For the second time in less than a week, dozens of children in the Washington, D.C., area were given the wrong dose of the Pfizer vaccine.
According to WTOP-TV in Washington, almost 100 students at South Lake Elementary School in Montgomery Village, Maryland, received a diluted amount of the pediatric Pfizer vaccine during a clinic on Nov. 10.
Parents of 98 children were notified by phone of the mistake on Monday. To make up for the diluted amount, the kids who received the incorrect dosage will receive an additional shot this Wednesday. If the child can’t attend that, their parents will have to schedule a make-up dose appointment when they can.
Even though this is the second such child vaccination hiccup in the same area in a week, the story still hasn’t gotten much mention nationally — in part, no doubt, because it doesn’t fit the narrative for some outlets or because tech giants like Google are demonetizing publications that do run with this. (The Western Journal is dedicated to fighting this — and if you appreciate our coverage, please consider subscribing.)
“The Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services learned on Saturday that the affected children received an amount of Pfizer’s pediatric vaccine that was diluted more than recommended. The staff person realized their mistake and notified officials,” the department said in a news release Monday.
“Health officials consulted with the Maryland Department of Health and Pfizer, who recommended that the children receive an additional dose as soon as possible.”
“We apologize for the error, and we are offering another opportunity for the children to be revaccinated,” said Dr. James Bridgers, acting Montgomery County health officer, in the statement.
“We are confident that this is an isolated situation, and staff have already received additional training on reconstituting and administering pediatric doses,” he added.
“Staff will continue to receive weekly updates on clinical guidance for the administration of vaccine doses to this age group.”
Do you believe children should be given the vaccine?
However, the Montgomery County Council said they were “extremely concerned” about the kids being given the wrong vaccine.
“We shared our concerns directly with our Acting Health Officer Dr. James Bridgers, who has assured us that the department is conducting a top-to-bottom review of this issue and has identified human error as the cause of the diluted doses,” the council said in a statement, according to WTOP.
“We understand the anxiety and distress that this mistake has caused for the students who received these diluted doses and their family members, and we will continue working with our public health team to make it right. The Department of Health and Human Services is reaching out to the families impacted and has scheduled an additional vaccination clinic at the school on Nov. 17.”
The incident came just a week after another D.C.-area vaccination issue involving diluted Pfizer doses, this one in Loudoun County, Virginia — ground zero for bad news involving minors as of late, apparently.
Unlike the situation in Maryland, however, this was less of a mistake and didn’t involve public schools. According to Washington’s WRC-TV, Ted Pharmacy in Aldie, Virginia, was giving children between the ages of 5-11 a diluted dose of the vaccine used for kids aged 12-17 on Nov. 3 and 4.
Given that the dose for the older kids has a purple cap and the dose for the younger ones has an orange cap, the dilution seems to be of an intentional nature. This is especially true given that one mother, Dasha Hermosilla, said she asked the pharmacist if it was OK to give her 7 year old a shot out of a vial with the purple cap and they said yes. A quick internet search revealed this was incorrect.
“Nothing says that you can change a purple to an orange,” Hermosilla said. “I had this pit in my stomach that, like, what did they just do to my daughter?”
Officials later acknowledged that Ted Pharmacy had given the incorrect dosage to 112 children.
“The pharmacy who administered the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination to your child last week has been removed from both state and federal COVID-19 vaccination programs,” said Loudoun County Department of Health Director David Goodfriend in a letter.
In that case, officials said the diluted vaccine ended with kids getting a lower dose than they should have; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance said parents could either restart their child’s vaccine series in 21 days or go ahead with a second dose using the orange cap as scheduled.
These are two events in one metro area over the space of one week. It’s not even counting the children who’ve been given adult doses of the vaccine in Garland, Texas, or Miami-Dade County, Florida.
None of these instances have resulted in a serious reaction that we know of — yet. The problem is that if they keep happening, the likelihood something does occur increases significantly.
And the media wonders why some parents still have questions about vaccinating their children?
Scottsdale, Arizona’s governing school board has voted to replace Jann-Michael Greenburg as president over an online “dossier” that he and his father allegedly had kept on parents critical of school board policies.
During a Nov. 15 emergency session, the Scottsdale Unified District No. 48 Governing Board voted 4–1 to appoint Patty Beckman to serve as president for the remainder of 2021.
Greenburg cast the dissenting vote.
It’s been an “incredibly difficult week,” said board member Zack Lindsay after the vote. “I find some of the allegations [against the Greenburgs] very troubling.”
The so-called Greenburg dossier was allegedly kept by Mark Greenburg and later shared by Jann-Michael, reportedly by accident.
The dossier now is the focus of an investigation by the Scottsdale Police Department.
Jann-Michael Greenburg, former president of the Scottsdale, Arizona, School District Governing Board, goes through papers at an emergency meeting on Nov. 15, 2021. The board voted to replace Greenburg as president amid allegations that he and his father kept an online dossier of outspoken parents against critical race theory and mask mandates. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
Jann-Michael Greenburg said he will remain on the board until “we have all the facts” at the conclusion of the investigation.
He opened the Nov. 15 emergency meeting by saying: “I am reassured the Scottsdale Police Department is investigating this matter. There appears to be bad actors involved and I am confident our law enforcement will quickly resolve these issues.”
More than 100 concerned parents gathered outside of school district offices on Nov. 15 and demanded Greenburg’s resignation.
“Resign, Resign, Resign,” one parent’s sign read.
Arizona state Rep. Joseph Chaplik held a press conference before the meeting. He called for an independent investigation of anyone involved in the alleged dossier, which targeted parents “simply for opposing critical race theory and mask mandates.”
“I’ve seen the Greenburg file and it doesn’t look good for Mr. Greenburg,” Chaplik said.
The dossier allegedly contained parents’ identifying information, including Social Security numbers, mortgage documents, divorce papers, personal background checks, family contact information, as well as photographs of their children.
Scottsdale parent Amanda Wray said she came forward after the dossier with her family’s private information went public. Like many other parents at the Nov. 15 gathering, Wray said she didn’t expect Greenburg, a Scottsdale attorney, to resign willingly.
Amanda and Daniel Wray of Scottsdale, Arizona, say their private identifying information was included in an online dossier that Jann-Michael Greenburg, former president of the Scottsdale Unified School District Governing Board, and his father allegedly kept on parents who opposed certain board policies. The Wrays, and more than 100 other concerned parents, attended an emergency meeting of the board on Nov. 15, 2021, to replace Greenburg as president. (Allan Stein/The Epoch Times)
“He’s a career politician. He was not here for children. This was a stepping stone,” Wray said. “I think he’s going to dig his heels in tonight.”
Her husband, Daniel Wray, said he found the contents of the alleged dossier “disturbing.”
“I know there’s an investigation. It feels criminal, but I’m not the one to say,” Wray said.
In a Nov. 15 open letter, SUSD Superintendent Scott Menzel said the board “acted in light of the information recently revealed that a dossier containing sensitive information on SUSD parents was allegedly created and maintained in publicly accessible Google drive folders by Mark Greenburg, the father of Jann-Michael Greenburg, and shared by the latter.
“The focus of the Governing Board should remain solely on improving educational opportunities for each and every one of our District’s 22,000 students. The decision this evening ensures that with new leadership this will be the top priority,” Menzel wrote.
Menzel said the district has launched an independent forensic investigation into whether any district resources were used to “create, maintain or modify the dossier.”
He said the district is fully cooperating with the police investigation.
“The existence of these files is disturbing and unacceptable. The Board, in fulfilling its duty, has the obligation to be honest, fair, caring, and respectful. Further, it must avoid conduct that creates the appearance of impropriety or conduct unbefitting a public official,” Menzel said.
Menzel said the dossier’s contents, including “disparaging descriptions” of parents who share differences of opinion on board policies, is inconsistent with district core values of inviting “civil discourse regarding educational matters.” He stressed that board members don’t have unrestricted access to student information protected by federal law.
In a Nov. 12 letter to Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, state Rep. Shawnna Bolick requested an immediate investigation into the alleged Greenburg dossier.
Bolick, in the letter, said Mark Greenburg is the “owner” of the online dossier with personal information on 47 people, including videos posted of him on Google Drive allegedly stalking parents at a school board meeting on Aug. 24.
“In the same video, Mark Greenburg acknowledges ‘they’ hired a private investigator ‘who’s writing down all of their [license] plates,’” referring to parents attending the meeting.
“A reasonable question to ask Mr. Greenburg is who is ‘they?’” Bolick wrote.
“I cannot imagine any legitimate action that would justify collecting and sharing personal identifying information as purported to have happened.”
In a related Nov. 12 letter sent to Menzel and the five SUSD School Board members, Bolick asked for their full cooperation in the police investigation.
“If any of you were part of this cyberstalking/doxing escapade allegedly undertaken by the Greenburg household, I would advise you to cooperate with law enforcement and resign immediately to allow a truly dedicated Scottsdale taxpayer to serve honorably in your school district,” Bolick wrote.
As the investigation gets underway, a community letter requesting Jann-Michael’s resignation has garnered more than 1,500 signatures.
If Jann-Michael refuses to resign, “we may have to go in front of (the Greenburg’s) house and show them how we really feel. We’re kind of mad,” said Miki Klann, who asked parents to sign the petition at the Nov. 15 meeting. The petition requires 21,000 signatures, she said.
The backlash against Jann-Michael is part of a national trend of parents becoming increasingly involved in school boards, largely in response to the infusion of the quasi-Marxist critical race and gender theories into class curricula.
The heated debates prompted the National School Board Association to pen a letter to President Joe Biden requesting that the Justice Department investigate parents who allegedly make threats against school board members and staff. The letter compared parents who opposed critical race theory to domestic terrorists.
Shortly after the receipt of the letter, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a national effort targeting parents over the alleged threats. Garland’s announcement led to outrage among parents and Republicans. School board associations in several states quit the national board in response.
Sens. Michael Testa and Joe Pennacchio introduced a bill that would prevent critical race theory (CRT) from being taught in New Jersey public schools, according to a statement. The bill would also prohibit public school teachers from engaging in political, ideological, or religious advocacy in their classrooms.
The bill specifies that critical race theory cannot be taught in schools “as part of a curriculum, course of instruction, or through supplemental instructional materials that promote concepts related to CRT,” the statement said.
The bill (pdf) specifically lists a number of concepts related to critical race theory that are prohibited from being taught in New Jersey public schools. For example, it bans teaching that one race or sex is inherently superior to another one; a person of a certain race or sex is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive; or a person should be discriminated against based on their race or sex.
Schools are also forbidden from teaching that a person’s moral character, values, or beliefs are determined by race or sex, the bill said.
The measure also singles out as prohibited teaching the concept that “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of their race or sex.”
Taxpayer money should be spent on teaching students basic concepts such as “mathematics, science, English, history, and civics and not on political or ideological indoctrination,” the bill stipulates.
“Providing an education in a democracy is best done by teaching students how to think, rather than telling them what they should think,” the bill said.
The measure encourages schools to present diverse views on controversial issues in the classroom and to foster open discussion.
According to the bill’s provisions, schools would have the right to teach the history of an ethnic group, provide “the impartial instruction on the historical oppression of a particular group of people based on race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion, or geographic region, or historical documents,” as well as engage students in “the impartial discussion of controversial aspects of history.”
Teachers would be required by the bill to “provide students with materials supporting both sides of a controversial issue being addressed and to present both sides in a fair-minded and nonpartisan manner,” the bill said.
The measure gives the state government the authority to withhold state funding from a school district that knowingly violates the rules specified in the bill.
“Critical race theory is a thinly-veiled effort to legitimize discrimination under the guise of an intellectual social theory,” Testa said in the statement.
“Every student should be empowered through lessons emphasizing the opportunity they have to succeed through their own hard work, individual merit, and the personal character they demonstrate to others,” Pennacchio said in the statement.
“In many classrooms, however, we’ve heard of teachers engaging in political advocacy and pushing partisan ideologies when they should have been teaching math, science, history, and literacy, “Pennacchio noted.
How CRT Is Being Taught
Some states passed laws banning critical race theory from being taught in their schools, but there are educators who teach other educators how to “back-door it” into the classrooms.
The Zinn Education Project has collected the names of nearly 7,500 educators who vow to keep pushing CRT into classrooms despite the passage of laws banning CRT in a growing number of states.
Screenshot from a webinar where Dr. Gholnecsar (Gholdy) Muhammad (top L) taught Florida educators how to slip CRT into classrooms, regardless of subject matter during a webinar sponsored by Florida Atlantic University on Sept. 20, 2021. (Patricia Tolson/The Epoch Times)
In September, Florida Atlantic University sponsored a webinar where Dr. Gholnecsar (Gholdy) Muhammad—an associate professor of language and literacy at Georgia State University—taught educators in Miami Dade, Broward, Martin, and Palm Beach counties how to creatively slip critical race theory through the back door of any classroom, regardless of subject matter.
Earlier this year, a parent from Chatam, New Jersey, who discovered that her children were being taught critical race theory in disguise in a number of classes, requested that the board of education set up an open discussion on this topic, according to “Tap Into.”
What teaching critical race theory “is calling for is ostensibly using racism to fight racism and that makes no sense in no world,” the parent said at the board of education meeting in a video posted by Tap Into.
Critical race theory is an offshoot of a Marxist branch of thought known as critical theory developed in the 1930s by a group of Marxist scholars first associated with the University of Frankfurt in Germany and later with Columbia University in New York.
Originally, Marxism divided people into two opposing classes: the bourgeoisie with capital and the proletariat, with a goal of instigating struggle between them. However, with industrialization, class mobility increased and that process started as early as the mid-19th century. For example, a supposed member of the proletariat is no longer among the proletariat if the person buys public equity in a company or starts their own business.
A mandatory ninth-grade ethnic studies curriculum at a school district in California’s Monterey County pushes dark and controversial political themes and imagery, says a critic of the program.
Kelly Schenkoske, a parent of homeschooled children and an opponent of ethnic studies and critical race theory (CRT), told The Epoch Times the ethnic studies curriculum being taught at schools in Salinas Union High School District (SUHSD) promotes anti-American, anti-Christian, and Marxist ideas.
The Epoch Times obtained a copy of the curriculum from Schenkoske who filed a California Public Records Act request through her attorney Craig Alexander. It was verified as legitimate by Kali Fontanilla, a former SUHSD teacher.
“So many parents don’t know what’s happening,” Schenkoske said.
Schenkoske claims the teaching materials contain anti-Christianity ideology while promoting other spiritual traditions. She said the curriculum also focuses on “counter-hegemony,” a concept developed by Marxist philosophers to target dominant social structures, such as capitalism.
CRT concepts are also clearly included on page 92 through 96 of the curriculum in excerpts from the article “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth” and page 97, featuring a diagram from “Examining Transformational Resistance Through a Critical Race and LatCrit Theory Framework: Chicana and Chicano Students in an Urban Context.”
“It’s absurd. This is propaganda schooling in every way, shape and form,” Schenkoske said.
SUHSD President Phillip Tabera and district superintendent Dan Burns did not respond to Epoch Times inquiries.
Schenkoske pointed out several examples of this dark imagery, including the work of Ernesto Yerena Montejano and Frank Shepard Fairey a contemporary street artist, illustrator, activist, and founder of OBEY. Fairey is also known for creating the famous Barack Obama “HOPE” poster.
The first page “Unit 2 Readings” on “Colonization and Dehumanization” in the SUHSD Ethnic Studies curriculum contains an illustration of a communist raised fist, the socialist rose and an OBEY symbol.
An illustration of a skull with American flags for eyes on Page 136 depicts the crucifixion of Jesus with pistols near both hands of the Christ figure nailed to a cross and hovering above a bottle with a skull-and-crossbones. Under Christ’s arms, dollar-signs and roots drape down near his sides.
“This particular drawing is offensive because it shows the crucifixion of Christ, with guns on either sides of his hands pointed outward, as if Christ Himself were holding and aiming them,” Schenkoske said.
The imagery, she said, is “biased propaganda” that some children in the district are currently being forced to learn.
“It’s offensive to Christians. It’s ridiculous,” she said.
The drawing also shows horses holding Britain’s Union Jack flag, a Spanish ship, sets of shackles surrounding Africa, vultures clasping hearts in their talons, and pigs.
“This is like looking at a representation of a nation that they believe should be dead,” Schenkoske said.
On the next page, a similar skull has “$” signs in its eye cavities. It shows military drones by the Liberty Bell, surveillance cameras, bulls, spilled oil barrels and burning oil wells with the heading “Colonization and Dehumanization.”
The image paints America and its flag in a negative light, Schenkoske said.
“This curriculum, and this image specifically, attacks capitalism,” she said.
On Page 46, the curriculum contains a chart from “Rethinking Ethnic Studies” that under “Religion” lists Christians as the “privileged/hegemonic” group responsible for “creedism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism” forms of discrimination.
The chart lists “Muslims, Jews, non-major world religions, atheists and indigenous spiritual traditions” as “oppressed/marginalized” groups. The chart lists “religious freedom/regenerating indigenous spiritual traditions” as a form of resistance to this “oppression.”
Under “Class” the chart calls for the “redistribution of wealth,” and a “shift in economic thinking.”
Parents Sue the State
Meanwhile the Californians For Equal Rights and three San Diego parents recently joined the Californians For Equal Rights Foundation (CFER) to sue the State of California over its statewide ethnic studies program for allegedly violating their constitutional right to freedom of religion.
CFER and parents Eric Gonzales, Steve Houbeck, and Jose Velazquez filed a lawsuit on Sept. 3 against the state government and its agencies, including the State Board of Education and the State Department of Education. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond was also named in the suit.
The co-plaintiffs allege that prayers to Aztec and Ashe gods in the state-approved Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) violate the California Constitution’s free exercise of religion and no government aid clauses.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation (Assembly Bill 101) on Oct. 8 making ethnic studies a statewide requirement for high school graduation starting in the 2029–30 school year. The new law also requires junior high schools to offer at least a one-semester course in ethnic studies, commencing with the 2025–26 school year.
The previous day, San Diego Superior Court Judge Eddie Sturgeon denied CFER’s petition for a Temporary Restraining Order “partially because AB 101 had not been signed into law at that time,” Wenyuan Wu, CFER’S executive director, told the Epoch Times in an email on Nov. 10.
“Our lawyers sent the court and defendants additional documents proving our case. The State of California emailed them asking to be dropped from the case, because the State doesn’t think it has legal standing in the case.
“But we don’t plan to drop the State of California from the list of defendants,” Wu said in the email.
Schenkoske declared in writing to the court that she would testify as a witness about the content in SUHSD ethnic studies program which documents the Aztec prayers.
Schenkoske states in the declaration that she learned through a public records act request SUHSD’s ethnic studies curriculum, has already incorporated the “In Lak Ech affirmation,” also known as the “Aztec prayers” that are being challenged in the lawsuit.
The California State Board of Education (SBE) met Nov. 3 and 4. The lawsuit was the first item on the agenda but discussion on the issue was held in closed session.
Aztec Chants Versus Christian Prayers
At a recent SUSHD board meeting, Schenkoske criticized the district allowing activism to seep into the classroom.
“Since when did public education become a political activist organization?” she asked. “Our government should be neutral. Our political ideologies should be left out of the classroom. It is time we all start questioning what every news media source says. It is time we start questioning what our teachers are doing in the classroom.”
She told the board the ethnic studies program teaches students about the Aztec god of human sacrifice. She later told The Epoch Times the lesson is on page 12 of local lesson plans and is included in the state curriculum.
The Aztecs believed Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of the sun, war “fed on human blood and hearts,” so they held human sacrifice ceremonies at which they cut open the bodies of prisoners or slaves and offered the victims’ hearts and blood to Huitzilopochtli, according to Brittanica.
“And this a god you want to pray to? “I mean, really?” asked Fred McCuistion, another parent at the same meeting.
If someone were to suggest reciting the Lord’s Prayer after the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning, “people would be having a cow,” McCuistion said.
Schenkoske pointed out that amid the ongoing CRT debate, Aztec dancers showed up in the parking lot before one school board meeting and often perform dances at school events in the district.
(Courtesy Kelly Schenkoske)
Critical Race Theory
Critics of the ethnic studies program claim it is based on CRT and pushes neo-Marxist ideology.
CRT has gained traction among left-wing activists and academia, but opposition from conservatives, Christians, parents and intellectuals reached a fever pitch over the summer and early fall. Opponents argue that teaching CRT in schools will further divide American communities along racial and political lines.
According to the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, CRT originally developed from critical legal studies, which formed in the 1970s. As described in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, critical theories are largely rooted in ideas inspired by Marxism, with stated objectives such as explaining “what is wrong with current social reality” and providing “achievable practical goals for social transformation.”
While Karl Marx focused on class struggles between the “bourgeois” and the “proletariat,” CRT focuses on the struggle between white “oppressors” and “oppressed” other races. It uses “privilege,” “intersectionality” and other terminology to describe these concepts.
Thursday press conference set to expose top Chuck Schumer staffer, White House doctor and others caught, plus display more than 50 lbs. of pedophilic paraphernalia seized in the sting.
WHAT: Predator DC Season 2 Press Conference Announcing Dozens More Busts
WHEN: Thursday November 18, 2021, High Noon
WHERE: Predator DC HQ, 1599 N Colonial Ter Arlington, VA 22209
PREMIERING SOON: Following on the first Season of Predator DC, which exposed 18 DC-area sexual predators, Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman have carried out another sting operation catching dozens more pedophiles attempting to sexually abuse children. In this case, Predator DC made use of both a male and female decoy posing as underaged teens online.
Busted In Sting: Scott Mexic (Far Left), Andrew Koneschusky (Top Middle), Cid Praderas (Bottom Middle), Mark Hotz (Top Right), Mark Milford (Bottom Right)
For Season 2, Predator DC cooperated with local law enforcement to ensure the criminal prosecution of the predators caught in their sting. “We can’t thank the brave men and women of the Glenarden Police Department enough” Jack Burkman said. “In particular, we owe a great deal of gratitude of Sgt. Shelby and Cpl. Covington” added Jacob Wohl.
Throughout the sting operation, sex predators brought a bevy of paraphernalia which they planned to use in the course of their molestation of decoys who they believed to be underaged teens. This included high heels, lingerie, condoms, sex toys of all kinds, booze and narcotics. Predator DC seized more than 50 pounds of the paraphernalia in cooperation with law enforcement, to prevent it from being used by the predators on other children.
Andrew Koneschusky, age 40, served as the national press secretary for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Prior to that, he served as the national press secretary for disgraced Former Congressman Anthony Weiner. Currently, as a Partner at CLS Strategies, he lobbies for Qatari state-owned media company Al Jazeera and drone manufacturer DJI. Koneschusky came to Predator DC’s sting house, rigged with hidden cameras, to have sex with a decoy posing as an underaged teen boy.
Predator DC’s hidden cameras rolled as Koneschusky (age 40) poured alcohol and clanked glasses for Predator DC’s decoy posing as an underage teen boy.Hidden cameras captured the moment that Koneschusky began stripping naked while demanding that the decoy show him his genitals.
Koneschusky’s arrival at the sting house in a suburb outside Washington DC came after he exchanged a series of very sexually explicit messages with the decoy who he believed to be an underage teen boy.
Andrew Koneschusky was confronted by Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl as he stood half naked, demanding to see the decoy’s private parts.
Koneschusky also brought narcotics known as ‘poppers’ to use on the boy he believed to be underaged. The FDA says they are tracking ‘increases in deaths and hospitalizations’ related to poppers.
Just before his arrival at the sting house, Koneschusky sent the decoy this photo, showing the poppers he planned to use on the boy he believed to be underaged.
The operation nabbed dozens of DC-area sexual predators who happen to be in positions of power, public trust and great influence. This included many people who possess top-secret security clearance.
Predator DC Producer and co-Host Jacob Wohl peers out a top story window with binoculars to get a closer look as a sex predator arrives at the sting house.
Scott Mexic, age 64, had a long and storied career as an operations officer at the Central Intelligence Agency, spying oversees from Europe to Afghanistan. In recent years, he’s taken up a second career in investment banking, currently serving as a principal at CIH International and as a partner at Ingenris, LLC. At Ingenris, Mexic recently led the purchase of British Telecom’s Latin American assets. Mexic traveled across state lines to Predator DC’s sting house to have sex with a girl who he believed to be just 15 years old.
Scott Mexic (age 64) looks over as he’s interrogated by Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman after coming to meet a 15 year old girl.
Mexic, like many of the predators caught in the sting, came bearing neatly wrapped gifts for the decoy, who he believed to be a 15 year-old girl home alone while her father traveled out of town on business. Mexic lavished the decoy with food and bottles of wine. He also brought an aroma therapy device, balloons filled with disturbing written messages, an herbal aphrodisiac known as ‘Blue Lotus’, edible marijuana and a sex toy. He admitted during the interrogation that he planned on drugging and then molesting a 15 year old girl.
Jacob Wohl cuts open the packaging of the sex toy brought by Scott Mexic, as Mexic (off-screen to the left) watches.
Mexic stated that it was his “first time” coming to meet an underaged teen from the internet for sex. All but one of the other Predators said the same.
Mexic shed his sweater and watched as Jacob Wohl opened one of the many wrapped gifts brought for the decoy posing as a 15 year old girl.
The depraved nature of the predators caught in Season 2 was shocking to the show’s producers Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, as well as the show’s allies in law enforcement.
One predator, an official for the State of Maryland, stripped naked upon entering the home to meet an underaged teen girl. Jacob Wohl handed him a towel to cover up with, before interrogating him.
Cid Praderas, age 66, has worked as an engineer for NASA for the past two decades. After sending numerous pictures of his genitals to Predator DC’s decoy posing as an underaged teen, Praderas came to the sting house for sex.
Praderas (age 66) pretended to be confused about where he was when confronted by Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman for questioning.
After exiting the sting house, Prederas stuck around in the neighborhood attempting to warn other perverts as they converged on the sting house.
Praderas captured on camera as he roved through the neighborhood, flashing his lights and honking his horn to warn fellow pedophiles that a sting was underway.
Cid Praderas’ efforts to warn other perverts as they approached the sting house were short lived, as he was swiftly pulled over and apprehended by officers from the Glenarden Police Department.
In some cases, predators spent hundreds of dollars on inappropriate gifts for the decoy, who they believed to be an underaged teen.
Mark Milford brought a bag of gifts for the decoy posing as an underaged teen, but quickly left the sting house when confronted by Wohl and Burkman.
Milford (age 62) looks at chat logs showing images of his genitals that he sent the decoy who he believed to be an underaged teen girl.
Milford sent some of most explicit chats ever encountered by Predator DC.
Milford walks away from the sting house with his eyes cast down as he carries away his bag of gifts.
Mark Hotz, age 62, works as an official at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal agency which regulates banks. He came to the sting house to have sex with Predator DC’s decoy posing as an underaged boy.
Hotz (age 62) puts on his shoes as he’s interrogated by Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman.
Many more Predators were caught in Season 2 of Predator DC. Some of those not discussed in this press release include a White House Doctor and a DOJ official, among many others.
A sampling of more of the pedophiles caught red-handed and interrogated in Season 2 of Predator DC.
SEASON 1 FINALE: Predator DC’s Season 1 Finale airs this Wednesday at 9 PM EST on PredatorDC.com.
IMPORTANT: Thursday’s press conference will expose the perverts caught in Predator DC’s second season. Exclusive content from the filming of Season 2 will be unveiled for the first time. The Predator DC cast and crew will be available for questions from the media.
ALL SUBJECTS ARE PRESUMED INNOCENT UNLESS AND UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY IN A COURT OF LAW.
To report an incident or suspicious situation that may involve the sexual exploitation of children, file a report on the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC)’s website at www.cybertipline.com, or call 1-800-843-5678.
On Oct. 27, Attorney General Merrick Garland sat before Congress and claimed the FBI would not be flagging parents protesting at local school board meetings as potential domestic terrorists.
Whistleblower documents released on Tuesday, however, suggest this may have been an outright lie.
The documents, sent to House Republicans by an anonymous FBI staffer, show that the FBI’s counterterrorism and criminal investigative divisions were tracking threats against teachers by flagging certain instances with “threat tags.”
Questions over whether or not the FBI was improperly investigating parent protesters first arose after Garland sent an Oct. 4 memo to the FBI directing the agency to track “threats” against public school officials. This memo came shortly after the National School Boards Association penned a letter to President Joe Biden demanding he treat “the growing number of threats” against school board members as acts of domestic terrorism.
Garland claimed during his Oct. 27 testimony that his memorandum did not rely upon the NSBA’s letter. However, according to Fox News, recently released internal emails show that both the White House and the Department of Justice coordinated with the NSBA prior to the release of Garland’s memo.
Following its release, Republicans quickly became concerned over Garland’s order, given that the attorney general had no examples to point to as credible “threats” against school officials. This led many to believe the target of these orders was actually the growing number of parents protesting against critical race theory, masking policies and other left-wing policies spreading throughout the American school system.
Concerns that such “threats” were being overly exaggerated seemed to be confirmed by the NSBA itself on Oct. 22 when the group apologized for its letter, saying “there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”
Did Garland lie to Congress?
According to CNN, Garland dismissed accusations that his order would be used to target parents, claiming the directive he gave the FBI was merely meant to respond “to concerns about violence, threats of violence, other criminal conduct.”
Here is the clip of AG Merrick Garland telling Congress that he “could not imagine any circumstance” that parents complaining about their school boards would be “labeled as domestic terrorism.”
“That’s all it’s about, and all it asks, is for federal law enforcement to consult with, meet with local law enforcement to assess the circumstances, strategize about what may or may not be necessary to provide federal assistance, if it is necessary,” Garland told Congress.
Given the leaked documents, these claims appear to be outright false.
The documents show that the FBI set up an investigative process to track potential threats against school board members and teachers by assessing “threat tags.” Whether or not these “threat tags” are being or have been applied to protesting parents remains unclear.
According to one of the leaked documents, threat tags are to be used in all “investigations and assessments of threats specifically directed against school board administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”
In a statement provided to The Wall Street Journal, the FBI maintained it “has never been in the business of investigating parents who speak out or policing speech at school board meetings, and we are not going to start now.”
In a letter addressed to Garland, House Republicans are demanding the attorney general provide answers regarding the whistleblower documents and his Oct. 27 testimony.
🚨🚨🚨#BREAKING: Whistleblower Discloses Explosive Documents Showing FBI Using Counterterrorism Tools to Investigate Parents pic.twitter.com/HpbdtinJQo
“We are now in receipt of a protected disclosure from a Department whistleblower showing that the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division is compiling and categorizing threat assessments related to parents, including a document directing FBI personnel to use a specific ‘threat tag’ to track potential investigations,” House representatives said in the letter.
“This new information calls into question the accuracy and completeness of your sworn testimony.”
“This disclosure provides specific evidence that federal law enforcement operationalized counterterrorism tools at the behest of a left-wing special interest group against concerned parents.”
FBI spokesperson says bureau not ‘in the business of investigating parents who speak out’
An unnamed whistleblower disclosed documents suggesting that the FBI is using its counterterrorism resources to investigate parents or individuals who threaten school board members, teachers, or other staff, according to a letter sent by the House Judiciary GOP dated Tuesday.
The GOP letter included copies of the documents allegedly sourced from the FBI whistleblower that included an email sent by Carlton L. Peeples, who serves in the bureau’s Inspection Division, saying that the Counterterrorism and Criminal Division “created a threat tag, EDUOFFICIALS, to track instances of related threats.”
“We ask that your offices apply the threat tag to investigations and assessments of threats specifically directed against school board administrators, board members, teachers, and staff,” the email reads. The email was signed by Counterterrorism Division Assistant Director Timothy Langan and then-Criminal Division assistant director Calvin Shivers.
In their letter on Tuesday, the Judiciary Republicans said that Attorney General Merrick Garland testified in front of a House panel that the FBI and Department of Justice were not using counterterrorism resources to target threats against school board members. However, the newly unveiled document, they argued, disproves Garland’s comments.
An FBI spokesperson told The Epoch Times on Tuesday evening that the bureau “has never been in the business of investigating parents who speak out or policing speech at school board meetings, and we are not going to start now.”
“The FBI’s mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. These are dual and simultaneous and not one at the expense of the other,” the spokesperson said. “We are fully committed to preserving and protecting First Amendment rights, including freedom of speech. The FBI’s focus is on violence and threats of violence that potentially violate federal law.”
Before a counterterrorism investigation can be opened, there has to be information that indicates the possible use of violence or force, or a potential violation of federal law, the FBI spokesperson continued.
But according to House Judiciary Republicans, the whistleblower’s disclosure is evidence that federal law enforcement used counterterrorism resources at the behest of a “left-wing special interests group” to go after parents, referring to a letter that had been sent by the National School Boards Association several weeks ago linking parents who are concerned about school curriculum to domestic terrorists. It further said that the FBI and federal agencies should use the PATRIOT Act and other tools to go after parents.
After the initial letter was sent by the National School Boards Association, Garland issued a memorandum directing the FBI to address an alleged “spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” and create “dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting” on the matter. But on Oct. 23, the school boards group issued an apology to the White House over the language included in the letter.
Now, the whistleblower’s disclosure “calls into question the accuracy and completeness” of Garland’s testimony before the House Judiciary panel last month.
“If … you were aware of the FBI’s actions at the time of your testimony,” the Republicans wrote, the document “shows that you willfully misled the committee about the” Department of Justice’s use of counterterrorism tools to target parents.
During the House Judiciary Committee hearing, Garland denied allegations that his agency would label concerned parents as domestic terrorists.
“Justice Department supports and defends the First Amendment right of parents to complain as vociferously as they wish about the education of their children, about the curriculum taught in the schools,” he told lawmakers on Oct. 21.
Garland also suggested that Republicans were mischaracterizing his memorandum, saying it only pertains to threats of violence aimed at school employees and teachers.
“This is not about what happens inside school board meetings,” the attorney general remarked. “It’s only about threats of violence and violence aimed at school officials, school employees, and teachers.”
After the National School Boards Association issued its initial letter, dozens of school boards around the United States have cut ties with the group. On Monday, the Kentucky School Board Association said its members voted to withdraw their membership.
A New Hampshire student is suing his high school for violating his right to free speech and religious beliefs after being disciplined for stating there are only two genders.
The freshman and football player for the school, identified as “M.P.” in the lawsuit, received a one-game suspension for violating the school district’s transgender student policy.
The student made the comments on a school bus and then later in a text exchange with another student off school grounds.
The student’s attorney, Ian Huyett of the Manchester-based Cornerstone Policy Research, said his client is seeking permanent relief from the school policy under protections for free speech and religious belief in the state constitution.
Huyett said the student is a practicing Catholic and has the constitutional right to hold the belief that there are only two genders.
“As the United States Supreme Court has said, students do not check their First Amendment Rights at the schoolhouse gate,” said Huyett.
“In New Hampshire,” he added, “we have a strong tradition of our state supreme court holding that our state constitutional protections are more protective of individual liberties than the corresponding federal right.”
District Superintendent Dave Ryan released a statement on the matter noting that the district had only just learned of the lawsuit on Nov. 9 and is in the process of reviewing it with legal counsel.
“We will be able to share a statement once we have completed that review,” Ryan said.
Calls made by The Epoch Times to the Exeter Regional Cooperative School Board, which enacted the gender policy, were not returned.
According to the lawsuit, which was filed on Nov. 4, the matter originated from a conversation the teenager was having with another student on a school bus.
It was about a request a female classmate made during their Spanish class that they use only non-binary pronouns in Spanish to address her.
It was another female student, said Huyett, who took offense to comments she overheard his client make in a conversation he was having with another student on a school bus ride home. They included the Spanish language not having non-binary pronouns.
According to Huyett, that student obtained his client’s phone number and initiated a texting debate over the issue. That student took screenshots of the texts and gave them to the school.
The following morning Huyette said his client was pulled out of class and told he was being disciplined for violating the school’s gender policy.
In another pending lawsuit against a New Hampshire school’s gender identity policy, a parent of a Gilford School District student was angered to learn the district’s policy permits and encourages school officials to hide disclosures students make about their sexual orientation from their parents.
The parent’s attorney, Rick Lehmann of the Concord law firm Lehmann Major List, said his client is also challenging the district’s policy for officials to issue no-trespass letters to anyone who doesn’t use non-gender pronouns on school grounds.
Huyett says he expects there will be more lawsuits to come in New Hampshire on the issue because so many public schools have adopted policies similar to the one being challenged.
Huyett’s legal fees in the case are being fully funded by the Cornerstone Policy Research, a nonprofit organization founded by 2020, and now 2022, New Hampshire Republican gubernatorial candidate Karen Testerman.
Testerman said she founded Cornerstone because too many New Hampshire residents with Christian values were underrepresented in legal and political matters. She said what happened to Huyett’s client is a prime example.
“It’s disturbing to have schools trying to control people’s thoughts by instituting this propaganda through alphabet policies,” she said.
The New Hampshire cases are the latest in a steady stream of lawsuits around the U.S. on school policies on the use of preferred pronouns.
Earlier in March, Virginia gym teacher Tanner Cross was suspended after refusing to use preferred pronouns of students over pronouns consistent with their original biological gender.
A judge later lifted the suspension and the Virginia Supreme Court, in ruling on an appeal of the court decision, ruled that the suspension violated the teacher’s First Amendment rights.
Also in March, an appeals court in Ohio sided with a college professor who claimed his right to religious beliefs were violated when he was disciplined by the Shawnee State University where he taught for refusing to call a transgender student by her preferred pronouns.
In the recent U.S. landmark case The United States vs. Varner, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the courts have no authority to compel the use of preferred pronouns because no federal statute gives them that authority.
Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Virginia Foxx of North Carolina are seeking access to communications between the Department of Education and the National School Boards Association over a letter from the latter comparing protesting parents to domestic terrorists.
In a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona exclusively shared with the Washington Examiner, the representatives demanded the department turn over all communications with the NSBA, the Department of Justice, and the White House regarding the September letter asking President Joe Biden to investigate protesting parents as domestic terrorists.
Jordan told the Washington Examiner the push for accountability from the agency is important because “moms and dads should be the ones making decisions about their kids, not the government. This idea that somehow the government is smarter than parents is ridiculous.”
The NSBA has since apologized for the September letter, which infamously prompted Attorney General Merrick Garland to issue a memo forming an FBI-DOJ task force to investigate parents protesting at school board meetings. Emails later showed the White House had coordinated with the NSBA on the release of the letter.
Jordan and Foxx are the ranking members for the House Judiciary Committee and the Committee on Education and Labor, respectively.
The letter asks for communications between administration officials and the NSBA regarding the appointment of the association’s president, Viola Garcia, to the National Assessment Governing Board, which publishes the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the “nation’s report card.”
If you go to work at one New York City school, a teacher said, it’s OK to wear a Black Lives Matter t-shirt — but don’t you dare wear a shirt that says “Proud Zionist” with the flag of Israel on it.
According to a report in Sunday’s New York Post, Jeffrey Levy — a teacher at MS 51 in the extremely woke neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn — says he was told by the school’s principal not to wear the shirt in school, even though Black Lives Matter and women’s rights shirts have been donned by other staff members.
In a discrimination complaint Levy filed, he said principal Neal Singh told him that students and staff at the school complained about the “Proud Zionist” shirt and a previous “Back the Blue” pro-police tee he wore.
“Singh told me that my t-shirt with an Israeli flag on it and the words ‘Proud Zionist’ were ‘politically explosive,’” read his complaint, which was filed Sept. 30 with the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity at the New York City’s Department of Education.
“He told me that Zionism involves the retaking of Palestinian land and is ‘offensive,’” the complaint added.
“Schools are not public forums for advancing personal political views, and per Department of Education regulations, employees are prohibited from using schools for the purpose of political expression,” said Department of Education spokeswoman Katie O’Hanlon.
Is anti-Semitism a serious problem in NYC?
“This principal’s request followed complaints from students and staff and is consistent with policies around political neutrality in schools.”
There’s a question as to whether or not the shirts were in violation of city school regulations.
“School buildings are not public forums for purposes of community or political expression,” Chancellor’s Regulation D-130 reads.
“While on duty or in contact with students, school personnel may not wear buttons, pins, articles of clothing or any other items advocating a candidate, candidates, slate of candidates or political organization/committee.”
Levy argued “Proud Zionist” doesn’t violate that, given that it has nothing to do with political expression or advocating for a candidate — noting in his complaint Zionism is a religious movement in support of the creation and maintenance of the state of Israel.
However, he highlighted in his complaint that, to the extent that it was political, there was a clear double standard at work at MS 51.
“Singh has permitted other staff to wear attire with ‘Black Lives Matter,’ ‘Feminism is the radical idea that women are people,’ ‘Feminist’ and [female Supreme Court justices] ‘O’Connor & Ginsburg & Sotomayor & Kagan,’” his complaint read.
“Singh’s definition of politically explosive attire appears limited to Jews only,” the teacher said.
“None of my attire, actions or beliefs endanger the emotional or physical safety of students or staff, which Singh accused me of … I have conducted myself professionally and have always respected the beliefs of all while doing my job neutrally and without bias … His attempt to threaten and intimidate me is anti-Semitic.”
Both Levy and the group Americans Against Antisemitism — headed by former state Assemblyman Dov Hikind — provided the Post with pictures of some of the shirts worn by other teachers; the Post’s article included one which said “Feminist.”
In a video for Americans Against Antisemitism, one which says “Black Lives Matter” can also be seen.
BREAKING: NYC Public School Teacher’s Job Threatened for Wearing Zionist T-shirt to School
Teachers there wear BLM and other political t-shirts, but only the Zionist was threatened!
“How insulting. This is sick. This is pathetic. This is anti-Semitic,” Hikind told the Post regarding Levy’s treatment.
“You can’t say you’re a proud Jew and supportive of the people and the State of Israel?”
Hikind, who is a Democrat, said the city’s Department of Education was “representing the extreme left, the radical wing of the Democratic Party” by having different standards for “Proud Zionist” t-shirts than it did for “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts.
“There should be one standard for all. But this is what’s going on in our city,” Hikind said.
Indeed, this is one of the more unfortunate problems of the de Blasio years in New York City — with anti-Semitic hate crimes up and city hall taking an unusually strong interest in cracking down on Orthodox Jewish communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is only a complaint at the moment, but it’s certainly a complaint that’s entirely believable given the priorities of the city’s leadership.
What gets defined as “politically explosive” only runs one way for the woke, after all — and support for Israel, unfortunately, very much runs that way.
Ohio’s attorney general on Monday filed a lawsuit against Meta, formerly known as Facebook, accusing it of violating federal securities law by misleading investors in claiming that its products don’t harm children’s health and wellbeing.
Attorney General Dave Yost filed the lawsuit (pdf) on behalf of the state’s pension fund—the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS)—and Facebook investors.
The suit accuses Facebook of having violated federal securities laws by having “knowingly exploited” children for profits, while “purposely misleading the public” that its products don’t harm children, and that the company had taken steps to stop the spread of misinformation and harmful content.
“Facebook said it was looking out for our children and weeding out online trolls, but in reality was creating misery and divisiveness for profit,” Yost said in a statement. “We are not people to Mark Zuckerberg, we are the product and we are being used against each other out of greed.”
Dave Yost in Columbus, Ohio, on Nov. 6, 2018. (Justin Merriman/Getty Images)
A Meta spokesperson told news outlets, “This suit is without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”
Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen in October shared a series of internal documents from the company that showed it was aware its platforms “facilitate dissension, illegal activity, and violent extremism, and cause significant harm to users, especially children,” but still refused to correct the issues, Yost said in the complaint.
The complaint also cited a series of company documents published by The Wall Street Journal in September. Among them were documents that showed Facebook did not tell the public about its internal studies that repeatedly found that Instagram users, mainly teenage girls, suffer from negative effects, including worsened body image issues, anxiety, and depression.
Zuckerberg said on Oct. 25 the leaked documents provided to the Journal and other news outlets paint a false picture of the findings of the studies, and that its products also bring benefits to its users.
The lawsuit alleges that Zuckerberg and other company officials purposefully lied about the safety, security, and privacy of its platforms.
Facebook had admitted in those internal documents that, “We are not actually doing what we say we do publicly,” Yost’s office noted in a release.
According to the complaint, the revelations resulted a devaluation in Facebook’s stock of $54.08 per share, causing Facebook investors to lose more than $100 billion within about a month.
Yost’s lawsuit is seeking to recover the loss in shareholder value and is demanding that Facebook change its practices to make sure it will no longer mislead the public about its internal practices.
Educators pursuing a career as a middle or high school English teacher should be “trained in anti-racism,” according to a newly released set of teaching standards created by National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).
The NCTE last revised its standards for educators preparing to teach English language arts (ELA) in grades 7 to 12 in 2012. The professional organization said that since then, literacy demands “have changed the landscape significantly” and that “the issues of justice, equity, and diversity” have become central for English teachers and learners.
The latest NCTE standards, released last week, replace the term “social justice” in the 2012 version with “anti-racist” and “anti-bias” based on “expert advice,” according to the council. It now recommends that prospective English teachers “apply and demonstrate knowledge of learners and learning to foster inclusive learning environments that support coherent, relevant, standards-aligned, differentiated, and antiracist/antibias instruction to engage grade 7–12 learners in ELA.”
“Bigotry, discrimination, oppression, divisiveness, and racism are part of the world in which future teachers of English are working,” NCTE President Alfredo Celedon Lujan said in a statement announcing the standards. “These new standards seek to support educators as they prepare to go into the classroom.”
When it comes to the definition of racism, the council defines racism in America as the “systematic mistreatment and disenfranchisement of people of color who currently and historically possess less power and privilege than white Americans.”
“Racism … and other forms of discrimination continue to be a part of American society, continuing to affect all students and their education,” the council declares, asking that teachers “explicitly push for anti-racism by participating in ongoing professional development for educators to succeed in countering racism and other forms of bigotry.”
Anti-racism is one of the concepts popularized by proponents of critical race theory (CRT), an outgrowth from Marxism that views society through the lens of a power struggle between white and non-white people, which proponents assign the labels of “oppressors” and “oppressed,” respectively. CRT advocates see deeply embedded racism in all aspects of American society and deem it to be the root cause of racial inequity, or different outcomes for different races.
Rather than teaching children tolerance, it requires discriminatory “antiracist” practices to solve the perceived inequity, according to CRT advocates. As explained in Ibram X. Kendi’s 2019 book “How to Be an Antiracist,” discrimination should be considered “anti-racist” so long it is “creating equity.”
“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” wrote Kendi.
The NCET didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The council will be holding its annual convention next week, featuring guest speakers such as former first lady Michelle Obama and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the leading author of The New York Times’ controversial “1619 Project,” a collection of historically revisionist literature promoting the idea that the United States is an inherently racist nation founded to preserve slavery.
The supposed experts shaping the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus forced their tunnel vision upon the administration, according to a former member of the White House Coronavirus Response Team.
In a new book, Dr. Scott Atlas lambastes the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx and former CDC Director Robert Redfield for refusing to look at all options.
In his book, “A Plague Upon Our House,” Atlas recounted an incident in which he wrote that he presented compelling data indicating that schools should be reopened and that children were not major factors in the spread of the virus.
Fauci and others acted as though he had never spoken, he wrote, according to excerpts published Saturday by Fox News.
“As I finished, there was silence,” Atlas wrote. “No one offered any contrary data … Zero comments from Dr. Birx. Nothing from Dr. Fauci.”
“And as always, not a single mention by Birx or Fauci about the serious harms of school closures. In my mind, this was bizarre,” he wrote.
Atlas wrote that he appeared to be the only one on the team looking at facts before forming theories.
“Why was I the only one in the room with detailed knowledge of the literature? Why was I the only one considering the data on such an important topic with a critical eye? Were the others simply accepting bottom lines and conclusions, without any analytical evaluation? Weren’t they supposed to be expert medical scientists, too? I waited,” he wrote.
When the reaction arrived, it was hostile.
Has the country lost faith in Dr. Anthony Fauci?
Birx said Atlas was “out of the mainstream” and part of a “fringe” group supporting school reopening, Atlas wrote, according to Fox.
“Meanwhile she insisted that all experts agreed with her,” Atlas wrote. “I shook my head, thinking of some of the world-class epidemiologists who agreed with me—John Ioannidis and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard, Carl Heneghan and Sunetra Gupta of Oxford—and wondered if she or Fauci had ever read a single publication by them.”
Atlas said he presented detailed data about the spread of the virus through children. Children were unlikely to spread the disease to adults, he wrote, and were themselves in little danger of catching it. In Sweden, in particular, he wrote, there were no children’s deaths from COVID-19, though schools remained open and there were no mask mandates.
“The icing on the cake was the evidence that almost all coronavirus transmission to children comes from adults, not the other way around,” Atlas wrote.
Atlas wrote that Redfield indicated that in his mind, the mountain of data was inconclusive.
“I was disgusted at Redfield’s apparent lack of knowledge, shocked at his ignoring the scientific studies that had been published from around the world,” Atlas wrote. “I looked around the room, wondering if anyone else understood the glaring incompetence on display. Clearly, [Vice President Mike] Pence needed more input.”
In excerpts published Friday by the U.K. Daily Mail, Atlas explained the root of his opposition to policies that pushed lockdowns as the magic answer to stopping the virus.
“People were dying from the virus, and the lockdown policies were not preventing the deaths,” he wrote. “The simple logic of assuming you could stop the spread of, and some said eliminate, a highly contagious virus by shutting down society after millions had been infected was worse than nonsensical.
“The idea of stopping all businesses and closing schools while quarantining healthy young people at little risk from a disease in order to protect those aged seventy and over — that is simply irrational,” he wrote.
In the book, he wrote that former President Donald Trump was being given bad advice from his top advisers.
“They had let Birx and Fauci tell governors to prolong the lockdowns and school closures and continue the severe restrictions on businesses – strategies that failed to stop the elderly from dying, failed to stop the cases, and destroyed families and sacrificed children,” he wrote, according to the Daily Mail. “The closest advisers to the president, including the VP, seemed more concerned with politics, even though the task force was putting out the wrong advice, contrary to the president’s desire to reopen schools and businesses.”
In late October, as Fox reported, Atlas accused Birx of trying to “rewrite history” during congressional testimony in which she said Trump’s advisers failed to push mask-wearing, social distancing, and other steps that could have saved lives.
Birx claimed Atlas wanted to let the virus spread to build herd immunity, regardless of the cost, a claim he denies.
“I never advised the president, the Task Force, or anyone else while in Washington to allow the virus to spread,” Atlas told Fox.
“Dozens of my writings and interviews during my Washington service explicitly called for specific mitigations, including social distancing, extra hygiene, and masks when not able to socially distance, and ‘focused protection,’ a heightened protection of those at risk, to allow a safe opening and end the public health destruction from lockdowns.”
Journalist and The Gateway Pundit contributor Jacob Engels was hacked after exposing a filthy porn book in a Florida public school library.
Several weeks ago, my friend and investigative journalist Jacob Engels who often reports for the Gateway Pundit was removed with force by police during an Orange County School Board meeting in Orlando, Florida for exposing a disgusting graphic and pornographic illustrated novel being peddled to our public school children.
The video of him addressing the OCPS School Board, which was filmed by local journalist DatabattlesZ, quickly went viral after the news broke here first on The Gateway Pundit.
I have known Jacob for nearly a decade and his work exposing the political interests who orchestrated the sham trial that wrongfully convicted me in a DC federal court, had the corrupt Obama appointed judge in my case threatening him with arrest only because he dared defend me publicly and expose the epic corruption surrounding ever facet of my sham trial.
After he exposed the Orange County School Board for prividing pronographic material to minors, which is a violation of state law, left-wing activists hacked his website Central Florida Post, erased over eight years of journalism that has exposed Hillary Clinton and George Soros alike. They even left behind source code in Russian, to make it seem like Jacob’s website was built by the Russian state. This is an obvious smear tactic of the left, who tries to paint anyone who is for President Donald Trump or against the political establishment as a “foreign agent.”
During the politically motivated Mueller Investigation, I underwent the same demonic attacks on my livelihood and character, from the very same left-wing authoritarians who want to forcibly mask or vaccinate us, while allowing children to have access to graphic novels.
Jacob’s story is not uncommon. Millions of patriots are being targeted on a daily basis by Big Tech. His former hosting company even has ties to the Council on Foreign Relations, General David Petraeus, Goldman Sachs, and a host of globalist goons who hate America.
According to several internet security experts, sites like the Central Florida Post have been targeted by massive hacking operations, with no oversight or protection from the hosting company Bluehost, where Jacob’s website was formerly hosted.
Please donate to his Give Send Go today. Without outlets like The Gateway Pundit, or the Central Florida Post on a local level, we would have no idea about the criminality of the Democrats and Deep State.
An eight-year-old Florida girl is making the system bend to her will as she defies the Palm Beach County School Board’s mask mandate.
So far, she has been suspended 38 times for failing to do as the adults tell her.
“I was really shocked by it,” said Bailey Lashell, Fiona’s mother, according to WTEN-TV. “I couldn’t believe it was all over not complying with the mask mandate.”
Fiona made a brief appearance at a board meeting to tell her school board exactly what she thinks of their rules.
“Just because I get suspended for not wearing a mask isn’t going to change my mind. You can keep suspending me. I still have the right not to wear a mask,” she said.
“It is not fair that I’m getting punished because you guys, the school board, are not following the law,” she said. “I’m still going to stand up for what I believe in.”
“I hope you all go to jail for doing this to me,” Fiona said.
She added one final thought: “Your rules suck.”
School board speech by Florida 2nd grader who was suspended 36 times for not wearing a mask: Legend 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/SjEAhuQuP8
Her mother is chronicling her daughter’s disobedience on a website named StandupforFiona, explaining how her child has been threatened with flunking second grade.
Is this nothing more than an abuse of power by supposedly responsible adults?
“Since August 31st and her first punishment of a referral and silent lunch in an office hallway, Fiona has been steadfast in her unwavering decision to not back down to tyranny and lunacy, vowing to do everything she can for every child going thru these lawless mandates,” she wrote.
“Fiona is a strong-minded and fearless young girl who was ready to conquer the world at 7. Unfortunately, the blows just seem to not stop as she was recently told after completing every assignment her teacher will provide that she is not only failing 2nd grade but that there is no way she could catch up per her teacher,” she continued.
Neither mom nor daughter seems the type to take these things lying down.
“Thankfully we realized this was as tyrannical a move from her teacher and after asking for nearly 3 weeks we received Fiona’s progression in an application known as success maker. Not only is Fiona at or meeting grade-level requirements in Math, but rather doing math work at a 4th-grade level with almost 100% mastery in most of the items calculated,” she wrote, noting that she put all the documents on the site for all to see.
“Fiona has changed her priorities a bit and is on a mission to take back, not only her rights but every American child’s constitutional rights from the tyrant school board,” her mom explained on the site.
Although in July, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order that made mask-wearing optional, in Palm Beach County masks have been mandated, although the mandate ends Monday.
“You wear it for a long time, and you breathe in all those germs,” Fiona said, according to WTEN. “You set it down at lunch and put it back on your face and breathed that all in all day long.”
“I’m doing it for other kids,” said Fiona. “Not just myself.”
“We have no problem with somebody wearing a mask,” Lashell said. “We just feel that the kids in this situation — or I guess the parents — should have been given that choice.”
President Joe Biden is having a hard time escaping the glaring lies he repeated during his 2020 campaign about Kyle Rittenhouse, who is currently standing trial for murder.
The trial has been a massive fiasco for the prosecution even as the establishment media carries water for the increasingly weak claims that Rittenhouse acted maliciously when he shot three people, killing two, amid the violent riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year.
So far, the state’s own witness has revealed that one of the men Rittenhouse shot had tried to grab his gun, and Gaige Grosskreutz, another of Rittenhouse’s “victims,” has admitted that Rittenhouse, who was 17 at the time, fired on him only after he pointed a loaded handgun at the teen.
One of the more painful moments of the trial came when Rittenhouse himself took the stand and broke down while describing the moments leading up to the shooting. As video evidence clearly shows, rioters chased him down before he was ultimately forced to fire in self-defense.
So Biden probably shouldn’t have counted his eggs before they hatched last year as he leveraged Rittenhouse to beef up the narrative that then-President Donald Trump was sympathetic to white supremacists. Now that he’s in office, the lies about both Rittenhouse and Trump are coming back to bite him.
In August 2020, just days after the Rittenhouse shooting, Biden was asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper why he thought Trump hadn’t yet spoken publicly about the police shooting of Jacob Blake, which sparked the riots in the first place.
Biden responded by suggesting that Rittenhouse was part of a “militia” and that Trump was unwilling to denounce white supremacists.
“Look, I don’t know enough to know whether that 17-year-old kid — exactly what he did. But allegedly he’s part of a militia coming out of the state of Illinois,” Biden said.
Do you think Kyle Rittenhouse is innocent?
“Have you ever heard this president say one negative thing about white supremacists? Have you ever heard it?” he continued, claiming that Trump had called white supremacists at the 2017 Charlottesville riot “very fine people.”
It really is astounding that Biden so confidently repeated this already exhaustivelydebunked lie.
Trump decidedly and in no uncertain terms condemned white supremacy after the riot, as a matter of fact.
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence. It has no place in America,” he said in August 2017.
“Racism is evil, and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
If this wasn’t clear enough, Trump immediately followed up his “very fine people” comment by saying, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”
That’s right — even though leftists continue to claim to this day that Trump called white supremacists and neo-Nazis “very fine people,” he actually clarified who he was talking about in the same breath and denounced the radical factions present at the Charlottesville riot.
There are no two ways about it: Biden was lying. Trump had denounced white supremacy literally years before Biden campaigned on the insane claim that he hadn’t.
Our current president was not only willing to blatantly lie about Trump, but also to imply that Rittenhouse was probably a racist militia member, too.
Of course, Anderson Cooper, the brilliant and objective journalist that he is, did not push back on this wild suggestion. The media has for well over a year now spouted entirely fabricated claims about Rittenhouse — which is probably why Biden felt perfectly comfortable including the teen’s image in a campaign video about white supremacy.
There’s no other way to put it: the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night. pic.twitter.com/Q3VZTW1vUV
The Rittenhouse family has refused to take this bald-faced slander from the media and our now-president sitting down, as well they should not.
“The media has been absolutely irresponsible and purely abhorrent with this entire situation. They’ve been parroting the same false information time after time after time,” Rittenhouse spokesman David Hancock told Fox News on Wednesday. “It’s appalling, absolutely appalling.”
Rittenhouse’s mother also slammed Biden this week for using her son’s image in the campaign video, which recycled the same debunked line that Trump refused to disavow “white supremacists.”
“When I saw that, I was shocked, I was angry,” Wendy Rittenhouse told Fox on Thursday. “President Biden [doesn’t] know my son whatsoever, and he’s not a white supremacist. He’s not a racist. And [Biden] did that for the votes.”
“And I was so angry for a while at him and what he did to my son. He defamed him,” she said.
Who can blame her?
It’s bad enough that the media has so aggressively tried to taint this kid’s name in the court of public opinion. But for a presidential candidate to lump him in with vile racists is quite another matter.
That there’s someone in the White House who has so little regard for the basic principle of presumed innocence should seriously scare us.
Reports of intense surveillance of parents opposed to teaching critical race theory in Arizona’s Scottsdale Unified School District have provoked calls for the board president’s resignation.
At issue is a dossier of personal information of the parents and their children.
Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who writes for City Journal and is a Manhattan Institute fellow, said he reviewed the information and tweeted his conclusions.
“Scottsdale Unified school board president Jann-Michael Greenburg has been caught assembling a dossier with confidential information on parents who oppose critical race theory — including photographs of their children,” he tweeted Thursday.
“I’ve reviewed the dossier and Greenburg has assembled a disturbing range of information on parents: commercial background checks, criminal records, address histories, divorce records, business filings, personal photographs, and other sensitive data. Abusive.”
I’ve reviewed the dossier and Greenburg has assembled a disturbing range of information on parents: commercial background checks, criminal records, address histories, divorce records, business filings, personal photographs, and other sensitive data. Abusive.
“Greenburg paid for extensive private investigation profiles on individual parents. This file is more than 160 pages, with information including home addresses, family members, phone numbers, mortgage data, traffic tickets, ‘known associates,’ and social security numbers,” Rufo noted.
WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language that some viewers will find offensive.
According to press reports, school board president Jann-Michael Greenburg, a 27-year-old man with no children, lives with and shares a computer with his father, Mark Greenburg. Parents have accused the father-son duo of harassing them and photographing their children.
“YIKES: Here’s the father of Scottsdale Unified school board president Jann-Michael Greenburg, secretly taking bodycam footage of parents on school property and saying he hired a “private investigator who is writing down all their [license] plates,” Rufo tweeted.
In the video, Mark Greenburg talks about the extent of his investigation.
“Somewhere around here, we have a private investigator who’s writing down all their plates,” he says.
“Yeah, I did. Yeah. I had our law firm do it so that it’s protected. So that we can get the information,” Greenburg replies.
These lunatics want to permanently mask your children and pump them full of critical race theory. We owe a debt of gratitude to the brave Arizona moms who are standing up to creeps like Mark and Jann-Michael Greenburg. Don’t stop until they are removed from public life.
Although the school district is blaming everything on Mark Greenburg, the father of Jann-Michael Greenburg who reportedly lives with his son, and trying to assuage parents, a report in AZ Free News made it clear that the damage — coming at a time when the National School Boards Association wants the Department of Justice to come down hard on parents resisting critical race theory — is beyond repair with soothing words.
“I am calling for the immediate resignation of our board president Jann-Michael Greenburg. We cannot allow anyone in a leadership position to secretly compile personal documents and information on moms and dads who have dared speak out publicly or on social media about their grievances with the district,” parent Amy Carney said.
“We request President Greenburg’s resignation from the Governing Board effective immediately for this and other recent embarrassments to our district.”
“These allegations are deeply troubling, especially as concerns the photography of a minor child without parental consent and the taking down of license plate numbers of parents who Mr. Greenberg supposedly perceived as political opponents,” said attorney Alexander Kolodin of the Davillier Law Group.
“Mr. Greenberg is an elected member of the school board. If such a photograph was taken with his express or tacit consent, he would potentially be liable for violations of Arizona’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, which recognizes a parent’s ‘fundamental’ right to consent before the government makes a video or voice recording of the minor child,” he said.
If you want someone to wear a mask, the first step is to normally just ask. But some teachers have decided to go with the option of just taping masks to their students’ faces instead.
In October, there were several reports across the country of teachers taping face masks on their students’ faces.
The most recent happened in Beloit, Wisconsin.
At McNeel Intermediate School, Fox News reported that the police are investigating after a student claimed that a teacher duct-taped a mask to his face.
The 13-year-old boy said he pulled his mask down for a moment because he was having difficulty breathing. When the teacher told him to put the mask on he responded, “I can’t breathe. Give me a moment.”
“She got clearish yellowish tape, pulled up my mask up to my nose and wrapped the tape around my head five times. I’m thinking in my head. I’m like, this is crazy. Why is she doing this?” the student told WKOW.
The student’s parent said, “when he came home, he (had) a red mark on the back of his neck area. And it was a little bit red around his face.”
According to the police report that the Wisconsin State Journal reviewed, the teacher claimed it was all a joke.
“The teacher told police she did tape the front of the student’s mask to his face, but only as a joke after she said the student challenged her to do so and then he laughed about it. The teacher said she removed the tape, after which the student wore his mask properly.”
Should kids be wearing masks at school?
The student said that he did not feel like he could go back to school after the incident because he did not trust anyone.
“I’m very, very upset. I’m gonna keep pursuing this until my son gets justice and my family gets justice,” the parent said.
In response to this incident, a protest was then planned for Nov. 5 to take place in front of the School District of Beloit. The school district and the Beloit Police Department then decided to close the schools, “for the safety of the students and staff.“
This may sound like an outlandish, one-time kind of incident — some COVID-hypersensitive teacher just went off the rails. But there have been other reports of this happening in different states earlier in October and September.
Near Las Vegas, in Clark County School District, one fourth-grader forgot to put his mask back on after getting a drink of water. The substitute teacher, instead of simply instructing the student to put the mask back on, pulled him to the front of the class and taped the mask across the top of his face.
“I was furious, furious. I was scared for my son on what kind of long-term effect it is going to have on him socially, the fact that the entire class was laughing,” the student’s mother told KVVU-TV.
The student said that this was not the first time that had happened. He recalled up to five other times that this has happened to students in the class.
KKTV News in Colorado Springs reported a similar incident happening at Chinook Trail Middle School in October.
The school investigated the situation and found that, while teachers at Chinook Trail did not go to the extremes of the Clark County teacher in Nevada, teachers instructed students to tape masks to their faces.
“After examining all evidence, the district determined a policy/procedure was violated by the teaching team of 642. While we found that the teachers did NOT affix any student’s mask to their face, we did learn teachers directed students to affix their mask to their face with tape; and students believed they were required, by a teacher, to use tape to affix their mask to their face,” the school principal wrote in a letter to parents.
The fact that children are wearing masks in school is still questionable.
Children are obviously still in the developmental stage. They are not just learning information in school, but also learning how to socially interact and be with other people. Their emotions, social skills and cognitive skills all depend on having healthy interactions with peers, teachers and parents. Numerous experts and studies have shown this.
“Face-to-face interactions between a parent and child are the building blocks of the child’s emotional, social, and cognitive growth,” the Hanen Centre reported.
It’s really quite common sense.
“The right socially interactive environment will help children develop strong language skills, creativity, social intelligence, and confidence,” Tender Care Learning Center advocated.
For students to have that face-to-face interaction taken away from them in school can be detrimental. For teachers to enforce and humiliate students by taping masks to their faces could damage students even further. That kind of humiliation handed down from an authority figure, in front of peers, is going to cause problems.
As the mother of the Clark County School fourth-grader said, “It’s crazy. Corporal punishment in schools should not be happening.”
In 68.2 percent of the 500 biggest school districts in the United States, students are still required to wear masks in school, according to data from community tracker Burbio.
To those who just view U.S. media, this shouldn’t come as a shock. After all, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, has made it clear even vaccinated kids still need to mask up.
“We still have about 85 percent of our counties that are in high or substantial community transmission,” Walensky said during an appearance on “NBC Nightly News” on Thursday.
“And so, while I’m encouraged that numbers are coming down, I would say as our children are starting to get vaccinated, just a week into this program, to continue to scale up our vaccinations for these children and to not yet get complacent with our mitigation and prevention strategies that are keeping our children in school.”
“So that means kids should continue to wear masks even if they’re vaccinated?” Holt asked.
“And I would say masks are for now,” Walensky said, “but they are not forever.”
And yet, while the CDC continues to promise the masks aren’t forever but need to be worn for now, the United States is one of the few countries in the Western world that still forces its students to mask up in the classroom.
According to a Wednesday report in the U.K. Daily Mail, only seven countries in the West still recommend kids wear masks in school. Meanwhile, in at least 14 other countries, there is no masking requirement.Should mask mandates be banned?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
“Aside from the U.S., DailyMail.com could only identify six other Western countries where masking is broadly required or recommended in schools: Canada, France, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Spain,” the paper reported.
Canada leaves it up to individual provinces, all 10 of which have some kind of masking requirement. France had lifted its masking requirement previously, but it’s being re-instituted for elementary school students as of Nov. 15.
The other four countries started the school year with a mask requirement in place on a national scale.
However, in most other countries, they’ve been — as we like to say in these parts — following the science.
The Daily Mail noted that studies have shown that while minors test positive just as frequently as adults, about half are asymptomatic (compared with roughly 10 percent of those over 18) and that only 0.1 percent of school-age children experience serious illness or die from COVID-19.
“And because of this low risk, most Western nations have opted to ditch the masks and have kids return to ‘normalcy’ in classrooms,” the Daily Mail reported.
“In the UK, for example, millions of children returned to schools in early September with face coverings not required.
“And while masks are a politically divisive issue in the U.S., members of both the Conservative and Labour Parties in the UK have stated that wearing masks prevent children from being able to communicate and socialize.”
How has that worked out for them? In the United States, children are being hospitalized at four times higher rates than in the United Kingdom.
The paper provided three potential answers for why the mask mandates aren’t in place in other Western countries.
The first postulate: higher vaccination rates. “For example, West Virginia and Idaho have yet to vaccinate 50 percent of their populations compared to more than 70 percent in all Nordic countries, according to data from the U.S. CDC and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control,” the Daily Mail reported.
However, this one doesn’t necessarily hold water; according to U.S. News and World Report, neither West Virginia nor Idaho has statewide school mask mandates.
Of the eight states that outright ban school mask mandates, only one had a fully vaccinated rate above 60 percent as of Friday, according to the Mayo Clinic — Florida. Meanwhile, of the states that require masks in school, only one had a fully vaccinated rate under 60 percent: Kentucky.
Therefore, issue number two is a bit more likely: In most Western countries, particularly in the European Union, there’s a higher degree of trust in authority figures. Paradoxically, this often leads to less regulation and freer societies. As Nick Gillespie — editor at large for libertarian publication Reason — pointed out in a Daily Beast piece back in 2016, research shows citizens in countries where authority figures are trusted want less intervention from authority figures.
Meanwhile, in the United States — where one can distinctly recall a recent gubernatorial candidate saying parents shouldn’t be deciding what the state teaches their children — one can see how this would lead to education and political officials who botched in-person learning policy and public health dictums being handed more control over it, despite having proved themselves to be unworthy of the task.
Finally, the Daily Mail noted children in other Western countries are tested more often.
“Currently the UK’s Department of Education requires all secondary school students, between ages 11 and 18, be tested at home twice a week using tests,” they reported. “Additionally, Norway is mass testing students to phase out quarantining students amid Covid outbreaks.”
All of these are valuable lessons — but then, the most valuable should be that we’re an outlier when it comes to school mask mandates and we shouldn’t be. There’s little evidence they serve a public health good, particularly among vaccinated children, and with other alternatives at hand. Psychologically, they’ve done far more harm than good.
Geez…I really think I’m going to puke. WTF is happening? [US Patriot]
Inclusion, acceptance, welcoming, understanding, equality and affirmation: These are the words we often hear in support of the LGBT community. But should all sexual preferences and orientations be accepted, welcomed and included?
What about attraction to minors?
Allyn Walker — an assistant professor at Old Dominion University in the department of sociology and criminal justice who identifies as “non-binary” — wrote the book, “A Long, Dark Shadow,” to look more deeply into “Minor-Attracted People,” address the stigma around them and discuss how they should be treated.
To be clear, though, Walker is not condoning child sexual abuse in the book.
“And I want to be extremely clear that child sexual abuse is never ever okay,” Walker said in an interview discussing the book with the Prostasia Foundation.
However, Walker did clarify that “having an attraction to minors as long as it isn’t acted on, doesn’t mean that the person who has those attractions is doing something wrong.”
“I think we have a tendency to want to categorize people with these attractions as evil or morally corrupt … From my perspective, there is no morality or immorality attached to attraction to anyone because no one can control who they’re attracted to at all.”
This immediately brings into question the meaning of morality. In the simplest terms, morality is understanding what is right and wrong. But more specifically, morality is intricately tied to natural laws and what is innate in rational human beings.
It is not natural to be attracted to a child. That is why pedophilia is treated as a disorder.
Is pedophilia a sexual orientation?
“Because it causes harm to others, it is considered a disorder,” medical information reference Merck Manuals noted.
Walker, however, wanted to distinguish between those who act on this impulse and those who simply have it but do not act on it.
“And then just as importantly, many MAPs never commit a sexual offense against a minor. And that difference is important because when we don’t understand that distinction, we make incorrect assumptions about the likelihood of offending amongst MAPs,” Walker said.
“This leads to people believing that just because someone is attracted to minors, they’re likely to commit an offense. And we start to criminalize a population just because of their attractions. Not only is this a problem in terms of criminalization, but it also serves to heighten stigma against MAPs in general, which is a huge problem.”
However, Walker is wrong in equating pedophilia with crime. Pedophilia, of course, can lead to sexual activity with children, but attraction, arousal and behavior all fall under the definitional umbrella of pedophilia.
“Doctors diagnose pedophilia when people feel greatly distressed or become less able to function well because of their attraction to children or when they have acted on their urges,” Merck Manuals explains.
Psychology Today also lines up with Merck Manuals, defining pedophilia as, “recurrent and intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children — generally age 13 years or younger — over a period of at least six months.”
Walker is attempting to make a distinction that flies in the face of medical information, trying to differentiate between attraction and action. But there is great danger in doing so.
If “MAPs” are just people who are attracted to children, but do not abuse them, why should they not be accepted in a society that is seeking to be inclusive and welcoming to all sexual orientations?
Following the same reasoning, this could happen with defining and diagnosing pedophilia. And there is a push to view pedophilia as a sexual orientation.
Toronto psychiatrist Dr. James Cantor has tweeted in the past, “Speaking as a gay men, I believe we SHOULD include the P. To do otherwise is to betray the principles that give us our rights.”
Speaking as a gay men, I believe we SHOULD include the P. To do otherwise is to betray the principles that give us our rights.
Cantor’s reasoning is correct. If our society keeps operating on the principles that give LGBT members the rights that they have, the same has to extend to pedophiles. If we follow that train of thought, attraction to children is just their sexual orientation.
There are even sites dedicated to pedophiles who are celibate, non-offenders. “Virtuous Pedophiles” is a social support group for pedophiles that promise to live celibate, non-offending lives.
The problem is that pedophilia is dangerous to children. Even if a person who is attracted to minors is determined to not act upon the impulse, having that attraction takes them one step closer to the potential of becoming an abuser.
So if pedophilia is accepted as just another sexual orientation and not treated as a disorder, that would also widen the door to “acceptable” abuse of children. If a pedophile has sexual interactions with a child, and the minor claims that they were abused, then the pedophile could hide behind their accepted, no longer termed as a disorder, sexual attraction.
As shocking as it may seem to talk about adding pedophilia to the spectrum of sexual orientations, it should be no surprise. By throwing out the conception that morality must align with what is natural, our society just opened Pandora’s box. This is just the fallout that we have to deal with now.
NCSBA’s separation follows the South Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri School Board Associations’ cutting ties from the NSBA after its Sept. 29 letter to the White House comparing parents to domestic terrorists.
Union County Public Schools Board Chair Melissa Merrell was on her way to an NCSBA convention when she received an alert from the NCSBA announcing its separation.
“It was a pleasant surprise,” Merrell told The Epoch Times. “I definitely did not see this coming. I’ve had a couple of board members who had been requesting and sending emails to the NCSBA asking if it were going to withdraw our membership from the NSBA, and they (the NSBA) had asked for our feedback, and then, on the way to the convention, we saw this message.”
Merrell said nothing was mentioned at the convention about the NCSBA’s departure from the national board.
According to Parents Defending Education (PDE), an organization that investigates indoctrination in schools, as of Nov. 9, 26 states have distanced themselves from the NSBA after the letter.
The NSBA, which represents more than 90,000 school board members and 14,000 public school districts in the United States, had written a letter to President Joe Biden asking that the parents who have protested COVID-19 restrictions and the teaching of critical race theory in public schools be regarded as domestic terrorists that should be investigated by agencies such as the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI.
This led to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Oct. 4 memorandum to the FBI directing the agency to work with U.S. attorneys to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff, and will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”
“The September 29 letter from NSBA to President Biden, in both its inflammatory language and the request for federal agencies to intervene in our communities, was just one in a series of lapses in governance,” said NCSBA President Amy Churchill in a press release. “NCSBA shares its members’ concerns about safety at school board meetings. As a proponent of local control, NCSBA believes that local law enforcement is in the best position to respond to those concerns and seek outside assistance if necessary.”
On Oct. 22, the NSBA issued an apology, stating that “there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”
State Response
The PDE requested statements from 47 states affiliated with the NSBA, and reported that the Alabama Association of School Boards (AASB) said it “has withheld its dues to join the NSBA for the current membership year, though AASB’s bylaws require it to be an NSBA member.”
According to the PDE, the AASB said it would be voting in December on changes to its bylaws that would give the AASB board of directors authority to determine its membership with the NSBA.
The PDE said it received no response from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees (MSCA), prompting the PDE to file a public record request for emails “to get a sense of their position.”
“It turns out that Glenn Koocher, executive director of the MSCA, was so happy about the letter that he put it in an email to NSBA CEO Chip Slaven,” the PDE said.
“We in MASC are all very happy that the NSBA has reached out to the FBI and, based on local coverage, has been identified as a key agent for generating federal support,” Koocher said in the email.
Thirty-six Republican state representatives asked that the South Carolina School Boards Association (SCSBA) end its NSBA membership.
“NSBA has labeled parents as domestic terrorists, with no evidence to justify that term,” the House Republicans wrote in a letter to the SCSBA executive director. “The reality is that parents and stakeholders are beyond frustrated being ignored and left out of decisions with their child. The NSBA is detached from reality and fails to recognize that Americans are angered by what is happening in our classrooms.”
SCSBA Executive Director Scott Price told The Epoch Times that the decision to separate from the NSBA was “aimed at protecting our membership from fallout from NSBA’s September 29 letter.”
“Any pressure that SCSBA was under stemmed primarily from our desire to keep this from impacting our members (local school boards),” Price said.
The NSBA did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
GQ Pan and Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report.
Writing for RealClearPolitics, Professor Andrew E. Busch of Claremont McKenna College finds that “one reason for Americans’ increasing political discomfort—the feeling that politics has become a blood sport in which traditional protections and safety nets are no longer present—is that the nonpartisan insulation protecting the rule of law and consent of the governed has frayed. There is a broad pattern of offices that require political neutrality being converted into offices that are genuinely partisan in their operation.”
What, I wonder, was his first clue?
Understandably, Busch concentrates on the most recent examples of this creeping partisanship in places that are supposed to be non-partisan, since the Biden administration represents a quantum leap in the politicization of everything, but especially of the law.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, he writes, “has already used the Justice Department to advance his own party’s version of the stolen-election story by suing to stop state legislative efforts to enhance ballot security, then threatening to sic the FBI on parents who complain to their local school boards about left-wing political indoctrination in the classroom.”
By contrast, Busch praises the non-partisan spirit of former Attorney General William Barr for resigning rather than supporting President Trump’s demand for a thorough investigation of election irregularities.
But then he can’t help noticing the concerted legal efforts by Democratic Attorneys General in swing states last year to change voting laws in order to create those irregularities—and, with them, the opportunities for cheating.
You can see why Busch wants to be even-handed and pretend that the partisan takeover of supposedly non-partisan institutions is coming from both sides, but he can’t quite obscure the fact that the overwhelmingly majority of these efforts have been made—and successfully made, thanks to the compliant media—on behalf of Democrats.
There is nothing like a Republican equivalent, for example, of the partisan takeover of the FBI under James Comey. “The course of the Russia investigation,” writes Busch, “complete with the obvious biases of Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page, implied that the bureau had picked sides.”
Implied? Can there be any doubt about which side these and others in the bureau were on? Or which side Robert Mueller and his team were on? If there were any doubt about it, it must have been dispelled by the recent revelations, and indictments, coming out of the John Durham investigation.
Busch might also have mentioned the disparity in federal law-enforcement’s treatment of the Capitol rioters of Jan. 6 as constituting an “insurrection” and its almost complete lack of interest in the hundreds of riots, the billions of dollars in property damage and the many deaths that took place around the country last summer.
You don’t have to be particularly good at spotting “implied” biases to tell that the difference between the two was that the first was in support of Donald Trump, the others opposed to him. And, violently, opposed to the police. But why would we expect the federal police, ostensibly there to uphold the rule of law, to care about that?
Also, as I pointed out last summer in these pages, General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the nation’s armed forces, traditionally our number one non-partisan institution, along with the judiciary, testified before Congress on behalf of the Democratic talking point by asserting on the basis of zero evidence that the Capitol riot was motivated by “white rage.”
Milley is also charged with weeding out of the services those identified by the extreme left as members of the “extremist right.”
But the perspicacious could have picked up hints of the erosion of the “nonpartisan insulation” of key institutions long before 2016.
The politicization of the judiciary, I would argue, began at least as far back as 1987 when a certain Joseph R. Biden, newly appointed chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, put the kibosh on President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court for transparently political reasons.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who once said of his fellow judges that “we don’t work as Democrats or Republicans,” has gone to heroic lengths to keep up the pretense of non-partisanship in the judiciary, but then he is also the man who, apparently without irony, once called the U.S. Senate “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”
The politicization of the armed services began even earlier. As the late Colin Powell cheerfully put it in 2007, presumably with reference to his own military career, which started in the Vietnam era, “Anybody who becomes a senior officer had better have some political instincts or you’re going to get ground up. We are a political nation. It is not a dirty word.”
What he meant to say, perhaps, was that it is only a dirty word when applied to constitutionally non-political institutions. Like the military.
I understand that he was talking about the internal politics that are inevitable in any large organization, but in the military, whose most senior officers are appointed by civilian (and political) authority, those politics are always bound up with the other kind.
Under President George W. Bush we learned, at least if we were paying attention, of the politicization of the CIA, which regularly briefed the media (anonymously, of course) against their ostensible commander-in-chief.
Under President Barack Obama we learned, even if we weren’t paying much attention, of the politicization of the Department of Justice and the IRS.
And, as everyone now knows, under President Donald Trump we learned of the politicization not only of the FBI and (again) the Justice Department but also of the State Department. All three, while ostensibly serving the President, were actually undermining him.
It should not be necessary to point out that all of these encroachments of the political onto officially non-political territory have been in one direction and one direction only—leftwards. It’s as if there were some law of political inertia analogous to Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”
Maybe this is what the progressives mean by saying that they are “on the right side of history,” If so, it means that the rest of us, who still treasure what we think is our right to be non-political, must be on the wrong side of history.
A public school district in Northern California announced Wednesday it will not be enforcing the state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for K–12 schools.
In a 5–0 vote, the governing board of the Calaveras Unified School District (CUSD) decided at a Tuesday meeting to not “enforce, support, or comply” with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s mandate, which would require students at all public, public charter, and private schools to receive COVID-19 vaccines following full federal approval of the shots for their grade span.
The school board said in a message to the school community that the decision, which came during the meeting, applies to both students and employees, adding that it will further discuss and potentially make a decision on mask mandates and testing protocols at its next meeting scheduled for Nov. 23.
In an earlier statement, the CUSD said its board was aware of the possible repercussions the district may face as a result of rejecting the state mandate, including “possible liability exposure, funding loss, and other formal actions that can be taken against the district.”
“[Board members] understand there are strong perspectives and opinions on both sides of the issue,” the statement read. “They understand the Superintendent’s recommendation for mandate compliance based on these potential consequences, but they feel strong in their individual positions on this topic.”
CUSD serves about 5,300 students and includes five elementary schools, one middle school, and Calaveras County’s only two public high schools.
California became the first state in the nation to announce COVID-19 vaccine requirements for K–12 schools in October, when the pediatric vaccines were still pending a recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Newsom said the mandate would take effect only when the vaccines receive full approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in children.
“The state already requires that students are vaccinated against viruses that cause measles, mumps, and rubella,” Newsom said when he announced the mandate. “There’s no reason why we wouldn’t do the same for COVID-19.”
“Vaccines work. It’s why California leads the country in preventing school closures and has the lowest case rates,” said the Democratic governor, who survived his recall election fueled by his pandemic response. “We encourage other states to follow our lead to keep our kids safe and prevent the spread of COVID-19.”
Despite mask mandates and other preventive measures the Newsom administration put in place, California’ COVID-19 infection rate has recently stopped dropping and started ticking up. As of Nov. 10, California remains one of the CDC’s red “high” level of virus transmission states, compared to yellow “moderate” level in Florida, where there is no state-issued mask or vaccination mandate.
NSBA leaders even altered the letter’s text to satisfy the Biden White House
Newly released internal emails reveal that the National School Boards Association coordinated with the White House and the Department of Justice before sending President Biden the notorious letter that compared concerned parents to domestic terrorists. Emails provided to Fox News show that NSBA had coordinated with the White House for weeks beforehand.
Viola Garcia, the NSBA president whom the Department of Education later named to a federal board, sent a memo to NSBA members on Oct. 11 (but dated Oct. 12), providing a timeline of the NSBA’s interaction with the White House ahead of the letter to Biden, which the NSBA sent on Sept. 29.
Five days later, on Oct. 4, the DOJ issued a memo directing law enforcement to investigate threats to school boards. On Oct. 22, the NSBA issued an apology for the letter.
“Concern over the current climate for school board members is also a top priority as disruptions at school board meetings grow and members face growing threats,” Garcia wrote at the time, according to the memo obtained by Parents Defending Education through a Freedom of Information Act request. “NSBA has been actively engaged with the White House, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Education, Surgeon General, and other federal agencies on pandemic related issues.”
(Oregon School Boards Association)
“In the September 14, 2021 meeting of the [NSBA Organization of State Association Executive Directors] liaison group, they were informed there had been a meeting with White House staff that morning and that NSBA was preparing to send a letter to the President. Subsequently, on September 17, 2021, the interim Executive Director emailed notice to the state association executive directors that indicated a letter requesting federal assistance would be sent.”
“In response to the letter sent by NSBA, on October 4, 2021 the Attorney General announced in a memorandum widely shared throughout the U.S. Department of Justice that he was ordering all U.S. Attorney Offices and local FBI offices to reach out to local and state law enforcement officials to coordinate efforts on this problem within 30 days of the memorandum,” Garcia also noted.
This statement appears to contradict Attorney General Merrick Garland’s testimony to Congress on Oct. 27. When Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., asked Garland if he had “second thoughts” following NSBA’s apology for the letter, he said that the DOJ memorandum did not rely upon the letter.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., calls out the attorney general for his memo directing the FBI to look into reports of threats against school board members and has harsh words for teachers union leader Randi Weingarten.
“The letter that was subsequently sent does not change the association’s concern of violence or threats of violence. It alters some of the language in the letter … that we did not rely on and is not contained in my own memorandum,” Garland said.
Neither Garland nor the DOJ responded to Fox News’ request for comment by press time.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appears before the House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on Oct. 21. (Michael Reynolds/Pool via REUTERS)
Another email exclusively sent to Fox News revealed that NSBA had discussed the issues with the White House “for weeks” before sending the letter. Garcia and Chip Slaven, an NSBA executive, altered the text of the letter to satisfy the curiosity of White House staff.
“In talks over the last several weeks with White House staff, they requested additional information on some of the specific threats, so the letter also details many of the incidents that have been occurring,” Slaven wrote in a September 29, 2021, email to the NSBA board of directors.
Parents have spoken up at school board meetings around the country, protesting harsh COVID-19 mitigation measures like school closures, and raising their voices against transgender policies, critical race theory, and other issues. The letter warned that these parents pose a violent threat to school boards, even going so far as comparing them to domestic terrorists.
The fallout from the letter has proven particularly severe. Ohio’s, Wisconsin‘s, and the school boards of nine other states have reportedly terminated their relationships with NSBA, and parent’s education rights organizations have grown in prominence since the letter. The letter may have also emboldened concerned parents who supported Republican Glenn Youngkin, who won the Virginia governor’s race earlier this month.
Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin gestures during a [Loudoun Parents Matter Rally] campaign event in Leesburg, Virginia, on Nov. 1, 2021. (REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz)
Parents who never imagined running for office battled to win seats on local school boards last week; they won some, but lost many. Their fiercest opponents were the teachers unions.
The media portrayed these school board races as culture wars, but more than anything they were struggles by parents to wrest control of the boards from self-serving unions. For decades, the unions have maintained a tight grip on who gets elected. No wonder school district decisions—about budgets, masking, COVID closures, curriculum, and teacher contracts—protect teachers first. Never mind what’s best for kids.
That needs to change. Albuquerque, New Mexico, winning candidate Courtney Jackson told a local newspaper, “the board of education should be the kids’ union,” not a puppet of the teachers union. Jackson decided to run after watching the board discuss when to end lockdowns. The discussion focused entirely on what teachers wanted, never addressing the kids’ needs. “Their interests were not brought up once,” she said.
In Guilford, Connecticut, a small seacoast town, the Guilford Education Association, representing teachers, ran the show. In a questionnaire for school board candidates, the union’s No. 1 question asked candidates to pledge support for “collective bargaining rights.” Question two asked candidates to guarantee unions will be included in all discussions of the schools’ policies and funding. Question three asked candidates to promise to “oppose all proposals that would censor teachers from teaching about inclusion, diversity, and equity.” What about the kids?
All five Guilford candidates who gave the “correct” answers won the union’s backing and prevailed on election night. Their slogan was “Protect Guilford Schools,” but their true goal was “Protect the Teachers Union.” One of the winners boasted of coming from “a long line of educators,” while another promised, “I will listen to our teachers, administrators, and superintendent and respect that they act always in the best interest of our students and schools.”
Nearly everywhere, teachers unions use money and manpower to turn out voters. Challengers need to do the same. The three Albuquerque school board candidates who defeated the union slate went to the local chamber of commerce, other small business groups, and Republican party allies for alternate sources of money.
When the results were in, the president of the Albuquerque Teachers Federation predicted “a new dynamic on the board,” with some members actually disagreeing with the school district’s employees. Imagine that.
In Colorado’s cities, including Denver and Steamboat Springs, union slates won handily. But in Douglas County, Aurora County, and Greeley Evans School District 6, challengers outspent the union and broke its monopoly on school board seats.
After union-backed candidates were defeated in Douglas County, Kevin DiPasquale, president of the local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, predicted big changes. In the past, teachers could just assume the school board “had their backs.”
In Montclair, New Jersey, the mayor, Sean Spiller, serves as president of the state’s largest teachers union but also appointed the school board—a blatant conflict of interest. The board negotiates the teachers’ contract. Last Tuesday, the town voted 70 percent in favor of replacing mayoral control with an elected board.
That’s an improvement, but electing the board won’t guarantee students become the priority. In New Jersey, the teachers union wields enormous electoral power with the support of Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.
Although school board elections are often officially labelled nonpartisan, that’s intentionally misleading. In Tennessee and Florida, Republican state lawmakers are pushing legislation to discard the nonpartisan label so voters can see these elections for what they are.
Last week’s elections were just the beginning. Many school districts will elect board members sometime in the spring, instead of on Election Day. That’s by design to keep the public in the dark that an election is even happening, and to discourage turnout.
Parents and other concerned citizens have roughly half a year to gird for these upcoming contests. For anyone who has a child in public school, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Some people spreading information about COVID-19 contrary to what is deemed “acceptable” by Big Pharma are criminals, according to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.
They’re professionals, he says, that “circulate, on purpose, misinformation” regarding mRNA vaccine shots.
“They’re not [just] bad people, they’re criminals. Because they literally have costed millions of lives,” Bourla said Tuesday in a telecast with Frederick Kempe, CEO of the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan think tank.
.@pfizer CEO Albert Bourla: People who share “misinformation” on vaccines’ efficacy are “criminals.”
“They’re not bad people. They’re criminals because they have literally cost millions of lives.” pic.twitter.com/VjIXs5rQCg
So who are these professionals? Dissenting researchers? Doctors treating patients with the Drugs Which Must Not Be Named? Nurses losing their jobs because of the vaccine mandate?
What about the president of the United States, Joe Biden? He’s a professional. Is he a criminal? If we follow Bourla’s reasoning, he would be.
Is Pfizer’s CEO out of line calling professionals who are critics of COVID vaccines “criminals”?
Several times throughout the course of the pandemic, Biden has said things to large audiences which contradict White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“You’re not gonna get COVID if you get these vaccinations,” Biden said.
However, Fauci has told the American people, “It is important to remember…that infections after vaccination are expected.”
BIDEN: “You’re not gonna get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
FAUCI: “Infections after vaccination are expected.”
— Young Americans for Liberty (@YALiberty) July 22, 2021
Now, in all likelihood, Bourla would not say Joe Biden is a criminal. He would say Uncle Joe’s just wrong. And Bourla said a lot of people are refusing to take the COVID vaccine for reasons which are largely not nefarious.
“There are two groups of people, alright, there are the people that — they are vaccinated [and] there are the people that are skeptical about the vaccination, and both of them are afraid,” he said.
“Those that are getting the vaccine, they are afraid of the disease and they believe, because people are not getting vaccinated, [the unvaccinated] are increasing the risk to them, they are increasing the exposure, so they are mad with them because they don’t get the vaccine.”
“Those that don’t get the vaccine, they’re afraid of the vaccine and they are mad with the people that are oppressing them to get it,” Bourla continued.
“Those I understand — they are very good people, they are decent people, but they have a fear and I understand it and they don’t want to take chances.”
“But there is a very small part of professionals, which they circulate, on purpose, misinformation so that they will mislead those that they have concerned. Those who are criminals. They’re not [just] bad people, they’re criminals. Because they literally have costed millions of lives.”
Millions of lives. Right.
There are plenty of top-notch medical researchers and professionals with legitimate questions about the catastrophic events of what is now going on two years, including the lockdowns, the mask mandates and, of course, the quickly developed vaccine.
But Bourla says professional dissenting “criminals” are profiting by pushing “conspiracy theory.”
“People want [to] make money — some of them — by playing with the emotions of these people [and] are creating a whole conspiracy theory and they are trying to basically to benefit and profit from this fear of the people. And this is who are the criminals.”
These are not criminals. They are individuals following the time-honored practices of science which, to sum it up as a sort of meme, is: “Here’s my hypothesis — change my mind.”
That’s the scientific practice of what’s called falsification.
That seems to have been missing in this entire COVID scenario. And it’s been evident in the unmitigated propaganda: the constant public service announcements, the droning announcements in stores, even the proclamations of electric highway signs.
And the censorship. Where there’s censorship, there is no science.
Besides being censored, people are losing their jobs, being subjected to unhealthy physical and mental health situations and suffering from divided friendships and families because of poor decision-making on the part of makers of public policy.
It’s due to a sickness that can be truly dangerous mainly to people who are aged and who have other physical problems, such as obesity, diabetes and more.
Maybe those at most risk can receive some reduction in the chance of getting COVID-19 from an experimental vaccine presented without legal liability on the part of companies like Bourla’s.
But confidence in a company like Pfizer is not increased when its CEO describes professionals who disagree as criminals.
For the second time in less than a week, parents are demanding answers after their children were given the incorrect of COVID vaccine.
The first incident, however, merely involved two children under 10 in Texas who were given adult doses of the vaccine on Oct. 31. This time, it involves over 100 children ages 5-to-11 in Loudoun County, Virginia, who were given diluted versions of the vaccine meant for those 12 and older, according to WRC-TV in Washington, D.C.
Despite the larger number of children who were affected this time, this still isn’t national news — in part because it doesn’t fit the narrative that the Biden administration is effectively rolling out a vaccine for children, and possibly because Google is trying to starve publications that don’t parrot the approved line when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines. (We’re trying to fight this at The Western Journal — and you can help us in our fight by subscribing here.)
On Wednesday, the Virginia Department of Health confirmed that Ted Pharmacy in Aldie, Virginia administered a diluted version of the inoculation formulated for 12- to 17-year-olds to 112 children younger than 11 on Nov. 3 and 4, according to Washington’s WTTG-TV.
On Nov. 5, state and federal authorities stepped in and ordered the pharmacy to stop administering the shots. The Virginia Department of Health later collected the remainder of the vaccines at the pharmacy.
Dasha Hermosilla’s daughter, 7-year-old Gryffin Fahle, is one of those affected. She told WRC that Gryffin was given a diluted dose of the vaccine for older kids, which comes with a purple cap. The dose for 5-11 comes with an orange cap to differentiate it.
The pharmacist said this was allowed. All it took was a Google search for Hermosilla to confirm that it wasn’t.
“Nothing says that you can change a purple to an orange,” Hermosilla told the station. “I had this pit in my stomach that, like, ‘what did they just do to my daughter?’”
She also criticized how the pharmacy treated parents after it happened.
Would you vaccinate your children against COVID-19?
“The way they have dealt with individuals is really, like, ‘Oh, it’s no big deal,’” Hermosilla said. “There are dozens and dozens of families out there that don’t even know that this is an issue.”
She wasn’t alone.
“Another mom sent News4 a screengrab of a Facebook conversation in which the pharmacy admitted to the mistake and apologized for the ‘inconvenience,’” WRC reported.
BREAKING NEWS: 112 children were administered the WRONG DOSE of COVID-19 vaccine at Ted Pharmacy in Loudoun County https://t.co/V1iq68N1yh
According to WRRC, the Loudoun County Health Department released an alert after the station reported Hermosilla’s case, acknowledging the incident.
The letter stated that the formulation used resulted in the affected children receiving “a dose of COVID19 vaccine that is potentially lower than recommended.”
“The pharmacy who administered the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccination to your child last week has been removed from both state and federal COVID-19 vaccination programs,” said Loudoun County Department of Health Director David Goodfriend said in the letter.
Virginia’s Board of Pharmacy, meanwhile, said it is “not at liberty to confirm nor deny whether an investigation into a possible violation of a law or regulation is or is not underway.”
“Should an investigation reveal there is probable cause to believe a law or regulation was broken an Informal Conference or a Formal Hearing before the board may be held for consideration of possible disciplinary action,” the board said in a statement.
“The Board’s findings of fact and resulting actions are contained in a Board Order that becomes a matter of public record available online on the Board of Pharmacy’s website under License Lookup and Recent Case Decisions.”
It’s unclear what this means for the children. As the county health department’s letter stated, the pharmacy’s action meant the children likely received a lower dose than they ordinarily would have.
Even still, Goodfriend’s letter said parents should first contact their pediatrician “for clinical judgment and decision making to determine the best course of action for each patient.”
The letter also urged parents to watch for the traditional COVID-19 vaccine side effects, such as fever, chills, fatigue or pain or swelling at the site of the injection.
“If any additional or more serious side effects occur or are prolonged, contact your primary care provider or pediatrician,” the letter warned.
Parents were then told to log the event in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance says parents can either restart the vaccine series in 21 days or wait for a second dose with the orange cap as scheduled.
In this case, the danger seems less pronounced than it was during a similar incident on Oct. 31 in Garland, Texas, where a 6- and a 7-year-old were both given adult doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine before a child formulation had even been approved.
“They asked us our kids’ ages, and so we told them 4 and 6, and they said ‘the 6-year-old can obviously get it if you’d like to go ahead and do that,’” Julian Gonzalez, father of the 6-year-old, told KTVT-TV in Fort Worth.
“Going off their confidence and what we read [on the form], we were all for it,” he said.
The next day, however, they were contacted by the Garland Health Department, alerting them that the vaccine hadn’t been approved for their son but that they’d received adult doses.
A dose for ages 5-to-11 is 10 micrograms while an adult version contains 30 micrograms. Gonzalez’s son experienced some side effects, while the mother of the 7-year-old said he was fine.
The case in Virginia is worrying for a different reason: It involved 112 children getting faulty vaccinations over a two-day period. And people wonder why some parents are skeptical about vaccinations?
As of Nov. 10, CDC data show only 595 individuals under the age of 17 have officially died of COVID-19 in the U.S. — and this says nothing about whether or not they had pre-existing risk factors. While every death is tragic, of course, 595 is a minuscule fraction of the more than 780,000 deaths attributed to the coronavirus in the country.
When looking at the cost-benefit analysis of vaccinating a child, that’s something that has to be taken into consideration.
Incidents like the one in Virginia may be rare. However, when it’s questionable whether the vaccination is necessary for this age group at all, it’s enough to give a mother or father pause.
A group of Virginia parents say they have secured enough signatures on petitions to remove the school board chair they say has endangered their children and placed woke politics ahead of education.
Fight for Schools filed the recall documents in Loudoun County Circuit Court on Tuesday, according to The Washington Post.
The filing said board President Brenda Sheridan broke open meetings laws by using closed Facebook groups as a way to discuss school business without the public being aware. Sheridan is also accused of violating the First Amendment rights of parents by limiting public comment at meetings.
The board chair is also accused of mishandling a sexual assault case in the schools in which a student who was accused of a sexual assault was shunted from one school to another, where he has been accused of another sexual assault.
“Today, we just filed 1200 signatures to remove the chairwoman of Loudoun County School Board, Brenda Sheridan,” Fight for Schools Executive Director Ian Prior told Fox News. “We decided that for the chairwoman and the vice-chairwoman, the buck stops with them, that we were going to draft new petitions … We were able to finish those off in 13 days.”
The group says it also has petitions to remove Board Vice-Chair Atoosa Reaser and board members Ian Serotkin and Denise Corbo, all with more than enough signatures to meet the legal requirement to trigger a recall. In Virginia, elected officials can be recalled if a petition to remove them receives a number of signatures equal to 10 percent of the votes cast in the previous election, Fox reported.
Have school boards become rubber stamps for liberals?
The intent to recall all of the board members was expressed during a public comment period at Tuesday’s board meeting.
“By the way, Denise, Brenda, Ian, Atoosa, we are well over 100% of required signatures for the petitions,” Megan Jenkins said, according to Fox News. “So I’m not going to encourage any of you to resign because when you are recalled and removed from office, it will be much more satisfying. See you in court.”
“I have the privilege of telling you that we are finished collecting signatures for your removal,” parent Jessica Mendez said during the meeting.
“I used to think that there was no point in speaking at these meetings,” Mendez said. “There was no point in trying to have a voice because you never seem to listen, anyway. But I had it all wrong. It wasn’t you who needed to hear our voices. It was all those parents, grandparents and neighbors listening at home, horrified at your actions or inactions. They were the ones who needed to hear us, and they were the ones who sign petitions, see you in court.”
“For six months, Fight for Schools has been out collecting signatures in the heat, the cold, the rain and even hail,” Prior said on Monday. “To get 20,000 signatures during that time is a testament to the dedication of our volunteers and an engaged community that wants to see a change on its school board.”
“We are looking forward to the next steps and replacing school board members that are political servants with non-partisan public servants who will put the focus back on excellence in education,” he said.
Sheridan issued a statement in reply.
“My election was a mandate from those who came to the polls — three times — to choose me as their representative. Tuesday’s filing is the result of a fraction of those citizens signing a petition, whether they voted or not,” she said, according to the Post.
But Prior said change is necessary.
“From violating open meetings law to ignoring the school board’s code of conduct to neglecting to keep our children safe, all for her activist causes, Sheridan has been nothing short of a disaster,” Prior said, the Post reported.
“Let this serve as a message to the rest of the board and Superintendent Ziegler,” he said. “We’re still here, and we’re not going anywhere.”
Procedurally, if recall cases go to trial, a judge or a jury rules on the removal of a board member. The board then gets 45 days to appoint an interim replacement and 15 days to schedule a special election, according to Fox.
In addition to issues over student safety, parents have objected to the district embracing Critical Race Theory, as explained Tuesday night by parent Erin Dunbar, who accused the board of using tax dollars to teach “critical theory of the Marxist philosophy,” Fox reported.
“You have activist teachers using to indoctrinate their kids who are at the mercy of their authority,” she said. “That is child abuse. And you have no right to brainwash children into believing that their skin color determines their purpose.”
Senator Cortez Masto has close relationship with nonprofit that says ‘young people need to know’ critical race theory
Nevada Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto praised a liberal nonprofit that has called to defund police and teach critical race theory in public schools.
On Nov. 3, Cortez Masto said she was “so glad” to speak at Battle Born Progress’s annual fundraising event, lauding the liberal group as “incredible advocates for our state.” The self-described “public relations firm of the progressive community in Nevada,” Battle Born Progress has taken a number of radical positions on hot-button issues, including the movements to defund police and teach critical race theory in K-12 classrooms.
In July 2020, Battle Born Progress Called to “save money by defunding” the state’s police presence in schools, adding that “police officers in schools help foster the school-to-prison pipeline.” Roughly one year later, executive director Annette Magnus argued during a Battle Born Progress virtual event that Nevada “should be teaching” critical race theory in public schools because “young people need to know this information.”
Cortez Masto’s close relationship with Battle Born Progress—less than one week after her fundraising appearance, the Democrat held a tele-townhall with the group—could become a political liability as she enters a difficult reelection battle in 2022. According to a 2020 Las Vegas Review-Journal poll, nearly two-thirds of Nevadans oppose cuts to police department funding. In June, meanwhile, a Reno-based school district ditched its plan to enact a “social justice curriculum” for elementary school students amid backlash from local parents.
Neither Cortez Masto nor Battle Born Progress returned requests for comment.
Battle Born Progress advocated critical race theory during an August virtual conversation with No Racism in Schools cofounders Akiko Cooks and Jshauntae Marshall. After Cooks noted she “absolutely” supports critical race theory but is not “yet” focused on including the framework in public school curricula, Magnus said she “like[s] the ‘yet’ part, because that’s exactly right.”
“I mean, eventually, yes, we should be teaching that,” Magnus said. “Young people need to know this information. I would love to have known that information.”
Cooks, whom Magnus said she is “very close” with, is also tied to the defund police movement. According to her LinkedIn, she works as an organizer for Mass Liberation Project NV, which aims to “abolish the criminal legal system as we know it.” The group in 2020 disseminated petitions to defund the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and has likened policing to “terrorism.”
In addition to Battle Born Progress’s call to teach critical race theory in public schools, the group has attacked Nevada parents who oppose the controversial curriculum. In August, the group tweeted a photo of a mother who spoke against critical race theory at her local school board meeting, calling the woman “another ‘Karen'” who holds “conspiracy-laden beliefs.”
Battle Born Progress has received tens of thousands of dollars in funding from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a George Soros-funded group that funnels millions of dollars to liberal causes but does not disclose its donors. According to the Sixteen Thirty Fund’s IRS filings, the group gave nearly $6,000 to Battle Born Progress in 2017 and an additional $90,000 to the Nevada nonprofit in 2018.
Cortez Masto has condemned so-called dark money groups like the Sixteen Thirty Fund. In a September press release, she stressed the need to “put power back in the hands of the public” by “getting dark money out of politics.”
Cortez Masto joined the Senate in 2017 after she defeated Republican challenger Joe Heck by less than 3 points. A slew of Republicans have entered the race to unseat her in 2022, including former state attorney general Adam Laxalt and Army veteran Sam Brown.
COLORADO SPRINGS — They admitted it. Now they think they can get away with it.
Three weeks ago, I reported to you on the appalling case of sixth grade student Rylee M., who was pressured by teachers at Chinook Trail Middle School to seal her mask to her face with thick blue painter’s tape. Another schoolmate came forward to describe how those teachers would patrol their classrooms for violators while twirling the tape rolls around their wrists.
Skeptics accused the children of manufacturing the story and of voluntarily putting the tape on themselves. Others, including the Colorado Springs Police Department school resource officer stationed at Chinook Trail, baselessly dismissed the incident as a prank committed by a teacher in “jest.” Gaslighters in the school district and their supporters misleadingly denied that teachers applied the tape directly to victims’ faces — something Rylee and her mom never alleged. By mischaracterizing the actual allegations, public school propagandists deflected attention from the brazen abuse of authority exercised by educators who issued de facto ultimatums that children comply with their directive to use the tape handed to them. Or else.
On Monday, after the district’s three-week-long internal investigation, Chinook Trail Middle School principal Tom Andrew confirmed in a meeting with Rylee’s mom, Stephanie M., that teachers had indeed “directed students to affix a mask to their face with tape” — a cruel measure that only sadists, not sane public health advocates, could embrace. Moreover, the unfazed principal blandly acknowledged, “Yes,” the “students thought they were compelled to follow through” on the teachers’ “requests” (to choke themselves off).
“In short,” the principal told Rylee’s mom in his sing-song scripted voice, “district policy and procedures were broken,” “trust and respect” were “broken,” and “poor decisions” were made. Now, the principal told Stephanie M., it’s time “to move this forward” after “admitting our mistake” and “trust” the administration. The abusers will remain in the classroom with vulnerable 11- and 12-year-olds; any disciplinary measures will be kept “confidential”; and brave Rylee, who has been harassed over the incident, will now be enrolled in online school to keep her safe from the mask bondage bullies.
“It was never our intent,” the anonymous group of “Team 642” tape torturers wrote in a crappy little note to parents handed out Monday night at a meeting closed to the public, “to cause anxiety, fear, confusion, or physical or emotional harm.” Never mind that these petty tyrants wrought all of the above and will be shielded from any transparent punishment. “We look forward to returning to normal and continuing along this learning journey with your family,” the teachers (none of whom have reached out to Rylee or her mom directly) cheerily chirped.
Elitist privilege means always pretending to say you’re sorry without ever suffering consequences for wrongdoing.
Darcy Schoening, parent advocate and town of Monument Board of Trustees member, agrees. She believes “the teachers responsible for this behavior should be fired. Their names should be released. Parents have the right to know WHO is abusing their kids. Protecting the teachers’ identities and disciplinary actions is a slap in the face to parents.”
“It’s sickening to me,” Stephanie lamented as the principal echoed the educrats’ desire to get back out of the public spotlight and “resume normalcy.” She’s not going to let it drop. “I am not going to be quiet,” the work-at-home mom of three young daughters told KVOR-AM 740 radio talk show host Richard Randall this week. “Plenty of parents are willing to step up for their kids.” No doubt about it. The Election Day revolt against K-12 control freaks just demonstrated that parents across the country from Loudoun County, Virginia, to El Paso County, Colorado, to Los Angeles County, California, will not let COVID-era abnormalities hijack their children’s health and freedom.
With Justice Department goons and local cops treating parents protesting at school board meetings like criminals, we know we can’t rely on law enforcement to side with sovereignty-defenders over the State. Remember: Stephanie M. immediately contacted the Colorado Springs Police Department to report the abuse as soon as her daughter told her what happened. They blew her off. Instead, according to creepy public record files I obtained last week, at least three members of the CSPD’s Metropolitan Vice, Narcotics and Intelligence Division/Strategic Information Center passed around my Twitter and Gab posts about Rylee’s case to several CSPD command staff and other individuals whose names were redacted. A CSPD “Intelligence Unit” detective made note of my “2 million (yes, million) Twitter followers” (so what?), and a sergeant falsely claimed I was aware of protest plans at the school (I heard no such information until after administrators shut down the school on Oct. 25 amid an international maelstrom of public scrutiny and press coverage).
It’s getting impossible to “back the blue” when they stand down as antifa and Black Lives Matter attack you for defending law and order, kneel before the altar of George Floyd, enforce junk-science-based COVID-19 tyranny lining the pockets of Big Pharma and Big Government, and spy on you for standing up for parents fighting educational malpractice. Teach your children well.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has vetoed a legislative package that would have granted tax credits for contributions to scholarship programs that could help low-income students to have a private school education they may not have otherwise been able to afford.
Collectively, the Senate Bills 687 and 688 and House Bills 5404 and 5405 would create Michigan Opportunity Scholarship Accounts that could be used by families to cover education expenses, including those related to non-public schools, courses, and programs. Michigan residents and businesses who donate to the scholarship accounts would receive a state tax credit equal to the value of their contribution.
Once established, the scholarships would prioritize students most in need, including those receiving free and reduced lunch, those living in foster care, and those with disabilities.
Whitmer, a Democrat, promised last month to veto the Republican-sponsored school choice bills, which the Democratic minority in the state legislature argue would have steered public money into private education.
“Simply put, our schools cannot provide the high-quality education our kids deserve if we turn private schools into tax shelters for the wealthy,” Whitmer said in her Nov. 5 veto message. “The movement to privatize education in this state has been a catastrophic failure, causing Michigan students to fall behind the rest of the nation.”
The Republicans decried the veto, saying that their plan was meant to help students get better educational outcomes after more than a year of school closures and the resulting stress, anxiety, and learning loss.
“Instead of empowering parents to give students—especially students with special needs or from underserved communities—better opportunities to learn and succeed, the governor has again rejected progress for the same old, tired, and failing approach to education, because she is beholden to the teachers’ unions and their generous donations,” said Republican state Sen. Lana Theis, who chairs the Michigan Senate Education Committee, said in a statement following the veto.
The Michigan Education Association (MEA), the state’s largest public sector union representing about 120,000 public school employees, applauded Whitmer’s decision. MEA President Paula Herbart criticized the Republican scholarship plan, characterizing it as an “unconstitutional school voucher.”
Herbart claimed that the plan would only benefit wealthy donors like Betsy DeVos, a Michigan-born billionaire whose tenure as the U.S. Secretary of Education was marked by increased federal support for charter and private schools.
“Michigan voters have resoundingly opposed attempts by mega-donors like Betsy DeVos to enact voucher schemes in our state,” Herbart said. “We value our neighborhood public schools and know that funneling money to private schools does nothing to provide equal opportunity for Michigan students.”
If a new study coming out of Japan is to be believed, many countries across the world may need to change their strategies for combatting COVID-19.
A team of researchers from Harvard University in Massachusetts, Gakushuin University in Tokyo and Shizuoka University in Shizuoka compared Japanese municipalities that closed down their school systems in spring of 2020 to those that did not, according to study published in Nature Medicine.
The team of researchers conducted the study by examining 847 municipalities in Tokyo and Osaka.
As it turns out, the shutdown of schools did not prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus during the first wave of the pandemic, their study found.
In fact, the number of COVID cases per 100,000 people between the two groups of municipalities remained exactly the same, regardless of whether or not schools were shut down.
“We do not find any evidence that school closures in Japan reduced the spread of COVID-19,” one of the study’s authors wrote.
“Our null results suggest that policies on school closures should be re-examined given the potential negative consequences for children and parents.”
“School closures reduce children’s learning opportunities, negatively affect their physical and mental development and make it difficult for their parents to leave for work in the daytime,” co-researcher Dr Kentaro Fukumoto said, according to the Daily Mail UK.
“The central government should carefully consider whether to ask schools to close in the future.”
Should school shutdowns still be used to combat COVID?
This news may come as a shock to many public health experts around the world.
This includes those in the U.S., many of whom have repeatedly called for school shutdowns since the COVID pandemic began.
The Center for Disease Control even went as far as to create a guide for “considerations for school closures” as a method for stemming the spread of COVID.
While the plan did advise against closing schools “early in the spread of a disease,” it did maintain that “waiting to enact school closures until at the correct time in the epidemic” would prove helpful in slowing COVID-19’s spread.
NIAID Director Anthony Fauci has also supported the closure of schools in the past.
In July of 2020, Fauci said that “It’s been shown that children from 10 to 19 can transmit the virus to adults as well as adults can,” according to CNBC.
While acknowledging that keeping students at home can create “negative consequences,” Fauci further said that schools should nevertheless close down at certain times.
“When you get to the real hot zones, I think you’re going to have to take a really good look and examine the advisability or not,” Fauci said.
“What likely would happen is that you would have parents that don’t want to send their children to school or you’re going to have teachers that not going to want to be there.”
Some Pennsylvania students just got a lesson in how discrimination really operates in American public schools.
A middle school used a video broadcast during school announcements to invite kids interested in flying drones to attend a weekend camp.
There was just one catch — and parents of white students probably weren’t happy to hear about it.
As National Review reported Monday, the Upper Merion Area Middle School’s announcement for the camp, which took place on Saturday, opened with a woman brimming with enthusiasm, followed by video of drone activities pretty much guaranteed to pique the interest of any adolescent.
Besides it being limited in size — there were only 24 slots available — the program was extremely limited in who its target audience was:
“Here’s the thing,” the woman said. “It is a Black Student Union-sponsored event, so, in order to participate, 1: You must have a signed permission slip to claim your seat.
“Secondly, you must be black, African-American, a person of color in order to participate.”
Check out the video here. The drone stuff is undeniably cool. The uncool, undeniably ugly part comes at the end:
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There it is — an actual example of literal “systemic racism” that progressives claim, ludicrously, is everywhere. Except in this case, it’s openly biased against white people.
But Upper Merion Area School District Superintendent John Toleno evidently doesn’t see a problem.
In an email to The Western Journal on Tuesday (a collection of bubbly boilerplate that was apparently being sent for PR purposes to any news organization that raised questions), Toleno noted that the program was simply part of the district’s “ongoing efforts over the past 8 years to give opportunities to groups who are underrepresented in STEM fields with a primary focus on students of Color and students who identify as female. This has been a national focus in the STEM community.”
The modern education mindset is on full display in those few words: jargon like “groups” who are underrepresented”; the obsequious capitalization of the “c” in “Color”; being careful not to say “girls,” just “students who identify as female.”
Walking on eggshells at the same time must be a tough way to live.
A couple of comments on Facebook communicated the reactions of what were doubtless many, many more people who heard about the video:
One commenter wrote: “This is wrong on so many levels and not at all what I want for my children, and that’s why I’m homeschooling now and by the grace of God, my children will never step foot in another public school — they undo and undermine everything my husband and I teach them.
“Maybe white people should take to the streets and start burning communities down. 😏 I jest, obviously. But this is blatant racism on its face.”
Do you think this is racism against white people?
There aren’t too many other ways to see it. (Liberals love to claim racism over differences of opinion. Don’t expect them to see it where it actually is.)
In his email, Superintendent Toleno stressed that the school district has drone programs open to all students throughout the year. He even noted that this particular program would have accepted white students if not enough black students were interested.
“Please be further advised that if we didn’t get to our 24 student limit with African American students as stipulated in the grant we wrote and were awarded, we would have absolutely opened this up to our entire middle school student population to fill the 24 student seats,” he wrote.
How very gracious. (The email didn’t come out and say whether all of the slots were filled at the event, but it sounds like they were.)
It’s worth noting here that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Upper Merion area, in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, is about 72 percent white, about 19 percent Asian, and 6 percent black.
Assuming the school district’s demographics are similar, the overwhelming majority of students who watched that really cool video about drones were told right to their faces that there was a party going on and they weren’t invited.
As ugly as it sounds, there’s no other way to put it: They’re not of the favored race these days.
That isn’t the United States as most Americans of any race understand the country. It’s not the United States the civil rights movement of the 1960s fought for, with Martin Luther King Jr.’s dreams about content of character being more important than skin color.
And it’s not what parents want for their children, as evidenced by the critical role of public education in last week’s election results in Virginia.
“How do you think these schoolchildren have felt for the last year?”
Speaking in Zephyrhills on Monday, Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis took aim at both Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers labor union in America, as well as Dr. Anthony Fauci. He pointed out that Weingarten, who had favored keeping schools closed through much of the pandemic, had been found maskless recently, but protested she did so because it was too hard to communicate while wearing a mask. DeSantis fired, “Well, how do you think these schoolchildren have felt for the last year?”
Regarding Fauci, DeSantis asserted, “I do think just the lack of just leveling with the public, I think it’s been very detrimental … I think you’re gonna see people have really, really serious misgivings the next time St. Fauci comes down the pike and says something.”
Speaking of mask mandates for schoolchildren, DeSantis said, “I think the smiles matter, and particularly the young kids. You will actually have school districts that will say, ‘We are relieving mask mandate for high schoolers but we’re keeping them on those elementary.” First of all, I don’t think you should have a mask mandate, period, but the elementary are the ones that need to be able to see the interaction more than anything, cause they’re learning to speak and read and do all that stuff.”
“And it’s absolutely critical. And don’t tell me it doesn’t make a difference,” he continued. DeSantis referenced Weingarten, who had said, “We took them off as people were having a hard time hearing us,” snapping, “Heck, this head of the teachers union who tried to keep the schools closed all last year; she was found maskless, and she said, I took it off because it was too hard to understand each other wearing the mask.”
He fired, “Well, how do you think these schoolchildren have felt for the last year?”
Focus on ‘genetically engineered,’ not on ‘accidental leak’
Let me just come out and say it: COVID-19 was engineered by China in cooperation with the democrats, deep state, elites of the world, etc. to oust Trump and take over and destroy the USA [US Patriot].
The recently declassified U.S. intelligence community report on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 muddies the water.
There had been months of open-source reporting from scientists around the world speculating that the likely origins of the virus was the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), not the so-called zoonotic disease theory (for example, a naturally-occurring virus jumped from an animal—supposedly a bat in a Wuhan “wet market”—to a human) that has been widely propagated by the state-run Chinese media, the highly politicized World Health Organization, and medical trade journals like The Lancet, and Western media anxious to divert attention from China.
Even a U.S. government agency, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, had concluded in a classified report in May 2020 “that the hypothesis claiming the virus leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan is plausible and deserves further investigation.”
But on Oct. 29, an article in The Wall Street Journal quoted from a declassified intelligence report that made this incredible claim: “Researchers at a Wuhan, China, laboratory were probably unaware of the existence of the virus that causes Covid-19 before the pandemic began in late 2019, and if it leaked from the lab, it was likely the result of an accident not connected to deliberate genetic engineering.” Incredible, as in not believable at all!
Here is one item that was conveniently dropped down the memory hole in compiling that “intelligence report” and the Oct. 29 WSJ story that torpedoes the contention that the zoonotic theory is still possible. Back in June on its own pages, The WSJ reported that the CGG-CGG amino acid sequence found in the virus is manmade and can only have been inserted through gain-of-function research, as the CGG-CGG sequence is not found in nature.
How did the U.S. intelligence community sidestep that inconvenient truth in concluding that “U.S. government analysts cannot determine whether the global pandemic emerged when the virus passed to humans from an animal, or from a laboratory accident”? Did the 18 intelligence agencies that reviewed the final report neglect to review that study because the story reporting it was behind a paywall and not readily accessible?
A second item conveniently forgotten was the study completed by British professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sorensen in May 2021, which claimed “that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a Wuhan lab.” The two scientists also claimed to have first-hand evidence of Chinese “retro-engineering” in hand for over a year, but were ignored by the scientific community and others. Another stake in the heart of the zoonotic theory!
Workers place barriers outside the closed Huanan Seafood wholesale market during a visit by members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team, investigating the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China’s central Hubei Province on Jan. 31, 2021. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
The final inconvenient truth is from The Oxford Student, which provided this final stake in the heart of the zoonotic theory: “Research by Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Fellow, Professor David Macdonald, has shown that neither bats nor pangolins were sold at Wuhan’s wet markets between May 2017 and November 2019.”
To summarize:
The Oct. 29 WSJ article quoted a U.S. intel community report that claimed the following: a) that researchers at the WIV were “probably unaware” of the virus before “patient zero” contracted it, and b) the virus was not “connected to deliberate genetic engineering.”
The virus contains a CGG-CGG sequence not found in nature, ergo it was genetically engineered.
Evidence of Chinese virus “retro-engineering” has been suppressed for well over a year.
There were no bats or pangolins sold in the Wuhan wet markets between May 2017 and November 2019.
Conclusion: The zoonotic theory is a farce and complete misdirection.
Secondary conclusion: Open-source research-derived evidence trumps classified obfuscation by the U.S. intelligence community.
No facts have ever been presented by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that “patient zero” was anywhere other than in Wuhan city, Hubei Province. In fact, all clinical evidence gathered to date points directly to Wuhan as ground zero for the outbreak. The only question is whether the outbreak was mendacious and accidental, or mendacious and purposeful, because the CCP lies have persisted regardless of which is correct. Regardless of which is true, the virus was human-engineered through gain-of-function research.
The U.S. intel community cannot conclude which alternative is correct, either, and apparently want us to believe a theory that the lab researchers who handled virus-contaminated material were simply unaware of the potential dangers, and blithely went about their jobs in a biosafety level 4 laboratory without taking appropriate personal precautions. Who truly believes that fantasy?
Focusing on “accidental release” rather than the virus origin itself is a poor attempt to exonerate the CCP. Even though that U.S. intel community report concluded that almost certainly the virus originated in Wuhan, never mind pressing the CCP for accountability for that bio-engineered virus that is still destroying the world economy and the lives of many innocents around the world. If the virus had not been bio-engineered in the first place, whether it was “leaked” purposely or accidentally would be irrelevant because the ensuing damage would not have occurred.
The state-run Chinese media tell us everything we need to know about the true origins of the virus. They know perfectly well that the virus was engineered, with the WIV being its last port of call before it was released into the human population. Denial and blame-shifting, including by Xi Jinping and his wolf warrior diplomats, mask that reality as they seek to avoid the financial pain that is coming when world consensus develops that restitution from the Chinese regime for the damages inflicted by the CCP virus is warranted and lawful.
Police officers wearing masks walk as the CCTV Building (left, back), the headquarters for the Chinese regime’s mouthpiece broadcaster, is seen in Beijing on May 19, 2020. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images)
And denial and blame-shifting about the virus origins has continued unabated in Chinese state-run media from early 2020 to the present day. Here are a few recent headlines:
“Objective, scientific, responsible attitude should be adopted for COVID-19 origins tracing: Chinese FM [Foreign Ministry]”—People’s Daily
“China slams ‘declassified assessment on COVID-19 origins’ released by U.S.”—Xinhua
“Stop scapegoating China! Chinese FM rejects US intelligence-led origins-tracing report”—Global Times
Conclusion
When all is said and done, and when all the CCP propaganda and denials are deconstructed, the facts remain—the communist Chinese regime and its media mouthpieces know that the human-engineered SARS-CoV-2 virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Biosafety Level 4 laboratory. And the CCP knows that the world will soon be knocking on its door, demanding restitution. Hence its continuing complete denials in the face of all evidence to the contrary, even when a U.S. intelligence community report provides them with a little bit of shade.
“Sesame Street” has become a propaganda arm of the Biden regime, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas charged Saturday.
On Saturday, the Twitter account of the “Sesame Street” character Big Bird tweeted a message telling children to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.
“I got the COVID-19 vaccine today! My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy. Ms. @EricaRHill even said I’ve been getting vaccines since I was a little bird. I had no idea!” the tweet read, referring to CNN journalist Erica Hill, who on Saturday hosted an event with Big Bird called “The ABCs of COVID Vaccines.”
I got the COVID-19 vaccine today! My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy.
Ms. @EricaRHill even said I’ve been getting vaccines since I was a little bird. I had no idea!
“Government propaganda … for your 5 year old!” he tweeted.
Has everything become political these days?
The Food and Drug Administration late last month gave Emergency Use Authorization for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to be given to children between the ages of 5 and 11.
Newsmax host Steve Cortes joined in with his criticism of the “Sesame Street” edorsement.
“This kind of propaganda is actually evil. Your children are not statistically at risk, and should not be pressured into a brand new treatment. Do Not Comply!” he tweeted.
This kind of propaganda is actually evil.
Your children are not statistically at risk, and should not be pressured into a brand new treatment.
Erin Gauch, of Middletown, Rhode Island, said concerns over side effects make her pause, according to The New York Times.
“I’m looking at a 9-year-old, and if I make a bad decision and he ends up with some debilitating side effects or lifelong adverse reaction, I don’t think I could live with that,” she said.
“If we ultimately decide not to get my youngest vaccinated right now, I guess I’ll be subjected to mommy shaming, but I’ll just have to deal with it,” Gauch said.
According to a report from Fox News on Thursday, the University of North Carolina Wilmington paid “The 1619 Project” writer and impresario Nikole Hannah-Jones over $16,500 to speak at a 55-minute event at the school this week.
“Nikole Hannah-Jones in Conversation,” which took place Tuesday, was part of the school’s “Writers Week.” On the university’s events page, it’s described as the “Department of Creative Writing’s annual celebration of the written word” where “authors, editors, students, faculty and the community join in discussions of literary craft and current issues of the profession.”
Hannah-Jones was the keynote speaker for the week. It shouldn’t be surprising that the rest of the speakers also seemed to skew left; of the other participants I knew, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino and “The House on Mango Street” author Sandra Cisneros were both identifiably liberal. Not that I expected for there to be a panel discussion of Ayn Rand’s work, but it gives one a general idea of what “Writers Week” is about.
It’s Hannah-Jones’ contract for the event that’s drawing some attention, however — particularly the reported $16,570 price tag.
The university also reportedly paid for her airfare, meals, transportation, and accommodations for two nights.
Just got to Wilmington, NC, for @UNCWilmington Writers Week, checked into my room, and I have to say, y’all know how to treat a gal. 😍 🥃 pic.twitter.com/rqDfwn4uWT
“The event consisted of a 40-minute speech from Hannah-Jones and a 15-minute Q&A period,” Fox News reported.
Is critical race theory an issue in America’s schools?
“The contract lists a 15-minute meet and greet with students, but is crossed out in the signed version of the contract.”
This, in other words, puts the event at 55 minutes — over a whopping $300 a minute for someone to peddle the bible of critical race theory, a left-wing school of thought that states America and Western societies are founded on systemic racism.
Because, make no mistake, that’s what Jones’ “1619 Project” is. In the introduction to the project, published in The New York Times, 1619 should be considered “the country’s very origin” because that’s when the first slaves arrived in America.
“Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day,” the introduction said.
“The seeds of all that were planted long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as our founders formally declared independence from Britain.”
Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize in 2o2o for her introductory essay to the project, although historians noted it was riddled with errors. Beyond the obvious lie of “reframing” our founding to 1619 for narrative reasons, several prominent historians publicly called out the Times and Jones for claims like the American Revolution was actually fought so Americans could keep their slaves.
“These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing,’” read the December 2019 letter, signed by five prominent historians — including two Pulitzer Prize winners.
“They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology. Dismissal of objections on racial grounds — that they are the objections of only ‘white historians’ — has affirmed that displacement.”
But never mind that. This is all about the narrative. For Hannah-Jones, that narrative could be summed up best with this delightfully race-baiting quote she gave in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes in 2019.
When asked if America could change its racial trajectory, Hannah-Jones said: “Whiteness cannot exist without blackness, so until white people are willing to give up whiteness, you will never see an end, really, to racism that is built on antiblackness, and I don’t have hope for that. It is really the oldest American value, and it continues to be so.”
Last November, Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” was reportedly paid $20,000 by the University of Michigan for an hour-long virtual discussion via Zoom, according to Campus Reform.
That event, the University of Michigan said, was paid for out of the university’s general fund, which “comes from a variety of sources, including student tuition and fees, state appropriations and costs recovered from sponsored research activities.”
In the case of Hannah-Jones, UNC Wilmington told Fox News the money was covered by a “donor-supported fund managed by the department.”
Either way, it’s a nice hustle to have, being so oppressed. Of course, one is left to wonder how many economically oppressed students at these woke institutions might have benefited from that money being used on lowering tuition instead.
An Indianapolis-based public school educator and education journalist has gone viral on social media after he pushed back on the narrative that critical race theory (CRT) isn’t being taught in schools, warning concerned parents to not be deceived and to “keep looking” for its presence.
“When we tell you that our schools aren’t teaching critical race theory, that it’s nowhere in our standards, that’s misdirection,” Tony Kinnett said Tuesday in a video he shared to Twitter. He explained that he works as a science coach and administrator at Indianapolis Public Schools, Indiana’s largest school district that serves about 23,000 students.
“I’m in dozens of classrooms a week, so I see exactly what we’re teaching our students,” Kinnett said, noting that while the schools “don’t have the quotes and theories as state standards,” the teachers are incorporating the concepts of CRT into their teaching of a variety of subjects.
“We tell our teachers to treat students differently based on color; we tell our students that every problem is a result of ‘white men’ and that ‘Everything Western Civilization built is racist,’ ‘Capitalism is a tool of white supremacy,’” he continued. “Those are straight out of Kimberle Crenshaw’s main points verbatim in ‘Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement.’ This is in math, history, science, English, the arts, and it’s not slowing down.”
In June 2020, amid the nationwide unrest sparked by the death of George Floyd, the IPS adopted a racial equity resolution (pdf) to identify and correct practices and policies that may perpetuate racism, which is defined as “a white supremacy system” in which those considered white “oppress” those who are not. It also partly attributed the student achievement gaps to the district’s history of “privileging the prejudice of white parents over the interests of black and brown students.”
“If students of color have lower reading scores, it’s because of inequity,” Kinnett asserted. “Therefore, we take from the white students and give to the colored students. That’s Richard Delgado, straight out of ‘CRT: An Introduction.’”
“Parents, when we tell you critical race theory isn’t taught in our schools, we’re lying, keep looking,” he said at the end of the video.
Kinnett posted along the video screenshots of an email, which appears to show the IPS instructing school principals to tell parents and community members that CRT is not taught in their schools. He also posted slides that are allegedly used in the ISP, including one that explains some of the tenets of CRT.
Kinnett’s call to action comes as controversies around K–12 education, including the teaching of CRT and COVID-19 restrictions on campus, took center stage in many of the state- and local-level elections across the country. In Virginia’s gubernatorial race, Republican Glenn Youngkin, running on a “Parents Matter” platform, defeated former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe who said parents shouldn’t tell schools what to teach. In Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and other blue states, school board seats are claimed by candidates who oppose the Marxist ideological indoctrination and support parents’ right to make medical decisions for their kids.
The Indianapolis Public Schools didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
New allegations come to light after explosive bathroom rape case
Virginia’s Loudoun County school district is being rocked by sexual misconduct allegations, with three cases surfacing in recent days.
Loudoun County police on Thursday charged high school counselor Ann Barrett, who allegedly had an inappropriate relationship with an underage student from 2013 to 2015. Loudoun County Public Schools placed Barrett on leave in May after the case surfaced. The counselor turned herself in and was later released on bond.
Police are also investigating a boy at Harmony Middle School who allegedly groped male classmates last week in a hallway.
And on Tuesday, the Daily Mailreported that the 15-year-old “gender-fluid” high schooler who last month was found guilty of raping a classmate in a school bathroom sent nude photos of himself to a girl when he was in the fifth grade. The girl’s parents decided not to seek charges against the boy as long as the school district separated him from their daughter.
Sex crimes in Loudoun County Public Schools gained national attention last month when the Daily Wire reported on that 15-year-old’s two sexual assault cases. In May, the student raped a female peer in a bathroom. District superintendent Scott Ziegler claimed he was not aware of any sexual assault allegations during a June school board meeting, but internal emails showed that he knew of the rape the day it occurred. The perpetrator was transferred to another district high school while investigators processed DNA evidence against him. Last month, he allegedly sexually assaulted another student in a classroom at that high school.
Sexual assaults and other incidents in schools have driven concerns among parents that their children’s safety is being jeopardized by school officials who play politics, Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, told the Washington Free Beacon.
“I think there’s a real sense among parents right now that districts are neglecting basic things like student safety in favor of advancing a political agenda,” Neily said. “And you don’t have to have a letter by your name to be upset by that. It’s a really bad look for people, and voters are unhappy.”
Education issues turned out Virginia voters for Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, who on Tuesday defeated Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe. Youngkin campaigned on greater parental involvement in public education, and McAuliffe tumbled in the polls late in the race after a gaffe during a debate in which he said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” The Republican won by a 2-point margin, just one year after President Joe Biden took the state by 10 points.
Students from at least 20 Loudoun County high schools staged a walkout last week to protest the district’s handling of sexual assault cases. More than 2,500 students participated, the WashingtonPostreported, and some students in nearby Arlington Public Schools participated in solidarity.
Neily said it should not be the responsibility of students to hold school officials accountable for their safety.
“It shouldn’t be incumbent on students to flag this,” Neily said. “What are the priorities of the Loudoun County School Board? What are you spending your time and finite resources on? Because if it’s not keeping children safe, people need to be held accountable.”
Children’s natural defenses against the SARS-CoV-2 virus have largely spared them and I ask, why would we seek to bypass these defenses and threaten them?
Why vaccinate our children for this mild and typically non-consequential virus when they bring protective innate immunity towards SARS-VoV-2, other coronaviruses, and other respiratory viruses? Why push to vaccinate our children who may well be immune due to prior exposure (asymptomatic or mild illness) and cross-reactivity/cross-protection from other coronavirus (common colds)?
Many children are likely COVID-recovered and as such are immune, so why not consider assessing their immune status? Between their young age and robust innate immunity and this possibility of being COVID-recovered, it should be hands-off regarding the vaccine.
Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche writes that children’s innate immunity “normally/ naturally largely protects them and provides a kind of herd immunity in that it dilutes infectious CoV [coronavirus] pressure at the level of the population, whereas mass vaccination turns them into shedders of more infectious variants. Children/ youngsters who get the disease mostly develop mild to moderate disease and as a result continue to contribute to herd immunity by developing broad and long-lived immunity.”
This is a potentially very serious issue, for the vaccine offers children no opportunity for benefit and only potential for harms. We could end up harming thousands of our children with these vaccines, for which there’s no proper medium or long-term safety data. Below are several studies that help make the case that children must be considered “already vaccinated” and must not be touched by these vaccines.
Different Immune Response
A Yale and Albert Einstein College of Medicine report on Sept. 18, 2020, in the journal Science Translational Medicine indicates that children and adults display different immune system responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection, which helps in understating why they have far less illness or mortality from COVID-19.
“Since the earliest days of the COVID-19 outbreak, scientists have observed that children infected with the virus tend to fare much better than adults,” stated a Yale news article about the study.
Researchers reported that “levels of two immune system molecules—interleukin 17A (IL-17A), which helps mobilize immune system response during early infection, and interferon gamma (INF-g), which combats viral replication—were strongly linked to the age of the patients. The younger the patient, the higher the levels of IL-17A and INF-g, the analysis showed. These two molecules are part of the innate immune system, a more primitive, non-specific type of response activated early after infection.”
Different Physiology
The virus uses the ACE2 receptor to gain entry to the host cell, and the ACE2 receptor has less presence in the lining of the nose in young children (potentially also in upper respiratory airways); this partly explains why children are less likely to be infected in the first place, or spread it to other children or adults, or even get severely ill—the biological molecular apparatus is simply not there in the nasal cavity of children as reported eloquently by researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston.
By bypassing this natural protection and entering the shoulder deltoid muscle, the vaccine, its mRNA and lipid nanoparticle content, and generated spike protein could be released into the blood circulation and could then damage the lining of the blood vessels and cause severe allergic reactions (e.g. Varga et al. 2020 in The Lancet, Nuovo et al. 2021 in the Annals of Diagnostic Pathology, Ogata et al. 2021 in Clinical Infectious Diseases, and Lei et al. 2021 in Circulation Research).
Fewer Deaths from COVID-19 Compared to Other Common Causes
Statistician William Briggs looked at the rationale for vaccinating children based on their risk of death from COVID-19. He notes 542 children aged 0–17 have died (crude rate of 0.00007 per 100; 132 under 1 years old) since January 2020 with a diagnosis of COVID-19 linked to their death, according to CDC data up to Oct. 22. This doesn’t indicate whether, as Johns Hopkins’ Dr. Marty Makary has been clamoring, the death was “causal or incidental.” That said, from January 2020, 1,043 children aged 0–17 have died of pneumonia.
Briggs writes: “There is no good vaccine for pneumonia. But it could be avoided by keeping kids socially distanced from each other—permanently. If one death is ‘too many,’ then you must not allow kids to be within contact of any human being who has a disease that may be passed to them, from which they may acquire pneumonia. They must also not be allowed in any car. In one year, just about 3,091 kids 0-17 died in car crashes (435 from 0-4, 847 from 5-14, and 30% of 6,031 from 15-24). Multiply these 3,000 deaths in cars by about 1.75, since the Covid deaths are over a 21-month period. That makes about 5,250 kids dying in car crashes in the same period—10 times as many as Covid.”
Yearly, around 500 children in the United States die of seasonal influenza and there has never been a mandated vaccine.
Briggs concludes, “There exists no justification based on any available evidence for mandatory vaccines for kids.”
Different Immune Systems
Dr. Stuart Weisberg, of Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and colleagues (building on 2018 research work by Brahma Kumar and colleagues at Columbia) suggest that the reason children can more easily neutralize the virus is that their T cells are relatively naïve. They argue that since children’s T cells are mostly untrained, they can thus immunologically respond more rapidly and nimbly to novel viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 for an effective robust response.
Research published in the journal Nature Biotechnology in August 2021 deepens our understanding of this natural type biological/molecular protection even further by showing that pre-activated (primed) antiviral innate immunity in the upper airways of children works to control early SARS-CoV-2 infection.
“The airway immune cells of children are primed for virus sensing, resulting in a stronger early innate antiviral response to SARS-CoV-2 infection than in adults,” states a report on the study by Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
When one is vaccinated or gets infected naturally, this drives the formation, tissue distribution, and clonal evolution of B cells, which is key to encoding humoral immune memory. There is research evidence published in May 2021 in the journal Science that blood from children retrieved prior to the COVID-19 pandemic has memory B cells that can bind to SARS-CoV-2, suggestive of the potent role of early childhood exposure to common cold coronaviruses. This is supported by Mateus and colleagues’ October 2020 report in Science on T cell memory to prior coronaviruses that cause the common cold (known as cross-reactivity/cross-protection).
In closing, there’s very little risk and no data or evidence or science to justify any of the COVID-19 vaccinations in children. Can the content of these vaccines cross the blood-brain barrier in children? We don’t know for it wasn’t studied. Recklessly so. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, and Food and Drug Administration are all going along with this push when there’s no sound medical justification for this. In my opinion, based on the science and all the data collected across 19 months, under no circumstances should we expose children to the risk of the COVID-19 vaccinations. To consider putting healthy children at risk so as to protect adults is illogical, irrational, perverse, and reckless. There’s no proper safety data.
The focus rather has to be on early treatment and testing (sero-antibody or T-cell testing) to establish who is a credible candidate for these injections if properly ethically informed and consented to, for it’s also harmful to layer inoculation on top of existing COVID-recovered, naturally acquired immunity (as studies are showing).
What does all of this mean? We could end up harming our children. Liability protection should be taken off the table. Government officials and vaccine companies must stand to be at risk too, not only our children. Don’t touch our children unless you’re 100 percent sure that any drug or vaccine is safe. These vaccines have not been shown to be. They aren’t needed based on the risk to children from COVID-19—near zero! Consider them already vaccinated. Leave them alone.
As the Gateway Pundit points out in a new report, children are actually at a higher risk for dying from drowning, the flu, or from car accidents than they do from contracting the coronavirus. Kids aren’t even forced to take the flu shot, but here we have Pfizer and the FDA, along with other government agencies trying their best to force this vaccine on kids. In fact, when you look at the data, more kids have been shot this year in Chicago than have died from COVID across the United States.
However, Pfizer sees an opportunity to put more green in their pockets by targeting this massive demographic of potential test subjects (that’s what they are, make no mistake about it) so they are going all in with this new ad campaign.
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill Thursday to prohibit the federal government from requiring COVID-19 vaccines for children.
Cruz introduced the bill as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention approved the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11.
“Parents should have the right to decide what is best for their children in consultation with their family doctor,” Cruz said in a news release.
“My view on the COVID-19 vaccine has remained clear: no mandates of any kind.”
NEW: Sen. Cruz Introduces Bill To Block The Federal Government And Public Schools From Mandating Covid-19 Vaccines For Kidshttps://t.co/nt9bd14m3D
Cruz noted President Joe Biden has repeatedly ignored the medical privacy rights and personal liberties of Americans when it comes to vaccine mandates.
The senator said his goal is to keep the government out of decisions related to a child’s health.
“President Biden and his administration have repeatedly ignored medical privacy rights and personal liberty by pushing unlawful and burdensome vaccine mandates on American businesses, and now they are preparing to push a mandate on kids by pressuring parents — all without taking into account relative risk or the benefits of natural immunity,” Cruz said.
Should kids be protected from COVID-19 vaccine mandates?
“I am proud to introduce this legislation today to ensure President Biden and his administration stay out of decisions related to a child’s health — decisions best left to parents.”
Cruz’s bill will prohibit “the federal government and any recipient of federal funding from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and/or the CDC at the state, local, Tribal, or territorial level from requiring any individual aged 18 or younger from requiring a COVID-19 vaccine.”
As a result, school districts would not be able to impose a vaccine mandate for students under 18 without losing Title IV, Part A and Title II, Part A funding.
Under the bill, parental consent would be required for the vaccination of a minor using any COVID vaccine that is fully approved or authorized for emergency use.
On Tuesday, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky endorsed the recommendation from the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices for children 5 to 11 years old to be vaccinated with the Pfizer/BioNTech pediatric vaccine.
“CDC now expands vaccine recommendations to about 28 million children in the United States in this age group and allows providers to begin vaccinating them as soon as possible,” the CDC’s statement said.
The statement also noted the effectiveness of the vaccine in clinical trials.
“Vaccination, along with other preventative measures, can protect children from COVID-19 using the safe and effective vaccines already recommended for use in adolescents and adults in the United States. Similar to what was seen in adult vaccine trials, vaccination was nearly 91 percent effective in preventing COVID-19 among children aged 5-11 years,” the statement said.
“In clinical trials, vaccine side effects were mild, self-limiting, and similar to those seen in adults and with other vaccines recommended for children. The most common side effect was a sore arm.”
“Together, with science leading the charge, we have taken another important step forward in our nation’s fight against the virus that causes COVID-19,” Walensky said. “We know millions of parents are eager to get their children vaccinated and with this decision, we now have recommended that about 28 million children receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
“As a mom, I encourage parents with questions to talk to their pediatrician, school nurse or local pharmacist to learn more about the vaccine and the importance of getting their children vaccinated.”
Despite there being only one vaccine in the country approved for children between the ages of 5 and 11, San Francisco is already looking at the day in the not-too-distant future when a vaccine mandate will apply to those children.
On Tuesday, federal officials gave final approval for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine to be given to children aged 5 to 11.
Moderna has developed a shot for children between 6 and 11, but it has not even asked the Food and Drug Administration for approval yet because its vaccine for adolescents aged 12-17 is being held up over concerns that it is linked to a higher-than-normal number of cases of heart inflammation.
Johnson and Johnson is in the process of studying the impact of a vaccine on adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17.
San Francisco currently forces anyone 12 and older to prove they are vaccinated against COVID to enter indoor establishments including bars, restaurants, clubs, and gyms. A vaccine mandate would require children to also show proof of vaccination to enter many businesses and public places.
City Health Officer Dr. Susan Philip said during a Tuesday town hall that a proof-of-vaccination mandate for children is an idea on the horizon and could be implemented early next year, according to SFGate.
“We definitely want to wait and make sure that children have an opportunity to get vaccinated,” Philip said.
“That will happen no sooner than about eight weeks after the vaccine is available to kids. So there will be a limited time in which there will not be those requirements, but then at some point, 5- to 11-year-olds will also have to show proof of vaccination to access some of those same settings.”
During the debate over authorizing the vaccine for children, some voiced concern that mandates would follow.
Do you trust these vaccines for children?
“I am just worried that if we say yes, then the states are going to mandate administration of this vaccine for children to go to school. And I do not agree with that,” Cody Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine, said during the FDA vaccine committee meeting last week, according to U.S. News and World Report.
“I think that would be an error at this time.”
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has indicated that the Biden administration will push to have children vaccinated.
“We know that vaccination eligibility for our elementary-aged students would be a game changer,” Cardona told the outlet in September. “Not only would it help us keep our schools open and have less quarantining and closures, but it would also help parents breathe a lot easier and increase confidence in communities that their schools are safe.”
Erin Gauch, of Middletown, Rhode Island, said concerns over side effects give her pause, according to The New York Times.
“I’m looking at a 9-year-old and if I make a bad decision and he ends up with some debilitating side effects or lifelong adverse reaction, I don’t think I could live with that,” she said.
“If we ultimately decide not to get my youngest vaccinated right now, I guess I’ll be subjected to mommy shaming but I’ll just have to deal with it.”
Pro-vaccine parent Abby Cooper of Bergen County, New Jersey, said the issue defines who is and is not in her circle of friends, and those who do not get their children vaccinated are no longer welcome.
“Their kids are going to school with my kids and putting them at risk for no reason. It’s very upsetting. So, sadly, I’ve lost friends over this,” she said.
Minnesota has seen in the latest school board elections a number of wins by candidates opposing critical race theory and COVID-19 restrictions, including in areas that traditionally vote Democrats.
In Anoka-Hennepin, Minnesota’s largest school district serving some 38,000 students and 248,000 residents, Matt Audette won by a margin of over 30 percent. The only key issue on Audette’s campaign website is preventing the infiltration of CRT, which he said divides students based on their skin color and teaches that the most important aspect of their humanity is not their character, morality, or actions, but their race.
While CRT is not incorporated as part of the curriculum in Anoka-Hennepin schools, the district has partnered with the Midwest and Plains Equity Assistance Center, an organization that promotes “anti-racism education” to analyze and address supposed “systemic racism” and inequity. “The school district did take a side, and they are siding with CRT,” Audette warned. “The use of this equity analysis in our schools will affect staff development, and it will eventually get into the classrooms.”
Instead of teaching “concepts of division and guilt” derived from CRT, Audette said he supports teaching about not only racism, but also achievements and successes in racial equality in the history of the United States. He also supports giving parents “complete access” to curriculum on demand.
A special one-year seat on the Alexandria School Board went to Maureen Eigen, who said in October that she opposes CRT because it “does not empower students of color” and “furthers segregation.”
“I don’t oppose CRT because of any political agenda. I oppose it because it’s not right,” she added.
In Lakeville, Cinta Schmitz narrowly won a special election for an open school board seat. A co-founder of local parental group “Informed Fully-Awake Parents,” Schmitz ran on a platform of allowing parents to make decisions for their kids when it comes to wearing masks and receiving COVID-19 vaccines.
“Keep divisive policies that teach racism and intolerance of people with different ethnic backgrounds or skin colors—whether it’s called CRT or any other equity-related term—out of our schools,” her campaign website reads.
The Minnesota wins could be suggesting a nationwide trend, too, according to the 1776 Project PAC, a political action group with the aim to combat CRT in K–12 education and help elect conservatives to school boards in the United States. The PAC reports that as of Wednesday, 44 of the 58 candidates it endorsed have either won or are leading in their school board races.
The 44 candidates backed by the PAC include 13 in Pennsylvania, with four of them sweeping seats in Perkiomen Valley School District, which serves the powerful Democratic bastion of Montgomery County. Also among them are 11 in Colorado, nine in Kansas, four in New Jersey, three in Virginia, and two each in Minnesota and Ohio.
Obviously, some books are better than others. This is something everyone should understand. A well-written book that tackles profound themes is far more likely to stand the test of time than a poorly written book that deals with superficial topics.
For example, Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” is a literary classic. That’s because it portrays the reality of slavery in the Antebellum South in a way that few other books have done. One cannot read that book without being deeply moved by the injustice of slavery.
However, “Huckleberry Finn” also contains inappropriate language, including a deeply offensive racial slur. As a result, some educators think that this book should not be held in school libraries or used in classrooms. That would be a mistake.
The problem with judging authors of the past by today’s cultural standards is that virtually no one measures up. This is why there is such a push among progressive educators to replace classical literature with contemporary books written by authors who espouse the “correct” ideology using the “correct” words—at least by today’s standards.
One can only wonder whether any authors from this century will measure up to whatever the prevailing ideology is several centuries from now.
At a recent meeting of the Waterloo Region District School Board, for example, the superintendent of human resources and equity announced that the board was in the process of reviewing every single book in school libraries. According to this superintendent, libraries haven’t been removing “inappropriate” books quickly enough.
“We recognize as our consciousness around equity, on oppression work and anti-racist work has grown, we recognize some of the texts in the collections that we have are not appropriate at this point,” stated the superintendent.
Not only is this verbiage typical of the gobbledygook often spouted at school board meetings, but it also reveals a profound lack of understanding of what education is all about. The notion that some books must be censored because they no longer conform to modern cultural standards is the antithesis of helping students become critical readers and thinkers.
It is only by exposing students to a wide variety of perspectives that we can help them become well-educated. The reality is that students are going to encounter ideas that challenge their core beliefs, whether we want them to or not. The only question is whether we want them to grapple with challenging concepts while in a classroom, or whether we think it’s better for them to just try to figure things out on their own after they complete school.
In addition, there is a world of a difference between culling library books due to space considerations and removing books because they might contain offensive material. Obviously, libraries have only a limited amount of space and it makes sense to remove books that no one is reading. On the other hand, it would be a travesty to remove excellent books such as “Huckleberry Finn” solely because they contain offensive language or reflect outdated cultural norms.
This does not mean that school libraries should be places where anything goes. Younger students should not have easy access to books with graphic sexual content, nor should school libraries be expected to stock books that promote blatantly false information (such as the works of prominent Holocaust deniers).
Unfortunately, censorship is becoming increasingly common in schools. For example, there has long been a concerted campaign to remove Dr. Seuss’s books from school libraries and classrooms because these books contain images and statements that are clearly inappropriate by modern-day standards.
However, a better approach would be to use these books as an opportunity for a teachable moment. Students should not only have access to classic literature but they should also be expected to study it and critique it. If students are going to grapple with challenging concepts, it’s best they do so by reading literature that has stood the test of time, and with the guidance of an effective teacher.
Hopefully, school trustees start pushing back against the woke ideology that undermines our kids’ education. There is a whole world of good literature for students to explore. Let’s not shelter our kids from reality.
Censorship is a poor way to promote literacy. If we want students to become good readers and thinkers, they need to read quality literature—including books that challenge their way of thinking.
Lawmakers say Virginia election results show parents want government out of schools
After education issues proved crucial to Republicans’ upset victories in Virginia, GOP lawmakers are turning their attention to Democratic plans to put the federal government in charge of education.
Buried in the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act is a plan to nationalize preschool programs and place them under the direction of the Education Department. The bill would require governors to submit learning standards for preschoolers for the secretary of education’s approval, which detractors say would further the Biden administration’s reach into public schools across the country.
According to Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), the plan to increase federal oversight of preschools is a natural extension of Democrats’ “far-left socialist tax and spending spree.”
“It gives the Biden administration complete control to approve the early education standards being taught to three to four years olds,” Stefanik said at a roundtable Wednesday hosted by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.). She pointed to Virginia governor-elect Glenn Youngkin’s (R.) successful appeal to parents to show that the Biden administration is “out of touch” with what Americans want in schools.
The Biden administration has repeatedly tried to extend federal control over public education. The Education Department in April proposed a rule to prioritize federal funding for education groups that help schools create lessons for elementary students based on “antiracism” and the New York Times‘s controversial 1619 Project. The Washington Free Beacon reported last month that the White House communicated with the National School Boards Association before the group petitioned the Justice Department to investigate concerned parents, whom it likened to “domestic terrorists.”
Stefanik also noted that Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona in September refused to say whether parents were a “primary stakeholder” in their children’s education. The round table discussion was focused on the Biden administration’s attempts to keep parents out of children’s education. Also present were Republican representatives Virginia Foxx (N.C.), Julia Letlow (La.), and Burgess Owens (Utah).
Foxx slammed Democrats for focusing on radical social issues rather than falling test scores.
“If you have a federal takeover of education, what you’re going to have is drag queen story hour instead of a math one,” she said.
Some speakers at Wednesday’s event seemed buoyed by Youngkin’s win over Democratic nominee and former governor Terry McAuliffe, who drew ire for saying parents shouldn’t have a say in what their children learn.
“It’s just the clear optics that McAuliffe had Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation for Teachers union, at his final rally. And then he lost,” Ginny Gentiles, a school choice advocate said. “That is very clear evidence that that power was surpassed by the power of parents who want something different.”
Still, Parents Defending Education founder Nicki Neily warned that Youngkin’s victory will not stop Democrats from attempting to radicalize education.
“As we saw in the House and Senate Judiciary oversight hearings, I do not think they will be walking this back. We are seeing them double down,” Neily said.
None of Virginia’s Democratic representatives responded to a Free Beacon inquiry regarding their stance on the education items in the legislation.
The Build Back Better Act has hit repeated snags on the way to the House floor. Whether or not it comes to a vote, however, Stefanik says the reconciliation bill misses the mark.
“Today’s Democratic Party believes that the government knows better than parents when it comes to what is right for their kids,” Stefanik said. “We know that is not a message that resonates with America.”
A group of House Republicans are demanding answers from all 93 U.S. attorneys about what steps they have taken since the U.S. Department of Justice issued a memo directing them to potentially crack down on parental protests.
“We are continuing to investigate the troubling attempts by the Department of Justice and the White House to use the heavy hand of federal law enforcement to target concerned parents at local school board meetings and chill their protected First Amendment activity,” the Republicans said in a letter (pdf) sent on Monday to every U.S. attorney in all 50 states and territories.
The DOJ memo, which sparked much controversy since its Oct. 4 release, directs the FBI and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to “convene meetings” with state and local governments to address an alleged “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against teachers and school leaders.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garlandlater revealed at a congressional hearing that his department issued the memo after communicating with the White House about a letter from the National School Boards Association (NSBA). The NSBA letter characterized disruptions at school board meetings as “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crime,” and urged the Biden administration to invoke counter-terrorism laws to handle “angry mobs” of parents seeking to hold school officials accountable for teaching the Marxist-inspired critical race theory and for imposing COVID-19 restrictions on their children.
“Concerned parents voicing their strong opposition to controversial curricula at local schools are not domestic terrorists,” the Republicans said, adding that state and local authorities are already equipped with legal tools in case any parent actually crosses the line to commit a violent act.
Although the NSBA has apologized for the letter which the DOJ memo was based on, Garland has yet to rescind the order, meaning that his directives to U.S. Attorneys are still in effect, the Republicans said.
They further noted that during Garland’s testimony before the House, “he appeared to have no idea whether the U.S. Attorney meetings he ordered were actually taking place.”
Specifically, the Republicans demand that the U.S. attorneys provide a trove of information, including all documents and communications related to convening meetings in their respective judicial districts in response to Garland’s memo, and the names of all individual employees involved and organizations that were invited to or attended such meetings.
The U.S. attorneys will have until Nov. 15 to hand in those materials.
The letter was co-signed by 19 Republican members of Congress, including Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.
If Republican Glenn Youngkin’s upset momentum carries him to victory in the Virginia race for governor, he’ll have voters like Saundra Davis to thank.
Davis, described by Fox News as a “lifelong Democrat,” appeared “Fox & Friends First” on Tuesday to describe how former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, had alienated Old Dominion voters.
And set the stage for a political showdown in Virginia that could stop President Joe Biden’s agenda in its tracks.
Simply put, Davis said, McAuliffe — a confidant of Bill and Hillary Clinton — had taken the governor’s race for granted.
By contrast, she said, the Youngkin campaign has made education issues, a concern of parents everywhere, a key part of its strategy.
“I have a whole group of Dems for Glenn, and when people hear that they think that we’re Russian trolls or dark propaganda, but we’re real parents,” Davis said.
“And Terry McAuliffe thought he would stroll into Virginia and take this election easily, and when he figured out that he wasn’t going to, he kept bringing in more and more outsiders. But Glenn kept listening to parents. He didn’t need outside help, he was himself, and here we are. Today is the big day.”
Tuesday isn’t just a big day in the Commonwealth of Virginia, where the polls were set to close at 7 p.m. Eastern.
Coming a year after Biden won the state by 10 points in the presidential election, election day in Virginia is being viewed as a referendum on the Biden administration so far.
Considering that that administration has been a disaster from literally its first day — when Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and issued the first of a series of executive orders aimed at overturning the rational approach former President Donald Trump used to impose order on the southern border — a referendum that turned into a rebuke would be richly deserved on any number of fronts.
But for Davis and voters like her, the key issue is the arrogance shown by McAuliffe — and his party as a whole — when it comes to the elemental issue of public school education. And if the Virginia vote goes against McAuliffe, Republicans would be wise to remember that lesson in the 2022 midterms.
Virginia, of course, has become ground zero in a national cultural battle over parents’ rights to oversee their children’s schooling.
During a gubernatorial debate, McAuliffe set himself up as the spokesman for the progressive establishment asserting its dominance when he declared:
“I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decision. I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
As it turns out, a lot of parents think they should have a say. After watching public schools being used as pawns by teachers unions in the coronavirus pandemic, and the persecution of parents opposed to school district policies on transgender students and the graphic contents of some of the literature being made available to their children, they decided it was time to fight back.
“Because we put our children first, and when the schools were closed, we started watching the school board meetings and we started trying to make comments,” Davis told “Fox & Friends First.”
“And we tried to start presenting them with science to reopen the schools and they ignored us, mocked us, made the time shorter that we were able to speak at these meetings, and we weren’t having it. We’re not having it.”
“We’re not having it” sums up the attitude of millions of American voters to the actions of the Biden administration so far. (Possibly even better than the more-rambunctious “Let’s go Brandon” slogan currently making the rounds of politics and song.)
“We’re not having” a country where millions of illegal immigrants can enter with impunity. “We’re not having” a country that by right is the leader of the free world taking the role of international embarrassment instead.
“We’re not having” an economy that is slipping further and further from the heights it enjoyed under the Trump administrations thanks to a series of self-inflicted wounds created by a leftist Democratic ascendancy.
That’s the message of opposition to McAuliffe and other Democrats on the ballot on Tuesday. (New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy is also up for re-election.)
Youngkin’s strength has been growing in recent polls, and if it carries him across the finish line, it’s going to be disenchanted Democrats who are going to be the key — the “secret weapon” of the Youngkin campaign.
A Republican victory in Virginia would ripple far beyond the state’s borders, delivering the message that Americans unhappy with the direction of the Biden administration are more than willing to flex their muscles at the ballot box to prove it.
But the fact that the race is as close as it is sends a message all by itself.
Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton spoke out Tuesday after Attorney General Merrick Garland refused to meet his deadline to provide answers regarding a memo to the FBI to investigate parents.
Cotton made the comments on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” with host Bill Hemmer.
“We’re going to demand answers,” Cotton said.
“[Garland] responded in just four intervening days from the time the National School Board Association sent him this outrageous letter accusing parents expressing their opinions at school board meetings of being domestic terrorists.”
“We’re going to demand answers.” @SenTomCotton comments after AG Merrick Garland misses Senate Republicans’ deadline to provide evidence to support his memo to investigate “threats” by parents against school boards @BillHemmerpic.twitter.com/uoipCfx6qH
“That’s a land speed record for the government, Bill. As you can probably imagine, these bureaucrats can’t restock the coffee in the pantry in four days, much less issue a nationwide directive siccing the feds on parents who are concerned about their kids’ education,” he added.
Cotton called the situation an obvious act of collusion.
“What happened here is obvious. The National School Board Association in concert with political hacks and the Department of Justice and the White House colluded in advance to issue this letter,” Cotton said.
Should Merrick Garland resign?
“The Department of Justice knew it was coming, and then they sicced the feds on parents. That’s why Merrick Garland should be resigning in disgrace.”
Cotton revealed that the National School Boards Association’s letter has now been repudiated.
“All he’s ever cited is the school board letter and unspecified news reports. I suspect the news reports are the ones cited in the School Boards letter, which the School Board Association has now repudiated, and which used such discredited examples as the parent in Loudoun County, who was angry when his doctor had been raped in a bathroom by a boy dressed as a girl,” Cotton noted.
“The school board then covered it up, because they didn’t want it to interfere with their transgender policy and Pride month. And even more amazingly, they transferred the perpetrator to another school where he assaulted another girl, all because it would have interfered with their woke agenda.”
The news also follows a letter last week sent by a group of 19 Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee to Garland demanding he rescind the memorandum sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation targeting parents at school board meetings.
The letter came after Garland appeared before the House Judiciary Committee last week.
“Your testimony before the Judiciary Committee last week concerning your October 4, 2021, memorandum targeting concerned parents at school board meetings was troubling,” the Republicans’ letter read.
#BREAKING: Judiciary Republicans demand Attorney General Garland withdraw school board memo.
“You acknowledged that you issued the unusual directive soon after reading about the thinly sourced letter sent by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) to President Biden and not because of any specific request from state or local law enforcement,” they added.
Speaking at a Loudoun County Public Schools Board Meeting, a mother claimed, in a now-viral video, that her young daughter “somberly” asked her whether “she was born evil because she was a white person.”
The mother, whose identity is not clear, claimed in a one-minute speech: “My children now are in private school and are thriving. We had specifically moved into LCPS district because of its great reputation, yet we’ve been chased out of LCPS due to the swift and uncompromising political agenda of Superintendents Williams, Ziegler and the school board that have forced upon us. First it was in early Spring of 2020 when my six-year-old somberly came to me and asked me if she was born evil because she was a white person, something she learned in a history lesson at school.”
She added, “I wish I could return my kids to LCPS; private school’s expensive and I want my kids to be able to walk home from schools with their friends in their own community. I refuse to allow you to destroy our schools. They are not your schools; they are our schools. You all should be ashamed and you should have the moral courage to admit you are wrong and step down.”
The next speaker stated that she was concerned about her 14-year-old daughter, who would be “walking the halls of Broad Run High School, and unfortunately I don’t trust you with her care.” After referencing the case of the male student accused of sexually assaulting a female student at a Stone Bridge High School in Loudoun County, she added, “I couldn’t but help notice the rules for this meeting; which state there will be no public access to bathrooms or other facilities inside the LCPS administrative offices. I guess you wanted to make absolutely certain that your restrooms were safe. Resign or be removed.”
Last week, a Virginia court ruled there was enough evidence to find that the teen accused of sexually assaulting a fellow student in a Loudoun County high school bathroom in May “engaged in non-consensual sex.” The Daily Wire reported on October 25:
The teen who appeared in court on Monday is standing trial on two separate cases: one involving a female student at Stone Bridge High School and a different incident in a classroom at Broad Run High School, both in the Loudoun County school district. The teen, who reportedly identifies as “gender fluid” is alleged to have assaulted Scott Smith’s daughter in a girl’s restroom at Stone Bridge while wearing a skirt. Despite indications that he had committed a serious crime, the boy was transferred.
A father of four young daughters spoke later saying, “Your policies are contributing to creating an unsafe environment in the schools. I do not want boys in my daughters’ bathrooms; I do not want boys on my daughters’ sports teams. How can I as a father, trust you as a superintendent and you as a school board to keep my daughter safe at school? Why would I want to entrust you with all of our daughters once they become school age? The answer is I can’t.”
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…
— Declaration of Independence, 1776
The promise of the United States has always been about more than itself. In recognizing that all human beings are created equal, and in defending individual liberty, the United States has demonstrated that self-government is possible.
It has done so while making steady progress toward realizing its ideals so that anyone—regardless of what race they are, whether they are male or female, or where they come from—may pursue his or her idea of happiness.
This has unleashed energy and creativity. America has achieved unheard of levels of abundance and has been a fount of invention, enriching all of humanity.
America’s first settlers traveled here to gain the freedom to worship as they chose, and the United States has all along recognized the importance of “in God we trust.” It has protected spiritual life in order to give its citizens the conditions needed to flourish.
But forces inside and outside the United States now threaten to undo America’s promise.
With the American Promise initiative, The Epoch Times seeks to revitalize America’s principles and traditions while contributing to our nation’s quest to perfect itself.
Main Challenges To The American Promise
Marxist Ideology Challenges America
When KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov spoke of America’s decline, he spoke of a gradual “demoralization” of the nation driven by Marxist-Leninist ideology. While faced with this domestic ideological crisis, America is also facing the threat of China’s ruling Communist Party, which for decades has infiltrated nearly every aspect of our society, in the fields of education, entertainment, politics, and business, among others. Exposing these threats and educating people about them is now, we believe, a critical element of allowing America to realize its promise.
Traditions Under Assault
Our founders believed that our form of self-government was created for a moral people. Traditions have allowed nations to flourish for thousands of years. How do we return ourselves to a path of tradition and righteous principles?
Ideological Education
Our education system is a cornerstone of society. Over the years, however, the idea of striving for excellence has been challenged by post-modernist ideology. If we want our nation to flourish, our children should be well-educated, moral beings.
Constitutional Rights Challenged
Our education system is a cornerstone of society. Over the years, however, the idea of striving for excellence has been challenged by post-modernist ideology. If we want our nation to flourish, our children should be well-educated, moral beings.
It has long been policy among Marxist progressives, socialists, and communists to undermine and destroy the family. The reason is obvious: When your goal is to vest all power in the government, any independent organization, such as the family, that retains the loyalty of citizens withholds power from the government. The commitments of families are to its members, not to the government, and Marxists think that this should be forbidden.
The self-proclaimed Marxist Black Lives Matter declared on its website, until it saw fit to scrub it off, that one of its objectives, along with disbanding the police, was destroying the two-parent family. Two-parent families are rare among African Americans, but in spite of poor academic performances, a high level of gang membership, a high level of incarceration, and a horrific rate of violent murder among African American youth, Black Lives Matter’s view is that one-parent families are a good plan. Black Lives Matter thinks that all will be fine (for them) once they take over.
Totalitarian societies such as National Socialist Germany, the Soviet Union, Soviet Eastern Europe, and communist China strived to undermine family loyalties, encouraging family members to inform on one another. Any anti-government sentiment, or even insufficiently strong pro-government sentiment, are grounds for re-education and punishment. Children are taught in government schools to vet their parents, and report them to the authorities if they’re not enthusiastically patriotic.
Kibbutzim in Israel were founded on the communist model. Everything was handled at the community level; nothing was left to the family unit: Cooking was communal, as was eating in the community cafeteria. Children resided and were reared in the community children’s house. But over the next decades, Kibbutzniks slowly had a change of heart, and mothers wanted more time with their children, first weekends, then full-time family apartments. Children, too, when they hit adolescence, were unwilling to reside and dress and undress in front of children of the opposite sex. Eventually unisex overalls were exchanged for clothes suitable for binary gender roles.
The logic of feminism, having incorporated Marxist class conflict for its identity politics, disparages men, marriage, motherhood, and families. What holds the greatest value for feminism is being able to kill unborn children. The feminist goal is not to support the government, but to take over the government, so that females can rule. The family stands in the way, so it has to go.
The two-parent family was the dominant form of the family, in all racial and ethnic groups, during the first half of the 20th century. But by the 21st century, the two-parent family was prominent only among Asian Americans and white Americans, with single-parent families a major percentage among Hispanics, Native Americans, and African Americans.
The two-parent family was also stripped down in both structure and function. In traditional societies in the Middle East, Asia, the Pacific, and elsewhere, families were either multigenerational, compound, or extended, with a large number of relatives providing a wider family within which the two-parent family was nested. In the 21st century, two-parent families, not to mention single-parent families, were in many cases on their own. This is largely the result of the spatial and social mobility facilitated and even required by an advanced industrial and post-industrial economy.
The traditional family was the basic productive unit of society, usually engaged in agricultural production. Children provided the necessary manpower to get the labor-intensive, multiple tasks done. Think of an American or Canadian family farm at the turn of the 20th century. Male children also provided the strong arms of the family militia that would defend, if necessary, the members and property of the family. In the 21st century, child labor and military defense are no longer functions of the family.
What remains of the functions of family in the North American 21st century is the establishment of a domestic household and the rearing and socializing of children, usually a small number of children, as they’re financial liabilities rather than assets. Many people under the influence of feminism choose not to marry or to establish a household with others, but instead reside as individuals, which indicates a loss of family households. Many single women decide to have children on their own, forming single-parent households. But children are increasingly under the authority, not of their parents, but of civic and governmental authorities, stripping parents of the child-rearing function.
Educational bureaucrats, school boards, and teacher’s unions engage in collusion to take control of children’s lives, sidelining parents who are purposely kept in the dark regarding what students are taught and how students’ lives are managed. These bureaucrats and officials share the radical ideologies of the extremist faculties of education in which they were trained. Thus, we see bureaucrats, unions, and school boards pushing political ideologies on K-12 students. These include racist “critical race theory” that condemns little white children as privileged oppressors and little black children as victims who have no control over their lives. Schools also push children into “transitioning” from their birth sex to an imagined alternative sex, smoothing the way for puberty blocking hormone treatments and disfiguring plastic surgery, all hidden from children’s parents. Schools now specialize in systemic programs of child abuse.
These educational officials also collude with friendly state and federal administrations, such as the Biden administration, which concur with the radical ideologies and wish to advance them. The point of this collusion among officials and governments is to wrench all children away from their parents, making them dependent on the government, in which the school officials are low-level members. This is a major step in destroying the family and making the government all powerful, smoothing the way to despotic socialism and communism.
We’ve all heard the story about the panicked mom summoning superhuman strength to lift a car off her trapped child. I’m not sure if it’s ever really happened, but I am sure that any politician who interferes with a mother’s ability to raise her children with the values she sees fit is playing with fire. The Democrats are holding the matches. Of all the radical ideas they’ve been trying to foist on America, messing with parents on K-12 education may be the one that does them in.
Democratic politicians have repeatedly failed to stand up to the “woke” crowd, the activist radical left wing of their own party. Remember the open borders question in the 2019 Democratic presidential primary debates? The moderators asked all the candidates to raise their hand if they wanted to decriminalize illegal border crossings. Almost every Democratic candidate raised a hand. Joe Biden was elected and took apart the Trump-era border policies that were working, and we now have record high levels of illegal border crossings and record low levels of arrests. Polls now show that opening the southern border isn’t actually popular with regular Americans, and now it looks as if the Biden administration may be walking back its radical open-border position. Most prominently, the White House has announced plans to begin reinstating Trump’s successful “Remain in Mexico” policy.
Democratic politicians around the country got caught up in the “defund the police” movement as well. It’s hard to find something crazier than open borders, but getting rid of police is a new level. Are there police abuses? Do we need police reform? The answer is, of course, yes. But only a crazy person thinks getting rid of the police is a real answer. Now that crime is going up, Democratic politicians across the country are starting to reverse course.
These are clearly wacky ideas. It’s hard to imagine the thought process that caused leading Democrats to promote them. Regardless, Democratic politicians’ unwillingness to stand up to the insanity in their own party has clearly hurt them in the polls. Hispanic voters, independents and even suburban moms are getting turned off by the ideological, radical strain driving the agenda. It seems that even after scalding their hands on the hot stove, Democrats are coming back for more punishment. This time, they are helping the radicals screw around with children’s education.
The things happening in American schools are truly scary. Despite the left’s desire to keep it quiet and the liberal media’s desire to whitewash it, parents are catching on — and they are not happy.
On race, school districts around the country are normalizing racism. Corporate media will tell you otherwise. The New York Times asserted definitively just this morning that “conservatives have … falsely claimed” divisive critical race theory is bleeding into schools. You’ll find similar gaslighting at NBC, The Washington Post and several other left-wing media companies.
Meanwhile, a teacher in New York City made headlines when he complained about students and teachers being broken up by race for “anti-racism” training, wherein they were taught that “objectivity” and “individualism” were white attributes. A school in Cupertino, California, asked third graders to “deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to their ‘power and privilege,'” according to City Journal. And, finally, if critical race theorists aren’t trying to indoctrinate children, why is the country’s leading critical race theory guru hocking an “Antiracist Baby” picture book for infants?
There are countless examples. Kids may not be learning the “advanced legal theory” graduate schools offer, but it is clear to anyone who has not had a significant psychological break from reality that these concepts are downstream from that theory, and schools are adopting them.
Contrary to the views espoused by Martin Luther King Jr., these concepts are teaching students that race defines us. They are teaching kids to judge others based on race. As usual with the left, this insanity is packaged to sound nonthreatening. They call it “critical race theory.” You shouldn’t. Just call it racism. That’s all it is.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a product of the segregated South, most eloquently pushed back on the insanity this week: “One of the worries that I have about the way that we’re talking about race is that it either seems so big that somehow white people now have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past — I don’t think that’s very productive — or black people have to feel disempowered by race. I would like black kids to be completely empowered, to know that they are beautiful in their blackness, but in order to do that I don’t have to make white kids feel bad for being white.”
That’s all there is to it. That’s America. Outside of the radical left and a few crazy racists on the fringe, most Americans share Rice’s vision. Parents should certainly have the right to instill these American ideals in their children. I wouldn’t want to be the one getting in their way.
The second area of radicalization in our schools concerns the LGBTQ agenda. Two recent headlines highlight the insanity in our schools going on in the name of tolerance. First, in Loudoun County, Virginia, a young girl was allegedly sexually assaulted by a male student with a skirt on in a female bathroom. The school district allegedly attempted to cover up the assault and instead arrested the young girl’s father when his complaints were viewed as endangering the school’s bathroom policies. Second, teachers in Broward County, Florida, brought elementary school kids to a gay bar for a field trip. There are so many things wrong with this. Who takes elementary school kids to any bar for a field trip? Who thinks teaching kids that young any of this in school makes sense in the first place? It’s literally insane.
Democrats may have made mistakes on the border and with policing, but there’s a good chance that the school issues dwarf even those within the electorate. Parents have the right to teach their children their own values. That’s a concept almost everyone agrees with. Yet, to date, the Biden administration’s only response to parents’ growing concerns was a Justice Department memorandum that equated concerned parents with domestic terrorists. That’s a decision they are very likely going to regret.
As of this writing, the school board associations of at least 11 states have withdrawn from the National School Boards Association.
I hope the number will rise to 50.
As many readers will know, the NSBA, a left-wing lobbying group, made headlines a couple of weeks ago.
Merrick Garland, attorney general of the United States, cited a letter from the group to the White House complaining about parents who had the temerity to vigorously criticize their local school boards for attempting to insinuate the Marxist teachings of “critical race theory” into schools, foisting virtue-signaling mask mandates on students, and injecting noisome gender-identity politics into primary and secondary schools.
The vocal criticism of those parents, the NSBA letter said, was “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
In response, Garland quickly issued a memorandum instructing the FBI and other DOJ entities to create a “Partnership among federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement to address threats against school administrators, board members, teachers and staff.”
What threats?
The NSBA cites a score of incidents, but almost all involve nothing more than parents loudly criticizing members of their school board. A good example is this splendid performance by a parent called Simon Campbell, a Brit who understands the American Constitution much better than many Americans.
One example where there was violence involved Scott Smith, who was tackled by police, arrested, and found guilty of resisting arrest and disorderly conduct in Loudoun County, Virginia.
Smith claimed that his daughter had been raped by a “gender fluid” boy who entered the girl’s bathroom wearing a skirt.
At first the school denied that anything happened.
We now know that Smith was right and that the boy in question not only raped his daughter but then, having been quietly sent to another school, went on to sexually assault another girl.
The NSBA, panicked by the criticism and defections, issued an apology.
They didn’t really think “or at least they are no longer prepared to say” that parents who criticize school board members are “domestic terrorists” who are guilty of “hate crimes.”
But I suspect that this effort at damage control will fail. It is too little, too late.
Garland’s breathtaking memorandum was subject to instant and scathing criticism.
And remember, Merrick Garland was supposed to be a “moderate.”
When Barack Obama toward the end of his second term proposed him for the Supreme Court (for the seat that eventually went to Neil Gorsuch), even many conservatives rallied round to tout his credentials, talents, and impartiality.
It turns out that the Republicans who kept him off the Court were right: he was a left-winger masquerading as a moderate.
We got to witness exactly what sort of partisan operative he is during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s sometimes blistering cross examination of Garland last week.
Especially noteworthy were the exchanges between Garland and Senators Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and Tom Cotton.
Among other things, Senator Cruz pushed the Attorney General on the interesting fact that his son-in-law is the founder and president of Panorama, a multimillion-dollar company that sells critical race theory and related ESG (environmental, social, and governance) materials to schools around the country.
Was Garland’s son-in-law, Senator Cruz wondered, likely to be enriched by more schools hopping on the critical race theory bandwagon, a predictable result of the Department of Justice’s threat to sic the FBI on parents who objected to the prospect of their children being indoctrinated.
All concluded their remarks calling on him to resign.
Tom Cotton found a silver lining, “Thank God you are not on the Supreme Court.”
Far from repudiating his memorandum, the Attorney General repeatedly reaffirmed it. He himself worked on it. He said, “It reflects my view. I stand behind it.”
Which leaves us where?
I very much doubt that Merrick Garland will resign, at least not until Republicans retake the House and the Senate in fifteen months.
In the meantime, we are left with an Attorney General who is happy to mobilize the police power of the state to quash dissent.
Sure, he says he is in favor of the First Amendment, and he repeatedly stressed that he was only trying to protect school officials against violence.
But the “violence” at school boards is parents yelling ridicule at the board members, behavior they are entitled to engage in.
The journalist Chris Bray put his finger on our predicament in a thoughtful article at his substack about (in part) what is happening at school boards.
“The trap in our own moment,” he writes, “is that, first, governments have in many cases entirely stopped listening, as officials signal with growing clarity that they regard all grievances to their right as inherently without merit.”
Bray continues: “You express a grievance, and the school board orders the police to clear the room (and the police, incredibly, always do). But, second, resistance is coded as domestic terrorism at the first sign of raised voices, even if Merrick Garland pretends to be coy about the maneuver.”
Bottom line: “If you don’t resist, you won’t be heard; if you do resist, you’re a terrorist and a criminal and FBI SEARCH WARRANT—GET ON THE GROUND.”
You can ask Mr. Smith about how that works.
Bray concluded: “The game is that everyone takes their turn and then, whatever moves any players make, you lose.”
Maybe there is a silver lining here, too.
Despite the best efforts of the regime media to bury stories like the Attorney General’s police state memorandum, the word is getting out and people are angry and getting angrier.
The Obama administration was able to paint the Tea Party as a bunch of Bible-thumping rednecks and “deplorables.”
In fact, the vast majority were ordinary citizens: business men and women, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, doctors, even some teachers and lawyers.
But the campaign of vilification worked. The Tea Party was declawed, rendered irrelevant.
The strategy backfired, though, because those millions of people did not go way. They voted en masse for Donald Trump in 2016.
That is something that the agents of the administrative state might wish to keep in mind.
With every passing day, legitimacy drains from the Biden administration.
Terry McAuliffe will lose the Virginia Governor’s race on Tuesday.
Republicans will retake the House and the Senate in 2022.
You know what will happen in 2024.
It won’t necessarily be Trump, but it might be.
And if it isn’t it will be someone equally obnoxious to the Left.
My three boys were in Virginia public schools from the beginning of their education. But no more. At the end of last year, after seeing exactly what was being taught and how little my schools prioritized education, I pulled them out. It is a sacrifice: I now have to pay tuition for my two younger children and am homeschooling my oldest child. It’s worth it.
More and more, parents are waking up to the reality that the public school system is broken. They aren’t just failing to teach kids basic skills; the public schools are misusing the trust that is placed in them. What’s worse, school boards and administrators are pushing political agendas and harming children in the process.
Many citizens still don’t know what’s going on. There is a reason why: Schools lock the public out, and the media supports it. They’ve even colluded with social media mobs to torment parents who try to speak up. Informing the public is an uphill battle.
Consider this: It recently came to light that numerous Virginia high school libraries stock a graphic novel (a genre geared to preteens) that includes extreme and violent sexual content. Parents understandably objected.
But this isn’t a case of parents trying to prevent their child from learning the facts of life or griping about the depiction of routine romantic or sexual situations. This is pornography.
A parent brought the existence of this book to the attention of the Fairfax County school board and read sections of the book out loud, revealing the obviously inappropriate content. The school board pulled the book from the libraries and is reviewing whether it should continue to be carried.
It’s nice that they have temporarily removed these books, but parents deserve more answers. Who included this book in the library in the first place? Are they reviewing what else is being featured in libraries? Is anyone being held accountable for exercising such poor judgment?
Independent Women’s Voice created an advertisement to raise awareness about this issue, which included images from the book. The ad was rejected as too explicit to run during the 11 p.m. hour on television in Virginia. Think about everything you see on TV and imagine what it takes for a television station to decline to run an ad that late at night.
Parents and citizens should be asking one question: Why are our schools so much less protective about what high school students as young as 14 are exposed to than TV stations catering to adults?
Will more parents start pulling their children from public schools?
This isn’t the only problem with Virginia schools. Students routinely endure race-obsessed classes, are given surveys that ask intimate questions about their sex lives, are treated to absurd lessons that tell them a British accent is a microaggression and form of racism, and are forced to watch misleading videos about Christopher Columbus in anticipation of “Indigenous People’s Day.”
Many parents woke up to the fact that something is very wrong with our schools last year when classes went virtual. Parents logged their kids into class and were surprised by what was being taught. As private schools quickly and safely resumed in-person learning, the public schools remained closed for most of the year.
We now know that our kids suffered tremendous learning losses during virtual learning, as well as from mental health issues due to the isolation and long hours spent staring at screens.
Since in-person classes resumed, safety has arisen as a major concern. For example, Loudoun County parents just found that school officials failed to report a violent sexual assault that occurred in a school bathroom, and that the student assailant was placed in another Virginia public school and went on to attack another girl.
Why was this student back in school just a few months after this first attack? Why weren’t parents alerted of the first attack? How many other incidents have Loudoun County school officials failed to report? Disturbing footage of violence in other schools has also been posted on social media. Are Virginia schools committed to actually providing students with a safe environment, even if it is at odds with their political narratives?
Gubernatorial candidate Terry McAulliffe recently said he doesn’t “think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” and as governor, he actually vetoed a bill that would have required schools to give parents more information about sexually explicit content covered in schools. Now administration officials in Washington are seeking to label concerned parents domestic terrorists.
What’s going on here? Why is the left demonizing parents and suggesting that we somehow aren’t supposed to be our children’s chief advocate responsible for ensuring that they grow to be healthy and responsible adults?
Public school officials need to remember that they work for parents and that their top priority should be to provide kids a safe environment in which to learn. That’s not happening in Virginia schools. Until that happens, parents will continue to do as I did — pull their children out of the public schools. And it will be worth it.
Way back in 1967, in that brief window of time between the media’s notice of the sexual revolution and its dawning awareness of second wave feminism, Hollywood made a movie called “A Guide for the Married Man,” which celebrated the joys of (male) adultery. Nowadays Tinseltown may practice it but doesn’t (usually) preach it; then it did both.
In one segment the mentor of a prospective adulterer answers the question of what to do if you are caught in the act by your wife by saying: “Deny, deny, deny.” There follows a vignette in which a man so caught does just that—until his partner in sin gets up, dresses and leaves.
“What woman?” says the husband.
“The one who just left,” says the wife.
“When?” says the husband.
“But, Charlie …” says the wife.
“What?”
“Aren’t you even ashamed of yourself?”
“Why?”
“Because of … Charlie?”
“What?”
“What would you like for dinner?”
Deplorable as the whole idea of such a movie is, there is a deep wisdom in this scene, which is this: when it ceases to be possible to catch someone in a lie, it also becomes impossible for that person to lie.
So long as the liar, like Charlie, holds the whip hand and therefore is powerful enough that it is impossible for anyone else to require him to admit to his lie, it’s not a lie.
The principle is basically the same as that expressed by the 16th century poet Sir John Harington:
“Treason doth never prosper; what’s the reason?
“For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
I tried to make a similar point, as you may remember, two weeks ago in this space, when I wrote that a lie that everybody knows to be a lie is no longer a lie but a kind of functional truth, since our knowledge that it’s a lie can reveal to us the truth.
It’s at that point, anyway, where those of us without the power to force an admission of lying can only shrug our shoulders and say of the liar, “Well, I guess he’s only expressing his truth.”
The examples I gave in that earlier column were taken from the collected works of President Joe Biden—most egregiously the obvious lies that the American evacuation of Afghanistan was “an extraordinary success” and that a $3.5 trillion spending bill would actually cost “zero.”
Of course, the power of the president to lie with impunity is not a constitutional one but is conferred upon him by the media, whose own greatest power is the power to ignore.
Applied to presidential lying, this power to ignore and therefore not to expose the lies means that, even if everybody knows they are lies, they can continue to function as truth—the president’s truth.
Despotisms have always functioned in this way, but usually through the despot’s direct control of the media. In America today the situation is somewhat different. The media’s power to ignore or to promote as truth the lies of the ostensible autocrat is assumed voluntarily and without constraint or fear of punishment.
Why should that be? I don’t know, but it suggests to me that it is not, under the Biden-style of despotism, the executive which is in control of the media but the media which is in control of the executive.
That would fit, too, with the sense that many of us have that, nasty as the old Joe Biden could be at times, the nastiness of his administration is no more all his own work than anything else that’s happened over the last nine months.
We caught a glimpse this week of how the process of collaboration between the media and Democrats in power to set the administration’s agenda works. The notorious letter from Attorney General Merrick Garland to the FBI, as reported in this space three weeks ago, setting up a task force to investigate as potential “domestic terrorism” any complaints by parents about left-wing curricular or other changes to public schools affecting their children turns out to have been not quite what it seemed at the time.
It was a result of collaboration between Garland and a few left wingers at the National School Boards Association, from which numerous state boards have since dissociated themselves, and was based at least in part on an incident in Loudoun County, Virginia, last June.
Then an aggrieved father, Scott Smith, was tackled by police and arrested at a school board meeting after complaining that his 15-year-old daughter had been raped in a girls’ restroom at Stone Bridge High School by a boy taking advantage of current left-wing orthodoxy to pose as a “transgender” girl.
On that occasion, Scott Ziegler, the Loudoun County school superintendent proclaimed that, “To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms,” adding on the authority of Time magazine that “the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.”
This was a lie on both counts. The Daily Wire reported two weeks ago that numerous allegations of sexual assault at the school had not been reported, as state law requires school authorities to do.
That, apparently was why “we don’t have any record” of such assaults. They didn’t trouble themselves to make one.
Then, on Monday, the “transgender” predator was convicted of assaulting not only Smith’s daughter but another girl at another school to which he had been transferred later as a potential embarrassment to Stone Bridge’s transgender restroom policy.
At this writing, Superintendent Ziegler still has his job. Deny, deny, deny certainly seems to have worked for him.
And, although the National Association of School Boards has since repudiated its own letter calling for investigation into “domestic terrorism,” Attorney General Garland still has his FBI task force to investigate it, as he informed the Senate Judiciary Committee on Oct. 27.
Joe Biden still has his job too, though now we have a better idea than we did nine months ago what that job is. It’s to cover up left-wing lies by playing the role of doddering old Uncle Joe who doesn’t know what he’s saying half the time anyway. You could call it type-casting.
Terry McAuliffe repeatedly claims that Critical Race Theory has never been taught in Virginia’s public schools.
At the same time, the Virginia Department of Education recommends “We Want to Do More Than Survive,” a book by Bettina L. Love, which explicitly pushes CRT. A Fox investigation revealed the book had been pushed on all school stakeholders since March 2020.
Somebody’s lying.
Traditional Marxism pitted the bourgeois, those accused of hording wealth and resources, against the proletariat, the laborers who made all the wealth possible to begin with. Curious as to why the Marxist Resolution hit a brick wall in Western Europe, the Frankfurt School developed Critical Theory and birthed Cultural Marxism. CRT is a particularly wretched form of Cultural Marxism.
CRT zeroes in on Whiteness, specifically white males, as the culprit and non-Whites, specifically Blacks, as the oppressed. The goal is the same under either banner: divide and conquer. It’s one of the oldest Marxist strategies in the book.
Bettina L. Love’s magnum opus, “We Want to Do More Than Survive,” drips with hatred. The book is littered with spiteful passages, such as “teachers spirit-murder children” because “their vision is impaired by hate, racism and White supremacy.”
I had know idea the teachers at the school down the street were all such vile creatures.
Love goes on to claim that teachers “will never understand how they are being fooled by White supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia and classism.”
Should kids be taught to judge one another by the color of their skin?
I guess only evil, stupid people stoop to becoming teachers? Who knew?
It sounds to me like Love, ironically, is the one guilty of the attempted spirit-murder of anyone who reads this litany in praise of hate.
Are Terry McAuliffe and Bettina L. Love Marxists? If so, they may or may not know it or care. What matters to them is cashing in on the pandemic of hate-mongering while they can.
They’re not alone.
Some of the most rabid CRT supporters claim they are not, in fact, critical race theorists. Ibram X. Kendi, the “anti-racist” conman who makes piles of money teaching racism, claimed he was not a critical race theorist in an interview with Joy Reid, as reported by The Federalist.
Kendi’s book, “How to Be an Antiracist,” has been placed on numerous recommended reading lists, including one for sailors in the U.S. Navy.
Two weeks earlier Kendi claimed in a podcast interview with Slate that “critical race theory is foundational to to to being Antiracist.” Sorry, Ibram, but you can’t have it both ways. It violates Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction.
Why all the contradictions and lies?
Sooner or later the cat was going to get out of the bag. CRT teaches kids to judge people not on the content of their character but on the color of their skin. The plain truth is CRT teaches kids to be racists.
Parents, to put it mildly, don’t like this.
Could that be why McAuliffe keeps denying that CRT is taught in Virginia? Is he trying to distance himself from reality by canceling truth? He may just end up canceling himself.
CRT and other Marxists campaigns attempt to reshape history and poison the minds of the people, especially the children. When a philosophy like CRT begins to implode, as must all reality-denying doctrines, people do all sorts of strange things.
Who can blame them? After slogging around in the pit of unreality for so long, they no longer know what is real.
Last Thursday, the Cincinnati Enquirer published a piece regarding school board candidates’ use of the cash-transfer app Venmo for donations, which may potentially violate Ohio state finance law, given that it went into personal accounts.
The article involved candidates for the Lakota Local School District board of education; the district, in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati, is one of many which has seen a pitched battle over whether critical race theory is being and should be taught in its schools.
The piece would have mainly been a boring one — it didn’t identify either of the candidates facing questions about their financing, Darbi Boddy and Russ Loges, as being anti-critical race theory.
However, in a painful lapse of journalistic ethics, the Enquirer decided they would leave a donor’s home address visible on a screenshot of the Venmo transactions page, essentially doxing them.
INBOX: The Cincinnati Enquirer just doxxed a middle class family from West Chester over the school board issue. Here’s a redlined screenshot of the main page on their website. pic.twitter.com/lljGbM4VGZ
“The Cincinnati Enquirer just doxxed a middle class family from West Chester over the school board issue,” political strategist John Ashbrook tweeted.
According to Fox News, the images were later taken down from the Enquirer’s website — although conservatives were outraged.
Should newspapers be allowed to dox people in this way?
“This is absolutely unacceptable,” said J.D. Vance — author, Ohio senatorial candidate and Cincinnati native.
“I’d expect national journalists to harass families, but not our local paper.”
Another Ohio GOP Senate candidate, former Ohio Republican Party chair Jane Timken, noted these were the same kind of activist parents being called “domestic terrorist[s]” by certain groups.
This is absolutely unacceptable. I’d expect national journalists to harass families, but not our local paper. https://t.co/lClNzizfWM
Labeled a ‘domestic terrorist’, doxxed by the media – THIS is what concerned parents are dealing with when they’re just trying to exercise their right to free speech, have a say over their children’s education, and protect their kids.
Gannett, which owns the Enquirer, noted the screenshot was erased from the article quickly after it garnered online attention — but offered an odd excuse for revealing the family’s address.
“The cropping of the promo image was corrected immediately although campaign donations are public record,” a Gannett spokesperson said, according to Fox.
This is indeed accurate. There a lot of things you do that are public record — that also shouldn’t be amplified to the world by the biggest media source in Cincinnati, or in any other city. Most people don’t seek that information out, but the Enquirer served it to its readership on a platter. That they can’t see the problem there is just as disconcerting as the fact they amplified it in the first place.
The story in its original form is available on Archive.is with the screenshot in place. The image is thoroughly unnecessary to the story. The two individuals mentioned are running for three open seats on the Lakota board, and while their sympathies aren’t mentioned in the story, they aren’t a mystery to voters or to Enquirer writers Erin Glynn and Madeline Mitchell.
Furthermore, given the tenor of school board debates, the decision to use the screenshot — and not vet whether or not the addresses or names were visible — is a mistake that can’t just be wallpapered over by saying, “yeah, but it’s public record.”
From the sounds of things, Boddy and Loges should have been more careful in terms of how they accepted campaign donations via Venmo. The article can serve as a warning to parent activists — dot your I’s and cross your T’s when it comes to campaign finance.
However, the story quickly became a major newspaper’s decision to dox donors in a contentious campaign and then hide behind a public record defense. That reasoning is inexplicable, particularly given how little the screenshot contributed and the obvious utility of the information for bad actors. This is doxing and targeting, plain and simple. The Cincinnati Enquirer needs to acknowledge that.
Loudoun County’s sheriff rejected a request by the school district’s superintendent to dramatically ramp up the law enforcement presence at a pair of school board meetings in August, newly released emails show.
Scott Ziegler, the superintendent for the Virginia county, asked the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office (LCSO) for three deputies to be inside the administration building for the Aug. 10 and Aug. 11 meetings, the emails show. He also requested a “K-9 explosive sweep,” a five-person “Quick Reaction Force,” undercover deputies, and another team “stood up and on standby at nearby location.”
Loudoun County Sheriff Mike Chapman rejected the request, according to one of the emails.You May Also Like
Chapman informed district officials that there would be no uniformed officers inside the building where the meetings were taking place nor would there be a law enforcement presence on campus.
Officers would be “in the area” in case they needed to quickly respond to a call, he said, according to a report on a discussion between district officials and the sheriff’s office conveyed to Ziegler in one of the emails.
Chapman said he was motivated not to approve the requests because the school board made a number of decisions without consulting the sheriff’s office, including deciding to limit public comment for a previous June 22 meeting and hiring a security firm with a metal detector.
“LCSO has been made to appear as the muscle for school board and work at the school board’s direction,” Kevin Lewis, a district official, told Ziegler in the call summary. The sheriff also said he believed citizens should have a right to address the board and that the board was being dismissive of people with whom they disagreed.
The documents were obtained by the Fight for Schools PAC and published by Fox News.
An LCSO spokesman confirmed to The Epoch Times that the conversation took place.
“The concerns raised by Sheriff Chapman was regarding the request for extensive resources and security measures that were not deemed necessary based on intelligence gathering for that meeting,” he said in an email.
He also said that the sheriff’s office does and continues to provide security for the school board meetings.
“For safety and security reasons, we cannot share law enforcement sensitive operational plans in regards to public meetings but we can assure residents that we allocate the appropriate level of resources based on the nature of the public meetings and the intelligence developed prior to each meeting,” he said.
The school district did not respond to a request for comment.
The northern Virginia county has become the epicenter for tension between parents and school board members seen across the nation in recent months.
Members have been vocally challenged in recent meetings on proposed policies like one that would let children who identify as a sex different than the one they are born with use various bathrooms. That policy was eventually approved, even though most parents who publicly testified opposed it.
Ziegler claimed in the June meeting that the district had no record of assaults happening in bathrooms, which was factually untrue, according to an email recently disclosed by district officials. He has said he misunderstood the question and is defying calls to resign.
A remark made by a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) adviser is “the most dangerous statement I’ve ever heard in medicine,” the only active practicing physician in Congress said in a new interview.
Dr. Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, and an associate physician specializing in infectious disease at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, sits on the administration’s vaccine advisory panel.
Before the panel voted this week to advise the FDA to authorize Pfizer’s COVID-19 jab for kids 5 to 11, Rubin said, in part: “We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes. That’s how we found out about rare complications of other vaccines, like the rotavirus vaccine.”You May Also Like
“That is literally the most dangerous statement I’ve ever heard in medicine,” Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.), a doctor, said on NTD’s “Capitol Report.”
“How’s that going to sit with the average mom, the average parent that cares about their child? That they want their child experimented on?” he added.
Rubin’s remarks were clipped by various people and widely circulated on social media, with some users saying it showed that the vaccine should not be given to children.
Asked about the criticism, Rubin told The Epoch Times in an email: “The clinical trial of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in children showed no adverse events. All data to date indicate that it is safe. It will prevent the hospitalization of children with severe disease, as it does with adults. The vaccine works, and saves lives.”
The claim the trial showed no adverse events is false, as the FDA did discover 13 cases of lymph node swelling. However, none of the trial participants experienced heart inflammation (myocarditis or pericarditis)—a serious side effect that has been seen at higher than expected rates among youth, particularly males.
The panel pondered the potential benefits and risks of giving young children the vaccine but ultimately decided the benefits outweighed the risks. The FDA accepted the recommendation on Friday.
Rubin said after the vote that surveillance systems would be crucial in learning “how safe” the Pfizer jab is for children.
“We decided to go for it with a lot of heavy conscience. But I’m hoping that this is the start of learning more about it,” he said.
Murphy and Rubin did agree on one point, that COVID-19 vaccines should not be mandated for young children at this point due to the lack of safety data. Several other FDA advisers also said this week they are opposed to mandating the vaccine for young kids at this time.
Murphy, speaking to NTD, noted a key difference between COVID-19 and diseases that children routinely receive vaccines for early in their life.
“The vaccines that we have for children are measles, mumps, rubella, those things that we give kids, we have to have them before they go to school. And I agree with that, that’s fine. But the problem is, those are childhood diseases. COVID is not a childhood disease. It can affect children, but its lethality rate is infinitesimal compared to what it is in adults,” said Murphy, who practices at the Vidant Medical Center, a 1,000-bed level 1 trauma center.
“I just don’t understand why it’s being pushed on kids so much,” he added, predicting a federal mandate for kids soon just to go to school. “We don’t mandate that kids get the flu vaccine to go to school. We don’t mandate that kids have the HPV vaccine. So I just don’t understand the biology and the virology for this.”
Just because a Food and Drug Administration panel recommended the COVID-19 vaccine for 5- to 11-year-olds, does not mean that it is risk-free. If it was, it wouldn’t have taken eight hours for the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee to deliberate the matter on Tuesday.
The whole meeting revolved around answering two questions: Do the benefits of Pfizer’s vaccine for children outweigh the risks? And what are the risks?
Pfizer announced in September that the vaccine is safe and efficacious for children, but there was a general consensus during the committee meeting that the data was limited. Ultimately, the panel’s decision to recommend the vaccines for children communicates that its members are fine with letting the general public be the next round of test cases to find out more about the possible risks and side effects of the vaccine.
“We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes,” microbiologist and infectious disease expert Dr. Eric Rubin said in the meeting.
Here is what is known about the COVID vaccine from the clinical trials so far.
First, it is important to note that the clinical trials for children were not huge. There were 2,268 participants between the ages of 5 and 11 in the trial, according to Pfizer.
This is technically in accordance with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s regulations for trial size, which require thousands of volunteers for the third phase. However, due to risks of significant health complications from the vaccine, federal regulators pushed both Pfizer and Moderna to expand their trial sizes over the summer.
A few thousand is not terrible for a clinical study, but with such a push to make the vaccine universal for the population, only 2,000 participants is a pretty small data pool.
Pfizer itself acknowledged that its data was limited. In fact, it did not even include data in its news release to show if the chances of children getting sick were lower.
Should young children be getting the vaccine?
“Gruber said that there were not enough cases of illness to tell,” Stat reported. “That means a decision has to be made on more limited data than regulators might like.”
The number of participants in this trial especially pales in comparison to the previous COVID-19 vaccine trials for adults. WCNC-TV reported in February that Pfizer’s Phase 3 of trials had 40,000 participants, while Moderna’s had 30,000.
With a relatively small clinical study, this means that if the vaccine is given emergency use authorization for children, 5- to 11-year-olds will more or less be joining a trial.
Besides concerns over fairly limited data, there are other risks from the vaccine that must be considered. One of the more serious risks, that still has lots of unresolved questions around it, is myocarditis.
Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle often caused by infection. It can cause a heart to beat irregularly, or even reduce its ability to pump. Sometimes the infection can leave the heart muscle weakened. In very rare cases, it can lead to death.
This problem can often resolve itself, but since it does affect the heart, it has the potential to become more serious, depending on the individual. Both the COVID-19 infection and vaccines have been linked to the heart complication.
This side effect of the vaccine has been rare, but it has shown up in Pfizer’s clinical trials. It is an especially concerning risk since Sweden, Finland and Denmark thought it problematic enough to pause Moderna, the other mRNA vaccine, due to an increase in myocarditis among youths.
“In the preliminary data … there is a suspicion of an increased risk of heart inflammation, when vaccinated with Moderna,” the Danish Health Authority said in a statement, according to Reuters.
Pfizer did look at the risk of myocarditis in its clinical studies, but determined it will take more time to really see how that potential risk could play out.
“The number of participants in the current clinical development program is too small to detect any potential risks of myocarditis associated with vaccination. Long-term safety of COVID-19 vaccine in participants 5 to <12 years of age will be studied in 5 post-authorization safety studies, including a 5-year follow-up study to evaluate long term sequelae of post-vaccination myocarditis/pericarditis,” Pfizer outlined in its briefing for the FDA committee meeting.
An outside Israeli study did provide more insight on this risk, however. The study, which looked at over 5 million people 16 years old and above that had been at least partially vaccinated, showed that the risk is small. But the demographic most at risk are adolescent males.
“During that time, 283 people had probable or definitive myocarditis, with 142 cases (50.2%) linked to the Pfizer vaccine,” the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy reported, regarding the study.
So going into the FDA meeting, there were plenty of questions about the risk of heart problems being an adverse side effect of the vaccine.
“There’s not a lot of controversy that the vaccine is causing some myocarditis. The question for the panelists is going to be how to weigh this against preventing Covid-19, which may cause more of the condition, and how severe these cases are,” Matthew Herper wrote for Stat ahead of the meeting.
Sure enough, committee members quickly brought up the heart risks that were linked to Pfizer’s vaccine.
Dr. James Hildreth, the CEO of Meharry Medical College, asked about some scenarios that Pfizer ran in its trials that showed an increase in myocarditis.
“When you did your risk-benefit assessment in your briefing document, there were six scenarios that you considered. It strikes me that scenario three, where you have the incidents from — I think it’s June of 2021, where the cases are low, the hospitalizations from myocarditis actually exceeded hospitalizations from COVID-19,” Hildreth said. “So could you comment on that, because to me, the single most important question is whether the benefits outweigh the risks, and in that scenario, they clearly don’t.”
Dr. William Gruber, Pfizer’s senior vice president for vaccine clinical research and development, answered that the benefits outweigh the risks. So while heart problems might be a risk, the benefits that the vaccine can offer in getting everyone back to normal life are greater.
“[T]he other benefits, and particularly those societal benefits — obviously protecting vulnerable populations, including populations of color, the ability to get the children back into the schoolroom setting … all of those things, I think have to enter into the equation, regardless of the rate,” Gruber said.
In its FDA committee meeting document, Pfizer reiterated that it considers myocarditis a small risk. But it’s important to note the wording and to keep remembering that since the clinical trials have been sped up, the full effects of the vaccine will have to be further discovered once it’s in the general population of 5- to 11-year-olds. There are still many side effects and responses that Pfizer can only “expect” at this point.
Despite this, the FDA committee did decide in favor of the vaccine, 17 to 0. But it is important to look at the one member who abstained from voting.
Dr. Michael Kurilla, from the National Institutes of Health, was the single abstention. He noted there was a lack of data, but particularly he questioned if vaccinating 5- to 11-year-olds was worthy of an application for emergency use.
“I don’t see the need for ‘emergency use’ of this vaccine across the entire age group and would have preferred a more nuanced approach,” Kurilla said.
There is no question that overall children are at much less risk of contracting and getting seriously ill from COVID than adults.
According to data accumulated by the American Academy of Pediatrics, states reported that only between 5.3 percent and 13.6 percent of children tested positive for COVID. Furthermore, children only accounted for 0 to 0.26 percent of all COVID-19 deaths, and 7 states reported no child deaths.
During the FDA committee’s discussion, there seemed to be some consensus that the vaccine should be available to high-risk children, but to make it universal was a bit more controversial.
“This is a really tough one. I do believe children at highest risk do need to be vaccinated, but vaccinating all the children to achieve that seems a bit much to me,” Hildreth said, according to Stat.
With such a low risk of contracting or dying from COVID in children, pushing for emergency use authorization is concerning. There does not seem to be an emergent need for the vaccine in the broad population of 5- to 11-year-olds.
No vaccine is going to be perfect and it’s natural that there will be side effects and that some may even have quite adverse responses (like myocarditis). Trying to push through a vaccine for such young children in the name of emergency should raise questions.
The speed and small data pool of the clinical trials seem to leave more questions than answers about the risks of the vaccine. At best, the data half-answers a lot of questions. Instead of convincing the FDA on grounds of strong, extensive data, Pfizer is essentially saying, “We are pretty sure that the risks aren’t too serious, but we’ll have to really just find out by giving it to the general population.”
Many decisions are going to boil down to choosing the lesser of two evils, but it should not be too much to ask for more extensive data in order to make the soundest decision possible. Most parents don’t want their child to be a guinea pig.
The New Hampshire School Boards Association (NHSBA) announced Thursday that it has withdrawn from the national organization following the group’s efforts to target parents.
The National School Board Association (NSBA) recently sent a letter to the Biden administration’s Department of Justice that described the actions of parents protesting policies such as critical race theory or COVID-19 rules as the equivalence of “domestic terrorism.”
“This email is to inform you that NHSBA [the New Hampshire School Board Association] has decided to withdraw its membership from the National School Boards Association, effective immediately,” NHSBA Executive Director Barrett Christina wrote. “NSBA’s recent actions have made our continued membership untenable.
The NSBA wrote Sept. 29 (pdf), “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat.”
The letter added, “As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
Following the NSBA’s letter, Attorney General Merrick Garland sent a memorandum to the Federal Bureau of Investigations to direct investigators to address the “disturbing spike” in harassment involving school board members by parents.
The controversy led lawmakers in Washington to discuss the matter with Garland this week. Republicans on the Judiciary Committee blasted the attorney general after he failed to rescind the letter or apologize regarding the matter.
“Thank God you’re not on the Supreme Court,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) told Garland. “You should resign in disgrace.”
The NSBA has since apologized for its letter.
“On behalf of the NSBA, we regret and apologize for the letter. To be clear, the safety of school board members, other public school officials and educators, and students is our top priority, and there remains important work to be done on this issue,” the NSBA wrote last Friday.
“However, there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter. We should have had a better process in place to allow for some consultation on a communication of this significance,” the letter added.
Despite the apology, the damage has already had negative consequences nationwide.
In addition to New Hampshire, state school board associations in Ohio, Missouri, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania have already withdrawn from the NSBA.
Three additional states, Alabama, Florida, and Kentucky, have also announced they are considering a departure from the national organization.
In the manner of a terrorist organization accepting responsibility for an atrocious attack on civilians, the Lincoln Project and a Democratic operative claimed credit for a bizarre performance of neo-Nazi cosplay on Friday as the Virginia gubernatorial race enters its final stretch.
Speculation swirled almost immediately after an NBC News reporter on Friday posted a photo of five dispirited young people, dressed in white shirts and khakis, holding tiki torches in front of Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin’s campaign bus in Charlottesville, Va. One of the “white supremacists” was an African American.
Their costumes were intended to evoke the “Unite the Right” rally in 2018, when white supremacist groups gathered to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. Despite the pouring rain, the cosplayers did not break character even as curious bystanders snapped photos.
“These men approached @GlennYoungkin’s bus as it pulled up saying what sounded like, ‘We’re all in for Glenn,'” NBC 29 reporter Elizabeth Holmes wrote on Twitter, the popular social networking website. The reporter’s post was subsequently promoted by a campaign staffer for Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe. Media experts instantly recognized the situation as “obviously a [Democratic] stunt,” but neither the McAuliffe campaign nor the Virginia Democratic Party would admit to paying hapless youngsters to get drenched in the name of social justice.
The Lincoln Project, a Democratic super PAC whose senior members are widely suspected of enabling the sexually predatory behavior of disgraced cofounder John Weaver, claimed credit for the amateur stunt after a Vice News reporter identified one of the Democratic operatives holding an unlit tiki torch in the rain.
“Today’s demonstration was our way of reminding Virginians what happened in Charlottesville four years ago, the Republican Party’s embrace of those values, and Glenn Youngkin’s failure to condemn it,” the Lincoln Project wrote in a statement. Democratic operative Lauren Windsor also posted a statement alleging she had worked with the Lincoln Project to “coordinate today’s Youngkin action in Charlottesville.”
Professional media observers were not entirely convinced by the Lincoln Project’s admission of guilt. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the Lincoln Project simply agreed to take responsibility after the fact as a favor to the McAuliffe campaign,” wrote Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
The Lincoln Project, which raised almost $100 million in the 2020 election cycle, has faced criticism after one of its founding members described his desire to transform the super PAC into a vehicle for “generational wealth,” while others have used the windfall to pay off back taxes, mortgages, and other debts.
Oh, and speaking of skinheads, here’s a photo of the Lincoln Project’s senior leadership:
Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson, and Reed Galen (Enemies of America)
A bill that would introduce party labels into local school board elections is advancing through Tennessee’s state legislature.
House Bill 9072, sponsored by Republican state Rep. Scott Cepicky, would allow political parties to nominate candidates for school board membership and school board candidates to campaign as a nominee or representative of a party.
Under the existing state law, school board elections in Tennessee must be conducted on a nonpartisan basis, meaning that one who seeks a position on a board will not appear on the ballot as a Democrat, Republican, or member of another political party.
The original version of the bill had sought to make partisan school board elections mandatory, but it was amended so that elections don’t have to be partisan. It passed the Tennessee House on Friday morning in a 52–39 vote.
“If the local parties don’t want to do it, they don’t have to. It’s totally permissive and wouldn’t be mandated across the state,” said Cepicky, reported Chalkbeat Tennessee.
The effort comes as controversies around public school boards, including the teaching of critical race theory and COVID-19 restrictions they put in place, continue to make national headlines. According to Ballotpedia, this year so far has seen at least 84 school board recall efforts against 215 board members, nearly triple from the previous year.
While opponents of the proposal argue that school boards elections should be made less, not more political, supporters say that a partisan ballot helps voters get a better sense of where each candidate stands on key issues.
“Our job is to provide as much transparency in the voter box as we can so that people have an idea of the level of expected performance from the people that they send to represent them,” Cepicky said, reported The Tennessean.
According to a 2020 survey by Education Next, Democrats have more favorable views toward increased school spending, the Common Core standard, and the effect of teachers’ unions on schools, while Republicans support school choice programs and basing part of the teachers’ salaries on how well their students learn.
A more recent survey by Morning Consult highlights the partisan divide on critical race theory. Nearly 80 percent of Republican participants said they view critical race theory negatively, compared with 7 and 46 percent of participants identifying Democrats and Independents, respectively. Republicans are also found to be more likely to describe the ideology with stronger words, such as “a Marxist proposal to indoctrinate children by blaming white people for everything.”
In Florida, a similar bill was proposed in September by state Sen. Joe Gruters, the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida. It is currently being considered in three state Senate committees.
The Orange County School Board in Florida removed a speaker from a board meeting after the man read a sexually explicit passage from a book that was available in local school libraries.
In a video recorded on Oct. 26 by a member of the Orange County chapter of pro-parental rights group Moms for Liberty, a man was ordered to be taken out of the meeting chamber by a police officer after he read from the 2019 graphic novel “Gender Queer: A Memoir.”
“I’m going to read a passage of a book that’s floating around in your schools that has been banned from many other schools,” said Jacob Engels, the speaker who was removed, according to Orange Observer. “As a member of the LGBT community, the fact that this is floating around for children as young as ninth grade is concerning.”
Engels then read a scene from the book depicting sexual acts before board chairwoman Teresa Jacobs asked him to stop, saying that he was “out of order.”
“If you don’t stop now, we will remove you from the chamber,” Jocob said. She then ordered the man’s removal as he continued to read.
Other community members in the audience can be heard protesting the interruption. “Our kids are reading this,” one man said.
“The language he just read is inappropriate in the forum,” Jocob explained.
“Then why it is appropriate for schools?” asked a woman.
“I understand the contradiction here,” Jocob replied, noting that neither she nor the board were aware of the book. “We will look into it, and I do hope the book is removed. OK? And if not, we’ll be back here having this conversation again, but I can guarantee you, I did not know that book was in the library.”
The school district later confirmed to the Observer that they have taken down all four copies of “Gender Queer” in three of the district’s 22 high schools.
“At this time, the book is not on library shelves and is under review,” the district said in a statement. “If anyone has a concern about materials or books found in our media centers or in our classrooms, Orange County Public Schools has a process in place for parents or guardians to submit a form to the school principal to address a concern.”
The graphic novel, created by California-based cartoonist Maia Kobabe, sparked a controversy earlier this week in Virginia, when conservative advocacy group Independent Women’s Voice (IWV) tried to run a 30-second TV ad containing the same sexual scene that Engels read. Local Virginia TV stations, including ABC, CBS, and NBC, have reportedly refused to air the ad, citing federal law which prohibits airing pornographic images.
“It’s shocking that images, and even some words, that federal law prohibits TV stations to share with adults are the same images being shared with Virginia students with no accountability,” said Victoria Coley, vice president of communications at IWV.
The book was available in schools in several Virginia districts, including in Fairfax, Loudon, and Arlington counties, according to IWV.
Mason became the second city in Ohio to criminalize abortion within city limits after a tense city council vote on Monday evening.
Located 25 miles northeast of Cincinnati, Mason, with a population of about 30,000 people, voted to ban abortions after four out of seven members of the city council supported the ordinance, which goes into effect in 30 days.
Mason now becomes the 41st city in the country and the second one in Ohio to offer “sanctuary for the unborn,” an initiative started by a Texas nonprofit. There are currently no abortion clinics in the city, but supporters of the ordinance say that this will ensure no facilities are set up in Mason.You May Also Like
There was a split between Republicans who believe in banning abortions and those who don’t, which was unexpected, according to Council member T. J. Honerlaw. Honerlaw, along with Tony Bradburn, Mike Gilb and Mayor Kathy Grossmann voted in favor of the ordinance, while council members Ashley Chance, Diana Nelson, and Josh Styrcula voted for abortion rights.
“I’m here to protect life. For me it’s a fundamental issue. If the foundations be destroyed, what do we have left,” said Vice Mayor Gilb at the meeting. “I’m not just here to decide how bright the street lights should be or where the next roundabout goes. Those things are certainly important issues, but they’re not as fundamental as protecting life.”
“America has a legal system in place to create order in our country. We must follow and abide by that system,” Nelson, who has served on the council for five years, said. “The supreme court has made a ruling on abortion, regardless of one’s opinion on abortion, creating local laws that contradict with federal laws is illegal and unconstitutional.”
There were demonstrators from both ends of the aisle displaying fierce support with banners that read, “Protect the Unborn,” and “Bans Off Our Bodies.” Speakers were allowed to voice their opinions while some constituents shouted to vote out the members who supported the ordinance.
The ordinance makes it illegal for anyone in Mason to “aid or abet” an abortion, including the possession and distribution of abortion-inducing drugs like mifepristone and misoprostol. Violators can be punished with up to 180 days in jail or $1,000 in fines. There are no penalties for someone seeking an abortion.
Exceptions include dangerous, disabling, and life-threatening situations for the mother, and accidental miscarriages.
While Kersha Deibel, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio, said to AP that the Mason ordinance opened up the city to “public ridicule, promised boycotts, and costly litigation,” Mike Gonidakis, president of Ohio Right to Life, said that this decision by the city council was a “a stand against the violence of abortion and for the protection of women and babies.”
Other smaller Ohio cities like London in Madison County and Celina in Mercer County are also considering implementing similar measures, and banning abortions within their city limits.
The only Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisory panel member to abstain from a major vote this week that essentially authorized Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for children as young as 5 said he did so because of limited safety and efficacy data.
All 17 others voted to advise the administration, or the FDA, to authorize the jab for children between the ages of 5 and 11. The agency already supported doing so and is expected to formalize the authorization soon. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would then decide which children should get the shot.
The vote was preceded by nearly eight hours of discussions and presentations, with multiple members expressing concern about the scant data on how the vaccine will affect the age group.You May Also Like
But Dr. Michael Kurilla, an expert on infectious diseases and pathology who directs a division inside the National Institutes of Health, was the only one who didn’t support the recommendation.
Kurilla told The Epoch Times in an email that he opposed the specific, binary wording of the question, which opens up the possibility that any child between 5 and 11 will be able to get the Pfizer vaccine. He was also concerned about the longest follow-up for the clinical trial involving the age group being only three months, data that shows children experience severe cases of COVID-19 much less often than adults, and how a large chunk of them have already had the disease, giving them some level of immunity.
If the authorization goes through as expected, at least some of the age group will be able to get two doses of 10 micrograms each, spaced three weeks apart.
The same dosage interval, with a dosage level three times as high, is currently in place for adults. But adults have seen waning effectiveness, especially against infection, prompting the recent authorization of booster doses.
Because the interval is the same, it can be predicted that the effectiveness will also wane in children, Kurilla said. The lower dosage level, meanwhile, brings into question whether the protection against severe disease and hospitalization will be as strong as in adults.
“Real-world evidence involving adults suggest the 3-week dosing interval is suboptimal in terms of durability and is likely to be similar in children, leading to waning immunity within 4–6 months,” Kurilla said. “Because the Pfizer vaccine offers protection against serious disease even after antibody titers have waned, there is some other basis for immunity, but at the lower dose in children, there is no expectation that those same immune processes will behave similarly to the higher adult dose.”
Pfizer/BioNTech’s new pediatric COVID-19 vaccine vials are seen in this undated handout photo. (Pfizer via Reuters)
Low Hospitalization Rate
During the meeting, members heard that among children 5 to 11 in the United States, there have been over 1.9 million infections since the start of the pandemic, but just 0.4 percent, or 8,400 of those cases, have required hospital care. And just 94 of them ended up dying.
They also heard that an estimated 20 percent of the hospitalized children were admitted for a reason besides COVID-19 and that nearly seven out of 10 of the children had existing serious health conditions like heart disease, illustrating just how little risk COVID-19 poses to healthy children.
Further, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 40 percent of children in the age group have already had COVID-19. Recovery from COVID-19 bestows some level of immunity, studies show, with multiple studies indicating the level is actually higher than vaccines provide.
“The benefit here is assumed to be prevention of severe disease, which is what we’re all hoping for,” Kurilla said during the meeting. But among the recovered, he added later, “The question really becomes, does this vaccine offer any benefits to them at all?”
Kurilla signaled he would have voted “yes” if the FDA had proposed opening up access to the vaccine to a subset of the 5–11 group. He also explained why he abstained.
“My abstention was based on the specific question the FDA asked. A ‘no’ vote would have been misconstrued as my opinion about the vaccine,” he told The Epoch Times. “There are high-risk groups within the 5–11 age group that would benefit from the vaccine, suggesting a more tailored approach.”
In this image from video, Dr. Michael Kurilla (C) questions the CDC’s Dr. Fiona Havers (R) during an FDA advisory panel meeting on Oct. 26, 2021. (The Epoch Times via FDA)
Others Question Widespread Use
Additional panel members openly questioned whether all young children should get the vaccine.
“I’m torn. On one hand, we know that many mothers and fathers and parents are eager to administer this vaccine to children because they’re so frightened, perhaps overly so, … that they really are anticipating having access to this vaccine in children,” said Dr. Cody Meissner, the director of pediatric infectious disease at Tufts Medical Center.
“On the other hand, I think we saw that approximately 68 percent of the children who are hospitalized with COVID-19 have underlying comorbidities. That means about 32 percent do not. And then if we were to take 40 percent of that group that may have immunity already, we’re getting down to a very small percent of otherwise healthy 6- to 11-year-old children who might derive some benefit,” he added.
But others said they saw the need for the vaccination. The protection it gives would prevent more hospitalizations and ensure schools remain open, some argued.
“We don’t want children to be dying of COVID, even if it is far fewer children than adults, and we don’t want them in the ICU,” said Dr. Amanda Cohn, a CDC official.
Jeannette Lee, a biostatistics professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, said she was impressed by the data presented by Pfizer, which relied on an approach called immunobridging. In this case, Pfizer’s trial showed the vaccine triggered antibodies in children. The antibodies were compared to those elicited in older groups, and that was used as proof the vaccine will protect the kids against COVID-19.
Kurilla, though, voiced disapproval with the approach, telling colleagues “it’s being based on an immunogenicity marker that we know wanes.”
He said he hoped for more flexibility in the authorization, including a single dose for some children and no doses for others, based on factors like prior infection.
“There are high-risk individuals and I think they do need to be attended to, that we do need to provide a vaccine for them. But for many others, one dose—or no dose, even, if they’ve had prior COVID infection. I think they may not need anything more,” he said.
A 14-year-old girl gets a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in Hartford, Conn., on May 13, 2021. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)
Side Effects
Cases of heart inflammation after receipt of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are highest in youth, especially boys in their teens. Based on reports submitted to the federally run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), the cases are higher than expected in males aged 12 to 49 after the second Pfizer dose and females 12 to 24 after the second Pfizer dose.
Over half of the children with confirmed myocarditis or pericarditis studied in the Vaccine Safety Datalink surveillance system required hospital care, though no post-vaccination deaths due to the conditions have been confirmed, according to federal authorities.
Pfizer said none of the 5- to 11-year-olds in its trials experienced post-vaccination heart inflammation. Using a third of the amount of that given to older people is, in part, an attempt to curb side effects, though how that will ultimately turn out is unknown.
FDA scientists said they determined the vaccine would prevent more COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among the age group than vaccine-linked heart inflammation cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. They assumed a vaccine efficacy of 70 percent against COVID-19 cases and an efficacy of 80 percent against hospitalizations linked to the disease. Among young males, “the benefits appear to outweigh the risks,” Hong Yang, an FDA scientist, told members. Among young females, “the benefits clearly outweigh the risks,” she added.
“What will the actual myocarditis rate be in these younger kids?” Dr. Ofer Levy, director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, wondered. That group “may be less susceptible to myocarditis, but right now that’s a speculation,” he added. “We don’t know that for sure.”
Members of the public also expressed concern, arguing the safety data wasn’t sufficient to authorize the vaccine for children so young.
But other members pointed to the trial data, the fact fewer reports have come in for 12- to 15-year-olds than 16- and 17-year-olds, and how, generally, fewer younger children experience heart inflammation versus older ones.
“I am not as concerned about myocarditis in this age group as I am in the older kids,” Dr. Melinda Wharton, another CDC official, said.
Surveillance systems like VAERS will help detect if inflammation becomes an issue in the younger children, members said.
“If the surveillance systems do start seeing severe outcomes and deaths from vaccination, I’m quite confident that those surveillance systems will tell us that we need to pause like we did with the J&J vaccine to really have a good idea of what the effects are vaccinating this age group,” said Dr. Patrick Moore, professor at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute.
In this image from video, Dr. Eric Rubin (L) explains why he will vote to advise the FDA to authorize Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for young children during an FDA advisory panel meeting on Oct. 26, 2021. (The Epoch Times via FDA)
The ‘Yes’ Votes
Ultimately, most members said the benefits and predicted benefits of the vaccine in the 5- to 11-year-olds outweighed the risks and potential risks.
“I think this vaccine will likely be effective in reducing pediatric COVID in this age group and may also help reduce transmission. On the safety end, I’m encouraged by the lower dose, … finding a dose that’s immunogenic and had not too much in terms of reactogenicity,” said Dr. Ofer Levy, director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Dr. Eric Rubin, an adjunct professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, said he wanted to give parents the choice to vaccinate their kids, imagining he had a child who was a transplant recipient, though he joined others in saying there are probably some younger children who shouldn’t get the vaccine.
“The question of how broadly to use it, though, I think is a substantial one. And I know it’s not our question, but I—and I know we’re kind of punting that to [the CDC’s advisory panel]—but I do think that it’s a relatively close call,” he said.
Soon after, in a comment that was widely distributed online, he added: “We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes. That’s how we found out about rare complications of other vaccines, like the rotavirus vaccine.”
Rubin told The Epoch Times in an email, responding to critics: “The clinical trial of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in children showed no adverse events. All data to date indicate that it is safe. It will prevent the hospitalization of children with severe disease, as it does with adults. The vaccine works, and saves lives.”
Isn’t it fitting that the homonym for vial is vile? [US Patriot]
The Biden administration has purchased an additional 50 million Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine doses for children to be delivered by the end of April next year, the drugmakers said in a statement on Thursday.
“The U.S. will receive these additional doses to continue to support preparedness for pediatric vaccinations, including securing vaccines for children under 5 years of age, should they receive regulatory authorization,” Pfizer-BioNTech said in a press release.
It comes after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee voted on Tuesday to recommend its authorization for the vaccine in children aged 5 to 11. Seventeen members of the outside panel voted yes to recommend the authorization, and one abstained.You May Also Like
Boxes of kid-size doses of Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, October 2021. (Pfizer via AP)
If the FDA agrees with the panel’s recommendation the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory panel would subsequently decide who can receive a shot. The companies said they expect to then begin shipping the vaccine immediately, in 10 microgram pediatric doses, as directed by the federal government.
The companies said the latest contract with the Biden administration brings the total number of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine doses secured since the start of the pandemic to 600 million—spanning doses for adults and adolescents, and children.
Separately, the companies said the Biden administration has also purchased an additional 1 billion doses for donation to low- and lower-middle-income countries.
The companies said preliminary clinical trial data on the use of its vaccine in children—aged between 2 to 5 years, and 6 months to 2 years—is expected in the fourth quarter of 2021 or early first quarter of 2022.
If authorized and recommended by the CDC, children between 5 and 11 would be administered two doses of 10 micrograms, three weeks apart.
Democrats dressed up as white supremacists in a last ditch attempt to smear Republican Glenn Youngkin.
n what quickly became a political stunt gone wrong, Democratic strategists have been accused on social media of posing as white supremacists while standing next to Virginia Republican Glenn Youngkin’s campaign bus.
Social media sleuths were quick to notice that the only people interacting with images promoted by an NBC reporter were Democratic Party political operatives. The photos were retweeted by far-left activist Adam Parkhomenko, as the public began to notice that one of the men posing as a fake Republican white supremacist bore a striking resemblance to Virginia Youth Democrats’ Finance Director, Camden Layton.
To be clear:
Virginia Democrat operatives dressed up as Neo-Nazis holding tiki-torches today to smear their opponent and attempted to pass it off as actually happening
Another woman in the same series of photographs was fingered as potentially being Colleen Wachenfeld, who boasts about having flipped Arizona “blue” on her Twitter profile. Wachenfeld quickly changed her LinkedIn handle to “C W” shortly after the photos started to be questioned by users on Twitter.
In response to tweets alleging that Parkhomenko was part of the “false-flag” attempt to associate moderate Republican gubernatorial candidate Youngkin, Parkhomenko said of user Alec Sears, “As I have said on the record: he made up a lie about me and is spreading that lie around the world. He claims to have receipts that don’t exist because his tweet is based on a lie. Delete your f***ing tweet you a**hole.”
Sears – himself a political consultant – has not deleted the tweet. It is unclear from an extensive search who Parkhomenko spoke to “on the record” as the tweets were only posted by Sears shortly before he responded with this threatening tweet.
The irony regarding CRT is that is actually white supremacy. If they believed in what they preach, shouldn’t they kill themselves to serve “the greater good?” [US Patriot]
On Friday morning, supposed “white supremacists” clad in white button-down shirts greeted Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin’s bus with tiki torches. Leftists immediately claimed they were Youngkin supporters showing their true colors.
“To my fellow Virginia residents: please vote against this blatant display of racism, hatred and intolerance,” NBC News legal analyst Glenn Kirschner wrote in a since-deleted tweet.
“Please vote FOR a kind, welcoming, diverse Virginia. Please vote @TerryMcAuliffe for governor. Because #JusticeMatters.”
But as the morning went on, other Twitter users began to notice the “white supremacists” were not Youngkin supporters at all. Instead, they appeared to be former Democratic staffers in the state of Virginia.
Virginia Young Democrats financial director Camden Layton and Democratic Party of Virginia staffer Colleen Wachenfeld were among the alleged participants in the stunt.
OMG LOL Va Dems did *not* just send a black man to play a ‘white supremacist for Youngkin’ 😬 pic.twitter.com/h0SZujvKX1
🚨 I am now confident that we have identified the woman in this group of political actors as Colleen Wachenfeld, with @vademocrats. pic.twitter.com/qySknRSUrd
Many Republicans saw the stunt as a last-ditch effort for Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe, who is falling in the polls ahead of next week’s gubernatorial election. Conservative pundit and strategist Greg Price called the actions “desperate.”
Terry McAuliffe’s campaign was feeling so desperate at their terrible poll numbers that they made a bunch of their staffers dress as white supremacists and condemned them to being memes for the rest of their lives.
Later on Friday, The Lincoln Project attempted to take credit for the stunt in a statement. The group claims to be dedicated to “protecting democracy” by fighting against former President Donald Trump and “Trumpism.”
“Today’s demonstration was our way of reminding Virginians what happened in Charlottesville four years ago, the Republican Party’s embrace of those values, and Glenn Youngkin’s failure to condemn it,” the statement said.
“The Youngkin campaign is enraged by our reminder of Charlottesville for one simple reason: Glenn Youngkin wants Virginians to forget that he is Donald Trump’s candidate. We will continue to hold Glenn Youngkin accountable. If he will denounce Trump’s assertion that the Charlottesville rioters possessed ‘very fine’ qualities, we’ll withdraw the tiki torches. Until then, we’ll be back.”
It is unclear whether the Democratic staffers coordinated with The Lincoln Project to perform the stunt. Judging by their social media reactions, the staffers weren’t nearly as proud to take public responsibility for their participation.
There are essentially two main explanations for the event. Either the participants were actually trying to fool people into believing they were Youngkin supporters, or they were trying to politically harm him by dressing up as white supremacists. In both scenarios, their actions are still reprehensible.
Youngkin has a real chance to win the governorship in Virginia next week, and that scares the life out of Democrats both in the state and around the country. If they think gimmicks like this one are going to help change that, they are sorely mistaken.
It was just another suburban school board meeting like the thousands of others that regularly take place around the country.
A typical meeting with the school superintendent and some staff, the board members probably facing the room, perhaps a microphone for comments from the public, and federal agents and a helicopter circling overhead.
Wait — what?
While a lot of attention has been focused on the Loudoun County, Virginia, school district and its cover-up of a girl’s rape, shady things have been going on in neighboring Fairfax County, another upscale suburb of Washington, D.C.
Parents arriving at a Fairfax school board meeting last week were greeted by unmarked federal government vehicles and a helicopter shining a searchlight down on them, according to Stacy Langton, a mother of six who attended the meeting.
“This is something that is incredible in America and it’s, you know, ridiculously un-American,” Langton told Fox News.
“Honestly, I have paid a heavy price because of what I said at my school board meeting on Sept. 23 about the pornography and the pedophilia that I found in my son’s high school — at Fairfax High School.”
Langton said she has been harassed since participating in a “very peaceful, uneventful” protest last weekend at the Justice Department headquarters in Washington.
“Since the DOJ protest on Sunday … my family has been receiving daily threats,” she said. “So I have threats against my children by name, I have been followed in my car with my children in my car. … They know where I live, and I don’t know who’s putting somebody up to this, but it’s obviously meant to intimidate me.”
On Oct. 4, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo advising the FBI and U.S. attorneys to be aware of threats against school officials and school board members. He said the Justice Department is “steadfast in its commitment to protect all people in the United States from violence, threats of violence and other forms of intimidation and harassment.”
Merrick’s memo followed the now infamous letter to President Joe Biden from the National School Boards Association likening parental protests to “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” The NSBA later rescinded and apologized for the letter.
After being grilled by Republican lawmakers during a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Garland reiterated his intention to mobilize federal agents against perceived threats to school boards.
Regarding the alleged threats against her, Langton could only speculate.
“It could be it’s the DOJ, it could be it’s [Terry McAuliffe’s] campaign people because I know this is suddenly all about the election here in the state of Virginia, it could be the school board, it could be the LGBTQ community. I know there are a lot of people who are very unhappy about what I said at the school board meeting.
“I don’t know why people have a problem with what I said because I don’t know who is in favor of pornography in their children’s school. This isn’t a political issue, and even the liberals shouldn’t be happy that there’s porn in the schools.
“So I’m not getting a lot of sleep right now. Nobody’s sleeping in my house because we can’t be sure that we’re safe.”
Langton speaks quite articulately, but one correction might be offered.
Ever since the National School Board Association issued an open letter to President Joe Biden which essentially branded parents who protest mask policies, critical race theory and transgender bathrooms as “domestic terrorists,” it’s become abundantly clear that school boards aren’t particularly thrilled about this new rip-roaring form of American populism coming from concerned parents.
The organization has since had to walk back its inflammatory suggestion, as member groups around the country have been pushing back, but not before the Department of Justice has taken up the cause. It appears that plenty of school boards are still very disgruntled that tax-paying parents want to show up and let them know exactly what they think about infusing COVID tyranny and leftist indoctrination into public school curricula.
One Minnesota school board has gone way, way too far, however.
Alpha News reported this week that residents of Mankato, Minnesota, who might want to point school board members to, say, COVID-19 case rates among children or to read aloud from pornographic novels they’ve found in the school library, will have to state their home address before they participate in the public portion of the meetings.
On Oct. 18, Jodi Sapp, Mankato Area Public Schools board chair, detailed the new rules, which include the disclosure of one’s home address, a ban on addressing board members directly or discussing any issues not on the agenda for the meeting, and — oh yeah — if anyone cheers, claps, or even hollers, by George, she’s shutting the public forum down at once.
“Effective tonight, open forum participants are prohibited from calling out or addressing any individual school board or school district staff member. If this occurs, open forum will be closed,” Sapp stated during the meeting that evening. “Beginning at the Nov. 1 school board meeting, open forum will be limited to those individuals who wish to speak to an item on the board agenda.”
“Crowd noise, or any sort of grandstanding during open forum, including applause, talking, hollering or any outburst will result in open forum being closed,” she also said. “Further, beginning at the Nov. 1 school board meeting, open forum participation will be limited to those individuals who wish to speak to an item on the board agenda.”
As Alpha News noted, this effectively dictates that the public will not be allowed to address any topics the board hasn’t already decided are kosher and that individual members of the board will be shielded from any direct public criticism during board meetings.
Have school boards gone full tyrant?
Perhaps Sapp has observed from afar the fate of Loudoun County board member Beth Barts, who recently stepped down amid efforts to remove her from office over her alleged involvement with a left-wing parents’ group that was compiling lists of local parents who opposed the LGBT and “anti-racism” policies the board was attempting to pass.
Additionally, the Mankato board is now openly requiring that any parents that speak during the public portion of their meetings dox themselves prior to giving comments.
“Each speaker is asked to state his or her name and address for the record. Failure to do so will result in an individual not being allowed to speak,” Sapp stated during the meeting as reported by Fox News.
According to Alpha News, this appeared to be the first time such a policy was put in place. A meeting on Sep. 20 requested no such thing from members of the public.
Disturbingly, as the Minnesota-based outlet reported, one man initially refused to state his home address but finally acquiesced, turning away from the microphone in the hopes that it wouldn’t be captured and broadcast to online viewers of the meeting.
However, “Sapp was sure to restate his exact address into her microphone so all could know where he lives,” they noted.
The stringent new requirements for members of the public came after an Oct. 4 meeting during which fewer than 10 people spoke to the board for roughly 25 minutes altogether.
“The majority of this time was used by community members to speak out against the district’s mask mandate and policy on staff vaccination,” Alpha News noted. “Some speakers’ remarks were followed by modest applause, much to the chagrin of Sapp, who appeared uncomfortable in the face of criticism.”
On Oct. 18, Sapp credited these people, whose behavior she derided as “unacceptable,” as being the reason behind the new regulations.
I’m sorry, even if these people had been heckling, shouting, and knocking chairs over during the previous meeting, what sane person thinks that forcing members of the public to disclose their home address is an acceptable means of maintaining decorum during a school board meeting?
This is not only petty and vindictive, it’s highly disturbing. Tax-paying members of the public certainly ought to be able to publicly address the board of the local school district they’re required to support without worrying that some nutjob could easily come and find them and their family while they sleep at night.
How is it remotely sensible or acceptable to risk the safety of every single member of a person’s family, including their own children, because you’re irritated that people don’t like mask policies and vaccine requirements?
Besides, if we’re supposed to believe that parents who hate masking, critical race theory and transgender students are basically domestic terrorists, wouldn’t it put any members of the public who spoke out in support of these policies at serious risk at the hands of these maniacs?
This is exactly the kind of subtle tyranny that’s being implemented across the country, from private employers to the federal government to classrooms and everywhere in between.
Sure, no one is forcing you to take the vaccine, but you’ll lose your job if you don’t. Sure, no one is forcing your child to adopt the ideology of critical race theory, but they’ll be alienated by their peers and told in class they’re a racist if they don’t repent of their whiteness.
Sure, no one is banning you from speaking out against local school board policies, but just go ahead and tell everyone where your kids sleep if you’d like the opportunity to do so.
All across America, parents are fighting back against school boards. They are getting more and more outraged that our public schools would defy their concerns and teach their kids a revisionist version of our history. Parents have spoken up, confronting these liberal-controlled school boards.
Biden struck back by having the DOJ brand these parents as criminals. But that hasn’t stopped patriotic parents from fighting for their children’s educations. And in Republican-controlled Texas, they are taking steps to take out one poisonous form of curriculum.
From The Hill:
The chairman of a Texas state House committee tasked with conducting investigations is launching a probe into books that school librarians keep on their shelves in the wake of a measure the legislature passed earlier this year to bar teaching of critical race theory in public schools.
Texas state government is launching investigations to probe the kinds of books available on public school shelves. They are searching for anything that teaches the previously barred “critical race theory” curriculum being pushed by Democrats in our schools.
Texas banned this kind of teaching in the classrooms. But it’s possible that schools found loopholes by putting these books in their libraries. Teachers and liberal librarians could easily encourage kids to read these books on their own, circumventing the law.
Critical race theory has been widely panned by many historians and conservatives. Many believe the ideology twists American history by branding our founding fathers as villains over slavery and other issues. It removes the merits of our leaders and the incredible work they did to found the United States.
Many, including leaders like Ben Carson, fear how this teaching can warp the minds of millions of young people. At least in Texas, their leaders are taking the steps to eliminate this toxic teaching and restoring accurate, honest historical curriculum.
But in many other states, parents have to fight to get their voices heard. Meanwhile, the DOJ and the media branding Americans for simply speaking their mind. The only way CRT will fail is if Americans refuse to back down.
Key Takeaways:
Texas state legislature is investigating to take CRT books from school libraries.
The state banned the teaching of “critical race theory” and is ensuring it isn’t in the libraries.
American parents have fought school boards to remove this teaching from schools.
Luke Rosiak’s report in The Daily Wire is further evidence that Democrats are pro-corrupt school boards and anti-parents. This should be a clear sign that Virginia needs Glenn Youngkin as governor to protect children.
The report from Luke Rosiak, a highly regarded investigative reporter, in The Daily Wire is quite disturbing. It details a cover-up of alleged sex crimes against a 12-year-old student in Fairfax County. Democrat Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe was a senior advisor to a law firm which is actually fighting against the victim. Please share this story as it should have a significant impact on the governor’s race and reinforce how we need to have control over our children’s education system.
A school board president in southern California is facing calls to resign after a hot mic caught her throwing a vulgar insult toward a parent who had expressed concern over vaccine mandates for children.
The incident occurred Tuesday in Orange County at a meeting between parents and members of the Los Alamitos Unified School District Board of Education, KTLA-TV reported.
Marlys Davidson, the board president, and other members of the board listened to questions and statements from parents who expressed their opinions on issues ranging from mask mandates to critical race theory.
As we’ve seen in recent months, some of those questions were passionate. One woman who had identified herself as a concerned parent came up to a podium during the meeting with a message for Davidson.
KTLA reported Lauren Roupoli had asked the board to respect parents by not calling parents “selfish,” and concluded that any assumption that those in attendance to speak up for their children were there for themselves was “rude.”
Roupoli had barely concluded her comments when a microphone caught Davidson sharing a two-word response which she apparently thought could not be heard by the parents in the room.
Would you enroll your child in this school district?
“F*** you,” said a voice reported to be that of Davidson in a brazen display of disrespect amid a broader conversation nationally about school boards and their relationships with their communities. Footage from the meeting cuts before parents or fellow board members are given time to respond to the comment.
WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language which some viewers will find offensive.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=y8k2VLnmxJw
Davidson later issued an apology to Roupoli through a statement that was sent to KTLA.
“I am going go personally apologize to the speaker who most certainly deserves to know that when the member of the public address the Board of Education, they must be heard with respect,” Davidson said. “I reaffirm my commitment to serve our community with dignity and integrity, and I hope they will accept my sincere apology.”
The apology felt hollow to Roupoli, however, who said she wants Davidson to step down from the board.
Every school in California is required to mandate masks for students, faculty and staff. KNTV-TV reported Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom intends to make the shots mandatory for every student in the state.
Public schools attempting to indoctrinate children with woke ideologies have been a problem for years. But Broward County, Florida, is reportedly taking things to a whole new level of crudity.
On Wednesday, Broward County school board member Sarah Leonardi tweeted pictures of a field trip she took Wilton Manors Elementary students on. The problem was the destination of the field trip was a gay bar.
“I was SO honored to be invited to chaperone @WiltonManorsES’s field trip to the incredible Rosie’s!” she wrote. “The students and I had a fun walk over and learned a lot about our community!”
I was SO honored to be invited to chaperone @WiltonManorsES’s field trip to the incredible Rosie’s! The students and I had a fun walk over and learned a lot about our community! A huge thank you to @RosiesBnG for hosting this special field trip every year! pic.twitter.com/A3rpMbyUJP
— School Board Member Sarah Leonardi (@bcpsleonardi) October 27, 2021
In one picture, young students in masks can be seen outside the bar with three adults. Another image shows the young children sitting at tables inside the gay bar.
On its online menu, Rosie’s has items such as “Naked Sweaty Lovin’,” “Smack My Cheeks and Make ‘em Rosy Sauce,” “Miley Highclub” and “Beet Your Brains Out.”
Doesn’t that sound like a nice, family-friendly establishment?
Seeing children at a bar like this is disturbing in any capacity, but the fact that it appeared to be a school-sanctioned event was even more grotesque. Many users took to Twitter to express their concern.
In her tweet, Leonardi suggested the gay bar field trip was an annual event. One can only hope this exposure will spare future students from such gross mistreatment.
Previous actions from the Broward County school board suggest the body is on the political left. For example, the board voted in August to enforce a universal mask mandate despite a ban on such mandates by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, WPLG-TV reported. (The board later voted to make masks optional at the district’s high schools.)
Unfortunately, sexually charged school events promoting an LGBT agenda are becoming more prominent. On Oct. 15, Burlington High School in Vermont hosted a drag show during halftime at a high school football game.
VT: Burlington’s high school homecoming drag show leaves LGBTQ+ students with mixed emotions.
Principal Lauren McBride waited near the field, her walkie-talkie crackled: “They’re coming out, and they look fabulous.”
Abuses like this are the reason parents are becoming more involved in their children’s education. They are also the reason why politicians like Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, who said parents should stay out of education, are falling in the polls. Meanwhile, students in China have reached the top of the world charts in reading and math performance.
Parents care about what their children are being taught, and they have every right to do so. If woke educators keep pushing leftist ideas on their students, the effects will almost certainly be felt in future elections.
The event “Defending Freedom in American Education,” held by a non-profit organization in Georgia on Oct. 23, addressed how parents can oppose Critical Race Theory (CRT), eradicate the harmful indoctrination, and preserve American values and principles in schools.
“We are vocal. We are loud. We are tenacious. We must be heard. But we are civil. We respect the rules of society and legitimate authority. We will not stand down. We are the majority—patriotic Americans who believe that a fair and just society can only be achieved when malleable young minds are free from the indoctrination that suppresses their independent thought,” said the organizer, Dr. Elana Fishbein from No Left Turn in Education.
Fishbein founded No Left Turn in Education in the fall of 2020 after her son was taught CRT at his Pennsylvania elementary school.
At the event, Fishbein said the first step is understanding the dangers of CRT and how it has infiltrated our culture through school curriculums, and that the goal of No Left Turn in Education is to empower parents to fight back.
CRT started in the mid-1970s in the writings of various American legal scholars, including Derrick Bell and Alan Freeman. It was revisited by Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1980s.
CRT claims to study racism in society, and it presents racism as the root problem for a wide variety of social ills. In recent years, it has been endorsed by many in academia as well as U.S. civil-rights thinkers, seeking to examine the intersection of race and legal justice, or as an approach to racial justice.
Dr. Carol Swain, Best Selling Co-author of “Black Eye for America: How Critical Race Theory is burning down the house” attended the event “Defending Freedom in American Education” in Georgia on Oct. 23, 2021. (Joan Wang/The Epoch Times)
Dr. Carol Swain, a best-selling author, pointed out that the current goal of leftist educators is to extend CRT into the 5–12 school system, from its well-established perch in U.S. colleges and universities, with the aim of diminishing American pride.
Paul K. Lott, the founder and president of the National Society for the Advancement of Black Americans (also NSABA) at the event “Defending Freedom in American Education” in Georgia on Oct. 23, 2021.(Joan Wang/The Epoch Times)
Paul Lott, the founder and president of the National Society for the Advancement of Black Americans told The Epoch Times “that the statistics show there is no discrimination in America.”
“Average white poverty went up in 2018,” he said. “The statistics comparing 1959 to 2018, show white babies were three times more likely to remain poor than black babies in America. … If racism was happening, this would never have happened.”
He also said he believes that this notion of race-based inequity is bred by the Hollywood media pushing these assumptions of fact on young people.
A recent lawsuit, handled by Southeastern Legal Foundation, challenges mandatory student segregation being exercised in Illinois schools. It’s said the white students and non-white students are separated from the same teacher and receive different curriculums.
Kimberly Hermann, the General Counsel of Southeastern Legal Foundation, attended the “Defending Freedom in American Education” event in Georgia on Oct. 23, 2021. (Joan Wang/The Epoch Times)
Kimberly Hermann, general counsel of Southeastern Legal Foundation, advised parents of children who were being forced to accept divisive concepts based on race, to pursue legal help. She also said she believes that history should be taught in school and children should be educated with love, kindness, and caring for each other instead of hating each other.
An NBC News analysis earlier this year found at least 165 local and national groups have arisen, seeking to “disrupt or block lessons based on race and gender.”
A Minnesotaschool board is facing criticism because of new policies for public comment sessions at its meetings, including requiring that commenters state their home address in order to speak.
The Mankato Area Public School Board updated its open forum guidelines earlier this month, but only sparked controversy recently after video footage of an Oct. 18 meeting was shared on social media. During the meeting, parents and community members were told they must give their full address before they could speak for three minutes.
“I just want to remind everybody this is a business meeting of the school board, it is not a meeting that belongs to the public,” chairwoman Jodi Sapp told the audience before the open forum segment began.
She went on to read out the guidelines, stating that each speaker will be asked to state his or her name and address for the record, and that failure to do so will result in an individual not being allowed to speak.
The new rules also banned “calling out or addressing any individual school board or school district staff member.” If it occurs, the open forum will be closed, and the violator will not be allowed to participate in future open forums.
“Crowd noise, or any sort of grandstanding during open forum, including applause, talking, hollering or any outburst will result in open forum being closed,” Sapp added.
One of the public commenters was a Mankato man who identified himself as John Wicklund. When Sapp asked him to reveal his address, he replied that he “would rather not,” saying that he had suffered from “property damage, eggs, and everything else” by “fun people and their friends.”
After Sapp repeatedly pressed Wicklund for his precise home address, the man turned away from the microphone and gave his address in an attempt to avoid potential harassment. Sapp then restated that address using her microphone so that all could hear where he lives.
Mankato’s new policies were first reported by Minnesota news site Alpha News, which noted that rule was apparently not enforced or did not exist before October, since public forum participants were not asked to “dox themselves” at a Sept. 20 meeting.
The policies caused widespread criticism on social media, with many people questioning whether it is legal for the board to make such requirements, or whether the rules should also apply to board members themselves. The website of the Mankato school board currently doesn’t disclose each member’s home address.
The controversy comes amid a nationwide debate over parents’ role in their children’s upbringing and education. While advocacy groups like Parents Defending Education call for more parental involvement in local school districts’ decision-making process, the National School Board Association requested federal law enforcement to help handle what it described as “angry mobs” of parents who allegedly threaten the safety of teachers and school officials.
The school board did not respond to request for comment on the public forum policies.
“General Garland, you have weaponized the FBI and the Department of Justice. Your U.S. attorneys are now collecting and cataloging all the ways that they might prosecute parents … because they want to be involved in their children’s education.”
That’s how Sen. Josh Hawley challenged Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday as Garland testified before a Senate committee regarding the Justice Department’s interest in parents protesting against school boards.
“It’s wrong,” Hawley said. “It is unprecedented, to my knowledge, in the history of this country, and I call on you to resign.”
There may be headaches around the country today for the people who repeatedly facepalmed during Garland’s testimony.
Hawley zeroed in on Garland in front of a large photograph of police arresting Scott Smith, the angry father whose daughter was sexually assaulted in a school restroom in Loudoun County, Virginia.
The Republican senator grilled Garland on a letter from the U.S. attorney for Montana that he said called for the prosecution of parents speaking out against school boards.
The letter followed an Oct. 4 memo from Garland calling upon federal law enforcement officials to develop plans to respond to “threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” That memo had come days after the National School Boards Association sent a letter to President Joe Biden comparing school board protesters to domestic terrorists.
“Now, you testified last week before the House that you didn’t know anything about [the Smith] case,” Hawley said.
“I find that extraordinary because the [NSBA] letter that you put so much weight on — the letter that’s now been retracted — it cites this case. … There’s a news article cited in the letter. It’s discussed in the letter, but you testified you just couldn’t remember it.”
Do you think Garland should resign?
Hawley had Garland backed into a corner. Either he hadn’t done his due diligence before signing off on the Oct. 4 memo, or he had lied to Congress about being unaware of the Loudoun County incident.
“Maybe this will refresh your memory,” Hawley continued. “Do you think people like Scott Smith — do you think parents who show up to complain about their children being assaulted ought to be treated like this man right here?” Hawley asked, pointing to the picture of Smith being pinned to the floor by police.
Garland countered by saying that parents who show up at school board meetings are protected by the First Amendment.
“Do you think that they ought to be prosecuted in the different ways that your U.S. attorneys are identifying?” Hawley shot back.
Garland answered, “If what they’re doing is complaining about what the school board is doing — policies, curriculum, anything else that they want to — as long as they’re not committing threats of violence, then they should not be prosecuted, and they can’t be.”
But Hawley said some of his Democratic colleagues at the hearing had repeatedly compared parents protesting at school board meetings to “criminal rioters,” a charge Garland denied.
“Oh, really?” Hawley replied, picking up a piece of paper and apparently reading a quote from it. “‘These people are just like the folks who came here on Jan. 6 and [were involved in] the riot at the Capitol’?”
Garland, perhaps suddenly recalling comments by Democrats, replied, “I don’t think that they were referring to the picture that you’re showing there”
“Well, I certainly would hope not. They were referring to parents who go to school board meetings. Mr. Smith is a parent who went to a school board meeting.
“I’ll leave it at this. General Garland, you have weaponized the FBI and the Department of Justice. Your U.S. attorneys are now collecting and cataloging all the ways that they might prosecute parents like Mr. Smith because they want to be involved in their children’s education and they want to have a say in their elected officials.
“It’s wrong. It is unprecedented, to my knowledge, in the history of this country, and I call on you to resign.”
Despite challenges from Hawley and other Republicans, Garland said Wednesday that he will continue to mobilize federal officials against threats to school boards, according to U.S. News & World Report.
“True threats of violence are not protected by the First Amendment. Those are the things we are worried about here. Those are the only things we are worried about here,” Garland said.
“We are not investigating peaceful protests or parent involvement in school board meetings. There is no precedent for doing that and we would never do that. We are only concerned about violence and threats of violence against school administrators, teachers, staff.”
Of course, violence is increasingly becoming whatever leftists say it is (as in the “silence is violence” line from Black Lives Matter).
Hawley is right — Garland should resign.
And here’s a suggestion: Think about sending the video of Hawley grilling Garland to your representative or senator as a primer on what many of us expect of those representing us in Congress.
A Texas House committee is investigating school library books in the wake of a new law that bans the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in public schools.
State Rep. Matt Krause, a Republican who chairs the House Committee on General Investigating, wrote on Oct. 25 to the Texas Education Agency and a group of unnamed superintendents, notifying them of the inquiry.
In the letter (pdf), Krause said a number of school districts across the state have recently removed books from libraries and classrooms after receiving objections from students, parents, and taxpayers. The letter cites five incidents as examples, which mostly involved concerned parents who complained that certain books are sexually explicit or teach CRT.
“In accordance with the Committee’s jurisdiction and my authority as Chairman, I am initiating an inquiry into Texas school district content,” he said.
Attached to the letter is a 16-page list (pdf) containing more than 840 books, published between 2021 and as early as 1969. It includes titles that are popular among social and racial justice activists, such as “Stamped from the Beginning: the Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” and “How to Be An Anti-Racist” by Ibram X. Kendi, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” by Michelle Alexander, and books about the Black Lives Matter movement.
Also on the list are books focused on transgender, gender identity, homosexuality, adolescent sexuality, pregnancy and abortion, including those discussing the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe v. Wade. It also includes “V for Vendetta” by Alan Moore, likely because of the graphic novel’s portrayal of homosexual characters.
Specifically, Krause asked school districts to report on how many copies of each listed book they possess, and how much money was spent on those books.
Krause further asked that school districts identify any other books that cover topics including “human sexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, or HIV or AIDS, sexually explicit images, graphic presentations of sexual behavior that is in violation of the law,” or contain material that might violate the anti-CRT law by conveying that students are inherently racist or sexist or should feel guilt because of their sex or race.
The school districts will have until Nov. 12 to respond to those questions, according to the letter.
The initiative faced almost immediate opposition from Texas’s teachers’ unions. In an Oct. 26 statement, Texas State Teachers Association President Ovidia Molina said Krause’s letter “smacks of a witch hunt.”
“This is an obvious attack on diversity and an attempt to score political points at the expense of our children’s education,” Molina said.
Molina was joined by Zeph Capo the president of Texas American Federation of Teachers, who called the move “akin to the Red Scare” and a waste of taxpayer’s dollars.
It is unclear what Krause is planning to do once the school districts provide him with the information. The Epoch Times has reach out to his office for comment and will update this article accordingly.
Denouncing efforts by the National School Boards Association to demonize parents who demand a say in the education of their children, the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday announced they will investigate potential collusion between the Biden administration and the National School Boards Association.
A rising tide of parental anger has been building across America as schools boards have jammed mask mandates, critical race theory, transgender activism and assorted other far-left extremist indoctrination tactics down the throats of children.
In response to defiant parents refusing to be pushed around any longer, Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this month issued a memo saying that the Justice Department will now intervene on the side of school boards against parents.
“As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes,” the group wrote in a letter.
The school boards association has since issued an apology for the reference to domestic terrorism, but not the general tenor of its attack on parents.
Is the Biden White House anti-parent?
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent a scathing letter to the National School Boards Association on Wednesday announcing the launch of their investigation into the organization’s war on parents in partnership with the White House.
“We are investigating the troubling attempts by the Department of Justice and the White House to use the heavy hand of federal law enforcement to target concerned parents at local school board meetings and chill their protected First Amendment activity,” the letter thundered.
Noting that the group’s letter denouncing parents produced the knee-jerk reaction of Garland’s memo, the letter added that Garland told the House panel that the letter’s wild claims were the basis of his anti-parent memo.
Merrick Garland tells @ChuckGrassley he will not dissolve school board task force even though the National School Boards Association apologized for the “domestic terrorism” letter that seemingly prompted Garland to create the task force
“The Biden Administration seemingly relied upon the NSBA letter — which it coordinated in advance with the NSBA — as justification to unleash the full weight of the federal law enforcement apparatus upon America’s parents,” the letter read.
“Parents have an undisputed right to direct the upbringing and education of their children, including expressing concerns about the inclusion of controversial curricula in their child’s education,” the House Republicans wrote, noting that the school boards association appears not to recognize that.
“Unsurprisingly, the NSBA’s September 29 letter to President Biden never once mentioned ‘parents’ or parents’ role in their children’s education — although its subsequent apology memorandum purported to value the ‘voices of parents.’ Concerned parents are absolutely not domestic terrorists and, to the extent actual threats exist, local law enforcement — and not the FBI — are the appropriate authorities to address those situations,” the letter read.
“Parents cannot tolerate this collusion between the NSBA and the Biden Administration to construct a justification for invoking federal law enforcement to intimidate and silence parents using their Constitutional rights to advocate for their child’s future.”
The letter called for a release of all the documents from the group and the Biden administration that were germane to its demand that parents be restrained from publicly advocating for their children.
The letter also asked whether, in light of its new-found claim that it values parents, “the NSBA will urge Attorney General Garland to withdraw or rescind his October 4 memorandum.”
The letter was signed by Republican Reps. Jim Jordan, of Ohio; Steve Chabot of Ohio; Louie Gohmert of Texas; Darrell Issa of California; Ken Buck of Colorado; Matt Gaetz of Florida; Mike Johnson of Louisiana; Andy Biggs of Arizona; Tom McClintock of California; Greg Steube of Florida; Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin; Thomas Massie of Kentucky; Chip Roy of Texas; Dan Bishop of North Carolina; Michelle Fischbach of Minnesota; Victoria Spartz of Indiana; Scott L. Fitzgerald of Wisconsin; Cliff Bentz of Oregon and Burgess Owens of Utah.
Parents group fires back, says DOJ memo designed to suppress dissenting parents
Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Oct. 27 that it was appropriate for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to send a memo to school boards despite a National School Boards Association (NSBA) decision to withdraw its letter comparing parent protesters to domestic terrorists.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Garland attempted to distance the DOJ’s memo from the NSBA letter.
“All it asks is for federal law enforcement to consult with, meet with local law enforcement to assess the circumstances, strategize about what may or may not be necessary to provide federal assistance, if it is necessary,” Garland said, in response to questioning from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).
The memo, he said, “alters some of the language in the letter that we did not rely on and is not contained in my own memorandum. The only thing the Justice Department is concerned about is violence and threats of violence.”
After the NSBA letter and DOJ’s memo were issued, Republicans in Congress said the Biden administration was trying to quash parental dissent against the teaching of controversial subjects, including the quasi-Marxist critical race theory.
Republicans have said the DOJ should withdraw the memo since the NSBA retracted and apologized for its letter last week. The original letter referred to protests against school board members and likened such actions to domestic terrorism, asking the DOJ to use the Patriot Act.
“I think all of us have seen these reports of violence and threats of violence—that is what the Justice Department is concerned about,” Garland said on Oct. 27. “That’s the reason that we responded as quickly as we did when we got a letter indicating that there was violence and threats of violence with respect to school officials and school staff.”
Real and concrete threats of violence against school officials “are not protected by the First Amendment,” he said. “We are not investigating peaceful protests or parent involvement in school board meetings.”
The follow-up apology letter issued by the NSBA “does not change” its concern about the threat of violence, Garland said, telling Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) that the DOJ directive merely addresses whether any federal laws were being broken.
Without providing any concrete examples or data, the attorney general’s memo issued earlier in October said there has been a “disturbing spike” in threats of violence, harassment, and intimidation against teachers, school board members, and other educators. In a separate statement, the DOJ also announced the creation of a task force that would deal with such threats, which includes the agency’s National Security Division.
In response to Garland’s testimony on Oct. 27, Parents Defending Education head Nicole Neily said in a statement that a “number of people across the country” were terrified by the DOJ memo. The memo also suppressed parents from attending meetings and voicing their concerns “because they feared a knock at the door by the FBI,” Neily said.
Garland confirmed during an Oct. 21 House Judiciary Hearing that the basis for the claim of a “disturbing spike” in threats was based on the NSBA letter—not on law enforcement intelligence or academic studies.
But the NBSA has since distanced itself from its initial letter.
“On behalf of the NSBA, we regret and apologize for the letter,” the group’s Oct. 22 letter said. “To be clear, the safety of school board members, other public school officials and educators, and students is our top priority, and there remains important work to be done on this issue.
“However, there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter. We should have had a better process in place to allow for some consultation on a communication of this significance.”
Letter requesting federal help on rowdy school board meetings prompted DOJ action
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee started an investigation Wednesday into what they called “collusion” between the Biden administration and the National School Boards Association ahead of the Justice Department’s decision to intervene in squabbles between parents and school officials.
In a letter to NSBA officials, the Republicans asked for their communications with the White House, FBI and Justice Department related to the organization’s Sept. 29 letter to President Biden calling for federal assistance and comparing threats against school officials to “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
The NSBA board of directors issued an apology last week to its state affiliates for the letter, after Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Oct. 4 directive bringing in the FBI to address “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” against school officials.
“We are investigating the troubling attempts by the Department of Justice and the White House to use the heavy hand of federal law enforcement to target concerned parents at local school board meetings and chill their protected First Amendment activity,” said the 19 House Judiciary Republicans in the letter obtained by The Washington Times.
They cited internal emails posted by Parents Defending Education in which NSBA President Viola Garcia and interim Executive Director Chip Slaven said their staff had been in discussions with the White House about the letter before it was sent.
“The Biden administration seemingly relied upon the NSBA letter — which it coordinated in advance with the NSBA — as justification to unleash the full weight of the federal law enforcement apparatus upon America’s parents,” said the Republican letter, led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the committee.
The GOP letter also asked “whether the NSBA will urge Attorney General Garland to withdraw or rescind his October 4 memorandum.”
“Concerned parents are absolutely not domestic terrorists and, to the extent actual threats exist, local law enforcement — and not the FBI — are the appropriate authorities to address those situations,” said the GOP letter. “Parents cannot tolerate this collusion between the NSBA and the Biden administration to construct a justification for invoking federal law enforcement to intimidate and silence parents using their constitutional rights to advocate for their child’s future.”
Mr. Garland refused to retract the memo under questioning Wednesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying it came “in response to concerns about violence, threats of violence, other criminal conduct — that’s all it’s about.”
He also made it clear that he never referred in his memo to “domestic terrorism.”
“The language in the letter that they disavow is language that was never included in my memo and never would have been,” Mr. Garland said. “I did not adopt every concern that they had in their letter. I adopted only the concern about violence and threats of violence and that hasn’t
changed.”
The NSBA letter backed up its request for federal involvement by citing two dozen articles about school board meetings featuring outspoken parents alarmed about critical race theory and mask mandates, but the reports listed only two arrests.
One of those arrested was Scott Smith, a parent in Loudoun County, Virginia, who was charged with disorderly conduct in June after he sought to confront the board about his daughter being sexually assaulted in a bathroom at Stone Bridge High School.
A Loudoun County juvenile court judge ruled Monday that the attacker engaged in “non-consensual sex” and would be sentenced in November.
“The letter cited a number of interactions at school board meetings, the vast majority of which did not involve violence or threats,” the Republicans said. “Notably, as one ‘example’ of alleged domestic terrorism, the NSBA cited an instance in Loudoun County, Virginia, where a father angrily confronted members at a school board meeting about the heinous sexual assault of his daughter.”
On Monday, Mr. Smith asked the NSBA for a full retraction and apology for being called a domestic terrorist, according to ABC7 News.
The Washington Times has reached out to the NSBA for comment.
The NSBA board of directors said in its Oct. 22 memo to state affiliates that “we regret and apologize for the letter,” which was signed by Ms. Garcia and Mr. Slaven, not the board.
“There was no justification for some of the language included in the letter,” the board said. “We should have had a better process in place to allow for consultation on a communication of this significance. We apologize also for the strain and stress this situation has caused you and your organizations.”
The memo said the organization would be conducting a formal review of its procedures.
As Republican Glenn Youngkin insists that the election for governor of Virginia is all about parents and their children, to President Joe Biden, it’s seemingly all about Donald Trump.
Biden name-dropped the former president 24 times in 17 minutes Tuesday during a campaign stop to help Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, according to the New York Post.
Youngkin has made the race a dead heat, leading to an onslaught of big-name Democrats coming to Virginia in hopes of energizing their voters in the Nov. 2 election.
Biden’s jabs at Trump were part of a Democratic strategy to paint Youngkin as a wild-eyed Trumpist who would bring the kind of chaos witnessed in the Jan. 6 Capitol incursion to the sedate liberal mainstream of Virginia voters.
Biden said “extremism can come in many forms,” including “the rage of a mob” and “a smile and a fleece vest,” according to Yahoo.
One of Youngkin’s campaign trademarks is a fleece vest.
Youngkin has Trump’s support, but given the highly divided nature of the state from its liberal enclaves around Washington, D.C., to its more conservative counties, Youngkin has decided on a campaign strategy that does not include using Trump as an in-person speaker to rally the Republican vote.
However, Biden pictures Youngkin as a Trump loyalist.
“I ran against Donald Trump. Terry is running against an acolyte of Donald Trump,” Biden said.
Will Democratic scare tactics work this time around?
“He (Youngkin) won’t allow Donald Trump to campaign for him in this state. He’s willing to pledge his loyalty to Trump in private; why not in public? What’s he trying to hide? Is there a problem with Trump being here? Is he embarrassed?”
During his speech, Biden was heckled by protesters concerning the Line 3 pipeline from Alberta, Canada, to Wisconsin.
“This is not a Trump rally; we let them holler,” Biden said
Biden, along with former President Barack Obama, Vice President Kamala Harris and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, are trying to energized Democrats.
Youngkin has turned away from the traditional political name game and has been strong in his focus on recent in-state controversies, including sexual assault accusations at Loudoun County Public Schools.
He also has backed parents who oppose certain books in schools that discuss sex in explicit detail. That has pitted him against McAuliffe, who has backed schools against parents.
What’s it like to have Terry McAuliffe block you from having a say in your child’s education?
“I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decision,” McAuliffe said in a debate against Youngkin, according to the New York Post.
“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Youngkin, however, said the upcoming election will define if parents will be relegated to second-class status.
“Virginians have a moment to stand up, not just for the future of Virginia’s kids, but for America’s kids. And that’s why this race is so important to everyone right now,” he said, according to Fox News.
“The nation is watching because they recognize that when Virginians stand up and take a state that has been blue and elect a Republican governor, it’s going to make a statement that’s going to be (heard) not just around the country, but around the world.”
Democrats are clearly concerned about the upcoming gubernatorial election in Virginia. In fact, President Joe Biden went down to Arlington, Virginia, on Tuesday to speak on behalf of Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe.
Before current governor Gov. Ralph Northam was leading the state with such accomplishments as being exposed for racist yearbook pictures and obscene views on abortion, McAuliffe was Virginia’s governor from 2014-2018. This time around, he is hoping that his previous tenure can push him to victory once again.
According to his website, McAuliffe successfully “fought the Republican-led legislature” in Virginia to achieve things like “expand[ing] preschool to thousands of Virginia children.” Biden was attempting to boast about this feat when he made one of his infamous gaffes.
“So, if you’re looking for someone who is going to keep your economy going and growing, the man behind me is the guy to get it done,” Biden said according to a White House transcript. “He’ll do it again. In fact, we’re taking a page from Terry’s book when he was governor and when he’d be governor next time.”
In his next sentence, Biden attempted to talk about McAuliffe’s achievements in Virginia preschools. If you just read the transcript, you would think nothing went wrong.
“We’re emerging from this pandemic, and we want to expand pre-k for three- and four-year-olds — millions of pre-K children,” the transcript claims Biden said.
In contrast, video from the speech posted to Twitter paints a much different picture.
Biden may be trying to say “millions of pre-K children,” but it sounds a lot more like gibberish. To the best of my ability, I would translate the comment as “milliuns uh pre-care gogu.”
In context, it is possible to use deductive reasoning and infer that Biden was talking about pre-K children. But that’s not the point.
Americans should not have to listen to the president garble his words over and over again and try to guess what he is saying. That is not a quality of a good leader.
Having a stutter is one thing, but consistently slurring, mumbling and forgetting things is another. Biden’s actions suggest cognitive deficiencies far beyond a simple speech impediment from childhood.
In addtion to that issue, McAuliffe’s preschool plan this time around is not all Democrats make it out to be. In reality, it is basically a massive spending spree, as are most leftist ideas.
Is Joe Biden suffering a cognitive decline?
In a separate tab on McAuliffe’s website, his campaign describes the preschool plan. McAuliffe plans to “invest a record $2 billion annually in education,” make a “$75 million per year investment in broadband to expand access and lower monthly costs,” and “cover education costs for students who commit to teaching for five years in one of Virginia’s public schools after graduation.”
Of course, the page doesn’t say how McAuliffe plans to pay for this plan, but it probably involves raising taxes and/or pulling money out of thin air.
To make matters worse, McAuliffe has made comments last month that suggest he cannot be trusted with any sort of power over education.
On Sept. 28, McAuliffe suggested parents should have less of a say in their own children’s education.
“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” he said.
Biden not only failed to speak clearly while trying to praise McAuliffe, but also praised him for his record on education despite multiple question marks. That is probably not the boost McAuliffe needed in a tight gubernatorial race.
The parents of a Leon County school student have filed a lawsuit against school officials for violation of parental rights in an effort to stop enforcement of the district’s transgender-affirming “guidance” for their minor-aged daughter that was kept secret from the parents.
The Plan
As reported by The Epoch Times in August, January Littlejohn of Tallahassee, Florida, was horrified to discover that school officials held a secret meeting with her 13-year-old daughter to discuss how the school would accommodate her decision to be acknowledged as non-binary and use an alternate name at school. The plan made it clear to staff that the parents were not “aware and supportive of their child’s gender transition.” Therefore, while the school psychologist/social worker, principal, assistant principal, counselor, student teachers, substitute teachers, and the child’s peer group were allowed to know what was going on, the use of “privacy when speaking to parents” was listed as one of the “considerations” that “must be accounted for in implementing this plan.”
Excerpt from the Leon County School District’s transgender gender nonconforming student support plan, directing staff to keep all guidance regarding a 13-year-old daughter’s new “non-binary” status secret “when speaking to parents,” filled out in a secret meeting on Sept. 8, 2020. (Obtained by The Epoch Times from January and Jeffrey Littlejohn in August 2021.)
According to the Leon County School District’s Transgender/Gender-Nonconforming Student Support Plan—filled out during a Sept. 8, 2020, private meeting and first obtained by The Epoch Times—a “checklist” was used to record the child’s new non-binary status, “preferred name,” and “preferred pronouns.” The child also determined which bathroom she preferred using and that she would “be comfortable rooming w/either sex” on overnight school trips. This opened the door to having the 13-year-old girl rooming with teenage boys without her parents’ knowledge.
Excerpt from the Leon County School District’s transgender gender nonconforming student support plan, directing staff to keep all guidance regarding a 13-year-old daughter’s new “non-binary” status secret “when speaking to parents,” filled out in a secret meeting on Sept. 8, 2020. (Obtained by The Epoch Times from January and Jeffrey Littlejohn in August 2021.)
Through the series of emails and meetings between January and Jeffrey Littlejohn, their attorney and Leon County Schools Superintendent Rocky Hanna—which followed the discovery of the secret meeting—Hanna eventually conceded in a May 24, 2021 letter addressed to Mary McAlister—lead counsel for the Littlejohns—that “there was no basis to exclude” the parents from the private meeting. In the letter—also obtained by The Epoch Times—Hanna also said “a revised Q&A specific to the Littlejohn’s concern was provided to the administrators reiterating the directive to promptly contact parents of students who identify as LGBTQ+.” In conversations with the Littlejohns, Hanna further admitted the passage of H.B. 241, the Florida Parents’ Bill of Rights, “changed everything” in this matter.
Leon County Schools Equity Officer Kathleen Rodgers also told The Epoch Times in August that the district was “working to put together a more detailed policy to be more inclusive of the Parent Bill of Rights” and that “a committee” would meet “in the next few weeks to tweak policies and begin the process to present them to the School Board for adoption.”
The Broken Promises
“We have been meeting with the district for over a year and we were holding faith in what the superintendent was telling us,” January Littlejohn told The Epoch Times the day after the lawsuit was filed, “They said ‘you’re absolutely right, you should have been included,’ and ‘from here on out parents will be included.’ We thought that hiring attorneys would let them know we were serious and that passing the Parents’ Bill of Rights and having that signed into law would be enough.”
However, while the Littlejohns believed their July 1 meeting with school officials and their attorney went well—just after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the Florida Parents’ Bill of Rights into law—the passage of time found nothing had changed.
While the Littlejohns requested to see the promised revised policy from the Leon County School District, all they found was that the school had pulled the old guide from the internet.
Despite Hanna’s assurance that parents will be included in important decisions being made for their child, it has become very clear that Leon County school officials are maintaining their policy of keeping everything secret.
“That was a huge red flag for me that they weren’t adhering to what was promised at the meeting,” Littlejohn said “and I became very concerned that we were being dragged along and they were not going to make good on their word. So we filed the lawsuit.”
The Lawsuit
According to Littlejohn, school officials continue to insist that they are following school guidelines, which are to protect the privacy of the children. However, their lawyer insists school officials are twisting the definition of the word “privacy” to push their own agenda.
“When we say ‘private,’ these school officials are taking the position of ‘keeping things private from parents,” Vernadette Broyles, president and general counsel at Child & Parental Rights Campaign Inc. in John’s Creek, Georgia, told The Epoch Times. Broyles is one of the attorneys representing the Littlejons in their lawsuit.
“We have no quarrel in protecting children’s privacy from a third party,” Broyles explained. What they do have a problem with is when school officials take the position that the decisions they make that affect the mental health and well-being of someone else’s child—like the decision to identify as something other than their sex, what bathrooms the child will use, and where they sleep on a field trip—should be kept secret from parents.
“Those are profoundly impactful decisions and they’re taking a position of saying they cannot share it with parents,” Broyles asserted “and that is a distortion of the concept of privacy of a child to keep such information from the child’s parents.”
According to Broyles, the individuals named in the complaint filed on Oct. 18 are Hanna and Rodgers. Broyles said the Leon County School Board was also named in the suit because they have reason to believe the board had “some complicity and knowledge of what was going on.”
The complaint alleges that the Defendants “violated Plaintiffs’ fundamental rights by implementing a protocol and training district staff to conceal from parents information regarding their children’s assertion of a discordant gender identity,” and “violated Plaintiffs’ fundamental rights by directing staff to deceive parents by using the children’s birth name and corresponding pronouns in the presence of or communication with the parents while using the children’s new chosen name and pronouns at all other times.”
‘Common Sense Things’
According to Broyles, they are asking for “some very common sense things.” They want the school to formally rescind the old guidance they had on the website, specifically the directives to “intentionally deceive parents by using the child’s given name and pronouns when the parents were around or when speaking to parents” and to “revert to using the assumed identity of the child” once the “parents were out of the way.”
“That is unconscionable,” Broyles said.
They also want a new policy drafted that makes it clear, “whenever a child expresses confusion about their gender identity or their sex that parents would be immediately notified because it is a health issue.”
In addition, “no meetings will be held and no actions will be taken until school staff and/or officials have first spoken to the parents and obtained their permission and their participation in these decisions.” They also demand that “any new policies be implemented through school board notification and voting.”
“That’s a big issue,” Littlejohn noted, explaining that many schools are able to keep parents in the dark about what is going on in their children’s schools by calling these procedures “guidance” rather than “policies.”
“We’re seeing around the country where these kinds of “guidance” are being implemented through back channels, decided somewhere in private conversations and then put in place not through the public school boards, which are accountable to parents and the community,” Littlejohn explained.
Asked if they believe the implementation of “guidance” through “private conversations” suggests there is an intentional violation of Florida’s Sunshine Laws, Broyles said the possibility is obvious.
“We suspect there is but we decided not to focus on that because those types of violations typically have a short statute of limitations and limited remedies,” Broyles explained. “This is a bigger picture. This lawsuit is about protecting the fundamental rights of parents to raise their children without the interference of government officials so we have focused on the guarantees under the Unites States Constitution, the Florida State Constitution, the protections of the Florida Parents’ Bill of Rights, and other Florida statutes.
“This is not just a Florida thing,” Broyles insisted. “This is a national agenda to drive a wedge between parents and their children because somehow public school officials have taken the position and have somehow come to believe that they know better than parents and that children are nothing more than the mere creatures of the state. This case is to establish that children belong to families and that parents are the rightful adults to be making these decisions about what’s in their child’s best interest.
“I want to be very clear about something,” Broyles added, “affirming a child’s discordant gender identity is a significant mental health and medical decision that affects the well-being of children with potentially life-long consequences. To affirm a child’s discordant identity is a treatment decision to a complex mental health issue that schools are not qualified to make. Parents must immediately be involved in such decisions. So this case is about establishing the rightful place of parents to make those decisions and that’s what protects children.”
The Secret Game of ‘Guidance’ Versus ‘Policy’
“This issue of ‘guidance’ versus ‘policy’ is really significant,” Littlejohn reiterated, sharing that she had watched a conference hosted by Equality Florida “that specifically told the schools, administrators, guidance counselors, and all of the attendees to implement guidance, not policy because you don’t have to have any input to do that.”
When they call it “guidance” rather than “policy” Littlejohn said school officials “can effectively train teachers, put on seminars, webinars and implement these procedures without ever having to go through the school board to get public comment.”
“It’s all done very much in secret from parents,” Littlejohn said, explaining how she had found “these same exact LGBTQ non-conforming guides” in many other Florida school districts including Broward, Dade, Palm Beach, Pinellas, Orange, Pasco, Hillsborough, and Alachua.
“And these were just the ones I researched,” Littlejohn noted. “I didn’t have time to research all the counties in Florida yet but it’s very easy to find these guides and it specifically states to keep this information from parents because outing a child to the parents could result in abuse or homelessness.”
Quisha King, the mother whose speech opposing critical race theory before the Duval County School Board went viral, produced a video warning parents that what happened in secret with the Littlejohns could also be happening to their children in Duval County. In the video, King reads directly from the Duval County Public Schools’ “Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Transgender & Questioning LGBTQ+” Support Guide (pdf), which instructs any teacher or school administrator who is asked about a child’s chosen status by a child’s parent to provide the following “appropriate response”:Based on policy and federal guidelines, I cannot divulge whether your child and I have had any such confidential conversations, as even students are legally afforded rights of privacy.
The guide further instructs that “upon notification of a transgender or gender non-conforming student’s status,” school staff should complete a support plan, just like the one filled out by the Littlejohn’s daughter in secret meeting with school officials, “in collaboration with the student and parent/guardian (if aware) to provide guidance to school staff on how to support the child at school.” The guide also provides a “reminder,” that “a student’s gender identity should never be disclosed without their consent even to a parent or guardian.” As it reads on the booklet cover, this guidance is to be practiced in “every school, every classroom,” with “every student, every day.”
“That’s devotion, honey,” King told The Epoch Times, clarifying that this means it applies to all Duval County children in kindergarten through twelfth grade. “They even have in the guide how to talk to kindergartners about this.”https://www.youtube.com/embed/fYbeqhTYvTA?wmode=transparent&wmode=opaque
“They put this out there under the umbrella of civil rights, privacy, and anti-bullying,” King explained. “But I don’t understand why we have to cater to one specific group. Nobody should be bullied. No one should be harassed. Why do we have to have LGBTQ signs everywhere as if they’re a special group? It should just be ‘we don’t tolerate bullying or harassment of anyone,’ period.”
The ‘Mishandling of This Situation’
“While we seldom comment on pending litigation, we have seen that the district openly acknowledged their mishandling of this situation and apologized for the matter,” Christina Pushaw, press secretary for DeSantis told The Epoch Times.
This is not the first time Leon County has been in the legal hot seat. On Oct. 12, Leon County was slapped with a $3.57 million fine for violation of state law prohibiting vaccine mandates for government employees and for firing 14 who refused to comply. They have until Nov. 5 to pay the penalty.
“The district should take every step necessary to get a firm grip on its school operations and hold accountable all those who permitted this ridiculous situation to occur,” Pushaw stated further. “Governor DeSantis has always stood strong for parents’ rights and will continue fighting to protect parents’ rights to make health and education decisions for their own children.”
“The Leon County School Board has admitted their mishandling of the situation and apologized to the family,” Brett Tubbs from the communications office for Florida Department of Education Director Richard Corcoran, told The Epoch Times, “however we must hold those who permitted this situation to occur accountable. The Leon County School District must take every step necessary to fix this situation. Governor DeSantis and the Florida Department of Education (FDOE) have fought for the rights of parents and will continue to do so when making health and education decisions for their students. FDOE has been extremely clear that elected officials cannot pick and choose what laws they follow and that parents have the right to make personal and private health care and education decisions for their families.”
The Epoch Times reached out twice to Hanna for comment. He did not respond.
The Epoch Times also reached out to Rodgers.
“We do not comment on open litigation,” Chris Petley in the communications office replied.
The Epoch Times also reached out twice to Leon County School Board Chair Georgia “Joy” Bowen (District 5). She did not respond.
“A group of four attorneys and three educators created this guide to be an antidote to the propaganda with which activists have flooded our schools,” Broyles said. “It is filled with medically accurate information that was reviewed and endorsed by fourteen medical professionals. ”
“They are really pinning the child against the parent and that’s what was so profound to me,” Littlejohn said. “There was not just one person in the meeting with my daughter but three school officials had her in a room, by herself, completing this guide with her and this is being done, not only in our state but all over America. This is a really significant issue happening that parents are in the dark about. Parents need to find a voice and stand up for parental rights before they’re completely gone.”
Republican Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy condemned Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Biden administration over Garland’s letter to the FBI targeting parents protesting at school board meetings.
Kennedy made the remarks in an interview on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” on Wednesday ahead of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
“Merrick Garland is the vessel here. The prophet is President Biden in the White House. Merrick Garland’s not going to back off until the White House tells him to back off, and all of this was instigated by the White House,” Kennedy said.
“Most parents don’t believe that babies can be white supremacists.” @SenJohnKennedy previews the questions Attorney General Merrick Garland will face during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the DOJ’s probe into ‘threats’ against school boards @BillHemmer@DanaPerinopic.twitter.com/c7W4hA8sKV
Kennedy said the issue is really about parents’ love for their children.
“You don’t have to be a Latin scholar to figure out what this is all really about. It’s about parental love. My late father used to tell me when I was a kid. He’d say, ‘Son, you’ll never know love until you have a child.’ And he was right,” the congressman said.
Should children be taught the tenets of critical race theory?
“Most parents want what’s best for their children. They don’t want their children to grow up to hate. They don’t want their children to grow up to be racists. And that’s what critical race theory teaches,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy argued that there is a clear distinction between teaching children American history and imposing a worldview that labels people racist from birth.
“Should our kids learn about slavery and Jim Crow in school? Yes. Should our kids be taught about the Tulsa Massacre? You bet,” Kennedy said.
“But should our kids be taught that white babies are born bad and black babies are born hopeless and can’t make it without the help of the government? That’s drivel,” he added.
“Most parents know that. They don’t want that because they don’t believe it. Most parents don’t believe that babies can be white supremacists. And that’s really what this is all about.”
Wednesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing comes after 19 Republicans on the committee sent a letter to Garland on Monday demanding that he rescind an Oct. 4 memorandum targeting parents protesting at school board meetings.
Garland had previously testified before the committee regarding the controversial memo.
“Your testimony before the Judiciary Committee last week concerning your October 4, 2021, memorandum targeting concerned parents at school board meetings was troubling,” the Republicans’ letter read.
Garland’s memo was sent to the FBI after the National School Boards Association sent a letter to President Joe Biden characterizing vocal parents as domestic terrorists. The NSBA later apologized for the letter.
Loudoun County, Virginia, parents have a clear message for their school board and superintendent: It’s time for them to go.
At a meeting Tuesday night, parents demanded the Loudoun County School Board and Superintendent Scott Ziegler resign, according to Fox News.
This comes after an uncovered email showed the superintendent knew about a May 28 sexual assault in a high school girl’s bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt but didn’t disclose it when asked at a school board meeting regarding transgender bathrooms.
That student, who was transferred to another school in Loudoun County, was accused of a subsequent sexual assault on Oct. 6.
The school board meeting came just hours after The Washington Post estimated 2,500 students walked out of Loudoun County schools in protest of the alleged sexual assaults.
“You are so concerned with pushing race and gender that you sacrificed our children,” Patti Hidalgo Menders, president of the Loudoun County GOP Women’s Club, told the board on Tuesday. “A girl was sexually assaulted in May, and you all knew about it. The predator was put back in schools to sexually assault another girl. You all should be fired.”
“We demand the resignation of Scott Ziegler,” Alicia Brand said.
Amanda Shallott, meanwhile, told the board that “LCPS protects rapists” and said the school board “covered up the assault” and that “Ziegler lied about it.”
“I call for immediate resignations of Dr. Ziegler and any of you that had knowledge of the rape this spring,” Shallott said.
Another father called upon Ziegler to “end the mockery you have brought on this great county.”
Loudoun dad calmly told the school board to resign tonight and “end the mockery you have brought on this great county” pic.twitter.com/DlTwuHwszO
“You have buried a sexual assault to protect your precious 8040 policy,” said Carrie Michon, a grandmother of schoolchildren in Loudoun County. “Every last one of you, resign!”
“All students are entitled to have access to restrooms and locker rooms that are sanitary, safe, and adequate, so that they can comfortably and fully engage in their school programs and activities. Students should be allowed to use the facility that corresponds to their gender identity,” the pertinent part reads.
The Virginia Department of Education requires similar guidance on transgender students for all schools, although there’s a subtle difference in its model policies: “Schools frequently maintain separate restrooms, locker rooms or other facilities for males and females. Students should be allowed to use the facility that corresponds to their consistently asserted gender identity.” [Emphasis ours.]
This may not necessarily be a distinction without a difference; “consistently asserted” would entail, at some level, a higher bar to use the facilities of the opposite sex as opposed to mere “gender identity.”
In June, the New York Post reported, Ziegler said “we don’t have any records of assaults occurring in our restrooms.” Yet, as the email revealed, he’d been notified of the May 28 case on the day it happened.
At that same meeting, the father of the victim in the case — Scott Smith — was arrested after he confronted district officials and a scuffle with police ensued.
Ziegler apologized for his comments at the June meeting last week, calling them “misleading” and saying he thought the question was “about the process, the experiences of students, and plans for transgender students and bathroom use during that discussion.”Should the Loudoun County School Board resign?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
“You just had hundreds of Loudoun County students walk out in protest because they feel unsafe in schools,” local mom Erin Smith said at Tuesday night’s meeting. “Did any of you even respond to this email on May 28 from Dr. Ziegler? Was that email alarming to anyone?”
Smith was referring to numerous protests at Loudoun County schools earlier in the day:
Smith also had choice words for school board Chairwoman Brenda Sheridan, who had said parental anger had much to do with the upcoming Nov. 2 gubernatorial election.
“We’re not here to impact elections, Brenda,” she said, adding they’d be back. “Get comfy because we are not going away.”
Loudoun County has been ground zero for parents revolting against school boards that have lurched too far to the left and don’t feel accountable to the parents whose children they teach.
The revelation that the superintendent knew about the sexual assault, refused to disclose it during a school board meeting and is now claiming he misunderstood the question has simply ignited the powder keg — particularly now that the convicted perpetrator has been accused of another crime.
The Loudoun County School Board and its superintendent need to listen to their students, parents, and constituents: It’s time to go. They’ve done enough damage.
The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee approved the Pfizer vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 today after about eight hours of discussion.
Six hours into the conversation, one doctor made a comment about how widespread the rollout of the vaccine should be.
He said it is a legitimate question to consider and though this advisory committee was planning to punt the question on to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, it was worth talking about.
“We’re never going to learn about how safe the vaccine is unless we start giving it, and that’s just the way it goes. That’s how we found out about rare complications of other vaccines,” Dr. Eric Rubin said in the meeting.
The committee voted 17 to 0, with one abstention, in favor of recommending emergency use of the vaccine in young children. The final decision will be made by FDA leaders, most likely in the next few days, NBC News reported.
The one abstention came from Dr. Michael Kurilla, who said he “would have preferred a more nuanced approach,” and not a blanket authorization for the age group, according to Stat.
Another committee member, Dr. Cody Meissner, a pediatrician at Tufts Medical Center, did voice his concern over the possibility of a vaccine mandate for children.
“I am just worried that if we say yes, then the states are going to mandate administration of this vaccine for children to go to school, and I do not agree with that. I think that would be an error at this time,” he said, according to CNN.
Should the FDA approve COVID vaccines for young children?
Dr. James Hildreth, a temporary committee member, also had concerns due to the number of children who have already had COVID-19, NBC reported. He pointed out some estimated that almost 40 percent of children already had some form of immunity to COVID-19.
“It just seemed to me that in some ways we’re vaccinating children to protect the adults when it should be the other way around. If 30 million children already have some form of immunity, they’ve made their contribution to herd immunity already and our focus should be to get the adults vaccinated to protect the children,” Hildreth said.
Last month, when Pfizer announced that the vaccine was safe for this age demographic, outside experts did say the clinical study did not produce copious amounts of data.
“It’s not a lot to go on, but what we do have to go on looks great,” Kathleen Neuzil of the University of Maryland School of Medicine told Stat last month.
With the passing vote of this advisory committee, though, the process for getting vaccines to 5- to 11-year-olds is underway. If the FDA leaders give their approval, then the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent advisory will meet on Nov. 2 and 3 to decide whether to recommend the vaccine for this age group.
The Missouri School Boards Association board of directors announced Monday it was withdrawing from the National School Boards Association due to the NSBA’s letter likening parents to “domestic terrorists,” among other reasons.
“This decision was not made lightly,” MSBA executive director Melissa Randol wrote in a letter to its members.
“The National School Boards Association, through its recent actions, such as its letter to the White House, has demonstrated it does not currently align with MSBA’s guiding principles of local governance.”
“We also believe that no school board member or educator should ever have to endure threats of violence or acts of intimidation against themselves or their families for making these difficult decisions,” Randol added.
“However, attempting to address that issue with federal intervention should not be the first step in most cases, and is antithetical to our longstanding tradition of local control. Further, the use of inflammatory terms in the NSBA letter is not a model for promoting greater civility and respect for the democratic process.”
“The National School Boards Association, through its recent actions, such as its letter to the White House, has demonstrated it does not currently align with MSBA’s guiding principles of local governance.” pic.twitter.com/U19n4K5Pky
In a Sept. 29 letter to President Joe Biden, NSBA president Viola Garcia and interim executive director Chip Slaven wrote, “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat. The National School Boards Association (NSBA) respectfully asks for federal law enforcement and other assistance to deal with the growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation.”
The two cited COVID policies and “propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula” as stirring angry confrontations and protests at school board meetings.Do you think other states should follow Missouri’s and Ohio’s lead?
“As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes,” Garcia and Slaven argued.
“As such, NSBA requests a joint expedited review by the U.S. Departments of Justice, Education, and Homeland Security, along with the appropriate training, coordination, investigations, and enforcement mechanisms from the FBI,” they added.
Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum less than a week later saying, “Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values. Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety.
“The Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate,” Garland added.
The AG directed the FBI to convene meetings nationwide to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff, and will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”
On Friday, the NSBA board of directors issued a memorandum apologizing for its Sept. 29 letter, saying, “there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”
“We should have had a better process in place to allow consultation on a communication of this significance,” the memo added.
On Tuesday, the Ohio School Boards Association joined its Missouri counterpart in terminating its membership with the NSBA, also citing the Sept. 29 letter to Biden.
In Loudoun County, almost everyone has made their voice heard.
Parent protesters both for and against the school district’s progressive curriculum continue to make headlines. School board members, district officials, teachers and other employees have made official statements to the media.
The one group we haven’t heard from, however, is the students themselves.
That changed on Tuesday morning when students in schools across the county decided to walk out of class in protest. The crowds of students were seen outside of Stone Bridge High School, Loudoun County High School, Briar Woods High School, Broad Run High School and Lightridge High School, according to WJLA-TV.
HAPPENING NOW —
Walkouts at Loudoun County High School, Briar Woods High School following sexual assault reports.
Students at Broad Run could be heard chanting “Loudoun County protects rapists.”
Listen to Broad Run High students start chanting “Loudon County protects rapists” & shouting other messages. Clarification: The suspect in both sex assaults at 2 different high schools in Loudoun County was not charged or convicted of rape. @7NewsDC#7NewsITeampic.twitter.com/VnoPAvl8jO
Why would the students say such a thing? Because they’re right: The evidence shows Loudoun County officials did indeed lie to their constituents in order to protect the perpetrator of multiple sexual assaults.
On May 28, a reportedly “gender fluid” 14-year-old boy wearing a skirt attacked and sexually assaulted a girl in a girls restroom at one of the district’s schools. The boy then went on to assault another girl on Oct. 6 at a different school where he was being electronically monitored.
According to WTOP-FM, the teen has been found guilty of sexual assault relating to the May 28 incident. When it comes to the Oct. 6 attack, he has been charged with sexual battery and abduction.
Leaked emails from May 28 show that county officials knew about the attacks and said nothing to their constituents.
In fact, during June 22 school board meeting, as parents voiced their concerns over a new policy allowing transgender students to enter the restroom of their choice, school superintendent Scott Ziegler went as far as to say, “To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.”
Scott Smith, the father of the teen’s first victim, attempted to speak out at the June 22 meeting, hoping to share the story of his daughter’s assault with the school board and parents present.
Instead, following a tense exchange with a pro-LGBT activist who claimed Smith’s daughter was a liar, police officers grabbed Smith and when he pulled away subsequently tackled him and dragged him out of the room.
In the many weeks that have followed, as news continues to break regarding the county’s cover-up of the sexual assault, parents have continued to become more agitated at the school district.
And now, it appears that the students have had enough as well.
Loudoun County, Virginia, continues to find itself at the center of controversy.
The county’s school board is already in hot water after recent reports revealed its members had seemingly covered up a rape allegation. A boy has since been found guilty of sexually assaulting a female student in one of the school district’s girls’ restrooms. The board falsely said it had no knowledge of such a case before voting in August to allow males to use girls’ restrooms.
Concerned parents say progressive ideas have entered Loudoun County school curricula and are currently being taught to children enrolled in the district. They continue to protest at school board meetings in hopes of pressuring the district to remove the controversial teachings from classrooms.
Now, it appears that parents in Loudoun County are required to sign non-disclosure agreement-style documents in order to see exactly what their children are being taught, including a curriculum called Second Step Programs.
According to documents reportedly obtained by the Daily Caller, parents who wish to review the program must sign a form agreeing not to “broadcast, download, photograph, or record” the curriculum “in any manner whatsoever.”
Additionally, the district’s agreement with Second Step says the curriculum is “not subject to traditional Virginia Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws,” according to the Daily Caller.
The Second Step Programs utilize a teaching style known as social-emotional learning and are promoted by the left-leaning non-profit Committee for Children. According to the organization’s website, SEL is “fundamental to achieving social justice.”
Many of the controversial ideas found in critical race theory and left-wing gender theories appear central to the Committee for Children’s agenda.
Speaking with The Western Journal on Tuesday, James Lindsay — a leading expert on, and critic of, CRT and other far-left academic philosophies — broke down what exactly SEL is.
“Social-Emotional Learning started off trying to help emotionally troubled kids learn to deal with those issues so they could have better educational attainment, and it worked. It’s basically a psychological intervention that can work in the right cases and right circumstances,” Lindsay told The Western Journal via email.
Should school districts be allowed to hide what they’re teaching children?
However, problems with SEL began to arise when organizations like the Committee for Children started utilizing its practices “in uncontrolled, non-therapeutic environments (classrooms) by underqualified teachers without licenses to practice psychology,” Lindsay wrote.
In his view, this should be criminal.
These novel forms of SEL are referred to as “transformative SEL,” Lindsay said.
“These programs mirror the educational programs put in place by Mao in China during the Cultural Revolution and are wholly damaging to children. They’ve also adopted Marxian themes and methods, hence ‘transformative,’ and are used to groom children into Marxian views on sexuality and also Critical Race Theory,” Lindsay wrote.
Scott Mineo, leader of Loudoun County’s Parents Against Critical Theory group, told the Daily Caller he found the district’s lack of transparency about the SEL program suspicious.
“LCPS is partners with Southern Poverty Law Center, Racial Equity Tools, and Learning for Justice (SPLC), all of which have copyrighted material, however, LCPS freely provides access to these materials,” Mineo wrote in an email to Loudoun County Public Schools.
“Why is there such a double standard when parents want to review Second Step SEL material in its entirety?”
Logic seems to have been thrown out the window in today’s culture and society.
The Babylon Bee, a hilarious satirical news site, does not seem so far-fetched nowadays with headlines like “Finally: San Francisco To Require Proof Of Vaccination To Poop On The Sidewalk” or “Oh No! Someone Replaced Joe Biden’s Copy Of The Constitution With A Copy Of ‘1984’.” Sounds legitimate honestly.
Then we have Democratic former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who is in a very tight race with Republican Glenn Youngkin, denying the existence of pro-life female CEOs.
He said to the Virginia Chamber of Commerce last week that, “There’s not a woman CEO in America that wants to go to a state where someone’s banning abortions.”
Could he or his staff not do a Google search on this one? There are plenty of CEOs, who also happen to be both pro-life and women, who would love to set up shop in a state that bans abortion. You’re reading the words of one right now.
I founded And Then There Were None in 2012, a ministry that helps abortion workers leave their jobs and find new, life-affirming ones. I founded ProLove Ministries in 2019 as an umbrella organization to stand in the gaps in the pro-life movement. I’m a CEO who lives in Texas because it is the great land of freedom and the first in the nation to effectively ban nearly all abortions.
I exist, Mr. McAuliffe. And I’m not the only one. Marjorie Dannenfelser, Cheryl Bachelder, Kristan Hawkins, Melissa Ohden, Janine Marrone, and Jeanne Mancini are all leaders of their respective organizations and are pro-life. Imagine that. Being a woman in charge of an organization and being pro-life. They do exist after all.
I understand that abortion is a huge, divisive issue in politics. I worked at Planned Parenthood for eight years and can attest to the urgency of both sides wanting to hold power in government.
Do you think McAuliffe will win his election?
But flatly denying the very existence of women in influential positions who hold the view that all life is precious and should be protected? At best that is ignorance; at worst, willful deception.
Abortion is almost always a big deal come election season, and this year, it is perhaps all the more crucial given the Texas law that bans abortion once a heartbeat is detected in the fetus, which is around six weeks.
In Virginia, abortion looms large as it should. Abortion ends the life of an innocent unborn baby and often harms the woman in emotional, physical and spiritual ways. It is the most imperative human rights issue of our time.
According to CNBC, McAuliffe is spending an extraordinary amount of money attacking his opponent for his pro-life stance.
“Three of McAuliffe’s most expensive ads, which cost from $510,000 to $922,000 to produce and run, have attacked Youngkin for his abortion stance,” the outlet reported. The ads have already run more than 1,100 times.
Polling also indicates McAuliffe’s support among suburban women is less than enthusiastic, which is problematic for him since it’s these women who have typically put candidates in his party into office.
Monmouth University Polling Institute president Patrick Murray attributes this lack of enthusiasm due in part to “a shift in key issues important to these voters and partly to dampened enthusiasm among the party faithful.”
Well, when you directly insult pro-life women and indirectly insult anyone who holds actual facts in some sort of relevance, what can one expect?
Terry McAuliffe is betting on the idea that Virginians cannot fathom a female CEO who is also pro-life. He’s wrong, obviously, but it’s up in the air whether his denial of reality sinks in with the women of Virginia come voting day.
The Ohio School Boards Association (OSBA) board of trustees has voted to cut ties with the National School Board Association (NSBA) over the latter’s attempt to have federal agents police school board meetings across the country.
“The Board of Trustees’ decision was prompted by NSBA’s recent letter to President Joe Biden requesting federal intervention at local school board meetings,” OSBA Chief Executive Officer Rick Lewis said Tuesday in a press release (pdf).
The letter in question (pdf), which was sent on Sept. 29, urged that federal law enforcement step in to handle “threats or actual acts of violence” against school leaders, alleging that “angry mobs” of parents who sought to express opposition to COVID-19 restrictions and the teaching of critical race theory have been “inciting chaos” during school board meetings.
“As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crime,” the NSBA argued in the letter, encouraging the federal government to invoke laws designed to counter terrorism, such as the PATRIOT Act, to address the alleged threats.
The Ohio school board group said they were not consulted by the national federation about the crafting of the letter, nor did they agree with the letter’s content.
“We were not informed of or asked for any input into the creation of the letter sent to the president,” Lewis said, adding that while it’s important to keep parental and community discussion at school board meetings free from violence and harassment, such interference should be dealt with at the local level, not by federal officials.
“We believe the letter from NSBA leadership demonstrated how out of touch the national association is with the concerns of local school boards and the principle of local control. Because of that, OSBA no longer sees the value of continued NSBA membership,” he said.
The announcement comes after the NSBA walked back its widely criticized message, saying that “there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”
“We should have had a better process in place to allow for consultation on a communication of this significance,” the NSBA said. “We apologize also for the strain and stress this situation has caused you and your organizations.”
The OSBA is the latest in a string of state school board organizations that have reevaluated or ended their membership in NSBA over the letter. According to statements collected by advocacy group Parents Defending Education, as of Oct. 21, 21 state chapters have distanced themselves from the national organization, with most of them clarifying that they were not consulted about the letter.
Children should not get vaccinated against the virus that causes COVID-19, according to Harvard University professor of medicine Martin Kulldorff.
“I don’t think children should be vaccinated for COVID. I’m a huge fan of vaccinating children for measles, for mumps, for polio, for rotavirus, and many other diseases, that’s critical. But COVID is not a huge threat to children,” he said on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program. The full episode will be released at 7 p.m. New York time on Oct. 26 on EpochTV.
“They can be infected, just like they can get the common cold, but they’re not a big threat. They don’t die from this, except in very rare circumstances. So if you want to talk about protecting children or keeping children safe, I think we can talk about traffic accidents, for example, which they are really at some risk.
“And there are other things that we should make sure to keep children safe. But COVID is not a big risk factor for children.”
Vaccinating older people and people of all ages with compromised immune systems against the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19, has drawn support from most medical experts. But vaccinating healthy young people, particularly children, has triggered more opposition, in part because of how little risk COVID-19 poses to them.
Children are more likely to contract serious disease or die from the annual influenza, or the flu, than COVID-19, according to data and studies that Kulldorff has reviewed. Just 195 children under the age of 4 and 442 between 5 and 18 have died from COVID-19 in the United States as of Oct. 20, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Children are 15 times less likely to be hospitalized with the disease than individuals who are 85 or older, and 570 times less likely to die, the agency says.
“One example is from Sweden, during the first wave in the spring of 2020, which affected Sweden quite strongly,” Kulldorff said. “But Sweden decided to keep daycare and schools open for all children ages 1 to 15. And there are 1.8 million such children who got through the first wave without vaccines, of course, without masks, without any sort of distancing in schools.
“If a child was sick, they were told to stay home. But that was basically it. And you know how many of those 1.8 million children died from COVID? Zero. Only a few hospitalizations. So this is not a risky disease for children.”
When weighing whether to vaccinate children, the risk of vaccine side effects must also be taken into account, Kulldorff said. The main risk to young people seen so far is heart inflammation, which has occurred post-vaccination at much higher than expected rates. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) added a warning label to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines over the summer about myocarditis and pericarditis, two types of heart inflammation.
“If you’re 78 years old, then it’s the no-brainer in my view, because the benefits are so great that even if you have a small risk for some adverse reaction, the benefit far outweighs the risk,” Kulldorff said. “On the other hand, if you have already have immunity from having had COVID, then the benefits of the vaccines are much, much smaller. If you’re a child, even if you haven’t had COVID, the risk of serious disease or death is minuscule … So it’s not at all clear that the benefits outweigh the risks for children.”
Kulldorff was speaking ahead of an FDA advisory panel meeting. Members on Oct. 26 were considering whether to advise drug regulators to authorize Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for use in children between 5 and 11.
Many federal health officials and some outside experts support vaccinating children. They say vaccinating children would help quicken progress toward herd immunity and protect household members, especially those most at risk from COVID-19, and that hospitalizations among COVID-infected children rose over the summer and into September.
“Kids need protection against COVID-19 and this vaccine is safe and effective,” Dr. Patrick Hickey, chair and professor of pediatrics at the Uniformed Services University, wrote on Twitter.
The FDA in a briefing document to the panel said that the rate of post-vaccination heart inflammation cases among young children is expected to be the same as those 12 to 15, who have been getting vaccinated for months, and that the benefits of Pfizer’s shot outweigh “the known or potential risks.”
A 15-year-old boy at the center of a controversy surrounding transgender school bathroom accommodations in Loudoun County, Virginia, was found guilty on Monday of sexually assaulting a girl in the girls’ bathroom in May — a decision sure to bring new attention to the hot-button topic.
“I found the facts sufficient to support the charges,” ruled Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court Chief Judge Pamela Brooks after a two-hour hearing, according to WTOP-TV. The teen had been charged with one felony count of forcible sodomy and one felony count of forcible fellatio.
In court, the victim said the two were “just friends,” but that she had “hooked up with him” — engaged in sexual acts — two times in the weeks before the attack took place.
On May 28, the boy — then 14 — texted the victim, asking her to meet him in the girls’ bathroom. The Washington Post reported she told the court that when she got there, he threw her to the floor and forced himself upon her.
She would report the assault to the school and was questioned by investigators from the sheriff’s office the same day. However, the defense tried to argue the encounter was consensual and noted the girl hadn’t told investigators about her two previous encounters with the boy.
However, the victim maintained she “never” gave permission or consent for the May 28 encounter.
“He flipped me over,” the victim told the court, according to the Post. “I was on the ground and couldn’t move and he sexually assaulted me.”
The incident ignited a firestorm over transgender policy after the father of the girl who was assaulted, Scott Smith, was arrested at a June 22 Loudoun County School Board meeting after progressive activist called his daughter a liar, according to a report last month by the Daily Wire. Smith had said the boy in the case identified as “gender fluid” and was wearing a skirt at the time of the attack.
After a shouting match ensued, a deputy grabbed Smith’s shoulder. When Smith pulled away, a tussle began and the father was arrested. Loudoun County lead prosecutor Buta Biberaj — who also assisted the prosecutor in the sexual assault case involving Smith’s daughter — was seeking jail time for Smith over a disorderly conduct misdemeanor charge stemming from the meeting.
Are transgender policies making schools more dangerous?
While that’s a controversy in its own right, the case became a flash point over new Virginia Department of Education transgender policies that require, among other things, that “Access to facilities such as restrooms and locker rooms that correspond to a student’s gender identity shall be available to all students.”
“All students are entitled to have access to restrooms, locker rooms, and changing facilities that are sanitary, safe, and adequate, so that they can comfortably and fully engage in their school programs and activities. Schools frequently maintain separate restrooms, locker rooms or other facilities for males and females,” the policy reads.
“Students should be allowed to use the facility that corresponds to their consistently asserted gender identity. While some transgender students will want that access, others may want alternatives that afford more privacy. Taking into account existing school facilities, administrators should take steps to designate gender-inclusive or single-user restrooms commensurate with the size of the school.”
Loudoun County had adopted a similar policy, although it wasn’t in place at the time of the May 28 assault. A statement from the family, however, noted that the district had “formalized the policy regarding restroom use that was easily exploitable by a potential sexual assailant,” according to WUSA-TV.
While the Smiths say the perpetrator of the rape defined himself as gender-fluid, mainstream media accounts didn’t confirm this and referred to the defendant as male. However, the Post’s report confirmed the boy was wearing a skirt at the time of the assault.
“The defendant did not testify during the trial, but prosecutors played interviews he gave detectives investigating the case during which he acknowledged ‘messing up’ and said he did not intend to perform one sex act with the victim and said he stopped once he realized he was hurting the girl,” they reported.
“The defendant initially told detectives the second sexual act did not occur, but later said it may have happened briefly and accidentally when a knee-length skirt he was wearing got caught on his watch as the pair were fumbling around in the bathroom stall.”
The controversies don’t end there. The boy, now 15, is accused of allegedly assaulting a girl in a different school on Oct. 6, where he was being electronically monitored. A hearing to determine the boy’s guilt or innocence in that case is scheduled for Nov. 15, WTOP reported.
It later emerged the superintendent of Loudoun County Public Schools had been notified of the first attack on the day it happened.
According to an Oct. 15 WTOP report, Scott Ziegler, the superintendent, said that while the school system “complied with our obligations” under Title IX regarding the sexual assault of students, he said the district’s processes were “insufficient.”
Bill Stanley, a Republican state senator and an attorney for the Smith family, hailed the court’s judgment in a statement.
“We are greatly relieved that justice was served today,” he said, according to WTOP. “No one should have to endure what this family has endured, and now their focus is completely upon their daughter’s health and safety as she progresses forward with her life.”
The family, which is suing the school district, said in a statement they “stand stronger than ever in moving forward to ensure that those responsible in the Loudoun County School system are held accountable, so that this may never happen again to anyone else’s child.”
And yet, so many facts about this case indicate it very well might. Neither the Virginia Department of Education nor Loudoun County Public Schools appear willing to take a second look at their transgender bathroom policies.
If another culturally and politically inconvenient attack, they’re likely to be just as loath to learn from it. Parents who vent their anger at school board meetings will arguably be treated with greater venom than Smith.
The verdict may bring justice. Wisdom, however, remains a long way off.
Appointment is the latest indication of the Biden administration’s collaboration with the group
The Department of Education earlier this month tapped the president of the National School Board Association to serve on a federal board that tracks student progress, the latest indication of the Biden administration’s collaboration with the group that compared parents to domestic terrorists.
Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on Oct. 13 appointed National School Board Association president Viola Garcia to the National Assessment Governing Board, which develops the tests used to track student achievement across the country. Garcia was behind a Sept. 29 letter urging President Joe Biden to have the FBI monitor school board meetings for potential violence. The Department of Justice formed a task force on Oct. 4 consisting of the FBI and Justice Department’s national security and civil rights divisions, sparking outrage from parents groups who say the administration is trying to stifle parents who oppose mask mandates and left-wing curricula.
Garcia’s position on the board could raise questions about whether the appointment was linked to her advocacy work at the National School Board Association. Emails reported by the Washington Free Beacon show Garcia coordinated with the Biden White House and Department of Education in the weeks before releasing the controversial letter. “These are troubling times. NSBA has been engaged with the White House and the Department of Education on these and other issues related to the pandemic for several weeks now,” Garcia wrote in an Oct. 2 email obtained by the group Parents Defending Education.
The National School Board Association apologized for the letter on Friday, saying there was “no justification” for the language comparing parents to terrorists. Other emails showed that some National School Board Association directors were upset with Garcia for issuing the letter without the board’s input. One director said that the letter’s reference to parents as domestic terrorists inflamed tensions at local school board meetings.
Garcia’s tenure on the governing board began on Oct. 1, according to a Department of Education press release.
Congress established the National Assessment Governing Board in 1988 to set policy for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called Nation’s Report Card. Part of the board’s mission is to draft the questions used on the assessment and to use the results of the test to propose policies to the Department of Education.
A Virginia judge on Monday found a teenage boy guilty of sexually assaulting a schoolmate.
The crime took place at Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn on May 28.
The boy, 15, was convicted on one count of forcible sodomy and one count of forcible fellatio, both felonies, local media reported.
“I found the facts sufficient to support the charges,” Pamela Brooks, the chief judge of the county’s Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court, said during the hearing, according to WTOP.
The victim said she and the boy had consensual sexual encounters before the assault but that she did not consent to what he did in May.
A defense attorney for the boy tried arguing that his client reasonably believed he had permission because of the previous encounters.
Neither the girl nor the boy are being named because they are juveniles.
Sentencing was put off until another case is adjudicated involving the male. He was charged with sexually assaulting another student at Broad Run High School, authorities have said. That assault took place on Oct. 6.
Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office deputies responded to Stone Bridge at approximately 1:30 p.m. on May 28, according to dispatch notes obtained by The Epoch Times through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Officers were briefed by an assistant principal that a student alleged they were “possibly raped or touched unwanted by another student” a couple of hours prior. The family of the victim was notified.
An FBI agent with the bureau’s Washington Field Office later that day called the sheriff’s office and inquired about the incident, according to the notes. The agent was advised that a sexual assault investigation was taking place. He said the incident would not require the FBI’s help.
The investigation led to the arrest of the male on July 8 and the case was turned over to the Loudoun County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office, which helped prosecute the boy.
The Broad Run incident involved a male student sexually assaulting a female student, according to dispatch notes obtained by The Epoch Times.
The sheriff’s office said no 911 calls were made and declined to provide body camera footage, citing state law. It also declined to immediately provide records on all reported sexual assaults at Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) dating back to Jan. 1, 2018.
LCPS failed to follow state law in reporting several sexual assaults from its schools to state authorities, Superintendent Scott Ziegler said earlier this month. He also recanted his claim that no sexual assaults had taken place in school bathrooms.
Ziegler made the claim during a school board meeting on a pro-transgender policy that lets students who claim to be a different gender than their biological sex use different bathrooms. The school board later approved the policy proposal.
LCPS did not respond to a request for comment on the guilty verdict.
Bill Stanley of the Stanley Law Group, who is representing the family of the victim, said in a statement that “We are relieved that justice was served today for the Smith’s daughter.”
“No one should have to endure what this family has endured, and now their focus is completely upon their daughter’s health and safety as she progresses forward with her life,” he said, adding that the family “stands stronger than ever in moving forward to ensure that those responsible in the Loudoun County School system are held accountable, so that this may never happen again to anyone else’s child.”
Scott Smith, a county resident, identified himself in early October as the father of the victim.
The family has filed a lawsuit against LCPS for allegedly violating Title IX in its handling of the case.
LCPS has told The Epoch Times that it couldn’t investigate what happened until law enforcement concluded its investigation, and that it was cooperating with the sheriff’s office and other authorities. It also said it was barred from disciplining any students without following the grievance process outlined in Title IX.
A group of 19 Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Biden administration Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday to demand that he rescind a communication targeting parents at school board meetings.
The letter came after Garland appeared before the House Judiciary Committee last week following his Oct. 4 message which called out concerned parents.
The controversial memorandum was sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigations after the National School Boards Association sent a letter to President Joe Biden criticizing vocal parents as “domestic terrorists.”
“Your testimony before the Judiciary Committee last week concerning your October 4, 2021, memorandum targeting concerned parents at school board meetings was troubling,” the letter read.
#BREAKING: Judiciary Republicans demand Attorney General Garland withdraw school board memo.
“You acknowledged that you issued the unusual directive soon after reading about the thinly sourced letter sent by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) to President Biden and not because of any specific request from state or local law enforcement,” it added.
Despite Garland’s testimony, the letter concluded, the attorney general “sidestepped” the effect of his memorandum.
“During your testimony, you sidestepped the obvious effect of your ill-conceived memorandum and the chilling effect that invoking the full weight of the federal law enforcement apparatus would have on parents’ protected First Amendment speech,” the letter said.
Should Merrick Garland resign as attorney general?
The committee’s letter upheld the rights of parents to direct the education of their children, including involvement at school board meetings.
The response also clarified that local law enforcement is the appropriate group to respond to any threats or violence rather than the FBI.
“Parents have an undisputed right to direct the upbringing and education of their children, especially as school boards attempt to install controversial curricula. Local law enforcement — and not the FBI — are the appropriate authorities to address any local threats or violence,” the House members wrote.
GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio accused the Justice Department of creating a “snitch line” to tell on parents during the committee’s hearing with Garland last week.
“When the attorney general, the United States sets up a snitch line on parents, Americans aren’t going to tolerate it,” Jordan said.
“I think they’re gonna stand up to this accelerated march to communism that we now see America is going to fight the good fight, they’re going to finish the course, they’re going to keep the faith, because Americans value freedom,” he added.
The NSBA apologized on Friday regarding its September letter.
“On behalf of the NSBA, we regret and apologize for the letter. To be clear, the safety of school board members, other public school officials and educators, and students is our top priority, and there remains important work to be done on this issue,” the NSBA wrote Friday.
“However, there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter. We should have had a better process in place to allow for some consultation on a communication of this significance,” the letter added.
Indignation keeps growing over the Loudoun County Public School system’s response to two sexual assaults that have happened in the last six months. Now, many are calling for resignations after discovering the superintendent and school board knew about the initial assault and did very little.
The police investigated, arrested the boy in July, slapped an ankle monitor on him and told him to go to a different school. But the assault and its details were not made public.
The boy began this school year at different school. Then on Oct. 6, he was arrested again for allegedly assaulting another girl at his new school.
This second assault brought the May 28 incident to public attention. Outrage ensued.
Two sexual assaults perpetrated by the same student naturally raises the question: What were the school board and superintendent doing to stop this?
The answer is, nothing. What makes this worse is, Superintendent Scott Ziegler knew what happened. It was recently discovered that he even sent an email informing the school board on the day of the first allegation, according to the Loudoun Times-Mirror.
ONLY ON WTOP: Loudoun County’s superintendent notified the school board the same day a female student was sexually assaulted at Stone Bridge High School, according to an email obtained by WTOP. https://t.co/Re4vkD7H60
“This afternoon a female student alleged that a male student sexually assaulted her in the restroom,” Ziegler wrote on May 28.
Should superintendent Ziegler resign?
It doesn’t get much clearer than that. Still, the school board did nothing.
The family of the May 28 victim is now pursuing legal action against the Loudoun County Public School system.
While there is plenty of blame to go around, the root of the problem actually lies with the school’s policy over restroom use.
“All students are entitled to have access to restrooms and locker rooms that are sanitary, safe and adequate, so that they can comfortably and fully engage in their school programs and activities. Students should be allowed to use the facility that corresponds to their gender identity,” the policy says.
In the name of “safety” the LCPS allows students to use what restroom they want. Yet, it was in the restroom that a female student’s safety was compromised.
The May 28 victim’s family has been clear that they largely blame this policy for the assault their daughter suffered.
“The sexual assault on our daughter and the subsequent sexual assault by the same individual were both predictable and preventable,” a statement from the family read. “Subsequent to the sexual assault on our daughter, Loudoun County Public Schools formalized the policy regarding restroom use that was easily exploitable by a potential sexual assailant. Because of poor planning and misguided policies, Loudoun Schools failed to institute even minimal safeguards to protect students from sexual assaults.”
So, not only did the school board do nothing in reaction to the initial assault, but the policy they passed enabled it.
Yet, Ziegler continues to say that the problem lies in insufficient procedures.
He proposes that there be a change in how the school system and the sheriff’s department act together and communicate “to ensure school discipline and criminal investigations can happen simultaneously … This includes notification from the sheriff’s office to the superintendent and principal when students are charged with serious offenses,” WTOP News reported on Oct. 15.
Sure, the sheriff’s department probably shouldn’t have let the kid simply go back to school. The school should have actually disciplined and expelled the student. But that still would not have fixed the essence of the problem.
The problem is that the school is allowing students to use whatever restroom they want. So if a boy wants to rape a girl, the female restroom is an excellent place to do it.
Can’t go into the female restroom as a straight boy? No problem. Just say you are gender-fluid or in transition. Then the door is wide open — literally.
After the May 28 assault became public due to the Oct. 6 assault, the Loudoun Times-Mirror reported that local residents began calling for the resignations of Ziegler and other school board members.
Resignations are certainly in order. Ziegler and board members knowingly put students in danger by letting a sexual assailant in school. But the real problem is the policy.
Removing the superintendent and board members would be like only fixing the symptoms of a disease instead of treating the disease itself. If the cause is not fixed, then easily preventable situations of sexual assault and rape will keep happening.
![Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin gestures during a [Loudoun Parents Matter Rally] campaign event in Leesburg, Virginia, on Nov. 1, 2021.](https://a57.foxnews.com/static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2021/11/640/320/GLENN-YOUNGKIN-RALLY-IN-VIRGINIA-THUMBS-UP.jpg?ve=1&tl=1)
