Are Students Threatened by Gender Ideology in Schools?

Families, communities, and nations are stronger when parents understand what is happening in their schools. According to Tyler O’Neil, there is a “threat of gender ideology in schools.” He posted an article at The Daily Signal discussing the problem of schools indoctrinating kindergarteners into “trans joy” and school clinics that offer transgender “medicine” for minors. 

According to O’Neil, the historic reelection victory of President-elect Donald Trump “represented a loud rebuke to the transgender movement.” However, the “noxious ideology still has a stranglehold in many institutions” and is backed by official state policy in some cases. In fact, a new report from The Heritage Foundation states that there are at least 16 U.S. states that have “curriculum standards that force teachers’ hands on the issue.”

The report, “Gender Ideology as State Education Policy,” highlights the state-level education standards and frameworks of 16 states that encourage gender ideology, which the report defines as “the subordination or displacement of factual, ideologically neutral lessons about biological sex with tell-tale notions such as ‘gender identity,’ ‘sex assigned at birth,’ and ‘cisgender.’”

This ideology rejects biology and tradition, promoting vague notions of identity that often rely on rigid sex stereotypes that feminists have rejected for decades.

Jay Richards, director of Heritage’s DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family, and Daniel Buck, senior visiting fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, analyzed the state-level education frameworks of all 50 states.

Richards and Buck asked whether the frameworks “encourage a distinction between sex or sex organs, and gender, the latter of which is undefined or treated as a social construct?” The analysts also asked whether the policies promote the notion that sex is merely “assigned at birth” and whether they use terms such as “cisgender,” “transgender,” and “nonbinary.”

These tell-tale signs reveal the promotion of gender ideology, which not only contradicts basic biology and tradition but also poses a real danger to impressionable children.

By telling little boys that they may really be girls, schools prime them for experimental medical interventions that leave kids stunted, scared, and infertile. The fact that medical societies endorse these interventions – despite the lack of evidence that they improve children’s lives and in the face of evidence that they carry severe side effects such as the risk of cancer in teens – is a scandal of epic proportions.

Even simply teaching children that “gender identity” may be different from biological sex carries the risk of setting kids on a destructive path. These lessons are rightly controversial, and parents should be able to remove their children from any such indoctrination.

O’Neil’s article lists the states and “the specific state policy requiring each to teach gender ideology. I will list the states, and you can link to O’Neil’s article to see the state policy. However, I will include the policy of a single state because I did not expect this state to even be on the list. The sixteen states are: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Wyoming’s policy is as follows: “Sexuality: the sum of the physical, functional, and psychological attributes that are expressed by one’s gender identity and sexual behavior.”

Wise parents will know the policies on gender ideology in their schools and can strengthen their family, community, and nation by rooting the ideology out of their school.

Why Was the U.S. Government Suppressing Speech and Press?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns suppression of speech and press by the U.S. government. According to an article by Gabe Kaminsky published in The Daily Signal, the Global Engagement Center (GEC) lost its congressional funding. The office was once housed within the State Department to “thwart disinformation and misinformation.” 

The GEC was founded in 2016 as a “product of an Obama-era executive order on counterterrorism,” but it “violated its mandate to work only overseas and devolved into a partisan enabler of speech suppression in the United States,” according to Kaminsky. Here is his explanation of how it happened.

Over the last two years, my investigative reporting in the Washington Examiner as well as that of Racket News journalist Matt Taibbi pulled back the curtain of the GEC’s ties to foreign and domestic nongovernmental organizations trying to defund news outlets they say peddle disinformation – including RealClear Politics.

My reporting showed that the GEC and the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy combined granted almost $1 million to the British Global Disinformation Index, which created a blacklist of U.S.-based websites that published content it determined to push adversarial narratives’ and the pressured advertisers to shut them down (think the Hunter Biden laptop story and COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis).

The GEC, moreover, was involved with the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of left-wing nonprofit groups, universities, and federal agencies that pressured Twitter and Facebook to remove GOP-aligned content in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election.

The GEC also bankrolled New York-based company NewsGuard, a “misinformation” tracker that, along with the Global Disinformation Index, has found itself at the center of a lawsuit brought by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas against the GEC for allegedly funding an unconstitutional “censorship scheme” that suppressed voices on the right.

Taibbi, the former Rolling Stone writer, demonstrated that the GEC pressured social media platforms in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic to moderate extensive content, testifying to Congress in March 2023, “We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.”

In turn, these revelations and others culminated in a high-level pressure campaign in December that resulted in the GEC losing out on a one-year lifeline through a congressional spending package.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy joined President-elect Donald Trump in demanding that House Speaker Mike Johnson – who had initially brokered a controversial deal to allow the GEC to continue to receive more of your tax dollars – remove the pro-GEC provision. Once this powerful trio came out against more GEC funding, the nail was squarely in the coffin. It didn’t help Johnson that conservative lawmakers with clout in Trump World such as Dan Bishop, Trump’s pick for a high-ranking role at the Office of Management and Budget, fervently opposed the bill.

Soon, the bill was dead. And the GEC with it….

While the GEC is no more, the employees who helped lead the office over the years are being reassigned elsewhere in the U.S. government, likely within the State Department, the agency said in a recent court filing.

The GEC’s failure to win reauthorization is a further vindication of our reporting on its seemingly unlawful activities.

But make no mistake: We will be watching to see where the federal officials accused in court of facilitating “one of the most egregious government operations to censor the American press in the history of the nation” end up next on the taxpayers’ dime. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

What Does Morning in America Mean to You?

Happy New Year, America! As Ronald Reagan once said, “It is morning in America.” Once again, a strong Republican president must clean up the mess left by a weak Democrat president. Reagan had to do it when he followed the Jimmy Carter administration, and Trump had to do it in his first term when he followed the eight-year-long Barack Obama administration.

Now Trump must clean up the even bigger mess left by the Joe Biden administration. Victor Davis Hanson explains the situation as only he can. 

A combination of two self-evident truths.

Joe Biden’s inept administration proved an ungodly disaster, not just for America but for the West as well, who looked abroad for a stronger America but found it weaker.

And second, Trump Invictus is now liberated – “In the fell clutch of circumstance / I have not winced nor cried aloud, / Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed.”

He is without worry over another election, or a discredited and defanged media (“so doves do peck the falcon’s piercing talons”), much less a third Nancy Pelosi-contrived impeachment.

Instead, he stalks indomitable, after failed de-balloting capers, failed lawfare vendettas, and failed assassination attempts. To quote Shakespeare of his recent visit to Notre Dame and the once hostile Euro crowd who now mobbed him, “He doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus, and we petty men / Walk under his huge legs and peep about / To find ourselves dishonorable graves.”

In sum, our weakest president is to be followed by our most audacious.

Biden’s bumbling arrogance nearly destroyed the American military in Kabul. It ruined Western deterrence. It showered the creepy Taliban with a multibillion-dollar windfall arsenal.

His lies, his incompetence, and, yes, his narcissism demoralized Americans and our allies, but at least ensured he would never reach 50% approval again.

What immediately followed from the Kabul nightmare was as bad or indeed worse: two theater-wide wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, appeasement of Iran, hammering of Israel, a nonexistent U.S. border, 12 million illegal aliens, the hyperinflation of staples, the weaponization of the executive branch, third-world lawfare, looting and shoplifting legitimized, spiking crime contextualized, and printing trillions of debased dollars normalized.

Biden sought to turn the once-preeminent U.S. military into a cruel cultural woke joke.

The trainwreck of the last four years was force-multiplied by Biden’s own feebleness, masked by the most scandalous media-politico conspiracy of suppression of it in U.S. history.

But now there is a giddy sense that restoration and normalization are not just possible but on the horizon.

The truth now is set free, and it smothers the old lying denials about the origins of COVID, about the truth of diversity/equity/inclusion, about the naked greed of the Biden family syndicate, about the dementia of Joe, about the chauvinism of three sexes, and about the joy and momentum of the fracking, gun-toting, McDonald’s veteran and border hawk Kamala Harris.

No one fears or listens to the now-defenestrated frauds and tiring dissimulators: the Bidens, a Fauci, Mayorkas, Garland, Milley, Austin, Jean-Pierre, Comey, Brennan, Clapper, or McCabe – and their old lies that Hunter is brilliant, Biden is fit as a [fiddle], no gain-in-function viruses, a bat caused COVID, the border is secure, Chinese army generals are more trustworthy than Trump, the laptop was Russian, Trump is a Putin puppet, and always their nauseating “I can’t recall,” “I don’t remember,” “I have no recollection,” and “I am not at liberty to say.”

Our allies are feeling more confident, our enemies scared.

The idea of an impending deterrent and reliable Trump administration has terrified Iran and helped collapse Syria. Israelis buoyant. Not so Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

In anticipation, the dollar reigns, the stock market stays strong.

Even Trump’s traditional enemies, whether on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or in corporate board rooms are whispering that they secretly are delighted with their old nemesis’s dream of more and cheaper energy, less government regulation and taxation, and confidence again that everything is now possible when a government says an exhilarant yes to dreams rather than a crabby no to them.

Suddenly the woke bullies are on the run. The porous border really can be closed; illegal alien gangs and criminals will be sent packing….

Each of us, at least for this brief window of opportunity, again feels, “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”

It is morning in America once again, but the mess left by the Biden administration is both wide and deep. We will notice some changes right away, but extensive changes may take time. Trump and his administration can do much to bring sanity back to America, but they need the help of all Americans