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All right, boys and girls, we are back with another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast brought to you by Fox News. You can check out all of our podcasts at foxnewspodcast.com. Today, I'm going to be talking with Ian Pryor, someone who's probably been on your TV screens if you're a Fox viewer over the past couple of months. He's someone who's at the tip of the spear on the conversation regarding critical race theory in public schools and
out of control school boards who have felt empowered during the course of the pandemic to really do whatever they want to and ignore parents on a host of different issues. Ian is someone who previously worked within the Department of Justice. He is now the executive director of Fight for Schools, which you can find out more about at fightforschools.com. He's also someone who ended up on the National School Board Association's
list of bad actors, their "Mean Girl" list that you might have heard of, that really did activate a number of different parents.
who were curious about what was really going on within Loudoun County schools and have made themselves heard across the country in lots of different corners. We talked about that, about what he's learned from the experience of fighting in Loudoun County, Virginia, and what he believes others should take from his experience as it relates to the school boards that they confront across the country. Ian Pryor, coming up next. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little...
Ian Pryor, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Yeah, thanks for having me, Ben. So,
So I wanted to talk to you because you've been someone who has been ubiquitous on Fox over the past several weeks and someone who has been speaking directly to so many of the issues that were at play in this Virginia gubernatorial race. But I'm not sure that our listeners or Fox viewers generally really know that much about you or how you even got involved into this race.
very critical and politically divisive fight that has been playing out. So I wanted to hear that from you. Maybe give us a little bit of how you got involved in this educational battle and what really was the motivation behind you taking a stand on it? Yeah, it's been a year-long battle, but it's really been sort of
heated up over the past seven months. And I would go back to, I think it was last summer when, you know, I read a couple of things, right? So the first thing I read was Matt Taibbi's article about Robin DiAngelo. And I'd never heard of her before. And, you know, she wrote White Fragility. And, you know, I just thought the way he wrote
wrote it up was humorous, but also kind of scary, seeing that this person is making, you know, millions of dollars going around to big corporations. So I picked up her book, I slogged through it. It was interesting, to say the least. And
You know, I listened to James Lindsay on Joe Rogan. That was another thing that sort of happened last summer. A neighbor of mine sent that over to me as we had been talking about the Robin DiAngelo stuff from Taibbi's article. And I just, I was like shocked that this stuff was going on at such a high level. It kind of brought everything together though. I mean, you think about all the different language uses now, the different words that we're talking about. You know, everyone's talking about systemic racism and you see, well, this is a,
This is a money-making venture here from people like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi. And then after that, the third piece of that was that I read an article in the Free Beacon that Loudoun County Public Schools was using teaching tolerance materials or resources for lesson plans.
And so that to me, right off the bat, you know, having worked at C4s, 501 C4 nonprofits, you know, that nonprofit doesn't mean charity. And so I called the principal or I emailed the principal and asked if this was true. And they said, no, but I decided to check it out for myself. And that's when I attended my first school board equity committee meeting, which was virtual and was last August. At that point,
The things that they were focused on were two things. Their detailed plan to end systemic racism in a lot of county public schools. And they had a lot of things like, you know, changing the names of team mascots or, you know, that kind of thing.
And then the other piece was this equity plan that they had come up with. Both of these things were basically done at the direction and consultation of a company called the Equity Collaborative, which is out of California. And that's when I really started to dig in. You know, it was interesting to see. I went back and I read your article for us.
from last October where you outlined what was going on in Loudoun County. And it was interesting to sort of look back at it in retrospect
without having any idea at the time that it would end up becoming an issue that would be, you know, certainly of statewide import, but national import as well. When you started to feel like you needed to write something about what was going on, did you have any idea that it was going to be something that took off to that degree?
No, not at all. In fact, you know, when I wrote that article, it was based on a couple of different things, right? One, I went through that equity collaborative report, and I was just shocked at how flimsy it was. You know, they were using this to claim that Loudoun County Public Schools today are systemically racist.
And what they did was they had focus groups. They excluded Asian and Caucasian families or parents from those focus groups. Number one, that's crazy because even if we're just talking about the diversification of Loudoun County, the diversification of Loudoun County is being driven by Asians. So for them to exclude that community from these focus groups is just, you know, insane. Second,
They had all these anecdotes. So they're doing a study and recommendation, and they're just talking to parents who have these anecdotal stories about how their kid who was black got in a fight with a white kid, and the white kid didn't get as much discipline. Well, we don't know the circumstances of that, and it's just one person giving one side of the equation, and we're not hearing about the other side or even how discipline was meted out.
So I just said to myself, this is an insane study for them to base an entire, you know, multimillion dollar effort on. And then I FOIAed the bills and learned that they spent half a million dollars in 2019 alone. So that's really what triggered me to write the article. You know, I ended up from there going to a single school board meeting in October and
And I didn't address the equity collaborative issue. What I did address was a proposed policy that I learned about that I also put in an article where the school system wanted to potentially discipline teachers if they spoke out against the policy
schools commitment to equity or their equity plan. And that discipline would include personal time and not just on social media. So if you had a teacher that, you know, walks across the street and is telling their neighbor that, Hey, you know what they're training us to do in schools, it's crazy. And that neighbor called the superintendent, that teacher could have been disciplined. Now that ultimately didn't pass, but that's what I went there to talk about specifically first amendment issues.
But, you know, it was October. I was I was involved in some campaigns last year. And I mean, you know how it is after elections when you're involved in that stuff, you just kind of check out. And I did. I checked out and I didn't really think about it much more. You know, I thought about, well, maybe I need to pull my kids and go to private school or Catholic school. But that kind of faded. And and I just forgot about it really until until March of this year. The ramifications of.
for speaking out against the school board or their equity program as a teacher. That itself kind of was an indication about the willingness of the school board to engage
in these anti-speech, almost very disturbing, almost dystopian efforts in terms of controlling what people were saying, even when they weren't in the schools. Did that surprise you at the time? Did you kind of think, wow, these people are really out of control? Or did you feel like they just didn't really understand the degree to which they were infringing on personal freedom?
I think it was a little bit of both. I think at first...
My thought was this, do they not have lawyers researching this? I mean, this is a pretty clear first amendment violation. I mean, it's a, a speaker's violation and there's also, you know, first amendment right to listen as well. And it was clear that they didn't consider that they eventually pulled that proposed policy because it got massive backlash and not just from conservatives or constitutionalists, but the teachers, the local teachers union was not happy with that proposal. So it was,
You know, I thought it was incompetence at the time. It wasn't until later that I started to realize that there is a very anti-free speech, anti-First Amendment, you know, zeitgeist going around the Loudoun County Public School Board and the administration. We'll have more with my interview with Ian Pryor right after this.
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I think that one of the issues that really crops up to me and looking back at all these stories is, you know, you have that instance of the bureaucrat who has an enormous amount of control within a small, confined area.
I think of the old Garrison Keillor side about like the most powerful person in the town being the one janitor who has all the keys, you know, and it's like that, that person who has all the keys, you know, they can open any door in the town. But, but, but they're only limited to that town. Was there a little bit of that going on? You felt like where, you know,
You know, even if these people, you know, maybe didn't have, you know, enormous power in the grand scheme of things, their their their limited power was something that that they viewed as being essentially unchecked.
Yeah, I think that's right. And you also have to remember that as I was writing this article and thinking about the school board and school board politics generally and how we treat that, this was a hotspot for parents organizing and trying to get schools reopened. And I wasn't in that fight. You know, I came to get to know a lot of those people later.
But they had been at it for a few months by that point in time, and they were extremely frustrated with the school board for not reopening schools. And so they had already, you know, the school board had already started exercising its power in ways that nobody ever thought imaginable when they voted in 2019.
And obviously, you know, you have a pandemic that puts a challenge on on school board members and administrations everywhere. But they you know, they didn't meet the moment. And I think that is where, you know, that's kind of the true origin story here. When you go out and you vote for school board members, oftentimes, you know, you're voting because if you know their positions, those positions are we're going to have more recess or we're going to have more school busses.
Certainly not, you know, we're going to keep your kids out of schools because the unions want us to do that, or we're going to inject political ideologies into the very fabric of how we teach. Those things weren't on the ballot in 2019. And I'd be surprised if those school board members even thought of that when they were running. But it's clear that once they were in power, others that had perhaps even more power started the influence game, and that's what we ended up with.
Tell me about the major characters on the Loudoun County School Board, the ones that you came to know and and what they started to do as it related to your criticism and the criticism of other parents. Sure. Well, the chairwoman of the school board, Brenda Sheridan, she's been on there for.
I think about 10 years, maybe 11 years. My understanding of her is that she sort of rules that board with an iron fist. You have the vice chairwoman. Her name is Atusa Reeser. She was elected in 2019. She is extremely political. I mean, her social media feeds all summer were her campaign events for McCullough, for various candidates. Those are sort of the two leaders
leaders of the board, de facto at least. And then, of course, you have Beth Barts. Now, Beth Barts was someone that was
Elected in 2019, she, you know, she really made a name for herself during the COVID pandemic for her social media behavior. You know, she would attack parents. She would get in social media fights with parents. She would put out misinformation about COVID statistics or hospital beds being filled up. And that ultimately led to her being publicly reprimanded last November.
which, you know, there's three things you can do on the school board to discipline your members. And that one is public reprimand, two is censure, and three, the chairwoman can strip people of their committees. So she was reprimanded in November for disclosing attorney-client privilege on social media.
That apparently didn't have the impact that the school board thought it would. And she continued her behavior and she was ultimately censured in March of this year. I believe it's like March 4th. So that's like the second step you can do in the discipline process.
She put out a statement after that, basically blasting the rest of the board for censoring her. So the chairwoman comes back the next week and strips her of her committees. So those three you have. You also have someone by the name of Denise Corbo. She's the at-large representative. She covered the entire county.
She also hasn't been to a school board meeting in months. You know, I understand she has a medical condition, but I think the rest of the school board is tired of that because they've seen her traveling around and promoting her private book company. So there's now a dynamic there that's getting interesting where, you know, people that sort of got elected on the Democrat ticket or with the Democrat endorsement are now at odds with each other. You have a guy named Harris Mahadabi who represents the Ashburn district.
You also had a woman by the name of Leslie King. She actually passed away this summer. So she's been replaced by the person that ran against her, Andrew Hoyler, who, you know, he's been on the board for about three weeks. I think he's already held three town hall meetings, which is more than probably the rest of the board has done in two years, which I think is extremely interesting. And then you also have two...
John Beatty, who's endorsed by the Republicans, he's now running for Congress. He's still on there, but he's running in the 10th District of Virginia. And Jeff Morse, who's the former chairman, and he's been there for about 10 years. And then finally, you have someone, Ian Sorotkin, who's at my district, Blue Ridge, who also was elected in 2019. So most of this school board was elected in 2019.
with the exception of two and they have a four-year term. The interest that you had in this school board that began when you started to do this investigating
It's obviously not something that most people across the country spend all that much time on. They don't tend to vote in school board elections, or if they do, they tend to vote for incumbents or slates that they're just given when they show up on election day. They're more focused on other things.
Did this experience reorient your attitude toward the importance of school boards as it relates both to your own life and to the importance that you think it ought to have in the lives of most citizens?
Yes, 1000%. You know, I, I like probably most of the people in this country have spent all my political focus really on national politics and on some level state politics. But you realize that that school boards do two things that are extremely important. One, the most important is they, they run your schools. And so the policies that get put in place that results in the education of our children are,
Those are approved by our school board. And, you know, our children literally are going to be the future leaders of this country. And so it's important to know who is setting the policy, who are the people behind these policies and who are influencing the individuals on the school board. This is number one. Number two, you know, school boards are sort of entry level positions in the political scheme and, you
You know, when people run for those, they often use that to move on to the next level and next level and next level. And so you need to sort of think through who you're putting on there because, you know, you could end up with people get momentum from these school board seats and then move into higher office positions.
And we want to make sure that we have the best sort of minor league system, at least in the political pyramid, and so that we have good candidates that can be future leaders. You know, the issue I think that comes up with so many of these things is, especially on the national news level, is an argument that, oh, well, this is just demonizing people who are just looking out for the best interests of students.
But it seems to me that upon further investigation, what you actually find is that they're putting the priorities of their own particular ideology ahead of what's best for the students. What was your feeling about that?
Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. The idea that we're demonizing people because they're looking out for students, that's what they're supposed to be doing, right? I mean, you go to school board elections in an ideal world. These are individuals that just want to be good stewards of, you know, here in Lowry County, certainly the $1.6 billion budget that they get and our children's education. But in reality, I think there's two things at play. One,
They already have sort of their political ideology. It's just not apparent when they're running for school board because there's no real means to communicate that to the public because these are really not well-funded races. But number two, you have in place special interests and outside groups that
You know, whether it's unions, whether it's, you know, other organizations that are well organized and they're small, but they go and they get the ear of these school board members and they make their lives miserable if they don't go along with what they want. They'll do that on social media. They'll do that politically. And then you have the rest of the people, which are just parents, right? They go to work. They work.
They watch football on Sunday. They take their kids to the park. And they're not organized because there's so many of them. And so to really have a different interest and get a seat at the table, it was incumbent upon parents to get organized and to come up with a plan to become young,
really more powerful than these small pockets of special interests that really only care about a few issues and then allow those issues to become the dominant themes at school boards and in our schools.
You know, I think that when it comes to the priorities that Republican candidates, conservative candidates and frankly, just conservative minded people, small C are going to have in the coming year. It's going to focus a lot on education and on the fallout from the different experiences that you're detailing here.
But I'm not sure that they know yet what the best answer is and what they prioritize is not necessarily going to be in line with what you or other concerned parents might want them to. So from your perspective, what is the policy solution for?
that ought to be advocated for in this regard. Do you have a favored solution? Does it look like a parent's bill of rights or some kind of requirements that are tied to federal spending, not related to ideological issues maybe, but simply related to what is expected of what public schools offer parents in terms of information, access to knowledge of curriculum and the like?
Yes. So a couple of policy, the Bill of Rights, first of all, I mean, that's something we drafted one locally back in, I want to say June and presented it to the school board. And we had, you know, a bunch of different policies in there from regular town hall meetings to transparency. That's one of the things that I think is most important.
is to get the information to parents without having them go through the FOIA process. So if you're engaging in teacher trainings, those teacher trainings should be put online. Classroom lesson plans, materials, books, they should all be put online so that parents can see what's going on. I think there needs to be a nonpartisan inspector general that exists in these school systems that can investigate when such transparency concerns
programs are being violated. I think we need to start looking at school boards like we would other legislative bodies or administrative agencies where we hold them accountable beyond voting for them every four years. And that's one of the things I kept hearing from the other side was, well, you're just trying to undo an election. No one's trying to undo an election. When
Once you get elected, that doesn't give you carte blanche to completely violate your code of conduct, violate the law, make it difficult for parents to collaborate on their children's education. There are processes in place at the federal level, certainly. We heard all about the impeachment process the last several years. There needs to be ways to hold school board members accountable beyond just electing them. So for me, transparency, accountability, federal spending, certainly, but I think
Here at the local level, so much of our tax dollars, I think 65% of our tax dollars go to Lowndam County Public Schools. They've got a $1.6 billion budget. And so there needs to be, you know, procedures and controls put in place where, you know, some of that spending has oversight or a lot of that spending has oversight and, you know, through our taxes. Yeah.
I am certainly curious what Glenn Youngkin will be able to accomplish as governor. But do you hope that his election in particular will lead to more answers about what was going on behind the scenes in Loudoun County as it relates to these issues? And of course, we haven't even mentioned it yet. The incredibly tragic and sad story about this sexual assault that was covered up.
I do. And I think, you know, while it's so important that we're going to have a Governor Youngkin, it's equally important that we're going to have an Attorney General Meares. He's already pledged that he's going to investigate Loudoun County Public Schools. And so I think that getting him in office is really going to expose
All the things that have been happening, not just this year, but going back to the equity collaborative and how the origin story behind the equity collaborative, which I also detailed in the Federalist, I think it's going to be eye opening. And it's really going to show just how much money is out there and it's being made off of our tax dollars by these individuals.
you know, equity consultants and DEI trainers. I mean, it is millions and millions of dollars. You know, we had one bill where they say, oh, you know, you don't teach critical race theory. That's what they say, right? Like, yeah, no kidding. I've never said you taught critical race theory like physics or chemistry, but it's a lens through which you educate children about America. And we had a bill from the Equity Collaborative. They're still charging like $625 an hour for teacher training.
I mean, that's insane. That is our money. Yeah, I mean, that's just that's absolutely insane. One one thing that does seem to be a factor in so many of these things, as you mentioned at the beginning, is that there's a very profitable angle to voicing this type of dogma.
I wonder how much is that actually the motive of the people who are involved in it from your perspective versus believing that they are engaged in some kind of of courageous crusade to right the wrongs of a racist world? I, you know, I think that it's a combination of both. I think a lot of these people on school boards are not necessarily sophisticated in that way. And just
they may have certain beliefs that have been influenced by the media, by what they read, by the information they get, by what they see in social media. And you have these companies that are profiting off of that and they know it and they know that, you know, we can go into this school district where you're going to have, you know, very left-leaning school board members, very left-leaning administrators, and we can get ourselves some fat contracts. You know, one of the things that I go back to with this equity collaborative is
This whole incident with them and their contracts all can be traced to one thing. And that was in 2019. There was what was billed as a runaway slave game at Madison's Trust Elementary School for Black History Month.
It was not a runaway slave game. What it was was an underground railroad simulation that the two phys ed teachers, actually one of them learned about it at a conference that he was sent to by the schools. It's a simulation that was designed by a guy named Anthony Galloway out of Minnesota, and he is an anti-racist and equity coach. So this was an anti-racist program
that these teachers put in place. They had the school backing them. The principal was tweeting about how great it was.
And then one parent complained about it to the NAACP out here. And then the NAACP made it this huge story. The administrators threw the gym teachers under the bus. They all deleted the tweets talking about how great the game was. The former superintendent comes out and says, OK, here's what we're going to do. We're going to get an equity committee on the school board. We're going to create an office of equity at Loudoun County Public Schools. And we're going to hire this equity collaborative.
It's even more interesting that there's a guy by the name of Glenn Singleton, who is another one of these equity trainer coaches. He's got a book, two books, Courageous Conversations and More Courageous Conversations. His second book spends an entire chapter highlighting this underground railroad simulation and the guy who invented it. This book is
is all over Lowndes County Public Schools' equity materials. It's also in Ralph Northam's, you know, Reimagining African American History document. It's listed as a preferred resource. So they basically, in trying to do what the anti-racist equity consultants are saying, these teachers got thrown under the bus and we've now spent millions of dollars to do what's being done here in Lowndes County Public Schools.
I want to ask you for your advice for other parents across the country. There are lots of people who have to be listening to what you're saying and wondering whether this is a situation that is being played out either behind the scenes or in public at their own school board. And if they need to be engaged on this topic, what they should know going into it. What's the advice that you would give to them?
So I bring it down into really three buckets. First, you need to investigate. So parents need to become basically private detectives and they need to use Freedom of Information Act to go out there and get those materials. They need to communicate, right? They need to talk with each other, understand what's going on at different schools. The Daily Wire story that Lou Groziak broke about the sexual assault cover-up never would have come out if parents hadn't been communicating publicly
about what happened at the second school. And you need to go out there and speak to the media. And one of the things I've found is that, yeah, okay, I may do this for a living where I go out and speak publicly and speak to the media, but there's lots of parents that
Out here, they've done a fantastic job doing that. And so it may be intimidating at first, but I've watched some of these parents grow so much and be able to just be dynamite on television and on the radio. And then the third piece is to activate. You need to get an organization going, be able to raise money, have fundraisers if you can, have rallies, do things that
you know, put you on the map and inspire others to, to join your cause. So that's, that's my advice is investigate, communicate, activate. Before I let you go in, there's certainly going to be conversation issues.
about this topic moving forward that spreads in a number of different directions. And I think that one in particular is going to be what is the alternative to this type of approach to schooling? As you've learned more about all of the different options that are out there and how much this has been something that has infected the conversation within public schools,
What is your advice to parents who just want to have some alternative? Because the ones that have come up to me, they're saying, you know, should I go to private school? Should I homeschool? I don't feel like I can change what's going on necessarily in my community and time to help my own kids. What should I do? Do you have a message to them on that front?
Well, you know, my my thought on that was at first I was going to send my kids to private school and then I decided, you know, I'm going to fight. I'm not going to I'm not going to just pull my kids from from public school, pay the taxes, send them to private school and let, you know, 90 percent of the kids in America that do go to public school. They're going to outnumber the kids that go to private school. Right.
And they're going to be our future leaders. So, you know, first step is fight. But if you can't, then yes, I mean, there's lots of homeschooling options out there. I've met so many people now that homeschool their kids. It's not something I ever thought of, you know, five years ago. And then there's the private school option, Catholic school, religious schools. I do think that what we're going to start seeing is
few things one there's going to be more private schools and charter schools out there there's going to be more homeschool options out there that you know this issue has obviously blown up um people are going to pull their kids from public schools so there's going to be more opportunities it's going to be more competition hopefully prices come down i also think school choice i mean school choice needs to be on the table you know i hear from the other side the opposition they
how they base their critical race theory approach and how they fix systemic racism. They say, well, we don't want kids to be hamstrung by their zip codes. Well, that's absolutely right. And that's why you should have school choice so that if you are in a place with underperforming schools, you have the option to take that money and go to a private school or go to a religious school. And then you won't be
hamstrung by your zip codes. So, I mean, the argument works against them, I think. So there's to keep the pressure on because I believe that we are going to be moving into a new phase of education in this country where we're going to have more competition. We're going to have school choice and we're just going to have more options for parents moving forward. Ian Pryor, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today. Thanks a lot, Ben.
At this point, I think we're all familiar with the different stories that are coming out about various aspects of society where people who become vaccine resistant or who have personal reasons for not taking a vaccine are being driven out of polite society and out of their careers, potentially in many instances, careers that they've spent decades building. I wanted to share one story from Hannah McDonald, who wrote about her own experience at The Federalist.
The title is How COVID Vaccine Coercion Drove Me Out of West Point. In the spring of 2021, she writes, during my first year at the US Military Academy, I was told that my decision to reject getting the optional COVID-19 vaccine would not negatively affect my time as a cadet at West Point. That quickly changed.
My Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act medical privacy rights were violated when my vaccination status was released to members of the freshman class and upperclassmen who were planning our summer details, to which an officer stated, HIPAA isn't the be-all, end-all.
Before leaving for the summer, the unvaccinated were forced to attend a re-education brief led only by vaccinated personnel. Unvaccinated personnel were not allowed on the panel, and it became a very hostile environment of us versus them. In this three-hour brief, our questions about natural immunity and health concerns were disregarded and labeled unscientific. During summer training, my unvaccinated friends and I were segregated, ostracized, and mocked.
We endured rude comments while others pointed and laughed at us for being in the dirty platoon of only unvaccinated and therefore masked cadets. Cadets yelled that we were the sick or dirty or anti-science platoon. Officers told trainees to stay away from us. After returning to the academy in the fall, unvaccinated cadets were subjected to COVID testing twice a week at 6 a.m., even if we didn't have any symptoms.
Even though the vaccinated can also contract and transmit COVID, they were not tested, and those who felt sick were denied COVID tests. The leadership purposefully made life miserable for unvaccinated cadets in what I can only conclude was an attempt to convince us to violate our consciences and blindly follow the rest of the herd.
Denied a pass for being unvaccinated, I was not allowed to leave campus with my friends because our radius was restricted compared to the vaccinated cadets. I could not even take an overnight pass to my sponsor's house on post, even though the same policy that restricted me from staying overnight allowed me to spend the day there.
I was visibly cast as the other when only the unvaccinated had to wear masks indoors and outdoors. This made it easier for teachers to identify me as unvaccinated. And during my summer class, I was the only one in our hot classroom forced to wear a mask for our three-hour class. Ironically now, everyone must be in masks in the classroom. Many of my teachers scoffed at the idea of students remaining unvaccinated for making such an unscientific and selfish choice.
I was subjected to this treatment while knowing that some of my fellow cadets had an adverse reaction to the vaccine, including life-changing heart problems. One of these adverse reactions resulting in heart issues happened on the crew team. That same team kicked my best friend off for being unvaccinated with her coach saying it went against her ethics to coach an unvaccinated cadet.
Around the same time, guidance was pushed down that we could not even attend our religious clubs. While this guidance then changed shortly after, no one questioned the unethical nonsense of telling cadets they could sit shoulder to shoulder in a classroom to study calculus, but it was too much of a health threat to have us in the same classroom six hours later discussing the one thing that gave us hope and comfort. The coercion grew worse when the official vaccine mandate paperwork came down on September 27th.
The other unvaccinated cadets and I were escorted to an auditorium at 5:45 AM. We were not allowed to leave without signing a document acknowledging that we were disobeying direct orders. We had a choice, either be vaccinated, separate, or apply for a religious or medical exemption.
At the meeting, we were denied any legal counsel. There were no judge advocate generals or legal advisors available for us to talk to before signing this document. And I was personally told by a colonel that I could not receive counsel before signing the documents. When I raised the point that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved vaccine, Pfizer's Comirnaty, with the proper lot numbers, had yet to be distributed in the United States,
that the only available vaccines were under emergency use authorization and that vaccination must be voluntary under those conditions. According to the Nuremberg Code, I was told this small legal distinction didn't matter.
My friend's medical exemptions, pleading natural immunity, have been denied by West Point. Contrary to science, we are not aware of any medical exemptions that have been granted. The religious exemptions are still being processed, but denial is assumed. Although I filed a religious exemption, I decided to separate from West Point because the U.S. Army is no longer an organization I can serve in.
Hannah's story is in one way not really unique. I'm sure it's being felt by a lot of people who perhaps you know or work within your place of work or in your communities. But it is uniquely disappointing to see a situation where a young woman who was willing to dedicate herself to the service in the unit's military, who was willing to do the work to get through West Point, was treated in such a fashion. There will be time in the years to come to look back on the type of regime the American people
or willing to accept under this administration and under leadership which demanded absolute obedience to their approach to vaccination protocols and the like.
That's going to be something that we look back on, I think, in years to come with a lot of disappointment and a lot of depression because of the mistakes that were made and because of the mandates that were passed down without thinking of the long-term ramifications, not just to people's health, but to our understanding of the relationship between the citizen and the state. I'm Ben Domenech. You've been listening to another edition of the Ben Domenech Podcast. We'll be back soon with more. Until then, be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.
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