Just look at the rates of booster administered. This must be causing some heartburn among the public health administrative set.
Concentrating on the pediatric population (kids)…
In babies and kids up to four years old, only 0.6% are fully vaccinated. About 5% have completed the primary series and 9% to 11% have had at least one dose.
The 5-11 year olds also are no longer getting vaccinated. Less than 5% have had a booster and only 33% have completed the 2-shot series.
It is believed that not being able to do extracurricular activities without vaccination, caused the 12-17 year olds to get vaccinated. But the good news is that only 8% have been boosted.
Frankly, these numbers are extraordinary. Parents are no longer vaccinating with this experimental vaccines.
The vast majority of adults have not had a booster!
I think we all deserve a big thanks for spreading the message. This is a world-wide group effort to fight big pharma and big government(s) controlling the narrative and we are winning!
The Five Eyes Alliance must be gritting their teeth!
Last Friday, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which is part of the World Health Organization, classified aspartame, a non-nutritive sweetener widely used in diet sodas, as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” Other substances that share the designation include gasoline, diesel fuel, engine exhaust, chloroform, DDT, and lead. But despite aspartame’s inclusion among that ominous cadre of chemicals, you can continue drinking diet sodas almost entirely worry-free. Here’s why.
IARC is terrible at science communication
IARC’s cancer classifications may be one of the greatest failures of science communication in the world. The agency reports “hazard” (that is, whether a substance could be dangerous) rather than “risk” (that is, the magnitude of any potential danger). By declaring aspartame as “possibly carcinogenic,” people around the world interpret that message as, “Diet sodas are causing cancer.” As always, context is everything, and IARC’s designations mostly leave that out.
Numerous studies over the years have probed whether aspartame is linked to a higher risk of cancer. The resulting data is essentially a wash. Some studies found a small increased risk, while others found no correlation. Trials in rodents do show that consuming inordinately large amounts of aspartame can cause cancer, but this is true for many chemicals eaten in extreme excess. That’s why the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) reasonably warns people against consuming more than 40 milligrams of aspartame per day per kilogram of body weight. For a 200-pound person, that’s equivalent to drinking 18 cans of diet soda.
“And even this ‘acceptable daily intake’ has a large built-in safety factor,” Sir David Spiegelhalter, an emeritus professor of statistics at the University of Cambridge, told the Science Media Center. In other words, the 40 mg/kg/day guideline is a conservative estimate; you could probably consume much more and be just fine. In fact, the JECFA considered the same evidence on aspartame and cancer that IARC did and concluded that the evidence for a link is not convincing, an opinion shared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Obesity risk vs. cancer risk
The IARC’s classification of aspartame as a possible carcinogen undoubtedly will cause a PR headache for food companies utilizing the compound, and perhaps prompt them to reformulate their products to avoid the risk of opportunistic lawsuits. The move unfortunately also may lead drinkers of diet sodas to choose sugar-laden options instead. Physician Walter Willett of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health told NPR that would be the “worst possible decision.” The health consequences of consuming large amounts of added sugar — including diabetes and obesity — dwarf the remote cancer risk from aspartame.
The simple truth is that every decision in your life affects your risk of cancer, from how much you sleep, to what you eat for breakfast, to whether you ride your bike or drive to work. How we balance that equation is up to each of us. Some decisions, like smoking and using tanning beds, increase the risk of cancer dramatically. Others, like eating right and exercising, clearly lower it. Many more, like using aloe vera, eating pickled vegetables, and drinking diet sodas, have such a small effect — if any — that it’s not really worth worrying about.
We are now being told that producing food is bad for the planet. To “save” the planet, globalists insist, farms must be shut down across the globe.
A family with starving children, Wikimedia Commons.
Under the guise of reducing “methane emissions,” thirteen nations have signed a pledge to engineer global famine by gutting agricultural production and shutting down farms. Announced earlier this year by the Global Methane Hub — a cabal of crisis engineers who exploit public panic to destroy the world food supply — those thirteen nations are:
Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Chile, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Germany, Panama, Peru, Spain, the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, and Uruguay.
Imagine no meat production from Australia, Brazil and the USA. This is the goal of the globalists. And they admit it’s all part of the climate fraud which has been thoroughly exposed as a quack science hoax, by the way. As Luis Planas, Spain’s Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food says, “I am glad to see the shared commitment by the international community to mitigate methane emissions from agriculture as a means to achieve the goals we signed for in the Paris Agreement on climate.”
“Food systems are responsible for 60% of methane emissions,” warns Marcelo Mena, CEO of the Global Methane Hub. She is saying that farming is destroying the planet. Hence, their demand to shut down farms. Without farms, you have no food. And without food, you get exactly what Kamala Harris called for over the weekend: “Reduced population.”
The depopulation agenda is no longer even a secret. They are bragging about it.
And here’s their logic: FOOD = GLOBAL WARMING. So they are attacking food and shutting it down.
Starving child in Africa.
Cows and chickens to be replaced by crickets and insect larvae
Enjoy the crunchy fake meat patties and Cricket McNuggets. Soon, you’ll be eating bugs because meat will be wildly unaffordable due to the governments shutting down farms and ranches. As journalist Leo Hohmann explains:
We can presume from this language that among the practices being considered are replacing a major portion of the beef and dairy cattle, pork and chicken stocks that populations rely on for protein with insect larvae, meal worms, crickets, etc. The U.N., World Economic Forum and other NGOs have been promoting meatless diets and the consumption of insect protein for years, and billionaires have invested in massive insect factories being built in the state of Illinois, in Canada and in the Netherlands, where meal worms, crickets and other bugs will be processed as additives to be inserted into the food supply, often without clear labels that will inform people of exactly what they are eating.
Hohmann also refers to the Deagel forecast which projects an almost 70 percent reduction of the U.S. population by 2025, saying:
There is no more efficient way to depopulate than through war, famine and plagues. Isn’t it interesting that all three of these time-tested methods of murder are in play right now?
In a related story, Michael Snyder from The Economic Collapse Blog writes:
Global food supplies just keep getting even tighter, and global hunger has risen to extremely alarming levels… According to the United Nations, nearly 30 percent of the global population does not have constant access to food right now, and there are approximately 900 million people that are facing “severe food insecurity”…
Chinese children starving.
Gee, add to that the next global PLANdemic, and you can see (if you take off your leftist blinders) where this is headed. And the BIDEN REGIME is particpating in it!–TPR
PublicSq. founder and CEO Michael Seifert and Colombier Acquisition Corp. Chairman and CEO Omeed Malik on how they decided to merge via a SPAC deal.
Patriotic online marketplace PublicSq. is thriving as more American consumers seek out products and services offered by non-woke companies, and now the conservative alternative to Amazon will soon be owned by “we the people.”
The platform, which touts itself as being pro-life, pro-family and pro-freedom, will merge Wednesday with Colombier Acquisition Corp. in a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) deal and will become a public company trading under ticker symbol PSQH on the New York Stock Exchange Thursday, when company officials will ring the opening bell.
PublicSq. CEO Michael Seifert founded the company in January 2021, and the idea of the company started when he started a list of businesses he and his wife felt proud to support because the companies’ values aligned with their own.
After sharing the list with friends, they decided to put it into a digital environment and allow other businesses to be added, and the site exploded in popularity with consumers and businesses alike.
Anti-woke marketplace PublicSq. will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange this week under ticker symbol PSQH. (PublicSq.)
“Clearly, there’s this very large, unaddressed market in the United States that feels like, in the era of sort of woke or progressive corporatism, they’re not being talked to. In fact, in many cases, they’re being actively ignored or antagonized,” Seifert told FOX Business.
PublicSq. now has over 1.1 million consumer members active on its platform and more than 55,000 businesses, 90% of which are small businesses. Accounts are free for both buyers and sellers.
Seifert says businesses looking to join the marketplace simply sign up in a process that takes roughly four minutes, then build their profile and agree to respect PublicSq.’s core values, which essentially means the seller agrees not to spend time, money or resources antagonistically against those values.
“We’re not asking anybody to be political,” Seifert said. “We’re certainly asking them not to lecture us about our views and values and to live in alignment with those so that our consumers don’t feel like they’re having to fund causes they stand opposed to.”
PublicSq. founder and CEO Michael Seifert discusses his patriotic marketplace designed to connect consumers to American brands that represent their values on ‘The Big Money Show.’
Once a business signs up, it is vetted by PublicSq. to ensure the seller does not take public positions against the platform’s core values and assures the business is legitimate in a process that is typically complete within 24 hours.
Seifert said PublicSq.’s growth has been tremendous. Beyond PublicSq.com, the company’s app is available from the Apple App Store and Google Play. This fall, the company will allow buyers to purchase within the app from multiple vendors with a single shopping cart.
PublicSq. has also begun selling its own products in instances where customers are seeking a product, but the platform has not been able to find a vendor that aligns with its values. For instance, last week, the company launched Everylife, a line of diapers and baby wipes, which Seifert says is the nation’s first openly pro-life diaper company.
PublicSq. founder Michael Seifert giving a talk (PublicSq.)
“We are looking to build the alternative to Amazon, and we really believe with the help of our consumers and future investors that that’s exactly what we can do,” Seifert said. “We want to be a company that’s by the people, for the people and owned by ‘we the people,’ and that only happens if the people will rally around it and build it with us.
“So our encouragement, any chance we get, is if instead if you want this patriotic, parallel economy to exist, we need your help build that with us.”
Kayla Hill, a senior at Great Oaks Career Campus at Diamond Oakes, graduated in June and took a job with Johnson Construction in her hometown of Cincinnati.
(Salena Zito)
The Great Correction, between choosing a trade or higher education, is in motion.
CINCINNATI, Ohio —It is just days before Kayla Hill is graduating from one of the four sprawling facilities that make up the Great Oaks Career Campuses — and the Pendleton neighborhood native has a broad smile on her face as she puts the finishing touches on the pitch of a roof which she is working on in her carpentry class.
The day after graduation, the 17-year-old said she already had a well-paying job waiting for her at Johnson Construction Company. “I was always drawn to carpentry watching my dad fix things around the house, so I followed him around and started asking him questions all of the time,” she said, adding, “When I found out I could go to school for this and get a job if I applied myself, I was so happy to be able to do what I love and get paid for it.”
Several classrooms away, sparks are flying as both Emma Ashcraft and Brianna Anderson, wearing their welding helmets, put the final touches on the individual projects they have been working on for their final in their welding class. Both are seniors and both took up welding in their pursuit of very different careers.
Kayla Hill, a senior at Great Oaks Career Campus at Diamond Oakes, graduated in June and took a job with Johnson Construction in her hometown of Cincinnati.
(Salena Zito)
Anderson is set on working with her hands. “I am lined up with a pipe fitting job, and with that career choice I will travel the United States, and to be honest, I cannot wait to get my life started,” she said.
Ashcraft said she has known since she was in middle school what she wanted to do. Still, it was when she saw what Anderson was doing, making airplane parts, that she said she knew learning how to weld would only enhance her goals.
“I have been interested in aerospace engineering since seventh grade, when I came here and saw that Brianna was welding airplane parts and helicopter parts, I wanted to learn that skill so I could be the one who designed those things,” she said.
Anderson is heading off to the University of Cincinnati this fall for aerospace engineering. She said the experiences here will give her an edge in application: “I came in here not knowing anything about welding, and now I was able to build a whole model of a helicopter.”
Hill, Ashcraft, and Anderson were just three of the scores of students I met here at the Diamond branch of the Great Oaks Career Campuses that provides hands-on, practical learning for high school students beginning in 10th grade. More than 36 public school districts feed into the four campuses located in Hamilton and Warren counties, with students having over 30 career options that range from graphic arts to surgical technician to advanced manufacturing.
Brianna Anderson (left) and Emma Ashcraft are taking their welding skills in different directions; one is seeking a degree in aerospace engineering the other is off to be a pipefitter.
(Salena Zito)
If you want to be a plumber, auto mechanic, carpenter, hairdresser, or welder, this school will help you reach that goal. In fact, students who attend Great Oaks will earn professional credentials by the time they graduate from high school, with many of them walking into fields that start in the six figures.
Eight years ago, everyone from guidance counselors to parents was pushing students into higher education choices and neglecting to at least give them the option to look at a trade school or a community college, often because there was a stigma attached to vocational trades.
Our culture did a pretty good job of reflecting dismissiveness and misconceptions about the trades — offering few role models or success stories as examples of achieving the American dream by using one’s hands for a living.
One of the few people who have elevated the working man and woman in the past 20 years has been Mike Rowe, whose Dirty Jobs TV show began when his mother called him and suggested it’d be great if his 90-year-old grandfather would see him actually “doing something on television that actually looked like work.”
At the time, he was working as a reporter for a television show in San Francisco.
Rowe said the next day, he was in a sewer doing a report shoulder to shoulder with a sewer inspector. The concept of showcasing the everyman who makes our lives better had never been done before and, to everyone’s surprise, including Rowe’s, it became wildly successful.
Why? In part because there were a significant number of people watching at home who saw themselves or their parents in the segments. Remember, only 34% of Americans have a college degree.
For the past 50 years, college and university attendance has been held up as the only path to success by educators and parents alike, especially parents who attended college, so much so that the trade classes were rarely mentioned to students as a post-high school option.
That resistance to giving children an option in vocational education in the 1980s and ’90s came home to roost in the past decades when the inevitable, steep decline of available skilled workers and tradespeople hit home.
But there has been a cultural shift in the past few years that is turning that resistance to trade schools on its head. At least part of that has to do with the out-of-control costs of attending a university and the debt that follows you decades after graduation, but it also has to do with how political college campuses have become.
A new poll from Gallup has found that confidence in higher education has plunged in the past eight years. Enrollments have dropped at the same time that tuition has risen and universities have become stridently politicized in the classrooms.
The June survey showed a mere 36% of Americans have either “quite a lot” or a “great deal” of confidence in higher education, which is down from 57% just eight years ago.
Conversely, while nearly every sector of higher education has been hit with enrollment declines, trade school programs are booming, research from the National Student Clearinghouse found.
Construction, culinary, mechanic trade programs, and surgical technician programs all experienced increases in enrollment between spring 2021 and 2022, the study showed, with construction trade programs experiencing the largest enrollment increase at a whopping 19.3 percentage points year over year.
There were also significant increases in mechanic programs and culinary ones, to name just a few.
The ignorance of the education system for decades has been that trade jobs lack relevance in society. However, it seems as though it’s pretty relevant to a homeowner to be able to call a plumber if a toilet is clogged, or if a business is experiencing a backup septic system, or a church basement is flooded.
No trade schools means no plumbers, no plumbers means no ability to fix the complicated systems that keep our homes and businesses functioning. The same goes with an HVAC technician: Who exactly did these decision-makers think would keep your furnace operating in the winter and air conditioning humming in the summer?
Unlikely it was someone with a degree in French literature or women’s studies.
Hill said she is very happy with her choice, “I get to walk out of high school with a skill and start my career. I don’t think enough high students know that is an option and that is a shame.”
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.
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.
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.
