One of the things that happens when secular leftists get control of a country is that they make it illegal to criticize the beliefs of the government. For example, in some countries, you can’t criticize global warming mythology. In other countries, you can’t disagree with abortion rights. And in other countries, you can’t disagree with LGBT lifestyles. Not even respectfully. Not even in private.

To give an example, Canada supports LGBT so much, that they’ve made it illegal for people to disagree with it.

Christian Post reported this:

On Wednesday, Canada’s House of Chambers unanimously passed Bill C-4, a bill that if — or when it passes in the Senate, will make conversion therapy an illegal offense punishable by up to five years in prison.

The Canadian government believes the Bible is filled with harmful myths about homosexuality and transgenderism — therefore, it is necessary to strip freedom of expression and freedom of religion from Canadian Christians.

When Bill C-4 becomes law, anyone who preaches what the Bible says about homosexuality and transgenderism could be sentenced to up to five years in prison.

That includes pastors and Christian counselors who believe what the Bible says about homosexuality and transgenderism.

Pastors and Biblical counselors who teach that homosexuality and transgenderism are unnatural and sinful thoughts and behaviors could be sentenced to prison. Christians who attempt to help homosexual and transgender people repent from their sins so they can have freedom in Christ might lose their freedom and be sentenced to prison.

The bill passed on December 9, 2021. This is why I keep telling you never to visit Canada. You don’t have the same rights to free speech  there, as you do here. It’s a police state. During the freedom convoy protests against vaccine mandates, the RCMP was trampling old women using walkers with their horses. That’s normal for Canada.

Look at this Bill C-4. That’s where the secular left in America would like to go. They also want prison sentences of up to 5 years for Christians who disagree with them on LGBT issues. Even in a private conversation. Even if you do it respectfully. Even if you’re just quoting the Bible. It doesn’t matter to them – it’s a criminal offense to be offensive to secular leftists.

So, how is the secular left doing in America?

Here’s an article from The Federalist from this week:

Kaley Chiles is a Christian counselor in Colorado. When the state passed a law forcing mental health professionals to advance radical gender ideology, she challenged it. Now, the Supreme Court has agreed to review the case — in what could bring a landmark ruling for free speech.

Chiles challenged Colorado’s law banning so-called “conversion therapy” in 2022, according to The Hill, saying it hindered her efforts to assist those with “same-sex attractions or gender identity confusion” who “prioritize their faith above their feelings.” She “never promises that she can solve” these issues but works to help clients “accept the bodies that God has given them and find peace.” Chiles sought an injunction, citing the law’s violation of her First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

She lost her case at the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, but it’s not over:

The 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against Chiles, but in November, her attorneys petitioned the Supreme Court to consider the case, according to SCOTUSblog.

ADF said the Colorado law violates Chiles’ freedom of speech by banning counselors from “having any conversation with clients under age 18 that ‘attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.’”

“Significantly, the law only prohibits counseling conversations in one direction,” reads the ADF release. “For example, it allows counseling conversations that aim to steer young people toward a gender identity different than their sex but prohibits conversations that aim to help them return to comfort with their sex when they desire that.”

I think it’s really important for Christians to understand that secular leftists are the ideological heirs of Nazis and Stalinists and other totalitarians. Atheists don’t have any rational grounding for human dignity and human rights. They think the universe is an accident, and human beings are just machines made out of meat. Just another animal. And morality? They believe in survival of the fittest.

Today’s secular leftists are great admirers of police states. They think it is wonderful when the centralized government uses threats, imprisonment, torture and even murder in order to force their ideologies onto citizens. Why think that our secular leftists are any different than the secular leftists of North Korea, or the Soviet Union? They believe the same things. The only difference is that here, they haven’t won. Yet.

So, Justin Trudeau, a former part-time drama teacher and snowboarding instructor, resigned as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. He was the Prime Minister. The Liberal Party has selected a new leader, Mark Carney. Mark Carney has a record that goes back to the United Kingdom, which is a fascist secular left country that bans free speech and prosecutes peaceful pro-lifers.

Let’s find out more about Carney, from this excellent article on Breitbart News:

The Justin Trudeau era is coming to a close in Canada, with the governing Liberal Party selecting former central banker Mark Carney as its new leader and eventual prime minister on Sunday.

Conservative leader reacts:

Critics, such as Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, have accused the former Goldman Sachs investment banker of being “sneaky” and of representing a doubling down of the failed economic and environmentalist Trudeau-era agendas.

Never ran a campaign, never elected to office:

While never elected to public office, likely the first prime minister to have never been voted for at any level, Carney has been deeply involved in politics in Canada and internationally for nearly two decades. He was first installed as the head of the Bank of Canada during the 2008 financial crisis.

Anti-Brexit, pro-EU:

Carney later became the first non-British person to be selected to lead the Bank of England in 2013. During his tenure as governor of the UK’s central bank, Carney frequently faced criticism for spreading “project fear” warnings of a potential financial crisis due to the Brexit withdrawal from the European Union.

Fascist views of opposition to COVID lockdowns:

During the Chinese coronavirus crisis, Carney served as an advisor to Boris Johnson’s government in Britain and later to Justin Trudeau’s government in Canada, both of which instituted some of the strictest lockdown restrictions in the Western world.

Carney publicly branded the Canadian “Freedom Convoy” uprising against the draconian measures, including vaccine mandates, as representing “sedition” against the government in Ottawa and advocated for the government to go after those who funded the protest movement.

“By now, anyone sending money to the convoy should be in no doubt: You are funding sedition. Foreign funders of an insurrection interfered in our domestic affairs from the start. Canadian authorities should take every step within the law to identify and thoroughly punish them. The involvement of foreign governments and any officials connected to them should be identified, exposed and addressed,” he wrote in 2022.

You might remember that Canada froze the bank accounts of peaceful protestors, leading to a flight of capital and investment for their little third-world Banana Republic.

He’s also an eco-socialist – using global warming alarmism to push for higher taxes, more spending, more regulations, and larger government:

Carney has also been at the forefront of the international green agenda, having served as the United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance from 2019 until January when he stepped down to run for the Liberal Party leadership.

Additionally, Carney led the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), an initiative to advance climate policies throughout financial institutions throughout the West. The institution has recently suffered significant blows, as top American banks, including J.P. Morgan, withdrew from the scheme in the wake of the re-election of President Donald Trump, who has vowed to combat so-called Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) policies.

If he wins, I would expect some sort of Chinese social credit system, but along the lines of complying with green energy socialism. Expect the sort of economic contractions that we see in France and Germany, where you have leaders crowing about supporting Ukraine, as they purchase all their (dirty) energy from Russia, because they don’t make any of their own. Carney is a huge supporter of carbon taxes, and will likely want Canadians to to pay more for “green” appliances, “green” vehicles and “green” homes. It’s a convenient way to squeeze the last bit of self-sufficiency out of voters, so that they have to agree with the central government in order to be able to afford to live.

Right now, the Conservative Party candidate is in the lead, but Canada has about 66% secular leftist voters. Which means that any candidate from a secular left party is going to have a lot of votes from this majority. It’s not a good country. Not a good place to live. Not even a good place to visit. And definitely not a good place to invest. They simply don’t understand basic economics.

In this article, I will start with an anecdote. After that, we’ll see what kind of student performance we are getting for the taxpayer dollars we spend on education. Is the federal Department of Education doing a good job of producing high-performing students? And after that, we’ll talk about what the Republicans can do to abolish the federal Department of Education.

Here’s the funny anecdote, reported by Newsweek:

Aleysha Ortiz, 19, alleges she cannot read or write yet says she graduated with honors from Hartford Public High School in 2024. She has since filed a lawsuit against the Hartford Board of Education and city officials, accusing them of negligence in failing to provide adequate special education services throughout her schooling, per reporting from Connecticut’s News 8 WTNH.

[…]Ortiz told CNN she was promoted through school without acquiring fundamental literacy skills. In a May 2024 city council meeting, she testified that after 12 years in Hartford Public Schools, she was unable to read or write, despite being awarded an honors diploma.

She can’t read or write, but she’s now a university student at the University of Connecticut.

So, let’s take a look at the federal Department of Education. Are they doing a good job of improving student test scores?

The Heritage Foundation has the answer:

Nearly 45 years after its creation under former President Jimmy Carter, high school seniors’ math and reading outcomes remain stagnant. Worse still, the academic achievement gap between the United States’s poorest and wealthiest students, a gap of four grade levels, has not narrowed since the department’s inception.

These dismal results come at a staggering cost. Funding this vast federal agency, with its more than 4,000 employees, has cost parents and U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars. Since 1980, K-12 spending and college costs have doubled in real terms, while every additional dollar funneled through Washington has come at the expense of local schools, including public, charter, and private, that actually educate our children.

As the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess recently pointed out, more than 1,000 Department of Education employees are paid more than $160,000 annually, with nearly 90 making upwards of $200,000—more than four times the average starting teacher salary.

The most common complaint from parents about federal control of education is not the inefficiency. It’s the weaponization of government against parents – the same parents who pay the salaries of the education bureaucrats.

More:

In just the past four years, the Biden administration has weaponized the federal government against parents and children in unprecedented ways. The FBI, under President Joe Biden’s direction, created “threat tags” to monitor parents simply for exercising their First Amendment rights at school board meetings and speaking up about critical matters such as school safety, boys in female bathrooms and locker rooms, and sexualized content in classrooms.

Meanwhile, the Department of Education rewrote Title IX rules to expand the definition of “sex” discrimination to include “gender identity” and then handed enforcement over to the Department of Agriculture, which threatened to withhold school meal funding from institutions that refused to embrace this radical ideology.

OK, excellent. We’re spending a lot of money on these bureaucrats, and getting lousy results. That would be unacceptable in the competitive, consumer-focused private sector. But it’s totally fine in a government monopoly that gives customers no opt-out.

Let’s shut it down. How can we shut it down? This article from The Federalist explains how the process has already started.

McMahon said that the review of the department was “long overdue,” noting the over $1 trillion spent by taxpayers on a government agency that has overseen plummeting education outcomes for American students. She also noted massive student debt for obtaining degrees that are less and less valuable, anti-American indoctrination in schools, and teacher shortages due to bureaucratic “red tape.”

“Disruption leads to innovation and gets results. We must start thinking about our final mission at the department as an overhaul — a last chance to restore the culture of liberty and excellence that made American education great,” she said. “Changing the status quo can be daunting. But every staff member of this Department should be enthusiastic about any change that will benefit students. “

McMahon laid out three “convictions” that will guide the closure of the department: Parents should be “the primary decision makers in their children’s education”; “taxpayer-funded education should refocus” on educational pillars like math, reading, science, and history as opposed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and gender ideology; and education beyond high school should revive its value by aligning degrees “with workforce needs.”

States, school systems, teachers, and families alike would benefit from being able to tailor education funds to their individual needs, as opposed to having objectives dictated by federal control, McMahon said.

By the way, a lot of states aren’t waiting for relief from federal mismanagement of education. The Federalist reports on which states already have school choice:

On Tuesday, Wyoming became the 15th state to enact universal school choice into law with Gov. Mark Gordon’s signature on the Steamboat Legacy Scholarship Act.

The Cowboy State joins a rapidly growing group of states that have passed laws giving all (or nearly all) families statewide choice concerning their children’s kindergarten through twelfth-grade education. Those states are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia.

The act grants families who choose to participate with an education savings account of $7,000 per student per year to allocate toward approved K-12 educational expenses. Education savings accounts with universal eligibility are the gold standard of school choice programs due to the flexibility they provide parents to select the best learning avenues for their children.

Do you live in a state without school choice? Why? Get out of there!