Joe Biden won’t talk to the press — and he won’t let his administration either! In news that ought to incense the American public, the president has ordered a media blackout on anything having to do with the immigration crisis. Everyone from border patrol to sector chiefs have been told to “deny all access” to the press, no matter how friendly they may be. That means no interviews, no photos, no facilities tours or ride-alongs without the White House’s express permission. Just how desperate is the situation on the border? Enough to risk an administration-wide cover-up, it seems.

Like a lot of outlets, NBC has been annoyed by the lack of communication on the border. Finally, after being rebuffed enough times, they decided that the real story wasn’t the migrant surge — but the Biden gag order. Their reporters started sniffing around, talking to a slew of anonymous sources, and they all said the same thing: the White House is desperate to keep people in the dark about the chaos they’ve created. “… [L]ocal press officers are instructed to send all information queries — even from local media — to the press office in Washington for approval; and those responsible for cultivating data about the number of migrants in custody have been reminded not to share the information with anyone to prevent leaks, the officials said.” Even designated spokespeople have to have their statements vetted.

Over at MSNBC, the anchors were openly critical of Biden, acknowledging that even at the height of the family separation controversy in 2018, the Trump administration was more than willing to let reporters in to assess the conditions for themselves. The press corps walked freely through the facilities, talked to the people who’d been detained, and took as many photos as they wanted. Now, under this cone of silence, even Biden’s cheerleaders in the media can’t help but wonder what he’s hiding. “I mean, if [this] had been the Trump administration,” Willie Geist admitted on “Morning Joe,” “we’d be rightly outraged that they were blacking out information on a very important story.” “It’s very frustrating from a journalist’s perspective,” Julia Ainsley agreed. “We need to know their conditions here. We need to be able to see it firsthand.”

It’s doubtful she’ll get her wish any time soon. Biden’s team, who even took the drastic step of locking ICE’s Twitter account, isn’t exactly eager to talk about its catastrophic failure. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas refuses to even call the situation a “crisis.” But maybe to them, Kris Kobach points out, it isn’t. Maybe this flood of migrants is exactly what the far-Left president wanted. “I would make sure that… we would immediately surge the border,” Biden said plainly during one Democratic debate. “We are a nation that says, ‘If you want to flee, and you are fleeing oppression, you should come.’”

Well, they’ve come all right. In February alone — a month after Biden signed a basket of executive orders relaxing immigration rules — illegal border crossings jumped 28 percent. “The U.S. is on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than it has in the last 20 years,” the estimates warn. With them, an incredible number of unaccompanied children — 565 a day — are pouring into the country. “We need to join forces and send a message that we cannot allow what’s happening on the border, because it’s our girls, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, the ones who are being raped,” Freshman Rep. Maria Salazar (R-Fla.) said. “It’s our girls, the ones, the children who are being trafficked.”

“The sad part about all this,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told reporters in El Paso, “[is that] it didn’t have to happen. This crisis is created by the presidential policies of this new administration. There’s no other way to claim it than a Biden border crisis.” And the American people agree. The president is in deep trouble when it comes to the border, pollsters say. His approval rates on immigration are the lowest of any other issue, CNN warns: 43-49 percent.

And it’s no wonder. Now, instead of building border walls, we’re building detention centers. Local mayors, like Texas’s Don McLaughlin, said his community is afraid to even go outside at night. “In Uvalde, Texas, we’re averaging 10 to 12 car chases a week. We never saw that before,” he told reporters. “This is something we’re seeing every day. Our local ranchers are having their fences cut, their houses are being broken into, they’re trying to steal their cars. It’s just gotten crazy.”

And what about the virus? While Americans who travel outside the U.S. are required to have a negative test before they’re allowed back in the country (or fined for not wearing masks), the Biden administration is letting untested foreigners stream into the country in massive numbers. Hundreds are testing positive just in Texas. It’s no wonder that Joe Biden has gone longer than any president in history without talking to the press. He might actually have to answer for his America-Last policy.

Originally published here.

California Puts the Fear of Gods into Students

When a new curriculum is too woke for the New York Times, it has to be the most wildly out-of-step model this country’s ever seen. It also has to be from California, which is one of the only states capable of taking public education to places even liberals would oppose. “The idea that a tax-supported public school system would, or could, be used to unleash this vicious cultural and spiritual poison into our young people’s consciousness is both extremely offensive and quite possibly illegal,” the Times’s Brad Stephens wrote. And yet today, that “poison” is on the verge of becoming the Ethnic Studies standard for six million U.S. students.

There was some hope, after last October when Governor Gavin Newsom (D) actually vetoed an earlier draft of this curriculum, that its creators would get the message that its curriculum was too much for even the state’s far-Left activists. Instead, the California Department of Education doubled down, writing another version that’s just as controversial as the one rejected by the state school board the last go-around. Stephens, who you have to credit for blowing the doors off of this proposal in what has become one of the most far Left papers in the country, couldn’t believe his eyes.

“Ethnic studies,” he pointed out, is supposed to be about multiculturalism. And unfortunately, that’s what some people might think if they didn’t dig deeper into the 900 pages of details. “[This] is not a way of exploring, much less celebrating, America’s pluralistic society. It is an assault on it… Public education is supposed to create a sense of common citizenship while cultivating the habits of independent thinking. This is a curriculum that magnifies differences, encourages tribal loyalties and advances ideological groupthink.” It shouldn’t be like this, he insisted.

Other outlets have started to pick up on absurd religious section, where children are taught that Christian settlers committed “theocide” against the Native Americans by “murdering” their gods and replacing them with the Christian God. This, the curriculum’s authors insist, is what led to “coloniality, dehumanization, and genocide,” and the “explicit erasure and replacement of holistic Indigeneity and humanity.” To help reverse that trend and create a new “social order,” where children are encouraged to cry out to Aztec gods and right this wrong.

“The chants have a clear implication,” one of the analysts of the curriculum says, “the displacement of the Christian God, which is said to be an extension of white supremacist oppression, and the restoration of the indigenous gods to their rightful place…” Of course, as plenty of legal scholars have pointed out, the forced practice of religion is a real violation of the Establishment Clause. If Christians can’t pray, then surely a coerced class of pagan incantation is unconstitutional.

And incredibly, the religious component is just a tiny piece of the statewide uproar. The whole goal of this curriculum seems to be turning California schools into godless “factories for Left-wing political activism,” where America cast as “an oppressor nation” that must be “deconstructed and subverted through politics.”

Under the guise of “equity” and “empowerment,” activists within the public education system have developed this radical new curriculum in order to transform California schools into factories for left-wing political activism. They have recast the United States as an oppressor nation that must be deconstructed and subverted through politics. The curriculum’s vision statement makes this aim explicit: it presents education not as a means of achieving competency, but as a “tool for transformation, social, economic, and political change, and liberation.”

An earlier draft of the model left out civil rights leader Martin Luther King and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall for radical revolutionaries like Pol Pot of Cambodian killing field fame. There were explicit threads of anti-Semitism that ran through the pages, until California’s Jewish community insisted they come out.

This is what happens, NRO’s Cameron Hilditch warns, when parents refuse to take on public education. “There is no other area of American life that conservative have so comprehensively abandoned for such a long period of time as K–12 education. [C]hildren in the public schools today are fated for this kind of indoctrination.” It’s not enough anymore just to call for school choice. Parents and concerned citizens have to be willing to fight over the content children are learning. “If conservatives… were to organize in as active, disciplined, and committed a way around the issue of education during the next 40 years as they organized around the law and the courts over the last 40 years, programs like this ethnic-studies curriculum might one day be remembered as strange historical artifacts of a brief and bygone moral panic.”

Instead, one of the largest states in the country is on the brink of mandating idol worship in kids’ classrooms! Maybe, John Fund quips, we should be glad all of California’s schools aren’t open. Because the only positive thing about COVID is that more parents are rethinking their child’s education. In California, as in other states, moms and dads need to do more than think. They need to act. Pulling their children out of government schools is one step; organizing with other Americans against this madness is the other.

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.