Alex Newman, co-founder of Public School Exit, warns of far-left indoctrination in government schools, citing pandemic-driven homeschooling growth—from 5% to over 10% of U.S. students—while public enrollment plummeted by 15-20%. His organization’s advisory board, including Carrie Woodruff of the Foundation for American Christian Education, revives classical methods like those used by James Madison, showing superior academic and behavioral results in schools like Oklahoma’s (600 students). Newman condemns policies allowing biological males in girls’ sports as "cruel" and highlights Pastor James Coates’ imprisonment in Canada for defying mask mandates, framing it as religious persecution. He urges support via publicschoolexit.com, thenewamerican.com, and the Red Pill Expo (June 4-6), arguing that faith-based resistance strengthens liberty movements. [Automatically generated summary]
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Is it time for a Brexit-style exodus of children from government-run public school systems?
I'm Sheila Gunread.
you can see, I'm on the road again today, but you're still watching The Gun Show.
First met Alex Newman of the New American and the Liberty Sentinel in the Epoch Times a couple of years ago at the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
It was actually the one that was held in Bonn, Germany.
And he was such a welcome face because I thought I was alone as one of the rare skeptical journalists at these things.
However, unlike me, Alex is still allowed inside the UN conferences.
Alex is a careful watcher of how government tries to control every aspect of our lives by using things like climate change, but also by using things like the public school system to create an army of compliant proselytizers of far left-wing politics.
And so Alex joins me on the show today in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon when I was still back at my home studio about his efforts to steward the exodus of children from the public school system in America and about his new award for being a courageous Christian leader.
Take a listen.
So joining me now is Alex Newman of The New American in The New American Studios, which is kind of exciting.
Alex, I had a pleasant surprise the other day when I opened up my email and I saw a press release saying that you had just won the Dr. Robert Dreyfus Courageous Christian Leadership Award.
First of all, congratulations on that award.
Tell us all about it.
Well, thank you so much, Sheila.
It's great to be with you.
And it's really humbling to get the award.
I'm always a little bit embarrassed about talking about myself, but it was a real honor.
It came from the group Frontline Ministries and the founder of that ministry and the executive director of that ministry has become a friend of mine.
And he's given it to some really wonderful people over the years.
And so I'm just humbled and honored to be included on it.
And he made this big list of all the reasons why he thought I earned it.
But I think what really pushed him over the edge was a speaking tour that I did in 2019 where I went all across the United States and even actually did some talks in other countries about the problem in the public school system.
And his mission in life has been now for decades to try to get children out of the public school system.
And for decades, that was kind of like a fringe idea.
And the times have really changed now.
We've had, for example, Rush Limbaugh, by far the most significant talk radio host in America.
In the year before he died, he said repeatedly, parents, you need to get your children out of the public school system.
President Donald Trump said twice that we need to protect our children from public schools.
The reason the children are all going crazy is because they're being indoctrinated in public schools.
We had Franklin Graham, one of the biggest evangelical leaders, said the same thing about what was going on in New Jersey.
And I don't know that we can take the blame for all of that, but I think in Ray's efforts, and then we created a new organization called Public School Exit.
It's kind of all the list of things that he listed on there.
And yeah, I mean, it just was really incredible.
It gave me a nice plaque.
And we had a nice ceremony at an off-the-record meeting for conservatives in Orlando.
So we had a little breakout session and just phenomenal.
We had probably more than 60 people there, including some of the top leaders in the world of Christian education, homeschooling.
It was phenomenal.
Yeah, I realized just how humble you are about your own accomplishments when I was reading that press release, all the things that you've done and all the organizations that you're involved with.
And I thought, I met Alex at the UN Climate Change Conference and he seems pretty sharp about those kind of things.
And then there's this whole other side of Alex Newman that I knew a little bit about based on, you know, the book that you wrote.
I think it would be two years ago now.
But I didn't realize all the things that you were doing to empower parents with regard to education.
And for me, I think that might be one of the things that really, one of the positives that comes out of the pandemic and the lockdown and the closures of the schools is that parents are realizing we don't need the public education system to do this.
We can be educators of our children because parents have always been the first educators of their children.
Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more, Sheila.
It's been such an amazing time over the last year.
You know, there's been the downsides.
We've lost huge amounts of freedom.
Some people have gotten sick.
Some people have even died.
And that's all very sad.
But the enormous silver lining here, if you look at the data in America, the tide is really changing.
And I can give you some examples of that in the homeschooling world, for example.
Before the pandemic, something like 5% of American families with school-aged children were homeschooling their children.
By the end of summer of 2020, that number had doubled.
It was now 10% of families with school-aged children that were homeschooling.
And people who know about homeschooling know that those families tend to be larger or significantly larger than your average family.
So that means well over 10% of American children now who are in education are being educated at home.
And that's true, legitimate homeschooling, right?
That's not like the government gives you a laptop and then the government beams your government teacher into your government school classroom at home.
This is true homeschooling where the parents are taking charge.
And you're absolutely right.
When people suggest that parents aren't qualified to educate their own children, well, if parents aren't qualified, who could possibly be more qualified?
Who loves that child more than the parent?
Who knows that child better than that parent?
Their learning styles, their difficulties.
And when you have a one-on-one or one small environment like that where the parent can deal with one or two or three children, it's an entirely different atmosphere than trying to control 20, 30 kids in a classroom.
And the data shows it clearly, too.
If you look at the data on homeschoolers, on average, they are light years ahead of the victims of the government school system.
So big things are happening.
And then if you look at the public schools data, their enrollment, Sheila, is dropping like a rock.
There's districts that have lost 15, maybe 20% of their students just since the pandemic started.
And a lot of those are never coming back.
So this is really, really good news for freedom, for family, and for the cause of perpetuating our civilization and our liberties into the future.
Yeah, there's an important thing that a lot of proponents of the government factory school system forget to mention.
And that is that Ivory League schools go out and openly solicit and court homeschool children.
Because by the time you get to a university, you need to be an independent learner, an independent thinker, usually.
I mean, that's changing pretty fast in the university system.
But I mean, these elite-level schools are openly looking for homeschooled kids because they are such high achievers.
And, you know, that's one thing the teachers' unions definitely don't want you to know.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And the data on this is clear as well.
I mean, the major elite universities are out there actively looking for homeschoolers because they know a few things.
They know the homeschoolers are going to be more likely to earn more money.
They know homeschoolers are going to be more likely to be involved in the civic arena, right?
In politics, in the community.
They know that homeschoolers are actually much better at doing university, right?
They're also more tolerant.
And the data on this is now starting to accumulate.
One of the previous recipients of the Robert Dreyfus Award for Courageous Christian Leadership was a wonderful man that I know well.
He's been in my house for dinner, Dr. Brian Ray, who runs the National Home Education Research Institute.
And he now has decades of academic research.
These are scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles laying out the facts about homeschooling.
And it's just like night and day.
These children do better on every front, academically and socially, and they're going to do better long into the future.
And these universities are thinking, hey, we want people who are going to go out and make money who can fund our endowments.
We want people who are going to be good representatives of the school.
We want people who we don't have to kind of go back and teach on basic English and reading and math for them to be able to get along here.
And homeschoolers meet that bill very, very well.
So very encouraging things are happening on this front.
And I think it's one bright spot in this just sea of horrors that we're in the midst of right now.
I wanted to ask you about some of the other initiatives that you're involved in.
Now, you touched on it briefly, and that was public school exit and then also Red Pill University.
What are those two things about?
And also, how can parents get involved?
Yeah, well, thank you for asking.
I'm incredibly honored to serve as the executive director for Public School Exit.
It's an organization that we started back in 2019.
It was almost like divine intervention that we started this shortly before the whole world went into lockdowns because that's exactly what was needed at this time.
But basically, after my speaking tour, we did a special report in the New American magazine, Rescuing Our Children.
I think I gave you a copy.
If not, I definitely need to.
Okay, very good.
And so I did a national speaking tour on that.
I think I've given that talk probably 150 times now in at least 43 states and multiple countries.
And out of that effort grew public school exit.
So we teamed up with some incredible people.
Dran Rees, who serves as our president.
She's been involved in ministry for a long time.
She does amazing work.
But she was realizing, you know, she was tracking all these bills moving through the California legislature and trying to keep track of what politicians are doing what.
And finally, she realized, hey, all these efforts are going to be for nothing if they get all our kids.
So we brought Dran, we brought Ray Moore together.
We brought my friend Dr. Duke Pesta, who's a very well-known academic, you know, regular guest on Fox.
And he's a professor at the University of Wisconsin.
And he also runs the Freedom Project Academy, where I happen to teach.
So that was our kind of core leadership team to begin with.
And we said, well, hey, our goal is to get the children out of the schools.
What do we do now?
And out of that grew this incredible advisory board.
People can find us online.
It's publicschoolexit.com.
And we've built just an amazing group of men and women, you know, lawyers, pastors, educators.
I mean, the former superintendent of public instruction for the state of Arizona, the highest ranking education official for Arizona, after four years in that job, she went in thinking, hey, I'm going to reform the school system.
And after four years, she said, hey, that's not possible.
I might as well just go beat my head against a brick wall.
So now she has joined in our effort.
That's the caliber of people we've brought.
And now we are working with pastors.
We are working with parents.
We have a scholarship fund set up so that, you know, when you do meet that very rare individual who literally can't financially make it work, you know, maybe single mom, you know, eight kids, deadbeat dad ran off and left the mom with the kids.
You know, then we want to step in and we want to help.
So we're partnering now with schools, with churches.
We want to help churches set up.
You know, they're empty for six days out of the week, maybe five days out of the week.
Why is all that space going to waste when we could be rescuing our children and getting them a good, solid Christian education instead of just letting the building get cobwebs?
So that's what we're doing.
Publicschoolexit.com.
Actually, just today I got an email from somebody in Canada, totally by coincidence, said, hey, do you guys have a chapter up in Canada?
What can we do up here?
So it's growing.
It's becoming international.
And this weekend at this off-the-record conservative meeting at our side event, we had at least half of our advisory board there.
Each one gave a little testimony.
One of them, for example, the president of the Pacific Justice Institute, very prominent attorney, Brad Dacas.
He said, I actually wrote a book years ago explaining how I thought we could reform the schools and how kids could go evangelize in the schools.
And then I realized, hey, they're destroying our children.
We're not going to reform the schools.
We've got to rescue our kids.
Going Back To What Worked00:04:44
So it's been incredible.
And then you ask about the Red Pill University, the Red Pill Expo.
J.D.R. Griffin, for those who don't know, is a very well-known American.
If you go to his Wikipedia page, I'm sure they say nasty things about him like they do everybody who's decent and honorable.
But he's a good man.
He's been involved in this fight for decades.
He wrote The Creature from Jekyll Island, which has sold just mind-boggling amounts of copies about the Federal Reserve System.
And he contacted me and said, hey, would you be involved in this initiative I'm working on?
So we have been every year for the last five years having Red Pill Expos where we bring together elected officials.
We bring together leaders in the liberty movement, doctors, leaders in the health field.
And the theme is, of course, based on the matrix.
You take the red pill and then you're awake as opposed to taking the blue pill and going back to sleep.
And it's been an amazing experience.
We're having our next one in South Dakota.
That'll be June 4th through 6th.
So any of you guys in Canada, we're not all that far from you if you can cross the border in the COVID.
And so that'll be fun.
And then we turned Red Pill Expo from that grew Red Pill University, where basically people can come at any time and learn from our faculty.
So we're putting up a lot of videos.
We're eventually going to have live classes and enormous things, incredible things happening.
And I'm tremendously honored to be a part of it.
You know, as you were talking, I thought, oh, you know, this is, it's been a really long time since somebody rethought the education system.
But then as you continued talking, I realized you're not actually rethinking the education system.
You're going back to exactly what worked.
Because for the duration of human history, except for maybe the last half a century, 60, 70 years, education, the bulk of education was done at home or in the church by the church.
Schools were church-run.
And so you're really not rethinking anything.
You're just going back to the idea that what isn't broke, we shouldn't have tried to fix anyway, I think.
That's exactly, exactly right.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
You know, we of our generation, I'm a millennial, which is so embarrassing, but we grew up in this world where government school was the norm.
And, you know, I never went to government school, but everybody else did.
And so that's just kind of, it's always been that way, right?
Well, no, okay, for thousands of years of human history, parents were the primary educators of their children.
If you go back and look at the generation that founded the United States of America and caused us to become an independent country, these were wonderful, I mean, great, great, very learned men.
And the overwhelming majority of them were homeschooled, people like James Madison, right?
He was educated by his parents at home, and then he helped educate his younger siblings.
They were in university by the time they were 14, translating, you know, Greek Bible into Hebrew and then back into English.
I mean, that's the level that they were at.
And we look at what we have today, we think, oh, we're so smart.
Absolute baloney.
And so that's really what we want to do.
We want to go back to what worked.
And one of the members of our advisory board, she was actually at the meeting over the weekend.
Her name is Carrie Woodruff.
She is the leader of the Foundation for American Christian Education.
And that's exactly what they're about.
Their two founders, these two wonderful ladies, figured out after World War II that education in America was taking a nosedive.
And they said, well, this isn't working.
What did education used to be like during the founding era?
So they went back and they studied that and they wrote some books and they said, wow, we can go back to what worked.
And the proof is in the pudding.
They've got a network of schools, not just across America, but all over the world.
In Brazil and in Uganda, they've got hundreds of schools using this method that was really just resurrecting good education from previous generations.
And the results speak for themselves.
I've spoken at some of those schools.
They've got one in Oklahoma.
It's got 600 students.
I spoke at one in Virginia, hundreds of students.
And even on the government's own test, they're off the charts.
And I went there.
You go into the kindergarten classroom and the children are learning how to read.
You go into the fourth grade classroom and the children have handwriting that looks like it came out of a computer.
And they're well-behaved and they're happy and they're thinking and debating.
It's just such a breath of fresh air when you compare it to the nonsense masquerading as education today.
And that really is the key right there, Sheila.
We know how education works.
Humans have been doing this for a long time.
We just need to go back to what worked.
You know, speaking of nonsense masquerading as education and bad ideas born in the public school system, or at least proliferated in the public school system, I wanted to ask you about, because you are in Biden's New America, this idea that biological males should be allowed to play on girls' sports teams.
I guess this would happen in a public high school.
Why Pastor Coates Matters00:09:17
I have a 14-year-old daughter who plays very competitive level rugby, but she's a 14-year-old girl and she has not undergone testosterone puberty.
Her rugby career is over the day a boy is wearing cleats on the other side of the ruck from her.
And so I can't even fathom what this means in the education system.
Does this mean boys in the girls' change room?
What does this mean?
Yeah, unfortunately, that's exactly what it means, Sheila.
It is tragic.
It's cruel.
I mean, the example of your daughter is actually a perfect one.
These are young girls who, you know, their passion is playing sports.
They're really good.
They've been working their whole life toward this goal.
And suddenly a guy, you know, pretending to be a girl is going to be competing against them.
And we're supposed to accept that our daughters are going to be competing against men.
It's cruel, I think, is the only word that describes it.
And the worst part is this is being done under the guise of being tolerant, being accepting.
It is no such thing.
This is a full frontal assault on women, on our daughters, on children.
And actually, what you described has been happening in the United States for years now, Sheila.
You have boys going into girls' locker rooms, and when the girls freak out and say, oh my goodness, what's going on here?
They're being told that there's something wrong with them because they don't want boys watching them undress in the locker room.
We had a scandal in my home state of Florida where the physical education teacher was actually threatened not just with losing his job, but with losing his teaching credentials.
So he could never be a teacher again because he was not comfortable watching a young girl undress and become naked and shower in the boys' locker room.
This was a major case in the state of Florida.
And this kind of thing is going to be happening a whole lot more under these crazy new rules that Biden had absolutely no legitimate authority to implement.
I wanted to ask you, since you are the recipient of a courageous Christian leadership award, I wanted to ask you if the case of Pastor James Coates is sort of on the radar within the Christian sphere in the United States.
Pastor James Coates is imprisoned at the Maximum Security Edmonton Remand Center for breaking public health rules.
The public health rule requires him to limit his church congregation to 15% of fire code capacity and force his congregation to wear masks.
He will not.
He has not.
And he turned himself in on February 16th.
And he's remained in the Maximum Security Remands Center since.
Even though he does technically qualify for bail conditions, however, as a man of good conscience, he cannot sign that bail release agreement.
That would require him to lie and say that he would limit the capacity of his church.
I want to know, you know, first of all, what you think about this, because I think from the outside looking in, everybody thinks that this is a pretty conservative place as far as Canada goes.
But what do you think about that?
And then is this leaking into the conservative sphere in the United States?
Do people know about it?
Do they care about it?
Or is this just something that's driving me insane?
Yeah, well, thank you for bringing that up, Sheila.
And I can tell you, I'm praying for our brother who is right now in chains.
This is horrifying.
It's grotesque.
But at the same time, you know, what an honor he has to be able to suffer for the cause of Christ.
It really, it's just, I'm almost a little bit jealous because that is just such a high honor to be able to suffer for the sake of the truth and suffer for the sake of the faith.
So God bless him.
The Christians in America know about this.
Many of us do.
We are praying for him.
And unfortunately, this is the kind of thing that is going to sweep all across Canada and all across the world if people don't stand up.
We're already seeing the beginnings of that sort of abuse here in the United States.
In my state of Florida, you know, everybody thinks Florida is the free state.
And right now we kind of are.
But even in Florida, early on during the pandemic, they sent a large force to go arrest a conservative pastor because he wouldn't shut down.
Now, fortunately, our governor, who is doing a wonderful job, stepped in and said, hey, you local people, you release him immediately.
But in many other states, I mean, in California, they're still threatening pastors.
One of the pastors on our advisory board for public school exit, Rob McCoy, he was at the meeting this weekend.
He was threatened with arrest for refusing to shut down his church in the United States of America, where the very First Amendment protects our freedom to assemble, our religious liberty, our freedom to speak.
It's just, it's mind-boggling.
So we're following the case closely up in Canada.
Hopefully this is a temporary aberration.
But if we continue moving in this direction, I think that's going to start becoming the norm.
And, you know, as a Christian, it's not that I'm worried about it.
The Bible is very clear that the gates of hell will never prevail against the church.
But maybe it's time for Christians to start preparing themselves because that's the direction the world is moving in.
And more of us may have to go to jail for the sake of our testimony.
So God bless the pastor.
We are praying for him.
And I hope everybody in Canada is as well.
This is a critical issue.
And I hope people understand the significance of this.
This is a major turning point.
This is not a small thing.
This is a turning point in our societies that, if left unaddressed, is going to have very, very serious consequences going forward.
Yeah, I've been to northern Iraq.
So I know where persecution leads to when you don't nip it in the bud beforehand, when you don't stand up and say something about it.
And, you know, I've spent the last four weeks in Pastor Coates' Grace Life Church.
I'm not a member of his congregation.
However, they'd sure love to have me.
What a great bunch of people.
Holy cow.
But, you know, the idea that they cannot let Pastor Coates free, because if he does, then his church pews will be full.
They are full.
Because anybody who locks up a pastor thinking that it will end Christianity misunderstands church history and the church itself.
The church thrives under persecution.
And inspired by Pastor Coates, other churches are doing the same.
They're saying, no, I'm sorry.
Pastor Coates has really brought an issue to light within the church that we must be obedient to God and not the government.
And we're seeing church after church after church make the same stand.
And I think they're going to need bigger prisons if they think they're going to lock up all the Christians who are obedient to God over our Premier Jason Kenny.
Amen.
I couldn't agree more with you, Sheila.
And before this happened, actually, I was invited to preach at a major Baptist church on the east coast of Florida.
I believe it was in October of last year.
And I actually preached on exactly this subject, the duty of Christians toward government and also the duty of Christians to resist and disobey government when that government violates what God has commanded.
And this is a theme that is constant throughout the Bible.
Daniel refused to stop praying to God.
He was thrown into the lion's den.
Shadrach Mishak Nobednego refused to bow down before this giant golden idol, and they were thrown into the fiery furnace and God protected them.
I mean, the apostles, right?
They refused to stop preaching in the name of Christ.
And then that's where that famous line that you just gave came from in Acts, right?
Is it better to obey God or men?
Well, hey, we are going to obey God and we must.
And so this is a theme that's all throughout the Bible.
Yes, Christians must submit to government, but Christians must submit to God first.
And you're right.
This is causing an incredible awakening in the church.
I think this is actually going to be very healthy for the church.
And you're also right, right on the money about the spreading and the thriving of Christianity under persecution.
If you actually look at the spread of the gospel, it came about as a result of the persecution.
They were persecuting the early church.
They scattered all over the world.
And boom, now Christianity is a global phenomenon.
There's nothing governments can do to stop it.
But what an honor it is to suffer for the cause of the truth.
Alex, I could probably talk to you all day, but I know that you're in New American HQ, so I'm sure you have other things to do than let me bend your ear.
How can people find the work that you do on, you know, not just at the New American, but other places?
And how can they support the work that you do and maybe find some of the excellent resources that you have for parents out there?
Well, thank you so much for the opportunity, Sheila.
So Public School Exit, we're really making an outreach right now to pastors, and we would love to work with Canadian pastors as well.
We've got a whole team of experts.
We can come in and help you set up a situation where you can start getting the children out of the government schools.
And the data is clear.
So you can find us at publicschooexit.com.
The new American, you can find at thenewamerican.com.
You can subscribe to the print magazine as well if you're so inclined.
My personal website is libertysentinel.org.
And I've got a lot of my kind of my sermons and my just ramblings and thoughts on things, personal thoughts that I put up there, and also articles and columns by people that I think very highly of.
And Red Pill Expo, if you guys want to come, you can go to redpillexpo.org.
Supporting Parents & Kids00:00:57
That again will be June 4th through June 6th.
And thank you so much for having me, Sheila.
I really appreciate it.
I love your show.
I love what you guys do at The Rebel.
And thank you for speaking out on behalf of Pastor Coates.
We sure appreciate it.
Keep sounding the alarm.
And thanks for everything you do, Sheila.
We will.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
And we'll have you back on again very, very soon.
Excellent.
Thank you, Sheila.
bless.
Like I said to Alex, if there is one good thing to come from this horrible pandemic lockdown, I hope it is that parents find the confidence to realize that they have always been the first and the best educators of their children.
It's always been that way since time immemorial.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here or, well, probably not here, but wherever I am next week.