I’m afraid I have some terrible news. The governor of America’s largest and richest state has just signed a law that puts 10 million children and adolescents in grave danger of medical mistreatment.
The media headlines have it wrong. They claim that California Governor Gavin Newsom’s new law protects children by stopping public schools from outing their new gender to their parents.
It does just the opposite. It makes children vulnerable to irreversible and lifelong medical abuse and mistreatment. And it is all based on the pseudoscientific idea that some children are born into the wrong bodies and that we can change a person’s sex through drugs and surgery.
For any of this to make sense, you have to understand what’s happening in Britain. Several years ago, the government appointed a well-respected pediatrician named Hillary Cass to investigate whether it was ethical to block the puberty of children, give them opposite-sex hormones, and perform surgeries on their bodies to make them feel better about their gender. Dr. Cass came back a few weeks ago and said no, absolutely not.
Around the same time, the British government banned puberty blockers nationwide. And, just a few days ago, the new Labor Party government affirmed that it would maintain the former government’s ban.
In her report, Cass said that the so-called “social transition,” whereby a child adopts the identity of the opposite sex, is not a neutral act and has psychological consequences. This means it is the first step toward medical intervention.
What Gavin Newsom has done is actively prevented schools from informing parents that their children have been put on a medical pathway.
This is an outrageous attack on the rights of children and parents. Children have a right to go through puberty. No adult should be able to block their puberty. And parents have a right to know if their child thinks that they are the opposite sex or were born into the wrong body.
We have seen with leaked internal documents of the leading gender medicine group, WPATH, that these medical interventions, namely puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery, are not only irreversible but result in sterilization and loss of sexual function.
Children or adolescents are simply not mature enough to understand the effects of so-called “gender-affirming care.” They cannot, in other words, give their informed consent.
The new law creates the grave risk that activist teachers, students, and outside groups will convince their children that they were born into the wrong body, and hide their “social transition” from parents, which will lead to harmful medical mistreatment.
As such, the law that Newsom just signed is the opposite of what both children and their parents need. We need schools to immediately warn parents if their children think they are the opposite sex.
After all, this is a diagnosable psychiatric condition known as “gender dysphoria.” And if your child has a psychiatric disorder, whether anxiety, depression, an eating disorder, or gender dysphoria, you have a right to know.
And schools must stop teaching children, or allowing other people to teach children, the pseudoscientific and dehumanizing ideas that it’s possible to be born into the wrong body and possible to change one’s sex.
As such, either the legislature, the courts, or a ballot initiative will be required to nullify Newsom’s law. Until then, it is important to spread the word to parents that California public schools are fundamentally unsafe for the millions of children who attend them.
The politicians — @GavinNewsom @EleniForCA @AGRobBonta @XavierBecerra @JoeBiden @KamalaHarris — must immediately stop this grotesque violation of human rights.
It's up to the courts not the Administration to determine whether it is non-justiciable. The administration must comply with the order until a higher court reverses it or sets it aside. That's how our system works.
If the Trump administration continues with these obviously unconstitutional actions, then it will lose the legitimacy, public support, and power it needs to pursue free speech diplomacy, which would be a very disappointing outcome @SecRubio @marcorubio
There's no proof of major waste, fraud, or abuse in govt spending, say the media. But there is. And now Public has obtained invoices revealing that a major contractor overcharged the Ed. Dept, paid its CEO $2M/year, and promoted debunked research as student performance declined.
US Education Department Contractor Overcharged Taxpayers While Spending Millions On Executive Salaries
As student math and reading scores declined, the American Institute of Research charged 50% in indirect costs and paid its CEO over $2 million
by @galexybrane and @shellenberger
Over the last few weeks, the media and Democrats have been lambasting President Donald Trump for cutting the Department of Education’s research budget. In particular, the media criticized the Trump administration for cutting a contractor’s research into support services for students with disabilities who are nearing graduation.
But it’s not clear that the research was necessary or successful, and there is already both state and federal funding aimed at helping students with disabilities to develop life skills and plans for the future.
And now Public has obtained invoices showing that the Department’s contractor for the research in question, American Institute for Research (AIR), had significantly overcharged the Department in so-called indirect costs.
The invoice is from November 18, 2024, and shows AIR billing the Department $411,961.35 for the month of October 2024. Of that money, $214,952.74 was in “total indirects.” AIR charged an additional $26,950.74 as a 7% fee.
The invoice shows that the cumulative amount that AIR had billed the Department of Education was $10,957,275.73, of which $4,993,376.12 was total indirects and $716,831.18 was total additional fees.
A second invoice is from January 15, 2025, and shows AIR billing the Department $60,913.72 for the month of December 2024. Of that money, $29,685.23 was in total indirects. AIR charged an additional $3,985.01 as a 7% fee.
The invoice shows that the cumulative amount that AIR had billed the Department of Education was $11,076,493.79, of which $5,028,446.77 was total indirects and $724,630.48 was total additional fees.
In response to questions from Public, an AIR spokesperson said, “AIR’s indirect rates are similar to those of other social and behavioral research organizations and we have always abided by our approved rates. For government contractors, indirect costs include such costs as information technology, data security, and compliance and reporting.”
However, 50% in indirect fees is widely considered excessive. The National Institutes of Health recently required that its contractors lower indirect costs to 15% to reduce widespread overcharging.
Indeed, when asked about the invoice, a spokesperson for the Department of Education condemned the high fees. “Contracts with indirect rates over 50% take gross advantage of taxpayer dollars, perverting the reason the contracts exist — our students,” said Department spokesperson Madison Biedermann. “Incoming leadership will no longer allow these unacceptable terms.”
According to AIR’s IRS 990 form, the total compensation of AIR’s chief executive, David Myers, in the most recent year available, 2023, was $2,241,374.
“At the end of 2023, David Myers finished a 14-year tenure as AIR’s President and Chief Executive Officer,” said the AIR spokesperson. “His compensation for his final year included a retention payment. The salary for our current President and CEO is lower and in line with what other non-profit organizations of our size and type pay their chief executives.”
However, AIR’s tax forms showed that Myers earned $2,294,637 in 2022 and $1,145,400 in 2021.
Jessica Heppen is the current president and CEO. In 2023, she earned $685,060 as president. Neither Heppen nor Myers responded to Public’s request for comment.
AIR’s 990 form shows other high salaries for staff and fees for board members. AIR’s Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer, earned $931,610 in 2023, and its CFO earned $1,145,400 in 2022. A member of the AIR Board, Robert Boruch, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, received $80,250 in 2023 for just 2 hours of work per week, which is $772 per hour.
While nonprofit board members typically donate their time, 14 of AIR’s board members received hundreds of dollars per hour for their service. None responded to requests by Public for comment.
AIR’s fees should be considered in the broader context of declining student performance and AIR’s role to provide research that improves student performance.
Today, only 31% of fourth graders and only 30% of eighth graders are reading at or above proficiency levels, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). In eighth grade reading, 33% of students scored “below basic,” the highest percentage recorded in the NAEP’s history.
Congress established the Education Department in 1979 “to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.”
Student performance has declined across the board over the last 10 years. While Covid school closures significantly worsened them, math and reading scores declined for fourth- and eighth-graders nationwide from 2014 to 2024.
AIR appears to be partly responsible. It gave a favorable evaluation to Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study curriculum, which used elements of the now-debunked “whole language” approach to reading instead of systematic phonics instruction.
Under the whole language approach, teachers taught children to memorize whole words and use guessing strategies instead of sounding out individual sounds in unfamiliar words.
The failure of the whole language approach was precisely why the Department of Education hires groups like AIR. The goal of research is to discover which teaching methods work and which don’t before schools adopt them. That didn’t happen. In fact, the opposite did. The result was a whole generation of children robbed of fundamental literacy.
“It is absolutely inaccurate to say we ‘gave a favorable evaluation’ to Units of Study,” said AIR.
But the evaluation was clearly positive. Implementation of the curriculum, AIR’s report stated, “is associated with improvements in ELA [English Language Arts] achievement starting in the second year of implementation, and in schools that opt to continue with the approach long term, the magnitude of the effects grow larger over time.”
And even AIR noted, in its email to Public, “We found no positive effect in the first year of implementation, then saw positive effects in subsequent years for some schools.”
Other Department contractors had much lower indirect rates. Why was AIR able to charge so much?
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The former head of the UK's foreign intelligence agency, MI6, told Boris Johnson in early 2020 that the Covid virus escaped from the Wuhan lab. That means that the US, UK, Chinese, & German governments all knew the truth, covered it up, and spread disinformation. Case closed.
"It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in Wuhan Institute of Virology... [China] is now engaged in an information & influence operation (IO) to deflect responsibility....the Journal Nature was used to promulgate the narrative..."
The newly released memo coauthored by the former head of MI6 is focused on how the Nature "Proximal Origin" paper was used to promote China's natural spillover narrative.
We reported in 2023 on hundreds of previously unreleased email and Slack direct messages which cover the period when Kristian Andersen and his colleagues collaborated to write “Proximal Origin."
They show that Andersen and his colleagues clearly thought it was indeed possible not only that the virus that causes Covid-19 had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but specifically that it had been cultured in the laboratory.
The documents make clear that pressure from “higher ups” — not “additional data, analyses, learning more about coronaviruses, and discussions with colleagues and collaborators” — led Andersen, Garry, and two of their coauthors to abandon the lab leak theory as implausible.
What’s more, the messages reveal that Andersen still suspected that a lab leak was possible in mid-April, a month after Nature Medicine officially published “Proximal Origin,” and two months after the authors published a preprint.
If the paper’s authors weren’t fully convinced that no culturing was possible, why did they rule out “any type of laboratory-based scenario” in their paper?
If the consensus opinion of the scientists across dozens of their initial emails and messages had to be summarized in a single phrase, it would be the name of the Slack channel: “project-wuhan_engineering.”
The name showed just how probable they felt it was that the virus came from a lab.
Then, on February 6, something strange happened. Andersen changed the name of the Slack channel from “project-wuhan_engineering” to “project-wuhan_pangolin.”
Zelensky says he wants the war to end, but he’s not acting like it. Friday he dismissed the US ceasefire as unworkable. Saturday he had European leaders affirm his position. And now he says the end of the war is “very, very far away.” Feels like we’re being played.
If Zelensky’s strategy is to alienate the American people, and the president they just elected, one day before he addresses Congress, it’s working.
Even The Guardian now gets it:
“On Friday, in the Oval Office, Zelenskyy contested Trump’s stance. The Ukrainian president stated flatly: “We will never accept just [a] ceasefire. It will not work without security guarantees.” Zelenskyy maintained that strong security guarantees had to come from the US, not just Europe. A European military force, he said, would not work unless the US provided a significant backstop: ‘They need USA.’
“In short, Zelenskyy insisted he would not agree to a ceasefire, because Russia would not honor it, unless the US provided precisely what Trump had seemingly already ruled out.
Zelenskyy says he’s grateful for US support but he acts entitled to it. He still hasn’t apologized for his behavior. And now he’s demanding the US do more. Zelensky, like Europe, doesn’t respect us. And relationships without mutual respect can’t last.
People say The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in 1994 provided security assurances, but it did not include a binding defense commitment. Even pro-war voices admit the US is not legally obligated to defend Ukraine militarily under the Budapest Memorandum.
To the people defending Zelenskyy: watch the full video. His behavior perfectly encapsulates the disrespect, dislike, and even contempt the majority of Europeans hold toward Americans.