CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – As the autumn sun warms the historic campus outside, a professor specializing in ancient and modern political philosophy guides undergraduate students through the seemingly ruthless nuances of Machiavelli’s 16^th-century philosophy of morals.

In another class, a professor specializing in political theory offers students a guided tour of the early American republic, as seen through the enlightened eyes of French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville.

And a professor of rhetoric, who moonlights as a conservative political consultant in national races, diagrams the components of a bulletproof argument on a blackboard as he preps students for an upcoming class debate on the pros and cons of universal basic income.

These vignettes may seem unexceptional, but they are at the center of an ambitious movement to reform what many see as the left-wing capture of America’s leading universities. The classes taught this fall in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s newly launched academic experiment, the School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL), revive approaches and values that were once accepted as essential to shaping informed and virtuous citizens in a liberal democracy, but are now regarded with deep suspicion by many academics: the classical liberal arts, the great books, Western Civilization, Socratic dialogue, civil discourse.

More than 100 civics programs have arisen in the past quarter-century in academia – emphasizing everything from the Great Books and the Western canon to free markets and entrepreneurship. But UNC’s program is part of a new wave that’s on a wholly different scale in scholarly ambition and political heft. In less than a decade, conservative reformers have created 13 relatively large civics centers at eight public universities – including five in Ohio alone – designed to operate autonomously, similar to law schools or business schools, with their own deans, their own majors, sometimes their own Ph.D. programs, and in a few cases, their own designated buildings.

Much of the mainstream media coverage of this movement has focused on criticism from the educational establishment – which commonly derides them as “freedom schools” and conservative “safe spaces” – because of the circumstances of their creation. Most have been launched by Republican legislatures, fast-tracked by conservative regents, and bankrolled by conservative donors. The civic schools often enjoy a great degree of independence as they are typically granted full control over faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure.

The education establishment, accustomed to having sole control over academic programming, casts these developments as a threat to academic freedom. Civics advocates say they must bypass the conventional procedural protocols because the left’s ideological capture of most campuses would make it difficult, if not impossible, to approve these programs.

The classical learning and civics revival has long been associated with Christian private schools at the K-12 level and independent colleges like Hillsdale College, the Michigan private institution that staunchly refuses any federal funding, and the recently launched University of Austin. But the new wave of civics centers, while enthusiastically backed by conservatives, is rejecting the appeal of a cloistered virtue, and instead adapting traditional educational philosophies to operate within existing university cultures.

After a series of faltering attempts to establish a viable liberal arts tradition over a century, the new civics centers are being built with longevity in mind. In some sense, they are the intellectual mirror of the successful effort by leftwing scholars and activists that began in the 1960s to seed departments – in African-American studies, ethnic studies, and women’s studies – that would exert a powerful influence on America’s universities and the broader culture. The 13 civics centers, which are expected to employ several hundred scholars, have been designed to supply the infrastructure – including financial support, academic posts, and professional conferences – to foster the next generation of civics intellectuals and further expand the movement.

Civics pioneer Paul Carrese, founding director of the civics department at Arizona State University who also served as a consultant for UNC’s civics initiative, said he’s in “serious discussions” with faculty and administrators about creating civics centers at public institutions in four more states. Carrese also said there has been renewed interest in civics at elite private universities ever since Stanford University three years ago restored its common core, called Civic, Liberal, and Global Education, including a course in which students read and discuss a mix of canonical texts and contemporary scholars.

Donald Trump’s election could aid the movement, as the president-elect and his supporters are vowing to reclaim universities from “Marxist maniacs,” in part by withholding accreditation, freezing federal funding, and taxing endowments, or by mothballing the U.S. Department of Education.

As an intellectual movement, civics represents more than a surgical strike against the dominant progressive mindset and hyper-partisanship that define elite campuses. The professors and leaders involved describe civics as nonpartisan, apolitical, and pluralist. They see themselves as leading a revival of the classical liberal tradition that not only rejects social justice advocacy as a university’s prime directive but also challenges academia’s hyper-focus on careerism and vocationalism and pushes back against the academic fetish for arcane sub-specialization within some disciplines.

“It is based on an ancient and powerful set of ideas,” said SCiLL dean Jed Atkins, a classics scholar in Greek and Roman political thought and moral philosophy. “I’m not making any of this up whole cloth. This comes from an established tradition.” Among the movement’s immediate challenges: attracting undergraduates to sign up for civics courses and to major in the discipline. In addition to stock courses on federalism, diplomacy, military history, constitutional rights, and the like, civics schools offer classes that are hip, cool, fun, and philosophical at the same time: explorations of happiness, friendship, immortality, faith, war, espionage, and other perennial themes that could easily be the subject of a Ted Talk.

Some civics professors wade into present-day moral minefields where tenured faculty fear to tread, exposing students to readings and discussions of the most sensitive subjects, like reparations, misgendering, trans athletes, abortion, and polyamory.

Carrese said civics education is maligned as affirmative action for conservatives but should be understood as the restoration of the original charter of the public and private university:  to prepare educated, responsible, engaged citizens.

“Part of the challenge for this movement going forward is to show that although in every single case these programs have been initiated by Red States, they’re not ipso facto a Republican partisan ideological enterprise,” said Carrese, who now consults on strategy for the Jack Miller Center, a suburban Philadelphia nonprofit that provides training and support for civics professors and K-12 teachers.

The Jack Miller Center has provided workshops and programs for more than 1,200 professors, including Carrese and most of the leadership cadre of the 13 civic centers, serving as a kind of networking hub for the movement.

“You can look at who’s been hired, what the courses are, what the enrollment is, what the public speakers programs are,” said Carrese, who is also a professor of moral and political thought in the Arizona civics program.

For Nadège Sirot, a first-year UNC student who plans to major in classics and minor in civics, SCiLL has been a revelation. Her high school experience was marked by “tons of trigger warnings,” the occasional land acknowledgment, and open invitations for students to walk out of class if they felt uncomfortable or offended by the subject.

In civics, core knowledge, as understood in the American context, is not presented as just another perspective in a subjective buffet of equally valid options but as the intellectual foundation for all other learning. In the Carolina civics course, Sirot said, the approach is not “Do you agree with Machiavelli?” but rather, “Do you understand what Machiavelli is trying to say? What can this thinker teach us today?”

“It’s a teaching method that has worked for centuries,” Sirot said. “And SCiLL is now trying to return to it.”

The new civics centers are generously funded, unmistakably ambitious, and already reshaping campus culture. The University of Florida’s Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education, which aims to build the nation’s top program in the study of Western Civilization, has 35 tenured faculty, runs about two dozen classes a semester with more than 500 students, and is slated to expand to 60 full-time professors.

The Hamilton Center has recruited professors with pedigrees from the Ivy League, Oxford University, and other marquee institutions to teach such courses as “The Crisis of Liberalism,” “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” “God and Science,” “Utopias and Dystopias,” “Political Violence and Power,” and “Why Spy?”

UNC’s SCiLL department is set to expand from three courses this semester to 14 courses next year. Planned offerings include “The Politics of the Bible,” “Science and Society,” and “Lab Coats and Legislatures: Science and Policy.” The school is in the process of developing a residential program on the Chapel Hill campus, modeled on the civil discourse dorm offered at nearby Duke University. In the long term, SCiLL leaders hope to create a semester study program in Washington, D.C.

Notably, the UNC school has already been green-lighted to lead a mandatory free speech session during orientation week next fall for all 4,700 first-year undergraduates – a requirement noteworthy for a university that has recently disbanded diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

Sirot’s professor, Dustin Sebell, whose Foundations of Civic Life course covers modern political thinkers and moral philosophers – including Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche – said that recognizing the immense contributions of the great thinkers stands in stark contrast to the prevailing trend in academe, where it’s often assumed that classic books and ideas are past their expiration date.

“The presumption is that the present is the peak – we can look down on the past with contempt and pity,” Sebell said. “It’s a kind of chauvinism, almost a kind of xenophobia.”

Civics advocates have hashed out a variety of strategic approaches in a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal, Law & Liberty, and other publications.

Some warn against the natural temptation to hire faculty based on political beliefs and wage warfare against the woke machine, and thereby risk becoming rightwing echo chambers and alienating professors and students. “The solution to politicization from the left is not politicization from the right,” wrote Harvard historian James Hankins last year.

Others say that to disrupt the status quo, civics should borrow from the playbook of politicized programs like women’s studies, ethnic studies, African-American studies, and gender studies. These sectarian, advocacy-oriented departments were once upstarts that muscled their way onto campus with boycotts, protests, and sit-ins, and were often treated with indifference or scorn by the Greatest Generation professoriate, but over time, the activist-scholars ended up producing a critical mass of scholarship – on implicit bias, microaggressions, systemic racism, structural oppression, power and privilege – that has proven highly influential in law, medicine, education, government, and corporate management.

“This is a legitimate tactic. It’s how universities work,” wrote two American Enterprise Institute scholars in the WSJ this year in a piece titled “Follow the Left’s Example to Reform Higher Ed.” “They develop ways of thinking that cohere as a discipline, in which students can be trained. They create associations; journals spring up; grants get funded; students get degrees. One generation of faculty acts as mentors to the next.”

The objections to civics range from rightwing political meddling to duplication of subjects already taught. Some skeptics go further and say that civics is a nostalgic throwback to a triumphalist, Cold War era scholarship limited by Eurocentrism and cultural myopia that now seem quaint and misguided.

UNC historian Jay Smith, who is president of the North Carolina conference of the American Association of University Professors, said SCiLL is an “invasion” and an “intrusion” on the campus. He acknowledged that the professor bios and course descriptions look solid – in fact, some SCiLL faculty are full-time professors in other UNC departments – but he said he would advise students to pass over SCiLL and instead take a class in the history department or political science department, where they can be sure the curriculum was not created under political pressure.

“To me civics is a code word the Right uses,” Smith said. “This is all intended to get students to get focused more on American greatness. Everything that’s special about America. And capitalism, too, in its way. They don’t have ‘capitalism studies’ in their title … but making the world safe for the capitalists is one of the unspoken objectives.”

The critics typically downplay or deny the amply documented grievance that a progressive overrepresentation on campus is stifling viewpoint diversity on campus and creating a climate of censorship and conformity.

Danaya Wright, a law professor at the University of Florida, is deeply suspicious of the legislature dictating a civics program by “a top-down, heavy-handed approach” but acknowledged that the Hamilton Center has hired “outstanding scholars” and is offering legitimate courses in a subject that is worth studying. Her concern is that the civics posture of intellectual humility toward the Western tradition betrays a tendency for sanitizing and mythologizing the past.

She said there are compelling reasons for exposing the moral blindness of the past from the contemporary perspective of social justice advocacy, and even acknowledging today’s perspective as morally superior.

“Don’t we think that people who are woke are actually more evolved?” she posed. “If there is a one-way direction of knowledge in engineering, isn’t becoming more moral and more empathetic – and more aware of the world around you – isn’t that a one-way ratchet, too ?”

And one other sore point bears mentioning.

“There’s a little bit of bad feeling because they’re getting a lot of funding,” Wright said, “and these other colleges and departments are not – they’re being starved.”

However, some civics courses do expose students to contemporary critiques of the West and of the American project – specifically, theories of power, privilege, and oppression as applied to intersectional identities of race, sex, and gender.

The Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville is teaching eight sections of classes this semester, with about 200 students enrolled, said Josh Dunn, the executive director. Dunn said that two of the courses include readings from The New York Times’ 1619 Project, a book-length collection of revisionist essays that characterize the United States as a “slavocracy” and center racism and discrimination as the nation’s core values. The 1619 Project is always paired with readings from critics who assess the project’s omissions and misrepresentations.

“To give a true version of American history, you have to expose students to these different perspectives of the debate over these conflicts and over our purpose as a nation,” Dunn said. “You’re doing a disservice to students if you don’t expose them to all these different sides.”

Civics also exposes students to both sides of current, ongoing controversies, a perspective students say they don’t get today. The topics are so radioactive that many professors won’t touch them for fear of offending students or administrators. The issues covered are the alpha-omega of contemporary tripwires and taboos: nonbinary pronouns and misgendering; transgenderism and female athletics; puberty blockers and teenage transitions; biological sex as a social construct; legalizing polyamory; white privilege, reparations, abortion, Israel/Palestine, among others.

These controversies are currently taught in Duke University’s civil discourse program by John Rose, a specialist in Christian ethics who has joined SCiLL and will be teaching the same subjects at UNC this spring. At Duke, Rose’s classes have included visits from prominent scholars directly involved in the controversies – including Harvard economist Roland Fryer (whose research shows that police don’t disproportionately kill black people), Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono (the expert witness for Asian plaintiffs opposing affirmative action in the recent Supreme Court case involving Harvard and UNC), and detransitioner Chloe Cole (who opposes medicalized “gender-affirming care” for minors).

SCiLL’s planned class on Israel and Palestine will take students on a university-funded trip over spring break to visit Israel and the Palestinian territories.

That approach is catching on. In May and June, Rose led seminars for university faculty on teaching these polarizing topics in college. To date, 84 professors from 70 colleges have attended these workshops, and some are teaching a version of this class, Rose said.

Addie Geitner, a Duke senior double majoring in economics and public policy, took Rose’s polarization class last spring. She described the class as “a total overhaul of what I was used to – there’s a 50-50 balance of perspectives.”

She said a typical policy class is very one-sided, exposing students to a narrow range of perspectives one might experience listening to NPR: “We focus on issues generally related to equity, and how it’s achieved. And we almost solely focus on what the federal government needs to provide to address those problems, as opposed to exploring any other route.”

Civics is only one example of recent efforts to course-correct academia.

Around the country, faculty have formed faculty free speech alliances, led by the example of Harvard’s Council on Academic Freedom, which opposes enforcing ideological compliance through mandatory “diversity statements” in faculty hiring, counsels faculty on free speech threats, and sponsors public events. The Harvard organization was launched in 2023 by Flynn Cratty, a historian who served as the Council’s founding executive director and has been described by The New York Times as a “prominent Harvard academic”; Cratty has since joined UNC’s School of Civil Life and Leadership.

A chief rationale for civics is the ideological monoculture on U.S. campuses. The conservative National Association of Scholars said in a 2017 report that civics has been replaced by the progressive ideal that “a good citizen is a radical activist.”

That claim may be hyperbolic, but studies consistently find that faculty political affiliations skew leftward, usually leaning liberal or leftist 10 to 1, and in some colleges leaning left more than 100 to 1. In a climate of cancel culture, shutdowns, and callouts, the majority of students are hesitant to discuss or ask questions about controversial subjects.

Dunn, who directs Tennessee’s civics initiative, is co-author of “Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University” (2016), a well-received book that describes conservative professors as a “stigmatized minority” on campus who sometimes resort to the coping strategies used by LGBTQ people. According to the Atlantic magazine review: “Many conservative professors are – as they put it – closeted. Some of the people they interviewed explicitly said they identify with the experience of gays and lesbians in having to hide who they are. One tenure-track sociology professor even asked to meet Shields and Dunn in a park a mile away from his university.”

Murmurs about civics deficiencies in education aren’t new, as universities continually face pressures to produce marketable graduates, publish cutting-edge research, and compete for federal research funding. According to a recent study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, 100% of the top colleges allow students to graduate without taking a single course in American history, and three-fourths of the colleges don’t require students to take any history course at all.

The School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas in Austin is led by Justin Dyer, who once described himself as “a conservative, straight out of central casting, a pro-life evangelical who is an unapologetic admirer of the American Founding Fathers and the U.S. Constitution.”

Dyer said the center is nonpartisan but does approach the American founding “from a posture of gratitude” and an appreciation of the Western inheritance that produced the U.S. Constitution and the American experiment.

“It’s not simply an uncritical exercise,” Dyer said. “We’re not value-neutral or value-free.”

The school has eight faculty with tenure or on tenure track and another 13 lecturers and adjuncts, and is legislatively mandated to have at least 20 tenured faculty. It has a budget of $6 million this year from state sources, and private donations and pledges have soared, exceeding $20 million. Top donors include Republican political funder Robert Rowling, a hotel magnate who is ranked 126 on Forbes 400 richest Americans, and Republican contributor Harlan Crow, a real estate magnate whose generous gifts to his friend, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, have been subjects of media coverage.

Rowling’s expectation is that the School of Civic Leadership will become a highly selective and competitive program, attracting world-class faculty and top-performing students.

But right now, the school is regarded with wariness by the university faculty.

“Look, I’m not foolish,” Rowling said. “If you voted among the faculty up or down on the School of Civic Life, they would absolutely say No.”

The director of the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center, William Inboden, said the Hamilton Center is animated by an “appreciation for the American founding” and the “uniqueness of the Western tradition. “We see history as more than a simplistic morality tale of the oppressor versus the oppressed,” he said.

“You will find more conservative viewpoints on our faculty,” Inboden acknowledged. “That’s not because of a political litmus test, but because we have removed the political litmus test.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran a lengthy, detailed account of how the University of Florida humanities faculty discriminated against students who became involved with the Hamilton Center. One student met with a Hamilton Center official at an off-campus coffee shop, where they wouldn’t be seen. Within the university, some professors regarded university officials who were involved in the Hamilton Center’s creation as “agents of the state.”

The university subsequently retaliated by subjecting six professors to an investigation. Ultimately, the probe was dropped after Ken McGurn, a former UF Foundation board chair, got involved. McGurn, a Kamala Harris supporter who has donated or pledged more than $10 million to the university, met several times with Inboden this spring to try to get to the bottom of the Hamilton Center’s purpose and agenda.

In an interview with RealClearInvestigations, McGurn said he has been impressed with the credentials of the Hamilton Center faculty and has received assurances that it’s not a political boondoggle, but he is concerned about an academic unit for which Republicans are “writing the checks.”

“This group that started the Hamilton Center,” McGurn said of state GOP lawmakers, “they went out there banning books. They went out there taking away civil liberties. It’s very suspect, very suspect.”

UNC’s School of Civic Life and Leadership has been subject to similar scrutiny. A nonprofit news site, The Assembly, recently ran an exposé about SCiLL, intimating that Jed Atkins’ “vision for the program is becoming clearer.”

The suspicion borders on the irrational when insinuating that Atkins’ scholarly interest in Cicero betrays a fascination with Roman statesmen that is a proclivity of the political right. The article further notes in conspiratorial tones that “Atkins is a Christian whose kids were homeschooled.”

Inger Brodey, SCiLL’s associate dean of faculty development and curriculum, is a UNC professor of English and Comparative Literature.

Brodey shared a draft syllabus for a civics course she plans to teach this spring entitled “Seeking the Good Life.” Reading selections for the class include the Bible, Bhagavad Gita, Aristotle, Nietzsche, the Quran, Confucius, Simone de Beauvoir, C.S. Lewis, and James Baldwin, among others.

Asked if SCiLL is a source of controversy among the professoriate, Brodey replied: “I have people hugging me and thanking me for taking this on, and people who won’t speak to me in the elevator.”

In August, the nation’s second-largest school district announced a major policy shift that caused the soon-to-be-unemployed minds at the Los Angeles Times editorial board to collectively explode last month. Why?

Because in the wake of a federal civil rights complaint filed by Parents Defending Education in 2023, the U.S. Department of Education forced the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to open up its $120 million Black Student Achievement Plan tutoring program to all students with academic need – no longer conditioning participation on skin color alone.

Read that again: a public school system – underwritten by public tax dollars – is no longer allowed to discriminate on the basis of race. In 2024.

The horror!

Just what was this program, though? Depending on a learner’s skin color, totally different courses were offered; for example, during the 2020-2021 school year, students of color were given exclusive resources including a “Black Cultural Arts Passport,” “STEM Makerspace Labs,” and “Parent Workshops and Community Fairs.” Students of other racial backgrounds, however, were left out of these learning opportunities altogether. Change black to white and this system is something the KKK would applaud.

How, exactly, was such an obviously illegal program able to take root?

Look no further than AFT/NEA affiliate the United Teachers Los Angeles, which bragged that “as part of our last contract fight, we successfully pushed the district to codify BSAP into our 2022-25 contract, winning agreements for more resources, staffing, and professional development for BSAP schools.”

To be clear, the program hasn’t been shuttered; as Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told the Times, “Our solution is one that preserves the funding, the concentration of attention and resources on the same students and same schools … We were able to reformat the program without sacrificing impact.”

Yet far too many see the end of the race-based program – which should be considered a civil rights victory –as a defeat, exposing their own support for racial discrimination in K-12 schools. Students protested at an October school board meeting, while an online campaign demanded not only the expansion of the program but also a formal apology.

Sure, excluding students from educational programming based on race is – and has been! – illegal since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and immoral since… forever. Yes, proficiency scores for all children of all races in LAUSD are below the national average. And yes, the Supreme Court ruled in 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision that “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

Man, that pesky Constitution and its insistence on “equality before the law!”

LAUSD’s revision of the race-based grant program frees up the $120 million in funding for use among needy students or those suffering from genuine socioeconomic disadvantages – of whom there are many. In 2023, more than half of California students were unable to meet grade-level reading standards, setting them up for a lifetime of failure. It would be far more beneficial to students if LAUSD’s grant was directed towards actually improving subject matter proficiency for all students – and now, it can be. This is a momentous achievement coming from LAUSD, which has an otherwise shameful track record of centering racial differences in nearly every student interaction.

Much to the chagrin of DEI activists, the program was revised in a way that brings it into compliance with federal antidiscrimination law – and not simply given a cosmetic lift, as so many similar programs receive when they are challenged outside of court.

As the saying goes, “the price of eternal liberty is vigilance” – and in Los Angeles and other cities, ensuring that the program doesn’t backslide will be an ongoing effort. In an interview with The 74, University of Southern California education professor Julie Slayton noted that “They’ll take away the language of ‘Black,’ … But it doesn’t have to change, profoundly, the way that they’re thinking about the distribution of these resources and the schools that will receive them.” Meanwhile, the much-aggrieved LA Times editorial board asserted, “There are grounds to defend the program, even in California, which bans affirmative action in the public sector. … government agencies are constitutionally allowed to use ‘race-conscious remedies’ to make up for past race-based discrimination. District leaders certainly should be able to do this.”

But remember: this complaint was resolved by a Biden Administration Office for Civil Rights – which has loudly and clearly telegraphed its support for identity politics over the past four years but still found LAUSD’s program to be a bridge too far. An incoming Trump Administration is likely to have far less tolerance for taxpayer-funded discrimination in America’s public schools. Let the administrators beware.

David Hogg, a student-turned-antigun-activist following a shooting at his school, has begun promoting himself to a leadership post in the Democrat party, and the online trolling erupted immediately.

“This the guy who stood on the bodies of his dead classmates to be famous, right?”

“I cannot tell you how much I want this to happen.”

“Please, keep filling Democrat leadership with extremists. It helps.”

And, “HAHAHAHA. I hope he does run, this guy is a moron,” were among the responses as soon as Hogg said on television he would like to be DNC vice chairman.

David Hogg says he’s considering running for DNC Chair pic.twitter.com/pGgJQePQUa

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) December 5, 2024

The Washington Examiner cited how Hogg “got trolled” across social media after stating he would consider a run to become part of the Democratic National Committee.

“I’m considering it because I think that, one, obviously, I think we need a new generation in the DNC. If this election has taught us nothing else, I think we need an intergenerational coalition as a party.”

His comments came during an interview with leftist CNN.

“This is what happens when everyone gets a participation trophy!” one commenter said.

Hogg continued, “I think what the party needs to do is open its eyes and take its fingers out of its ears. We can just surround ourselves with people that agree with us a lot of the time, in terms of the party leadership and also within the party itself, and think that’s just who we need to be talking to constantly instead of listening to people who don’t agree with us.”

He said Democrats’ “condescending tone” is causing voters to see them as “out of touch” elitists.

In fact, during the 2024 presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump increased support for the Republican party in just about every demographic category, as the GOP now is considered the party of the “working man.”

Hogg has made his reputation as a gun control extremist following a shooting at his school, Stoneman Douglas High. He’s helped lead a bunch of protests, marches and boycotts.

He helped start, then left, a pillow company, and founded a political action network.

On Feb. 14, 2018, when a former student went to the school and started shooting people, Hogg hid in a closet.

After the shooting, he made himself a point person for demands for gun control.

He has claimed people have no rights to have a gun under the Second Amendment, in stark opposition to the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion on that issue.

He charges that the Second Amendment is about states having a national guard.

Satanists are aiming to influence school children with their lessons of “empathy” and “justice” and more at an Ohio district where they are beginning to take part in a program in which students are released from classes for short times for instruction from their own church programs.

A report from WSYX explained the Satanists, part of the Satanic Temple, are using a new state procedure to begin “Hellions Academy of Independent Learning” for students at Marysville School District.

“When they hear it, it’s initially shocking, oh the Satanic Temple,” explained June Everett, a program promoter. She cited the lessons to teach empathy and justice “in a fun environment without religious pressure,” the report said.

The report explained, “HAIL was created as an alternative to Christian Release Time Religious Instruction programs (RTRI). Marysville is already involved with LifeWise Academy. Students within the district have been able to participate in the off-campus classes since September 2023.”

Community organizer Betty Elswick explained in the report she sought out the Satanic Temple to begin its work.

“We wanted to make sure that we had a program that was teaching compassion and empathy and also inclusion. Several parents had expressed concerns about their kids coming home and being bullied or made fun of and teased for not participating in the other programs in the area,” she said.

The program claims to teach “critical thinking,” “creative expression” and more.

Four students are signed up, the report said.

It was the state legislature that at the same time is considering whether to require school districts to excuse students who want to attend a released time courses in religious instruction.

LifeWise spokesman Joel Penton said, “We believe all families should have the opportunity to choose religious study during school hours, and we trust parents to make the best choice for their children.”

A report from CBN said a school in Pennsylvania already has started offering the HAIL program.

CBN noted its Faithwire reported earlier this fall The Satanic Temple also is actively involved to promoting abortion businesses as “religious abortion services.”

The same organization also has been sponsoring after-school “Satan Clubs,” as WND previously reported.

There, school officials have said they allowed the events because they also allow Christian student groups to use school facilities after classes are over for the day.

In one district, officials explained, “Please note that the district must provide equal access to all groups and that students need parental permission to attend any after-school event. Our focus remains on student safety and student achievement.”

The Satan Clubs offer “science projects, puzzles and games, arts and crafts projects, [and] nature activities.”

WND had reported in 2016 that a series of Satan club meetings was proposed, but within a year the plans turned out to be a dismal flop, attracting the interest of only one person.

A school district in Waterville, New York, has been delivered a five-page letter with instructions on how it should get rid of its “hostility” to the Bible, and comply with federal law.

The fight is over a decision by Waterville Central School District officials to refuse to recognize a student Bible club.

A student had followed all of the required processes and procedures for establishing that group, but according to the letter, the school refused to acknowledge the club “as it would any other clubs,” because of its association with faith.

“By denying the same benefits to the Bible club that it provides to all non-curricular clubs, the school has missed the concept of ‘equal’ in the Equal Access Act,” explained Keisha Russell, a lawyer for First Liberty Institute. “The school’s actions are unconstitutional, and its justification is legally flawed. The Supreme Court has made clear that the Free Exercise Clause protects religious practices by both students and employees in public school settings.”

At issue is an effort by Elijah Nelson, an eighth-grader, to establish an official Bible club.

The letter from the institute, along with C. Kevin Marshall and Michael Bradley of Jones Day, cited the school’s explanation that “we cannot have a school-sponsored club associated with a religion meaning that we can’t fund the club or provide an adviser.”

Nelson has worked for two years already to start a Bible club.

School officials, relying on what the letter describes as incorrect advice from their own layers, said the club could meet informally during lunch while a staff member supervised the students without participating in the group’s activities; or the club could apply as an outside organization to use the school’s facilities after hours.

The letter explains to the district that “rejecting Elijah’s request because the school could not endorse a certain religion is ‘anachronistic and misplaced.’ The letter clarifies that while ‘endorsement did once feature in the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause decisions,’ it does not now. ‘Today, the Establishment Clause never requires—and never allows—the government to discriminate against religious observers and organizations when granting benefits.'”

After explaining the requirements of equal access, fair treatment, and non-discrimination standards, the letter tells school officials they are violating two parts of the First Amendment, free speech and free exercise.

“The school is out of line. It has denied Elijah’s request simply because of its religious nature, and it has thereby violated the Constitution, federal law, and its students’ rights,” the letter explains.

The letter asks for prompt notification when the Bible club is approved “on the same terms and conditions that govern official clubs.”

Otherwise, the letter suggested, litigation will be coming.

“Waterville needs to dispense with its ‘hostility toward the religious viewpoint’ and show Elijah and his fellow students some respect.”

A school in Nevada has agreed to settle a lawsuit brought on behalf of a child in the district who was forced by officials to read pornography – out loud – in class.

The resolution to the case is described by the American Center for Law and Justice as a “significant victory.”

The basis of the lawsuit was that officials in Nevada’s Clark County School District had forced a child to perform a pornographic monologue in a theater class, the legal team explained.

“After significant testimony was revealed in depositions, CCSD settled with us, affirming the rights of parents and students in the face of inappropriate educational content,” the ACLJ announced.

The case was over the forced performance by a 15-year-old student, and a judge had rejected the school’s demand that the case be dismissed.

The next step, then, was discovery, during which even school officials expressed shock over what had happened.

One, for example, said, “The content that [the client] performed, I believe, was inappropriate. … The overall content and language was not something that I felt should have been there.”

And another admitted, “I do remember the first time I read it, being in shock. … What was written was not appropriate to be read and performed in a school setting. … And so it crossed the boundary.”

School officials said even if parental permission had been requested, the reading still “never” would have been approved.

The student’s mother became the plaintiff in the lawsuit, and explained she was forced into the action in order to document that her daughter “had nothing to do with creating this … .”

The district, on social media, had offered a misleading statement, that, “The Clark County School District is investigating the circumstances surrounding a class assignment consisting of a student-generated writing exercise that produced content not conducive to student instruction.”

That resulted in a hate campaign against the student.

The student’s parents responded, “This was an especially difficult time for our daughter. The reason her Dad didn’t come to the school board meeting with me was that he was deployed overseas with the U.S. military for a year, then sent to Ft. Bliss for an additional year & a half, recovering from injuries. As any military family will tell you, life can be very difficult for the kids whose parents are deployed. We try to do everything we can to keep their spirits up, but it’s not always easy. Her teacher knew this, but I guess it didn’t matter to her, and we feel she took advantage of a 15-year-old who just wanted to be a good student and get good grades. Our daughter never wanted to be in the public spotlight for something like this, just like most teens would not want that, so this was all very overwhelming and not an easy journey for her.”

The student now is in her first year of college, writing and singing her own songs.

The ACLJ noted that the Nevada legislature subsequently adopted a law that defines “sexual impropriety” by a teacher to include “sharing pornographic or sexually explicit materials,” which is expected to allow teachers in future situations to be held accountable.

Details of the settlement were not disclosed.

Topline: A Kentucky school district decided in 2021 to close its middle schools and build giant high schools that could accommodate students in grades 6 through 12. The controversial plan was recently nixed, but not before the district sank $3 million into the construction project, according to WDRB.com.

Nelson County’s “Community Campuses” plan was approved by the school board in December 2021, but they changed their minds later on. Two board members who initially voted in favor, later voted against the plan in 2023 and killed the idea.

In addition to the $3 million sunk cost, Nelson County had already hired Trademark Excavating for construction and had to pay a $27,500 settlement for canceling the job, WDRB reported. The district had also paid architects to draw up blueprints for the schools.

The district has also spent $614,409 on attorney fees since 2022, according to records obtained by WDRB. Most of the money was for lawsuits related to the “Community Campuses” plan, including one filed by Amanda Deaton, who is now a member of the school board.

If Nelson County had completed the construction project, it would have been eligible for “urgent needs” funding from the state. Board member Damon Jackey estimated its value at $30 million.

Jackey also told WDRB he believes construction companies will charge the district more for future projects because of its history of backing out of deals.

Background: The lost $3 million is just part of the chaos surrounding Nelson County School District.

The school board voted to fire Superintendent Wes Bradley in March as a scapegoat for students’ low academic performance. One month later, the Kentucky Board of Education reinstated Bradley, saying there was not “competent and relevant evidence” for a single one of the six reasons the board gave for firing him.

The district is now enrolled in a “management improvement program” with the state.

Bradley only earned $70,596 in salary last year, but 42 school employees outearned him, according to data obtained by OpenTheBooks.com.

Search all federal, state and local government salaries and vendor spending with the AI search bot, Benjamin, at OpenTheBooks.com. 

Summary: Maybe Nelson County’s school board members should attend their own Community Campus to relearn basic money management skills.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

A state court ruling regarding a forced COVID treatment on a young child at his school is being denounced as something that “threatens every child in America.”

The comment is from John Klar, a lawyer, pastor and writer who has written at the Federalist about the case involving the 6-year-old Vermont boy.

He was “vaccinated with an experimental COVID-19 intervention against the family’s wishes, and now the Vermont Supreme Court has endorsed the actions by the state actors,” he reported.

“The Vermont court had ruled that the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) prohibits such claims, granting immunity to school and government personnel when they mandate vaccinations,” he explained, as the case now is being forwarded to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Stunningly, the Vermont Supreme Court did not even pay lip service to the constitutional liberties implicated, ruling against traditional protections of parental rights and informed consent. But the PREP Act is not above the Constitution’s supremacy clause; it’s the other way around,” Klar explained.

He said it’s part of a move to erase parental rights.

“In Vermont, minor children may obtain transgender hormones and birth control without parental consent, and a 2024 law bars parents from seeing which library books are checked out by their children 12 years and older. Yet these are examples where the child wants something against his parents’ wishes. In Vermont’s COVID-19 vaccination case, the child protested and was forced to be jabbed anyway,” he said.

Klar, representing the family in the case, explained, “Tony and Shujen Politella and their son Leo were shocked that their clear expressions of opposition to Leo being vaccinated were ignored.”

“Tony had visited his son’s school with the express purpose of ensuring his child would not receive a COVID-19 vaccine, offering to keep Leo home on the day of an upcoming clinic. He was assured Leo would be fine … .”

But the school’s scheming took over, and, Klar charged, “Leo was given an arm tag displaying another boy’s name and vaccinated despite his vocal protests.”

Then the school refused to explain “how such a gross error occurred.”

Leo now is at a different school, Klar explained.

Then the bureaucracy inflicted a further injury “when the Vermont attorney general and Vermont court system employed laws designed to grant product liability immunity to Big Pharma to instead insulate incompetent government employees from accountability for their wrongs.”

He said the threat now is that other courts “may rely” on its implied preemption by the government of family rights.

He explained, “Congress never intended for the PREP Act to abolish fundamental medical ethics or the legal rights of patients and parents. The PREP Act does not shield public servants from accountability for actions that have nothing to do with vaccine safety or efficacy. The Politellas did not sue a vaccine manufacturer for a harmful product; they sued school officials who inflicted very real harm.”

His warning is that those suspicious of various shots now could extend that distrust to schools “and courts that favor negligent or ill-willed works over the rights, and health, of young children.”

COVID shots, in fact, now have been linked to a wide range of serious and sometimes fatal side effects, especially in young people. And federal officials have admitted they likely didn’t prevent someone from getting COVID.

When he was a child, my husband’s nickname was “Sputnik.” That’s because he was born the day after the famous Russian satellite was successfully launched in 1957.

That historical moment spurred more than just a childish moniker for a young boy. It also spurred the so-called Space Race, a “symbol of the broad ideological and political contest between two rival world powers,” in the words of the National Air and Space Museum.

It also spurred a change in our public education system. Concerned that America was falling behind in educating its children when compared to global standards, rampant changes swept the nation. “Two generations after the event,” NASA chief historian Roger D. Launius wrote in 1997, “words do not easily convey the American reaction to the Soviet satellite.”

The most obvious concern was the failings of the U.S. educational system in comparison to the Soviets. “The schools are in terrible shape,” Life magazine noted in a 1958 five-part series addressing the crisis. “What has long been an ignored national problem, Sputnik has made a recognized crisis.”

Science education, in particular, was ramped up. “With the Soviets claiming the first manned spaceflight, the drive to create a generation of scientists and engineers intensified even further,” notes this article. “In the two decades after Sputnik soared into orbit, the NSF [National Science Foundation] contributed $500 million for teacher and classroom development.” Technology was brought into the classrooms for the first time, largely consisting of audio-visual aids that now seem primitive.

This revamping of America’s public education system culminated in 1979 when President Jimmy Carter authorized the Federal Department of Education. Things went downhill from there.

Rather than focus on what parents wanted their children taught – reading, writing, math, history, geography, science – suddenly America’s public schools lurched left into an agenda-driven curriculum. Whatever marvelous educational advances were promised, they’ve long since sputtered out in favor of progressive indoctrination.

My husband and I were in the midst of this educational reformation of the 1960s and 70s. I distinctly remember holding hands in a circle and singing Kumbaya. Far away in another state, my husband’s class participated in school-wide renditions of “In the Year 2525.” These activities didn’t teach us science or math, but they did herald the beginning of the decades-long process of turning children into proper little leftists.

In subsequent generations, parents have fought and fought and fought against these progressive fads with little success. Teachers were often required to incorporate lesson plans and teaching methodologies contrary to both educational success and common sense. The satirical songwriter and mathematician Tom Lehrer famously poked fun at this trend back in 1965 (watch this hilarious YouTube video to see what I mean).

And then it got worse. Older traditional teachers retired, and a younger, more radical agenda-driven crop of educators entered the field. Climate change, critical race theory, and gender ideology replaced history and math and especially science. Horrified parents yanked their kids out of school in droves, but it made little difference to the educators. Indoctrination was now the norm, aided and abetted by powerful teachers’ unions whose goals, apparently, have nothing to do with education and everything to do with retaining power.

It is for these reasons that I view Trump’s plan to dismantle the Department of Education as one of the most exciting possibilities for the incoming administration. That department should never have been formed in the first place.

Public education in America is broken. It is deeply, deeply broken. When our daughters were babies over 25 years ago, my husband and I decided we would never let them set foot in a public school, and they didn’t. (We homeschooled.) Twenty-five years later, education has deteriorated even more, spiraling down not just to laughable levels, but into the realm of absolute evil.

The federal Department of Education put kid-hating nutjobs in charge of education, and catered to every left-wing radical agenda that ever flitted across the minds of extremists.

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Now the left is in meltdown mode at the possibility of losing full control of the nation’s children. Teachers are freaking out in classrooms (see here and here and here and here and here and here and here) and administrators are in full damage-control mode, frantically trying to convince the public that all their efforts are beneficial and (/sarc/) for the children.

The plaintive cry of “We just need more money for schools!” continues to rent the air, but this time people aren’t buying it. The government has been throwing money at the problem for generations, and the educational results are worse than ever.

Children shouldn’t be “transitioned” for purposes of obscure gratification without their parents’ knowledge or consent. Parents shouldn’t be handcuffed and termed “domestic terrorists” and have the Dept. of Justice sicced on them for raising concerns at school board meetings. Parents are fed up with having children radicalized by teachers.

And that’s the point: Parents are fed up. Really seriously fed up. That’s one of the reasons Trump was elected an in an historical landslide. PARENTS ARE FED UP.

An EdChoice Schooling in America Survey from April 2024 showed fully 70% of the public and 64% of parents of school-age children think K-12 education is on the wrong track. A Pew Research Center poll found that only 16% of Americans were willing to say things are going in the right direction in education. The 2022 NAEP revealed that nationwide, 29% of the nation’s 8th-graders are proficient in reading, while just 26% are proficient in math. This is progress?

Spoiler alert, this is one of the many reasons Trump was reelected. As historian Victor Davis Hanson put it, “The fault, dear Democrats, is in yourselves.” He continued: “This election, the left committed the two cardinal sins of American politics: one, never talk down to the American people as too stupid to appreciate the wisdom of their supposed elite betters; and two, never abandon the upwardly mobile aspirations and real struggles of the middle class.”

Will Trump’s changes turn America’s schools around? I don’t know. But I do know something has to be done. We’ve become a laughingstock on the world stage. Our enemies (notably Russia and China) look upon the progressive indoctrination of our students and applaud. They know weakness when they see it.

The Founding Fathers deliberately omitted education from the Constitution. They knew it was not a federal matter, but an issue that should be left at the state or local level. Until a few decades ago, that was the case. Now it’s the opposite.

“The key to improving education quality and stopping schools from promoting a political agenda is restoring control over education to those most concerned that children receive a quality education and who best know children’s unique needs and abilities: Parents,” notes Ron Paul.

I’m willing to bet an enormous number of concerned parents aren’t so-called right-wing extremists; they’re centrist or even liberal. But where their kids are concerned, don’t poke the mama bears with a stick; they’ll fight back tooth and nail.

In fact, they just did.

If it seemed like a lot of the various “enforcement” actions by the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration put a bull’s-eye on Christians, it was because they did.

A report from Fox News explains how an assessment by the American Principles Project showed that “nearly 70% of enforcement actions executed by” the Biden-Harris Education Department “targeted faith-based and career schools.”

Among those under attack were Christian colleges Grand Canyon University and Liberty University.

The APP explained it drew on data that found almost three in four of the Department of Education’s punishment schemes focused on that segment of all schools, even though “those schools represent less than 10 percent of students in the U.S.”

The project concluded, “While major assaults from agencies like the Department of Justice have taken most of the headlines, we should not ignore similarly corrupt efforts in other agencies as well,” explained Jon Schweppe, the APP policy director.

“As our report details, the Biden-Harris Department of Education has been engaged in a long-running scheme to punish Christian colleges that are ideologically opposed to the left’s agenda. The unfair targeting of these institutions has been egregious, and it needs to stop immediately.”

The Biden-Harris regime, of course, is scheduled to lose its main power in just a few weeks, and its remaining power will be the bureaucrats and policies it leaves behind, all subject to change by the income administration of President-elect Donald Trump.

Both Grand Canyon and Liberty “faced record-level fines worth significantly more than ‘all penalties imposed over the past seven years combined,’ including fines imposed on Penn State ($2.4 million) and Michigan State ($4.5 million) relating to Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nassar’s sexual crimes,” the report said.

Grand Canyon currently is appealing a $37.7 million fine levied by the Department of Education on claims about its documentation of costs.

And Miguel Cardona, a Biden-Harris regime education secretary, “vowed to shut down GCU during a House Appropriations Committee hearing about for-profit colleges. The Biden administration official claimed that ‘predatory schools’ are ‘preying on first generation students,'” the report said.

The report documented that at least a dozen Christian colleges have been abused with “excessive penalties” or by being “banned from receiving federal student aid.”

“The average fine against a Christian school for a Clery Act violation was $815,000, compared to $228,571 against public and private institutions,” the report said.

Fox explained just one of the attacks, and how the Biden-Harris administration lost that fight:

The report comes after GCU recently scored a legal win over the ED regarding the Christian institution’s non-profit status. ED denied GCU’s nonprofit recognition after it was approved by the Arizona Board for Private Postsecondary Education, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the State of Arizona, and the Higher Learning Commission. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the ED unlawfully applied an incorrect standard to determine the university’s nonprofit status.

A federal official claimed to Fox that a school’s religious status doesn’t make a difference in the department’s enforcement actions.

In response to a student’s objections to her school district’s mask mandate during COVID, the district suspended her three times, told police to cite her for trespassing, then had her arrested and jailed.

So of course she has standing to sue of the treatment, according to an appeals court decision.

It is the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees federal judges in Wyoming, that rejected and overturned a decision from Judge Nancy Freudenthal, who had dismissed the complaint from Grace Smith and her parents Andy and Erin Smith.

They sued the Albany County School District in August 2023 over its attacks over the mask demand.

Freudenthal claimed that Smith had no standing, so dismissed the action, a move that was reversed in a ruling from Harris Hartz, Gregory Phillips and Allison Eid of the 10th Circuit.

According to a report from the Cowboy State Daily, the judges wrote, “We are not persuaded” by Freudenthal’s claims.

The ruling explains when a government regulation forbids or requires some action by the plaintiff, she almost invariably can show she’s been harmed.

“Grace has easily met the requirements for standing. She alleges that the defendants repeatedly punished her for opposing the mask mandate. They suspended her three times and requested that local law enforcement issue her two trespassing citations, arrest her and take her to jail,” the appellate judges noted.

Smith, now a former Laramie High School student, now can continue her court battle against the school.

The Cowboy State Daily report noted, “Smith had refused to wear a mask, had declined to take virtual instead of in-person schooling, organized a walkout in protest of the mask mandate, was suspended for three different two-day stints, and was ultimately arrested for trespassing while at school.”

As a result of the school’s demands, “Police officers arrested and handcuffed Smith, drove her to the police station, booked her for trespassing, then released her to her father.”

She then withdrew from the school.

The report explains she has accused the school of violating her right to free speech by compelling her “to utter what was not in her mind” by wearing a mask.

Then, her claims include, there was retaliation by the school, and a violation of due process.

Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed a bill Wednesday that bans biological males from using girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms and other facilities in schools.

The policy applies to all public and nonpublic K-12 schools as well as all colleges and universities in the state, according to the bill’s text. Schools are forbidden from establishing facilities that are open to both sexes at the same time.

“A school shall designate each student restroom, locker room, changing room, or shower room that is accessible by multiple students at the same time, whether located in a school building or located in a facility used by the school for a school-sponsored activity, for the exclusive use by students of the male biological sex only or by students of the female biological sex only,” the bill states. “No school shall permit a member of the male biological sex to use a student restroom, locker room, changing room, or shower room that has been designated by the school for the exclusive use of the female biological sex. No school shall construct, establish, or maintain a multi-occupancy facility that is designated as nongendered, multigendered, or open to all genders.”

Senate Bill 104 passed the state Senate and House in early November and was presented to the governor on Nov. 14. This was the last day for the governor to sign or veto the bill before it became law without his signature.

DeWine previously vetoed legislation that would have banned sex-change procedures for minors before signing an executive order a week later in January that banned sex-change operations but allowed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. The Ohio Senate later overrode the governor’s veto but the bill has since been challenged by a state judge.

The governor has reportedly received over $40,000 in donations from children’s hospitals that support transgender medicine.

A similar law in Idaho banning sex-change operations, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors made its way to the Supreme Court after facing legal challenge but was later allowed to stand. Several states have passed legislation protecting minors from transgender medicine.

Numerous school districts have policies allowing schools to hide children’s gender identities from their parents, many of which have been challenged in the courts.

DeWine did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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Threats and bullying from peers and censorship from his college couldn’t stop detransitioner Simon B. Amaya Price from sounding the alarm on so-called gender transitions for children.

Amaya Price, 20, was tasked with creating an event about social change for a class at Berklee College of Music, a private music college in Boston. He decided to host a presentation Oct. 20 titled “Born in the Right Body: Desister and Detransitioner Awareness” to share his own struggles with gender dysphoria in high school and how he overcame them.

After Amaya Price received almost 1,000 negative comments on social media, including messages threatening his physical safety and recommending he drop out of school and commit suicide, the administration of the liberal arts college forced him to cancel the presentation, Boston-native Amaya Price told The Daily Signal.

But on Sunday, Amaya Price made a comeback. After Berklee failed to follow up on his requests to reschedule the event, he found his own platform.

“It was one hell of a vindication,” Amaya Price said.

The MIT Open Discourse Society allowed Amaya Price to host his lecture on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An organization called Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender provided refreshments and logistical support. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, also raised awareness of Amaya Price’s situation.

The event logged about 40 in-person attendees and 60 virtual listeners. Many in the audience were parents whose children suffer from gender dysphoria, looking for answers of how to save their children from the transgender cult, Amaya Price said.

“This is a really hard situation, seeing your kid basically completely change all of a sudden,” Amaya Price said, “and want to do these treatments with the hormones and the surgeries, which are really harmful.”

One mother, a Bosnian refugee, told Amaya Price that what she was going through with her daughter identifying as transgender was harder than surviving genocide in her homeland.

“I feel like I’ve given a lot of these parents hope, because I’m here today, I’ve been through this, I came out the other side, and I’m OK,” he said, “That’s what a lot of these parents need. They need hope. And right now how it is in Massachusetts, especially, there aren’t a lot of places to look.”

Amaya Price’s presentation highlighted the hate he says he has received on social media since announcing his event and his journey from identifying as trans to accepting his biological sex. He ended with the reminder: “No child is born in the wrong body.”

Amaya Price, who has been diagnosed with autism, said he experienced social ostracism and a mental health crisis in ninth grade, leading him to decide his problem was that he actually was a girl.

He told his therapist, who affirmed his gender dysphoria and referred him to Boston Children’s Hospital for hormones and surgeries. His pediatrician told Amaya Price’s father he could choose between having a “dead son or a living daughter,” and that the then-14-year-old would kill himself if denied hormones and surgery.

Amaya Price’s father immediately shut down the possibility of a medical “transition,” which his son now says is “the best thing he could have done.”

Amaya Price calls himself a “desister,” someone who identified as transgender but decided to live in accord with his biological gender instead of undergoing medical interventions.

After Amaya Price spoke at the Sunday event, senior researcher Ian Kingsbury of the medical watchdog Do No Harm gave a presentation on understanding the faulty “science” behind pediatric gender medicine. Do No Harm is responsible for a database of 225 hospitals that perform child gender transitions.

“Simon is remarkably brave for speaking out,” Kingsbury told The Daily Signal. “Detransitioners and desisters receive more venom from trans activists than anyone. That’s because [activists] hope to bully desisters and detransitioners into silence so they can tell the public that detransition is rare.”

“I was and remain eager to support Simon in whatever way I can,” Kingsbury said.

Two hours of Q&A followed the presentations by Amaya Price and Kingsbury.

Although Amaya Price is a reformed Jew, social media naysayers called him a neo-Nazi in the lead-up to the rescheduled event.

“Saying that I’m somehow the same as the people who previously genocided my people 80 years ago, that’s disgusting,” Amaya Price said.

The event had some “heated moments,” including two transgender-identifying individuals who abruptly left the lecture, he said. Still, he said, the event ultimately “built some bridges” and paved the way for respectful dialogue with those who disagree with him.

One person who identifies as transgender asked Amaya Price if he’d be interested in organizing an event featuring both transgender individuals and detransitioners.

“If we have an open dialogue about things, there’s a good chance the truth will show itself,” Amaya Price said. “I believe in people’s ability to make up their own minds, and I think this event proved that we can have a really productive dialogue with people who disagree with each other.”

Amaya Price said he hopes Berklee College of Music will allow him to share the experience of detransitioners and desisters such as himself before he graduates on Dec. 12.

FIRE sent a letter to Berklee Nov. 1, posted on the school’s website, and issued a “Take Action” notice decrying Berklee’s decision to “indefinitely postpone” the event.

“I hope Berklee realizes the error of its ways,” Amaya Price said, “and I hope they will extend an invitation for me to do this presentation at my home institution.”

Berklee censored his speech based on his opinion and identity, Amaya Price said, which encourages those who bullied him to be more hateful and threatening. Because he cares about his college community, Amaya Price said he hopes to see it improve as a safe place for those whose opinions differ from the majority.

Berklee College of Music didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.

“It’s become really obvious to me that a hell of a lot of people care about this,” the 20-year-old said, “and a hell of a lot of people really resonated with what I had to say at my presentation.”

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]

A school district in Wisconsin wants its students and employees to say what it wants – and only what it wants.

And it’s apparently going to try to force that by imposing a “hate” speech code that is in violation of the First Amendment, according to a report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

The organization reports that it is the Baraboo School District that has a draft policy stating, “Hate speech is not protected speech” and outlines plans for the district to “not tolerate any form of hate speech.”

Those statements and opinions, the school insists, will be banished “both on and off school grounds,” FIRE reported.

“But here’s the problem: ‘Hate speech’ has no legal meaning in the United States, and the term is often used to describe speech that is constitutionally protected,” FIRE reported. “The policy does provide its own definition of ‘hate speech,’ namely ‘any form of communication that attacks, threatens, degrades, or insults a person or group based on their race, color, national origin, ancestry, creed, age, gender, disability, sexual orientation, gender variance, or any other group.'”

But FIRE, in a letter to the district, explains that “vague and subjective definition violates the First Amendment.”

Actually, many analysts have said the First Amendment was created in order to protect offensive speech, because inoffensive comments – those that everyone would support – would need no special protection.

FIRE explains, “The First Amendment makes no general exception for offensive, repugnant, or hateful expression.”

And it cited the U.S. Supreme Court, which “recently reaffirmed that ‘America’s public schools are the nurseries of democracy.’ That means they have an interest in protecting students’ freedom to express themselves, and that ‘protection must include the protection of unpopular ideas, for popular ideas have less need for protection.'”

Students’ speech rights inside school walls actually are abridged somewhat, in order to “maintain order and discipline.”

“But school officials don’t have carte blanche to ban whatever speech they personally think is offensive or inappropriate. Rather, they can restrict student speech only in limited circumstances, such as when it would substantially disrupt the learning environment. … Schools cannot suppress speech out of ‘mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint.'”

For example, FIRE challenges, “Is it ‘hate speech’ for a student to argue that Joe Biden and Donald Trump are too old to be president because it ‘attacks’ or ‘degrades’ a person based on their age?”

“Absent evidence of substantial disruption, the First Amendment protects students’ expression of controversial opinions…”

Further, the organization notes, when “students leave school grounds, they’re under the authority of their parents, not government employees.”

The Texas school board approved a measure Friday allowing lessons on the Bible to be taught in elementary schools.

The Texas State Board of Education narrowly approved the measure in a 8-7 vote, allowing schools to optionally implement Bible-based curriculum as soon as 2025, according to NBC News. Schools that choose to teach such lessons will receive additional funds from the state.

“The materials will … allow our students to better understand the connection of history, art, community, literature, and religion on pivotal events like the signing of the U.S. Constitution, the Civil Rights Movement, and the American Revolution,” Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement earlier this year, according to the Texas Tribune.

Texas Democrats bashed the school board’s decision in a press release following the vote, saying the curriculum undermines “religious freedom” and that “religious doctrine should stay in our places of worship where it belongs.”

Texas Democratic Party Responds to Approval of Bible Study for Elementary School Curriculum

Read more: https://t.co/mQznxOK6B0 pic.twitter.com/c9uhmbJ909

— Texas Democrats (@texasdemocrats) November 22, 2024

Oklahoma in June began requiring Bible lessons be taught in all schools, and Louisiana mandated that all classrooms must display the Ten Commandments, though the law has faced legal challenges.

This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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A historic counterrevolution in public education is occurring in Texas. In an 8-7 vote, with three Republican members voting no, the Texas State Board of Education approved a new reading/language arts curriculum that jettisons Marxist ideology and returns to the traditional model that was highly successful in educating our ancestors and founders. Dubbed Bluebonnet Learning, the printed curriculum for grades K-5 is integrated with history, science, literature, art, culture and religion as a foundational tool for history and literature.

For decades a quiet American revolution has been waged with education as a primary change agent. Public schools gradually dumbed down the curricula, normalized radical sex, discredited the family, banned all religious expression that supposedly violates the principle of “separation of church and state,” discredited our founders, discouraged the teaching of American history and discredited American culture. The result has been ignorant, violent and mentally destabilized students who loathe America and support socialism.

The communist attack on public education has had a devastating effect on academic achievement. From colonials who were the most literate people in the world, today our workforce is the dumbest in the industrialized world. In Texas, 19% of adults are lacking in literacy skills, placing the state at 46th out of 50. Nationally, 21% of Americans are lacking in literacy skills. The low literacy rate has impacted personal lives and income while annually costing our national economy $2.2 trillion.

Critics charge that Bluebonnet is too rigorous. With the dumbing down of academic content has come lowered public – including teacher – expectations for student achievement. Critics claim Bluebonnet’s engaging stories in listening, spelling and reading lessons are not age appropriate – 7 and 8-year-old children apparently should be reading about “puppies, kitties and birds.” Compare this low level of expectation for public school students with private classical schools in Texas where children begin the study of Latin at age 6.

The problem of Texas illiteracy can be reversed by the rigorous lessons in Bluebonnet Learning. As Texas goes, so goes the nation. With 22 states already having expressed an interest in the free open source curriculum, America again can become a highly literate nation – critical if we are to Make America Great Again.

The most intense opposition to the new curriculum has been over the inclusion of religion. Critics charge that the lessons violate the “separation clause” of the Constitution, except that the phrase does not exist, only a ban on an official state-sponsored church.

Under U.S. law, public schools cannot endorse a specific religion or provide religious instruction, but they can teach religion in the context of history and other related subjects. Under Texas law, school districts must teach “religious literature, including the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) and New Testament, and its impact on history and literature.”

Opponents claim that lessons proselytize for Christianity and devote more time to it than to other faiths. They ignore that America’s founding documents were Judeo-Christian. Do they believe that countries where Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, or Islam are predominant would allow Christianity to be included in their school curriculum?

Although critics claim the “Bible-infused” lessons are unconstitutional, they miss the point that the Bible is the most widely read book in the world with the English language and Western thought and culture infused with concepts, phrases and allusions directly from the Bible.

Even Ivy League professors who tend leftward admit that, without some knowledge of the Bible as a foundational text, students are at a great disadvantage in comprehending Western and American literature. Learning to read is more complicated than whether phonics or whole language is employed. If students are to comprehend what they are reading, they must possess some background knowledge and context of the reading passage. People of all faiths daily use biblical references – see eye to eye, sour grapes, feet of clay, writing is on the wall, go the extra mile, to cast pearls before swine, straight and narrow, wolves in sheep’s clothing, a house divided against itself cannot stand, salt of the earth, fall by the wayside, the blind leading the blind, flesh and blood, sign of the times and many others.

Although the fight over religion curriculum is supposedly that it is a constitutional violation, advocates of “religious freedom” are saying out loud what they fear most – that a conservative Christian movement is sweeping the nation. Texas was the first state to allow public schools to hire religious chaplains as school counselors. The Republican-controlled legislature has tried to require public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments and likely will try again.

At the national level, the conservative Christian coalition will have power at the highest levels of all three branches of government. Alongside Trump in the White House, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, a Catholic, will elevate the traditionalist vision of family life. In Congress, House Speaker Mike Johnson’s political vision is through an evangelical lens. The Supreme Court, with Trump’s three nominees, is expected to further strengthen religious rights.

To understand why revolutionaries for the overthrow of the U.S. have targeted education and religion, one must consider the vision of our founders. John Adams thought that education was vital for the preservation of rights and liberties. Thomas Jefferson held that the surest prevention of tyranny was to educate the masses. With Bluebonnet Learning, students will learn about our founding – that “all men are created equal,” found in our Declaration of Independence, is related to the Magna Carta that was inspired by Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. They will learn why the Sermon on the Mount is the key building block of Western civilization.

John Adams said, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” Through classroom activities and biblical stories about the Golden Rule, the Good Samaritan and the Sermon on the Mount, students are taught moral values and positive character traits.

Those who clamor for the downfall of America have much to fear with Bluebonnet Learning and the rigorous traditional education it will restore to our public schools.

Topline: Nevada’s largest school district gave teachers an 8% raise this year, but it forgot to include the added expenses in its budget. The district made cuts but still has a $10 million deficit that is causing the governor to take notice.

Key facts: Clark County School District, which includes Las Vegas, underestimated the average teacher’s salary by $5,700 in its January budget. Multiplied by the 16,500 teachers in the district, it’s an added expense of roughly $94 million that schools had no idea they would need to account for.

The district also forgot to use Nevada’s new formula for funding at-risk students. Over 3,000 kids in Clark County will no longer receive extra state funds, but the district expected the state to provide the students $928,000 anyway, the Las Vegas Review Journal reported.

Five administrators, 36 licensed professionals and 41 support professionals have been reassigned to lower-paying jobs to help free up money. Three staffers quit and four new hires will lose their jobs, according to the Review Journal.

Schools will also have fewer supplies and less programming. One parent told NBC3 his kindergartener’s “Accelerated Reading” class was cut, and two teachers and a social worker were let go from their school.

On top of the miscalculations, the district says it had higher legal costs than expected — $53 million instead of the $20 million budgeted, as well as an unexpected $15 million contract for cybersecurity software, after the district was hacked the year before.

Those underestimations are causing the district to have a $10 million shortfall — in addition to the staff pay and at-risk funding miscalculations.

The fiasco caused the Nevada Department of Taxation to form a new subcommittee that will monitor all of the district’s fiscal activities. The school may also be placed on “fiscal watch,” requiring them to give monthly financial updates to the state.

The district fired Chief Financial Officer Jason Goudie, who maintains the issues were caused by teacher raises and not by mistakes from his own staff. He was making $222,000 per year, according to OpenTheBooks.com.

Search all federal, state and local government salaries and vendor spending with the AI search bot, Benjamin, at OpenTheBooks.com.

Supporting quote: “In my opinion, the errors in the budget preparation were not foreseeable because they were caused by mistakes; however, the mistakes were preventable, Interim Superintendent Dr. Brenda Larsen-Mitchell told the State of Nevada. “In my opinion, the mistakes were a result of insufficient process documentation and communication and organizational and process silos. The mistakes were not acceptable and should not have occurred.”

Summary: It’s not unheard of for complex budgets to misjudge small expenses. Forgetting the most generous contract in a school district’s history is a completely different matter.

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com

Imagine these words as the first speech delivered by the incoming Secretary of Education.

Today, I am here to deliver bitter medicine: American education has failed. Teachers and parents, administrators and government—and even students—all bear some responsibility.

The most common explanations for our educational crisis are inadequate funding, overuse of standardized testing, and systemic prejudice. They are false.

• Our schools do not lack funding—no country spends more on public education.
• The poor results of standardized tests indicate our failures; they are not the cause.
• Our schools are not prejudiced—the most aggressive education reforms since 1955 directly aimed to eliminate systemic discrimination.

For decades, we ignored signs of trouble, but the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the depth of our challenges. The problems are so pervasive and complex that there is no quick fix. We cannot merely repair; we must rebuild.

Since 2020, American families have struggled mightily. The declining quality of education prompted affluent families to opt out of public schools, leaving middle- and working-class families with diminished resources and influence to push for reform. States’ refusal to enact school choice reforms widened the wealth gap and limited generational mobility.

But lower- and middle-class families bear some responsibility, too. The rise of single-parent households, less common among affluent families, has been catastrophic. When the only adult in the home works up to 60 hours a week to make ends meet, there is little time for homework help, PTA meetings, or engaging with school officials. Even in households with two working parents, time and energy are often in short supply.

Teachers, for their part, have good reason to despair. Despite the monumental importance of their work, many are underpaid. They face administrators who value standardized test scores above all else. Meanwhile, declining standards for decorum and discipline, often justified in the name of “social justice,” have made schools unsafe for both teachers and students. Violence and insubordination create an environment unfit for serious learning. Some parents treat schools as daycare centers or demand good grades for minimal effort. Worse, parents of disruptive students often refuse to ensure their children do not rob others of the opportunity to learn.

Yet teachers, too, have failed. They inflate grades to keep their jobs but do no favors for students unprepared for future challenges. This, in turn, lowers the quality of education for students ready for more advanced work, driving gifted students out of public schools.

Another harsh truth is that many teachers are unprepared for the job. The education system has failed for so long that many teachers have never mastered the material they are supposed to teach. Colleges steer future educators toward “education” majors, where coursework focuses more on leftist “social justice” ideology than on subject mastery. Some graduates believe their mission is to “dismantle” an “unjust” society by creating anti-American activists.

When these activist-teachers enter classrooms, they often abandon their duty to transmit America’s culture, knowledge, and values. Instead, they teach students to disdain their nation, its people, its past, and its way of life. This undermines social cohesion and deprives disadvantaged students of the tools they need to succeed.

Outdated curricula exacerbate these issues. Most schools still use models from the late 20th century, failing to address how computing, the internet, and artificial intelligence have transformed how we read, write, and learn. Even in innovative schools, teachers often struggle to balance the needs of non-native English speakers with those of native speakers, diluting the educational experience for the latter.

Our colleges and universities are also broken. Admitting underprepared students has lowered academic standards nationwide. General education curricula often assume a need for remediation, leaving motivated students without the challenge or preparation they deserve.

Government-run financial aid has inflated tuition costs while diminishing the value of college degrees. Proposals to cancel student debt signal to universities that they can continue raising prices without consequence, encouraging predatory admission policies that saddle students with unmanageable debt.

How do we revitalize American education?

Nothing short of an academic Sputnik will suffice. Just as Sputnik spurred the urgency that sent Americans to the moon, we need a bold initiative to revolutionize education:

• We will create K-12 curricula prioritizing history, civics, and an understanding of our government.
• We will eliminate curricula that divide Americans by race, class, religion, sex, or sexual identity.
• We will implement school choice nationwide.
• We will end federal student loan programs, allowing private lenders to evaluate borrowers’ ability to repay. Conditional lending will force colleges to lower tuition and revise admissions and program offerings.
• We will expand vocational training and enhance opportunities for gifted students.
• We will raise teacher credentialing standards to ensure advanced subject knowledge.
• We will enforce decorum and discipline in schools. Uniforms will unify student bodies, and measures like suspension and expulsion will ensure classrooms are conducive to learning.
• We will revise college accreditation standards to reflect post-graduation success and employment metrics.
• We will penalize public colleges and universities that engage in discriminatory admissions practices.

And that is just the beginning.

The destiny of our nation depends on education. The effort to revitalize our schools must be as bold as our aspirations. Together, we will bring American education into the 21st century. Together, we will make American education great again.