Free Republic

A 24-year-old illegal immigrant from Venezuela who posed as a teenager in Toledo, Ohio, now faces decades in prison after admitting to a scheme that lasted more than a year. Anthony Emmanuel Labrador Sierra pleaded guilty this past week to multiple charges after forging immigration documents and claiming to be a 16-year-old student at Perrysburg High School in January 2024, the New York Post reported. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Ohio, Sierra, who crossed the border in 2019 and was only permitted to stay until March 2020 by the Biden administration, also illegally purchased...

Nick Sortor @nicksortor 🚨 BREAKING: ICE just ARRESTED the Superintendent of Des Moines Iowa schools, who is an illegal immigrant from AFRICA, per @BillMelugin_ He was armed, and attempted to FLEE WTF? He led the LARGEST school district in Iowa. Our kids are NOT SAFE with Democrats in charge. INSANE Ian Andre Roberts will now be sent back to Guayana.

Jennings was perhaps the most outrageous government appointee in memory. He is a long-time homosexual activist who began his career in Massachusetts, and founded GLSEN, the national homosexual group that targets children in schools. Jennings' depraved record of pushing homosexuality and transgenderism to kids goes back decades. Jennings' Dept. of Education office received $410 million in FY 2011. Among other efforts, last year, Jennings helped introduce Bill 4530 in Congress that would require normalization of homosexuality, transgenderism, cross-dressing, etc., in America's public schools. He also set up an "anti-bullying" conference at the White House in March, part of the larger...

Our experiences walking to and from school were similar to those of most of our classmates. Their parents did not drive them to school or put them on a bus. They let them walk. That was not unusual in America in the 1960s and early '70s. But it is today. An article published in 2011 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine noted that 47.7% of students in kindergarten through eighth grade walked or biked to school in 1969. By 2009, that had dropped to just 12.7% of students. A survey published in this same journal in 2019 reported that...

A shadowy for-profit company and its nonprofit counterpart provide free services to at least 40 far-left prosecutor offices, raising questions about whether it’s working on behalf of taxpayers or of donors who have essentially bought government. The Wren Collective is a shadowy group that emerged from a Cold War-era initiative aimed at promoting Soviet films in the United States. Its current iteration — funded by a former Enron executive and host of other leftist megadonors — claims that America’s “system of policing and mass incarceration is deeply flawed and intractably racist.” The group has intervened on specific criminal cases, written...

Like a great pendulum that has swung too far in one direction, American education has spent decades lurching away from its founding principles. For generations, our public schools have transformed from institutions that acknowledged the divine into sterile laboratories of secular indoctrination. Parents have watched helplessly as their children were taught to hide their faith like contraband, to whisper prayers as if they were speaking profanities. But sometimes, just when the pendulum seems frozen at its furthest point, gravity reasserts itself. The erosion didn’t happen overnight. Since the 1960s, a series of court decisions and bureaucratic edicts have systematically scrubbed...

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a curious new religious group began spreading throughout the fledgling United States. Their official name was the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing – known colloquially as “Shakers” for their tendency to fall into ecstatic trances and literally shake or tremble during worship. The Shakers are most famous today for their belief in strict celibacy – even within the confines of marriage. All members, whether single or married before joining, had to agree to remain chaste for their entire lives. Because of this, their communities had no biological offspring. They...

This week, another transgender shoot-up of a Christian school provides more chilling evidence that the culture war is a spiritual war. The Minneapolis shooter’s actions and Democrats’ interpretation of them both demonstrate this. The New York Post published excerpts of the shooter’s journal posted on YouTube that include a drawing of him communing with a Satanic figure in a mirror. As I’ve written before, Satan-worshippers can be startlingly more direct than many Christians about the connections between their spiritual and political beliefs.

Robert “Robin” Westman, a man who identified as a woman, attacked Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis today, killing two and wounding 17 others. The two fatalities were children with 14 of the 17 wounded also being school kids. Three adults were also injured. Westman penned an alleged manifesto and posted a video before the attack. His mother reportedly used to work at the school before retiring in 2021. Some of the writings were written in Cyrillic, but New York Post reporter Diane Nerozzi translated some of the pages (via NY Post): Transgender Minneapolis shooter Robin Westman spoke of murdering “filthy...

Today, the U.S. Department of Education (the Department) announced it is placing Alexandria City Public Schools, Arlington Public Schools, Fairfax County Public Schools, Loudoun County Public Schools, and Prince William County Public Schools (the Divisions) in Northern Virginia on high-risk status with the condition that all federal funding flowing to these districts is done by reimbursement only. This action is being taken after all five Divisions have been found in violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX). The Department found the Divisions in violation of Title IX last month for their policies allowing students to...

The Fairfax County Public Schools system in Virginia has launched an investigation into accusations that school staff arranged abortions for students without notifying their parents, according to local reports. School officials at Centreville High School in Union Hill allegedly arranged and bankrolled abortions for girls in 2021, including a 17-year-old, according to local news outlet WJLA. “We learned yesterday of these concerning allegations from 2021,” FCPS said in a statement to the outlet on Wednesday. “We are launching an immediate and comprehensive investigation as we take all concerns of student wellbeing very seriously.” Pressed on whether FCPS staff have ever...

The Trump administration should investigate them to stop potential violations of federal civil rights laws.It’s been two years since the Supreme Court banned racial discrimination in college admissions. Nonetheless, at medical schools, evidence suggests that the discrimination continues.That’s my conclusion after submitting Freedom of Information Act requests to all 93 public medical schools. I asked for several years of admissions data, including on students who matriculated in 2024, following the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard. I sought data on race, undergraduate grades, MCAT scores, and admission status, in order to assess whether...

The Florida Department of Education on Friday sent a scathing letter to Alachua County School Board Chair Sarah Rockwell in response to her social media post celebrating the death of Hulk Hogan as “one less MAGA,” and the board’s attempt to silence a parent at Thursday’s school board meeting. “Your recent unprofessional conduct has been brought to my attention. You made disparaging comments about the death of a conservative public figure, leading the public to lose confidence in your ability to treat all students and families fairly,” Commissioner of Education Anastasios Kamoutsas wrote. That concern has now been reaffirmed by...

The College Board reduced the Reading and Writing portion of the SAT exam by up to 500 words, arguing the length was nonessential in assessing students' aptitude.. One expert projects the ACT will soon cut its standards as well. In 2024, the College Board introduced sweeping changes to the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), made largely without the awareness of lawmakers. According to a June 18 op-ed by Michael Torres, the policy director for the Classical Learning Test (CLT), one major change was the format switch from paper to computerized testing. This allows the exam to be adaptable, which means that...

“We’re aware; the challenge here is finding a federal hook. But WH has been in touch about whether we can assist in some form or fashion.”America First Legal shared documents with Fox News showing communication between the Biden White House and the DOJ over the memo that demonized protesting parents at school board meetings. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland’s memo weaponized the FBI against these parents after the National School Boards Association begged former President Joe Biden’s administration to intervene. The NSBA described the protests as “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” The memo came out on October 4,...

There’s an old saying that goes, something that can’t go on forever won’t. Chicago is now in the early stages of learning that this applies to their public school system. They’re facing a massive budget deficit of $734 million and are on pace to lay off almost 1,500 teachers and staffers. Perhaps Mayor Brandon Johnson should have been more focused on delivering the services that American citizen taxpayers paid for and less on the needs of illegal immigrants and Chicago’s ‘sanctuary city’ status. ... Chicago Public Schools parents and community members sounded off on Monday, three days after the district...

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” CNN Political Contributor and Democratic strategist Paul Begala said that while he disagrees with bans on gender transitions for children, it’s “crazy” for states like California to keep schools from telling parents about their children transitioning. Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX) said, “[T]his is one of the reasons why the Democrats are losing on an issue like this, because, again, if you can’t definitively tell — I have a six, a four, and a 2-year-old. My six and four-year-old, they think that they’re Anna and Elsa and my little boy thinks he’s Lightning McQueen....

The education news outlet Chalkbeat recently highlighted a Denver, Colo. elementary school that’s teaching students as young as age 3 about environmental damage. Mental-health professionals praise their efforts, saying the lessons can help prevent “eco-anxiety,” a “chronic fear of environmental doom.” The mental-health industry’s logic is self-serving: Introduce kids to the idea of Earth’s demise, then step in to manage their worry. Climate catastrophism has come to the classroom — and, as one educator put it, it’s “scaring the kids to death.” Human beings aren’t born aware of our supposed environmental crisis. The fear of climate change — and therapists’...

In the 2024 U.S. presidential election, a seismic shift caught many political analysts off guard: young voters, assumed to be a reliably progressive demographic, showed unprecedented support for conservative candidates. This was no fleeting anomaly. Rather, it reflects a cultural transformation among America's youth, in particular young men, one that is steering them toward traditionalism and a rejection of the liberal paradigms that have dominated their cultural landscape for decades. From a resurgence of traditional religious practices to a renewed appreciation for authentic, skill-driven music, the young are embracing values that align with Traditionalism. As politics is downstream from culture,...

The Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which accredits medical schools, will no longer consider Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs during evaluations. Another medical education accreditor announced earlier this month that it would suspend diversity requirements. ... The Liaison Committee on Medical Education—which accredits medical schools around the country—has announced that it will no longer consider Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs during its evaluations. On May 19, the committee, which is sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) decided to eliminate DEI considerations as part of its criteria for assessing medical schools’ performances, ... The Liaison Committee...