Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 734 | Teachers' Unions Must Be Stopped | Guest: Marissa Streit

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

Today we're joined by Marissa Streit, CEO of PragerU, to discuss the failures of teachers' unions and public education. PragerU just released a short documentary, "The Bigger Bully in School: Why Public Education is Failing in America," which exposes today's teachers' unions as highly funded and politicized organizations that do nothing but hurt the public education system and protect terrible teachers. And the worst part? These unions are not even hiding it. We discuss how they get away with this and what we can do to get involved and fight back for our kids. Then, we react to some of the worst teacher/school board TikToks we can find. --- Timecodes: (00:54) Interview with Marissa begins (01:18) The idea to start PragerU (02:45) Teachers' unions / The Bigger Bully in School: Why Public Education is Failing in America (11:50) Equity and lowered standards (15:20) How to get involved (21:20) Reacting to teaching TikToks --- Today's Sponsors: Carly Jean Los Angeles — use promo code 'ALLIEB' to save 20% off your first order at CarlyJeanLosAngeles.com! A'Del — go to adelnaturalcosmetics.com and enter promo code "ALLIE" for 25% off your first order! EdenPURE — get 3 Thunderstorm Air Purifiers for under $200 at EdenPureDeals.com, use promo code 'ALLIE3'! --- Links: PragerU: "The Bigger Bully in School: Why Public Education is Failing in America" https://www.prageru.com/video/the-biggest-bully-in-school-why-public-education-is-failing-in-america --- Relevant Episodes: Ep 662 | Teachers Union Demands Anti-White Racism https://apple.co/3WuPba2 Ep 361 | Teachers' Unions vs. Our Kids & Pastors vs. 'Jezebel' Harris | Guest: Corey DeAngelis https://apple.co/3W9WXWP --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Well, there is a problem with the education system in the United States. If you listen to this podcast, you are probably well aware of that. But where does this problem start? Today, the CEO of Prager You, Marissa Strite, is joining me to talk about the corruption of the teachers' unions and how this is manifest. itself in the classroom. And then after that interview, I'm going to react to some of the craziest and most popular TikTok videos of teachers just airing out all of their absurdities that they are bringing into the classroom to confuse children. This episode is brought to you by Good Ranchers.

Go to Good Ranchers.com. Use promo code Alley at checkout. That's good ranchers.com. Code Allie. Well, thanks so much for joining us. For those who might not know, tell us what you your job is at Prager You. So I'm the CEO of Prager You. And you're the person who called the shots and you started this whole thing. Yeah. Prager You actually started 11 years ago in my kitchen. And in some ways, it's like my first child.

I have three other kids, but Prager You started first. Wow. And how did you get the idea? I don't know if I know the answer to all of the questions that I'm asking. I thought that I knew, but how did you get the idea to start Prager You? So it was actually not my idea. The idea came about from Alan Estrin, who is the producer of Dennis's radio show, and he's been working with him for 30 years.

And then one day he said, you know, we really need to use the internet to help cure people. It looks like we need to give some medicine for the mind. And Dennis Prager has what we call, you know, kind of like penicillin for the mind. He has this great way of explaining complex ideas. And America has become sicker and sicker. really education got us into this massive mess that we're seeing today. And so they said, well, let's hire somebody who has kind of a background in education at that point in my life. I had a master's in education. I taught in California every grade, kinder through seventh. I ran a school

myself. I also had a nonprofit background experience. And I had experience in digital media. And so the combination of all of those random skill sets seem to have been kind of what maybe God plan for me. And so the three of us got together and we started really small. As I mentioned, we started in my kitchen. And Dennis entrusted me with, you know, his name and his values. And I worked closely with Alan to build what is now the largest educational media enterprise, the conservative movement, has ever seen. And the combination of your skill set and your background also kind of sets us up for the video that you guys just published about why education in this country, specifically public education, is failing. So tell us a little bit about that. Why is it so

bad? Right. So this is exactly why I'm here and this is why I'm doing what I'm doing. 20 years ago when I started with the world of education as an educator, I realized that there is a very big bully in school who is never held accountable for their bullying. And Those are the teachers unions. And so we produced a short 20-minute mini-documentary that really outlines and explains why one of the biggest problems in America right now that we're facing are the fact that we have these teachers unions that actually admit this is just before I joined Prairie before we got started in 2009, the head council of the teachers union announced that they don't really care about students. They don't really care about government schools. They care about power. And I saw that firsthand when I was an educator, and it frustrated me because there were not enough organizations out there that are actually advocating for kids and advocating for parents.

And so you fast forward 20 years now, we're seeing the power of these teachers unions and the fact that they basically haven't been stopped and they keep gulping and gulping additional power. And it has come to a point, Allie, where they don't even hide it anymore. Back when I was a teacher, it seemed a little sneaky, a little bit behind the scenes. But if you read their most recent, the NEA, which is the largest teachers union group in America, they published in July their platform and the things that they were going to be focusing on. And they're not focusing on issues that help children or teachers. They are focusing on very hard left-wing political issues. And they're using the teachers' unions, the power of the reach that they have.

with their membership and their money and their connections to actually brainwash American kids. And if I spend a moment just describing to you how egregious this platform is, one of the things that they're focusing on, and I'm just going to read you a list. I have the entire packet here from July, but I pulled out some excerpts because I think you might find this really interesting. One of the things that at the top of their agenda is support transitioning students and push the whole pronouns agenda. Fight institutional homophobia. Fight for equity.

Fight against white supremacy culture in America, anti-black and colorism. Fight for more DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. And make sure to put pressure on universities to use that as a tool to decide which kids should make it into college. In addition to that, they want to fight by all, this is how they write this, all means to defend Roe v. Wade

and give students, kids, access to birth control and abortion. Additionally, I have a few more of them. They're working on giving asylum for migrants who are now arriving at the border. This is a very topical issue actually this week. Fight Florida and they don't say gay law, which of course we all know is a complete farce

with the way they title it. Fight for mandatory masking and vaccines in schools. This is, again, in the NEA as agenda. This article number 35, if anybody wants to look it up, attack the largest 25 organizations that they don't like. I would not be surprised if Prager Yu is probably on their list. Take a stand on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, accusing Israel of abuse and discrimination, packing the courts. I mean, for goodness sakes, how are any of these issues important for children? And so we have to, this is our time as parents to defend our kids, to defend our future, and fight this behemoth.

Wow. I had a woman, a former teacher who was on the show a couple years ago. I think she was out of the state of California who tried to stand up to the teachers' unions because they're not just taking away valuable education from kids. They're really bullying a lot of teachers. Teachers who don't agree are scared and for good reason to stand up to the teachers unions because they really, act kind of like the mafia. They're like, if you do not support us, if you don't align with how, with, you know, the things that we believe, then we're going to ruin you. We're going to make it very difficult to do your job. So when the teachers unions have this much power and they're this disinterested in the success and the well-being of students, how in the world do we begin combating it? Sometimes it seems like they're just too big and too powerful to embed with

the Democratic Party for us to really be able to push back against them. So the teachers unions are the Democratic Party. You know, read through the list. It's basically synonymous. I don't believe that we fight because we know we can win. I believe that we fight because we know we have to fight. And, you know, the truth is with us. And I also believe that there is something very powerful about parenting that gives you

a source of energy that you never believe that you would have. And so if parents understand what is at stake and we all come together, we can be so incredibly powerful. And part of what we need to do is we need to revolt. This is our revolution. This is our moment to protect our kids. And our eyes need to be wide open and we need to just push hard against it. And I can't tell you how many teachers I know that actually share our values and are

still part of the teachers unions thinking that they have to be members because they think they need the protection. I mean, on a daily basis, I get DMs on my Instagram from teachers who follow us and say, you know, I'm really sorry, but I feel like I have to be part of the union because I feel like I need the protection. And it's really a farce because they don't actually protect good teachers. Good teachers don't need to be protected. They're not going to get fired. It's the bad teachers getting protected. Right, right. They protect not just bad teachers. They protect, not just bad teachers, but in some cases, criminal teachers. There was that story a couple of years ago. I remember in the New York Post where this guy was still getting paid over $100,000 a year after he had been

found guilty of sexually harassing high school students. There are these kinds of rubber rooms across the country where these bad, corrupt, in some cases, criminal teachers are still getting paid taxpayer money. That's what the teachers unions are good for. Exactly. I mean, they protect the bad teachers and they actually don't reward the good teachers because there are plenty of really young, energetic, incredibly amazing teachers out there. But just because they haven't been tenured yet, they haven't received, you know, they don't receive bonuses. What is what a great way it would be if we could reward teachers who do great by actually providing them bonuses for doing good work as opposed to being rewarded based on the number of years. that you serve the membership of the NEA and the teachers' unions, which is now how they effectively get rewarded. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie,

you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers.

they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. I wonder sometimes what is the why behind this? When you have stories coming out of places like the city of Baltimore, where I think

it was last year that almost half of the class graduating only really. read at about a kindergarten level. So we're talking basically illiterate adults and they're able to graduate because what we see in the pursuit of so-called equity is just the lowering of standards over and over again. I just wonder why someone would even go into the field of education if they don't care about that. Why don't you want your students to be able to read? Why don't you want them to be able to write? Why don't you want them to be able to do math? I mean, I know that, okay, yeah, sure, we've got some corrupt communists in there who just care about power. They just want activist, but surely that can't characterize all of these even liberal teachers. So I just wonder,

like, what is the motivation behind dumbing down these students? Yeah, I mean, I think the dumbing down these students is, is blame and child abuse, right? And like to not hold kids accountable to the standards that they could and should be held accountable to is child abuse. I don't believe that all teachers are bad. And I don't believe that the teachers who are teaching at lower standards are bad. I think the lowering of standards comes from two places. One is it's institutional and, you know, it's in the system's best interest to lower the standards in order for them to have an easy time simply meeting the standards, right? It's like, okay, well, if we didn't meet the standards last year, let's just lower the standards so that we don't have to hold the

bureaucrats and the teachers accountable for something like that. And the other thing is, in many case of what I have seen is that the standards have been lowered in the name of equity. And so there is this flattening of expectations of kids. And you are not allowed to have some kids who are ahead and some kids who are in the middle and some kids who are below. What they're trying to do is flatten everybody's ability. And so the way to do that is to lower the standards as much as possible so that nobody feels bad because there are other kids who are doing better. And so rather than allowing having a philosophy that is a little more competitive. You know, I believe that part of a competition

is a great thing for a child, but they don't believe in competition. They believe in equity. And so if you don't believe in competition and you only believe in equity, the only way to actually achieve equal results is to completely lower the standards to a point where anybody can pass.

And that has been essentially what has happened in our education system. They've continued to lower the standards so that everybody can pass and everybody like an assembly line can be brought up to the next grade without real accountability from the bureaucrats or the system itself. Man, and that has lifelong implications. Of course, you're going to be, in a sense, a slave to the system and completely dependent on an entity to take care of you. If you have not achieved true liberation, they use that word often not really meaning liberation,

but true liberation, which comes through education, the ability to read. the ability to reason, the ability to write and communicate is everything. It's everything. And to not be able to teach kids that, that have the capacity, as you said, it is a form of abuse. It's certainly a form of neglect. So for the teachers and especially the parents who are listening to this, I know you mentioned the revolt, but they're listening and they're incensed and they're thinking, okay, I want to get involved. I want to do something. Whether or not a parent has kids in the public school system, it's still your tax dollars. It's still your community. You still have a vested interest because those kids are going to grow up to be your future leaders and neighbors and voters and all of that.

And so we all have to care. Tell us like the first steps to take for people who just want to get involved and try to fight, as you said. Okay. So there are there are few types of fighters out there. There are people who are like us who can run into arrows. And we're in that field, right? And so it's a lot. I don't want to make it sound like anybody should just go. and speak and be vocal because not everybody can do that, but everybody can do something, right? And so one thing you can do is start with your own community, your own family, your friends, and your community. We are trying at Prageria to provide as many resources we can for parents, including the

parents who are not ready to be out there in vocal. We've created an app that you can download onto your television, you can download onto your iPad, and instead of your child watching the type of garbage that is out there, and frankly, a lot of the educational stuff that is out there is garbage. Watch Prager You. It's broccoli for your child's brain. They'll be the smartest kid at the next birthday party, I guarantee. We have shows for kindergartners all the way through 12th grade and up.

So that is one way to get started. You can also get started by simply being informed. Every quarter, there is just a massive amount of more information that parents need to be aware of. We can't keep our head in the sand. The more aware you become, the more you're going to build the instant. on how you can be helpful to the movement, right? And so follow accounts like yours, follow Prager You, subscribe to our newsletters.

We provide a lot of information of what's happening out there. If you're ready to actually enlist, join your school board, join your community board, join your city council, most of these egregious decisions are actually made on a local level. People pay attention to presidential elections because it's exciting and it's all over the news. But most of the things that are impacting people in their families,

are really localized decisions. And so try to find a way to get involved. And then also don't do it alone. Find a cohort, find other friends that can do this with you. If you're locking arms with other parents, you're going to be much more powerful and much more confident. And I would also say this is a little behind-the-scenes information from back when I was ahead of a school.

This is a little advice. When you go to the head of school, if you're sending your kid to a school, do not meet with them alone. Request a town hall. The reason they want to have alone meetings is because you're more isolated and they can say things to you

that they won't say publicly. And they will, you know, some of them actually listen, but many of them just pretend to listen. They'll pretend to take notes and they'll pretend to say that they're going to do something about it. But because they're just meeting

with you face to face, there's no real accountability. And so find your cohort and have town halls with the leadership of the school and say many of us have the same issue. Many of us are concerned about, the sexualization of our kids and the lowering of standards and and all of the things that you're

concerned about push for these town halls so that it can be recorded and so that it can be public and so that there can be actual accountability afterwards um and then you know lastly i would say is just talk about it with everybody you can including your children you know make sure that they're prepared to know that when you send them to school that values are taught at home not in school it's not the job of the government to teach your kids values. It's a job of the parents and we need to take that ownership back into our own home so that we don't forfeit some of the most important things in our kids and that is their character and their moral values. For too long, we've been relying on these institutions to do that for us. And it's a lot of work. I totally get it, but it's something

that we can't neglect. And those are the beginning seeds of what I believe is the revolution that we need to create. Yes, and amen. Well, that is so good. And I really do encourage people download the app. People are always asking me, what content should I allow my kids to watch? Well, you don't have to worry about navigating Netflix and things like that or worried about what YouTube ads are going to pop up. You can just download the Praker U app.

You don't have to worry about any of that stuff. Got all the content right there. Thank you so much for taking the time to join me. I know this is going to be really encouraging for a lot of moms out there. Thank you, Ali. I love your work. Okay. I love that conversation.

She is just so fiery and unfortunately. and she just makes me feel like I can run through a wall for the sake of our kids. All right. Just to kind of put a fine point on how crazy our schools are right now, how crazy some of these teachers have become. I just wanted to react to some popular TikTok videos that have been posting recently by human beings that are educating our children. just to give you an example of what we're up against here.

Here's one. The way to make sure that students' pronouns are respected in your classroom is to give a class survey. It's anonymous. And the first question you can ask is, what is your name on the roster? Then the next question following up could be, you know, what is the name you'd like me to call you in class? And it's really important to follow those up with questions such as, can I share this information with your caretakers? Can I share this with your other teachers? Can I share this information with other students in the classroom?

And then doing all of that again with pronouns. All right. So I know that this might sound like she's just being considerate and she's just protecting their safety. But look, parents have a right to know this stuff. And I don't know. Maybe you think, well, what if the parent is abusive? Look, if the parent is abusive, then teachers are mandatory reporters. If they actually suspect abuse, they have to report that to the proper authorities.

what they mean typically these activist teachers by safe or unsafe is do these parents affirm their idea, the idea that their daughter can become a boy. And so that's what they deem as safe. What is unsafe is a parent who says, you know what? I know my daughter. This might be a difficult stage that she's going through right now, but we are going to affirm how God made her. And we are going to help her accept who she is and love her body. That's what they would deem unsafe.

the people they are protecting these kids from is really just parents who care about the best interests of their kids. These teachers don't. These teachers don't care at all. This is like about them feeling good. This is about them finding validation in children because these teachers at the end of the day are not going to walk alongside these students as they medically transition and ruin their bodies and lives. They're not going to be the ones picking out the pieces of their depression and suicide when these children are pushed into irreversible damage. The parents are. And so this attempt to try to separate parents from kids in the name of safety and love and inclusion, I mean, it's criminal. It's absolutely criminal. All right, here's the next one.

So in the preschool classroom I work in today, a little kid asked me, are you a boy or a girl? And this has happened a few times, but I live in a pretty conservative area, so I don't necessarily feel comfortable saying what I would like to say, which is I'm neither, some people are neither a boy or a girl, so I just went to my go-to, which is, well, what do you think? And they said, I think you're a boy. And the kid next to them said, no, she's a girl. And then the first kid said, no, she's a boy. And I think she's a boy is personally pre-gender affirming for me. And it came at a great time, because tomorrow is my first HRT appointment, and I'm very nervous and very excited.

So wish me luck. Oh my gosh. So, so sad. I mean, first of all, she is laughing about these young children being confused about this. As we've talked about before, it is so important for kids' development to be able to put things in people in categories, to be able to distinguish between male and female, helps them understand themselves and put themselves in proper context and categories.

and do the same for other people. Kids, you see, naturally order their world to try to make the world make more sense and try to make the world smaller. It helps them feel secure. It helps them feel safe. Kids like routine. They like predictability. They like stability.

And when you destabilize their understanding of the world by saying that this person who really looks like a woman but just has short hair and probably dresses like a man is neither one or the other or both one or the other. I mean, you are seeking validation from the confusion of children. And again, that's wrong. There's something very grotesque, I think, about that. We should be providing as much as we can as parents of these children a foundation of clarity and truth. Having said that, I believe that Mr. DeLeo would make an excellent president.

However, I feel that electing the only cis white male. on this board president of this district sends the wrong message to our community, a message that is contrary to what we as a board have been trying to accomplish. I think that it's important that we practice what we preach and that our words have strength when they are spoken. All right. So this is someone in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. this is the school board at Upper Moreland School District saying that they are not going to elect a guy for the president of the district because he is a cis white male, a cisgender white male because again in leftist crazy world, your immutable characteristics, your identity as a white person is a strike against you.

It's not a matter of competence. It's not a matter of qualifications or background or merit or even desire to do the job. It is just a matter of what boxes you check off. And that is why so many things that are run by leftists just spiral into chaos and to disarray because they care less about what you bring to the table as far as your skill set and more about completely meaningless characteristics like how much melanin you have in your skin. So these are the people that are making decisions in a lot of cases. is about what your students are learning, what your kids are learning. Like if you have a white

student, wouldn't you be a little bit concerned to have them in the school district knowing that the people making the decisions see them as someone who is automatically disqualified from certain positions simply because of the skin that they were born in? Or aren't we past that? Doesn't that sound kind of familiar from a few decades ago? We didn't like how that worked out. Why would we reverse that in hope for different results? Crazy. All right, here's another clip. I have a thought. Now, I know the trolls are going to be like, oh, oh, she should have stopped there, but I'm not going to do that. So there's a lot of controversy about whether or not sex education, health education, relationships, gender, all that stuff should be taught in the classroom. here's what I think.

You, you as in parents, send their kids to school to learn math, reading, writing, history, science, from a professional, right? But in the same token, a lot of people who do that also think that they're experts in sexuality education because they've had kids. With all due respect, just because you've had kids does not mean that you are a sexuality education expert. It does not mean you are an expert in sex. It does not mean you are an expert in the body. It does not mean you are an expert in gender. It does not mean you are an expert in relationships. So the same way that we're sending our kids to school to learn these skills,

these life skills like math and quadratic equations and calculus and whatever else from a professional, we also need to be ensuring that our students are learning information about their health, about identity, about very complex issues from a professional. I mean, like, it makes sense. It makes sense. No, it doesn't make sense. You're not an expert in anything. You're not an expert in anything.

I have a lot of awesome teachers that follow me and love this podcast. And we did an episode about education and teachers a few weeks ago and something that a lot of you said, because I think it was about this tweet that someone said, you know what, these parents, they shouldn't be able to homeschool. Teachers go through all of this education, get all of these certificates in order to homeschool. That makes them, or in order to educate your kids at school. And so that makes them an expert.

You're not an expert because you didn't go to school for this. And what a lot of you said, who are teachers, is that the courses that you took were basically jokes, that what you have learned about being a good teacher, you have learned on the job, that most of the things that you learned in school were to, not actually what helped you become a teacher and that those certifications are really meaningless. Look, I had a lot of friends in college who were education majors. And it was something that they even joked about, that their classes were so easy, that their courses were easy to take. Now, these people are great teachers. And they learn on the job. It's a matter of loving your

job and learning as you go. But a lot of great teachers will tell you that their degree was almost, maybe not entirely, depending on what you teach, but almost meaningless. Like I think actually teachers are probably better off studying a different major than education because these education courses are so often packed in with so much activism and so much meaninglessness and so many empty lessons that you finish with a degree that in some cases like this girls make you feel like an expert, but you're really not. And this is what I said on Twitter. and I know some people got angry about this.

This is not demeaning teachers in general, especially those who have learned so much apart from the degree that you have. Whatever degree this girl has. Whatever degree. Degrees a maybe, plural. This girl has. I guarantee that 95% of parents in this country

could probably complete it in a month. Just take the test, give me the quizzes, tell me what you know. I guarantee I could do it. This girl is not an expert in anything. She's not an expert in sex. she's not an expert in identity, whatever that even means. She's not an expert in relationships.

She's not an expert in children. Yes, being a parent of a child makes you an expert in those things for that child because this woman does know anything, anything personal about the children that she is teaching, but they think that they know more than you. They think that they are better than you. I'm sorry, but you do not know the children that you are serving. You don't know them like their parents do. you don't have a right to talk to them about this kind of personal stuff.

And I think that you're creepy if you want to. I really do. We have too many creepy teachers out there. A lot of great ones. Too many creepy ones. Okay, I think we have one more. So I run the Pride Club at my school. And I'm having kind of an issue with another teacher in the school building right now.

I have a couple kids who have come to me and told me that she has called them out in the of class for being gay. She said some pretty terrible things about me and the club, telling kids that she thinks it's stupid and a waste of time, and, you know, we're pulling kids out of her class, which technically, yes, you know, we are pulling kids out of the class. But it's only for 30 minutes a week, and it's on Mondays. So the last, like, 30 minutes of first period, the kids come to me.

I understand that, you know, the kids are coming to my class during another class period. I have okayed this with my administration, with my principal, my admin on that, because the kids told me straight up, they were like, we don't want to have it after school just in case because some of their parents don't know. It would make them feel more comfortable to just, you know, do it at school. That way it's a little more, you know, discreet. So it is completely okay with my admin that I'm running this club during school hours. And again, it's only 30 minutes a week. However, this teacher is now crossing a line. She is calling out my kids.

She is saying extremely homophobic things. She's bashing the community and the club itself. And I'm kind of fed up with it. She literally came to my class and went through every name in her roster to try and get me to out the kids to her. So she knew who was, you know, not straight. So that way, you know, she'd have that information, which I did not give her.

I would not give her that. I don't really care if she doesn't like me. Whatever. Not my business. I don't particularly care if she doesn't like when the club happens because that's not her business either since I okayed it with my admin. All right. I know that was long.

I don't understand why these people go to TikTok with like these kind of problems, first of all, why does the TikTok world need to know that? But I think that this clip does highlight an important thing that's going on. Like this teacher is taking kids out of a class where they are probably learning something valuable because of their identity. And she got approval of this by the administration. So the administration knows that these kids for 30 minutes a week are not getting taught the things that they need to be taught, are not learning, reading, writing, and arithmetic and are instead getting together to talk about what,

sexuality and gender, maybe that's why our literacy rate is so low. Maybe that's why our math competency rate is so low. Maybe that's why you see those videos circulating constantly of the man on the street interviews in New York City where a guy is like asking a young person, hey, how many states does the United States have and they don't know? Like, what does it mean when this clock is pointing to the nine and the six? They can tell you. Like we're talking about 18 year old kids in the United States in some cases who don't know the answers to these questions. And in case you think that's a one-off, you can look at the statistics. I mean, we ain't smart. That's for sure. We don't have a, we do not have a concern about being too smart in the United States because kids simply are not

learning as much as they used to. And when every classic book is deemed controversial and it's replaced with like anti-racist baby, we've got a problem. We've got a problem. And look, I know that these teachers are not every teacher. And you could say, oh, well, you're just picking, you're cherry picking. Look, videos like this are rampant on TikTok. These are not just like a select, they are a select few, but they're not a representative of a small population of teachers. This is coming down from the teachers unions. It's infecting the minds of thousands of teachers across the country. Like I said, there are a lot of good teachers, a lot of great teachers, a lot of wonderful Christian teachers. and I'm glad that you are doing what you are doing,

it's you are a light in the darkness, that you are teaching truth to those kids. You might be the only representative of that these kids ever get. And that's amazing. But just know, especially if your kids are in public school, like this is coming to your area. It doesn't matter if you're in a rural area in Alabama where you know all the teachers because they're in your Sunday school.

This is headed your direction because it starts at the top. And that's what progressivism does. It takes over institutions and tries to conform everything to its own image for the purpose of activism. So just beware, just understand that the problem is really big. But you, of course, as Marissa said, can raise a respectful ruckus for the things that matter. And you can also ensure that your kids are educated in a way that aligned with your values and that they are actually becoming smarter from the things that they learn rather than dumber. All right.

That's all we've got time for today. We will see you guys back here soon. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular.

This is a show for people who want honesty over high. and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.