consent to sex with adults, comparing it to a child willfully engaging in kickball or participating in bar mitzvah lessons.
What are the legal ramifications of such an unspeakably vile perspective? Kershnar lays it out. Since he’s not sure if raping infants is good or bad, “the thumb on the scale should go to liberty.” Liberty for who? Moral monsters who want to rape infants.
Kershnar is open to the idea that pedophilia is deeply harmful to victims, but he just can’t put his finger on why. He thinks it could be because of bigots like you and me, who go “berserk” when pedophiles rape kids. He even argues that we often make children do things they don’t want to do, like “go to church” or “go to temple” or “go to their sister’s ballet recital.” His perspective is backed up by podcast host Thaddeus Russel, who makes an equally monstrous argument when he says, “all a child’s life is, is coercion by adults … often to make the child do something for the adult’s pleasure only.”
It’s also telling that these dangerous viewpoints have found their way into the mainstream through left-wing outlets. At one point, Russel boasts that he authored an article in The Daily Beast that argued for lowering consent laws.
If SUNY Fredonia would like to right this wrong, it can begin by correcting Kershnar’s bio, which adopts the language of child groomers by calling pedophilia “adult-child sex.” Thus far, SUNY Fredonia’s response has been swift, although incomplete. In a statement, the university remarked that Kershnar’s views are “reprehensible and do not represent the values of SUNY Fredonia in any way, shape or form” also noting that “The matter is being reviewed.”
Only one moral decision can be made following such a review. Half measures, or any other move to placate those who are correctly outraged at the situation rather than remedy the crisis, are entirely unacceptable and unbecoming of any institution that hopes to maintain a shred of legitimacy. Although SUNY Fredonia may in fact come to the correct decision, it must be recognized that these sentiments did not come out of nowhere. The institution is responding to a high-profile case that’s just now been exposed.
Some of the school’s alumni weren’t the least bit surprised. After all, we’re talking about a professor who published a book titled “Pedophilia and Adult-Child Sex: A Philosophical Analysis” all the way back in 2015. That SUNY at Fredonia is only now responding to this moral crisis in response to public outcry is disgraceful and deceptive.
Kershnar Is Not Alone
When hearing about such an outrageous situation, it can be easy to believe that it is an isolated experience, that such insane notions couldn’t possibly have taken root elsewhere. Unfortunately, this would be a misconception. As mentioned previously, it hasn’t been long since a former professor at Old Dominion University rebranded pedophiles as “minor-attracted persons.” Even this instance was not unique.
A professor at Yale University by the name of Joe Fischel publicly argued that children should be shown nudity, thereby victimized by acts of indecent exposure, at LGBT pride parades. His article was replete with the same strategies that child groomers use, as I outlined previously. These handful of pedophilia apologist professors are just the tip of the iceberg, one facet of a wider campaign to normalize pedophilia. The logical results of these sentiments have trickled down into K-12 institutions, with gay pornography being featured in school libraries, while other government-run schools host LGBT clubs for four-year-olds, all while refusing to reveal if parents were required to be present on these clubs’ Zoom calls.
The crisis isn’t relegated to education, either, with similar themes popping up in a number of totally different sectors. A commercial from Twix featured child cross-dressing, just one more example of the elite attempt to groom children.
A YMCA’s LGBT center hosts youth-only events, and hosted a man who creates drawings that feature characters from children’s shows having sex. Meanwhile, a broader push to foist transgenderism on children has a dark and storied history of pedophilia, child abuse, and psychological torment. Make no mistake, there is a broad and deliberate push in nearly all areas of public life to normalize pedophilia. This push must be fought wherever it is found, without reservation.
Here’s How To Fight Pedophilia’s Normalization
Let’s be abundantly clear: this is not a complicated issue. In fact, there can be no simpler issue. Pedophilia is evil. That’s it. We shouldn’t accept the notion that pro-pedophilia sentiments are valid ideas to be contended with in the marketplace of ideas by the use of rhetorical flourish or superior philosophizing. Illiberalism is no crime when your opponent uses bad-faith arguments to justify moral atrocities that target the most vulnerable among us, victimizing them in ways they can’t even comprehend. These ideas, just like those who use their institutional positions to normalize this horrid evil, must be ostracized, shamed, shunned, stigmatized, and mocked out of any and all forms of socio-political or academic influence. This is not extreme. It’s the natural immune system response that any healthy society enacts when confronted with a rising tide of danger and evil.
Here are some simple ways you can reject it:
Refuse to use euphemistic and manipulated language.
By using euphemisms, you fight the battle against child groomers on their terms. You must completely reject phrases like “minor-attracted person,” or “adult-child sex,” both of which seek to grant sympathy and dignity to these atrocities and those who commit them. Maintain the moral high ground with terms that accurately identify evil.
Become comfortable with being intolerant.
Tolerance is a vice, not a virtue, when you are asked to tolerate unspeakable moral crimes. Our society has begun to see tolerance as the mark of an enlightened person. Reject this faulty framing, and all the degeneracy and spiritual rot that has followed closely behind it.
Fight, fight, fight.
If there was ever a time to be uncompromising, to cling to your beliefs with unrelenting zeal, this is it. The only proper response to situations such as this is action backed by righteous anger. Root out attempts to normalize pedophilia anywhere and everywhere you find it. Publicize it. Send examples like this to The Federalist. Demand that institutions that are home to these sentiments condemn it wholeheartedly in speech and in action. Fight, fight, fight.
Kershnar did not respond to a request for comment.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at The Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
A long-term study from Vanderbilt University found that children who attended Tennessee’s state pre-k program underperformed in the sixth grade compared to children who did not attend the program.
“Data through sixth grade from state education records showed that the children randomly assigned to attend pre-K had lower state achievement test scores in third through sixth grades than control children,” the study found. The “strongest negative effects” were found in sixth graders.
The study also found a negative effect for “disciplinary infractions, attendance, and receipt of special education services, with null effects on retention.”
The Tennessee Voluntary Prekindergarten program (TN-VPK) operates under the control of the state department of education and is used by low-income families statewide, according to Vanderbilt University. Tennessee has dumped $86 million worth of funding into the program since 2005, giving 15,000 preschoolers statewide access to the program and opening 786 new classrooms.
The study tracked 2,990 preschoolers from low-income backgrounds who applied for the oversubscribed TN-VPK, and researchers observed students who were accepted as well as rejected. This allowed the study to create a “statistically appropriate control group,” as all students came from families who wanted the children in pre-k, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The researchers also stated that there are “no distinctive characteristics of the Tennessee program have yet been identified that are a likely explanation for the disappointing findings,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
President Joe Biden, along with progressives in Congress, has also been pushing universal pre-k for all 3-and-4-year-olds as part of his administration’s Build Back Better framework. The Build Back Better Act, which was set to cost $2 trillion, was blocked in the Senate after Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin stated“this is a no on this piece of legislation,” and that he would not vote for it.
Manchin stated Tuesday that Build Back Better was “dead” and that “there is no Build Back Better bill,” the Daily Caller News Foundation reported. However, Manchin has shown support for certain elements of the bill, including universal preschool.
A now-deleted portion of the Riverside, Califonia school district’s website obtained by The Federalist displays that the district promoted an essay that attacks people based on their inborn skin color. The essay, titled “Decentering Whiteness” by Jeff Hitchcock and Charley Flint, claimed that “attacking whiteness is not enough.” It sought to divide people on the basis of their race and argued that “whiteness” should be pushed to “the margin,”
Riverside Unified School District promoted the essay at least three separate times, under the “Professional Learning,” “Community Engagement,” and “Culture and Climate” sections of their Equity, Access, and Community Engagement resources page, according to screenshots.
The Federalist previously revealed that both Riverside Superintendent Renee Hill and Board of Education member Tom Hunt lied about the district teaching critical race theory. One parent from the district, who wished to remain unnamed, told The Federalist that the resources list that contained “Decentering Whiteness” was removed from the website following the exposé of the district’s dishonesty.
When asked why the resources had been removed, Communication Director Diana Meza stated that the district is “updating the Equity, Access & Community Engagement google site and landing page, the page should be back up soon.”
The school district has charge of nearly 40,000 students, according to federal data, and 35 percent of those students are white. School families’ median income is significantly above the national average, at approximately $73,000 per year.
Decentering Whiteness
The removed 19-page “resources” document, which can be viewed here, not only condemned “whiteness” but served as a guidebook for how institutions can fight it, so that “whiteness itself can be made more marginal.” The paper explained, “Decentering whiteness, as we envision it, is a collective process that can take place in organizations, sectors of society, personal lives, etc., over periods of days, months, years and generations.”
While launching into both anti-white attacks and blatant attempts to divide people on the basis of their immutable characteristics, the paper engaged in race essentialism. It cast race as a defining rather than incidental characteristic when it tells readers to “Assume whiteness, and race, always structures our experience, and thus needs to be consciously considered as part of any social process.”
White people are also openly villainized in the materials. One line reads, “white culture has, on balance, been based on principles of conquest and exploitation” while another says that in the attempt to marginalize whiteness, “simply attacking whiteness is not enough.”
The document did not oppose attacking “whiteness” out of an opposition to racism, nor did it express any concern over the potential fallout of seizing on racial fault lines for socio-political ends. Rather, it simply argued that openly attacking whiteness wouldn’t be strategically effective. It remarked “Simply attacking whiteness is not enough to accomplish this goal. Assaults on whiteness, depending on their nature, may have the effect of confirming and solidifying the central position of whiteness in American society.”
Lighter skin color has been and continues to be one of the prime targets of critical race theory. Noel Ignatiev, a Marxist Harvard professor who is cited in “Decentering Whiteness,” infamously claimed that “treasonous to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”
He also remarked, “Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed—not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed.”
Perhaps most sinister, “Decentering Whiteness” clearly sought to encourage racial division and even racial conflict, calling on a multiracial coalition to “displace” whiteness. It read “It will take a multiracial effort to displace whiteness, one that includes people from all racial/cultural groups.”
How exactly any of this rhetoric benefits the students or staff at Riverside Unified School District is entirely unclear. The presence of this material in a school climate is in fact both un-American and undeniably harmful, not only to the white people who are maligned by it but also those of all other racial backgrounds whom the article attempts to conscript into a race-based power struggle.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at The Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com. SPENCER LINDQUISTVISIT ON TWITTER@SPENCERLNDQST
Goldie Hawn warned that the national trauma inflicted on children by the COVID-19 pandemic is approaching and “could very well surpass” the dread brought on by the 9/11 terror attacks and the Cold War. In an op-ed for USA Today, Hawn described how she saw her “entire world get ripped apart” by the threat of all-out nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1956 when she was in the fifth grade. After being shown a graphic and grim educational film about the dangers of nuclear war, the then-11-year-old Goldie Hawn ran home during lunch to call her mother at work and told her, “Mommy, come home quick! We’re all going to die!” Hawn said the threat of nuclear holocaust inflicted trauma on her for years.
“Even in high school, I’d hear a siren in the morning and be too terrified to go to school that day,” Hawn wrote. “This was a specific trauma that affected me, but it was a collective trauma, too – an entire generation of American children was, in some form or another, taught to think of nuclear holocaust as a real threat.”
Hawn compared the collective trauma endured by her generation to the upheaval other generations experienced – such as children who watched the Challenger space shuttle disaster happen live on Jan. 28, 1986, the kids who witnessed the Twin Towers collapse from the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the youngsters who have had their lives turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We all know how magical a child’s imagination can be – the wonderful worlds they create in their minds. But there’s a flip side to the joyful creativity that can turn a big cardboard box into a spaceship,” the “Overboard” actress articulated. “A child’s mind exposed to real-world fear, without the ability to properly process it, can go down dark passages leading to nothing less than existential dread.”
Hawn explained that the COVID-19 pandemic has robbed adults and children of critical “support structures that all humans depend on for perspective, encouragement, and love.”
“The COVID era has changed our children’s lives in far more real, tangible ways — social distancing, school closures, daily mask use,” she added. “Kids are afraid of people, spaces, even the air around them – a level of constant fear not seen in decades.”
Hawn cited a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found emergency room visits for suspected suicide attempts by adolescent girls spiked nearly 51% in 2021 and almost 4% for boys. The movie star noted that U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy cautioned in December that the COVID-19 pandemic has had “unprecedented impacts on the mental health of America’s youth and families.” She also linked to a declaration of national emergency in child and adolescent mental health by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association.
“As health professionals dedicated to the care of children and adolescents, we have witnessed soaring rates of mental health challenges among children, adolescents, and their families over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, exacerbating the situation that existed prior to the pandemic,” the declaration stated in October. “Children and families across our country have experienced enormous adversity and disruption.”
Hawn commented on the alarming concerns about the mental health of America’s youth, “This tells us that as a nation, we have failed our children.””We are not properly funding preventive care and early interventions that normalize the mental struggles every individual has at some level,” the Academy Award-winning actress wrote. “There are everyday tools for mental fitness, just as there are for exercise and healthy eating; we just don’t teach them in any systematic way to our nation’s children.”
Hawn called for “helping children understand the chemical reactions that occur in their mind” when they hear the “latest horrifying statistic or headline on the evening news.” She said that understanding how the brain works will provide children with “the patience and confidence to put things in perspective, rather than fall victim to the emotions of the moment and end up in a helplessness that leads to depression and sometimes self-harm, the kind we are seeing in record numbers among children.”
She warned that the answer is not to allow kids to “be over-diagnosed or shuffled through a system that screens and treats extreme cases after they are too late.”
“We will survive the COVID-19 pandemic, but I’m not sure we can survive an entire generation whose collective trauma sends them hobbling into adulthood. We need more research, more preventative care and more early intervention. And there’s still time,” Hawn concluded. “If we get it right, today’s kids could emerge as the strongest generation America has ever produced.”
Hawn also made headlines this week when she appeared on “The Megyn Kelly Show” and proclaimed that Hollywood celebrities need to entertain the public no matter what political affiliations they have. “I stay in my lane,” Hawn declared when it comes to spouting political opinions.
“Marxism, Anarchism, and the Black Radical Tradition,” “Witchcraft and the Cultural Imagination,” “Trans-bodies in Horror Cinema,” “The Problem of Whiteness,” and “Transnational Queer Politics and Practices” are not course titles invented by “The Babylon Bee” to mock the state of America’s universities. Rather, they are real classes I came across this year while scrolling through the course listings for the University of Chicago’s winter quarter.
As a senior, I had flexibility in my schedule to take a class simply for the joy of learning, irrespective of whether it fulfilled a graduation requirement. This should have been an enjoyable experience. Instead, the process left me fearful of the close-minded young people being inculcated by my school and so many other academic institutions.
As a politically conservative student, I am accustomed to being in the classroom minority. To be clear, I was not looking for a course that would reinforce my conservative beliefs (even if I was, “conservative” classes simply do not exist). All I wanted was to take a class that was not explicitly partisan by its very title or course description. I desired to be in a class where I would actually learn,with the help of a fair and open-minded professor who is intellectually confident enough to include multiple perspectives in his assigned readings. Unfortunately, it was incredibly easy to find swaths of leftist courses but quite difficult to come across classes aimed at genuine intellectual exploration.
There is a reason explicitly leftist courses like “The Problem of Whiteness” are prevalent, but it is impossible to take “conservative” classes and hard to even find open-minded ones. In recent years, conservative or middle-of-the-road professors have been weeded out or forced into self-censorship by a rigid, punitive academic culture. If a professor does not agree with the majority of his colleagues or dares to depart from left-wing orthodoxy, he is threatened and punished by fellow educators and students (even in the STEM fields).
While it is demoralizing for conservative students to never have our views and ideas discussed, much less validated, we at least have the advantage of constantly being intellectually challenged. Sadly, I cannot say the same for my leftist peers, who can fill their entire course schedule with classes that reaffirm their preconceived worldviews.
Graduating after being virtually unchallenged for four years is not only a disservice to students; it’s dangerous for our country. A 2017 study by P. J. Henry and Jaime Napier showed that “education is related to greater ideological prejudice,” finding that the higher one’s education level, the stronger his political intolerance. This is the obvious byproduct of leftist thought saturating the academy—more time spent there necessarily fosters a one-sided sense of intellectual superiority. A more recent 2021 study done by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education found that 66 percent of students said they supported shouting down speakers. Shockingly, 23 percent of student respondents support using violence to stop a speaker. Both numbers have spiked since 2020.
By indoctrinating and coddling young people, American universities are breeding intolerance. We are already seeing the effects of this indoctrination. Young leftists have disavowed our founding documents and fathers, and they censor, fire, harass, and publicly slander anyone who dares think differently from them.
Consider that our federal bureaucracies, the chambers of Congress, and the boardrooms of America’s most powerful corporations have only received the first wave of woke young people. Subsequent waves will be even more intolerant. Thanks to their immersion in the left-wing academic monoculture, the next generation will undoubtedly cement the downfall of the American mind and limit frighteningly more liberty in their wake.
Evita Duffy is a senior contributor to The Federalist, co-founder of the Chicago Thinker, and a senior at the University of Chicago, where she studies American History. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, & her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evitapduffy@uchicago.eduEVITA DUFFYVISIT ON TWITTER@EVITADUFFY_1MORE ARTICLES
Amid ongoing supervision from parents across America, the Episcopal School of Dallas has sought to reassure parents it is not teaching critical race theory or targeting students on the basis of their race. Despite this attempt, documents obtained by The Federalist prove that the institution is teaching critical race theory while telling parents it’s not.
The elite private school, which bears a whopping tuition price of $26,945 for kindergarteners and $34,075 for high school seniors, sought to insulate itself from backlash on its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion page, which preemptively responds to common critiques. The page warns against “misinformation” before assuring parents the school is “not teaching critical race theory,” nor is it teaching “that being part of an ethnic or racial group makes a person responsible for systemic problems, or to cast blame on or shame any member of the community for actions that took place in history.” According to other school documents, however, these claims are false.
Student assignments show the school is teaching the left-wing extremism that targets children in so many government-run K-12 schools.
CRT In The Classroom
One Episcopal School of Dallas reading assignment for a middle school history class titled “This Thing Called White” exhibited the defining characteristics of CRT. The assignment claimed that “Whiteness is a constantly shifting boundary separating those who are entitled to have certain privileges from those whose exploitation and vulnerability to violence is justified by their not being white.” It goes on to contend that race was created “with the purpose of giving power to white people.”
In an 8th grade history class taught by Ron Frankland, students were required to listen to a podcast from the 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Frankland also signaled his support for CRT while bemoaning the wave of pushback from parents who’ve voiced their opposition to the ideology.
Nevertheless, attempts to turn students into leftwing activists through indoctrination appear to be working. An open letter titled “Our Turn To Rise Up,” penned by students as part of a history assignment at the school, condemned America as “diseased” and endeavored to “spark a fire of revolution.”
Faculty Members Endorse CRT
Furthermore, several faculty members, including many who are in key positions, have demonstrated an allegiance to the doctrines of CRT, as well as expressed their intent to incorporate the divisive theory in the classroom.
Jennifer Jarnagin is the chair of the school’s Classical and Modern Languages Department, as well as a sponsor of the Middle School Diversity Club and a middle and upper school Latin teacher. Several of Jarnagin’s tweets display an anti-cop and anti-white bias informed by the teachings of critical race theory. During the height of the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots of 2020, Jarnagin implied all police officers were violent.
She also stated that she was happy to “disrupt white nonsense,” and that she dreams of “throwing 90% of straight white men into the ocean.”
In Jarnagin’s Twitter bio, she states that she’s “dismantling white supremacy, misogyny and heteronormativity” and that she’s a “Latin teacher interested in proficiency, inclusion, and empathy.”
Tolly Salz, an English teacher and the chair of the English Department, has also signaled her support for ideas endemic to CRT. On Twitter, Salz promoted an article titled “White People’s Fear of Critical Race Theory is Based in Ignorance,” as well as one from Learning for Justice, a project of the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, titled “Confronting the Weaponization of Whiteness in Our Classrooms,” which claims that white supremacy is “baked into America’s foundation.”
The article also condemned white womens’ emotions as instruments of oppression, making the claim that “Men going to war with armor is the same as white women waging war through tears.”
Salz also promoted a guide labeled “Teaching with the New York Time’s 1619 Project.”
Critical race theory also appears to have affected the Christian school’s religious leadership.
Antoni Luc-Tayengo, who recently became a chaplain at ESD, has publicly advocated for CRT. In an article titled “Predominantly White Churches & Racial Justice: Discern The Next Right Thing,” the female chaplain argues people should “look for color” and frames involvement in the openly Marxist Black Lives Matter movement as a moral imperative for Christians.
Her article also links to a “well-cultivated list of resources for anti-racism education of all ages.” The page includes the 1619 Project and work from critical race theorists Robin DiAngelo and Kimberle Crenshaw, among various others.
Rev. Nate Bostian is a senior chaplain at ESD. While his public remarks have not carried the same vitriolic tone of many others at the school, from his public remarks it’s clear that leftwing ideology influences his religious understanding. In this prayer he gave for LGBT pride month, Bostian begins by referring to God as the “God/god of Diversity and Inclusion.”
In another post, he cites infamous critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi before going on to provide a theological argument for diversity, inclusion, and equity.
ESD’s Institutional Ties To CRT
None of these examples are isolated incidents. Despite telling parents that they do not teach CRT or engage in shaming tactics against children on account of their race, ESD, as an institution, has done both. ESD sent parents a list of CRT information compiled by Elizabeth Goatley, the school’s director of diversity and inclusion. Parents were directed to a page called “Anti-Racism 102: Why Not All Discrimination Is ‘Racism.” Intended for children in grades K-4 and adorned with colorful cartoons, the page erroneously claims that white people cannot be the victims of racism, saying “reverse racism isn’t a thing. Stop trying to make reverse racism a thing.” It also claims everyone is complicit in systemic white supremacy and that “whiteness” must be “de-centered.”
The recommended reading list included Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” material from critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw, Kendi’s “How To Be An Anti-Racist,” the 1619 Project, “Anti-racism for Kids 101,” and Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” among others. The list also linked to a “K-8 Racial Literacy” curriculum from an organization called Pollyanna. Pollyanna’s Conferences for School page sheds light on the type of material the organization presents to children.
Topics include “Race, Privilege, and Community Building,” “Shaping & Sustaining Safe Schools for LGBTQ+ Community,” “Intersectionality,” “Cultivating Racial Awareness and White Engagement,” and “Implicit Bias.” The organization also claims systemic racism “permeates every aspect of our society and transcends person-to person interactions,” a core belief of CRT.
The school’s DEI page explains that both staff and students frequently attend several conferences, including the People of Color Conference hosted by the leftwing National Association of Independent Schools. The POCC overtly teaches CRT. One presentation from the conference describes kindergarteners as “natural social justice warriors,” while others explicitly outline how to create a curriculum based on CRT.
Another presentation condemns the American system, telling the audience to “burn sh-t down.” It also discusses the “White People Way,” with the presenter condemning “perfectionism” and “power hoarding” as defining characteristics of white people.
The Federalist reached out to multiple school staff for comment, inquiring about the 1619 Project, racially charged statements made by a faculty member, and CRT in the classroom. The Federalist also asked why the school was present at the POCC event, where teachers were taught how to develop a curriculum grounded in CRT, if there was no intention of teaching the racially charged ideology.
In response, ESD’s Director of Communications Julie Clardy provided the following statement: “We present challenging material that asks students to consider multiple points of view. For instance, we present the 1619 and 1776 projects together and ask students to analyze and argue their merits. Students are edified, not damaged, when they are asked to examine ideas they may disagree with.”
ESD Is Not The Only School Deceiving Parents
The Episcopal School of Dallas is by no means the first academic institution to lie to parents about teaching critical race theory. Over the summer, President of the American Federation of Teachers union Randi Weingarten falsely claimed CRT is not being taught in K-12 schools despite her organization previously bragging on national television about teaching the ideology.
The Federalist reporting has revealed that officials at both Riverside School District and Los Angeles Unified School District lied to their school communities, falsely claiming they did not teach CRT. Despite the obvious parallels with previous instances, the state of the Episcopal School of Dallas demonstrates that elite private schools are not immune from the left’s push for CRT in America’s K-12 institutions.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at The Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
For almost as long as Covid-19’s been around, parent anger at local school boards over this or that issue has been a reoccurring major news story. We’ve all seen the viral social media videos and Facebook posts of parents skewering their local elected school boards over critical race theory, unscientific and abusive mask mandates, maddening repeat quarantines of healthy children, and other educational corruption that wrecks children’s ability to learn.
We’ve also seen those viral videos have little effect on what the school board or state board of education subsequently decides. So parents have filed lawsuits and are mounting primary and general election challenges, all of which are great and a healthy part of self-government.
What these strategies don’t do is provide immediate relief to children, whom parents claim are being abused, taught racism, and denied their right to an education. They require children to continue to be abused at least until the next election cycle or until three or five or more years when lawsuits finally reach the highest court that will hear them. That’s a third of a child’s education years.
These strategies also are predicated on the assumption that the people who have created these outrageously irrational and abusive school climates should continue to be trusted to run schools. The entire leadership teams of most schools, school districts, and state education bureaucracies have disqualified themselves from leading any children at all by the kinds of abuses parents charge, but just filing a lawsuit or kicking a few school board members out of office will still leave almost all corrupt educators controlling millions of kids in perpetuity.
If you can’t trust a principal or superintendent to keep teachers from teaching racism and to accurately assess children’s needs and vulnerabilities through Covid even though the data on that is plentiful and clear, how can you trust any other of such persons’ judgment calls?
More than being restrained by a lucky court order merely from putting toddlers in masks, a person whose judgment is so corrupt shouldn’t be making any decisions about children. A person who puts a toddler in a mask, or allows teachers to shame children based on their skin color, cannot be trusted to do just about anything else important and needs to find a new and more productive line of work. Errors this bad are completely disqualifying, and they will not be rectified by merely changing a few surface policies such as the quarantining of healthy kids.
The fact that parents keep their children in schools they charge are teaching racism or delaying crucial development with Covid irrationality gives the schools all they need to keep ignoring the parents. Parents are saying one thing while doing another. They are voting with their feet, and their feet are voting for what they themselves acknowledge is oppression.
So it’s no surprise that school boards, principals, and other entities disregard what the parents say. What the parents say has no, or no immediate, enforcement. And therefore it really isn’t credible. No wonder the school districts don’t take them seriously.
If the parents wanted to be truly effective — as well as truly honest — they would pull their children from schools en masse until problems of such serious magnitude were resolved favorably. Sickouts and mass protests are highly effective forms of warfare on children waged by teachers unions all the time. But parents so far haven’t responded in kind.
Why is that? Why are parents all bark and no bite with their school complaints? Possibly they don’t know how to be effective. And possibly, many aren’t willing to make the big sacrifices required to enforce their beliefs. They can see that something very serious is wrong, but they aren’t willing or able to fix it. They’re still waiting on others to fix things for them.
They, and their children, will wait a very long time for that. They will certainly wait long past Covidtide. And that’s why public schools are as bad as they are — the people who are supposed to hold them accountable refuse to do exactly that even while claiming to.
In the end, schools and parents are basically fighting over something underneath all these disputes that almost nobody mentions: money. Schools get public education money, not parents. It gives them the power to abuse children while parents complain yet keep putting that mask on their kindergartener every single day, even after he throws up in it at school or it prevents him from being able to read or speak properly.
School boards don’t care about complaints. They care about money. As long as they have it, and parents don’t take it, schools will continue to do whatever they want to children. And American children will continue to be unhappy, uneducated, and unprepared for life while everyone pretends it’s someone else’s fault.
It’s clear that American parents have a codependent relationship with the schools they claim to despise. They are in fact enabling the very abuse they complain about. So while it is entirely legitimate to go yell at school boards and vote bad people out of office, it’s also time for parents to engage in some critical thinking about their own choices that enable this situation. As long as public schools continue to get money no matter what they do, this situation will continue, no matter how many uncomfortable meetings and lawsuits parents instigate.
If state legislatures do not yank money from America’s abusive public school systems, parents must yank their kids. Trust, me, it will work. It might already be happening.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Sign up here to get early access to her next book, “How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
CNN’s Brian Stelter recently interviewed 8th-grade students and their teacher at P.S. 207 in Queens, New York, about their class on how to detect “misinformation” online. In a video published Sunday, Stelter — CNN’s chief media correspondent — spoke to teacher Barbara King, who said she began teaching media literacy 10 years ago and that it’s “a skill my students really need; there’s too much misinformation around us in the world.” The clip shows King telling her students about satire, false context, imposter content, manipulated content, and fabricated content.
Stelter also interviewed students outside classroom time about how they’ve been using what they’ve learned. One student said his family believed COVID-19 was a “hoax” when the pandemic was breaking but that he argued back that it was real. With that, Stelter emphasized the tendency of some who want to believe untruths — and then added that instead “you gotta face reality head-on.”
As readers of TheBlaze know, Stelter and CNNrepeatedly have been called out for pushing misinformation and bias. The latest example appears to be Stelter running “cover” for NPR’s report — refuted as fake news — claiming Chief Justice John Roberts “in some form” asked justices to wear masks because Justice Sonia Sotomayor has diabetes and that Justice Neil Gorsuch refused, Fox News reported. All that to say, a number of commenters under CNN’s YouTube video of Stelter’s report about the “misinformation” class mocked the notion of him interviewing teenagers about the subject:
“The irony of Brian Stelter talking about how to spot fake news is pretty incredible,” one commenter wrote.
“Like, ‘Kids, CNN is full of lies, so watch them as an example on how journalism shouldn’t be,'” another commenter quipped.
“LMAO! Tell me this is a joke!” another commenter wrote. “If Stelter wants to teach kids how to spot misinformation, he should give them a picture of himself.”
“They should just watch CNN,” another commenter said. “They’ll be experts in spotting it within a half hour.”
“How to spot misinformation, eh?” another commenter noted. “They should show a CNN article of the Covington kid then their undisclosed amount they had to pay him for defamation.”
“Brian Stelter story? On misinformation?!” another commenter remarked. “That’s rich.”
Don’t forget that CNN just last week announced that it’s putting together a news team “dedicated to covering misinformation.” The announcement also was met with derision.
These students are learning how to spot misinformationyoutu.be
Davis Joint Unified School District in Davis, California, pushed leftwing distortions of gender and critical race theory through its Office of School Climate, which taught staff that “gender is a scam” and advertises the White Privilege Conference on March 9-12, 2022. The office is “responsible for supporting district staff and recommending and piloting ways to address structural oppression and to enhance school climate, equity, diversity, and inclusion,” according to their website.
The district, which includes approximately 8,500 TK-12 students throughout 16 different schools, also recently voted to adopt an Ethnic Studies requirement, which a press release notes will “explore issues of identity, analyze systems of power” and “examine social movements.”
Distortions Of Gender
The district’s site features a number of different resources that pushed radical leftwing distortions of gender. One presentation called “Supporting LGBTQ+ Students and Staff” was given to staff members at Harper Junior High School in May 2021 by two of the school’s teachers, both of whom use “they/them” pronouns. One also uses the abbreviation “Mx.” in lieu of Mr., Ms., or Mrs.
One slide bore a pride flag with transgender colors and black and brown stripes, both of which “sought to further represent the queer and trans identities of black and brown people.” Another one linked to a video titled “Gender is a Scam,” which compels audiences to “decolonize their language,” while a linked article called “15 Things LGBTQ people of colour want you to know” tells you “Why you might be guilty of white fragility.”
The slideshow instructed staff to use the pronouns they/them until someone says his pronouns and told them that “Posters/flags that support LGBTQ+ people are just the beginning” before going on to ask, “does your curriculum center primarily white/cis/straight voices?” The same slide warns against using medical and scientifically accurate terminology in regard to gender.
Meanwhile on the office’s LGBTQIA+ Supports page, a link to the activist group Human Rights Campaign promoted “LGBTQ+ Inclusive Picture and Middle School Books,” some of which are even aimed at children in pre-k. A link to the USC Rossier School of Education’s site “Students and Gender Identity Guide for Schools” also features a “Gender Identity Glossary for Schools” with woke vocabulary terms like “deadnaming,” “gender expansive,” “polygender,” “third-gender,” and “two spirit.”
Critical Race Theory and the White Privilege Conference
The office also promotes a trove of critical race theory resources intended for students, families, staff, teachers, and administrators under the subheading “Anti-Bias and Racial Justice.” The site opens by promoting free webinars from Embrace Race, a left-wing organization aimed at young children. Their webinars bear titles like “Addressing Racial Injustice with Young Children” and “RaceTalk among White Families Post-Floyd. Now What?”
The White Privilege Conference, a project of The Privilege Institute, is also promoted to staff members. The annual conference, not to be confused with the institute’s similarly named White Privilege Symposium, intends to provide “an opportunity for participants to discuss how white privilege, white supremacy, and oppression affects daily life while giving strategies for addressing issues of privilege and oppression and advancing social and economic justice.”
Last year’s conference hosted Robin DiAngelo, who discussed the subject of her latest book “nice racism,” which condemned all white people, including the far-left white people who comprise her audience, as definitionally racist.
The conference featured myriad workshops each day, which boasted titles like “Critical Race Theory/Critical Race Feminism: Creating a Plan of Action during the Biden-Harris era,” “A Good Womyn is Hard to Find,” and “The Making & Remaking of Whiteness.” The institute also hosts the Youth Action Project, with one-day institutes geared towards middle schoolers and high school students.
The district’s office also advertises the 1619 Project curriculum alongside a site called Learning for Justice, which they note “offers excellent, teacher-developed classroom curriculum.”
‘Dismantle White Supremacy’
Included under the heading “For Teachers, Staff, and Administrators” are K-12 frameworks for anti-bias and social justice education from Learning for Justice, a project of the extremist Southern Poverty Law Center whose mission is to “dismantle white supremacy” and “strengthen intersectional movements” by pushing critical race theory into schools.
One such video from The New York Times titled “A Conversation with White People on Race” features white people expressing guilt over their alleged privilege, with one person remarking “We’re all implicated in a racist system, and I play my part in it as a white person.”
The office adds that they have a library of books and videos for staff, including one titled “Cracking the Codes and Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible.”
Meanwhile, students and families are also directed to a number of critical race theory-inspired resources, including one link to a site titled “100 Race-Conscious Things You Can Say To Your Child To Advance Racial Justice,” which includes quotes of things parents have told their children when discussing race. Particularly striking is number 53, which makes the claim that “if you are White and you commit a crime … police might say ‘that was wrong, don’t do that again,’ and that’s all…but if you are Black and commit the same crime, they might arrest you and you might go to prison.” One quote under the subtitle “police violence” discusses black victims of police brutality, writing“The man who killed them didn’t like brown skin. He had white skin like us.”
The list isn’t exclusively focused on race, however, also promoting left-wing distortions of sex with quotes like“You know, some people are born with penises but feel like girls on the inside and some people are born with vaginas but feel like boys on the inside. We can’t always tell if someone is a boy or a girl just by looking at them and that’s okay.”
“Guidelines for Strong White Allies” is also included on the district’s list. Among the guidelines were requests for “resources,” “money,” and even “your body on the line.” Author Paul Kivel also told “white allies” to “understand and learn from the history of whiteness and racism” and to “assume racism is everywhere, every day.”
An anti-racist book list for children promoted by the district explains how parents can ease children into CRT by first starting “very gently” with entirely unobjectionable books that “just show kids that racial diversity exists.” The goal, however, is to eventually employ books that discuss “racial privilege, colorism, and the subtle tools that uphold white supremacy, such as white fragility and respectability politics.”
The district’s previous superintendent John Bowes signaled his belief in the leftist claim that America is fundamentally racist when, after the conviction of Derek Chauvin, he sent out a message explaining that he was reminded of the need to “rid our country of the systemic bias and institutional racism that exists in all parts of our society.” He went on to explain that “public education, including DJUSD schools, are part of the solution.”
Davis Joint Unified School District’s promotion of both critical race theory and leftist distortions of sex are part of a broader leftwing push in K-12 institutions throughout the country. In California alone, other districts have lied about teaching CRT, hosted LGBT clubs for four-year-olds, paid extremist organizations to “disrupt whiteness,” and promoted material that tells students to use witchcraft against those who say “all lives matter.”
The politicized nature of California’s government schools, along with general concerns regarding quality of education, may lead some to support a recently launched bipartisan campaign to pass a school choice initiative in the golden state.
Neither Superintendent Matt Best nor Climate Coordinator Kate Snow responded to The Federalist’s request for comment.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
California’s Jefferson Elementary School District will be the first district in the United States to implement ethnic studies courses in all of their elementary and middle schools, and their new curriculum for this includes teaching children to become leftwing “co-conspirators.” The district’s curriculum that brings new state requirements for high school into the earliest grade levels was created by Community Responsive Education, a leftwing organization run by critical race theorists at San Francisco State University.
The district, which is located in Daly City, California, and serves roughly 6,000 students across ten elementary schools and four middle schools, has agreed to pay the organization nearly $170k in taxpayer money.
Public Dollars to Make Leftist ‘Co-Conspirators’
District documents note that the radical curriculum will be piloted in the 2021-2022 school year. It was presented by Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, a professor at San Francisco State University and the co-director of Community Responsive Education. The presentation was given during a school board meeting in July 2021 and began with a land acknowledgment that described the Ohlone people, not the United States, as the rightful stewards of the land that JESD is on.
Tintiangco-Cubales, who uses the pronouns “she/her” in addition to “siya,” a Filipino word that means both male and female, explained that she is “a settler, an uninvited visitor” on Ohlone land before going on to note that JESD is America’s first district that “is committed to rolling out Ethnic Studies in all of their middle and elementary schools.” In late 2021, California passed a state mandate that “ethnic studies” be taught in all public high schools.
The presentation explains that the curriculum is designed to “eliminate racism and other forms of oppression” by “creating, learning, listening, uncovering, and sharing of the his/herstories, experiences, and current conditions of those who have been racially marginalized, underrepresented, and/or silenced.”
The curriculum is divided into four different units, labeled “self,” “systems,” “social movements,” and “solidarity.” Each unit is accompanied by a corresponding set of “essential questions” and “enduring understandings.”
One such “enduring understanding” under the “self” unit reads: “Learning about our own identities and those of others allows us to become more empathetic and builds our capacity to go from being allies to co-conspirators/accomplices in the elimination of oppression.”
Teaching Kids America Is Inherently Evil
The second unit condemns America as institutionally racist and teaches children that white supremacy is entrenched in American systems such as education. The unit also indicts white people as the beneficiaries of racism, claiming that they use the system of white supremacy to maintain their “wealth, power, and privilege.” Additionally, students learn that “institutional racism is the way in which white supremacy continues to oppress non-white people.”
Children are then turned into ambassadors for critical race theory at the end of the unit when they are tasked with creating a public service announcement that “denounces systems that are oppressive,” which could, according to the curriculum, include American education systems if not America itself.
Directly after accusing America’s systems of being fundamentally racist and condemning white people as beneficiaries of racism who maintain white supremacy, teachers tell children how to mobilize and engage in “transformational resistance” in the third unit.
The unit focuses on social movements and blatantly aims to turn students into racially motivated leftist revolutionaries. Tintiangco-Cubales notes that special emphasis is placed on “the notion of transformational resistance.” Students are asked “How do we build social movements to create change and impact society?”
The final unit teaches children how they can “pursue true liberation” through an understanding of “solidarity, liberation, collective action, intersectionality, and dismantling systemic oppression.” Children are also taught that “To achieve true liberation, we must actively and collectively work together to dismantle various systems of oppression (ie: institutional racism, white supremacy, etc.).”
Making Children Into Political Agitators
Students’ transformations into leftist activists are completed with their “solidarity praxis project,” where students create a campaign to address a problem in their community. Even the presentation’s imagery leaves no doubt regarding the curriculum’s intent. Each unit is introduced by a cartoon-esque flat art character holding a protest sign.
District Pays Nearly $170k For CRT Courses
Tintiangco-Cubales presented the curriculum on behalf of Community Responsive Education, an organization that offers “professional and curriculum development services for community organizations and educational institutions to begin or sustain the journey of becoming community responsive.”
At a meeting in February 2020, the district agreed to pay Community Responsive Education $40,000 in taxpayer dollars to facilitate the development of Ethnic Studies units and lessons to be piloted in Jefferson Elementary School District,” according to the meeting’s public records.
Then in August 2020, Jefferson Elementary School District unanimously approved a motion to pay the organization $28,502 for “services during the 2020-21 school year to facilitate the development of Ethnic Studies units and lessons to be piloted in Jefferson Elementary School District,” according to the school board meeting’s minutes.
The district also voted to pay Community Responsive Education an additional $100,000 “for Ethnic Studies Curriculum and Teacher Development for both Middle and Elementary school teachers beginning on July 1, 2021 until June 30, 2023” for a total of $168,502.
The concept of “community-responsive education” from which the organization draws its name, just like “culturally responsive education,” is effectively a rebranding of critical race theory. The curriculum from Community Responsive Education is predicated on a belief that U.S. institutions are defined by racism and that collective action must be taken to dismantle them, a core tenet of critical race theory.
Furthermore, CRE, just like CRT, takes the traditional Marxist dichotomy that pits the oppressed proletariat against the oppressive middle class and reapplies it to race, thereby designating moral value, victimhood, and collective guilt on people as a result of immutable characteristics.
A Dangerous Model for Extremists In Education
As America’s first school district to implement ethnic studies curriculum in all of its elementary and middle schools, Jefferson Elementary School District could have significant influence on other ethnic studies curricula across California and America.
Without sacrificing any of the usual extremism inherent to CRT, this curriculum may mark a shift towards a more strategically oriented method of instruction. Rather than simply indoctrinating children with the beliefs of systemic racism, privilege, and oppression, this course is blatantly designed to create the next generation of extreme leftwing activists operating from these false premises.
This model will not be specific to Jefferson Elementary School District. In fact, a report from Parents Defending Education found that Community Responsive Education has a foothold in a variety of other school districts, including six others in California and one each in New York, Texas, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
A number of other California districts have also taken steps to indoctrinate children with CRT. One Bay Area school district promoted materials that told children to use witchcraft against people who say “all lives matter.” The Los Angeles Unified School District lied in claiming that CRT is not taught in its K-12 institutions despite hosting a critical race theorist who taught staff to “challenge whiteness” and inviting the director of UCLA’s Center for Critical Race Studies to give input on their ethnic studies curriculum.
This overt leftwing takeover of government schools has led some California parents to support a bipartisan campaign that would enshrine school choice and tether taxpayer dollars to students. Should it receive the required number of signatures and pass a vote, the initiative would allow parents to take their children — and their money — out of schools that prioritize indoctrination over education.
Neither school board President Clayton Koo nor Tintiangco-Cubales responded to requests for comment.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
The left-leaning American news media has so far refused to cover a bombshell report indicating that the Biden administration may have been instrumental in the drafting of a letter that compared protesting parents to domestic terrorists and requested the Patriot Act be used against them.
What are the details?
A newly obtained email exchange appeared to show that the highly controversial Sept. 29 National School Boards Association letter that directly resulted in the FBI using counterterrorism tactics against parents was drafted and sent to President Biden at the direction of Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona.
The email communication — obtained by activist group Parents Defending Education through a Freedom of Information Act request — raised serious concerns that the administration had predetermined to go to war against parents protesting school lockdowns and critical race theory in classrooms, merely formulating the letter as a cover.
“Despite this stunning revelation, all three evening broadcast shows ignored the report,” the outlet said., adding, “While ABC ‘World News Tonight,’ NBC ‘Nightly News,’ and CBS ‘Evening News’ all ignored the story, Fox’s ‘Special Report’ reported on it during the show’s A-block.”about:blank
As of Wednesday afternoon, the email exchange citing Cardona as the letter’s solicitor wasn’t reported on by CNN, either. Nor was it covered by any of the three major American news sources: the Associated Press, the New York Times, or the Washington Post.
The email exchange has been covered by a variety of conservative news sources.
What’s the background?
In the Oct. 5 email, the NSBA’s secretary-treasurer Kristi Swett told fellow board member Marnie Maldonado that interim CEO Chip Slaven had “told the [board] officers he was writing a letter to provide information to the White House, from a request by Secretary Cardona.”about:blank
Maldonado had expressed concerns to Swett that the letter was sent without following board policy. The board member also complained that the letter “essentially allowed the White House to direct the Attorney General to consider members of our community ‘domestic terrorists.'”
Shortly after the letter was sent to Biden, on Oct. 4, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo dispatching the FBI to meet a supposed “disturbing spike” of “harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against school administrators, board members, and other personnel.
The FBI followed the orders by creating a “threat tag, EDUOFFICIALS,” for agents to “track” any “threats of violence or fear” against school personnel.
Anything else?
In a statement to the Washington Free Beacon, the Department of Education denied allegations that Cardona had requested the letter.
“While the Secretary did not solicit a letter from the NSBA, to understand the views and concerns of stakeholders, the Department routinely engages with students, teachers, parents, district leaders, and education associates,” a department spokesperson said.
Following the news on Tuesday, Education and Labor Committee ranking member Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) called on Cardona to answer the allegations before Congress.
“It is abundantly clear to me that Secretary Cardona must answer to the Education and Labor Committee, Congress on the whole, and especially the American people,” Foxx said. “Anything less is an insult to the proud parents who want to better the education of their children. This pattern of behavior displayed by the Biden administration — let alone the Secretary of Education — is what one could expect from a political arsonist.”
She added that the news proved that “from the very beginning, the targeting of concerned parents has been nothing short of a witch hunt orchestrated by partisan demagogues in the White House, Department of Justice, and the Department of Education.”
WAUKESHA, Wis. — The banquet hall buzzed with impassioned chatter as parents, friends, first-time school board candidates, and other locals congregated for a Saturday morning town hall that felt more like a strategy session. After two major public school districts, Milwaukee and Madison, shut down yet again and blamed COVID, parents were fired up. Talk of critical race theory, leftist administrators, mask mandates, and school shutdowns hummed through conversations with the kind of first-hand animation that could propel once-complacent Wisconsin parents into a movement of activists capable of unleashing an unquenchable red wave in the Dairy State. They saw what happened in Virginia, and now they want to bring it home.
Former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, who’s now running to unseat Democrat Gov. Tony Evers in November, organized the event. Although Kleefisch is in campaign mode, the overarching energy of the gathering wasn’t as much, “Help get me elected,” as it was, “How can we get more of you elected?”
Calling All Parents
“We need more parent activists. This is that important,” Kleefisch said while moderating a panel of concerned moms-turned-activists.
One of those moms was Scarlett Johnson, a mother of five who, after discovering the apathy in the Mequon-Thiensville School Board, decided she needed to run for a seat.
“We just started paying closer attention,” Johnson said to the room of eager fellow parents. “I hadn’t attended school board meetings. I vote, but I never voted for a school board candidate.”
But that all changed this last year. Johnson said she and a group of other moms started getting together and doing their research. When they did, they found toxic racial propaganda in their kids’ classrooms, such as teachers assigning books like Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility.” The moms started making phone calls and sending emails to school officials. “It started a movement,” Johnson said.
In the course of her run for school board, Johnson said she’s been called a white supremacist and received death threats, but noted, “I’m still here, I’m still fighting.”
Kylee Zempel/The Federalist
No Room for Apathy
Parents aren’t just fired up about nefarious actors in the school systems, however. They’re also on the lookout for complacent school board members and district officials. Another mom on the panel, Alyssa Pallow, is getting involved simply because her school board doesn’t seem to really know anything about dangerous ideologies such as critical race theory. Kleefisch agreed, stressing to parents that they don’t have to wait to get involved until one of their kids cracks a textbook or assignment that makes their jaw drop open. “It can be that you’re horrified by the apathy,” Kleefisch said.
“It snowballs,” said another mom, Amber Schroeder, regarding parent activism. “You will inspire people to get involved.” Schroeder and Johnson worked together in the Mequon-Thiensville district to organize a recall election of four school board members.
“People are afraid to do it alone,” Schroeder continued. “Once you realize you’re not alone, a lot more people get involved. … If you build it, they will come.”
A Time for Choosing
Other parents have been shocked to watch their children become casualties in the left’s Covid crackdowns. Mattie Allen stressed the importance of school choice after her kids had a horrible academic year due to lockdowns. Allen’s son spent his first year in school doing it virtually, “which was horrendous,” she said. Her daughter spent one year at Milwaukee Public Schools, where her GPA plummeted, and it was “one of the worst years.” Thanks to school choice, they’re now in a charter school with just one grade per class. “Their school is so open, and I love it,” Allen said, noting that her daughter’s GPA is back up, she’s on the honor roll, and she’s playing volleyball.
But some families aren’t so fortunate. One of Allen’s friends who is stuck with her kids in Milwaukee Public Schools is watching the district once again shut down. This single mom has a first-grader and a third-grader, meaning she had to switch to third shift just so she could fulfill the roles of both teacher and provider. She’s “up all day, up all night,” Allen said, getting choked up. “How do we give all moms that [school choice] option?”
Maggie Vinopal, a mom in the Eau Claire school district, has also had enough with the COVID madness, saying school officials are weaponizing Statute 252, a state quarantine law, to punish and quarantine unvaccinated kids. Her healthy seventh-grade daughter has been quarantined four different times for a total of 14 schools days, despite coronavirus posing almost zero risk of severity to healthy children. Anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 is required to “isolate,” Vinopal told The Federalist. But when students come into contact with a positive case, only the unvaccinated have to “quarantine,” despite the ability of the vaccinated to contract and spread COVID.
On the very first day of school, Vinopal’s daughter was seated at the same lunch table as a vaccinated student who later tested positive and had to isolate. While the vaccinated students at the table were allowed to proceed as normal, Vinopal’s daughter was required to quarantine and provide proof of a negative test.
Jumping in the Ring
Covid nonsense like this is what inspired people like first-time Waukesha School Board member Kelly Piacsek to run. When a number of people decided to “abuse our children in the name of science, I got really mad,” said Piacsek, who is now known for holding firm on a decision to end a harmful federally-funded school lunch program in the face of vicious and dishonest attacks. “That’s what motivated me.” Running for school board is “absolutely worth it,” she told parents. “We’ve got to take this on because we have a front-row seat to the consequences.”
Piacsek inspired people like Slinger parent Bill Brewer to run for his school board. Brewer, a veteran, has lived in Slinger for approximately 18 years. He coaches youth football there and is now involved in the league’s leadership. But the school board’s apathy and lack of urgency against dangerous ideologies have prompted him to get involved.
“Marxism doesn’t come and punch you in the face in round one. It creeps in,” Brewer said. “I just can’t have that, not for my community, not for these kids. They deserve better.”
Rebecca Kleefisch Campaign
Brewer said his strategy isn’t so much a campaign “as a giant, three-month listening tour.”
“Once I get elected, that’s not going to stop,” Brewer said.
That seems to be the Kleefisch campaign strategy too. Rather than spending two hours rattling off campaign promises, the gubernatorial candidate opened the floor on Saturday for parents to voice their concerns and asked attendees to fill out cards with the top three issues that matter to them to help guide her policy. That’s more than these weary parents have gotten from Evers, who has worked to keep parents in the dark. In December, the governor — who was the state superintendent of public instruction for a decade — vetoed education transparency legislation that would have required districts to publish classroom materials online. This anti-parent action from Evers followed his school-closing impulse that kept kids home and tanked their academic advancement.
“We need you to be successful and aggressive,” Kleefisch rallied, encouraging the parents fighting in local races. If the energy in the Waukesha banquet hall was any indication, these parents won’t have any problem with that.
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religious liberty, and criminal justice. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
The woke-o-meter in public schools is about to ramp up. Parents who think they don’t have time to homeschool may soon realize that, compared to the effort involved in monitoring and countering the nonsense from leftist classrooms, homeschooling is the relaxing alternative. Not all teachers buy into the leftist narrative of race-obsessed anti-Americanism. But leftist K-12 administrators want to ensure that, eventually, all teachers will present only approved ideas and counter any wrongthink children are taught at home. Many of these educrats are now embracing a technological fix.
Trade publication Education Week recently reported that about 500 school districts around the country are rating teacher applicants according to their “cultural competency,” another code for “wokeness.” Many of these districts are contracting with a teacher-hiring company called Nimble, which uses artificial intelligence to examine applications and interview answers to determine which candidates harbor the correct political and cultural attitudes.
A central concern of Nimble and its leftist clients is mindsets about race. The goal is to hire only teachers who are “anti-racist” activists, who will reject equal treatment of all students in favor of discrimination against some (whites) for the supposed benefit of others (racial minorities). Note that under this rubric, Asian students, who as a group work hard and consequently excel, don’t qualify as an oppressed racial minority.
“Now that we’ve become a little more aware of the concept of anti-racism and maybe a little more woke as a culture, I do think that districts have started to emphasize these questions a little bit more,” Nimble CEO Lauren Dachille told EdWeek. “They might be more common, they might be more explicit.”
Anti-racism as a motivating societal force was popularized by Ibram X. Kendi, who along with other savvy race grifters is profiting handsomely from the concept. Getting points for honesty if not integrity, Kendi teaches that discrimination against white people is a positive good, and indeed necessary to establish the “equity” of equal outcomes for all regardless of intelligence or effort. This is what is meant by anti-racism: “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist.”
Note the racism inherent in anti-racism. “Anti-racists” assume that black and brown children are “less than” white or Asian kids—they can’t excel in academics, they can’t follow basic rules of personal conduct. It’s necessary to change all standards to accommodate these presumed “inferior” beings. Such a theory ensures minority kids will never overcome personal obstacles because they’re told they don’t have to. This is the system that, with Nimble’s help, many schools are trying to establish and perpetuate.
EdWeek identified a Boston elementary school principal who “will tell candidates the school’s priorities around anti-racism and ask them to respond.” To make crystal clear the political attitudes expected from successful candidates, “she will ask them what they’ve done personally or professionally to be more anti-racist.” Presumably, getting arrested at a Black Lives Matter riot would be, as Rush Limbaugh used to say, a resume enhancement.
Applicants in Indianapolis may be asked “how [they would] ensure that student outcomes are not predictable by race, ethnicity, culture, gender, or sexual orientation.” Of course, there’s only one way to ensure such an outcome: manipulate it to guarantee that all students end up at the same low level. Any students who threaten the leveling by working too hard or achieving too much will have to be brought to heel—at least, if they’re the “wrong” race.
Indianapolis teaching applicants may also be asked, “Why do you think that low-income students predictably perform lower on standardized tests than their more-affluent peers?” One would be pretty safe to assume a preferred answer would be “because of systemic racism,” not “because those students, largely due to decades of misguided government policies, are more likely to come from fatherless families and grow up in a dysfunctional environment.”
Throughout the article, district officials emphasize the importance of hiring teachers who are amenable to the schools’ “priorities” and “values.” But how is it appropriate for a public institution, funded by taxpayers who hold a wide range of political opinions, to institutionalize one set of those opinions? Even worse, how is it appropriate for the institution to guarantee the propagation of those opinions by limiting hires to candidates who agree with them?
These questions illustrate the bubble mentality of the left. Leftists are so certain of the objective correctness of all their views that they cannot conceive of any person of goodwill taking a different position. In the leftist mind, anyone not willing to engage in discrimination against whites or Asians in the name of “equity” is the moral equivalent of a Klansman. And who would object to screening out Klansmen from the teacher corps?
Parents who hope the public schools are still salvageable might want to reconsider. The skyrocketing wokeness of administrators who control teacher hiring will ensure that all classrooms are increasingly devoted to indoctrination rather than education.
How exhausting it is for parents to constantly monitor what their children are being fed in every class and then try to repair the intellectual and moral damage at home. Viewed in this light, does choosing another schooling arrangement really seem so hard?
Jane Robbins is an attorney and a retired senior fellow with the American Principles Project in Washington DC. In that position she crafted federal and state legislation designed to restore the constitutional autonomy of states and parents in education policy, and to protect the rights of religious freedom and conscience. She is a graduate of Clemson University and the Harvard Law School.
A Minnesota school district will soon exclusively give non-white teachers extra pay to become mentors to other minority teachers.
The Mankato School Board earlier this month voted unanimously to provide “additional stipends” to non-white teachers who become mentors to other non-white colleagues. Additionally, Minnesota-based Alpha News reported that the new policy will also see the district “placing American Indian educators at sites with other American Indian educators and educators of color at sites with other educators of color.”
The school board claims that this new policy will “increase opportunity for collegial support” for teachers who are black, indigenous, and for other people of color. They hope to increase retention rates among these demographics.
“Retention strategies may include providing financial incentives for teachers of color and teachers who are American Indian to work in the school or district for at least five years and placing American Indian educators at sites with other American Indian educators and educators of color at sites with other educators of color to reduce isolation and increase opportunity for collegial support,” the policy reads.
Before the vote on Dec. 7, board members denied that the policy of placing teachers at different work sites based on their race would amount to segregation.
“When you’re one [minority] of a [white] majority it can be very isolating and lonely. To have a support system in place for them is not to segregate them, it is absolutely to support them,” board member Erin Roberts said. “My biggest fear is that we are going to lose talent because of the feeling of being unsupported by those within our district.”
“It’s not about trying to throw the few [BIPOC] individuals we have into one building. It’s about showing them they aren’t alone,” she continued.
“It creates global citizens at the end of the day,” Vice Chairman Kenneth Reid added.
According to Alpha News, the school board based the language of the policy on state law that says “school districts must develop teacher mentoring programs” and that districts may offer “additional stipends as incentives to mentors of color or [those] who are American Indian.”
The outlet observes that while state law requires school districts to develop mentoring programs, they have the option to leave out race-based stipends, yet the board chose to include a racial element in the policy anyway. That racial component is drawing opposition from at least one state lawmaker.
State Rep. Jeremy Munson (R) blasted the policy in a Facebook post, calling the state law it is based on “racist.”
“Our largest local school district just voted to pay people differently, not on merit, or by the content of their character, but based solely on the color of their skin. This is allowed and encouraged under a revision to Minnesota state Statute 122A.70,” Munson wrote.
“I voted against this legislation. I called it racist when we debated it and believe it is wrong, racist, and unconstitutional to pay people more money or less money based solely on the color of their skin,” he said.
This is not the first time the Mankato School Board has caused controversy. In October, Chairwoman Jodi Sapp was criticized for limiting the ability of parents to speak at school board meetings and requiring that they state where they live if they wanted to speak.
The family of a 12-year-old middle school student in Salinas, California, recently accused two teachers of secretly coaching the young girl’s gender transition behind their backs, according to videos posted online this week. During a Spreckels Union School District board meeting on Wednesday, the girl’s mother and grandfather sounded off on the district, alleging that school staff altered her name and pronouns without their consent and called Child Protective Services when they objected to her social transition. The family said that teachers didn’t even notify them after finding out their daughter was suicidal.
The girl’s mother, identified as Jessica Konen by the Epoch Times, alleged in her speech that her daughter’s clandestine transition occurred within an LGBTQ+ club at Buena Vista Middle School.
“I am outraged,” the mother said, asking, “Is this really barely coming to light?”
“How could you even allow this?” she continued. “You allowed these teachers to open their classrooms teaching predatorial information to a young child … that doesn’t even know how to comprehend it all.”
The speeches were also documented in a Twitter thread posted by the profile “Libs of TikTok.”
“How do you not know what is going on at your campuses?” the enraged mother went on to say, declaring, “You took away my ability to parent my child.”
The grandfather, identified as Gunter Konen, claimed during his speech that his granddaughter is “confused because she was coached” by the teachers.
“CPS was called on my daughter because she went into school to have a discussion with a teacher for hiding the fact that she was given a new name, a boy’s name,” he added, noting that to refer to a child as a boy simply because the child claims to be a boy is “vile nonsense.”
CPS later dropped the case, the Epoch Times reported.
“Kids are impressionable at that age,” the grandfather said, also suggesting that “we need God back in America. We need God back in schools.”
In the article, Shrier claimed that leaked audio from an October California Teachers Association conference showed Buena Vista Middle School teacher and LGBTQ club leader Lori Caldeira and fellow middle school teacher Kelly Baraki describing how they recruited students into the club and concealed the students’ activities from parents. The teachers reportedly admitted that they recruited kids into the club, in part, by stalking their Google searches and monitoring their conversations.
Outrage over the teachers’ behavior reportedly prompted the district to announce significant changes in November. In a letter to parents, the district announced that the school club, called UBU (“You Be You”), had been suspended and that teachers were no longer permitted to monitor students’ online activity, among other changes, according to KSBW-TV. Though it was not clear what action was taken against Caldeira and Baraki.
The letter only said: “Regarding the teachers involved, appropriate personnel steps are being taken to make sure such activities and comments will not be repeated.”
In an interview with Epoch Times prior to the school board meeting, Jessica Konen said her daughter was coaxed into joining the club when she was in sixth grade, where teachers began affirming bisexuality. By seventh grade, she was called into the school for a meeting with her daughter, a teacher, and the school principal. There, the teacher informed her that her daughter was “trans fluid.”
“They kept looking at me angrily because I kept saying ‘she,’ and that it was going to take me time to time to process everything,” Jessica Konen said. “I was very confused. … I was very upset. I was blindsided — completely blindsided.”
Within a few days of the meeting, the King City Police Department reportedly showed up at the family’s residence, saying a complaint had been made to CPS.
Konen said that her daughter is now attending a different school.
University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas — formerly known as Will Thomas — has garnered national media attention in recent weeks for shattering collegiate swim records that were previously held by biological women, sparking fresh accusations of unfair competition.
Thomas, who competed as a male at the school during her freshman, sophomore, and junior years, decided to undergo a year of testosterone suppression treatment ahead of her senior year in order to compete as a female. To no one’s surprise, the biological male is dominating the competition.
But it’s one thing to hear about Thomas’ newfound domination, and another thing entirely to see it. A new video that surfaced online shows just how wide the gap is between Thomas and the women competing against her.
“Just to show you how absurd this is. Here’s the trans swimmer ‘Lia’ Thomas crushing all of the female competitors by 40 seconds,” Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh tweeted in a caption to the video. “This is what that looks like in real time. A total farce.”
Just to show you how absurd this is. Here’s the trans swimmer “Lia” Thomas crushing all of the female competitors by 40 seconds. This is what that looks like in real time. A total farce.
The video showcases the tail end of Thomas’s incredible performance during the 1,650-yard freestyle race at the Zippy Invitational Event in Akron, Ohio, during which Thomas bested the second-place finisher by an eye-popping 38 seconds.
During the video, the narrator quips that “the lefties have just gone a little too far with this one” while pointing out how fast Thomas swam in relation to the competition. He then painstakingly points out the numerous times that female swimmers make their turns and continue racing while Thomas rests having finished well ahead of them.
“Thomas is a 6-foot 3-inch strapping young man coursing with testosterone and here he is in a girls swimsuit competing with the girls,” the narrator says.
Since the story started receiving national attention, at least two teammates of Thomas’s have spoken out about the unfair situation. One anonymous teammate said last week that having Thomas on the team is something that “secretly everyone just knows it’s the wrong thing to do.”
“When the whole team is together, we have to be like, ‘Oh my gosh, go Lia, that’s great, you’re amazing.’ It’s very fake,” the team member told Outkick.
Another teammate expressed that the entire team is “angry” over the situation.
“They feel so discouraged because no matter how much work they put in it, they’re going to lose,”she explained. “Usually, they can get behind the blocks and know they out-trained all their competitors and they’re going to win and give it all they’ve got.”
“Now they’re having to go behind the blocks knowing no matter what, they do not have the chance to win. I think that it’s really getting to everyone,” the female swimmer continued.
The team member added that amazingly Thomas, unfazed by the criticism, has been bragging about being No. 1 in the country amongst female swimmers.
“Well, obviously she’s No. 1 in the country because she’s at a clear physical advantage after having gone through male puberty and getting to train with testosterone for years,” the swimmer said. “Of course you’re No. 1 in the country when you’re beating a bunch of females. That’s not something to brag about.”
Thomas responded to some of the criticism recently in a podcast interview with SwimSwam.
Penn’s Lia Thomas Opens Up On Journey, Transition To Women’s Swimmingyoutu.be
Mandatory Title IX training violated school’s own free speech policies, critics say
A screenshot of Boston University’s mandatory Title IX training this semester.
Boston University is requiring all students and faculty to affirm that they should “intervene” if a woman is complimented on her husband or encouraged to have children, guidance transmitted during a mandatory Title IX training this semester.
The training included multiple-choice questions that had to be answered correctly in order to complete it. Some questions were empirical—”How often do you think people make false allegations?”—while others asked about the appropriate course of conduct in a given scenario. Faculty who did not complete the training would “not be eligible for merit-based salary increases,” the school said in a campus-wide email, with further penalties possible for “continued non-compliance.” Students who did not complete it would “be blocked from registering next semester,” according to the university’s website.
Several scenarios involved “bystander intervention,” the idea that onlookers should prevent harassment by inserting themselves into potentially inappropriate encounters. In one vignette, an Asian woman is told that her white husband is “good-looking”and that “half-Asian babies are the cutest.” Asked “what should you do,” students and faculty were forced to select “Intervene” to advance through the training. Even though the woman “smiled” at the compliment, the training explains, she still “might have felt uncomfortable” about comments relating to “her race, her husband’s appearance, or the prospect of having children” itself.
The training also required students and faculty to affirm that people “rarely” make false accusations. “You might be surprised to learn that false reports aren’t common, and frivolous claims are almost nonexistent,” the training says. “Sometimes” was not an acceptable answer—though one study found that as many as two-thirds of hate crime accusations turn out to be false.
The training drew sharp criticism from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which told the Washington Free Beacon that Boston University was violating its own free speech policies.
“BU makes clear commitments to free expression and academic freedom, and that includes the right to be free from compelled speech,” FIRE’s Aaron Terr said. But to complete the training, students and faculty “must select the university’s preferred answers as their own,” Terr explained.
“This is compelled speech and has no place at a university that promises its faculty expressive freedom,” Terr said.
Boston University did not respond to a request for comment.
The training, which was created by the education consultancy EVERFI and appears on the school’s “compliance services” website, demonstrates how the antidiscrimination law can become a Trojan Horse for compelled speech. Universities frame such compulsion as a way of complying with Title IX and other civil rights statutes, even when it goes far beyond what the law requires. Simply quizzing students and faculty on their legal obligations does not violate academic freedom, Terr said. But the Boston University training, which requires “them to express agreement with particular viewpoints,” does.
Boston University has seen several such violations since the summer of 2020. Between July and November of last year, the university’s theater and playwriting programs both adopted a policy of requiring “land acknowledgment[s]” before performances, with the theater program also requiring all instructors to “include a [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] statement in their syllabus.” In October, FIRE sent the university a letter of concern about both policies but has yet to receive a response.
Statutes like Title IX can give administrators cover for this sort of overreach. After Yale Law School’s “discrimination and harassment coordinators” pressured second-year law student Trent Colbert to write a pre-drafted apology for a “triggering” email, the dean of the law school, Heather Gerken, claimed the administrators were merely “attempting to carry out their obligations under university policy whenever discrimination complaints are filed.” She also invoked Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which “oblige[s] the law school to ensure a learning environment free of discrimination.”
In the name of complying with these laws, universities have attempted to regulate a quotidian and constantly expanding list of behaviors. The BU training goes so far as to imply that telling someone to put their phone away could constitute illegal discrimination or harassment. One question asks about the “best path forward” when a classmate “keeps checking their phone” while working on a group project. The “right” answer involves giving the classmate “the benefit of the doubt”; the wrong one involves telling them to “stop checking your phone—that’s rude.”
Other questions encourage people to police flirtatious encounters and potentially offensive jokes. “You sit near Heidi, and for the past week you’ve seen David come over to talk to her several times,” one scenario begins. “You’re not sure, but you thought you saw David rubbing her back at one point today. What should you do?” Students and faculty who said “Nothing” were told to “try again.”
“You don’t have to be certain that potentially concerning behavior crosses the line before taking action,” the training states.
Nor must you be certain that anyone finds a joke offensive before speaking up about it. “What should you do” if “Greg begins speaking loudly in a stereotypical Chinese accent,” the training asks. “Say something. Mocking an accent is offensive”—even if nobody registers offense.
The training justifies such interventions by positing that “microaggressions” are more damaging to “employee well-being” than “overt harassment.” Even “[w]ell-meaning people can still cause harm,” one module says. “It’s important to separate someone’s intention from the impact of their actions.”
Kimberly Fletcher, president of Moms for America, speaks at a protest outside the National School Boards Association headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, on Oct. 27, 2021. | Moms for America
The fallout over a letter from the National School Boards Association comparing parent protests and threats to domestic terrorism continues as 18 state affiliates have announced intentions to cut ties with the national education organization, according to a watchdog group. The letter at issue, sent by NSBA leadership to President Joe Biden on Sept. 29, requested “federal assistance to stop threats and acts of violence against public schoolchildren, public school board members, and other public school district officials and educators.”
After expressing concern about the increased “acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials,” NSBA President Viola Garcia and Interim Executive Director and CEO Chip Slaven urged Biden to classify “these heinous actions” as “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
In October, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland sent a memorandum directing the FBI to “convene meetings with federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders within 30 days” to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”
While the NSBA apologized for the letter three weeks after its publication and it has since taken it offline, outrage over the tone of the request still looms large. In the weeks and months following the letter’s publication, the number of state school board associations that have either distanced themselves from the NSBA letter or withdrawn from the organization entirely continues to grow.
The advocacy group Parents Defending Education, which vehemently opposes the rhetoric of the NSBA letter, has compiled a list of actions taken by state school board associations in response to the letter. In the past three weeks alone, state school board associations in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Mississippi and Virginia have voted to withdraw from the NSBA. The school board associations in these states join their counterparts in Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin in announcing their departure from the NSBA immediately or in the near future.
Additionally, several additional states have distanced themselves from the rhetoric in the NSBA letter without formally withdrawing from the national organization. Most notably, the Delaware School Boards Association, based in the president’s home state, issued a forceful response to an inquiry from Parents Defending Education.
“The DSBA disagrees, in the strongest possible terms, with parents and citizens protesting school board meetings being characterized as ‘domestic terrorists’ and their protests being likened to ‘hate crimes,” the organization said in a statement. “The DSBA firmly asserts that citizen and public engagement in school board meetings is an integral and vital aspect of school board governance. We also made it clear that any attempt to silence citizens’ voices is a clear violation of their rights to free speech.”
The DSBA also lamented that the NSBA did not consult with them before sending the letter, noting that had they done so, the state organization would “NOT have allowed the DSBA to be associated with the letter” and “would have asked that the language be changed to reflect the fact that the DSBA does not support the letter and should not be generally included in it.”
The NSBA letter stated that it was sent “on behalf of our state associations and more than 90,000 school board members who govern our country’s 14,000 local public school districts.”
Nine other state school board associations responded to Parents Defending Education, expressing some degree of disagreement with the rhetoric of the NSBA letter or stressing a belief in the ability of parents to speak out about their children’s education. Those states are Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, New Jersey, North Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming.
Hawaii is not part of the NSBA. An email obtained via public records request revealed the head of the Rhode Island Association of School Committees telling his board that he thinks they should ignore the email from Parents Defending Education. The remaining state school board associations did not respond to the inquiry from the advocacy group.
The NSBA letter followed a summer defined by intense protests at school board meetings in some localities nationwide as parents and community members had expressed outrage about policies allowing trans-identified students to use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity as opposed to their biological sex, the use of sexually explicit material in the curriculum and the incorporation critical race theory components into the curriculum.
Specific examples cited by the NSBA letter of “heinous actions” taken by parents speaking out at school board meetings include “anti-mask proponents [who] are inciting chaos during board meetings,” confrontation of school board members by “angry mobs” that have “forced meetings to end abruptly” and a resident of Alabama who describes himself as “vaccine police” calling school administrators “while filming himself on Facebook Live.”
Another occurrence cited as problematic in the letter was the mocking of a Tennessee student “during a board meeting for advocating masks in schools after testifying that his grandmother, who was an educator, died because of COVID-19.”
Five days after the NSBA letter’s publication, Garland wrote the memorandum directing federal law enforcement agencies to work with their counterparts at the local level to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats.” The move led to further criticism and a lawsuit.
Opposition to critical race theory and sexually explicit material in public schools played a significant part in last month’s off-year elections. In last month’s election, candidates who campaigned in opposition to critical race theory performed well in school board races.
At the same time, Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe, who proclaimed in a debate with his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” lost the election. A recent poll from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty found that 63% of Americans think parents should have the “final say” in what children are taught at school.
While documenting my former high school’s attempt to indoctrinate me with critical race theory six years ago, I remarked that now, several years later, “the situation has undoubtedly worsened.” Worsened it has. Now, Campbell Union High School District has promoted more than 100 “equity resources” to students and staff, including a document that taught students how to put a curse on those who say “all lives matter.”
Colorblindness, Cops, and Curses
The page serves as a vast library for CRT resources and features 60 different links, including a Google Drive folder with 45 different documents. The list made sure to include the full range of CRT buzzwords, with links like Raising Race Conscious Children, the infamous 1619 Project, Anti-Racism for Beginners, and Social Identities and Systems of Oppression, among others. One link takes you to an “Anti-Racism Resource List,” which teaches about “white fragility” and claims that racism can only be perpetrated by white people. One of the “resources” provided was a Trevor Noah speech labeled “Why rioting makes sense,” followed by an unhinged anti-white rantfrom Sonya Renee Taylor, demanding that white people “throw your white body” on police officers and “put their bodies on the line for the purpose of justice.”
The list also addresses white people when it says, “We are socialized into white supremacy from the moment we are born” before going on to say, “It is about completely dismantling how you see yourself and how you see the world, so that you can dismantle … white supremacy.”
Samuel Martin graduated from CUHSD’s Branham High School in 2019 and was appalled by the district’s actions. He told The Federalist, “The idea that white students must ‘dismantle themselves’ in the context of their personality is cultish. Not only is it cultish, but it is deliberate in that this school system wants its’ white students to hate themselves. Do these people honestly think that drilling racial identitarianism into childrens’ heads from a young age is going to make them less racist?”
CUHSD also links to the Black Lives Matter Resource Guide, specifically their section labeled “high school,” which itself includes 45 different texts. Amid a wide variety of CRT inspired assignments is a document that includes writing prompts on police brutality and racist violence.
One section titled “Hex” tells the reader, “Hexing people is an important way to get out anger and frustration.” It becomes increasingly deranged, suggesting that those who say, “all lives matter” or commit “microaggressions,” should be targeted. “Write your own hex poem, cursing that person,” it instructs.
When asked her thoughts on the document that instructed K-12 students to use witchcraft on political opponents, Branham teacher Meredith Allen told The Federalist she hasn’t read the documents her district recommends, so she “can’t comment,” but that she is generally “opposed to the ‘all lives matter’ message.”
Another section labeled “A World With No Police” cites police and military as “systems or institutions that … contribute to oppression.” It asks, “What would the world be like without them?” before telling the reader to write a poem discussing “a world without these institutions.”
“The Black Radical Tradition,” is a 565-page e-book that includes articles from the Communist League and Noel Ignatiev under the pen name Noel Ignatin. Ignatiev was a Marxist who argued that “abolishing the white race is … so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists.”
Then there’s a slide show entitled “What is the Black Lives Matter Movement?” which is made for children and was produced in part by teachers at LAUSD. It includes a glossary of terms like “white supremacy,” the definition of which includes the line, “systems, like schools and jails, have white supremacy built into them because white people have had so much power for so long.”
The ADL’s linked document “George Floyd, Racism, and Law Enforcement” defines racism as “the … oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people,” a definition that reinforces the malicious lie that white people can’t be the victims of anti-white racism.
The district’s equity resources page is just the most visible result of a series of steps in support of CRT that started long ago. In fact, the district was a testing ground for CRT before it spread throughout the nation. The book “Research Studies on Educating for Diversity and Social Justice” was published in 2018 and describes the process. An entire chapter, written in part by my former teacher, is dedicated to discussing how CRT was used at my high school so it could be replicated.
The book noted the use of the theory, saying, “CRT is used here to centralize the discussion of race and racism at Branham High School.” It went on to describe an “equity advisory” class that I was placed in as a sophomore, where “Students learn about the different types of oppression along with the privilege it affords the oppressors.” The authors hoped their tactics would spread, writing, “the intent behind sharing the process Branham underwent is to provide a model that could be followed by other schools across the nation.”
The district’s Board of Trustees supports this agenda, recently offering unanimous support for a resolution resolving to “dismantle institutionalized racism in our society and our school district” and is “committed to … implicit bias training, Ethnic Studies, and resources that foster dialogue around the guiding principles of #BlackLivesMatter.”
Note the district’s adoption of the term “equity” rather than “equality.” Here’s superintendent Robert Bravo two hours and 39 minutes into a board meeting saying he believes “equity is about equity of outcomes.”
CUHSD even established an Anti-Racism Team, which is divided into eight Equity Teams that include teachers, principals, administrators, and even two students who must be “BIPOC.” That means white students are banned from the “Equity” Teams. They’re tasked with “challenging imbalances of power and privilege,” among other roles.
Michael Espinoza is a member of one such Equity Team and a teacher at Branham High School who won the district’s teacher of the year award. Here he is calling a Native American tribe the “rightful stewards of the lands our schools and district offices stand on” and telling teachers to recognize “the power of critical race theory and use it in our lesson plans.”
He also gave a speech to the class of 2021, where he levied leftwing complaints against America and quoted Huey Newton, imploring students to engage in revolution instead of “conforming to the machine that is the United States.” On his Instagram account, Espinoza celebrates mandates for ethnic studies classes and complains of living under “white supremacist, heteropatriarchal rule” in a plea to his “co-conspirators.”
If this is CUHSD’s model teacher, what does their model student look like? Espinoza’s students created a variety of leftwing posters in his ethnic literature class. One poster demanded “Dear White PPL: Start Listening, Stop Talking” and others that said, “Wear UR F-cking Mask” and “Give us back our land.” Principal Lawton took down the posters amid outcry before caving in and apologizing to the leftwing agitators.
Co-Conspirators? Or A Conservative Counter Culture?
The full ramifications of our education system’s descent into leftwing radicalism is yet to be fully realized, although we can be certain that many of the students it doesn’t lose to homeschooling will be successfully transformed into “co-conspirators.” But as the rhetoric of revolution becomes standard for stodgy school administrators, its appeal to youth might wane.
Conversely, they run the risk of creating a small but clever cadre of conservative youth who understand from firsthand childhood experiences the consequences of toxic racial grievance politics. Don’t be surprised if the propagandizers who intend to give permanency to left-wing hegemony instead give rise to a nascent conservative political force that will uproot it.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
The Los Angeles Unified School District Office of Human Relations, Diversity & Equity prepared a presentation that told students critical race theory isn’t being taught in schools while the district made presentations that did precisely that. The district also mandated that teachers take an “antiracism” course taught by a known critical race theorist who told them to “challenge whiteness.”
LAUSD Lies, Denies That Critical Race Theory Is Being Taught In Schools
A LAUSD presentation titled “Critical Race Theory and Racism in K-12 Education” starts out by defining the theory as a “Theoretical Framework through which researchers and scholars try to understand how structural and racial inequities exist and endure in our society.”
The PowerPoint implores students to rename a headline referring to critical race theory, “since we now understand that Critical Race Theory is not taught in schools.” A separate document, which claims “there is no evidence that CRT is widespread in K-12 education,” is also listed on LAUSD’s website.
Although administrators at LAUSD claim CRT isn’t taught in their schools, the district created lesson plans that embed the corrosive theory in their very own classrooms, all after the district brought in a critical race theorist to tell teachers how to “challenge whiteness.”
K-12 Students Subjected To Critical Race Theory By Diversity And Equity Team
The LAUSD Office of Human Relations, Diversity and Equity introduces its advisory lessons by highlighting their desire to speak with students “about power, privilege, oppression, and resistance.” The section of the website labeled “Human Relations, Diversity & Equity” lists several critical race theory-inspired presentations, including slideshows that teach Thanksgiving is evil and propose an alternative holiday.
One presentation told students to check their privilege and included a video called “What is Privilege.” It shows people engaging in a privilege walk, an activity that I had to do six years ago as a freshman at my California high school. In it, people line up and take steps forward or backward depending on their answer to a series of questions. It is incredibly easy to manipulate the results through selective questioning in order to make people believe CRT’s sweeping claims of privilege and oppression based on skin color.
The presentation claims that white people, among others, are uniquely privileged, before telling students how to become an ally of left wing social justice movements. There’s also a slideshow about the Black Lives Matter movement that includes a note signed by the LAUSD Human Relations, Diversity and Equity team. The presentation mocks the phrase “all lives matter” in a comic.
It also includes the infamous tagline “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family” and featured a grab bag of intersectional insanity, imploring students to “celebrate queer people,” “dismantle patriarchal practices,” and undermine “hetero normative thinking.” One graphic demanded that our society “fund counselors not cops” and “mandate black history and ethnic studies.”
The presentation discussed white supremacy, which it defined as “The belief that white people are better than other races” and claimed that “Some systems, like schools and jails, have white supremacy built into them because white people have had so much power for so long.”
The administrators are evidently not fazed by the irony of peddling the conspiracy theory that America’s schools are fundamentally controlled by hegemonic white supremacy while they, as influential members of the nation’s second-largest school district, engender animosity against their white students by offering a state-sponsored crash course on racial identity politics.
A wide variety of other presentations also peddled the same themes and pushed for CRT.
Teaching critical race theory and then lying about its presence in schools isn’t new. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, has claimed CRT isn’t taught in schools after her organization boasted of teaching it on national television.
LAUSD Enshrines Core Tenets of Critical Race Theory
One slideshow focused on the Cleveland Indians changing their name, claiming that various teams were named after racial slurs and that Native Americans are the only people group whose identity has been turned into a mascot, conveniently forgetting about teams such as the Minnesota Vikings, Boston Celtics, and Notre Dame Fighting Irish.
A whole section on the LAUSD website is dedicated to “Election, Insurrection, and More.” One slideshow focused on “domestic terrorism,” invoking Jan. 6, 2020. It also features discussion of white supremacist domestic terrorism, while making no mention of Black Lives Matter riots or the rape and murder-infested Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
When asked why the Human Relations, Diversity and Equity team told students that CRT is not being taught in schools despite teaching it themselves, the team’s coordinator Judy Chiasson avoided the issue, responding, “We encourage students to hear different perspectives, become critical thinkers, and build camaraderie across identities so they may become the leaders of tomorrow.”
LAUSD Brings In Known Critical Race Theorist
Lest you believe these presentations were simply the handiwork of a rogue team of far left administrators, turn your attention to this memorandum from the LAUSD that mandates that teachers take a course dubbed the “Anti-Racist Journey.”
During the training, Howard tells teachers to “celebrate people of color,” and then discusses the need to “challenge whiteness,” which he bizarrely connects to ideas of merit and individualism. As Howard and one facilitator guide notes, “Whiteness’ … does not mean an indictment of white people and refers to a majority perspective and construct.”
But critical race theorists frequently use the term to secure this indictment. Psychoanalyst Donald Moss published an article claiming that whiteness is a “parasitic condition” without a “permanent cure,” while Noel Ignatiev, the communist and Harvard lecturer who founded the journal “Race Traitor” and claimed that “treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity,” argued that “abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists.”
Yet we’re somehow expected to believe that these critical race advocates are just trying to end racism. They’re not being anti-white. They’ve simply constructed an ideology around attributing some of the worst evils to “whiteness.”
In the face of the district’s lies, there might be reason to rejoice. It might be an indicator that even school districts in incredibly far-left areas have realized just how quickly they’re losing ground on the issue among decent people of all races. By lying, LAUSD might’ve accidentally admitted a greater truth about critical race theory: that parents and voters can stop it.
Howard, the LAUSD School Board, and Superintendent Reilly did not respond to requests for comment.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
A Catholic student has filed a lawsuit against a New Hampshire school district, claiming he was punished for stating that there are only two genders in a debate with another student. The student, a freshman at Exeter High School identified in court documents as “M.P.,” was suspended from playing football for one game after saying there were only two genders. The school district contends that no rights were violated and the decision was made by coaches.
The lawsuit was filed in Rockingham Superior Court on Nov. 4, with the local school administrative unit, known as SAU 16, receiving a copy of the complaint last week. Cornerstone Action, a conservative group representing the student, argued in a statement on Monday that the punishment violated the student’s free speech rights. The group claims that a politically progressive student who is not trans-identified engaged the Catholic student in a debate over gender identity, in which M.P. argued that the only two genders are male and female. The progressive student allegedly turned over an exchange of text messages to Vice Principal Mary Dovholuk. The vice principal is accused of confronting M. P. with printed copies of the messages.
Of particular objection was the school district’s Gender Nonconforming Students policy enacted in 2016, which Cornerstone contends is used to coerce speech.
“In applying this policy, the defendants have not only punished a student for expressing an opinion, but seek to compel students to use ‘non-binary’ pronouns such as the singular pronoun ‘they,’” the lawsuit reads.
“M. P. did not harass or demean any student, but simply expressed his views on a contentious cultural issue. The key question before the court will be if Exeter’s Gender Nonconforming Students policy, nearly identical to the policy adopted by school districts across the state, can be used to suppress the free speech rights of students who hold dissenting views.”
In a statement shared with The Christian Post, SAU 16 Superintendent David Ryan said school officials “respect the right of coaches to make such decisions in a manner consistent with the standards for all student athletes.”
“While we cannot reveal all of the facts at this time, due to the pending litigation and involvement of a minor, it is our belief that once all of the facts are reviewed as part of the legal process, it will be clear that no rights were violated,” the superintendent stressed.
“SAU 16 remains committed to creating and sustaining a trusting, diverse, inclusive school community where all are welcomed, respected, valued and empowered.”
Ryan also defended the school district’s gender-nonconforming policies, saying that the measures “exist in order to meet the districts’ legal obligation under New Hampshire law to ensure that transgender students have equal access to educational opportunity and are protected from discrimination.”
“The policies do not mandate student discipline, but instead recommend corrective action for discrimination or harassment,” Ryan added.
“It is important to note that a coach’s decision is different from a suspension from school and that all student athletes are expected to serve as role models and to treat their fellow students with respect. SAU 16 is in full support of the measures taken by the coaching staff at Exeter High School.”
A New York City junior high is planning on separating students by race in order to discuss social justice topics next week, according to The New York Post.
According to an email sent to parents obtained by the outlet, the Lower Manhattan Community Middle School will conduct the activity in order to “…undo the legacy of racism and oppression in this country that impacts our school community.”
Principal Shanna Douglas wrote in the email that children in grades seven and eight will opt into one of five “affinity groups.” Asians, whites and multi-racial students will be in their own categories. African-American and Hispanic students will be combined into one group.
Douglas added that said she is emphasizing race this school year because “…students are talking about it since race has become a popular topic on social media, or parents are talking even more about it at home due to the recent incidents across the nation.”
She claimed that the school had failed to adequately address race issues before in the institution that is 44 percent Asian, 29 percent white, 15 percent Hispanic, and 8 percent black.
An additional group will be offered for those uncomfortable with the format of the program. Nathaniel Styer, spokesperson for the Department of Education said that it is “…abundantly clear to both students and parents that anyone can opt-out of this two day celebration if they desire.”
The opening question for discussion will be “Why are we even talking about racial identity?”
Parents told the outlet that they are concerned that the program will be more divisive for students that that the politically charged program is being prioritized over traditional academics.
After witnessing Twix’s latest ad or hearing about Sex Offender Story Time, you might have mistakenly assumed that the left’s push to sexualize children and normalize pedophilia couldn’t be any more blatant. But alas, the word “restraint” isn’t in the vocabulary of those whose insatiable hunger for the most potent forms of moral rot have driven them to take bites out of the few remaining taboos that we haven’t “progressed” past quite yet.
The latest attempt to normalize pedophilia comes from Allyn Walker, an assistant professor at Old Dominion University who uses the nonsensical pronouns “they/them” and has advocated for pedophilia to be “destigmatized,” calling for pedophiles to instead be referred to with the insultingly euphemistic term “minor attracted persons.”
Walker is the author of the book “A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor Attracted People and Their Pursuit Of Dignity,” which challenges “widespread assumptions that persons who are preferentially attracted to minors—often referred to as ‘pedophiles’—are necessarily also predators and sex offenders, this book takes readers into the lives of non-offending minor-attracted persons (MAPs).”
Walker’s attempt to legitimize non-offending pedophiles isn’t the first of its kind. Vice also looked into allegedly “non-offending” pedophiles, including a foster parent pseudonymously called Gary who, to no one’s surprise but everyone’s horror, was accused by one of his foster children’s biological mothers of sexually abusing her daughter.
There was also a man dubbed Ian who was so non-offending that he felt comfortable testing himself by working at a job that “involved children directly.” You might be a tad skeptical if your friend who was recovering from alcoholism took a job managing the local liquor store. That skepticism is all the more warranted when we’re running the risk of children being groomed and abused instead of overindulgence in a few too many handles of Old No. 7.
The Intellectualization Of Pedophilic Pathology
Take a look at this viral video where Walker promotes the book and explains why Walker uses the term MAP, saying that the phrase is “less stigmatizing than other terms like pedophile.”
That’s the point. Pedophiles are stigmatized because pedophilia is and deserves to be accurately seen as unspeakably reprehensible. Stigmas are a way we socially communicate this reprehensibility. Any word, framing, or action that chips away at this stigma inevitably breaks down the guardrails against such evil actions.
Yet again we witness an instance of the left siding with the oppressor while pretending to advocate for the victim, this time under the guise of academic inquiry. One has to wonder if Walker has ever considered that our sympathies should lie not with pedophiles who don’t appreciate being called what they are but instead with their victims. Walker’s book intends to help pedophiles pursue dignity. How does a child robbed of his or her innocence pursue his or her sense of dignity?
After hiding comments on Twitter concerning the controversy, Old Dominion released a thoroughly insulting statement in support of Walker opening with the line, “An academic community plays a valuable role in the quest for knowledge.” It also included a statement from Walker, who wrote, “I want to be clear: child sexual abuse is an inexcusable crime. As an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice, the goal of my research is to prevent crime.”
Framing this conversation as if it is a legitimate field of research that one delves into out of altruism doesn’t fool anybody when you come out and openly say that you’re trying to make pedophilia “less stigmatizing.” It becomes even more transparent when we discover who’s behind this movement and when all social and political indicators point towards a coordinated attempt to sacrifice children’s safety and innocence at the altar of limitless tolerance, the promotion of which has framed the unrelenting degradation of all moral standards as one of our society’s defining moral imperatives.
Meet the Groups Trying to Normalize Pedophilia
Walker is unfortunately not alone in the desire to normalize pedophilia. In defense of the term MAP, Walker cites an organization called B4U-ACT, a pedophile advocacy group. It was founded by a man named Michael Melsheimer, who was convicted of a heinous crime. Wondering what it is? Don’t think too hard. Bank robbery? Nope. Gambling? No. Jaywalking? Not quite. Melsheimer was a convicted pedophile who had served a sentence in federal prison.
In case there is somehow any confusion regarding the group’s character, note that their “About Us” page lists their values and mission without even once articulating a desire to mitigate sexual assault. Its FAQ section includes lines like, “We see minor-attracted people as whole human beings … not as criminals or ‘deviants’ who need to be controlled” as well as “We are not advocating treatment to change sexual feelings.” Allow me to ask, what exactly occurs when the sexual desires of someone who is attracted to children aren’t changed and then subsequently aren’t controlled?
B4U-ACT is not the only organization running cover for pedophiles. In fact, the video of Walker detailing Walker’s reasons for wanting to rebrand pedophilia comes from a conversation hosted by the Prostasia Foundation, which advocates for the same evil as B4U-ACT.
Here’s a section of Prostasia’s website called “Our campaign against doll bans.” What type of dolls exactly? Sex dolls that “governments define as ‘childlike.” The organization also works alongside the “MAP Support Club,” a “peer support chat” for pedophiles. It just so happens that the minimum age to join the chat is 13.
If you point out that taking children and sticking them in group chats with pedophiles sounds more like a recipe for child grooming than it does abuse prevention, Prostasia might just accuse you of being far right.
The organization’s talk with Walker was also conducted by their communications director Noah Berlatsky, who has a history of publicly advocating for pedophiles, whom he complains are part of a “stigmatized group.”
4W’s article “Prostasia Goal Is To Normalize Pedophilia” points out that the organization has also been home to other unsavory characters, including sex offenders Jeff White and Guy Hamilton-Smith.
‘Progress’ Doesn’t Have An Off Switch
If it feels like there is no limit to the degeneracy, and in this case genuine evil, that the left will attempt to mainstream, it’s because there isn’t one. “Tolerance” is a key staple of leftwing rhetoric, but no parameters have ever been set. Tolerance is not a virtue in and of itself. It is entirely dependent on what your society is tolerant of. For a wide swath of the left, their answer seems to be all sexual behaviors, with no limits.
There is no off switch to progress, no regulating mechanism within progressive ideology that can ever account for this degree of moral decline. Our rapidly decaying social standards and taboos used to be capable of slowing our descent, but now the brake lines have been cut.
You might get fired if you refuse to play into a transgender co-worker’s delusions and use biologically accurate pronouns. You might suffer the same fate if you come out too vocally against critical race theory in your child’s classroom or if you refuse a COVID-19 vaccine.
The unending march of “progress” has resulted in a society where any of these offenses against neo-liberal totalitarianism and woke ideology might leave you without a job, but you’ll be granted support from your university for being a pedophilia sympathizer, which is now entirely system-approved.
Progressivism evidently can’t be trusted to regulate itself. Any hope to stop and eventually reverse our decline lies solely within the prospect of a right that eschews the left’s bankrupt moral framework and the language used to justify it. Now that we know where it leads, we have no other option.
Neither Old Dominion University nor Walker responded to requests for comment.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at the Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President and the Chief of Staff of the California College Republicans. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
IT Support Technician Michael Hakopian (R) distributes computer devices to students at Hollywood High School on August 13, 2020, in Hollywood, California. With over 734,000 enrolled students, the Los Angeles Unified School District is the largest public school system in California and the 2nd largest public school district in the United States. | Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images
At least 26 state school board associations have distanced themselves from the National School Board Association after it urged the Biden administration to use federal law enforcement agencies against parents who oppose the teaching of controversial curriculum in public schools by labeling them as potential “domestic terrorists.”
The national grassroots organization Parents Defending Education says the states that have distanced themselves from the NSBA’s letter include: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming.
Out of these, 12 states — Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Wisconsin — have taken further action to withdraw membership, participation or dues from the NSBA.
PDE wrote to NSBA member states for their comment on the Sept. 29 letter sent to them by NSBA Interim Executive Director Chip Slaven, which critics believe likened activism of concerned parents to “domestic terrorism.”
The letter said the NSBA had asked the U.S. Department of Justice to mobilize law enforcement agencies to respond to “threats and acts of violence against public schoolchildren, public school board members, and other public school district officials and educators” as actions of “domestic terrorism.”
While some school board members across the nation have publicly shared incidents of threats they’ve purportedly received from angry residents, critics believe the request to get federal law enforcement involved is unwarranted and an attempt to silence parents. Specific examples of concerning actions included the disruption of school board meetings “because of local directives for mask coverings to protect students and educators from COVID-19,” the incitement of “chaos” at school board meetings by “anti-mask proponents,” and the confrontation of school boards by “angry mobs” that have led boards to “end meetings abruptly.”
John Halkias, the director of the NSBA’s Central Region, wrote to Slaven the same day, on Sept. 29, sharing his belief that “the Board of Directors should have been consulted before a letter like this was sent out publicly, and no less to the President of the United States and the National Press.”
“I also agree that the letter took a stance that went beyond what many of us would consider to be reasonable and used terms that were extreme, and asked for action by the Federal Government that many of us would not request,” he added. “In fact in a recent press conference, the White House Press Secretary stated that when these incidents occur, it is a matter for local law enforcement and local authorities, and NOT the federal government.”
In an Oct. 2 email, NSBA President Viola Garcia told the organization’s board of directors that “NSBA has been engaged with the White House and the Department of Education on these and other issues related to the pandemic for several weeks now.”
Five days later, the Department of Justice published a memorandum directing “the Federal Bureau of Investigations, working with each United States Attorney, to convene meetings with federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders within 30 days” to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers and staff.”
Republican members of Congress also criticized the memo.
“As someone who was born in the Soviet Union, I am … disturbed, very disturbed, by the use of the Department of Justice as a political tool, and its power as the police state to suppress lawful public discourse,” Rep. Victoria Spartz, R-Ind., said in a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing. “The FBI is starting to resemble old KGB with secret warrantless … surveillance, wiretapping and intimidation of citizens.”
A Fort Worth, Texas, parent supportive of teaching critical race theory in classrooms recently reportedly threatened other parents during a school board meeting, saying he’s got “over 1,000 soldiers ready to go” and that he’d be “locked and loaded” next time.
Officers were called on to escort the enraged parent, Malikk Austin, from the Fort Worth Independent School District board meeting on Nov. 9 after he turned around to face other parents in the room and shouted at them repeatedly, Fox News reported.
“For those who got an issue with this critical race theory equity, this is something I fought for, for my children,” Austin, who is black, said at the start of his remarks.
“How dare you come out here and talk about the things that my daddy and my grandparents went through, the lynching, the oppression, Jim Crow, and my kids are still being afflicted by this. How dare you come out here and challenge me on critical race theory,” he continued looking at other parents in the audience.
“Look up the word, ‘racism,’ this is something deliberately done to people of African descent,” he added. “They’re shackling us down. This hate, fear, [inaudible] ain’t gonna work no more.”
“We are not our ancestors. I got over 1,000 soldiers ready to go,” Austin then threatened, as seen in video of the contentious meeting.
A separate video posted on Twitter shows Austin warning, saying, “I’ll bring my soldiers with me next time … locked and loaded.”
He can be heard repeating the phrase “locked and loaded” several times as officers walk him out of the building.
A Far-Left activist in an FWISD Board meeting threatened parents all because they were criticizing CRT. The activist said that he would bring 1000 soldiers and that he will be "lock and loaded" next time. pic.twitter.com/VmqNaQQh10
Parents at the meeting reportedly told Fox News that Austin’s comments made them feel threatened and unsafe.
“Absolutely, it made me feel threatened,” Hollie Plemmons, a stay-at-home mother of three, said. “I’m scared and I’m afraid he’s going to do something.”
“Everyone there felt threatened,” Carol Guarneri, a grandmother of four students, added. “This gentleman was profoundly angry, he was not putting on a performance. When he made the statement that he had his thousand soldiers and they’d be back locked and loaded, it was very frightening to me.”
“I was thinking about calling my husband and having him come to the parking lot because I was afraid to come to my car,” she recalled.
According to Fox News, Guaneri claimed that Austin had attended a school board meeting in August wearing “tactical gear.” Fox noted that Austin can be seen wearing the gear at the 39-minute mark in this video.
When reached for comment, Austin reportedly told Fox News that it was not his intention to threaten anyone.
“First Amendment rights, freedom of speech, need to be implemented,” he argued, adding that “locked and loaded” is “a term I used when I coached football. It means, ‘Prepare and get ready.'”
Parents in Leon County, Florida, are suing the school district for holding a meeting with their teenage daughter about her chosen gender identity without their knowledge or consent. The parents have warned that the district’s LGBT policies create a “wedge” between students and their parents.
January and Jeffrey Littlejohn filed a lawsuit against the school board, Superintendent of Schools Rocky Hanna and Assistant Superintendent, Equity Officer and Title IX Compliance Coordinator Kathleen Rodgers in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida on Oct. 18.
In the lawsuit, the Littlejohns accuse the defendants of violating their substantive due process right to direct the education and upbringing of their children under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and other rights guaranteed to them by state and federal law by excluding them from a meeting with school officials discussing their 13-year-old daughter’s gender identity.
Vernadette Broyles of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign, a legal organization created two-and-a-half years ago “specifically to stand with and help parents who are in some way or the other … seeking to protect the well-being … of their child from gender identity ideology,” is one of the attorneys representing the Littlejohns in the litigation.
In an interview with The Christian Post, January Littlejohn and Broyles elaborated on the lawsuit and the events that led up to it.
Littlejohn explained that her daughter, who is now a high school student, began undergoing treatment for gender confusion in the summer before the start of the 2020-’21 school year. She attributed her daughter’s gender confusion to peer pressure from her “friend group because three other children in that same friend group had come out as nonbinary or transgender within the previous six months.”
While Littlejohn told one of her daughter’s teachers at Deer Lake Middle School that she was “seeking mental health counseling and she was experiencing distress that we weren’t affirming her at home because we didn’t feel like it was in her best interest,” she did not expect the school to begin referring to her daughter using they/them pronouns and give her the option to sleep in the same quarters as her male classmates on an overnight school field trip.
Littlejohn only found out that the school had taken such action because her daughter revealed to her that she’d had a meeting about her “nickname,” with the concerned parent telling CP that “that’s kind of what we refer to it as.”
She said her daughter then asked, ‘“isn’t it funny that they asked me what restroom I wanted to use?”’
“My daughter has ADHD … and so to her, this seemed like the silliest thing in the world that they asked her which restroom she preferred to use. That was my first indication that the school had met with her without … notifying my husband or myself,” she said.
“I immediately called her guidance counselor. The guidance counselor said she needed to call me back. She called me back with the assistant principal on the line. So right then and there, I knew something … felt different about the situation because I had spoken to the guidance counselor multiple times in the past because of my daughter’s 504 plan … for her ADHD.”
Littlejohn accused the school of “colluding with my daughter to deceive us so that we would never have known she was going by an alternate name.”
The concerned mother also insisted that she “absolutely should have been at that meeting” and expressed disbelief that the school that she volunteered at did not partner with them. “I was volunteer of the year at that school. It wasn’t like I was an unknown parent.”
Littlejohn recalled the detrimental impact of the school’s decision to hold meetings with her daughter about her gender identity confusion without her knowledge or consent, saying: “It created a huge wedge between our daughter and us, as her parents. We have worked very hard over the past year-and-a-half to stabilize the situation through counseling, and I do feel like she’s on a better path at this time.”
Broyles told CP that the purpose of the lawsuit was to get the school district to “rescind the guidance … that was in place that … basically instructed school officials not to inform parents when a child begins to indicate a transgender or LGBTQ+ identity.” The attorney expressed particular concern that the guidance implied that “outing a student to their parents could be dangerous to a student’s well-being.”
“Every time I think about this lawsuit, it really hits me: The district guidance had the message to parents that you don’t have the best interests of your child in mind. It sends the message that children need to … be protected from parents rather than by parents, and that is an earth-shattering message that cannot stand,” Broyles asserted.
Specifically, the guidance, part of the “LCS Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Gender Nonconforming and Questioning Support Guide,” warned that “Outing a student, especially to parents, can be very dangerous to the [student’s] health and well-being” because “some students are not able to be out at home because their parents are unaccepting of LGBTQ+ people out.”
The guidance maintains that “as many as 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQ+, many of whom have been rejected by their families for being LGBTQ+,” suggesting that “outing students to their parents can literally make them homeless.”
“We are seeking that guidance to be permanently removed and replaced with new guidance that complies with the Parents’ Bill of Rights there in Florida as well as the Florida and United States Constitution that honors the parents’ right to make decisions for their children,” Broyles added. “It’s really important to recognize that affirming a child’s discordant gender identity … involves a significant mental health decision that affects the well-being of children … and with potentially lifelong consequences.”
The lawsuit, as summarized by Broyles, is asking the school district to implement new guidance requiring school officials to notify parents whenever their child “expresses gender discordance, gender confusion, a different identity other than their physical, biological sex” and “new policies that provide public notice and a public hearing regarding the new guidance through the school board.” Additionally, the Littlejohns are seeking “some sort of monetary damages for the … pain and suffering and … the impacts this has had on their family.”
Broyles stressed that the situation facing the Littlejohns is not unique: “This violation of parental rights is driving a wedge between parents and their children by school officials. … It affects parents … all throughout the political spectrum on both political parties or independents, whether it’s Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, agnostics. … We’ve spoken to almost virtually every stripe of parent.”
The attorney maintained that the Child and Parental Rights Campaign is working on several similar cases: “We hear almost weekly from parents who have … something similar happening to them and their children.”
“This same guidance I described to you is present on the websites of at least 11 other school districts throughout Florida,” Broyles said. She further noted that the “Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Student Support Plan” included in the “LCS Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Gender Nonconforming and Questioning Support Guide” is also on the ACLU’s website.
“A lot of these documents are already out there and school boards, based on what I’ve been told, simply adopt those and put their name on them,” Broyles added.
“That’s why there seems to be the exact same guidance in multiple counties in the state of Florida and all over the country in all 50 states.”
Littlejohn told CP that she’s aware of other parents in Leon County that have found themselves in the same situation as herself.
“A lot of the parents are really scared to speak out or they don’t feel like they can speak out because it would jeopardize the very fragile relationship they have with their child who’s experiencing distress related to their gender.” She added that she speaks to other families “almost weekly to try to help them understand the situation at hand and help them get resources.”
She also pushed back on the claim that the school was conducting a “benign intervention”: “It’s the first step toward medical transitioning, which is why it is so imperative that parents be included [in] any discussion with their child that could impact the short-term and long-term mental and physical well-being of their child, whether it’s this issue or any issue. So fundamentally, this is about parental rights and what the schools can and cannot do … without their permission.”
Littlejohn emphasized that despite the harm this experience has caused to her and her family, “it’s made our faith grow” as Christians. She seconded Broyles’ assertion that “this issue affects all kinds of families” and “people of all faiths including atheists.”
In the time since officials at Deer Lake Middle School first met with Littlejohn’s daughter to discuss her gender identity, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed the Parents’ Bill of Rights into law. The measure mandates that “important information relating to a child should not be withheld, either inadvertently or purposely, from his or her parent, including information relating to the minor child’s health, well-being, and education, while the minor child is in the custody of the school district.”
Additionally, the law directs school districts to work with parents, teachers and administrators to “develop and adopt a policy to promote parental involvement in the public school system.”
Superintendent Hanna reacted to the Littlejohns’ lawsuit in a statement to news outlet WCTV: “We certainly want to include parents, and with the Parental Bill of Rights, I understand and respect that, but we also have to respect the rights of the individuals, safety of the children we care for each and every day” because “while the children are under our care we act in loco parentis, on behalf of a parent while they’re under our care.”
The lawsuit follows a year of unsuccessful efforts to convince the school district to change its policy. Littlejohn insisted that “We tried to do this without filing a lawsuit, which was never our intention.”
While the complaint mentions that the district removed the guide from the publicly accessible portion of its website, it alleges that the district did not comply with the Littlejohns’ request to “publish on the Website a written statement that parents would be notified when their child/children express a discordant gender identity and included in meetings or discussions with their child/children regarding their gender identity.”
The complaint contends that “there is no indication on the website or otherwise that the Guide has been rescinded, only a notation that it is being revised.” Additionally, it states that “no revised guidance regarding parental notification has been published or provided to Plaintiffs.” The website of the Leon County Schools’ Equity and Diversity Department has a section devoted to the LCS LGBTQ+ Support Guide, which informs visitors that “[the] Guide is currently being reviewed and is under revision.”
The lawsuit against Leon County Schools comes at a time when parents have expressed an increasing amount of unease with some of the material their children are exposed to in school. In recent weeks, outraged parents and community members in several states have descended on school board meetings to condemn the inclusion of sexually explicit material in books available to students in school libraries and writing prompts in a textbook used in a college-level English class.
Parents of students in the Scottsdale Unified School District were shocked to discover that a school board member had secretly compiled a dossier detailing parents who opposed critical race theory. The dossier was compiled on Google Drive and contained a list of parents who objected to teachings about CRT; it included photographs of both the parents and their children.
Parents who had been calling for the recall of Governing Board President Jann-Michael Greenburg are now demanding he resign
over the secret dossier, to which he had access.
“I am calling for the immediate resignation of our board president Jann-Michael Greenburg,” said Amy Carney, a mother of six, who is now running for a seat on the Scottsdale Governing Board.“We cannot allow anyone in a leadership position to secretly compile personal documents and information on moms and dads who have dared speak out publicly or on social media about their grievances with the district,” she added.
The dossier included a trove of information on 47 parents, including home addresses, phone numbers, mortgage data, traffic tickets, family members, and social security numbers.
One of the videos on the drive showed Greenburg’s father wearing a bodycam before going out to record video of the parents.
The dossier was discovered when Greenburg sent a screenshot of his desktop to a parent that displayed the address of the link to the Google Drive.
Amanda Wray told KTVK-TV that she saw photographs of her children on the dossier and was horrified.
“When I first saw the contents of the Google Drive and I saw my 8- and 10-year-old’s photos, that was terrifying. And like, what’s he doing?” said Wray.
“But he has pictures of my vacation home, property records,” she added. “I’m not a political opponent, I’m an involved parent and that is threatening to me and it makes me wonder why and what he was planning to do with those photos.”
The district said in the letter that Greenburg could only be removed if he was recalled, if he resigned, or if he was voted out in the next election.
Attorney Alexander Kolodin told the Arizona Free News that Greenburg and his father could face criminal charges related to intimidation.
Last month, a 15-year-old student in Charlotte, North Carolina confided in her school’s administrators that a classmate had sexually assaulted her in the girl’s restroom. She claimed that the unnamed male student had been following her into the bathroom, groping her without consent and that he had been doing so “for weeks” before she was able to work up the nerve to come forward.
But instead of intervening or protecting her, the woke administrators at the Hawthorne Academy of Health Sciences inexplicably called her a liar and suspended her for “filing a false report,” even though the police had already charged the male student with two counts of sexual battery and even coaxed a confession out of him.
The school has reportedly not punished the alleged attacker in any way.
“They are making her feel like she is being punished for coming forward,” the mother told WBTV.
The assaults went unreported for quite some time because, according to the Daily Beast, the victim “was afraid no one would believe her,” which makes the school’s punishment of her for coming forward that much more unsettling – also begs the question, what kind of ‘culture’ is in place at Hawthorne that would make a student feel that way?
After enduring the abuse for weeks, she felt confident enough to speak up after attending a Title IX assembly earlier in the year that encouraged students to come forward about instances of abuse.
“Around the time of the assembly, the girl spoke with another student who told her she had had a similar experience with the same assailant. The two of them brought their allegations to the assistant principal, who notified the police, triggering an investigation. (A copy of the police report reviewed by The Daily Beast states that two minors reported that the suspect “attempted to engage in sexual contact against the victims will.”)
A few weeks later, her mother said, the police called to say the alleged assailant had confessed. He was later charged with two counts of sexual battery.”
The Legacy Report
The whole situation has left the victim’s mother completely shocked, especially with the school’s decision-making. While remaining anonymous for her daughter’s protection, she told The Daily Beast this week that she believes the school “has failed” her daughter.
“Schools teach your kids – ‘you see something, you say something’ – and in this case my daughter did, and it seems that the school system has failed her.”
Shortly after the school was notified of the incidents, the victim’s mother was informed by Hawthorne’s assistant principal – Nina Adams – that they had found no evidence of a sexual assault, and instead accused her daughter of filing a false report based on lies. When the mother confronted Adams with the fact that the police had gotten a confession to the assaults from the male student, she brazenly replied “unfortunately, the police department has nothing to do with the school system.”
“I said to her, ‘I’m a little confused because this student admitted to the detectives that interviewed him at the police station that he did in fact do this,’’’ the mother recalled. “And she said, ‘Unfortunately, what the police department does has nothing to do with the school system.’”
Keep in mind, this is a PUBLIC school official…
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District has been largely silent throughout the incident. Members of the board who were questioned by WBTV refused to comment at all, and even the mother of the victim said she had not heard from them until this Friday when someone from their office called to say they were opening an investigation. Hawthorne’s principal – Diann Weston – has not reached out to the mother or the victim even once.
The only one to issue a public statement was the District’s Superintendent, Earnest Winston, who said he could not release “confidential information about such matters as individual student discipline or ongoing police investigations.”
Despite intense criticism and protests by students and parents, the school is refusing to back down from requiring the victim to not only serve her suspension but also sign a “non-retaliation” agreement against her attacker and unbelievably attend a class called “sexual assault is preventable” before they allow her to return to class.
By forcing her to attend this class, the administrators are directly implying that the 15-year-old could have prevented the assaults if she modified HER behavior in some way.
It is a bit similar to the Loudon County assault case.
If you are a parent or have any concerns you would like to share with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District about this incident and their decision to punish the student for coming forward, they can be contacted HERE – and the School Board can be found HERE.
Or you can contact the Hawthorne Academy of Health Sciences directly HERE.
If there’s one lesson to be learned from the red sweep in Virginia this week, it’s that politicians, schools boards, and education administrators shouldn’t mess with parents, especially on the well-being of their children. Many more school districts across other states still have to learn this lesson, and to that end, one Wisconsin parent is enlisting the help of attorneys to go after her son’s public school.
On Wednesday, counsel for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) sent a letter to the school district of Kenosha, the scene of violent riots last summer and the site of the ongoing trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, threatening legal action if the Kenosha Unified School District does not allow a concerned parent to observe her son’s class as required by federal law.
It started when the mother of a student at the Kenosha School of Technology Enhanced Curriculum, a public charter school, became concerned about her son’s dropping grades. According to WILL, the student had reported a bevy of classroom disruptions that contributed to his struggle, including fighting, profanities, racial epithets, and property damage, as well as a new math curriculum that does not involve homework nor a textbook.
In September, the mom decided to take action, figuring the best way to help her son succeed would be to observe and understand his learning environment. She requested access to see his classroom for herself, but both the school district and the school reportedly denied her requests multiple times, giving her inconsistent rationale as to why she couldn’t enter.
For instance, Bill Haithcock, the chief of school leadership for the district, allegedly told the mother that an in-person observation by her would serve “no educational program,” ignoring the school’s charter contract, which says, “Parents are important partners in the educational program at KTEC.” Haithcock reportedly further noted that he didn’t think it was the “best idea right now” to “expos[e] the class to an outside visitor.”
However, as the WILL letter notes, the district’s policies and social media pages indicate that many other types of visitors such as mentors, chaperones, and nonprofits are welcomed.
Other times, the school district allegedly told the mother that as a parent, she was “not connected to the educational curriculum” and that allowing her to visit the classroom would open the floodgates of other parents wanting to observe. WILL hopes Kenosha schools change course and “view parents as partners in the education of children.”
According to federal law signed by the Obama administration in 2015, these denials are illegal, as WILL argues in its letter. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, public schools must have systems in place that involve parents in educational settings, meaning the Kenosha district must have a policy that grants parents the “observation of classroom activities.”
This is just the tip of the iceberg of parents’ rights in their children’s education. They also have a right to access curriculum, see progress reports, engage in communication with staff, schedule yearly parent-teacher conferences, and participate in their kid’s classes.
The Kenosha school district does have policies in place for parent involvement and “classroom visits,” yet it has so far stonewalled this concerned parent.
In response to The Federalist’s request for comment, the Kenosha Unified School District’s Chief Communications Officer Tanya Ruder said, “KUSD is aware of the WILL letter and is working with legal counsel to review the matter at hand.” The Kenosha School of Technology Enhanced Curriculum did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
WILL said it hopes Kenosha schools change course and “view parents as partners in the education of children.”
“Public school classrooms should not be a ‘black box.’ Parents have the right to know what is being taught in classrooms,” said WILL Deputy Counsel Dan Lennington.
This controversy over whether parents are partners in their children’s education or whether they should be staying out of schools has shown to have remarkable electoral significance this week, especially in the Virginia gubernatorial race. After candidate and former governor Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” and doubled down on keeping parental involvement out of public schools, Republican candidate and parent advocate Glenn Youngkin won the race in the same state President Joe Biden won by 10+ points just one year ago.
“Federal and state laws impose simple and straightforward transparency requirements on public schools such as allowing parents to sit in on classes and the right to view curriculum,” Lennington told The Federalist. “But if public schools continue to treat parents as adversaries by concealing what’s going on inside school buildings, they face the real risk of an electoral backlash, like we just saw in Virginia.”
Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.
A Christian student group has filed a lawsuit against the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, accusing the school of wrongfully denying funding for a guest speaker.
The UNL chapter of the international apologetics ministry Ratio Christi filed a lawsuit against UNL last week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska, alleging that university officials engaged in “viewpoint discrimination.”
At issue is a funding request to host Christian philosopher and Notre Dame Professor Robert Audi for a lecture on whether it is rational to believe in God. The student group requested $1,500 in student activity funding for the event with Audi, who previously taught at UNL for nearly 30 years before his time at Notre Dame.
University officials denied the request, the complaint stated. The school allegedly told the students that they would need to invite a speaker to represent the opposite views of Audi to get the funding. The school reasoned that the funding could not be used to promote “speakers of a political and ideological nature,” the lawsuit added.
“Defendants spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in student fees each year to pay for speakers and other events promoting political and ideological viewpoints on topics like sexual orientation, ‘gender identity,’ ‘reproductive justice,’ social justice, police reform, and political activism,” the lawsuit reads.
“And Defendants do not present opposing viewpoints. … Commonly, the student speech that Defendants fund on those and other topics conflict with the viewpoints held by Ratio Christi, the Student Plaintiffs, and other University Students.”
Michael Ross of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal nonprofit representing Ratio Christi, said in a statement that public universities should foster “an inclusive environment that showcases a variety of viewpoints, not dismiss those with whom the administration disagrees.”
“The University of Nebraska–Lincoln has failed to ensure its student organizations are treated fairly and objectively; it turned down Ratio Christi’s reasonable request because of a blatant bias against its particular religious and ideological viewpoint,” Ross claimed.
UNL spokeswoman Deb Fiddelke said in a statement reported by The Omaha World-Herald last Friday that the university welcomes all viewpoints. She rejected claims of discrimination.
“We have a variety of speakers on our campus, from across the ideological, religious and political spectrum,” stated Fiddelke, adding that there are “many different sources” for event funding and that “Ratio Christi has been previously funded for speakers and events from other funding sources.”
The lawsuit drew the attention of Gov. Pete Ricketts, who called for the university to support “speakers from a wide variety of viewpoints on campus, including Christian speakers.”
“UNL has previously brought in much more controversial speakers, and Dr. Robert Audi and Ratio Christi should be given the same respect,” the Republican governor said in a statement. “I urge University of Nebraska Chancellor Ronnie Green to step in and define policies to end this kind of discrimination and to send a message that all viewpoints, including Christian values, are welcome.”
ADF has represented Ratio Christi groups in other cases, including a recent lawsuit against The University of Houston-Clear Lake that claims the school denied official recognition of the student group.
Days after the ADF filed the complaint against the University of Houston-Clear Lake, the university officially registered the Christian group as a student organization.
However, the university maintains that it never denied official status to Ratio Christi and was still processing the application when the lawsuit was filed.
A juvenile court judge found a teenage boy guilty of “nonconsensual sex” with a female student in the controversial case from Loudoun County in Virginia. The sexual assault became a national outrage after public school officials denied any knowledge of an assault during a heated confrontation with parents protesting against a transgender bathroom rule proposal.
Scott Smith, the father of the victim, was dragged out of the June 22 board meeting by police after engaging in an altercation with a woman who accused his daughter of lying about the assault. That altercation was used to justify an announcement by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland that the FBI would investigate threats against school board members.
On Monday, Juvenile Court Judge Pamela Brooks found that the evidence presented was sufficient to find that the 15-year-old suspect had engaged in “nonconsensual sex” with the victim during the bathroom assault on May 28 at Stone Bridge High School. The suspect was also accused of sexually assaulting a second victim early October after he had been moved to another school in the district.
“The matter will be continued for review, to determine the outcome of the second set of charges against the same young man, who is accused of sexually assaulting a second Loudoun County student after being transferred to Broad Run High School,” read a statement from attorney Elizabeth Lancaster, who represents one of the victims in the case.
The boy reportedly said in court that he had worn a skirt into the restroom.
Parents and other critics of the Loudoun County school board have called for resignations of those members who are accused of covering up the sexual assaults at their schools in order to push liberal policies. The Smith family said in a statement Monday that they would continue to press for accountability from the school officials responsible for the scandal.
“We are relieved that justice was served today for the Smith’s daughter,” the statement said. “This horrible incident has deeply affected the Smith family, and they are grateful for today’s outcome.”
Here’s a news report about the shocking Loudoun school scandal:
What do you call it when the country’s largest school board association secretly coordinates with the Biden White House before issuing a formal request that the administration use the FBI to investigate dissenting parents as potential “domestic terrorists,” and then, five days later, the Justice Department issues a memorandum to the FBI to do just that?
The old-fashioned word for it is corruption — corruption of our institutions, the rule of law, the administration of justice, the separation of powers. It is also an egregious abuse of power on the part of the Biden administration, which apparently has no qualms about calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland when the president’s political allies need a little muscle.
In a contentious congressional hearing on Thursday, Garland confirmed that the basis of his Oct. 4 memorandum, which directed the FBI and U.S. attorney’s offices to launch a task force to combat what Garland called a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff,” was a letter that the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent to the White House on Sept. 29.
That is, Garland’s evidence that there’s a “disturbing spike” in these kinds of threats is the NSBA letter itself, which was produced after weeks of collaboration with Biden’s White House. This is the same letter in which the NSBA urged the Biden administration to use tools like the Patriot Act to target parents who show up at school board meetings to complain about mask mandates and critical race theory curricula, as if they were “domestic terrorists.”
Biden AG Merrick Garland concedes that he started targeting parents for "possible domestic terrorism" because the NSBA sent a letter. pic.twitter.com/ZDvhZ6vDzO
Incredibly, the news about NSBA’s collusion with the White House broke while Garland was testifying Thursday. During his testimony, Garland insisted that, the NSBA letter notwithstanding, he “can’t imagine any circumstance in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children,” nor any circumstance in which those instances “would be labeled as domestic terrorism.”
We are left to understand then, that the role Garland envisions for the DOJ in all of this is — what? His memo cites no instances of violence or threats of violence against school board members, and Garland himself admitted before Congress that the basis of his memo was the NSBA letter.
But the vast majority of incidents cited in the NSBA letter didn’t involve attacks or threats of any kind. A few cases involved local law enforcement, but nothing cited in the letter comes close to “domestic terrorism” or anything that would justify the involvement of the FBI or the DOJ. For the most part, the letter cited cases in which parents disrupted school board meetings by protesting, often because they were not given an opportunity to speak out on issues that directly affect the education of their children.
The letter of course didn’t cite instances where school board members have threatened parents, Like this one:
To be clear, the DOJ has no role whatsoever in policing the interactions of parents and local school boards. Whatever happens at those meetings, however contentious they might get, they are entirely under the purview of local and state authorities. For Garland to even suggest that federal prosecutors might get involved is itself a scandal and an egregious abuse of power.
That’s what this is really all about. Set aside the details of the machinations between the Biden White House and the NSBA and the DOJ. What it comes down to is a coordinated effort by the left — including the most powerful law enforcement official in the country, the attorney general — to intimidate parents into silence.
Want to show up and speak out at your local school board meeting? Maybe hold a protest sign in the parking lot? Well then, you might just get a knock on your door from the FBI. Better think twice about that.
These are parents who have every right, by God and the U.S. Constitution, strenuously to voice their opposition to mask mandates, critical race theory, transgender ideology, and all the other nonsense that woke school boards and teachers are trying to foist on their kids. In fact they have a duty to do so.
But instead of listening to the concerns of such parents, the top brass at the NSBA decided to call in a political favor to the White House, which in turn let loose the Justice Department. Through it all, the corporate media executed a PR campaign on behalf of Biden and the school boards.
And why are they trying to intimidate parents into silence? Because when all’s said and done, the leftist ideologues who sit on school boards, work in the White House, and push paper for Garland’s Justice Department don’t want parents to have a say in how public schools are run and what children are taught. As far as they’re concerned, your children don’t belong to you, and their education is not your concern.
The message from the left is clear: comply, stay quiet, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll leave you alone. For now.
John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.
In 2014, Rolling Stone published a story about a female student named “Jackie” who claimed she was raped at a fraternity party at the University of Virginia.
“The 9,000-word story prompted a wave of outrage and revulsion,” said the Washington Post. The fraternity in question was graffitied within hours, protesters descended upon the campus in Charlottesville, Va., the university president suspended Greek life until the following year, and elected officials condemned the incident.
“University of Virginia Contends With Outrage Over Horrific Rape Reports,” Time Magazine headlined. CNN reported on the story and the university’s swift reaction to it, as did ABC News. The Huffington Post also picked up the story.
The story, we now know, later unraveled, leading to a retraction from Rolling Stone and massive defamation lawsuits. But not before the appalling tale of a helpless young woman being brutally assaulted on an educational campus shook Americans’ sensibilities. No one was disagreeing that, if true, the incident deserved horror, outrage, and efforts to try and keep such abuses from happening again.
The Story We Should All Be Up In Arms About
Just seven years later, a similarly harrowing tale has emerged just 100 or so miles away from U-Va., in Loudoun County, Va. An investigation from The Daily Wire earlier this month reported allegations from Loudoun County father Scott Smith that in May, “a boy allegedly wearing a skirt entered a girls’ bathroom at nearby Stone Bridge High School, where he sexually assaulted Smith’s ninth-grade daughter.”
“A boy was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of forcible fellatio, related to an incident that day at that school,” according to Smith’s attorney.
But instead of receiving national outrage across the political and media landscape, the alleged incident was reportedly covered up by the Loudoun County School Board for months. In a June meeting, board members insisted they didn’t know of any such assaults. After showing up to a school board meeting in protest, Smith was arrested and smeared as a “domestic terrorist.”
Days after the Daily Wire investigation broke, another report alleged the school district had been failing to report sexual assault claims for years. Meanwhile, LCPS appears to have quietly transferred the alleged rapist to another school, where he has since been accused of another sexual assault of a female student.
Where Is The Outrage?
Where is the outrage? A search for “Scott Smith Loudoun” returns zero results on the Washington Post’s website, despite Loudoun County’s close proximity to the Post’s home city. On Tuesday, the Post finally published something on the story, but failed to mention Smith by name and initially failed to admit that the alleged attacker identified as “gender fluid.”
A search for “Scott Smith Loudoun” or “Loudoun sexual assault” returned no results from The New York Times on Wednesday. The extent to which CNN covered the story was to say “[Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn] Youngkin on Tuesday promised action following parental outrage over two recent alleged assaults in public schools in the state’s Loudoun County,” immediately after a paragraph of damage control for Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe’s statement that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Can you imagine if, instead of discovering holes in the U-Va. story, additional coverage had revealed that the school had been covering up other sexual assault allegations for years? Or, if the allegations in the Rolling Stone story had been true, can you imagine if U-Va. had quietly moved the rapists to another fraternity and tried to cover the whole thing up? Or tried to smear Jackie and her family as “domestic terrorists”?
The Loudoun County incident has all the ingredients of a horrifying scandal worthy of the front pages of every newspaper in the country. It should provoke our outrage, not as conservatives, but as caring and compassionate human souls whose sympathies are pricked by the horrors allegedly endured by an innocent 15-year-old girl.
If We Can’t Agree Rape Is Bad, What Can We Agree On?
Ensuring the safety of young girls — in their places of learning and elsewhere — should not be controversial. But the loudest voices on the left, the same ones who screamed “Me Too” from the rooftops of their Hollywood mansions, are too allegiant to the fringe demands of transgenderism to speak up. Many voices in the middle, even, seem too cowardly to come to the defense of young women like Smith’s daughter.
In a widening partisan divide, if we can’t agree that young girls being raped at school is an outrage, what can we agree on? Does the left hate conservatives with such vitriol that, once voices on the right speak up for a young girl’s right to bodily safety, that issue is suddenly anathema, tainted by the fingerprints of concerned parents slandered as domestic terrorists?
Plenty of other common-sense perspectives that any Democrat nominee would have supported up to a couple of years ago have suddenly become “radical” conservative positions too: funding police departments, not segregating kids in school based on race, having international borders, or allowing people to make their own medical decisions without government coercion. Any of these should have been enough to make Americans stop and wonder why the rules of the game are changing so drastically — and who is changing them.
But even for those who had yet to notice, the harrowing tale from Loudoun County Public Schools — and the subsequent shrug that legacy media, Democrats, and the Me Too crowd gave it — should settle that the biggest war in America right now isn’t between Republicans and Democrats, nor between blustering, blundering congressmen battling over whether to sell your children’s future for $3.5 trillion or $1 trillion.
The biggest war in America is between the allegiances we’ve always taken for granted — those of the family, church, and local community — and a conglomerate of forces that will stop at nothing to break them down. Sacrificing a 15-year-old girl’s right to basic safety at her school on the altar of fringe identity politics is just part of that fight.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
It’s a phone call every parent dreads receiving. Earlier this year, Virginia father Scott Smith was notified his 15-year-old daughter had been sexually assaulted. While that news was horrific, little did Smith know this would just be the start of a nightmarish series of events in which he would end up being cast as the villain. He can thank Democrats for enabling the whole outrageous affair.
The saga began back on May 28 at Loudoun County’s Stone Bridge High School, the sheriff’s office confirmed, where Smith was summoned by school officials. Smith told The Daily Wire he learned his daughter had allegedly been assaulted in a girls’ restroom by a boy wearing a skirt. (According to some reports, the boy identifies as “gender-fluid.”) Smith said school officials told him they intended to handle the incident in-house, instead of through the police and courts. After Smith became understandably upset at this callous and wholly improper decision not to involve law enforcement, he says school officials calls the police on him.
Fortunately, Smith was not arrested that day, but the story did not end there. A month later, he attended a Loudoun County School Board meeting to protest a proposed policy that would, among other things, allow students to access whatever restroom or locker room corresponds with their self-identified sex.
Concerned parents argued the policy would take privacy and safety from girls. LCPS Superintendent Scott Ziegler responded, “To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.” Smith couldn’t believe his ears. Later, a conversation between a left-leaning parent and Smith grew heated when the other parent implied Smith was lying about his daughter. This time, police did arrest him and video of the incident went viral. Overnight, Smith became the poster boy of supposedly dangerous parents. The National School Boards Association even specifically pointed to him in the now-infamous letter to the Biden administration, arguing that distraught parents ought to be seen as “domestic terrorists.”
The full truth about what had happened to Smith’s daughter did not become public until this past week: The sexual assault committed against her was no anomaly. Not only that, it was the direct result of policies promoted and advanced by Democrats who are willing to sacrifice the bodies, minds, and souls of innocent children to protect leftist gender ideology from criticism.
The prime culprits of the Smith family’s tragedy are dictates like Virginia’s “Model Policies for the Treatment of Transgender Students in Virginia’s Public Schools.” Such dictates — disarmingly labeled “policies” — elevate subjective “gender identity” over sex, allowing male students to participate in girls’ sports, lodge with girls on overnight school trips, and, yes, access girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.
This is far from a new project. Democrats have been attempting to impose their gender insanity on the rest of the country since at least the Obama administration, when the U.S. Department of Education threatened schools with a loss of federal funding if they did not implement such policies. Unfortunately, weak Republican governors like South Dakota’s Kristi Noem have also been complicit through their refusal to meaningfully resist this agenda.
Concerned parents and others have fought this effort, arguing these changes would put girls in particular at risk to potential predators. Sespite Democrats’ best attempts at gaslighting, this is exactly what’s happened, and not just in Virginia. In November 2017, a five-year-old girl in Georgia was allegedly sexually assaulted in her school bathroom after the school introduced a new transgender policy. Her case, Thomas v. City Schools of Decatur et al, is still making its way through the state’s courts.
Still, Democrats and their left-wing allies refuse to even acknowledge this outcome of their transgender policies. After claiming there had been no assault in a school restroom, the Loudoun County School Board passed its new transgender policy in August. The alleged perpetrator was reportedly transferred to a different high school where, earlier this month, he was reportedly charged with sexually assaulting yet another girl. Still, the corporate media blackout of the story persists, while the Biden administration and Democrat politicians — and their henchmen in Big Tech and the press — continue to vilify ordinary parents like Smith.
Democrats’ true priorities are clear. Despite past “believe all women” rhetoric, their party’s ideology about sex has driven them to summarily toss aside the safety of girls in their campaign to normalize crazed gender ideology. As for the fundamental right of parents to choose how their children are raised, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe last month spelled out where he and his Democrat comrades stand: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
To stop the left’s nefarious agenda, parents and pro-family Americans must become politically engaged and toss out bad elected officials. If this doesn’t happen soon, Scott Smith’s nightmare could be endured by many others around the country.
Terry Schilling is the executive director at American Principles Project.
The National Sex Education Standards’ updated 2020 guidance is featuring what many parents may consider to be disturbing, indoctrinating sex-related information that public school districts are teaching children from very young ages. The new standards, according to the report, were conceived by the Future of Sex Education Initiative, a partnership between Advocates for Youth, Answer, and SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change that seeks to “create a national dialogue about the future of sex education and to promote the institutionalization of quality sex education in public school.”
According to a Tuesday report from the Federalist‘s Nick Bell, the sex education “blueprint” is steeped in “extremist sexual ethics” that are “designed to destroy children’s innocence”as well as undermine their Christian faith.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a 2016 report noted that approximately 40% of school districts across the country adopted the National Sex Education Standards’ 2011 edition — a less extreme version of its 2020 successor.
“The 2020 standards unequivocally endorse abortion at any time, teach the topic starting in sixth grade, and even force teachers to provide information on local abortion clinics to students in ninth grade,” Bell wrote. “The standards also insist that children must be allowed to choose their own gender and false pronouns must ‘be respected by the adults in their lives.'”
According to the new standards, children as young as kindergarten age should learn about gender identity, while third-grade students should learn about the role of hormone blockers for transgender youth. Teachers should also be equipped to explain masturbation to students as young as just eight years old.
It gets worse from there: Bell noted that sixth-graders — who are often 11 and 12 years old — “must define oral, anal, and vaginal sex as well as the benefits of withdrawing one’s penis before ejaculation during intercourse.”
Sixth-graders, the groups said, should also learn that people ought not “assume that people with a penis are boys and people with a vagina are girls,” and that they should never assume another person’s sexual orientation. Students of this age group, according to the guidance, should also attend LGBTQ rallies and challenge themselves and others on ways to combat homophobia. Sixth-graders would also engage in a card game in which cards ask whether various sex acts — “oral sex (mouth on genitals),” “anal sex (penis to anus)” — are considered abstinence.
For seventh-graders, anything but “sperm in vagina” would constitute abstinence, the guidance added, and teachers would demonstrate how to put on a condom.
A lesson for eighth-graders, the guidance added, would encourage anal and oral sex over vaginal sex in order to avoid pregnancy.
The new standards, according to the organization, were “written with a trauma-informed lens; have been infused with principles of reproductive justice, racial justice, social justice, and equity; address social determinants of health and how these can lead to inequitable health outcomes; and take an intersectional approach. This edition uses less cis and heteronormative language that reflects a broader range of relationships and identities.”
The updated standards also appear to place parental consent on the back burner and encourage children to demand respect from the adults in their lives when it comes to sexual choice.
“No one else is qualified to label or judge another person’s sexual identity, including their sexual orientation or gender identity, and it is important that the language and terms young people use to identify themselves is respected by the adults in their lives,” a portion of the report added.
The skirt-wearing male student at the center of a purported sexual assault that recently took place in a vacant school classroom was previously placed under electronic surveillance for another sexual assault, according to reports.
Loudoun County commonwealth’s attorney Buta Biberaj on Wednesday announced that the same 15-year-old has been charged in both crimes.
According to a Wednesday report from Newsweek, the male Loudoun County, Virginia, high school student accused of assaulting a female student in a school classroom was reportedly under court-ordered electronic surveillance for a previous sexual assault charge when the assault incident took place.
The outlet noted that it is unclear at the time of this reporting as to why the 15-year-old male student was permitted on school property after having been charged with sexually assaulting a fellow student in a bathroom just five months prior to the new incident.
The unnamed teen was accused last week of sexual assault after he reportedly forced a female victim into an empty classroom at Broad Run High School in Ashburn, Virginia, where he reportedly “held her against her will and inappropriately touched her.”
The student, just five months earlier, was arrested for reportedly sexually assaulting a female student while wearing a skirt in another Ashburn-area school bathroom in May.
Authorities in May charged the teen with two counts of forcible sodomy for the purported bathroom assault.
He is currently being held in the Loudoun County Juvenile Detention Center, according to a report from WTOP-TV.about:blank
WTOP reported that the teen was due to appear in court this week regarding the May incident, but the date has been rescheduled due to the filing of the second charge.
In a Wednesday statement, the Loudoun County School Board said that police are investigating the incident.
“Loudoun County Public Schools is aware of the media and social media reports concerning alleged sexual assaults at two of our high school campuses,” a portion of the statement said. “Principals are legally required to report to the local law enforcement agency any act, including sexual assault, that may constitute a felony offense. That process was followed with respect to these allegations.”
The statement added, “Furthermore, LCPS is prohibited from disciplining any student without following the Title IX grievance process, which includes investigating complaints of sexual harassment and sexual assault. LCPS does impose interim measures to protect the safety of students involved in the original incident, deter retaliation, and preserve the integrity of the investigation and resolution process.”
Critics have lambasted the school board, accusing it of covering up the abuse, and parents have said that the school board was complicit in the assault.
Scott Smith, father of the female student assaulted in May, recently announced that prosecutors told him to remain quiet about the case in order to help the case move forward.
Smith complied, but when parents objected to a new trans bathroom policy within the school district, officials denied any incidents of assault.
“The predator transgender student or person simply does not exist,” Loudoun County Schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler said in June. “We don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.”
In its Wednesday statement, the district added that the board was not aware of any details of the accusations.
“School Board members are typically not given details of disciplinary matters,” the statement insisted. “The board may be obligated to consider long-term suspensions or expulsions and must ensure that students have not been deprived of due process. Consequently, members of the Loudon County School Board were not aware of the specific details of this incident until it was reported in media outlets earlier this week.”
You can read more on the background of the case here.
Loudoun County Public Schools claims the school board did not know details of horrific sexual abuse allegations
The school district accused of covering up horrific sexual abuse at one of their schools released a lengthy statement Wednesday denying that the school board knew the details of the case.
Loudoun County resident Scott Smith said that his daughter was raped on May 28 by a boy allegedly wearing a skirt in a restroom at Stone Bridge High School. He said that he was told by prosecutors to stay quiet about the case publicly in order to help the prosecution case move forward.
When parents later objected to a new transgender restroom policy at the school district, officials denied any incidents of sexual assault had occurred.
“The predator transgender student or person simply does not exist,” said Loudoun County Schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler in June. “We don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.”
On June 22 at a school board meeting, Smith got into an altercation with a woman who he says was accusing his daughter of lying about the assault. The incident was used by the National School Board Association in their demand to the Department of Justice that threats to school boards be investigated as “domestic violence.”
Although the incident remains under investigation, the details of the horrific accusations were documented in a report by the Daily Wire.
On Wednesday, the school district responded to the controversy in a statement, which cited two assaults.
“Loudoun County Public Schools is aware of the media and social media reports concerning alleged sexual assaults at two of our high school campuses,” the statement read.
Principals are legally required to report to the local law enforcement agency any act, including sexual assault, that may constitute a felony offense,” the statement continued. “That process was followed with respect to these allegations.”
The statement went on to say that LCPS was not allowed to investigate the matter until after a criminal investigation by police is completed.
“Furthermore, LCPS is prohibited from disciplining any student without following the Title IX grievance process, which includes investigating complaints of sexual harassment and sexual assault,” the statement added. “LCPS does impose interim measures to protect the safety of students involved in the original incident, deter retaliation, and preserve the integrity of the investigation and resolution process.”
The district went on to say that the board was not aware of the details of the sexual assault accusations.
“School Board members are typically not given details of disciplinary matters. The board may be obligated to consider long-term suspensions or expulsions and must ensure that students have not been deprived of due process,” the statement claimed.
“Consequently, members of the Loudon County School Board were not aware of the specific details of this incident until it was reported in media outlets earlier this week,” the statement concluded. “We are unable to locate any records that indicate that Scott Smith had registered in advance to speak at the June 22, 2021 board meeting.”
Outraged parents demanded the resignation of Superintendent Ziegler at a school board meeting Tuesday after more details of the harrowing case were revealed.
Here’s more about the Loudon schools scandal:
Va. school district claims it followed protocol amid reports 2 girls were sexually assaulted by trans student
By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter| Wednesday, October 13, 2021
A parent speaks at a Loudoun County School Board meeting in Virginia on in October 2021 to demand the resignation of Superintendent Scott Ziegler. | Screenshot: Fox News
A Virginia school district is defending its response to two sexual assault allegations after it was accused of covering up one of the assaults because it raised questions about the potential consequences of a policy passed in August allowing students to use bathrooms based on their gender identity.
Loudoun County Public Schools released a statement Wednesday acknowledging that it is “aware of the media and social media reports concerning alleged sexual assaults at two of our high school campuses.” The district maintained that the proper “process was followed with respect to these allegations.”
On Aug. 10, the Loudoun County School Board approved Policy 8040, allowing trans-identified students to use bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity instead of their biological sex.
The Daily Wire reported the May 28 sexual assault of Scott Smith’s 15-year-old daughter at Loudoun County’s Stone Bridge High School Monday. The publication reported a biological boy who identifies as a girl alleged to have been wearing a skirt entered a girls’ bathroom and sexually assaulted Smith’s ninth-grade daughter.
Although juvenile records are sealed, Smith’s lawyer, Elizabeth Lancaster, told the news outlet that the student faces two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy and one count of forcible fellatio related to the incident at school.
As Smith noted during an appearance on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” Tuesday night, a “concerned parent” contacted him and his wife Friday night to ask for the name of the boy who sexually assaulted his daughter.
When Smith refused to divulge that information and asked for the reason behind the inquiry, the caller informed him that “there was another assault at Broad Run High School and the rumor is that it’s the same boy.”
“Within a half an hour, it was confirmed that yes, this did happen,” he added. From there, Smith decided to speak out publicly about what happened to his daughter.
The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office released a statement last week announcing that “a teenager from Ashburn has been charged with sexual battery and abduction of a fellow student at Broad Run High School.”
“The investigation determined on the afternoon of October 6, the 15-year-old suspect forced the victim into an empty classroom where he held her against her will and inappropriately touched her,” the statement from the sheriff’s office reads.
The reaction to The Daily Wire reporting was swift and immediate. In video footage obtained by Fox News, outraged parents confronted the Loudoun County School Board and Superintendent of Schools Scott Ziegler at a school board meeting Tuesday night.
“When is Dr. Ziegler and this board going to be held accountable?” one parent asked. “What did you think was going to happen when you pushed porn into the classrooms and into the libraries and let boys into girls’ bathrooms?”
Another parent maintained that “there is something seriously wrong with a system that prioritizes reporting a rape internally to the superintendent so that they can control the narrative instead of calling the police.” A third parent accused the district of “hiding evidence from every parent in LCPS about a heinous sexual assault of a student that occurred in a bathroom so you could pass radical Policy 8040.”
In its statement Wednesday, Loudoun County Public Schools offered clarification of its responses in the cases of these two sexual assault allegations. The school district contends that police were contacted to investigate the claims of sexual assault.
“Principals are legally required to report to the local law enforcement agency any act, including sexual assault, that may constitute a felony offense [under Virginia law],” the school district’s statement reads. “That process was followed with respect to these allegations.”
The statement further adds that the Loudoun County Sherriff’s Office was “contacted within minutes of receiving the initial report on May 28.”
“Once a matter has been reported to law enforcement, LCPS does not begin its investigation until law enforcement advises LCPS that it has completed the criminal investigation,” the statement continued. “LCPS has cooperated and continues to cooperate with law enforcement.”
The school district stated that it is “prohibited from disciplining any student without following the Title IX grievance process, which includes investigating complaints of sexual harassment and sexual assault.”
“LCPS does impose interim measures to protect the safety of students involved in the original incident, deter retaliation, and preserve the integrity of the investigation and resolution process. LCPS has complied and continues to comply with its obligations under Title IX.”
The school district also maintains that members of the school board “were not aware of the specific details of this incident until it was reported in media outlets earlier this week.”
The LCPS statement didn’t address the fact that the perpetrator of the sexual assaults was a trans-identified male and that one of the incidents took place in a girls’ bathroom. The district also declined to weigh in on parental concerns about Policy 8040.
Concerns about Policy 8040 predate the reporting about the May 28 assault on Smith’s daughter.
On June 22, slightly more than three weeks after the sexual assault of Smith’s daughter, a school board meeting in Loudoun County made national headlines as parents forcefully spoke out against a proposed school district policy that would allow trans-identified students to use facilities that correspond with their gender identity.
Scott Smith, whose daughter was raped by a male wearing a skirt in a girls’ bathroom at her high school in Loudoun County, Virginia, appears on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle,” Oct. 12, 2021. | Screenshot: Fox News
At least two parents were arrested after the meeting was declared an “unlawful assembly.” Smith was one of those parents.
The Daily Wire noted that Smith became the “poster child” for the National School Boards Association’s claims that parent protests of school board policies could be a form of “domestic terrorism” as a result of a viral video showing his arrest.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice directed law enforcement agencies to collaborate on “addressing threats” against school officials after the NSBA requested “federal assistance” to combat what the organization characterized as “domestic terrorism” and “hate crimes.”
In his Fox News appearance Tuesday, Smith accused the Biden of administration of using the video of his arrest at the school board meeting to “weaponize” the government against concerned parents.
Smith also elaborated on the events that led to his arrest. As one of several parents hoping to address the Loudoun County School Board on June 22, Smith and his wife were confronted by a left-wing activist who berated them upon learning that they were there to speak out against the transgender policy. When Smith tried to tell the woman what happened to his daughter, she asserted, “that’s not what happened.” After she vowed to hurt his business by posting unfavorable reviews on social media, Smith called her a “b****.”
From there, law enforcement officials descended on Smith, wrestling him to the ground and causing his lip to bleed. Smith’s wife shouted out, “My child was raped at school, and this is what happens!”
The Daily Wire concluded that the passage of the policy would have been “politically impossible had Smith’s story seen the light of day.” Lancaster agreed, suggesting that “If someone would have sat and listened for 30 seconds to what Scott had to say, they would have been mortified and heartbroken.”
While the school district had knowledge of what happened to Smith’s daughter, it assured the public that such incidents had not taken place in Loudoun County.
At the June 22 meeting, Ziegler dismissed the idea of predators taking advantage of policies like Policy 8040 as a “red herring.” He cited a Time Magazine article and asserted that “the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.”
Smith told Fox News that in the weeks following his daughter’s assault and his arrest, he wanted to keep a low profile because “we were under the impression from the prosecutor that this sexual predator was being held on in-house arrest with an ankle monitor and would not return to school until these court sessions were done.”
“I was told by everyone … my attorneys, the prosecuting attorney, friends of the family, people that I don’t even know that if I wanted justice for my daughter, that I needed to keep my mouth quiet and not speak out,” he said. “Because in order to get justice for my daughter, which is the most important thing to me of course, was do not come out and let justice prevail.”
Elaborating on the harm that the incident at Stone Bridge High School caused his family, Smith told Ingraham that as “the school board and the school system just went on summer break and abandoned us, my wife and I had to spend the entire summer … rebuilding our daughter.” He indicated that while his daughter had a “couple … rough nights” and the family endured “Hell,” she is “doing very well.”
“She’s a survivor,” he said. “She’s a winner.”
Smith’s daughter is not the first to have been sexually assaulted in a girls’ bathroom.
Pascha Thomas alleged that in 2017, her 5-year-old daughter was sexually assaulted in a girls’ bathroom at an elementary school in Decatur, Georgia.
“One of her classmates came into her bathroom, a little boy,” Thomas recalled. “She tried to leave the bathroom, [but] the little boy pushed her against the bathroom stall. Basically pinned her up against there. She asked him to stop. He wouldn’t. He took his fingers and he was penetrating her through his pants. She asked him to stop, and stated several times that it hurt. He refused.”
Thomas worked with the legal group Alliance Defending Freedom to file a lawsuit against the school district, contending that its bathroom policy enabled the assault on the then-5-year-old girl to take place.
A poll from Rasmussen Reports released on Wednesday finds that Americans are split in their opinions of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s order for law enforcement to address threats against school boards.
While 44% of likely voters believe that the investigation into alleged threats against school officials is warranted, 47% disagree. Support for investigating threats against school officials stands at 64% among Democrats and 31% among Republicans.
At the same time, 68% of respondents agreed with a statement from Republicans in the U.S. Senate asserting that “the reported heated encounters between concerned parents and school boards often involve speech that is clearly protected by the First Amendment.”
Seventy-eight percent of Republicans agreed with that statement, along with 57% of Democrats and 72% of unaffiliated voters.
People hold up signs during a rally against “critical race theory” (CRT) being taught in schools at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg, Virginia on June 12, 2021. “Are you ready to take back our schools?” Republican activist Patti Menders shouted at a rally opposing anti-racism teaching that critics like her say trains white children to see themselves as “oppressors.” “Yes!”, answered in unison the hundreds of demonstrators gathered this weekend near Washington to fight against “critical race theory,” the latest battleground of America’s ongoing culture wars. | AFP via Getty Images/Andrew Caballero-Reynolds
Our shocking slide into the surreal world of leftist leadership has led to this: American parents are now the enemy. Big Education and a weaponized Department of Justice are going after the very people who should have the most say in public education. School boards and public school administrators, like in Loudoun County, Virginia, where I live, have faced unprecedented informed dissent from parents of every background. Instead of acting like public servants, they act like the petty gods of Mount Olympus recklessly wielding their (unconstitutional) power as they try to strike down (e.g. silence, fire, dox and demonize) anyone who dares to challenge their rule.
But like typical progressives, they’re the victims. They’re more than deserving of the outrage and peaceful protests by American parents. We’re fed up with the pollution of our children’s minds with LGBT pedophilia and porn, racism, colorism, anti-capitalism, religious bigotry, anti-free speech, and other anti-American propaganda.
I don’t advocate violence in any form. I fully advocate parent-led education and fully oppose government-led indoctrination. My wife and I withdrew our school-aged children from Loudoun County Public Schools. I won’t be silenced by those who think parents have no right to help shape what our children learn in schools funded by our tax dollars. We now homeschool all of our children and are passionate about school choice. Sorry, Terry McAuliffe. Not sure why you “don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” There are no schools without students. There are no students without parents. Parents are the primary educators, the primary influencers, and the primary individuals who have to deal with the emotional and psychological fall-out of public education’s increasingly destructive liberal indoctrination.
The National School Boards Association, bolstered by the leftist news establishment’s false narratives, has called for President Joe Biden (whose children didn’t attend public schools) to sic the Department of Justice on dissenting parents, now grotesquely labeled as domestic terrorists.
Let me introduce you to some of the parents leading this fight in my county. These are passionate individuals who never would’ve thought they’d be forced into such a battle. These are everyday moms and dads who defy the fake news caricatures. I’ve shared the stage with each of these remarkable women and men. So, I’ve asked them why they’ve chosen to get involved.
Meet Xi Van Fleet.
Xi fled communist China. She knows, firsthand, about the suppression of basic human rights like life, free speech, and religious liberty. She knows what unlimited government control looks like. “Many black/brown/Asian parents speak up against Critical Race Theory. The Left always uses the Trump card to divide Americans and to discredit those who dare to push back on their radical agenda,” Xi explains. I asked her why it matters if you use someone’s “preferred” (and made up) pronouns. “This is not about pronouns,” she says. “The radical Left is altering reality and forcing us to conform. The goal is not to help transgenders. The goal is to control everyone else.”
Meet Joe Mobley.
Joe is another Loudoun county parent. He’s a podcaster and describes himself as an “uncloseted conservative”. One of the viral videos with his informed dissent focused on the insanely sexually explicit “diversity” books offered by the school district to young children (see it here.) I asked him about the most shocking thing he learned since getting involved in fighting LCPS [Loudon County Public Schools]. “LCPS’ willingness to openly lie, even when the truth is a matter of public record. Like saying CRT isn’t in our schools while CRT Develop Planning is a line item in the budget,” Joe explains. “Media Matters says we’re billionaire-backed professional activists. I can assure you I am struggling to stay in the fight for my family, community, and country. I have a real job that is extremely demanding and important, I’m active in my church. We are about to have our fourth child under seven. The only support I have is emotional support from my family.”
Meet Patti Hidalgo Menders.
Patti is the president of the Loudoun County Republican Women’s Club (the largest in Virginia). For some reason, it’s only a problem when a conservative is involved politically. On the Left, it is a standard operating procedure. Her parents fled communist Cuba; they were branded “enemies of the state.” Now, Patti has become the enemy of Big Education as she was blacklisted by a private Facebook group made up of former and current LCPS teachers and board members who wanted to target her publicly. She’s also a mom of six boys, one of whom is still a student at LCPS.
I asked her why she’s involved. “If parents don’t get involved, then the school boards will continue to dictate what is best for their children. I do not coparent with the government. I do not coparent with the school board. This Loudoun County school board continues to listen to special interest groups and equity consultants instead of listening to the parents and the children/students. Parents need to take a stand!”
Meet Michael Rivera.
Michael is yet another Loudoun County parent, with two children in LCPS. He’s a public safety professional who is deeply concerned about the safety of children’s minds in public education. “Students may not have the intellectual wherewithal to ‘fight’ per se but we can educate our children. As a result of the indoctrinating topics being proliferated, our job as parents got harder,” he explains. “We need to explain things to our children by stating and explaining reality and facts. That explanation includes ugly facts about the history of the United States. We need to give our children evidence and truth so they can debate and refute radical political ideologies. In the end, our children will be independent thinkers, but it is our job as parents to guide them down the right paths.”
Michael opposes the blatant CRT principles being pushed on students in government schools. “I’m not white, but I prefer not to lead with that fact. There is absolutely NO good that comes from reinforcing judgment of others solely by color. We know for a fact that it is illogical and was a false proposition during the awful years of slavery and oppression of blacks. I look to all of the successful minorities in America and only see progress for all. How ironic and ludicrous is it that wealthy, powerful, successful black Americans are trying to destroy the very [capitalist] system that allowed them to be who they are?”
Meet Shawntel Cooper.
Shawntel is a working, fighting mom. She is a no-nonsense warrior for her children who doesn’t mince words. Her speeches at school board meetings are straight fire! I asked her if she’s the parent fake news keeps talking about that wants to oppress black and brown people (insert eye-rolling and laughter here). “I’m black, and I’m very happy with my natural skin tone. I have noticed a lot of flip-flopping with the school system stating they are not teaching CRT. But then they changed the name to Culturally Responsive Framework anti-bias with the same curriculum they lied about. I was taught to never listen to rumors but check the facts before assuming. I’ve seen so many people marching for BLM, and we all witnessed BLM didn’t do a thing for those communities they encouraged [activists] to burn down. When I saw the shooting and looting, I knew then and there it was a political move to keep racism alive.”
Meet you.
The great thing about these parents, who apparently threaten Big Education and the Biden administration, is that they not only peacefully oppose the destructive policies being passed, but they also offer detailed alternatives. There are lots of great teachers and administrators in the public education system. My wife was a private and public school teacher for thirteen years (and continues as a homeschool educator). But Critical Race Theory, Feminist Theory (FemCrit), Queer Theory and other radical ideologies have been supplanting actual education for years. And the National Education Association (here, here and here) and the American Federation of Teachers (here, here and here) insist on this radicalization.
As a parent, are you willing to be silent while our children’s minds become experimental grounds for forced political activism?
There are resources to help inform and equip you like Fight for Schools, Parents Defending Education, and Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). There is a battle going on for the very heart and soul of our youth who are daily bombarded with dangerous and divisive ideologies. We must have zero tolerance for schools marginalizing parents and pretending our voices don’t matter. It’s a struggle parents cannot lose. It’s a struggle America must win.
Ryan Bomberger is the Chief Creative Officer and co-founder of The Radiance Foundation. He is happily married to his best friend, Bethany, who is the Executive Director of Radiance. They are adoptive parents with four awesome kiddos. Ryan is an Emmy Award-winning creative professional, factivist, international public speaker and author of NOT EQUAL: CIVIL RIGHTS GONE WRONG. He loves illuminating that every human life has purpose.
Outraged parents demanded the immediate resignation of Loudoun County Schools Superintendent Scott Ziegler at a school board meeting Tuesday that was dominated by public comments on allegations that the school district covered up two alleged sexual assaults. More than 60 parents, students, and county residents spoke at the school board meeting, blasting members of the school board after the Daily Wire reported on alleged efforts by the school board to conceal the sexual assault of a ninth-grade girl by a gender-fluid boy in a school bathroom amid debate over a controversial transgender accommodation policy.
“This is not China, this is the United States of America, and we will not be silenced,” said one furious mother, according to Fox News. “Remove the superintendent immediately and then resign for your negligence and duplicity. End this nightmare!”
Loudoun County resident Scott Smith says that his daughter, a student at Stone Bridge High School, was raped by a boy allegedly wearing a skirt in a school bathroom. Smith’s attorney, Elizabeth Lancaster, told the Daily Wire that a boy at Stone Bridge High School was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of forcible fellatio related to an incident on May 28, when Smith says his daughter was attacked.
The sheriff’s office confirmed to Fox News that a sexual assault case from May 28, 2021, was conducted following a “thorough 2-month-long investigation that was conducted to determine the facts of the case prior to arrest.” Police said the case is still pending court proceedings.
On Oct. 6, at another Loudoun County school, a 15-year-old boy was charged with sexual battery and abduction after police said he forced a girl into an empty classroom, where he held her against her will and touched her inappropriately. The Daily Wire reported that the suspect is the same student who allegedly assaulted Smith’s daughter, though police have not confirmed that.
“These incidents were reported immediately to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, and LCPS cooperated fully with the investigations,” said a spokesperson for Ziegler. “Any information related to student information is confidential under state and federal laws regarding student privacy.”
Over the summer, Loudoun County Public Schools debated a policy that would allow students of any gender into all school bathrooms. The policy faced opposition from parents who were concerned that a male student claiming to identify as female might abuse girl students in school bathrooms. Though parents raised these concerns, school officials repeatedly denied that the transgender policy posed any danger to girl students.
“The predator transgender student or person simply does not exist,”Ziegler said at a June 22 school board meeting. “We don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.”
The school board voted to adopt the controversial transgender policy on Aug. 11. Policy 8040 requires teachers to use the preferred pronouns of students and mandates that school bathrooms be renovated to increase privacy, since any student can use whichever bathroom they want now.
Following the Daily Wire’s bombshell report, livid parents at Tuesday’s school board meeting castigated school officials for adopting the policy without disclosing either alleged sexual assault.
“The 8040 policy was rushed through to a vote without consideration for the safety of all students, simply to satisfy a liberal agenda – a policy that you knew full well would allow our children to be abused inside our schools,” said one mother. “At least two young women are recent victims of sexual assaults in our high schools, one of them in a restroom.’
“Your moral compasses are busted! You, Dr. Ziegler, and our school board – every one of you – are complicit in these crimes against our children because you did nothing about it, nothing.”
“What is worse than a child being raped at school? The cover-up by those who are trusted with the safety and well-being of children,” another mother said. “Today, Scott Ziegler must resign for the unconscionable act of allowing an alleged rapist back into school to rape again, and for that cover-up.”
“You guys failed. Sexual assaults happening in public schools is unacceptable and should never happen,”said Linda Killen.
“How do you expect parents across this county to drop off their kids and entrust you all to keep them safe when you’ve shown on more than one occasion you are not up for the job?” added Monica Sadeghi.
“When the Catholic Church passed predator priest from parish to parish, the walls came eventually crashing down on them. And they were finally held accountable for the abuse. When is Doctor Ziegler and this board going to be held accountable?” asked Theresa Lieberman.
A total of 36 parents expressed their concerns, each restricted to one minute of speaking time alone in the room with the school board before being ushered out for the next person to comment. None of the school board members nor the school superintendent have publicly responded to calls for their resignations.
Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Amid heated debate over controversial transgender-affirming policies in Virginia’s Loudoun County this summer, school officials concealed that a ninth-grade girl was allegedly sexually assaulted by a gender-fluid male student in a bathroom,the Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak reported.
The girl’s father, Scott Smith, was arrested during a raucous June 22 school board meeting that shut down public comment from incensed parents who came to protest critical race theory and proposed transgender policies. Smith was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest after he had an argument with a woman for whose daughter Smith’s wife had been a Girl Scout leader. Smith’s arrest was captured on video and went viral, calling national attention to parent protests at school board meetings. The National School Board Association cited his arrest in a letter to the Biden administration requesting that the Department of Justice classify threats and intimidation from angry parents as “domestic terrorism.”
Telling his side of the story publicly for the first time, Smith told the Daily Wire that he had been provoked by the woman, who said she did not believe his daughter, and by Loudoun County school officials who had covered up the alleged sexual assault. The Daily Wire reported that while juvenile court records are sealed, Smith’s attorney, Elizabeth Lancaster, said a boy at Stone Bridge High School was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of forcible fellatio related to an incident on May 28, when Smith says his 15-year-old daughter was attacked in a school bathroom.Smith says that the boy wore a skirt when he entered the girls’ bathroom and allegedly attacked his daughter. After the alleged attack, the administration called Smith to come to the school and told him it would handle the incident “in-house.” When he began to make a scene, as any outraged parent would, he says the school called police officers on him and it was only after he managed to avoid getting arrested that he convinced police to escort his daughter to the hospital to have a rape kit administered.
A records request from the Daily Wire confirmed that a report titled “Offense: Forcible Sodomy [and] Sexual Battery” was filed matching the date and location of the alleged assault.
Later that day, the school principle sent an email to the community informing them of “an incident in the main office” that required a police presence. “There was no threat to the safety of the student body,” the principal wrote. He offered counseling services for any student who was upset by Smith’s behavior but made no mention of the alleged assault.
“LCPS washed their hands of this,” Smith told the Daily Wire, adding that the incident was only taken seriously because of the sheriff’s office.
A spokeswoman for Loudoun County Public Schools said, “Any information related to student information is confidential under state and federal laws regarding student privacy.”
According to Smith’s attorney, the suspect made self-incriminating statements during an interview with prosecutors and a conviction is “expected imminently, likely in the form of a plea deal to a charge of felony aggravated sexual battery.”
School officials never publicly acknowledged the incident even as the district debated adopting policies that would permit transgender students to use bathrooms that matched their self-declared gender identity. During the June school board meeting, school officials told parents minutes before Smith’s arrest that concerns about transgender students in bathrooms or locker rooms were a “red herring” and that there were no records of assaults occurring in bathrooms. They did not inform the public of the alleged assault against Smith’s daughter, which was reported to police three weeks before.
Smith stood there and listened as members of the school board lectured the public about how there were no issues involving transgender students and that “if a crime or violation of the rules were committed, that would be investigated and dealt with to the full extent of the rules or the law.”
Members of the public were permitted to speak, and while many parents voiced their opposition to critical race theory and transgender policies, other speakers who supported the transgender policies accused them of being hateful. One woman who attended, a left-wing activist named Jackie Schworm, confronted Smith and his wife Jess, demanding to know which side they were on. Jess, a Girl Scout troop leader, had mentored Schworm’s daughter as part of her troop.
The Daily Wire reports that the confrontation between Smith and Schworm, which led to Smith’s arrest, unfolded as follows:
Schworm was at the June 22 school board meeting, wearing a shirt with a rainbow heart on it. As a Girl Scout troop leader, Jess had mentored Schworm’s daughter. Smith and Jess said Schworm sought them out in the crowd, demanded to know which side they were on, then berated them that they were wrong. “Jess, who is this?” Smith asked his wife.
“I thought she was my friend,” Jess replied.
Smith tried to tell her what happened to his daughter, he said. “And she looks me dead in the eyes and says ‘that’s not what happened.'”
Schworm noticed that Smith was wearing a shirt with the name of his plumbing business on it, “And she goes ‘Oh… I’m going to ruin your business on social media,'” he said.
“You’re a bitch,” Smith told her, video shows. A police officer monitoring the tension-filled exchange pulled on Smith’s arm, he yanked it away, and soon, Smith and the officer were wrestling. Other officers pinned Smith to the ground, bloodying his lip in the process, as Smith uttered, “I can’t breathe.”
Jess cried out, in words lost in the chaos: “My child was raped at school, and this is what happens!”
Smith was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
During an interview with the Daily Wire, Schworm made contradictory statements denying that she had an argument with Smith (an argument that was caught on video) and also made “repeated comments” about Smith’s daughter’s “mental stability.” She also repeatedly brought up that Smith was convicted of a crime and sentenced to 10 days in jail.
The arrest and the subsequent negative media coverage of Smith has taken an emotional toll on the family. Smith told the Daily Wire he had to install temporary fencing around his house to keep news reporters away. On social media, Smith was mocked for his physical appearance and demonized for his arrest.
Buta Biberaj, Loudoun County’s progressive top prosecutor, personally appeared in court to prosecute the case against Smith. The Daily Wire noted that Biberaj was elected on a platform opposed to “mass incarceration” but sought to put Smith in jail for misdemeanor charges.
Meanwhile, the 15-year-old male suspect who allegedly attacked Smith’s daughter has not yet been convicted and is accused of sexually assaulting another girl at a different school.
On Oct. 7, the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office announced that “a teenager from Ashburn has been charged with sexual battery and abduction of a fellow student at Broad Run High School.”
“The investigation determined on the afternoon of October 6, the 15-year-old suspect forced the victim into an empty classroom where he held her against her will and inappropriately touched her,” police said.
The Daily Wire reported that the suspect is the same male student who allegedly assaulted Smith’s daughter.
Prosecutors in Loudoun County have reportedly moved the date the suspect was expected to plead guilty to assaulting Smith’s daughter from Oct. 14 to Oct. 25., so that both cases could be handled together.
The Loudoun County School Board approved the policy permitting transgender students to use whatever bathroom they wish on Aug. 11. Parents were never told about the alleged assault of Smith’s daughter until the Daily Wire’s report was published late Monday evening.
Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to note that the Daily Wire’s report was published on Monday evening, not Sunday.
Brenton Netz (L), the concerned father of a child with gender dysphoria, details how his son was convinced that he was a “transgender lesbian” at the Pray Vote Stand Summit in Leesburg, Virginia, Oct. 8, 2021. Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge looks on. | Family Research Council
Leesburg, VIRGINIA — A concerned father of a child whose mother is trying to convince her autistic son that he’s a girl is warning about the dangers of “radical gender ideology,” proclaiming that “we must do everything we can to save them from the jaws of this beast.”
On the final day of the Family Research Council’s Pray Vote Stand Summit, a panel of elected officials, journalists and activists addressed a crowd of social conservatives gathered at Cornerstone Chapel. They discussed the extent to which gender ideology has permeated American society. Moderated by Joseph Backholm, the senior fellow for biblical worldview at the Family Research Council, panelists included parent activist Brenton Netz from Michigan, Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge and The Christian Post journalist Brandon Showalter.
After Backholm mentioned the astronomical rise in the number of cases of gender dysphoria in children, Netz elaborated on his “legal battle to prevent his son from being given experimental gender transition” drugs, such as puberty blockers, against his will. Netz recalled the shock he felt upon reading notes from his then-8-year-old son’s therapy session with a gender clinician in St. Cloud, Minnesota, who asserted that “Miles reports her sexual orientation as lesbian”and “she reports her gender as transgender female.”
Netz described his son as a “vulnerable child” who was “diagnosed with autism at the age of 4” with “an obsessive personality” and “other real behavioral issues.” He criticized the therapist who treated his son, Troy Weber-Brown, for referring to his “autistic son as a girl named Miley using she/her and them/their pronouns.” Weber-Brown is a licensed family and marriage therapist who specializes in LGBTQ behavioral healthcare.
The father condemned the “appalling way he (Weber-Brown) counsels troubled and vulnerable children,” adding “his stated goal is to re-parent them.”
“In my case, Troy set himself up as my son’s surrogate father,” Netz said. “He meticulously manipulated my son into thinking he was not only a transgender girl and lesbian, but they were also having structured discussions about irreversible hormones and surgical options.”
“There is no way my autistic little boy voluntarily self-identified as a transgender lesbian unless he was convinced of that by an adult,” he asserted.
Netz noted that during the therapy sessions, his son’s “crotch area was examined to see how much pubic hair he had to determine if he reached the beginning stages of puberty so a referral for hormone blockers could be written.”
Netz lamented that the medical establishment and family courts have been “steadily corrupted by … postmodern gender ideology.” He concluded his opening remarks with a call to action.
“Our kids are under attack,” he said. “We must do everything we can to save them from the jaws of this beast.”
Netz identified himself as “the only adult in my son’s life who is not affirming … his delusion.”
“[T]he schools are calling him Miley. … Everybody in the medical establishment treats him as a girl, calls him Miley,” he explained.
“In our case, what has happened is there’s kind of this gridlock that happens because the medical establishment will say well, it’s a family court issue. … You can get this solved by going to the family court. Then you go to the family court, and they can’t solve it either.”
As a divorced parent, Netz has custody of his son “every other weekend plus a lot more time in the summer.”
“If anybody met my son, within the first five minutes, you would realize that … he’s incapable of coming to those conclusions.”
Backholm attempted to explain the reasons behind the increased prominence of children with gender dysphoria and the push to “affirm” children in their chosen gender identities. He cited reporting from Abigail Shrier, journalist and author of the book, Irreversible Damage. Shrier interviewed“a former Planned Parenthood employee … about the decisions … at Planned Parenthood about whether a child should receive cross-sex hormones.” The former Planned Parenthood employee told Shrier that those decisions were made by a clinic manager who had “no prior medical experience and whose former job was managing at Wendy’s.”
The former employee characterized children with gender dysphoria as “cash cows” because, in many cases, “they are kept on the hook for the foreseeable future in terms of follow-up appointments, bloodwork, meetings, etc.”
While Planned Parenthood is known for performing abortions, the former employee said that “abortions are hopefully a one-and-done situation.” By contrast, children with gender dysphoria are seen as longterm potential customers, giving the organization a financial incentive.
Netz agreed that every child is vulnerable prey for agenda-driven gender clinicians.
“They will diagnose that child with gender dysphoria. … If they can do it to my son, they can do it to any child.”
Backholm held up the SAFE Act as an example of a legislative solution to combat the harm of “radical gender ideology,” including cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers. SAFE is an acronym for the Saving Adolescents from Experimentation Act. He cheered Arkansas for becoming the first state to pass the “model legislation that prohibits the gender transition procedures or chemicals being given to minors.”
Rutledge informed the audience that she was “wholeheartedly defending the SAFE Act.” Netz offered praise for the SAFE Act as “a necessary measure to protect children from this mess.”
Showalter illustrated how Netz’s situation is not unique.
“I have never heard such excruciating anguish from moms and dads who somehow manage to find my journalistic work at The Christian Post.” He added that “many of them are not even Christians, they’re not conservative. I’ve received phone calls from atheists, left-wing people who say they can’t believe they’re reading CP now.”
Showalter has engaged in several conversations with parents experiencing “off-the-charts pain and anguish as they are forced to watch the slow-motion dissociation and chemical disintegration of their own children.”
He told the story of a mother who had an 18-year-old daughter with a developmental delay. The daughter went to Planned Parenthood and was given a prescription for testosterone “based on her own self-diagnosis” within 30 minutes.
“So this mom wanted to see how easy it would be for her to get testosterone” as a 50-something, he added. “She was given testosterone within 30 minutes. All they had to do was take the blood pressure, did a finger prick (blood test), and she declared herself the opposite sex, and all she had to do was sign an informed consent document that she shared with me.”
Rutledge also commented on how illogical it was to allow children to choose their gender while not allowing them to make other significant decisions such as voting and serving in the military. She also stressed that “kids are not even taken into consideration when their parents are getting a divorce as to … which parent they want to live with.”
“Why is it OK now for these medical providers and courts to push forward and allow these children to make life-altering, permanent decisions that are irreversible?” she asked.
As The Daily Wire reported, Netz is considering filing a lawsuit against the gender clinic that has convinced his young son that he is a trans-identified lesbian. Last year, Netz successfully obtained a court order to prevent his son, who’s now 11 years old, from receiving further “gender-affirming” treatment at the clinic.
Three parents filed a lawsuit accusing the California state school curriculum of violating the U.S. Constitution over an Ethnic Studies lesson that asks kids to pray and chant to Aztec gods.
“Our clients are not opposed to having students learn about different cultures and religions, including the practices of the Aztecs,” said Paul Jonna, special counsel at Thomas More Society, which is representing the parents in court.
“But the California State Board of Education’s approved Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum goes far beyond that by directing students to pray to Aztec deities,” he explained. “This portion of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum is not only offensive, but blatantly unconstitutional.”
The curriculum invites teachers to have their kids recite Aztec prayers and an “Ashe” chant as a way to energize students to learn better. The alarming lessons were documented by Christopher Rufo in March.
“This section includes several ethnic studies-oriented chants, proverbs and affirmations,” reads a passage from the curriculum’s “Lesson Resources.”
“This section includes several ethnic studies-oriented chants, proverbs and affirmations,” the document continues. “These can be used as energizers to bring the class together, build unity around ethnic studies principles and values, and to reinvigorate the class following a lesson that may be emotionally taxing or even when student engagement may appear to be low.”
The filing from the parents included a statement from Purdue University anthropology professor Dr. Alan Sandstrom, who is supportive of the curriculum’s goals but not the lesson having kids chant.
“The affirmation as presented amounts to a religious activity that I think has no place in public schools,” he said.
The lawsuit is seeking a temporary restraining order to keep “[d]efendants from authorizing, promoting or permitting the use of Aztec prayers and the ‘Ashe’ chant in California’s public schools and also requiring Defendants to direct those under their authority not to use the Aztec prayer or ‘Ashe’ chant in public schools.”
The California Board of Education and Department of Education are named as defendants in the lawsuit.
Here’s more about California’s Aztec curriculum: PLEASE WATCH AND SHARE.
Saying that Kara Bell was a bit upset at board members of the Lake Travis Independent School District in Austin, Texas, is a bit of an understatement. No, Bell — a local mom and former board member candidate — was livid during the school board meeting last week over a middle school library book she deemed sexually explicit, KXAN-TV reported.
Image source: KXAN-TV video screenshot
And watching video of Bell reading a passage from the book to the board, some might be inclined to argue that she’s on to something.
“Take her out back, we boys figured, then hand on the t***ies, put it in her cornbox, put it in her cornhole, grab a hold of that braid, rub that calico,” she recited to the board, before adding, “You can find that on page 39 of the book called ‘Out of Darkness,’ which you can find at Hudson Bend Middle School and Bee Cave Middle School.”
“Out of Darkness” is a 2015 young adult novel by Ashley Hope Pérez, the station said.
Bell continued, “All right, not gonna lie, had to Google ‘cornhole’ because I have the game in the back of my yard. But according to Wikipedia, ‘cornhole’ is a sexual slang vulgarism for anus. The term came into … use in the 1910s in the United States … its verb form ‘to cornhole,’ which came into usage in the 1930s, means to have anal sex.”
Image source: KXAN-TV video screenshot
Then she blasted the board members: “I do not want my children to learn about anal sex in middle school! I’ve never had anal sex! I don’t want to have anal sex! I don’t want my kids having anal sex! I want you to start focusing on education and not public health!”
At that point Bell’s microphone was cut off, but her school board takedown can still be heard on video: “You are not public health officials; you are supposed to be educating our children! Do not teach them about anal sex!”
Here’s the clip of Bell going off. Content warning: Language:
The school district told KXAN the book in question was removed from both middle school libraries and that its contents will be reviewed.
“A district possesses significant discretion to determine the content of its school libraries,” the district spokesperson told the station, citing school board policy. “A district must, however, exercise its discretion in a manner consistent with the First Amendment.”
The spokesperson added to KXAN that the “district shall not remove materials from a library for the purpose of denying students access to ideas with which the district disagrees. A district may remove materials, because they are pervasively vulgar or based solely upon the educational suitability of the books in question.”
The district told the station it doesn’t know how long the review of the book will take.
The station said “Out of Darkness” is about a love affair between a black boy and a Mexican-American girl amid a 1937 explosion in East Texas that killed nearly 300 schoolchildren and teachers, citing an NBC News article published just after the book was released.
Jonathan Friedman of Pen America, which KXAN said is a nonprofit that “defends diversity, inclusion and free expression in literature,” told the station that many books with sexually explicit content have holistic value that includes diverse viewpoints and exposing young people to the realities of the world.
“Central Texas is one among many areas in the country that have become hotspots for these eruptions of local anger and disagreement,” Friedman added to KXAN. “I think to pretend books that deal explicitly with sex or sexual assault are in some way a threat to young people are doing them a disservice. This is about having access for young people to a wide variety of literature that people from different backgrounds are reflected in.”
Friedman also took direct aim at moms and dads, telling the station that “you have a small contingent in many cases of parents who decide that they disagree, and that they must know better than those who are in the classroom.”
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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