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Posts tagged ‘Terry McAuliffe’

3 Reasons Parents Are Absolutely Right To Demand Informed Consent To What Schools Do To Their Kids


REPORTED BY: EMILIE KAO | MARCH 10, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/10/3-reasons-parents-are-absolutely-right-to-demand-informed-consent-to-what-schools-do-to-their-kids/

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A parent can look at the label on a juice box to decide what ingredients to allow into her child’s body. He should also be able to decide what ingredients a teacher puts into his child’s mind, but that isn’t the case in a growing number of public schools.

When Covid-19 brought the classroom into the kitchen, parents’ eyes were opened to some unsettling revelations, including that their children are being indoctrinated into critical race theory, and that some schools are secretly treating girls as boys and vice-versa.

Food labeling helps parents make informed decisions about what their children eat. In the same way, transparency helps parents make informed decisions about what their children learn. Yet some schools are resisting calls for transparency. Corporate media and teachers’ unions have inaccurately disparaged parents, but these critics are wrong. Here are three reasons why.

1. Children belong to their parents, not to the ‘community’ or the state.

Former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry infamously called on her viewers to “break through our kind of private idea that ‘kids belong to their parents,’. . . and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.” Her pitch was strikingly similar to that of Terry McAuliffe, former Virginia governor and chair of the Democratic National Committee, who said parents shouldn’t be telling schools what to teach.

This view of parental rights is at odds with parents’ fundamental right to direct the education and upbringing of their children. The U.S. Supreme Court recognized this in 1925 in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, stating, “The child is not the mere creature of the State; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”

As Professor Melissa Moschella writes, parental rights stem from the uniquely intimate relationship between parents and children. Children belong to their families, which are headed by their parents. Therefore, parents have the most direct obligation and authority to care for children until they are mature enough to direct their own lives. Until then, parents mediate a child’s relationship to the larger political community.

The failure to recognize that the family is distinct and relatively independent from the political community, and that parental rights are pre-political and natural rights, is not just wrong, but dangerous. Moschella notes Hannah Arendt’s observation that eliminating the intermediary structures between the individual and the state — namely the family and the church — is the essence of totalitarianism.

2. More schools are crossing the boundary line between education and indoctrination.

If schools just taught the “three Rs” (reading, writing, and arithmetic), parents would not suspect schools were undermining their values, beliefs, and authority. But, as parents in Albemarle County, Virginia, recently learned, some schools are indoctrinating students with so-called “anti-racism” ideology.

Instead of condemning all racism, “anti-racism” replaces one form of racism with another. Following “anti-racist” logic, Albemarle County schools used race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity to label students as “dominate” or “subordinate.”

Parents from five families of diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds challenged the policy. The school undermined what these parents believe and teach their children — that all people are created equal and should be treated as such. The school even threatened to punish students for not supporting the policy.

Yet, as Judge James C. Ho of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit wrote in Oliver v. Arnold, “Schools should educate—not indoctrinate. Teachers can teach. And teachers can test. But teachers cannot require students to endorse a particular political viewpoint.”

Parental rights don’t end at the schoolhouse gate. Parents must be able to protect their children from policies that place burdens and privileges on them according to their immutable characteristics.

3. Backed by the Biden administration, schools are even engaging in unauthorized treatment of students’ mental health.

The U.S. Department of Education has promoted “gender support plans.” An official fact sheet instructs schools to maintain “confidentiality” for students who identify as transgender at school by not using the student’s birth name or “sex assigned at birth if the student wishes to keep this information private.” But there is no mention of notifying, much less involving, parents in such a consequential decision to adopt a new name and pronouns that correspond to the opposite sex.

The agency tells schools to support a student’s gender transition by using “a checklist of issues to discuss with the student or their family” (emphasis added). Without an explicit requirement that schools inform and obtain parental consent to treat the child as a member of the opposite sex, it is reasonable to assume that notification to parents is optional. The schools may also perceive parental notification as a matter that depends on whether the child views their parents as “affirming” of gender transition.

Schools’ use of “gender support plans,” like those recommended by the Biden administration, have shocked parents around the country. After learning that schools sought to hide their children’s emotional distress from them, they challenged these policies in Wisconsin, Florida, and California courts.

Alliance Defending Freedom recently informed Virginia’s Harrisonburg City School District that its policy of using different names and pronouns amounts to “a psychosocial treatment that will increase the odds of long-term persistence,” according to Dr. Kenneth Zucker, an expert in treating gender dysphoria in children. Up to 90 percent of children with gender dysphoria eventually become comfortable with their bodies if they aren’t encouraged to live as the opposite sex. Schools should not endanger students by hiding information from parents about their mental health or engage in unauthorized treatment of gender dysphoria.

Lockdowns allowed many parents to see the ingredients inside their children’s education. That prompted them to support laws that provide more transparency into curriculum and policies. Parents should be able to decide on the education that best suits their child and their family’s beliefs.

Too many schools are hiding crucial information. They must be held accountable through policies that require transparency, so parents won’t receive more nasty surprises.

Emilie Kao is senior counsel and vice president of advocacy strategy with Alliance Defending Freedom.

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McAuliffe complains that Virginia has too many white teachers on last day of campaign


Reported by Nick Monroe, Cleveland, Ohio | November 1, 2021

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/watch-mcauliffe-complains-that-virginia-has-too-many-white-teachers-on-last-day-of-campaign-2655475878.html/

The race for Virginia governor comes down to the final hours in the battle between Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe and Republican contender Glenn Youngkin. The primary concern of education amongst voters has come home to roost on the last day before official Election Day voting.

John Roberts interviewed a local mother who voted for President Joe Biden about how she felt about McAuliffe. It wasn’t down party lines.

“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” said McAuliffe in a debate at the end of September.

The Fox News host asked the local parent for her feedback. “Well I think it just highlighted, again, […] that Terry wants to silence  the voices of parents, and I think that that comment made parents realize that we need to stand up, we can’t sit back. We can’t wait when it comes to our children’s safety in our schools and their education and what they’re learning in school,” the mother answered.

These remarks echo the concerns of parents in Loudoun County. They recently had to face a controversy surrounding how the school board handled a sexual assault case involving one of their students in a school bathroom.

This all comes as McAuliffe’s education plan intends to put “anti-racism” at the forefront, going as far as redrawing school’s boundary zones to reflect that ideological sentiment, which could see a return to 1970s-style bussing. In an event on Sunday in Manassas, Virginia, the Democrat vowed to the crowd that one of his priorities is diversifying the teacher base.

“50 percent of the students of Virginia schools K – 12 … 50 percent are students of color, and yet 80 percent of teachers are white!” McAuliffe said. “We all know what we have to do in school to make everybody feel comfortable in school. So let’s diversify! So here’s what I’m going to do. We’ll be the first state in America … if you’ll teach for five years here in Virginia, in a high-demand area that’d be geographic or course-work … We will pay room, board, and tuition at any college, any university, any HBCU here in the commonwealth of Virginia.”

According to the Daily Mail, McAuliffe has cancelled a Virginia Beach rally event scheduled for Monday as polls show him neck-in-neck against Youngkin.

This comes at the final hours of the McAuliffe campaign, who at the end of last week had to contend with a purported Lincoln Project hoax involving tiki torches and fake Republican supporters standing outside the Youngkin campaign bus. When the Democrat stunt was debunked, McAuliffe’s campaign had condemned the dirty tactics, despite spreading the hoax themselves all day.

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Democrats Are Using The Same 2020 Election Shenanigans To Overtake Virginia This Year


Reported By Hayden Ludwig | NOVEMBER 1, 2021

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/01/democrats-are-using-the-same-2020-election-shenanigans-to-overtake-virginia-this-year/

Virginia’s hotly contested gubernatorial race is just days away, and with Republican Glenn Youngkin and former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe tied in the polls, the professional left isn’t leaving anything to chance. A McAuliffe defeat is largely considered a bellwether for congressional Democrats in the 2022 midterms.

So how do Democrats plan to ensure a McAuliffe win and a subsequent retention of power in the state and U.S. Senate? By using the same tactic they used in the 2020 national contest: profligate mail-in voting and fake grassroots get-out-the-vote efforts funding by philanthropies and wealthy leftists, a strategy revealed through Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s gift to the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL).

And it’s a smart strategy. Joe Biden voters were twice as likely as Donald Trump voters to vote by mail in 2020, for example; and we know the effect of Zuckerberg’s millions on the 2020 election. The Capital Research Center specializes in exposing the activists behind these efforts. Here’s what we’ve discovered about the funding and activists behind them.

Getting Out the Vote for Democrats

Vote Forward is one of the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) groups swamping Virginians with a letter practically begging them to vote early. Here’s my copy:

Vote Forward is ostensibly nonpartisan—until you look at its original website from 2018, which reads “Flip the House Blue: Send letters to unlikely voters.” Elsewhere, the group admits it was founded to send “get-out-the-vote” mailers to “traditionally underrepresented communities,” code for Democrat-leaning constituencies.

The New York Times praised Vote Forward’s goal of boosting Democrat turnout just one week before the 2020 election. An old FAQ states that many of its campaigns “typically target low-propensity voters who we believe are likely to vote for Democrats when they do cast a ballot.”

In 2020, that target was 10 million voters. To make that happen, Vote Forward sued the U.S. Postal Service, accusing Postmaster General Louis DeJoy—a Trump nominee—of “undermin[ing] USPS’s ability to ensure the on-time delivery of mail ballots” in the 2020 election. The details of their settlement remain unclear, but USPS agreed to deliver mail-in ballots in time for Georgia’s January special election, the result of which ultimately handed Democrats control of the U.S. Senate.

Like many organizations that present themselves as more interested in voting than election outcomes, Vote Forward is part of the Left’s Voting Machine: A massive web of interconnected GOTV nonprofits commanding tens of millions of dollars, mostly gifted by ultra-wealthy institutions like the Ford, Gates, and Rockefeller Foundations.

We’ve traced more than $600,000 flowing to Vote Forward from the Hopewell Fund, part of a $731 million “dark money” network run by the consultancy Arabella Advisors in Washington, DC. After studying this network for years, it’s become clear to us that wherever Arabella is involved, one is sure to find the left’s top operatives as well.

For example, Vote Forward’s board includes Ezra Reese, a partner at Perkins Coie and its Marc Elias-led spin-off (the Elias Law Group) “focused on electing Democrats, supporting voting rights, and helping progressives make change”—a fact you won’t find advertised on the “nonpartisan” group’s website. Perkins Coie is the left’s law firm of choice. Elias was general counsel to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and a partisan operative whose past dealings include George Soros-funded efforts to abolish voter ID laws.

A Flood of Mail-In Ballots

In September, I reported on a new wave of 2 million applications for Virginians to register for absentee ballots in 2021. These applications weren’t sent out by state or local elections officials, but by politically active nonprofits: the Voter Participation Center and Center for Voter Information (collectively “the center”). An internal memo details the spots they planned to cover most aggressively, many of which parallel Biden’s performance in 2020.

The center explicitly targeted the “New American Majority,” another code for likely Democratic voters that they define as “young people, people of color and unmarried women.” That bloc contains 73 percent of all unregistered voters nationwide, which is why the left-wing strategists at the Democracy Alliance consider their turnout “central to progressive long-term success.”

The IRS requires all nonprofits be officially nonpartisan in order to be tax exempt. In the center’s case, nonpartisanship comes in the shape of a fig leaf—as liberal journalist Sasha Issenberg explains in his 2012 book, The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns: “Even though the group was officially nonpartisan, for tax purposes, there was no secret that the goal of all its efforts was to generate new votes for Democrats” (emphasis added).

The center sent out 15 million vote-by-mail applications in 2020 and registered 4.6 million new voters. Time credits the center’s partisan registration efforts as central to the “shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election” for Biden. No surprise that the center is heavily funded by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), AFL-CIO, Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, and Tides Foundation.

Will Zuck Bucks Continue?

We were among the first to report in-depth on how billionaire Zuckerberg and the little-known Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) spent $350 million to effectively privatize the 2020 election in battleground states, helping turnout for Biden in the name of COVID-19 “relief.”

Overnight, this little nonprofit’s revenues grew by more than 12,000 percent from $2.8 million thanks to Zuckerberg’s cash injection—fueling its “nonpartisan,” “charitable” façade to elections officials and helping Democrat turnout in precisely the spots Biden needed to win the presidency.

Across nine states, our data shows that CTCL’s grants consistently ignored Trump counties in favor of big, Democratic-leaning spots like Philadelphia, Maricopa County, and Houston—all essential to Biden’s victory. In Georgia, for instance, Biden counties were two-and-a-half times more likely to receive CTCL funding than Trump counties.

Virginia received close to $4 million in Zuck Bucks, more than one-third of which went to populous Fairfax County to “support in-person early voting” and “vote by mail.” Fairfax County was Biden’s biggest vote-haul in the state and is the linchpin to McAuliffe’s strategy.

Nearly $970,000 paid for “temporary staffing support” to bolster Fairfax County’s elections agency. That may sound innocuous, but as CTCL expert William Doyle recently wrote at this site, that funding “supported the infiltration of election offices by paid Democratic Party activists.”

[CTCL] funded self-described ‘vote navigators’ in Wisconsin to ‘assist voters, potentially at their front doors, to answer questions, assist in ballot curing … and witness absentee ballot signatures,’ and a temporary staffing agency affiliated with Stacey Abrams called ‘Happy Faces’ counting the votes amidst the election night chaos in Fulton County, Georgia.

Fairfax County applied for an extension to its CTCL grant in January, but ultimately returned its remaining $187,709 in April, spokesman Brian Worthy told me. To his knowledge, the county has not applied for another grant for the 2021 election. That’s a good start, but to save the integrity of our elections, Zuck Bucks need to be banned. No exceptions.

There’s no faster way to destroy what remaining trust Americans have in their elections than by giving them to the highest bidder. Private funding of elections would take us back to the worst of the 19th century robber barons, when rich political machines won elections by buying public officials and intimidating voters. It also presents opportunities for foreign interests to manipulate our politics and undermine American sovereignty.

It’s unknown how much CTCL money remains in Virginia or if the group has continued to make grants here. Neighboring Fairfax City reports $14,175 in CTCL funds leftover for the 2021 election.

CTCL has been surprisingly mum about the ongoing election considering how loudly it advertised open-ended grants to Georgia counties in January. It’s possible that the dozens of exposés, hundreds of critical news articles, flurry of state Zuck Buck bans, and an inquiry from furious congressional Republicans silenced the leftists running CTCL.

Or maybe not. A recent CTCL statement calls lawsuits against its grants program “frivolous” and its funding “equitable,” particularly in small counties with small elections budgets.

Today’s left has cynically embraced Zuck Bucks out of short-term thinking, believing like NPR that “private money from Facebook’s CEO saved the 2020 election.” That’s a losing hand. Americans can see that the same leftists who’ve now embraced plutocracy were just yesterday crying “eat the rich” and “abolish billionaires.” Close to a dozen states have already banned Zuck Bucks and grassroots groups are leading a national movement to audit the 2020 election and save the country.

Leftists believed the country would overlook their desperate indiscretions, claiming—as CTCL does—that Zuckerberg’s unprecedented spending spree somehow made 2020 “the most secure election in U.S. history.” We’ll know even more in December, when CTCL releases its IRS Form 990 filing to the public. If coming revelations are anything like observers expect, that claim will age about as well as milk.

Hayden Ludwig is an investigative researcher for the Capital Research Center in Washington, DC.

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Virginia Democrats Claim ‘Free And Fair’ Election While Rigging It Again


Reported By Stella Morabito | OCTOBER 28, 2021

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/28/democrats-claim-free-and-fair-election-in-virginia-while-rigging-it-again/

Photo OSCE Parliamentary Association / Flickr

A lot of roadside signs for Virginia’s Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe include a special message: “Vote in Free and Fair Elections beginning September 17.” Odd. Shouldn’t “free and fair” go without saying? Why include it on a campaign sign?

This is especially odd since the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors recently asked Virginia’s current governor, Democrat Ralph Northam, to waive the legally required witness signature for absentee ballots, as well as the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number, both statutory requirements. They asked this about a month after voting began.

For me, the gratuitous addition looks like an attempt to cover up the left’s belief that fair elections are below its paygrade. McAuliffe’s operatives can’t possibly believe it, especially as they work to change and ignore rules in the middle of the game. But they sure want you to believe the electoral changes they enacted for 2021 in Virginia—including expansions of mail-in balloting, conditions for ballot harvesting, no requirement for photo ID, etc.—somehow add up to “free and fair.”

On top of that, the huge ballot drop box in front of Fairfax County is supposed to have 24/7 surveillance, but Director of the Fairfax County Office of Elections Scott Konopasek says the camera feed will never be available to the public.

As Mollie Hemingway’s investigative work in her recent bestseller “Rigged” shows, the 2020 elections added a lot of moving parts to the machinery of election rigging. In addition to inviting fraud, there are now more ways to disguise irregularities and to render election results unverifiable. Such chaos-by-design has been in the works for many years. It reached a tipping point when the oligarchical triad of Big Tech, Big Gov, and Big Media used the Wuhan virus shutdowns to vastly expand mail-in voting while relaxing controls on it during the 2020 presidential election.

Obviously, their first order of business was to prevent President Trump from winning re-election. I imagine the second order of business is to entrench these processes for other elections so that a permanent one-party state can cross all state lines.

At the moment, there seems to be just enough pretense—such as the continued existence of in-person polling places and polling officials who request some form of identification—to create an illusion of propriety. The idea is to keep actual voters clutching their ballots with the same persistent trust as Charlie Brown holding onto Lucy’s football every time she offers him a “free and fair” chance to kick it. McAuliffe, a heavily seasoned Democratic National Committee (DNC) operative, is joined at the hip to all that machinery. Yet Democrats in Virginia are acting as though they’re “nervous” that McAuliffe might lose.

Granted, if we’re operating on a level playing field, he should be nervous. For example, his callous assertion during a debate that parents shouldn’t be involved in what their children are learning in school caused a great backlash among his presumed base. It led to lifelong Democrat voters in Virginia openly campaigning for McAuliffe’s opponent, Glenn Youngkin. So, yes, it looks like McAuliffe should be in deep doo-doo. My guess, however, is that he isn’t really worried about “winning.”

Consider that he actually doubled down on excluding parents from their children’s education. He’s just fine with the idea of the FBI investigating concerned parents as domestic terrorists. He even walked away from a televised interview because he didn’t like the questions. This is the sort of behavior I’d expect from someone who believes he has it all locked up, kind of like the Biden campaign’s extreme confidence despite the candidate’s pathetic low energy and gaffe-prone appearances, of the snoozer of the DNC convention.

So if the McAuliffe campaign feels nervous, it’s likely only over the slight possibility of not generating enough fraud. So it looks like a two-track strategy. First, make sure enough leftist operatives (like that guy in Fairfax County) are taking care of the business of generating unverifiable fraud. Second, keep propping up the illusion of “free and fair.”

Maybe that’s how you get a CYA dog-and-pony show with Stacey Abrams stumping for McAuliffe by warning against voter suppression. Maybe that’s the point of Vice President Kamala Harris’s video to 300 black churches during Sunday morning services to get out the vote for McAuliffe. The in-your-face illegality of Harris’s “Souls to the Polls” action adds to the hubris.

I’ll still mark a ballot on Election Day in Virginia (if I’m not told that I already voted.) Assuming McAuliffe ends up in Richmond again, I’ll expect to see local polling places disappear in Virginia in the future. And I’ll continue to have contempt for fake elections in 2022 and beyond.

Stella Morabito is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow Stella on Twitter.

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Virginia churches air Kamala Harris endorsement of Terry McAuliffe in apparent violation of federal law


Reported by CHRIS ENLOE | October 17, 2021

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/virginia-churches-air-kamala-harris-endorsement-of-terry-mcauliffe-in-apparent-violation-of-federal-law-theblaze-2655316306.html/

Vice President Kamala Harris is being accused of helping Virginia churches break federal law prohibiting tax-exempt churches from engaging in overt political activity. More than 300 “black churches” across Virginia will reportedly view a pre-recorded message from Harris over the next several weeks urging them to vote for Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the upcoming Virginia gubernatorial election.

According to CNN reporter Eva McKend, the message began airing Sunday and will be continue to be broadcasted through Nov. 2. The message “will air during morning services as part of outreach effort aimed to boost @TerryMcAuliffe,” McKend reported,

In her message, Harris does not hide her endorsement of McAuliffe. Not only does she urge parishioners to “vote after today’s service,” but Harris tells church-goers that, “I know that you will send Terry McAuliffe back to Richmond.”

The explicitly political message, which certainly endorses a political candidate, seemingly violates the Johnson Amendment.

The Internal Revenue Service explains:

In 1954, Congress approved an amendment by Sen. Lyndon Johnson to prohibit 501(c)(3) organizations, which includes charities and churches, from engaging in any political campaign activity. To the extent Congress has revisited the ban over the years, it has in fact strengthened the ban. The most recent change came in 1987 when Congress amended the language to clarify that the prohibition also applies to statements opposing candidates.

Currently, the law prohibits political campaign activity by charities and churches by defining a 501(c)(3) organization as one “which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”

The IRS further explains that tax-exempt organizations that violate the law are subject to losing their tax-exempt status.

Under the Internal Revenue Code, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity.

Violating this prohibition may result in denial or revocation of tax-exempt status and the imposition of certain excise taxes.

Tax-exempt organizations, however, are permitted to engage in “certain voter education activities” and “other activities intended to encourage people to participate in the electoral process” so long as they are “conducted in a non-partisan manner.” Harris’ message clearly goes beyond such permitted activity.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki appeared to skirt the Hatch Act last week when she seemingly endorsed McAuliffe during a press briefing from the White House.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has filed an ethics complaint over Psaki’s remarks.

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‘We Do Not Co-Parent With The Government’: Virginians React To McAuliffe’s Dismissal Of Parental Oversight In Education


Reported by HAROLD HUTCHISON | CONTRIBUTOR | September 29, 2021

Read more at https://www.conservativereview.com/we-do-not-co-parent-with-the-government-virginians-react-to-mcauliffes-dismissal-of-parental-oversight-in-education-2655198366.html/

Candidates Participate In Final Debate For Virginia's Gubernatorial Race
Win McNamee/Getty Images

Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe generated reactions across the country after making a controversial statement about parental involvement in education during the Sept. 28 gubernatorial debate with Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin.

“I’m not gonna let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions,” said McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee who previously served a term as governor from 2014-2018. He went on to boast of his 2016 veto of legislation that would have allowed parents to block sexually explicit books.

Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools recently were forced to pull two books, “Gender Queer” and “Lawn Boy,” after explicit material was revealed by Stacy Langdon, a mother, during a school board meeting on Sept. 23. Neighboring Loudoun County has been the flashpoint for debates over the use of critical race theory (CRT) in schools.

CRT holds that America is fundamentally racist, yet it teaches people to view every social interaction and person in terms of race. Its adherents pursue “antiracism” through the end of merit, objective truth and the adoption of race-based policies.

“Terry McAuliffe believes that parents should have no say in their children’s education so that he and his radical special interest allies can keep pushing their political agenda into classrooms. As governor, McAuliffe shut down parents who wanted a better education and more choices for their children, and his disastrous policies and lower standards have led to plummeting SOL scores and more students being left behind” Youngkin campaign spokesman Christian Martinez said in a statement provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Glenn Youngkin will get politics out of our schools and be a champion for parents and students.”

“The public schools in Virginia do not exist to raise our children, they exist to teach them math, science, reading, writing, and history. They definitely shouldn’t be providing pornographic material, encouraging gender confusion, and teaching children that they are either oppressed or oppressors,” Ian Prior, a Loudoun County parent and executive director of Fight for Schools, told the DCNF.

“Well, it’s unfortunate that one of our governor candidates, McAuliffe, feels parents do not have a right to their own children in the schools. We do not co-parent with the government, we do not co-parent with teachers or with the school board. We are the parents and ultimately, we have the final decision over our children,” Patti Hidalgo Menders, the president of the Loudoun County Republican Women’s Club and a parent with children in Loudoun County Public Schools, told the DCNF.

“We have every right to know the materials they are reading in the schools. That’s our right as a parent,” she added.

“The intentional efforts made by certain elected officials starting from the school board all the way up to a gubernatorial candidate like Terry McAuliffe to silence and shut out parents from their children’s education and insert themselves as the government as the primary educator instead of the parents being the primary educator of the children is appalling.” Elizabeth Schultz, a former member of the Fairfax County school board who has a child in middle school said.

“Every parent, regardless of their political affiliation, regardless what age their students are, should be repelled by the notion that the government alone is in charge of what your children learn,” she added. 

Across the country, parents have been speaking out about the use of critical race theory in classes. In Missouri, an online training seminar became controversial when the trainer, Dr. LaGarrett King of the University of Missouri, coached teachers on how to sneak teaching social justice past “Trump country” parents. In Loudoun County, several school board members were part of a secret Facebook group that sought to publically expose parents who opposed the use of critical race theory in school curricula. The revelation triggered a recall campaign targeting six of the members. Loudoun County Public Schools denied using critical race theory, but evidence provided by parents contradicted that denial.

McAuliffe’s remarks also drew criticism on social media.

“Terry McAuliffe should learn Virginia law. #VAgov § 1-240.1. Rights of parents. A parent has a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education, and care of the parent’s child,” McAuliffe’s opponent, Glenn Youngkin, posted on Twitter,

Radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt vowed on Twitter that he was playing McAuliffe’s comment “coming into every break” during his program.

“Last night on the gubernatorial debate stage Terry McAuliffe stood before you and said ‘I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach’. The choice is CLEAR. Vote @GlennYoungkin,” Aliscia Andrews, a Loudoun County parent and former Republican candidate for Congress, tweeted.

Julie Perry, the Republican nominee for the 86th House District for the Virginia House of Delegates, noted McAuliffe’s endorsement of her opponent on Twitter, and after quoting his remarks, asked if her opponent would “distance herself from the top of her ticket.”

Steven Law, whose Twitter profile describes him as CEO of the Senate Leadership Fund, noted in a tweet that the issue with McAuliffe’s statement went beyond what he said.

In July, campaign finance disclosures revealed that McAuliffe’s campaign received $250,000 from the American Federation of Teachers. The Virginia Education Association’s political action committee has endorsed McAuliffe’s candidacy.

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Joe Biden’s DHS Nominee Is The Absolute Picture Of DC Political Corruption


Reported by Christopher Bedford DECEMBER 4, 2020

Alejandro “Al” Mayorkas is a left-wing Democrat with a history of doing favors for wealthy and politically connected people, including working to help suspected Chinese spies enter the country and convicted drug dealers get out of prison. Last time he was in power, he administered President Barack Obama’s most anti-congressional use of executive power to accomplish amnesty. He also earned zero votes from the Republican minority when applying for that job.

Some might suggest this makes Mayorkas just about the worst possible nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), but not Joe Biden, who plans to put him in the post in 2021.

So why would Biden do it? The left wing of the party was promised a partnership in a Biden presidency, with Sen. Bernie Sanders claiming Biden personally told him he will “be the most progressive president since FDR.” So far, they’ve been disappointed, with nominees including a Clinton-mold liberal interventionist to the Department of State, and Janet Yellin (over, say, Elizabeth Warren) to Department of the Treasury.

And if Democrats succeed in Georgia to tie the Senate, a Vice President Kamala Harris can push Mayorkas across the finish line and earn the left a man on the inside. If they lose, the left gets a human sacrifice in their honor. Either way, the left gets a try, although it’s unlikely enough to satiate The Squad.

So who is Mayorkas, and why does the left seem to like him so much? In his role at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), he swiftly implemented  Obama’s extra-congressional amnesty order. His work with legal and illegal immigration advocates earned their praise, and at least two awards from outside immigrant groups. In his eventual role as deputy secretary of Homeland Security, he led the president’s Cuba delegation. Combine this resume with his Cuban-American heritage and he stands in stark contrast with President Donald Trump’s DHS.

Now, why won’t he gain any Republican support? In addition to his politics, he appears about as corrupt as modern D.C. gets.

A 99-page report prepared for the U.S. Senate by the DHS inspector general (IG) details the allegations against Mayorkas during his tenure at the head of the USCIS. While he denies the allegations and prefers to talk about the orphans he’s helped in his letter to the IG, the three cases detailed involve trying to give citizenship to politically connected, wealthy foreigners, at the behest of powerful Democrats.

“I was praised for my leadership when I engaged with the poor and the needy,” he complained in a letter to the IG, maintaining that his influential Democrat buddies with direct access to him don’t deserve any less.

The meddling was allegedly on behalf of figures like Hillary Clinton’s now-deceased brother, Anthony Rodham, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, future Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, then-former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, and the then-mayor of Los Angeles. Unsurprisingly, Mayorkas says he can’t remember the substance of any of the private conversations he had with these players. Equally unsurprising: Every one of these outside players declined to speak with the IG.

The program in question, the EB-5 program, essentially trades U.S. citizenship for “job creation,” doling out the coveted passport to foreigners who can pull together $500,000 and demonstrate their money will create jobs in a specific area of the country. More than 80 percent of applicants come from China, The Daily Caller News Foundation reports, including those working with a casino represented by Reid’s son, Rory, and including the Chinese investors working with McAuliffe and Rodham.

The Chinese government doesn’t let its subjects go abroad without a promise to keep their party and loyalties in line, and Republicans have accused the Chinese Communist Party of specifically using the pay-to-play citizenship model to infiltrate the United States for low cost. Indeed, one of Rodham’s clients was a vice president of Huwaei, a company globally targeted for extensive connections to Chinese spying operations.

The three incidents of Mayorkas’s meddling were plenty sufficient to shock the IG, as were the number of people willing to report on his behavior.

“That so many individuals were willing to step forward and tell us what happened is evidence of deep resentment” stretching from the Washington office all the way to California, the IG report reads. These whistle-blowers included “current and retired career and non-career members of the Senior Executive Service, attorneys, all levels of supervisors, immigration officers, and those involved in fraud detection and national security.”

Mayorkas says he was just a good public servant trying to fix a broken system without regard to “the identity of the petitioners.” The agency, he said in justification for his abrasive attitude, “was failing in… administration of the EB-5 program, including failing to enforce the law, adhere to its own policies, promote sound policy, understand business facts and realities, correctly apply economic principles, and honor its own representations.”

Also, McAuliffe is a belligerent ass — and on that point Mayorkas is hysterically and believably adamant.

Mayorkas has a point about the bureaucratic difficulties in Washington, but according to a great number of interviews, his motives can’t be taken seriously. “Employees were afraid to speak up in meetings,” the report reads, “because if they had a different view, Mr. Mayorkas would ‘cut them up, take them apart, or put them in their place.’”

“Another high-ranking official,” it continues, “described going to a meeting with Mr. Mayorkas as feeling like ‘going into a lion’s den to justify our existence as a Christian… That scenario always comes to a predictable end.’”

“I fear,” one official emailed when the Reid deal began, “we are entering a whole new phase of yuck.”

It’s all in the IG report —  a report that helped earn Mayorkas 41 Republican nays, four abstains, and zero yays when  Obama nominated him for a promotion to the deputy secretary of Homeland Security — the department Biden now wants him to lead. Democrats were less concerned, voting unanimously for him with only his old friend Leader Reid sitting it out (a customary move when his vote is not needed).

The behavior detailed in the report isn’t a career standout: Favors for the powerful are no strange game to Mayorkas. As his term as President Bill Clinton’s attorney for Central California drew to a close, he used his power to become the most influential person in favor of commuting the sentence of Carlos Vignali, Jr., who was serving 15 years for trafficking massive amounts of cocaine.

“U.S. Attorney Alejandro Mayorkas provided critical support for the Vignali commutation that was inappropriate, given his position,” a 2002 House of Representatives report reads. “Mayorkas, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, was asked by Horacio Vignali to call the White House in support of his son’s clemency petition.”

“His call,” the report continues, “conveyed support for the Vignali commutation … despite his knowledge that the prosecutors responsible for the Vignali case opposed clemency.”

So why would he make the call? In short, Vignali Sr. was a major Democratic backer, who made donations to powerful politicians in Los Angeles.

Once again a Hillary Clinton brother — this time Hugh Rodham — joined in on the fun, earning $204,200 for “working part-time for two months gathering materials in support of Vignali’s case and making telephone calls to White House staff.” When his sister and brother in law pressured him to return the money, the congressional report reads, he returned just $50,000.

These are the circles Mayorkas runs in, and has for decades. Even the Hunter Biden-China trouble doesn’t seem enough to dissuade Joe Biden from wanting him to defend the homeland.

He was “smart, charismatic, and persuasive,” his old employees said. “Full of emotion, impulsive, volatile, and tenacious.” In other words, he does well in Washington — and so do his friends. That is, if Democrats win in Georgia.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Christopher Bedford is a senior editor at The Federalist, the vice chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, a board member at the National Journalism Center, and the author of The Art of the Donald. Follow him on Twitter.

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