Think about the three people who affected you the most growing up. For a lot of us, I’d bet at least one is a teacher or coach. It speaks to the influence and importance schools can have on our lives and education. Teachers are difference makers who help us, as parents, educate and develop our kids. But just as we don’t need Washington to tell parents how to parent, we don’t need federal bureaucrats telling our schools how to teach. Many classroom decisions are best left up to our leaders at the local level.
Last week, the Trump administration, under the leadership of Education Secretary Linda McMahon, announced it is following through with a campaign promise to rethink the size and scope of the Department of Education. I think it’s beyond time to return those powers and decisions to the states and restore local control, giving families more freedom.
Since the Department of Education was formed as a standalone department in 1980, we’ve seen its budget and workforce bloat — but we haven’t seen improved outcomes for students, parents, or teachers. We clearly aren’t getting what we’re paying for.
For a decade, I served on the Board of Regents for the University of Nebraska system, getting into the weeds of education policy and decision making for our state. One of the philosophies I brought with me from that experience into the governor’s office is that we need more accountability in government.
Just like a teen staring at a phone screen, too often the U.S. Department of Education’s bureaucracy has been distracted from its mission, and American education has suffered for it. We can’t predict the future, but we have to change something. Our kids’ education is too important for us to keep pursuing mediocre results that cost us billions.
For starters, American taxpayers shouldn’t be funding controversial culture wars through our schools. We should expect that our investment will be spent on teaching kids the essentials: math, reading, science, and civics.
There is a simpler, better path forward. By sending education back to states, we let those nearest to the student have the biggest influence. This is a pro-kid, pro-parent, pro-teacher, pro-school position. No matter the style of schooling families choose — public, private, homeschool, or hybrid — our lessons should be focused on helping our youth succeed, and you don’t need federal government mandates to do that.
In Nebraska, I know the type of people who serve in our schools. Our teachers devote their lives to our kids. We’re human, and we’re not going to get things right 100 percent of the time, but I’m confident in our ability to lead and ensure we’re addressing the needs of our students, teachers, and schools.
Because technology and research constantly change the way we learn, educators must be able to move fast in the classroom in ways some faraway cubicle worker in Washington can’t. Teachers and administrators are closer to the action and better prepared for this type of work.
In my state, we’re leading by making localized decisions: We’re rethinking how we invest and fund K-12 schools, raising awareness and doubling down on special education opportunities, and working with students and schools to ban the distraction of cell phones bell-to-bell.
Secretary McMahon’s stated goal is to make the state of education in America “freer, stronger, and with more hope for the future.” That’s a mission all of us should be able to get behind because there’s no politics in it.
Let’s focus more on how to help the teacher in the classroom who is giving our kids this week’s spelling test. Let’s figure out ways to better support dynamic, inspiring lessons. Let’s support the guidance counselor who is helping our students navigate adolescence while they make big, life-long decisions.
Let’s let our country’s kids — and education — reach the world-changing potential they have. That should be the American tradition. The Department of Education just needs to get out of the way.
On Tuesday, Wyoming became the 15th state to enact universal school choice into law with Gov. Mark Gordon’s signature on the Steamboat Legacy Scholarship Act.
The Cowboy State joins a rapidly growing group of states that have passed laws giving all (or nearly all) families statewide choice concerning their children’s kindergarten through twelfth-grade education. Those states are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.
The act grants families who choose to participate with an education savings account of $7,000 per student per year to allocate toward approved K-12 educational expenses. Education savings accounts with universal eligibility are the gold standard of school choice programs due to the flexibility they provide parents to select the best learning avenues for their children.
It also expands eligibility of the state’s existing pre-kindergarten education savings account program from parents with a maximum income of 150 percent of the federal poverty line to up to 250 percent. The amount provided to qualifying parents is $7,000. According to Gov. Gordon, “early education builds a very strong foundation. It’s important that when kids get to kindergarten, they have the grounding that’s necessary to be able to move forward, thrive and really do well.”
Wyoming Speaker of the House Ocean Andrew is a defender of education freedom and under his leadership the bill promptly passed the House by a 39-21 vote on Jan. 29. It then headed to the Senate.
Mid-February, President Trump applauded the leadership of Senate President Bo Biteman and urged every state senator to vote in favor of the bill. On Feb. 19, the Senate passed the bill with a vote of 20-11. As part of the Wyoming legislative process, a Joint Conference Committee was tasked to successfully negotiate the policy differences between the Senate and House, which was completed on Feb. 27. The following day, the Speaker of the House and President of the Senate both signed the bill, sending it to Gov. Gordon for signature.
Wyoming State Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder, who was voted into office in 2022, has been instrumental in providing a strategic plan for the state’s education system. She is a proponent of school choice and understands that it is a rising tide that lifts all boats. Of her six key initiative areas for education reform in Wyoming, “parental empowerment” are the first two words.
“As an economist, I know that greater choices lead to greater outcomes. I am an ardent supporter of universal school choice because even parents in the most rural corners of Wyoming should have the opportunity to determine the best education for their child,” Degenfelder told me.
Hats off to Wyoming leaders for embracing the innovative educational approach of a free market K-12 education landscape by enacting universal school choice. The market forces of competition will drive quality, spur innovation, and decrease costs, which are foundational for achieving the governor’s goal of a world-class education system in Wyoming.
Dr. Keri D. Ingraham is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute, Director of the American Center for Transforming Education, and a Senior Fellow at Independent Women’s Forum.
A teacher on the outskirts of Cincinnati is recovering from brain surgery after a student violently attacked her earlier this month. The 60-year-old teacher was harmed so severely by a teenager that doctors had to remove part of her skull to help manage swelling in her brain.
Last spring, a Tennessee teenager pepper-sprayed a teacher for confiscating her phone. Also last year, a Texas administrator was beaten to the ground by a group of students.
As school choice expands across the country, millions more parents have the chance to send their children to schools that best meet their needs. They are eager to flee schools that foster poor behavior. Parents know their children best, and they know a child’s best educational fit is based on more than only test scores and graduation rates. Academic performance is critically important, but so too are intangible factors that shape a child’s educational experience. It is no surprise that school culture is one of the top factors parents consider in choosing where to send their kids to school.
The most recent Parent Involvement in Education survey, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2019, found that 71 percent of parents who considered sending their children to a school other than their government-assigned one rated “safety, including school discipline” as “very important.” Only 53 percent ranked “academic performance of students (e.g. test scores, dropout rates)” the same way.
This concern for discipline and safety is not surprising. No parents want to send their children somewhere unsafe. Sadly, many schools tolerate bad behavior and thus foster more of it, creating an environment where teachers can hardly teach, and students can hardly learn.
School violence is on the rise for several reasons, two of which can be tied directly to policies pushed by teachers’ unions and fringe civil rights groups and accepted as gospel by many in the public education establishment. The first is prolonged school closures resulting in a steep decline in good behavior by students.
The Student Pulse Panel, a study conducted by the Institute of Education Sciences, found that 38 percent of public schools saw an increase in physical altercations between students following the pandemic. (Less than 10 percent saw a decrease.) More than half of public schools saw an increase in threats of physical altercations between students. The damage is not just physical. More than half of public schools reported an increase in “student acts of disrespect [towards staff] other than verbal abuse.”
The study says, “More than 8 in 10 public schools have seen stunted behavioral and socioemotional development in their students because of the COVID-19 pandemic.” But Covid did not cause student behavior to circle the drain. Prolonged school closures, driven by teachers’ unions and their political allies, meant that students forgot how to behave at school.
The second culprit is “restorative justice,” a so-called “disciplinary” model embraced by teachers unions and administered by school systems across the country. This harmful practice is by no means restricted to blue states, nor is it a post-Covid phenomenon. Leading into the pandemic, 21 states and D.C. had laws on the books supporting the use of restorative justice in schools. Among those states are Texas, Florida, and Utah, far from the usual suspects when it comes to educational malpractice.
Under restorative justice, suspending and expelling a student is to be avoided at all costs. Real consequences are replaced by “healing circles.” School resource officers are sidelined, and teachers lose control of their classrooms.
Every single one of the violent incidents noted above happened in a school or school district that has embraced restorative justice policies. The teacher near Cincinnati taught at a school that advised a “verbal warning using restorative practices and affective language” when students are disruptive. The school district in Tennessee is the home of a “restorative practice program,” and the Texas school had moved to adopt more restorative practices in its Campus Improvement Plan.
Education freedom can help solve this problem. Several studies have demonstrated that school choice leads to safer schools.
But a school culture need not be violent to be rotten. There is a reason “Mean Girls” resonates across generations. Bullying is real, it can be severe, and parents deserve the right to decide if and when their child needs a fresh start at a new school. No children should have to risk their mental health and emotional development because they can’t choose another school and get a fresh start.
A good school, the kind of school parents seek out for their kids when they have school choice, is one that not only excels academically but maintains high standards of behavior. Such schools excel academically in no small part because they maintain high standards of behavior. Test scores are only one piece of the education freedom puzzle. Parents see the full picture, and education leaders would do well to follow suit.
Angela Morabito is the spokesperson at the Defense of Freedom Institute, a former U.S. Department of Education press secretary, and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
According to the corporate media, hundreds of high schoolers are taking it upon themselves to walk out of school to protest Israel’s right to defend itself. In New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and more, the nation’s budding humanitarians are banding together with the hope of ushering in a new era of peace, the stories say. As is the case with so many stories surrounding Palestinian terrorism and Israel’s response, the prevailing narrative is wrong.
These walkouts are not the result of well-meaning teenagers choosing to take a stand. These protests are being conceived of and then planned and executed by radical left-wing groups using children as political props.
The largest of these was the “#schools4Palestine” walkout, which disrupted learning in an estimated 100 New York City public schools on Nov. 9. A coalition of far-left groups, including New York Collective of Radical Educators, NYC Educators for Palestine, Palestinian Youth Movement, and Teachers Unite, authored a “toolkit” — a handbook aimed mainly at adults to show them how to turn students into pro-Hamas activists. The document purports to be for “students, teachers, and parents,” but its content is less relevant for students than for teachers who seek to influence them. Another far-left group in the San Francisco Bay Area created a toolkit of its own, full of the same hateful lies about Israel.
Though the New York City toolkit’s writers claimed, “High school students are organizing walkouts,” they don’t seem to believe their own words. The document, created by left-wing adults, provides a ready-made plan for students, with poster templates, instructions for identifying chant leaders, and even a sample schedule. The students are being organized by adults.
NYC high school students walking out from across the city in the hundreds today to demand a #CeasefireNow in Gaza!
They were showing up, at the behest of their teachers, to support a cause probably very few of them understand. The toolkit contained a sample script for teachers to encourage their students to participate, and it notes that teachers may “show support for their students … canceling tests or major paper deadlines or making the lesson more flexible to accommodate students who walk out.” Teachers who followed this advice placed their own radical politics ahead of learning and committed a major violation of professional ethics. They abused their positions of responsibility for the sake of their own agenda.
The toolkit put words in the mouths of children with a recommended chants list, including “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want Zionists here.” When they took to the streets, some of the students chanted, “F-ck the Jews,” thus flaunting their hatred and abandoning the façade that this protest was ever about peace.
Students Aren’t Being Taught the Truth
Students are being taught that it is good and noble to walk out in support of Hamas. What they are not being taught is that there was a ceasefire in place on Oct. 6, and it did not stop Hamas from slaughtering Israelis and taking hostages. They’re not teaching students that so many Palestinians live in poverty, not because of Israel, but because Hamas would rather spend money on rockets and tunnels and their own plush hideaways in Qatar than on basic infrastructure. They’re not teaching that supporting the Palestinian people means opposing Hamas, an enemy of peace and prosperity and the reason that Gazans are suffering today.
Some meager accountability for this indoctrination has come from parents who are angered about what their children are being taught. A principal in Montgomery County, Maryland, emailed the entire school community to “make them aware” of a walkout, noting that all absences due to the protest would be excused. Backlash was so swift and severe that the principal has since resigned.
These protests do not happen in a vacuum. In many schools, Jewish students are seeing their peers cheerlead for terrorism with their teachers’ encouragement. No student should be forced to face this kind of hostility and harassment. No parent should be forced to send his or her child to a school where this sort of teacher-sponsored bullying is allowed or encouraged.
As Hamas tightens its death grip on Gaza, pro-Hamas protesters will desperately attempt to appear thoughtful and mainstream. But not unlike the group these protesters are supporting, they’re experts at using children as pawns.
Angela Morabito is the spokesperson at the Defense of Freedom Institute and a former U.S. Department of Education press secretary.
“At this point, parents need to assume they will be deceived by their school if their child makes a gender identity declaration to a teacher or counselor at school,” Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon says. Pictured: Books are on offer at a school board candidate’s event Oct. 16, 2022, in Vero Beach, Florida, from Jennifer Pippin, president of the Indian River County chapter of Moms for Liberty. (Photo: Giorgio Viera /AFP/Getty Images)
A new report sounds the alarm on the growing number of schools embracing transgender ideology and keeping parents in the dark. According to Parents Defending Education, at least 1,040 U.S. school districts have adopted policies instructing or encouraging faculty and staff to keep students’ gender identities a secret from parents.
Those districts include over 18,000 schools responsible for nearly 11 million students. The vast majority of those school districts (593) are in California.
“I am grateful to Parents Defending Education for their attempt to quantify this problem,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for education studies at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “It is important to support with evidence what many parents know by instinct or experience: Our educational system that is supposed to work with parents will often work around parents instead.”
“At this point, parents need to assume they will be deceived by their school if their child makes a gender identity declaration to a teacher or counselor at school,” Kilgannon said.
Commonly called “Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Policies,” such dictums have been the subject of controversy and even protest across the nation, with parental rights organizations such as Moms for Liberty and Mama Grizzly forming to combat the policies and others like them.
“[I]f we have the ability to do so, we must engage with people and systems that view this parental deception as good for children,” Kilgannon said of the role of parental rights groups. “Obviously, something is very wrong if some people can believe the answer is government first, parents second or never.”
A recent example of the controversy may be found in New Jersey, where a state judge last week blocked a trio of school districts from enforcing a policy requiring faculty and staff to inform parents of students’ gender identities at school, effectively forcing the school districts to keep parents in the dark.
Those policies would require teachers, coaches, and other school staff to inform a student’s parents if that student used a bathroom that didn’t correspond to his or her biological sex, requested different pronouns be used in addressing him or her, or asked to play on a sports team that didn’t correspond to his or her biological sex.
The controversy over “Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Policies” comes as debate continues on why an increasing number of children are identifying as transgender or nonbinary.
One study from earlier this year, for example, classified the increase as part of “a socially contagious syndrome,” stating that it’s likely that “common cultural beliefs, values, and preoccupations cause some adolescents (especially female adolescents) to attribute their social problems, feelings, and mental health issues to gender dysphoria. That is, youth[s] … falsely believe that they are transgender.”
Some theorize that standard peer pressure, coupled with the social popularity of transgenderism, largely is responsible for the increase in children identifying as transgender. However, others—such as Mama Grizzly founder Stacy Langton—argue that it’s largely rooted in the sexual grooming of children by teachers.
“[T]his is where our own action as parents are so important,” Kilgannon said. “We must be present to our children, engaged with them, being the most important person in their lives. … [L]ike everything in life, it starts with ourselves and our relationships to the people God has put in our lives, especially the children we are blessed with and responsible for.”
On Tuesday, Iowa became the second state in the country to pass universal school choice, directly providing families with funds to support their children’s education. Arizona was the trendsetter for this new wave of educational freedom after Gov. Doug Ducey signed universal school choice into law on July 7, 2022.
Now the race is on to advance educational freedom, with several red states looking to follow suit. The significance of these developments can hardly be overstated. What was once a pipe dream for many education reformers — the enabling of school choice at scale during their lifetimes — is now becoming a reality.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, true to her word, wasted no time in the 2023 legislative session by introducing the Students First Act in her Condition of the State address on Jan. 10. Within two weeks, the bill was signed into law. It took less than 24 hours for debate in the House and Senate, followed by Reynolds’ signing. The education savings account (ESA) program will provide parents with approximately $7,600 annually to allocate toward approved educational avenues. Most families are eligible in years one and two, and the benefit will be extended to all families statewide in year three.
Of course, powers beholden to leftist teachers unions should not be expected to go down without a fight. Even in pioneering state Arizona, new Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs seeks to undo its universal school voucher expansion law in her 2023 budget proposal. With Republicans controlling both state legislative bodies, her proposal will likely go down with the same fate as her massively failed veto referendum that sought to stop the law from taking effect while she was secretary of state last fall. For a politician, Hobbs is remarkably insensitive to the views of Arizona voters, 67 percent of whom support the state’s ESA program (the number jumps to 77 percent of Arizona parents of school-aged children).
States with a Republican governor and GOP majorities in both their House and Senate, on the other hand, are leading the charge across the United States to empower parents with options. The goal is universal school choice — through ESAs — to provide flexibility for families to select their desired educational avenue. Funds can be spent on school tuition, homeschool expenses, online learning, tutoring, special needs therapy, learning materials, and other education-related expenses.
ESA programs not only afford parents options outside of government-run, union-controlled public schools, but they save the state money because typically only a portion of the student state funding is provided. For example, in Arizona, instead of upwards of $12,000 spent per student within the public system, the ESA provided to families is only $7,000.
As the race to pass universal school choice picks up speed, several states could be heading to the home stretch in the coming weeks and months.
Utah is positioned extremely well to join the universal school choice ranks as the House and Senate have both passed the “Utah Fits All Act” as of January 26. If signed into law by Gov. Spencer Cox, families would have access to roughly $8,000 each year for educational expenses.
Florida is historically a national leader in school choice, with almost half its students learning in an option outside of their assigned traditional public school. Current legislation is calling for universal school choice. With Republican lawmakers holding supermajorities in both the House and Senate, and Gov. Ron DeSantis at the helm, it’s only a matter of time.
Oklahoma is a contender in the educational freedom race. The Education Freedom Act is currently in the Senate, which has a 40-8 Republican supermajority. The House has an 81-20 supermajority. Once the bill hits educational freedom champion Gov. Kevin Stitt’s desk, it will be signed into law. It will grant all families statewide access to an ESA based on the state’s per-pupil education expense. State Superintendent Ryan Walters is a fierce supporter of empowering Oklahoma families with educational freedom to select the schools that will best serve their children.
Texas, traditionally lagging behind other red states on school choice, is not to be counted out this session in advancing ESAs. In May 2022, Gov. Greg Abbott urged lawmakers to empower parents through state funding following students. As the months passed, the groundwork was laid, including debunking the notion that school choice does not benefit rural areas or that it hurts rural school districts.
West Virginia was the national leader prior to Arizona passing universal school choice in 2022. In West Virginia, roughly 93 percent of students have access to the Hope Scholarship to date. There is the possibility to expand it to 100 percent of the state’s children within the next three years. Despite the state’s families having negligible educational freedom options until 2019, West Virginia is now among the leaders.
Indiana has efforts underway to expand the state’s existing ESA program to all students statewide while also increasing the grant amount from 90 percent of the per-student state funding to 100 percent. That would translate to an average of $7,500 allocated per student for educational expenses of the parents’ choosing.
Arkansas shouldn’t be overlooked this session. Newly elected Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has stated her support for plans to “empower parents with more choices … so no child is ever trapped in a failing school.”
The tide is turning, and the implications are tremendous. No longer will families be at the mercy of government-run, union-controlled traditional public schools. Parents in an increasing number of states will be empowered as decision-makers in their children’s education.
The question is: Which state will be next to achieve universal educational freedom?
Dr. Keri D. Ingraham is a Fellow at Discovery Institute, Director of the American Center for Transforming Education, and a Visiting Fellow at Independent Women’s Forum.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Monday morning, I swept through the marbled halls of the Supreme Court of the United States, off First Street NE here in the nation’s capital, to enter the highest room of jurisprudence in the land. The sound of my footsteps muffled atop thick carpeting, the blinds on the massive windows mostly drawn and the room packed with rows upon rows of chairs, slowly filling.
A daughter of India who grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia, little could I know that over the next four-and-a-half-hours I would ride an emotional rollercoaster as three so-called “liberal” justices and four attorneys overlooked, erased, and tried to gaslight the truth of Asian Americans who face discrimination — or as the ideologues call it, “systemic racism” — in admissions to Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
If not for fierce questioning from the court’s six conservative justices and the arguments of two attorneys for the plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, Asian Americans would have been erased in the courtroom that day — much as they have been nationwide by “equity warriors” for whom we are an inconvenient minority. Instead, this is my prediction for the rulings, expected next year: a 6-2 victory by Asian American families and students over Harvard and a 6-3 win over the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Born in India, I was on an emotional roller coaster today in the Supreme Court, listening to 3 justices + 4 lawyers try to gaslight America on the reality of anti-Asian racism. Fortunately, 4 justices argued fiercely. My bet: 6-2, Harvard loses. 6-3 UNC loses. America wins 💯 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/IsQ1yK8Ny1
In 332 pages of court transcripts, “diversity” was referenced 202 times, most of the time by the universities’ lawyers and the three justices that supported them, with “Asian” mentioned only 81 times. The universities’ lawyers, the sympathetic U.S. solicitor general, and the three like-minded justices spoke many times about supporting “students of color,” “minorities” and “diversity” but most often excluded Asian Americans. Ironically, the three liberal justices waxed eloquently about “diversity” without once noting the obvious: There wasn’t an Asian American justice beside them.
In the most defining moment of the day, Harvard’s attorney, Seth Waxman, tried to downplay “race” as a “determinative factor” in admissions to Harvard, noting that it was just like, “you know,” being “an oboe player in a year in which the Harvard-Ratcliffe orchestra needs an oboe player will be the tip.”
Chief Justice John Roberts shot that comparison down immediately.
“Yeah. We did not fight a civil war about oboe players,” he said firmly.
“I—,” Waxman tried to interrupt.
Roberts continued, undeterred. “We did fight a Civil War to eliminate racial discrimination, and that’s why it’s a matter of — of considerable concern.”
Across the country, parents listening to the proceedings laughed and cheered. The day before, many of those parents, with names like Jack Ouyang, Wai Wah Chin, Eva Guo, Suparna Dutta, Yuyan Zhou, and Harry Jackson, stood on the steps of the Supreme Court at an “Equal Education Rights for All” rally with signs promoting simple ideas. “Stop Anti-Asian Discrimination.” “Diversity ≠ Skin Color.” Together, over the past years, we had become accidental activists in the war on merit and Asian American students.
Since late August, parents had been meeting at 9 p.m. on Thursday nights over Zoom to ready for the rally, trading messages through the week on WeChat, Telegram, and Signal. CNN and Fox News featured their voices in their coverage of the case. Chinese-language newspapers put news of the rally on their front pages. But inside the Supreme Court, to the lawyers for the universities and the three justices who supported them, it felt as if we were invisible.
‘Gas lighters’
I’d first visited the nation’s capital decades ago as an 18-year-old intern in the summer of 1983, but this was my first time in the Supreme Court hearing room. It is about the size of a soccer field. At 57, I had to be a witness for the approximately 22 million Asian Americans living in the United States, about one of every 15 people, most hailing from 19 countries and the fastest-growing racial group in the U.S., according to Pew Research Center.
In response to a K-12 education system that has largely failed black and Hispanic students, officials at Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill have allegedly rigged their admissions processes with “race-conscious” standards that discriminate against Asian American students to boost the number of black, Hispanic, and other “underrepresented minorities,” known today as “URMs.”
I brought two books into the Supreme Court with me: the big red book, “Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement,” and the yearbook for the class of 2021 from my son’s alma mater, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Alexandria, Virginia, a magnet school known as “TJ,” where about 70 percent of the students are Asian American.
The yearbook theme was simple, “We know exactly how you feel.” Unfortunately, activists for the tenets of critical race theory don’t even pretend to want to know how we feel, and I witnessed this tone-deaf callousness from the three activist justices: Associate Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. In my notebook, I penned their three names under “Gas Lighters.”
These three justices infused their questions, comments, and analysis with the politics and worldview of critical race theory, the ideology that teaches that society’s injustices must be corrected through the lens of race. Kagan wondered whether “people who have been kicked in the teeth by our society for centuries” can get a “thumb on the scale” instead of “white men.” She spoke about “our color blindness, whatever that means, because our society is not color blind in its effects.” Sotomayor punctuated many a question with “correct?” For example, she said schools are working to examine the “whole” student as “equals” — “correct?”
Quickly, Kagan found a kindred spirit in the country’s solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, who spoke so sing-song it took a careful ear to recognize the disturbing worldview of critical race theory in her words. To the plaintiff’s argument on the “color-blind interpretation of the Constitution,” she said, “There’s nothing in history to support that.”
Under “Fierce Against Racism,” I wrote four names: Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Under “Sympathetic” to the plaintiffs, I penned two names: Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.
Photo/Asra Nomani
Prophets of critical race theory, such as author Ibram X. Kendi, have spread a toxic, unbelievable, and illiberal idea: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” Asian American students have been their sacrificial lambs in their racial experiment, with K-12 schools like TJ in the crosshairs of their war on merit.
In December 2020, after the killing of George Floyd turned educrats into activists, the 12-0 Democratic school board in Fairfax County, Virginia, eliminated the merit-based admissions tests to the school and replaced them with a “holistic” process that would increase the number of black, Hispanic, and other “URM” students, assigning “bonus points” to racially engineer the student body. A group we started, Coalition for TJ, filed a lawsuit with attorneys from a public-interest nonprofit, Pacific Legal Foundation.
In early 2022, a federal judge ruled that the new admissions process is “blatantly unconstitutional,” but the “UnFairfax” school board, as we like to call it, is appealing the case, and it will likely end up in the U.S. Supreme Court as early as fall 2023.
‘Asian’ Does Not Appear
On Monday, to hear the three “Gas Lighters” and the university’s lawyers, you wouldn’t have even known they were weighing the effect of systemic racism against Asian Americans. In fact, at one point, Alito turned to David Hinojosa, an attorney representing current and former students at UNC-Chapel Hill supporting race in admissions and said: “I was struck by the fact that the word ‘Asian’ does not appear one time in your brief. Yet Asians have been subject to de jure segregation. They have been subjected to many forms of mistreatment and discrimination, including internment.”
Like a magician, Hinojosa said there was no mention of “Asian” in his brief because, voila, a “record” of discrimination against Asian Americans “actually doesn’t exist.” He instructed the court to take it up with Harvard.
When Alito pressed the Harvard attorney, Waxman, on why Asian American students received a lower “personal score” than other students on character traits, including “integrity, courage, kindness, and empathy,” the Harvard lawyer did a tap-dance, saying the “syllogism” of the question was “wrong,” then asserted that the personal score difference is a “slight numerical disparity” that doesn’t reveal any “evidence of discrimination in admissions outcomes against Asian Americans,” because it’s “simply a number” that “fades into the background.”
Simply a number.
“They think we’re that stupid.”
Alito pounced with the obvious question: “If it doesn’t matter, why do you do it?” Waxman dismissed the “personal score” as a “matter of triage” for overwhelmed admissions officers.
What about “affinity groups,” the controversial new tool for separating and segregating students in housing, discussion groups, and elsewhere in schools by race and other identity markers, asked Justice Amy Coney Barrett? Oh, they have “incredible benefits,” gushed Hinojosa.
Photo/Asra Nomani
In the 1920s, Harvard President Lawrence Lowell discriminated in admissions against another group: Jewish students, because he believed there was a “Jew problem” with the overrepresentation of Jewish students at the school. In gaslighting back then, Harvard officials said they weren’t discriminating against Jewish students but just putting in place a “holistic” admissions process.
Now, in his closing remarks, Cameron Norris, an attorney for Students for Fair Admissions, said, “Harvard thankfully does say it is ashamed of its history of Jewish discrimination. I hope someday it says the same about how it’s treating Asians.”
Asra Nomani is a senior contributor at The Federalist. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Nomani writes a regular newsletter, Asra InvestigatesAsra Investigates, with breaking news and analysis on the frontlines of culture and politics. She is a senior fellow in the practice of journalism at the Independent Women’s Network and a cofounder of the Coalition for TJ, a grassroots parent group, and of the Pearl Project, an investigative reporting initiative. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com and @AsraNomani.
While society has increasingly embraced alternative families like single-parent homes and stepfamilies, a new Institute for Family Studies research brief suggests students who live with their married biological parents perform better in school.
The brief, written by Nicholas Zill, a research psychologist and IFS senior fellow, and Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and a fellow at The Future of Freedom at IFS, was based on data from the 1996 and 2019 National Household Education Surveys.
These surveys were completed by parents whose children were enrolled in elementary and secondary schools nationwide. The 1996 survey covered 17,535 students in kindergarten through the 12th grade, while the 2019 survey covered 15,990 students in the same age range.
In their analysis, Zill and Wilcox looked at the frequency of teacher and school interventions for students from both non-traditional and traditional families. They examined whether or not the child repeated one or more grades, if the child was suspended or expelled, the frequency with which schools contacted parents about their child’s schoolwork and how often parents were contacted about the child’s behavior.
The researchers found that the overall frequency of school interventions fell from 1996 to 2019.
In 1996, parents of 21.9% of students were contacted about their child’s schoolwork. By 2019, this share fell to 17.4%. Over the same period, the percentage of parents contacted about their child’s behavior dropped from 27% in 1996 to 21.6% in 2019. The share of children who repeated a grade fell from 12.9% in 1996 to 6% in 2019. The share of children suspended or expelled also decreased from 18.8% to 9.4%.
Despite the overall decrease in the frequency of school interventions from 1996 to 2019, the odds of school interventions increased for students in non-traditional families on all measures. However, the increased risk was only considered statistically significant for suspensions and parental contact about student behavior.
“It is only for suspension and parental contact about behavioral problems that the increases were statistically significant,” the researchers wrote. “But it is striking that the odds ratio increased for all four outcomes in the last quarter-century. Our results are consistent with the theory that marriage matters more than ever for today’s children.”
When the data were adjusted to control for differences across family types in racial composition and parent education levels, as well as for the ages and sexes of the students in each group, the researchers found that the greater risks of school intervention faced by students from non-traditional families declined.
Still, according to Zill and Wilcox, “students from non-intact families continue to have nearly triple the risk of suspension and double the risk of grade repetition as students from intact, biological families.” Specifically, students who grow up in non-traditional families are 2.92 times more likely than their peers in intact families to get suspended from school while those who live in non-traditional families are 2.01 times more likely to end up repeating a grade than children from intact families.
Parents of students growing up in non-traditional households are 2.18 times more likely than parents of students raised by a nuclear family to have schools contact them about their children’s behavior. At the same time, parents of students living in a non-traditional household were just 1.63 times more likely than parents of children from two-parent homes to have schools contact them about their children’s schoolwork.
“Despite the declines in the frequency of school interventions for students from single-parent, stepparent, and other non-intact family types, in both surveys, these students were significantly more likely than those from married, biological families to receive each of these interventions,” the researchers explained. “And the over-time declines in the frequencies of school interventions were greater for students from married, biological families. So, the relative risk faced by students from non-traditional families has actually increased or remained the same.”
The researchers clarified in their brief that their findings should not be interpreted as saying students from non-traditional families cannot succeed in school, only that the odds of academic success are “more favorable” for students from traditional ones.
“These results reaffirm the conclusion that children from stable, married families have a better chance of receiving the guidance and support they need to succeed academically and adapt confidently to the classroom environment than children from disrupted or reconstituted families,” they noted. “This does not mean that children from non-traditional families cannot do well in school. Many do, despite the conflict, turmoil, or curtailed parenting they may experience at home.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
This article features explicit material unsuitable for all readers.
Coaxing 10-year-old girls away from their parents, promising a fun and safe environment, and then forcing them to sleep in the same room as grown men is the kind of behavior you’d expect from a sexual predator. It’s child endangerment at best and traumatizing abuse at worst. Yet that’s exactly what California’s Los Alamitos Unified School District forced little girls at a school-organized science camp to do for three nights in San Bernardino, according to outraged parents.
“No parent should feel the way I feel after knowing what could have happened to my daughter,” parent Suzy Johnson told local news. “If I was aware of it and I had initialed something saying this was going to be done at this outdoor science camp, I would have kept my children home.”
When confronted about the sleeping arrangements, the camp’s defense was, “Per California law, we place staff in cabins they identify with,” and the two men refer to themselves as “they/them.”
While the science camp incident is enraging, it’s far from the first or only indication that government schools likely harm children more than they benefit them. Before entrusting their kids to a behemoth that has repeatedly subjected children to abuse, parents should demand proof that schools are trustworthy — and assume they aren’t until proven otherwise.
Public schools’ insane obsession with the transgender agenda has physically endangered young girls before. Just look to Loudoun County, where a boy in a skirt raped a young lady in the women’s bathroom and the school board covered it up to keep the incident from sinking their transgender bathroom policy. What else don’t parents know about?
When these far-left pipe dreams about erasing sex don’t subject kids to physical abuse, they often inflict mental abuse. Even in a red state like Idaho, a report earlier this month found that “School administrators in Coeur d’Alene manipulated an 11-year-old girl into believing she was a boy and should undergo gender transition surgery” behind her parents’ backs. “The elementary school counselor had coached the young girl into believing she was transsexual and instructed her how to tell her parents about her new identity,” the Idaho Freedom Foundation reported.
In Virginia, a public school made kindergarteners sit and listen to a “transgender rights advocate” — a man dressed as a woman who goes by “Sarah” — read them a book about a transgender teen.
In Iowa, a school district used the “Black Lives Matter at School Guiding Principles” to teach kids as young as four years old to “free[] ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking,” “dismantle cis-gender privilege,” and “disrupt[] the Western prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.”
A school in a small Colorado town outside of Boulder showed elementary students a play about a transgender raven, accompanied by videos like “He, She, and They – What is Gender” and “No More Gender Roles.” The videos include conversations with a gender-confused teddy bear that conclude gender roles are “mean, they are not fun and they are big problems.” One parent of a first-grader reported that, after showing one of the videos, his daughter’s teacher paired kids up to talk about their preferred pronouns.
Leaked audio from a conference of California’s largest teachers union revealed teachers being instructed on how to stalk middle schoolers and coax them into LGBT groups behind their parents’ backs. “Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents,” Abigail Shrier reported.
School libraries like the one at Baird Middle School in Massachusetts feature sexually explicit books like “Sex Is A Funny Word” by Cory Silverberg. Not only does the book cover “subjects of transgender identity, intersex conditions, and masturbation,” its author is a sex shop owner who specifically targets kids.
A Rhode Island mom filed a police report over a local high school’s promotion of a gay porn book to minors in its library. The book “features discussion of gay sexual fantasies and is incredibly graphic, including scenes of gay men having sex and a scene of one man performing oral sex on another.”
These examples are only some of the incidents that have been brought to light — and they merely scratch the surface. Exposing vulnerable children to sexually explicit material and indoctrinating them to question their own identities, often against their parents’ wishes, is nothing less than mental abuse and exploitation.
A Harvard study in 2015 found youth who identified as transgender were at more than double risk for depression, anxiety, attempted suicide, and self-harm. Last year, Forbes reported that more than half — 52 percent — “of all transgender and nonbinary young people in the U.S. seriously contemplated killing themselves in 2020.” Even aside from students’ exposure to the trans agenda, the toxic environment of public schools has tragically been linked to child suicides, which have escalated in recent years.
This isn’t to say every student in the public school system will be tempted to suicide, subject to pornography, placed in danger of sexual assault, or mentally abused. There are wonderful, truth-loving teachers out there who remain in the system to do as much good as they can for children they care deeply about. I know several. But the examples from all across the country, from known crazies in California to small-town red state school districts, should be enough to convince parents to be wary. Especially of what schools don’t tell them.
Nothing should be more paramount for parents than protecting their children. If a stranger offers to babysit your child, you don’t accept the offer with the rationale that your child might be fine. You expect anyone to whom you entrust your child to first prove he is worthy of stewarding your most sacred possession. Public schools are no different, and the repeated instances proving their abuses should drive your trust even further away. Maybe, like many Americans, you don’t feel you have what you think are feasible alternatives. Or maybe your local school district is sheltered from some of the most radical exploitation. But it behooves you to verify that first before betting your child on it.
Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.
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.
These folks have some pretty strong negative comments about these State of the Union quotes…
Cabot Phillips from Campus Reform spoke to several students outside John Jay College in New York and asked them to comment on some of the statements from the SOTU speech. What Phillips didn’t tell them is that the statements actually quoted Obama.
This is what ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ looks like in action.
Watch:
And then, when some of them realized what had happened, they backpedaled.
My favorite is the girl with the fur-trimmed hood and red scarf that went from ‘we need to mind our own business because there are other countries with automatic and nuclear weapons‘ to, ‘some people are quick to judge Donald Trump just because of a few things he says, but I think if they paid attention to his whole Presidency they’d have a better perspective on him‘.
But that’s not her, right — it’s ‘some’ people?
Riiiiight.
And then there’s the guy at the end that is reasonable. President Trump managed to get through to the American people that were really listening to him when he delivered the State of the Union Address.
Could it be because Democrats have learned absolutely nothing after the last election and shoved privileged, trust-funded ‘Kennedy Dynasty’ Rep. Joe Kennedy III to deliver the counter to the President’s SOTU speech?
We’ve all heard the stories of students and employees who take to social media to rant about teachers, other students, employers and other employees.
In more than one case, students have been suspended and even arrested due to their rants on social media. Employees have faced punishment, demotions and even termination due to their social media rants. In other incidents, social media has censored postings that weren’t in line with the agenda of the social media executives.
One such incident happened last September when one prominent social media site shut down the account of a conservative site with nearly 700,000 likes, because the site posted items that criticized Islam and homosexuality. The same social media site allowed highly negative and derogatory posts against Christians, Jews, Republicans and other conservatives.
In another incident, the father of a two-month old baby son turned to a social media site in a campaign to raise funds to help pay for heart transplant for his infant son. He used a photo and video of his helpless son in the hospital, connected to tubes and monitors. Then he received a notice from the social media site saying that his post was too gory and graphic and evoked a negative response, so they closed his account.
In 2012, Political Media Inc. President Larry Ward posted a meme on same social media site, on behalf of SOS, Special Operations Speaks is an organization comprised mostly of military veterans who want to help other former and active military personnel in many areas. He was informed by the social media site in a short time that they were pulling the meme from the posting. Ward reposted the meme and again it was pulled and he was given a 24-hour suspension from the social media site. He was told that the meme violated site’s Rights and Responsibilities terms. The meme was on behalf of the Navy SEALS which showed an image of Osama bin Laden with the caption – ‘Obama called the SEALs and THEY got bin Laden’. There was also an image of Barrack Obama with the caption – ‘When the SEALs called Obama, THEY GOT DENIED’.
So, what should happen to a Florida teacher who took to her social media page to rant about Christian students in her class?
“The school district is investigating a school teacher for
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allegedly making disparaging remarks about her students on a closed Facebook page for local atheists.”
“Karen Tucker, a spokeswoman for Bay District Schools, said it is against school policy to criticize students either in person or on an Internet page.”
“In one of the posts, Susan Creamer, a teacher with Merritt Brown Middle School, states some of her middle school students ‘are taking turns either inviting me to church or leaving (anonymously) flyers inviting me to church events. … Every time any child sneezes, they loudly say ‘God Bless You!’ and look in my direction. I have complained twice to the principal — once last month and once today. She has spoken privately to one or two of the little cretins, but it seems to do NO GOOD’.”
“‘I am feeling bullied and harassed. It has become intolerable’.”
A spokesperson for the school district says that they are investigating the remarks that Creamer made on her Facebook page along with other posts. They also issued the following statement:
‘Teachers are encouraged and trained, to keep clear boundaries between their personal and professional lives to ensure that the classroom remains a neutral and supportive environment,’ the statement reads. ‘This training and related School Board policy includes guidelines for interactions on all social media platforms including, but not limited to, Facebook. We do not condone the use of disparaging comments about our students in any form, on any social media platform or in any school’.”
Since when are public school classrooms neutral? There have been many reports of teachers using the classrooms to brainwash and influence their students. Public schools across the nation are teaching that homosexuality is normal and something they should all experiment with, without letting their parents know. Public schools are also the greatest brainwashing tool used to produce millions of young socialists.
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Again, I ask, what should happen to Creamer concerning her derogatory comments and name calling of Christians in her classroom? For one thing, she has no business teaching in a public school with that kind of attitude and animosity toward a specific group of students. No doubt, her atheist biases are most likely seeping into her class lessons with the purpose of persuading her students to believe as she does. Would you want your kids sitting in her classroom?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dave Jolly
R.L. David Jolly holds a B.S. in Wildlife Biology and an M.S. in Biology – Population Genetics. He has worked in a number of fields, giving him a broad perspective on life, business, economics and politics. He is a very conservative Christian, husband, father and grandfather who cares deeply for his Savior, family and the future of our troubled nation.
A public high school in Maine was caught red-handed trying to recruit students to work on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign as a “community service opportunity”– without the knowledge or consent of parents.
Could you imagine the national media firestorm had the school been recruiting for Donald Trump’s campaign?
Students at Marshwood High School in South Berwick received an email from the Clinton campaign – urging them to sign up for positions as unpaid “fellows”.
“Hillary for New Hampshire is looking for smart, energetic winter fellows who are committed to winning the New Hampshire primary for Hillary Clinton,”read the email from a campaign staffer. “Everyone working on the campaign now started off as a fellow at some point so it is a great way of getting a different skill set whilst helping an important cause.”
Tim and Elita Galvin were furious that their teenage son had received the solicitation – calling it “disingenuous and sneaky.”
“My son didn’t appreciate being targeted by anybody via his school email for a political campaign,”Mrs. Galvin told me. “I’ll be honest – he’s not a fan of Hillary Clinton to begin with. He’s done his homework and he doesn’t like her.”
The Galvins reached out to Paul Mehlhorn, the principal of the high school. They provided me with a copy of his emailed response.
“We often receive information from outside sources regarding opportunities for students to get involved in their communities,”he wrote. “We pass on this information to provide students with ways they may meet the requirement to perform 50 hours of community service to graduate.”
Mehlhorn went on to explain that students are not obligated to volunteer for Clinton’s campaign, “nor does it suggest the school supports a particular political candidate, religious doctrine or branch of military.”
“If other ‘campaigns’ were to seek volunteers, we would pass that on also,”he noted.
The principal went to say that the email solicitation sounded like a great way to have a conversation with their children about understanding their choices in getting involved or not.
As you might imagine, Mr. and Mrs. Galvin were not all that thrilled with the principal’s explanation.
“Politics doesn’t belong there – Republican, Democrat, green, purple, white, whatever,”Mrs. Galvin told me. ” It doesn’t belong in the schools. The kids get, we get so much of this — we get bombarded during the political campaigning season, which now is almost never ending. Those kids should be able to go to school and learn without having that noise around them or targeted at them.”
I reached out to Mary Nash, the superintendent of schools. She told me it was a mistake to send out the email. She said a school staffer had forwarded the email to students without providing “additional information regarding this community service opportunity.”
However, the intentions were pretty well explained in the email. They wanted minors to pound the pavement for Hillary Clinton. She directed the principal to send a letter to moms and dads.
“In general, all staff must refrain from sending out any solicitations supporting any non-school organization,”the principal wrote.
Mrs. Galvin said there is absolutely nothing wrong with students getting involved in political campaigns. However, the school overstepped its boundaries.
“If you want to campaign for someone – that’s fine – but that’s between the child and the parents,”she said. ‘That’s not for the campaign to target you at school and it’s not for the school to suggest to you. That’s between you and your parents.”
Who could have guessed that after the largest terror attack on American soil, the United States would take in record numbers of Muslims? But that is exactly what we have done. And continue to do.
Per a recent Breitbart report, we admit “more than a quarter of a million Muslim migrants each year.” This figure includes legal immigrants with residency status, refugees, asylum seekers, students, and foreign workers. Of note, the number of student visas granted to Muslims from the Middle East has skyrocketed, with a 16-fold increase granted to students from Saudi Arabia since 9/11.
Muslim imports with “resettlement privileges” are given work permits, access to public welfare programs (over 90% of recent arrivals receive food stamps), and the ability to become voting citizens (= Democrats).
There is such a cascade of horrors that accompany this demographic of immigrants that it’s difficult to know where to begin. So let’s start here: it has become abundantly clear that Muslims who come to America as refugees have fueled a rapid rise of insular communities that become breeding grounds for terrorists.
Meanwhile, half a million Muslim girls in the United States are now at risk for female genital mutilation. Per Breitbart, “there are more girls in the United States at risk of lifelong sexual disfigurement than there are in Uganda and Cameroon.”
The report also states that a “review of recent terror activity – provided by the Senate Immigration Subcommittee – confirms the terror threat posed by our federal immigration policy of issuing large numbers of visas to majority-Muslim countries.” (See here, here, here, here, here, and here for a few examples.)
Despite mounting evidence that Muslims are not good for America, we just keep on bringing them in. And as an aside, to those who say Muslims aren’t the problem; Islam is the problem, I say it’s impossible to tell which Muslims are for us and which are against us, as I wrote about here and here. (There is also an excellent article related to this topic written by the indefatigable Pamela Geller here.)
And so, to be honest, I feel it’s reasonable to say “Muslims” when writing on this subject matter. Muslims are, after all, the people who follow the teachings of Islam. And while there are surely Muslims who may not be pious or who haven’t read the Quran, I can’t tell who’s who. And I know that the vast majority of mosques in America preach jihad. And I know that the culture breeds Jew-hatred. And that taqiyya (deception) is sanctioned. And at a certain point, though I know more than that, that’s enough to know. And self-preservation kicks in.
But I digress.
As I was saying, despite mounting evidence that Muslims are not good for America, we keep admitting them.
Most recently on the matter of bringing “Syrian refugees” to this country, a host of prominent Republicans, many of whom are presidential candidates, have come out in support of this plan – Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, and John Kasich, to name a few.
Even Trump’s perspective has been waffling and off the mark. His most recent statement – “from a humanitarian standpoint, I’d love to help, but we have our own problems” – missed the point. Forget the “humanitarian standpoint.” This is the moment to speak about the threat of Muslim immigration, irrespective of where the Muslims come from or under what circumstances. We can’t afford to theoretically “love to help.” This is not about that.
This is about an invasion. It is about conquest. It is hijrah.
Would one of our leaders please – please! – speak the truth? It would be ever so appreciated and would go a long way (or even a short way, but we have to start somewhere) toward saving ourselves and our country.
Who could have guessed that after the largest terror attack on American soil, the United States would take in record numbers of Muslims? But that is exactly what we have done. And continue to do.
Now, we’re getting somewhere. The judge that ordered Kim Davis to be jailed for not breaking the law, but opposing his unlawful orders, is the same judge behind re-educating (indoctrinating) Kentucky student who opposed sodomy. That judge, a Bush appointee no less, was none other than US District Judge David Bunning.
In 2003, the communist American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the Boyd County Board of Education. The suit was to bully the Boyd County High School into allowing a “gay-straight” alliance club to meet. Parents overwhelmingly spoke out against the club, but to no avail. (Hint: Parents who love your kids, get them out of these indoctrination centers now!) This same group, the ACLU, is also the same organization that filed suit against Kim Davis. Judge Bunning ordered the allowance of the sodomite-straight club on campus, despite the fact that he had no jurisdiction to do so.
He wrote in his ruling, “Absent a preliminary injunction, plaintiffs will be unable to meet at school, unable to benefit from a forum for discussion with other students who are suffering the effects of harassment based on sexual orientation, and unable to work with other students to foster tolerance among all students.”
But Bunning also required the school district to implement training as part of a settlement, which mandated school staff and students to undergo diversity education, “a significant portion of which would be devoted to issues of sexual orientation and gender harassment.”
However, a number of students objected to being forcedto watch a video that asserted that it is wrong to oppose homosexuality and that a person’s sexuality cannot be changed. They discovered that they could not opt-out of the training without being penalized, and contacted the legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) for assistance.
ADF then sued the Boyd County Board of Education over the matter on behalf of student Timothy Morrison and his parents, who said that the re-education requirement “effectively forces the students to speak in agreement with the school district’s view that homosexuality is a safe and healthy lifestyle that cannot be changed.”
But in 2006, Bunning again ruled that the students must watch the video and could not opt-out because of their Christian identity,stating that the education “rationally related to a legitimate educational goal, namely to maintain a safe environment.” He said that the training wouldn’t mean that students would have to change their religious beliefs, therefore, an opt-out was unnecessary.
Bunning then denied the students request who were refusing the training. “Plaintiffs are not requesting that a student absent from the training be considered an ‘excused’ or that the Board offer an alternate assignment on the issue of diversity. Rather, they seek to opt-out of the training altogether,” Bunning wrote. “Given the requirements of the consent decree, the Board cannot meet this demand. Moreover, as there is no burden on plaintiffs’ freedom of speech, free exercise or other constitutional right, there is simply no basis for an opt-out,” he added.
He then appealed to a First Circuit ruling, in which he noted, “If all parents had a fundamental constitutional right to dictate individually what the schools teach their children, the schools would be forced to cater a curriculum for each student whose parents had genuine moral disagreements with the school’s choice of subject matter.”
That, my friends, is statism, plain and simple. But, of course, the schools can push any depravity, historical revisionism and even religion they want to, so long as the state agrees that it is so.
This judge’s previous ruling and the ruling against Mrs. Davis demonstrates that he should be impeached, charged and justice be brought down upon him… and if those who took the oath to uphold the law, namely Sheriff Jack Carter won’t carry out the enforcement of the law, then it is up to the people to carry it out. What will you do people of Rowan County Kentucky?
Our children are the future of America, and our public schools are systematically training them to become accustomed to living in a “Big Brother” police state. All across the United States today, public schools have essentially become “prison grids” that are run by control freaks that are absolutely obsessed with micromanaging the lives of their students down to the smallest detail. As you will read about below, students all over the country are now being monitored by RFID microchips, their lunches are being inspected on a daily basis by school administrators, and the social media accounts of students are being constantly monitored even when they are at home. Of course these sorts of things do not happen everywhere just yet, but on the path that we are on it is just a matter of time. At this point, many of our public schools very closely resemble “totalitarian dictatorships”, and so if the United States ever slips into totalitarianism the students of today will actually feel very comfortable under that political system.
I went to public schools all my life, so I have experience in this area. Sadly, things have gone downhill quite a bit since those days. For example, one thing that was unheard of back when I was in high school was “active shooter drills”. They are being held in school districts all over the nation today, and they often involve the firing of blanks and the use of fake blood. The following is from a recent NBC News about these drills…
In a cramped, carpeted amphitheater in the basement of Troy Buchanan High School, 69 students are waiting to die.
“You’ll know when it pops off,” says Robert Bowen, the school’s campus police officer. “If you get engaged with one of the shooters, you’ll know it.”
“When you get shot, you need to close your fingers and keep ‘em in,” adds Tammy Kozinski, the drama teacher. “When the bad guy and the police come through, they’ll step all over you, and who will be saying they’re sorry?”
“Nobody!” the students cry in unison.
This isn’t a bizarre, premeditated mass murder or some twisted sacrifice led by a student cult. These are the 20 minutes preceding an active shooter drill, the 13th one Missouri’s Lincoln County school district has staged in the past year.
You can read the rest of that article right here, and a YouTube video about these drills is posted below…
Fortunately, the students participating in the active shooter drills in Missouri know in advance what is happening.
In other instances around the country, that is not the case. In fact, sometimes teachers are not even told what is going to happen. Just check out the following example from New Jersey…
About 50 teachers at a New Jersey school experienced a terrifying moment when a shooting rampage turned out to be a drill, but the teachers didn’t know it.
It happened Aug. 28 at the Phillipsburg New Jersey Early Learning Center.
A man burst into the library and started shooting. But the gun didn’t have any bullets, just blanks.
Teachers took cover under child-sized tables, crying and trembling.
“People are crying. The girl next to me is trembling and shaking. You heard people crying. You heard other people praying. It was pretty dramatic,” one teacher said.
Could you imagine your own children being put through something so traumatic?
And of course “active shooter drills” are far from the only way that our public schools are being transformed into prison camps. Just consider the following list…
-Public schools in some parts of the country are beginning to use RFID microchips to track school attendance. (Link)
-Some public schools are now systematically monitoring the social media accounts of their students. (Link)
-Listening devices are being installed in classrooms all over the nation. (Link)
-Bureaucratic control freaks are checking student lunches at many schools to ensure that they are “balanced”. (Link)
-Students are being suspended from school for simply making gun gestures with their hands. (Link)
-Some public schools do not even allow parents to walk their own children to class. (Link)
–A few years ago, a class of 3rd grade students at one Kentucky elementary school were searched by a group of teachers after 5 dollars went missing. During the search the students were actually required to remove their shoes and their socks.
–At one public school in the Chicago area, children have been banned from bringing their lunches from home. Yes, you read that correctly. Students at that particular school are absolutely prohibited from bringing lunches from home. Instead, it is mandatory that they eat the food that the school cafeteria serves.
–The U.S. Department of Agriculture is spending huge amounts of money to install surveillance cameras in the cafeterias of public schools so that government control freaks can closely monitor what our children are eating.
–A teenager in suburban Dallas was forced to take on a part-time job after being ticketed for using bad language in one high school classroom. The original ticket was for $340, but additional fees have raised the total bill to $637.
–It is not just high school kids that are being ticketed by police. In Texas the crackdown extends all the way down to elementary school students. In fact, it has been reported that Texas police gave “1,000 tickets” to elementary school kids over a recent six year period.
–A 17 year-old honor student in North Carolina named Ashley Smithwick accidentally took her father’s lunch with her to school. It contained a small paring knife which he would use to slice up apples. So what happened to this standout student when the school discovered this? The school suspended her for the rest of the year and the police charged her with a misdemeanor.
–In early 2010, a 12 year old girl in New York was arrested by police and marched out of her school in handcuffs just because she doodled on her desk. “I love my friends Abby and Faith” was what she reportedly wrote on her desk.
–There are actually some public schools in the United States that are so paranoid that they have actually installed cameras in student bathrooms.
-Down in Florida, students have actually been arrested by police for bringing a plastic butter knife to school, for throwing an eraser, and for drawing a picture of a gun.
-The Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice has announced that it will begin using analysis software to predict crime by young delinquents and will place “potential offenders” in specific prevention and education programs.
-A group of high school students made national headlines a while back when they revealed that they were ordered by a security guard to stop singing the national anthem during a visit to the Lincoln Memorial.
–In some U.S. schools, armed cops accompanied by police dogs actually conduct surprise raids with their guns drawn. In this video, you can actually see police officers aiming their guns at school children as the students are lined up facing the wall.
Our public schools are systematically training our children for life in a police state, and hardly anyone is complaining about it.
We are heading down a very dangerous road, and at the end of that road we would end up like other totalitarian regimes such as North Korea.
If you think that you would like to live in a truly totalitarian regime, just consider what a new UN report that was just released says is going on in North Korea right now…
The commission documents crimes against humanity, including “extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.”
One witness, a survivor of a North Korean prison camp, told the commission of seeing a guard beat a nearly starving woman who had recently given birth, then force the woman to drown her baby.
Others told of being imprisoned for watching soap operas, trying to find food for their families, traveling without permission or having family members considered suspect by the government.
“Because we saw so many people die, we became so used to it,” one prison camp survivor told the commission. “I’m sorry to say that we became so used to it that we didn’t feel anything.”
Perhaps you think that such a thing could never happen in America, but the truth is that we are also becoming very accustomed to the emerging Big Brother control grid which is being constructed all around us.
And the youth of today are sadly ignorant of what this nation is supposed to look like. In fact, activist Mark Dice discovers that many students at one college in California cannot even name any of the Bill of Rights when they are asked to do so.
So is there any hope for the next generation of Americans?
Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…
Michael T. Snyder is a graduate of the University of Florida law school and he worked as an attorney in the heart of Washington D.C. for a number of years. Today, Michael is best known for his work as the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog. Michael and his wife, Meranda, believe that a great awakening is coming and are working hard to help bring renewal to America. Michael is also the author of the book The Beginning Of The End
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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Published by ClashDaily.com | on February 5, 2018
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