The Patriots

by Don Feder

An earlier version of this article appeared in FrontPageMag.

NOTE: Almost all of us have heard of Horace Mann and John Dewey as pioneers in public education in America, which began in Massachusetts in 1830. But as Paul Harvey used to say, most people don’t know the rest of the story.

When he was governor of Virginia in 2015, Terry McAuliffe (who was deservedly defeated in this election) was pushing Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the schools, something he claimed did not exist in his 2021 campaign for governor.

When McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach,” he was articulating a first principle of public education going back to its beginnings in the early 19th century: “Give us your money. Give us your kids. Then close your eyes. Shut your mouth. And let us do our job of transforming society.”

Today, the cutting edge is Critical Race Theory (whites are inherently evil), the 1619 Project (America is inherently evil) and what one proponent called the Queering Up of public education.

A Kansas school apologized for handing out a “Gender Unicorn” worksheet which asked students, “Do you know your identity or are you still in identity confusion stage?” In Broward County, Florida, an elementary school class went on a field trip to a gay bar. (“Mommy, what’s fisting?”)

The National Education Association (NEA) makes sure that America's teachers have all the "tools" to indoctrinate children in the LGBT agenda.

But these are just the latest mutations. Sex education, which started in the 1940s, quickly devolved into sexuality education – where students learned a variety of perversions in the name of disease prevention and birth control.

For at least twenty years many schoolchildren have been taught more about Malcolm X than George Washington or Thomas Jefferson.

Overt anti-Americanism in the schools may be relatively new, but it has a long pedigree.

When the virtual "distance learning" took over during COVID, parents began to see what was actually being taught to their children.

The Marxist concept of universal education

The seeds of today’s horror show were planted at the outset. The basis of today’s educational radicalism comes from early Marxist ideology.

In “The Communist Manifesto” (published 1848), Karl Marx decreed, “The education of all children from the moment that they can get along without their mother’s care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.” When the workers’ revolt failed to materialize in capitalist countries, state education became the engine of revolution.

Writing in the 1920s, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci said, “Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and media (and then) by transforming the consciousness of society.” Hence the long march through the institutions.

And so, socialist ideology has captured the schools. In his book, “American Marxism” (published in July), Mark R. Levin writes: “It is academia and its rule over the education of generations of students that serves as the most potent force for Marxist indoctrination and advocacy, and the most powerful impetus for its acceptance and spread.”

Mann and Dewey: The radical foundations of American public education

While Europeans Marx and Gramsci preached the importance of education to the coming revolution, Horace Mann and John Dewey laid the foundation for public education in America.

Generally acknowledged to be the father of state schools, Mann was a utopian and an admirer of the collectivist communities (early attempts of socialism) established by industrialist Robert Owen (the George Soros of his age) in the Northeast and Indiana.

In the 1830s, Mann pioneered the first public school system in America in Massachusetts, by setting up the first State Board of Education and becoming its first secretary. Mann later went to Prussia (then the cradle of statism) to learn how government schools could mold impressionable minds.

Horace Mann (left) and John Dewey were monumental in shaping - and radicalizing - the public education system.

John Dewey (the father of so-called Progressive education) carried Mann’s work into the 20th century. As Mann had looked to Prussia for inspiration, Dewey made his pilgrimage to the USSR. As Levin documents: “Dewey was an early fan of the Soviet Union and its ‘educational system’ – or, more precisely, its massive propaganda effort where obedience and conformity were contorted into a new unity.”

Dewey was a signer of the 1933 Humanist Manifesto (“a socialist cooperative economic order must be established”). He said: “You can’t make socialists out of individualists. Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.” Indeed.

… And into the 21st century

In the 21st century, Marx’s and Dewey’s work of social transformation is carried on by the teachers’ unions and their auxiliary, the Democrat Party.

Critical Race Theory is the Marxist model of oppressor and oppressed applied to race. Queering Up applies it to gender.

Again, it’s not about teaching children how to think but what to think. That’s why the fight over Critical Race Theory and mask mandates has turned so vicious, with Attorney General Merrick Garland threatening to treat unruly parents as domestic terrorists.

And it’s why the 2.3-million-member National Education Association (NEA), at its annual convention in July, voted to increase its support of Critical Race Theory and work to fight against so-called “white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy … capitalism… and other forms of power and oppression” that are said to animate opposition to CRT.  (It’s also why the NEA gives 94% of its campaign contributions to the Democrat party.)


The other major union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is also heavily into the CRT agenda. This photo, from their website, shows the AFT president and secretary-treasurer at a George Floyd memorial.

These are the people who get to spend an average of 15,000 hours per student indoctrinating the captives of America’s public school system.

Final thoughts from MassResistance: In order to effectively fight what’s happening in our public schools, we need to understand the many decades of momentum behind this radicalism, and that a certain kind of people have been attracted to its power structure. None of this is accidental – and it will take a very deliberate, unrelenting, and focused effort to change it.

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Don Feder is a former columnist for the Boston Herald and currently works with The Ruth Institute. He is also a long-time friend of MassResistance.

by Allen Williams

Dear Mayor Michael Copeland and Council members:

Bott Radio Network has recently brought to the public’s attention Olathe City Council’s intention to enact a non discrimination ordinance which translates to special protection for a minority group over and above what everyone else enjoys.  Council has passed this ordinance so far without punitive measures for others seeking to live their lives according to their faith and convictions. How long this will last is anyone’s guess because existing ordinances are easy to amend and unfortunately,you’ve opened the door for the LGBTQ agenda of forcing people to affirm their lifestyle.

I would caution this council to thoroughly educate themselves on the ramifications of further ‘enhancements’ to this ordinance drawing from the lessons of harassment of master cake baker Jack Phillips in many legal challenges including his unwillingness to celebrate transgender transformations which is nothing short of persecution. Then there is Baronelle Stuzman punished for failing to allow government to dictate her artistic endeavors in producing flower arrangements for a gay wedding and sweet shop owners Aaron and Melissa Klein fined $135,000 for failing to bake a cake affirming a gay wedding.  I would ask is ‘choice’  relegated to abortion only?

Often these ‘non discrimination’ ordinances are used as a springboard to punish people who live by a different system of values. The fact that someone declines to support a message that opposes their religious beliefs is not harmful discrimination any more than it is for someone to refuse to vote for the candidate of LGBTQ choice. After all, isn't that what the First Amendment was intended to do protect free religious exercise? 

I would  suggest that council tread lightly on this footpath of ‘equality’ as the LGBT agenda has demonstrated that much more than mere equality is desired.  Anise Parker, the former LGBTQ mayor of Houston, thought it necessary to subpoena the messages of local pastors to ensure that proper ‘thought content’ was being conveyed to parishioners. We are rapidly moving in the magnitude and direction of Orwell in defining ‘thought crimes’.

The LGBTQ message appears to be ‘their one size fits all’.  We hope Olathe government is capable of learning from the mistakes of others and will not traverse the same disastrous path that leads to affirmation of one class of citizen’s rights over and above everyone else’s.  Otherwise this mayor and city council will leave an untoward legacy that may never be overcome.

Rest assured, we’ll be watching.

by Robert Oscar Lopez

{An excellent 2014 article that exposes the insipidness of gay adoption:  Lopez considers himself a “children’s advocate” in rejecting gay marriage and gay adoption.  In the process he is also addressing one of the greatest threats to the survival of the family in recent history, especially with the global explosion of gay surrogacy and gay adoption.  Some of the dark “underworld” agendas he hints at need more attention -- publicly.  Read his own story at:  http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/08/6065. -- DNI]

S.E. Cupp is one of the latest media figures to make a pitch on gay marriage and adoption.  As is often the case, she throws out so many canards in this cocktail of insipidness, one scarcely knows where to begin. 

I will say conservatives have got to move on gay marriage....[and] on gay adoption. If abortion is the abhorrent option – and I believe it is – then adoption by any two loving people has got to be the better option. 

First of all, the latest estimates indicate that somewhere between 12-15% of heterosexual couples struggle with infertility.  Currently many of these viable homes, rather than adopting, are being steered to the artificial reproduction market and contributing to the 1.5% (and rising) of live American births tied to in vitro technology.  The alternative to abortion is obviously to get more of these viable straight couples to avoid sperm-banking or surrogacy, and to consider adopting instead.

Anyone who’s lost a birth parent to death, divorce, or a tragedy knows that a kid feels the absence of a father or mother.  This is square one for adoptees, orphans, children of divorce, or children of same-sex couples – someone was there when you were born, and now he or she is not there.  That person is a very real human being, tied to you by flesh and blood.  A kid mourns the missing person, thinks about him, longs to reconnect with him.  It hurts to be cut off from a mother or father.  I was cut off from my dad because he divorced my lesbian mother; I was reared by two women.

It’s not a small thing to make a kid grow up without a father because a bunch of self-centered adults can’t get their acts together.  I’ve had enough of pundits like S.E. Cupp being so glib about things that are incredibly painful for people who are actually in these situations, and powerless about it to boot.  If you haven’t been raised by a gay couple and you haven’t been adopted, it might be hard to understand how offensive it is to hear people on TV talk about fraught transactions like adoption and same-sex parenting with such confident nonchalance.

One of the unnoticed ironies in the debate on gay adoption has to do with David Brock, the chieftain at Media Matters, whose subdivision Equality Matters has gone after me more than once for my views on a child’s right to his mother and father.  Brock spent much of his 2002 memoirs, Blinded by the Right, on the pain he felt about being adopted.  In fact, his adoption weighed on him and complicated his relationship with his father much more than did his gayness. You would think that Brock would understand why it’s not such a simple thing to yank kids from a birth family and toss him into a home with one or two adults unrelated to him.  Ironic self-awareness is apparently lacking on the left.  {And with Child Protective Services who often remove children from their true parents with out sufficient justification. - ED}

The truth is that adoption in the United States is too expensive, and many heterosexual couples find the costs prohibitive, so they are priced out of the market by gay couples, who have much higher incomes and are, 100% of the time, forced to take babies from other people since they cannot conceive them on their own.  In fact, gay adopters have such an insatiable desire to parlay their high incomes into cash-for-kids that they waged a war against Catholic Charities adoption centers, going as far as forcing many such agencies to shut down as punishment for not giving gay couples other people’s abandoned children.

The dirty secret about gay adoption is that most often when homosexual couples adopt, one of their pair is the biological parent.  Usually the child comes from a former heterosexual relationship that broke down.  So when they “adopt,” they typically have to put a bunch of people through the mud fight that my dear friend Janna endured: they have to drag the opposite-sex parent to family court, strip him or her of custody, and then force the poor little kid to submit to the parental authority of a new, sometimes creepy, person who’s sleeping with a biological parent and very likely caused the breakup of that child's original family.

That’s the real-life adoption story that doesn’t make for great gay headlines.  Gay adoption has unfortunate but ineluctable ties to divorce.  In fact, by encouraging gay adoption so much, we are encouraging a whole new generation of homewreckers – gays who want to be parents and figure out that the cheapest way to do it is to seduce someone of the same sex who is currently in a rocky marriage with children.

You will hear, from time to time, about hundreds of thousands of children in foster care who can’t find families to adopt them.  This is a favorite statistic for gay marriage gurus to throw out as a kind of emotional Shock and Awe, a debate-stopper of the first order, especially if you can cough up an example of special-needs children being raised by adorable lesbians in Michigan.  There has never been a backlog of infants, so these holdouts are typically older children who landed in the child protective services system because of a crisis.  Many of them are kids who don’t want to placed with gay couples, or kids whom gay couples don’t want, either.  What people don’t tell you – because they don’t want to and don’t have to, until you push them on it – is that most of those children have living parents, or living kin networks, and the foster care system has to work on reuniting them with their struggling birth families.  Otherwise, the government would merely be an oppressive police state taking people’s kids away and signing them over to rich folks in exchange for cash, as happened in dictatorships like the kind that governed Argentina in the 1970s.

Most people don’t have the time to work through the nuances of foster care versus adoption.  Fewer still are aware of how many people in “Adoption Land” – the community of adoptees and adoptive families – are calling for massive reform in both foster care and adoption.  What gay activists are asking for, on both fronts, would actually be moving in the precisely wrong direction; gay lobbyists want agencies to speed up the process by which foster kids are cut off from their birth mothers and fathers and subordinated permanently to same-sex couples eager to acquire them.  On the international adoption front, even gay adoptive father Frank Ligtvoet has faced the painful reality that adoption systems are overemphasizing the desire of wealthy childless families rather than the needs of impoverished communities that are struggling to provide for their children (in the Huffington Post, no less).

It took a while for brave activists like Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy to apply the same critiques on the domestic fronts, but now, too, people are scrutinizing domestic adoptions and finding much to improve.  (The film Philomena, ironically, humanizes the pain of a birth mother who is pressured to give up her infant who turns out to be gay; despite the film’s sympathy for homosexuals, the gay movement is pushing to create more Philomenas nowadays so they can build their rainbow families.)

Foster care costs the public money, whereas adoption is a huge moneymaker for certain attorneys and even, in the United Kingdom and here, for social service agencies (see this article on the blowback that resulted from rewarding people too handsomely for placing foster kids in adoptive homes).  So the mentality that it’s always best to get kids out of foster care and into adoption is a mixed bag.  On the one hand, we have ample evidence that life in foster care is hard, and we know that many adoptive homes are great places to save suffering children from such instability.

(I should confess: when I was fifteen, there were problems in my home, and my father did not want to take me in, so he drove me to a “boarding school” in Maine, where I stayed while my home situation might improve.  It was very hard to feel abandoned, essentially, at the moment that my dad dropped me off at the main office with a check, but would it have made sense for some couple to adopt me at that point?  In the end I returned to my mothers’ home and finished high school early, going to college as a de facto emancipated minor.)

On the other hand, we have much to worry about when we envision rushing kids out of foster care into gay adoption.  Gay adoptive parents have proved just as capable as straight foster parents of kidnapping, murder, abuse, rape, child pornography, and neglect involving the children they acquire.  So everything that’s painful about foster care with straight people is also painful about gay adoption; the difference is that in a gay adoption, the child loses forever his chance at having a mom and dad.  Whether adopters are gay or straight, it’s not a good idea to incentivize social services agencies’ power to remove children from troubled homes and transfer all parental equivalence to a new home without making a good-faith effort to repair problems with the birth family.

It sounds ominous to be in the position of “aging out” of foster care without having been adopted.  But it’s not necessarily as bad as it sounds.  You can still maintain contact with foster parents, but once you are emancipated, it is your choice to do that (not something forced on you by law), and you also have the choice to rebuild your relationship with your birth kin network, the way I rebuilt a relationship with my father as an adult.  My mother’s lesbian partner never adopted me, and that was probably the right decision.

---

Robert Oscar Lopez edits English Manif.  [See also his own “bio”: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/08/6065/ The article first appeared here.

by Malachi Bailey

An inmate in a British female prison sexually assaulted multiple fellow inmates, and it turns out the predator is actually a man, formerly known as Steve, who “identifies” as a lesbian woman.

These days, according to The Telegraph, the 52-year-old is officially known as Karen White, but was born with the name Stephen Wood. At the time of the assaults, White was undergoing sex reassignment, but had not had surgery, The Telegraph reported.

White didn’t hesitate to prey on the female inmates. Within weeks of arriving in prison, he began making lewd comments toward another inmate before he forced himself on her, according to the Telegraph.

That was not White’s only victim. He was accused of four sexual assaults in total between September and November last year, according to The Guardian. He confessed to at least two of the attacks.

He was finally moved to an all-male prison, according to PJ Media.

It’s good that he won’t be able to assault any more women in his new prison, but he should have been in the all-male prison to begin with.

The female prison where White committed his assaults did not only have female prisoners. It also had children. The prison contains a mother-and-baby unit that can accommodate up to 10 infants aged under 2, according to The Times.

This fact becomes even more shocking considering White’s past convictions.

White is a convicted pedophile who was previously jailed in 2001 for an attack on a child, according to PJ Media.

Putting a convicted male pedophile into an all-female prison with infants and toddlers is not just a simple mistake. This is an example of negligence in the name of being “progressive.”

Social media users were disgusted at the news.