A Plan to Get Divisive & Radical Theories Out of Our Schools By Donald J. Trump
Source: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/18/a_plan_to_get_divisive__radical_theories_out_of_our_schools_145946.htmlJune 18, 2021
As a candidate, Joe Biden’s number one promise was to “unite” America. Yet in his first months as president, his number one priority has been to divide our country by race and gender at every turn.
There is no clearer example than the Biden administration’s new effort aimed at indoctrinating America’s schoolchildren with some of the most toxic and anti-American theories ever conceived. It is vital for Americans to understand what this initiative would do, what drives it and, most importantly, how we can stop it.
For decades, the America-blaming left has been relentlessly pushing a vision of America that casts our history, culture, traditions, and founding documents in the most negative possible light. Yet in recent years, this deeply unnatural effort has progressed from telling children that their history is evil to telling Americans that they are evil.
In classrooms across the nation, students are being subjected to a new curriculum designed to brainwash them with the ridiculous left-wing dogma known as “critical race theory.” The key fact about this twisted doctrine is that it is completely antithetical to everything that normal Americans of any color would wish to teach their children.
Instead of helping young people discover that America is the greatest, most tolerant, and most generous nation in history, it teaches them that America is systemically evil and that the hearts of our people are full of hatred and malice. Far from advancing the beautiful dream of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. -- that our children should “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” -- the left’s vile new theory preaches that judging people by the color of their skin is actually a good idea.
Teaching even one child these divisive messages would verge on psychological abuse. Indoctrinating generations of children with these extreme ideas is not just immoral -- it is a program for national suicide. Yet that is exactly what the Biden administration endorsed recently in a rule published in the Federal Register aimed at inflicting a critical race theory-inspired curriculum on American schoolchildren.
The rule explicitly cites the New York Times’ discredited “1619 Project” as a motivation. The Times has described the goal of its endeavor as the “re-education” of the American people, and the project even includes a lesson plan that encourages students to practice “erasing” parts of the Declaration of Independence. The Biden rule also directly cites a left-wing activist and leading proponent of critical race theory whose textbook states, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
This is what the Biden administration wants to teach America’s children.
The Department of Education rule stems from an executive order Biden signed on his first day in office. Biden’s order abolished the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission I created to honor America’s founding principles, and reversed an executive action I took to stop these depraved theories from being imposed upon federal employees in workforce training sessions.
Thankfully, most Americans oppose this insanity. The left has only gotten away with it until this point because not enough parents have been paying attention and speaking up. But that is quickly changing. From Loudoun County, Va., to Cupertino, Calif., parents are beginning to make their voices heard against the left-wing cultural revolution. What they need now is a plan to actually stop it.
Here are the reforms that every concerned parent in America should be demanding.
First, every state legislature should pass a ban on taxpayer dollars going to any school district or workplace that teaches critical race theory, which inherently violates existing anti-discrimination laws. Inspired by my executive order last year, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, Oklahoma and other states have already taken steps to pass such laws. It needs to happen everywhere — and Congress should seek to institute a federal ban through legislation as well.
Second, each state should create its own 1776 Commission to examine the public school curriculum and ensure that students are receiving a patriotic, pro-American education — not being taught that the United States is an evil nation.
Third, parents have a right to know exactly what is being taught to their children. Last year, many parents had the chance to routinely listen in on classes for the first time because of remote learning. As students return to the classroom, states need to pass laws requiring that all lesson plans have to be made available to parents — every handout, article, and reading should be posted on an online portal that allows parents to see what their kids are being taught. Furthermore, in many places, there are rules preventing students from recording what teachers say in class. States and school boards should establish a “Right to Record.”
Fourth, parents need to organize locally — in every school district in America — to eliminate “Action Civics” and other versions of the effort to contort traditional civics education into a vehicle for political indoctrination. The left’s new argument is that our “divisions” stem from a lack of “civics education” — a problem they intend to “fix” with lots of new taxpayer money and a redefinition of “civics” in schools, just as they are trying to redefine the meaning of “infrastructure.” Right now, Congress is working on a $1 billion bill known as the Civics Secures Democracy Act. No Republican should trust the Biden administration with a billion dollars to spend on such programs. Even worse, the legislation threatens to establish a de facto national curriculum for history and civics, effectively bribing states into adopting the left’s anti-American curriculum. It is Common Core all over again -- but much more extreme. And like Common Core, parents must unite to stop this new federal power grab.
Fifth, any parent who objects to the material being taught to their child in public school should get an automatic voucher, empowering them to pick another school of their choice. The government has no right to brainwash students with controversial ideologies against their parents’ will.
Sixth, states need to take back control of their schools of education and credentialing bodies to ensure they are not churning out radicalized teachers. To be clear, the overwhelming majority of our nation’s teachers are some of the most selfless and wonderful people there are — but regrettably, many have graduated from extremely biased education schools and may not even be aware of the degree to which leftist ideology has permeated their curriculum. States should set up alternative credentialing bodies that can certify great teachers who know how to instill a sense of love for America. School districts can then make it a priority to hire teachers with these certifications, especially for English, history, and social studies roles. States could even set up their own versions of Teach for America to get passionate and patriotic young people into the classroom.
Finally, states need to break the tenure monopoly in public K-12 schools. Tenure was originally supposed to protect competent teachers from being subjected to undue political influence; it has turned into a mechanism to protect incompetent teachers who themselves wield undue political influence over our children. Educators who are alienating children from their own country should not be protected with lifelong tenure; they should be liberated to pursue a career as a political activist.
Make no mistake: The motive behind all of this left-wing lunacy is to discredit and eliminate the greatest obstacles to the fundamental transformation of America. To succeed with their extreme agenda, radicals know they must abolish our attachment to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and most of all, Americans’ very identity as a free, proud, and self-governing people. The left knows that if they can dissolve our national memory and identity, they can gain the total political control they crave.
A nation is only as strong as its spirit. For our children, we must act before it is too late.
Donald Trump was the 45th president of the United States.
I built the wall; Biden built a humanitarian catastrophe By Donald J. Trump
Source: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jun/30/donald-trump-i-built-the-wall-biden-built-a-humani/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=email_this&utm_source=emailJune 30, 2021
When I was president, I delivered on my promise to build a border wall to protect our country. All Joe Biden had to do was paint it.
Instead, Biden has enacted the most radical open borders agenda imaginable. This is perhaps the first time in world history a nation has purposely and systematically dismantled its own defenses to invite millions of foreign migrants to enter its territory and break its laws.
No one knows who they are, presenting a dangerous threat to Americans. To say that Biden has provoked a national security disaster does not even begin to do justice to the calamity.
In May, illegal border crossings were nearly 700% higher than when I was president during the same period last year. For each of the last three months, more unaccompanied minors have arrived than in any prior month in recorded history. Seizures of ultra-lethal fentanyl are up 265% from last year — more of the drug has already been intercepted than in the entirety of 2020.
Joe Biden has restored catch-and-release, torn up our hard-earned asylum agreements with Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, and announced that anyone on the planet who lives in a crime-afflicted area now qualifies for asylum in the United States. Meanwhile, ICE is effectively shut down, senior border security officials have been fired, and criminals are being released in record numbers.
To top it all off, the Biden administration has announced a new program whereby the U.S. government will literally pay to fly illegal aliens' relatives from other countries to join them in the United States.
These policies are utterly depraved — the actions of someone who by all indications wants to completely abolish America’s southern border.
Yet of all the vindictive, shocking, and self-defeating border security actions Joe Biden has taken, none surpasses his decision to stop the final completion of the wall.
Nearly 740 miles of border wall had been fully funded and more than 660 miles were already built or undergoing construction, Customs and Border Protection confirmed on Jan. 15, five days before I left office. After more than two years of litigation and Democrat obstruction, the wall was going up at an average rate of two miles per day. We had already more than doubled the length of the physical barrier protecting our southern border. We had also replaced much of the previously existing dilapidated fencing with new impenetrable metal beams, focusing on the highest traffic areas that border patrol agents themselves had identified.
The wall was planned, approved, paid for, and virtually done. Only a few key areas remained to be completed. All Joe Biden had to do was let the contractors finish their work. The border agents wanted it, and it would make the whole country safer.
Instead, Biden sabotaged the completion of the wall, ordered an immediate halt to construction on his first day in office, impounded the funds Congress had appropriated and took steps to terminate the National Emergency declaration that had facilitated it.
By stopping construction, Joe Biden purposely and deliberately left gaps in the wall, creating unsealed channels right in the middle of the border to be exploited by human traffickers and drug smugglers. I built a wall — Biden built a humanitarian catastrophe.
This decision has also done egregious harm to our sovereignty. As my administration clearly demonstrated, walls work. After my border wall was constructed, illegal border crossings dropped by 90 percent in the Yuma area and 80 percent in the Rio Grande Valley, and parts of El Paso. Illegal drug trafficking and human smuggling also drastically decreased in those areas. Building just 12 miles of border wall in San Diego alone reduced necessary border patrol manpower by 150 agents a day, saving millions of taxpayer dollars, and freeing up those agents to provide additional border security elsewhere.
As a result of Biden’s abdication of his sworn duties, Texas now says they will "build the wall." This should not be necessary and is at best a band-aid over the gaping wound Biden created.
Border security is a core responsibility of the federal government — and my administration had already done everything required to complete the project. We secured the necessary legal authorities, acquired the land, designed, engineered, and tested the wall. With little help from Congress, my administration obtained the money, executed the contracts, and hired the personnel. For Texas to be unnecessarily forced to repeat these complicated steps will take months or years if it is even possible for them to do it at all.
Governors and state legislatures should certainly do what they can — but there is no substitute for federal action.
We handed Biden the most secure border in history. We ended asylum fraud, terminated catch and release, negotiated historic migration agreements with Mexico and other countries, and virtually stopped illegal immigration. Precisely because of these policies, we achieved an incredible 90% reduction in illegal crossings.
Our nation is being destroyed by Biden's border crisis. The United States must immediately restore the entire set of border security and immigration enforcement measures we put into place — and critically, we must finish the wall.
A nation without borders is not a nation at all. For the sake of our country, Joe Biden must finish sealing the border immediately, or the American People must elect a Congress that will.
Why I’m Suing Big Tech By Donald J. Trump
Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-j-trump-why-im-suing-big-tech-11625761897July 8, 2021
If Facebook, Twitter and YouTube can censor me, they can censor you— and believe me, they are.
PHOTO: MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO/GETTY IMAGES
One of the gravest threats to our democracy today is a powerful group of Big Tech corporations that have teamed up with government to censor the free speech of the American people. This is not only wrong— it is unconstitutional. To restore free speech for myself and for every American, I am suing Big Tech to stop it.
Social media has become as central to free speech as town meeting halls, newspapers and television networks were in prior generations. The internet is the new public square. In recent years, however, Big Tech platforms have become increasingly brazen and shameless in censoring and discriminating against ideas, information and people on social media— banning users, deplatforming organizations, and aggressively blocking the free flow of information on which our democracy depends.
No longer are Big Tech giants simply removing specific threats of violence. They are manipulating and controlling the political debate itself. Consider content that was censored in the past year. Big Tech companies banned users from their platforms for publishing evidence that showed the coronavirus emerged from a Chinese lab, which even the corporate media now admits may be true. In the middle of a pandemic, Big Tech censored physicians from discussing potential treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, which studies have now shown does work to relieve symptoms of Covid-19. In the weeks before a presidential election, the platforms banned the New York Post— America's oldest newspaper— for publishing a story critical of Joe Biden's family, a story the Biden campaign did not even dispute.
Perhaps most egregious, in the weeks after the election, Big Tech blocked the social-media accounts of the sitting president. If they can do it to me, they can do it to you— and believe me, they are.
Jennifer Horton, a Michigan schoolteacher, was banned from Facebook for sharing an article questioning whether mandatory masks for young children are healthy. Later, when her brother went missing, she was unable to use Facebook to get the word out. Colorado physician Kelly Victory was deplatformed by YouTube after she made a video for her church explaining how to hold services safely. Kiyan Michael of Florida and her husband, Bobby, lost their 21-year-old son in a fatal collision caused by a twice-deported illegal alien. Facebook censored them after they posted on border security and immigration enforcement.
Meanwhile, Chinese propagandists and the Iranian dictator spew threats and hateful lies on these platforms with impunity.
This flagrant attack on free speech is doing terrible damage to our country. That is why in conjunction with the America First Policy Institute, I filed class-action lawsuits to force Big Tech to stop censoring the American people. The suits seek damages to deter such behavior in the future and injunctions restoring my accounts.
Our lawsuits argue that Big Tech companies are being used to impose illegal and unconstitutional government censorship. In 1996 Congress sought to promote the growth of the internet by extending liability protections to internet platforms, recognizing that they were exactly that— platforms, not publishers. Unlike publishers, companies such as Facebook and Twitter can’t be held legally liable for the content posted to their sites. Without this immunity, social media companies could not exist.
Democrats in Congress are exploiting this leverage to coerce platforms into censoring their political opponents. In recent years, we have all watched Congress haul Big Tech CEOs before their committees and demand that they censor "false" stories and "disinformation"— labels determined by an army of partisan fact-checkers loyal to the Democrat Party. As the cases of fellow plaintiffs Ms. Horton, Dr. Victory and the Michael family demonstrate, in practice this amounts to suppression of speech that those in power do not like.
Further, Big Tech and government agencies are actively coordinating to remove content from the platforms according to the guidance of agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Big Tech and traditional media entities formed the Trusted News Initiative, which essentially takes instructions from the CDC about what information they need to "combat." The tech companies are doing the government's bidding, colluding to censor unapproved ideas.
This coercion and coordination is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has held that Congress can't use private actors to achieve what the Constitution prohibits it from doing itself. In effect, Big Tech has been illegally deputized as the censorship arm of the U.S. government. This should alarm you no matter your political persuasion. It is unacceptable, unlawful and un-American.
Through these lawsuits, I intend to restore free speech for all Americans— Democrats, Republicans and independents. I will never stop fighting to defend the constitutional rights and sacred liberties of the American people.
Mr. Trump was the 45th president of the United States.
