The Media’s Latest ‘Book Ban’ Story Appears To Be Completely Unfounded

Numerous major media outlets quickly seized on a story claiming that a Florida school had “banned” a poem, but according to a message sent to school parents and obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, the book is accessible to “all students.”

The Associated PressUSA TodayNPRPoliticoThe New York Times, CNN and the Guardian ran headlines claiming a school within Miami-Dade County Public Schools (MDCPS) had “banned,” “block[ed]” and “restrict[ed] access” to “The Hill We Climb,” a poem read at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, after a parent complained it contained “hate messages.” However, it appears elementary school students can still access the book; MDCPS sent a letter Wednesday, obtained by the DCNF, that informed parents that though the poem had been moved from the elementary school section to the middle school section, the poem is still accessible to “all” students.

“Recently, there has been media coverage regarding one of the books in our collection entitled The Hill We Climb,” the message read. “This text was reviewed and placed in the middle grades area of our school media center. As an additional point of information, The Hill We Climb is classified as Young Adult in Titlewave by Follet and categorized as Middle Grades in Accelerated Reader. However, to be clear, even though The Hill We Climb is located in the middle grades area of our media center, it remains accessible to all students.”

Prior to the Wednesday statement, the school district clarified in a tweet Tuesday that the book had not been “banned” or “removed” from any schools.

Moreover, Ana Rhodes, a spokesperson for Miami-Dade County Public Schools, told The Washington Post that elementary school students must request the book from a media specialist and prove they read at a middle school level, but can otherwise access the text.

The origin of the news story appears to be a Miami Herald report, based on documents obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project, which said that elementary school students’ access to the poem was restricted.

Nowhere in the documents does it say that the poem was ever banned. Instead, the documents merely say that the poem was deemed “educational” and its vocabulary was “of value” for middle school students, and would be placed under the older age group’s section of the library. There does not appear to be any evidence for the assertion that the poem was ever banned.

Politico included the school district’s original tweet and issued a correction clarifying that the poem was not “outright banned.” USA Today wrote that the poem was now only available to middle school students, but included the school district’s original tweet.

The AP, which described the poem as “banned,” wrote that the poem had been placed on a “restricted list” and that the school district said the poem is available to middle school students.

The Guardian’s headline states that the poem was “ban[ned]” and that it “was removed for reading by elementary school children.”

The book was deemed more age-appropriate for older students after a parent of a student at Bob Graham Education Center, a K-8 school within the district, challenged the poem stating it was “not educational and have (sic) indirectly hate messages,” and would “cause confusion and indoctrinate students,” according to documents released by the the Florida Freedom to Read Project.

The parent challenged four additional books and poems, though the school district’s materials-review panel decided to not completely remove the material, a Florida Freedom to Read Project report stated.

“So they ban my book from young readers, confuse me with Oprah, fail to specify what parts of my poetry they object to, refuse to read any reviews, and offer no alternatives … Unnecessary book bans like these are on the rise, and we must fight back,” Amanda Gorman, the author of the poem, said in a tweet.

The Associated Press, USA Today, NPR, Politico, The New York Times and CNN did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include comments a Miami-Dade County Public Schools spokesperson made to The Washington Post.

AUTHOR

REAGAN REESE

Contributor.

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

VIDEO: Gender vs. Free Speech

Constitution Corner with Robert Owens published the video below titled Gender vs. Free Speech. Owens states,

A school district in Ohio recently enacted a policy that allows administrators to expel a student for the crime of “misgendering”.  Sound Crazy?  The group, Parents Defending Education, thought so too, so they are suing the school district to keep Freedom of Speech alive.­

WATCH:

Take Action:

1.) Like and Share this video with others.

2.) Apply for Membership with The John Birch Society and get involved.

3.) Learn more about home school options at the Freedom Project Academy.

©2023. Robert Owens’ Constitution Corner. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Why The Media Attacks Detransitioners

EXCLUSIVE: Biden Admin Tells Adults How to Discuss Sex with Teens Behind Parents’ Backs

As part of its month-long focus on adolescent health, the Biden administration is promoting a document that tells Planned Parenthood and other taxpayer-funded family planning offices how to talk to minors about sex without their parents overhearing, and how to secretly deliver birth control to adolescents without parental knowledge or consent.

Federally-funded guidelines instruct adults to pause before discussing sex with minors and to ask, “Are you alone in the room?” These instructions specify tactics to follow “if you’re really having a hard time getting a parent” to leave the room during the sex talk. They suggest children as young as 13 discuss sex with groups like Planned Parenthood in a parked car or communicate in writing, so their parents cannot hear the adults’ side of the conversation. And they encourage offices to have vans roam neighborhoods giving minors federally funded contraceptives; to mail birth control to adolescents in “plain, unmarked packaging;” and/or to have teenagers receive contraceptives at public meet-up places.

A federal grant recipient admitted the cloak-and-dagger sex discussion is necessary, because “parents might not agree with some of the things that we’re talking about.”

The emphasis on shutting out adults comes as the Biden administration and 24 states are fighting against a lawsuit to recognize parents’ right to know if the government is enabling underage sexual activity by giving teens birth control.

Biden Admin: ‘It Takes a Village’ to Teach Teens about Sex

The Biden administration revealed that it aimed to “expand sexual and reproductive health information and services” for teens during National Adolescent Health Month (NAHM), which runs during the month of May. The announcement made it clear government-funded strangers would take a leading role in forming teens’ views of sexuality.

“The adage ‘It takes a village’ has been proven time and again,” said Jessica Marcella, deputy assistant secretary for Population Affairs and director of the Office of Adolescent Health in the official press release. “[T]his year,” the Biden administration is “amplifying the important role of youth-serving professionals and other caring adults in their interactions with young people.”

The Biden administration’s official Resources for National Adolescent Health Month™ 2023 links to a document titled “Providing Family Planning Services to Adolescents During Uncertain Times,” produced by the Reproductive Health National Training Center (RHNTC), a group that trains Title X providers at taxpayers’ expense. Its instructions detail how Title X recipients, who distribute federally funded contraception to children in the name of “family planning,” can and should bypass parents during sex-related telehealth meetings.

‘Why Are You Talking to My Young Person in the Bathroom with the Door Locked?’

The plan to speak about sex one-on-one with impressionable youth begins during scheduling. “Confirm with youth clients that you have their phone number/contact information rather than their parents’ contact information,” the document tells federal grant recipients. “At the beginning of the visit, do a privacy screen. Ask ‘Are you alone in the room?’ or ‘Can other people hear what you are saying?’”

The document links to a webinar which fleshes out these ideas in greater detail. A slide on “Ensuring Adolescent Privacy” tells Title X grantees to ask:

1. Are they alone in the room? Always ask first! If a parent is present, ask to provide alone time during the appointment.

2. Can people hear them outside the room? Can they relocate? Use headphones? Use yes/no questions or chat feature?” (Emphases in original.)

The written document tells teens who want to “protect their privacy” from their parents “during a virtual visit” to:

  • “Take the call in the bathroom, outside, or in a parked car.”
  • “Use headphones.”
  • “Schedule the call at a time when there are fewer people at home.”

“[P]arents might not agree with some of the things that we’re talking about and some of the services that our patients are looking for,” Safiya Yearwood, a nurse at Baltimore’s Star Track Clinic, told the webinar. Title X grantees must “mak[e] sure that patients are, number one, safe to even have these conversations, and determine[e] where they can do it.”

The easiest method is to assure teens know how to call without their parent or guardian’s input. “[A]re we letting all of our adolescent patients know what their protections are?” asked webinar host Kaleigh Cornelison, MSW, who was then lead program specialist at the University of Michigan’s Adolescent Health Initiative, and who now works at ETR, which specialized in “health equity” advancement. “[A]re we informing everyone of what their rights are?”

“Are we ensuring that everyone knows what their rights are and what they have access to without a parent or caregiver’s consent?”

If parents are present, Title X grantees should make every effort to get them to leave the room. “Standardize time alone for all adolescent clients with the provider,” Cornelison instructed Title X offices. Have a “system in place so it’s standard practice; it’s not out of the ordinary. It comes to be expected every time.”

“We had to create scripts” for telehealth visits, explained Chinwe Efuribe, MD, MPH, who founded the Centered Youth Clinic and Consulting clinic and medical director of Every Body Texas, on the webinar. Employees told parents their absence “is our practice” and, “we usually have one-on-one time with our young people, and we would like to continue that.”

It is important to normalize the practice to evade parents’ suspicion, she said. “If the parent was there in the visit, also let them know that this is something that we’ve always been doing that we want to continue doing, so they don’t think that, you know, ‘Why are you talking to my young person in the bathroom with the door locked?’” said Efuribe.

If parents refuse to leave, Cornelison told Title X recipient offices, they should tell teens they “can maybe get a little creative about moving rooms, putting on headphones, maybe some questions are asked in a chat instead of verbally just to sort of deal with that privacy issue if you’re really having a hard time getting a parent or caregiver outside of the space.”

To maintain silence after the visit, Cornelison told providers to assure all emails are sent to the teens’ private email account, so no “parent is going to get a red flag.”

Two sexually active minors testified the Biden administration-promoted guidelines helped them hide their sexual activity from others, including parents.

“It had been an ongoing battle for me” to keep her parents uninformed of her sexual activity, said Kacie, an underage teenager. “I did not think I needed to hear or experience the repercussions from my family.” Her efforts included talking to her Title X office “on the phone behind the shed” and lying to her parents to get the use of the family car. “I’d be like, ‘Hey, I’m going here, and I’m doing this.’ It’s not like, ‘I’m going to my doctor to get help with Title X services,’” she said. Bianca, a teen who uses they/them pronouns, added that she particularly appreciated online events, where “you can tell someone, ‘Hey, I’m going to this event!’ and you don’t have to say, ‘I’m going to the clinic.’”

Contraceptive Vans and Unmarked Boxes of Condoms

After the consultation, adult Title X grantees must deliver contraceptives to minors without the parents’ knowledge. “With more virtual visits happening, clinics have come up with creative ways to deliver the prescriptions and supplies that they previously gave youth on-site at the clinic,” says the document, which encourages offices to begin:

  • “Mail delivery of supplies in plain, unmarked packaging”
  • “Curbside pickup of supplies at the clinic or other community locations frequented by youth”
  • “Use of a mobile van to bring supplies to people in their neighborhoods”

Yearwood told the webinar she mailed teens “That Box,” a box full of condoms, “little toys,” and other sex items. “There’s no sort of markings on there that would say, ‘There’s HIV [testing kit] and condoms in here,’” she said.

“When I go to the clinic, Safiya and them [sic] always give me like a ‘goodie bag.’ And it’s so cute. It’s like a bag but it has condoms and all these things that I need,” said Bianca — with her parents none the wiser.

Eroding Parents’ Rights Did Not Begin with Gender

“These guidelines encourage health care providers to keep the parents of teens in the dark about their potentially life-altering decisions surrounding sexual activity,” Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, the founder and president of the Ruth Institute and author of “The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologies are Destroying Lives and How the Church was Right All Along,” told The Washington Stand.

“It has long been federal policy that minors past the age of puberty have a right to contraception without their parents’ knowledge or consent,” Morse told TWS. “This latest effort by the federal government to actively encourage health care providers to help teens deceive their parents is part of a longstanding pattern of the Sexual State to spread the ideology of the Sexual Revolution — whether people know it or not, whether people want it or not.”

Title X became law when President Richard Nixon signed the Family Planning Services and Public Research Act of 1970 (now Public Law 91-572). In 1978, Congress amended the law specifically to include adolescents. A series of courts ruled that the law forbids parental consent or notification laws. In 2021, the Biden administration codified these rulings in regulation to federal law 42 C.F.R. § 59.10(b), which states that “Title X projects may not require consent of parents or guardians for the provision of services to minors, nor can any Title X project staff notify a parent or guardian before or after a minor has requested and/or received Title X family planning services.”

Family advocates have tried to remove the government-imposed barrier between parents and unemancipated minors for more than a quarter of a century. In 1997, then-Rep. Ernest Istook attempted to require parental consent before federally funded facilities could give birth control to minors. But the House Appropriations Committee defeated the Istook amendment, substituting a watered-down alternative that asked Title X participants to encourage family involvement “to the extent practical.”

More recently, parents earned a victory in a federal courtroom — a breakthrough the Biden administration is trying to reverse.

Biden Takes Parents to Court

A concerned parent sued HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, Deanda v. Becerra, last December, arguing that Title X confidentiality guidelines violate parents’ rights — and won.

The secretive “administration of the Title X program violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children,” ruled U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, who also recently found the FDA had wrongly approved the abortion pill (mifepristone). “[P]arental rights … do not completely disappear with respect to a minor child’s sexual activity.”

The Biden administration appealed the decision in February. The attorneys general of 24 states and the District of Columbia signed an amicus brief siding with Biden and against parents/guardians.

They are supported by Planned Parenthood and other federally funded contraceptive providers who oppose parental “involvement” — starkly framing the legal battle as a struggle between their business and parents’ rights.

“Forced parental notification and involvement undercuts the integrity of the Title X program and creates barriers to care and decision-making,” said Clare Coleman, president and CEO of the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association (NFPRHA). Establishing parental oversight of their minor children’s sex life would “eviscerate longstanding Title X program protections that ensure young people can access the care they need from providers they trust.”

The Deanda lawsuit is “shameful,” said Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson. “Young people deserve access to the health care they need to make their own decisions about their bodies, lives, and futures.”

Planned Parenthood said it is “grateful” to the president and “fortunate that the U.S. Justice Department and the Biden administration [is] dedicated to fighting back,” said Johnson, adding that Planned Parenthood will “look forward to our ongoing work with them.”

Sexually Active Teens Have Worse Mental Health: Biden Administration

The Biden administration’s anti-parental rights legal efforts seem at odds with its own advice on how to improve poor teen mental health. The CDC website states multiple times, “Parent engagement also makes it more likely that children and adolescents will avoid unhealthy behaviors, such as sexual risk behaviors and tobacco, alcohol, and other drug use.” Sexually active teens are more likely to suffer from depression, addiction, and suicidal ideation than their abstinent heterosexual peers, according to a report the CDC released in February. Teens who have sex with members of the opposite sex are twice as likely to self-report attempting suicide, more than twice as likely to use marijuana, and 45% more likely to report overall poor mental health.

The rates are higher for teens who have sex with members of the same sex.

Independent studies have found parental involvement is particularly important for vulnerable populations the Biden administration uplifts as the center of its policies. Black female teens living in low-income urban areas and “at increased risk for sexually transmitted diseases” found high levels of “perceived parental supervision” resulted in lower rates of gonorrhea and chlamydia, concluded one such study. “[P]arental supervision can result in lower sexually transmitted disease rates in urban high-prevalence populations.”

“Given the mental health crisis among American teens, deliberately putting a communication barrier between children and their parents is a really bad idea,” Morse told TWS.

Any sexual activity increases the possibility of physical health impacts, as well. While abstinence prevents all pregnancies and disease, the oral contraceptives distributed by Title X fail to prevent pregnancy at least 7% of the time, and condoms have a “typical use failure rate [of] 13%,” according to the CDC. The NAHM’s resources page admits that “condom use with every sexual act can greatly reduce — though not eliminate — the risk of” sexually transmitted infections/diseases (STIs/STDs). People between the ages of 15 and 24 accounted for half of the 26 million new STDs/STIs in the U.S., according to the CDC.

Many of the hormonal contraceptives and long-acting reversible contraceptives Title X offers teens also constitute potential abortifacients. And many are now distributed by Planned Parenthood, which may now refer visitors for abortions.

‘It Takes a Family,’ Not a Village

Perhaps knowing how incendiary its materials are, the RHNTC guide carries a disclaimer that, although “[t]his publication was supported by the Office of Population Affairs (Grant FPTPA006030),” the “views expressed do not necessarily reflect the official policies of the Department of Health and Human Services.” It does, however, reflect a training document intended to teach Title X providers how to use the taxpayer dollars furnished by the HHS.

Pro-family advocates say these prescriptions align with the Biden administration’s attempt to have minors guided on sexual issues by unrelated adults at the government’s direction, instead of loving parents.

Marcella’s reference that “it takes a village to raise a child” is “simply an attempt to replace parents. It takes a family to raise a child — not a village. It takes a loving mother and father who work together to teach their child to strive for the good, true, and beautiful,” Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand.

“Since day one, the Biden administration has worked to replace mothers and fathers with a village — and not just any village, but one that is only made up of people intent on leading teenagers down the path of self-destruction and death.”

Resources: You can read the document here. You can view the webinar here.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Class Warfare: Training The Next Generation of Childhood Red Gender-Guards

One of the most depressing stories of 2023 features a British teacher who claims to have been removed from her job in a prestigious, fee-paying English high school for the heinous crime of referring to her pupils as being female. This is despite the school in question being a girls’-only institution.

Giving testimony to an independent enquiry into childhood gender dysphoria, the anonymous educator told of an occasion in May 2021 when she greeted her 11-year-old students with the innocuous phrase “good afternoon, girls”. Immediately, the politically primed students piously informed her that “not everyone here identifies as female”, even though they all clearly were. One particular classroom cadre even stood up and demanded the teacher “acknowledge their pronouns”.

The following day, the girls all wrote their names on the whiteboard, together with their preferred pronouns – including one who affected the nonsensical labels “they/them”. The junior Red Guards even held a lunchtime protest against their “oppressor”, bearing home-made placards with modish slogans like “Trans lives matter”.

Dishearteningly, school managers sided with the out-of-control children, placing their teacher into “some sort of disciplinary process”. She was forced to stand before the class whilst the girls’ Head of Year ritually apologised, telling them they were “all really loved by us” and how nobody “meant to offend” them, a charade the newly-minted non-person found “humiliating and embarrassing”.

The unfortunate teacher was subsequently “managed out” of employment when her temporary contract came to an end by the school’s head, she says. How had things come to this, where an innocent woman could find herself made jobless simply for calling girls girls?

A little learning is a dangerous thing

The infant rebellion began after the girls had been subjected to obvious indoctrination by the school’s “Diversity and Inclusion” prefects, 17 and 18-year-old upper-school students who evidently functioned as the institution’s designated gender-commissars.

The prefects had shown their younger sisters a video proselytising the various modern-day gender categories which supposedly now exist, besides making absurd claims about a baby’s sex being merely “assigned” it at birth by a malign cabal of transphobic doctors and midwives in hospitals. In other words, the impressionable 11-year-olds had been deliberately groomed into Far-Left political pogrom against their ideologically non-compliant elders.

In early May, further details emerged of a London-based charity, the School of Sexuality Education (SSE), which was alleged to be promoting partisan LGBTQI-related activities amongst schoolchildren. According to an SSE worksheet seen by the London Times, students are specifically encouraged to become amateur grass-roots political activists:

“Using what you have seen, read and thought about so far, think about what you and your communities could do to celebrate sex-positivity and sexual diversity. You could even chat about this with friends over Snapchat/FaceTime to try to make some activist plans for the future!”

Other SSE worksheets urge children to transform “all of your points so far into a quickfire asexuality explainer video” for TikTok, to spread such infectious, normativity-dissolving ideologies further. Another bizarre worksheet explains how “virginity does not exist”, being a mere “damaging social construct”. In certain rougher inner-city British schools virginity may indeed no longer exist, even amongst the 11-year-olds, but this still seems an odd thing to be teaching schoolchildren.

Little Pink Books

The SSE deny they proselytise any partisan political views at all, but such people always do. A mere day after the SSE worksheets made the newspapers, UK media also reported on the publication of a new book of essays by teacher-activist members of the country’s National Education Union (NEU), Lessons in Organising: What Trade Unionists Can Learn from the War on Teachers.

The NEU pleaded this was not an official publication of theirs, but as its co-authors were members, and it featured glowing praise on the back cover from the NEU’s current Joint-General Secretary, you can certainly see how such a mistaken assumption might otherwise have arisen.

Containing essays from NEU leaders like Gawain Little, former General Secretary of the Young Communist League, the book says teachers should no longer just strike and agitate over legitimately relevant “narrow questions” like their own personal pay and working conditions, but as part of a larger struggle aimed at reshaping “political and civil society” more generally.

At a meeting of the Far-Left Socialist Worker’s Party cult in 2022, the NEU’s incoming General Secretary, Daniel Kebede, explained the necessity of “taking back control” of Britain’s education system. Upcoming teacher-led strikes, he said, were about much more than securing pay-increases, and more about “reorganising society, [to a point] where we are free from … oppression.”

Free from oppression how? Well, the fact that the NEU’s Lessons in Organising book possesses a cover image of several sharpened classroom colouring-pencils arranged to match very closely the colours of the Transgender Pride flag gives us some kind of a clue. The NEU recently voted its approval for Drag Queen Story Hour in UK schools to help “challenge” their “heteronormative culture and curriculum”.

Evidently, calling girls girls is now just another form of gender-genocide.

Schools for scandal

I used to be a teacher in an all-girls’ school myself. This was only just over a decade ago, and I can tell you now that each and every one of the students I taught was, quite unsurprisingly, a girl. Not one of them came out as being trans, quite a reversal of more recent 2022 data implying over half of British schoolteachers now have at least one kid under their care who delusionally claims to have been born trapped in the wrong body.

Many of these children would seem to in fact be autistic or disturbed, having been duped into embracing the utopian idea that impossibly changing their biological sex will somehow bring them into a state of purest happiness – look how often we now hear the slogan “trans joy” being dubiously promoted to society at large (including in this piece from Teen Vogue, of all places). Yet the truly disturbing thing is that many of these adult groomers happen to be the students’ teachers themselves, as clearly demonstrated by the well-known “Libs of TikTok“ account.

Given the attitudes of the merely adult-bodied mental adolescents increasingly placed in charge of their education, it is perhaps no surprise a May 2023 survey commissioned by the think-tank Civitas found a barely believable one in ten British 16-18 year-olds surveyed from a sample of 1,168 said they either wished to change their gender or had already done so.

Given that around a third were now being lied to by in-school activists that a woman could have a penis, and a fifth being misled into believing that men can get pregnant, it is a wonder the numbers questioning whether or not they too could become magical chromosomal shape-shifters in post-human form was not higher.

According to Conservative MP Miriam Cates, the survey revealed that “What is happening in our schools under the guise of sex-education is a population-level psychological and social experiment on our children. This cannot go on.” I quite agree. If only the so-called “Conservative” Party of which Cates is a member were the current British party of government, and therefore able to step in and intervene to put a stop to such blatant programmes of extra-democratic social engineering if they really had the guts to do so – oh, wait …

The Children’s Crusade

Commentator Toby Young, head of the Free Speech Union campaign group, further complained the survey’s findings demonstrated what “woke madrasas” Britain’s schools had by now become. Mentally indoctrinated Britain’s kids may well increasingly be, but hard-line Islam may not be the best comparison to make here: whatever other flaws they might possess, underground Islamist madrasas (of which Britain has a fair few too, it must be said) at least do not teach their students that women possess penises.

Teachers in madrasas do instruct their charges to respect their elders, albeit often to a somewhat excessive degree; gender indoctrinators in British schools today do the precise reverse. The same Civitas poll also found 77 percent of parents surveyed wanted the legal right to inspect just what insane “sex-education” [sic] materials their offspring were being force-fed in class, rather suggesting they didn’t approve of queer commissars persuading their children to aspire towards acts of unnecessary surgical mutilation of their breasts and genitalia for no good reason.

But will parents be listened to? No, because children no longer belong to their parents anymore, but to self-appointed outside Far-Left activists who will teach them only to despise their immediate biological progenitors, and to reject everything they believe in and stand for.

A better comparison for Young to have made may therefore not be Islamist madrasas, but Maoist re-education camps.

Ignorance is bliss

It is embarrassingly obvious what is going on here – the facilitation and artificial fabrication of a new, youth-led Cultural Revolution not unlike that disastrously unleashed onto 1960s China by Chairman Mao. The similarity of leftist upheaval in European and US schools to the Cultural Revolution has often been noted: but rarely by the historically illiterate schoolchildren themselves.

This is because Western kids are deliberately kept in a state of historical ignorance about the unparalleled crimes of Chinese Communism. According to one 2016 survey, an astonishing 70 percent of UK 16-24-year-olds had never even heard of Chairman Mao, and of those who had, 99 percent probably considered it a hate-crime not to call him “Chairperson”. Only 20 percent of those who had heard his baleful name associated him with what the pollsters called “crimes against humanity”.

Attempts to counter such ignorance are often blocked. In March, Republicans in the US State of Virginia tried to pass Bill HB1816, which sought to officially designate every November 7 as Victims of Communism Day, requiring all public schools to teach students about the countless millions killed by the immensely damaging ideology.

However, Virginia Democrats and teaching unions defeated this plan, on the spurious grounds that, as four of the world’s five remaining officially Communist states are in South-East Asia (China, North Korea, Laos and Vietnam – the fifth is Cuba), teaching students that Communism was wrong-headed would inevitably “subject Asian-American students to [bullying] anti-Asian sentiments.”

A shame they are not so considerate of the well-being of white students when pumping their classmates’ heads full of anti-white Critical Race Theory, or of all those poor autistic pupils whom they are perfectly happy to brainwash into agitating for having their breasts chopped off under histrionic threat of committing suicide if denied permission to do so by their parents.

The real reason leftists are reluctant to tell students about Victims of Communism Day is that, if they do, one day those same students might wake up and realize they are increasingly becoming Victims of Communism in the classroom themselves. So, it seems, are their remaining non-compliant teachers.

I wonder how many hours or minutes it may have taken for me to be sacked if I was unlucky enough to still be teaching in a British school today?

AUTHOR

Steven Tucker

Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His next, Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience… .

RELATED COLUMN: News from Salem: The bullying of those who dissent from transgender dogma is out of control

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Assistant Professor Sues University That Allegedly Forces Faculty To Pledge Commitment To Diversity

An assistant professor is suing a California university that allegedly requires faculty applicants to pledge their commitment to “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI) policies and ideology.

The Pacific Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit Thursday on behalf of Dr. John D. Haltigan, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, against the University of California (UC), Santa Cruz alleging that institution violates faculty applicants’ First Amendment rights by requiring them to submit a statement displaying their support of DEI. Requiring a statement on increasing diversity along racial and ethnic lines forces faculty applicants to agree, or pretend to agree, with such values, the lawsuit alleges. 

“UC Santa Cruz’ DEI statement requirement is nothing more than a rebranding of the unconstitutional loyalty oaths that proliferated during the Cold War,” Wilson Freeman, an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, said in a press release. “Universities are not permitted to discriminate against applicants because of their political views. UC’s DEI statement screening is a thinly veiled attempt to do exactly that.”

Haltigan, who holds a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Miami, wished to apply for the institution’s tenure-track position in Developmental Psychology but did not because of the required DEI statement, the lawsuit shows. The application for the tenure-track position in Developmental Psychology allegedly tells applicants that its scoring rubric grants low scores to those applying if they “believe race and sex should not be used to judge individuals.”

“If Dr. Haltigan were to apply for this position, he would be compelled to alter his behavior and either remain silent about the many important social issues addressed by the DEI Statement Requirement or recant his views to conform to the dictates of the University administration,” the lawsuit alleges.

Throughout the country universities are requiring some sort of DEI statement from applicants outlining their competencies in diversity; in May 2022, Indiana University School of Medicine updated its standards mandating that professors who wish to be promoted, “show effort toward advancing DEI.” The University of Tennessee requires applicants to submit a diversity statement, which they are judged on, telling how they will help contribute to diversity and inclusion at the school.

“The University of California has adopted a modern day loyalty oath for professors who seek to join the faculty,” the lawsuit alleged. “Today’s loyalty oath does not demand a pledge that professors are not members of the Communist Party, but professed agreement with ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ policies and ideology.”

The University of California, Santa Cruz did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

REAGAN REESE

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: University Sexuality Program Hosts ‘Radical Playdate’ To Help 5-Year-Olds Explore Their ‘Gender Identity’

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Florida Law Defunds DEI in Higher Ed

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) on Monday signed three bills to excise woke ideology from state higher education institutions and promote productive education goals.

SB 266 will “prohibit institutions from spending federal or state dollars on discriminatory initiatives, such as so called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)’ programs,” the governor’s office summarized in a press release. HB 931 will “prohibit Florida’s public institutions from requiring students, faculty, or staff to take political loyalty tests,” and SB 240 will “expand workforce education programs and increase access to career and technical education (CTE) programs.”

The first of these laws doubles down on Florida Republicans’ efforts last year to crack down on woke ideology in institutions of higher education. SB 266 forbids “a Florida College System institution” to “expend any state or federal funds” on “any programs or campus activities that: (a) Violate s. 1000.05; or (b) Advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI], or promote or engage in political or social activism.”

The first prohibited category (violations of s. 1000.05) refers to a section of Florida law dealing with discrimination in K-20 public education, which the Individual Freedom Act (a.k.a. Stop Woke Act) modified last year. The Stop Woke Act added paragraphs stating that “it shall constitute discrimination … to subject any student or employee to training or instruction that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels such student or employee to believe any of the following concepts.” The list that followed included foundational tenets of critical race theory (CRT) and other leftist ideologies, such as “A person’s moral character or status as either privileged or oppressed is necessarily determined by his or her race, color, national origin, or sex.”

In October, a federal judge in the Northern District of Florida temporarily blocked Florida officials from enforcing this section of the law, on the grounds that it ran afoul of First Amendment Freedom of Speech.

Following this legal setback, Florida Republicans devised a different approach to achieve their original objective — eliminating woke programming on academic campuses. It began with Governor DeSantis ordering all state universities and colleges “to provide a comprehensive list of all staff, programs, and campus activities” related to DEI or CRT. Within days, the same parties who had challenged the Stop Woke Act complained that Florida was violating the judge’s preliminary injunction against portions of the Stop Woke Act. However, the judge denied the motion on the grounds that the injunction had not been violated.

Perhaps in an effort to avoid another free speech challenge, SB 266 does provide an exception from its DEI funding ban for “student fees to support student-led organizations” and “use of institution facilities by student-led organizations.”

SB 266 also enacted other DeSantis objectives for higher education. It directed the Board of Governors to review the mission and curriculum of each university, gave university presidents (as opposed to less accountable academic departments) final authority over hiring full-time faculty, and prohibited left-wing loyalty pledges as a condition of employment. These changes are among those DeSantis set forth in his January 31 education agenda “to focus on promoting academic excellence, the pursuit of truth, and to give students the foundation so they can think for themselves.”

In addition to SB 266, DeSantis also signed HB 931, which states that “a public institution of higher education may not … Require or solicit a person to complete a political loyalty test as a condition of employment or admission into, or promotion within, such institution.” It also bars universities and colleges from giving “preferential consideration” for employment, admission, or promotion based on “an opinion or actions in support of: a. A partisan, a political, or an ideological set of beliefs; or b. Another person or group of persons based on the person’s or group’s race or ethnicity or support of an ideology or movement … that promotes the differential treatment of a person or a group of persons based on race or ethnicity.” This prohibition encompasses university diversity statements (not academic diversity but identity diversity), which require university staff to affirm a DEI agenda as a condition of employment.

While DeSantis’ educational initiatives make headlines for countering woke ideology, they reflect a fundamentally positive vision, not one that is negative or contrarian. Rather, the goal is to remove politics from education, thus “empowering students, parents, and educators to focus on creating opportunities for our younger generations,” said DeSantis. This mission, to prepare young people to be productive members of society, is reflected in the third bill DeSantis signed, SB 240, which will “expand workforce education programs and increase access to career and technical education (CTE) programs.”

Unsurprisingly, left-wing activists like the ACLU of Florida dislike Florida’s higher education reforms, which demolish the barriers protecting left-wing academic hegemony. But every significant reform will face opposition. Ray Rodrigues, Chancellor of the State University System of Florida, said the legislature and DeSantis were “re-orienting our distinguished universities to missions that treat people as individuals, that reward merit and achievement, and center on recruiting excellent faculty while creating the talent pipeline necessary to fuel Florida’s future.” Making the right enemies is worth it, for the right reasons.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘Destroy The Role Of Parents’: Karine Jean-Pierre Gets Angry Reactions For Saying Children ‘Belong To All Of Us’

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has drawn angry reactions for commenting that children “belong to all of us” at an award ceremony held by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).

Jean-Pierre made the comments during an interview with Jezebel magazine at the 2023 GLAAD awards, weeks after President Joe Biden said there’s, “[n]o such thing as someone else’s child. Our nation’s children are all our children.” She was advocating for children to have increased access to sex change operations, procedures which are banned or restricted in many countries.

The activist organization Catholic Vote accused the Biden Administration of “working to destroy the role of parents at every turn,” in a tweet Wednesday.

In a comment provided to the Daily Caller, Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, Board Chairman of the medical group Do No Harm said that children can’t “make informed judgements” about these sorts of treatments.

“Miss Jean-Pierre is correct that the state plays an important role regarding children,” Dr. Goldfarb said. “That role is to protect children from child abuse and from their own inability to make good judgments. That is why children cannot drive, cannot smoke, and cannot vote.”

“The idea that children can make informed judgments about altering their body and their reproductive future suggests that adults, particularly those in healthcare, who support so-called gender, affirming care, are betraying these children.”

Pro-life advocacy group Protect Women Ohio commented that, “No parent wants to hear the government tell them their kids are not theirs.”

“Democrats, from the president to the local level, are fighting to prevent parents from being able to protect their own children,” another pro-life group, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, tweeted.

“Biden Admin Says Your Kids Belong to the Them. Guess what? NO THEY DON’T. We the Parents won’t let Big Government and their schools along with the ACLU & URGE remove our rights/responsibilities as parents so they can destroy our kids and our future,” the conservative group Eagle Forum said.

AUTHOR

SARAH WEAVER

Social issues reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The World Health Organization has a message for parents: ‘sexuality education starts at birth’

The World Health Organisation has orchestrated a “framework for policy makers, educational and health authorities and specialists” titled, “Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe”.

Its purpose is to standardise (in other words override) the diverse teaching practices of each sovereign nation within Europe and the wider international community with regards to sexual education.

Having all-but-forced European nations to comply, the United Nations is seeking to expand a similar framework to all UN member states – including Australia. This framework is called International Guidance on Sexuality Education, produced as part of UN Education 2030 and counter-signed by UNICEF. The WHO are now actively promoting the framework. In mid-April of 2023, the Commission on Population and Development failed to reach a consensus on advancing the strategy, providing a reprieve … for now.

“Nobody is happy with this result,” said a spokesperson representing Senegal. They went on to point out that people come from different “horizons and realities” and that the commission must “respect all cultures”. The problem with Communist-style policy is that it demands a uniform approach with identical ideological outcomes irrespective of culture.

And what sort of “vision” does the WHO have in mind for the world’s children?

Their preferred framework demands that sex education begin at birth and be guided by the State via the relentless work of educators instead of the current model of parent-led development with catch-up assistance from schools.

European countries have already begun integrating the WHO agenda into their curricula with Germany, for example, using the WHO document “widely” for “development and revision, advocacy work, and training educators”.

Quite frankly, the Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe is a “rapey” document that reads like the mind of a child-fiddling psychopath given control of public health.

The UN document makes their intention very clear that:

“This framework aims to empower children and young people to develop respectful social and sexual relationships. These skills can help children and young people form respectful and healthy relationships with family members, peers, friends and romantic or sexual partners.”

The Framework also teaches children what consent consists of, meaning they assume a child can consent to sex.

Starting sex education at birth

The WHO lays out its reason for teaching children aged 0-6 the detail of biological reproduction – that is, children who are still young enough to believe in Santa and the Tooth Fairy. By age 6, the WHO wants the education industry – and presumably their teachers – to expose children to the concepts of intercourse, masturbation, and pornography. By age 9, they are expected to reach an “adult” knowledge of sex including teaching of masturbation and viewing of online pornography. At age 12 – remembering that we are still talking about young children – the WHO wishes the official European education course to explore political and emotional responses to sex, puberty, and gender.

Starting sex education at birth is an indication of the mindset of these people. 0-4 year-olds should be able to distinguish between consensual and non-consensual sexual interaction and develop a “positive attitude” to the different sexual lifestyles of adults.

These standards, if you can call them that, form part of an initiative launched by the WHO Regional Office for Europe in 2008 and were further developed by the Federal Centre for Health Education with the collaboration of 19 “experts” from Western European countries.

In their own words, it was created as part of a “new need” for sexual education “triggered by various developments during the past decades”. These include “globalisation and migration of new population groups with different cultural and religious backgrounds, the rapid spread of new media, particularly the internet and mobile phone technology, the emergence and spread of HIV/AIDS, increasing concerns about the sexual abuse of children and adolescents and, not least, changing attitudes towards sexuality and changing sexual behaviour among young people”.

It sounds as though bad parenting, incompatible cultural practices, and a lacklustre policing of child abuse is being used as an excuse to do away with fundamental child protection standards and the innocence of children that the West used to pride itself in.

The original argument for introducing basic levels of sex education into the school system centred around child safety. These courses were designed as a catch-up, particularly for young girls who had reached an age where it was possible for them to get pregnant, to ensure they understood reproductive essentials in order to protect themselves. The point was to avoid dangerous adolescent pregnancies and abuse – not to encourage sexual behaviour in minors.

Now it appears that adults seeking affirmation for their sexual choices are flooding the education system with age-inappropriate content that is being solidified through the edicts of unelected global bureaucracies such as the WHO.

Demographic changes

In this case, the education framework points out that there is an increase in the spread of sexual diseases among children and a rise in teen pregnancies across Europe – but what the report does not explain is that this is largely being seen among migrant demographics after coming from cultures where the abuse and sexualisation of children is common compared to European standards.

There are countless articles detailed a doubling of child abuse in recent years, with some publications describing Europe as “a hub of child abuse material” and Save the Children reporting that child migrants are being “systematically abused by police, people smugglers, and other adults”.

It could be argued that policies, like that of former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel and her 2015 “refugee pledge” encouraging Europe to open the floodgates to mass migration (and thus the escalation of people smuggling rings) is largely to blame for the danger children in Europe now face.

The solution would seem obvious: focus on the integration of migrant communities into the established moral order of European nations and severely punish adults who carry on illegal practices imported from their homelands while enforcing extreme criminal penalties on people smugglers and the police who assist them.

Above all, you might imagine that parents and the education system would seek to shelter children from the sexual world in their formative years to ensure the cycle of degeneracy was broken.

That is not what is being proposed by the WHO.

Sex-positive education

In reference to traditional (and highly successful) sex education in schools, the WHO says:

“Traditionally, sexuality education has focused on the potential risks of sexuality, such as unintended pregnancy and STI. This negative focus is often frightening for children and young people: moreover, it does not respond to their need for information and skills and, in all too many cases, it simply has no relevance to their lives.”

Well, yes, children should be frightened of pregnancy – it could kill them. As for a “need for information and skills”, children do not need “skills” in sexual practice. Indeed, the document appears to lament that most Western children have their first sexual encounter between 16-18.

The WHO adds:

“A holistic approach based on an understanding of sexuality as an area of human potential helps children and young people to develop essential skills to enable them to self-determine their sexuality and their relationships at various developmental stages. It supports them in becoming more empowered in order to live out their sexuality and their partnerships in a fulfilling and responsible manner.”

Remember, we are speaking of children, not teenagers.

Significant ethical problems

There are significant ethical problems with this document that jump out of the page. For example, during its complaint about traditional “age appropriate” sexual education in schools, the WHO insists that “it is more correct to use the term ‘development-appropriate’ because not all children develop at the same pace”.

As the document goes on, it appears to misuse the sacred concept of fundamental human rights to claim that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child “clearly states the right to information and the State’s obligation to provide children with educational measures” which includes “sexual rights as human rights related to sexuality” and that “everybody [has the right] to access sexuality education”.

All persons, without discrimination, have the right to education and information generally and to comprehensive sexuality education and information necessary and useful to exercise full citizenship and equality in private, public, and political domain.”

It lists human rights as the “guiding principle” of the WHO Reproductive Health Strategy in search of those lofty and terrifying “international development goals” that have caused so much horror in Western nations in other aspects of society including – but not limited to – the bid to lock people into 15 minute cities.

Sexual health needs to be promoted as an essential strategy in reaching the Millennium Development Goals…”

This is followed by the dubious claim that “the fear that sexuality education might lead to more or earlier sexuality activity by young people is not justified, as research results show”.

A generation of increasingly sexualised children

Regardless of this “research”, real-world results show a generation of increasingly sexualised children and moves to normalise paedophilia among activist communities under the guise of terms such as “minor-attracted persons”.

Germany, one of the early adopters of the framework, has seen a dramatic rise in sexualised violence against minors, listing 17,704 children in 2022 as victims of sexual violence. One of the leading causes of this abuse? Young people sharing sexual images on social media – which is unsurprising given they are being sexually encouraged by the State from infancy.

As for the adult perpetrators, Germany might have more luck stamping out abuse if it increased its sentencing. On one occasion in 2019, two men aged 56 and 33 were jailed for only 13 and 12 years respectively for abusing hundreds – possibly as many as a thousand – children at a campsite over a period of 20 years, assaulting children aged 3-14.

Meanwhile, the saturation of kindergartens and classrooms with LGBTQ+ and trans ideology has led to a rapid increase in children – who are too young to be thinking about sexual relationships – identifying as part of these movements or becoming confused about their gender to the extent that they become severely distressed. In both Europe and the states, this has created a lucrative medical industry in the chemical and surgical interference of children’s bodies the results of which children will never recover from.

Children are impressionable. Opening up their world to adult sexual content is wholly inappropriate.

“When talking about the sexual behaviour of children and young people, it is very important to keep in mind that sexuality is different for children and adults,” says the WHO. “Adults give sexual significance to behaviour on the basis of their adult experiences and sometimes find it very difficult to see things through children’s eyes. Yet it is essential to adopt their perspective. […] The development of sexual behaviour, feelings, and cognitions begins in the womb and continues throughout a person’s lifetime. Precursors of later sexual perception, such as the ability to enjoy physical contact, are present from birth.”

Which sounds awfully like the WHO believes a baby enjoying its parent holding its hand is linked to sexual feelings.

Children have sexual feelings even in early infancy. Between the second and third year of their lives, they discover the physical differences between men and women.”

During this time, children start to discover their own bodies (early childhood masturbation, self-stimulation) and they may also try to examine the bodies of their friends (playing doctor) […] from the age of three, they understand that adults are secretive about this subject. They test adults’ limits, for instance by undressing without warning or by using sexually charged language.

Sexuality Education Matrix

The conclusions this report draws is not that society and its adults should protect children from the complex and confusing process of growing up into an adult – keeping them safe from not only themselves, but from other adults who might seek to abuse them.

Click here to view the WHO Sexuality Education Matrix

“Sexuality education starts at birth,” claims the WHO and, “sexuality education is firmly based on gender equality, self-determination, and the acceptance of diversity.”

The implementation of this horror show comes via the Sexuality Education Matrix and includes questions such as, “Why should sexuality education start before the age of four?”

Within the Matrix, 0-4 year-olds will be taught about pregnancy and birth, the enjoyment of child masturbation, gender identity, and different types of “love”. 4-6 year-olds will be encouraged to “consolidate their gender identity” and acceptable feelings of love and understand that “all feelings are okay, but not all actions taken as a result of these feelings”.

And so it goes on.

As the UN proudly declares, “Teachers must equip children to have sexual relationships.”

What is the track record of the UN itself?

Why? Why is it the role of the State to encourage the sexual behaviour of children? More to the point, why would anyone allow the United Nations or World Health Organisation to be involved in the protection of children when their organisations have been repeatedly involved in sexual abuse and child rape in the third world?

A recent report found that the WHO failed in its obligation to tackle “widespread sexual abuse during the Ebola response in the Congo”.

It was alleged that WHO staff were aware of the serious allegations in May of 2019, but nothing was done about it until October of 2020 – keep in mind this is the organisation that wants to micromanage the sexual education of Western children.

The investigation found that at least 83 victims said they had been lured into sex work, with the investigation finding that people were promised jobs in exchange for sexual relationships during a time of extreme vulnerability. At least 29 pregnancies resulted from this abuse.

“How many times do I have to speak before (the doctors) at WHO responsible for the sexual abuse are punished? If WHO does not take radical measures, we will conclude that the organisation has been made rotten by rapists…” said a Congolese woman, who worked at an Ebola clinic in north-eastern Congo, as reported by AP News.

It’s not the first time the WHO or the UN has been caught up abusing the people it is charged with helping, with one the co-director of the AIDS-Free World saying, “The process itself is the opposite of justice. The UN is the only institution in the world that is allowed to investigate itself. The WHO’s head handpicked experts to lead a commission to look into criminal allegations against the agency”s personnel and senior officials.”

Further, according to The New Humanitarian, the independent commission criticised the WHO “for a ‘systematic tendency’ to reject all reports of sexual exploitation and abuse unless they were made in writing”.

Let us not forget that an Associated Press investigation from 2017 accused 100 United Nations peacekeepers of running a child sex ring in Haiti for a decade with over 2,000 complaints of sexual abuse made against UN peacekeepers.

Why would any nation allow an organisation accused of the institutionalised abuse of women and children in third-world nations to dictate sexual education for minors?

The United Nations and the World Health Organisation are the last places on Earth that we should be taking advice from regarding the health and prosperity of our children…

This article has been republished with permission from The Spectator Australia

Texas A&M received almost $500,000,000 in grants from jihad terror-linked Qatar regime

It isn’t just Texas A&M. Georgetown and Harvard, among many others, are bought and paid for as well. This is why our nation’s universities never speak the truth about jihad, Sharia, Islam’s origins, or other key issues, and instead pay lavish attention to the spurious phenomenon of “Islamophobia.”

Documents Show Texas A&M Appeared to Receive Almost $500 Million in Grants from Qatar Regime

Judicial Watch, May 3, 2023:

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it received records from Texas A&M indicating that it received $485,811,921.33 in grants and contracts from the Qatar Foundation.

There appear to be discrepancies between what is listed in the gift reporting received from Texas A&M and what was reported by the school to the federal foreign gift reporting system. For instance, Texas A&M’s gift record for January 1, 2013 – May 22, 2018, only lists a total of $69,844.41 from the Qatar Foundation, whereas the Department of Education’s database shows a total of over $47 million for the same period.

The new information was released in a court victory last month in litigation on behalf of Judicial Watch client Zachor Legal Institute under the Texas Public Information Act. Zachor fought for information about the potential influence by the Qatar government’s funding of certain Texas A&M University programs and a Texas A&M campus in Education City, Al Rayyan, Qatar (Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development v. Ken Paxton, Texas Attorney General (No. D-1-GN-18-006240))….

Read more.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Watch this WHO School Video that Teaches Kids to Masturbate

STOP World Control is a solid, integrity based organization pushing back assertively against the diabolical works of those moving to create a New-World Order, a Global Community where the sovereignty of a nation no longer exist, only the regions developed by a hidden and dark group of people meeting secretly to control all of humanity. Man-made pandemics, teaching of masturbation in the classroom to five year old’s (see actual instructional movie below), moving children away from loyalty to parents to loyalty of the state, and many more insidious lessons deliberately presented to students inducting them into the socialist, God-less system clearly proclaimed in the Agenda 2030 political and social plan now unfolding in clear sight.

Take some time, right now, and scroll down to look at the incredible and factual information presented below. Watch an actual training video showing teachers telling children to masturbate. None of what you are about to read and review is theatrical or conspiracy minded. NONE! This insidious work is being accomplished rapidly and in plain sight in your community…right now! Few are the voices speaking up against this diabolical attack. Do not even look to the church at-large to speak up assertively against this Ephesians 6 attack. The church at-large is more concerned with not losing their 501-c-3 status by the government than confronting those in government who swore an oath to preserve, defend and protect our Constitution and exceptional privileges given to us by the Lord of lords and King of kings, the One True God, Adonai. Our foundational principles and documents were drafted with a biblical basis (which this fact is also no longer taught in schools or even churches).

Take some time, right now, and review what is below. What is your response? What actions are you willing to take to repeal the darkness exposed in the material below? Time is very short, and the forces of darkness have worked diligently for some time now. I began exposing this horrid set of plans in 2010, and many simply did not want to be bothered, choosing to remain bliss and in their bubble. Sadly, the numbers today are not much improved. Wake Up America…the deliberate plan is to collapse the United States into the New-World Order so remaining countries will fall quickly like a house of cards.


School training video shows teachers telling kids to masturbate

A training video sent to thousands of schools in Europe, shows teachers telling young children to start masturbating. This is part of the World Health Organization “comprehensive sexuality education”, whose objective is that children should have sexual partners and start with s*x as soon as possible.

The publisher of this video, the Rutgers Foundation, operates in 27 nations, is a close partner of the WHO and UN, and is supported by Bill Gates.

The language spoken in the video is Dutch, but please be aware that this is a real-life example of the execution of an INTERNATIONAL agenda of the World Health Organization and United Nations, meaning this will come to public schools in every nation of the world.

I send this video to you as a warning. If we don’t stand up, this will happen in our communities as well, in no time.

Click here to learn more from STOP World Control.

©2023 Lyle J. Rapacki, Ph.D. All rights reserved.

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The Boy Who Knew Too Much for His School

Exposing trans madness in education doesn’t require advanced degrees, political influence, charisma, or even 18 years of life, as one plucky middle-schooler demonstrated. At the April 13 School Committee Meeting for Middleboro, Mass. Public Schools, 7th grader Liam Morrison, a student at Nichols Middle School, stepped up to the microphone for two minutes of public comment — and then reached up to turn it down towards his mouth. He then narrated for the school committee what might be the silliest reason any student has ever been sent home from school: wearing a shirt conveying factually accurate information.

“I never thought the shirt I wore to school on March 21 would lead me to speak with you today,” began the pint-sized culture warrior. He described how he was removed from his Tuesday gym class “to sit down with two adults for what turned out to be a very uncomfortable talk. I was told that people were complaining about the words on my shirt, that my shirt was making some students feel unsafe.”

“What did my shirt say? Five simple words: ‘There are only two genders,’ Morrison emphasized. “Nothing harmful. Nothing threatening. Just a statement I believe to be a fact.” And not only a fact, but a bedrock principle to many lessons Morrison would likely have encountered in both biology class and grammar class.

“Yes, words on a shirt made people feel ‘unsafe,’” repeated Morrison. If people did complain, they lacked the courage to tell Morrison to his face. In this instance, the accused was not accorded the right to face his accusers, making their very existence unverifiable. Morrison recalled, “Not one person, student, or staff, told me that they were bothered by what I was wearing. Actually, just the opposite. Several kids told me that they supported my actions and that they wanted one, too.”

“I was told that I would need to remove my shirt before I could return to class,” Morrison continued. “When I nicely told them that I didn’t want to do that, they called my father. Thankfully, my dad supported my decisions [and] came to pick me up.” In other words, because Morrison’s shirt proclaimed a fact of biology and language that he learned (or should have learned) in school, school personnel sent him home — which would hinder his ability to learn — to quarantine his knowledge from other students.

School personnel tried to justify their decision to Morrison, who said, “Their arguments were weak, in my opinion.” The Nichols Middle School dress code does not prohibit students from wearing clothing that displays a message — which is sometimes the case in a controversy of this nature — and school personnel did not object to Morrison’s shirt on that basis. Instead, they claimed that the shirt was disruptive and targeted a protected class.

The dress code does provide:

  • “Clothing that … inhibits learning is not allowed.”
  • “Clothing must not state, imply, or depict hate speech or imagery that target groups based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious affiliation, or any other classification.”

“I was told that this shirt was a disruption to learning,” said Morrison. But “no one got up and stormed out of class. No one burst into tears. I’m sure I would have noticed if they had. I experience disruptions to my learning every day. Kids acting out in class are a disruption, yet nothing is done. Why do the rules apply to one yet not another?” A healthy measure of common sense lies underneath the crew cut.

“I have been told that my shirt was ‘targeting a protected class,’” explained Morrison. But he had questions. “Who is this protected class? Are their feelings more important than my rights? I don’t complain when I see pride flags and diversity posters hung throughout the school. Do you know why? Because others have a right to their beliefs just as I do.” Here Morrison argues for the basic principle of free speech, that merely holding and stating a political opinion does not count as hate speech against anyone who disagrees.

It’s not the dress code itself that Morrison spoke out against, but the illegitimate, arbitrary, and unequal way school personnel enforced it against him for his disfavored political views.

Per the dress code policy, Morrison was asked to change. “If students wear something inappropriate to school, they will be asked to call their parent/guardian to request that more appropriate attire be brought to school.” Since he was unwilling, and his father supported his decision, he was sent home. Yet Morrison could face “disciplinary action” if he wears the shirt to school again.

Even while they were enforcing the dress code policy against Morrison, the school officials seemed reluctant to admit what they were doing. “They told me that I wasn’t in trouble, but it sure felt like I was,” said Morrison. “I feel like these adults were telling me that it wasn’t okay for me to have an opposing view.”

But Morrison responded, “I know that I have a right to wear the shirt with those five words. Even at 12 years old, I have my own political opinions, and I have a right to express those opinions, even at school. This right is called the First Amendment to the Constitution.”

In Lee v. Weisman (1992), the Supreme Court prohibited prayer at high school graduations because “adolescents are often susceptible to pressure from their peers towards conformity.” They reasoned, “What to most believers may seem nothing more than a reasonable request that the nonbeliever respect their religious practices, in a school context may appear to the nonbeliever or dissenter to be an attempt to employ the machinery of the State to enforce a religious orthodoxy.” Now, the logic of the opinion is working in reverse, as “the machinery of the State” enforces the anti-religious orthodoxy of transgender ideology on adolescents who are just as susceptible to outside pressure as they were 30 years ago (although Morrison stands out as a remarkable contradiction of this generalization).

Alas, this is the state of public education in America today. Pride flags and other ostentatious celebrations of sexual deviance go unchallenged. But if a single 12-year-old wears a shirt stating the biological and grammatical truth, “there are only two genders,” two adults will pull him out of class to berate him for “targeting a protected class.” Content to let classroom disruption slide most of the time, if any young person has the temerity to wear a truth-telling shirt to class, the school will disrupt his education to call him disruptive.

What other shirt messages might, for simply telling the truth, fall afoul of this ridiculous interpretation of the dress code? Here’s a few likely candidates: “2+2=4 is math, not white supremacy,” “Life begins at conception,” “Latinx is bad Spanish,” or “Jesus is the only way.”

“I learned a lot from this experience,” concluded Morrison. “I’ve learned that a lot of other students share my view. I’ve learned that adults don’t always do the right thing or make the right decisions. … Next time, it might not only be me. There might be more students that decide to speak out.” Education experts have determined to train students as activists, calculating that they can harness their convictions into a left-wing political agenda, but with just a few brave freethinkers like Morrison, teaching students to stand up for truth and right may just backfire.

Just about any young person would find it intimidating to stand up and speak before nine adults in a formal setting — not least one beginning to experience the awkward and uncomfortable physical changes of puberty. But Morrison was not deterred; after all, it’s his future education and free expression that he’s fighting for. His generation (and every other one) could use a few more courageous men willing to stand up for what’s right.

“I didn’t go to school that day to hurt feelings or cause trouble,” Morrison told the school committee. “My hope in being here tonight is to bring the school committee’s attention to this issue. I hope that you will speak up for the rest of us, so we can express ourselves without being pulled out of class.”

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Serbian Seventh Grader Kills 8 Classmates And Guard In Targeted School Shooting

A 13-year-old boy opened fire at his school in Serbia on Wednesday, killing a security guard and eight classmates and wounding six other students and a teacher, officials say.

Kosta Kecmanovic, a seventh-grade student at Vladislav Ribnikar School, was arrested following a deadly attack police say was meticulously planned, complete with a list of victims the suspect intended to target, The Associated Press reported. Kecmanovic allegedly began his shooting spree by first killing the guard at the Belgrade school and then opening fire in a classroom located near the school entrance, the outlet stated.

Milan Milosevic, whose daughter was in a history class during the shooting, told local reporters she witnessed Kecmanovic firing at the teacher first before the children ducked under their desks, AP reported. Many students reportedly fled the scene by escaping through a back door, officials told the outlet.

After his deadly assault, the suspect reportedly called law enforcement authorities himself before being taken into custody on the school grounds, according to AP.

A classmate of Kecmanovic’s, identified only as Evgenija, told Reuters she would have never suspected the quiet teen was capable of carrying out such a deadly assault. “He was somehow silent, and appeared nice and had good grades. Did not know much about him, he was not that open to everyone. I would never expect that this could happen,” she said, per the outlet.

“I heard noises and I thought some boys, some kids were throwing firecrackers, just for the fun of it, but then I heard that even closer and … then I saw the security guard falling to the ground,” she added, telling the outlet as soon as she realized what was happening, she ran away.

The gun Kecmanovic allegedly used in the attack was licensed to his father. Kecmanovic reportedly knew the code to the gun safe and was able to access the weapon, Interior Minister Bratislav Gasic told AP, adding that the boy’s father had also been arrested.

Serbian Education Minister Branko Ruzic has called for three days of national mourning beginning on Friday, Reuters reported.

AUTHOR

GRETCHEN CLAYSON

Reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

In a World Full of Robots, Humans Wanted

The K-12 district schools I went to while growing up in a Boston suburb look nearly the same today as they did when I attended them in the 1980s and 90s, when they also looked quite similar to how they did when my father attended those same schools in the 1950s and 60s. Sure, there are some new technologies and updated curriculum—and more testing—but for the most part, traditional schools haven’t changed much over the past few generations.

The world around those schools has, of course, changed beyond measure. The disconnect between the outdated structure of standard schooling and the economic and cultural realities of the innovation era is growing harder to ignore.

At a time when top jobs didn’t even exist a decade ago, and many jobs of the next decade haven’t yet been invented, most young people today continue to learn in conventional classrooms that train them to be passive bystanders, rather than active, agile pathmakers in a complex, constantly changing culture.

This conditioning starts early. The exuberance and inquisitiveness that young children naturally display is quickly constrained within a system of coercive schooling that favors obedience and compliance over originality and curiosity. With the growth of universal preschool programs, more children today are beginning this standard schooling path when they are just barely out of diapers. They learn to color in the lines, to wait to speak, and to ask permission to use the bathroom. They learn that their interests and ideas are irrelevant, that their energy and enthusiasm are liabilities. They learn to need to be taught.

​​Indeed, as Ivan Illich wrote in his classic book, Deschooling Society: “School makes alienation preparatory to life, thus depriving education of reality and work of creativity. School prepares for the institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.”

This may have been more tolerable at the dawn of the industrial era, when compulsory schooling statutes were first passed and when conventional schooling created a pipeline to factory jobs that required obedience and compliance. Even then, parents like Nancy Edison recognized that standard schooling could crush a child’s creativity. She pulled her son Thomas out of school after only a few short weeks when his teacher called him “addled.” From then on, Thomas Edison mostly directed his own education as a homeschooler, following his own interests and passions.

Later in life, while working in his massive laboratory in New Jersey, one of Edison’s chemists concluded: “Had Edison been formally schooled, he might not have had the audacity to create such impossible things.” [i]

Today, we need more young people to grow up with the audacity to create the impossible things that will brighten our lives, enhance human flourishing, and improve our planet. We need more young people to nurture the qualities and characteristics that separate human intelligence from artificial intelligence. These human qualities—including curiosity, critical thinking, ingenuity, and an entrepreneurial spirit—are the same qualities that are so often eroded in our dominant system of traditional schooling.

To successfully coexist, compete, and cooperate with ever-smarter machines, humans need the chance to cultivate the cherished qualities that make us distinctly human. The type of rote, by-the-book, standardized behaviors that conventional schools inculcate are exactly what AI and other technologies are increasingly automating. To thrive in the economy of tomorrow, children need to learn how to both harness and rise above the robotic.

There are some who believe that conventional schools, both public and private, can successfully change to meet the economic and social realities of the 21st century, but I am doubtful. The continued stagnation, and in some instances increased standardization, of conventional schooling demonstrates why any meaningful educational change will come from outside the prevailing model, not in it.

I already see signs of these changes in my work spotlighting the stories of the entrepreneurial parents and teachers who are creating innovative learning models beyond the conventional classroom, including many that emphasize self-directed learning. These everyday entrepreneurs recognize the growing gap between how most schools teach and what humans need to excel in the innovation era, and are doing something about it.

Take the story of James Lomax, for example. He and his wife enrolled their daughter in a top private preschool at the age of two, thinking they would set her up for a successful path to college and career. “What we found was that the preschool was very, very, very focused on academics, on being kindergarten ready,” Lomax told me in a recent podcast episode. “So we got progress reports home saying she can only count to 100, but she should be counting to 150 at this point. And her Spanish comprehension is not where we want it to be. And around this time, it’s starting to click with me that maybe these aren’t the important things.”

Lomax had other questions for the preschool staff, such as what was happening on the playground? Was his daughter making friends? Was she learning to solve conflicts? “And I just kept getting this blank stare,” Lomax said in response to his inquiries. He felt there had to be a better way.

Simultaneously, Lomax saw in his work as an engineer that many of the young engineering new hires coming straight from college lacked important competencies. “A lot of these engineers went to very top universities with perfect grades. We get them on the job, and it’s very clear, very soon that the only thing they really learned how to do in their education was to take tests. So they can’t critically think, they can’t solve a problem without the exact path given to them to solve the problem. They don’t have basic life skills,” said Lomax.

“I started to think this is not the path I want for my daughter, because the skills we need are different skills than what’s being taught in school,” he added.

Lomax founded Life Skills Academy, an Acton Academy affiliate in Las Vegas, Nevada. Acton Academy is a leading network of learner-driven microschools that was founded in 2009 in Austin, Texas and now has approximately 300 affiliate microschools across the US and around the world. Acton Academy puts learners in charge of their own education and “hero’s journey,” in collaboration with their mixed-age peers and adult guides.

Acton Academy is one of the fastest-growing educational networks to challenge the schooling status quo by empowering learners, but there are others as well. Liberated Learners is a network of self-directed learning centers for tween and teen homeschoolers that was modeled after one of the first microschools, North Star, that launched in 1996 to provide maximum freedom and autonomy to young people. Agile Learning Centers also use a self-directed learning model that emphasizes youth agency. Similarly, Sudbury schools, inspired by the original Sudbury Valley School that was founded in 1968 and continues to flourish today, use no adult-imposed curriculum, and no grades or evaluations, while allowing young people to fully direct their own lives and learning.

Research on Sudbury Valley alumni has found that even though their education is entirely self-directed, graduates go on to lead fulfilling lives, pursue higher education without difficulty if they chose, and work in a wide variety of careers. Research on grown unschoolers, or homeschoolers who learn in a self-directed way with no forced curriculum, reveals similar findings, including a high percentage of entrepreneurial individuals who were working in fields connected to interests that emerged in childhood and adolescence.

Independent microschools that aren’t affiliated with a national network, such as Bloom Academy in Las Vegas, Wild Roots in Dallas, Wildflower Community School in Kansas, and Moonrise in Georgia, all incorporate unschooling principles that allow young people to direct their education, with support and without coercion.

We may have left the industrial era long ago, but our culture’s dominant educational model continues to be defined by top-down, teacher-directed, curriculum-driven, coercive schooling. As we now get further into the innovation era, there is a deepening mismatch between how most children learn in school and what they will actually need to know and do to live meaningful, purposeful lives in a rapidly-changing, technology-molded world.

Fortunately, schools and learning models that nurture curiosity and creativity and enable young people to direct their own paths, in pursuit of their own goals, do exist—and more are continually being invented. These schools and models are also growing increasingly accessible to all learners, as education choice policies that enable funding to follow students become more widespread.

As A.S. Neill wrote in Summerhill, his 1960 book about the self-directed school that he founded in England in 1921 (and that recently celebrated its centennial): “The function of the child is to live his own life—not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educator who thinks he knows what is best. All this interference and guidance on the part of adults only produces a generation of robots.”

In a world full of robots, humans wanted.

[i] Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992), 412.

AUTHOR

Kerry McDonald

Kerry McDonald is a Senior Education Fellow at FEE and host of the weekly LiberatED podcast. She is also the author of Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom (Chicago Review Press, 2019), an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, education policy fellow at State Policy Network, and a regular Forbes contributor. Kerry has a B.A. in economics from Bowdoin College and an M.Ed. in education policy from Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and four children. You can sign up for her weekly email newsletter here.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Biden Admin Grants Waiver Allowing Universities To Host Chinese Confucius Institute Chapters: Report

The Department of Defense (DOD) is granting waivers to universities in the U.S. that would allow them to receive federal funding while hosting Chinese Confucius Institute chapters, the Washington Free Beacon first reported Wednesday.

The DOD announced it would begin granting the waivers in late March, despite federal law prohibiting federal funding for universities that host the Institute. Members of Congress told the Beacon the DOD is subverting that law, which was passed as part of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

“The Chinese Communist Party [CCP] is subverting U.S. institutions and Joe Biden is sabotaging legislation to stop them,” Republican Indiana Rep and House Select Committee on China member Jim Banks told the Beacon. He said the committee is trying to “win a game of oversight whack-a-mole against a president who is running cover for China.”

The Confucius Institute acts as an education and cultural promotional tool for the CCP at universities around the world, under the guise of promoting Chinese language and culture. Critics have accused the CCP of meddling at the Institution’s chapters to harass Chinese dissidents, curtail academic freedom and spread CCP propaganda.

The CCP has opened more than 100 chapters of the Institute in the United States in the past 15 years, according to the Free Beacon, although some universities have cut ties due to concerns about CCP influence. China has spent at least $426 million in American higher education since 2011, and $158 million on the Confucius Institute, the Beacon reported.

The NDAA provision aims to remove Pentagon-funded contracts from universities potentially hosting Chinese espionage centers. The ban is set to go into place Oct. 1, 2023, but it is unclear whether the change will have any teeth if the reported DOD waivers are allowed to stand.

AUTHOR

DYLAN HOUSMAN

Chief foreign affairs correspondent. Follow Dylan on Twitter.

RELATED ARTICLE: U.S. High School Students Wrote Gushing Letters To Xi Jinping, Chinese State-Media Reports

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Who said, ‘Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed’

The United States Department of Education was created by President Jimmy Carter and signed into law on October 17, 1979 under the Department of Education Organization Act. The creation of this federal Education Department began the process of inextricably and fundamentally transforming our Constitutional Republic, over the past 44 years, into a totalitarian state.

According to the U.S. Department of Education website the mission of the DOE is,

ED’s mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.

ED was created in 1980 by combining offices from several federal agencies. ED’s 4,400 employees and $68 billion budget are dedicated to:

  • Establishing policies on federal financial aid for education, and distributing as well as monitoring those funds.
  • Collecting data on America’s schools and disseminating research.
  • Focusing national attention on key educational issues.
  • Prohibiting discrimination and ensuring equal access to education.

The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee from 1922 until his death in 1953 Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin said, Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

So who holds the Education Department’s weapon in its hands and at whom is it aimed?

Education in America

This Department of Education’s bureaucracy has grown not only in terms of its size and budget but more importantly in the scope of its policies.

Today’s education is no longer about reading, writing and arithmetic. It is about equity, a.k.a. social justice, inclusion and diversity.

Since Dr. Miguel A. Cardona, the former commissioner of education in Connecticut, was sworn in as the 12th U.S. Secretary of Education on March 2nd, 2021 public education has taken a dramatic.

Dr. Cardona’s biography reads in part,

Across all these areas, Secretary Cardona has highlighted the urgency of seizing this moment through intentional collaboration—particularly working in partnership with parents, families, students, and educators—and the opportunity we have, as a nation, not only to recover from the pandemic, but to reimagine a higher-performing and more equitable education system that works better for all.

However, in 2022 Cardona solicited a National School Board Association letter comparing parents to “domestic terrorists.” According to Fox News, NSBA Secretary-Treasurer Kristi Swett recounted that NSBA interim CEO Chip Slaven “told the officers he was writing a letter to provide information to the White House, from a request by Secretary Cardona.”

In response, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI to use its authority to identify threats and prosecute concerned parents.

But there’s more.

Before the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday [April 18th, 2023], Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) grilled U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on biological male athletes participating in women’s sports, as Cardona repeatedly and awkwardly refused to offer a definition of the term “woman.”

“Following the civil rights movement of the 1960s, lawmakers established Title IX — rules to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex and federally-funded education programs, making a historic impact on girls and women sports,” Clyde said. Prior to that, he noted, “female athletes only received two percent of college athletic budgets and athletic scholarships for women were quite rare.”

According to Clyde, Title IX “unquestionably transformed women’s sports, ensuring female athletes enjoy the same opportunities as their male counterparts.”

Turning to Cardona, the congressman from Georgia said, “Earlier this month on April the 13th, your department filed a proposed rule, amending Title IX regulations that would unilaterally force schools to allow biological males to participate in women’s athletics,” he said. “This proposed rule would withhold federal assistance from schools across the nation seeking to maintain the integrity and safety of women’s sports.”

Due to the relevance of determining the difference between men and women, Clyde asked: “So can you please tell me or can you please define for me what is a woman?”

“Our focus at the department is to provide equal access to students, including students who are LGBTQ, access free from discrimination,” Cardona responded.

“So what’s the definition of a woman? You haven’t given me that. You haven’t answered my question,” Clyde fired back.

“I think that’s almost secondary to the important role that I have as secretary of education,” Cardona replied.

Clyde explained that his question was “not secondary.” He pressed, “My question is very simple: what does HHS say the definition of a woman is?”

“I lead the Department of Education, and my job is to make sure that all students have access to public education, which includes co-curricular activities,” he said. “And I think you highlighted pretty well the importance of Title IX and giving students equal access, whether it’s scholarship and facilities and participation as well.”

“OK, so you’re not going to answer my question,” Clyde said “Do you believe that a biological male who self-identifies as a woman should be allowed to compete in women’s sports?”

“I believe our focus needs to make sure that all students have access to public education,” he said.

“A yes or no is sufficient,” Clyde retorted.

“I think it’s not answered with a yes or no,” he said. “I think all students should have access to co-curricular activities.”

“I think that is a yes or no question,” Clyde said. “Do you believe that a biological male who self-identifies as a woman should be allowed to compete in women’s sports?”

“I believe all students should have access to all things that public education—” Cardona replied.

“So you’re not going to answer my question: do you believe allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports benefits female athletes?” Clyde interjected.

“I believe it’s important that we take into account the needs of all students when they’re engaging in co-curricular—” he began to say.

“So again you’re not going to answer my question: do you believe allowing biological males to enter women’s private spaces such as bathrooms and locker rooms is safe for female students?” he asked.

Cardona responded: “It’s critically important that we make sure all students feel safe in their school environment… It means that the perspective of all students should be taken into account when decisions are made around facilities.”

A person who can’t, or rather won’t, define what a woman is should have no position in government at any level, from President down to dog catcher. That person shouldn’t even be allowed to graduate from grade school.

The Bottom Line

Discover the Networks says this about Secretary of Education Cardona,

In 2011, Cardona joined a state task force committee that made policy recommendations intended to close the “academic achievement gap between racial and socioeconomic groups in Connecticut.” Upon its inception in January 2011, the task force affirmed its belief that “it is morally and economically imperative that Connecticut eliminate the academic achievement gap between racial and ethnic minority and white students, and between poor and middle-income students, by the end of the current decade.” In a 2014 report, the committee recommended remedies that included increased access to public housing, social services, and anti-hunger programs.

[ … ]

In 2013, Cardona began working as a Performance and Evaluation Specialist for Meriden Public Schools. In 2015 he was promoted to Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning, a role in which he pursued an array of ambitious measures designed to support minority students. These measures included: (a) flying to Puerto Rico to attract bilingual teachers; (b) hiring school climate specialists to interact with students in their native languages; and (c) ensuring that those same specialists were of the same racial and/or ethnic background as the students whom they served.

[ … ]

During his Senate confirmation hearings in early 2021, Cardona expressed his firm support for the acceptance of transgenderism in public schools: “It’s nonnegotiable to make sure that our learning environments are places that are free of discrimination and harassment for all learners, including our LGBTQ students,” he declared. Cardona also indicated his support for legal protections that would enable transgender students to participate on sports teams in accordance with their own “preferred gender identity.”

Read more.

The current Department of Education has now become “a weapon” and that weapon is aimed at parents, Christians, Jews, Muslims, girls, straight white men and those who understand scientifically that there are only two genders (XX and XY).

Adolf Hitler said, “He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.”

The U.S. Education Department has become a weapon of mass destruction. It is intent on teaching children what to think, not how to think.

The DOE is now in his hands of ideologues like Cardona who:

  • Blames racism for the “academic achievement gap” between black and white students
  • Supports the tenets of Critical Race Theory
  • Views America as a racist nation
  • Promotes the acceptance of transgenderism in public schools
  • Advocates free community college
  • Favors the forgiveness of student loans

Each of the above destroys not only our children’s minds but also sets the stage for centralized state control by those that it is raising and teaching children to hate America.

Be warned that the swamp goes from the school house to the White House and they are winning the hearts and minds of our children. Their most effective weapons of mass destruction are K-12 public school students.

©2023 Dr. Rich Swier, Ed.D. All rights reserved.