Free Republic

Moms for Liberty has, in recent years, been a major player in America’s culture wars. The group has been behind the drastic increase in book ban attempts across the country, influenced local leaders to implement anti-LGBTQ+ policies, and railed against educators and others in communities, smearing them as child abusers. In 2023, Moms for Liberty held its annual convention in Pennsylvania, sparking widespread protests. Now it has set its sights on the state’s many school boards. There are 500 different districts spread over Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, and ahead of next week’s elections in the state, HuffPost found that Moms for...

Oct 24 (Reuters) - Dozens of U.S. states are suing Meta Platforms (META.O) and its Instagram unit, accusing them of fueling a youth mental health crisis by making their social media platforms addictive. In a complaint filed on Tuesday, the attorneys general of 33 states including California and New York said Meta, which also operates Facebook, repeatedly misled the public about the dangers of its platforms, and knowingly induced young children and teenagers into addictive and compulsive social media use "Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens," according to the complaint...

Republican messaging on “parental rights” in education is having an effect on New Jersey voters, and that could spell trouble for Democratic state lawmakers in November, a new poll shows. Election Day is less than three weeks away, and with all 120 seats in the Democratic-controlled state Legislature on the ballot, both sides are trying to shape the narrative on a range of hot-button issues. New Jersey residents generally favor Democrats over Republicans in the upcoming election, with 42% of likely voters saying they’ll vote for the Democratic candidate in their district compared to 26% in favor of the Republican...

Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said on Friday that he does not "respect" people who are "misbehaving in public and acting like they know what’s right for kids." Cardona gave a video interview with the Associated Press discussing the state of education in the U.S., including the recent Supreme Court decisions on race-based admissions and President Biden’s attempt to relieve student debt. Cardona was also prompted to address his past comments saying that public education was "under attack." "I wonder whether this is something other education secretaries have had to grapple with," AP reporter Collin Binkley asked Cardona. "I [sic]...

Longtime Stanford University professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried — the parents of Sam Bankman-Fried — were sued by the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency company FTX on Monday. In the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Delaware, the couple is accused of using FTX funds to enrich themselves and give to their “pet causes,” including millions of dollars in donations to Stanford. The lawsuit alleges that both Bankman and Fried “fraudulently transferred and misappropriated” tens of millions of dollars in total from FTX. They were also given a 30,000-square-foot $16.4 million home in the Bahamas and a $10 million cash gift by...

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said Tuesday that parents who want to be notified by schools if their children want to change genders have been “ginned up” by misinformation produced by Republicans and conservative news outlets. The Newsom administration is currently suing the school district of Chino Valley in Riverside, California, over its new policy of parental notification, claiming that it violates the rights of transgender minors to “out” them to their parents. Newsom was asked about the issue Tuesday in a live forum by Politico‘s California bureau chief, Christopher Cadelago. We’re winning. Instead of answering @ccadelago’s question on parental...

If you’re a California resident and a parent, you really ought to leave the state now. On Friday, the California Assembly passed AB 957, which means that a parent who doesn’t “affirm” their child’s “gender identity” could lose custody of that child. AB 957 amends state Family Code to include “a parent’s affirmation of the child’s gender identity or gender expression as part of the health, safety, and welfare of the child.” The bill is now headed for Gov. Newsom’s desk, where he will most certainly sign it. A recent comprehensive study found that there is no medical benefit for...

Debate over enforcement comes as the country battles with how to effectively diminish the use of the highly accessible and extremely deadly drugMadison Bernard climbed into bed before dawn with her toddler, Charlotte, who was asleep next to a nightstand strewn with straws, burned tinfoil and a white powder. Hours later, the mother woke and found her daughter struggling to breathe, according to investigators who described the scene in court documents. After being rushed in an ambulance to a hospital, the 15-month-old girl died from a fentanyl overdose. Her mother and father, whom authorities said brought the drugs into their...

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit Monday against the Chino school district, ordering an end to a policy that requires notifying parents if their children change their gender identity, alleging it is discriminatory and violates civil rights and privacy laws. The “parental notification” policy, which has been proposed by a handful of conservative-leaning districts in California, puts transgender and gender nonconforming students in “danger of imminent, irreparable harm” by potentially forcibly “outing” them at home before they’re ready, according to the lawsuit. “They are in real fear that the district’s policy will force them to make a choice:...

California's Gov. Gavin Newsom continued his attacks on red states, blasting Texas and Florida for "banning" books containing pornographic imagery from school libraries. Nothing could be further from the truth, he oleaginously assured. Newsom insisted that outstate groups had misled parents into thinking that schools are somehow "sexualizing" children.Incredibly, he did this while touting his state as a bastion for parental rights, going so far as to argue that no state outdoes California on "local control and parental engagement." Newsom actually claimed that he supports “the rights of parents to speak out,” despite the fact that the state is poised...

Indiana parents have been charged after their 5-year-old son allegedly shot and killed his 16-month-old brother. Police say both young children had drugs in their systems. Around 3:00 p.m. on March 28, officers from the Lafayette Police Department responded to a report that a child wasn't breathing at an apartment building in Lafayette — about an hour north of Indianapolis. Cops discovered a 1-year-old boy deceased and determined the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head. After an investigation, police said that 16-month-old Isiah Johnson had been shot and killed by his 5-year-old brother. Law & Crime...

When I was a boy there were occasionally lurid stories in the news that fascinated us about Japanese soldiers found on deserted Pacific islands, still fighting World War II decades after the war ended. These were sad, embittered and deranged individuals who had cut themselves off from the world and prosecuted their war alone. They lived furtively, rather like mole rats in caves, like some gollum from a Tolkien story, half starving, hysterical, half mad. And then came adolescence and girls and competitive sport into my life with the faint promise of learning to drive a powerful V-8. So the...

A local school board in Chino Valley, California, ejected California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond after he tried to intervene in a meeting about parental notification for gender transitions. The board voted 4-1 to approve a policy that requires schools in the district to notify parents or guardians if a child wishes to change his or her gender. Critics say the policy requires to “out” transgender kids to parents.

Virginia parental rights advocates scored a huge victory Tuesday with the release of model policies from the Virginia Department of Education reversing a 2021 version that “kept parents in the dark." The guidance, Model Policies on Ensuring Privacy, Dignity and Respect for All Students and Parents in Virginia’s Public Schools, provides clearer input for school boards regarding the role of parents in decisions relating to their child’s gender identity, as well as restricting transgender students from participating in sex segregated extra-curricular activities that don’t align with their biological sex. In addition, the new directive requires students to use bathrooms or...

Okay, that’s not exactly the headline the Post used but it’s close: “‘Racist,’ ‘grooming’: Why parents are trying to ban so many picture books.” The article is of course written as if the people who would complain about children’s picture books are all wild-eyed bigots.The discontent with children’s picture books overwhelmingly centers on titles with LGBTQ characters and storylines, which were targeted in 75 percent of such challenges, The Post found. The top motive, cited in 64 percent of the picture-book complaints, was a wish to prevent children from reading about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, nonbinary and queer lives. The...

An 18-month-old Florida girl “baked to death” after police said her parents left her alone in a car all night in 105-degree heat after returning home from a Fourth of July party where they drank alcohol and smoked marijuana. Joel and Jazmine Rondon, both 33, from Lakeland, have been arrested on a charge of aggravated manslaughter of a child in what Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd described as their daughter’s “torturous” hot-car death, which he blamed on “negligence and drug use.” The couple went to a party on Tuesday with their three children, all under the age of 9, and...

Democrats pose as the champions of democracy—except when democracy doesn’t go their way. After 84% of parents in a Virginia county rejected co-ed sex education and gender ideology in schools, the taxpayer-funded school board dismissively announced that “the majority doesn’t always dictate.” Fairfax County has been a hotspot of crazy LGBTQ ideology and persecution of concerned parents for quite a while now. Woke or authoritarian nonsense from Fairfax schools includes making false statements about a dress-wearing boy who raped a girl in a school bathroom (before trying to get the victim’s father jailed), pushing pornographic books to kids, and suspending...

My home state of California is Bizzarroland, totally over the edge. It was bad enough, but now it has crossed the Rubicon and blown up the bridge and burned the boats. The Golden State is set to take away parental rights and create a police state where a court and judge must (not may) affirm a child’s chosen made-up gender “identity.” But that same California requires permission for a minor to get a tattoo. Make sense of it. I can’t. Soon in California, if the Democrat super-majority gets its way, confused children can be taken from a parent(s) and chemically...

Muslims will be the swing voters in the 2024 presidential election, Asra Nomani predictedMuslim parents are waking up to the "unholy alliance" their community forged with the Democratic Party after standing side by side with conservatives to fight for parental rights, said a Muslim journalist. "Parents everywhere, from the Muslim community to the Asian community, the Armenian-American community in California, are recognizing that their children are in the crosshairs of this woke army and they don't want to have any part of it," Asra Nomani, the author of "Woke Army," told Fox News Digital. "These woke activists have stirred the...

Americans who are protecting children from transgenderism and irreversible surgery are hysterical, prejudiced, cruel, and terroristic, President Joe Biden said in a scripted response to a question at a White House event. Biden promised from the White House podium that he would champion new rights for the often-contradictory demographic of varied “LGBT” people, saying: Our fight is far, far, from over because we have some hysterical, and I would argue prejudiced people, who are engaged in all what you see what’s going on around the country. It’s an appeal to fear and it’s an appeal that is totally, thoroughly unjustified....