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April 24, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
56:37
SENDING EDUCATION BACK TO THE STATES Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 1069
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Hi, everyone.
I'm Danielle D'Souza Gill, and I will be hosting Dinesh's podcast while he is away in Israel this week.
I've heard that it's been a really meaningful, special trip for him, so I'm so glad to hear he's having a good time.
If you're a regular Dinesh D'Souza listener, you might have heard me on here before.
I've been hosting this week.
I'm frequently busy being a mom to my daughter, Marigold, and I also support my husband's role in U.S. Congress.
We live in North Texas.
And I'm about two weeks away from having second baby, so wish me luck there.
But I always love coming on to guest host, and it's been a great week so far.
The best way you can find out more about me is to follow me on True Social, Facebook, Instagram X, Rumble, YouTube, all of those places.
I'm at Danielle D'Souza Gil.
But beware if you follow me on Facebook.
I do post often, so I will be blowing up your news feed with mostly good news.
I'm from Trump and the admin, so that's where you can find a lot of my content, thoughts, videos.
But we have a lot to get to today.
Today we're going to be talking all about education, all about public schools.
We'll be speaking with Corey DeAngelis.
He is a senior fellow at the American Culture Project, and he's the author of The Parent Revolution, Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools.
We'll also discuss Ketanji Brown Jackson's Recent comments about how parents can simply pull their kids out of school.
We'll talk about what's on the horizon for SCOTUS a little bit, and we will also discuss wokeness and gender ideology in these public schools.
All right, well, let's get started.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Imagine being a white-collar worker in a modern business setting.
One day, your department is summoned into a conference room and everyone is informed that the company is going to be more sensitive regarding issues of race and gender.
That there's going to be a new set of bathrooms installed for those new employees who don't fall into one of the binary gender types or the opposite gender is now going to be using your bathroom.
That from now on the company is going to look at factors like race, gender, preference when hiring the next batch of co-workers.
Your company is going to prioritize DEI because diversity is our greatest strength.
So what do you do?
Do you pull aside a member of management and kindly inform them that this is not a good idea, that they're wasting money promoting ideas that can only destroy productivity and further burden the statistically few competent workers in the company who are already struggling to keep a hand?
Doing so would be a surefire way of outing yourself as someone who's not on board with the modern way of running business, and you could be punished for even speaking up.
This is the leftist way.
There can be no quicker path to finding yourself downsized out of a job, given leftists' unwavering intolerance for good ideas, logic, and merit.
So maybe you just sit there, trying your best to keep quiet, to go along to get along, while watching the company slowly crumble under the effects of bad management while you walk on eggshells and try not to offend people.
The third option would be you could look for a job elsewhere.
You could bail when you get hired at a new job.
Of course, that presumes that you can find a job that isn't also infected with this DEI hiring.
And good luck with that.
Even companies headquartered in Asia, a region that is notoriously derisive of American social justice warrior culture and mindless ESG and DEI games, will embrace leftist managerial groupthink here in the U.S. So if you find this kind of ideology repulsive on its face and offensive to your core,
you pretty much only have two options, self-employment or unemployment.
For all intents and purposes, your job market has been frozen out by a handful of crazies in HR and cronies who are bent on hamstringing American industry to pave the way for, ultimately, socialism.
Oh, and even if you can find success being self-employed, Good luck doing any kind of banking, because those banks are run by the same insane anti-American leaders who will debunk you, debank you, under that other insidious business practice called know your customer.
Under the weakest of justifications, they'll make sure to disassociate from you permanently.
They'll say, you don't affirm and respect trans people.
That makes you, you know, someone that needs to be fired.
Now things are really dire, so you decide to take your last remaining dollars and go see a movie to take your mind off of the fact that irrational leftists are fast-tracking you towards a life in the gutter.
Only once you get to the theater, the movies are all anti-white, they're all anti-male, they're anti-romance, anti-freedom, they've replaced any kind of traditional relationships with girl bosses or some kind of LGBTQ messaging.
Now these people on there are probably living out some kind of producer's fantasies while being endlessly praised as a hero who's not a real hero.
That's all there is at the theater nowadays.
Just endless streams of this.
And this is all thanks to pro-DEI propaganda in Hollywood.
These three examples of the workplace, of finance, of entertainment, they all show a simple principle at play.
It's that once an institution is co-opted by woke, those same institutions make sure that only the woke survive.
Conservatives like to talk about DEI, like it's a matter of freedom of speech.
It is, but that's not why these coercive authoritarian tactics are embraced by the left.
To them, it's not about speech as much as it is about power.
It's about the left gaining a monopoly on where you can earn money, where you can enjoy yourself watching a film, where you can work.
The left hates choice.
They hate freedom and they hate any kind of traditional values.
They understand that under true market forces, that which works can continue working and that which doesn't fails.
So they don't like to have a true market.
They like to control the levers of power and shift it so they can be the ones who kind of decide what people are actually experiencing here and they can't really choose.
And what the left believes more than anything is that failure shouldn't be an excuse to do away with something.
So they work to create an environment that is failure-friendly and in the process rig the system to be intolerant of people who are deserving of success.
They trap you in their web of good intentions, robbing you of choice in the name of kindness and inclusion.
They're like the Kathy Bates character from the movie Misery.
They love you so much they'll use a sledgehammer to break your legs so you can't run away from them.
And once in that position of total dominance, they not only delude themselves into believing that they're helping you, but they also feel validated by the fact that they, and their ilk, Are controlling your life?
What is communism but a system of total control by a bunch of bureaucrats who believe they understand your best interests better than you can?
At its core, leftism is the misplaced longing of someone who never got to experience the true joy of being a parent or a wife or husband.
So instead, they must live out their innate drive.
To mother by turning it into an impulse to smother.
They terrorize you with caring.
They're carerists.
It's not only these few institutions I just referenced, but woke nonsense is choking all aspects of American life, and one of the saddest examples is the institution of education.
Because this affects our young minds, this affects children, and they are being used as pawns in this whole scheme.
Right now, President Trump and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon are working to limit the Department of Education as much as they can.
In order to completely dismantle the department, they would need a supermajority, so the best they can do right now is downsize its 4,400-man workforce and $200 billion budget as much as possible.
And yes, I did say billion.
Why? According to his executive order of returning control of education to the states, President Trump seeks to take a significant step forward to give parents and states control over their children's education.
Teachers will be unshackled from burdensome regulations and paperwork, empowering them to get back to teaching subjects.
Bringing control of education back to the states is a way of smashing the federal monopoly on education, which is much overdue.
When everything was controlled by just the one central government entity, natural market forces that nurture excellence were all squashed, and American education suffered.
Since the inception of the Department of Education in 1980, so, hey, it's not that old, was not envisioned by our founders, literally came far along after there was even welfare, scores in reading and math have remained stagnant.
With the latest trends showing a precipitous decline, especially over recent years.
Now you would think, without us putting billions of dollars into this, that kids' grades would increase, their competency of different subjects, but no, it's actually the opposite.
There's nothing in those charts that justifies the continuation of this $200 billion boondoggle.
And keep in mind, many schools across the country are constantly lowering their standards.
For reading and math because they want to make it seem like more kids are passing.
Some districts have gone so far as to decree standards themselves as racist.
So test scores are catering at the same time to race as we're lowering standards.
Obviously this is ridiculous, but that means that actual mastery of reading and math is objectively more rare than our current charts even show.
Meanwhile, school zones become war zones where kids are bringing knives to school or they're bursting into violent fistfights.
There has been outright attacks on teachers in a lot of these public inner-city schools.
And on the other hand, you have creepy teachers who spend all their classroom time talking about sexual perversion, grooming children into transitioning, or just meeting them up for...
Unfortunately, you know, some kind of rape situation.
I mean, it's horrible.
These teachers need to be stopped.
And this kind of grooming, this kind of gender, you know, ideology for kids, we have to stop it.
Between that and the drugs and even smartphones, turning every minute into a high anxiety place for kids in the classroom, the only thing not happening in American classrooms, honestly, is good old traditional learning.
It's clear that the best path to securing a good education is to give parents the right to decide what is best for their kids when it comes to education.
So school choice programs are becoming more popular with currently 29 states offering some sort of program to help parents make these decisions.
It's a shame that many states have not joined that list, and it's a shame that many liberal states are actually doubling down on the woke gender ideology.
But at the same time, we can be hopeful because some states are deciding to give this power back to parents.
At the same time, smothering leftists decree any such action saying that it takes money for books out of school budgets or things like that.
It's actually funny because the whole idea about programs like tax credits and vouchers is so book money can follow the student.
The other complaint is that some of this money ends up in the hands of families sending their kids to a private school, therefore they don't need a voucher or tax cut.
However, parents should have the right to send their kids to private school or homeschool.
Notice the other lack of remorse about the fact that those parents are paying taxes to educate, Someone else's kid while paying out of pocket for their own child's education?
That doesn't make sense.
If schools were good, then everyone would want to go to those schools.
So naturally, we need to create an environment that creates schools that compete, that get better teachers, do a better job of educating.
But this is the mentality of the left.
When they have you cornered in one of their monopolies, their goal is to make you powerless.
Accountability for failure.
Isn't even an afterthought.
They don't even want to be responsible for educating these kids.
They don't even think that it's their job, but in a way, weirdly, they also feel like they own the kids and they feel like it's their job to indoctrinate them.
So there's indoctrination, but there isn't learning.
To them, it's not your taxes.
It's their money and their classroom.
What's most insidious about this is that schools are where you're supposed to learn the basics to get you started in life.
You're supposed to learn new ideas, learn foundational things, but that's impossible when you're under the boot of the dogmatic and intolerant left.
They prefer frivolity over competency, all while placing rigid ideological blinders at a moment when children are supposed to be expanding their horizons and learning actual skills for adulthood.
This system perpetuates failure and ruin.
Remember that leftists like to think of themselves as liberals.
They tell everyone that everything they do is about attaining greater and greater freedom, about being who they are, which ironically is achieved through monopolistic means of control for minors.
When they talk about liberty, it's not meant to be a shared legacy.
Liberty for the leftist means their own personal liberty.
The liberty of someone who has you chained up in their house that they can do with as they please.
That's the type of liberty that they're going for.
Ironically, conservatives are also committed to liberty.
Sure, we don't call ourselves liberal, but that's because we're focused on the method to maximize and perpetuate everyone's individual liberty by conserving values and ideals.
Ideals like limited government and things that go back to our founding.
Self-reliance, personal responsibility.
Liberals are named after their supposed aim of what liberty means.
Conservatives are aiming for true liberty, but they take their name from what they understand is the best method of attaining liberty for society as a whole.
Liberals have demonstrated that they don't care about the methods.
When I say liberals, I mean leftists don't care about the methods.
It's all just a means to an end to create the kind of little student that they want to create.
So they have no problem embracing even the most illiberal of methods around in order to get a child, let's say, to embrace a foreign gender ideology.
While conservatives, on the other hand, are preserving the one proven method for sharing maximum liberty for most people, which is freedom.
That's why we advocate for going back to letting market forces empower disenfranchised parents to let them decide how their children receive an education.
And that is an important difference, one that I'm sure our children are not learning in public schools yet.
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I am delighted to welcome our guest today, Corey DeAngelis.
He's a senior fellow at the American Culture Project, a visiting fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, and he's also the author of the book, The Parent Revolution.
Corey, thanks for joining us.
Hey, thanks so much for having me.
Yeah, well, you're an expert in the education realm, and so I wanted to ask you some questions about this.
How do you kind of think it's going so far with our Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, and this kind of initiative to send a lot of education back to the states and taking power away from these federal bureaucrats?
Yeah, it's a fantastic move.
I hope Linda can get in there as soon as possible and body slam that unconstitutional department once and for all.
It should have never been created in the first place.
It started in 1979 as a political payoff by Jimmy Carter to the teachers unions, the NEA, the largest labor union in the country.
And the word education does not exist in the federal constitution of the United States.
So therefore, the whole department is a violation of the 10th Amendment.
We should send education back to the states.
And you'd have more local control.
If that money goes back to the state, you'll have actually more money for education than you had before because you wouldn't be wasting all those dollars on useless bureaucrats sitting around doing a bunch of nothing, pushing paper in Washington, D.C., thousands of miles away who don't know anything about your kids.
When you have more local control, you have more accountability to your constituents.
And so this is a great move.
Trump actually signed an executive order to send education back to the states.
But there's only so much you can do via executive order.
I know he's trying to get in there and give a death by a thousand cuts.
I know they've fired at least half of the employees already.
That's a great first move.
Oh, we're halfway there.
But they're also continuing the march towards freedom by cutting funding for DEI initiatives.
And hopefully Congress can get their act together and vote to erase this unconstitutional department once and for all.
But you do need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate.
And Republicans have a majority, but they don't have a supermajority.
And I don't have a lot of confidence that seven Democrats are going to come along.
They should, because it's a good idea.
But they're so stuck on...
They're Trump derangement syndrome right now.
They're fear-mongering.
They're arguing it's a straw man.
They're saying that this is going to defund education.
They're saying that this is going to get rid of vital programs.
It does neither of those things.
Trump, Linda McMahon, and so on and so forth have been clear from the start, and they're still saying the same thing, that the money will go back to the states, and the programs that are vital, like special needs programs, just go to other departments.
We're not getting rid of vital services.
It's a logical thing to do.
It's the constitutional thing to do.
And it would improve education across the country.
Yeah. And if this kind of continues to go back to the states, the money that was initially, I guess, going to federal programs and so on, would that be going to the state?
Or would it go back to the taxpayer?
What do you kind of think would be the best situation?
Because some people I know, you know, they'd rather kind of have...
You know, the money in their pocket.
Some people would rather go to public schools and so on.
So how do you kind of, I guess, moving away from federal is definitely good.
But then at the state level, do you think it kind of should just be decided by each state?
Or what do you think?
Yeah, look, returning education to the states is a good first step.
But the utopian or the best move is to return education.
Not just to the states, but to the parents.
They're the primary decision makers for their own kids.
So this funding should ultimately go back to families to then determine how to direct the upbringing of their children and how to educate them.
So I think the money should be used for school choice.
I know the teachers unions are very concerned about that happening right now.
Randy Weingarten, who lobbied the CDC to keep schools closed as long as possible during the COVID era.
I mean, they held children's education hostage to secure billions of dollars in ransom payments.
They only care about themselves.
They don't give a crap about the kids.
But she admitted on a podcast, on a left-wing show, that she knows that Trump has said that they'll block grant the funding back to the states.
But what she's really concerned about is states like Texas, my home state.
Well, we might decide to give the funding to school choice programs.
Lo and behold, we did just pass the 16th state to go all in, to pass a universal school choice program very recently.
It's on its way to the governor's desk very soon.
And Texas will be the biggest day one victory for school choice in our nation's history.
And that's what the unions are very afraid about right now.
They see their power slipping away.
Right between their fingertips as we speak.
And that's good news for families, even if it's bad news for people like Randy Weingarten, who make over $500,000 a year to trap your kids in her failing schools.
You have places like Chicago, they have 30 schools with 0% proficiency rates.
They spend $30,000 a kid per year.
The private schools cost half that amount and do a better job.
And so let's let the parents decide.
And if that's the public school, that's great.
That's your...
But the choice shouldn't be with the government.
It shouldn't be with the teachers unions.
It should be for the parents to determine for their own children.
And so that is the ultimate proposal.
But I will say the proposal in Congress right now is in the form of the block grant to send it back to the states.
And the states can determine how to figure it out.
I will say Trump on the campaign trail did point out that...
Some states may do better than others.
Iowa may knock it out of the park with more control.
But what about states like California and New York?
They might fumble the football.
And my response to that is, well, it can't get any worse in those states than it is right now.
They're already keeping secrets.
They're already failing kids.
They're already throwing more money at the problem.
And so there's no, there's only one way forward from where they're at and that's up.
And for the States that it would benefit the,
The upside in those states outweighs any of the potential downside, which is minimal in the states that they're already having problems.
So the Department of Education doesn't lead to better outcomes.
It doesn't get rid of the gender insanity in a lot of these schools.
Behind closed doors, these rebel teachers and the unions, they do what they want anyway.
So at the end of the day, the best accountability is from the bottom up with school choice.
Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I don't even know why.
We shouldn't even have federal involvement in that, and the parents should really be the ones deciding these things.
You mentioned the fact that some of these teachers, schools, they hide things from parents, but we have seen some cases where, you know, I think in California, they don't really hide it.
They basically just say, hey, you know, this is the law.
If your kid wants to be trans, we're...
And we also will make it a crime if you try to intervene as the parent.
And so some places have gotten to the extreme where it's like that.
And in other places, I guess they kind of slip in the inappropriate books and things like that.
But what are you kind of seeing in, I guess, these very liberal places?
Yeah, look, Trump won the parent vote in November by nine points.
That was a seismic shift to the Republicans on the issue of education, which, He beat Kamala Harris on education, too, according to Atlas Intel, one of the best pollsters in the country, on at least two occasions before Election Day.
You'd think the Democrats would have learned a little bit of where they failed when it came to parental rights.
We'd think they learned from the Terry McAuliffe loss in Virginia after he said, I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.
Glenn Youngkin beat Terry McAuliffe in a blue state that apparently went to Biden by 10 points the year before.
President Trump running on education freedom, running on school choice, running on abolishing the department, still won on the issue of education.
These are ideas that resonate with parents.
And on the other hand, you have the left quadrupling down on failure for kids and also this idea that your kids belong to the government.
They don't.
The Supreme Court ruled this in 1925.
They famously said, Quote, the child is not the mere creature of the states.
The Democrats should figure that out sooner than later if they don't want to lose elections in the future.
Republicans are probably saying, shh, don't tell them.
Let them continue to fumble on these issues.
But, I mean, in Colorado right now, they just, on a Sunday, a couple weeks ago, Sunday of all days, they passed taxpayer-funded abortions.
On the same day, they passed...
It making it child abuse if you quote-unquote misgender your child.
If you don't play into this delusion of a small child, you can lose your kid.
The state can take your child away for living in reality.
And the Democrats, they think this is a good idea.
Or they know it's a bad idea.
They know this is an 80-20 issue against them.
The public, they're not with the will of the people.
And maybe they just don't care.
They're just so concerned about control and forcing their ideology onto everybody else that they're even willing to lose elections over it.
And hopefully that's the case because then you'll have places like Colorado shift to the right where Republicans can return sanity to the classroom, return sanity to the state.
And in Illinois, I mean, Chicago is bad enough, but Illinois, the state lawmakers are calling to...
To regulate homeschool freedoms.
They also got rid of school choice two years ago in Illinois.
They are just coming after parents left and right.
And on the other hand, you have the red states passing school choice left and right.
They're kind of diverging in a way, but the Republican states are embracing parental freedom.
They basically become or emerge as the parents party.
And hopefully the Democrats kind of learn their lesson sooner than later.
Because if not, that's going to be bad for parents in the short run.
But in the long term, maybe that'll help Republicans win some elections.
Well, Corey, in a lot of these states, the strange thing is parents are being punished for, quote, misgendering their kids.
In other words, if you have a son.
Who wants to be a girl, you're punished as a parent if you don't make him a girl, if you don't acknowledge that, if you don't call him other pronouns and all this stuff.
But the reality is, it should be the opposite, where parents who do transition their kids are the ones who are punished because they actually are misgendering their kids by giving them...
Puberty blockers and using their child is basically this experiment to see kind of what happens when they change their gender at such a young age.
So I think that that should be the crime in a lot of red states in any case because the blue states are doing the opposite.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And I think the Democrats don't want to get into this game because we're on the right side of history.
It's an 80-20 issue in favor of parents as opposed to the Democrats.
And the Republicans in states like Colorado, they're taking the moderate position.
If anything, they're not going and saying, well, on the flip side, that if you're telling your boy that he's actually a girl, then you're the one abusing the child.
The Republicans are taking a hands-off approach.
If anything, they're saying, Well, we're not going to use the state to put our thumb on the scale one way or the other.
And so, yeah, the Democrats should back off of this issue.
And they kind of started to, in Colorado, on final passage, when they were passing that bill to criminalize parents and to basically rip kids away from them if they, quote-unquote, misgendered their child, which basically means that to them,
if they're...
Calling a boy a boy and a girly girl and living in reality and not living into the delusions of a small child.
They would take the kids away.
But on third reading, they actually cut off the bait.
They invoked something called Rule 16, which means we're not going to talk about it anymore.
We're just going to ram it through because they know it's unpopular.
They knew it was blowing up in the national media even after the second vote.
They didn't want to do it again.
They knew this was hurting their reputation.
It was going to be used against them in the next election cycle.
And you know what?
We're winning at the Supreme Court, too.
Just a couple days ago, the U.S. Supreme Court took up a case out of Montgomery County, Maryland, of all places, where they used to have an opt-out for families if they disagreed with the transgender ideology in the classroom.
Families used to be able to opt out in Maryland for specific instruction that violated their religious beliefs.
But they're still teaching the transgender ideology.
They're still doing it, and guess what?
They now don't allow you to opt out.
I guess they got lobbied by the gender ideology lobby.
Who wanted them to force-feed this material down the throats of young children.
Even Randy Weingarten went on Fox News a couple days ago with Martha McCollum, and she was forced to concede that if she was teaching those kids, Randy Weingarten, she wouldn't be teaching this material to four- to six-year-olds.
She even admitted that on Fox News.
So case closed.
Let's call it a day.
And based on the comments, the oral arguments in that case out of Montgomery County, Maryland, They're going to rule on the side of parents.
I think it actually, you might get one of the liberal justices, Justice Kagan.
She was even hinting that, you know, she said that non-religious parents might even be object to this material.
Religious parents, they're absolutely going to have a problem with this.
So it might even be a 7-2 ruling in favor of parental rights and education.
That's going to be a big win, and it hopefully gets some of these.
Rogue school districts in different states, red states and blue states, they do this everywhere, to kind of back off and focus on the basics, focus on education as opposed to indoctrination.
And I just got to point out, Judge Jackson, who doesn't know what a woman is, she made the argument that, you know what, if you don't like what the public school is teaching, if it violates your religious beliefs and values, Too bad.
It's not a big deal.
You can just pay to go to a private school or you can homeschool your kid.
And it's like, read the room, Judge Jackson.
It's easy for her to say.
She sent both of her kids to a private school in Washington, D.C. called Georgetown Day School.
It costs about the same as Harvard University.
It costs about $60,000 per student in tuition each year.
That's a great argument for school choice.
If you're saying the public schools can't meet families' needs and it's going to cause chaos if they opt out of certain curriculum, well, how about other families get a choice too?
How about the money that we're spending in the public schools, which on average nationwide is about $20,000 per kid, which is about 60% higher than average private school tuition in this country?
How about we let that money follow the child?
We only need about half of it.
And then families who...
A religious education won't have to have their rights violated anymore.
We already do this for other specialized categories, like kids with special needs.
Real quick, under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, IDEA, if a district is not meeting a kid's special need, they will be compelled to pay for that kid's private education where they can get their needs met.
We already have school choice in a way for students with disabilities.
Well, what about for religious families?
Public schools, they can't be religious.
And so if you're a religious family and you want to raise your kid with religious values and have that moral compass, you don't really have a choice.
You've got to pay twice.
And a lot of families can't afford to pay twice, once through taxes and again out of pocket.
So let's apply what we've done with special needs families to...
Religious families, too, because the public schools, they're falling short for these families, and they shouldn't be discriminated against.
The entire system, not just this one in Montgomery County, the entire system overall discriminates against religious families because they can't get the kind of education they want for their kids.
Right. And Ketanji Brown-Jackson is one of the most liberal judges.
I have that quote from her here.
She says, if your public schools curriculum violates your religious beliefs, You can go to a private school.
She says, quote, you have a choice.
You can homeschool them.
So it's interesting because to her, I guess the default is have schools teach liberal gender ideology.
And if you believe in science, if you believe in the difference between a man and a woman, then it's on you to homeschool or pull them out of the school.
The reality should be that the schools teach, here's a man, here's a woman.
That's what science is, biology.
And if you're a parent who opposes that, then you can take your kid out of the class, I guess.
So I don't know why the default has all of a sudden become crazy land.
And now we have to be the ones who are saying, oh, no, we have to pull our kids from the school.
Because hypothetically, I would think this would apply to Christian families, but also Jewish families, Muslim families, atheist families, like Justice Kagan was saying.
So I don't know why we're all catering to this.
Tiny percentage of crazy parents or even people who are probably a higher percentage of these bureaucrats and teachers, sadly, are liberal, woke women who get in there and then they decide they want to use this little child in this little classroom as their kind of experimental place where they can make their mark on the world and teach people.
Probably many of these women, you know, don't have kids of their own and so on.
So they feel like this is their way to make a difference.
But in fact, they're actually just brainwashing these kids.
So this has to stop somewhere.
I mean, the Supreme Court and then also, you know, we've seen local parents getting involved.
You mentioned the Glenn Youngkin race.
And even in places where the kids are being used as pawns, you know, we talked about school choice, but in a lot of inner cities, it's like these kids.
Aren't getting an education.
Some of them don't even pass and yet their schools are getting all this money just to prop up these bureaucrats and teachers who aren't really teaching.
I mean, really good teachers work super hard and they should be rewarded, but what about the teachers who are, you know, just not really doing much?
They're basically letting this...
I'll get worse.
And I don't blame a lot of them because I know some of them are dealing with really challenging situations, sometimes violence and stuff from the kids.
But that's why I think it's just, how can you even learn in an environment like that?
If you're in an environment where there are gangs and so on, I mean, you can't be focused on actually reading the homework or going over math for the day.
So I don't know why those kids have to be stuck in those kinds of schools.
But it seems like so many Americans agree on these things, especially common sense people agree, you know, we can't have gender ideology here, horrible schools, we just have to get rid of them, or they will get better in a new way,
whatever. But we can't keep doing this anymore, yet it seems like there's all this red tape.
There's either red tape at the federal government, or once you get to the state level, then there's more red tape.
And it's just constant, constant, constant issues as opposed to just making things simple.
So what is kind of your, I don't know, maybe mission or recommendation of how we can just make things about school again?
Yeah, we have to reclaim our institutions.
One way is to have school choice to...
Provide some accountability because we saw what happens when families protested at school board meetings and tried to make their voices heard.
The teachers unions told us that was the way to go before, but once families disagreed with them, they didn't want to hear it anymore.
They cut off the mics of parents.
They labeled them as domestic terrorists.
They're taking them to the Supreme Court to try to trample on parental rights and education.
They're ultimately going to lose this war because parents care about their kids more than anybody else, so they're going to fight harder than anybody else.
And parents have more power in numbers than the employees in the system.
The problem with the government school system is that it's been more focused on the adults.
The government school system has unfortunately become more of a jobs program for adults than an education initiative for kids.
I mean, we have data on this from 2000 until today at the United States federal level.
And the number of students has been relatively flat since 2000.
It's only increased by about 5%.
The number of teachers has increased by about twice that rate, by about 10%.
But the number of administrators in the system has increased by about 95%.
The monopoly has no incentive to spend money wisely.
So parents, when they can say, you know what, if you're going to cut off my mic and call me an evil person, I'm going to take my money somewhere else, that gives the school board and the employees an incentive to say, hey, you know what, if they're going to take that funding, Maybe,
hold on, don't leave yet.
I'm going to treat you like a customer.
I'm going to treat you like a partner in the relationship.
If you want to opt out, fine.
They'll actually care more about what the parents have to say.
And that's how markets work.
It works in every other area of life.
It works in education, too.
And I will say, this is a fringe ideology that they're trying to force into the classroom.
The problem is the radicals have infiltrated the government-run school system.
They figured out that they don't even have to have their own kids anymore.
They figured, well, I can just take over the schools where they have about 50 million kids churning through that system every year for 13 years of their lives, for seven hours a day.
They have a captive audience.
They have compulsory education laws that force the kids to go there.
You're forced to pay for it.
And if you don't like it, Judge Jackson tells you.
Too bad.
You can just pay again, like I did for my kid that goes to $60,000 a year private school.
Judge Jackson just revealed her true colors.
She basically had her Mary Antoinette moment where she said, let them eat cake.
It's just so easy to just go to pay out of pocket to homeschool or to private school your kid when you're already having to pay for the public school.
I think the school choice train is going to continue.
We've had 16 states go all in on the issue.
We're going to have more.
New Hampshire will be the next government-run school monopoly domino to fall.
And we're going to keep winning on the issue.
Danielle, we're winning so much, I'm almost getting tired of winning.
But we're not done yet.
We've got to get those blue states to come along.
And if they don't, if they keep kicking and screaming to fight against parents, we're going to have to turn them to red states too.
And that will be the way we unleash education freedom for all.
Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask you something a little bit different.
What do you think about these kind of schools and areas that are popping up that are mostly illegal immigrants and these areas where I've heard, even in Texas, it's all illegals.
And who is probably paying for this?
Taxpayers. It's very frustrating because our system is also getting burdened by illegals who are abusing the system.
And I mean, we have to stop this because at a certain point, how can we ever give a good education to American children if we have all of these illegals?
That's exactly right.
And the public schools do have an incentive to let as many legals in as possible because guess what?
They're funded based on how many students they have in the school.
So if they can open the floodgates, Texas Public Schools, the numbers just came out last week.
They spend over $18,000 per kid per year.
And that is, you just multiply that.
I mean, just think about it.
That is millions and millions of dollars.
And most of that doesn't go to the kid to get a good education.
They just check a box.
They get the enrollment up.
And then they don't educate the kid.
They relegate them to the corner.
They don't actually teach them anything.
And they have...
They're not getting a good education.
They're not being productive citizens.
And so we're not seeing the return on investment.
And so there is a Supreme Court decision on this from 1982, which said that you had to educate all kids regardless of their immigration status in the public school system.
We have a different court now.
And so I think a Republican in a Republican state should offer a bill, maybe in Texas, to...
Only fund the public education of students who are here legally and the residents of the United States legally.
That may go through and not get taken up by the Supreme Court.
Maybe it just continues and people listen to the law.
But if it doesn't, if it goes to the Supreme Court, I don't think the left wants to take this fight to the Supreme Court because they'll probably lose.
And that 1982 decision, Plyler v.
Doe, may be reversed.
But it's going to take a Republican leader to file a bill, either in Congress or at the state level, to do so.
Yeah. It's interesting because if you think about it, it shouldn't be an issue.
We just should deport all of the illegals, and then we don't have to have a special law for schools or for illegals.
Who have kids here or something?
Because theoretically, I mean, that basically just frees up their parents' time to sell drugs, I guess.
So, I mean, I don't even know how we have this situation happening at such a massive scale.
We've had these open borders, but illegals need to be deported.
And at a certain point, I mean, we just can't keep having our hospitals, our schools, our taxpayer dollars.
Everything is burdened by this.
Even aside from all of the horrible violent crimes that are committed by illegals.
But Corey, thank you so much for your thoughts.
I appreciate it.
And hopefully we can keep up some education wins and ultimately stop this crazy wokeness.
Hey, thank you so much for having me.
I'm looking forward to talking with you again soon.
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It's D-I-N-E-S-H Dinesh.
We're going to do something a little bit different to end the show today.
We're going to take a question from one of our listeners.
This question comes from Bree in Texas.
Hi, Danielle.
This is Brie.
I love your show and how you say we need to be the counterculture.
I totally agree with you.
Well, if I want to be the counterculture to my friends and in my community, how do you recommend I respond when people ask me to affirm their views on things?
If I don't believe what they are saying, it's gotten to the point where someone may not even be my friend anymore if I don't agree with them.
And I want to ask you what you would do if you were facing this.
I, of course, don't want to be a sheep and don't want to go along with the tide around me.
But how can I apply being the counterculture in this situation with friends who might try and cancel me?
That is a great question, Bree.
I think so many young people are facing this issue today.
Honestly... I think this has been happening to young conservatives for quite a long time, certainly during Trump's first campaign and presidency, and then even in the years in between when Biden was in office and now.
And I think it is getting better for young conservatives where you're probably more...
Bold in your beliefs at this point, if you're a conservative, because we have been through so much of, you know, the left attacking us and censoring us.
And you mentioned friends, you know, defriending you and so on.
And so I think at this point, if you're conservative, you're probably pretty tough.
Although I do think a lot of people still today who are young and who are liberal are very liberal.
You're Gen Z and you're conservative, or you're traditional, or you're very kind of in that world, or you're the opposite.
You're deep down the road of wokeness.
And so I honestly think it would be hard to stay friends with someone who is a militant, a militant anti...
If they hate people who like Trump, if they hate people who are different than they are, then I think it would be hard to make that friendship work.
And I don't think you should put that burden on yourself or blame yourself or even really continue to try.
I know that might sound like a different advice than other people give because a lot of other conservatives would say, oh, you know, you just keep on being loving to everybody and eventually everybody will love you.
And certainly we want to be kind to people.
We don't want to be rude or anything.
But I think it's not your obligation to make everyone like you or be best friends with everybody.
Because ultimately, there's only so much time in your day.
There's only so much time in life.
And I don't think someone who really vehemently hates you or who wants to have nothing to do with you, I would consider someone saying, I'm ashamed of you.
I want nothing to do with you.
I'm defriending you.
I'm not talking to you anymore.
I would consider that, well, it's not really anything I can do then, you know?
You're not going to change your beliefs.
You're not going to say, okay, I'm not Christian anymore.
Okay, I'm not conservative anymore.
Just so we can continue to have conversations that are not even rooted in any kind of honesty.
I think to be friends with someone who has a different view from you, they have to be...
I have a two-way street.
Otherwise, that's not really a friendship.
I think, you know, always kind of conducting yourself beyond reproach in a sense.
You don't want to be mean to anyone.
But I still think that there is no obligation there to put a lot of effort into those friendships, which are not friendships.
And to be honest, I think over time, whoever are your real friends, the people who really do care about you, the people who stay in your life a long time, you'll realize, oh, okay, you know, these are my friends.
These are the people who do want to, you know, hear my thoughts on things and we can talk about life.
And to talk to someone who's constantly offended by everything is very exhausting.
And I totally get if you're currently in school and you're younger, maybe you can't escape.
These people, because there is bullying that goes on, and there are people out there who are super mean, that it can be a lot harder to just kind of, you know, disengage from someone.
But I think do the best that you can to really just surround yourself with, maybe even if it's only a couple people who are good friends.
That's really all you need is a couple good friends, people who share your values.
Try to surround yourself with those people.
I just really wouldn't even waste my time or put the mental energy into all those other haters because they're thriving off of it.
They love to be rent-free in your head and they love to think they're high and mighty and better than everybody else.
And the reality is they're just a confused person who maybe will change.
Maybe they'll become conservative as they're older.
Maybe not.
You just do your best to follow your values, stay the right course.
And honestly, I think at this point, I don't know if you saw the New York Magazine cover where it's like conservative kids are the cool kids now.
It said the cruel kids, but it showed how they were all the ones who were super attractive or going and doing fun things and all this stuff.
So I actually think it's going to be cool to be a young MAGA conservative.
And there are so many young people who are becoming conservative.
So if you are in college or high school right now, then you probably do have other conservative friends because of what we've seen with the demographics changing.
But I would just lean into that.
I would embrace it.
I would just be like, yeah, you know, this is what I believe.
And I am conservative.
And I support President Trump.
And honestly, the left...
They're just so negative.
They're just deep into wokeness.
And that's not going to lead you anywhere.
It's not going to lead you down a path of happiness.
It's not going to lead you to a future good marriage or family or any of those things that give you long-term fulfillment.
So I would just focus on staying true to your values and trying to meet a few friends that...
Do align with you.
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