Hard to overstate the significance of this.

J.D. Vance is linking up with Lance Wallanu, the man who popularized the Seven Mountain Mandate that says conservative Christians are called to rule society, and who has been warning that Kamala Harris is possessed by demons.

https://twitter.com/taylormatthewd/status/1839507621339963653

Want a flavor of what Vance is mainstreaming? Read my story from May about FlashPoint, the Christian TV program blending Newsmax-style political commentary with prophetic warnings about the coming end times.

Wallnau is a regular. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/f…

NEW: School officials in Southlake, Texas, are refusing to negotiate w/ the feds to resolve four student civil rights violations.

The district argues, in part, that the Supreme Court's overturning of Chevron limits the Education Department's power to enforce civil rights laws. The district's full letter to Education Department lawyers can be read here:

And here is the district's statement on the cases: resources.finalsite.net/images/v172289…
resources.finalsite.net/images/v172289…

A Texas megachurch pastor who advised Donald Trump — and who has repeatedly warned his congregation that Satan is at work inside public school libraries — has confessed to “inappropriate sexual behavior” with a child four decades ago.
christianpost.com/news/pastor-ro… The name of the pastor, Robert Morris, will be familiar to readers of “They Came for the Schools.”

Want to understand how the mainstream GOP has changed in the era of Trump? Watch this video of Charlie Kirk.

Kirk in 2018: “We do have a separation of church and state, and we should support that.”

Kirk in 2022: “There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication.” New this morning with @akarl_smith:

How Charlie Kirk came to embrace the Seven Mountains Mandate, and what his political and religious transformation tells us about the future of right-wing politics in America. nbcnews.com/politics/2024-…

The Carroll school board in Southlake, Texas — the district at the center of my new book, “They Came for the Schools” — voted last night to authorize the Alliance Defending Freedom to sue on its behalf to stop the Biden Administration from extending federal civil rights protections under Title IX to LGBTQ students. You’ve likely heard of ADF, the powerful Christian conservative legal fund that helped overturn Roe v Wade and has fought laws granting civil rights to LGBTQ people. newyorker.com/magazine/2023/…

My book "They Came for the Schools" is out today.
It tries to make sense of America's school board wars by showing how & why that fight exploded in one Texas suburb.

To really understand the anti-DEI backlash, I needed to uncover a much longer history.

Here's what I found🧵 First, some context: In 2021, Southlake, Texas, became a poster child — or cautionary tale — of the right’s new war on “woke.” The strategy pioneered there would be copied in towns across the nation — quietly shaping what untold numbers of children learn. chalkbeat.org/2024/05/10/the…

LifeWise Academy teaches Bible lessons during the public school day, and it's spreading fast — with chapters in more than 300 schools across 12 states reaching 35,000 students.

I spent some time reporting on the program and its founder's ambitious goals.🧵nbcnews.com/news/us-news/l… First of all, this is legal. Many are surprised to learn that under a 1952 Supreme Court case, groups are free to offer religious instruction during school hours, so long as it's off-campus and not funded by the gov.

LifeWise has supercharged the concept. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/l…

NEW from me: A look at Speaker Mike Johnson's ties to evangelical activist David Barton, who's spent decades fighting church-state separation & who says he's already in touch with Johnson's team to offer advice on who he should hire to his staff. @NBCNewsnbcnews.com/news/us-news/e… Barton said on his podcast that he’d already been in touch with Johnson’s team, “talking with them about staff” and offering advice on who the speaker should hire.

“They need to be the people with his worldview,” said Barton. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/e…

Rep. Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the U.S. House, sued New Orleans in 2003 to block the city from giving health care benefits to the partners of gay employees. (Johnson was a lawyer for Alliance Defense Fund, the influential group now known as Alliance Defending Freedom) In 2004, Johnson defended a Louisiana elementary school that had been leading students in Christian prayer at recess, arguing that "The founders of this country believed that religion and morality were indispensable."

🧵Last August, I was listening to a feed of a heated North Texas school board meeting while juggling my nightly dad duties.

Which is why I was getting my 3-year-old to bed when I heard a mom make a shocking statement that @ahylton26 and I have now spent a year investigating. 1/ The mom said a teacher in Grapevine, Texas, had given her child access to information that led the teen to change genders.

As her time expired, she said, "I lost my son."

As I rubbed my own kid's back, the thought hit me: What book could separate a parent from their child? 2/

A Franklin, Tennessee, council member just held up a photo of what she described as a drag queen biting into “a live, beating heart” in explaining why she’s going the vote against granting a permit for a LGBTQ pride festival.

“This could have happened here.” This same Franklin aldermen is scolding pride festival organizers for refusing to offer a booth to this religious group, which believes that homosexual attraction is the result of Original Sin and teachers gay youth to embrace a lifetime of celibacy: equipyourcommunity.org/what-does-equi…

“I believe that their lifestyle is wrong,” this man said, speaking out against allowing an LGBTQ pride festival in Franklin, Tennessee.

Folks came wearing “Protect ALL kids” stickers. Lots of others wearing rainbow T-shirts as well.

Happening now. “I’ve had gay and lesbian friends since before these kids were alive,” this speaker said, calling on Franklin city leaders to not allow an LGBTQ pride festival in town.

WATCH: Last month, at an event hosted by Patriot Mobile, David Barton urged North Texas school boards to seize on recent SCOTUS decisions to "go on the offensive" and impose Christian values in public schools:

"We can now go back to singing the traditional Christmas carols." David Barton continued: Student-led prayer, prayer at graduation, Ten Commandments displays, for-credit Bible classes: "We need to be aggressive in pushing these things" in public schools.

RIGHT NOW: David & Tim Barton, who've said the purpose of public schools "is to teach students to love and serve God," make the case for forcing public schools to display the 10 Commandments in every classroom.

One suggests the measure could have stopped the Nashville shooting. Context:

https://twitter.com/Mike_Hixenbaugh/status/1642911722523574272?s=20

Today in Austin, two Southlake Carroll school board members spoke at a press conference alongside GOP legislators about their recent decision to leave the Texas Association of School Boards over "woke, leftists policies."

The lawmakers called on other districts to follow suit. It's part of a yearslong pattern on Southlake leading the way in the backlash against DEI programs and LGBTQ inclusion in schools.

You can watch the full press conference here: tlchouse.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.ph…

Two GOP bills to chip away at the separation of church & state and promote Christianity in public schools are getting a hearing in the Texas Senate this week.

One, SB 1515, would require schools to display the Ten Commandments (King James version) in EVERY classroom. 1/ Every K-12 public classroom in the state of Texas would be required to display these words:

"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant."

Yes, please explain that line to a 6-year-old. 2/

NEW: The Carroll school board in Southlake will once again consider removing the words “gender” and “sexual orientation” from the non-discrimination statement in the district’s student code of conduct.

This year’s SCOC vs a new draft proposal: This comes from a committee appointed by the board to review district policy, & comes three years after the district added explicit language to the student code of conduct prohibiting racial slurs and bullying based on sexual orientation. Most of that language would go away.

The new Twitter feed is a mess. Tonight mine is filled with far-right influencer and conspiracy theory accounts that I don’t follow. In a few swipes I was served up a couple election deniers, the PizzaGate guy and an anti-Muslim extremist. (Yes I know I can switch the timeline to see the latest posts. As someone who tries not to spend all day on here, I preferred the curated feed)

In the first tweet, Elon adopts the exact philosophical position — “Freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” — that he attacks in the second tweet. “Yet unfortunately the debate over free speech online is also being shaped by fundamentally incorrect understandings of the First Amendment.” brookings.edu/techstream/mis…

NEW w/ ⁦⁦⁦@KateReports⁩: School board wars over Covid, racism, gender and sexuality have “softened the ground” for private school vouchers in Texas.

Now far-right megadonors are spending big to get the policy across the finish line. nbcnews.com/news/us-news/t… “These groups have been demonizing what is being taught,” effectively eroding faith in public schools, @bjrottinghaus told me. “Whether it’s true or not is irrelevant. If people believe that it’s true, then it’s politically potent.” nbcnews.com/news/us-news/t…

An example of how mandatory reporting & the resulting fear of criminal charges create a massive dragnet that ensnares innocent parents: 24 out of 25 abuse reports called in by PA educators turn out to be unfounded.

One of many findings in our new report: nbcnews.com/news/us-news/c… And to be clear, this does not mean there was conclusive evidence of abuse even in the 1 in 25 reports from educators that were “substantiated” by child welfare caseworkers. Context: