Some More News - SMN: The GOP Simply Wants To Abolish Public Education

Episode Date: September 7, 2022

Hi. In today's episode, we look at the escalating attacks from conservatives on school boards, and examine what the right actually wants to do with public education. (Note: it's not good!) Please fill out our SURVEY: https://kastmedia.com/survey/ Check out our new series SOME THIS! - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkJemc4T5NYbcqTbNmyH3uqutwcj8fHf3 Support us on our PATREON: http://patreon.com/somemorenews Check out our MERCH STORE: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews?ref_id=9949 SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh Subscribe to the Even More News and SMN audio podcasts here: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1 Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/show/even-more-news Find your new favorite shoes for sunny days and upcoming travel at ALLBIRDS.COM. Get 15% off your first set of sheets when you use promo code MORENEWS at BOLLANDBRANCH.COM. Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hLbG8VMrXOofp0sRnB5nbX-Tv5BdPpaJXjqulBganMQ/edit Support the show!: http://patreon.com.com/somemorenewsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, news shrimps! Scuttling little news shrimps just fascinated with the world around you, like you're seeing it through your tiny shrimp eyes for the very first time. Maybe you just hatched from your little shrimp egg. Do shrimps lay eggs? I don't know.

Who knows? It's impossible to know. Look, it's shrimp days at Red Lobster. And although lobsters aren't shrimp, I've always thought of them that way. And the point is, I really want to order some delicious buttery shrimps and I can't do that until we get through the news.

So here's some news. Conditions for inmates have grown steadily worse since the beginning of the pandemic. Many of the buildings are overcrowded and in a degree of disrepair. Showers and restrooms are inadequate and unsafe. Food is substandard, and many inmates are expected to pay for their meals.

If they can't, in many cases, they don't eat. They're inadequately supplied to the point where employees have to purchase basic things required to get through their day that any reasonable person would expect to be provided for them. And violence at prisons has seen a frightening spike. The number of people murdered in prison

has skyrocketed over the past two decades, from an extremely rare and near unheard of occurrence in the mid 90s to a constant looming threat today. And lawmakers refuse to do anything about this, which is wild since I've, we just did a prison episode, I feel, ah! Schools! Sorry, not prisons. I feel, ah, schools. Sorry, not prisons.

I'm talking about schools. Everything I just said is true of schools in these United States of this here America. My mistake. But you see how I might confuse the two. Yuck, yuck, yuck. Of course, schools aren't literally prisons because we don't call them that.

And in prison, you don't actually have to pay for your lunch. Yuck, yuck, again. Anywho, it's back-to-school season in America. I got my nice, tight, back-to-school haircut, my nice, clean, back-to-school shave, and you probably have noticed that schools have been a focal point of the Republican Party over the past year or so. Conservative politicians, pundits, and parents groups have been fiercely attacking school boards across the country, demanding that drastic action be taken immediately to protect our darling children. Sorry, our darling white children. We have such a hard time getting teachers.

I know it's such a hard, hard job. Y'all have a hard job getting teachers. Very hard. People just don't want to be teachers anymore. I know it's such a hard job. You'll have a hard job getting teachers. Very hard. People just don't want to be teachers anymore. I get that. It's hard. But SciFair has, what, 13% black teachers. I know you mentioned it earlier. Do you know what the statewide average is for black

teachers? Not at this moment. 10%. I looked it up. The statewide average for black teachers is 10 houston isd which i'll use the shine example you know you know what their average number of percentage of black teachers is 36 i looked that up you know what their dropout rate is four percent i don't want to be four percent i don't want to be hisd i want to be a shine

example i want to be the district standard. I wanna be the place, the premium place where people go to be. And quite frankly, we have a limited budget with limited resources. We have a great place and let's don't mess it up for everyone else. Fucking yikes. That was a newly elected member of the board

of the third largest school district in Texas and soon to be fired guy saying that black teachers are responsible for low test scores. And that the way to pull those test scores up would be to hire more teachers that big quotes, look like us. Then there's this mother who hijacked a school board meeting also in Texas to ramble about an anal sex reference in a novel found in the middle school library.

For the boys, pussy or the idea of pussy or the idea of idea of pussy, a Mexican is a Mexican is a Mexican. Take her out back, we boys figured, then hand on the titties. Put it in her coin box, put it in her cornhole, grab ahold of that braid, rub that calico. You can find that on page 39 of the book called Out of Darkness, which you can find at Hudson Bend Middle School and Bee Cave Middle School. Alright, not gonna lie, I had to Google cornhole because I have the game in the back of my yard. Coincidentally, the book in question, the 2015 young adult novel Out of Darkness, is about an interracial relationship between a black boy and a Mexican-American girl

amidst the extremely racist backdrop of 1930s Texas. But I'm sure that had nothing to do with it being singled out as dangerous pornography. Also, not for nothing, but the book was not part of any curriculum. It was merely available in the school's library. You know what else is available in most school libraries in Texas?

Mein Kampf. It's funny how that never gets brought up. Not enough anal sex in Mein Kampf, I guess. Anyway, you've seen the clips, countless infuriating clips of K through 12 parents losing their turds over a fundamental misunderstanding of everything from critical race theory, a completely manufactured fake crisis

you can watch us explain here, or click the thing, or whatever, or mask mandates, or God forbid, the existence of LGBTQ people. CRT is not an honest dialogue. It is a tactic that was used by Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan on slavery very many years ago to dumb down my ancestors

so we could not think for ourselves. Your children and your children's children will be subjugated. No mask mandates. My child, my children will not come to school on Monday with a mask on. All right. That's not happening. And I will bring every single gun loaded and ready to, I will call every- That's three minutes. Did that lady just threaten to shoot up a school if there was a mask mandate? The answer is yes. Fun fact, the board she was threatening there had already voted to make mask wearing optional. So like, what the fuck is happening here? Why are there so many conservative parents

freaking the fuck out at school boards? What is so fucking scary about mask mandates in high schools or the terrifying prospect of diversity? Just watch this struggling alabaster tea kettle who screamed a bunch of disconnected nonsense in response to an equity statement by a Florida school board. One additional comment. The school board recently adopted an equity statement. Why? Your only job is education, not indoctrination. Attention board members,

our nation is a republic. We are the people. We have a voice. Our votes are our weapons and we will use them in 2022 and beyond. We in the military, our blood, our sweat is the equity. It is courage, character, not color, not gender that makes this nation great. Working Americans are united. We are not divided. Stop trying to incite division among us. We are Americans first and we will be free always. For reference, the statement that drove this man to slobberingly draw a line in the sand like a bloodhound with an art scholarship reads, in part, each student, regardless of race, ethnicity, poverty, disability, language status, undocumented status, religious affiliation, gender identity, and sexual orientation, will have access to the opportunities, resources, and support they need to imagine, nurture, and achieve their dreams. And that the board is committed to dismantling racism and other systems of oppression and inequity. You know, you gotta, you gotta stop those dangerous ideas

from infecting America's precious children. Sorry, precious white children. Come on, get it right, okay. This recent spike in deafeningly ignorant parents' rights activists is partially a result of the line between Facebook parenting groups and anti-vax groups becoming very blurry during the pandemic.

According to a study from George Washington University, Facebook's internal mechanics pulled parenting groups closer to COVID-19 misinformation by way of so-called wellness groups that purport to offer alternative healthcare solutions, but are actually vibrating rats' nests of disinformation. To wit, the study also found that these alternative wellness communities were subsequently exposing mainstream parents groups to fringe conspiracy theories, like government mind control programs executed via fluoride chemtrails and 5G towers.

You know, the kind of wacky kazoo toots that land you a gig inspecting Alex Jones' toothbrushes for recording devices. And this misinformation is being fed directly to parents' groups under the pretense that it's the secret knowledge that will keep their kids safe. And it's working.

The Florida-based Moms for Liberty is a political lobbying group masquerading as a grassroots parental advocacy group, staunchly opposed to any kind of COVID protocols being observed in classrooms. For the past year and a half, the group has been using Facebook to rile up their base and attract new members.

In an embarrassingly uncritical Newsweek article from this year, Moms for Liberty co-founder, Tiffany Justice said, we want the masks off of the kids. Masking, quarantining, all of that should be at the sole discretion of the parent. If your children are sick, keep them home. It's what's been done for years and years and years.

If children are sick, keep them home. If they're healthy, send them to school. Justice isn't interested in the will of the parents who say, don't want their kids to catch a deadly virus responsible for the worst pandemic of the past 100 years. Sure, they can choose to send their kid to school with a mask on, but if the rest of the students aren't wearing masks, it's way less effective.

And I'm not sure if you know anything about kids, but they tend to pressure their peers. So the only recourse is to keep their child at home. But that particular parent's right wouldn't count because they don't align with Justice's masks are the devil mandate. Worse than the devil, the shrimp devil. Incidentally, Justice co-founded Moms for Liberty with Tina Deskovich in 2021 after Deskovich lost her school board seat to a pro-mask opponent.

The group has chapters in 195 counties and has been a major political force in recent elections. Most notably in helping secure Glenn Youngkin's victory in Virginia's gubernatorial race last November. And hey, wanna bet whether Moms for Liberty is banging their loud ignorant pots about critical race theory? Well, bet it all on, of course they are, because of course they are.

In fact, in that same Newsweek article, Justice said, social and emotional learning is a vehicle that's being used to influence curriculum and to kind of weave critical race theory and other types of critical theory, including gender theory, into our children's education and parents have had enough. Now, the Newsweek article doesn't bother to contextualize

or comment on Justice's rambling nonsense statement because the article is bad and irresponsible. For instance, a quick, explain what you mean by any of that would have gone a long way to expose Justice as either ignorant or a bad faith actor, or both. But I want you to cut through all that gibberish and focus on the phrase social and emotional learning.

Notice how justice is deriding the concept of social and emotional learning as a bad thing, as though it's something not to be trusted, rather than a vital part of any child's development. Tuck that under your news caps, because it's going to come back later. Oh boy! Oh boy is right, you cheeky title monkey, you!

And conservative politicians rally around these concerned parents because if anyone is going to protect this nation's children, it's the grand old party. Pappy Cowboys Party, the party of law and order and good Christian values. Conservative PACs are dumping tons of money into school board races to control what can and can't be taught to students in grades K through 12.

More specifically, what those students can and can't be taught about American history with respect to slavery, the genocide of the country's indigenous population, and general white supremacy. I wonder why that is, unless I don't wonder why. But what's really messed up is that it's working. Schools have been all but bullied

into removing mask mandates, regardless of what the latest COVID research and statistics say. Conservative lawmakers sprang into action to pass legislation banning critical race theory from schools in 16 states so far, with more legislation in more states likely on the way. School boards have been pulling books

that were deemed inappropriate from school libraries, including Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, Mouse, which is a book about the fucking Holocaust. We're banning fucking Holocaust books from schools because they're inappropriate. And Florida, of course, passed the so-called Don't Say Gay Bill, which prevents any discussion

of gender or sexual orientation in kindergarten through third grade classrooms. It also prevents those discussions in upper grades in any manner not considered age appropriate. If you're wondering what the fig butt that means, so am I. What is considered age appropriate? Age appropriate for whom? Who decides what is and isn't age appropriate? Age appropriate for whom? Who decides what is and isn't age appropriate?

The law doesn't say. We actually did a whole video on that in case you don't recall. And now at the time of this writing, more than a dozen states are considering similar legislation, including Texas, because Texas is always going to Texas. It's a tale as old as time.

A game as old as Minecraft. Older even, Minecraft's not that old actually. In fact, we gotta do a quick break, but when we come back, we will absolutely start talking about the history of schools doubling as conservative battlegrounds, and why perhaps that is, as the kids say 20 years ago, BRB. Hey, sup y'all.

It's school kitty. That's cool with a K. Wink. As someone who spends a lot of time on the worldwide web, I know it is important to have good sneakers. It's hard enough that you have to strap on your virtual goggles, dual-wheeled power gloves, and run in place on an omnidirectional treadmill, you shouldn't have to worry about foot discomfort on all of that. That is why I recommend Tree Runners by Allbirds. They're made from eucalyptus fiber, making them lightweight, breathable, and silky soft

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Find your new favorite shoes for sunny days and upcoming travel at allbirds.com. That's A-L-L-B-I-R-D-S dot com. Get there today. Get some shoes. We're Bea, and we're thinking about shrimps. Thinking about shrimps and talking about schools and school boards run by shrimps? No, that's silly. Also, we were discussing conservatives dictating their will on K-12 schools and how that's not at all a new thing.

It goes all the way back to the 19th century, much like the majority of Republican policies and Republican politicians themselves. Schools have always been the front line of political battles about culture and progress. America has a long, storied history of the absolute worst people in the country complaining to schools any time extremely necessary change is proposed, or really, any time the status quo or the white supremacist doctrine is threatened. These are the exact same people who shotgun desperate, alarmist memes about woke culture gone out of control every time Star Wars has a black person or a same sex couple winks across the screen

for a nanosecond in a Disney movie. While the court's decision in 1954's Brown v. Board of Education was the tipping point for integrating public schools, back then the Southern states did whatever they could to keep black students out, even though segregation had been ruled unconstitutional. For instance, in 1959, one Virginia County completely shut down their public school system and funded a whites-only private school,

keeping black students out of the county's classrooms for another four years. And who could forget George Wallace, our favorite supporting Forrest Gump character? In addition to looking like a racist cigarette ad from the golden age of television, Wallace served as Alabama's governor for most of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and was essentially the face of segregation. He famously stood on the steps of the University of Alabama's enrollment office to block two black students from entering when the school was racially integrated in 1963 and also tried to prevent four black children from enrolling in an elementary school in Huntsville. He notoriously declared, segregation now, segregation tomorrow,

segregation forever in his inauguration speech, which was written by Asa Earl Carter, an actual Ku Klux Klansman. The point is during the civil rights era, the fight against integration was usually fought by the school boards and elected officials. In the 1958 case Cooper v. Aaron, the school board of Little Rock, Arkansas sued the federal government in an effort to defy Brown v. Board of Education by delaying desegregation for more than two years, arguing that the public mood around

desegregation was so hostile that black students should remain in segregated facilities for the time being for their own safety, of course. The school board took it all the way to the Supreme Court who ruled that it was equally unconstitutional to deprive black students of their rights for the purposes of maintaining law and order. Neato, thanks Supreme Court. Way to not deprive people of their rights.

I'm sure that'll be something you apply to all your future cases. Today, we're seeing heavily funded anti-critical race theory zealots winning school board seats. Candidates backed by the 1776 Project PAC, a group whose stated goal is to bring back patriotism and pride in our American history by overturning any teaching of the 1619

Project or critical race theory. Those candidates won three quarters of 58 races across seven states last November. If you recall, the 1619 Project aims to teach the actual truth of slavery in America. You know, rather than the heavily sanitized patriotic version that a lot of schools push for the sake of protecting vulnerable children, lest they shatter into a billion pieces like a brittle George Washington commemorative plate. Whether it's the fight against integration or the CRT and don't say gay stuff,

it's always framed as a way to protect the fragile minds of America's children. A phrase here meaning America's white Christian children. They believe kids need to be protected from learning American history or world history or literally anything that might challenge their worldview. The same way they believe that kids need to be protected from anything that might threaten their ability to remain a blank goldfish. Or unflavored shrimp.

God, I want that shrimp. Anyway, school boards provided a similar battleground for the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools. Many Supreme Court cases affirming evolution education in classrooms were first brought on by disgruntled parents who saw evolution as infringing on their child's religious freedom. Teaching kids that the Bible probably wasn't literally true

was the most dangerous thing they could imagine. Nevermind that most people in the world aren't Christian or that evolution has been generally accepted as fact by the scientific community. Even now, 17% of high school biology teachers are presenting creationism as a scientifically credible alternative to evolution. Today, the Boogeyman is a sort of sequel to integration,

AKA the pervasive threat of trans students parading their existence through schools for anyone to see. Even these impressionable young goldfish eyes, can you imagine? How could they be so reckless? Have these trans students no decency? 2021 saw a staggering 33 states introduce over 100 bills targeting trans people,

many of which focused on trans youth and school policies, targeting everything from trans students' participation in sports to their access to lockers, bathrooms, and medical care. In addition to the Don't Say Gay bill, school boards and conservative lawmakers have been pushing for extreme anti-trans laws in schools. For instance, Florida lawmakers recently passed a bill

that would have allowed schools to verify a student's birth gender via a genital inspection. Yes, that is correct. A law giving schools the right to inspect kids' genitals. That's absolutely fucked, huh? What does Moms for Liberty have to say about that? Nothing? You're gonna stay silent on that one?

Because it sounds like this should be the exact sort of hog shit those dance moms would be all over. It's weird how they don't care about that. While that provision was ultimately dropped when DeSantis signed the Fairness in Women's Sports Act into law, it still bans trans students from playing sports and gives parents the right to sue the school board if they learned that a trans student was allowed

to play on the same team as their child. Interesting or fucked up to note that there are currently more laws against trans students in sports than there are trans students in sports. This is also all in spite of the fact that all the data shows that LGBTQ students are far more likely to have been bullied

at school and online. Trans students are three times more likely to have been bullied at school and online. Trans students are three times more likely to attempt suicide because of this bullying. These numbers were dramatically higher than those reported for cisgender students, so shouldn't these parental advocacy groups be sounding the alarm to protect trans students? Shouldn't these anti-trans laws rile them up

10 times more than a mask mandate? Or teaching grade school students about slavery. They don't because again, the wellbeing of children is not actually what these groups are concerned with. If they were, they might have something to say about the innumerable, real, inexcusable problems with public schools in this country, which is why we like to call this next segment

Real Actual Problem problems with schools, not the fake ones invented by conservatives. This is probably the most frustrating aspect of the right's false concern over schools and kids, which is that there are very real problems being completely ignored in favor of this reactionary hogwash making the newspapers. Just for starters, Xtree, Xtree,

a lot of schools are poor as shit. Seems like a good place to begin, you know? Schools are funded by state, federal and local governments, but that local revenue is based on income tax and property value, which means two things. One, that schools in wealthier areas receive way more funding than schools in poor neighborhoods. And two, that huge revenue disparity is 100% by design.

You don't accidentally create a system that gives middle and upper class kids access to better schools than poor kids. And we know this because of parents in poor neighborhoods try to send their kids to different districts with better funded schools. They literally go to jail. When Ohio mom Kelly Williams Bowler

sent her kids to school at a highly ranked school in a neighboring county, the school district accused her of falsifying her records and lying about her address, even though the children's father lived within the district. The school district actually hired a private investigator to follow Williams Bowler and photograph her as she dropped her kids off at school, which in many ways could be viewed

as fucking weird and gross. They demanded she pay $30,000 in back tuition and accused her of cheating because she was sending her kids to a nicer school without paying the taxes to fund it, even though Williams-Bowler pays the exact same taxes as all the rest of us do. You know, except these guys.

Cheating, cheating! Sending your kids to a school in their father's district where they actually receive adequate funding is cheating. What child benefits from that mentality? Ah, right. It's the rich white ones. Should have known. School officials were quoted as saying,

"'Those dollars need to stay home with our students.'" As if every child in this country doesn't deserve the same access to quality education if they don't live in a McMansion neighborhood with a name like Woodard's Mill Lake with two SUVs in every driveway. As if schools creating an us versus them policy about which kids are worthy to receive an education

benefits children in any way. Williams Bowler's kids are no longer enrolled in the school, but don't worry, she also spent 10 days in jail, received three years probation and must perform community service. Funding is so uneven and inadequate that 94% of school teachers in this country have to spend their own money on school supplies.

You know, the basic things required to do their jobs, their jobs being teaching our children. Shouldn't the fact that we're not giving schools enough money to actually function as a school be a concern? More so than requiring kids to submit to a genital examination in order to play volleyball. Public schools in America are designed to single out and punish poor kids for the crime

of not being born into generational wealth. And in case drawing ludicrously tiny districts around wealthy white neighborhoods to keep all the brown kids out and literally sending their parents to jail if they dare across those district lines wasn't proof enough, look no further than the debate over whether kids should receive free lunches at school. It's weird that that's even a debate, right? Why in the shrimp hell would you send kids to school for eight hours a day and not feed them? The answer of course, is because many of the seats of power within this country are occupied by Skeletors.

Except Skeletor is somehow less white. In 2019, the National School Lunch Program served around 5 billion lunches. Any student at or below 130% of the federal poverty line In 2019, the National School Lunch Program served around 5 billion lunches. Any student at or below 130% of the federal poverty line can receive a free lunch. Students between 130 and 185% of the poverty line qualify for a reduced-priced lunch. And any student above 185% of the poverty line must pay full price. So, a family of four with an annual income of $36,000 can get free lunch for their kids.

But a family of four earning $51,000 has to pay full price. Considering how expensive it is to raise two children, the difference between annual income is just kind of lost on me. Just make lunch free for everyone who wants it. We're already requiring students to show up for a full day and their parents are literally footing the bill for both the school and the national school lunch program

with their tax dollars. The very least we could do is feed them, but we don't. And so back in 2017, the School Nutrition Association reported that 76% of American school districts have students with lunch debt. Get used to it kids, college is right around the corner. And I'm just gonna say that phrase again, kids with lunch debt.

Anyway, there are no federal guidelines in place for what should be done when a child can't afford lunch. Students who can't pay regularly have their hot meals taken away and replaced with a cold cheese sandwich and a small carton of milk. In some districts, they don't get anything at all. Back in 2015, a cafeteria worker at a school in Denver was fired for paying for a student's lunch.

And a worker at a Pennsylvania school quit their job in protest in 2016 after being instructed to take away a child's meal over a $25 lunch debt. Other practices have included making kids wear wristbands or stamping the phrase, "'I need lunch money' on their hands, throwing their meals in the trash in front of them,

banning them from extracurricular activities and threatening to place them in foster care. What on earth is the goal of punishing kids for being poor? Something that is totally out of their control. It's as though the point is to make it impossible for poor kids to succeed in school. Hmm, very interesting. Go ahead and pop that tid of a bit beneath your cap of news

because it too will be coming back along with segregation and emotional learning is bad. Really planting seeds here for them all to come together in an Avengers end game of Christofascism. Shit, spoilers. My bad. Also, public schools in America are still extremely racially segregated

with black children paying the highest price. Black children are five times more likely than white children to attend schools that are highly segregated by race and ethnicity and are more than twice as likely as white children to attend high poverty schools. According to a 2016 report, non-white school districts received $23 billion less

in funding than predominantly white school districts, despite serving the same number of students. And white districts serve around 1,500 students, half the national average, while non-white districts enroll more than 10,000 students, or three times the national average. And in case your eyes glazed over like a buttery delicious shrimp

while I was rattling off all those numbers, consider this unbelievably frustrating fact. A high school in Wilcox County, Georgia, just held its first racially integrated prom in 2014, the year the Lego movie came out. Everything is awesome, we races. And then of course, there's the problem of gun violence. As I'm sure I don't need to remind you,

American schools have been increasingly targeted by mass shootings since the Columbine massacre. More than 311,000 students have been exposed to gun violence at school since 1999, the year of the Columbine murders, according to data collected by the Washington Post, because the federal government doesn't track school shootings.

Again, we won't keep track of how many kids are getting shot to death at school, but we will pass bills requiring students to get genital inspections to play sports. The Post also found that at least 185 children, educators, and others have been killed, and another 369 have been injured in that same period. The response after Columbine was to flood schools with cops. In the 2019-2020 school year, roughly 51% of U.S. schools had at least one armed school resource officer.

However, the presence of school resource officers hasn't resulted in fewer school shootings. In fact, school shootings have increased since the Sandy Hook massacre, from 22 in the 2012 to 2013 school year to 93 in the 2020 to 2021 school year. And those are just shootings in which there were casualties. A recent study conducted by researchers

at Hamline University and Metropolitan State University in Minnesota, examined 133 school shootings and determined that the presence of school resource officers did nothing to deter violence. In fact, school resource officers spend nothing to deter violence. In fact, school resource officers spend most of their time assaulting children, especially non-white students.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, black students without disabilities made up 30% of school-related arrests in the 2017 to 2018 school year, despite only accounting for 15% of the public school population. White students without disabilities who comprise 48% of students enrolled in public school, made up 34% of school-related arrests.

And according to the Center for Public Integrity, black students were referred to law enforcement at higher rates than all other students in 46 out of 50 states. Additionally, the Center for Public Integrity found that in 46 states, black students were referred to law enforcement at higher rates than all students. But conservative groups continue to call for more armed officers in schools,

even after over a dozen armed cops waited for over an hour to enter a classroom in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman was executing children. If we take cops out of schools, who's going to put 10 year old boys in chokeholds or arrest multiple six year olds for having a tantrum? Ah, what else sucks? Oh, your knowledge of history is completely defined

by what state you were born in. That's because different states have textbooks with completely different versions of historical events in them. That seems like a large problem. In California, for example, textbooks might downplay Native American violence on white invaders, which is silly because you can teach that violence occurred,

but also point out that white people did way more violence back and were invaders. And in Texas, you'll of course see the opposite details stressed. Stuff like the Second Amendment has way less context in the Texas textbooks than California's, and so on. As you might suspect, it's often directly related to the politics of that state. Seems bad. Also bad, the time of day we send kids to school is also not in their best interest, because their biological sleep patterns change dramatically as they get older.

Despite study after study demonstrating that a later start time directly relates to improved academic performance, school districts across the country have resisted pushing back the time students are expected to begin class, not even by a single hour. Most schools start sometime between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. because that's around the time when parents

need to leave the house to start their work day. But even then, many parents don't work a nine to five work day, and even if they did, schools that begin between seven and eight usually let out between three and four. It doesn't even line up with the typical work day schedule. So students who can't ride the bus home have to just wait around after school to be picked up.

We won't adjust school schedules in a way that we know to be beneficial to students' academic performance, or give them nutritional food that we know to be beneficial to their academic performance, or give them the money and resources we know to be beneficial to their academic performance, or even keep them from being arrested or murdered while at school. And that's all for this week's episode of

Real, actual problems with schools, not the fake ones invented by conservatives. Conservatives don't want to do anything about any of these very real problems, and in fact, seem to enthusiastically support doing everything to make these problems worse across the board. That's because I suspect they don't consider learning

to be the actual point of schools, which raises an extremely important question. What is the point of public school in America? What is the goal, the Avengers end game, if you will, of this quagmire of inefficiency and cruelty? Oh, don't you wanna know, huh? But you'll have to watch these ads first. That's right, fuckers, we got you!

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bed sheets? Hey look, Cody's back. We were talking about all of the very obvious problems that kids in public schools face, stuff like bullying, no free lunches, segregation, underfunding and counterintuitive schedules. And how these problems are largely ignored by the most vocal school board yammering

in favor of drummed up panic against diversity and masks and the terrifying existence of LGBTQ kids and what that all means. As in, why is it like that? To these people, what is the actual purpose of schools if they don't exist to feed and teach and keep kids safe? Looking at the facts, it's really hard not to conclude that public schools in America are designed

to be bland as hell daycare centers designed to indoctrinate children, to prepare them for real life, a phrase here meaning an adulthood of unquestioningly working to perpetuate dogmatic capitalist thinking. This is of course, despite the many great teachers actually trying to make it something more than that. Schools appear designed to teach children

that their worth is determined by how much money their parents have. It's a system designed to keep families in poverty lest we convert to some scary socialist system, and Reagan knows we cannot abide that. And so most schools function to teach kids early that your worth stems from your ability to keep a job. That's why they instill so many arbitrary rules in children. It's training them to follow the same arbitrary rules we all follow as adults. Everyone needs to work five, six, or seven days a week for eight hours a day, never missing a day

or taking any time off for anything that's unproductive. A term here meaning doesn't earn any money for an employer. That's part of the function of homework, to train kids to never have any space where they aren't being required to accomplish a task for someone else. It's why they give out attendance awards. Thanks to the way we've allowed schools to be designed

and operated in this country, they're little more than factories designed to train kids how to be good worker bees. But with conservatives, the end game is somehow even more insidious than that. Just look at their specific goals over the years, keeping schools segregated, deliberately structuring their funding

to favor wealthy white districts, vilifying social and emotional learning, rigidly controlling curriculum to reframe and omit history in service of grotesque jingoism and using increasing gun violence as an excuse to deploy more and more armed officers who spend most of their time victimizing non-white students. All of this sure seems to serve the purpose

of transforming public schools into factories that perpetuate white supremacy in a Christofascist state. There's no other conclusion based on what these groups are pushing. At the very least, like, to be charitable. It's all a desperate attempt to keep conservative ideals relevant by brainwashing impressionable youths. All this manipulation of language has paid off for the left, because whoever controls the words controls the culture. Don't believe me?

Just try using plain language instead of the left's politically correct jargon. But be careful. Use the wrong words and you might lose your job, your home, and your reputation. The culture war is largely a war of words. Right now, the left is winning. You can see the consequences everywhere—in politics, in education, in media. It's time to fight back. We should not cede another syllable. What's in a word? Everything. That's a charmingly batshit video titled

"'Control the Words, Control the Culture' by PragerU, a right-wing propaganda machine masquerading as a university. And it's no accident that they have been framing themselves as a school. It's part of that Breitbart-speak belief that politics is downstream from culture. Currently, the right has lost control over our culture,

which is why their politics are deeply unpopular. And the perception is that younger people are skewing far more to the left than ever because of secret commies and so on. I have no idea if that's true. It seems impossible to know. Polls seem to indicate as much, but what kind of rad Gen Z kid is taking a fucking poll?

Polls are, are, ah, they're for old folks. They're not tubular and radical like not polls. But in order for their politics to become popular again and for them to regain control of the culture, they clearly have to start young. Sort of like how Camel introduced a cartoon mascot in order to hook new smokers at an impressionable young age. Except at least Camel was required

to include cancer warnings on their advertisements. Right-wing media openly and frequently rants about a dire culture war that the left is winning. And they frame their beliefs and arguments around this idea. The idea of losing this culture war allows heavily funded far-right grifters to cast themselves as the underdogs fighting the good fight, while peppering in alarming fundamentalist rhetoric with the goal

of turning Gen Z towards Christian nationalism and a Christofascist state. It's way easier to hold on to power if you rig the game so that kids are literally taught white supremacist propaganda in schools, because those kids will grow up to unquestioningly support every piece of Christofascist legislation the right puts forward. It creates a cycle of these people getting bad educations, growing up and not understanding history because they weren't taught it, and being against education because everything

in right-wing politics and media says education is the enemy. You see, schools are where the liberal elite sneak in their leftist doctrine, teaching people that slavery and genocide happened and were bad. And that white Christians don't have a God-given right to rule the world. And they're really trying to make it happen, like really, really hard. Rock hard, like the glistening abs of a meaty shrimp curled up on a dish with a dab of butter and garlic. Butter and garlic oozing through its cum gutters.

Man, where are those shrimps? Can't believe I said that just now. A big part of this movement can be traced back to Rappin' Ronnie, a band so devoted to the cause of white supremacy, he once referred to African UN delegates as monkeys who were still uncomfortable wearing shoes. To see those monkeys from those African countries,

damn them, they're still uncomfortable wearing shoes. Hey, he made Nixon laugh. That counts for something. Not sure what, possibly hotel credit at a casino in shrimp hell, but still. During his presidency, Reagan accepted a report called Nation at Risk, leading to a culture war against the mediocrity of public education.

The report depicted the country's education in dire straits with declining educational standards and students being out-competed internationally. This report has led to cascading conservative education policies like busting up public sector unions and embracing tax cuts and deregulation and opening the door to charter schools and school choice.

In other words, defunding public schools so thoroughly that they basically don't exist anymore. They can't outright abolish public schools, not yet anyway, so they have to do the next best thing. While the report was at worst propaganda and at best misleading, it did set back Reagan's effort to dismantle the Department of Education. Yes, that's right,'s effort to dismantle the Department of Education.

Yes, that's right. Reagan tried to abolish the Department of Education. It was one of his platform issues. He referred to the DOE as Jimmy Carter's boondoggle because he's a folksy racist. Carter had created the department in the final year of his presidency, but Reagan believed it was just another example

of too much big government meddling in the affairs of regular people, which is a thing conservatives only pretend to care about when it involves protecting the rights of non-white people and the poor. But because the Nation at Risk report opined that America's public schools were in an unacceptable state, Reagan couldn't convince anyone in Congress to eliminate the Department of Education

and reduce federal involvement in schooling, and his proposal died on the Hill. A decade and a half later, President G.Wiz Bush II's No Child Left Behind Act compelled states to reach rigid math and reading testing requirements and sanction schools that didn't meet those goals. The Obama administration piggybacked on this idea

with the Race to the Top initiative, which used block grants to encourage states to embrace policies like charter schools, college career-ready standards, and evaluating teachers using student test scores. And while Obama was by no means a conservative president in some ways, Race to the Top was very much inspired by and a continuation of conservative policies towards public education, basically requiring public schools to constantly justify their existence by producing students who can score well on standardized tests or else risk losing their funding to charter schools. It all serves a Reagan-era strategy of indirectly eliminating public schools in America by

saddling them with every possible disadvantage and then making them dance for their supper. This increased focus on standardized tests also means that schools across the country have been gradually eliminating electives. Things like art, music, philosophy, and creative writing are commonly seen as frivolous or useless because they don't help schools raise their test scores. They're also commonly derided as not having any value

for kids when they grow up and enter the real world, meaning art and philosophy classes won't help you land the series of shitty jobs you will be required to work every day for the rest of your life in order to keep this big old ship called capitalism running smoothly. It's not running smoothly, not at all. That's why we're doing this whole thing, all right.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. That clears a lot up actually. Hey, could you check on my shrimps? They're not gonna check. So because of this, public schools have been cutting elective courses for decades now. But the pandemic and remote learning placed even more pressure on schools to cut electives and get kids caught up

on core classes in order to meet testing requirements. Especially as more and more frustrated parents are opting to enroll their kids in charter schools. More words on that later. No doubt words of praise. Sure, man. So school in this context is seen as a means to an end, just a preparation period for a kid's real life.

But this is their childhood as well. Shouldn't they be enjoying their time? Shouldn't we allow them the space to discover new interests and have those interests nurtured and developed? The assumption that you should only go to the classes that will help you get a job or help the school raise its test scores really diminishes the human experience.

We don't exist to work. People, especially kids, should have the opportunity to better themselves and grow despite what their chosen profession ends up being. Also, things like art, music, and philosophy are incredibly vital for helping children develop empathy because the arts are about opening yourself to new experiences outside of your own.

In fact, a 2019 study covering 10,000 Houston students found that more exposure to the arts, such as music, theater, and dancing, led to a decrease in disciplinary incidents, higher achievements in writing, and an increase in students' compassion toward each other. They're super important in growing up to be a well-adjusted, thoughtful person.

Hey, remember years ago when I pointed out the right-wing talking point of deriding social and emotional education as a sinister backdoor tactic the woke left uses to push its liberal doctrine? This is why. They don't want kids to learn empathy. They see it as a gateway to socialism or woke poison or something.

And man, you ever wonder if they ever stand back and think about why that is? Or do they know somewhere that teaching kids to feel empathy is against their political goals, which are, if perhaps they looked for one extra moment, selfish and cruel? But even if you're looking at school solely as little factories designed to churn out kids

who can score well on tests, electives can help you do that. A 2010 CDC report that examined 50 studies on physical education and academic achievement found PE, arguably one of the least respected courses in the history of education, can help improve classroom performance, including grades and standardized tests. The report also found positive associations

between PE and enhanced concentration, attention and class behavior, because it's, you know, exercise. There are countless studies on the benefits of regular physical activity, even if it's extremely light, like crab soccer or shrimp soccer. Hmm.

Yeah. But there's no exercise section on those standardized tests. So PE tends to get the ax alongside every other elective, because again, to some people, school isn't about taking care of kids or providing them with a quality education or feeding them fucking lunch. It's about creating an army of right-wing sycophants.

To wit, let's take a look at some of the anti-critical race theory laws the GOP is passing to control exactly what kids are taught about American history. The stated goal of one now-passed bill in Florida is to prohibit schools and businesses from making white students and employees feel discomfort when learning about history or completing anti-discrimination training. The bill, titled the Precious Bassinet for Triggered Snowflakes Bill, I'm sorry, wait,

it's called Individual Freedom because these people are nothing if not the most obvious embarrassing babies shitting bald eagle shapes. The bill reads in part, an individual by virtue of his or her race or sex does not bear responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex. An individual should not be made to feel discomfort,

guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race." Hmm, seems confusing and vaguely worded. Seems like a way to just not teach history at all, since I imagine being taught that your race was seen as subhuman to the point of doing a war to keep them as slaves and not being able to vote until 70 years ago

would probably cause some distress and discomfort and anguish. The vagueness though, is kind of like this anti-CRT law that was passed last June in Texas, which stipulates that teachers can't teach any concept that could be interpreted as one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex, or that someone is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive based on their race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex, or that someone is inherently racist,

sexist or oppressive based on their race or sex. Furthermore, teachers are required to include multiple perspectives when discussing widely debated and currently controversial issues. The wording is so confusing and so removed from any actual reality of teaching that teachers were immediately asking for clarification on issues that should never ever need clarification, like the Holocaust. No, really. Here's leaked audio from a training session of teachers in Texas' Carroll Independent School District in South Lake. There's a lot of districts that are in the exact same spot we're in,

and no one knows how to navigate these waters. I mean, no one. As you go through, just try to remember the concepts of 3979 and make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one that has opposing, that has other things. How do you oppose the Holocaust? Believe me, that's other things. How do you oppose the Holocaust? What? Believe me, that's come up. So number the stars. No, no, no. Holy fucking shit. That is unreal. Also, it's real.

And the thing is, conservative politicians and pundits can act like they didn't directly instruct the school to teach both sides of the Holocaust, but they certainly must know that this is the end result of the laws and outrage they're creating. The both sides-ing of history and learning

that opens the door to some real fucking Nazi shit creeping its way back into power. Currently, at least 16 states have passed anti-CRT laws that generally ban any discussion of America being inherently racist or having systemically racist issues, including any discussion of bias, privilege, discrimination, and oppression related to race as well as gender.

So like most of American history, like literally the whole thing. Also conspicuously, the Texas law prohibits academic credit for advocacy work. So it's not just that you can't learn about the country's innumerable systemic problems with racism and white supremacy. You can't even get credit for learning

about that stuff outside of school. They don't want kids to learn about it at all. And in case you think I'm exaggerating or that these teachers are making a goose stepping mountain out of a goose tiptoeing molehill, here's sitting Indiana Senator Scott Baldwin telling a concerned teacher that while they are allowed to teach kids

about the existence of Nazism, teaching the kids that Nazism is bad is going too far. I'm not discrediting as a person, Marxism, Nazism, fascism. I'm not discrediting any of those isms out there. And I have no problem with the education system providing instruction on the existence of those isms. I believe that we've gone too far when we take a position on those isms as it relates to we need to be impartial. Again,

I'm going to use this term. We need to be the purveyors of reason. We just provide the facts. The kids formulate their own viewpoints. That's right. You have to impartially teach about the fascist extermination of millions and let the kids decide if that's good or bad because they don't want schools to be places of moral learning,

which leads back to the purpose of schools for these people to be daycare centers, to prepare kids to toil unquestionably as adults. Also, you know, the racism. Just recently, Texas educators suggested to the State Board of Education that slavery be taught as involuntary relocation to second grade students.

To their credit, the board said, no. But again, aside from how fucking racist it all is, I think a big part of these stories is that schools are so terrified of being sued by parents that they feel the need to sanitize everything. That's the point of making these laws confusing and vaguely worded. It isn't so much to limit what is actually taught in schools

because passing a rigid legislation like that would probably be much more difficult. It's much easier to convince people to get behind a bill that prohibits schools from teaching your kids anything harmful than it is to get behind a bill that specifically defines what is and isn't harmful. No, the point is to have these vague laws on the books to allow these growing conservative parents groups

to sue teachers, schools, and school boards over whatever they personally feel is harmful. Florida's individual freedom bill prohibits teaching any concept that makes a white student feel uncomfortable. And aside from the fact that a lot of history is uncomfortable, and that the entire modern day conservative movement is built on the idea that nothing is offensive and you don't have a right to not be uncomfortable and fuck your feelings, et cetera. The word uncomfortable is also an extremely subjective term that depends on everything from a person's entire history and experience to however they happen to be feeling

at that particular moment, which means that the only burden of proof any parent needs in order to file ruinous lawsuits that further the right-wing goal of dismantling public schools is to say that a lesson, literally any lesson, made their child uncomfortable. That's the point of these clumsy, vaguely worded laws. It's not an accident, it's by design.

And once again, boy, the irony of boomer conservatives calling young liberals snowflakes when these laws are on the fucking books, seriously. Remember when they were all going off about safe spaces in colleges? How is this not literally that, but times a thousand? I don't know, math makes me uncomfortable. Texas Governor Greg Abbott even introduced

a parental bill of rights this past January. The proposed bill of rights would give parents even greater control over what schools can and cannot teach and even how they operate. For instance, parents would get a say in whether or not their child has to repeat a class or even an entire grade. It also suggests severe legal penalties,

including exorbitant fines and even jail time for any teacher found to be providing their students with pornographic materials. Now, you may have noticed that pornography is something that has never been available in schools or in school libraries, but for a disingenuous, far-right asshole like Abbott and the parents in these conservative groups, pornography means books.

Books like Maya Koubeyev's genderqueer, A Memoir, and Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, which feature same-sex relationships and mature topics like domestic abuse. Too intense for a third grader? Possibly. But both books are recommended for high school readers. And anyway, the domestic abuse is absolutely not the part Abbott is gnashing his pearly white shrimp peelers about. No, it's these same-sex relationships,

which are equivalent to pornography in the eyes of conservatives who want to eradicate queer people by contextualizing their very existence as sexually predacious and harmful to children. So in the end, this is all designed to slowly whittle away public schools, giving parents more and more power to sue teachers and schools into oblivion

for teaching anything about the country's history until public schools no longer exist. So the only options left are charter schools and private schools, which choose their own curriculum and teaching methods. Because of course, the end goal is to privatize schools and by extension, create a country where education

is only available to white kids who come from money and where the only thing they learn about history and civics is that America was God's gift to white people, and to produce entire generations of these burpy little freaks. This one version of a woodpecker isn't going to be around anymore. Okay, well, there's other woodpeckers around that can fill their place, I'm sure. They can pick up the woodpecker baton. They can't really pick it up, but metaphorically speaking. And if we're told that climate change is going to kill us all, then why are we trying to keep other species around that are emitting, you know, with their carbon emissions?

It adds up. So should we be celebrating this, kind of thinning the herd a little bit? I don't know, but for climate change and environmentalists, they want to thin the herd among people, not among the Bachmann's warbler or the ivory-headed woodpecker. That's what they want to do. So when they hear,

this is how twisted these people, I know when I say, I don't care if these species are going extinct It you know people hear that and they're horrified by it. It sounds like I'm some sort of sociopath and Maybe I am Wow. What a very Stupid asshole. Yes, that's confident bonehead Matt Walsh and the evil version of me Walsh regularly hosts a show on the Daily Wire in which he rambles about hot button issues and is boldly incorrect about literally every subject he has ever approached.

No, seriously, his entire career is being wrong on Twitter and getting savagely dunked upon for his wrongness. It isn't quite accurate to refer to anything Walsh does as famous because he is an extremely online dweeb known only to other extremely online dweebs, whether they be other confidently incorrect ghouls like Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro, or a humble online newsboy waiting for some word,

any word, of his missing shrimps. So while it isn't quite accurate to call anything Walsh does famous, the most famous thing he's done is lease a house in a school district in Virginia last year so he could speak alarmist anti-trans bullshit at a school board meeting. Walsh's children are homeschooled and he lives in Tennessee. In other words, not only do his

children not attend school in any district in the Commonwealth of Virginia, he doesn't even live in the same fucking state. His kids will literally never be affected by any decisions made by that school board. In fact, his kids probably don't know a whole lot because he homeschools them. But he's just some weirdo who rented a house in a different state so he could rant about wokeness at a local school board meeting. Because it's not about defending his kids or anyone's kids,

it's about log jamming public schools with dumbass regressive moralist arguments until public schools get consigned to oblivion. When he's not busy fucking with other people's lives because non-white children and queer people give him the ickies, Walsh writes horrendous blogs about the advantages of homeschooling

where he spews white supremacist garbage, real tasty catfish shit clouds, like expecting your kid to learn social skills from public school is like sending him to live with chimpanzees so that he'll learn proper table manners. Yep, all those chimpanzees at public schools. Because he's racist and ignorant, you see.

And that actually needs repeating. Matt Walsh is a very ignorant man, in that he knows very little about actual facts, and that ignorance makes him overly confident and extremely easy to mock. A man doomed to never be self-aware, to walk the earth like some kind of hollow-souled wraith with his shoelaces tied together. And I bring him up not just because of all of his school board bullshit, but because he's the end product

of eliminating public schools or forcing them to teach conservative-only values. The goal is to create a perpetual cycle, conservative parents groups and politicians hijacking school boards across the country to drum up fear about imaginary threats and force schools to scrub mentions of slavery or genocide of indigenous people or the existence of queer people. To turn schools into places where teaching morality is wrong and should be left to the

parents even if that morality is as simple as saying that the Holocaust was bad. All so that they can ensure that their children can be just as ignorant as them. Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk and Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene and any number of other proudly ignorant conservative noise machines are the products of this exact system in action. Walsh rants about homeschooling. Charlie Kirk became famous by ranting about out-of-control liberalism on college campuses, indoctrinating young adults into a lifetime of tragic wokeness,

despite the fact that Charlie Kirk has never attended college for a single minute of his giant-headed life. And of course, Shapiro was born in a conservative bubble, and now insists college is a scam, and that he refused to learn anything his professors tried to teach him in a noble act of resistance against the liberal elite. Ben Shapiro loves telling people not to go to college. Colleges are not about training kids for the real world. Colleges are not about teaching them significant modes of thinking or examining timeless truths. This is not what universities

are about anymore. They're not what they were about 150 years ago or 100 years ago or even 50 years ago. Universities are not about skill sets, at least not in the humanities. They're about two things and two things only, credentialism and social connections. That is it. Go to a liberal university, use it as an opportunity to educate yourself. Instead of when they assign John Maynard Keynes, go out and read some Milton Freeman on the other side, and then write exactly what the teacher wants, get the credential and use it to your advantage. The Harvard Law stamp of approval on my resume is definitely a wonderful thing to have, even though I disagree with everything that pretty much all of my professors ever said at Harvard Law School. For the record, studies have shown that college doesn't turn anyone more conservative or more liberal.

On average, they just become more tolerant of opposing viewpoints, something I thought these freaks wanted. And there's a whole other video about issues with universities in America, but people like Ben are of course very against college, and don't want anyone to go to college, because they of course see college as the turning point for poisonous liberal indoctrination. They're terrified of their brave little soldiers going off to university and learning that white Christians are not, in fact, the center of the universe, and that America has done some pretty wild shit. But since there's no school board for colleges,

nothing they can get their talons into, their message has to be that college is a big waste of time. Just don't go to it, folks! Nothing to see here. Enroll in fuckin' PragerU instead! Because for them, this is all a war of ideas, one they are losing, and so they'll resort to any lie they can

to maintain any level of control. They stage grandstanding stunts to capture the attention of the media to help stoke the fires of outrage. For example, the critical race theory panic was entirely manufactured by right-wing media, by people like conservative activist Christopher Ruffo. In addition to looking like one of the Jigsaw Killer's star pupils, Ruffo has blatantly and methodically outlined how right-wing media could use critical race theory as a rhetorical strategy to bait Democrats into an argument about school transparency

that could then be used to further demonize public schools as hives of dangerous ideas and use that platform to win elections. He's literally admitting that it's all a bad faith grift designed to dismantle public schools and win elections. And he did this in a public Twitter thread. Because as we've mentioned here and covered in the past, CRT isn't a thing being taught to high schoolers.

And they know this and the outrage around it that saturated the media was all from nothing, because they lie. This is a campaign of lies, designed to reshape schools to uphold conservative Christian and white values. I didn't mention what Matt Walsh actually said when he spoke at that school board meeting in Virginia.

Well, here's what was so important that he leased a house to say it. It's a minute long, and I'll show you the whole thing because, quite frankly, Matt Walsh is so incredibly innocuous that nothing he ever says should be considered dangerous. I would thank you all for allowing me to speak to you tonight, but you tried not to allow it, yet here I am. Now, you only give us 60 seconds, so let me get to the point. You are all child abusers. You prey upon impressionable children and indoctrinate them into your insane ideological cult, a cult which holds many fanatical views, but none so deranged as the idea that boys are girls and girls are boys. By imposing this vile nonsense on students to the

point even of forcing young girls to share locker rooms with boys, you deprive these kids of safety and privacy and something more fundamental too, which is truth. If education is not grounded in truth, then it is worthless. Worse, it is poison. You are poison. You are predators. I can see why He just fucking called them groomers. hoping we shut up and go away, but we won't. I promise you that. Thank you for your time, and I'll talk to you again very, very soon. He just fucking called them groomers. Same old shit. Matt was specifically there concerning a story out of Loudoun County and a parent named Scott Smith. Smith is a Virginia parent whose ninth grade daughter

was sexually assaulted in the girls' bathroom at school by what the Daily Wire is trying to strongly suggest was a trans girl. Smith was arrested at a school board meeting for nearly getting into a fight with other parents over the board's decision to allow trans students to use the facilities corresponding to their gender identity.

Ben Shapiro was all over this story to rail against the dangers of wokeism and how the deranged liberal agenda had created an environment in which boys can dress up like girls and walk into any school bathroom and rape their fellow students. Smith's tragic story was fully embraced The problem is, Smith left out several important details. policies in schools that were causing irreparable harm to both children and this great nation. The problem is, Smith left out several important details. For starters, that his daughter was the victim of relationship violence rather than a random attack. But also, the student who assaulted her wasn't a trans girl.

He's a cis boy with whom she'd had an ongoing sexual relationship. That's like a pretty important detail, right? Don't get me wrong, it's awful. A horrible crime that never should have happened. The school absolutely failed to protect her. And Smith has every right to be furious with the school board. But what it isn't is an example of a trans student taking advantage of school policy to assault someone.

The school's trans-inclusive bathroom policies weren't even enacted until months after the assault. So while it's true that the boy was wearing a skirt when he entered the bathroom, it was likely as a quick disguise to thwart any nearby faculty and not because he was posing as a trans girl to ambush his victim.

But people like Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh and the dozens of hooting hinge-jawed pundits and politicians who jumped on Smith's story as an example of the evils they've been trying to fight all along, well, they don't care about Smith's daughter at all. It was never about her safety or her well-being. Otherwise, they might have bothered

to actually tell her story, instead of the version of her story that better suited their agenda. They care so little about the actual problems that kids face in school that states like Oklahoma and New Mexico began using police officers and the National Guard as substitute teachers to combat COVID-related staffing shortages.

Remember how I started this episode with a fun joke about how schools are kind of like prisons? That was a simpler time when my belly was still full of morning shrimp. It's similar to the pro-life movement, which claims to have an enormous amount of concern for our children until the moment they are born and have to go to school and get shot or arrested.

The children are an abstract concept to these people, a rhetorical device that ceases to exist the second they pass laws punishing whichever minority group they're pissed off about this election cycle. These people go above and beyond when it comes to punishing kids, real go-getters about it, finding new and inventive ways to make school a bleak and terrifying experience. But they won't show up screaming at the top of their lungs

about their kids being required to memorize mass shooter safety drills, because the same lawmakers they unequivocally worship refuse to make it even slightly more difficult for dozens of children to be shot to death literally anywhere at any time. The point is so far removed from any genuine concern for the well-being of children that a far-right organization called Liberty Alliance, whose mission statement is to fight the woke agenda permeating all across Missouri, published a map of so-called woke hotspots, places with an abundance of dangerous liberal ideology. And yeah, we're not showing it because the map Liberty

Alliance posted was a map of fucking schools. Every single woke hotspot was a school. They published a map of schools and called them dangerous hotspots of anti-American activity. When so many spree shooters often cite white supremacist or anti-woke talking points, what, if not violence, is the end goal of doing that? What is there to say about that except holy shit? Holy fucking shit. They don't actually care about the kids. They don't. And you the kids. They don't.

And you know how I know that? Besides the fucking woke hotspots map? Because the very same people calling teachers poisonous child abusers and groomers are using that same breath to call for teachers and faculty to be armed to thwart potential mass shooters. In other words, giving those same deviant child abusing monsters guns to carry in the classroom. If those teachers are so dangerous

that we need to keep passing wildly restrictive laws on what they can and cannot say to our children, why on earth would we also require those same teachers to carry guns? Unless, of course, you don't actually believe the teachers are dangerous, or you don't actually care about the children. In this case, it's probably both.

The version of children that these ghouls have in their minds says a lot. In their minds, children are completely incurious, have zero emotional intelligence, and are totally incapable of interpreting the world around them. Goldfish, in other words. These people think children are goldfish. They're so helpless that they have to be protected from ideas, from knowledge. If you take these people completely at their word, and not as the bad faith actors many, if not all of them actually are, kids need to be protected from the truth about America

because, eh? There's not actually a good reason. The best any of these parents groups can muster is that learning about slavery might make kids feel sad. If we teach the real history of America's violent, genocidal treatment of indigenous people, it might make white kids feel guilty. And while kids shouldn't feel guilty

about the actions of generations past, is this a bad thing to work through? Kids need to be protected from those feelings? Why? Experiencing a feeling and processing it, ideally with the help of adults in their life, such as teachers and parents, is how kids develop emotional intelligence.

It's one of the actual points of an education, the very reason we send children to school. The whole point is to learn about the world and develop as a socially conscious person. But in order for those wholly unjustified and unjustifiable arguments to land, these groups have to pretend that children are bland gray blobs with zero vitality,

personality, or curiosity. Shrimps, if you will. So what do we do? It's all pretty exhausting, especially when you are getting by on the promise of a bucket of delicious shrimps that never arrived. I'm not even exaggerating.

They bring them to you in a bucket, like an actual metal bucket. One you might find on a dairy farm or a bucket farm. I don't know what they do on farms. The point is red lobster goes all out for shrimp days, and that means truckloads of gleaming metal shrimp buckets. Luckily, young people are a lot more intelligent than conservatives insist they are.

And many of them are loudly rejecting this shit. Like Xander Moritz, the senior class president at Pine View School in Osprey, Florida, who was told he couldn't speak about his experiences as an openly gay student during his commencement speech, or else his microphone would be cut. I used to hate my girls. I spent mornings and nights embarrassed at them, trying desperately to straighten this part of who I am. But the daily damage of trying to fix myself became too much to endure. So, while having curly hair in Florida was difficult,

due to the humidity, I decided to be proud of who I was and started coming to school as my authentic self. And while it undeniably sucks that Moritz has to use his curly hair as a metaphor for his experience going through high school as an openly gay teenager in 2022, it's at least proof that the kids are, for the most part, all right, no matter what the offspring says. Kids are smart, infinitely smarter

than these conservative paste eaters would have you believe. And they can tell this is bullshit, and many of them are fighting against it as we speak. Have you ever tried to stop a kid from doing something? The more dangerous you make these books or woke ideas seem, the bigger the backlash. Not to mention that the internet exists. The idea that you can just ban stuff has been antiquated ever since Al Gore whipped up this whole tapestry of interwebs so many years ago. And the internet is everywhere. It's not like you can cut kids off by never buying them a mobile plan. They're going to find their way to it eventually. And they read all the same bullshit and watch all the same bullshit that the rest of us do, and they'll make up their own minds about it whether you want them to or not. That's why we do our best to guide them and teach them by instilling curiosity and empathy

at a young age and nurturing it throughout their developing lives. You know, like school is supposed to do. The goal should never be to deprive kids of experiencing reality, least of all to protect their feelings. Growing up in isolation with a fabricated version of reality doesn't do a kid any favors once it's time to start interacting with the rest of the world. That's what happened to the whacked up dinosaur in Jurassic World, and look how that turned out. For it and for us.

Ah, that movie is not good. I guess what I'm trying to say is that all you kids out there should watch this show, Cody Schoedie, the news show you can trust-o, the harrowing saga of a newsboy, no, a newsman, waiting for a bucket of shrimps. Hey, Cubs, there's a giant metal bucket of shrimp on your stoop, like huge. It's honestly the biggest bucket I've ever seen. You can milk cows from space with a bucket like that.

Anyway, I think it's been out there for a while. It's mostly liquid and beetles. Yep, just a big metal bucket of liquid shrimp and beetles. I don't think the beetles were a part of the original bucket configuration though. Oh no, they definitely found their own way into that bucket. Probably because it's been sitting out there for so long. Just a big smelly bucket of shrimp juice, let me tell you. Uh, Cody? Raccoons knocked the bucket over. Just flooded under your door. You know, like that scene in Titanic where the old couple are in bed while the boat is sinking?

Yeah, you know. Oh, boy! It stinks! Okay, just gonna force open one of these windows and crawl out because your front door is unusable I just want shrimp. I can feel it in my toes. My socks are wet now. It's the juice.

It's the shrimp juice. you you you