Of Course They Want to Control Our Speech

There’s a reason America’s founders were dead set against the tyranny called democracy. It’s tyranny of the majority. If you can persuade 501 people out of a thousand that they ought to confiscate the property of someone in the minority, then that little guy loses his property to that group of thieves.

The dangerous one in that scenario is the one doing the persuading.

image found here

That persuasive guy is probably not going to say something true, like, “That guy worked as hard as any of us for the extra cow he’s got. But we want it, and all of us together have the power to take it. So that’s what we’re going to do. And then we’ll butcher the cow and divide it up among a few of us.”

That wouldn’t persuade. He would be more likely to say something like, “You worked hard for what you’ve got. Why don’t you have an extra cow? Is it fair that this rich guy has an extra cow and you don’t? The only explanation for him having an extra cow is that he unfairly deprived you of the chance to have it. The way to settle this unfairness is to even things out: take his cow, divide it up among all the less fortunate.”

If he controls the message that the people hear, repeating that lie, instead of the truth, over and over, so it’s the only idea people have access to beyond their thinking, he’s likely to get half plus one—of those making the effort to vote—to go along with that tyranny of the majority.

Democracy is especially dangerous when someone is controlling the message.

Their History of Message Control

Do you remember, back in 2011, when Obama was pushing for something they called internet neutrality? And then his efforts to give away US control of the internet in his second term, succeeding at the tail end of 2016? Yeah, those things happened.

Barack Obama
screenshot from here

Last week he was heard to say that tech platforms, private businesses, “need to recognize that they play a unique role in how people consume information. And their decisions have an impact on every aspect of society. With that power comes accountability.”

Wonder what he means by accountability for all that power? He means, of course, more control of the messages they allow—or maybe government needs to step in and control the message. To protect “democracy.” He says,

Each of us has to pick a side. Do we allow our democracy to wither, or do we choose to make it better? That’s the choice we face, if it’s a choice worth embracing. Solving the disinformation problem won’t cure all the ills our of democracy or tears all the fabrics of our world. But it can help rebuild the trust and solidarity needed to make democracy stronger.

What’s the problem with media, again? Disinformation. How does he lay out this big problem? Again, he’s talking to Big Tech:

Some of us have an opportunity to do what America has always done at our best, which is to recognize that, even when the source code is workin’, the status quo isn’t. And we can build somethin’ better—together. This is an opportunity. It’s a change that we should welcome for governments to take on a big, important problem, and prove that democracy and innovation can coexist. It’s a chance for companies to do the right thing. You’ll still make money. But you’ll feel better.

Who wants Obama—or anyone who believes and talks as he does—in charge of controlling the messages we get to hear? Anyone?

What about Hillary Clinton? She put out this tweet: “For too long tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability.”

Hillary Clinton tweet from April 21, 2022

Ahem. There was that Trump-Russia-collusion hoax—paid for and disseminated by the Clinton campaign. That was actual Russian disinformation. But that’s not what she means. There was the Clinton email server—info that was mostly quashed in the media, but was actual. She doesn’t mean that. Well, she considers the true story of it to be disinformation—because she doesn’t like that message.

Clinton and Obama were both pushing for the Digital Services Act to be passed in the European Union. It did pass, by the way. She says, “The EU is poised to do something about it”; i.e., something about all that stuff she labels disinformation. She continues, “I urge our transatlantic allies to push the Digital Services Act across the finish line, and bolster global democracy before it’s too late.” 

Bolster global “democracy” by controlling the messages that are allowed. She doesn’t mean (although she wants you to think she means) supporting the idea of self-rule, where the people rule rather than the tyrants. She means supporting the tyranny of the majority—when the majority is formed by controlling the messages they are allowed to hear. And she wants that controlling tyranny to be global, rather than just national.

This has been evident for a while to people who have been paying attention. But now they’re getting so obvious that inadvertently they’re waking up the masses they thought they had under their spell.

In Sunday’s Crossroads episode [first half hour on YouTube], Joshua Philipp spends an hour going through some of the history, which was making me feel like things were hopeless; we were doomed to suffer this censorship and loss of our free speech. But there was good news by the end. And more has happened this week. Every day there’s more, so I’d better just finish this today. After hearing Joshua Philipp, I went back to see what I had in my files to add to what he talked about.

So let’s go through that trajectory, from history to what’s happening today.

There’s a Wall Street Journal Political Diary piece by Jason L. Riley, from February 3, 2011, 12:44 P.M. ET. The lead-in says,

About Those New Internet Regulations

Two days before Christmas, the Obama administration issued new "net neutrality" regulations for Internet service providers. But Republicans now in control of the House say the issue is far from settled.

The issue at that time was mainly about ISPs (internet service providers), and whether they could charge for different tiers of service. Rep. Marsh Blackburn was trying to get it blocked. One argument was that the FCC didn’t have power to make this rule without going through Congress. The issue appeared to be mostly partisan. Entities favoring “net neutrality” included, according to Wikipedia, computer science experts, consumer advocates, human rights organizations, and internet content providers. Opposition included ISPs, computer hardware manufacturers, economists, technologists, and telecom equipment manufacturers. There are various reasons. But, as with virtually all areas where government interferes, there would be unintended consequences, and they would likely be exactly opposite of the stated goal, which was better internet speed for all. I won’t list all the details of how it played out, but in 2017 President Trump got rid of it.

About halfway through Obama’s second term, he started pushing for further control of the internet. An Investor’s Business Daily piece from November 11, 2014, starts with this: 

While in China, where free speech is suppressed, the president again pitched net neutrality, in which a "free and open Internet" is regulated by a government that would be both gatekeeper and traffic cop.

He’s still calling it “net neutrality” at this point. But it’s about government control of content, something the Chinese have been fully embracing for a long time. That editorial reminds us, “In a 2010 speech to graduates at Hampton University in Virginia, Obama complained that too much information is a threat to democracy.” He’s consistent on that to this day.

Back in June of 2016 the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) “decided” (I’m assuming at the Obama administration’s insistence) to turn over control of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Senator Ted Cruz was fighting to prevent that from going through. In an American Thinker editorial I had saved, they said,

On the surface, this would appear to be a welcome effort to privatize a former government function, but in reality it relinquishes the U.S. government’s role as the arbiter and guarantor of Internet freedom and turns over full control to a group subject to the anti-freedom impulses of the so-called international community, including the United Nations.

The important detail here is that it wasn’t just the assigning of names and numbers that got turned over. And the story we got told was that the US didn’t relinquish control; it just dispersed some of it. Instead of the US Commerce Department, which must abide by the US Constitution's free speech clause, the US is now one of 171 nations plus 35 observers in the Governmental Advisory Committee. None of those other entities have any obligation to abide by our Constitution.

There’s more to be concerned about. In September of 2016, Joshua Philipp was one of the few reporters talking about this turnover. In an article for the Epoch Times he writes:

In November 2014, Li Yuxiao, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Cyberspace, stated, according to the state-run China Daily: “Now is the time for China to realize its responsibilities. If the United States is willing to give up its running of the internet sphere, the question comes as to who will take the baton and how it would be run.

“We have to first set our goal in cyberspace, and then think about the strategy to take, before moving on to refining our laws,” he said.

Li is now the head of a department designed to enforce the Chinese regime’s laws on technology companies. His comments are tied to a process announced by the United States in 2014 to relinquish control of the internet by ending the contract between the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

This process is now nearing its completion, with a deadline of Oct. 1.

It took a bit longer than October 1, but by December 2016, the turnover had happened—so, prior to Obama leaving office.

A Chinese paramilitary policeman tries to block photos of a military 
parade rehearsal prior to the 2008 Beijing Olympics (Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)
image found in Joshua Philipp's 2016 article

China, of course, seized the opportunity to fill the vacuum. Here’s an explanation from Philipp from his 2016 article:

Li is now the secretary-general of the Cyber Security Association of China, which is chaired by Fang Binxing, the creator of China’s Great Firewall, which censors and monitors the country’s internet. The association, formed on March 25 [2016], gives the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) a vehicle for spreading its systems and laws for governing the internet abroad, while giving its efforts a benign facade under the label of “cybersecurity.”

The association is registered as a national nonprofit organization, but according to the report, it answers directly to the Leading Small Group for Network Security and Information—which is chaired by CCP leader Xi Jinping—and is “responsible for shaping and implementing information security and internet policies and laws.”

According to the report, the Cyber Security Association of China, among other tasks, focuses on “public opinion supervision to help in information control and propaganda” and “protecting core Chinese interests under globalization, and promoting globally competitive Chinese IT companies.”

This sounds ominous. In practice, it might have simply looked on the surface as international trade with China, which was being encouraged at that time (and you could insert a story about Biden family corruption in China as well). Philipp’s article continues:

The Chinese regime has begun bringing major U.S. tech firms—including Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., Cisco Systems Inc., and International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)—into its newly formed committee, the Technical Committee 260.

You may recall that, around that time (2015 and beyond), China was pressuring tech companies to turn over their source code. Apple refused; IBM gave in. China was also demanding encryption keys and backdoors to be built in. China threatened to bar these tech companies from the Chinese market if they failed to comply.

Maybe you noticed that, shortly after this Obama-administration turnover of the Internet, censorship started increasing. Messages on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms started getting taken down, blocked, shadow banned, or tuned in such a way that it didn’t come up for most users. Google algorithms started filtering out certain sites, stories, and viewpoints. All this was well timed ahead of the 2016 election.

This Digital Services Act in the EU, that Hillary Clinton was lobbying for last week—in a Financial Times piece about it, they admit,

Regulators will also include an emergency mechanism to force platforms to disclose what steps they are taking to tackle misinformation or propaganda in light of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine.

What has the actual misinformation/disinformation been?

·       There are no treatments; hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin don’t work and are dangerous.

·       Lockdowns and masks prevent the spread of the virus.

·       The vaccines are safe and effective.

I’m still unsure what Ukraine-related information is actual misinformation, or disinformation. There may not be a good side, just people who are suffering because of various corrupt regimes fighting each other. It may take more time for a clearer picture to come through.

But, there was a fair amount of disinformation and censoring of information to prevent people from knowing about the Obama administration connection to Ukrainian corruption, and the Biden family involvement in corruption there and in China, and elsewhere.

There was the Hunter Biden laptop. That actual, true information came out just ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Should American voters have been allowed to know about it? Mainstream media, in lockstep with those who favor internet controls to disallow free speech, claimed it was Russian disinformation. It was not.

They delayed the truth coming out. But the thing is, the story is coming out anyway. We now know that the Hunter Biden laptop is what the 2020 New York Post story said it was—the story that was taken down by Twitter and Facebook. To protect you from “misinformation.”

Good News for Truth

Truth has a way of showing up—eventually. And maybe the pressure of all that speech suppression is calling for a truth explosion.

Here are some recent good news items:

·       Disney has lost $35 billion in shareholder value. [That was when I wrote this on Monday. As of Thursday it was around $41 billion.] This is in response to the public learning that Disney has indeed implemented a not-so-secret effort to aim LGBTQ-sexualized materials at children. Disney decided to support wokeness rather than the families that have been their customers.

·       Disney lost its special privileges in Florida and will be subject to the same taxes and regulations as other businesses.

·       CNN+ launched and failed in less than a month, losing $300 million in the process. One wonders why they thought something that people could get for free and were choosing not to tune in to would bring in viewers if they had to pay for it.

·       Netflix has lost 35% of its share value, costing them $400 million. This is in response to pushing woke programming.

·       Spotify dropped the Obamas. That was a better business decision for them than dropping Joe Rogan, whom they had tried to censor because of his COVID-19 experience, which didn’t comport with the allowed message.

·       Trump’s new platform Truth Social has improved after moving servers to Rumble. Reports from Joshua Philipp, as well as several Blaze contributors, is that engagement is suddenly much better on Truth Social than they had had on Twitter.

·       Twitter—there’s the big story of the week. Elon Musk had bought enough shares to be offered a place on board. He turned that down. That wasn’t enough to give him a controlling interest, and he didn’t want to be limited from buying more shares. So he made an offer to buy the company outright. That sale went through on Monday of this week. He may take it private. But whatever he does, the intention appears to be to restore free speech to the public square.        

That’s a lot of good news for free speech in a short amount of time.

The opponents of free speech are reacting as you might expect: with weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.[i] Literally, in the case of that story of Disney losing government privileges in Florida. Independent reporter Andy Ngo provided video from the floor of the State House in Tallahassee. While the speaker was calling for mutual respect and decorum surrounding the vote on the issue, Democrat lawmakers and lobbyists were literally shrieking in the background.

On Monday, after news came out of Elon Musk’s success in purchasing Twitter, panic set in among the speech suppressors. First, here are a couple of things Musk said:

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”—Elon Musk

We’ll forgive him for using the word democracy; in this sense I think he means self-rule. He also says,

“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter,

because that is what free speech means.”—Elon Musk

Now, for the critics. The prize goes to Ari Melber of MSNBC:

“You could secretly ban one party’s candidate, or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else and the rest of us might not even find out about it until after the election.”

He seems blissfully unaware that that is what actually happened. It has been happening for several elections. It is a big reason for someone who favors free speech to step in and stop their rule by secret algorithm.

Other classic responses include several pundits handwringing about how dangerous it is to have a billionaire own a tech platform—while they are working for a billionaire-owned tech platform. (There’s a collection of responses here, with some brief pithy commentary.) 

So, as Laura Ingraham puts the question:

“Netflix losing subscribers. CNN+ shuts down. Disney stock value dropping. Twitter takeover by Musk. Just the beginning?” —Laura Ingraham

image found here

More Battles to Come—But We Know the Outcome of This War

Yes. Let’s hope this is just the beginning. My sense is, like some wars, you can look back and see when the final outcome was determined, but there are still battles to go through on the way there.

The control of the Internet—along with so many media outlets—will continue to cause serious free speech casualties. The evil overlords seem intent on imposing CCP-style speech controls on all of us.

Thursday the Biden administration announced its creation of a Ministry of Truth (1984 reference), which they are giving the dystopian name of Disinformation Governance Board, under the Department of Homeland Security. It appears DHS is now in the business of—not protecting our borders, or protecting US citizens from America’s enemies seeking to commit terrorism here on US soil; rather it is in the business of spying on US citizens, down to the details of their social media posts, to stop them from disagreeing with the controlling tyrants.

While the timing makes it appear this new DGB was in response to Musk’s purchase of Twitter, it must have been in the works for some time. They announced that this new law enforcement agency will be headed by 33-year-old Nina Jankowicz. Tucker Carlson went through what we know about her—which is both dystopian and ridiculous. This was a colorful line: “Jankowicz comes from a place called the Wilson Center. That’s a nonprofit named for America’s other mentally incapacitated warmonger bigot president.” The Wilson Center produces disinformation, and supposedly information about disinformation. It is heavily funded by the Biden administration.

Jankowicz happens to be a former advisor to the neo-government in Ukraine, which at this time in history makes that connection to the Biden administration look more than suspicious. Tucker plays video of her singing—yes singing. A little ditty about disinformation that she has set to the tune of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” from Mary Poppins. In another place and time, her voice might be acceptably pleasant. But here, this ditty is too unbelievable to be put in a dystopian novel.

Nina Jankowicz, head of the new Disinformation Governance Board
screenshot from here

The ACLJ covers this new agency as well. They point out that, to stop it, Congress merely has to cut off funding. That’s the short solution. The longer one is to take things to court, because the very existence of an agency to censor the speech of US citizens is clearly unconstitutional.

The thing is, we see what they’re doing. We’re speaking freely regardless. We’re finding free speech alternatives. We’re finding new and maybe better ways to be heard. If they try to control the Internet, who knows, we may find some entrepreneur who will develop a parallel, free-speech internet that they can’t control.

So, battles still to come. But we know the outcome of this war on free speech. Truth wins.

---

[i] Matthew 13:42, Matthew 8:12, related to Revelation 19:20

Schools Are Not Families

We’ve already slipped down the slippery slope. How did it happen? A little at a time, and then quickly.

Americans have always been a pretty literate people. Back at the time of the founding, when the Federalist Papers were editorials written in newspapers, the regular farmer or shopkeeper would read them thoroughly, and discuss them with their neighbors. Any ideas you had about widespread illiteracy in that period of time is mostly erroneous.

Almost everyone was homeschooled—which meant women were literate as well, in case you were wondering. Beyond the home, neighborhoods would pool resources and hire a teacher. When a child got a bit older, he’d go into the family business or find an apprenticeship. Homeschooling is a pattern for educating the next generation for some six thousand years.

Public schools were invented in the industrial age, patterned after factories, to remove from the streets uncared-for children of poor factory workers.

Then John Dewey got involved, with the intent of using public schooling as a way to indoctrinate the next generation.

As M.D. Aeschliman put it, in a review[i] of the book John Dewey and Decline of American Education,

Eschewing our existing institutions and what he called the “idolatry of the US Constitution,” Dewey promoted a futuristic, socialistic idea of “the Great Community,...” Dewey’s promotion of what he called “social experimentation leading to great social change” was a working out of [Walt] Whitman’s social, psychological, and sexual radicalism and egalitarianism.

Dewey’s acolytes have been doing it ever since.

If you think free public schooling is your right, remember that “free” things from government are not free; they cost you tax money, your freedom, and sometimes even higher costs.

So, what is it schools are indoctrinating students with? The names keep changing. But the general idea is that kids should not trust their parents; they should not believe in the principles of freedom, prosperity, and civilization; they should not believe in God; and they should not think for themselves.

Not all teachers buy into this indoctrination plan. Many are not only well-meaning; they are good people who will teach good and useful things regardless of what higher ups tell them.

Many others want to just teach their subject matter and help kids, but they’re tied up in way too many requirements from decisionmakers above them—including in particular the teachers’ unions.

Many teachers—and nearly all today—have gone through indoctrination themselves and may not recognize what should not be inculcated into our children. The language has been corrupted in a way that it takes a clear thinker to slog through—and clear thinking hasn’t been taught in K-12 or universities for quite a while.

Those of you who are older—say, 55+—you might be thinking public schools were good enough for you, so they ought to be good enough for students today. You’d be wrong. Can a student get a decent public school education today? Yes, but not without a bunch of unwanted baggage along the way. So it depends on how much the family counters those things successfully at home—while the schools are subtly undermining trust in parents.

If you need to put so much time and energy into countering the bad influence of school, why not just do the schooling yourself? It’s not rocket science. Before the historically recent invention of public schools, practically everyone learned to read and do basic math at home. Nearly every parent felt capable.

In fact, children are designed to learn in a family setting—so much better than in a factory setting. Children learning at their own rate, among children who are at completely different learning levels, and learning each thing until they’ve mastered it before going on to the next concept, enjoying much one-on-one attention from a parent who loves them and cares about their education—that is ideal for practically every child. When a school looks at ways to improve actual learning for a child, they talk about smaller class sizes, tutoring for those not keeping up, and other ways to mitigate the shortcomings of the factory institution.

If it were only a matter of public schools not doing as well as a family, at least as a society we could talk about tradeoffs, especially for families that can’t afford to dedicate a parent to schooling the kids at home. Unfortunately, this is the least of the problems of public schools.

They haven’t been trying to replicate the teaching style of families. They have been trying to replace families.

Sometimes it sounds like they’re doing this with good reason. Shouldn’t schools teach children good behavior while they have them all those hours? Certainly they should socialize in a way that kids learn not to bully, or not to make fun of kids who are different. But this has metastasized way beyond what we want: good manners and being kind and respectful.

Have you heard the term Social Emotional Learning (SEL)?

A friend here in Texas passed along an attempt at defining it last November. The original post was written by someone named Emily Swanson, whom I know nothing about, but I gather she is from Utah, in the Jordan School District area (the neighboring district to where I grew up and went to school). She says this: 

The SEL standard is set by an organization called Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL). The CASEL framework (pictured below) is clear. Classrooms—Schools—Families and Caregivers—then Communities—make up a child’s experience, in that order, according to their chart. The curriculum is designed to follow this pattern.

Here is how this shows up in the Second Step Curriculum [an SEL curriculum used in Utah and popular across the country]: When parents are mentioned, it is only as part of the outer support system or as a negative. All examples of families used are negative and elicit negative emotions in the child. All positive examples are of school teachers or staff and elicit positive emotions in the child. Families are mentioned as possible members of the student’s support system alongside friends and the community (as if friends or the community were going to pay for your child’s music or sports or college). The curriculum is systemically designed to get children to rely on the school and not their families.

SEL diagram, found here

The purpose is to supplant the family. Not supplement family, particularly for children whose home situation is less than ideal, but to undermine functional families.

I had been thinking that SEL was just another thing we had to worry about in schools—in addition to Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the LGBT agenda that is sexualizing our kids in perverted ways. Now there’s this too. I thought it was using health programs and school counseling to access kids in private ways without parental knowledge.

But last night on Glenn Beck’s special, he talked about it in a different structural way than I had pictured. SEL is the umbrella used to incorporate CRT and CSE—an acronym new to me, meaning Comprehensive Sexuality Education, in other words both the LGBT agenda and the pro-sexualization we’ve been aware of for a while. (See here and here.) Beck drew a triangle with SEL at the top, connecting all three of these acronyms.

Glenn Beck, "Project Groomer"
screenshot from here

As he explains it, the CDC is involved—the Center for Disease Control. They seem to have “discovered” a thing they call ACE—adverse childhood experiences. (Sick of the acronyms yet?) Beck says, “Every kid can be grouped and categorized for something: racism, oppression, gender, whatever they need.” In other words, they discover a right to intervene with your child. Every child. For their good, they would tell you, if they tell you at all. And they have a sort of slogan: “Whole school; whole community; whole child.” They are using the school to raise the child—in a way that not only denies the parent that right but undermines the parent’s ability to do so.

ACEs are the CDC's excuse to intervene. Some, such as discrimination
or community disruption, could encompass just about everyone.
screenshot from here

So they’ll say, “We’re not teaching CRT,” or “We’re not teaching CSE.” Because they’re just wholistically “caring” for the child.

As Swanson says at the end of her post,

Of course we all want kids to learn the tools of goal setting, personal responsibility and problem solving. We need to reframe it, however, with the family at the core of a child’s life and the school and community supporting the family.

When you let the schools do the “caring,” who’s really doing that? Outside organizations such as CASEL—that’s Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning. And who are they collaborating with? Planned Parenthood and the CDC. Add in the Department of Education and teachers’ unions, and you’ve got a pretty huge cabal trying to take ownership of your children and claim you should just step back and let the experts handle it their way.

Parents are waking up. But we haven’t been equipped to even understand the enemy. We’ve been fighting only a part of the enemy.

Glenn Beck showed a statement from Austin ISD (independent school district):

“In Austin ISD we believe that Social Emotional Learning is at the heart of equity-centered systems and structures.” Oh, that’s great.

See, SEL ties it all together. And that’s the driver of the “whole school, whole community, whole child” thing. And they admit it in their own curriculum publications. CRT and CSE are just parts of the pie. So, when we’re fighting one, they’re getting away with everything else. The Social Emotional Learning is how they’re getting it all done. We’ve been fighting an incomplete partial battle, focusing just on CRT or sex ed.

SEL is being implemented in Austin ISD, in Texas
screenshot from here

How do you fight the whole comprehensive enemy? With everything you’ve got. Sit in your child’s classroom every day if you have to. Be at every school board meeting. Pressure the legislature to outlaw the concepts underlying all of those acronyms: SEL, CRT, CSE, ACE—and add in DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The whole thing, when you connect the dots, is designed to create a transformed society—to create obedient, non-thinking units that can be forced quite willingly to do whatever the tyrants want them to do. Report parents who disagree? Yes. Report friends who have different opinions? Yes. I’m sure you can think up a few more examples after what we’ve seen during the pandemic, especially if you’ve studied 20^th Century totalitarian regimes.

If you thought math classes were safe from the SEL framework, you were mistaken.
screenshot from here

Glenn Beck titled his report “Project Groomer.” The opposition laughs about that use of the word groomer. It’s hard to convince parents that every child’s teacher is a pedophile. But that’s not what the word really means. Yes, there’s a lot of sexualization going on, especially in the CSE corner. You might think of it as slowly boiling the frog.

Back when we talked (here) to a Houston mother, Kelly Litvak, whose daughter had been trafficked into the sex trade, we learned the steps of grooming:

1.          Befriend—to get the target to see the groomer as someone to trust.

2.          Intoxicate—to cause inability to think clearly combined with causing friction at home.

3.          Alienate—to drive a wedge between target and family and their core values.

4.          Isolate—to separate the target from old friends who held their original core values.

5.          Desensitize—to confuse the target’s moral compass, making the previously unthinkable seem common or even normal.

6.          Capitalize—to take the target into control by the groomer, and subject to sex slavery.

Four of the six are being done by schools. You might add in causing an inability to think clearly, step 2, but without the intoxicants. And the actual sex enslavement, step 6, may not be the goal. But control of that child for life is.

That’s a lot of grooming behavior.

If you found that a family friend had been doing these steps with your child, what would you do? Hopefully you would refrain from murder. You would sever ties, and contact the police to get the perpetrator prosecuted.

You wouldn’t say, “Well, a lot of the time this friend is doing good things with my child; and I sure do appreciate him taking the child off my hands while I work.” You wouldn’t let your children be subject to this dangerous, injurious grooming another day.

The quickest solution is to pull your kids out of public schools. If you feel trapped, then you’ll have to do all the hard things.

Get informed. And get active.

My kids are no longer in school (and we pulled them out to homeschool for ten years). But my grandchildren are in public schools. And I am a taxpayer here. So I’m active where I believe I can do something useful.

This week I contacted my school board members asking them to adopt the new TEA model policy for selecting and removing materials from school libraries. This will increase transparency and better respect parental rights, and will require a district librarian to read all materials before they can be accepted, which currently is not always done. (Read a Texas Scorecard article here.) This issue came up in my school district this month at the school board meeting. (I wrote about it here.)

This morning I got notified of a need related to the upcoming Texas Library Association conference (program here).

Certainly some of it could be useful. But here are some of the highlights:

·       Ibram X Kendi: CRT author, teaching kids to be “anti-racists” (i.e., racists, especially against whites)–keynote speaker.

·       Justin Johnson/Alyssa Edwards: drag queen/performer that coaches KIDS–evening keynote/performer.

·       Jenna Sky: former MissGayUSA–featured speaker.

·       Nadine Strossen: past president of the ACLU and advisor on legislative policy.

·       A speaker from the Dallas Foundation, primary funder of the Dallas Morning News Education Lab, which has published no less than four articles critical of parent concerns over sexually obscene content in libraries. Their research was used by an activist teacher in Austin to target independent school board candidates all around the state and citizens organizing through PACs to fight transparency and accountability issues in Texas schools.      

It may be too late, but you can try calling the school board to squelch plans to send librarians from your district to this indoctrination camp—at your expense.

Something new is likely to show up tomorrow.

Swanson mentioned some places to help get yourself educated:

·        Committee for  Children, Second Step resources (to read them yourself)  

·        Parent toolkit to reject CRT, from Heritage Action 

I’ve had a few others on my list:

·        Christopher Rufo has a Critical Race Theory Briefing Book (online resource) here.

·        Christopher Rufo provides The Anti-CRT Parent Guidebook here.

·        Charles Lehman offers this Toolkit for Concerned Parents.

·        Jim Copland offers Model Legislation.

·        Michael Hartney makes the case for moving off-cycle school board elections to on-cycle, in order to empower parents, in this research paper.

·        Heritage Action has launched a site called SaveOurSchools, to help people fight CRT in their local schools.

o   SaveOurSchools provides a list of Critical Race Theory terms that may be used in our schools, here.

·        Whose Children Are They is a full-length documentary shown in area theaters Monday, March 14. Trailer here. Now available here. 

Whose children they are shouldn’t even be a question; they are the parents’ children, and the parents’ responsibility.

Civilization depends on strong, loving families raising their own children. Any institution trying to supplant the family can only lead away from civilization and into savagery. And that is no longer a vague possibility; that is what our children are experiencing at the hands of the indoctrinators—the groomers.

Schools cannot be families; they cannot replace families. And we’d better force them to get out the way of our families—if it is not already too late.

---

[i] “Permanent Revolution” (Review), by M.D. Aeschliman, review of the book John Dewey and Decline of American Education, by Henry T. Edmondson III, National Review, April 24, 2006, pp. 56-58.

Local School-Related Irreconcilable Differences

Cy-Fair ISD school board meeting gets underway, April 11, 2022
screenshot from here

There's an action item at the bottom, so if you're in Texas, please don't miss that.

We have some irreconcilable differences in our school district. This month’s school board meeting was last Monday, April 11th. The public comment is where we see much of the conflict. There is one side that wants more power to the parents, more transparency, and less indoctrination and sexualization of our children. There is another side that wants to limit parent choice and to denigrate parent concerns.

Our school district is not unique in facing these differences. But what I want to emphasize is, this is not a problem seen elsewhere but not here in our backyard. It’s here.

School Board Member Concern

A friend passed along a blog post to me recently about some issues in our district. The blog post is anonymous. You can read it here.  Because I don’t know who wrote it, I can’t vouch for them. But I’ve read it and corroborated much of what is in it, and learned more to clarify a few things. 

A member of our school board recently joined a private group on Facebook of people in our community who have influence on what happens in our district. The group is called Cy-Fair Civic Alliance. Their description of the group says:

Cy-Fair Civic Alliance envisions a Cy-Fair ISD [Independent School District] that embraces the future, prioritizes an inclusive and equitable learning environment, and supports a diverse community where every child can thrive. Cy-Fair Civic Alliance works to engage, inform, and unite Cy-Fair ISD staff, parents, students, and taxpayers.

If you’re aware of the term “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (sometimes in different word order), then you can see why this is concerning. DEI is against diversity of thought, against equality of opportunity and instead favors equal outcomes, and excludes whoever they disfavor, which tends to be anyone with white skin, or possibly with Christian beliefs. This is an ideology spreading in businesses and institutions, like schools and governments. It’s often associated with ESG scoring, the social scoring system used in China.

The blog writer wanted to know what was going on in this group, so he/she joined, after answering several “progressive” questions. I wasn’t willing to answer those questions against truth, but I wondered what they were, so I went so far as to request membership, see the questions, and then withdraw the membership request. The questions are:

·        Please share your thoughts on diversity, inclusion, and equity in public education.

·        Why is Public Education important?

·        How do you see yourself contributing to this community? (Attending the board meetings, sending emails, sharing on social media, outreach, etc.)

It’s clear there is a certain viewpoint in the group. So when Cy-Fair ISD Board Member Julie Hinaman joined the group, she presumably answered those questions in a way that indicated she was in alignment with the group’s viewpoint.

welcome message for Julie Hinaman, 
posted on Cy-Fair Civic Alliance,
image found here

Hinaman was welcomed to the group with a post on November 9, 2021. The group was created November 4, 2021, immediately after the election in which three long-time school board members were replaced with what we hope are three members more aligned with parent values. It does appear that it was created in response to that school board changeout.

At the school board meeting last week, Hinaman was referred to as a founding member of Cy-fair Civic Alliance, which she denies. That might be a semantic difference; she joined during its first week of existence, but may not be a person involved in creating, or founding, the group.

One controversial issue that has come up with this group is their influence to reinstate in the Bridgeland High School library certain books that had been removed following parent concerns. The blog post includes screenshots of a book called Flamer, which was brought up by several citizens at the board meeting. It appears to be a graphic novel, and the samples shown in that blog post are particularly vile. They are sexually perverted in nature and involve minors. Clearly this violates the anti-pornography laws in place to protect young people.

So, to review, parents reported the content of these books to the school district (I don’t know to which entity), and some schools then removed the books from their libraries. CyFair Civic Alliance proudly announces in its Facebook group its success in getting the books placed back in the library at Bridgeland High School, where they had been removed. This post, by Tana Lam, is shown in the blog post, and was read during public testimony at the school board meeting.

During the meeting, Hinaman was accused of knowing about the content of the books in question, and knowing about Cy-Fair Civic Alliance’s personal contact with the librarian, making that decision to override parent concerns, and doing nothing about it.

CFISD Board Member Julia Hinaman, at the April 11 board meeting
screenshot from here

Later in the meeting Hinaman defends herself. She says,

I would like to correct a false statement made during public comments using my name…. While there is a board policy and a district process for reviewing library books, I have not been a part of the review process for any library book, because it is not part of my role of governance.

Regarding a Facebook group, I am a follower. I follow several different community groups across our community, just to stay in touch and to see what’s going on in our community. I am not involved in the management of that particular group that was mentioned. I am not a founder. And I’m unaware of the post that was referenced.

There’s a difference between “following” a group and being a member of a private group on Facebook. She had to join, and express her allegiance to the ideas of the group, so that’s a bit disingenuous.

Also, I haven’t seen her membership in any of the community groups I’m in, the kind that want to promote parents’ rights and school choice, for example.

About being unaware of the post that was referenced, that may be true, but it was testified to by multiple community members on both sides of the issue, so by this late point in the meeting she is aware of the post and of the involvement of the group for which she is a member. And by her very resistance to the parents calling her out, she is supporting the pornographic material being put back into the library. She could have expressed that she was unaware of the group’s involvement and then have added that she would not approve of such materials in our libraries, but she doesn’t do that.

On April 8, Cy-Fair ISD announced that Julie Hinaman had been elected to the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB), “taking an interim position representing Region 4, Position F.”

During our district platform work, where we took the resolutions from precinct conventions to develop wording to pass along for the state platform, one of the most common education resolutions was a demand to cut ties with various organizations, of which TASB was mentioned specifically. The platform wording we came up with was,

Sever Ties: We insist that local ISDs immediately sever ties with organizations that have opposed parental rights and the voices of parents, particularly concerning CRT-related materials and the sexualization of the child as in the LGBT agenda. These include but are not limited to the HB3 Reading Academies, the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB), the Texas Association of School Administrators (TASA), the Texas Association of Community Schools (TACS), the National School Boards Association (NSBA), the American Library Association (ALA), the Texas Library Association (TLA), and the International Baccalaureate Program (IBP), nor will we accept testing from the Next Generation Assessments and Accountability (NGAA).

Reasoning from the resolutions mentioned that TASB, among others, consistently lobbies against bills for parental rights and transparency, works with the National School Boards Association (NSBA) to label parents concerned with Critical Race Theory as domestic terrorists, and has worked to erode parental authority.

The SREC (State Republican Executive Committee) has also called out TASB for these issues.

In other words, being on TASB is not a reason to trust Julie Hinaman to represent parents in our district; it is a reason to distrust her.

Irreconcilable Differences

We can see that those who oppose parent values in our schools coincidentally favor books like those pornography examples we talked about. But they want, not only for those things to be in our schools; they want parents to have no place to go.

One of the public commenters at last week’s meeting called out the new board members, particularly Natalie Blasingame (not by name, but she’s the only new female board member), for having the audacity to suggest that underutilized campuses could be used for things parents want.

Dr. Tara Cummings, speaking at the April 11 school board meeting
screenshot from here

So, this was the testimony of Dr. Tara Cummings:

In response to the report [demographic report at Thursday’s work session], one of our trustees commented that she’s committed to making CFISD the very best choice for all families. I’m glad to hear that, but I’m a bit confused and concerned, considering some of the anti-public ed political candidates that she and our other new trustees have publicly endorsed.

Knowing that charter growth is a threat to our district and public education in general, it’s imperative that our trustees mind their votes accordingly, and that the community continue to pay attention to such.

This same trustee also stated in the future she hopes to see underutilized campuses “used for things families want.” Although I agree that the district must be judicious in making decisions about the facilities, our facilities now and in the future, the primary priority, and a factor that sets us far and above other educational options, especially charter and private schools, is the commitment to opportunity for all. The promise that all students, regardless of their zip code, campus, or circumstances are afforded exceptional and equitable educational opportunities.

Speaking of equitable, how ‘bout them equity audit recommendations? As a parent partner in education, which according to our new trustees makes me the primary stakeholder in education, what I don’t want is something along the lines of magnet-type programs. CFISD doesn’t need lotteries in order to provide a world-class education to every single one of our students. Opportunity for all means just that.

I’ve talked with Dr. Natalie Blasingame about what “used for things families want” might mean. She suggests that, if there were parents of 20 students that wanted, say, a particular track, maybe a Christian track, it would be possible—at no extra cost—to accommodate that choice. We simply use current facilities and willing current staff to fill the need.

While I am very pro-homeschooling, Blasingame wants the opportunity for the school district to try to meet the needs before a parent feels like they have to turn elsewhere.

Dr. Cummings here reveals a couple of divisive points. She claims, as though it’s common knowledge, that charter schools are a threat to public schools. Charter schools are public schools; they are a type of public school, with funding being part of public school funding; i.e., taxpayer funding.

Every student that goes to a charter school goes there because the public school they were assigned to failed to meet their needs—and because they were among the lucky ones to get a slot in a charter school, which the parents hoped would be a better option. The problem is, the waiting list for charter schools is long—too long. And we’re not getting enough new charter schools. Even though there is great demand, charter schools with proven track records, such as those coming out of Hillsdale College, are being refused a charter in Texas.

When Dr. Cummings says CFISD can “provide a world-class education to every single one of our students; opportunity for all means just that,” she doesn’t mean meeting the needs of all those students who have turned elsewhere because their needs aren’t met; she means she wants to keep them stuck in the failing situation along with everyone else that’s stuck there—so she can make sure all of the state’s education funding goes to indoctrinating them the way she wants.

Stacy DeMeier speaks at the school board
meeting on April 11,
screenshot from here

Another of last week’s public commenters, Stacy DeMeier, is what I refer to at times as a public school believer—like it’s a religion. And anyone who doesn’t agree with her is a heretic. She claims that charter schools are a threat. But, again, charter schools are public schools, just not her preferred sect. If the entire school system were changed so that all schools were charter schools, and parents chose the type they wanted for their child, public schooling would simply look different; it would not disappear. Funding might need to be restructured. Charters actually do cost more per child right now, unlike private and homeschools, which accomplish the goal at lower costs. But if there were a free-market deciding the costs, that could change everything for the better. But DeMeier doesn’t want better services at lower costs; she wants every child stuck in the type of classroom she believes in:

It’s pretty clear that if we, as a community, do not stand up to the recent attacks aimed at undermining public education, including book banning, false accusations of CRT in the curriculum, and the constant attacks on our teachers, then we will be left with a school district that is not receiving adequate funding it needs. We need to support pro-public education representatives. And we especially need board members who are not actively trying to take funds away from our district by supporting and publicly endorsing school choice voucher-loving politicians.

What she calls book banning is removing harmful pornographic materials from school libraries intended for minors. We’re not talking about depriving children from reading Huckleberry Finn for its depiction of racial issues, or Harry Potter because it mentions witchcraft; we’re talking about keeping out of school libraries actual pornography aimed at children. This used to be something parents and schools could agree on.

And there aren’t false accusations of CRT in the curriculum; there are actual examples of CRT ideology being taught—which have been presented in multiple previous school board meetings. I don’t know what she means by attacks on teachers, unless she means teachers who are going against the will of the parents and teaching things we’ve insisted not be taught. Such a teacher might feel “attacked,” if a parent calls for them to be accountable. But no, there are no physical or even verbal attacks on teachers, so that’s what you might politely call a mischaracterization—or, more accurately, a lie.

Ayse Endomayo speaks at the
school board meeting April 11,
screenshot from here

As for physical attacks, though, the person who bragged in that Facebook group about getting the book back in the library, Tana Lam—she reportedly attacked one of the parents—one of those testifying at this meeting and who regularly attends and testifies, Ayse Endomayo (sp?). According to Endomayo's testimony, this happened a couple of months ago outside the meeting. There was a police report filed. The school board has been made aware of it. And yet this person has been allowed to go into a school library and get pornography put back in.

So, what is a heretic in DeMeier’s public school religion? Someone who supports choice for parents who want their children’s needs met without indoctrination or sexualization of the child.

We are at an impasse. As parents, grandparents, and concerned community members, we’d better push harder than the public school religion inquisitors. And we’d better do it now. Because the harm to our children is already being done. The next school board election isn’t until 2023. We need better from our board now.

Call to Action

One more thing. The Texas Education Association (TEA) has, at the direction of Governor Abbott, updated their guidelines for selecting and removing school library materials. (Texas Scorecard story here.) The purpose of these statewide standards is to prevent the presence of pornography and other obscene content in Texas public schools, such as those we’re talking about here in CFISD. The new standards require a district librarian to read all materials brought into libraries, something that has not always happened. And the review and selection process will be transparent and will emphasize parental rights.

I got a text today suggesting that several hundred of us ought to contact our school board members to adopt these new library review policies. What the TEA has set forth is a model policy; it is then up to local school districts to adopt policies. That means the parents need to require it. Maybe a reminder that showing porn or other harmful materials to minors is against the law, so in order to protect themselves from prosecution, they’d better set an appropriate policy.