View this email in your browser ([link removed])


** ‘Non-Binary’ Teacher Refused to Teach 10-Year-Old Son of Conservative School Board Member
------------------------------------------------------------


** The teacher was concerned for 'their' personal safety.
------------------------------------------------------------

By Sara Dogan

In an outrageous demand that turns the concept of civil rights on its head, a fifth grade teacher in the Tumwater School District in Washington State rejected the placement of a 10-year-old child in ‘their’ class because the student is the son of a conservative school board member who rejects transgender ideology and objects to biological boys competing in girls’ sports.

The origins of the conflict extend back to last February when school board member and father of a student in the district Casey Taylor joined a 3-1 majority in voting for a resolution stating that only biological females should compete in girls and women’s sports within the school district. The resolution was merely symbolic, since it is superseded by Washington State law which absurdly protects the right of students to join whatever team aligns with their “gender identity.” But the vote had real-life ramifications for the board members.

Fellow school board member Darby Kaikkonen, who also voted for the resolution protecting girls’ rights, was put on administrative leave and then fired ([link removed]) from her full-time job with the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI), despite an unblemished work history. Kaikkonen is currently suing OSPI and its director along with the State of Washington for retaliatory termination.

The board vote in favor of girls’ rights led to months of harassment and disruption from radical transactivists at every subsequent school board meeting. Video clips ([link removed]) show masked attendees wielding transgender flags screaming “Trans rights are human rights” to make conducting school business impossible.

In an attempt to limit the effects of the protests, Tumwater school board meetings were moved from a centralized district building to a local elementary school and security was increased, but to little effect. The actions of the transtifa activists were so extreme that in June the school board made the announcement that all future meetings would be held virtually due to, among other incidents, “Property damage; assault of an agent working on behalf of the district; exits being blocked; employee vehicles being rushed by protestors when exiting the building; and a recent threat of bodily harm against members of the school board, currently being investigated by law enforcement.”

Amidst all this turmoil, school board member Casey Taylor was facing much more personal repercussions. The elementary school principal told Taylor’s wife that one of the fifth grade teachers, a person who identifies as “non-binary” and insists on being referred to as “Mx. Thornton,” was objecting to his son, who was then a 4^th grade student in the district, from being placed in ‘their’ class for the upcoming school year.

Taylor rightly rejected this request as wholesale discrimination due to the family’s political views and withdrew their son from the district for his own well-being while filing a misconduct complaint against the non-binary teacher.

Forced by Taylor’s complaint to investigate, the school district hired an independent firm to verify the details of his accusation. What they found is deeply disturbing. The investigation confirmed that Mx. Thornton did in fact approach the school principal claiming that “they” were concerned for “their” personal safety if Taylor’s son were to be assigned to “their” class.

The investigator’s report filed in September states that:

“Mx. Thornton told me they had talked to (the principal) about their concern regarding their safety with the placement of students with parents who do not support people who are nonbinary…their concern was that Mr. Taylor may have “some transphobia” because he did not support transgender athletes. They also said they had requested a meeting with (the principal) to discuss developing a policy or practice to help mitigate the placement of students in their class who come from families that do not support LGBTQIA+ identities. They stated that their request was centered on their safety and an effort to prevent future harassment.”

Outrageously, even after this confession, the investigator called Taylor’s allegations of misconduct against Mx. Thornton “unsubstantiated.”

The investigator wrote: “This allegation is unsubstantiated because I could not substantiate that Mx. Thornton said they could not teach (student) because of different political views. Mx. Thornton did share her concerns with her peers and supervisors about not feeling safe and having possible negative parental interactions with the Taylors because of Mr. Taylor’s action on the school board. Mx. Thornton’s concerns were based on previous negative experiences with parents in general. Mx. Thornton indicated they were afraid that future parent teacher interactions with Mr. Taylor would be negative based on actions he had taken regarding transgender athletes while on the school board.”

“That is insane,” declared ([link removed]) Brandi Kruse, a political commentator who hosts the podcast unDivided. “So this is an investigator saying a non-binary they/them teacher, fifth grade teacher, went to the principal to say ‘I want there to be a policy in place that I don’t have to teach kids whose parents are anti-alphabet mob.’ So basically, I would say that’s any conservative or moderate family. Because most conservative or moderate families don’t believe in the trans nonsense that’s being pushed and believe that, yeah, boys shouldn’t compete against girls. So this teacher—how can you keep your job after that? How can you keep your job after that, after basically saying ‘I don’t want to teach the kids of parents whose politics I disagree with?’”

“What should parents think of that who have a child in Mx. Thornton’s class?” Kruse queried. “I would pull my child out immediately. It’s very clear. That teacher is going to have this inherent dislike or hatred for my child because of my political beliefs.”

For his part, Taylor has now filed a tort lawsuit naming Tumwater School District and Mx. Thornton, alleging, among other things: “Discrimination against (student) on the basis of familial status and perceived political ideology; Improper influence of the elementary class-placement process for personal gain; Request for a discriminatory policy allowing exclusion of student whose families are perceived unsupportive of LGBTQIA+ identities; Misuse of protected non-binary identity as a pretext to exclude student; [and] retaliation against School Board Member Casey Taylor and family.”

In elections for the new school board president this month, the two-left leaning school board members tried to prevent ([link removed]) Taylor’s election as president of the board due to an alleged “conflict of interest.” Thankfully, their attempt to blackball Taylor was unsuccessful. Let’s hope he can act to restore some sanity to the Tumwater School District.

By Sara Dogan

One of the foremost principles of higher education is the pursuit of the truth through free and open discourse, no matter where it may lead. Yet over the past several decades, few places in America have become more hostile to free speech than our universities. These institutions of higher education have often lived up to their ivory tower reputation, becoming cloistered echo chambers of leftist thought where voicing a dissenting view is cause for abrupt dismissal or being hauled before a disciplinary board and sentenced to reeducation.

The last year has brought an apparent shift in these attitudes. In the wake of rising anti-Semitism and the pro-Hamas campus rallies and occupations that were sparked by the terror group’s October 7 massacre, university administrators seem to have had a sudden change of heart. Free speech, once considered suspect, is now declared to be of paramount importance to the healthy functioning of a university, even—or perhaps especially—when the group being targeted by it is Jews.

In defending Penn’s hosting of the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, which featured multiple speakers well-known for their anti-Semitism, Former Penn President Liz Magill released a statement naming free expression as one of the university’s foremost values. “We unequivocally – and emphatically – condemn antisemitism as antithetical to our institutional values,” she wrote. “As a university, we also fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission. This includes the expression of views that are controversial and even those that are incompatible with our institutional values.”

Columbia University’s former president Minouche Shafik, who resigned following her failure to rein in pro-Hamas demonstrations on campus, similarly pledged that the university administration “are committed to academic freedom and to ensuring that all members of our community have the right to speak their minds” and argued before Congress that “We believe we can confront antisemitism and provide a safe campus environment for our community while simultaneously supporting rigorous academic exploration and freedom.”

Responding to pro-Hamas protests on campus, the University of Louisville’s former President Kim Schatzel described why they must be permitted to continue, saying, ([link removed]) “The answer is that as a public university, the University of Louisville’s restrictions on such speech—no matter how offensive the content—would constitute a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution that protects free speech…”

These sentiments might forecast a step in the right direction—if only they were consistent. But at far too many campuses, the same administrators that have defended the free speech rights of Jew-haters, Hamas supporters, or radical gender activists have blatantly failed to secure the same rights for those with opposing views.

It is time that we hold these university administrators to account for their double standards in protecting free speech on campus and withdraw federal funding from those who do not immediately rectify this duplicity.

The following report names the most egregious perpetrators of these double standards in free expression as Ivory Tower Hypocrites. These are universities whose leaders have permitted woke leftist activists, including those affiliated with the terrorist group Hamas, to run roughshod over campus rules and violate codes of conduct—not to mention moral decency—with impunity, while failing to extend even basic free speech protections to students and faculty with opposing views. The rule of the mob has no place in academia.

We call on the universities implicated in this report to take immediate action to review and standardize their policies on free expression to protect all viewpoints equally and to further institute harsh penalties for those who disrupt organized events or speakers. We further call on all alumni of these universities to withhold any further donations until they have been sufficiently convinced that these severe defects in equal protection have been remedied. And we urge President Trump and Congress to investigate these clear violations of federal law and withhold funding to those universities who fail to uphold equal standards in protecting free speech.

#1: University of California-Los Angeles
#2: Columbia University
#3: University of Pennsylvania
#4: Georgetown University
#5: University of Louisville
#6: Wake Forest University
#7: University of Nevada-Las Vegas
#8: University of Illinois-Chicago
#9: George Mason University
#10: University of Washington

Read the full report HERE ([link removed]) .

The Top Ten Jew-Hating Academic Departments in American Universities

#1: San Francisco State University, College of Ethnic Studies

#2: University of California-Santa Cruz, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department

#3: Columbia University, Center for Palestine Studies

#4: University of Pennsylvania, Middle East Center

#5: University of Minnesota, Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies

#6: University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies

#7: University of Colorado-Boulder, Ethnic Studies Department

#8: University of Maryland-College Park, Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

#9: University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, Department of Latina/Latino Studies

#10: Northwestern University, Asian American Studies Program

Introduction:

Ever since October 7^th, 2023, when Hamas launched its barbaric attack on innocent Israeli civilians—slaughtering over a thousand innocent people, raping and mutilating women, massacring children and the elderly for kicks—the world has borne witness to the atrocious Jew hatred housed in our most prestigious colleges and universities.

Across the nation, on nearly every major university campus, students took to the streets—not to decry Hamas’s brutality but to applaud it as a valid act of “resistance” against their “colonial oppressors.” Chanting genocidal slogans—“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Intifada, Intifada,” “Resistance is Justified, When People are Occupied”—these students, often accompanied by faculty, cheered for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.

The revelation that American campuses are hotspots of Jew hatred may seem sudden for some, but in truth this hatred and prejudice has been percolating for many years, aided and abetted by the universities themselves. For the past two decades, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has shone a rare spotlight on the genocidal Jew hatred emanating from our college campuses and raised the alarm. Now, the world at large is witnessing how much ground we have already given up in this fight.

In the midst of this turmoil, the presidents of our major universities have found themselves trapped by their own complicity, forced to condemn the undeniable Jew hatred that roils their campuses while attempting to obscure their own role in abetting it.

As the Freedom Center has relentlessly documented, American universities have played an undeniable role in funding and providing a veneer of legitimacy to anti-Semitic student organizations like the Hamas-funded Students for Justice in Palestine and the Muslim Students Association. What has received less attention—but should in fact be highlighted as American universities’ worst offense—is the Jew hatred promoted by official departments and institutes of the universities themselves.

Millions of dollars in both public and private money is funneled into academic departments and centers, housed at America’s most prestigious universities. These official organs of the university actively promote Jew hatred, glorify in Hamas’s violence against Israeli civilians, and spread genocidal lies about Israel being an “apartheid” and “settler-colonialist” state. They invite speakers and host conferences whose entire purpose is to cast aspersions on the Jews and their homeland of Israel.

Whole academic departments and institutes, under the official auspices of their prestigious universities, violate every principle of academic integrity to cast their lot with the barbaric Hamas terrorists in order to bring about the destruction of Israel—all while the presidents of those same universities declare themselves horrified by growing anti-Semitism on campus. They fuel the atrocious Jew hatred that has overtaken both students and faculty on campus and turned the halls of academia into training grounds for the next generation of jihadists.

The following report will expose the blatant hypocrisy of American universities and their leaders, who express horror at the outbreak of anti-Semitism on campus yet spend millions funding academic centers and departments which actively promote that same Jew hatred.

We call on the universities implicated in this report to take immediate action to discipline these academic centers and departments which openly defy university policy to promote Jew hatred. If they should fail to do so, we urge Congress to withhold all federal funding until they eliminate this cancer in their midst.

Read the full report HERE. ([link removed])

============================================================
Contribute to Freedom Center On Campus by making a donation today:
** Donate ([link removed])
Follow Stop Campus Jew Hatred on social media:
** [link removed] ([link removed])
** [link removed] ([link removed])
Follow Stop K-12 Indoctrination on social media:
** [link removed] ([link removed])
** [link removed] ([link removed])
Copyright ©2023 www.FreedomCenterOnCampus.org

A project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Our mailing address is:
[email protected]

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can ** update your preferences ([link removed])
or ** unsubscribe from this list ([link removed])
.