Liz Wheeler's new book, "Hide Your Children," exposes the Marxist behind the attack on America's kids and what we can do to stop it once and for all. She's joined by Don Jr. Gold to discuss how we can stop the indoctrination of our children by the leftist agenda and the best way to do so is to educate ourselves. Don't miss this episode of Triggered! Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code TRiggered to receive 20% off your first month with discount code: "TRiggered" at checkout. Today's episode is all about one of the biggest issues facing our country today, the attacks on our education system by the left-wing "activists" in our schools, colleges and higher learning institutions. It's time we wake up to the fact that our children are being indoctrinated by a leftist agenda, and we have to do something about it. If we don't get involved at this point, I don't think it'll end well. Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE so you don't miss the next episode where we'll be discussing the latest in the latest "triggers" and how you can protect your kids from indoctrination. You'll get 10% off the purchase of gold and silver! Don JR. Gold is a high-yield, hard hitting gold and precious metals! If you like the show, you'll love the show! Subscribe to the show and share it on your social media! so you can be apart of the movement! We'll be the first to know who knows what's going on and who's getting it! and who knows who's winning! the next one will be the real winners will be next! Tweet me and we'll take the win! Timestamps: or send me what you're listening and what you think of the most important thing I'm listening to? to let me know what you thought of it? and I'll be sure to send it to the rest of your friends! ;) Tweet Me! or text me ! & I'll let her know what your thoughts! in a message about what you'd like it's the best thing you've heard so I'll get a shoutout! :) Thank you for listening and a shout out! - DM me! & other things you've been listening!
00:05:28.000you guys welcome to another major episode of triggered
00:05:57.000And today's episode is all about one of the biggest issues facing our country today.
00:06:02.000The left-wing indoctrination of our children, the attacks on our education system, and what we can ultimately do to stop it.
00:06:11.000Because, frankly, if we don't get involved at this point...
00:06:13.000I don't think it ends well. Today, we're joined by author and commentator Liz Wheeler, who's out with a new book called Hide Your Children, exposing the Marxist behind the attack on America's kids.
00:06:26.000For too long, conservatives have stayed on the sidelines as the left took over one major institution after another,
00:06:35.000and that includes our schools, our places of higher learning.
00:06:40.000They've been totally commandeered, and this book lays out not just how it happened,
00:06:45.000but most importantly, what we can do to stop it once and for all.
00:06:50.000We always talk on the show about, hey, all the things, we can complain all we want,
00:06:55.000but we actually need to do something about it.
00:06:58.000We can't just sit on the sidelines and complain.
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00:08:35.000DonJrGold.com Joining me now, author of the new book, Hide Your Children, Exposing the Marxist Behind the Attack on America's Kids, is Liz Wheeler.
00:08:45.000Liz, you've been talking about this a lot.
00:08:49.000But everything you talk about in the book In a big theme of this show, we see time and time again the leftists in power trying to coerce, trying to indoctrinate our children.
00:09:02.000Can you lay out the sort of timeline of how this all happened and the main premise of the book?
00:09:08.000I appreciate you having me on the show.
00:09:11.000It's finally out. The reason that we're experiencing this cultural insanity is because something the Republican Party is doing when they're fighting back against the left isn't working.
00:09:44.000So I think it's time we sat down and we analyzed what is this political enemy that we're facing?
00:09:50.000Who are we up against? What is their goal?
00:09:54.000And then we recalibrate our fighting tactics so that we are effective and we actually control these institutions that protect our children.
00:10:03.000I couldn't agree with you more on that one.
00:10:05.000I mean, the Republicans, you know, I say this all the time.
00:10:08.000I mean, it's our own fault. We're live and let live, and we turn the other cheek, and we do this while the left...
00:10:14.000And they're like, excellent! This is great.
00:10:16.000We'll take the win, and we'll chip away at your freedoms again tomorrow.
00:10:20.000We'll take the win, and we're going to push gender-affirming surgeries on your children.
00:10:24.000We'll take the... I mean, it's our own fault.
00:10:26.000I mean, we've watched the ship sink in total cluelessness.
00:10:32.000As they chip away at each and every institution, they've taken over the upper echelons of the military.
00:10:37.000And, you know, we make a distinction between the door kickers, who actually are probably all conservative, but they've done the same in law enforcement.
00:10:44.000You know, as much as they hate it, they still own the upper echelons of American law enforcement, whether it's the FBI and the DOJ and all these things have been commandeered by the left.
00:10:52.000So you're right. I mean, it is our own fault.
00:10:55.000We allowed this to happen right under our noses.
00:10:58.000We did. And let me give you one of the most horrendous examples.
00:11:01.000So you bring up transgender surgeries for children.
00:11:03.000This is pretty much universally condemned in our nation.
00:11:06.000You don't have to be a conservative or a Republican or a Christian to think that this is just brutal mutilation of the bodies of innocent children.
00:11:21.000And then you have Governor Chris Christie, this crazy guy who maybe delusionally thinks he's going to be president.
00:11:26.000He's not. Who went on CNN two weeks ago and was asked why he doesn't support the state's bans on transgender surgeries for children.
00:11:37.000And this is what the guy said. He said, well, listen, I don't necessarily support these surgeries, but it's not the government's role to tell parents what they're supposed to do with their children.
00:11:45.000This is something that parents should be involved in, and I don't want the government to usurp parental rights.
00:11:50.000And, Dawn, I listened to that and I thought, Well, we all knew this guy was an idiot, but he's stupider than we thought because we already have laws in the books that prevent parents from abusing their children.
00:12:00.000Parental rights aren't absolute to the point that you can starve your child or beat your child.
00:12:04.000We have laws, actually, that aren't just based on the physical safety of children.
00:12:08.000We have a law in our country that bans children from walking across the floor of a casino.
00:12:13.000Why? Is that physically harmful for a child?
00:12:16.000No, but we all agree that it's a moral hazard for a child.
00:12:20.000And Republicans somewhere along the way have lost this idea that there is just authority of government to acknowledge basic right and wrong, objective reality.
00:12:30.000And we've fallen prey to this idea of That there can be neutrality in institutions.
00:13:20.000And the reason public schooling was made compulsory there was because there was an influx of immigrants
00:13:25.000into our country at the time, particularly Catholic immigrants.
00:13:29.000And the Protestant politicians at the time wanted these immigrant children to be indoctrinated
00:13:34.000in American values so that they were loyal first to America versus the country of their
00:13:38.000And they wanted these children indoctrinated in Protestant values because they were anti-Catholic and there's always going to be a raging battle between Protestants and Catholics.
00:13:46.000And I realized our education system actually is designed to be an indoctrination center.
00:13:52.000Indoctrination itself is kind of a nebulous, morally neutral concept.
00:13:55.000It's what's being indoctrinated that determines whether it's good or bad, right or wrong.
00:14:00.000And Republicans along the way have surrendered that education system which was designed for the good kind of indoctrination.
00:14:07.000They surrendered that in the name of neutrality to the left who were only too happy to swoop in with their Marxist ideologies and try to co-opt our kids' minds.
00:14:16.000Yeah, I mean, it seems like when you see Chris Christie, it's like, you know, the trans thing, it's such a small, tiny...
00:14:24.000I've never seen sort of... I call it the trans mafia, right?
00:14:26.000I've never seen such a tiny group of people control so much power, so much narrative.
00:14:31.000I mean, if you're trans, it's like, oh, you can murder someone, it's fine.
00:14:40.000I didn't even know about the Chris Christie example.
00:14:41.000That's surprising. But it's like, you know, it almost feels like those guys...
00:14:46.000They get like a little Scooby snack from the media.
00:14:48.000Now, Chris Christie likes his snacks, but if you go trans, if you accommodate, if you bend the knee, it's like they'll give you some love because they're all in on it.
00:15:02.000And in many of those cases, you know, with Chris Christie's probably trying out for the, you know, conservative commentator role on CNN or whatever it may be.
00:15:09.000So, you know, you got to give a little bit.
00:15:11.000You got to bend a knee. You got to show them that, you know, their ideas aren't totally crazy rather than actually fighting.
00:15:17.000And I think, you know, Republicans, so many of them, they're hooked desperately on that need for that little crumb from the media, that little acknowledgement that, hey, maybe you're not all that bad.
00:15:28.000I mean, is that what it is or is it even worse than that?
00:15:31.000I think for politicians, you're right.
00:15:33.000Politicians and a lot of media figures, even ostensibly Republican and conservative media figures, have this weird, twisted craving for validation from their enemies, which is never going to lead to anything healthy and good.
00:15:46.000If you're going to do what I do, you're going to do what you do, Don, I don't need to tell you.
00:15:49.000You're going to have to just get used to people criticizing you and hating you and calling you all sorts of names that aren't true.
00:16:02.000I'm like, when they hate me, I'm doing something right.
00:16:04.000I'm over the target. I know, and I oftentimes find their rage so funny because they're so frothing at the mouth that they're not even clever in their insults, and for some reason that amuses me.
00:16:13.000You can call it a twisted sense of humor or whatever, but a lot of Republicans, listen, I don't want to speak with animosity about libertarians because I was a libertarian or at least libertarian-minded when I was young.
00:16:25.000I think all conservatives when we were young was more libertarian-minded.
00:16:30.000But libertarianism really is the root of the problem in Republican ideology.
00:16:35.000And this is a little philosophical, but it has practical implications that I'll get to in a moment.
00:16:39.000You and I sit here and we think of the United States as a free nation, right?
00:16:46.000What's the purpose of it? Is freedom the ultimate end of our policies?
00:16:49.000Or is freedom the means to something greater?
00:16:52.000And the Republicans have chosen this former definition that freedom is the ultimate end.
00:16:58.000But if that's true, and this is what I challenge conservatives to think about in my book, if that's true, then what David French once said when he said that drag queen story hour is a blessing of liberty, That would have to be true.
00:17:09.000Because these grown men who are dressed up as sexualized versions of women gyrating in front of children would have to have some kind of inherent morality just because the men had the freedom to do that.
00:17:20.000You and I sitting here, we know that's grotesque.
00:17:21.000We know it's evil. So freedom must be the means to something greater.
00:17:25.000And we as conservatives and Republicans, the Republican Party apparatus specifically, have forgotten to grapple with the question, well, what is the something greater?
00:17:33.000What do we want our society to look like?
00:18:27.000A kindergarten. At a library for minors.
00:18:31.000It's a flagrant attack on, let's say, the most easily influenced, you know, the people with the least developed, you know, mindset, ideology, whatever, and it's trying to get to them early.
00:18:54.000I got... When you have as many kids as I do, you're used to it.
00:18:58.000But it's not that prevalent that magically the number of story hours around the country seem to be entirely commandeered by drag queens, entirely done.
00:19:08.000That is a specific attack on our children.
00:19:25.000And that's what we have to grapple with, right?
00:19:27.000Because I'd love the government not to have to decide these things.
00:19:29.000I'd love to have them not involved in any aspect of my life.
00:19:32.000But if that's what they're doing, the sexualization and perversion of our children, which it's literally, I don't know how anyone could even make a credible argument at this point that that's not exactly what they're doing.
00:19:44.000That's a problem. It is a problem, and you articulated it well.
00:19:48.000I agree with your feelings on libertarianism.
00:19:50.000I have that streak, too, that says, government, get off my lawn.
00:19:53.000Mind your own business. Don't get involved in my life.
00:19:56.000We all do. That's sort of the American spirit.
00:19:58.000That's a good thing. But let me tell a little tale on myself.
00:20:23.000I'm doing interviews. And this independent journalist comes up to me with his video camera and asks me not who I preferred as a candidate, which is what most people were asking because that's what people cared about.
00:20:33.000He asked me this very philosophical question.
00:20:35.000He goes... What's the definition of liberty and what role do you think government has in protecting the liberty in our country?
00:20:42.000And so I gave him a very Declaration of Independence answer.
00:20:45.000Like, government should protect our individual rights.
00:20:49.000They can tax people. You know, they're a little bit regulatory in our economy, but really they should mind their own business.
00:20:54.000And he immediately pivots into asking me, okay, well, do you think that we should legalize marijuana?
00:21:00.000And I was like, oh, OK, this is a sharp pivot here.
00:21:03.000And I was like, no, I'm not generally in favor of legalizing marijuana.
00:21:06.000I don't think it has good societal impacts.
00:21:08.000And he says to me, well, isn't that a contradiction of what you just articulated when you said that government shouldn't be involved in regulating people's behaviors unless it's violating someone else's rights?
00:21:18.000And at the time, I defended my position.
00:21:20.000I was like, no, no, it's not a contradiction.
00:21:21.000I mean, I don't want to legalize marijuana or meth or heroin or anything that has such negative impacts.
00:21:26.000And this, I finally realized, by the way, that this guy's not a journalist.
00:21:29.000He was like a drug legalization advocate, which makes a little more sense.
00:21:32.000But this conversation stuck with me for years because I realized that he actually was correct.
00:21:39.000I was contradicting my viewpoint when I defined liberty just as a libertarian would because there's no justification for even illegalizing meth or heroin unless we acknowledge that, yes, government is supposed to Help us form some kind of moral order in society by establishing some things that are baseline right and wrong.
00:21:59.000And that kind of began my transformation away from libertarianism to where I am now.
00:22:04.000Yeah, and I think the left has weaponized that very effectively, right?
00:22:07.000They take the one example, you know, of hundreds and try to throw it in your face to push, you know, again, what I think is degeneracy.
00:22:14.000I've gotten in trouble with this one myself, right?
00:22:16.000The weed issue is one that, you know, and again, I get where you're going.
00:22:20.000Where's the line? I don't really care that much if grown people smoke weed.
00:22:25.000I don't want to be paying for it. I don't You know, the BS that sort of flows downhill from that with what they do to their lives.
00:25:01.000The Hawley-Ran Paul example, and I'm friends with both of them, it's a perfect example because we can actually have like 99% of what we want collectively as a party on the books ready to sign, and we'll screw it up because of one thing, whereas the Democrats can be at 51%.
00:25:22.000They take the win, they get in lockstep, they sign it, and the next day, they're chipping away at the other 49%.
00:25:30.000We blow, I mean, some things that are just, would be huge for our party, for our movement, for conservatism, however you want to block it, over...
00:25:40.000The technicality. And again, the technicality is a big one.
00:25:42.000We talk about this, but we're not intelligent in terms of strategy.
00:25:46.000We don't run these things or think about it like a business.
00:25:51.000We're always looking for the grand slam to finally dunk on the leftists and really win everything.
00:25:57.000It's just not a realistic thing in the way...
00:26:01.000Congress functions with the obstacles, again, that I've discussed that we're up against.
00:26:04.000I mean, I wish we would actually take those small, you know, victories and just add them to each other.
00:26:10.000I mean, that's how we win in the long run, but we blow entire major pieces of legislation to try to get the grand slam, and it just doesn't seem to work.
00:26:18.000Right. It's like, congratulations, Congressman, you got a viral video on Twitter, but the policy in our nation and the cultural fabric hasn't changed one bit.
00:26:27.000So what have you actually accomplished when we've sent you to Washington, D.C.? Listen, what you're talking about, this cohesion of the Republican Party or their strategy, their commitment to their ideas, that's what I discuss in the first half of my book.
00:26:38.000It's why I put the word Marxist in the title.
00:26:41.000Yeah. Even though I knew a lot of people were going to be like, whoa, Liz, isn't that hyperbolic?
00:26:50.000Not if you look at what they're actually saying.
00:26:51.000I mean, they're not even covering that up anymore.
00:26:54.000I mean, the same people screaming about democracy for the last seven years or under the Trump presidency, they're totally fine with a weaponized DOJ going after...
00:27:04.000The former president of the United States, trying to put him in jail for like a thousand years and possible death penalty.
00:27:08.000The same week, they can attack Vladimir Putin for literally doing the same thing to his political enemies.
00:27:16.000I don't know how you can get away with it, but I guess irony doesn't affect them.
00:27:22.000They get their talking points and they move on.
00:27:24.000No, they don't care about hypocrisy or the double standard that you and I care about, because we're good faith, honest people of integrity, and they are Marxists who believe they are justified using quote-unquote extra-legal means to topple the government of the United States, and they just happen to be using Donald Trump as their first bowling pin that they're trying to knock over.
00:27:41.000What we're watching unfold before us is evil, and this is what I tell people at the beginning of my book.
00:27:46.000The reason that I Trace the origins of the attack, whether it's critical race theory or trans ideology, the assault on parental rights, technocracy, this rule by the experts, all these different ways that our children are being assaulted, I trace it back to the specific people and organizations, the specific Marxists, I should say, and Marxist organizations that are behind this, is because I always tell people, if we do not acknowledge the reality of the political enemy that we're facing, we won't fight well against it and we won't win.
00:28:15.000I want to win. I'm tired of being in the same party as people like Mitt Romney who look at Joe Biden and say, he's a decent man.
00:28:23.000No, we are not fighting against well-intentioned political opposition who are simply unwise about their policies but share fundamental bedrock values.
00:28:32.000That is not what we're facing in the United States.
00:28:34.000And if we don't start acknowledging Who these people are and exactly how they've accomplished, what they've accomplished, this institutional capture, and what their plan is moving forward, then we're never going to recover from this cultural insanity.
00:28:46.000And I refuse to accept that as reality.
00:28:50.000When you look back at your work in the media, you've been there for a while doing these things, are there specific moments that stand out to you where you realize that, you know what, this is a full-blown crisis?
00:28:59.000I mean, were there any just like aha moments that got you thinking about these things and actually talking about them?
00:29:04.000And why are there so few people actually willing to actually do that?
00:29:08.000Yeah, there are a couple of moments that stick out in my mind.
00:29:10.000So a few years ago, this is maybe 2018, 2019, right around that time.
00:30:14.000They have no idea what they're talking about.
00:30:15.000I'm the one who read the text of the bill.
00:30:17.000And if the Bible had been presented as, here, read the word of God, and it will help you properly order your sexual behavior, then that Bible could have been banned from being sold under that pretext.
00:30:27.000And when that happened, and the backlash followed when I exposed this in California, We exposed this to the point that 20 million people saw this video, and the state of California was forced to pull this bill from consideration.
00:30:39.000And when I saw the backlash from the left doubling down on this, I realized, well, this is not one evil person in the California state legislature.
00:31:14.000You can't discriminate against that person in the workforce.
00:31:16.000You've got to hire them to work at a kindergarten.
00:31:18.000California, they always say, you know, we're not really doing those things.
00:31:22.000And then the next week, 100% of the California state legislator votes to say, no, if you don't just go along with your three-year-old deciding that they want to go through gender-affirming care or whatever the hell that means, we're going to take your children away from you.
00:31:35.000They're always like, no, no, no, that's not really what you're doing.
00:31:37.000But then you're like, but here, it literally says it right there.
00:31:40.000Like, it's not some, you know, radical lunatic outlier.
00:31:44.000This is the California state legislator.
00:31:46.000And 100% of the Democrats voted in favor of exactly what you're saying.
00:31:53.000That's exactly right, but they've co-opted the media.
00:31:55.000The left has co-opted the media to the point that they know most people won't do what we'll do and probably what the viewers of your show do, which is read the text of the legislation ourselves and see for ourselves and draw our own conclusions about what those words mean.
00:32:09.000They believe that they can just lie to people and that people will buy into that.
00:32:14.000Listen, COVID was another one of those moments.
00:32:16.000I was in California during COVID. Governor Newsom was one of the first ones to implement a lockdown campaign.
00:32:21.000And he did it under the pretext that this virus had a 3.6% fatality rate, which is what the World Health Organization and Fauci told us, that it was going to affect everyone, even children.
00:32:31.000But Don, we knew right from the beginning.
00:32:33.000We knew right from the beginning. After that cruise ship, there was a case study, an accidental case study on that cruise ship, where we saw that even among older people, I think it was like middle-aged older people, 50, 60, 70-year-olds on this cruise ship, the case fatality rate was still...
00:32:48.000We knew these narratives were false, yet we were told in the name of listen to the experts that we weren't allowed to have any voice in the governance of our country, that we had to just sit down and shut up, have our businesses closed, be barred from going to church.
00:33:01.000I actually had police officers kick me out of a park.
00:33:04.000I was sitting on the grass in the sun in San Diego, not near anyone else, and a police on a little four-wheeler came up to me and was like, You have to leave because we have to have social distancing.
00:33:13.000I was like, well, the only person that's been near me is you.
00:33:27.000Was begot of French socialists and Russian Bolsheviks who understood that rule by the experts or technocracy is a stepping stone from capitalism to communism.
00:33:36.000It's how you convince a citizenry to give up their participation in governance in the name of science and technology and things they know nothing about.
00:33:43.000It's very dangerous. Yeah, well, I think there was no question there was a case study, and I think the reason, you know, you could also see how quickly, you know, Republican governors across the board wanted to give freedom back to people once we figured out exactly everything that was going on.
00:33:56.000And you know, you're talking about, you know, 1% fatality.
00:33:59.000That's before you even start talking about, you know, sort of the preexisting conditions, right?
00:34:43.000Just trial run for their totalitarian takeover of everything that we know and love about our country.
00:34:49.000And, you know, I was sort of disappointed with really how many Americans just sort of went, you know, lockstep with this, you know, governed by the experts, even once we started seeing the facts.
00:35:01.000You know, you didn't know. I mean, what are you seeing?
00:35:03.000I mean, but once we started, like, well, children, it was like zero percent.
00:35:07.000Well, we got to keep shutting down schools and we got to keep doing it.
00:35:10.000It was intentional, and it was so obvious to everyone.
00:35:14.000It was so obvious to everyone, and I agree.
00:35:16.000I found myself very disillusioned during the summer of 2020 because I thought surely people in sunny San Diego, which is where I was, wouldn't agree to not go to the beach, wouldn't agree to keep wearing a face mask while they're riding their bike on the sidewalk, wouldn't agree to lock down.
00:35:32.000I mean, the restaurant industry was absolutely decimated.
00:35:34.000People's livelihoods were ruined, and I expected people just to be like, yeah, right, buddy, we're done with this, and to go back to normal, and they didn't.
00:35:40.000And I hope people's eyes have been opened.
00:35:43.000I don't say that with any judgment per se, no animosity at least.
00:35:47.000I hope people have reflected on that and understand better the reality
00:35:51.000of this political enemy that we face because once we understand it,
00:35:55.000The very last chapter of my book, I lay out a 12-step plan for how we can use
00:36:00.000the just authority of government to order our society towards good.
00:36:04.000And when I say the just authority of government, a lot of times conservatives mistake
00:36:07.000the idea of limited government for a government that's just tiny in size.
00:36:11.000And that's not really what limited government means.
00:36:13.000Limited government means constrained by enumerated powers, constrained by accountability to the people.
00:36:17.000But there is a just authority of state, local, and federal government, and we should use that.
00:36:23.000It's not just a matter of, oh, we should order our lives, take our families to church, do the right thing as individuals, and the cultural effect will be downstream of that.
00:36:29.000No, we have to ban critical race theory from the military, from the federal government,
00:36:34.000from any public school system, from any private business that does any business, that does
00:36:38.000any contracts with the federal government.
00:36:40.000We have to prohibit the transgender ideology and ban these surgeries on children.
00:36:45.000We have to eradicate DEI, again, from any governmental institution or any private institution that does business with the federal government, including private universities that take federally subsidized student loans.
00:36:57.000We have to prohibit ESG. It's It's dishonest.
00:37:01.000It's a Chinese Communist Party social credit score system intended to control us and control our businesses.
00:37:07.000There's so much we can do if we just understand that it's okay to use government to do it.
00:37:12.000To kind of circle back to the book and the key premise, when you look back at your experience in school, your childhood, why is it that the schools have become so radicalized?
00:37:21.000Is it the types of people going into education?
00:37:24.000Is it all part of sort of a big plan of sort of that Marxist ideology?
00:37:28.000I mean, it does seem like if you quote any of the sort of...
00:37:31.000The famous dictators of the world, it's always about going after the children, pitting them against their parents, pitting them against their country, breaking down any of the social structures and social norms that probably America's society was based on for so long.
00:37:45.000Is there even a chance of getting conservative or patriotic teachers back into schools?
00:37:49.000I know there are some. Because I'll get blown up.
00:38:32.000It was actually, the concept was coined by a Brazilian Marxist named Paulo Freire, who Who contended that our education system, or the education system in Brazil at the time, shouldn't teach children facts and knowledge.
00:38:44.000He said it's oppressive for teachers to teach facts and knowledge to children because he said there's no such thing as objective truth.
00:38:50.000It's just the prevailing political narrative.
00:38:52.000So what he suggested, instead of teaching facts and knowledge, he suggested that children be taught a way to view the world, a worldview.
00:38:59.000And he called this worldview critical consciousness.
00:39:02.000Well, critical consciousness is a way to view the world.
00:39:05.000It's viewing the world through a Marxist lens where every person is either labeled as an oppressor or someone who is oppressed.
00:39:12.000Don, Paulo Freire's critical consciousness is packaged in every schoolroom in our country, in your local neighborhood elementary school, in the reddest state in the country.
00:39:22.000It's there in the form of what's called social-emotional learning, a phrase that a lot of parents ignore because it sounds really neutral, it sounds really innocuous.
00:39:36.000It's not supposed to be facts and knowledge, but values education, if you read what it is, it is teaching children to view the world through Paulo Freire's critical consciousness, through the lens of wokeness, as Marxists.
00:39:47.000So this was transferred to the United States from Brazil.
00:39:50.000There are organizations and lobbyists right now who are trying to get this into every schoolroom in the country, including Randy Weingarten.
00:39:58.000They had a very easy time doing this because in the 1960s, these radical Marxist academics took over our teachers' colleges.
00:40:06.000Particularly Columbia Teachers College, and they seeded throughout universities and high schools and even elementary schools teachers who had been trained to teach Paulo Freire's critical consciousness, to teach children to be essentially little Marxists.
00:40:20.000And conservatives, while this was happening, it took decades to be successful.
00:40:24.000Conservatives just had their head in the sand.
00:40:25.000They were complacent. They were like, oh, we don't want to violate the separation of church and state by teaching American values and Judeo-Christian values.
00:40:31.000And that simply allowed the left to completely co-opt the system.
00:40:35.000I think that was great, because I think everyone knows what woke means, kind of.
00:40:40.000But to define it, it was really important.
00:40:41.000We touched on this in the beginning, but your book's also really explicit in saying we're up against actual Marxists.
00:40:48.000How would you define Marxism in the context of education, and what's the end goal of that system there?
00:40:55.000Yeah, this is also a great question, because a lot of times when we think of Marx, we think of Karl Marx, we think of the Communist Manifesto, we think of the working class revolting against the ruling class to overthrow capitalism, and people will be like, is that really what you're talking about?
00:41:10.000Well, here's what happened historically.
00:41:12.000Karl Marx envisioned this global Marxist revolution happening after he wrote the Communist Manifesto, and it didn't really come to fruition.
00:41:18.000There were some countries that had Marxist revolutions, but We're good to go.
00:41:45.000And what he found is that when Marxist revolutions were successful, they weren't sparked by a discontented working class.
00:41:52.000They first co-opted the civil institutions, which means cultural institutions, that the working class relied on.
00:42:00.000And Gramsci named, among others, the media, the education system, the law, religious institutions, and the nuclear family.
00:42:08.000What Gramsci envisioned is what we're seeing play out And this is the trippiest thing I came across in the entire course of my research.
00:42:16.000Gramsci's ideas were not translated into English until the last 50 years, and I'm reading these prison notebooks of Gramsci, and I suddenly, on the front of the cover, see who did the translation.
00:42:28.000The man who translated Gramsci from Italian to English, his name is Joseph Buttigieg.
00:42:37.000He was a fan. He ran an international fan club for Antonio Gramsci and brought this Marxism, this cultural Marxism, here to the United States.
00:42:45.000Wow. I wasn't expecting that one, but yeah, no, it's amazing how that's happened.
00:42:53.000And I think you're right. That's what the left tries to do.
00:42:55.000Well, no, no, it's different than communism, but the end goal is still the same, right?
00:43:01.000They have total capitulation, total control.
00:43:04.000I guess one of the things, you know, because we talk about this a lot on the show, there's a different sort of, and hey, we're all guilty of it as well at times.
00:43:12.000We complain about, what is it that parents can do to stand up to this madness?
00:43:19.000You know, I see it with the trans thing.
00:43:21.000And I know it's, while they're incredibly powerful, while they cancel and punch way above their weight class, I know that the average person doesn't believe it, because if I put out a tweet being like, hey man, I think it's ridiculous that a dude won, like, the Girls Track Championship in Connecticut and is getting a full-ride scholarship, the commentary I get from a platform that, you know, user-based is still vastly left-leaning, I hate you with a passion, Don.
00:43:48.000You're the worst human being in the world.
00:43:49.000I can't believe I actually agree with you on something.
00:43:53.000I don't think that anyone actually wants this.
00:43:56.000And yet there's a small group of people that have a very, you know, large amount of undue influence punching above that weight class.
00:44:18.000That came from our Department of Justice.
00:44:20.000Now, they may have been commandeered by radicals.
00:44:23.000What's your advice to parents who want to stand up to the indoctrination, but at the same time, you know, are realistic about the consequences of that, right?
00:45:42.000She doesn't watch screens. She's not going to be getting the phone until probably she's out of my house.
00:45:47.000I'm going to homeschool her because as much as some people of your age and my age had a good experience with public schools, it's very, very different now.
00:45:55.000I wouldn't wish my worst enemy to send their children to a public school.
00:45:59.000So homeschool your children if you can.
00:46:02.000Outside of the individual family unit, we have to, as conservatives, be willing and be comfortable to use government towards some of these ends.
00:46:10.000So whether it's banning transgender ideology in schools so that our children aren't indoctrinated, whether it's banning TikTok because the Chinese communists are trying to brainwash their kids, whether it's making woke corporations abandon ESG practices which force them to put Wokeness in their children's programming like Disney, whatever it may be, we have recourse if we pressure our elected officials to do what they're supposed to do and harness the just authority of government to prevent evil from destroying our families.
00:47:07.000I mean, single-digit age. And, you know, they're literally laughing about some of the pronoun stuff at times.
00:47:11.000Like, you know, has the other side taken it so far that even the impressionable minds that they're trying to indoctrinate, that they're trying to manipulate, are calling a...
00:47:21.000Frankly, just calling bullshit at this point and being like, okay, give me a break.
00:47:24.000Because I've seen that with a lot of kids.
00:47:26.000Now, I live in Florida. They're not in the public school system.
00:47:30.000But I do see, every time I hear them laughing about it, I'm like, okay, good.
00:47:35.000There's hope. They're not just buying blindly into it.
00:47:40.000Do you see some of that or is it just so much worse in the public school system and also perhaps geographically depending on where you are?
00:47:48.000Well, both. I think it is worse in the public school system.
00:47:50.000It's worse when children don't have parents like you who are teaching them right from wrong.
00:47:55.000And a lot of parents aren't being delinquent intentionally.
00:47:58.000They just assumed that the public school system would teach their children right from wrong.
00:48:01.000They didn't realize that, yes, that's what the school system is doing, but their definition of right and wrong are very different.
00:48:07.000I say in my book that we should expect escalation from the left.
00:48:10.000So you can use the phrase, jump the shark, and I hope that you're correct.
00:48:14.000I hope that they have overshot and that the backlash causes them to retreat.
00:48:19.000But I fear that they're going to have to continue to double down because they've enjoyed this cushion for literally...
00:48:26.00060 years to infiltrate, subvert, plot, and capture our institutions with very little pushback from the right.
00:48:35.000And all of a sudden, conservatives, mostly conservatives, probably not Republicans, conservatives' eyes have been opened, and we do acknowledge the reality of what we're facing.
00:48:44.000And so the left realizes that their time to impose Marxism on our country is either now or never.
00:48:50.000So they are going to double down, and I hope that the parental backlash that they face is enough to squash it once or for all, but they're not going to back down easily.
00:48:58.000Yeah, no, I saw that, you know, before we left New York, one of my kids that were in school and, you know, some friends of ours that had kids a little bit older, like fourth grade, you know, there was literally a one hour long trans curriculum going on in school, but it was the only class, and this was, you know, some of the finest, you know, schools anywhere in the world, the kids all go to Ivy League school, you know, like one of these institutions that's just like that, but it was the only class that didn't have homework.
00:49:22.000You know, because they wanted to push it, they wanted to get it on the kids, but they didn't want the parents to know about it.
00:49:27.000I think where the left did, you know, they sort of shot themselves in the foot with COVID. The school lockdowns, the this, that, and the other, the online learning.
00:49:37.000Got to listen in the background into the crap that our kids were taught.
00:49:42.000I mean, I think it was sort of one of the great self-owns of modern time and perhaps finally woke conservatives up, not because they wouldn't have been thinking of this stuff, but they just had no idea that this level of subversion would be happening in their schools that they pay for, even in conservative areas.
00:50:01.000And you're wondering, you know, You're in a conservative area.
00:50:03.000Why is the school board a purple-haired trans lunatic?
00:50:08.000They don't even want children, but why are they going after ours?
00:50:11.000And finally everyone started to wake up, and it was because they couldn't help themselves.
00:50:18.000They had to do it. They had to keep going.
00:50:20.000And it became apparent what was actually happening to our children in their minds.
00:50:50.000It's why you've seen all these mama grizzly, these mama bear groups cropping up around the country because moms are like, oh, no, you're not doing that to my kid.
00:51:27.000They're just evil based on their skin color.
00:51:29.000They start hating their parents because their parents made them white or made them black.
00:51:33.000And then you see the trans ideology swooping in, almost like a one-two punch, offering these children the redemption that they otherwise cannot have by saying, hey, you can throw off this oppressor identity of being a white child if you put on this marginalized identity of being transgender or non-binary or LGBTQIA. And in the process of not only mentally, physically and bodily We're good to go.
00:52:23.000Yeah, I mean, but they were then branded domestic terrorists.
00:52:27.000You know, again, not by some fringe, you know, group or, you know, the fact checkers who think they're 9,000 genders, you know, talking about basic biology and all that.
00:52:36.000They were branded that by the FBI. You know, practicing Catholics were branded potential terror threats by our DOJ. The DOJ also got involved in branding those same parents domestic terrorists.
00:52:49.000I mean, you can see why it would be very intimidating for people to get involved in this.
00:52:58.000Let's call it the MAGA movement, the America First movement, perhaps even my father's campaign.
00:53:03.000How should they be messaging on this issue to get people to understand what's going on and what policy priorities are most important to make sure that that happens?
00:53:13.000Well, listen, one of the most important things that your father can do when he takes office, after he wins the 2024 election, is he can abolish the administrative state.
00:53:23.000I know he had a policy. It was issued just before he left office in January of 2021, so it didn't have time to come to fruition.
00:53:30.000But to get rid of these- Schedule F. Yes, exactly.
00:53:34.000to get rid of these bloated executive agencies and this bureaucrat to give the chief executive
00:53:38.000the power to fire people in his own executive branch who are working against him.
00:53:43.000I know it's really nerdy, but this will make the biggest difference
00:53:46.000in the targeting of conservatives compared to any other policy out there.
00:53:50.000The next Republican president needs to tell parents in no uncertain terms
00:53:54.000that he is a champion of parental rights, that parental rights predate the American government,
00:53:59.000that no politician has a right to trample on parental rights.
00:54:03.000He needs to promise to ban critical race theory, to ban transgender ideology from schools,
00:54:08.000to defund any institution that works with the federal government that pushes DEI,
00:54:12.000to abolish ESG, and to actually acknowledge that our nation,
00:54:15.000you don't have to go to church, you don't have to be a practicing believer or a Christian,
00:54:19.000but that our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian morals, which define for us what is right and what is wrong,
00:54:25.000and that that administration will work to protect that and will never, ever violate that natural law.
00:54:31.000If you go with that message, I promise people are going to be like, whoa, wait a second, this guy is actually going to save the country.
00:54:52.000We've got to continue the forever war so that we can get our board seat at Raytheon.
00:54:55.000I mean... The good thing about, I think, all of this, again, maybe it's the jump to shark concept, or maybe I'm just so into it that I believe that everyone has to see it, but between the radical trans ideology, between the insanity of Russia, Russia, Russia, you see everything going on.
00:55:11.000you know, Ukraine is the new religion of the left and they're honoring actual Nazis, SS officers,
00:55:17.000in Canadian parliament because, you know, the guy killed Russians during World War II. I'm trying
00:55:23.000to, I'm still trying to figure this all out, but it's interesting to me when you talk about
00:55:28.000education because all of the radicals on the left have completely departed from the actual purpose
00:55:35.000of education. I mean, there's a pretty famous Martin Luther King Jr. quote that reads,
00:55:39.000the function of education is to teach one to think intensely and to think critically.
00:55:46.000But what we're seeing from the left is exactly the opposite.
00:55:49.000It's not to think critically or at all.
00:55:51.000It's to blindly follow the group thing, regurgitate what you say, even at the highest levels of learning.
00:55:57.000I mean, I went to an Ivy League school and, you know, Back then, when I graduated in 2000, I mean, you could actually have arguments.
00:56:05.000You could take a conservative standpoint on something, and the fact that you were thinking about it wasn't penal to you.
00:56:10.000But now, if you're not just blindly regurgitating the narrative, you can't even get ahead.
00:56:16.000And that's at Harvard, I mean, where they're saying, hey, you have zero chance at free speech.
00:56:19.000I think they were rated like the worst in the country for that, and that was supposed to be one of the finest institutions of higher learning.
00:56:54.000First of all, the Department of Education needs to be abolished because it is just a cesspool of these Marxists who want to weaponize the education system.
00:57:02.000There's no need for the Department of Education.
00:57:05.000And that could be done with a simple signature by the chief executive.
00:57:09.000And then we need to have laws that say public schools aren't going to receive a dime of taxpayer money if they have any of these elements, critical race theory, trans ideology, revisionist history, 1619 Project, all that nonsense, all that garbage, any mention of that, a breath of that, a whisper of that, and you lose federal funding.
00:57:26.000And then we have to have states who not only prohibit the teaching of those concepts, but actually go on the offense and say, listen, we're not just going to ban critical race theory, but we're going to have curriculum that teaches children the evils of communism.
00:57:38.000The actual consequences of left-wing authoritarianism, what these Marxist leftists want.
00:57:43.000And I want to go back to one other thing.
00:57:45.000When you're talking about what makes a successful campaign or what's going to sell the American people, especially those middle ground voters that I think are always the unicorn, how do we capture the centrists?
00:57:55.000One of the best moments of your father's campaign in 2016 was on the third debate.
00:58:09.000I was actually sitting at my hairdresser in California.
00:58:13.000My hairdresser was this lovely Mexican girl who was totally liberal, hated Trump, and we were watching it together because I had to watch it for work.
00:58:22.000And she's doing my hair, and Trump stands there and says to Hillary Clinton, we are not going to abort babies up until birth in nine months.
00:58:30.000We're not going to dismember them and brutally kill them.
00:58:33.000And you could have heard a pin drop in that place.
00:58:37.000And let me tell you the impact of actually describing what some of these atrocities are versus just talking about them hypothetically.
00:58:44.000The girl that was doing my hair We're good to go.
00:59:05.000Whether it's the brutal mutilation of children's bodies to the name of the transgender ideology, whether it's critical race theory, the more descriptive we can be about what is being taught, the more parents are going to be like, I don't know what that is, but I don't like that, and I agree.
00:59:19.000You're going to stop that. I'll vote for you.
00:59:21.000Because you and I and everyone in politics oftentimes gets lost in the philosophy.
00:59:25.000We assume people know the details, and they don't.
00:59:34.000The trans child that was manipulated into doing something at seven years old, you see them in their 20s and they're suicidal and they can't believe it.
00:59:55.000And I think we've got to talk about those things.
00:59:56.000In education, Are you optimistic about the path forward?
01:00:00.000I mean, education was a winning issue for the Democrats for so long, but it feels like the Republicans are gaining ground a little bit because they know what that is.
01:00:10.000You know, what are the benchmarks for success to keep chipping away at this insanity?
01:00:15.000How do we know and how do we get to the point where we can actually win?
01:00:19.000I mean, it's going to take generations to get Marxist teachers out of those schools.
01:00:24.000How do we do that? How do we put an end to the insanity?
01:00:29.000I mean, I have a very based opinion on this, honestly.
01:00:31.000I tend more towards thinking that we should abolish the public school system entirely.
01:00:35.000I'm with you, by the way. I say it like, if you can get your kids out of our public school system, I get it's hard.
01:00:40.000I get it's easy. I understand that I'm blessed to be able to pay for private education.
01:00:44.000Frankly, a lot of private education has been commandeered just as badly.
01:00:48.000But, you know, it's not possible for everyone, though.
01:00:51.000I think we should try and strive for that.
01:00:54.000Yeah, we should. And until that point, I think eventually the prevailing Republican thought or conservatives will catch up to us on this viewpoint.
01:01:01.000Right now, there's a little pushback I receive whenever I say, oh, I don't know, maybe we should abolish the public school system.
01:01:07.000But until we do, we need to understand that there are mechanisms that we can use to hold leftist
01:01:13.000schools accountable besides the legislative efforts that I've mentioned a couple times.
01:01:17.000We can also enact school choice. I mean, school choice, when it's real school choice,
01:01:21.000when the funding goes with the child, parents can band together and say, listen, we're going
01:01:26.000to take our child out of this school and the money that comes with my child if you continue
01:01:30.000to teach X, Y, and Z. And what happens when, I mean, it's a market effect, right?
01:01:35.000What happens when enough parents say they're going to remove their children and the money that comes with their children from these schools is schools are either forced to change their curriculum or that school shutters.
01:01:44.000And this is also a very politically advantageous point of view, by the way.
01:01:48.000It's something that a lot of black mothers who otherwise identify as Democrats, if you offer them school choice to give their children a better education, they cross the party lines and they vote for Republicans.
01:01:59.000So it's not only the right thing to do from a moral standpoint when it comes to saving our education system or taking it back from the radical left, it's also something that's a political winner.
01:02:09.000Oh, 100%. I mean, it was a huge part of our platform.
01:02:11.000Still is. But, you know, there's a lot of resistance.
01:02:16.000The teachers union. Because they know what a threat it is.
01:02:18.000They know what a threat. And they know that they have zero chance of standing up to it if you do.
01:02:22.000So, yeah, it's an issue that it's hard to believe it doesn't get more traction.
01:02:26.000But the amount of money being spent to prevent the money from following your children, to prevent school choice, is...
01:02:34.000Is astounding, especially when you look at the actual results that our public school systems put out, which are, you know, dismal at best.
01:02:41.000Yeah, exactly. I mean, all that money that you mentioned and the incredibly strong lobby against school choice tells us exactly what we need to know, that we are posing an existential threat to the way that they indoctrinate our children.
01:02:53.000They wouldn't waste money on something that they just kind of liked or something that was tangentially useful.
01:02:58.000This is a fundamental part Of how they intend to turn our country from a free country into a Marxist nation.
01:03:04.000And if we can possibly break their grip on public education, we will have gone a long way in eradicating Marxism from being at least an immediate threat to our future.
01:03:14.000So that kind of resistance is something I actually like to see force them to spend the money on that so they can't spend it on something else and fight like hell to get school choice.
01:03:23.000And in the meantime, if you can, get your kid out of public school, homeschool if you possibly can.
01:03:27.000So Liz, thank you so much for joining us today.
01:03:29.000I know you've got to go, but where can everyone find your book, Hide Your Children?
01:03:34.000Because I think people should read it.