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Posts tagged ‘KIDS’

Sen. Hawley Humiliates Mark Zuckerberg For Lying About How Big Tech Hurts Kids


BY: JORDAN BOYD | JANUARY 31, 2024

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2024/01/31/sen-hawley-humiliates-mark-zuckerberg-for-lying-about-how-big-tech-hurts-kids/

Mark Zuckerberg

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley forced Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to publicly apologize to the families of children victimized by his company’s addictive algorithms and practices.

During opening remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Zuckerberg, who is on the record as encouraging his kids to play outside instead of use screens, falsely claimed social media doesn’t damage many kids’ happiness and health.

“Mental health is a complex issue, and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having more mental health outcomes,” Zuckerberg said.

When Hawley pressed Zuckerberg about the statement later in the hearing, Zuckerberg doubled down.

“What I said is I think it’s important to look at the science. I know it’s — people widely talk about this as if that is something that’s already been proven and I think that the bulk of the scientific evidence does not support that,” Zuckerberg replied.

Hawley spent the next five minutes citing Meta-funded studies that find the opposite. One internal research project conducted by Meta in 2021 determined one in three teenage girls struggling with body image “reported that using Instagram made them feel worse.”

“Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups,” a slide summarizing the study noted.

Wall Street Journal analysis of the study warned that Meta researchers “repeatedly” found that Instagram “is harmful for a sizable percentage of [young users], most notably teenage girls” but did nothing about it.

Zuckerberg tried to dispute his own company’s findings, but Hawley did not let his excuses slide.

“You’re here testifying to us in public that there’s no link. You’ve been doing this for years. For years, you’ve been coming in public and testifying under oath that there’s absolutely no link, your product is wonderful, the science is nascent, full speed ahead. While internally, you know full well your product is a disaster for teenagers,” Hawley countered, which elicited a round of applause from viewers.

“That’s not true,” Zuckerberg replied.

Hawley didn’t let Zuckerberg’s protests stop him.

“That’s not a question. Those are facts, Mr. Zuckerberg,” Hawley said, before continuing to list evidence that Meta knows its products endanger their users.

He listed several statistics uncovered by former Facebook executive Arturo Béjar. Béjar testified to a Senate subcommittee last year that high percentages of teen girls were exposed to nudity, unwanted sexual advances, and self-harm content within the last seven days on Meta social media platforms.

“I know you’re familiar with these stats because he sent you an email where he lined it all out. I mean, we’ve got a copy of it right here. My question is, who did you fire for this and who got fired because of that?” Hawley asked.

Zuckerberg danced around the question several times before Hawley answered it for him.

“You didn’t fire anybody, right? You didn’t take any significant actions,” Hawley said.

When Zuckerberg tried to deflect because he didn’t think it was “appropriate” to talk about his hiring and firing decisions, Hawley did not hold back.

“You know who’s sitting behind you? You’ve got families from across the nation whose children are either severely harmed or gone. And you don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about steps that you took? The fact that you didn’t fire somebody?” Hawley asked. “Let me ask you this. Have you compensated any of the victims?”

Zuckerberg confirmed he has not.

“Don’t you think they deserve some compensation for what your platform has done? Help with counseling services help with dealing with the issues that your service has caused?” Hawley pressed, noting that profit drove Meta’s decisions.

As Zuckerberg fumbled for a response, Hawley demanded he turn towards the gallery of onlookers and apologize to the families of children Big Tech has helped harm.

“There’s families of victims here today. Have you apologized to the victims? Would you like to do so now? Well, they’re here. You’re on national television,” Hawley said. “Would you like now to apologize to the victims who have been harmed, but you’re not showing the pictures? Would you like to apologize for what you’ve done to these good people?”

Zuckerberg stood, turned away from his mic, and told the parents holding pictures of their children’s faces that he understood “your families have suffered.”


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, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

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Don’t Trans the Tomboys


BY: ANONYMOUS | NOVEMBER 16, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/11/16/your-tomboy-isnt-trans-shes-a-girl/

girl sitting on stoop looking off into street

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These days, when she gets ready for school, the hair will be done. Perhaps it will be a braid of some sort, perhaps it will be curled. Earrings will be selected. A light and subtle application of age-appropriate makeup usually follows. The only constant is that she will always put on a skirt.

It didn’t used to be this way. When younger, she was quite the tomboy. There were the fights over getting her hair cut short, fights she lost not because we’re that controlling, but because short hair has to be cut more frequently and we didn’t want to add monthly visits to the stylist to the calendar. The uniform was shorts or pants and a polo for school, nicer pants and tops for dressier occasions, and athletic gear for casual moments. Jewelry was a no-go, even the pearls and things that grandmothers like to give to be worn at church.

She never suffered from dysphoria. She always knew she was a girl. It bothered her how often she was mistaken for a boy, not connecting the dots between her preferred functional form of attire and how it was virtually indistinguishable from the clothing sported by little boys. She was horrified when a classmate exhorted her to “just get the surgery.” That was reading too much into the truth, which was that she just wanted to play, to roughhouse, and to get outside. Dresses and skirts didn’t lend themselves to such things.

Once puberty arrived, the interests largely remained, but the video tutorials on how to do different braids and requests for new earrings joined them. It’s also when she looked at me earnestly in the car one evening and said, “I’m glad you and Mom aren’t liberals. You would’ve tried to turn me into a boy.”

While there are people across the political spectrum who recognize the realities of biology, statistically speaking, she wasn’t necessarily wrong in her proclamation. If she’d been born to this momthis mom, or this mom, things could have turned out much differently. Thankfully, she was born to us, and we don’t hold retrograde opinions about the imaginary relationship between preferred clothing, toys, activities, and sex.

Not everyone is so enlightened, though, instead preferring to categorize children based on rigid stereotypes about how superficial things define us as boys and girls, men and women. Countless stories, like those linked above, of parents realizing their daughter was “transgender,” start with “I knew my son [sic] was trans when…” and revolve around such stereotypical markers. She didn’t like the color pink (once hated in our house, now one of her favorites), dresses, or games associated with little girls. Ergo, she must be a boy!

All one has to do to make such a logical leap is ignore the fact that prepubescent kids are, by definition, not sexual creatures and, as such, not much thinking in terms of true masculinity and femininity. They are just thinking about what interests them, not how those interests align with or diverge from their sex. It’s misguided parents who swoop in and make those assumptions.

This viewpoint is especially incomprehensible when one realizes that tomboys have long been with us. They were once staples of literature and other entertainment, from Laura Ingalls to Jo in Little Women to Pippi Longstocking. That they enjoyed clothing or activities more typical of boys wasn’t reason to attempt to muck around with their biology, and it still isn’t reason now.

If you have a daughter, you have a daughter. Her preferred clothing and activities do not define her, particularly when she’s young. Maybe she just finds pants more comfortable or likes playing in the dirt more than playing with a Barbie. If you let her grow up as a girl, those preferences may stick or they may, as in our case, shift in more traditionally feminine ways. In either case, it is not our job as parents to guide them toward self-destruction, but toward self-fulfillment and flourishing.

Let your tomboy be a tomboy. As a father, enjoy that you can get out and do more rough-and-tumble things with her. As a mother, enjoy that she isn’t raiding your closet or makeup tray. To do otherwise, to make the destructive assumption that because she doesn’t fit a stereotype she must have been “born in the wrong body,” is to abdicate your responsibility as a parent, to punish her with pseudoscience, and to saddle her with a lifetime of legitimate suffering, not the imaginary kind that arises from preferring blue to pink.  

This author is a regular Federalist contributor.


This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.

LGBT activist threatens anyone who would try to keep him out of women’s bathrooms or protect their kids: ‘It will be the last mistake you ever make’


By: JOSEPH MACKINNON | April 24, 2023

Read more at https://www.theblaze.com/news/lgbt-activist-threatens-anyone-who-would-try-to-keep-him-out-of-womens-bathrooms/

Image source: Twitter video, @OliLondonTV – Screenshot

An LGBT activist recently took to Tiktok to threaten anyone who would bar him or other male transvestites from entering women’s washrooms, daring concerned parents to try to protect their children. Despite these and other threats made both before and after the Nashville massacre, when six Christians were murdered by a transgender extremist, Thomas Jay White‘s account remains active on the platform.

Reduxx reported that White, who calls himself “Tara” and identifies as “Poly Trans Lesbian,” is a “baby fetishist” into “ageplay” and “diapers.” He indicated on his Twitter account that he is into various other deviant behaviors including “bloodletting.”

In a now-deleted video, White said, “If you back a wild animal into a corner, they are going to become a dangerous animal. So if you want to die on that hill of yours — of righteousness and moral majority — then you go right ahead.”

“I dare you to try and stop me from going into a women’s bathroom. It will be the last mistake you ever make. I dare you to try to stop a transgender woman in my presence from using the bathroom. It will be the last mistake you ever make,” he continued.

The radical transvestite clarified that this was indeed “a call to action and a call to arms to everybody within the United States” and told others within the so-called LGBT community to “arm up, plain and simple.”

“Go out and buy a gun. Learn how to use it efficiently, through and through, because the time to act is now,” White added, indicating he had done likewise.

“There are lots of people like me who are not afraid to die,” he said, adding sardonically, “So you go ahead, you protect your kids.”

According to the Daily Mail, White recorded the video after the March 27 Covenant School massacre in Nashville.

This was not the first time that White intimated LGBT radicals should use violent means to get what they want. In a video posted Feb. 15 framed by rainbow #ForYourPride captions, the transvestite radical railed against Tennessee’s Senate Bill 3, the Republican legislation since ratified that protects children from sexually graphic drag shows. Alluding to similar bills in his home state of Kansas, White said, “I am not going to go down without a fight and I call upon everyone in this country … do not sit back and just take this.”

“If it means me going to jail or prison or worse, I’m going to do everything in my power to fight,” he added.

White noted in a subsequent video that he would be migrating his channel to the social media site Clapper, where he could better “tackle and defeat and shred all of these Christians and evangelicals that love to cherry-pick Bible verses to justify their bigoted behavior and bull****.”

Oli London, a critic of the transgender movement who announced he was converting to Christianity and de-transitioning last year, told Fox News Digital, “This is just another example of a biological man feeling emboldened to invade women’s spaces in the name of ‘self-identity’ and threatening women’s safety without any fear of repercussions.”

“In today’s America, people like this man, who identifies as a Poly Trans Lesbian, are encouraged to do this and praised as ‘stunning and brave’ for entering women’s spaces. Anyone that calls out men like this are immediately deemed ‘transphobic’ and ‘hateful bigots,'” added London. “This is a harmful narrative, but sadly has become all too common across society.”

While White’s Tiktok and Twitter accounts remain active, his Instagram page appears to have been shut down.

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Ann Coulter Op-ed: Who Really Cares About Dead Kids?


April 19, 2023 by Ann Coulter

Read more at https://anncoulter.com/2023/04/19/who-really-cares-about-dead-kids/

Who Really Cares About Dead Kids?

We’ve heard a lot lately about how Republicans don’t care about dead kids — just keep your hands off their guns! The bullhorn insurrection staged by Tennessee legislators, for example, was justified on the grounds that they were JUST TRYING TO SAVE CHILDREN’S LIVES!!!

      As MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell put it, the bullhorn episode showed “who is trying to protect the children of Tennessee and who isn’t.”

The amazing statistic that’s supposed to make us give up our guns PRONTO is that since 2020, gun violence has become the leading cause of death for American children.

You’re supposed to be thinking of the little kids killed in school shootings, like in Uvalde or the Christian school in Nashville. In fact, the odds that a child will be killed in a mass school shooting are 1 in 10 million.

The trick is that “children” includes 16-to-19-year-old gang members.   Exclude 16-to-19-year-olds, and the number of kids killed by guns every year plummets from 2,811 to a few hundred.

It turns out, black teenagers are using guns to kill a lot of other black teenagers.

This will come as a surprise to most people because black-on-black violence is not considered newsworthy. (By contrast, any white-on-black violence, even the sort of thing that wouldn’t make local news if the perp were black, will get front-page coverage at The New York Times, international headlines and a call from the president.)

Based on arrests reported in the local news, here are a few recent examples of “children” being killed by gun violence. You will notice that none of these suspected homicides would have been prevented even if Republicans gave up all their guns.

And consider that, in most urban areas, the huge majority of murders never result in any arrests at all. For example, the “clearance” rate for murder — which is much higher than the “arrest” rate — is only 22% in Chicago, 43% in Baltimore and 37% in Philadelphia.

According to police arrests:

  • — On March 29, 2023, 16-year-old Vincent Lee Bradley III and 17-year-old Devonte J. Pool fired at least 33 shots, gunning down a 16-year-old high school student, Larry Marshall III, in Tacoma, Washington.
  • — A few days earlier, 16-year-old Lorenzo A. Brooks and 19-year-old Aaron Randolph Carter allegedly shot and killed 18-year-old Jasiah Smith in a Fredericksburg, Virginia, parking lot.
  • — A week before that, 19-year-old Adrian Daeshawn Granville and 24-year-old Teonjenique Elizabeth Lashay Hudson Howard were shot and killed at the Embassy Suites hotel in Portland, Oregon, by an unknown suspect — the same hotel where 15-year-old Deandrae Barber fatally shot 18-year-old Parnell Badon Jr. on Nov. 19, 2022. (Can’t wait to read the Yelp reviews.)
  • — On March 7, 2023, two brothers, Jacob Tobias Bryant, 18, and John Aalen Bryant Jr., 20, along with an unnamed 16-year-old juvenile, fatally shot a 17-year-old in Georgetown, South Carolina.
  • — On Feb. 23, 2023, Keith Melvin Moses, 19, shot and killed a 9-year-old girl, T’yonna Major, and her mother in a shooting spree in Orlando, Florida, that left several others wounded or dead.
  • — On Jan. 23, 2023, 18-year-old Preston Walls removed his ankle bracelet before gunning down rival gang members, 18-year-old Gionni Dameron and 16-year-old Rashad Carr, at a violence reduction program in Des Moines, Iowa.
  • — On Jan. 4, 2023, 18-year-old Jakari Harps fatally shot 17-year-old Breck Gerard Williams Jr. and 14-year-old Adrian Daniels in west Fort Worth, Texas.
  • — Right before Christmas last year, 17-year-old Lavon Semaj Longstreet and 18-year-old TaeShawn Adams-Wright killed 19-year-old Johntae Raymon Hudson at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, standing over Hudson’s body and firing “multiple rounds into his body.”
  • — Earlier in December, 17-year-old Tejuan Johnson and 18-year-old Jaylan Dubose shot and killed 15-year-old Nonaisha Jones and 19-year-old Logan Lawson in the Roselawn neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio.

All these incidents of “children” dying by gun violence consisted of black teenagers killing other black teenagers — and a 9-year-old.

More than half of all black teenagers who died of any cause in 2020 were killed by guns. Black males 15- to 34-years-old were more than 20 times more likely to die by gun homicide than white males that age.

Unfortunately, there is probably no story of less interest to our media (or the president) than the epidemic of black teenagers killing one another. In Jill Leovy’s acclaimed book, “Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America,” there’s a full page of racist quotes explaining why, historically, “black-on-black killing drew so little notice.” This one is from a white Tennessean during Reconstruction: “[N-word] life’s cheap now.”

Or, as Cook County (Illinois) State’s Attorney Kim Foxx put it in declining to prosecute a gang shootout, it’s “mutual combat.”

Far from highlighting the crisis of black teenagers shooting one another and declaring a national emergency, the media, corporate America and Democrats mightily egged on black violence after the death of George Floyd. It’s fun for them. They get to watch riot porn from the safety of their lily-white neighborhoods.

The only people who actually give a damn about black people getting killed are the police. And who have the bien-pensants declared war on? You guessed right.

Propose anything that would actually reduce the plague of black-on-black crime, such as arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning criminals, and liberals scream, STOP PUTTING BLACK BODIES IN PRISON!

Needless to say, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, the Tennessee representatives who attacked democracy because they were JUST TRYING TO SAVE CHILDREN’S LIIIIIVES, are huge BLM supporters. They prattle about “ending police violence,” blacks being “lynched by police officers,” and accuse the police of running a “system of white supremacy.”

Jones told Teen Vogue that “more policing does not lead to community safety.” (The thousands of black men who are still alive thanks to Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s more policing policy would disagree.) Instead, Jones proposed “more funding to social workers, public education [and] ending poverty.” (Why didn’t anybody else think of that?)

On NPR, Pearson blamed “white supremacy” for the death of Tyre Nichols. (“White supremacy” is such an awesome force, it even infected the five black Memphis police officers charged with Nichols’ death.)

You want to know who doesn’t care about “our children’s lives,” MSNBC? You, the rest of the media, George Soros-supported prosecutors and the entire Democratic Party. Their motto: “[N-word] life’s cheap now.”

     COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER

Why Parents Should Assume Government Schools Will Sexually Abuse Their Children Until Proven Otherwise


REPORTED BY: ELLE REYNOLDS | FEBRUARY 22, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/22/why-parents-should-assume-government-schools-will-sexually-abuse-their-children-until-proven-otherwise/

shadow of a man and little girl

This article features explicit material unsuitable for all readers.

Coaxing 10-year-old girls away from their parents, promising a fun and safe environment, and then forcing them to sleep in the same room as grown men is the kind of behavior you’d expect from a sexual predator. It’s child endangerment at best and traumatizing abuse at worst. Yet that’s exactly what California’s Los Alamitos Unified School District forced little girls at a school-organized science camp to do for three nights in San Bernardino, according to outraged parents.

“No parent should feel the way I feel after knowing what could have happened to my daughter,” parent Suzy Johnson told local news. “If I was aware of it and I had initialed something saying this was going to be done at this outdoor science camp, I would have kept my children home.”

When confronted about the sleeping arrangements, the camp’s defense was, “Per California law, we place staff in cabins they identify with,” and the two men refer to themselves as “they/them.”

While the science camp incident is enraging, it’s far from the first or only indication that government schools likely harm children more than they benefit them. Before entrusting their kids to a behemoth that has repeatedly subjected children to abuse, parents should demand proof that schools are trustworthy — and assume they aren’t until proven otherwise.

Public schools’ insane obsession with the transgender agenda has physically endangered young girls before. Just look to Loudoun County, where a boy in a skirt raped a young lady in the women’s bathroom and the school board covered it up to keep the incident from sinking their transgender bathroom policy. What else don’t parents know about?

When these far-left pipe dreams about erasing sex don’t subject kids to physical abuse, they often inflict mental abuse. Even in a red state like Idaho, a report earlier this month found that “School administrators in Coeur d’Alene manipulated an 11-year-old girl into believing she was a boy and should undergo gender transition surgery” behind her parents’ backs. “The elementary school counselor had coached the young girl into believing she was transsexual and instructed her how to tell her parents about her new identity,” the Idaho Freedom Foundation reported.

In Virginia, a public school made kindergarteners sit and listen to a “transgender rights advocate” — a man dressed as a woman who goes by “Sarah” — read them a book about a transgender teen.

In Iowa, a school district used the “Black Lives Matter at School Guiding Principles” to teach kids as young as four years old to “free[] ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking,” “dismantle cis-gender privilege,” and “disrupt[] the Western prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.”

A school in a small Colorado town outside of Boulder showed elementary students a play about a transgender raven, accompanied by videos like He, She, and They – What is Genderand No More Gender Roles.” The videos include conversations with a gender-confused teddy bear that conclude gender roles are “mean, they are not fun and they are big problems.” One parent of a first-grader reported that, after showing one of the videos, his daughter’s teacher paired kids up to talk about their preferred pronouns.

Leaked audio from a conference of California’s largest teachers union revealed teachers being instructed on how to stalk middle schoolers and coax them into LGBT groups behind their parents’ backs. Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents,” Abigail Shrier reported.

School libraries like the one at Baird Middle School in Massachusetts feature sexually explicit books like “Sex Is A Funny Word” by Cory Silverberg. Not only does the book cover “subjects of transgender identity, intersex conditions, and masturbation,” its author is a sex shop owner who specifically targets kids.

A Rhode Island mom filed a police report over a local high school’s promotion of a gay porn book to minors in its library. The book “features discussion of gay sexual fantasies and is incredibly graphic, including scenes of gay men having sex and a scene of one man performing oral sex on another.”

These examples are only some of the incidents that have been brought to light — and they merely scratch the surface. Exposing vulnerable children to sexually explicit material and indoctrinating them to question their own identities, often against their parents’ wishes, is nothing less than mental abuse and exploitation.

A Harvard study in 2015 found youth who identified as transgender were at more than double risk for depression, anxiety, attempted suicide, and self-harm. Last year, Forbes reported that more than half — 52 percent “of all transgender and nonbinary young people in the U.S. seriously contemplated killing themselves in 2020.” Even aside from students’ exposure to the trans agenda, the toxic environment of public schools has tragically been linked to child suicides, which have escalated in recent years.

This isn’t to say every student in the public school system will be tempted to suicide, subject to pornography, placed in danger of sexual assault, or mentally abused. There are wonderful, truth-loving teachers out there who remain in the system to do as much good as they can for children they care deeply about. I know several. But the examples from all across the country, from known crazies in California to small-town red state school districts, should be enough to convince parents to be wary. Especially of what schools don’t tell them.

Nothing should be more paramount for parents than protecting their children. If a stranger offers to babysit your child, you don’t accept the offer with the rationale that your child might be fine. You expect anyone to whom you entrust your child to first prove he is worthy of stewarding your most sacred possession. Public schools are no different, and the repeated instances proving their abuses should drive your trust even further away. Maybe, like many Americans, you don’t feel you have what you think are feasible alternatives. Or maybe your local school district is sheltered from some of the most radical exploitation. But it behooves you to verify that first before betting your child on it.


Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

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


Reported BY: RICH CROMWELL | FEBRUARY 10, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/10/will-parental-bill-of-rights-finally-enforce-government-school-transparency/

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.


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.

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


A.F. Branco Cartoon – Bubble Boy

A.F. BRANCO on August 3, 2021 | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-bubble-boy/

People are growing more and more distrustful of Dr. Fauci and what he has to say.

Flip Flop Fauci

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 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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