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How Sarah Sanders Is Putting Arkansas On The Map

By: Brent Scher | March 13, 2023

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R.) / Getty Images

LITTLE ROCK, Ark.—Less than one month into her first term as Arkansas governor, Sarah Sanders was tapped to deliver the Republican response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union, a speaking slot typically granted to rising stars in the party with the intent to elevate them onto the national stage. But stepping onto the national stage doesn’t appear to be Sanders’s goal—at least for now.

In her address, she used Arkansas as the example of what Republicans are doing across the country. “Here in Arkansas and across America, Republicans are working to end the policy of trapping kids in failing schools and sentencing them to a lifetime of poverty,” Sanders said.  ”We will educate, not indoctrinate our kids, and put students on a path to success.”

In an hour-long interview, the former White House press secretary dodged questions about the 2024 election, diverting the conversation back to what she’s doing in Arkansas.

She already has substantive accomplishments to point to. This past Tuesday, exactly one month after her State of the Union response, the state legislature passed Sanders’s signature legislation, an ambitious overhaul of Arkansas schools, and she has already signed it into law. Corey DeAngelis, a leading advocate for school choice, said Arkansas is now the “gold standard for educational freedom.”

The bill is a kitchen-sink approach to education reform—in addition to establishing universal school choice, it yanks obscene sexual materials and critical race theory from classrooms, sets stringent new learning standards, and raises the base teacher salary from $36,000 to $50,000.

“This is what bold conservative education legislation looks like,” Sanders said from the governor’s office, where she monitored the debate on the bill taking place on the other side of the Capitol.

And Sanders says Arkansas as a whole can be the “blueprint” for what conservative states could do.

Sanders joins a crowd of superstar Republican governors making headway by focusing on schools, and armed with a legislature of staunch conservatives, she’s charging ahead of other states. Florida’s Ron DeSantis is still fighting to get the sorts of reforms passed by Arkansas in Sanders’s first few weeks over hurdles in his legislature—his universal school choice bill, for example, faces even some Republican opposition. Sanders came out of her long campaign in Arkansas eager to establish herself as the “Education Governor” and thus far is doing just that.

Sanders’s growing profile has also made her a target of Democratic activists and politicians. Washington Post columnists are writing hit pieces questioning why anyone would move to Arkansas: “Good luck recruiting Californians for Arkansas, Sarah Sanders,” wrote Philip Bump. Shortly after Sanders’s national address, California Democratic governor Gavin Newsom took aim at Arkansas’s crime rate and last week was taking shots on Twitter about local Arkansas pieces of legislation.

Sanders acknowledges that she’s drawing more scrutiny to her state, but she doesn’t think that’s a bad thing. “We outkick our coverage, frankly, in a lot of places,” she said.

“When it comes to politicians on the national stage for a small state, we have some pretty big names out there,” the governor said. “I’m sure you’ll find people that will disagree, but my opinion is that it’s a good thing for our state, and I plan on using that platform to better us.”

Sanders says the critics are unavoidable. “I try to tune it out and stay focused on the objectives in front of us. There are people who wouldn’t care what’s in the bill, they’re gonna hate it simply because I’m associated with it. They don’t want to see me be successful. Certainly, that’s disappointing, but not surprising, and it’s not gonna slow us down from doing things that we feel like are the right thing to do.”

Sanders sharpened her ability to drown out the critics as White House press secretary. Not only was Sanders the longest-serving Trump administration press secretary—she was the only person to hold the job for more than a year—she was also the most successful, taking over as the daily briefing became a media feeding frenzy and adding a semblance of order to the chaos. She remains beloved by staff, some of whom followed her to Arkansas, and her former boss, to whom she still talks regularly.

Though Sanders is taking advantage of lessons learned at the White House, former colleagues say she’s also developed the ability to talk fluently about policy.

“We used to tell her, you need to get more detail,” said a former White House colleague. “Now the opposite is the case. She’s gone from somebody who was laser-focused on communications with a thin understanding of the policy to somebody who is a policy expert. It’s impressive to me.”

It’s not the first transformation of her career, Sanders says. When she first joined the Donald Trump campaign, she never foresaw that she’d become the lead spokeswoman for Trump’s administration.

“I was much more on the strategy and political operation side, and really didn’t see myself as a front person or the public-facing individual,” she explained.

Sanders joined the Trump campaign in 2016 to do coalition-building in the South, but after a few TV appearances, Trump called her to say he wanted to see her on television every day. And at the White House, after Sanders filled in for then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer while serving as his deputy, Trump tapped her to fill the job.

Her rise to the Arkansas governorship is a different story. Sanders announced her run in January 2021 and, as the prohibitive favorite from the outset, had two years to prepare for the job. It’s during that time that she decided she wanted to be the “Education Governor”—she not only became an expert on the issue but also gained confidence that she had to make it her trademark legislation.

“I went to all 75 counties,” Sanders said. “Everywhere I went as I traveled on the campaign for two years, every community wants their kids to do better. If we don’t have a good education system in place, then we are not setting our kids up for success.”

On the ground in Arkansas, Republicans say Sanders has brought a “new energy” to the legislature. “The whole atmosphere and mood of everything is different,” said Bart Hester, who leads the state’s upper chamber. “It’s such a fun energy, an exciting and new energy. It’s fun to come in everyday.”

Hester says the onslaught of opposition from teachers’ unions against the education bill was no match for Sanders.

“We have a governor now where members are more scared of her than they are their superintendents or the teacher union—we’ve never experienced that,” Hester said. “They don’t want to disappoint her—they know that she’s super popular, they don’t want to be the guy that was against their number-one priority.”

Sanders scoffs at suggestions that her education plan was a “copycat” of legislation championed by DeSantis, another high-profile Republican governor. “Hard to copy when ours is much bigger and goes much further,” Sanders said. But she has nothing negative to say about her Republican counterpart in Florida, and says there’s a “great sense of camaraderie and willingness to share best practices” between her and DeSantis, who has emerged as Trump’s chief competition in the Republican Party.

Sanders is yet to weigh in on who the Republican presidential nominee should be in 2024—her “focus is solely on Arkansas,” she says, in the same way every ambitious and upwardly mobile politician does. And Trump, her former boss, reportedly called Sanders in recent weeks to ask for her endorsement, which still hasn’t come.

But she also said she “maintains a great relationship” with Trump, and left the door open for an endorsement in the future.

“When the time comes, maybe, but right now, I don’t want to do anything that takes away from the huge agenda list that we have to get done here in Arkansas,” Sanders said. “I don’t intend on slowing down on that front at any point soon. And so I don’t want to do anything that takes away, not just my attention, but also the attention of what we’re accomplishing.”

A former White House colleague who remains close to Sanders doesn’t expect her 2024 neutrality to change any time soon. “Trump’s not her boss anymore,” the former colleague said. “Her boss is the people of Arkansas, and that’s where I assume her priorities will lie.”

Republicans in the state appreciate her focus on Arkansas and recognize she’s putting the work they’re doing in the Capitol first. “Everyone wants a minute with her—she can be Sarah the national celebrity, or Sarah the governor, and she only has so many minutes in a day,” Hester said. “She is spending those minutes as Sarah the governor.”

Republican state senator Matt McKee says Sanders has the whole legislature bullish on Arkansas.

“I know Florida’s been at the forefront, Texas has done things, but Arkansas can be the place,” McKee said.

Sanders says her appreciation for Arkansas has grown since moving her family back to her home state. After traveling to each county for her campaign, she has enhanced her ability to sell the state to visitors. The governor boasts that she can point to the best place to eat in any Arkansas town—this reporter was sent to CJ’s Butcher Boy Burgers in Russellville.

When it comes to dining, things are going more smoothly for Sanders in Arkansas. Thus far, she says she hasn’t been denied service, as she was in 2019 at the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia.

“You know, knock on wood, I have not been asked to leave any restaurant so far,” Sanders said. “It’s amazing to be home.”

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Asra Nomani Op-ed: Democrats are closing doors on parents, and that’s a win for the GOP

Asra Q. Nomani | Fox News | Published March 9, 2023 10:31am EST

On Sunday night, as I was doing laundry, I got a text message from a fellow Virginia mother with an interesting invitation: Ben Litchfield, a Democratic Party Virginia Senate candidate from Fredericksburg, was convening a statewide Zoom call of “parents, educations and pro-public school activists” to discuss education issues.

A “mama bear” activist from northern Virginia since June 2020, I thought it was a unique opportunity to brainstorm. A Democrat all my life, I moved to Virginia in December 2008 with my young son, then in kindergarten, only because the state elected Barack Obama to be U.S. president.

Born in India, I am an American Muslim immigrant and single mother, and I thought the state was finally progressive enough for me. With English as my second language when I arrived in the U.S. at the age of 4, I believe in the power of America’s public school system to empower a girl like me to become a reporter for the Wall Street Journal at the age of 23.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin gestures after signing a House bill at the Capitol, March 2, 2022, in Richmond, Virginia. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

That’s why I fight every day to support a public system where teachers are able to spend their time educating my younger self, not indoctrinating kids with divisive, distracting activist agendas.

YOUR CHILDREN BELONG TO YOU, NOT A SCHOOL. IF YOU DON’T FIGHT, YOU’LL LOSE THEM

This time, these activists were hosting a strategy session to develop “a coordinated opposition” to the Youngkin administration’s alleged “attack on public schools, educators, and students.”

The designated “Topic” for the call: “VA Dept of Education and Youngkin Town Hall.” Thursday night, CNN host Jake Tapper is hosting a town hall meeting with Gov. Glenn Youngkin. I know because I’ve encouraged many parents and students to join the town hall.

Suparna Dutta was smeared when nominated to the Virginia Board of Education in July 2022. (Fox News Digital)

When I joined the call, I recognized some names. Cheryl Binkley, a former northern Virginia teachers’ union leader, was guiding introductions. Mariane Burke, the local leader of the national activist group, Indivisible, was online.

I knew them well. They had led a successful hit, organized by the Virginia chapter of a national teachers’ union campaign – #RedForEd – to assassinate the character of a friend, Suparna Dutta, an American Hindu immigrant, with the “White supremacist” smear when Youngkin nominated her to be on the Virginia Board of Education. They won a 22-18 vote, with Democrats casting their ballots unanimously against Dutta.

On the call, another woman introduced herself, and then Binkley, a former Virginia Education Association union official, turned to me. I introduced myself fully: I’m Asra Nomani, and I’m a mother in northern Virginia, and I looked forward to learning from others.

Video

“I think you’re in the wrong meeting,” Binkley responded, laughing.

IS PROGRESSIVE FEVER FINALLY BREAKING? 5 SIGNS AMERICANS GETTING FED UP WITH WOKE POLITICIANS AND POLICIES

“No, I’m in the correct meeting,” I answered.

While we may have a difference of opinion on a few – OK, many – issues, I thought we could benefit from a much-needed conversation, hearing each other out, at least virtually face-to-face. Binkley had another point of view.

She kicked me out of the meeting, and my only participation was left to my introduction and this note that popped up on my phone: “The host has removed you from this meeting.”

"...I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach." declared Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat's gubernatorial candidate in Virginia in 2021. — “**…I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.**” declared Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat’s gubernatorial candidate in Virginia in 2021. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

The Virginia Democrats’ removal of me – a Muslim immigrant single mother from India and “woman of color,” as U.S. Rep. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez once described Rep. Ilhan Omar – symbolizes much more than the ejection of one person. It captures the utter failure of the Democratic National Committee to actually be inclusive to the millions of parents – many of them immigrant minority parents – who refuse its lockstep agenda with the country’s two teachers’ unions – the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association.

Even though President Joe Biden won the White House in 2020, Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race in 2021, over Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe, who famously sealed his loss with the assertion in a debate that “…I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

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The arrogance, political corruption and myopia of Democratic Party officials to parents portends bad news for the Democratic Party in 2024 and good news for Republican candidates. On cue, every Republican presidential candidate, former Gov. Nikki Haley, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former President Donald Trump – and those still unannounced, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Virginia Gov. Youngkin – have made education a key issue on their platform.

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Take a bow. That’s the mama bear movement driving issues, not the other way around.

On Twitter the next day, the Democrat loyalists didn’t apologize and acknowledge the error of their ways. One user responded: “Good. You have no business in Virginia education.”

But I actually do have business in Virginia education. So does every parent.

Democrats will turn off more parents with their closed-door mentality, and that will drive a wedge issue between traditionally Democratic parents, like Black, Hispanic and Asian parents, and the Democratic Party.

Republicans have embraced a winning agenda item, and they will win the White House if they continue to translate their platforms with policy and legislative answers restoring parents’ rights in America.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM ASRA Q. NOMANI

A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Asra Q. Nomani is the author of a new book, Woke Army. She is a senior fellow at Independent Women’s Network. She is reachable on Twitter as @AsraNomani.

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Virginia Committee Passes Parental Rights Bill After School Coverup of Teen’s Dysphoria Enables Sex Trafficking

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JANUARY 30, 2023

kids reading in a classroom — My daughter ‘was terribly bullied, but no one told me. … Please don’t let ideology harm another child,’ pleaded the mother of a 14-year-old girl who was isolated from her parents by school and court authorities and sex-trafficked twice.

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

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A subcommittee in the Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill on Monday that mandates public educators notify parents if their child “self-identifies” as something other than his or her natural sex. Introduced by Republican Dels. Dave LaRock, Tara Durant, and John McGuire, the measure (HB 2432) would provide parents with greater oversight into their children’s lives at school and increase transparency in public education. According to a summary of the legislation, if a school official “has reason to believe” that a student “is self-identifying as a gender different from the student’s biological sex,” said official is required “to contact as soon as practicable at least one of such student’s parents to ask whether such parent is aware of the student’s mental state and whether the parent wishes to obtain or has already obtained counseling for such student.”

Under the bill, school officials, such as counselors and clinical social workers, are barred from “encouraging or coercing a minor to withhold from the minor’s parent the fact that the minor’s perception of his or her gender or sex is inconsistent with the minor’s biological sex” or “withholding from a minor’s parent information relating to the minor’s perception that his or her gender or sex is inconsistent with the minor’s biological sex.”

Monday’s subcommittee vote came along party lines, with five Republicans voting in favor and three Democrats opposing.

Known as Sage’s Law, HB 2432 was introduced after it was revealed that a then-14-year-old Virginia girl ended up in the hands of sexual predators after her school failed to disclose her gender dysphoria to her mother. As The Federalist previously reported, the chain of events began in August 2021 when Sage began identifying as a boy and suffered intense bullying and harassment at school. Eventually, Sage ran away and was “found nine days later in Maryland, a victim of sexual assault.”

Appomattox County High School, which affirmed Sage’s new “identity” without notifying her mother, was following model guidelines issued by then-Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam’s administration on so-called gender affirmation. Such guidance has since been terminated by current GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

[READ: Virginia Teen Sex-Trafficked Twice After School Hides Gender Identity From Her Parents]

Throughout Monday’s hearing on Sage’s Law, witnesses supporting the bill discussed its importance in keeping parents involved in their children’s livelihoods, especially in the school classroom. During her testimony, Sage’s mother Michele called on the subcommittee to put commonsense before ideology.

“If I had known [what was going on], this would be a much different story. [Sage] was terribly bullied, but no one told me,” Michele said. “Please don’t let ideology harm another child. Let parents do our jobs. We know our children best and we love them a million times more.”

Also called to testify at the hearing was Dr. Erin Brewer, a former “trans kid” who spoke about the importance of schools helping children through their gender dysphoria without affirming such confusion or concealing it from parents.

“I was insistent that I was a boy when I started first grade after a brutal sexual assault. If I had been affirmed by my teachers, it would have allowed me to completely dissociate from myself as a girl and create a new persona who could pretend that the horrible trauma that triggered my gender dysphoria hadn’t happened to me,” she said. “Instead of encouraging my confusion and hiding it from my mother, the school contacted my mother, got permission for me to be assessed by the school psychologist, and they came up with a comprehensive program to help me resolve my gender dysphoria. … I [one] hundred percent support this legislation.”

Erin Friday, a lifelong Democrat and co-founder of Our Duty, a national and international parent and child advocacy group, also spoke in support of Sage’s Law. Throughout her remarks, Friday noted her personal experiences with a gender-dysphoric daughter and stated that “schools should never keep secrets from parents.”

Opponents to Sage’s Law also spoke at the hearing, with one man claiming to be a “trans woman” arguing that such legislation is “ridiculous” and that schools should be able to conceal a child’s gender dysphoria from that child’s parents.

“It should be that child’s own choice,” he said. “If we wanna tell who we wanna tell, like, that’s on us.”

Despite leftists’ support for deceptively-termed “gender affirmation” and the “transitioning” of children, research has shown that “upwards of 80 percent of gender dysphoric children embrace their sex as they emerge from puberty” and that “children who are ‘affirmed’ as the opposite sex … particularly if puberty blockers are used, consistently go on to further medicalization.” Children who undergo such protocols are subjected to lifelong damage to their bodies. The practices are so horrific that nations around the world, such as England, have ended the disfiguring practices that are falsely labeled as “gender-affirming care” for minors.

“Parents should never be the last to know [about what’s going on in their children’s lives],” said Durant during the subcommittee meeting. “It’s a very strange, strange place to me that we’re in now where parents are being told to step aside, to sit down, that ‘we as educators, as counselors know better [for] your own child’ — and that’s just simply not true.”

Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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Minnesota Will Soon Make Teachers Endorse Child Mutilation to Get a License

BY: RYAN MACPHERSON | JANUARY 10, 2023

Minnesota teacher with a lesbian sign — **To be state licensed in Minnesota starting in 2025, every teacher must personally advocate critical race theory and transgender ideology.**

RYAN MACPHERSON

The state’s insistence that every teacher positively affirm homosexual behaviors and transgendered identities understandably aggravates consciences among moral traditionalists, but the issues run deeper than the “culture war.” What is at stake is the nature of knowledge, the future of liberty, and the prospects for a sustainable social order. In a word: civilization.

A perfunctory hearing on Aug. 24, 2022, and the resulting order for implementation with slight revisions by a solitary administrative judge in December cemented the new regime. The revised Standards of Effective Practice require radical changes to teachers’ curriculum selection, classroom management style, and self-understanding of the teaching vocation. The education departments at colleges and universities also must document their fulfillment of the new standards or else have their program certifications rescinded by Minnesota’s Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB).

The new requirements require teachers to positively affirm extremist leftist positions about human nature and sexual practices in order to be allowed to teach in government schools.

Teachers will be required to choose “anti-racist” — i.e. critical race theory — instructional strategies for students. An administrative judge told the state to amend No. 4 here requiring teachers to expose children to sexual identities. It will likely still go into effect, with slightly different language.

The new license requires teachers to affirm transgenderism.

The revisions represent only the latest attack against American heritage in Minnesota’s public schools. In 2013, the state education department successfully removed the four presidents featured on Mount Rushmore from social studies standards.

Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan also got the ax that year, as did the Magna Carta. References to the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were relativized, as students were to be instructed that those documents do not contain universal principles of ordered liberty, but merely the opinion of one powerful group of 18th-century men.

A decade later, the vanguard has advanced again. The revised teacher licensing rules strike the following from the mathematics standards: “addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, whole numbers, fractions, decimals, and percentages.” They insert this for teachers of all subjects: “The teacher fosters an environment that ensures student identities such as race/ethnicity, national origin, language, sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical/developmental/emotional ability, socioeconomic class, and religious beliefs are historically and socially contextualized, affirmed, and incorporated into a learning environment where students are empowered to learn and contribute as their whole selves.”

It no longer suffices simply to discuss the controversies of radical reform; teachers and students must also become advocates for change: “The teacher creates opportunities for students to learn about power, privilege, intersectionality, and systemic oppression in the context of various communities and empowers learners to be agents of social change to promote equity.” Minnesota’s Scandinavian ancestors must be turning over in their graves at this new smorgasbord of Marxist truffles.

The PELSB’s “Statement of Necessity and Reasonableness” for the licensure changes draws support from two states just as blue as Minnesota. From New York, PELSB gleans: “Inclusive curriculum and assessment … works toward dismantling systems of biases and inequities, and decentering dominant ideologies in education.” In Illinois, each teacher must internalize a Marxist mentalité: “The culturally responsive teacher and leader will explore their own intersecting identities, how they were developed, and how they impact daily experience of the world.”

Illinois has expressly abandoned what Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, called “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” In place of objective truth, “what is seen as ‘correct’ is most often based on our lived experiences.” As in New York, so also in Illinois — and soon in Minnesota — all teachers must practice what cultural Marxists preach: “Assess how their biases and perceptions affect their teaching practice and how they access tools to mitigate their own behavior (racism, sexism, homophobia, unearned privilege, Eurocentrism, etc.).”

Back in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, conservative watchdogs encouraged citizens to participate in open forums and public hearings, which fomented large protests against the licensure revisions, to no avail. The ever-active Child Protection League, the stalwart Center of the American Experiment, and a 2021 start-up called the Foundation against Intolerance and Racism sounded the alarm.

But to whom? Neither the people nor their elected officials decided the matter. A solitary administrative judge, appointed by the governor, ordered the implementation of the radical licensure changes after merely recommending a few tweaks.

The labyrinth of administrative procedure affords limited opportunity for appeal, but one can hope that a teacher, a parent, or a teacher-preparation college will petition for declaratory relief. If nothing else, PELSB’s radical rewriting of human nature smacks of a state-imposed religion, in violation of the First Amendment’s no establishment clause, not to mention the dereliction of duty when schools jettison mainstream academic content in favor of extremist ideology.

If recourse to the courts should fail, another remedy remains, modeled for the free world in Norway in 1942. When the National Socialists ordered parents to enroll their children in indoctrination camps with just three weeks’ notice and required all school teachers to implement a Nazi curriculum, the people simply would not have it. Five out of every six teachers resigned.

A similar proportion of parents flooded the Norwegian education bureau with letters — literally, laundry baskets full of letters — registering their protests. Adolf Hitler’s henchmen were grossly outnumbered, and the Nazis’ outward control of state agencies never penetrated to the hearts and minds of the people. The fusion of Viking blood with Lutheran “here I stand” courage made otherwise docile Norwegians invincible. Whether the Minnesotans can muster similar resolve soon will become evident to all.

Ryan C. MacPherson, Ph.D., is a Minnesotan and author of “Rediscovering the American Republic: A People’s Quest for Ordered Liberty.”

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Loudoun County Dad Arrested For ‘Trespassing’ At Local Public School Board Meeting Found Not Guilty

BY: JORDAN BOYD | JANUARY 05, 2023

John Tigges being arrested at school board meeting

A Loudoun County father, whose arrest at a June 2021 school board meeting was used by the Biden administration to justify a politicized attack on concerned parents, was found not guilty of trespassing on Wednesday.

Law enforcement arrested Jon Tigges at a Loudoun school board meeting on June 22, 2021, after he tried expressing concerns about the school district’s “moral decay.” A Virginia district judge found Tigges guilty in October of 2021. Loudoun Circuit Judge Douglas Fleming Jr., however, cleared Tigges of any wrongdoing. Fleming determined that Tigges not only had a First Amendment right to attend the heated meeting but also that the superintendent who shut down the official gathering last summer had no right to declare it an “unlawful assembly.”

“My thanks to God for justice,” Tigges wrote on Twitter on Wednesday afternoon.

Tigges was one of the more than 250 people who had signed up to speak during the public comment section of the Loudoun County School Board meeting that summer night. He intended to voice opposition to the board’s new transgender policy proposal, which mandated that employees use students’ so-called “preferred pronouns” and preferred restrooms regardless of their sex. Before Tigges could speak, School Board Chairwoman Brenda Sheridan called off the meeting, and the now-recently fired Superintendent Scott Ziegler declared the gathering an “unlawful assembly.” Ziegler ordered the hundreds of people waiting to express their outrage at the government school district to vacate the premises or risk arrest.

Tigges refused to leave.

“I just felt led to realize that we could still speak,” Tigges told The Federalist last year. “It’s a public forum, a public room. It had been scheduled until seven o’clock for people to speak. I stood up to encourage folks to stay and if they had something to say whether they were on the left or the right, didn’t matter. They’d be heard and we’d respect one another and do so and so people started doing that without any amplification at all and you could hear them fine because it was a peaceful assembly.”

Despite Tigges’ claim on the First Amendment, police officers handcuffed, arrested, and charged him with trespassing.

Two arrests made at the Loudoun County, Virginia school board meeting after it was declared an unlawful assembly and some parents here to protest against critical race theory and a transgender policy refused to leave right away #CriticalRaceTheory pic.twitter.com/dsZDrqJ0Gp
— Gabriella Borter (@gabriellaborter) June 22, 2021

Tigges’ arrest in June of 2021 was used by the National School Boards Association (NSBA), in collusion with the Biden White House, to justify the smearing of concerned parents as “domestic terrorists” who required punishment from federal law enforcement. In September of 2021, the NSBA sent its infamous complaint letter, secretly solicited by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, to the Department of Justice, which sparked a politicized attack on parents who wanted to speak out against corrupt school boards.

“Despite this victory, I have serious concerns about where we are as a country. We’ve been subverted by a darkness that is spilling out in rot at all levels and in both political parties,” Tigges tweeted after the decision. “Nothing will change until We the People value conviction over comfort.”

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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America’s Education System Is So Bad, Even Leftists Are Homeschooling Their Kids

BY: AUGUSTE MEYRAT | DECEMBER 08, 2022

mom Homeschooling her kid — **Homeschooling may be a huge commitment of time and energy, but it’s also the only real way to protect kids from bad kids, bad teachers, and bad ideas.**

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Anew survey shows that after schools arbitrarily shut down for several consecutive months, parents of all political backgrounds continue to take on the rigors and responsibilities of homeschooling long after schools have reopened.

Educators in both public and private schools should be asking why this is. Why would parents decline the services of certified professionals running various curricular and extracurricular programs at an operational, fully equipped campus just down the road? Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars go into these schools, which not only educate children but serve as the cultural center of most localities. By homeschooling, parents are saying no to all that — along with the lifestyle they could have without kids at home — and instead shouldering the burdens of pedagogy, instructional materials, scheduling, behavioral management, and socializing their kids throughout their academic careers.

Not only this, but why would parents on the left who agreed with lockdowns and are largely sympathetic to public schools opt to homeschool? According to the survey, “47% of new homeschoolers skewed left of center self-reporting as either progressive or liberal (vs. 32% pre-Covid homeschoolers).”

Educators need to investigate this, but rather than confront the glaring problems of schooling — low standards, chaotic classes, corrupt bureaucracies, rampant tech addiction, and leftist propaganda — or do the slightest bit of soul-searching, nearly all administrators and educators have dismissed these concerns and now pretend that the last two years never happened, except when they need to make excuses to the communities they serve. The monopoly on public education has afforded them the luxury to forget everything and learn absolutely nothing.

Nowhere is this complacency better illustrated than in the recent book “Stolen Year: How COVID Changed Children’s Lives, and Where We Go Now” by Anya Kamenetz. Despite devoting more than 300 pages to the mistakes made by public school leaders and education unions during Covid, Kamenetz never thought to question the general mediocrity of these institutions. Instead, she wholeheartedly supports them and advocates for more funding. How exactly will more money make up for the learning loss and the psychological damage done by derelict school systems? Kamenetz never says, but she does find time to attack President Trump.

This leaves parents of all political persuasions to determine what they can do to save their kids. Sure, some may fight the good fight and send their kids to public schools, be more vocal at school board meetings, and keep a close ear to what’s happening in their children’s classes. Others may be blessed with a classical school that recreates the old-fashioned learning experience that prevailed in the West before things got so bad. And some may simply hold their noses and think happy thoughts as they drink the Kool-Aid, convincing themselves that everything will be fine and that their clinically depressed and gender-confused child who spends xir days binging on violent anime and #neurodivergent TikTok videos is simply going through a phase and will learn to read and do math eventually.

Or they can try homeschooling. It may be a huge commitment of time and energy, but it’s also the only real way to protect kids from bad kids, bad teachers, and bad ideas.

Although Covid has exacerbated the situation, the rationale for homeschooling isn’t all that new. What’s notable is how homeschooling today appeals to conservatives and leftists alike. While conservatives have always liked the option of homeschooling as a means of safeguarding their values and avoiding the harms of government incompetence and modern decadence, leftists generally paid lip service to public schools (while sending their kids to private schools) and looked down on the homeschooling crowd as fundamentalist crackpots doomed to being unsuccessful losers.

This has changed in recent years. Now it’s leftists who want to safeguard their values and circumvent the problems of formal schooling. Ironically, their reasons for doing this are the exact opposite of why conservative parents homeschool. These parents actually believe that schools are way too traditional in their values and instruction, don’t offer enough accommodations to suit their children’s learning style, and still do too little about Covid. They fear their child will be bullied, receive bad grades, and be red-pilled by that one Christian conservative teacher they have for English.

Despite certain school boards and superintendents doing their utmost to adhere to liberal orthodoxy, this does little to change the conservative nature of their actual schools. As Robert Pondiscio argues in Newsweek, the very concept of formal schooling is inherently conservative: “Kids sit at desks, teachers stand in front of the room and the academic diet leans heavily on the best that has been discovered, thought and created: our language, literature, history, scientific discoveries and artistic achievements. This default mode is by definition culturally ‘conservative.’” This is often a big turnoff for leftist parents, many of whom insist on a “progressive learning” experience. Many want something student-centered, self-paced, relevant to current times, less judgmental (i.e., no grades or assessments), and altogether open and undefined — something only achievable through homeschooling.

The mutual disdain for formal schools from both the left and the right perfectly illustrates the “horseshoe theory,” in which opposing sides of an ideological spectrum come closer together as they become more extreme. So while the reason for homeschooling may be different to the point of incompatibility, the outcome is the same: Parents aren’t happy with their public schools, so they seek out alternatives.

Whether this leads to a renaissance or decline in education is anyone’s guess, though I’m pessimistic about rebirth if homeschooling becomes a leftist trend. Without a neighborhood school to provide some kind of personal stability and connection to the greater world for these families, it’s difficult to see how this benefits anyone. Conservatives usually have a church and extended family and abide by a clear set of principles; most leftists lack these foundations, so it’s difficult to see how they could make homeschooling work. More likely, they will become the “unschooled” crackpots on the margins, unable to function in society whom they have derided for so long.

The atomization of America and the epidemic of loneliness will likely get worse if too many families opt out of formal schooling. Covid demonstrated that most families need their schools, and even if schools refuse to see it, it’s also true that they need families.

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.

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Trans Hormone Profiteer Planned Parenthood Teaches Public School Sex Ed In 16 States, Including Red Idaho

BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | OCTOBER 07, 2022

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A sex-ed curriculum developed by an offshoot of Planned Parenthood to teach children about abortion and radical gender ideology is being imposed on school districts across red-state Idaho. The curriculum, called “Reducing the Risk,” is a project of the nonprofit Education, Training and Research (ETR) developed in partnership with Planned Parenthood and already deployed across 16 states, including Idaho.

Students under the “queer-centered” curriculum, which is behind a paywall, are presented with a new definition of abstinence, which has been amended from its real meaning — refraining entirely from sex — to “choosing not to do any sexual activity that carries a risk for pregnancy or STD/HIV,” according to the conservative Idaho Freedom Foundation. The curriculum then offers explicit material about “porn literacy,” condoms, anal and vaginal sex with contraception, transgender ideology, and even guidance on abortion, the state think tank reported.

Anna Miller, the education policy director for the Idaho Freedom Foundation, blew the whistle on the curriculum in a video published on Twitter in September. The video features an apparent clip from the ETR package, which shows animated students watching porn.

Idaho’s government offers “porn literacy” to students, planned parenthood curriculum and advocates for abortion.

If this can happen in Idaho, it can happen anywhere. pic.twitter.com/e0mjPIB0vo
— Anna K. Miller (@annakate_miller) September 13, 2022

The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, a state agency, is facilitating the program in the state’s schools with federal grant money, bypassing the state education department.

[READ: How Activists Use Your Tax Dollars To Sexualize Kids At School]

This is How The Federal Government is Corrupting our Schools on the State Level — Injecting Leftism, Sexualized Curriculum, and Abortion into Rural America. ⁦@scottyenor⁩ ⁦⁦@CenterForAWL⁩ pic.twitter.com/uAkKjttCia
— Anna K. Miller (@annakate_miller) October 5, 2022

While the curriculum is designed for high school students, the state reported to the federal Department of Health and Human Services that kids as young as 12 are being presented with the material.

All seven of Idaho’s health districts have either recommended or implemented the controversial curriculum in local schools, according to the Idaho Freedom Foundation. Districts have also begun to promote links to additional resources including Power to Decide, where kids can find where to get an abortion. Other resources include links to where students learn to hide their browsing history from parents and explore polyamory.

In a September statement responding to outrage over porn literacy being taught in Idaho schools, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare described the Planned Parenthood-sponsored curriculum as compliant with the “National Health Education Standards” from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the department’s website on teen pregnancy does not link to standards from the CDC. Instead, it links to the “National Sexuality Education Standards,” which were created by a series of radical left-wing interest groups including the Human Rights Campaign and Planned Parenthood, which has become the nation’s second-largest provider of transgender hormones. In other words, Planned Parenthood’s trans-focused sex ed materials are encouraging kids to become its lifelong mutilation customers. The standards dictate that students should understand and “describe” the “role of hormone blockers on young people who identify as transgender” by the end of fifth grade.

In a bizarre student workbook for the “Reducing the Risk” curriculum on the Planned Parenthood website, students are trained to call clinics to inquire about sterilization, shop for condoms, and answer questions about different hypothetical situations. One situation describes a scene where “a lot of kids are getting high, and some couples are leaving — maybe to have sex.” Another worksheet guides students to document how to get to a so-called “family planning clinic,” such as abortion giant Planned Parenthood, by bus or train.

The trans-centered curriculum in Idaho is being implemented without notifying parents, many of whom are being left in the dark by administrators claiming to teach “abstinence education.”

Children have become a prime target for left-wing ideologues promoting radical transgender ideology. Health care networks have taken notice, capitalizing on gender-confused kids who then become life-long patients when they start to pursue irreversible gender-bending treatments.

According to a report from Grand View Research, a California-based business consulting firm, transgender surgeries will become a $5 billion industry over the next 10 years. In September, Vanderbilt University earned national attention for openly placing dollar signs on children as a “big money maker.”

Vanderbilt was apparently concerned that not all of its staff would be on board. Dr. Ellen Clayton warned that "conscientious objections" are "problematic." Anyone who decides not to be involved in transition surgeries due to "religious beliefs" will face "consequences" pic.twitter.com/CgNicrG4Mg
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 20, 2022

Boston Children’s Hospital has also promoted “gender-affirming” hysterectomies and sterilizations for minors, who are almost always introduced to transgender ideology either on social media or in the classroom.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

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Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Shipwreck

A.F. BRANCO | on August 28, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-shipwreck/

The Teachers Union wants to lay off white teachers before black no matter their seniority in Minnesota.

Teachers Union is Racist — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco 2022.**

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Changing Of The Guard

A.F. BRANCO | on August 29, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-changing-of-the-guard-4/

Our leadership is changing Washington D.C. and the country into a radical far-left Banana-style republic.

Bannana Republic FBI, DOJ, IRS — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022**

DONATE to A.F.Branco Cartoons – Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.

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At This Manhattan Middle School School, Sixth-Graders Are Asked to Surveil Friends and Family for ‘Microaggressions’

By Aaron Sibarium | July 27, 2022

Students at a New York City public school, March 2022. (Getty Images)

A New York City public school encouraged students as young as 10 years old to keep a list of all the “microaggressions” they witnessed, both at school and in their own families, according to materials from the school’s curriculum reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. The same students were also asked to list their gender identity—”cisgender,” “nonbinary,” or “trans”—as well as their sexual orientation on a graded worksheet.

The sixth-grade humanities curriculum from Lower Manhattan Community Middle School, where just 31 percent of students are white, required students to read Tiffany Jewell’s This Book Is Anti-Racist, one of only five books assigned for the 2021-2022 year. The book contains 20 lessons on “how to wake up, take action, and do the work”—including the work of confronting the police, which Jewell suggests white students can do without ending up “in jail or harmed.”

“If you are a Black, Brown, or Indigenous Person of the Global Majority, you will need to decide how each outcome could end for you,” Jewell writes in a chapter called “Choosing My Path.” “White people, this is not something you need to do because you are at the center of the system.”

From Tiffany Jewell’s ‘This Book Is Anti-Racist’

The book also asks students to surveil their friends and family for racist behavior. “Grab your notebook,” one “activity” instructs readers. “Look and listen for the microaggressions around you. Write them down and note your observations.” Another activity asks students how “folx” in their families “resisted” or “contributed to racism,” defined as the “systemic misuse and abuse of power by institutions.”

The curriculum, which went into effect August 2021, came as parents across New York City were mobilizing against critical race theory in public schools—and as education officials across the country were denying that there was any such thing.

“Critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools,” Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, asserted in July 2021. Parents “are bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history.”

One month earlier, New York Regents chancellor Lester Young stated that critical race theory “is not our theory of action” and assured parents that “we are not preparing young people to be activists.”

Jewell’s book belies that assurance. “We will work together, in solidarity, to disrupt racism and become anti-racist accomplices,” the preface reads. “There are many moments to pause in this book so you can check in with yourself and grow into your activism.”

The curriculum could spell legal trouble for the school, which is already under investigation for separating seventh and eight-graders into racial affinity groups. That practice prompted a civil rights complaint in December from the watchdog group Parents Defending Education; on July 13, the Department of Education announced it would investigate the middle school over the complaint.

“It’s astonishing that administrators at Lower Manhattan Community seem determined to create a racially hostile educational environment on top of the civil rights investigation that was just opened,” said Nicole Neily, the president of Parents Defending Education. “Parents who were once proud of the school’s academic performance compared to other New York City public schools are now concerned—justifiably so—about the school’s increasing fixation on race.”

Those concerns come amid steep enrollment declines—and budget cuts—in New York City’s public schools. With enrollment down 8 percent since 2020, schools have lost $215 million in funding this year alone, forcing widespread layoffs and larger class sizes.

Divisive curricula like the one at Lower Manhattan Community School have exacerbated that exodus. One parent told the Free Beacon that their child would not be returning to the middle school this fall on account of an assignment that required sixth-graders to disclose their “social identities”—including their sexual orientation—on a worksheet. Though students did not have to “write something for every category,” instructors collected the worksheet for a grade.

Such lessons aren’t the product of a few school administrators run amok but reflect the race-conscious worldview of the New York City Department of Education. In June 2020, then-executive superintendent of Manhattan public schools Marisol Rosales hosted a panel on dismantling “systemic racism in our schools,” which held up Lower Manhattan Community School’s “mission statement on race” as a model for the entire school system.

“To undo the legacy of racism and oppression in this country that impacts our school community,” the mission statement reads, Lower Manhattan Community Schools works to instill “anti-racist beliefs and practices.”

The school’s sixth-grade humanities curriculum is a microcosm of what that education looks like in practice. Three of its five units concern “identity,” with Jewell’s book listed as a “key text” for unit one. The “social identities” worksheet was part of a broader lesson on “the dominant culture,” which consists of “people who are white, middle class, Christian and cisgender.”

Whoever does not fit into this “box,” Jewell writes, is “part of what’s called the ‘subordinate culture.’” Her description of that culture is exhaustive, albeit studded with solecisms: “Folx included in the ‘subordinate culture,’ include Black, Brown, indigenous People of Color of the Global Majority, queer, transgender, and nonbinary folx, and cisgender women, youth, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, atheist, and non-Christian folx, neurodiverse folx, folx living with disabilities, those living in poverty, and more.”

“The people who want to talk about racism all the time are the racists,” said Maud Maron, who served as an elected representative for parents in the district where Lower Manhattan Community School is located. “The people who suffer are the kids who get cheated out of a wholesome school experience and hours of learning that should be focused on academics instead of race indoctrination.”

Lower Manhattan Community School did not respond to a request for comment.

The focus on race extended to the seventh-grade social studies curriculum—ostensibly devoted to early American history—which used “anti-racist” guru Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning as its main textbook, according to a syllabus for the 2021-2022 school year reviewed by the Free Beacon.

These curricula do not seem to have soothed racial tensions at Lower Manhattan Community School, which is 41 percent Asian, 15 percent Hispanic, and 7 percent black.

A group of parents and administrators in April began planning a “restorative justice circle” to address alleged incidents of racism that had taken place over the school year, according to emails reviewed by the Free Beacon. The incidents included a black student calling a South Asian student “Indian Boy,” an Asian student touching a black student’s hair, and a “rumor” that a white student “used the N-word.”

The school eventually canceled the circle after a parent objected that it would “violate students’ privacy” and “possibly put current students at risk”—and after parents started to litigate the incidents over email, replicating the racial catfighting that had consumed the classroom.

One parent questioned the wisdom of discussing the transgressions of Asian students at a time when anti-Asian hate crimes were on the rise. It didn’t go over well.

“African Americans have been facing race-based violence for 500 years in this country, and still face it every day,” another parent responded. “So, I’d ask you to please be sensitive to that fact during discussions and emails with our group.”

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EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Ted Cruz Introduces Legislation to Redirect Unspent COVID-Relief Funds to School Security

By HENRY RODGERS, SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT | July 22, 2022

Photo by Nathan Howard:Getty Images 1222 — **Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images**

Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz introduced legislation Friday that would use COVID-19 education-related funding to improve the security at schools across the U.S. The legislation, first obtained by the Daily Caller, is titled the Protect Our Children’s Schools Act and is a Senate companion to legislation introduced by Republican Texas Rep. Randy Weber. The bill would allow schools to use unspent previously appropriated Federal COVID-19 education-related funding to improve school security. The bill requires the Department of Education to make all un-obligated federal COVID relief funds that are available to the secretary of education for school safety purposes. As of May 2022, states have not spent the majority of their relief funding. Cruz’s legislation would try to improve school security in K-12 elementary and secondary schools.

“Far too many atrocities have been committed at schools in Texas and across our nation. Increasing school safety is of paramount importance. The excess and unused monies given to schools to address the coronavirus should be used to keep our kids safe from monsters in their communities, and our bill would make sure local schools can use these funds to address their specific security needs,” Cruz told the Daily Caller before introducing the legislation.
“It’s teachers and local education officials who know best what their schools need, and how to use funds to keep our kids safe when they go to school,” Cruz added. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Rep. Roger Williams Calls On Pelosi To Pass School Security Bill, Forget ‘Partisan Gun-Control Package’)

READ THE BILL HERE:
https://www.scribd.com/embeds/583674164/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-xDR09IqgY4YiX0eQcE5W

(DAILY CALLER OBTAINED) — … by Henry Rodgers

“My district knows too well that evil people do evil things, and we know the importance of protecting our children in schools. As we approach a new school year, our children should feel safe and secure when they walk through the doors, and that’s why I introduced a commonsense bill to harden schools,” Weber told the Daily Caller before Cruz introduced his legislation. (RELATED: Ted Cruz Introduces Legislation To Send Illegal Immigrants To Martha’s Vineyard, Other ‘Democrat-Led Communities’)
“I appreciate Senator Cruz introducing the Senate version of the Protect Our Children’s Schools Act,” Weber added.

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Excusing Misbehavior Is Bad for Kids and Schools, But That’s What Biden Admin Wants to Do For ‘Equity’

REPORTED BY: WILL FLANDERS | JULY 11, 2022

In the latest example of doubling down on bad policies, the Biden administration is currently seeking to restore Obama-era federal guidance that had severe consequences for student safety. According to recent reports, the policies under consideration would investigate schools based on their rates of discipline of students with disabilities and those from racial minority backgrounds. In the past, these investigations have led to the threats of federal lawsuits against school districts and mandated a focus on reducing the rates of suspension for disabled and minority students.

All of these policies are based on the woke narrative surrounding “disparate impacts.” Under this theory, even a policy that, on its face, is entirely race-neutral, is adjudged to be racist if it affects individuals from different races or backgrounds at different rates. This narrative has come to the forefront not only in education, but also in policing with countless headlines noting that minorities are arrested and incarcerated at higher rates for a wide variety of crimes.

What is not allowed to be discussed is whether this is a result of true racism, or of differences in behavior that are correlated along race lines. Even though it is politically incorrect, most of the evidence points to the latter. The reality is that on objective measures where there is little or no possibility of racial bias, racial disparities still exist in the rates of anti-social behavior.

For instance, research has found that African Americans are far more likely than their white peers to report having been in a fight at school, and more likely to face mandatory discipline where there is little room for discretion on the part of teachers and principals. There are many explanations for why this could be the case. The most likely is differences in poverty among white and minority students, which correlates very well with student discipline disparities. Indeed, extensive research has found that poverty rates are predictive of misbehavior regardless of student race. But whatever the reason, ignoring misbehavior is likely to lead to greater harm to the students it is designed to protect.

My research on the implementation of similar policies in Wisconsin has found that students report feeling less safe in schools as rates of suspension for minority students decline.
Districts that implement kinder, gentler discipline policies see test scores decline over time.
Across the country, teachers complain that students who have engaged in behaviors that warrant a suspension are being given more lenient punishment in the name of keeping numbers down. Some have even attributed the mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School to a school system that turned a blind eye to the eventual killer’s behavior one too many times.

This lack of support for teachers is causing some of them to leave the classroom entirely. Given that majority-minority districts are some of the most in need of effective educators, this is especially problematic. Indeed, because America has many majority-minority schools, the students who bear the brunt of this policy failure are other minority students who are focusing on their schooling and want to succeed.

In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and school shutdowns, the achievement gap between white and minority students has only expanded. Parents who lacked the resources to supplement their children’s educations during the era of at-home “learning” are desperate for schools to help their kids make up for lost time. This makes fighting back against this discipline guidance from the Biden administration all the more critical. Students who want to learn deserve the chance to be in safe, non-disruptive classrooms where they can gain knowledge. The alternative where chaos reigns in the name of political correctness is unconscionable.

Dr. Will Flanders is research director for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.

WILL FLANDERS

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Washington State School Board Director Plans Sexual ‘Pleasure’ Workshops For 9-Year-Olds

REPORTED BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | JULY 06, 2022

A school board director in Washington state who also owns a sex shop in Bellingham is planning a series of workshops for children as young as 9 to discuss “sexual anatomy for pleasure” and “safer sex practices for all kinds of sexual activities.” The classes, branded under the name “Uncringe Academy” at the WinkWink Boutique, will host 9- to 12-year-olds in the first string of courses Aug. 10-11 and 13- to 17-year-olds a few days later in the second.

“The class for 9- to 12-year-olds is an introduction to topics related to relationships, puberty, bodies and sexuality,” store owner and Bellingham School Board Director Jenn Mason told Seattle radio host Jason Rantz. “We focus on how puberty works, consent and personal boundaires, defining ‘sex,’ and discussing why people may or may not choose to engage in sexual activities.”

“There’s a lot to learn when it comes to bodies, puberty, sex, gender, and relationships!” the course description reads. “That’s why WinkWink created ‘Uncringe Academy’: honest, supportive, and inclusive sex education classes to help young people of all genders and sexual identities understand this important part of their life.”

Topics discussed under an “affirming framework” will include

“the ethics and realities of sexualized media and pornography” and
“What IS sex? Kinds of solo and partnered sexual activities.”

Students who enroll under the sliding-scale fee schedule from $5 to $50 will also be taught about “the science of puberty,” “healthy relationships and relationship models,” and “gender and sexual identities.”

Mason did not respond to The Federalist’s inquiries into how the age range was selected and whether it was appropriate to present explicit material to minors.

WinkWink is advertised as a “woman-owned, all-inclusive sex shop” where “we celebrate sexual expression and exploration, banish shame, and help our customers to better love themselves and others.”

“Pleasure is our revolution,” the website reads. “We believe that normalizing, accepting, and affirming all bodies, identities, and gender experiences is an inherently political act.”

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

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TRISTAN JUSTICE

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Barr: Public Schools Are Now So Hostile to Christians, They’re Unconstitutional

A MUST READ AND SHARE -Jerry Broussard

REPORTED BY: JOY PULLMANN | JUNE 27, 2022

Religious devotion, the keystone of ordered liberty in the West, has been under systematic assault by anti-religious forces Barr called an ‘atheocracy.’

Author Joy Pullmann profile

JOY PULLMANN

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The West is facing its deepest civilizational crisis since Jesus Christ resurrected, and addressing the crisis requires removing militant secularists’ monopoly on education, former U.S. attorney general William Barr told a packed Christian conference in Chicago, Ill. on Saturday.

“We are going through a fateful crisis in western civilization. This is the deepest crisis we’ve faced in my mind since Christ,” Barr said. “That’s because our whole civilization is based on the Judeo-Christian tradition and that tradition is under sustained attack by increasingly militant secular forces.”

In a reprise of a 2019 speech at Notre Dame University that met massive corporate media backlash, Barr told the audience U.S. public schools have become hostile to traditional religion while wresting control of American children’s upbringing from their parents. This is a threat to the entire Western order, Barr said, because the unique American system of self-government cannot exist without a citizenry that is committed to traditional religion.

That’s because there are only two ways to restrain people from following disordered passions, Barr said: internal restraints, which are largely provided by one’s beliefs; and external restraints, which are typically provided by government. So, in order to have a limited government, Barr noted in an explicit echo of the American Founders, citizens must practice self-restraint. Such self-restraint is primarily developed through religious devotion, he said. But religious observance, the keystone of ordered liberty in the West, has been under systematic assault by anti-religious forces Barr called an “atheocracy,” his amalgam of the words “atheist theocracy.” These anti-religious forces now control the minds of American kids due to their monopoly on U.S. education institutions.

“The threat today is not that religious people are about to establish a theocracy in the United States, it is that militant secularists are trying to establish an atheocracy,” Barr said. Barr also spoke to The Federalist about the asymmetric justice being carried out under Joe Biden by the agency he has led twice, the U.S. Department of Justice.

In a 2021 interview with the legal nonprofit Alliance Defending Freedom, Barr said anti-religion leftists have effectively turned public schools into “secular-progressive madrassas.” In his Chicago speech on Saturday, the nation’s former top lawyer told the audience this state of affairs is likely a violation of the Constitution’s ban on government establishment of one religion over others, as well as a violation of the Free Exercise Clause that forbids the government from interfering with Americans’ religious obligations.

“What we’re living through is not a situation where religion is intruding into the government’s rightful arena, it’s exactly the opposite: It’s that government and politics is usurping the role of religion,” Barr said.

Barr told the sold-out Chicago audience at the 2022 conference of the Christian radio show “Issues, Etc.” that American politics now aligns with religious beliefs. The dichotomy in American life is no longer about prudential issues but religious ones: whether one acknowledges an objective, external, unchanging reality ordered by a transcendent deity or whether one insists the material world is all there is, which makes one’s god the self.

This anti-God materialism now maps onto and fuels political leftism, Barr said:

When a purely materialist worldview takes hold in society, it’s drawn to a messianic utopianism. Its adherents become enthralled with the idea that the meaning of life, what gives them purpose and meaning, is to be found in the quest for a perfect earthly society. The manipulation of the material world to achieve some form of nirvana here on earth. And the means used is achieving political power.
The main obstacle to this earthly paradise is the existing structure, conventions and superstitions like religion. Any obstacle to our earthly paradise has to be torn down.
These ideas are represented by the progressive movement in the United States. It basically is an ersatz religion that gives them a sort of truncated version of the place filled by religion in people’s lives. It also explains the bitterness in our politics today. Because once you adopt this view, then your political opponents aren’t just disagreeing with you, they’re evil. They are standing in the way of the salvation of mankind.
…Another part of this revolutionary era and the consequences we have been witnessing over the last couple of hundred years is a worldview that boils questions of morality solely down to an individual’s internal feelings. And their interior sense of pleasure and satisfaction. That’s how we gauge acts, whether people feel internally satisfied. And anything that advances that feeling is good, and anything that constrains or restricts that feeling is bad. This is a fundamental change in the worldview of the West.

Because the U.S. Supreme Court and other American political institutions have turned public schools from essentially Christian schools into essentially anti-Christian schools, Barr said, the U.S. school system has been erasing the faith required to sustain limited government. Multiple studies provide evidence this is true.

Banning Christianity from education created a moral vacuum that has ultimately been filled badly with political leftism. This has not only increasingly turned younger American generations against their own faith, families, and country, it has turned public schools into indoctrination camps.

“Personal and civic moral systems don’t just sort of hover in the air,” Barr explained. “They have to rest on an explanatory foundation, a metaphysical foundation. When people tell you to do something, you ask ‘Why?’ Why is it necessary to be good and what is it that consists of being good? So, the extent to which an education seeks to contribute to a student’s moral formation, it necessarily invades the space of religion when explaining what the moral values are and how they should be inherited.”

Thanks to the current Supreme Court’s adherence to the original Constitution as written, Barr said he thinks this is an opportune moment for both court and legislative work to address this existential national crisis.

“Public education was established as a melting pot that would establish a common American identity. How are the public schools doing on that front?” Barr asked, at which the audience burst into laughter. He continued: “The curriculum is now attacking the fundamental legitimacy of our form of government and our founding documents. That’s no way to bring us together as a nation.”

The most direct way to resolve this constitutional and existential crisis in American education is to end the government monopoly over the provision of education, Barr said, with full school choice. (The form of school choice that offers the fewest opportunities for hostile bureaucrats to interfere with parent choices, by the way, is education savings accounts.)

“The variety of American beliefs now makes a monopoly on education untenable,” Barr said. “You can’t finesse it anymore. You can’t pretend what’s being taught in schools is compatible with traditional religion, nor can you pretend schools are neutral anymore.”

Because anti-religious public schools hold a monopoly on public education funds, Barr noted, parents are forced to fight mostly ineffectively over what public schools teach, such as transgender ideology to kindergarteners and anti-white racism. Allowing parents to take their children’s public education dollars to institutions that match their beliefs will end such culture wars, he said, as well as help families more effectively pass their republic-sustaining faith on to their children.

This alone can’t solve the entire existential crisis of the West, Barr conceded: “It’s not a panacea, but I cannot see a way out for us and the way for Christian citizens to live in peace in this republic until we address the educational system.”

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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Education, Political

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The Public Education Swamp Refuses to Learn Anything from A Year of Embarrassing Failures

REPORTED BY: ROBERT BUSEK | JUNE 08, 2022

Instead of welcoming self-reflection and accountability, the educational establishment and its media allies are trying to gaslight parents.

ROBERT BUSEK

The 2021-2022 school year is coming to a close. As usual, students, parents, teachers, and administrators are looking over the past year to see what worked, what didn’t, and how to improve.

This year, the educational establishment’s report card is even worse than usual. It has failed to address the learning losses due to unnecessary Covid lockdowns and inspired parental uproar over critical race theory and LGBT advocacy in the classroom. It has suffered a surprising electoral defeat in Virginia and a not-so-surprising legislative setback in Florida, as well as an unprecedented number of school board recall elections. Most damaging of all, close to 2 million students have abandoned government schooling for greener (not to mention safer) pastures.

Faced with such massive public losses, one might think a little self-reflection would be in order. Instead, the educrats, with the help of their friends in the legacy media, have decided to address these serious problems by gaslighting the American public.

Avoiding Accountability at All Costs

The most recent example of this deception comes from the continuing saga of the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) effort last fall to smear parents who complain at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists.” The now infamous letter and even more infamous Department of Justice memo that followed it represent the depths to which the educational establishment was willing to sink to protect itself from accountability to the families it theoretically serves.

A recently completed independent review exonerated the NSBA’s board from culpability in this fiasco, fixing the blame for “both the ‘origin and substance of the letter’” on former Interim Director and CEO Chip Slaven. The review also found that while unnamed members of the Biden administration “collaborated” with Slaven, it “did not find direct or indirect evidence suggesting the administration requested the letter.”

In an effort to “clear the record,” Slaven recorded an interview last week with Fox News Digital, where he whined about being “betrayed” and “completely backstabbed” by the organization that he led. He also admitted that he disagreed with the NSBA board’s futile efforts to walk back the language of the letter, claiming that “it drenched an already inflamed and out-of-control narrative with another helping of gasoline.”

Neither Slaven nor the NSBA’s announcement bothered to address the elephant in the room: that the

organization sees engaged parents and community members who attend school board meetings as potential threats that need to be watched and possibly prosecuted by federal authorities. When pressed about this during the interview, Slaven lamely defended the substance of the letter he penned by saying, “The word ‘parents’ is not in the letter anywhere,” despite the examples cited in the letter’s footnotes.

The NSBA has offered vague platitudes about “advocat[ing] for local control” and being “committed to parent engagement” as it pursues its “nonpartisan” goals. These attempts to rewrite history come as 25 state school boards have chosen “to withdraw membership, participation, or dues from NSBA.”

Meanwhile, an FBI whistleblower has claimed that “counterterrorism tools” were indeed used against parents in accordance with the DOJ’s memo. It remains unclear whether these efforts continue presently despite the NSBA’s repudiation of the letter and its alleged author.

Legacy Media Provide Covering Fire

Of course, the left-wing corporate media have gone all in to support educrats’ efforts to deceive the public into believing they remain the valiant heroes in this ongoing drama. Lately, they’ve decided to focus their attacks on a favorite target of the left: homeschooling families.

This is hardly surprising, as the number of these families at least doubled during the lockdowns of 2020-2021. What’s more, that number has been largely maintained despite schools re-opening in the fall of 2021.

On Mother’s Day, Keith Olbermann fired an opening salvo in this new campaign against educational choice when he tweeted that a homeschooling mom was “ruin[ing] the lives of five innocent children.” Not to be outdone, MSNBC columnist Anthea Butler initiated a preemptive strike against Kirk Cameron’s upcoming documentary “The Homeschool Awakening” by disingenuously linking homeschooling not just with conservative Christianity, but also with the “segregation academies” of the post-Brown v. Board of Education South.

After grudgingly admitting the recent increase in homeschooling “may [in part] be attributed to Black parents and other diverse groups” who might not otherwise dare to disagree with her leftist party line, Butler ended her hatchet job with a dire warning:

Homeschooling may have greater appeal now because of these debates and the desire for parents to play a big part in their children’s educational life. It may also arise out of pandemic concerns, but parents unfamiliar with the existing networks of homeschooling run the danger of being drawn into Christian conservative networks and theocratic teaching. [Cameron] says that people choosing homeschooling are having an awakening, but the public needs to awaken to the reality that public schools may disappear if people with his extreme beliefs have their way.

The left’s message to parents is loud and clear: Exercise your right to homeschool your kids and you are complicit in the cold-blooded murder of public schooling.

Institutional Suicide

In these efforts, Slaven, Olbermann, Butler, and their comrades studiously deflect from the simple truth: If American government-run schools are dying, it is not a case of murder, but of suicide.

The self-inflicted wounds keep coming despite all the warning signs of the past academic year. Last month, the school district in Kiel, Wis., accused three middle schoolers of sexual harassment for failing to refer to another student by her chosen pronouns. What parent wants to go through that as a consequence of sending his kids to public schools?

Meanwhile, in Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools is planning to adopt a policy to suspend or even expel students who “maliciously misgender” classmates. The vote, originally scheduled for May 26, has been suspiciously delayed until June 16, perhaps so the happy chaos of the last day of school will allow the board to avoid further public scrutiny and outrage.

As kids across the nation start their summer vacations, the battle for their minds and souls rages on. True to form, the educational establishment fights dirty, using cheap manipulation tactics to distract the public from its pursuit of ideological “business as usual.”

Robert Busek is a Catholic homeschooling father of six who has taught history and Western Civilization in both traditional and online classrooms for over twenty years. His essays have also been published in The American Conservative and The American Spectator. The views he expresses here are his own.

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Education, Political

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Why Are So Many Kids Rejecting Christianity? Look At Their Parents

COMMENTARY BY: PAMELA DANZIGER | MARCH 28, 2022

The education and scientific establishments have been co-conspirators in propagating their secular worldview and banishing the biblical one.

PAMELA DANZIGER

The Cultural Research Center (CRC) is out with a new study comparing the number of American parents of children under age 13 who hold a biblical Christian worldview with those who adhere to competing secular alternatives. The results are a damning indictment of Americans’ rejection of or simple indifference to a biblical worldview.

Across all parents of pre-teens, only 2 percent hold a biblical worldview, which is defined as “consistently interpreting and responding to life situations based on biblical principles and teachings.” Those with a biblical worldview believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God containing all moral truths.

Among all respondents, other measured worldviews (such as secular humanism, nihilism, postmodernism, etc.) garnered even fewer adherents. Fully 94 percent subscribed to “a blending of multiple worldviews in which no single life philosophy is dominant.”

The needle scarcely moves for all self-identified Christians (not just pre-teen parents). Only 6 percent of them look at and interpret the world through a biblical lens; that number rises to 21 percent among those attending evangelical Protestant churches.

The fact that the biblical Christian worldview has become so insignificant in the culture should be of concern to all Americans because our country, including its governing principles and legal system, was based on our founders’ biblical worldview.

All around, we see the results of our abandonment of the biblical worldview. According to CRC research, more than half of the population accepts that truth is subjective.

Without objective truth, there is no way to determine what’s real and no moral absolutes to distinguish right from wrong. So we hear the popular “my truth” refrain as the justification for any idea or behavior depending upon what feels right at the time.

Why Worldview Matters

Professor Mikael Stenmark defines worldview as “beliefs, values, and attitudes that … constitute [people’s] basic understanding of (a) who they are, what the world is like, and what their place in it is, (b) what they should do to live a good and meaningful life, and (c) what they can say, know and rationally believe about these things.”

A dividing line between a secular and a biblical worldview is the belief in how the world came to exist. Secularists hold that reality consists entirely of physical matter and forces, which can only be explained through science. For the secularist, the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution explain how all things came to be.

Those with a biblical worldview believe in an all-encompassing divine mind — i.e., God — who rules over and maintains physical matter and forces. The theistic worldview is founded on the core belief that God exists and is the creator of all things.

It is easy to see why the biblical worldview is all but extinct in the culture. Every living generation — baby boomers, Gen X, millennials, and many of the silent generation (pre-1945) — has been educated predominantly in a secular or naturalistic worldview based on the prevailing science of the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution.

Science Declares God Is Dead

The only “official” science approved to be taught in the primary grades through post-graduate education is the anti-faith naturalistic one. It’s virtually illegal to teach anything that hints at creation science or intelligent design. The National Center for Science Education proudly displays ten major court cases, including a Supreme Court ruling, that essentially ban the teaching of intelligent design.

It’s not just the education system. Mathematician and philosopher William Dembski calls the scientific establishment’s approach to intelligent design a “zero-concession policy.”

For example, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) issued a statement claiming “There is no significant controversy within the scientific community about the validity of the theory of evolution. The current controversy surrounding the teaching of evolution is not a scientific one.”

Scientists and post-graduate students who dare to challenge naturalistic-science orthodoxy are subject to professional ridicule, or loss of jobs or research funds. Peer-review journals reject their submissions, as do scientific conferences and meetings.

It’s not in support of science that the establishment defends its official position so vehemently, but to protect its secular worldview. And the American Civil Liberties Union backs them up with legal firepower a detailed statement about why students must be protected against intelligent design at all costs.

Truth Will Come Out

Not all scientists are so didactic. But the “vital few” in control have effectively kept any serious discussion of intelligent design from the rest of the scientific community. However, when they are presented with evidence supporting intelligent design, many discover truth there.

That includes scientists like astronomer Allan Sandage, who studied under Edwin Hubble and continued his work after Hubble died. Sandage’s study of astronomy and astrophysics led him to conclude there is “evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event,” or what he called a “creation event.”

Plenty of members in the scientific community see much to challenge in Darwinian doctrine. More than 1,000 academics and scientists have signed the Dissent from Darwinism petition stating, “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

The number of acclaimed scientists who challenge the establishment’s orthodoxy is growing thanks to the work of places like the Discovery Institute, the research arm of the Center for Science and Culture.

Rekindling the Discussion

The education and scientific establishments have become co-conspirators in propagating their secular worldview and banishing the biblical one. But there is hope. Belief in God “as described in the Bible” is still held by a 54 percent majority of Americans, according to a 2022 poll reported by The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd.

Noting that 72 percent of Americans agree the nation’s moral compass is “pointed in the wrong direction,” she writes, “As generations age and the push for secularism and the erasure of faith continues in American establishments such as public schools, younger people are losing spiritual influence and instruction, and with it their faith.”

That is the ultimate goal of our society’s ruling institutions, including government, education, science, medicine, and business. They are determined to wipe out faith by indoctrinating all into their secular worldview using the Big Bang and evolution as the cudgel.

So far, the scientific establishment has been successful in shutting down discussion that the Bible might be true from beginning to end. But continuing research in intelligent design and more scientists who question science’s naturalistic orthodoxy will arm the public with information to support the biblical worldview and loosen the stranglehold of the secular one on our youth and culture.

“Let there be light,” God said in Genesis 1:3. “And there was light.” Jesus said in John 8:32, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” That day isn’t here yet, but we pray it comes quickly.

Pamela Danziger is a market researcher specializing in the study of consumer behavior and motivation. Author of ten books, she shares insights as a senior contributor on Forbes.com. And as a Christian, she is co-founder of Faith Underground. She holds an M.L.S. from University of Maryland and B.A. in English Literature from Penn State.

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Political, Spiritual

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Today’s FOUR Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Tragicomedy

A.F. BRANCO | on March 24, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-tragicomedy/

Biden and Kamala are laughing stocks performing daily on the world stage demonstrating weakness for all to see.

Kamala Biden World Stage — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

A.F. Branco Cartoon – War on Womxn

A.F. BRANCO | on March 25, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-war-on-womxn/

Lia Thomas and the woke leftist destroy everything they touch including women’s sports via bio-male transgender athletes.

Destruction of Women’s Sports — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022.**

A.F. Branco Cartoon – War on Freedom

A.F. BRANCO | on March 27, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-war-on-freedom/

Teachers have declared war on capitalism. what is on full display during this strike is the anti-capitalist position taken by the nation’s teachers’ unions.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Off the Charts Sticker Shock

A.F. BRANCO | on March 28, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-off-the-charts-sticker-shock/

“Biden did that” stickers are on gas pumps all over America, but gas isn’t the only thing he’s raising.

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.

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Political

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Wisconsin School District: Parents Are Not ‘Entitled to Know’ If Their Kids Are Trans

REPORTED BY: M.D. KITTLE | MARCH 08, 2022

Madison, Wis. — Parents are “not entitled” to know their kids’ gender identity, according to a recent training session in Wisconsin’s Eau Claire Area School District.

Empower Wisconsin obtained a copy of a training slide from a late February staff development session. The 2021-22 Equity session on Safe Spaces reminds teachers that “parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned.”

“Teachers are often straddling this complex situation. In ECASD, our priority is supporting the student,” the professional development facilitator guide states. Teachers were encouraged to “Talk amongst yourselves!”

The lesson — that teachers know better than parents about what is best for their kids — is not sitting well with some community members.

“We are appalled that ECASD would display such blatant disregard for the parents and guardians of our community’s children. We are equally dismayed that current school district leadership would pressure teachers into breaking a social contract that we all know and understand—that parents and guardians hold primary responsibility and decision making for the welfare and care of their children,” said parents and school board candidates Nicole Everson, Corey Cronrath, and Melissa Winter in a joint statement.

The district’s training session is also legally suspect. A district court in 2020 issued a partial injunction against Madison Metropolitan School District’s policy allowing children of any age to transition to a different gender identity at school — without parental consent. The full case is now before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed the lawsuit on behalf of a group of parents challenging the gender identity policy “that violates the rights of parents to make important healthcare decisions on their children’s behalf.” The policy includes the following provisions:

Children of any age can transition to a different gender identity at school, by changing their name and pronouns, without parental notice or consent.
District employees are prohibited from notifying parents, without the child’s consent, that their child has or wants to change gender identity at school, or that their child may be dealing with gender dysphoria.
District employees are even instructed to deceive parents by using the child’s legal name and pronouns with family, while using the different name and pronouns adopted by the child in the school setting.

It’s not clear whether the Eau Claire Area School District has a similar policy.

The school board candidates are demanding district administrators issue an apology to teachers for “placing them at odds with families and also to parents and guardians for breaking the trust and partnership that is critical for thriving students and a stellar school district.”

An apology doesn’t appear to be forthcoming. ECASD Superintendent Michael Johnson issued a statement to Empower Wisconsin asserting the district is upholding its responsibility to maintain an educational environment that is “equitable, safe and inclusive for all students.”

“Our staff often find themselves in positions of trust with our students. The staff development presentation shared extensive data and information to assist our staff members in our ongoing efforts to create a safe and supportive learning environment for all students,” Johnson said in the statement. “The ECASD prides itself on being a school district that makes all students feel welcome and safe in our schools.”

The superintendent said the staff training focused on data showing students who identify as non-heterosexual have a higher incidence rate of mental health issues than heterosexual students. But critics say a school’s commitment to “equity and inclusiveness” does not give license to educators to hide important information from parents and guardians.

Cronrath, Everson, and Winter are among seven candidates, including two incumbents, running for three open seats on the school board next month. The three jumped into the race because they were concerned about the eroding of parental rights in the district. They say Eau Claire schools’ “blatant disregard for parental rights and responsibilities” has been creeping into the district’s classrooms. The latest training session sends three very dangerous messages to parents and the wider community, the candidates assert.

1. Schools are in control of children, not parents and families—When you entrust your child into the walls of ECASD, you no longer have the right as a parent to be informed of major developments in your child’s school life. In fact, you must ‘earn it.’
2. Current Leadership is willing to pit teachers against parents—Open communication between the classroom and home has always been critical to healthy school communities and student development. ECASD is putting teachers in a difficult and dishonest position by instructing them to actively withhold information from parents.
3. What goes on in the walls of ECASD is privileged information—By indicating that information about your child is ‘knowledge that must be earned,’ ECASD is setting a dangerous precedent. If identity questions for your child can be hidden from you, is diet, curriculum, healthcare, inappropriate relationships, mental health concerns, etc. also no longer the business of parents? Just what are parents and guardians allowed to know and when?

The Republican-led state legislature passed a Parental Bill of Rights that would prohibit school policies that infringe on a parent’s or guardian’s role as the primary caregiver of their child. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat and the former state superintendent, is likely to veto the bill.

Eau Claire Area School District has a history of overreach. Last fall, school officials worked with the local health czar in removing a 14-year-old girl from school after someone in her class tested positive for Covid-19. The girl and her mom resisted, accusing authorities of abusing their powers. The county health director then sought a court order to have the girl forcibly removed from school.

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Education, Political

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Meet The Sex Shop Founder Who Is Grooming Children Through Books In School Libraries

REPORTED BY: SPENCER LINDQUIST | INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM | FEBRUARY 16, 2022

This article features obscene quoted material.

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.

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Education, Family, Political

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Will A ‘Parental Bill Of Rights’ Finally Enforce Government School Transparency?

Reported BY: RICH CROMWELL | FEBRUARY 10, 2022

mom holding kid's hand walking into school

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.

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Another Unhinged Professor Has Been Exposed as a Pedophilia Apologist

REPORTED BY: SPENCER LINDQUIST | FEBRUARY 03, 2022

This article contains obscene quoted material.

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.

🚨🚨🚨 Professor says an adult wanting to have sex with a kid is accepted as being wrong but “it’s not obvious to me that it is in fact wrong” pic.twitter.com/ygC5nuHDNa
— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) February 2, 2022

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.”

It just keeps getting worse! @FredoniaU this guy needs to be fired ASAP pic.twitter.com/mgOi1spSxt
— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) February 2, 2022

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.

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Study: Free Pre-K Programs Like Those Pushed by Biden Actually Hurt Kids

Reported by BRYAN BABB, CONTRIBUTOR | February 02, 2022

universal-pre-k-randi-weingarten-build-back-better-education-tennessee — **(Photo by Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images)**

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.

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California School District Tells Kids: ‘Attacking Whiteness Is Not Enough’

REPORTED BY: SPENCER LINDQUIST | FEBRUARY 02, 2022

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

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Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – San Fran Nanny

A.F. BRANCO on February 2, 2022 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-san-fran-nanny/

Nancy Pelosi says she’s running for reelection again in 2022 because of the children.

Nancy Pelosi Election 2022 — Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2022

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

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Dallas Private School Lies to Parents About Teaching Students Racism

REPORTED BY: SPENCER LINDQUIST | JANUARY 27, 2022

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.

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Joy Pullmann Op-ed: If Parents Pulled Their Kids from School for Covid Insanity, It Would Already Be Over

COMMENTARY BY: JOY PULLMANN | JANUARY 26, 2022

Young man in a mask at high school graduation

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.

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Wisconsin Parents Join National Crusade To Wrestle Their Kids Back From Left-Wing Government Schools

Reported BY: KYLEE ZEMPEL | JANUARY 11, 2022

Wisconsin parents town hall with Rebecca Kleefisch

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.”

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?”

[WATCH: Meet The Parents: How The Moms And Dads Of Loudoun County Took Back Virginia]

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.”

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.

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No, Those Who Pushed Lockdowns Can’t Hide from the Consequences Now

Reported BY: JOY PULLMANN | JANUARY 11, 2022

Americans are starting to feel the increasing collateral damage from our unprecedented, ineffective, and ill-advised Covid lockdowns. It was known before March 2020 that lockdowns would cause lifelong and avoidable damage to billions, yet the world’s ruling classes who claim to have earned their place atop a “meritocracy” strenuously demanded such damage be inflicted especially on children and other vulnerable people.

This ruling class used all their massive financial, communications, and government powers to ensure these tragic outcomes, even though anyone who was an actual expert—or, like me, just someone who reads and has common sense—predicted this false “cure” would hurt worse than the disease.

Now that people are beginning to more deeply feel the foreseeable evil consequences of ruling class responses to a novel virus, that ruling class is pulling what propaganda experts call a “limited hangout.” That’s admitting to bits of the truth in order to re-establish yourself as a credible authority while attempting to keep the whole truth hidden.

Why are they all of the sudden simultaneously changing the narrative, and effectively admitting that they have been over-counting Covid hospitalizations? Why is it so coordinated and simultaneous? pic.twitter.com/CXpqY2G0nT
— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) January 4, 2022

So we have outlets such as The Atlantic and The New York Times, which have throughout the Covid era worked as government butt-coverers, now publishing articles admitting that lockdowns and continued rolling blackouts of school instruction is irrevocably damaging Americans, especially children and even more especially the poorest. The kids, as I pointed out in April 2020 and numerous times thereafter, will never as a generation recover.

Now that the damage is done, major corporate media organizations have decided to pivot to acknowledge just enough of the truth to cover their complicity. The Atlantic, for example, last week published an article titled “America’s Covid Rules Are A Dumpster Fire” (It took you two years to figure out what was apparent within the first month?).

CNN’s Brian Stelter recently did a segment acknowledging the foreseeable “mental health crisis” from lockdowns that is causing suicides, ruining marriages, putting formerly perfectly normal kids into rocking fetal positions, and erasing the credibility of formerly mostly ignored “public health experts” at institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Stelter made multiple statements that have gotten numerous conservatives punished by and erased from social media, such as that “Covid zero is…an impossibility” and “the CDC has turned into a punchline.”

CNN’s Brian Stelter: “It’s so sad, but it’s true, the CDC has turned into a punchline.”

When you've lost CNN's chief propagandist… you've truly, truly lost. pic.twitter.com/4hjCuh2H5g
— Jason Rantz on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) January 9, 2022

Where was Stelter a year and a half ago, when data reflecting the exact same outcomes were also plentiful? Heck, Stelter was still legitimizing Covid panic one month ago, when CNN and other news organizations reinstituted lockdown measures amid omicron panic they helped inflame. Six months ago, Stelter was indicating Fox News had “blood on its hands” for reporting less hysterically than all the other major media organizations about Covid.

Clearly, Democrats are becoming ensnared by their own trap, and they’re trying to get out with this public reversal of their messaging. The limited hangout is afoot.

Brave NYT truth-teller David Leonhardt also recently published an article and an accompanying tweetstorm on the topic.

“The number of E.R. visits for suspected suicide attempts by 12- to 17-year-old girls rose by 51 percent from early 2019 to early 2021, according to the CDC,” he tweeted.

“Data now suggest that many changes to school routines are of questionable value in controlling the virus’s spread. Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. Other interventions, like forcing students to sit apart from their friends at lunch, may also have little benefit,” he noted in the article.

No sh-t, Sherlock. So why did The New York Times run hit pieces on Trump medical advisor Scott Atlas for being one of the few scientists courageous enough to point this long-ago known data out more than a year ago, when the damage could have been mitigated? Why did Stanford University colleagues and formerly respected medical journals, boosted by corporate media attack campaigns, try to discredit Atlas and colleagues such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for saying things The New York Times, Atlantic, and CNN are admitting now?

Why did the CDC punish world-renowned vaccine scientist Dr. Martin Kulldorff for publicly disagreeing with them on vaccine safety? Why does Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook shadowban nearly every Federalist article on anything touching Covid-19, and why did they spend two years on massive information suppression campaigns against scientists, politicians, podcasters, and just ordinary citizens who had some questions, contrary data, and objections to elites’ demanded Covid response?

Because it was politically expedient to sacrifice science, Americans’ civil rights, human lives, and the world’s future then, and it is not politically expedient to face the consequences for that choice now. And they think nobody can or will hold them accountable for their deadly and despicable lies.

All the misery these too-late admittals underscore appears to be true, but it also could have been prevented. CNN and The New York Times not only did nothing to help prevent this kind of irreversible damage, they willingly, even gleefully, participated in this completely unwarranted mass abuse of Americans. The left lied, children committed suicide.

The corporate left’s morally abominable Covid propaganda operation demands justice. The people who could and should have known, and in fact likely did know, that lockdowns would harm millions of innocents while not protecting the vulnerable can never be trusted again.

Did any of these people tell the truth back when it could have saved the generation that comprises the world’s future? Nope. They not only watched it happen, they cheered it on and viciously ostracized all who told the truth.

All these people have erased all their moral authority and their claims to expertise. The same goes for all the education “experts” and “leaders” who didn’t spend the last two years screaming at the top of their lungs that school shutdowns are a stupid, scientifically unwarranted, and evil idea. Yes, that’s basically all of them.

Experts who knowingly allow mass child abuse because they don’t want to harm their careers are not experts, they are cowards. They deserve not one ounce of public trust or even to retain their jobs. They certainly should have no public funds nor authority over any portion of the upbringing of American children.

Not one parent or elected official should give these education and public health “experts” the time of day. In a time of dire need, these keepers of the nation’s children and controllers of billions in public funds piled American children on a funeral pyre, lit it on fire, and cheered as it burned. Requiring that they find a more honest line of work would be an act of mercy.

These “experts” and “leaders” have shown themselves to be grossly incompetent at discharging their crucial public trust and duties. They should be relieved of those duties as soon as possible. If state lawmakers will not do it, citizens must. If they do not, they are also complicit cowards and also deserve to be sanctioned and socially shamed for their willingness to sacrifice the most vulnerable for their personal comfort.

For a long time now, American parents have registered deep dissatisfaction with the public schools they feel forced to stick their kids in. Even before lockdowns, unscientific and education-damaging forced masking in schools, ridiculous repeated quarantines of healthy kids, and rolling “brownouts” of in-person schooling, polling shows most American parents wish they didn’t feel like the public schools in their ZIP code were their only option.

After all this incompetence-imposed life chaos, the current surge of parent outrage at local school board meetings is only the tip of the spear. As more evidence emerges of the unnecessary harms we knew beforehand would result from lockdowns, public anger will only grow. It won’t be limited to schools, either.

If more exciting school board meetings, primaries for craven politicians, and parents yanking funding from schools that don’t serve them are what it takes to run every one of these moral cretins out of every position of power they’ve abused throughout their careers, then go, Americans, go. Do it for the kids. Our future will remember who stood up for the truth, lives, and liberties, and who made billions of precious humans needlessly suffer.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Sign up here to get early access to her next book, “How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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500 School Districts Publicly Declare Only Woke Teachers Need Apply

Reported BY: JANE ROBBINS | JANUARY 10, 2022

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.”

What types of discrimination do Kendi and his disciples approve? Examples abound. White students may be shamed in classroom “privilege walks” or “privilege deconstruction” sessions. Black or Hispanic students may be held to lower standards of behavior. Programs for gifted students may be abolished.

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.

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Critical Race Trove From California District Tells Students How To Use Witchcraft On People Who Say ‘All Lives Matter’

Reported By Spencer Lindquist | DECEMBER 6, 2021

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 rant from 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.

Another ADL resource condemns colorblindness and provides carefully crafted methods to indoctrinate white students with the idea that they have privilege without incurring backlash while a “Racial Equity Resource Guide” advertises the White Privilege Conference.

Top-Down Pushing Critical Race Theory On Students

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.

Update: After publication, CUHSD removed the Black Lives Matter Resource Guide. CUHSD’s original equity resources list can be viewed here.

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.

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Matthew Cochran Op-ed: Amid The Parent Surge, Republicans Can Either Lead, Follow, Or Get Out Of The Way

Commentary By Matthew Cochran | NOVEMBER 9, 2021

Americans have two political parties, both of which we loathe. We take turns punishing one by rewarding the other. Our political elites depend on this vicious cycle, and it’s why the only thing both parties ever seem to agree on is screwing ordinary Americans like a two-headed weasel in heat.

It’s easy to think it’s merely that vicious cycle at work in Virginia’s recent election upset: Democrats came out hard in favor of enabling bathroom rape, teaching kids that white skin is evil, and alerting the FBI about parents who expressed concern over such things.

So they got punished for it, and now Republicans have a new opportunity to squander. After that, Americans would normally punish the GOP for failing their mandate by reelecting Democrats who finally rediscovered how to shut up about their true intentions for five minutes.

But the opportunity presented to Virginia Republicans goes beyond another chance for the GOP to suckle on a fresh serving of voters’ goodwill. The massive rightward shift in Virginia wasn’t just business as usual. It was driven by a growing number of parents choosing to reclaim their authority over their households.

Parents Awaken to Their Responsibilities

Providence has given parents the awesome responsibility to raise and provide for the well-being of their children. Like any true responsibility, it comes with the authority to carry it out. When parents are unable to fulfill those responsibilities alone, they delegate.

For example, if parents cannot reliably protect their household from murderers, rapists, and robbers, they collaborate with institutions that can. If they cannot adequately educate their children alone, they enlist the help of teachers. This delegation is ultimately why any and every government institution exists: to assist families in some way or another.

It is precisely this authority Democrat Terry McAuliffe openly tried to usurp. As a result, the election became a referendum on whether children belong to the state. Enough parents were willing to say “no” that a blue state turned red overnight.

Parents can be tricked into delegating their authority to the unfit if they can plausibly tell themselves their children will be fine. The public school system is proof enough of that.

But the past couple of years have rapidly eroded that plausibility. We’ve seen schools forcibly cover children’s faces and isolate them from friends over an illness that poses virtually no threat to them. Remote learning also exposed their curriculum to an extent most parents had never witnessed before. The promotion of sexual degeneracy by schools is likewise coming home to roost more and more often.

Justice Delayed Is Justice Denied

It’s also not just Virginia and not just the schools. Our state and federal governments have spent two years devastating our economy, stripping our stores bare, and inflating our currency, making it harder than ever to care for our children. Our media has spent even longer lying to us about all this and more, and it is only doubling down on censorship for the sake of our elites. Worst of all, the Biden-Harris administration has tried to threaten our families with destitution unless we submit to vaccines whose risks often far outstrip any potential benefit.

These are not things parents will forget—especially when committed by those to whom we delegated our authority for the sake of our children. There are also limits to how long any parent is willing to simply wait and hope for improvement before taking action for our children’s sake.

This reclamation of authority by parents is still a work in progress, certainly—McAuliffe only lost by two points, after all. But it is in progress, and it’s not easily reversible.

Once a parent realizes someone has threatened his child, he will never trust that person again. If parents cannot disassociate the people threatening them from the institutions these people run, then they will not trust the institutions either.

Nobody who’s gotten a good look at the true face of progressivism is going to forget it anytime soon. This new dynamic is not stopping. It is accelerating.

If Republicans Don’t Use Their Power, They’re Toast

That brings us to the opportunity for Republicans. I’ve seen a lot of people are calling this a seismic shift in government. But the only reason parents voted for Republicans is that they still hold out hope that the GOP might willingly serve on their behalf.

Should that hope prove false, parents won’t stop trying to reclaim their authority; they will just start doing so in even more earth-shaking ways. One way or another, America’s vicious two-party cycle is not going to persist for much longer. This is the bare minimum Republican office-holders need to do to keep that hope alive.

First, education needs to be addressed, and a few token policy changes aren’t going to cut it. Those faculty and administrators who betrayed parents’ trust need to be removed.

The person who was distributing pornography to your children in school, for example, won’t suddenly become trustworthy because someone makes a rule. The same is true of teachers and administrators who hate your child because of her skin tone. Those people need to go—some fired, some even prosecuted.

Public universities that train teachers to act this way likewise need to be addressed. No program peddling degeneracy and critical race theory to aspiring educators should receive any state funding.

To the timid who complain, “But that’s cancel culture!” I simply respond, “Yes.” If someone starts shooting at your children, you aren’t “sinking to their level” by returning fire. It is parents’ moral obligation to fight back. Leftist institutions chose to escalate to this level of aggression, and they can choke on the consequences.

Yes, this will certainly be a long and difficult battle, which is why parents should immediately be given school choice until it’s resolved. Let parents take their tax dollars away from these errant institutions so they can enlist the help of real schools instead.

Faith In Election Integrity Must Be Restored

Republicans’ second job should be to decisively end voter fraud in their municipalities so parents are guaranteed a voice in their government. There is no point in winning votes if we lose on counting votes.

Do a full forensic investigation of elections you won whether you think there was fraud or not. Prosecute every violation you find whether it made a difference in the outcome or not. And after the investigation, enact common-sense fraud control to address everything you found.

Americans deserve to have confidence in their elections, and parents need to know they still have a say. Republicans need to teach by example that any state or municipality that refuses to transparently ensure the fairness of its elections is doing so because they have something to hide.

Third, Republicans need to use their state and local offices to protect people against the corporations and the federal government that are actively attacking families. Ban corporate mask and vaccine mandates. Provide compensation and other assistance for people being fired for their consciences. Enact laws explicitly holding corporations responsible for the side-effects of any medical treatment they mandate. And, of course, prevent schools from forcing vaccines and other procedures on students—or encouraging such things behind their backs.

Sanctuary States for Right Voters

Now that federal officials are trying to classify outspoken parents as domestic terrorists, states and municipalities will also need to protect their people from those agencies. Republicans should be as diligent about creating sanctuary cities for their own people as the Democrats are about creating sanctuaries for illegal aliens.

Republicans and other conservatives have been great at making careers out of complaining about the left, but that isn’t going to cut it anymore. Parents are finally acting like parents again and taking back their God-given authority. They are offering Republicans a chance to assist them. They aren’t going to stop taking action just because Republicans fail yet again.

Neither are they going to stop because leftists call them racist for the thousandth time. Not only is everyone growing numb to such histrionics, they cease to matter when our children are under threat.

The left can complain about white women voting for white kids all they want, but mothers and fathers are almost always going to vote for their children—not because they’re white, but because they’re their children. No adequate parent really cares about someone’s motive for viciously attacking his family; parents are still going to defend their kids no matter what it takes.

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Wisconsin Parent Goes After Kenosha School District For Illegally Barring Her From Observing Son’s Class

Reported By Kylee Zempel | NOVEMBER 4, 2021

**Photo Alexroberson/Wikimedia Commons**

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.

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Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – New Teacher

A.F. BRANCO on October 17, 2021 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-new-teacher/

The Left wants to indoctrinate our kids with radical Ideas about sex and pornography.

03 Sex Ed Teach AN 1080 — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.**

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Stupid Policy Tricks

A.F. BRANCO on October 18, 2021 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-stupid-policy-tricks/

Biden and his administration’s policies are turning America into one big Dumpster fire.

03 Dumb ster LI 1080 — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.**

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

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Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Kids at Risk

A.F. BRANCO on October 1, 2021 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-kids-at-risk/

The Education system is out of control and could use a little parental control against the likes of McAuliffe.

Parents in Education — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.**

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Art of the Steal

A.F. BRANCO on October 4, 2021 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-art-of-the-steal/

Biden is trying to build back better our country into bankruptcy disguised as infrastructure.

Build Back better Act — **Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.**

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

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Teachers Union Publishes Instruction Manual from Hell – Here’s the Sick How-to Guide

Reported by Mike Landry | August 5, 2021

Prepare to be patted on the head.

And listen for the “Tsk, tsk, you don’t really understand what we’re about, dear.” That’s how it will be in Minnesota and probably elsewhere if a leftist teachers union can spread its ideas on how to respond to its promotion of critical race theory.

Before reading the following, you might want to take a deep breath and exhale or whatever it is you do to reduce stress. You might have to do that after reading it, too.

Education Minnesota is trying to counter growing community pushback against CRT around the state, so it has published a guide on how teachers should respond, a copy of which was obtained by Powerline and publicized by Minnesota’s Alpha News. First of all, the union tells teachers not to call what they’re teaching critical race theory. They know parents are catching on. And the guide presents buckets of mush designed to obscure the issue and talk down to critics.

It’s a classic snow job using the special language of “educanto,” a term coined by the late Paul Greenberg, public school critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning Arkansas newspaper editor. Education Minnesota tells teachers that when asked why they teach kids that all white people are racist, they should give the following response:

“First off, I’m thrilled you’re taking such a deep interest in how and what our kids are taught, a conversation that I feel is long overdue.
“What I know most Americans believe is that we expect our students — whatever their color or background — to be able to learn hard truths and handle honest history and civics.”

May I pat your head?

“I believe in children’s potential to meet new challenges and have an honest reckoning, and when we try to edit and distort our history, we are doing them, and our future, a disservice. My loyalty is to children and who and what they can become.”

That’s how teachers should respond to your question about their “evil white people” push. And, of course, as the left always says: It’s for the children.

Education Minnesota does more than purr in its teacher voice. In its guide for its union members, it provides does some hard-knuckle political messaging against CRT critics by presenting “Key Concepts for Responding.”

Here are excerpts:

“Seize the moral high ground and engage on our terms. With attention on education, let’s talk about the teaching and curricula we support and communicate how it benefits all students.”
“Ascribe motivations to the opposition. Instead of reflexively repeating the opposition’s claims to dispel them (e.g. ‘we are not teaching grade schoolers about XYZ’) talk about why they’re attacking standards, equity and classroom educators.”
“Bring the conversation back to what we want. Don’t stay on defense.”
“Avoid the academic term ‘critical race theory. This phrase, unfamiliar to most audiences, has been redefined by the political right as an all-purpose racial dog whistle. Talk instead about the more honest and more complete education our students deserve.”
“[I]t is so disappointing to see that a few billionaires, and the promoters and talking heads they pay for, have launched a national campaign to mislead Americans about the lessons educators teach about history, culture, gender and politics.”
“Once again, they’re trying to distract and divide us so we don’t demand the richest 1 percent and the largest corporations pay what they owe for what our communities need, like affordable health care for all.”

Leftist educators try to hide what they’re teaching, but word is getting out. The Center for the American Experiment has been monitoring CRT in Minnesota and produced a video noting instances of it. It found that in Burnsville, fourth-graders were reading a book that said police officers were “mean to black people but nice to white people” and deliberately shot black men.

The video cited officials in the Minneapolis suburb of Hopkins as saying school operations were built on “white supremacy” values of logic, linear thinking, perfectionism, objectivity and “requiring black students to turn in assignments on time.” Letter grades are gone since they are part of “a dominant white culture.”
White Bear Lake sixth-graders were divided into groups based on race, sex, religion and place of birth and told to address issues of oppression and privilege.
Edina kindergarteners through second-graders did an exercise on how to identify themselves by their skin color. Kindergarten through second grade!
St. Louis Park scrapped the gifted and talented program, opening it to everyone and focusing on “anti-racist talent development.”
Minnesota teachers are taking anti-racism training, which, in effect, advocates new forms of racial discrimination, according to the video.

It’s not known if Minnesota schoolchildren are learning, like first- and second-graders in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, that “whiteness is a bad deal” and that if you are white, you essentially are a devil oppressing people of color, as reported Wednesday in a RealClear Policy piece that included shocking curriculum photos.

Education Minnesota defines CRT as “an academic framework that is more than 40 years old and is centered on the idea that racism is systemic, not just a product of individual bias or prejudice, and embedded in our policies legal structure.”

Indeed, CRT came from legal theorists during the 1970s and ’80s. The problem is it left the campus, and no matter how groups like Education Minnesota try to hide it, it is gumming up primary and secondary education.

Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist scholar and social commentator whose gravitas stems from also having been a farmer, points out a problem with woke nonsense being dreamed up on the college campus. College professors, Hansen has said, were once like court jesters of old. They could say all kinds of crazy things and no one was offended, not even the king, because everyone knew professors, like jesters, had no real power. Now, according to Hansen, crazy ideas have escaped the campus and are setting public policy.

It’s part of corporate wokeness, too.

Classic Marxism may have hit some resistance since its call for dividing people by income and class could be hindered by the relative affluence of most of the U.S. population, at least by world standards. But for sure, today’s Marxists are focused on dividing by race and gender to class. And critical race theory fits right in.

There’s a lot to process here: lying teachers, overt racism, emotional oppression upon very young children. You might want to take that deep breath.

Mike Landry, Contributor,

Mike Landry, PhD, is a retired business professor. He has been a journalist, broadcaster and church pastor. He writes from Northwest Arkansas on current events and business history.

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Graphic Content Warning: Crowd Gasps as Fed-Up Parents Read School’s Pornographic Books Out Loud at Board Meeting

Reported by Christine Favocci | July 30, 2021

If there’s one good thing that came out of school closures, it’s that parents finally had a window into what their kids were being exposed to in the classroom — and many were horrified by what they saw.

That’s exactly what happened in Carmel, Indiana, where parents learned the full scope of the perversion being peddled to their children. The school libraries there are filled with storybooks pushing radical transgender ideology, lessons on masturbation for middle schoolers, and novels with explicit sexual scenes including one describing a bloody rape.

At a meeting of the Carmel Clay School Board on Monday, outraged parents took turns reading excerpts from these materials. They are so objectionable that it’s necessary to issue more than our usual warning of graphic content. Watch at your own risk — but keep in mind, this smut is being made available to schoolchildren.

WARNING: The following video contains graphic language that some viewers will find offensive.

One parent spoke out against the “global campaign to promote sexualized material to grade school children which is heralded by the UN, championed by Planned Parenthood and is now making its way into the Carmel schools.”

She noted some of the titles available at elementary schools, including “Introducing Teddy: A Gentle Story About Gender and Friendship,” which uses a teddy bear to teach kids that gender isn’t determined by biology. There is also “Sparkle Boy,” about a toddler’s cross-dressing tendencies, and “Call Me Max,” in which a kindergarten girl gets a teacher to call her by a boy’s name.

(Whatever happened to reading Dr. Seuss books to schoolchildren? Oh, right — canceled by the woke mob.)

Another parent read from a novel available to Carmel high schoolers that includes a pornographic scene explicitly describing characters engaged in various sex acts. It’s too obscene to even summarize.

A third parent read from the book “It’s Perfectly Normal,” which is available to middle school children and promoted by Planned Parenthood. It teaches kids how to masturbate and is filled with nitty-gritty details.

A book called “Crank” details a disturbing rape that transpires when a young couple goes into the woods to get drunk and high on meth.

“If I had known you were just going to lay there, I wouldn’t have bothered,” the rapist tells his victim on the car ride home.

The video of Monday’s school board meeting was uploaded to YouTube by the group Unify Carmel, which is raising the alarm on the wokeism pervading the city’s public schools.

Alvin Lui, a parent activist, told WIBC in May that he fled California to escape radical leftist ideology — only to find it in his new home in Indiana.

“If I [raised] my daughter in California, the schools and the culture there would teach her that her two most important things in life [are] that she’s Asian and she’s female,” he said.

Lui said he began to worry about his daughter’s new school when he saw ideas like critical race theory make their way into the curriculum, a change that no doubt came about when the district hired its first “diversity, equity and inclusion officer” in January.

“We saw a lot of little things before other people saw it because we’ve lived through it previously,” Lui said. “So for my wife and I, it kind of feels like we’re living through that same nightmare all over again except in the very beginning.”

Parents have already begun pushing back against other items on the woke agenda, but Monday’s meeting in Carmel revealed the sexual indecency introduced to children in public schools.

“If I were to read it to you, you wouldn’t be able to air it because it would be against FCC obscenity laws,” Lui told WXIN-TV. “Everyone was uncomfortable, and these are adults.”

To his credit, Carmel Clay Superintendent Dr. Michael Beresford said he wasn’t aware of the books until the meeting and pledged to look into them. Carmel certainly isn’t the only place where so-called educators are sexualizing children — leftists are hard at work across the country. They know that sexually active kids make great abortion clients for Planned Parenthood and turn into Democratic voters when they become impoverished single parents.

Transgender advocates know that if they can get a hold of kindergarten minds, they can recruit a generation of confused children. The doctors who prescribe the puberty blockers and perform the “transition” surgeries can get that much richer.

Beyond the political sphere, what we have here is a battle for the hearts and souls of American children. This perversion tailored to kids stems from a diabolical determination to spoil their innocence and set them up for a life of servitude to sin. Whether they know it or not, the teachers giving smut to their students are cooperating with the dark powers that would turn us away from God by shackling us to our basest desires. There’s no surer way to do that than to expose children to this filth early and often.

Americans now have the opportunity to see and hear exactly what’s going on in public schools — and it’s our job to do exactly what these parents did on Monday.

Christine Favocci

Christine earned her bachelor’s degree from Seton Hall University, where she studied communications and Latin. She left her career in the insurance industry to become a freelance writer and stay-at-home mother.@CFavocci Facebook

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White Student Born in Drug and Alcohol Abuse Home Asks School Board How She Can Have ‘White Privilege’

Reported by Michael Austin | June 29, 2021

One brave girl from Fishers, Indiana, had some important questions for members of her local school board last week. Fighting back tears, the girl explained to the board members how they have “failed [her] as a student.” Her comments can be seen starting around the 41:57 mark in a video on the Hamilton Southeastern Schools website.

“I have been in counseling as long as I can remember because I was adopted from foster care at age 4,” she said at the school board meeting on Wednesday.
“The things I’ve learned along the way are being challenged now when my science or math teacher is trying to teach me how to be emotionally — and why are they teaching me about sexuality and how to identity?” the girl said.
“I don’t want to hear about sexuality during class in front of other students because that should be a private thing. This should be left in the homes and between students and counselors or one-on-one conversations.‘
“This has been a very traumatic part of my past, and the more that the school focuses on sexuality, the more it affects me and my anxiety.”

Following that, she revealed that she had been accused of having “white privilege” by school staff members.

“I was told I have white privilege. How can a child born in an abusive, drug and alcohol abuse home who lost her entire biological family, that has experienced all forms of abuse and neglect, be privileged?” the girl asked.
“If you found a child at 15 months in a home with holes in the floor eating cat poop, would you consider them privileged? Just asking, because when I was told that, I was upset and cried myself to sleep.”

A quick look at the website of the girl’s school district confirms that far-left “equity and inclusion” propaganda is being disseminated to students. Just as she said, this propaganda focuses on sexuality and anti-racism (which teaches about the supposed prevalence of “white privilege”).

An “Equity and Inclusion” web page on the district’s website offers various “Anti-Racism/Bias Resources,” presumably for teachers, students and parents to use for educational purposes.One resource recommended by the district encourages educators to read a book by Ibram X. Kendi, a controversial scholar known for pushing the philosophy of “anti-racism.” According to Kendi, you are either an anti-racist — a progressive political activist who agrees with Kendi’s vague redefinition of racism — or a racist. In his view, there is no in-between.

“What’s the problem with being ‘not racist?’” Kendi wrote. “It is a claim that signifies neutrality: ‘I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.’ … One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist.”

In other words, vote for Democrats and radical socialist policies such as welfare redistribution — the very same policies that have impoverished the African-American community for decades — or you are a racist. These are the sorts of ideas that Hamilton Southeastern officials push on their students.

Another resource offered by the district links to a video defending the political goal of equity, also known as equality of outcomes.

In its argumentation for the necessity of equity policies, the video uses a popular meme that supposedly shows how equality, or treating people as equals, is not good enough to address supposed systemic inequity. Instead, the proponents of equity argue, in order to reach true equality of outcomes, minorities must be afforded special privileges in order to address the unique disadvantages they face.

Not only is such thinking illogical, but it is also deeply racist due to the fact that it treats minorities as helpless children in need of government aid. Moreover, as conservative commentator Ben Shapiro explained in a Feb. 2 Op-Ed, such reasoning is faulty because it fails to take into account group differences.

“This philosophy is both idiotic and perverse. It’s idiotic because all human groupings — literally all of them — will result in differential outcomes. Draw a line down the middle of any room in random fashion and the result will be unequal income distribution, criminal records, educational histories,” Shapiro wrote.
“When culture takes a hand, disparities can be more deeply rooted than random chance. Discrimination would still not be the cause of such disparity. As a basic logical matter, discrimination is not the cause of all disparity.’
“This philosophy is perverse because it attributes malice to those who have none; it fosters policy that actively discriminates, supposedly in order to alleviate unproven discrimination.”

Indeed, when it comes to the Hamilton Southeastern Schools, this philosophy certainly attributed “malice” to someone who has none.

A girl who has suffered abuse and neglect was called “privileged” just for being white.

Michael Austin

Michael Austin joined The Western Journal as a staff reporter in 2020. Since then, he has authored hundreds of stories, including several original reports. He also co-hosts the outlet’s video podcast, “WJ Live.”@mikeswriting

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Today’s THREE Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Air-Disasters

A.F. BRANCO on May 15, 2021 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-air-disasters/

Biden is turning out to be an unmediated disaster leaving many longing for Trump to return.

Biden Presidency a Disaster — Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Reading Writing and Rioting

A.F. BRANCO on May 16, 2021 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-reading-writing-and-rioting/

Rioting and violent protesting Being taught today in some Minnesota schools according to news reports.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Mullah-Bucks

A.F. BRANCO on May 17, 2021 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-mullah-bucks/

Obama money to Iran most likely used to supply rockets to Hamas who is and now firing them into Israel.

U.S. Money to Iran, then to Hamas — Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2021.

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

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DeSantis Shreds Biden: Democrats Put ‘Interests Of Education Unions’ Ahead Of ‘Wellbeing Of Our Children’

Reported By Ryan Saavedra | Feb 16, 2021 | DailyWire.com

SANFORD, FL - OCTOBER 12: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis arrives before President Donald J. Trump arrives to speak during a campaign "Make America Great Again Event" at the Orlando Sanford International Airport on Monday, Oct 12, 2020 in Washington, DC. — Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis slammed the Biden administration during a press conference this week, warning that kids will “not go back in [this] school year” under the Biden administration’s current plans and “may not even go back in the fall.”

DeSantis specifically highlighted the newly released CDC guidelines for reopening schools. The Washington Post reported that the Biden administration’s new guidelines effectively would do away with full in-person learning for the foreseeable future, even as cases drop around the country, because to have full in-person learning the rates of community transmission would need to be “quite low,” which The Post notes does not exist almost anywhere in the U.S.

“Florida schools are open for in person instruction, every single parent in this state has a right to send their kid to in person instruction,” DeSantis said during a press conference this week. “We have done it the right way, we are not going to turn back. What the CDC put out five o’clock on a Friday afternoon, I wonder why they would do it then, was quite frankly, a disgrace. It would require if you actually followed that, closing 90% of schools in the United States.”

“We have been open, they will remain open and we are not turning back,” DeSantis continued. “We’ve been open the whole time since August. We had kids doing camps and athletics and all that over the summer. And we’ve been in person as much as anybody in the country. And yet, we’re 34 out of 50 states and DC for COVID-19 cases on a per capita basis for children. Thirty-three states have more cases per capita than than Florida, for children per capita. And many of those don’t have a lot of in person instruction in school. And so there is no evidence to suggest that kids should do anything else other than be in school. This has been clear for months and months and months, we followed the data when we worked to get the parents the option to send the kids back because we had looked at what happened in Europe, places like Sweden and all these other places.”

“And it does not require another 100 billion dollars,” DeSantis continued. “The school reopening plan that makes the most sense, if you want to open schools, open them, open the door, let them come in and let them learn. And the only reason that that is not happening across this country like it is in Florida, like it is in a handful of other states, it’s one reason and one reason only, because the Democratic Party puts the interests of education unions and special interests ahead of the well being of our children and our families. These kids have been out of school in parts of this country for almost a year. And if you follow that CDC guidance, they will not go back in this this school year and they may not even go back in the fall. That is a disgrace. That is not science. That is putting politics ahead of what’s right for kids. That is putting politics and special interests ahead of what the evidence and observed experience says.”

WATCH:

Public health experts Joseph G. Allen and Helen Jenkins wrote in The Washington Post:

The new report on schools from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should be a wake-up call to parents everywhere: If they’re not back already, your kids are not going back to school full-time this year.

The report adds new and unnecessary demands that will ultimately keep millions of kids out of school. In particular, there are two items that will act as barriers: the use of community-spread metrics to determine whether schools should open, and the requirement of routine screening testing. …

The science is clear: Kids — especially young children — can get and transmit covid-19, but they are less likely to do so than adults. Kids can die from the disease, but the risk of that happening is one in a million; they are about 10 times as likely to die by suicide. Teachers also have lower risk than other occupations and can be kept safe through adherence to universal precautions.

The science is also clear that keeping children out of school is doing real harm: Loss in literacy progress. An exploding mental health crisis. Billions of missed meals. Women dropping out of the workforce. Hundreds of thousands of kids missing school. The effects are compounding daily.

Even CNN’s Jake Tapper grilled CDC Director Rochelle Walensky this week, saying that he had “high hopes that schools would be able to resume in person learning, because so many scientists and health officials, including you and Dr. Fauci and others, had been talking about the science supports opening the schools as much as possible.”

“I know that a lot of teachers are very concerned, and I know the teachers unions have been pushing back on this,” he continued. “But it sounds to me like you’re asking for 100 percent mask compliance and a number of measures that we’re never going to be able to achieve. And that makes me feel like, boy, I don’t know if the schools are ever going to open until everybody’s vaccinated.”

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Biden Turns His Back Against Those Banking on Student Loan Forgiveness Order: ‘I’d Be Unlikely To Do That’

Reported By C. Douglas Golden | Published December 28, 2020 at 7:22am

One way to keep anyone interested in politics is free money. Granted, such a thing doesn’t really exist, but — and this is particularly true when it comes to liberals — if you promise people you’ll transfer enough of someone else’s hard-earned wealth to them, their ears will remain perked-up.

This was especially evident in the 2020 election cycle when millennial and Gen Z voters weren’t particularly thrilled with Joseph Robinette Biden as the Democratic Party nominee. It wasn’t just that he came across as a cadaver-in-waiting who made strange references to record players and didn’t know where he was on not infrequent occasions, he also didn’t seem to be the kind of left-wing candidate that would fit the moment.

Polling showed both groups had a negative opinion of Biden as late as September, which didn’t bode well for voter excitement — even if younger voters preferred Biden to President Donald Trump.

And yet, according to an analysis by Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, millennial and Gen Z voters pushed Joe Biden over the top in key swing states and had a high voter engagement rate. Why, you might ask?

I’m not saying that it was necessarily a September proposal floated by Democratic leadership that stated the president and secretary of education could cancel up to $50,000 in student loan debt via executive order, but let’s face it — younger voters were pretty certain that with Biden in the White House, student loan forgiveness was going to be a top priority.

Well, at least when it comes to that executive order proposal, it seems younger voters may soon be feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse.

According to The Washington Post, Biden was speaking with a select group of columnists last week when he said he’d be unlikely to pursue any kind of executive order that involved forgiving student loans, inasmuch as he’s going to be very careful not to test the limits of rule by fiat.

“Biden also said that, as a president who wants to avoid inflaming a closely divided Congress, he plans to tread lightly when it comes to using his executive power — a declaration that no doubt will cause some heartburn on the left, where such caution is considered naive,” The Post’s Karen Tumulty wrote.

Upon his inauguration, Biden says he plans to issue executive orders to undo some of what Trump has done. He will instruct the United States to rejoin the 2015 Paris climate agreement, to protect immigrant ‘dreamers’ whose parents brought them to the United States as children, and to reinstate environmental regulations that Trump did away with.

TO READ THE REST OF THIS REPORT, GO TO https://www.westernjournal.com/biden-turns-back-banking-student-loan-forgiveness-order-unlikely/

C. Douglas Golden

Contributor, Commentary

C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal for four years.

@CillianZeal

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‘Sanctuaries of Learning’: Churches nationwide help students navigate virtual school

Reported By Ryan Foley, Christian Post Reporter | Monday, November 09, 2020

Tutors assist students with schoolwork at the Restart Learning Center, a distance learning center set up by the Los Angeles Dream Center, a faith-based nonprofit organization based in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, 2020. | Los Angeles Dream Center

As the pandemic has forced many of America’s public schools to begin the school year with remote learning, several churches and faith-based groups nationwide have opened their doors to students who don’t have internet access at home or whose parents can’t stay home with them. Among those institutions are 14 Houston-based churches belonging to the Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church that partnered with the Houston Independent School District to serve as distance learning centers.

The distance-learning centers were attended by hundreds of children before the school district’s return to in-person learning in late October. The eighth-largest school district in the United States, with the help of the UMC conference, birthed the “Sanctuaries of Learning” program to aid approximately 500 students in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. The program helped the students navigate the waters of virtual learning, a new experience for most K-12 students in the U.S.

“They lived in the neighborhood, they registered through the school, they called the school to save a place, … [and] their parents were notified about it,” said Rev. Jill Daniel, an elder in the Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.

Although the program concluded in mid-October when the school district resumed in-person learning, the program’s impact can be felt nationwide as some school districts have not yet returned to in-person classes.

In an interview with The Christian Post, Shannon Martin, director of communications for the Texas Annual Conference, explained that their regional church body “birthed this program.”

“But then as people started hearing about it … it started catching on across the country. So there are people all over the country doing this,” she said. “Other people have adopted the same name, Sanctuaries of Learning. We certainly did not copyright it. We wanted people to use it and certainly utilize the same model of working with school districts. Once there’s a good model, we want other churches and other people to be able to follow along with … the same model because it’s worked.”

Daniel said the conference started receiving calls from all over the U.S., specifically recalling phone calls from New York City, California, Colorado, Oklahoma, the Carolinas and elsewhere in Texas. They asked: “What can we do to make this happen?”

“We probably had … well over 120 or so Zoom meetings with people all over the United States and we walked a little closer with some of them,” she explained. “And it’s been amazing to just watch God doing this very new thing and blessing it so mightily.”

The pastor predicted that the establishment of the Sanctuaries of Learning program would lead to a “rebirth” of neighborhood churches because “during quarantine, we had all this time where … our churches have been that mission depot in the neighborhood, where we’ve had food distributed and people have done dinners for their neighbors and checked on one another.”

While schools in Houston have returned to in-person learning, schools in California’s Los Angeles Unified School District are not likely to return to in-person learning before January. This week, the district released data based on 10-week interim assessments showing that poor grades surged in the district’s lower-income communities.

In addition to churches, faith-based organizations have also worked to set up distance learning centers.

The faith-based nonprofit Los Angeles Dream Center established the Restart Learning Center, a “safe, socially distanced outdoor learning environment” in the parking lot of its Echo Park campus. The parking lot contains a solar panel shed that shields against heat and precipitation.

Like the Sanctuaries of Learning in Texas, the Restart Learning Center draws in students residing within walking distance of the surrounding neighborhood. Participants include attendees of both public and private schools. The Restart Learning Center operates five days a week from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. The center is free of charge.

“This will all be executed in an effort to support parents, work schedules and schooling, to cheerlead kids and to provide them a safe place and motivation center,” Matthew Barnett, pastor of the Los Angeles Dream Center, told CP.

Barnett explained that about 80 children each day attend the learning center along with a “rotating group” of students that come and go. According to Barnett, the lockdowns in Los Angeles have had an adverse impact on “the poorest of the poor.”

“I don’t think maybe people understand how much of a gap has been left between those that are in need and those who have,” he surmised.

“We had to supply more than half of the 80 kids learning tablets with our own money,” he continued. “I would say 75% of the kids get them from us.” The remainder of students use school-issued computers, he added.

How Sanctuaries of Learning came to be

Students gather outside as members of the Houston Texans visit a Sanctuaries of Learning campus in Houston, Texas on Houston Texans’ Founder’s Day. The Sanctuaries of Learning were distance learning centers set up by the Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church for children in Houston, Texas, 2020. | Jill Daniel

Daniel, who serves as director of a Texas Annual Conference initiative called “We Love All God’s Children,” explained how the Sanctuaries of Learning program came about. The initiative aims to “change the trajectory of the lives of children from birth through the end of elementary school.” It also aims to help families in underserved areas through a holistic approach that includes discipleship and early education.

“We work with all 683 United Methodist Churches in the Texas Annual Conference,” she said.

“We Love All God’s Children” has worked to set up UMC Children Centers, which the elder described as “state-of-the-art early childhood centers.” Several United Methodist Children Centers were planned to open in 2020. But because of the coronavirus pandemic, they couldn’t open this year.

“We immediately shifted from doing what we had been doing to [figuring out] how can we help our churches … in this new crazy time,” she said.

“And so one of the things I tried to keep in mind was that … my ministry area focuses on underserved children. And so it would be the children who I focus on who were not going to have access to technology, who didn’t have Wi-Fi in their house.”

Over the summer, the pastor said she began praying and trying to figure out how churches could join together to help the public school systems since it was looking very likely schools would return for the 2020-2021 school year virtually.

“And so I worked on a proposal. I went to one of our district superintendents, who’s the district superintendent over the … Central South District — that’s all the United Methodist churches within Beltway 8 in Houston,” she said. “And I pitched that idea to him. And he said, ‘I’ll tell you what … let my churches be the guinea pigs.’”

After the bishop approved her idea in early June, Daniel reached out to Dr. Grenita Lathan, the interim superintendent of the Houston Independent School District. However, she did not hear back from her right away. At the end of July, Daniel received an e-mail from Lathan, who said that she would announce the district’s plans for reopening later that week and asked if she wanted to meet with her.

“I know now that the reason she never responded was because she had no idea what Houston ISD was going to do,” Daniel explained.

“She kind of took the reins on our Zoom meeting. She wanted to join with us. She wanted to make use of all the United Methodist churches that she could that are near a neighborhood elementary school.”

District sent support staff to churches

According to Daniel, the churches needed people to oversee the safety of the students while teachers taught live from their classrooms.

“We just needed people to oversee the safety of the kids, to help if one of them has trouble logging on or that sort of thing,” the UMC elder explained.

Daniel said that the school district sent support staff to assist students at all distance-learning campuses.

“Those were people they were paying already, like cafeteria workers or bus drivers,” the reverend explained. “They were paying them but they didn’t have any work to do.”

In addition to deploying support staff, the school district also provided breakfast, lunch and an afternoon snack to all of the children participating in the program. The school district also provided personal protective equipment and a “cleaning crew that came in every afternoon” to clean the churches.

“They even came before we ever started and did a deep clean to start with. And then they also came every night and did it,” she recalled.

Daniel was amazed at what the school district provided.

“We never dreamed of that or imagined that,” she said. “If we didn’t have enough bandwidth, they brought boosters over so that everything would be good for the kids. They also sent their safety team and their property management teams around all of our churches.”

Also, the Houston Independent School District even added the churches to its liability insurance.

The Sanctuaries of Learning program was paid for in part by coronavirus relief that the Texas Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church received. Each church that participated in the Sanctuaries of Learning program received a $1,000 check.

“We were so thankful to be able to provide a safe, healthy, affirming Christian environment, positive environment for those kids to be in,” Daniel said.

Every Friday was “fun Friday” for students participating in the Sanctuaries of Learning program. Daniel told CP that on Houston Texans’ Founder’s Day, Oct. 6, the football team came out to some of the churches. Daniel recalled one cheerleader reading a book to all the kids in that school. All the children received a free T-shirt.

“One fun Friday, we had ice cream sundaes and we gave … each child a whole library from the Barbara Bush Literacy Foundation,” Daniel stated. “Each child had 25 books on their reading label to save and to take home.”

The Sanctuaries of Learning program did not come without challenges.

On the second day of school, a student at one of the campuses tested positive for coronavirus. This forced the campus to close down and anyone who worked closely with the infected student had to quarantine. For the remainder of the program, no one at any of the Sanctuaries of Learning campuses tested positive for coronavirus, however.

Daniel described the Sanctuaries of Learning program as a “game-changer for our children.”

“It’s a game-changer for mama or for daddy or for whoever is raising that child who doesn’t have to be worried every day about whether they’re safe and how and whether they’re going to get … what they need at school,” she said.

While in-person schooling has resumed in the Houston Independent School District and other large school districts nationwide, the Sanctuaries of Learning program is ready to restart should the district decide to move to online learning again.

No end to remote learning in sight for Los Angeles

A tutor assists a student at the Restart Learning Center, a distance learning center set up at the Los Angeles Dream Center, a faith-based nonprofit based in the Echo Park Neighborhood of Los Angeles, 2020. | Los Angeles Dream Center

Barnett explained that the Los Angeles Dream Center has the resources to continue operating the Restart Learning Center for the remainder of the semester. But he is “terrified of the fact that [remote learning] could go on for a whole year.”

“With the teachers afraid to go back and the union battles that are going on, this thing, I fear it will be the whole year long,” he said. “So that’s going to really test our ability to keep it going. But we’re going to give it a try.”

The Restart Learning Center program provides one tutor for every three students.

“The best thing about it is that they have somebody who’s a cheerleader next to them, pulling for them to succeed and celebrating their accomplishment,” Barnett stated. “So I think that’s the … most important thing.”

He assured that tutors are there “every step of the way” to help students with whatever questions they may have.

Barnett estimated the cost of running the center is about $300 per month per student. It costs about “$20,000 a month to operate all these stations and school.”

“We’ve invested a lot of money that we really expect not to get back,” the pastor explained. “We just did it in a labor of love. … If people want to support, they can. … It’s been a kind of a missions work for us and it’s almost like we just started helping people and we’re trying to catch up.”

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Today’s THREE Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Riding On The Black Vote

A.F. BRANCO | on August 9, 2020 at 9:54 pm | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-riding-on-the-black-vote/

Joe Biden is taking the black vote for granted with comments like ” if you don’t vote for me you ain’t black”.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Law Blocker

A.F. BRANCO | on August 9, 2020 at 10:00 pm | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-law-blocker/

Minnesota AG Keith Ellison is protecting criminals while promoting defunding the police.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Child Abuse

A.F. BRANCO | on August 10, 2020 at 7:40 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-child-abuse-2/

The Teachers Union continues to hold our children’s education hostage in order to push their radical leftist agenda.

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Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Moms on the Frontline

A.F. BRANCO | on August 2, 2020 at 7:40 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-moms-on-the-frontline/

Frustrated mothers in Minnesota and across the country want schools opened and are looking for leadership.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Pandora’s Box

A.F. BRANCO | on August 3, 2020 at 7:40 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-pandoras-box/

Mail-in voting creates the perfect conditions for voter fraud on a scale unlike we’ve ever seen.

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

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Oakland Abolishes School Police Department

Reported by JOEL B. POLLAK | 25 Jun 2020

URL of the originating web site: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/06/25/oakland-abolishes-school-police-department/

Abolish the police Oakland (Philip Pachedo / AFP / Getty)

The Oakland Unified School District abolished its own police force at a school board meeting on Wednesday night, bowing to the wishes of radical left-wing activists and the Black Lives Matter movement.

The decision came a day after the Los Angeles Unified School District board could not agree on a similar proposal. It follows nationwide demands from activists, including many Democrats, to defund or abolish the police.

The San Jose Mercury News reported:

In an unanimous vote, the board passed the “George Floyd Resolution to Eliminate Oakland Schools Police Department.” The annual $2.5 million spent on the 10 sworn officers and police administrators is instead expected to be redirected toward other student support services and restorative justice efforts.

Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell has from August until Dec. 31 to build a new alternative safety plan, which will include input from a committee of community members and other stakeholders.

Of the nearly 30 speakers who addressed the board Wednesday, all were in favor of the elimination of the police force. Some spoke about how black and brown students can feel dehumanized, disrespected and generally not safe with having police on campus. Others urged the board to set an example for the nation in their act of removing police.

The organization Black Organizing Project helped craft and bring the resolution to the board. Jessica Black, its organizing director, addressed the board about the importance of the resolution and her organization’s fight for the last 10 year[s] to remove the police from schools.

Meanwhile, across the bay in San Francisco, the board voted to sever ties with the local police department. Police provide protection for schools against gang violence in the hallways and mass shooting events.

Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly disagree with the idea of defunding or abolishing the police, though some surveys show a majority of Democrats favor the idea.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, is available for pre-order. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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School Principal Gets the Boot Because She Was Critical of BLM Pressures in a Facebook Post

Reported By Ryan Foley | Published June 22, 2020 at 9:02am

URL of the originating web site: https://www.westernjournal.com/school-principal-gets-boot-critical-blm-pressures-facebook-post/

Tiffany Riley, the principal of Windsor High School in Windsor, Vermont, faced the wrath of the PC police after failing to fully and unequivocally endorse Black Lives Matter in a Facebook post earlier this month. The backlash was so severe that she ended up losing her job.

According to the Valley News, Riley’s post June 10 made it clear that she believes that “black lives matter,” but she added a caveat that caught the ire of the leftist mob: “I DO NOT agree with coercive measures taken to get this point across; some of which are falsified in an attempt to prove a point.”

“I do not think that people should be made to feel they have to choose black race over human race,” Riley wrote, adding: “While I understand the urgency to feel compelled to advocate for black lives, what about our law enforcement?”

She also declared that “just because I don’t walk around with a BLM sign should not mean I’m a racist.”

Sadly, according to many in Windsor, including the school board, her failure to “walk around with a BLM sign” does make her a racist.

The Mount Ascutney School Board, “uniformly appalled” by her words, voted unanimously to place Riley on paid leave June 14.

Channel 3 News

✔@wcax

The Mt. Ascutney School Board has voted unanimously to place Windsor School principal, Tiffany Riley, on paid leave immediately, following a Facebook post that ‘uniformly appalled” the board. https://www.wcax.com/content/news/Windsor-School-principal-on-paid-leave-following-appalling-social-media-post-571244001.html …

Windsor School principal on paid leave following “appalling” social media post

The school board says the post does not reflect the values of the district.

wcax.com

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The district’s superintendent, David Becker, said the district will work to put together a “mutually agreed upon severance package” with Riley and justified the decision to let her go by saying, “It’s clear that the community has lost faith in her ability to lead.”

Ridiculously, Becker said he thought Riley’s Facebook page was hacked and indicated that he fully agreed with the criticism that her post was “racist.”

“I felt like a post like that, with those kinds of racial overtones and what I define as pretty much outright racist in my values system, she would have never posted that,” he said.

The fact that Riley’s community would take such umbrage at her comments should not come as a surprise. Windsor County supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by a 2-1 ratio in 2016, and the state as a whole keeps electing democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders.

In an era when American education has become just another arm of the left, Riley’s circumstances are hardly unique. Eric Thompson, a professor who taught at Moreno Valley College in California, was dismissed from his position after daring to sympathize with traditional viewpoints on marriage, gender and sexuality.

In addition to causing professors to lose their jobs, holding conservative positions can also have consequences for students who hold prominent positions on campus. Earlier this month, the president of the Florida State University Student Senate was removed from his post after daring to criticize Black Lives Matter and other liberal organizations deemed heroic by the radical left.

Despite the fact that Riley went out of her way to empathize with the point of view of her opponents and offered analysis consistent with the views of many Americans, she lost her job. What happened to Riley could have a chilling effect that will cause many people to think twice about posting anything critical of Black Lives Matter — a leftist movement dressed up as opposition to racism.

That’s the whole goal.

With Riley’s firing, diversity of opinion in education continues to shrink. According to a 2016 study from Econ Journal Watch, liberal professors outnumber their conservative counterparts by a ratio of 11.5-1 in the departments of economics, history, journalism, law and psychology at “40 leading U.S. universities.”

This liberal uniformity extends into K-12 education, with research conducted by Verdant Labs finding that “there are 97 Democrats for every three Republicans” teaching English and “87 Democrats for every 13 Republicans” among math and science teachers.

Riley’s situation is saddening but not surprising. Hopefully, what happened to her will launch a renewed movement to ensure freedom of speech in education for teachers and students alike, from kindergarten through college.

Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager’s documentary “No Safe Spaces” is definitely a good start.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ryan Foley

Ryan holds a bachelor of arts in political science from Rhode Island College. In addition to participating in the National Journalism Center’s internship program, he has written for several conservative publications.

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Washington Democrats Push Mandatory LGBTQ-Focused Sex Ed for Kindergartners

Reported by Dr. Susan Berry | 1 Feb 2020

URL of the original posting site: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/02/01/washington-democrats-push-mandatory-lgbtq-focused-sex-ed-for-kindergartners/

NEW YORK, NY – JUNE 26: A boy carries a flag during the New York City Pride March, June 26, 2016 in New York City. This year was the 46th Pride march in New York City (Photo by Eric Thayer/Getty Images)

Democrats in the State House are pushing House Bill 2184, a measure that would mandate “comprehensive sexual health education” by the year 2022.

Informed Parents of Washington, a group that describes itself as “a coalition of parents dedicated to fighting Comprehensive Sexxx [sic] Education in our schools and legislation that imposes upon parental rights,” is warning parents about the dangers of the legislation.

The Democrat narrative behind the legislation is that such a bill would establish “equity,” i.e., equal access to sexual health information, especially with regard to the topics of “affirmative consent” and the needs of LGBTQ students.

A work group composed of 16 women that reviewed K–12 sex ed provisions in the state concluded in its final report that “members agree all students would benefit from K–12 comprehensive sexual health education.”

The conclusion, however, was reached after the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) conducted a survey about the issue and received more than 10,000 responses, nearly three-fourths of which came from females. Ironically, the work group found 58 percent of survey respondents said comprehensive sexual health education (CSHE) should not be required in grades K–12, and 42 percent said that it should be required.

Nevertheless, the work group stated:

The Sexual Health Education Workgroup agreed that all students in Washington’s public schools should have access to comprehensive sexual health education (CSHE) in grades K–12. Mandating CSHE is an issue of equity and would help to ensure all students across the state receive quality, evidence-informed instruction, regardless of who they are or where they live. The Workgroup found that several groups are often excluded from relevant, inclusive instruction, including students in out of home care, students with disabilities, students who identify as LGBTQ+, and English learners, among others.

The website of Washington Rep. Michelle Caldier (R) provides a radio report with John Sattgast in Olympia about the bill.

“When I looked at the curriculum, I’d be happy to read some of this stuff, but I will tell you I know that the chair would gavel me because it is completely inappropriate for me to say here,” Caldier said about the proposed mandated sex ed curriculum. “And I think that if it is inappropriate for me to say on the dais, I don’t think that’s something that I would want to teach a kindergartner.”

Sattgast observed that 97 people signed up to testify, yet only 16 were permitted to do so within the time limit.

Though the bill to mandate comprehensive sex ed died in the last legislative session, the current bill is equally as controversial, stated Washington conservative radio host Jason Rantz of The Jason Rantz Show on AM 770 KTTH.

“And it’s fueled less about meeting the sexual needs of young kids (these needs don’t exist), than it is about pushing a very specific social justice agenda on gender identity for all classrooms,” he stated.

According to the Democrats’ proposal, called “Rights, Respect, Responsibility: A K-12 Curriculum” (3Rs), kindergartners would learn about the proper names for body parts, but only after a “note on language” clarifies that biology is subservient to gender identity.

“You will notice that this lesson refers to ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ and ‘male’ and ‘female’ when identifying body parts,” states the note to teachers. “Lessons in higher grades use more precise language and begin to introduce a broader concept of gender.”

With the aid of a PowerPoint presentation, teachers are instructed to tell the young children:

Most girls have a vulva, which is the name for the area between the legs. The vulva describes the whole area including the small hole where urine or pee comes out called the opening to the urethra, the hole below that, which is a little bigger and is called the vagina that is used when a female has a baby, and the hole below that where a bowel movement, or poop, comes out called the anus. So a person with a vulva has three holes between their legs and a very sensitive little area at the top called the clitoris.

…

Most boys have a penis between their legs which they use to urinate or ‘pee.’ Some boys have a foreskin, which is a piece of skin that covers the end of the penis and some boys do not. A boy also has a hole where a bowel movement, or poop, leaves the body called an anus, just like a girl.

In the proposal, first graders would begin to learn about gender roles. Teachers are instructed to read My Princess Boy prior to the lesson and then ask the children:

“Does the job a person has, or what they wear mean the person is a man or woman?” (No) “Do the activities someone likes to do for fun or what they wear mean they are a boy or a girl?” (No)

…

Close the lesson by asking “How could you support others in trying new things and participating in activities that some people may sometimes say are only for boys or only for girls?” Ask for volunteers to offer strategies. (Some responses might include: tell them that you think it’s great; tell them that they shouldn’t listen to what other people think; tell them that you will do it with them; tell them that there is no such thing as girl activities and boy activities, etc.)

In the Democrats’ proposal, sixth graders would learn “language … that seems less familiar – using the pronoun ‘they’ instead of ‘her’ or him,’ using gender neutral names in scenarios and role-plays and referring to ‘someone with a vulva’ vs. a girl or woman.”

“This is intended to make the curriculum inclusive of all genders and gender identities,” states the proposal.

Informed Parents of Washington noted as well what the “3Rs” curriculum will teach 15-year-olds about “sexting”: “Sexting is here to stay folks. The real issue is consent. If you think about it like that, then sexting is just another aspect of normal sexual behavior.”

“That’s what The 3Rs curriculum wants to tell your 15-year-old, using a video the IT will have to unblock so it can be shown,” the parents’ coalition posted to Facebook.

“Then they’ll discuss scenarios that make sexting seem like the norm,” the parents add. “For homework kids go out and share their newfound knowledge with at least four friends. Though they do tell students that naked photos of kids under 18 is illegal, if they were serious about discouraging kids from sexting they would take a different, more serious approach.”

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Trump DOE Promotes School Prayer on National Religious Freedom Day

Written by Penny Starr | 16 Jan 2020

URL of the original posting site: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/01/16/trump-doe-promotes-school-prayer-on-national-religious-freedom-day/

Girl closed her eyes and folded her hand in prayer on a Holy Bible / Sasiistock/Getty Images

The guidance will be posted in the Federal Register on January 21, 2020 and it states, in part:

Section 8524(a) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act and codified at 20 U.S.C. 7904(a), requires the Secretary to issue guidance to State educational agencies (SEAs), local educational agencies (LEAs), and the public on constitutionally protected prayer in public elementary and secondary schools. In addition, section 8524(b) requires that, as a condition of receiving ESEA funds, an LEA must certify in writing to its SEA that it has no policy that prevents, or otherwise denies participation in, constitutionally protected prayer in public schools as detailed in this updated guidance.

Education Week’s report on the guidance noted precedent for the Trump administration’s move:

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act, in its current and past versions, requires the U.S. Department of Education to provide guidance on prayer in schools every two years, but that guidance hasn’t been updated since 2003, a senior administration official said.

“President Trump is committed to making sure that people of faith, particularly children,” are not discouraged from constitutionally protected rights to pray, an administration official said in a conference call with reporters.

The new school prayer guidance, which will be published in the Federal Register Thursday Jan. 21, reiterates requirements under existing law that school districts must annually certify to their state departments of education that they have “no policy prohibiting participation in constitutionally protected prayer,” officials said. State education departments must have a process for fielding complaints the right to prayer has been violated, and they must report any complaints or lawsuits over school prayer to the federal Education Department, the guidance says.

The guidance also states that student religious groups should have the same access to school facilities as secular groups, which has been in place since 1998, Education Week reports.

The Trump administration will also issue a directive on Thursday that states religiously affiliated groups can get federal grants even if the group is located in a state that prohibits public funding of such groups.

“Those laws, known as Blaine amendments, are the subject of a case on tax-credit scholarships for private schools that will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court next week,” Education Week notes in its report.

Follow Penny Starr on Twitter

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Top 10 Craziest Attacks on Campus Conservatives of 2019

Written by Alana Mastrangelo | 1 Jan 2020

URL of the original posting site: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/01/01/top-10-craziest-attacks-on-campus-conservatives-of-2019/

UC Berkeley Assault TPUSA / screencap

10. “You’re going to end up fucking dead” shouts a Sacramento State leftist at a black conservative student after appearing to strike him on video.

An alleged leftist and LGBT activist at California State University, Sacramento (Sacramento State) appeared to assault a black conservative student on video in December, before shouting, “you’re going to end up fucking dead.”

9. UT Austin leftists threaten to dox students for joining conservative student groups on campus.

Leftists at the University of Texas at Austin — who have doxed conservative students in the past — threatened to dox incoming freshmen students in June, claiming that they would release the students’ personal information if they were caught joining conservative groups on campus — namely the Young Conservatives of Texas and Turning Point USA.

8. Mob of leftist students surrounded and harassed conservative students at Binghamton University. Leftist protesters then shut down an event hosted by the conservative students days later.

A mob of leftist students at Binghamton University surrounded and harassed conservative students in November. “Look at you shaking, you little bitch,” shouted one leftist. Days later, leftist protesters crashed the conservative students’ event featuring economist Arthur Laffer, causing the event to immediately be shut down. Two protesters were arrested. All incidents were caught in a series of disturbing videos. Binghamton University did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

7. Man arrested after attempting to chain the doors to a University of Washington conservative event.

A man was arrested in June after attempting to chain the doors to a College Republicans event in a classroom at the University of Washington. The move, which appeared to be an attempt to lock the conservatives inside the classroom, failed as the speaker’s personal security members and students forced the doors open. The man acted after an Antifa call to action to disrupt the event.

6. Chico State protester takes sign from a conservative student and strikes him in the face with it.

In November, a student protester at California State University, Chico shouted expletives at the school’s College Republican’s chapter president, before taking his sign and striking him in the face with it. The incident was caught on video.

5. Students assault pro-life activists at both UNC-Chapel Hill and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in two separate incidents caught on video.

A student allegedly assaulted a pro-life activist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after seeing pro-life signage depicting aborted children. In a separate but similar incident at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a woman was caught on video assaulting a pro-life activist, and spray painting one of his signs.

4. North Carolina State University student sprays paint into the face of Rep. Dan Bishop’s son.

An alleged member of NC State’s Young Democratic Socialists of America club sprayed paint into the face of Jack Bishop — the son of Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) and a member of the school’s Turning Point USA club — while spray painting over a message promoting the conservative student group’s upcoming event in November.

3. Three students arrested at Tulane University after setting fire to Turning Point USA chapter president’s dorm room door.

Three individuals were arrested for aggravated arson after allegedly setting a dorm room door on fire in March at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. One of the students living in the targeted dorm room was the president of Tulane’s Turning Point USA chapter, and had recently been “doxed” by leftists seeking to “expose” members of the conservative student group, as well as Young American for Liberty.

2. Police investigate “bias incident” at South Seattle College after Turning Point USA chapter president was stalked by a man in an SUV.

Police investigated a hit and run accident that they considered a “bias incident” in April, after a man allegedly followed the president of the South Seattle College Turning Point USA student group with his vehicle as she walked to her car. The incident — which occurred following an argument between the two individuals over TPUSA signage — resulted in the conservative student calling 911 after the man struck another vehicle while circling her with his SUV.

1. Conservative activist Hayden Williams punched in the face at UC Berkeley.

Hayden Williams, a field representative from the Leadership Institute, was punched in the face at the University of California, Berkeley in February while recruiting conservative students. The incident — which was caught on video — is said to be the catalyst for prompting President Donald Trump to sign an executive order in March requiring colleges and universities to uphold the First Amendment on campus if they want to receive federal funding.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.

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Rap Sheet: 117 Acts of Violence and Harassment Against Conservatives on Campus

Written by Alana Mastrangelo | 28 Nov 2019

URL of the original posting site: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/11/28/rap-sheet-117-acts-of-violence-and-harassment-against-conservatives-on-campus/

MAGA Make America Great Again hat burning at Berkeley (Elijah Nouvelage / Getty)

Since 2016, there have been over 100 acts of reported violence and harassment perpetrated against conservatives on college campuses. Within the last few months, scores of additional instances of violence and harassment have been reported bringing the current total to 117 incidents. Whether perpetrated by students or school faculty, instances of violence or threats against conservative students — and sometimes even conservative professors — are becoming commonplace on America’s college campuses. This trend is also expanding to the high school level.

Here is a list of incidents of violence and threats made against conservatives on campus, or made by leftists in academia, that have been reported within just the last few months.

November 22, 2019: Chico State protester takes sign from conservative student and strikes him in the face with it

November 19, 2019: Leftist protesters shut down Art Laffer speech at Binghamton University

November 18, 2019: Mob of leftist students surround and harass members of College Republicans and Turning Point USA at Binghamton University

November 13, 2019: North Carolina State University student sprays paint into the face of Rep. Dan Bishop’s son Jack Bishop while spray painting over a Turning Point USA display.

November 8, 2019: University of Florida students demand impeachment of student body president over Donald Trump Jr. visit to campus

November 6, 2019: North Carolina State teaching assistant compares conservatism to “white supremacy”

November 1, 2019: Pacific Lutheran professor Troy Storfjell: “I have no problem” with Antifa violence

October 31, 2019: University of Michigan student dismantles entire Turning Point USA recruiting table and steals all of the group’s supplies — even the cookies and hot chocolate

October 30, 2019: University of California Riverside student destroys conservative group’s sign promoting Second Amendment

October 22, 2019: “I Hope You Die:” University of New Hampshire students destroy Turning Point USA display

October 21, 2019: University of Minnesota Duluth student admits to tearing down Turning Point USA posters

October 18, 2019: Leftist students steal Michigan State pro-life display

October 16, 2019: Man steals Turning Point USA signs at UNLV and punches them into a trash can

October 11, 2019: Student covers University of Wisconsin college GOP office with accusations of racism

October 4, 2019: Student arrested for attacking conservatives on University of Nevada, Reno campus

October 4, 2019: Georgia Tech students call for university president’s firing over Kavanaugh support

September 30, 2019: University of Minnesota College Republicans’ mural vandalized for a fourth straight year

September 24, 2019: Colorado State University president compares Turning Point USA to blackface and swastikas

September 23, 2019: University of Maryland students act as “Free Speech Zone” enforcers by stealing conservative signage and running away

September 23, 2019: Clown shuts down Georgetown College Republicans event

September 19, 2019: Man arrested for bomb threat at a pro-life event at Rochester Community and Technical College

September 19, 2019: Conservative students harassed at Irvine Valley College by students, as well as adults who appear to be professors

September 12, 2019: University of Maryland official accuses conservative activists of “trespassing”

September 10, 2019: Jones County Junior College faces lawsuit after threatening students with arrest for exercising their First Amendment rights on campus

September 9, 2019: University of Wisconsin official tells a conservative student to move or police will be called

September 4, 2019: College of Charleston professor celebrates the death of political opponents

August 22, 2019: University of Kentucky staffers mock and slow-walk application for conservative club on campus

August 19, 2019: University of Houston student leader apologizes after defending free speech amid calls for his removal

August 16, 2019: NC State Vice Chancellor Mike Mullen resigns after calling GOP “Neo-Nazis” and “KKK,” but remains a professor

August 15, 2019: University of Texas instructor Alex Wild says Trump and his supporters are Nazis

July 23, 2019: Ole Miss professor James Thomas compares pro-Trump teenagers to Hitler Youth

July 15, 2019: UC Santa Barbara teaching assistant under fire for saying men are not women

July 11, 2019: Woman assaults pro-life activist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

July 9, 2019: Conservative student assaulted at Bentley University while promoting Tomi Lahren event

July 9, 2019: Colorado State professor Oi Yan Poon: “I’m ready to punch” political opponents “in the neck”

July 4, 2019: University of Florida student says he was attacked for MAGA hat on the 4th of July

June 23, 2019: Leftists at the University of Texas at Austin threaten to dox students for joining conservative groups on campus

June 20, 2019: Whatcom Community College student destroys pro-life display, “because I disagree”

June 11, 2019: the University of Illinois faces a lawsuit for allegedly installing a campus “Speech Police” system

June 10, 2019: Students at Georgia Gwinnett College want legal immigrant professor fired for criticizing illegal immigration

June 7, 2019: Man arrested after attempting to chain the doors to University of Washington conservative event

June 5, 2019: Rap sheet: 76 additional acts of violence and harassment against conservatives on campus that have been reported since 2016

This list will be updated as needed. Back-filling it will be an ongoing project. Please contact Breitbart News with any updates or incidents you think deserve to be added to this list.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo and on Instagram.

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After Years of Common Core, Betsy DeVos Announces ‘Devastating’ Results

Posted By Jared Harris | Published October 31, 2019 at 3:55pm

URL of the original posting site: https://www.westernjournal.com/years-common-core-betsy-devos-announces-devastating-results/

Years after Common Core made its debut in many state education systems, the disastrous long-term results of the program are finally being seen. The revelation came as part of the Department of Education’s 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress report.

“Every American family needs to open The Nation’s Report Card this year and think about what it means for their child and for our country’s future,” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in a media release. “The results are, frankly, devastating.”

“This country is in a student achievement crisis, and over the past decade it has continued to worsen, especially for our most vulnerable students,” she added.

The NAEP is a test administered in alternating years to students in the fourth and eighth grades. The government-mandated assessment covers both math and reading proficiency. The students’ reading assessment paints a grim picture of educational readiness, with tested fourth and eighth graders failing to best the previous test’s results. This year’s results were only marginally better than those from 1992.

The mathematics scores show the most damning results — an upward trend until the year 2015, when the momentum seemed to grind to a halt. Although there were double-digit gains since the ’90s, fourth graders only managed to score a single point above their previous tests. Eighth graders failed to meet that low standard, sinking below their predecessors from two years before.

“This must be America’s wake-up call,” DeVos said. “We cannot abide these poor results any longer. We can neither excuse them away nor simply throw more money at the problem.”

The dip doesn’t seem to be without cause, either. By 2015, most states had implemented some form of Common Core standards, according to the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Studies have linked Common Core to declining test scores and generally poor student performance.

This failure in U.S. schools comes at a time when Chinese students appear to be blowing American children out of the water. Results from the Program for International Student Assessment, which tests students internationally on their proficiency in math, science and reading, show that China ranks a full 21 spots ahead of the United States.

The 21st century needs to remain an American century. Letting the Chinese take the global lead would have disastrous results across the world. If we expect our future engineers, scientists, and mathematicians to compete in an increasingly globalized world, it’s clear that Common Core needs to be abandoned.

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LGBT-Activist Official: Drag Queen Story Hour Protesters Hold ‘White Supremacist Beliefs’

Reported by Dr. Susan Berry | 3 Sep 2019

URL of the original posting site: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/09/03/lgbt-activist-official-drag-queen-story-hour-protesters-hold-white-supremacist-beliefs/

Drag queen Scalene Onixxx (R) gestures seated beside Athena Kills while reading during Drag Queen Story Hour at Cellar Door Books in Riverside, California on June 22, 2019. – Athena and Scalene, their long blonde hair flowing down to their sequined leotards and rainbow dresses, are reading to around 15 …FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images

A battle over a Drag Queen Story Hour event in Chula Vista, California, has intensified as an LGBT-activist member of the city council accused pro-family protesters of the events of holding “white supremacist beliefs.”

As CBS8 reported, Steve Padilla, an openly gay, LGBT-activist Chula Vista councilmember, posted to Facebook that Drag Queen Story Hour protesters, such as pro-family group MassResistance, hold “white supremacist beliefs.”

Padilla voiced his support for the events, one of which has been scheduled by the Chula Vista Public Library later in the month, with a statement on his Facebook page:

I am disappointed that some voices both from inside and outside our community have chosen to use the upcoming Drag Queen Storytime as an opportunity to perpetuate long discredited false and discriminatory narratives targeting the LGBTQ+ community in the name of protecting children. This is wrong and must be called out for what it is – the spreading of ignorance, fear, and hate. Much of this fearmongering is being organized by the local chapter of a nationally known hate-group which promotes not just anti-LGBTQ beliefs, but also anti-immigrant and white supremacist beliefs. These ideas and tactics do not reflect the community I love and serve.

Pro-family protesters rallied Thursday in front of the main branch of the public library in Chula Vista to condemn the Drag Queen Story Hour scheduled on September 10. The library advertised the event as one that would encourage “reading, learning & inclusivity” among young children and “celebrate our wonderfully diverse community with stories, crafts and dancing.”

“Drag Queen Story Hour is not innocent fun to celebrate play while teaching diversity and tolerance,” said Arthur Schaper of pro-family group MassResistance, reported CBS8. “If adult entertainers engage in those behaviors, they can do so freely in their nightclubs and cabarets but not around children.”

NBC7 reported many parents have been alerting others online, urging them to call upon the library to put an end to the event.

Amado Huizar, a father of four and pastor in Chula Vista, said he is concerned about how the drag queen reading event influences children, especially regarding “the sexual innuendo.”

NBC7 interviewed drag queen performer “Strawberry Corn Cakes” about whether the reading event is about sexuality.

“Not at all. Not all,” the drag queen replied. “Especially not with kids. Come on now.”

“It’s unfortunate that people aren’t agreeing with it in when it’s all about fun,” Strawberry Corn Cakes said.

However, last fall one drag queen admitted the story hours for young children are not just about fun. Dylan Pontiff, a gay man who uses the name Santana Pilar Andrews when dressed in drag, helped organize a story hour for Louisiana preschoolers. He said the event’s purpose is “the grooming of the next generation.”

“I’m here to let you know that this event is something that’s going to be very beautiful and for the children and the people that supported are going to realize that this is going to be the grooming of the next generation,” Pontiff told the Lafayette City-Parish Council. “We are trying to groom the next generation to not see the way that they just did.”

LGBTQ activists countered the protesters at the rally, with several officers from the Chula Vista Police Department on hand to keep the crowd in check.

“The Drag Queen Story Hour helps teach them about the acceptance of all,” said Dennis Nicely of LGBT-activist group PFLAG.

Other activists said the event promotes tolerance and diversity.

“We are here to represent community values, which are inclusiveness and acceptance, love and diversity,” said Irina Sagade. “These are values of a public space.”

An announcement by the library posted to Facebook said the scheduled Drag Queen Story Hour event was “in celebration of the city of Chula Vista’s proclamation of September 14, 2019 as LGBTQ Day.”

“We strongly believe that libraries are a clear reflection of the community they serve,” the public library continued. “We aim to foster an environment that encourages reading, learning & inclusivity, celebrate our wonderfully diverse community with stories, crafts and dancing on 09/10/2019.”

On Sunday, the library announced the location of the Drag Queen Story Hour would be changed from the Otay Ranch Library to the Chula Vista Civic Center:

“More space needed to accommodate expected attendance,” read a news release.

“The Chula Vista Public Library welcomes everyone, and programming at the City’s three libraries includes and reflects the diverse communities the libraries serve,” the release continued. “Hosting drag queens to read and relate with children promotes reading and literacy and sends a positive message of acceptance and tolerance.”

The library stated the drag queen event was “sponsored in partnership with San Diego Pride and South Bay Alliance.”

Caroline (Cara) Dessert, Esq., CEO of the San Diego LGBT Community Center, said in a statement the Drag Queen Story Hour promotes “literacy,” among other things:

Drag Queen Story Hour provides a fun and engaging way to promote literacy and to help young people understand the value of diversity and acceptance. These types of events also offer us a chance to appreciate individuality and combat harmful gender stereotypes. With that in mind, it [sic] easy to understand the reasons that American Library Association is supporting Drag Queen Story Hours as an effective way to add inclusive, diverse, and more equitable programming at public libraries.

The left-wing American Library Association (ALA) encourages Drag Queen Story Hour events and is supporting those libraries experiencing “pushback” from their communities.

“ALA, through its actions and those of its members, is instrumental in creating a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive society,” the organization states. “This includes a commitment to combating marginalization and underrepresentation within the communities served by libraries through increased understanding of the effects of historical exclusion.”

Concerns about safety at the Drag Queen Story Hour events made headlines recently when Houston MassResistance discovered drag queen Alberto Garza, who uses the name Tatiana Mala-Nina when reading to young children, had been convicted in 2008 of sexually assaulting an eight-year-old boy. The Houston library system had failed to perform a background check on Garza or any of the other drag queens appearing in its programs.

Multnomah County Library in Portland, Oregon, also faced backlash when it was found the library system had quietly removed from social media photos of the Drag Queen Story Hour that took place at one of its libraries during which young children were lying on top of the drag queens and fondling their false breasts.

According to the Drag Queen Story Hour website, the aim of the event is to present gender fluidity as a positive quality children should accept and even emulate:

Drag Queen Story Hour captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity in childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models. In spaces like this, kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, and where dress-up is real.

However, a special education teacher protesting the Chula Vista drag queen event carried a sign that read, “Stop perversion of children.”

“It’s horrible what’s happening to America,” she lamented, CBS8 reported. “It’s horrible what’s happening to San Diego.”

“Wake up, America, wake up!” she added tearfully.

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Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘Education’

By: Brent Scher | March 13, 2023

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Asra Q. Nomani | Fox News | Published March 9, 2023 10:31am EST

A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Asra Q. Nomani is the author of a new book, Woke Army. She is a senior fellow at Independent Women’s Network. She is reachable on Twitter as @AsraNomani.

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BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JANUARY 30, 2023

“If I had known [what was going on], this would be a much different story. [Sage] was terribly bullied, but no one told me,” Michele said. “Please don’t let ideology harm another child. Let parents do our jobs. We know our children best and we love them a million times more.”

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BY: RYAN MACPHERSON | JANUARY 10, 2023

Ryan C. MacPherson, Ph.D., is a Minnesotan and author of “Rediscovering the American Republic: A People’s Quest for Ordered Liberty.”

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BY: JORDAN BOYD | JANUARY 05, 2023

A Loudoun County father, whose arrest at a June 2021 school board meeting was used by the Biden administration to justify a politicized attack on concerned parents, was found not guilty of trespassing on Wednesday.

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BY: AUGUSTE MEYRAT | DECEMBER 08, 2022

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BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | OCTOBER 07, 2022

Boston Children’s Hospital has also promoted “gender-affirming” hysterectomies and sterilizations for minors, who are almost always introduced to transgender ideology either on social media or in the classroom.

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – Shipwreck

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Changing Of The Guard

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By Aaron Sibarium | July 27, 2022

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By HENRY RODGERS, SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT | July 22, 2022

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REPORTED BY: WILL FLANDERS | JULY 11, 2022

Dr. Will Flanders is research director for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.

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REPORTED BY: TRISTAN JUSTICE | JULY 06, 2022

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A MUST READ AND SHARE -Jerry Broussard

REPORTED BY: JOY PULLMANN | JUNE 27, 2022

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REPORTED BY: ROBERT BUSEK | JUNE 08, 2022

Avoiding Accountability at All Costs

Legacy Media Provide Covering Fire

Institutional Suicide

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COMMENTARY BY: PAMELA DANZIGER | MARCH 28, 2022

Why Worldview Matters

Science Declares God Is Dead

Truth Will Come Out

Rekindling the Discussion

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A.F. Branco Cartoon – Tragicomedy

A.F. Branco Cartoon – War on Womxn

A.F. Branco Cartoon – War on Freedom

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Off the Charts Sticker Shock

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REPORTED BY: M.D. KITTLE | MARCH 08, 2022

Madison, Wis. — Parents are “not entitled” to know their kids’ gender identity, according to a recent training session in Wisconsin’s Eau Claire Area School District.

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REPORTED BY: SPENCER LINDQUIST | INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM | FEBRUARY 16, 2022

From Sex Shops To School Libraries

Involvement In Curriculum Development

Institutional Support of Extremism

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Reported BY: RICH CROMWELL | FEBRUARY 10, 2022

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.