We Are All Domestic Terrorists

Ladies and gentlemen, we are all domestic terrorists. Please welcome, founder of the 1776 Project PAC, Ryan Gerduski. Executive Director of Fight for Schools, Ian Pryor. Texas School Board, Julie Pickren. And your moderator, co-host of CPAC Now, Mercedes Schlapp. Much louder than this, because I don't know if the big guy is going to show up if you're this quiet. All right, are we getting fired up? Okay, you're not tired on me, right? Because I know you all socialize a lot and are networking, but you know, you've got to be really spirited, all right? Okay. First of all, this is the power panel right here. We've talked about all these critical, critical issues like the economy, energy independence, national security. But this group, I can't even tell you, I've been spending so much time with them. And what I have learned is going to shock you. And these are the people on the front lines who are making sure that your children will not be indoctrinated or taken over by the left. So, Julie, I'm going to start with you. You are running to be a board, right, a state board trustee of education here in Texas. Yes, Mercedes. Texas State Board of Education. That's right. You even said it better than I did. Now, let me ask you this. There was a proposal that was put out this past Monday. Right. It is shocking what we're going to hear within this proposal that they're pushing forward for this curriculum. It's in Texas, but it impacts everyone nationally. Give us the rundown. Yes, let me give you a brief rundown because just give me two seconds to say, number one, nobody in this room is a domestic terrorist. We are we, the people. Our children, the Bible and Psalm 127 says that our children belong to us. They belong to the parents. They belong to the families. Our children do not belong to the government. So let me do a quick rundown. A quick Monday at the Texas State Board of Education, a curriculum, a full rewrite of civics, history and social studies was proposed Monday at the Texas State Board of Education. This curriculum is called the International Baccalaureate Program, which is the U.N.'s curriculum capstone. By the U.N.'s own words, they say this is the capstone of education for them. It is not right for Texas. Article 7 of the Texas Constitution says the whole purpose of a free and public education is to preserve our liberties and our freedoms. And this does not do that. I just want you to give them one or two examples of what's in this curriculum that they're pushing. Part of the curriculum is it teaches if we have any DPS officers in here, Texas Rangers in here, thank you from the bottom of this Texas heart. You are the best of Texas. But part of what this curriculum will teach is that our Texas Rangers are a racist and oppressive organization. And we will not stand for that for Texas finest. Another thing that it teaches is it teaches that every child must learn about the gay pride movement in the 8th grade. It also will bring in what's called intersectionality, where critical race theory will be taught to our children. And every child in the state of Texas will be taught about critical race theory, even though the state legislature, thank God for Senator Brian Hughes and Representative Steve Toth last year, passed the full critical race theory bills in the great state of Texas. Ian, let me go to you. I've had the great honor to work with Ian in the Trump administration. He was over at Department of Justice while I was at the White House. Ian, you took this on as like a volunteer, like a parent, just a concerned parent in Loudoun County, where it was ground zero when all of this came down, where the parents stood up and said no more. Walk us through that year, that time frame of 2021, when you saw the damage that the school boards were doing. Well, you know, it was really three inflection points in Loudoun County in 2021. The first one, you had this private Facebook group, the anti-racist parents of Loudoun County, that put up basically a hit list of parents that spoke up at school board meetings that they disagreed with and they wanted to hack their websites, cancel them, publicly expose them. And that brought a bunch of people together. And then you get into late May and they put a teacher on administrative leave for simply going to a school board meeting and speaking out against a proposed policy that would allow girls to use boys' rooms and vice versa, force kids to say what pronouns other kids want them to say. And then the third inflection point is when you get to October and we find out that there was a sexual assault in a bathroom, a girls' bathroom, by a boy. The superintendent lied about it to his school board meeting. This kid was moved to another school and he sexually assaulted someone else. And that ultimately became a story. It was really everything we had warned about, which is this is a school system that is focused on politics. They're not focused on excellence in education. They're not focused on school safety. They're not focused on the basics. They're focused on a political agenda. And I think that because of the parents in Loudoun County, but also Northern Virginia, Fairfax. I know there's some Fairfax County people here and all over Virginia. That's why Glenn Youngkin is now governor of Virginia. And obviously Terry McAuliffe, he didn't think parents should be involved in our children's education. I do also want to follow up with you on this as well. We had the race. Glenn Youngkin won. How surprised were the school board members when finally someone actually confronted them and said, we've got to reevaluate this and stop what you're doing? I think they were surprised to some degree, but they clearly have not learned their lesson. Everything that they do. And that's kind of the secret, really, of what happened in Loudoun County. It's the game that couldn't shoot straight. And every time they were faced with a difficult choice, they made the wrong one. And you had savvy, intelligent, dedicated parents that knew how to take advantage and hold them accountable when they did that. Ryan, really important is the funding. Because Republicans were always so focused about the federal race, the state races. But now school board elections are critical. And you're part of ensuring, part of the Super PAC, leading the Super PAC to fund candidates to really turn things around. Tell me, what are you seeing on the ground? What have you been able to do? And how much more do we need to get done? So I started my 1776 Project PAC back last May. My godson, I don't have children, but my godson was being told by his teacher about that policemen were racist. Everyone was upset. I don't have the funds to sit there and start a school, but I started a school board PAC. Last year we did 58 elections in 7 states and we won 42 of the 58. This year so far we've done 21. We've won 18 of them. 15 in Texas. We won 15 out of 15 in Texas, including Frisco and Harris County. And we're doing 60 in Florida on August 23rd. If you live in Florida, if you know someone in Florida, there's not a competitive governor's race or senate race, but every school board is up on August 23rd. And if a person gets more than 50%, there's no follow-up election. Every school board election in Florida is up on August 23rd, primary day. So we're doing over 60 elections. Thankfully Governor DeSantis has been very, very involved. He's endorsed 29 of our candidates. We're competing with them. He's the only governor so far who's been involved. He's been excellent on it. But we need every governor involved. And what I'm really hoping to do eventually, and my goal if we continue my project, is by the end of this year I'll have hopefully over, at the end of this month, I'll have over 100 elected school board members nationwide that my PAC supported who are anti-critical race theory, anti-transgender ideology in schools, who believe in the basics, who believe that public education is a common good. It's not only there to teach someone how to be a good worker and know reading, writing, and arithmetic, but to love the republic. Because we put tax dollars in there, whether you have children or not, so that they not only become a good worker, but want to invest in the future of this country to overthrow it. We need a lot of people to sit there and realize what's going on with school boards. We need more funding from grassroots donors. And we need to sit there and make sure we have probably over 500 candidates by the end of this year. I was going to say, you said 500 candidates. How many of these school boards do we have to really see a transformation, have them change into Republican? Not every school board is problematic, but ironically, a lot of the more Republican counties are the ones that are the worst off. Because parents sit there and they assume everything's fine. A perfect example, Indian River, Florida. Voted for Bush, Romney, McCain, and Trump twice. Right now, they are having a new policy in their school where they're trying to make suspensions equal among the races for equity. Nothing is equal. So some kids are getting alternative suspension if they are some kind of race, and others are getting suspended if they are another kind of race. Wait a second, wait a second. So suspension, you need it equal across the board. Equal by race across the board. By race. Exactly. Right. This is the kind of policies that led to things like the shooting in Florida, where they sit there and say, let's look at the race of the person before we get them in trouble, rather than what they've done. Things like this need to be changed. It's critical. Hopefully, after Florida, I'm looking at races in North Carolina, Michigan, Rhode Island, California. I think this is possible. Yes. This can happen anywhere. So, you know, as you mentioned, it was the National School Board Association who really sent this letter to the Biden administration, because God only knows, angry parents are domestic terrorists. Just think about that for a moment there. It is just disgusting, really. I mean, and you've seen many of these state school board associations. They've dropped them. They've dropped the National School Board Association. Is that enough, or do we just need to gut the whole National School Board Association? It's not enough, Mercy. What we really need is we need a ban on taxpayer-funded lobbying. They're using our dollars against us and against our children. This is your money that's being used to call great people throughout America domestic terrorists, which we are not. We're parents. We are we, the people. So we need a ban on taxpayer-funded lobbying. And it was Viola Garcia, who's a trustee in Aldine ISD right outside of Houston, and she was the one who was the president of the National School Board Association that approached the Biden administration to use the Patriot Act against parents, parents who were just concerned about masking and critical race theory and their children's education and pornographic their children being exposed to pornography at young ages. These are not domestic parents. These are parents who just want an excellent education for their children. Ian, you're working closely on all these lawsuits, not only in Virginia but nationwide. Walk us through why this is important. Give us an example of one of the lawsuits that you all are working on. So I work with America First Legal, where I'm a senior advisor, and we're looking around all over the country for places where schools are violating constitutional rights, whether it's parents' 14th Amendment right to be the primary decision-maker on the upbringing and education of their children or First Amendment rights to be able to speak, you know, speak truth. One of the cases that we have is actually in Rediffering, Pennsylvania. And a parent went in, filed a right-to-know request under Pennsylvania law to inspect materials from the Pacific Educational Group, which is really one of the biggest equity consultants out there. So he gets in there, and they say, you can't copy it. You can't take pictures of it. So he starts making voice notes. Well, they kick him out. We brought a case against the school system for violating his First Amendment rights. Now, as part of that, we asked for the materials that they would not provide to him via FOIA. They wouldn't provide to him via FOIA because they said it was copyrighted. Well, Pacific Educational Group said, okay, we'll give them to you now, now that we're in court. And it's a 166-page document of documents that really ends the lie that they're not using critical race theory in school. It's all over the place, the permanence of whiteness. Critical race theory is this big circle right under how to change the education system in America. It's all over the documents. It completely blows up their narrative that critical race theory is not used. And now we actually got a reply to one of our legal documents where we were called ultra-MAGA. So I'm not sure if that's the first reply. Who's ultra-MAGA out there? So I think for us, another thing that the left loves to use is acronyms. It's like BLM, DRT. And now there's DEI. Right. And so why should parents be on the lookout for DEI if their kids are going to public school? DEI is diversity, equity, inclusion. It's in public and private school. It's not like private schools are a lot better. Diversity, equity, and inclusion is basically CRT in practice. So they sit there and they'll tell administrators, and superintendents will tell teachers, how to infuse critical race theory within the academic system. They'll do things like having privilege walks in class. Well, they say, if you're white, please take a step forward. If your parents are married, take a step forward. If you're heterosexual, and then they'll say, these are the most privileged kids in your class. So they isolate and separate kids based on quote-unquote privilege. Whiteness is used constantly. At one school district in Frisco ISD in Texas. Wait. Don't clap yet. You're not going to like what I say. They had basically a chutes and ladders board where one player's were white and one were black. The black players could never win. And that's what they said America is like. This type of stuff is how you use it. So they constantly come with the idea that every one of our heroes are villains. Every one of our national institutions are problematic. And it's infused with a child's understanding of the world. That way they sit there and they have that approach on everything. And by the time they get to college or they start reading conservative stuff, they already have this infused within their education process. DEI is very problematic. And it's what everyone should be looking out for. Julie, are we going to see change? Absolutely. We are winning. Are we going to see change? Are we going to win? Are we winning? We are. And just to tag on what he's saying. So DEI is robbing our children of their chance of the American dream. Because what happens is whenever the numbers are not equal on class participation, they cancel the programs. So we have school districts right now all over the state of Texas that have canceled their advanced placement and their honors programs. And these children, they are not getting a great education because of DEI. It's been instilled in our school districts. So yes, Mercy, we win. We absolutely win. You know why? We win because of the great men and women in this room and the great men and women who are watching. But we mainly win because we're on the side of God. Amen. That's right. Ian, as we close out this session, final thoughts? Well, you know, it's been a crazy year and a half. But from certainly where we started in Virginia and the results that we saw in November last year, and then seeing everybody here and seeing this happening across the country, it is spreading. It's not something we're going to fix in three years or even five years or even ten years. It's going to take a concerted effort for the next generation to preserve that generation. And, Ryan, your final thoughts, especially as parents being swing voters in this midterm election, I really think that that's the goal is to get. This is suburban moms' issue. You move the districts so they have good school boards. We've lost a lot of institutions on the right. The one thing we haven't lost yet is voters. They can do this. They can do it for school boards, and they can go up the ballot. I would say vote from the bottom up. Vote for school board, then go all the way up to governor and senator, and we'll have conservative majorities across the entire election. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, don't forget these folks. They're on the front line. They are your leaders to help protect your children and help parents to be able to make sure that they can take care of their children. Round of applause for my fabulous guests, Julie, Ryan, and Ian. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you.