Trump

Linda McMahon: ‘Listen to Parents, not Politicians’

Testifying on Thursday morning before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions to confirm her nomination as Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon laid out a blunt agenda to reform the embattled agency.

“So what’s the remedy?” she asked rhetorically. “Fund education freedom, not government-run systems. Listen to parents, not politicians. Build up careers, not college debt. Empower states, not special interests. Invest in teachers, not Washington bureaucrats.”

How refreshing.

McMahon’s directives are sorely needed in various states, especially New York and Colorado.

Concerned parents in the upstate New York Penfield school district were shut down at a school board meeting this week after expressing concern over a perverted book being used with children as young as five years of age.

The book at the center of the controversy was “The Rainbow Parade: A Celebration of LGBTQIA+ Identities and Allies.”

The illustrated book contains drawings of naked people, so-called “furries,” and even two people wearing leather “bondage” attire.

One father, John Feathers, rose and addressed the board.

“If you think that that’s appropriate for children to see, then there’s something wrong with you,” he said. “You need to have a mental evaluation. There’s no reason that should be in the schools whatsoever at all. You can see the guy’s butt is clearly out.”

How did the board respond to the outraged mothers and fathers?

Instead of giving the parents a hearing and pledging to investigate, the board dug their heels in and began lecturing those gathered on how to officially file complaints.

“It’s our board meeting,” said one parent. “We pay you!” shouted another.

The board then proceeded to abruptly adjourn the meeting, magnifying the agitation of the already fuming parents.

More public school dysfunction?

Here in Colorado, school officials in Jefferson County are apologizing to the parents of a 17-year-old female student who was groomed by a female teacher – with the help of other instructors.

Social studies teacher Leann Kearney at Columbine High School became physically involved with the student. Fellow teachers at the school helped the young woman falsify a federal form declaring herself homeless so that she could move in with Kearney.

Making a bad situation even worse, officials hid the wickedness including the falsification of the paperwork from the student’s parents. When the student turned 18, the two individuals moved out of the state.

In a statement, the Jeffco School District acknowledged the heinous offense:

Obviously, the student did not meet the criteria to be considered homeless and the staff involved in this isolated incident were addressed as part of the investigation as the proper channels in place were not followed.

While we have taken every step to remove this former employee from Jeffco and prevent her from working in another educational setting… we recognize this is of little comfort to the family…. we deeply regret how profoundly this violation has affected their family.

Of course, not every public school in America is riff with this type of deliberate deviance, but it’s this flavor of destructive dysfunction that’s leading many mothers and fathers to seek alternative education options for their children.

Instead of collaborating and cooperating with parents, far too many schools are currently engaged in open combat with the very people whose taxes are paying their salaries.

It’s no wonder that homeschooling is the fastest-growing form of education in the United States, expanding at between 2% and 8% annually. It’s now estimated that over 3 million American children are being taught at home in 2025.

Parents in the Penfield and Jeffco school districts are justifiably incensed and demanding officials clean house and reform the corrupt and perverted systems. It won’t be easy. They and countless other moms and dads need prayer, wisdom, and creative and innovative energy to help transform a broken public education system that is currently on life support.

There is No Constitutional Crisis

Years ago, the late radio talk legend Rush Limbaugh exposed the mainstream media’s penchant for coordinated messaging by stringing together soundbites echoing the same word or phrase uttered by dozens of national hosts concerning a particular topic on a specific day.

It was as if a talking points memo had been faxed or emailed from a single source. It very well may have been.

Well, as Ronald Reagan liked to say, “There they go again.”

It’s known as the “Illusory Truth Effect” – the idea that by repeating a lie often enough, people will begin to believe it, and sometimes even the people who are saying it.

The new phrase of the week is “constitutional crisis” and it’s being repeated over and over by liberal pundits upset with a wide range of efforts currently being employed to reform the government.

In fact, #constitutionalcrisis was trending on X Tuesday morning with tens of thousands of references to the phrase.

Leading the charge is The New York Times, which despite its waning influence, remains the source for many radical talking points. In many ways, it’s the left’s bible.

To be sure, since being sworn in on January 20, President Trump has issued hundreds of executive orders and made many decisions that he and his team believe fall within his executive authority.

Garnering particular attention and significant angst from numerous camps has been the President’s efforts to cut government waste and uncover potential corruption. It’s all being led by Elon Musk and housed under the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

With a federal debt of $36 trillion and climbing, and a desire to cut $1 billion a day from the current budget, officials are eager to expose any improper use of American taxpayer dollars.

Last week, Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa released information on some of the ways our money is being spent through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

“From funneling tax dollars to risky research in Wuhan to sending Ukrainians to Paris Fashion Week, USAID is one of the worst offenders of waste in Washington… all around the world,” Ernst posted on X.

Some of the examples include $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Columbia, $32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru, $1.5 million for a DEI program in Serbia, $20 million to Iraq to fund the expansion of the Sesame Street children’s public television program.

By labeling these executive actions and investigations a “constitutional crisis,” critics are obviously hoping to swing public opinion. The latest polling finds that a majority of Americans favor efforts to uncover waste and corruption.

The scope of President Trump’s authority – or any chief executive’s power – is a hotly debated topic of conversation, and especially when the Oval Office occupant expresses interest in an ambitious agenda.

When it comes to interpreting the president’s jurisdiction, judges can often come to different conclusions.

But is it a crisis?

In their inspired wisdom, our Founding Fathers created a government that consists of three branches – the executive, legislative and judicial. In short, it’s the “separation of powers” and was designed to make sure that no one person or body has too much power.

Labeling the current debate a “constitutional crisis” is a deliberate attempt to escalate and inflame what is a common and ongoing conversation.

Given the current context, Merriam-Webster defines a crisis as an “unstable” moment. In reality, all three branches of government are currently operating peacefully. The only thing “unstable” would be those critics looking to incite protest in the streets or worse. And the only crisis that’s ongoing is giving money Americans don’t have to people and efforts that are contrary to our nation’s founding values and morals.

As Christians, we must continue praying for our leaders (1 Timothy 2:1-4), take a big deep breath (Phil. 4:6), and trust that our ultimate fate is in His will and His ways (Col. 1:16-17).

Image from Getty.

DOT Secretary Sean Duffy Officially Favors Marriage and Fertility in Federal Policy

Newly-seated Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Sean Duffy has already gotten busy improving his department, and America by ensuring the nation’s traffic policy protects and promotes families.

A new order issued by Secretary Duffy requires all DOT policies, programs and activities, as much as possible, to be determined and executed relative to their “benefits for families and communities.”

To this end, Secretary Duffy declares DOT “shall prioritize projects and goals” focusing on helping “families and family-specific difficulties, such as the accessibility of transportation to families with young children, and give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average [emphasis added].”

This is a profoundly wise federal policy development that Focus on the Family strongly supports.

Communities with higher than average marriage and birth rates are clearly some of the strongest communities in our nation because they are more likely to capitalize on the protective and life-enhancing benefits of marriage. Decades of university-based social science and medical research consistently demonstrate that children benefit in every important measure of well-being when they are born to and raised by their own married mother and father.

Growing, healthy, thriving children are the future of our nation.

For any country to grow, its citizens must have enough babies to boost that nation over basic replacement level of 2.1 children per family. The U.S. has fallen under this important marker, to 1.7 births per woman.

Economists demonstrate this decline has been particularly dramatic in the last two decades.

Simply put, America cannot sustain itself with this level of natality without aggressively importing citizens from other nations. The world has already passed what demographers call “peak child” – a truly ominous milestone where fewer and fewer babies will be born each and every year.

So this is extremely wise national policy incentivizing marriage and married fertility. The Institute for Family Studies has explained, in great detail, many of the compelling reasons why such policies like the DOT’s will benefit families and the nation.

Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia, one of the world’s leading sociologists of marriage and family, explains, “Secretary Duffy’s move … is a very big deal.”

He notes “we don’t typically think of DOT spending as family policy, but it is.” This is because,

DOT transportation spending has often been directed toward large, urban transportation projects that end up favoring denser and more urban communities. From a family-friendly perspective, the problem is that such denser development is associated with lower family formation — less marriage and fewer children.

Professor Wilcox adds,

Insofar as Duffy’s policy prioritizes communities with higher marriage and birth rates, it is likely to reorient transportation dollars to lower-density communities where there are more single-family homes, family life is often more affordable, and family formation is higher.

The Secretary’s order also states that “DOT shall ensure comprehensive public engagement … with families” and other vital community stakeholders. This is more productive than attacking and becoming suspicious of concerned parents as we saw in the previous Presidential administration.


Let us hope that more heads of federal departments follow Secretary Duffy’s wise and bold approach to make it easier for married mother and fathers to build and maintain every nation’s greatest resource: families.

Image from Getty.

President Trump: ‘Without Faith in God, There Would Be No American Story’

President Donald J. Trump participated in two separate prayer breakfast events in Washington, D.C., on Thursday – one at the Capitol and a second one at the Washington Hilton.

“We have to bring religion back,” the President told those gathered on Capitol Hill. “We have to bring it back much stronger. It’s one of the biggest problems that we’ve had over the last fairly long period of time. We have to bring it back.”

As one means to do so, the 47th chief executive announced plans to establish a presidential commission on religious liberty.

Trump also told those gathered that new Attorney General Pam Bondi will be overseeing a task force designed to “eradicate anti-Christian bias” and weed out or prevent “all forms of anti-Christian targeting and discrimination within the federal government.”

President Trump pledged:

“While I’m in the White House, we will protect Christians in our schools, in our military, in our government, in our workplaces, hospitals and in our public squares,” he said. “And we will bring our country back together as one nation under God.”

In the opening minutes of his address on Capitol Hill, Trump, speaking softly and slowly, referenced the harrowing Saturday back in July of 2024 when he narrowly escaped the would-be assassin’s bullet.

“It changed something in me,” he said. “I feel even stronger. I believed in God, but I feel, I feel much more strongly about it. Something happened.”

During his remarks, Trump referenced the various giants of the Christian faith who are memorialized in stone and statue not far from where he was speaking in the Capitol.

John Winthrop, who served twelve terms as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was a devout Puritan and worked tirelessly to cast a vision for a culture and country that held high Jesus Christ.

Ronald Reagan, whose birthday was February 6, often quoted Winthrop when declaring America was “a shining city on a hill.” That phrase came from the Puritan’s famous message, “A Model of Christian Charity.”

“We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body,” urged Winthrop. “So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.”

President Trump also mentioned the statue of Roger Williams, another Puritan, who is credited with founding the state of Rhode Island.

“How frequent, how constant ought we to be, like Christ Jesus our example, in doing good,” urged Williams. “Especially to the souls of men and especially to the household of faith (yea, even to our enemies), when we remember that this is our seed time, of which every minute is precious, and that as our sowing is, so shall be our eternal harvest.

President Trump rightly observed, “Without faith in God, there would be no American Story.”

Over the years, the National Prayer Breakfast has been a bipartisan gathering, though not always without some metaphorical fireworks.

Many of a certain age will never forget a stooped Mother Teresa addressing those gathered inside the Capitol, including President Clinton. It was February 3, 1994. The diminutive nun boldly and courageously raised the subject of abortion.

“I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself,” she said. “And if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another? How do we persuade a woman not to have an abortion?”

Mother Teresa was right.

Timothy Goeglein, Focus on the Family’s Vice President of External Relations who heads up the ministry’s Washington, D.C. office, has attended nearly every prayer breakfast over the last three decades, including this year’s gathering.

“The encouraging and heartening narrative of this year’s National Prayer Breakfast was a rededication to our fundamental religious liberty and conscience rights,” Goeglein reflected. “Over and again, religious freedom as foundational to our constitutional republic was being discussed by this year’s attendees, and after the regular breakfast, there were a number of breakout sessions and forums where religious liberty was being discussed and celebrated yet again.”

Goeglein concluded, “What a good thing, and what a refreshing subtext to this year’s gathering where there were 2500 of us praying for our nation, for our leaders, and for the next chapter of the American experience.”

Image from Getty.

RFK Jr: ‘Sometimes Love means saying No’

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President Donald J. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, was back before members of the Senate yesterday to make his case to be head of the critical government department.

In an exchange with Senator Josh Hawley, Kennedy expressed his opposition to sexually confused minors being allowed to mutilate their bodies.

“We don’t let children drink,” he told the Missouri lawmaker. “We don’t let them drive an automobile. Because they have bad judgment. They are flooded with hormones. Their brains are still in formation. Their sexuality is still in formation. To allow them to make judgements about, that are going to have life-changing, forever implications for the rest of their life at that age are unconscionable.” 

Inexplicably, the American Medical Association has supported the destructive policy of permitting children to maim their bodies. They claim doing so will help reduce the risk of suicide.

Dr. Jay Greene, senior research fellow at Heritage’s Center for Education Policy, suggests fair research demonstrates the exact opposite.

“Increasing minors’ access to cross-sex interventions is associated with a significant increase in the adolescent suicide rate,” writes Dr. Greene. “Rather than facilitating access by minors to these medical interventions without parental consent, states should be pursuing policies that strengthen parental involvement in these important decisions with life-long implications for their children.”

Predictably, Dr. Greene’s research elicited a firestorm of opposition from radical academics and activists committed to the popular narrative claiming puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormone treatments are necessary to preserve the mental and physical health of sexually confused children.

Referring to the rule issued by the Biden administration calling for youth treatments, Kennedy said:

“That rule is anti-science. Even more, just from a common sense – if you’re a patient, do you really want somebody performing surgery on you who is morally opposed to that surgery? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Robert F. Kennedy’s nomination has drawn intense interest from a broad spectrum of watchers. Although originally seeking the Democrat nomination for president, the son of the slain United States Attorney General endorsed President Trump in the closing days of the campaign.

At Thursday’s hearing on Capitol Hill, Kennedy made clear he believes every child, especially those who are sexually confused, should be shown dignity and respect.

“They should be loved,” Kennedy said. “Sometimes love means saying no to people.”

For time immemorial, mothers and fathers have followed this fundamental principle. Only fools enable destructive behavior, which is precisely what it is when a child is allowed to mutilate their own body.

This is why Focus on the Family’s Jim Daly strongly supports President Trump’s executive order protecting children from so-called transgender medical interventions:

President Trump’s executive order blocking the mutilation of children is a compassionate and common sense response to the reckless and destructive social reengineering experiments of recent years.

Studies have shown that upwards of 90% of young people who express sexual confusion will eventually self-correct and re-embrace their biological sex. 

It’s our obligation as adults to protect our nation’s children, especially those who are vulnerable and often silently crying out for help. It’s unconscionable to exploit them for political gain. Instead, we’re called to nurture, defend and provide them with strong and wise counsel.

Critics of President Trump are claiming this withholds ‘care’ but the exact opposite is happening. To enable and allow physicians to maim young bodies is the ultimate act of heartless carelessness. 

While we grieve the necessity of this order, we applaud its implementation. We call upon our Christian brothers and sisters to pray for those suffering from such fundamental and foundational confusion. And may our leaders continue to demonstrate courage and resolve in the face of strong opposition.

Robert F. Kennedy’s testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee wrapped up two days of questioning. A vote on the nominee is expected sometime next week.