The Daily Signal - This Group's Mission Is to Raise Next Generation of American Patriots

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

The principles of patriotism and the history of America’s founding are not being taught in schools as they once were. Now, many parents are taking it upon themselves to instill national pride in their children.  Rachel Gerli is one such parent. Gerli, along with friends Alli Pillinger Choi and Britt Riner, founded the online platform Primerrily to offer families the resources to help raise the next generation of American patriots.  Gerli joins the show to discuss Primerrily's mission and how you can take advantage of those resources. Visit Primerrily's website here: https://www.primerrily.com/. We also cover these stories:  Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., says he won't meet with Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the president’s Supreme Court nominee.  Voters in New York receive ballots in the mail with incorrect addresses, voter ID numbers, and names.  The Justice Department says San Francisco Mayor London Breed, a Democrat, may be violating First Amendment rights by limiting church meetings to one person. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, September 30th. I'm Rachel Del Judas. And I'm Virginia Allen. Patriotism is not being taught in schools like it used to be. So many parents are taking it upon themselves to instill national pride within their children. Rachel Jerley is one such parent. Along with two other moms, Jerry founded an online platform called Primarily, which offers resources for families to raise up the next generation of American.

Patriots. Durely joins me on the show to discuss the mission of primarily and how you can take advantage of all the resources they offer. Don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now onto our top news. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, says he will not meet with Amy Comey Barrett, the President's Supreme Court Justice nominee. Schumer said in a tweet Tuesday, I am not going to meet with Judge Barrett. Why would I meet with a nominee of such an illegitimate process and one who is determined to get rid of the Affordable Care Act? If confirmed, one of the first cases Barrett would vote on would be the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.

Barrett arrived in Washington, D.C. Tuesday morning to meet with several different Republican senators, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsay Graham, ahead of the confirmation hearings which are reportedly going to begin on October 12th. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the press that the Senate is glad to have her here and glad to get the process started. Voters in New York are receiving ballots in the mail with incorrect addresses, voter IDs, and names. The Hill reported that some voters said they received absentee ballots mislabeled as the official ballot for military members, while others said the envelope meant to return their ballot did not bear their name or address. It also cited reporting from the New York Post, which said that the ballots marked as military ballots were wrongly printed in Queens, and that experts say it will not change how the votes are marked up.

In a statement to the Washington Post, New York City Councilman Jenny Van Bramer said, There's just mass confusion about these ballots and what people are supposed to do with them. People were already not trusting this process, and they were already not trusting the Board of Eleanor. to count the ballot right. San Francisco's Democrat Mayor London Breed is still limiting church meetings in the California City to one person, and the Department of Justice is speaking up. The DOJ sent a letter to Mayor Breed on Sunday, explaining that San Francisco's limitation of indoor worship to one congregant without regard to the size of the place of worship is

Draconian, out of step with the treatment afforded to other similar indoor activities in San Francisco wholly at odds with the nation's traditional understanding of religious liberty and may violate the First Amendment of the Constitution. The DOJ raised evidence of a double standard in San Francisco's COVID-19 restrictions. Personal service providers, including barbershops, nail salons, massage locations, and tattoo parlors, where there is significant contact between the service provider and the customer over an extended period of time, are permitted to serve as many customers indoors as they can space at six feet apart. The DOJ argues in the letter that the same standards should be applied to houses of worship

and warns that they are reviewing their options and may take further action as and if appropriate to protect the religious liberty rights of the people of San Francisco. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Rachel Jerley about primarily an online resource to inspire patriotism and teach history to the next generation. Do you have an interest in public policy? Do you want to hear some of the biggest names in American politics speak? Every day, the Heritage Foundation host webinars called Heritage Events Live. Webinar topics range from ethics during the COVID-19 pandemic to the CARES Act and the economy.

These webinars are free and open to the public. To find the latest webinars and register, visit Heritage, I am joined by Rachel Jarley, one of the founders of primarily an online resource for families and teachers raising the next generation of American patriots. Rachel, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me here. I wish my two co-founders, Allie Pillinger, Choi and Britt Reiner could be here, but like many other conservative parents, they're picking up the kids from school and running campaigns for

local office. Well, that's great to hear. And we're excited to hear a little bit of the story of all three of you, how you came together to found this site primarily. Your website offers so many great resources for parents, for teaching children about our founding and really instilling in them a spirit of patriotism. So just tell us a little bit about the mission of primarily. Absolutely. So you kind of nailed it. It's a parenting resource. It's really aimed at passing along American founding values and a love of our country to the next generation. And we do that through fun crafts, through curated stories, guided conversations for your dinner tables. You can find more at primarily.com. The name is a portmanteau of primer, like the New England primer of education, the first textbook in this country, and Marely, like Marely down the stream, because we want it to feel a primer for a merry American life. Oh, I love that. I was going to ask you where that name came from. That's so clever. Yeah. I mean, it's, we tried to do all these different plays on the values that we cherish, but in the end, we just came down to, we want to have fun. We want to make patriotism cool and

civility about old school kindness, not political correctness. Civics can be fun, and I think we've found a lot of ways to unlock that for families. So right now in our country, I think there's no doubt that we need this. We can all be in agreement that we are at a moment in history where we need to be inspiring those traditional values. We need to be raising at patriots. But this journey began for you and your two friends that you mentioned about two years ago. So tell us the story of how you all kind of stumbled upon this idea and how it was brought about. Absolutely. So it really did start with Britt and Allie. There are a few years ahead of me in the parenting journey. and they had styles of motherhood that I really admired.

So we were all at this black tie thing down in D.C. And kind of bemoaning what we were seeing in culture and in schools. And Ali was saying that at her child's preschool, they stopped saying the Pledge of Allegiance. So they hung a flag in their New York City apartment. And Ali taught her daughter herself. And it's a ritual they still do every morning, even though now the children are older.

And Britt, who's down in Florida, is always posting these pictures. and ideas around things she does with her kids to commemorate American holidays, planting flags in the front yard, talking through their family constitution on Constitution Day. And so we said to her, is this something that you're seeing in Florida also? Or are we in this New York bubble? And she's like, actually, that was a question in the debate for school board candidates last year. We were like, when did the flag become controversial?

So our kind of initial outrage sparked an idea of an opportunity that if we didn't get involved and we simply allowed the mainstream media and culture to raise our kids, we were going to raise woke children. And we're really intentional in everything else we do. We recognize that children are sponges. So it was important to us to know what they're absorbing. And we want them to absorb American values. We want them to learn about America and see growing up in America as this really fun, exciting adventure because anything still really is possible. And I think so many parents are in that same boat where they're looking at society and they're just kind of wondering, what do I do? Because those founding principles that used to be taught in school are not being taught

anymore. So tell us a little bit more about the website. What is actually on there? What can be found there? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, Lincoln said that the philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation as the philosophy of government in the next. And we know that we don't have control over the school room. So we're taking it up at the dinner table. And we've split our site into a few different categories, parent-to-parent content of tips that we found or ideas that we have that we feel like are worth sharing, discussions for the dinner table that are more like big ideas for small people. So things about how to talk to your kids about race, for example, and how we do that through food. immersion and we take our children to Korean restaurants and restaurants in Harlem and Lebanese

restaurants and celebrating in that way. And then we also have a section we called the tree house, which is activities. So it's things like holidays. Like if you start following primarily, be prepared to celebrate a lot of holidays. We're not just here for Memorial Day and Veterans Day. It's the day our towns were founded. It's election day. It's the anniversary of the moon landing, the defense of the Alamo. There's so much. And sometimes it's a patriotic couple. and sometimes we have activities around those, around those holidays. And then the last category is our shop where we've curated books, materials, craft, supplies that we think have deeper meaning because we just see an opportunity for curation and so much

of what's put in front of children. And so we've tried to do that there. On the about page of your website, you write, America is not perfect and we believe it is the best country on earth. Now, we are at a moment in history where we are being reminded that America is not perfect. We have a broken past and at present and we're facing a lot of division and violence across the country. But you all hold fast to the perspective that America is the greatest nation on earth and you want to teach your kids that. Why? Absolutely. I mean, it was the American experiment and this is our parenting experiment. And just,

like America is not perfect, there's all this pressure on parents who really consider these things to be perfect. And I'm coming to you with a mom bun today to say that it's not about becoming the perfect parent. No one mom or dad has the corner on parenting genius. And as we think about America and how to share it with our kids, we're still figuring it out too. We're figuring out how to talk about sacrifice in a way that young minds can understand. And as we piece this together, if we're each thread the needle and share our stitch, we might just strengthen the fabric of our nation and the character of the next generation. So we're giving it a try. We're trying to put a positive spin on even the segments of our history that maybe are a little bit tougher for young children

to understand, but we always do it through a kid's lens so that everything feels really age appropriate. Well, and when we look at the current events of today, whether it, you know, be racism, disagreement over how to handle COVID-19. We see violence erupting in cities. How are you all taking those big conversations that we see in the news and talking about them with your kids at a level that they can understand? And then how through primarily are you giving parents the resources to do the exact same thing? Absolutely. So some of it is just from our homes to yours. So Britt, I thought, had a really great piece about line leaders. And we were talking about the election and how to explain why people run for office. And every child understands in their school the person that gets to be the line leader. If you say the pledge, the person that gets to be the flag holder, these are positions of leadership that they create. We say, you know, our country's leaders are the line leaders of our country. And we want to make sure that we're following them to the places that we want to go. When we think about racism and we talk about, we talk about. food, we have another piece that just launched today with some more ideas around that. But I think

the key of it is to make it relatable to young minds because they won't always understand the scope of sacrifice when you visit a veteran cemetery. But if you leave them coming home learning something about courage and bravery and what it means to give up something for something you love, there are ways to distill it into ways that they can receive. What is the response that you have received from other families that have stumbled upon primarily. What are they saying? So we've only just soft launch. So we might be preaching to a choir thus far. People have been so enthusiastic. And we've received so many wonderful offers to contribute to the site because people are seeing and experiencing things and they've come up with a solve for that that they want to

share with the rest of the parents in our community, whether it's how to support families in your community who are fostering through foster care. When you've lost a dog, how to talk to your kids about that and grief. And part of how we get ahead of that is through books and curating children's books, which I could talk to you forever about. But there are just so many children's books out there that are misguided or just vapid. There's no content to them anymore. And intentional parenting involves asking, like, what's the intent of reading this book? So parents, in other words, they can visit your site and they can see, okay, here's a list of books that I can trust, that I know I can read to my child that's going to instill those traditional values that's going to instill patriotism within them. Absolutely.

So we're curating book lists for every occasion from going back to school to 9-11 to grief. and we're accompanying those lists with questions to ask your child about the book and then follow-up activities to really solidify the values. So one of the books that comes to mind that I loved as a kid, but I read as a parent and was kind of horrified, was the rainbow fish. Do you remember this book? I do.

I do remember that book. So you may not remember the theme, but the abbreviated version is that there's this gorgeous shiny fish surrounded by a bunch of drab fish, and he's peer pressured to give. his scales away to the other fish so that he can fit in. And I was like, what am I teaching this child to do? Accept bullying and become the average of his peers. And we just recognized an opportunity to highlight so many great materials that are out there, pull them into lists by age and by

occasion, and have these follow-up questions like, have you ever been pressured to do something to fit in or, you know, things that are maybe more to their level. Because if you can change a generation, you can change the world. And it's all about what you give them to absorb. So true. So you mentioned that you all have soft launched. When is the hard launch? Yeah, we're probably about two weeks away from that. We're planning additional like ancillary streams of communication with our audience and social media and on the podcast. And we're just ramping those up to get going. but we're really excited to start shouting about it because right now it's been very much like a wink and a nudge. Have you heard about this thing that I'm working on?

I love it. So tell us practically, how should parents think about this resource? I mean, is this something that is really intended to be used on a daily basis? I mean, how can parents really practically start making primarily part of their family's life? That's such a great question and something that Britt and Allie and I talk about all the time. I think ideally, if you sign up for our listserv, you'll get articles once in a while, some that may be relevant to you at the time and some that maybe you want to revisit later. But it's a great archive for when you're coming upon either a milestone or a holiday and you say,

my child lost a tooth. How can I make this potentially more meaningful than slipping a dollar under the pillow and saying that a fairy brought it? I should have said, shield your ears if they're young listeners. But actually losing a tooth can be a great celebration of growth and civics because coins and bills are conveniently compact treasure troves of American symbolism and history. If it's the first tooth, maybe you give a Susan B. Anthony dollar and you talk about Susan B. Anthony or a Jefferson $2 bill and dig into that founding father. there's so many occasions that we just don't give the intentional underscore of value to. I was thinking about birthdays recently. I wrote an article about this and how when you turn a year older, there's a cake, there

are presents. But in order to give that idea of getting older and with age comes power, with power comes responsibility, starting a tradition of giving your child two envelopes, one with a new privilege and one with a new responsibility. Both age appropriate. Maybe it's 15 minutes more reading time before bed, but your new responsibility is bringing the laundry to the laundry room. But something that says that this isn't just a celebration of you, but also I'm trusting you to carry on responsibility for this house. So ideas like that are, I think, what you can expect to hide it primarily. Yeah, I love that. Wow. I think that's such a good idea because it is, it's practice.

It's hands-on, and it's simple, but yet, wow, would have such a huge impact, I'm sure, on so many kids. So tell us just kind of the practical how to. What is the website? How can we follow you on social media? Yes, so the website is www.primarily.com. You can also follow us under the same name on Instagram, and our podcast will hopefully be forthcoming in the next couple of weeks. And we invite everyone to send us ideas of how you're instilling your kids to be the voters and the teachers and the parents and the citizens of tomorrow. Because some of our best ideas have come from readers.

And we've only been doing this a couple of weeks. So we're so encouraged seeing all the creativity that's out there. That's so exciting. Rachel, we will be sure to put the link for the website in today's show notes. And we certainly encourage all of our listeners to check out primarily. and we just thank you so much for your time today. Thank you so much for having us. And that'll do it for today's episode.

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