Joe Biden issued an executive order last week approving the mobilization of 3,000 reserve troops who could deploy to Europe in support of Operation Atlantic Resolve. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has not sent any of the 3,000 reservists to Europe yet, but the move was announced as last week’s NATO summit wrapped up and comes a year after the United States deployed 20,000 troops to Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Lt. Gen. Douglas Sims, operations director for the Joint Staff, told reporters the mobilization “reaffirms the unwavering support and commitment to the defense of NATO’s eastern flank in the wake of Russia’s illegal and unprovoked war on Ukraine.”
What do you call an organization made up of 3 million government employees that can’t find even 3 parents per state to agree with their radical agenda?
Indeed, as chronicled in a new report from Education Week, the NEA, which is the nation’s largest teachers’ union, has just wrapped up its annual assembly – and the group’s trajectory is as bleak as it is extreme.
Those of us who support students and parents’ rights have great cause for hope.(iStock)
As EdWeek reports, the NEA lost 115,000 members between 2017 and 2022 and projects losing an additional 24,000 teachers as part of its latest budget (in addition to thousands of other “education support professionals”).
But the truly revealing story is the catastrophic lack of support for the NEA’s radical agenda outside of those financially profiting from its taxpayer shakedowns. In particular, parents have apparently so thoroughly rebuffed the NEA’s extremism that EdWeek reports:
“Another category of membership never fully materialized: In 2019, the NEA opened up a ‘community ally’ category for non-educators, who could be parents or other supporters of its work. The union had expected to enroll 6,300 community allies by this fiscal year – but instead, the number is closer to 150” (emphasis added).
It’s perhaps little wonder that parents would have little stomach for a group explicitly dedicated to promoting critical race theory (CRT), race-based reparations and radical gender ideology – all while it tries to brand parent groups like Moms for Liberty as “threatening” to public schools.
At the same time, even when it comes to its existing base of government employees, the NEA is in panic mode after Govs. Ron DeSantis and Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed legislation blocking the unions from automatically siphoning money out of teachers’ paychecks to pay membership dues this year. “Eliminating payroll-deduction services will have a ‘devastating and immediate’ impact on membership, NEA President Becky Pringle warned delegates,” EdWeek reports.
In short, the union recognizes that if their members begin feeling the impact of the NEA’s hand in their pocket, the group’s membership rolls may truly begin to spiral downward.
Until then, however, the organization – which has already called for the re-election of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, budgeted over $50 million for political campaigning and lobbying, and is now planning to shovel over $1 million to boost support among its anemic “community ally” (parent) program – will continue to flex its muscle over U.S. elections and the education of millions of American children.
But thanks to grassroots groups like Moms for Liberty and the leadership of governors in Florida, Arkansas and elsewhere, the voices of parents are poised to reverberate far more loudly in the halls of government and the sphere of education than those who demanded endless shutdowns, masks and federal spending during COVID-19.
Indeed, it is clear that for the first time in decades, the public school establishment is on the defensive – with universal school choice sweeping the nation in 2022 and 2023 over the howls of protest from union activists dedicated to keeping students trapped in underperforming government-run schools.
Now, it is imperative that political leaders and champions of parents’ rights continue to press forward, promoting not only school choice, but companion legislation such as full online academic transparency to disclose the course content being pushed on public school students.
Of course, victories for students will not all come overnight, and the list of union absurdities will continue to grow, as the NEA and its allies increasingly twist and abuse the English language to redefine words and concepts to suit their purposes. But if the latest NEA assembly – which, for instance, calls for renaming “right to work” states as “anti-worker” states in all union communications – is any indication of their desperation or their tenuous grasp of truth, then those of us who support students and parents’ rights have great cause for hope.
The NEA’s “community ally” brigade on the other hand, perhaps not so much.
Matt Beienburg is the director of education policy at the Goldwater Institute. He also serves as director of the institute’s Van Sittert Center for Constitutional Advocacy.
The Biden administration’s Department of Justice web page on the dangers of child sex trafficking is suddenly missing some very crucial text that raises further questions as to the degree the department has been politicized.
In fact, in recent months, most of the original text on what the public should look for has been deleted — presumably in order to protect an embattled pro-LGBT White House and its failed border policies.
According to an archive of the page, up until recently, the DOJ warned off international sex trafficking rings that use the border to exploit children.
A section on “International Sex Trafficking of Minors” for years read as follows:
“One form of sex trafficking involves the cross-border transportation of children. In these situations, traffickers recruit and transfer children across international borders in order to sexually exploit them in another country.
“The traffickers can be individuals working alone, organized crime groups, enterprises, or networks of criminals working together to traffic children into prostitution across country lines.”
The DOJ reported that once missing and exploited children enter the country illegally, they often are never found and are afraid to come forward.
Other crucial excerpts on the international slave trade are also missing.
One obvious explanation for why this information is suddenly gone is that President Joe Biden and his administration have watched over an open border for the last two-and-a-half years.
Why else would anyone in federal law enforcement in the corrupt federal government feel it is necessary to remove such important information?
But there are also excerpts missing that could be interpreted as pointing toward the LGBT community.
For example, in its previous form, the DOJ warned of predators whose motives might be to take advantage of young people whose backgrounds could match those of confused kids in distress.
One of those excerpts once read:
“Offenders of this crime who are commonly referred to as traffickers, or pimps, target vulnerable children and gain control over them using a variety of manipulative methods. Victims frequently fall prey to traffickers who lure them in with an offer of food, clothes, attention, friendship, love, and a seemingly safe place to sleep.”
Another stated bluntly:
“It is common for traffickers to isolate victims by moving them far away from friends and family, altering their physical appearances, or continuously moving them to new locations. Victims are heavily conditioned to remain loyal to the trafficker and to distrust law enforcement.”
Organizations that cater to children who are confused about sexuality and gender often report they feel ostracized and end up homeless.
For example, the LGBT youth group The Trevor Project states that 28 percent of young people in its community have been homeless.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that such a situation would set some of these kids up to be taken advantage of.
We know with the modern left’s extreme views on gender, kids are being urged to undergo life-altering surgeries. Who knows where some of them end up?
That fact might explain why the DOJ’s warning that predators who are known for “altering” the physical appearance of their victims is now gone.
More information about the trafficking of human beings is always better than less — especially in regard to children.
But for some reason that has not been addressed publicly, the DOJ cut out this very important information — whittling it down from more than 1,300 words to only 400.
The department also removed the following 2011 quote from then-Deputy Attorney General James Cole:
“Some of our most vulnerable children also face the threat of being victimized by commercial sexual exploitation. Runaways, throwaways, sexual assault victims, and neglected children can be recruited into a violent life of forced prostitution.”
Given the politicized nature of federal law enforcement under the Biden administration, we can only assume the DOJ removed information about victims who are inconvenient and that it was done for political reasons.
Available funding for pregnancy resource centers in Ohio has more than doubled for the next two years.
Gov. Mike DeWine signed the state’s budget in late June, allocating $14 million for the Department of Job and Family Services’ Parenting and Pregnancy Program, which distributes grants to nonprofits that assist families, moms, and babies — including pregnancy resource centers, WDNT reported. The state’s new budget for pregnancy resource centers is up by $8 million.
Services provided by pregnancy resource centers include offering pregnancy testing, ultrasounds, clothing and baby supplies, as well as referrals, medical support, maternity housing, and state assistance programs. Their mission is to encourage women to choose life for their child.
“The majority of women who have abortions report that they did it because they lacked resources and they lacked community,” Beth Vanderkooi, executive director of the Greater Columbus Right to Life, told NBC 4. “They’re alone – they don’t have a partner; they don’t have a family; they don’t have that support. Pregnancy centers are there to walk with women.”
The move comes as the state’s six week abortion ban has been blocked by a judge since October.
With more than 200 pregnancy resource centers across the state, a 2021 study by Ohio State University found one in seven women of reproductive age have visited a pregnancy resource center.
However, many on the left mischaracterize pregnancy resource centers as “fake clinics” that “spread misinformation.”
State Rep. Bride Rose Sweeney (D) called this budget appropriation meant to help women “unfortunate.” “It’s unfortunate that we are spending quite significantly – any public money – towards health care that is not trusting women to make their own decisions and get all of the information that they need,” Sweeney said.
Other states have even gone as far as to ban funding for pregnancy resource centers. In April, Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed “$2 million in state funding into a program to promote childbirth for unplanned pregnancies,” the Kansas Reflector reported.
President Trump on Saturday wanted to know what happened to the Biden classified documents case.
There have been no leaks and virtually no updated media reports on the special counsel investigating Biden’s stolen classified documents case.
“Whatever happened to the Biden Documents Case? 20 times more documents than I have, and I’m allowed to have under the Presidential Records Act, he’s not. What about the Classified Docs he had in Chinatown, and on his garage floor in Delaware. Is he being charged under the Espionage Act? What about Penn Center, which receives China money, or the 1850 boxes that he is not wanting to release? Was Obama, Clinton, Bush, or others so charged? No, only “TRUMP,” because I am illegally being targeted!” Trump said on Truth Social on Saturday.
Biden stole SCIF-designated classified documents and improperly stored them at the Penn Biden Center.
Biden also stored classified documents in his garage next to his Corvette where his son Hunter had access to the sensitive materials.
Nine boxes of documents were taken from Joe Biden’s lawyer’s Boston office and we have no idea what is in those boxes because the National Archives is covering up for Biden.
Joe Biden is also withholding information from the Senate Intel Committee.
The University of Delaware is covering for Biden and refusing to release 1850 boxes of his Senate records!
The University of Delaware refuses to release Biden’s records and said that the papers will not be released until two years after Biden retires from public office.
“The collection of former Vice President Biden’s senatorial papers is still being processed, with many items yet to be cataloged,” an email from a school spokeswoman said. “The entire collection will remain closed to the public until two years after Mr. Biden retires from public life.”
Judicial Watch and the Daily Caller News Foundation initially filed a FOIA lawsuit in 2020 for all of Biden’s senate records – 1,850 boxes of records.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed US Attorney Robert Hur as the special counsel overseeing the investigation into Biden’s classified documents scandal in January and still no charges.
In contrast, Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as a special counsel to investigate documents stored at Mar-a-Lago in November and he indicted Trump approximately 6 months later after hundreds of damaging leaks to the media.
Leftists Furious at In-N-Out After Company Reveals New Policy, Demand Boycott. Music to my ears.
Conservatives have engaged in a very successful boycott of Bud Light over the company’s blatant political agenda, but now it looks like the left has found its own boycott target after famed fast food giant In-N-Out Burger has made them mad.
The fast food giant has garnered the ire of the left by telling employees that the coronavirus crisis is over and there is no longer a reason to wear masks in the workplace.
Frankly, why shouldn’t the burger behemoth? There are no reputable studies that show masking prevents the transmission of viruses. Masks just don’t work.
Leftist Dr. Lucky Tran was incensed enough to start a massive Twitter thread in which he wailed about the burger company and urged his leftist followers to attack them with tweets and messages on the company’s websites.
One week ago, a court in California ruled that employers cannot be sued for spreading COVID to their workers due to lack of protections.
This week, In-N-Out banned their employees from wearing masks.
Looking back at the CNN town hall with Trump. It was the right thing to do. The noise has settled down since the far left and MSM got all upset that Trump did a town hall with CNN.
The Democrats and Independents got to see and hear Trump give his side, and it worked. Trumps ratings went up with Democrats, Independents, but also with women. Mission accomplished.
They can find who owns pot in the WH but not who owns Cocaine found in the WH? Oh all the drugs showing up at the WH. It’s just like the good old days when Clinton and Obama were there.
So the Secret Service finds the pot and who owned it, but yet are unable to find anything on the Cocaine user? Who really believes that?
Not saying the Cocaine is Hunter’s, but it’s obvious it belonged to someone higher up.
Protesters rail against Moms for Liberty outside this year’s Joyful Warrior Summit in Philadelphia. (Michael M. Santiago via Getty Images)
Attendees at the Moms for Liberty Joyful Warrior Summit stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in Philadelphia on July 1. (Michael M. Santiago via Getty Images)
ByRobert Pondiscio
In a breakout session in a windowless conference room at last weekend’s Moms for Liberty “Joyful Warrior Summit” in Philadelphia, Christian Ziegler, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party and father of three school-aged daughters, is stiffening spines. Dozens of attendees, mostly women, are nodding and taking notes as Ziegler explains how to work with local news media.
“Your product is parental rights. Your product is protecting children and eliminating indoctrination and the sexualization of children. You’re the grassroots. You’re on the ground. You’re the moms, the grandparents, the families that are impacted. The stories you tell help set a narrative,” Ziegler coaches them.
One story above us, the ballroom floor of the downtown Marriott is groaning under the weight of crowded press risers, where camera crews have set up for the parade of Republican presidential hopefuls coming here to curry favor with the more than 600 Moms for Liberty members attending—and a few thousand more watching the livestream.
Ron DeSantis held forth this morning. Nikki Haley is scheduled to speak at lunch. Donald Trump will close things out later this afternoon. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson are on tap for tomorrow.
It’s an astonishing display of political drawing power, considering Moms for Liberty didn’t even exist three years ago. The candidates have all come to pay obeisance to the animating idea that has galvanized these women: that parents—not the government—should be in charge of how their children are raised and educated.
If you want to understand why these politicians have come, you need to go to the breakout sessions, away from the camera’s gaze, where, hour after hour, Moms for Liberty chapter leaders and foot soldiers learn how to run for school boards—and if they win, how to advance their agenda even when in the minority. There are talks on messaging strategies and mining school board minutes for signs of “woke indoctrination.” There are workshops on how to file public records requests and navigate the legal system.
They aren’t messing around. More than half of the 500 candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed for local school board elections last year won their races. “School choice moms” provided the margin of victory in DeSantis’ first run for Florida governor in 2018. Democrat Terry McAuliffe was leading the race for Virginia governor in 2021 before his debate remark that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” handed the win to Republican Glenn Youngkin.
Moms for Liberty is the beating heart of this country’s movement of angry parents—and American education has never seen anything quite like it.
Moms for Liberty launched in January 2021 when frustration with pandemic masking rules had reached a boiling point. Requests to form local chapters started coming in almost immediately after co-founder Tina Descovich called in to Glenn Beck’s radio show. Appearances on The Rush Limbaugh Show, Fox News, and Steve Bannon’s War Room quickly followed. Within six months, Megyn Kelly was hosting a fundraiser. Its slogan, emblazoned on thousands of t-shirts, is “We don’t co-parent with the government.”
That message has found an enormous and growing audience. With 120,000 members and nearly 300 chapters in 45 U.S. states, Moms for Liberty is already the most consequential education advocacy organization since Teach For America—but with none of the halo effect that inspired a generation of elite college grads to put off law school and Wall Street to teach in inner cities.
Moms for Liberty is Teach For America’s dark opposite number. They won’t be talked out of their conviction that malign forces in public schools—gender ideology, critical race theory, Marxism, anti-Americanism—have come for their children, and they’re having exactly none of it.
“I think they’re one of the few truly authentic and responsive edu-parental rights groups that has emerged in recent history,” says a prominent parent choice supporter not associated with Moms for Liberty, who would only speak anonymously because of the group’s radioactive reputation in education and philanthropic circles. “They’re not just mouthpieces on social media; they have a real following. If they weren’t effective, and if their message wasn’t resonant, they wouldn’t be so vilified.”
It’s true the group attracts and frequently abides a lunatic fringe, fueling its critics’ counternarrative that the movement is intolerant, racist even.
Just last week, an Indiana Moms for Liberty chapter put a Hitler quote in its newsletter and the story went national. The quote—“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future”—was intended to warn parents what happens when a regime targets its children for indoctrination. But when critics are calling you ultra-right wing Christofascists, it’s probably unwise to invoke Hitler in any context.
The local chapter chair apologized, “probably because she hasn’t gone through this” training, Ziegler tells the crowd.
“Frankly, it was bullshit.”
Even before the Hitler controversy, media coverage of the group has been harsh. The Nationdescribed Moms for Liberty as “hateful fascist bigots.” The New Republicsaidthe group has “created nightmares for schools across the country.” An article in Vice reported they have ties to the Proud Boys—a claim that co-founder Tiffany Justice strenuously denied to me. A story in The Washington Post led with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s recent designation of Moms for Liberty as an “extremist group” devoted to spreading “messages of anti-inclusion and hate.”
When Ziegler’s wife, Bridget, one of the original Moms for Liberty, started serving on the school board in Sarasota County, Florida, nearly a decade ago, the negative press coverage reduced her to tears. Now, Ziegler tells the room, the couple compares their bad press clips on date nights.
“You actually get to this amazing moment when you realize, ‘Hey, if they attack me, I can go raise money on this. I can get my message out by piggybacking on that attack,’ ” advises Ziegler.
“It’s brutal to be on defense,” he continues. “Always play offense. Never apologize. Never, ever, never,” he insists.
Ziegler, meanwhile, likes this morning’s Washington Post story just fine, even though it details a litany of complaints and criticisms aimed at the group. “Moms for Liberty didn’t exist three years ago. Now,” the paper says, “it’s a GOP kingmaker.”
“Probably the best headline I’ve ever seen,” he grins.
In 2021, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) was forced to apologize after a letter it sent to the Biden administration went viral, asking for federal law enforcement to stop “domestic terrorism” at school board meetings.
While Moms for Liberty was not mentioned by name, the letter cited several incidents at which members had protested. Since then, 25 state associations have cut ties with NSBA. At the Philadelphia summit, a handful of mothers were proudly wearing “Domestic Terrorist” t-shirts.
Outside the Marriott, protesters from ACT UP Philly and the Young Communist League are registering their displeasure with an all-day “dance party protest”—a strange response to the fascist threat they insist is unfolding four flights up. From beyond barricades several hundred feet away they shout at the hotel and wave signs: “Philly is a Trans City,” “Kancel Klanned Karenhood,” and “Moms for Liberty Go Home!”
But the Moms are unrepentant. They seem almost to revel in the abuse.
On the eve of the Philadelphia Summit, co-founder Tiffany Justice told me, “We are fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating, and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government.”
A few years ago, if you had to bet on which parent organization could influence the 2024 election, the smart wager would have been on the well-funded National Parents Union (NPU), which calls itself an “authentically parent-led organization,” a label that Moms for Liberty would undoubtedly use to describe itself.
The afternoon before Moms for Liberty kicked off their conference, NPU held a sparsely attended rally in Philadelphia’s Love Park to condemn its “evil and divisive” rival, which, it claimed, seeks school book bans and to whitewash history lessons taught to children. What Moms for Liberty insists are efforts to keep pornography out of school libraries and to combat “indoctrination” about critical race theory and gender fluidity, NPU says are attempts to attack and marginalize children of color and LGBTQ youth.
At the Love Park rally, NPU’s president publicly blasted Moms for Liberty, stating unironically that they’re bankrolled by “big checks from the evils of white supremacy.” NPU, for its part, has raised millions in philanthropic support from the Walton Family Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Charles Koch Institute-backed Vela Fund.
Moms for Liberty’s most recent tax filings from 2021 claim a modest $370,000 of revenue. Descovich says accountants are finalizing Moms for Liberty’s updated Form 990, which “will show that our revenue sources have grown from merchandise sales and small donors to include large donors too.” Justice confirms that she and Descovich now draw full-time salaries for their work. They are two of nine full-time staffers.
Their grassroots appeal is easily observable. At the summit, I ran into a neighbor who last year upended our small town in upstate New York with a failed campaign for school board, pushing back on “government overreach” and demanding a return to “traditional education.”
“What are the chances we’d run into each other here!” he greets me.
“Probably 100 percent,” I reply. I write about education for a living and he’s here with his wife, who’s thinking about launching a local chapter. They are the Moms for Liberty couple from central casting.
Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley speaks during the Moms for Liberty summit in Philadelphia. (Michael M. Santiago via Getty Images)
“I’ve never seen a consensus like this. This is a winning issue.”
Until Moms for Liberty, efforts to organize parents into an effective political counterweight to teachers unions and to impose their will on K–12 education haven’t amounted to very much. Colleen Dippel, the founder of Houston-based Families Empowered, a parent support organization with no connection to the group, says of Moms for Liberty: “They are doing things that other organizations have received millions of dollars to do and haven’t been able to get done. The National Parents Union hasn’t flipped a school board. They haven’t changed a policy that I’m aware of.”
The rise of Moms for Liberty as a force in education policy, local elections, and now the 2024 campaign is, if anything, a function of their refusal to follow the playbook common to parent advocacy organizations, which tend to wither and die when their philanthropic support dries up.
“Philanthropists will never be able to control these women,” says Dippel. “Why? Because these women are college educated and they don’t need their money. They also have time, they have skills, and they’re empowered primary voters. The message they send to elected officials is, ‘No, no, no. My kid, my money, you work for me. And if you don’t, I’ll organize all these other women, tell them what’s going on, and kick you out of office, because that’s democracy, right?’ ”
At a private dinner on Friday night after Trump’s speech, pollster Jim McLaughlin presented Moms for Liberty’s leaders and advisers with the results of a survey he conducted of likely voters in the upcoming general election. A clear majority (67 percent) feel that K–12 public education in the U.S. is “on the wrong track,” including half of Democrats, he says. Nearly three-fourths, including independents and Biden voters, think it’s more important for schools to teach children “basics” like reading, writing, and math rather than “issues of social justice, reproductive rights, sex education, and transgender issues.”
Matt Palumbo, a 30-year veteran Republican political adviser who has worked on seven presidential campaigns and attended the briefing said, “I’ve never seen a consensus like this. This is a winning issue.”
Obviously, schools do not choose between teaching reading and gender ideology, but it was hard to miss the narrative taking shape in real time in Philadelphia. The basic thrust of Moms for Liberty’s advocacy—that parents, not the government, should have the ultimate say in what children are taught in public schools—has legs. Not one subgroup in McLaughlin’s crosstabs—Trump or Biden voters; pro-life or pro-choice; black, white, or Hispanic; urban, rural, or suburban—disagrees.
Education is a state issue, not a federal one; schools are ground zero in the country’s culture war, and Moms for Liberty is positioned to be at the center of it through next November. A majority of Americans simply don’t buy the idea that a person can be a gender other than the one “assigned at birth,” and they don’t want their children taught otherwise in public schools. Every presidential contender who came to the summit talked about it in one form or another. And the crowd leapt to its feet every time.
Moms for Liberty has angered activists and inspired harsh media coverage—and yet the organization’s status as a GOP kingmaker has only grown. (Michael M. Santiago via Getty Images)
But the passion and energy that has rocketed Moms for Liberty to kingmaker status is also its Achilles heel: some overly zealous members have gone too far.
Members of a local Tennessee chapter last year, for example, sued to remove an outstanding English curriculum, Wit & Wisdom, from their school district, on the grounds that its elementary school texts about civil rights icons Ruby Bridges and Martin Luther King Jr. are too dark and disturbing for children and violate state laws against teaching critical race theory. A New Hampshire chapter offered a $500 bounty “for the person that first successfully catches a public school teacher breaking this [state’s anti-critical race theory] law.” An Arkansas Mom was banned from school grounds after an audio recording captured her saying “if I had any mental issues, [school employees] would all be plowed down by a freaking gun right now.”
Neither are the group’s fanatical elements limited only to local chapters. On Saturday morning at the conference, Moms for Liberty fixture James Lindsay painted a picture of the organization as “war moms” fighting a “Maoist cultural revolution” engineered at the highest levels of government and elite institutions. When Mao came to power, Lindsay claimed, his first step was to close schools and reeducate teachers. “They shut down the schools for two years and came back with a whole new program. Does that sound familiar?”
Lindsay’s conspiracy theory earned him a raucous standing ovation.
Erika Donalds, the wife of Florida Congressman Byron Donalds and another former school board member who was present at the founding (she remains on Moms for Liberty’s board), believes the group is ready for its moment in the national spotlight, but she’s clear-eyed about the potential pitfalls of such a rapid rise. “They’re very intentional about who speaks on behalf of the organization. They train their members on the issues, and they get out in front of things,” she says. “But their biggest risk is some rogue woman wearing a Moms for Liberty shirt at a school board meeting acting like a cuckoo.”
Tiffany Justice acknowledges the risk to the brand but minimizes the downside.
“There is no doubt in my mind that there will be things that chapters do that we may not agree with, or we may not be able to stop in advance,” she tells me. “If it rises to something that’s the level of violating our code of conduct, we have no problem removing a chapter chair or taking the steps to remove a member. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. This work is difficult. And we know that.”
The Moms for Liberty mission statement, “We Do Not Co-Parent with the Government” has animated an enormous audience—with almost 300 chapters in 45 states. (Octavio Jones via Getty Images)
Teach For America, which is now derided by conservatives for its hard left turn into “woke” education, claims that 270 of its alumni serve in elected positions around the country “from state representatives to city council members to school board officials.” Moms for Liberty might have that many or more school board members already, and a multiple of that number weighing a run. Teach For America has been around for 30 years. Moms for Liberty? Thirty months. And the way things are going, their influence is likely to explode in the next few years.
“Today’s school board members are tomorrow’s state legislators,” said Christian Ziegler, the Florida Republican Party chairman, when I spoke with him a few days after the Philadelphia summit. His wife, Bridget, who is serving what she says will be her last school board term in Sarasota, is leading a new program for school board candidates at the Virginia-based Leadership Institute, which since 1979 has trained 250,000 conservative activists in campaigns, fundraising, and communications.
“And today’s state legislators are tomorrow’s congressmen.”
Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of How the Other Half Learns. Follow him on Twitter at @rpondiscio.
I have never had a problem with gays or POCs in and of themselves. And I support any who have legitimate grievances. What I DO have a problem with is those who think they are entitled to special treatment because of what they are or claim to be or who DEMAND others bow down in acquiescence to their lifestyle choices. –TPR
Discovering the disinformation playbook An excerpt from ‘The War on Ivermectin: The Medicine That Saved Millions and Could Have Ended the Pandemic’, by Dr. Pierre Kory
Having fought in the “War on Ivermectin” now for almost two and half years, I know most of the military plays. But when I first set foot on the battlefield, I was blissfully unaware of the rules of engagement. Hell, I didn’t even know I was fighting in a war.
One thing was crystal clear to me: Something illicit was happening around ivermectin, and Big Pharma’s fingerprints were all over the crime scene. But in the beginning, I truly believed that the pandemic would be over in a matter of months—just as soon as our review paper was published. The world would know that there was an incredibly effective agent to prevent and treat Covid-19; deaths would stop, and life would resume.
It physically pains me to write that last sentence.
I credit my combat training to two people, both of whom appeared in my life around the same time. The first was a man who writes under the pen name Justus Hope, MD, author of Ivermectin for the World. I had come across his book as well as multiple articles published in a California newspaper called The Desert Review in my research, so I knew who he was when he reached out. We had several in-depth conversations during which he explained his long-standing interest in Big Pharma’s war on repurposed drugs. That interest was triggered by a close friend with brain cancer which led him to the discovery that there were multiple effective repurposed drugs to treat cancer that had long been suppressed by Big Pharma. Early in the pandemic, he published a book called Surviving Cancer, Covid-19, and Disease: The Repurposed Drug Revolution. I was beginning to understand that this was an old, old war.
My second mind-altering mentor during this period was a complete stranger named Bill Grant, PhD, a physicist and the founder and president of the Sunlight, Nutrition, and Health Research Center in San Francisco. Bill is also one of the world’s foremost experts on the science behind vitamin D, with more than 300 peer-reviewed papers to his name. Out of the blue, Bill reached out to me in March of 2021 with a simple, two-line email:
Dear Dr. Kory, What they are doing to ivermectin they have been doing to Vitamin D for decades. Bill
The note was followed by a link to an article by a group of scientists detailing precisely how disinformation is used to sway public opinion. Intrigued, I clicked the link.
The article described various disinformation tactics by equating them to American football plays. By the time I got to the end of that article, a switch inside me had flipped. I instantly knew that it was the key to understanding a world that I no longer recognized.
The article went on to detail five primary disinformation “plays” or tactics used by companies or industries when science emerges that is inconvenient to their interests: the fake, the fix, the blitz, the diversion, and the screen. As I read, I could think of dozens of examples for every single one of those maneuvers that had occurred around ivermectin since my senate testimony had gone viral.
The mother of all Macy’s 4th of July fireworks celebrations was going off in my brain; one realization exploding after another, each one brighter and more astonishing than the last.
Holy crap. The FLCCC was in the middle of a disinformation war with the pharmaceutical industry.
From that day on, that conceptual framework was the only thing that could make sense of what had happened and what was yet to happen in my attempts to highlight one of the safest and most effective treatments in any disease in history.
Although each play was widely represented in the events surrounding the Covid response, “the fake” was by far the most prominent—and the most damaging. In regard to repurposed drugs specifically, it involves conducting trials “designed to fail,” selectively publishing negative results while censoring positive results, and planting negative ghost-written editorials in legitimate journals. The article emphasized that these tactics can gravely undermine public health and safety.
You don’t say.
“The fake” formed the foundation of a campaign that would result in one of the most significant humanitarian catastrophes in history, causing millions of deaths around the world.
To be clear, ivermectin wasn’t the first casualty of World War Covid. The same tactics had been used against hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) in 2020 and had they not, HCQ would have been deployed at the onset of the pandemic and saved even more lives. The closest and best description of that war I’ve discovered was featured in Robert F. Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci (Skyhorse Publishing, 2021), a brilliant, expertly researched, and undeniably incriminating takedown of “America’s Doctor.”
“HHS’s early studies supported hydroxychloroquine’s efficacy against coronavirus since 2005, and by March 2020, doctors from New York to Asia were using it against Covid with extraordinary effect,” Kennedy wrote. By autumn, more than 200 studies supported treatment with hydroxychloroquine. “From the outset, hydroxychloroquine and other therapeutics posed an existential threat to Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates’ $48 billion Covid vaccine project, and particularly to their vanity drug remdesivir, in which Gates has a large stake. Under federal law, new vaccines and medicines cannot qualify for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) if any existing FDA-approved drug proves effective against the same malady.”
In other words, if HCQ or ivermectin had been recognized as a viable treatment, the massive cash cow that was the global Covid-19 vaccine campaign would have been slaughtered on the spot.
Keep in mind that HCQ and ivermectin not only threatened the vaccine campaign, but also the massive and exploding competitive market for other pricey Big Pharma products like Veklury (commonly known by its generic name, remdesivir), Paxlovid, molnupiravir, and monoclonal antibodies. Never in history had two generic, repurposed medicines threatened a marketplace of such a colossal size.
The answer to that pesky little conundrum?
Disinformation.
Over and over, each devious play has been strategically deployed to further the interests of the establishment to the unbridled disservice of mankind.
You can find ‘The War on Ivermectin: The Medicine That Saved Millions and Could Have Ended the Pandemic’ at a bookstore near you.
