The Greatest Education Battle of Our Lifetimes

By Stanley Kurtz | March 15, 2021

With last week’s introduction in Congress of the misleadingly named Civics Secures Democracy Act, we are headed toward an epic clash over the spread of uber-controversial pedagogies — Critical Race Theory and Action Civics — to America’s classrooms. I don’t know whether the country will wake up to the danger of this legislation before or after it passes. Sooner or later, however, the truth will out. When it does, the culture war will have merged with K–12 education-policy disputes to a degree never before seen.

Because this new legislation is a backdoor effort to impose a de facto national curriculum in the politically charged subject areas of history and civics, the battle will rage in the states, at the federal level, and between the states and the federal government as well. The Biden administration’s Education Department will almost certainly collaborate in this attempt to develop a set of national incentives, measures, and penalties that effectively force Critical Race Theory and Action Civics onto states and localities. The likelihood of education controversies moving from third-tier to first-tier issues in federal elections has never been greater.

The Republicans who have co-sponsored the “Civics Secures Democracy Act” in the Senate (John Cornyn) and the House (Tom Cole) have been hornswoggled and hogtied into backing legislation that is about as far from conservative as a bill could be. It should be said in extenuation of their decision that the bill is careful to bury its true ends under anodyne jargon. You have to know a lot about Action Civics, for example, to understand that this bill is designed to force it onto the states. Most conservatives don’t even know what Action Civics is, much less understand its misleading jargon. The very term “Action Civics” is a euphemism for political protests for course credit, something close to the opposite of a proper civics course. That’s one reason why the “Civics Secures Democracy Act” is so egregiously misnamed.

There have, of course, been many important education battles in our time. The conservative movement was founded by William F. Buckley’s 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, an early attack on the secular socialism of the university. Cultural issues remained important to movement conservatism, yet the focus soon turned to politics and policy in the ordinary sense. The 1960s gave birth to a series of intense cultural battles, with universities as epicenters of controversy. Yet many of the clashes were over the war and the draft. For the most part, the federal government kept out of higher-education controversies in that era.

The battle over the teaching of Western Civilization at Stanford in 1987 kicked off a decade-long culture war over multiculturalism and political correctness, the ancestor of our clashes today. At this point, education battles began to seep into national politics, especially via the actions of Education Secretary William Bennett and National Endowment for the Humanities chair Lynne Cheney. Even so, universities incubating what eventually was to become today’s woke culture were largely insulated from government intervention by academic freedom.

The Obama administration pushed the K–12 Common Core on states, but the founders of Common Core made a calculated decision to omit the controversial subjects of history and civics from that effort. They understood the dangers of mixing education policy with high-intensity culture war issues. Now, however, in an attempt to complete the creation of a de facto national curriculum, the top supporters of Common Core (including, sad to say, a few conservatives) have formed an alliance with the top national advocates of Action Civics and Critical Race Theory. The result is what we see in the “Civics Secures Democracy Act” — and what we’re likely to get very soon from the Biden administration — a de facto national curriculum in Action Civics and Critical Race Theory. And all of this is happening as woke culture is spilling out of the campuses and into the wider society. Once the reality of this new push for education “reform” comes into the open, we will see the culture war merge with the details of federal education policy in unprecedented fashion.

What does the not-so-civic “Civics Secures Democracy Act of 2021” actually do? Above all, it appropriates $1 billion for federal grants to support K–12 curriculum development, teacher training, and research on the K–12 teaching of history and civics. Sounds good, if expensive, until you look at the fine print. Priority for grants is decided according to two basic criteria.

First of all, priority goes to grants that support “evidence-based practices.” The bill goes on to list these supposedly evidence-based practices, which are essentially the menu of troubling teaching techniques favored by the movement for Action Civics (Bill Page 5, Line 16-Page 6, Line 5). These are the very same practices I have written model legislation to block at the state level. They include: 1) directing teachers to discuss current social and political controversies in class; 2) out-of-class political protests and lobbying (nearly always for leftist causes) for course credit (in the bill, called “projects” and “experiential learning”) and 3) internships with (invariably leftist) lobbying and advocacy organizations for course credit (in the bill, called “service learning”).

Programs in “media literacy” are also marked as a priority. These programs ostensibly warn students away from dangerous conspiracy theories. In practice, however, they discourage students from looking at conservative sources and hold up mainstream media fact-checkers (largely left-biased) as sources of ultimate authority. Essentially, “media literacy” programs favored by advocates of the new civics inculcate the Democratic Party’s position on “fake news.”

The upshot is that the lion’s share of this billion-dollar jackpot will support mandatory leftist protest, lobbying, and indoctrination, while supporters of traditional civics and history will be frozen out.

The second criterion for priority applies to grants that “improve knowledge and engagement” among “traditionally underserved” students, as well as grants that promise to “close gaps in knowledge and achievement among students of different income levels, racial and ethnic groups, and native languages.” This gives the inside lane to Critical Race Theory, while largely disqualifying those who believe that American history and civics can unify if presented in a broadly similar manner to students of all incomes, races, and ethnicities.

That may sound too strong. Keep in mind, however, that the main public justification for the controversial, Critical Race Theory-based “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” just approved in Illinois was that they would be more likely to attract minority teachers and more likely to appeal to minority students, thereby closing achievement gaps. Yet those standards force teachers to call America systemically racist, affirm the “fluidity” of gender, “mitigate” their Euro-centrism and whiteness, and substitute activism for achievement when grading students. Finding creative ways to present traditional civics to minorities is one thing. Teaching radical activism is quite another.

Yet the movement for Critical Race Theory in education essentially presents itself as fulfilling both priority criteria for grants listed in this bill: “experiential” advocacy projects designed to appeal to minority students. We are talking about Black Lives Matter protests outside of police stations for course credit. And the grants will be disbursed by President Biden’s Education Department, sure to be staffed by left-leaning bureaucrats who believe — as does the president — that our country is “systemically racist.” Put together the priority criteria and a Democrat-controlled Department of Education and you will see a tremendous number of grants going to Critical Race Theory-based political advocacy programs, all under the label of “civics.”

Critical Race Theory, of course, is antithetical to the classically liberal principles upon which our constitutional republic rests. Teaching it is actually a form of anti-civics. Yet that is what hundreds of millions of dollars disbursed by the “Civics Secures Democracy Act” is going to be used for.

So, the “Civics Secures Democracy Act” is a massive boondoggle in support of politicizing students and teaching them to trade away equality and individual liberty for identity politics and the redistribution of . . . well, pretty much everything. But there’s more. On top of its billion-dollar lure, the bill revamps a key national test as a backdoor way of imposing a de facto national curriculum on the states.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), famous as “the nation’s report card,” is the national test that allows us to tell how well the states are doing at teaching basic knowledge and skills. NAEP allows us to see that, whereas America’s reading and math scores had once been headed up, Common Core has brought them down. Yet NAEP was never intended to create a national curriculum. On the contrary, NAEP was deliberately designed to make it difficult or impossible to link its results to state or local curricula. If anything, by revealing the failure of Common Core, NAEP has already discredited the very idea of a de facto national curriculum.

For decades, however, some have dreamed of using NAEP as a way of imposing what amounts to a national curriculum on the states. If NAEP could be aligned to specific history or civics standards, and administered in such a way as to facilitate state-by-state comparisons between results, the test could effectively force a federal curriculum on states and localities. Variable state NAEP results could then be tied to the awarding of federal grants. State-by-state rankings would have a profound effect on parental satisfaction with schools, and thus on migration in and out of state by both individuals and businesses.

The Civics Secures Democracy Act of 2021 is very much part of an effort to use NAEP to force a revisionist history and civics curriculum down the throats of unsuspecting states and localities. The bill would increase and regularize NAEP assessments in history and civics, facilitate state-by-state comparisons, and condition grants on the willingness of a state to participate in the history and civics portions of the test on a regular basis. Grant renewals would also be conditioned on statewide performance on the reorganized NAEP.

Combine this with the ambitions of the new, supposedly bipartisan, Educating for American Democracy (EAD) initiative (aptly described as a “Trojan Horse for Woke Education”). The leftist leaders of EAD, who just happen to be the chief public backers of the Civics Secures Democracy Act of 2021, issued a draft report on implementation that I have seen, but that seems not to have been released to the public in final form. That draft report calls for NAEP to be redesigned to align with EAD. This would be an inexcusable national power-grab and an affront to the proper purpose of NAEP. It’s clear, however, that this is exactly what the bogus leftist “civics” coalition wants. (For a new report by the Heritage Foundation critical of EAD and its national ambitions, go here. For more critiques of EAD, go here and here.)

In effect, we are looking at an effort to impose a new federal Common Core in the politically explosive subject areas of history and civics. Worse, the program in each of these areas does more than just lean a bit toward the left side of the political spectrum. Instead, it sharply breaks with fundamental assumptions in American education, first by promoting illiberal Critical Race Theory, and second by turning what should be a politically neutral classroom into a training ground for leftist advocacy and lobbying.

All around us, the culture war has broken the bounds of the university and spilled into our day-to-day lives. Conservatives and traditional liberals are rightly up in arms about the woke assault on our most fundamental freedoms, extending to inculcating guilt and shame in elementary-school students for the color of their skin. The Democrats in Congress, in league with the Biden administration and the leftist Action Civics movement, are about to supercharge this culture war by injecting it into the heart of federal education policy. Whether sooner or later, this is destined to become the greatest education battle of our lifetimes.

STANLEY KURTZ is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. This article first appeared in the March 15th edition of National Review.

ANOTHER “Woke” Education Law Just Signed by Gov. Pritzker

Written By Laurie Higgins | 03.15.21

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings to hardworking Illinoisans—which, by definition, excludes members of the Chicago Teachers’ Union—but there’s more news on the education front. Lefty swamp creatures in Springfield wallowing in their own presumptuousness and power have yet more changes in store for the unfortunate Illinois school children who haven’t yet been freed from the re-education camps that self-identify as schools.

The newest offenses from Springfield are buried in the thousands of words of a new bill just signed into law by Governor J. B. Pritzker on Monday March 8, 2021.

The first offense is providing general revenue funds to be used for the creation of a network of Chicago Freedom Schools (CFS) which will be breeding grounds for leftist social activists. This is an official photo from the school. Currently, Chicago has one Freedom School—a non-profit organization—which opened its doors to budding young social justice warriors in 2007. But leftists believe that one CFS and all public schools are not creating nearly enough community agitators.

The law states,

The State Board of Education shall establish a Freedom School network to supplement the learning taking place in public schools by creating a 6-week summer program. … A Freedom School shall intentionally and imaginatively implement strategies that focus on … Racial justice and equity. … The Freedom Schools Fund is created as a special fund in the State treasury. the [sic] Fund shall consist of appropriations from the General Revenue Fund, grant funds from the federal government, and donations from educational and private foundations.

The CFS makes clear its BLM/Critical Race Theory mission and tactics:

CFS uses social justice and anti-oppression practices to work to transform oppression into liberation by naming, analyzing, implementing and teaching actions that dismantle systems of supremacy that give power and privileges to some at the expense of others.

CFS invites “young leaders of color ages 13-17” who are “passionate about social justice” to apply for a Freedom Fellowship in order to build “community organizing skills” and “become community change-makers” by exploring current issues such as racism and climate change in order to “develop skills” for “dismantling injustice.” I’m not sure, but I think limiting government-subsidized fellowships to leaders “of color” might be racist and violate anti-discrimination law.

The CFS’s Summer Leadership Institute studies “issues of systemic oppression like racism, heterosexism, food justice, the school to prison pipelines, sexism, and more.” Something tells me that discussions of the pipeline to prison don’t include discussions of premarital sex, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and fatherlessness.

  2019 CFS fundraiser entertainment

Let your fingers do the walking right on over to the Chicago Freedom School’s Facebook page and take a gander at the photos of the school that your taxes will now be used to replicate all around Chicago. Check out the photos of their November 2019 fundraiser titled Moments of Justice: Unmasking Our Ancestral Gifts. By “unmasking,” they evidently mean unclothing, and by “gifts,” they evidently mean—well, you can see for yourself.

The man in the furry black vest is homosexual activist Tony Alverado-Rivera who is the executive director of Chicago’s only Freedom School. He wants to defund police, abolish ICE, and remove Chicago Police from dangerous Chicago schools. CFS supports “trans”-cultism and BLM, and offers workshops to help other leftist agitators build “social justice practices” into their schools, which presumably includes public schools.

And now, thanks to leftists in Springfield and the taxes of Illinoisans, Chicago won’t have just one ideological factory churning out activists; Illinois will have an entire network. And to make matters worse, it appears the law grants carte blanche to the reliably leftist Illinois State Board of Education to implement the Freedom Schools project for creating social justice change-agents:

The State Board of Education may adopt any rules necessary to implement this Section. (emphasis added)

The new law also includes a change in the school code regarding what must be taught during Black History Month. The school code already required every elementary, middle, and high school to teach a unit that addresses the following:

[T]he events of Black History, including the history of the African slave trade, slavery in America, and the vestiges of slavery in this country. These events shall include not only the contributions made by individual African-Americans in government and in the arts, humanities and sciences to the economic, cultural and political development of the United States and Africa, but also the socio-economic struggle which African-Americans experienced collectively in striving to achieve fair and equal treatment under the laws of this nation.

Further, existing law said, “The studying of this material shall [must] constitute an affirmation by students of their commitment to respect the dignity of all races and peoples and to forever eschew every form of discrimination in their lives and careers.”

While many Illinois schools haven’t yet been able through the study of “material” to get students to affirm the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, lawmakers think they will be able to get them to “forever eschew every form of discrimination in their lives and careers.” Wowzer!

As noble a goal as ensuring students forever eschew every form of discrimination in their lives and careers is, is that really the role and responsibility of government employees? And is there a comprehensive list of every form of discrimination that leftist lawmakers believe students must be indoctrinated to eschew in their lives and careers?

Remember, Springfield swampsters and their leftist allies on the Illinois State Board of Education believe that disapproval of volitional homosexual acts is a form of discrimination. The belief that marriage is by nature a sexually differentiated union is a form of discrimination. The belief that biological men—also known as men—don’t belong in women’s sports or locker rooms is a form of discrimination.

But, the social justice despots who rule Illinois are nowhere near done tinkering with laws in order to manipulate the minds of other people’s children. The new law adds the following to everything else that must be taught to Illinois children in order to satiate leftists who want to use public schools to turn children’s hearts against America and turn children into social justice warriors. Now, the Black History unit will have to include,

[T]he history of the pre-enslavement of Black people from 3,000 BCE to AD 1619 … the study of the reasons why Black people came to be enslaved … and the study of the American civil rights renaissance.

This change to the study of black history constitutes a means to weasel controversial 1619 Project ideas into curricula without Illinoisans realizing it.

Classroom time does not permit any public K-12 school to teach the history of any country or identity group comprehensively. The partisan view that K-12 schools should teach about “the pre-enslavement of Black people from 3,000 BCE to AD 1619” is both absurd and doctrinaire. Why just the history of blacks from that period? And why those specific dates? Well, we know why the dates. They’re lifted straight out of the much-condemned 1619 Project written by non-historian New York Times writer /social justice agitator Nikole Hannah-Jones.

If public schools are going to mandate the “study of the reasons why Black people came to be enslaved,” are they going to require that students study those reasons in context of the worldwide history of slavery and the participation of African blacks in the slave trade? Are they going to make clear that more black slaves were sold to Europe, South America, and the Caribbean than to the United States? Are they going to require students study the history of the role of Christianity in the abolition movement? Will resources used include those by conservative blacks like Carol Swain, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and John McWhorter?

Doubtful, because the goal of leftists is not historical accuracy or exploring diverse ideas. Their goal is partisan politics.

There will be no satiating the swamp creatures in Springfield who, in cahoots with leftist “educators,” are drowning government schools in leftist ideology, thereby turning education into indoctrination and Illinois children into leftist activists.

Read more:

Despite Nationwide Condemnation, Illinois Passes Leftist Teacher-Training Mandate (Laurie Higgins)

Most American Schools Are Damaging Your Child

I have been telling parents for decades that sending a child to almost any college is playing Russian roulette with his or her values.

But it is a different version of Russian roulette. In the traditional version, only one of the gun’s six chambers contains a bullet. In the college version of Russian roulette, 5 of the 6 chambers contain a bullet. If your child attends almost any university in America (or Canada or anywhere else in the English-speaking world), the odds are that your child’s decency, intellectual acuity, faculty of reason, character and moral compass will be damaged, perhaps permanently.

The worse news is that sending your child to almost any elementary school or high school — public or private — is fast becoming equally toxic. More and more schools are being taken over by left-wing ideologues and by nonideologues who lack the courage to confront the ideologues.

Once infected with leftism, these schools teach children to hate reason, tradition, America, Christianity, whites, excellence, freedom and masculinity. To cite one example, thanks to a million-dollar grant from Bill Gates through his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Oregon Education Department has announced that teaching there is “one right answer” in math — yes, in math — is an expression of white supremacy. Why, then, would an Oregon parent who cares about his or her child’s mind, send that child to an Oregon school?

In addition to perverting education, teachers and their unions have exhibited a contempt for children that has taken even conservatives by surprise. Teachers’ unwillingness to show up in class for more than a year is as unscientific as it is unprecedented. On Feb. 3, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told reporters during a White House news briefing that teachers do not need to get vaccinated against COVID-19 before schools can safely reopen: “There is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated.

Vaccinations of teachers is not a prerequisite for safely reopening schools.”

Nevertheless, in the country’s major cities, these cowards and hypochondriacs — people who claim to care more than anything else about their students — have refused to return to school (while demanding to be paid). They have refused to teach, despite the facts that child-to-teacher transmission of the COVID-19 virus is extremely rare and a teacher being hospitalized, let alone dying, as a result of interaction with students is rarer than a teacher dying in a traffic accident on the way to school. Why, then, would you send your child to be “taught” by people for whom you have — or should have — so little respect?

Why would you send your young child to a school that sponsors a “Drag Queen Story Hour” or that dwells on “nonbinary” gender identity? Do you think such things do not damage your child’s innocence? Do you want your child to be challenged about his or her sexual identity?

Why would you send your child to any school that teaches The New York Times’ “1619 Project”? This project holds that America was not founded in 1776 but in 1619, with the arrival of the first black slaves in North America, and that the Revolutionary War was fought not to gain independence from Britain but to preserve slavery. Virtually every leading historian specializing in American history — most of whom are liberals and Democrats, and some of whom were anti-Trump activists — have labeled “The 1619 Project” a lie.

Whenever I meet adults who hold traditional American values, I ask them three questions:

The first is, “Do you have children?”

If they do, my second question is, “How many of them share your values?” It is not common to meet people all of whose children share their parents’ traditional values.

If they respond that any of their children do not share their values, my third question is, “What happened?”

In every instance, these parents attribute the alienation of their child(ren) from their (the parents’) values to the college and, increasingly, the high school their child attended.

Moreover, not only are these children alienated from their parents’ values, but they are often also alienated from the parent(s). One thing you learn when you become left-wing is to have contempt for those who hold other beliefs.

Had these parents known how their children would turn out, they would never have sent them to college — or even to the high school they attended. It appears, however, that no matter how many people lose their children’s hearts and minds to left-wing indoctrination, and no matter how much information accumulates about the perversion of education in American schools, parents continue to take risks with their children they would never take in any other sphere.

I am well aware of the enormous obstacles. If your child wishes to study STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) or law, college remains a necessity. Otherwise, it isn’t.

As for elementary and high school, parents must either find a school that teaches reading, writing and arithmetic rather than America-hatred, or they should home-school their child. This, understandably, sounds terribly daunting. However, it is becoming considerably easier to do so as home-school groups and quality home-school curricula proliferate around the country.

Whatever your decision, never say you weren’t warned.

Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in May 2019, is “The Rational Bible,” a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, “No Safe Spaces,” was released to home entertainment nationwide on September 15, 2020. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Parents hear warning: Quit letting public schools destroy your children

More and more parents want to rescue their children from poor academics and left-wing dogma in public school classrooms, and the time has come for churches to play a role in helping them do that, says a public education watchdog.

“You’re literally playing Russian roulette with your children,” Alex Newman, executive director of Public School Exit, warned the American Family Radio audience in a March 10 interview.

On the topic of classroom academics, Newman did not hold back about the state of public education in the U.S. After living in eight countries growing up, where he sat in classrooms in every one, Newman said American parents would be shocked to learn that even Third World students are learning to read and write, and do basic math, sooner and better than American students.

In the U.S. in particular, he told radio host Sandy Rios, less than a third of students score high enough to be graded as “proficient” in basic subjects.

The left-wing Huffington Post cited similar statistics in a 2019 story: 34% of fourth graders, and 35% of eight graders, scored proficient in reading.

Rios, responding to those statistics, said she has spoken to college professors who are alarmed incoming freshmen struggle in basic subjects.  

“The worst part, and this is the part that people struggle to get over,” Newman said, “is this was deliberate.”

That is because left-wing activists have used public education not only to indoctrinate students but to create a dumbed-down population. One example of that success, he said, is that 90% of students who were raised in a church-going family will leave their faith after sitting through weeks and months and years of public school education.

“They’re literally turning our children against God, against their family, and against their country,” he warned, rattling off topics such as transgenderism, social justice, and critical race theory being taught.

On the issue of parents pulling their students from public schools, Newman suggested parents look closer at home schooling, which he described as the “gold standard” for challenging academics, and for preparing children for the world.

Newman also advised the radio audience that private schools remain another option, and he said more churches should be working together to form private schools. If that effort is not possible, he said, then churches should assist parents in their own congregations with tuition.

Public School Exit is currently working with churches and their pastors to not only create a "mass exodus" from public schools but to help parents finally realize today's public schools are not the same as their own childhood. 

Parents do have legitimate concerns about how to home school their children, or how to afford private school tuition, Newman concluded, but every Christian parent should decide, for good, to leave public education behind because doing so is saving their children. 

Megyn Kelly on Race in Education | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

How This Bill Will Harm Parents and Children

How This Bill Will Harm Parents and Children

Mar 11, 2021

HR 5, the misnamed “Equality Act” is now live on the Senate floor and can be called up for a vote any time without going through committees. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said he will do “big, strong, bold things” this session. This is one we must stop.

This dangerous bill will affect everyone. It will not just infringe on religious freedom—it will completely obliterate it. But it goes far beyond destroying religious freedom. It will harm parents and children. Rush your urgent fax to the Senate to stop the “Equality Act.” —Mat

Since 2012, my legal team has challenged state and local laws that ban counsel to minors who seek help to overcome unwanted same-sex attractions, behaviors and gender confusion. Last year, we won a major victory in two federal courts. But this “Equality Act” would ban ALL counsel for ALL ages from both licensed and unlicensed counselors—which includes pastors.

Our work has connected us with incredible, highly qualified professionals, counselors and people who have experienced freedom from these unwanted attractions, behaviors and confusion. This week our team in Washington, D.C., connected these professional leaders with key senators to share their stories and concerns.

If the “Equality Act” passes, this decade of work and our successes will be erased. In addition, there will be a legal basis for endless litigation against every person and institution of genuine faith to bankrupt them and fill the personal pockets of abortion-minded and LGBTQ individuals.

We have bipartisan support to keep the filibuster—which requires 60 votes. The Democrats do not have 60 votes. That is why they are looking for ways to sneak this through on a majority voice vote. Every minute of every day we need one person on the floor to object. This will force a full vote.

We are working with senators to guard the floor. WE NEED EVERY VOTE AND EVERY VOICE. We need your voice NOW to send a strong message.

STOP this bill from becoming law with your fax to the Senate today.

This bill will harm parents and children most of all. It will override parents and harm children. It will fundamentally damage the parent-child relationship in multiple ways:

First, the “Equality Act” will make abortion a federal right on demand through all nine months until birth. It will preempt every state law—including parental notification and informed consent. Parents will have no say, nor will religious hospitals, health care workers or pharmacists. Insurance companies cannot refuse coverage. It will subject any person who refuses to comply to suit by the U.S. Department of Justice, by individuals and even by organizations like Planned Parenthood!

Second, if a child becomes confused by the propaganda at schools fueled by the “Equality Act” and thinks you can choose your sex like you choose your clothes, there will be no one to help. The child can demand hormone-blocking drugs, opposite-sex hormones and even surgery to remove healthy body parts, and no one can stop this insanity. Insurance and taxpayer funds will cover the expense. If the parents object, their child could be removed from the home. I am not exaggerating—this is already happening even without the “Equality Act.”

Third, if the child asks for help to overcome unwanted same-sex attractions, behaviors or gender confusion, there will be no one to help. The “Equality Act” makes it illegal to provide any such counsel to help overcome these unwanted attractions, behaviors or confusion. In fact, this bill makes such counsel illegal for ALL AGES and FOR ANY COUNSEL—licensed and unlicensed—even pastoral counseling.

Fourth, this dangerous bill will require faith-based adoption and foster care ministries to place children in LGBT & Q homes. And remember, the “Q” encompasses nearly 550 paraphilias—which includes pedophilia!

WE MUST STOP THIS BILL! Send your fax to the Senate to stop the "Equality Act" from endangering our kids.

Lifesaving counsel is critical in cases like Ken’s. Without such counsel, he testified under oath, “I probably would have killed myself.”

At age 5, David was sexually molested by a 16-year-old neighbor boy. David began to hate his maleness, and then during puberty, turned that self-hate into sexual attraction to boys. He became clinically depressed and on the verge of ending it all when he found a counselor to help him. Today, David experiences freedom.

Walt Heyer struggled with gender confusion as a result of a family member sexually abusing him as a boy, combined with his grandmother’s decision to secretly clothe him as a girl. Unable to find a counselor to address his underlying issues, he took opposite-sex hormones and underwent surgery. After several years, he regretted his decision and became severely depressed—until he surrendered his life to Jesus Christ. He received lifesaving counsel, and now he helps people who are like he once was.

The “Equality Act” would wrap these chains that can lead to death around each struggling person—and will tie the hands of parents and counselors.

WE MUST STOP THIS BILL! Send your fax to the Senate to stop the "Equality Act" from endangering our kids.

In addition to sending a fax and signing the petition, I invite you to partner with us by taking advantage of our Challenge Grant that will DOUBLE the impact of your gift. We can't fight effectively without you!

Thank you for your concern and prayer for our nation and for partnering with Liberty Counsel Action in defense of life, family and freedom!

Mat Staver, Chairman
Liberty Counsel Action

P.S. Support Liberty Counsel Action and have the impact of your donation DOUBLED through our Challenge Grant. Then send a fax demanding that senators block this horrific bill.

And please sign our petition. I also invite you to forward this message to likeminded friends who want to see parental rights preserved in America.

After Hours - OANN Teachers Union Pushback with Rebecca Friedrichs

NYC school encourages kids to stop using words like ‘mom,’ ‘dad’ in ‘inclusive language’ guide

A Manhattan private school aiming to use more “inclusive language” is encouraging its students to stop using the terms “mom,” “dad” and “parents” because the words make “assumptions” about kids’ home lives.

The Grace Church School in Noho — which offers academic courses for junior kindergarten through 12th grade — issued a 12-page guide to students and staff explaining the school’s mission of inclusivity.

The detailed guide recommends using the terms “grown-ups,” “folks,” “family” or “guardians” as alternatives to “mom,” “dad” and “parents.” It also suggests using “caregiver” instead of “nanny/babysitter.”

“Families are formed and structured in many ways. At Grace Church School, we use inclusive language that reflects this diversity. It’s important to refrain from making assumptions about who kids live with, who cares for them, whether they sleep in the same place every night, whether they see their parents, etc.,” the guide reads.

The document also states how to use appropriate terms relating to gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity.

Instead of asking a person, “What are you? Where are you from?,” the query should be, “What is your cultural/ethnic background? Where are your ancestors/is your family from?,” according to Grace’s guide.

The school defended the guide, telling City Journal that its goal is to “promote a sense of belonging for all of our students.”

“Grace is an Episcopal school. As part of our Episcopal identity, we recognize the dignity and worth common to humanity,” the Rev. Robert Pennoyer, assistant head of school, said in a statement to the outlet.

The Re-Barbarization Of California

Christopher Rufo is a national treasure. Someone leaked to him a draft of the new plan for the Ethnic Studies curriculum in California public schools. It will be voted on next week. What’s in the plan? According to Rufo:

R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, the original co-chair of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, developed much of the material regarding early American history. In his book Rethinking Ethnic Studies, which is cited throughout the curriculum, Cuauhtin argues that the United States was founded on “Eurocentric, white supremacist (racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous), capitalist (classist), patriarchal (sexist and misogynistic), heteropatriarchal (homophobic), and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.” The document claims that whites began “grabbing the land,” “hatching hierarchies,” and “developing for Europe/whiteness,” which created “excess wealth” that “became the basis for the capitalist economy.” Whites established a “hegemony” that continues to the present day, in which minorities are subjected to “socialization, domestication, and ‘zombification.’”

The religious narrative is even more disturbing. Cuauhtin developed a related “mandala” claiming that white Christians committed “theocide” against indigenous tribes, killing their gods and replacing them with Christianity. White settlers thus established a regime of “coloniality, dehumanization, and genocide,” characterized by the “explicit erasure and replacement of holistic Indigeneity and humanity.” The solution, according to Cuauhtin and the ethnic studies curriculum, is to “name, speak to, resist, and transform the hegemonic Eurocentric neocolonial condition” in a posture of “transformational resistance.” The ultimate goal is to “decolonize” American society and establish a new regime of “countergenocide” and “counterhegemony,” which will displace white Christian culture and lead to the “regeneration of indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity.”

This religious concept is fleshed out in the model curriculum’s official “ethnic studies community chant.” The curriculum recommends that teachers lead their students in a series of indigenous songs, chants, and affirmations, including the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” which appeals directly to the Aztec gods. Students first clap and chant to the god Tezkatlipoka—whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism—asking him for the power to be “warriors” for “social justice.” Next, the students chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, seeking “healing epistemologies” and “a revolutionary spirit.” Huitzilopochtli, in particular, is the Aztec deity of war and inspired hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices during Aztec rule. Finally, the chant comes to a climax with a request for “liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization,” after which students shout “Panche beh! Panche beh!” in pursuit of ultimate “critical consciousness.”

The chants have a clear implication: the displacement of the Christian god, which is said to be an extension of white supremacist oppression, and the restoration of the indigenous gods to their rightful place in the social justice cosmology. It is, in a philosophical sense, a revenge of the gods.

Read it all. If you think Rufo is making it up or exaggerating, then look at his article. He’s quoting from and characterizing the actual documents. You need to understand what it being proposed here for the millions of public school students in California: not only will they be taught to hate whites, but they will also be led in chants to Aztec gods to whom human beings were once sacrificed.

The children will chant to Xipe Totec (Xipe Totek), who, according to Wikipedia’s lengthy and detailed article on human sacrifice in Aztec culture:

Xipe Totec, known as “Our Lord the Flayed One”, is the god of rebirth, agriculture, the seasons, and craftsmen.

Xipe Totec was worshipped extensively during the festival of Tlacaxipehualiztli, in which captured warriors and slaves were sacrificed in the ceremonial center of the city of Tenochtitlan. For forty days prior to their sacrifice one victim would be chosen from each ward of the city to act as ixiptla, dress and live as Xipe Totec. The victims were then taken to the Xipe Totec’s temple where their hearts would be removed, their bodies dismembered, and their body parts divided up to be later eaten. Prior to death and dismemberment the victim’s skin would be removed and worn by individuals who traveled throughout the city fighting battles and collecting gifts from the citizens.

California children will also be taught to chant to Huitzilopochtli, who, according to Wikipedia:

When the Aztecs sacrificed people to Huitzilopochtli (the god with warlike aspects) the victim would be placed on a sacrificial stone.  The priest would then cut through the abdomen with an obsidian or flint blade. The heart would be torn out still beating and held towards the sky in honor to the Sun-God. The body would then be pushed down the pyramid where the Coyolxauhqui stone could be found. The Coyolxauhqui Stone recreates the story of Coyolxauhqui, Huitzilopochtli’s sister who was dismembered at the base of a mountain, just as the sacrificial victims were.[33] The body would be carried away and either cremated or given to the warrior responsible for the capture of the victim. He would either cut the body in pieces and send them to important people as an offering, or use the pieces for ritual cannibalism. The warrior would thus ascend one step in the hierarchy of the Aztec social classes, a system that rewarded successful warriors.

During the festival of Panquetzaliztli, of which Huitzilopochtli was the patron, sacrificial victims were adorned in the manner of Huitzilopochtli’s costume and blue body paint, before their hearts would be sacrificially removed. Representations of Huitzilopochtli called teixiptla were also worshipped, the most significant being the one at the Templo Mayor which was made of dough mixed with sacrificial blood.

This is more or less the rite Mel Gibson recreated in his film Apocalypto. The natives in the film are Maya, not Aztecs, and the deity to whom they sacrificed (in the film) was Kukulcan, the Maya name for Quetzalcoatl. (See this link for more on Mayan human sacrifice; it appears that for the Aztecs, Quetzalcoatl was a god who did not require human sacrifice.) Here is a link to the Apocalypto clip. Do not watch this if you are squeamish, but you really should watch it so you will know what kind of gods the progressives in California propose that school children beseech for spiritual gifts.

Social-justice Marxists who want to teach millions of children in the state’s public schools to achieve liberation against the descendants of European colonists of 500 years ago by teaching them to chant to Aztec gods who required human sacrifice. How do you think this is going to end?

Wake up, folks, and read the signs of the times.

Revenge of the Gods

California’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum urges students to chant to the Aztec deity of human sacrifice.

Next week, the California Department of Education will vote on a new statewide ethnic studies curriculum that advocates for the “decolonization” of American society and elevates Aztec religious symbolism—all in the service of a left-wing political ideology.

The new program, called the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, seeks to extend the Left’s cultural dominance of California’s public university system, 50 years in the making, to the state’s entire primary and secondary education system, which consists of 10,000 public schools serving a total of 6 million students.

In theoretical terms, the new ethnic studies curriculum is based on the “pedagogy of the oppressed,” developed by Marxist theoretician Paolo Freire, who argued that students must be educated about their oppression in order to attain “critical consciousness” and, consequently, develop the capacity to overthrow their oppressors. Following this dialectic, the model curriculum instructs teachers to help students “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs” and critique “white supremacy, racism and other forms of power and oppression.” This approach, in turn, enables teachers to inspire their pupils to participate in “social movements that struggle for social justice” and “build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic racism society.”

R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, the original co-chair of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, developed much of the material regarding early American history. In his book Rethinking Ethnic Studies, which is cited throughout the curriculum, Cuauhtin argues that the United States was founded on a “Eurocentric, white supremacist (racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous), capitalist (classist), patriarchal (sexist and misogynistic), heteropatriarchal (homophobic), and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.” The document claims that whites began “grabbing the land,” “hatching hierarchies,” and “developing for Europe/whiteness,” which created “excess wealth” that “became the basis for the capitalist economy.” Whites established a “hegemony” that continues to the present day, in which minorities are subjected to “socialization, domestication, and ‘zombification.’”

The religious narrative is even more disturbing. Cuauhtin developed a related “mandala” claiming that white Christians committed “theocide” against indigenous tribes, killing their gods and replacing them with Christianity. White settlers thus established a regime of “coloniality, dehumanization, and genocide,” characterized by the “explicit erasure and replacement of holistic Indigeneity and humanity.” The solution, according to Cuauhtin and the ethnic studies curriculum, is to “name, speak to, resist, and transform the hegemonic Eurocentric neocolonial condition” in a posture of “transformational resistance.” The ultimate goal is to “decolonize” American society and establish a new regime of “countergenocide” and “counterhegemony,” which will displace white Christian culture and lead to the “regeneration of indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity.”

This religious concept is fleshed out in the model curriculum’s official “ethnic studies community chant.” The curriculum recommends that teachers lead their students in a series of indigenous songs, chants, and affirmations, including the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” which appeals directly to the Aztec gods. Students first clap and chant to the god Tezkatlipoka—whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism—asking him for the power to be “warriors” for “social justice.” Next, the students chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, seeking “healing epistemologies” and “a revolutionary spirit.” Huitzilopochtli, in particular, is the Aztec deity of war and inspired hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices during Aztec rule. Finally, the chant comes to a climax with a request for “liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization,” after which students shout “Panche beh! Panche beh!” in pursuit of ultimate “critical consciousness.”

The chants have a clear implication: the displacement of the Christian god, which is said to be an extension of white supremacist oppression, and the restoration of the indigenous gods to their rightful place in the social justice cosmology. It is, in a philosophical sense, a revenge of the gods.

California parents should be concerned. Under the guise of “equity” and “empowerment,” activists within the public education system have developed this radical new curriculum in order to transform California schools into factories for left-wing political activism. They have recast the United States as an oppressor nation that must be deconstructed and subverted through politics. The curriculum’s vision statement makes this aim explicit: it presents education not as a means of achieving competency, but as a “tool for transformation, social, economic, and political change, and liberation.”

The religious element of the ethnic studies curriculum, with direct appeals to Aztec gods, is almost certainly a violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Public schools are prohibited from leading state-sanctioned Christian prayers; they would presumably be similarly prohibited from leading state-sanctioned chants to the Aztec god of human sacrifice.

The state board of education will vote on this curriculum next week. Any sane governing body would reject it wholesale. Given the nature of California politics, though, the board is likely to pass it. The best hope for opponents is to strike out some of the most galling material, such as the chants to the Aztec gods, and then devise a long-term strategy to push back against the public education establishment. For now, the activists appear to be driving the narrative—and they will not stop until they have solidified their “counterhegemony.”

Christopher F. Rufo is a contributing editor of City Journal and director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth & Poverty. Sign up for his weekly newsletter and watch his new documentary, America Lost, which tells the story of three “forgotten American cities.” This article is part of an ongoing series on critical race theory in American schools.