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Dec. 26, 2022 - The Michael Knowles Show
23:31
BRAVE Mom SHOCKS Woke School Board With Graphic Reading | Interview With Shannon Ayres

Interview with Shannon Ayres. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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My favorite genre of video today, it's videos of mothers going to school boards.
And then my favorite subgenre of this genre is when mothers read materials from the school classrooms and from the school libraries, and then the school boards shut them down and tell them to stop talking because that material is inappropriate for the children in the room.
The material from the classrooms and the libraries that's inappropriate for the children who might be in the room at the school board meeting.
And a prime example of this just took place in Frisco, Texas.
This would be Shannon Ayers, who is a mother of two, married for 30 years, was a small business owner in Frisco for 20 years, now works with a national organization called County Citizens Defending Freedom in their Collin County chapter.
Shannon, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thank you, Michael, for having me.
So I became aware of you because you show up to the school board and you're not flamboyant, you're not yelling, you're not emotional, you're not wearing some silly costume.
You show up like a normal person and you say, here is the material being read in the schools.
This is obviously inappropriate.
And you get out, I don't know, a few minutes of this pornography before the school board says, hey, you got to cut that out.
There are children in the room.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So this was my second time to actually go in front of the school board.
I went last month as well, and they did let that one go.
But this one, I think, went viral because the school board president, her name is Renee Archimbal, I think is how she says it, stopped me, even though I was actually stopped.
My mic had already been cut and I had already started to walk away when she said, I need you to stop reading that because there's a child in the room.
And I don't know, I was just, I'm sure you heard the audience reaction to that, which was the same as mine.
Like, wow, are you kidding me?
I mean, that's like my whole point.
That's why I'm asking you to take this out of the school library.
So it kind of made a big splash.
Do you think that the chairman of the school board, was she aware of how absurd what she said sounded?
Was she aware that she had just made your point for you?
Or no, she was actually just reacting in the moment to the obvious obscenity that you were reading.
I don't think she was aware.
I don't think she was aware.
I still don't know that she's aware.
I've heard rumblings that people are very excited that people on the other side of the issue thought it was great that she did that.
I'm like, okay.
But if you look at the comments underneath the video that was posted online, 99.9% of them are with me.
Of course, I can't believe that there is an other side to the issue.
Because the issue here that we're talking about is, should 14-year-olds read porn in schools?
And it's not just...
It's not even just normal porn.
I mean, obviously what you were reading in that viral video was...
Gross, but it was pretty run-of-the-mill pornography.
But then in your other appearance before the school board, you're reading a book that was in the school library of a father graphically and violently raping his little daughter.
Yeah, and I don't know if it's obvious in what I read, but it was actually the rape was being watched by her twin sister, and the twin sister was actually longing for that type of affection from the father.
So it was a pretty sick, in my opinion, that book was even worse than what I read this last week.
Of course.
Man, I can't believe that that scene, which was already so creepy, somehow got even creepier with that context.
I can't say I'm familiar with that author's work, but how is there another side of this issue?
I just don't get what kind of sicko...
Could even concoct an argument as to why 14-year-olds need to be exposed to pornography of little girls longing for their father to rape them the way the father raped the girl's twin sister.
What's the argument?
The only argument that I'm hearing is that there might be a young teen, a young girl who's experiencing that and needs to be able to see in literature that she's not the only one, that things like this happen, that she's not alone, something that she can identify with.
I mean, that's all I've heard that...
That they've tried to use it as an excuse.
But even, let's say that there's some poor girl who's being raped by her father.
And this is why these liberals who are running the school libraries, they say, we need to have this rape fantasy incest porn for the girl who's being raped by her father.
They're saying that the best way to reach out to this girl is to present a rape of a father to a daughter as something to be longed for and fantasized about?
Right.
It makes no sense.
I mean, the child needs to be in therapy, obviously, doesn't need to be reading a book.
It basically makes it seem normal.
You're not the only one.
It's okay.
It happens.
No, that's not what we want to do.
Well, that's amazing.
And you've just put that into words, what they are doing.
Their actual argument is, we need to normalize this.
We need to normalize a father raping his daughter.
That's the best argument they've got for it.
That's That's the best argument that I've heard.
That is truly chilling.
Obviously, the public is with you.
I don't need to take a public opinion poll to know.
The public is with you on this.
This has been a major political force now.
You saw it in the Glenn Youngkin election.
You saw it in Ron DeSantis' elections in Florida.
You're seeing it around the country.
How is the movement going?
Obviously, there are still these crazy school board members.
There's still this porn in schools.
Where does the whole thing stand?
Well, unfortunately, you know, the only way you can remove a school board member is with an election.
There's no mechanism in Texas to be able to recall or remove a school board member.
So we have to wait for elections.
And every election cycle, there's only, you know, a couple of seats available to run for.
So last May, we did have an election.
Three seats were up for re-election.
We won two of those.
So we do have two amazing...
School board members who are on our side who are helping, but they're, of course, not the majority yet.
So they can only really get the message out.
They can ask questions during school board meetings.
They can put things on the agenda for parents to be aware, but they can't, you know, they lose We're looking forward to next May.
We have two more seats up for re-election, and we are hoping to run two very conservative board members who will hopefully take those seats, and then we will have the majority.
But right now...
The district will tell you that they are doing something about it.
They have updated their library resources review process.
We have a formal reconsideration process.
Then we have appeals processes that you can go through.
The problem with that is the book remains on the shelves even during that process.
The process is very lengthy.
The first book that I read about the father and his daughter, that had been submitted back in August.
For reconsideration.
It passed the first round of reconsideration.
So it was appealed.
And I think it was in the middle of appeal when I read the book out loud.
And two days later is when it was taken off the shelf.
So it was eventually taken off the shelf.
Shannon, do you think that had to do with the precise timing of the appeals process?
Or do you think maybe you shining a little bit of light on this might have sped that process up a little?
It might have.
I don't know how long that process generally takes or where it was in that process, but it might have.
It might have.
Interesting, though, that book was written by an author who has many books in our school libraries all across the country.
She's a very popular author with teens.
And 15 books were removed during that appeal process, and 12 of them were the same author.
Who is the author, if you don't mind my asking?
Her name is Ellen Hopkins.
Ellen Hopkins.
I gotta write that down.
The name of that book was Identical.
It was about identical twins.
Twin girls.
And the incest, Michael, is just one of many very disturbing topics that that book talks about.
It talks about sadomasochism.
It talks about cutting.
It talks about drugs.
There's prostitution.
I mean, there's everything you can think of in that book.
So hard to believe there's any redeeming value to it at all.
Sometimes when people make perfectly common sense observations like we don't need hardcore incest porn in schools, the rejoinder will be, well, you're censoring art.
You Philistines are trying to get rid of culture.
And sometimes even people will say, you know, there's a lot of bad stuff in the Bible.
There's incest in the Bible.
There's rape in the Bible.
Are you now advocating that we ban the Bible?
And it brings me back to really the center of the American debate over obscenity, which completely spun out of control in the middle of the 20th century.
It comes back to a Supreme Court justice named Potter Stewart, who was asked how to define pornography and obscenity.
I can't quite define it, but I know it when I see it.
And this line is made fun of.
It's a term of derision that is thrown at conservatives.
But I don't really see why it is made fun of when, as far as I can tell, you actually do know it when you see it.
Is that such a crazy observation?
You do.
I mean, there's this legal definition, you know, of what obscenity is.
I don't know why we need a legal definition, because you do know it when you see it.
But that's what, you know, unfortunately, in Texas, there is an obscenity exemption clause in the law.
And so if it's used for an educational purpose, then it's allowed.
And that's what they're hiding behind in, you know, the...
That and the First Amendment.
They're saying it violates a child's First Amendment rights to pull these books off of the shelf, which, I mean, I spoke to that in my first video.
It's like, really?
I mean, are we violating their Second Amendment rights when we tell them they can't carry a gun to school?
No, because they're children.
We're talking about children.
They don't have the same rights that we do as adults, for good reason.
Are we violating their Third Amendment rights when we quarter British soldiers in their...
Well, never mind.
That's not a good example.
But there are plenty of other examples.
No, of course.
I mean, first of all, since when does the First Amendment protect your right to be able to access any book you want at a specific library, period, even if you're an adult?
But then, second of all, to suggest that children have this right?
Do children have the right to say whatever they want in schools?
I don't think so.
I think if I said naughty things in schools, the teacher would yell at me and probably give me a bad grade.
Right.
And we get called book burners a lot and we're trying to ban books.
And my argument for that is, look...
Are we banning cigarettes and alcohol because we don't allow children to buy cigarettes and alcohol?
Are we banning movies because we don't allow them to watch Rated R, Rated X, NC-17 movies?
Are we banning all movies because of that?
Are we banning guns because we don't let them carry a gun or buy a gun?
No, we're just limiting their access, children's access to these things because they're not mentally, emotionally ready for this kind of either physical or mental harm.
I mean, you don't you they have their brains have are so ripe for I mean, they're just so impressionable is the word I'm looking for at that age.
And so we have to protect them.
That's what we're supposed to do as adults.
When did that stop?
We've always protected our kids.
And now all of a sudden it's like, oh no, they can handle it.
They need to see it.
They need to know that they're not alone.
They throw out the whole...
Bible thing, and I actually saw somebody online arguing that point, and I'm like, okay, name a Sunday school class where the parts in the Bible about incest and all of that are, you know, a Sunday school class where they teach those passages.
Those passages are hard even for an adult sometimes to process and understand.
So, of course, we're not going to teach that to children.
In the introduction to the book of Genesis, say, maybe you wait a year or two before you deal with that.
Maybe, yeah, yeah.
You know, you stick with the Noah's Ark.
You know, and Adam and Eve being, you know, in the garden with the apple and all of that.
You don't hit those topics that are really very difficult, even sometimes for adults to understand.
So, got to protect the kids and wait until they're developmentally ready for that type of material.
I love it when people call me a book burner and a book banner.
I always say, oh, you're accusing me of banning and burning books like Plato or like the Apostles in the Book of Acts or like, I don't know, most great men throughout history who have, beyond this kind of provocative image of burning books, who have had Standards.
Every society has standards, and we usually apply those standards in a much stricter way when we're talking about children.
And they pretend that we're sort of somehow monsters, like we're fascists or something, because we want to have what every society forever has always had, which is some kind of standard.
I mean, the real irony of this, of course, is that Up until the middle of the 20th century, every school just about taught the Bible and banned pornography.
And now, so many schools teach pornography, and the one book you are not allowed to teach in school, it's the only one.
You can teach Mein Kampf, you can teach hardcore porn.
The one book you can't teach is the Bible.
So who's really doing the banning here, and what sort of banning are they doing?
It's a very good point.
And the whole, you know, standards thing, yeah, they're definitely trying to – it feels like they're trying to lower the standards every day, lower and lower.
The bar gets lower and lower, and you can't – I mean, the only thing I can assume is that they're just wanting to normalize this stuff so that kids, their inhibitions are – honestly, I personally feel like they're trying to lower the inhibitions of children so that when they are approached, you know, by – Any traffickers, any kind of attempt to, I don't know, I mean, pedophilia seems to be, they seem to be going towards even normalizing that.
There are books in our libraries that have been, I don't know if they still are, don't quote me on that, but there have been that depict pedophilia, you know, LGBTQ gay sex, And I don't care.
No sex.
Sorry.
No sex.
Neither book that I read from had anything to do with the LGBTQ community.
And that's another criticism that we get, is that we're just after this certain segment of the population.
And it's just not true.
When you say, we don't want books about pederasty in our schools, they say, how dare you?
That's homophobic.
Come again, hold on.
All right.
Now you're the one who are a lot in these two things.
But of course, you know, Shannon, I can see you almost don't even want to say it.
You don't even want to suggest that maybe these guys are trying to normalize pedophilia.
But of course we know that they are doing that.
I mean, there was a professor who was caught in a big scandal because she was caught on camera trying to normalize pedophilia, to change even the word pedophile, to map a minor attracted person, to take away the stigma of this orientation with which people are born.
And you see this going on throughout the culture.
You're seeing the normalization of Drag Queen Story Hour.
What's that about?
It's about bringing little kids into sexual situations.
You're seeing on that same...
Line of thought.
Drag kids.
These poor little kids who are being sexually abused and who put on little skimpy dances and in multiple cases have had grown men put dollar bills in their clothing.
I mean, so this is not something that you're imagining in some crazy fever dream.
This is happening.
It's being broadcast on the mainstream media.
And they tell us on the one hand, this is not happening.
It's a delusion of the far right.
And on the other hand, they're saying, this is happening.
It's so wonderful and you better celebrate it.
Yeah, the celebration part is where I have an issue.
A lot of people tell us, especially if you're a Christian, if you're a believer, we're to love everybody, and we are called to love everybody.
But my definition of love is not encouraging and celebrating something that I think is destructive and evil.
So I think we need to think twice about what our definition of love really is.
Of course.
And you know, the way you can really prove the absolute unprincipled character of the arguments that these people are making is try to put a book into the school library that says that LGBTism is intrinsically disordered and it's a grave mortal sin and people should not do it.
And actually marriage is a union between...
A man and a woman for life, for the good of the spouses, and the sake of the generation and education of children.
Not only would they toss the book out, they probably would set it on fire.
And they'd probably come to your house with a pitchfork if you did that.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
It's very hypocritical.
Which, you know, we saw in the video.
The hypocrisy is...
I don't know how they don't see that.
I really don't know how they don't see that.
I don't even know if they see it now.
Of course.
No, of course.
And to them, you know, there's a good line from the Harvard law professor, Adrian Vermeule.
He says, it's not hypocrisy, it's hierarchy.
They just think that there's one set of rules for you, and there's one set of rules for us, and that's the way that it goes.
Boy, haven't we seen that in the last several years?
Of course.
In many ways.
I mean, I'm just so pleased to hear that, you know, this is working and that, you know, you're getting a couple school board members out there and you're actually doing what the libs are very, very good at and conservatives usually are not that good at.
Conservatives are very good at complaining and conservatives are very good at sort of winding into a microphone.
You know, I... I don't mean to diminish my own profession here, but I think it's important to shed light on these things.
But what the Libs are very good at is going out and running for office and filling the appointed positions and turning the wheels of government, not just at the federal level, but even all the way down at the local level, which is where a lot of these really important rules are put into effect.
And you're actually doing that, and you're clearly having results.
Well, I hope so.
It seems slow going.
Like I said, we've been struggling with this in Frisco for about a year.
And they say they're doing things and they're really not things that are working, at least not very quickly.
We even appropriated an additional $450,000 last summer, the board did, of our taxpayer dollars to get the mess cleaned up, the mess that they originally said we didn't really have.
We didn't really have the books in the library at first.
And then we only had a couple.
And then when it became clear that it was a problem, then they appropriated all this extra money to get rid of all the books.
And they're still there.
That's why in my first video, I was like, you know, we're still, still, after all of this, we're still plagued with these books in our libraries.
There's just no excuse for it.
At first, you had to read the entire book before they would have a committee read the entire book before they could decide whether or not to remove it.
They couldn't just look at that little excerpt and say, okay, that's not good.
They had to read the whole book.
So the timing, I mean, it was like 30 days they had to get the book reviewed.
And in the meantime, it's still on the shelves for the kids to check out.
So...
I do think it's, you know, maybe I'm hoping that the spotlight that you and others are putting on the district will, you know, the public pressure will hopefully cause even more change quicker.
I certainly hope so.
There's, of course, a tipping point, which is right now, you know, the good guys are in the minority on the school board, but they've got a representation, and May become May.
You tip that to the point that the conservatives control the school board, and that's when we really see things happen.
There was a report I read recently.
It was...
A campaign that was being run by moms for liberty, but it was, I forget the school district that it was in, but in any case, the conservatives took over the school board.
Within two hours, they fired the superintendent, they fired the district lawyer, they banned critical race theory, they banned the crazy gender curricula.
This was within two hours.
What are they going to do in two weeks?
What are they going to do in two months?
I know.
I know.
I'm so excited to see.
I think that was, was that South Carolina?
Yes, it was Berkeley, South Carolina, I think.
Yeah, I was very excited to see that.
And, you know, it gives you hope.
It gives you hope when you're in a district that's not quite there yet, going, oh, gosh, when we get there, look at what we can do.
Look at the changes that we can make.
So, I mean, I will say they have pulled, you know, some of these books.
It's just like pulling teeth.
And it shouldn't be so hard.
It shouldn't be so hard to pull complete depravity and, you know, porn, sexually explicit material off our school shelves.
It just shouldn't be.
And shouldn't be hard.
I mean, forget the liberals, you know.
I mean, they've got their view and we're just going to have to beat them at the ballot box and beat them with the wielding of political power.
But even some of these squish, quote unquote, conservatives and Republicans who just don't have any sense of why this is a problem.
And they don't want to deal with the issue.
And they want to look away.
And they say, oh, that's a culture war distraction, please.
Let's just, all I want to do is talk about cutting taxes.
I love tax cuts, but come on, there's more to life than that.
And it seems that the higher up you get in politics, the more disconnected these people become.
And so I really do hope that you stick around the school district for a little while, keep this thing going, get the job done.
But then I really hope, Shannon, people like you, people like a couple of conservative members of that school board, people like these moms across America who are doing this, just let me know when you run for Congress.
Let me know where to send the check because I would be more than happy to do it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I don't know that running is in my future.
I feel like I can have a lot more impact doing what I'm doing now.
I've been asked before if I want to run for school board.
I just think you put a budget in front of me and my eyes glaze over.
I don't want to deal with that.
You and me both.
Yeah, I don't think I'd be very, I'd serve the public very well in that capacity.
But, you know, right now I'm just working with the County Citizens Defending Freedom.
It's called CCDF. Go to the website, ccdfusa.com, and they definitely are all about taking action at the local level because that's where it's at.
Your local level is where the real impact that's going to make a difference in your life every day is in your local school board, city council, mayor, those kinds of elections are the most important, so...
Absolutely right.
Shannon, keep up the good work.
Thank you for coming on the Michael Walls Show.
Thank you so much.
And I look forward to seeing more.
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