You Are Whatever You Say You Are – or – How The West Was Lost thumbnail

You Are Whatever You Say You Are – or – How The West Was Lost

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By Jihad Watch

At a school in Great Britain, one more example of the insanity that has gripped large parts of the Western world was recently on display. One pupil, a 13-year-old eighth grader, questioned another pupil’s decision to identify as a “cat.” This innocent inquiry was overheard by the teacher, who went into a tirade about that child even daring to question another child’s “choice” of “identity.” More on this bizarrerie can be found in this story from several weeks ago, which, sadly, retains its relevance:

Teacher calls student ‘despicable’ for questioning classmate’s claim she’s a cat

by Eric Utter, American Thinker, June 24, 2023

Recently, a 13-year-old girl was called “despicable” by her progressive, tolerant, inclusive, and nonjudgmental teacher at a Church of England school in the United Kingdom after asking a classmate how she could identify as a cat.

The schoolgirl– and her friend– were reprimanded by the Rye College teacher near the end of an eighth grade “life education” class, in which they were told: “Be who you want to be and how you identify is up to you,” according to The Telegraph.

Following the “lesson,” one of the students asked a classmate: “How can you identify as a cat when you’re a girl?” Good question. Inquiring minds want to know.

But not the teacher, who then informed the students they were being reported to school administrators and would no longer be welcome at the school if they continued to express radical beliefs such as that one can’t become another sex– or species—simply by claiming to be one.

A video clip, taken by one of the students, shows the teacher remarking, “How dare you, you’ve just really upset someone” by “questioning their identity.”

To which the student replies: “If they want to identify as a cat or something then they are genuinely unwell – crazy.” The teacher then proceeds to ask the young girls where they got the preposterous notion that there are only two genders. The indoctrinator avers:

Gender is not linked to the parts that you were born with, gender is how you identify, which is what I said right from the very beginning of the lesson.” Right. Gender in no way correlates to the “parts that you were born with,” which are randomly distributed– for some reason. Or, more likely, no reason at all….

Microaggressions and hate speech allegedly abound. “Misgender” somebody or “dead name” them and you are deemed to be a monster. Words are now frequently construed as “literally violence” by those on the left. Yet, the unimpeachably progressive “educator” finds it okay—necessary even—to label a young student “despicable” for her failure to believe a person who claims to be a cat…actually is one. Wow.

Fellow Westerners, one question: Just how much intolerance (disguised as tolerance), authoritarianism, amorality– and insanity –are you willing to put up with?

My fellow Americans, perhaps it is time we listened to our founding fathers……rather than obeying the Marxist/Fascist whackos who would be our masters.

If I choose to identify as an African-American, can I qualify for reparations in California? Can I be admitted to the college of my choice under affirmative action?

If I choose to identify as a woman, and exhibit couvade-like symptoms, or pseudocyesis, can I go on paid maternity leave?

If I choose to identify as a cat, will the government pay CHEWY to deliver Friskies Party Mix Natural Yums With Real Chicken Cat Treats to my door?

Questions, very good questions.

AUTHOR

HUGH FITZGERALD

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

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Legislature Forms Committee Looking Into ASU Free Speech Concerns

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By Cameron Arcand

Following a free speech controversy at Arizona State University, the state Legislature is forming a new joint committee to examine “freedom of expression” in the state’s public universities.

ASU shut down the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development after its main donor, Tom Lewis, pulled funding after a controversial event featuring conservative personalities Charlie Kirk and Dennis Prager. The former executive director, Ann Atkinson, said in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “I Paid for Free Speech at Arizona State” that she was fired by the university for organizing the event. A committee hearing scheduled for July 18 will feature testimony from Atkinson and Prager, as well as Dr. Owen Anderson and radio host Seth Leibsohn.

Tom Lewis himself said that the backlash from faculty protesting the conservative speakers was the reason he felt compelled to terminate funding to the center, which was part of Barrett, The Honors College.

“Because these were mostly conservative speakers, we expected some opposition, but I was shocked and disappointed by the alarming and outright hostility demonstrated by the Barrett faculty and administration toward these speakers,” Tom Lewis himself said in a statement. “Instead of sponsoring this event with a spirit of cooperation and respect for free speech, Barrett faculty and staff exposed the radical ideology that now apparently dominates the college. After seeing this level of left-wing hostility and activism, I no longer had any confidence in Barrett to adhere to the terms of our gift, and made the decision to terminate our agreement, effective June 30, 2023.”

State Sen. Anthony Kern, R-Glendale, and state Rep. Quang Nguyen, R-Prescott Valley, are co-chairing the committee, and Nguyen tweeted Thursday that he’s “very concerned” about the situation.

“[Arizona’s] public universities must be unfettered bastions of free speech & expression,” he said. “I’m very concerned to see admins terminated after coordinating to have conservatives speak on campus. I look [forward] to hearing from [university] leadership as to why this happened.”

The school currently holds a “green light” rating from the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression, which measures free expression rights at universities, and the group called Atkinson’s story “troubling” before learning that the donor pulled the funding himself.

“FIRE sees no #1A problem with such a closure, provided there are genuine funding concerns. But, because schools often point to viewpoint-neutral reasons to justify viewpoint-based censorship, we’ll continue to monitor closely,” the organization tweeted on June 21.

*****

The article was published by Center Square and is reproduced with permission.

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Britain’s Shakespearean Constitution

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By Adam Tomkins

When teaching constitutional law in the United Kingdom, one of the first challenges is to reflect on where the British constitution gets its authority. We say, for example, that it is not merely a rule that the Prime Minister must be a member of the House of Commons, but a constitutional rule. Likewise, we say that the King may do nothing except on ministerial advice—normally, prime ministerial advice—and that this is a rule of the constitution. We say these things because we wish to deepen and entrench the status of such rules. We regard them as fundamental, and we reach for the rhetoric of the constitution to signify this sense of fundamentality.

Of course, in the United Kingdom, we have no document or codified text we can point to as authority for our proposition that the Prime Minister must be a member of the Commons or that the King may act only on the advice of ministers. Like New Zealand’s, the British constitution is “unwritten.” That is an inapt term. Almost all of the UK’s constitution is written down, somewhere. But it is not codified. There is no single authoritative text. 

If the British constitution does not obtain its authority from a governing text, where does it obtain its authority from? Of late, it has become fashionable in British law schools to imagine that the constitution is based on (and obtains its authority from) a number of fundamental principles. Some say that parliamentary accountability is a fundamental principle; some say democracy is. Such commentators go on to say these principles explain why we have rules such as the two I’m using as examples. They tell us it is important that the prime minister is a member of the House of Commons because it is to the House of Commons that the PM must discharge his (or her) constitutional obligations, subjecting himself to parliamentary accountability.

That is why we have Prime Minister’s Questions every week, and so on. Likewise, it is important that the King understands that, in today’s constitutional order, the forces of monarchy have been well and truly subjected to those of democracy. The King remains head of state but he is unelected. He owes his position to an accident of birth, not to the ballot box, but it is the latter that rules. Ministers are accountable to the representatives of the people. Thus the King must act only and always on ministerial advice: the principle of democracy insists upon it. 

This style of constitutional reasoning may seem logical. It may appear to be rational—grounded in reason and, as such, consistent with the Enlightenment principles upon which all modern constitutionalism is said to be based.

And yet I am entirely unpersuaded by it. One may admire this style of constitutional reasoning as a matter of elegance, but does it hold up? Does it not, indeed, beg the rather obvious question: where do the principles come from, and who decides (in the context of an uncodified constitution) what “counts” as a fundamental constitutional principle and what does not? Why is parliamentary accountability a constitutional principle and how did it become one? On whose authority has democracy become a trump card, subjecting even the King himself to the will of the people?

The many centuries of English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish history make for an overwhelming canvas. No one could master it all, so we have to pick and choose—even when we only wish to grasp the historical foundations of our law.

These questions—and many more like them—are answerable. But, in the end, they are answerable not on the basis of any claim to a higher authority or abstract principle. They are answerable only by reference to history. The British constitution does not obtain its authority from a written legal text. Instead, it owes its authority to the past—to its history. The reason why ministers, from the PM down, are accountable to the House of Commons owes its explanation to no philosophy of modern constitutionalism (after all, there is no equivalent in the US Constitution). Rather, it owes its explanation, both as a descriptive fact and as a norm of constitutional behaviour, to history. It is because Parliament insisted upon it, first on the battlefields of the Civil Wars of the 1640s and thereafter in legislation. Likewise, the reason why the King may act only on ministerial advice and may not use his undoubted prerogative powers to thwart or to run counter to what ministers want is because, by the end of the seventeenth century, Parliament had won for itself not only the right to hold the Crown’s ministers to account, but the right to determine the powers of the Crown itself and, if necessary (as it was in 1688), to remove the Crown from the incumbent’s head and place it on someone else’s instead. None of this can be readily explained as a matter of constitutional rationality, reason, or principle. These are binding and genuinely fundamental rules of constitutional behaviour in the United Kingdom—and they are so because our history demands it.

The United Kingdom is not an especially old country. In its current form, it dates only from the 1920s, when the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland became the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But the UK is composed of four exceptionally old nations, all of which have constitutional histories that reach back into the deep past. England is the dominant partner (it has about 85% of the UK’s population and is responsible for about the same share of the UK’s GDP), although Scottish, Welsh, and Irish history have each made decisive contributions to the UK’s interweaving story. The many centuries of English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish history make for an overwhelming canvas. No one could master it all, so we have to pick and choose—even when we only wish to grasp the historical foundations of our law. Mostly, we venture no further back than the Civil Wars of the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, which finally resolved the constitutional disagreements that had helped to fuel them. Occasionally, we may mention Magna Carta, which dates from 1215, but even then we tend to do so anachronistically, and, certainly, few ever say anything about the four centuries which separate it from the constitutional conflicts of the seventeenth century. 

This is a shame, as there is much that can usefully be learned about today’s constitution from the medieval political orders of the Middle Ages. One could start with Henry de Bracton, for example, and his thirteenth-century writings on kingship. Or with Sir John Fortescue’s De Laudibus Legum Angliae, written in the 1470s as a handbook for Edward IV but not published until the 1540s (well into the reign of Henry VIII). Or one could read Sir Thomas Smith’s brilliant Elizabethan overview of Tudor government, De Republica Anglorum, first published in 1583. All contain insights about the nature of rulership and government which remain pertinent to this day. Fortescue, for example, is as compelling as Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries are, written in the 1760s, that the genius of the English constitution is its mixing together of elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Blackstone was adamant that it was the mixed nature of the constitution that had given England her stability. But he was hardly the first great English jurist to alight upon this theme. Fortescue beat him to it by some three hundred years.

I confess that I do not teach Bracton, Fortescue, or Sir Thomas Smith to my constitutional law students. Perhaps I should. Were I to try to convey a sense of the ongoing importance of today’s British constitution of the late Middle Ages, I would be inclined to reach first for Shakespeare. In particular, I would cite his great tetralogy of history plays, Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V. These are not only Shakespeare’s best histories: they are among the finest of all his plays. Richard II is a story of weak and conflicted rulership, when the ruler doubts himself and crumples under the weight of leadership. Henry IV is a story both of guilt (aka, the burden of taking responsibility for the means by which you have obtained power) and of the public/private split, asking us to reflect on the moral fibre of our putative leaders, as reflected not only in their public action but also in their private behaviour.

The dominant figure in the first story is of course the king, who usurped Richard’s Crown to become Henry IV; the dominant figure in the second is his son (and heir) Hal, who will rise to become Henry V. The closing of the quartet, Henry V, is a study in leadership, principally but not only in war. It is a case study of how to take men with you, how to lead from the front knowing that the loyalty of those behind you is not only publicly displayed but—far more important, then as now—inwardly felt. The Chorus puts it thus, at the opening of Act 4:

For forth he goes and visits all his host.
Bids them good morrow with a modest smile
And calls them brothers, friends, and countrymen. 
Upon his royal face there is no note
How dread an army hath enrounded him …
But freshly looks and overbears attaint
With cheerful semblance and sweet majesty.
That every wretch, pining and pale before,
Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks.
A largess universal, like the sun,
His liberal eye doth give to everyone,
Thawing cold fear, that mean and gentle all
Behold, as may unworthiness define.
A little touch of Harry in the night.

Henry is about to lead his troops in war. Outnumbered by the “confident and over-lusty” French, they fear decimation. But the king instead leads them to victory, and to glory.

Of the numerous constitutional insights contained within these majestic and brilliant plays, let me highlight just two, as illustrations of how Shakespeare can be used to illuminate aspects of constitutional law. The first concerns the identity of the state. What is it, this thing, which is constituted by the constitution? This is a question that, in the Anglo-American mainstream, lawyers have not spent enough time worrying about. (It is quite different in the French tradition, where la pouvoir constituant has been a fixation of constitutional theorists since at least the Abbé Sieyès). Perhaps now, as the rise of populism challenges us to consider where the limits should be set to the idea of popular sovereignty, we are belatedly coming around to the realisation that it is not just constituted power we should worry about, but constituent power too. Who has the authority to constitute the state—and what is the state, anyway? These are the foundational concerns of Richard II and they are most powerfully expressed in a speech, loaded with pathos, of the king himself (the speech, “Of comfort no man speak”, in Act 3, scene 2).

It isn’t popular sovereignty on which Richard ruminates, but his own supposed sovereignty—the sovereignty, that is, which literally embodies the state. The physical embodiment of the state is Richard himself. He realises his body is at once his own (as a man) and the manifestation of the state (as king). It is no accident that Ernst Kantorowicz, in his great study of what he called “medieval political theology,” The King’s Two Bodies (1957), devoted an entire chapter of his analysis to Shakespeare’s Richard II. Richard instructs his companions to:

… sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings,
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed …

“All murdered,” he blasts. He is inviting his companions (and by extension us) to reflect not only on what it means for the king to die, but what it means for the state. It is worth recalling that Shakespeare is writing at a time when it was treason—a capital offence, no less—to imagine the king’s death. The passing of the monarch risked the passing of the body politic itself. It was a moment of extreme frailty and fragility. And yet, as Richard laments, it is wired into the system (a feature, not a bug). All the king is granted is “a breath, a little scene ǀ To monarchise, be feared, and kill with looks”. Death is never far away. It is “vain conceit” to imagine that the king’s “flesh which walls about our life ǀ Were brass impregnable.” All it takes for death to bore through the king’s flesh—his castle wall—is “a little pin … and farewell king.” The truth, Richard concedes, is that his subjects:

have but mistook me all this while,
I live with bread like you, feel want, 
Taste grief, need friends.

“Subjected thus,” he asks, “How can you say to me I am a king?” What goes for the king as sovereign goes likewise for any other body making a claim to sovereignty, even the people themselves. Who are we, to think we have the power to lay down the law, the law of the constitution, no less? Are we not mere flesh, living with bread, feeling want, tasting grief, and needing friends? How do we square our own mortal, quotidian ordinariness with the exceptional power we arrogate to ourselves to exercise popular sovereignty? Richard II helps us begin to articulate these questions in a way few other texts can approach.

My second example of contemporary constitutional insight drawn from Shakespeare comes from the end of Henry IV Part 2. Upon his father’s demise, Hal has acceded to the throne—he is now King Henry V. He meets two older men, each very different from the other, both of whom have played an avuncular role in his life. One is Falstaff, Hal’s great lord of misrule. Sir John is clearly expecting preferment but instead is unceremoniously dumped—banished from court with the cutting words, “I know thee not, old man.”

The other is the late king’s Lord Chief Justice who, we are told, had once had Hal arrested and detained for breach of the peace. The judge fears—indeed, he knows—that the new king “loves [him] not” (Act 5, scene 1). He is expecting, at best, to be dismissed. But the new king surprises him by retaining him in office, telling him to:

… still bear the balance and the sword;
And I do wish your honours may increase
Till you do live to see a son of mine
Offend you and obey you as I did. 
So shall I live to speak my father’s words;
“Happy am I that I have a man so bold
That dares do justice on my proper son,
And not less happy having such a son
That would deliver up his greatness so
Into the hands of Justice.” You did commit me,
For which I do commit into your hand
Th’unstainèd sword that you have used to bear,
With this remembrance: that you use the same
With the like bold, just, and impartial spirit
As you have done ‘gainst me. There is my hand.
You shall be as a father to my youth;
My voice shall sound as you do prompt mine ear,
And I will stoop and humble my intents
To your well-practised wise directions.

Henry may be a new king, and he may have acceded to the throne at a tender age (he was in his mid-20s), but he is experienced enough to appreciate that he needs honest counsel, impartial justice, and an independent judiciary. That the rule of law must be administered alike to one and all, irrespective of status, is a given of modern constitutionalism, as is the fact that the realisation of this aspiration demands judges who are independent of government. Neither the “rule of law” nor the “separation of powers” were terms of constitutional art in Shakespeare’s day (the former we owe principally to Dicey; the latter to Montesquieu and Madison). Both are core maxims of the modern constitution, and both are proudly and defiantly on display in Henry IV Part 2, this poignant scene made all the more powerful by its contrast with the banishment of “old Jack Falstaff.”

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Obama Comes Out, Pushing Gay Porn in School Libraries

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By The Geller Report

Long time Geller Report readers know full well the sexualization and promotion of perverse sexual practices to children in our public schools is nothing new. It all began with Obama. Everything terrible thing the government is doing to the American people (and the world) was put in place during the Obama years.

ALERT: Obama, a left-wing extremist who is one of the most corrupt presidents in American history, supports pornography for children. https://t.co/G4IFTCX60e

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) July 17, 2023

Gender Queer is one of the Books Obama is Promoting for Children…

Literal Porn… Do you want your kids reading this disgusting garbage⁉️⁉️ pic.twitter.com/bhaBbMSxLo

— 𝕊𝕔𝕒𝕣𝕪 𝔼𝕝𝕖𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝔻𝕖𝕟𝕚𝕖𝕣 🇺🇸 (@nomandatesco) July 18, 2023

When they accuse us of “banning books” they’re referring to graphic books containing pornographic content offered to kids in schools across the country.

For some reason, they never show examples from the books 🤔

Why does Obama want your kids to read porn like this in school? https://t.co/bTScYwTAKM pic.twitter.com/p2jzqXK0XY

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) July 17, 2023

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLES:

Obama-Linked GLSEN Organization Was Handing Out ‘Fisting Kits’ to Children at School Conference – Now Target Is Partnering with GLSEN in Promoting Gender Transition in Schools

It All Started with Obama: Barack’s Fist-F**king “Safe Schools Czar” Pushed Books that Encouraged Children to Meet Adults at Gay Bars for Sex

Ascension of Evil: Obama’s Fist F**king “Safe School Czar” Kevin Jennings

OBAMA APPOINTEE KEVIN JENNINGS: FISTING AND “[F–k] ‘em” to the “Religious Right”

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Montana State Library Commission Cuts Ties With American Library Association Over New ‘Marxist Lesbian’ President thumbnail

Montana State Library Commission Cuts Ties With American Library Association Over New ‘Marxist Lesbian’ President

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By Joshua Arnold

The Montana State Library Commission voted Tuesday to withdraw from the American Library Association based on that organization’s new president, who is a “Marxist lesbian” by her own description.

The lopsided vote (5-1, with one abstention) represents the first time a state entity has withdrawn from the 147-year-old nonprofit.

“Our oath of office and resulting duty to the Constitution forbids association with an organization led by a Marxist,” the commission told the ALA.

After winning an election to become the president of the ALA from 2023-2024, Emily Drabinski celebrated in a now-deleted tweet, “I just cannot believe that a Marxist lesbian who believes that collective power is possible to build and can be wielded for a better world is the president-elect of the @ALALibrary. I am so excited for what we will do together. Solidarity! And my mom is SO PROUD[.] I love you[,] mom.”

Drabinski later confirmed in an interview that the “Marxist lesbian” label is “very much who I am and shapes a lot of how I think about social change and making a difference in the world.”

“Queer theory informs new strategies for teaching the library catalog from a queer perspective,” Drabinski wrote in 2013, in an article titled “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction,” which was published in the peer-reviewed quarterly journal Library.

Drabinski speaks frequently on topics such as “organizing for change,” “teaching the radical catalog,” “decolonizing the library catalogue,” “herstory through activism,” and “critical librarianship.”

In 2019, she co-authored a research article in Transgender Studies Quarterly documenting “a collective effort by a handful of catalogers” to revise library catalogue practices “so that binary gender was not encoded into the metadata of library records.”

“The ALA has been promoting progressive ideology for many years,” Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council senior fellow for education studies, told The Washington Stand. “Their annual conference has had breakout sessions on how to feature racist and sexualized content frequently. The reelection of an openly Marxist president, who ran for the job promising to inject her militant views into the organization, was the last straw in Montana.”

At the commission’s June 22 meeting, Commissioner Tom Burnett proposed to consider withdrawing from the ALA at a special meeting, which was scheduled for Tuesday.

“Marxism stands in direct opposition to the principles of the Constitution of the United States,” said Burnett. “It’s fair to discuss and learn about Marxism, not to affiliate with Marxist-led organizations.”

“I believe that the national association has been polarized,” agreed Montana Superintendent of Public Instruction Elsie Arntzen, another commissioner. “We do not need to be tethered to a national organization that does not honor our great state, our values, or our nation as being America.”

Kilgannon said public libraries are especially important in a state like Montana, a mostly rural state with long months of winter weather.

“The public library is where movies are checked out, books are checked out, community fellowship happens, especially when the weather is bad,” she said. “When politics enter this space or ideology takes over, it alienates the people libraries are supposed to serve.”

During an hour of public comment, many speakers supported the decision to withdraw from the ALA.

“I think this is a really good move to send a really clear signal to our national organizations that we are not in agreement with the direction they are taking these organizations,” said parent Cheryl Tusken.

Tusken drew a parallel to the Montana School Boards Association’s withdrawal from the National School Boards Association last year.

After NSBA leadership conspired with the Biden administration to draft a letter asking it to investigate concerned parents as domestic terrorists, 30 of its 49 member state associations “distanced themselves from the NSBA’s letter,” and 26 states took “further action … to withdraw membership, participation, or dues from NSBA.”

Even though the NSBA appointed a new CEO and issued an apology, many of those state associations formed their own alternate interstate association instead of returning.

“We are grateful to them for their leadership in setting a standard other states should follow,” said Kilgannon. “The National School Boards Association learned this the hard way. Amazingly, other education groups have failed to learn from that example or the millions of parents across the country who are speaking out.”

The Executive Board of the Montana Library Association issued a statement opposing the decision to withdraw from the ALA. However, not every Montana librarian shared its position.

One Montana librarian submitted an email comment, concealing his identity “due to fear of retribution.” He complained that he had watched “my profession go from honorable to shameful,” as “libraries all over the country and within Montana have shifted from serving communities to serving power.”

The anonymous librarian lamented that he noticed a “change in my co-workers who had become aggressive to the point of supporting violent acts (I have evidence of this I am not willing to share in an email).” He said he had “become fluent in critical pedagogy” to “adapt to the rapidly deteriorating conditions in my workplace and surroundings.”

In April, Montana found itself embroiled in a tense cultural controversy that drew national attention when the Legislature worked to enact a law to protect minors from irreversible, harmful gender-transition procedures.

A trans-identifying lawmaker accused his colleagues of having “blood on your hands” and urged on protesters who were disrupting proceedings. The protests only grew more heated after the Legislature censured the representative because he refused to apologize.

It “said a lot” that the librarian was afraid to use his or her name, Commissioner Tammy Hall noted, “because of the personal attacks this person would be open to if they didn’t follow what I would call ‘the woke agenda being promoted by the ALA to our librarians.’”

“Parents all over the country are waking up to the fact that many in organizations like ALA are not willing to entertain other ideas or accommodate differences,” Kilgannon added. “The best course of action now is to leave the organization, take your funds and brain power with you, and use that money to serve the people in your state.”

*****

This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

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Confidence in American Colleges In Free Fall

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By Jerry Newcombe

At one time, America was among the best educated nations in the world. James Madison of Virginia, a key architect of the Constitution, said, “A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.”

But a recent Gallup Poll earlier this month has found that American faith in college today has dropped significantly.

In an article entitled, “Confidence in US higher education has drastically declined,” Campusreform.org reports: “A July 11 Gallup poll reveals that opinions about United States higher education has seen a sharp decline since 2015, with only 36% of polled Americans saying that they have confidence in the country’s colleges and universities. This figure is down from 48% in 2018 and 57% in 2015.” That’s a 21-percentage-point drop in just eight years.

Why is confidence in college plummeting today? Democrats, according to the survey, blame the costs of the schools. Republicans blame the politics. Both seem valid concerns.

Why is confidence in American colleges in free fall? I think it is because virtually all of the colleges and universities have gone “woke,” like so many aspects of our culture.

Many times crazy ideas are hatched in the university faculty lounges that may sound great in theory, but are awful in practice.

Socialism is a great case in point. Can anyone name a square inch on the entire planet where socialism has benefited the people? The ruling elites love it because they benefit from it. Just ask the Castro brothers. American universities today are hotbeds of Marxism and socialism.

About half a century ago, William F. Buckley, Jr. once observed, “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

How far Harvard has fallen from its original Christian purposes. The official motto of Harvard for a couple of centuries was “Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae.” In Latin, that meant “Truth for Christ and the Church.”

The library built in 1914 still has that Latin motto chiseled in stone. But sometime in the early 20th century, they cut off Veritas from its Christian moorings. So now the motto is only “Veritas.” To paraphrase Francis Schaeffer, noted Christian social critic, one could say that Harvard now has truth firmly planted, with both feet in mid-air.

There is a plaque in stone at the entrance of Harvard which declares, “After God had carried us safe to New England, and we had built our houses, provided necessities for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the civil government: one of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance learning, and perpetuate it to posterity: dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”

The last time I was there, in order to film a portion of our Providence Forum “Foundation of American Liberty” series, I saw that they had planted a tree in front of that stone plaque, so you had to move the branches to even see the sign.

But Harvard has long abandoned the faith that gave it birth. So have so many other universities in our time.

Much of the college campus wokeness is encapsulated in the 3-letter phrase, DEI— standing for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion.

Recently, the New York Post noted that New York’s university system will require heavy doses of DEI, and social justice in order for students to be able graduate. Good-bye, founding fathers. Hello Marxism. Good-bye, free enterprise. Hello, socialism.

Former college professor Jordan Peterson of Canada left his professorial position ultimately because of political correctness and DEI. He says that they have that acrostic in the wrong order. It should be DIE, because it is killing our universities.

Recently Florida Governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis declared that “DEI-infused” curriculum has no place in the Sunshine State’s public schools: “Florida is getting out of that game…If you want to do things like gender ideology, go to Berkeley — go to some of these other places.”

DeSantis also spoke before a Republican group in North Carolina, where he again railed against woke ideology in the schools: “We’re also the first state in the United States to eliminate DEI from our public university system. They say it is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, but in reality it’s ideology. It’s an agenda that they are trying to impose, not just on the students, but on faculty and staff.”

He went on to say, “Indeed, DEI, the way it’s practiced, better stands for Discrimination, Exclusion, and Indoctrination, and that has no place in our public institutions.”

Until the universities get back to classical education and jettison the cultural Marxism, we will likely see the confidence in college education and its usefulness for helping build a positive future sink even further.

©2023. Dr. Jerry Newcombe, D.Min. All rights reserved.

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Experts Pick the Top 5 Conservative Colleges in the Country

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By Family Research Council

As the state of universities continues to worsen with leftist ideology becoming entrenched in institutions of higher education, conservative parents are left wondering where they can send their children for education, not LGBT indoctrination. The Washington Stand reached out to a number of prominent conservative educators to ask for their recommendations on the best colleges and universities that educate, enrich, and produce virtuous Americans.

1. Grove City College

This private Christian liberal arts college in western Pennsylvania topped the list of recommendations from conservative educators. The school has a strong focus on a humanities-based core curriculum and offers 60 majors, including in Biblical and Religious Studies, English Literature, History, Political Science, and more, all taught from a conservative Christian perspective.

Unlike many colleges today, Grove City has a focus on honing a fully-formed human, not just a well-trained wage slave. The school also places a strong emphasis on freedom of conscience and its website boasts, “Your freedom of conscience is foundational to the healthy academic community and classroom experience you will find at Grove City College. We hold fast to the belief that all Truth and knowledge begin with Christ, allowing you to rigorously pursue the highest academic excellence.”

Notable alumni include former U.S. deputy attorney general Paul McNulty (now the president of Grove City), conservative economist Peter Boettke, Institute for Justice founder Scott Bullock, and Catholic author and theologian Scott Hahn. Notable professors include author Dr. Paul Kengor, who teaches political science, federal judge Arthur Schwab, biblical scholar G.K. Beale, and theologian Dr. Carl Trueman.

“Grove City is the best.” — William J. Bennett, former Education Secretary under President Ronald Reagan

2. Hillsdale College

Another private, Christian liberal arts school, Hillsdale comes in at a strong number two. The college bases its educational philosophy on the belief that the Western world is the product of both Greco-Roman civilization and Christian tradition and philosophy. Hillsdale offers a host of traditional majors, including Classical Education, American Studies, Military History and Grand Strategy, and Rhetoric and Public Address, among many others. In the 1980s, both Hillsdale and Grove City chose to opt out of federal funding in order not to be bound to Title IX, which now protects homosexuality and transgenderism.

Hillsdale requires its students to enroll in and complete a core curriculum to accompany their majors and minors. Some of those areas of mandatory study include classical logic, theology, American heritage, science, deductive reasoning, theology, and the Great Books.

“Faithful to the conservative spirit and resolutely independent from federal funding. Hillsdale’s ‘declaration of independence’ from the federal government is an inspiration.” — Joseph Pearce, author and former literature professor

3. Ave Maria University

A private Catholic university in Florida, Ave Maria has consistently been featured in the Newman Guide and was ranked by College Factual in the top 8% of “Best Colleges for the Money.” The university has made classical thought and Catholic culture a core aspect of its identity. Every dormitory building features a chapel, and the pre-1969 Traditional Latin Mass is offered on campus.

Ave Maria offers 33 undergraduate degrees, including American Studies, Catechetics, Classics and Early Christian Literature, Marriage and Family Studies, and others. Ave Maria also features a law school, which has consistently been ranked the “most conservative” and “most devout” law school in the U.S. The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia helped develop the law school’s curriculum. Founder Tom Monaghan said his hope is for Ave Maria to become a “Catholic Ivy.”

In 2012, Ave Maria sued the federal government, claiming a Health and Human Services mandate requiring employers to provide birth control would violate the university’s religious freedom. Pornography and contraceptives are banned on campus and the university instructs local shops not to sell pornography or contraceptives, either.

4. Thomas Aquinas College

Another private Catholic liberal arts school clocked in at fourth place on TWS’s list of recommendations. With campuses in both Ventura, California and Northfield, Massachusetts, Thomas Aquinas offers only one degree: a bachelor of arts in liberal arts. The college’s program of study is steeped in Christian philosophy and based on the Great Books, conducted in a seminar fashion. Notable alumni include traditionalist theologian Dr. Peter Kwasniewski and Trump-appointed environment czar Mary Neumayr.

Thomas Aquinas has placed a great emphasis on the beauty of Western art and architecture. The college’s chapel blends early Christian, Renaissance, and Spanish Mission architectural styles and has been described as the “crown jewel” of the campus. The late Pope Benedict XVI blessed the chapel’s cornerstone. The school’s library is also an artistic marvel, featuring a ceiling from a 17th century Spanish monastery.

5. Liberty University

A private Baptist school in Virginia, Liberty University boasts over 700 programs of study and a stringent Christian code of conduct. The university purports to produce “champions for Christ” and has been both hailed and derided as a “bastion of the Christian right.” Liberty features a popular series of online degrees as well as a law school, a business school, an aeronautics school, and more.

The university mandates a code of conduct for students, called the “Liberty Way,” which prohibits premarital sex, cohabitation, alcohol use, and “LGBTQ states of mind.”

Of course, this list is not exhaustive: there are many colleges and universities that have shaped and still do shape bold conservatives, but these are some of the very best, according to prominent conservative educators. As leftism and LGBT ideology continue to invade higher education, conservative institutions will become fewer and fewer. What’s most important is to raise children well, ensuring that their foundational education — intellectual, moral, and spiritual — is a strong one, so that they may face the evils the present age seems to be perpetually producing, and stand firm.

Honorable mentions:

  • College of the Ozarks (Point Lookout, Mo.)
  • Franciscan University of Steubenville (Steubenville, Ohio)
  • University of Dallas (Dallas, Texas)
  • Wyoming Catholic College (Lander, Wyo.)

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer 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.

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Recent left-wing attempts to subvert maths curricula hold some awkward historical parallels

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By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

If you were an author of school textbooks and wanted to teach a small child that 2+2=4, how would you choose to do so? Perhaps you might draw a picture of two easily-understandable items like apples, next to another two apples, followed by a final illustration of four apples, these simple and innocent images linked by the common mathematical signifiers + and =.

Or, alternatively, perhaps you may prefer to throw out those rotten old apples and have kids learn to count by totting up images of highly politicised things with rather more Social Justice content to them instead, like raised BLM fist-logos, rainbow-coloured condoms, or Free Palestine flags?

Parents should relax: these specific examples have not yet happened – as far as I know. But maths questions like the following, found in an Irish school textbook in 2018, have:

Craig buys his boyfriend a birthday present that costs €215.65 including VAT [Value Added Tax] @ 13.5%. What was the original bill before VAT was added?

Just harmless attempts at trying to make all social groups feel included in the classroom? Not according to the response of some gleeful commentators to the question when it went viral online.

But what if some parents don’t want their children to have their “heteronormative programming” forcibly unpicked in school mathematics classes? What if they just want their kids to be taught to add up properly, not be turned gay by their calculators? (As if such a thing is even possible …)

Poisoning the Pi

Mathematics is, stereotypically-speaking, supposed to be the most ideologically, culturally and morally impartial of all subjects under the sun. Yes, us fallen humans can use maths to do bad things – to calculate how much explosive to add to a bomb, say – but numbers themselves are neutral. Certainly, I have yet to encounter a sexist fraction or a racist cone-section.

Yet in Britain, headlines were recently made when the QAA, a university standards (-lowering) body, released official guidance for mathematics courses, to the effect that “Values of EDI [Equality, Diversity, Inclusion – i.e. wokeness] should permeate the [maths] curriculum and every aspect of the learning experience to ensure the diverse nature of society in all its forms is evident.”

One of the specific ways in which the QAA suggested this “essential” goal could be achieved was by professors shame-facedly informing their students that mathematics itself had frequently operated as a tool of white supremacy throughout its long and chequered past, even to the extent that “historically, some mathematicians have recorded racist or fascist views or connections to groups such as the Nazis.”

Well, this is true. Some obscure mathematicians were indeed committed Nazis, like Ludwig Bieberbach. But, likewise – and I find it difficult to believe this fact actually now needs to be stated – the vast majority of mathematicians throughout history were not Nazis at all. Doubtless some train-drivers, pig-farmers and stamp-collectors in 1930s Germany were fascists also. Next time they hop on public transport, eat a sausage or post a letter, do the general public really need to be piously reminded of this appalling fact lest they absent-mindedly allow another Führer to rise to power some dark day soon?

There is also the amusing irony that, when the Nazis actually did specifically abuse the field of mathematics for their own sinister ends, the way they most frequently did so was alarmingly similar to the methods now being “recommended” to British universities by the QAA: namely, by ensuring that their own chosen political values “permeate the [maths] curriculum and every aspect of the learning experience.”

To be sure, the Nazis’ specific extremist values were far different and far worse than those of the QAA, whose board-members have thus far at least not actually killed anybody (at least not in any professional capacity) – but their basic methodology is absolutely identical.

Multiplying oppression

To enable them to maintain power, the Nazi Party developed an omnipotent method of social control called Gleichschaltung, which can be taken as meaning “marching in step”, or more literally as “synchronisation” or “coordination”, terms  taken from electrical engineering, and indicating the switching of current between its two different AC and DC forms, a literal forced rewiring of the human brain: just like “unpicking heteronormative programming” in kids, maybe.

The Nazis were committed social-engineers who saw society as some gigantic machine, every cog of which had to be captured and made to serve as a tiny wheel within the overall centrally-imposed design-blueprint … even maths.

The most notorious example of this was Question 97 in the 1935 textbook Mathematics in the Service of National Socialist Education. Edited by regime-friendly teacher Adolf Dorner, the author boasted in the text’s foreword that it was intended to “hammer into the people [i.e., naïve children] the basic facts that determine the policy of the government” – in Question 97’s case, the government’s policy of mass-murdering the disabled to save money:

A mentally ill person costs 4 German Marks (RM) a day [to the State], a cripple 5.50RM, a criminal 3.50RM. In many cases, a civil servant has only 4RM per day, a public employee barely 3.50RM, an unskilled worker not yet 2RM [despite being] head of the family.

(a) Represent these figures graphically.

(b) According to cautious estimates, there are 300,000 mentally ill persons, epileptics, etc, in nursing homes. How many loans for young [healthy] families at 1,000M without refund could be spent from this money each year? (NOTE: For each child that is born alive in the marriage, one fourth of the original loan is relinquished)

Such a question not only teaches impressionable infants legitimate mathematical skills like how to draw graphs, it also encourages them to view medical genocide as a highly moral and financially sensible decision which will directly help them in their future lives. In short, “2+2= support Nazism!”

Marxism by the numbers

Similar tactics were pursued in the Soviet Union, under the rubric of partiinost’, or “Partyness”, the Kremlin’s own domestic equivalent of Nazi Gleichschaltung. Here is an excellent illustration of raising Far-Left political awareness amongst children, taken from the key Stalinist school resource Culturally Specific Pedagogy in the Mathematics Classroom: Strategies for Teachers and Students [pp.170-2]:

[The Left-wing political trade union activist] Cesar Chavez organised the National Farm Workers Association to help fight for the rights of migrant farm-workers [in the US]. In 1965, Cesar and his followers organised a 250-mile march from Delano, California, to the State Capitol in Sacramento. It took 17 days for the marchers to reach Stockton, California, It is about 200 miles from Delano to Stockton. Find the average number of miles the people had walked so far.

Chavez’s movement on behalf of migrant farm-workers was non-violent. To bring attention to La Causa [The Cause], Chavez went on hunger-strikes, refusing to eat food for many days. In 1993, Chavez went on a 36-day hunger-strike. How many weeks did this hunger-strike last?

Except, as the dates mentioned above rather give away, this particular example does not come from the USSR during the 1950s at all, but from the US in 2019, being contained in a textbook for teachers printed not by a fringe Communist press, but by the major international academic publisher Routledge. Doubtless a close sequel, The Bobby Sands Maths Book, will soon be released to encourage further anti-imperialist hunger-striking in Northern Ireland.

The text’s author, Jacqueline Leonard, argues that framing classroom questions in such a blatantly biased way will help spread “Social Justice”. According to Leonard, embedding leftist propaganda in maths lessons “empowers teachers and students to change society, challenging the status quo”, as Britain’s own QAA may also desire.  A more honest way of putting this may be to imitate her Nazi predecessor Adolf Dorner and admit such brainwashing actually helps “hammer into the people the basic facts that determine the policy of the government”, or the policy of the government as left-wing activists posing as impartial educators like Ms Leonard would one day like it to be, anyway.

Political problems

You can find any number of such lesson plans easily available for teachers to make use of online. Consider “What’s a Fair Housing Wage?”, an activity in which American students are asked to draw graphs for the earnings of various families on differing incomes before “identifying slope and y-intercept in each representation.” Yet these legitimate skills are supplemented by explicitly identified “Social Justice Goals”, namely that students must: “Recognize that the current minimum wage does not allow an individual to afford the fair market price of a moderate 2-bedroom rental unit, assuming that housing should require about 30% of income.”

This may indeed be true: or, then again, it may not. This is a debatable political opinion, being pushed as objective fact, within an inappropriate educational context, the true aim of which is to indoctrinate pupils into despising capitalism, and perhaps even defenestrating landlords. Maths questions traditionally only have one acceptable correct answer: 2+2 is always supposed to equal 4 (although some ideologues now even dispute this too …). Subjective political and economic questions should not be treated similarly; that is a literal definition of totalitarian One-Party rule.

Even more self-evidently propagandistic are the various Black Lives Matter maths resources available to teachers. Look at this 2019 example from a school boasting how it had children examine rates of incarceration by race in US prisons, clearly designed to persuade students the entire criminal justice system is systemically racist against non-whites.

In conclusion, having considered such data, Young Pioneers were asked to explain whether or not expanding the US border wall at Mexico would be an effective way to reduce crime, as Donald Trump thought, rightly or wrongly. If junior thought-criminals still answered “yes”, you have to presume that would be a big red ‘X’ for dim little Johnny, just as he would receive for writing that 2+2=5. At least the Nazis’ maths textbooks openly admitted they were fascistic in their very titles; today’s Western Marxist equivalents never seem honest enough to do the same.

In 2022, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis banned 54 out of 132 school maths textbooks submitted for use in the State’s schools either because they did not meet various required standards or because, in his officials’ opinion, they were simply being used as vehicles for leftist propaganda – if you wish to transform this into a politicised maths problem of your own, that’s 41%.

Some of the books required students to parse bar-graphs and equations purporting to demonstrate that, the older and more conservative-leaning you were, the more racist you were too. Presumably the data used to “demonstrate” this took no account of anti-white racism, in which case the demographics represented by these bar-charts may well have been directly reversed, so successful has in-school woke Gleichschaltung now become.

The Book of Numbers

Religious extremists also subvert maths curricula to similar ends. In 2020, it emerged that UK aid money given to Palestine had been used to fund Islamist textbooks where nine-year-olds were challenged to calculate the number of martyred terrorists from various anti-Israeli uprisings down the years, accompanied by charming photographs of their funerals. That wokeists are increasingly acting similarly provides further evidence the whole movement is just a contemporary secular cult.

I used to quite happily teach in religious Catholic schools myself — which critics may also deride as ideological indoctrination-factories — but Catholic content there was strictly restricted to assemblies and religious education classes, not any other subjects. Maths lessons did not require children to calculate how many Vatican missionaries were required to convert the benighted heathen in Country X or determine how many  innocent infant souls were lost to abortion each year.

Whenever anyone does try and religiously convert pupils via maths, they are dealt with harshly. Consider an amusing 2016 instance where the following question surprisingly appeared on an internal maths exam in a UK grammar school:

If in a town, 70 percent of the men are married to 90 per cent of the women (and each marriage is between one man and one woman, as God intended when he made humans male and female), what percentage of the adult population are married?

The volunteer teacher responsible for handing out the paper – described as “a caricature of conservative Christianity” by one disapproving pupil (i.e., someone who actually believed in the tenets of his own religion) – soon had his services dispensed with, on the grounds of unprofessional behaviour. Rightly so, you may say. In which case, all the teachers responsible for promoting BLM, homosexuality, anti-capitalism, etc, detailed above should also have been dismissed or disciplined too. But they never are, are they?

Divide and conquer

In February 1953, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower was asked whether or not known Communists should be banned from teaching in Cold War-era American schools and universities, not only in the easily-abused humanities subjects, but also in ostensibly non-ideological areas such as maths. Eisenhower replied the idea should be considered.

Following World War II, Eisenhower recalled having been shown a Nazi mathematics textbook in which, rather than asking children to calculate how many apples are in a barrel, pupils were instead tasked with working out how many “Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia … belong to Mr Hitler”. This, said Eisenhower, showed how a politically suspect teacher can indeed “use mathematics to be rather doctrinal”, if they so desire.

Until recently, Eisenhower’s words were used as a prime example of what was painted as the extreme and comical “Reds Under the Bed” paranoia of the 1950s McCarthyite era. Viewed anew from today’s perspective, it suddenly seems as if the President had a point after all.

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 of the past, will be published in summer 2023.

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

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Movie Review: The Sound of Freedom

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By Neland Nobel

From seemingly out of the blue, an independent film about child sex trafficking has eclipsed some heavyweight Hollywood productions for the summer box office draw. In actuality, we learn the film was produced some five years ago and it took all this time and struggle to get it to the big screen.  Why such a struggle?

Like many of you, we have heard about the film and the criticism that it was simply a front for the blatherings of Qu Anon conspiracy advocates.  But most of this is coming from talking heads on left-wing TV networks and we discounted much of what they said.

Besides, The Prickly Pear had run some important articles (here and here) about the film, so we decided to see it for ourselves.

There have also been anecdotal reports of “funny business” by some theatres to suppress viewership.  We had our own experience and can’t verify the experience in the video below.

We saw the show at a multiplex in Arrow Head Mall in West Phoenix.  As we attempted to purchase for a matinee show, we were shown a diagram of a full theatre with just two seats available, right up against the big screen in the extreme right-hand extreme corner.  We decided to take them knowing that a visit to the chiropractor would likely follow almost two hours of stressed necks.  After all, we were late getting to the facility and felt that was the penalty for tardiness.  But once we were in, we found at least a half dozen empty seats and moved to more comfortable seating.  Why would theatres do that?  Was this deliberate or just incompetence? Aren’t they dying to win back customers?

We were glad to find seating. Wow, what a movie!

Both my wife and I felt we could not recall ever seeing a movie as moving as this one.  It is extremely well-acted.  We marveled at where the producers found these child actors and actresses. Jim Caviezel is outstanding and believable.

This is no date night movie.  The theme is a dark one, and that is perhaps what is drawing the ire of the Left.  It suggests there are boundaries when it comes to sexual behavior and the children are off limits.  This happens to be a big topic right now in our society and the Left seems hell-bent on sexualizing children.  For what ends are debatable but the attempt is undeniable.

Some, of course, will not tolerate any “God Talk” in a movie, although they are quite happy to see lots of secular moralizing about “global warming”, racism, and gay rights.  But we found really no political content in this movie.

There is mention of God only twice I can recall.  One involves the statement that “God’s children are not for sale.”  One would have to be really jaded to object to that.  The movie does not do a lot of moralizing but the story itself carries the burden.

We are very hard-pressed to see why so many critics either ignore or criticize this movie.  You would think if there was any subject where a bipartisan consensus could be achieved, it would be in opposition to child sex slavery.

Conservatives need to support all the forms of new communication that help break the monopoly of the Left on our culture. See the film and support its producers.  Moreover, see this film because it is powerful and beautiful art that tells an important story and you are well justified to see it on those grounds alone.

TAKE ACTION

As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

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Gallup Poll Reveals Americans’ Plummeting Confidence in Public Schools

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By Kerry McDonald

Americans have soured on public schools, but there are alternatives.

Americans have soured on public schools. That’s the takeaway from Gallup polling results released earlier this month showing that Americans’ confidence in public schools is at a low point, with only 26 percent of respondents indicating a “Great deal/Fair amount” of confidence in that institution.

Indeed, public schools join three other institutions that are also at or tied with their record lows, including the police, large technology companies, and big business. Along with the presidency, public schools are now among the most politically polarizing institutions in the US.

On a positive note, confidence in small businesses remained high, topping the list of institutions tracked annually by Gallup. It’s not surprising, then, that more parents are turning away from public schooling and choosing smaller, low-cost private schools and related out-of-system learning models, like homeschooling.

It’s also not surprising that there is growing support among Americans for school choice policies that enable education funding to follow students instead of going to school systems. 2023 has become a record year for school choice, with several states now joining Arizona in passing universal education choice legislation for all K-12 students.

Even in states without robust school choice policies, like where I am in Massachusetts, parents are continuing to choose education options beyond their assigned district schools. This exodus may have accelerated during the school closures of 2020, but it’s hardly disappearing. Demand for alternatives to public schools remains high, and education entrepreneurs are rising to meet that demand throughout the US.

“Families are in search of programs that can deliver personalized, high-quality instruction to their children,” said Ada Salie, who launched a learning center in Massachusetts in 2021 and is opening two additional locations across the state this fall. “As alternative education programs, we can pivot quickly in response to the needs of our students, and allow them to learn in the ways that serve them best.”

Salie’s program, Life Rediscovered, offers full- and part-time programming for homeschoolers, including many who have recently opted out of public schooling. Her program offers a blend of academic support, student-led projects, abundant time outside, and a cohesive, mixed-age community of learners and hired educators. This model is attractive to many families, with Salie’s three locations now at or near capacity.

Salie credits much of her expansion success to grants she has received from the VELA Education Fund, a national, philanthropic non-profit organization that supports entrepreneurial parents and teachers who are building unconventional, out-of-system learning models. Since launching publicly in 2019, VELA has issued grants to more than 2,200 everyday entrepreneurs, totaling more than $26 million. “We would not have had the confidence to go ahead with opening more sites without funding from VELA,” said Salie.

With back-to-school season just around the corner, parents don’t need to be tied to a school assignment that doesn’t meet their expectations. There is a growing number of inexpensive private schools and alternative education models all over the US, representing a wide variety of educational philosophies and approaches. I recently spotlighted 35 of them across five cities, from the busy streets of New York to the quiet crossroads of Grants Pass, Oregon.

Confidence in public schools may be fading at least in part due to their politically polarizing characteristics that inevitably create a battle of wills among diverse constituents with different preferences and worldviews. A decentralized education ecosystem, by contrast, allows families to choose what is best for their children without forcing their preferences upon others.

As faith in large, centralized institutions wanes, look to the entrepreneurs and small business owners who are creating what people want, in education and elsewhere, while reducing polarization and social strife.

*****

This article was published by FEE, The Foundation for Economic Education, and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

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Today’s Reserve Officer Training Corps. Cadet Summer Training Camp Fiasco!

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By Royal A. Brown III

Unbelievable! I was a member of an Army Senior ROTC Summer Camp training staff over 3 summers at Ft Riley, Kansas as a G3 Training Officer and a Regimental Commander and these kind of problems didn’t exist—of course this was before the Army and rest of military became totally WOKE.

Fort Knox cadets taste Army life: walkouts, expired MREs, water issues

By Jaime Moore-Carrillo

Worker protests. Suspended dining services. Expired rations. Water supply cutoffs.

Reports of conditions at this year’s ROTC Cadet Summer Training (CST) at Fort Knox, Kentucky read like dispatches from a neglected outpost or underfunded sleepaway camp, not a flagship officer training program managed by the biggest branch of the wealthiest military on earth.

Thousands of college-aged officers-in-waiting have congregated at the base for a months’ worth of classes and field drills designed to imbue the Army’s next generation of “tough, adaptable leaders” with the skills needed to “thrive in ambiguous and complex environments.”

For some aspiring lieutenants, the ambiguous and complex environment that awaited them at CST may have been more than they bargained for.

Tales of shoddy provisions and contracting woes began flooding social media platforms in late June. Army Times sifted through the rumors, contacting base officials and CST participants to separate fact from fiction.

The deluge began, as with most contemporary digital scandals, with a viral TikTok video. The eleven-second clip, which has amassed 1.5 million views since hitting the platform July 3, showed dozens of Fort Knox employees gathered in a driveway chanting, “No Pay, No Work” in rhythmic unison. Other clips uploaded to the video-sharing service capture the scene from different angles.

Cadets, cadre, and other CST support personnel — speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the press — said the walkout occurred during the final week of June outside Sprocket 1, the cadre’s principal dining facility (DFAC).

The videos’ bold-texted captions claimed the protesting DFAC employees hadn’t been paid in over a month. Richard Patterson, a spokesperson for U.S. Army Cadet Command (USACC), acknowledged in a statement to Army Times that the command “terminated the food service contract that supported the Warrior Restaurants for CST on July 1st due to the contractor not fulfilling its obligations.” Patterson declined to say whether or not unpaid wages precipitated the termination, deflecting the matter to the contracting company. Army Times was unable to confirm whether the DFAC employees had gone without pay prior to the walkout.

Read more.

Jaime Moore-Carrillo is an editorial fellow for Military Times and Defense News. A Boston native, Jaime graduated with degrees in international affairs, history, and Arabic from Georgetown University, where he served as a senior editor for the school’s student-run paper, The Hoya.

©2023. Royal A. Brown III. All rights reserved.

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California’s Largest School District Slapped With Complaint Over ‘Black Student Achievement Plan’

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By The Daily Caller

Parents Defending Education (PDE), a parental rights organization, filed a civil rights complaint Tuesday to the Department of Education Office of Civil Rights (OCR) against California’s largest school district over its “black student achievement plan” that allegedly discriminates against students on the basis of race.

The complaint, obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, names Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) for allegedly engaging in race-based discrimination through a program designed to “directly respon[d] to the unique needs of Black students.” The “black student achievement plan” allocates resources such as “school grants” and “Historically Black Colleges and Universities Tours” within the district through a race-based tiered system, the complaint alleges.

“This District has a race-based tiered system of programming that caters to students of certain races, but discriminates against others,” Caroline Moore, vice president of PDE, told the DCNF. “Upon enrollment in this district two students of different races would be offered entirely different courses, solely based on their race. Not only is this discriminatory and illegal, it is inherently un-American and no student in this country should face limited course options because of his or her skin color.”

During the 2020-2021 school year under its “black student achievement plan,” LAUSD offered resources and benefits exclusively to students of color, the complaint alleges. Students of color were given resources such as a “Black Cultural Arts Passport” as well as exclusive “STEM Makerspace Labs” and “Parent Workshops and Community Fairs,” the complaint says.

Students of color are also given resources such as “restorative justice teachers,” “secondary counselors” and “black student union grant[s],” the complaint alleges.

The district recently came under scrutiny after parents protested a June Pride event that showed a video to elementary school children explaining that “some kids have two mommies, some kids have two daddies.” Following the protest, the school board passed a resolution which encourages schools to adopt lessons on gender identity and sexual orientation.

The “black student achievement plan” allegedly focuses exclusively on students of color and aims to “address the need for [a] culturally responsive curriculum” as well as build partnerships within the community.

From October 2021 to September 2022, civil rights complaints filed to the OCR alleging discrimination in the nation’s schools almost doubled from the previous year, with nearly 19,000 filed, according to The New York Times. A majority of the complaints filed name race and sex-based discrimination.

LAUSD did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

REAGAN REESE

Contributor

RELATED ARTICLES:

Harvard University Is Hosting A Race-Based Music Program, Complaint Alleged

Chicago Public Schools Tell Staff To Dismiss Parent ‘Pushback’ On Gender Ideology, Boys In Girls’ Bathrooms

Here Are The Left-Wing Initiatives Stuffed In California’s Math Framework

Popular Children’s Book Changed Character’s Pronoun, Parental Rights Group Apparently Finds

First Grade Teacher Sexually Assaulted Six Girls In Classroom, Investigators Allege

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.

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Pray for America’s Children

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By The Geller Report

Unearthed Video Shows Teachers Union President Ranting And Raving On Stage, Calling Students ‘Our Babies’

By: Reagan Reese, Daily Caller, July 14, 2023:

A recently unearthed video shows the head of the largest teachers union wailing on stage during a keynote address, calling students “our babies.”

During the National Education Association’s (NEA) July 3 Representative Assembly, Becky Pringle gave a keynote speech addressing more than 6,000 NEA delegates in Orlando, Florida. Toward the end of her speech, Pringle shouted about the union’s “righteous fight for freedom” and changing “the world for our students.” (RELATED: Biden Says ‘There’s No Such Thing As Someone Else’s Child’ While Honoring National Teacher Of The Year)

“We will never bend,” Pringle shouted. “We will never be broken because we are the NEA and we will always do what we must to be worthy of our students. Thank you NEA for all you do every day for our babies and for our colleagues and for your states and for this country. Onward NEA. Onward.”

The closing of Becky Pringle’s latest speech to the NEA was a Hitlerian performance. This is not a casual comparison. https://t.co/TuDs8EXW8V pic.twitter.com/B0Ow7uBqZA

— Paul Rossi (@pauldrossi) July 14, 2023

[…]

At the NEA’s representative assembly, delegates approved a new measure that calls for the organization and its members to promote sex-change procedures for LGBTQ youth. The new business item will be in place for one year and will update the NEA’s bargaining guidance around LGBTQ issues, such as access to sex-changing procedures for school employees.

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLE: Biden Says ‘There’s No Such Thing As Someone Else’s Child’ While Honoring National Teacher Of The Year

RELATED TWEET:

The NEA Collects $375 Million in Annual Dues. Here’s Where the Money Goes: Oh it’s 98.7% democrats pic.twitter.com/tfSuYo8xQG

— 🇺🇸ColonelMAGAMark🇺🇸 (@ColonelMark4) July 14, 2023

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Is There Any Such Thing as Legislation Anymore?

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By Ryan M. Yonk and Laura Arce

The attention given to the recent decision in Biden v. Nebraska rests fundamentally on political differences that have become increasingly stark, and that will no doubt continue to be the source of much disagreement. At its core, the question asked is primarily one of the wisdom of a policy decision made by a President, grafted onto a congressional statute granting him emergency powers, and then decided by the Court on what would ordinarily be viewed through the lens of narrow administrative law. The political stakes are high, and as a result, the core policy issue that underlies the political debate is left unresolved by the Court’s decision.

On June 30th the Supreme Court of the United States ruled against the Secretary of Education´s use of the  Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003 (HEROES Act) to forgive student loan debts of 430 Billion Dollars on the basis that the Secretary of Education does not have the authority to enact this plan. While the ruling focuses on the Secretary’s authority, the plan itself emerged from a series of political promises made first by Candidate Biden, and later by President Biden to forgive student debt. With congressional opposition to a legislative approach clear, the Administration decided to work through the Department of Education to use the HEROES Act to accomplish administratively what they had been unable to do legislatively. 

The plan, as laid out by the Department of Education and endorsed by President Biden, would have given up to $20,000 in debt forgiveness to students. Most borrowers would qualify for $10,000 in forgiveness as long as they were making less than $125k a year, or less than $250k in annual household income in 2020 or 2021. Those who received Pell Grants could qualify for another $10,000 of forgiveness. This plan would have completely eliminated the debts of 20 million borrowers and lowered the median amount owed by another 23 million from $29,400 to $13,600.

In response to this administrative action, six states (Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and South Carolina) challenged the plan, claiming the Secretary was exceeding his statutory authority. Last week’s decision held that “…the HEROES Act provides no authorization for the Secretary’s plan when examined using the ordinary tools of statutory interpretation–let alone ‘clear congressional authorization’ for such a program.”

The Secretary argued that by using the HEROES Act and Title IV of the Education Act, the Department of Education could cancel student debt in order to assure that its recipients are not placed “in a worse position financially because of the national emergency.” The emergency they reference is the COVID-19 pandemic. To bolster this argument, the Secretary claimed that because the Act allows him to “waive or modify” regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs, those abilities could be extended to fully cancel student loan debt. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, dismissed this notion observing “The Secretary’s plan has “modified” the cited provisions only in the same sense that “the French Revolution ‘modified’ the status of the French nobility”—it has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely. “With a less rhetorical flourish, the majority plainly states “It does not allow him to rewrite the statute completely”

The decision and the argument surrounding it have been derided by those who support action on student loan forgiveness as political activism. In one sense they are right. The question emerged primarily from the political reality that meant loan forgiveness was legislatively impossible. The majority cites convincing precedent that requires Congress to enact major changes like those the Secretary unilaterally proposed. Instead, they push the responsibility back to the legislative branch to enact legislation that explicitly gives the department such power.  

The dissent adopts a wide reading of the authority granted by the HEROES Act. They, like the majority, rightly point to congressional action as the necessary source of the power in question, and regardless of the wisdom of the plan, Congress has given that power to the Secretary in order to alleviate the effects of a national emergency.

The Court is remarkably consistent in its view that at its core, congressional authorization is necessary, but diverges widely on the meaning of the statute, and how far undelineated grants of authority range. That the case is one with clear political undertones is clear, but those undertones were present from the day it became clear executive fiat would supplant legislative action, and not on the day the Court issued its ruling.

*****

This article was published by AIER, The American Institute for Economic Research, and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

As we move through 2023 and into the next election cycle, The Prickly Pear will resume Take Action recommendations and information.

MICHIGAN: A Muslim & Vice-Chair of the State’s GOP Board Rola Makki speaks out against ‘inappropriate books’ thumbnail

MICHIGAN: A Muslim & Vice-Chair of the State’s GOP Board Rola Makki speaks out against ‘inappropriate books’

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By Dr. Rich Swier

A reader sent us the following comments and the below video. Rola Makki, who is featured in the video, is a resident of Dearborn, Michigan. H/T JW.

This brief video of Rola Makki the Michigan GOP (MIGOP) outreach vice-chair is a Muslim acclaimed to be a wonderful speaker and a gift to the state party to fire up the Muslim vote.

Sodomy/homosexuality is antithetical to Sharia (Islamic law) and must be killed.

She is one of three Muslims on the MIGOP committee.

Islam dictates Muslims cannot follow man’s law i.e. the U.S. constitution, only sharia. When questioned she did not have an answer.

She also was unable to answer the constitutional question and will defer to an Imam.

Take a look.

WATCH: Public Comment Against Inappropriate Books – Rola Makki – Dearborn School Board (10-13-2022)

We have reported on Muslim outrage against teaching children about sodomy and having pornographic books in public school libraries and media centers.

Tom Perkins from The Guardian on June 17, 2023 reported:

In 2015, many liberal residents in Hamtramck, Michigan, celebrated as their city attracted international attention for becoming the first in the United States to elect a Muslim-majority city council.

They viewed the power shift and diversity as a symbolic but meaningful rebuke of the Islamophobic rhetoric that was a central theme of then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.

This week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had – like many others being flown around the country – been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.

Muslim residents packing city hall erupted in cheers after the council’s unanimous vote, and on Hamtramck’s social media pages, the taunting has been relentless: “Fagless City”, read one post, emphasized with emojis of a bicep flexing.

In a tense monologue before the vote, Councilmember Mohammed Hassan shouted his justification at LGBTQ+ supporters: “I’m working for the people, what the majority of the people like.”

While Hamtramck is still viewed as a bastion of multiculturalism, the difficulties of local governance and living among neighbors with different cultural values quickly set in following the 2015 election. Some leaders and residents are now bitter political enemies engaged in a series of often vicious battles over the city’s direction, and the Pride flag controversy represents a crescendo in tension.

“There’s a sense of betrayal,” said the former Hamtramck mayor Karen Majewski, who is Polish American. “We supported you when you were threatened, and now our rights are threatened, and you’re the one doing the threatening.”…

The resolution, which also prohibits the display of flags with ethnic, racist and political views, comes at a time when LGBTQ+ rights are under assault worldwide, and other US cities have passed similar bans, with the vast majority driven by often white politically conservative Americans. [Emphasis added]

©2023. Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

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Education Game-Changer

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By John Droz, Jr.

Last week, for the first time, a major state formally rebuked one of the core elements of the Left’s scheme to undermine our education (see below). If other states are paying attention, this could be the beginning of an extraordinarily significant awakening and rejection of the stranglehold that the Left now has on our K-12 education system…

It’s no secret that the Left’s plan is to take down America. Their number one strategy to bring this about, is to corrupt the education system. Their objective is to produce uneducated and unthinking K-12 graduates, who (in short order) become voting citizens. As explained before, their focus has been on K-12 Science Education.

They have been successfully undermining two pillars of K-12 Science Education: the Scientific Method and Critical Thinking. Their primary tool is the progressive NGSS, which was purposefully designed to kill both of those. Unwittingly, over the last ten years, 45+ states have bought into all or most of the NGSS, and its anti-American agenda! What happened in NC is a MAJOR rejection of that insidious effort.

It’s essential to understand some bureaucratic background to appreciate the profound significance of what happened in North Carolina, on July 6th, 2023: please read this.

2023 was apparently the first time that NC K-12 Science Standards were formally reviewed since 2009: way too long. I initially became aware of what was being proposed when the 2nd Draft was published on the NC Dept of Public Instruction (DPI) website. As a professional scientist, I read these carefully, and had two major concerns.

The first was that nowhere in any of the NC 15 Science Standards was the Scientific Method even mentioned! When asked about this omission, the DPI answers were:

a) It wasn’t their doing, as the Scientific Method was dropped from the North Carolina K-12 Science Standards over ten years ago.

b) The Scientific Method is undesirable as it promotes “linear thinking.”

c) They had replaced the Scientific Method with an “improved” version — the progressive Science and Engineering Practices.

d) Even though the Scientific Method had been deleted from NC Science Standards, that did not prevent any local NC teacher from teaching it.

e) No one had formally complained about the Scientific Method removal in these last ten years, so what’s the big deal? (By “no one” they meant that no teachers, parents, citizens, scientists, conservative organizations, legislators, media, etc. had formally objected to NC scrapping the Scientific Method.)

My response to each of these was:

a) No one that I’m aware of said that it was the current DPI who removed the Scientific Method from the state’s Science Standards. This year we are formally reviewing the current NC Science Standards to see what can be improved on — and adding back the Scientific Method is one major recommendation.

b) The linear thinking claim is malarky for multiple reasons: i) it is just parroted from the progressive Framework,  ii) linear thinking is not a bad thing,  iii) the Scientific Method is not linear thinking anyway, etc.  For more details read this.

c) The progressive Science and Engineering Practices is not an “improvement” of the Scientific Method!  See Appendix I of my Education Report for details.

d) Yes, even though the Scientific Method had been deleted from NC Science Standards, that does not prevent any NC teacher from teaching it. However, this deletion is reflected in state-approved textbooks and statewide tests — so it is not likely that many teachers will take a path that deviates from the state’s.

e) Yes, it is concerning that there have not been complaints by parents, citizens, and legislators — but the most probable answer is that they were unaware that the Scientific Method was no longer being taught in NC. Also, teachers are not likely to complain as they don’t want to buck the system. Conservative organizations have chosen to focus on other education problems (e.g., school choice). Etc.

What happened this year regarding the 2023 NC DPI proposed Science Standards:

1) In the first draft of the updates, there was no mention of the Scientific Method.

2) In the second draft of the updates, there was no mention of the Scientific Method. It was at this point that I formally filed a written objection about this to DPI. They subsequently said that they receive some 14,000 inputs on the Science Standards, and apparently I was the only one bringing up this issue (!).

3) In the third draft of the updates, there was no mention of the Scientific Method. Having been alerted to this matter, two SBE members (out of eighteen) queried DPI about this omission, and (per above) pushed back against the DPI answers.

4) In the final version of the updates, there were significant changes regarding the Scientific Method. This version was approved by the SBE on July 6th, 2023!

The new NC words regarding the Scientific Method are excellent. The addition of these words is to the credit of NC DPI and NC SBE, so kudos to them. This new emphasis on the Scientific Method will be beneficial to all NC K-12 students.

As stated above, dumping the Scientific Method has been a planned progressive strategy, which started back in 2012 with the Framework for K-12 Science Education, which morphed into Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The NGSS has been fully or mostly adopted by some 45 states. Hopefully, some of those states will follow the good NC example, and reinstate the Scientific Method in their K-12 Science Standards.

I’m optimistic that NC DPI and SBE will soon address my second major concern here: the Science Standards need more specificity regarding Critical Thinking. Currently, Critical Thinking does not appear in these Standards!

With a little thought, it should be clear that there is an intimate connection between a Critical Thinking analysis (comprehensive and objective), and the Scientific Method (a universal problem-solving procedure).

Further, NC’s Portrait of a Graduate, proudly proclaims that Critical Thinking is a key characteristic that DPI is promising legislators, parents, and citizens, that NC students will be proficient in doing — yet nothing about it appears in the Science Standards, the most appropriate place for Critical Thinking to be taught…

Using the same cooperative spirit (plus public support). we can fix the Critical Thinking deficiency in short order. That would be in the best interest of ALL NC K-12 students — and likely a fatal blow to the Left’s plan for education indoctrination.

Their worst fear is to have informed, critical thinking citizens.

©2023. John Droz, Jr. All rights reserved.

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The Chinese Military Is Training Kindergarteners For War In Bootcamps Across The Country

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By The Daily Caller

The Chinese military is training kindergarteners to handle firearms and fight like soldiers in boot camps across China this summer, according to dozens of school social media accounts reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The boot camps feature combat training for boys and girls with a wide variety of toy weapons including knives, grenades, rifles and shoulder-fired missiles, and require the children to adopt military behavior, such as saluting, the schools’ social media posts show. The rise in the militarization of China’s youth appears to follow a 2019 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee push for increased “National Defense Education” and a related effort directing schools to hold National Defense Education activities in 2022, according to government documents.

“There’s sort of a ‘get ’em while they’re young’ mentality that has always been part of the communist ethos,” Brandon Weichert, a U.S. Air Force consultant, told the DCNF. “Xi Jinping is trying to inculcate not just a patriotic fervor among the next generation, but I think he’s trying to also create actual next soldiers for the inevitable campaigns that he plans on waging militarily.”

Uniformed People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers oversaw all of the kindergarten boot camps that the DCNF reviewed. The boot camps were located in major Chinese cities, such as Beijing, Nanjing and Shenzhen, and were also run in more than half a dozen provinces including Anhui, Fujian and Guangdong, according to the schools’ social media posts.

The programs featured roughly the same sequence of activities, according to a DCNF review of posts from the participating kindergartens.

The boot camps generally began with basic military etiquette and proceeded to teach various military skills ranging from combat to emergency medical training. Additionally, a number of these programs also taught the children about famous PLA heroes and martyrs, according to the schools’ accounts.

‘Swear To Love The Motherland’

In May 2023, faculty members and more than 80 children of the Xingtan Guanghui Kindergarten in Guangdong province assembled on the playground for the opening ceremony of their school’s week-long National Defense Education camp, all wearing matching camouflage fatigues, according to the school’s social media account.

“INHERIT THE RED GENE, CARRY FORWARD PATRIOTIC FEELINGS, LOVE CHINA, LITTLE SOLDIER,” declared a large PLA banner, which partially hid the kindergarten’s playset.

“Kindergarten momma encourages her children not to fear hardship, fatigue or strict training,” the school’s principal told the children during the opening ceremony, the school’s social media account reported. “Respect the instructors and obey all commands.”

Uniformed PLA soldiers then performed a flag-raising ceremony, with all attendants singing the Chinese national anthem, the social media post stated.

“We solemnly swear to love the motherland from now on, to dedicate our hearts to working together to build the dream of a powerful country,” the children then pledged, according to the social media post. “Even if I fall to the ground I will continue onward!”

PLA soldiers then taught the kindergarten recruits how to groom themselves and make their beds in accordance with military standards, before drilling them in how to stand at attention, stand at ease and salute, the school’s social media account shows.

Experts say recent efforts to militarize China’s youth are part of the CCP’s ideological goals.

“While these measures do appear intended to put the Chinese masses on a stronger military footing in the longer term, they are also directed at the CCP’s longstanding efforts to deeply embed itself in civil-military relations and as part of its broader push to shore up the CCP’s legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese masses through stoking nationalism,” Russell Hsiao, executive director of the Global Taiwan Institute, told the DCNF.

“The CCP has been hardening its ideological line over the past decade and these measures are indicative of this expanding ideological campaign undertaken by Xi Jinping,” Hsiao said. “Xi has long emphasized the importance of early political indoctrination of Chinese youths, so it is no surprise that the youths are also singled out as an important target of CCP’s National Defense Education program.”

‘If The Youth Are Strong, The Country Will Be Strong!’

After teaching the children how to follow orders and act as units, the various kindergarten bootcamps then typically graduated to weapons training, according to a DCNF review of the schools’ programs. A majority of the kindergarten boot camps provided a similar selection of toy weapons to the children.

The boot camps typically included some form of close combat training, and issued toy knives or toy batons and ballistic shields to the children. The various programs also usually taught the cadets “rifle tactics” with toy guns, according to the schools’ social media accounts.

Multiple programs used these toy guns for squad-based skirmish exercises, during which the children pretended to shoot each other, the posts show.

“If the youth are strong, the country will be strong!” children sang over footage of a skirmish exercise during the May 2023 Houjie Yazhi Kindergarten boot camp in Guangdong province, according to the school’s social media post.

WATCH:

The boot camps also frequently provided different types of toy high explosives to the “little soldiers,” the schools’ social media accounts show.

The programs variously featured toy “potato smasher” hand grenades, foam rocket launchers and mortars, according to the posts.

WATCH:

Some boot camps, such as the May 2023 Xingtan Guanghui Kindergarten program in Guangdong province, trained the children to use all three types of explosive weapons, the school’s social media account shows.

“They’re prepping for war, and now they’re getting their kids involved,” said Weichert, author of “Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life.”

“Their kids aren’t talking about boys becoming girls and vice versa. Their kids are talking about, ‘let’s go out with bayonets, play in the field and pretend like we’re killing Americans.’ That’s where this is headed,” Weichert said.

‘Little Heroes’

Several kindergarten boot camps reviewed by the DCNF taught children to emulate famous war heroes and PLA martyrs.

For example, a June 2023 National Defense Education event held by the No. 2 Experimental Kindergarten in Zhengzhou, Henan province, screened an episode of the computer-animated children’s series, “Long March Hero,” according to the school’s social media account.

Kung Fu Animation Studios and the Jiangxi provincial government co-created “Long March Hero,” which focuses on communist special forces prior to the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China, according to government records. Characters in “Long March Hero” frequently kill each other during battle sequences, according to a DCNF review of multiple episodes.

The Zhengzhou kindergarten’s social media account states that the children were allegedly riveted by the “Long March Hero” action scenes depicting the Red Army fighting Imperial Japanese forces.

Solomon Yue, co-founder of Republicans Overseas, an organization that advocates for Republicans living abroad, told the DCNF that while growing up in Shanghai during Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the PLA subjected his class to a type of National Defense Education training called the “Long March Exercise,” which simulated “a retreat under attack by America.”

“Kids were asked to march 20 miles a day with food and blankets on ones’ backs for a week,” Yue said.

The Chinese government is also teaching kindergarteners to admire PLA martyrs this summer, the DCNF found.

In one instance, the Qingyuan Experimental Kindergarten boot camp in Zhejiang province showed children an animated video about Huang Jiguang, a celebrated PLA martyr who sacrificed himself for his military company during the Korean War by sacrificing his body to cover the opening of an enemy machine gun nest in 1952.

Likewise, “little soldiers” at a kindergarten boot camp in Guangdong province’s Longmen county, learned about PLA martyrs like Dong Cunrui, who sacrificed his life to blow up a key bridge while fighting the Chinese Nationalist army in 1948.

WATCH:

Yue told the DCNF that the CCP taught his class to revere PLA martyrs when he was growing up in China.

“PLA soldiers visited my school to brainwash the kids often,” Yue said. “The CCP wanted Chinese youth to believe that being PLA martyrs was glorious. A suicide attack against one’s enemy is to honor the CCP.”

AUTHOR

PHILIP LENCZYCKI

Investigative reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: EXCLUSIVE: Chinese Intel Arm Quietly Operates ‘Service Centers’ In 7 US Cities

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.

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Nation’s Largest Teachers Union Votes To Officially Promote Child Sex Changes

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By Lyle J. Rapacki, Ph.D.

The push to influence children (5–12 years old) is intensifying and morphing into varied methods to achieve goals the WOKE and LBGQT servants want. Parents be damned! Morality and family unit integrity be damned! The educational setting is no longer concerned preparing students to become critical thinkers; to learn and appreciate the rich history of our exceptional nation, and to become responsible members of society. The educational setting has become a psychological and emotional mine field, dangerously traveled and fraught with immense pressure to adhere to the authoritarians running the system. Once again…parents be dammed. The educational system, teachers and school boards are dictating.

School Boards in each community were “hired” most likely through election by the citizens in the community. For school boards to intentionally and arrogantly ignore the very people who placed them in such positions of responsibility is atrocious, and then some! There are four branches of government in our Republic. Executive, Legislative, Judicial and WE THE PEOPLE. Yes…rarely taught anymore, but WE THE PEOPLE are a significant branch. Of course we elect representatives, but the very name shouts their role – to represent WE THE PEOPLE! It is a contract, and those of us who elected (hired) these representatives have every right to watch closely how they serve and represent us. This includes school boards.

We elected school board members to represent us, to watch over our children, to assume the fiduciary responsibility of providing the children a safe environment to learn, to challenge their minds appropriately with academics not political and psychological mind alterations. To do NO harm historically has been the given on campuses. To nefariously breach the innocence of a child under your care is abhorrent! Be gone school board members, each of you who knowingly has violated the trust placed on your shoulders. And to encourage the radical socialist teachers union to promote child sex change, amoral behaviors and beliefs, psychological concepts far above the ability of children to grasp, or need to, is all the more reason you need to be gone, and even criminally charged with child abuse – at least a civil action filed against you individually.

Moms…Dads…STAND UP! The emotional and psychological well-being of your child is being assaulted in very sophisticated ways and through multiple methods. STAND UP…run into this battle. Don’t worry about who will be running with you, begin yourself, now! Others will come along. Assertively go after teachers, administrators, school board members who intentionally are altering your child’s morals and mores and the integrity of the family unit.

Nation’s Largest Teachers Union Votes To Officially Promote Child Sex Changes

The nation’s largest teachers union approved a new measure this week that calls for the group and its members to promote sex-change procedures for LGBTQ youth, according to Education Week, a news organization that focuses predominantly on K-12 schools.

At their annual representative assembly meeting July 3-6, the National Education Association (NEA) passed a new business item that will spend $580,000 to address “the prevalence of discrimination and violence targeted” at LGBTQ students and educators, according to Education Week. The measure, which will be in place for one year, will update the NEA’s bargaining guidance around LGBTQ issues, such as access to sex-changing procedures for school employees.

“We know that in ‘24, the next presidential election, [the attacks on LGBTQ+ communities are] only going to get worse,” Scott Miller, head of the NEA’s LGBTQ Caucus, told the outlet. “This helps give NEA a roadmap on how we maneuver through those attacks and how we’re coordinated and making sure we’re one voice rather than fragmented or not on the same page.”

The new business item requires the union to promote and facilitate access to sex-changing procedures for LGBTQ youth and address homelessness among the community, Education Week reported. In accordance with the measure, the NEA will create grant opportunities for professional development courses regarding preferred pronouns, “LGBTQ-inclusive” policies and how to support gender-transitioning students.

Read more.

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

RELATED ARTICLE: Teachers Union Exec Defends Remote Schooling By Saying Learning Loss Made Everyone ‘Equal’

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Make Public Libraries Safe for our Kids Again

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By Church Militant

Library shelves are chock-full of LGBT propaganda.

Public libraries are no longer a place for kids or even adults, for that matter. They have become hubs of X-rated material designed to sexualize children and debase human sexuality to the lowest common denominator.

This past Sunday afternoon, a good friend, part of the Church Militant Resistance crew, stopped by my home. She was carrying a couple of heavy bins of library books. Both bins were chock-full of pro-LGBTQ+ books for kids. Some were rainbow-colored, some were comic books, some were paperbacks, and some were hardcovers, but all were designed to foist on kids the deviant gender agenda.

My friend explained her visit and the books: “I am entrusting these to your care for the next week or so. Please say some deliverance prayers over them, Father!”

As she unpacked the bins and placed the books across my sofa, she explained, “A group of us, all concerned parents, signed these out of our local public library yesterday so that they would not fall into the hands of our youth.”

As she shuffled the books around on the sofa. She concluded: “What we will do with these books after Pride Month is over, we have yet to figure out. But please hang on to this demonic filth for us for the time being.”
All of the books my Resistance friend removed from the shelves of the public library — in an effort mirroring that of other concerned U.S. parents — constitute propaganda by LGBTQ+ proponents aiming to groom and ruin children.

Her visit confirmed for me what self-proclaimed “library watchdog” and author Dan Kleinman told me about the importance of parents resisting the American Library Association’s push to fill libraries with pornographic materials targeting children.

“Please get involved and stay involved, no matter what names they call you,” the moderator of the SafeLibraries blog said.

He added:

Parents must take back control of libraries, and the best way is by getting on library boards and removing the influence of the American Library Association. If parents do nothing, ALA retains control, and it “reframes” adult material as diversity and inclusion, leaving children exposed to adult material. Do not be complacent. Now that parents are waking up to reality, ALA is ratcheting up its activities that harm children — even the White House has jumped on board with ALA ideology.

After my friend left, I perused the contents of the bins.

A Look at the Books

Children’s section at the public library

The total number of LGBTQ+ books checked out by the group of concerned parents is 34, representing a total of over 9,500 printed pages of propaganda.

Some of the titles of the books are

  • What’s the T? (pushing transgenderism)
  • The Pride Guide
  • Queer! The Ultimate Guide for Teens
  • The Book of Pride
  • The ABC’s of LGBTQ+ and
  • Gender Quest.

Common themes emerged in the 34 publications, including

  • Homosexuality and gay sex are all A-OK
  • There are no downsides to being gay
  • What feels good for you is right
  • What gender you are born with no longer matters; you can change, and
  • Don’t accept any pushback about being LGBTQ+ from anyone — not your parents, family or friends.

It was clear that the books have no intrinsic value, either from an educational or cultural standpoint. None are a work of Shakespeare in the rough. Most significantly, there is no spiritual dimension. God is not only dead in the books; He does not exist. Simply put, they are propaganda designed to indoctrinate youth into a queer lifestyle. If you doubt me, listen to the chants at the New York Pride Parade this weekend: “We’re queer. We’re here. We’re coming for your children.”

NYC Drag Marchers chant “we’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children” https://t.co/ucK1qM4fv5 pic.twitter.com/OhBguhWwZY

— Timcast News (@TimcastNews) June 24, 2023

Looking at two books more closely reveals the depth of the atheistic, depraved pro-LGBTQ+ doctrine they promote.

Sick ‘Sacrament’

The Pride Guide by Jo Langford, published in 2018, boasts of being the complete guide to sexual and social health for LGBTQ+ youth.

Nowhere in this book is there a mention of God or a higher power. In the short, two-page chapter called “The Religion Thing,” Langford concedes that “many queer people do find a way to mesh their beliefs and identity together.” But, the chapter is really just about bullying.

“Coming out,” on the other hand, holds great significance for Langford. If the author believed in the sacred, it would be tantamount to a sacred rite, akin to the sacrament of confirmation for Catholics. Langford dedicates a chapter to this so-called rite.

She describes it this way: “‘Coming out’ is the process of accepting and being open about one’s sexual orientation, particularly when one’s orientation is not straight. This is part of being healthy, being true to yourself, and being the most ‘you’ you can be.”

I suppose it’s vital that you do the ritual correctly so that you get all the graces from this black sacrament.

Throughout Langford’s book, she adheres to the belief that what feels good is right. Indeed, this is her main theme. It is also the anti-Christian occultist Aleister Crowley’s hedonistic commandment: “Do what thou wilt.” For Langford, as with Crowley,  the subjective feelings of a person are what make something good. Catholics, by contrast, understand something as good only in how it adheres to God’s natural law.

No Treatise on Transing

Ashley Mardell’s The ABC’S of LGBT+, published in 2016 and overpriced at $16.08 on Amazon, is advertised as a “powerful tool for those that might be questioning their own identity.” It reiterates for 189 pages that changing your identity and surgically removing parts of your body to suit the new transgender ideology is as easy as the ABCs.

Mardell justifies her theme, saying: “Learning about new identities broadens our understanding of humanity, heightens our empathy, and allows us different, valuable perspectives.”

There is no discussion of how the fraudulent trans ideology pervaded the medical profession, who is really pushing the agenda, how schools are involved and how it is being used to separate children from their families.

There is no input from doctors opposed to transgender ideology. There are no cautions about the dangers of trans surgeries. There’s nothing about the hundreds of thousands of dollars for the drugs and surgeries. There’s nothing about the lifelong struggle to maintain the changes or repair the damage wrought by the mutilation of healthy body parts. There’s nothing about the ethics of fast-tracking trans surgeries — including for people with autism.

There’s nothing about how transgender ideology denies basic truths about the human person.

This is not a guide in the true sense of the word. It is a work of fiction.

The author, currently going by the pseudonym Ash Hardell, recently underwent a radical mastectomy, having her perfectly healthy breasts removed because she fancies herself a man. Mardell — aka Hardell — posted a video of herself after surgery in which she dances shirtless in men’s underwear. The perversity of posting half-naked pictures of herself celebrating the surgical removal of her breasts matches the perverse advice in her book.

The reality is that most public libraries are not safe for kids. It is foolhardy for them to be left unattended in what was once a safe space. The only option for a parent is for parents and guardians to accompany their children to the library and be very careful of the materials they peruse.

Kleinman, the stalwart advocate for children and for making public libraries safe for kids again, urges parents to “get involved in your local library, and take it back from the leftist, godless commies.”

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

Go See ‘Sound of Freedom’ for the Truth on Millions of Trafficked Children thumbnail

Go See ‘Sound of Freedom’ for the Truth on Millions of Trafficked Children

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By Catherine Salgado

The movie Sound of Freedom will finally come to theaters the week of July 4, based on the stories of real-life heroes and their work to free children from the hellish and lucrative world of child trafficking.

Toward the end of the trailer above, actor Jim Caviezel (who played Jesus in the magnificent Passion of the Christ) says that “an estimated 2 million children are trafficked” every single year. These children are raped, abused, tortured (and many of them later killed by having their organs harvested). The fact that anyone could do such horrific things to any other human being is unimaginable, but to do it to innocent children is a truly Satanic level of evil.

As Caviezel said, the movie is “heartbreaking” but tremendously important, because these children’s stories need to be known as a first step toward justice and help for them. Caviezel said he hopes for 2 million attendees at the movie’s opening, one for every precious child trafficked annually. It has taken Caviezel and the others behind Sound of Freedom years to bring this movie to the public, because they’ve been canceled and delayed. The powers-that-be don’t want you to know about this trafficking, but you need to know.

Sound of Freedom will be in theaters for the week of July 4, Independence Day. In honor of our Founders who were willing to sacrifice everything to secure freedom to themselves and others, make the small sacrifice to go see Sound of Freedom and learn about the most innocent victims in need of liberty.

Search for locations and buy tickets HERE. You can also pay for someone else’s ticket as a donation to help spread the word and ensure as many people as possible attend. As Caviezel urged, let’s start a movement to ensure that “God’s children are no longer for sale.”

*****

This article was published by Pro Deo et Libertate and is reproduced with permission.

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