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School Board President Says Sex Ed Can Make Kids Gay

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‘Well Maybe You Just Swayed the Kid to Go That Way’

A California school board president is under fire in his conservative county after making inaccurate comments about sex education, making offensive comments about LGBT people, refusing to apologize, and claiming his religious and free speech rights are being challenged. He is adamantly refusing to resign.

In a five hour school board meeting Wednesday that was open to the public, Fresno Unified School Board President Brooke Ashjian listened to concerned parents speak in support and opposition of him and his remarks.

It was Ashjian’s comments earlier this month to a local newspaper that created anger, pain, and upset throughout the school district. Included among his remarks were his belief that telling children being gay is OK can make them gay.

Ashjian had told The Fresno Bee his “biggest fear in teaching” sex education is “you have kids who are extremely moldable at this stage, and if you start telling them that LGBT is OK and that it’s a way of life, well maybe you just swayed the kid to go that way.”

That is of course false.

“It’s so important for parents to teach these Judeo-Christian philosophies,” he added, as if being LGBT is immoral. The Fresno Bee identified Ashjian as Mormon.

Wednesday night’s meeting became very emotional, with one person saying it made them sick to their stomach.

“Ashjian spurned demands for his resignation from people in the audience at an overflow board meeting Wednesday night, and equated LGBT activists, who have opposed him, with Ottoman Turks,” The Fresno Bee reports. “In a two-page letter that Ashjian read into the record, he said LGBT leaders were attacking his faith and trying to silence him and force him from his school board, tactics he said were akin to what the Ottoman Turks did to Armenians leading up to the 1915 genocide.” 

A Trump supporter, Ashjian concluded his remarks by saying open debate is what “makes America Great.”

KSEE anchor Megan Rupe posted the text of his remarks to Twitter:

“These individuals who are personally attacking me and my religious foundation while demanding my resignation, I ask why?” Ashjian said in his statement, which he read aloud (video below). “Is it simply because I exercised my Constitutional rights of freedom of speech while I was doing my duty or isn’t something more nefarious, like simply desiring to muzzle anyone who dares not fall in line with the narrative of the day.”

“It is sad, they like the Ottomans are trying to be the thought police,” Ashjian said of LGBT activists. “They are trying to make people of faith second class citizens, as they seek to silence our voices in the public square. Just like what my grandparents and millions of other grandparents had to endure at the hands of the Ottomans before escaping to America.”

“I will NOT resign my position and I will not be silenced by bullies who want to control the public narrative by mischaracterizing the intent and meaning of my statements. My comments were not intended to offend anyone, but to simply express a concern. If we as board members cannot openly and honestly express concerns without being marginalized and labeled, then why do we even have a board?”

It’s important to note that no where in his remarks did Ashjian mention anything about the LGBTQ students he is supposed to be serving. He did not mention what effect his remarks might have on young LGBTQ children or teens, or what lessons might be taught by this very public display of animus against them.

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White House Responds to ‘Stone-Cold Loser’ Carville After Devastating Prediction

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In a rare move, the White House is pushing back against James Carville, after the longtime political consultant and prolific pundit predicted that Donald Trump’s presidency would end within the next year.

“I’m saying this right now,” Carville declared on his Politicon podcast. “You’re not going to be president a year from now. You’re too soft a man. You’re too weak. Your support is draining out.”

“People are going to be on to you. And when the Democrats get back in office in January, they’re going right after the corruption,” Carville added.

“We’re going to find out all the money that has gone the wrong way, and we’re going to have a legal proceeding, and we’re going to have what you call a clawback,” he said.

The White House, in a statement to Fox News, slammed Carville.

READ MORE: Where Were Republicans as Trump Zigzagged on Iran War and Peace?

“James Carville is a stone-cold loser who suffers from a severe and incurable disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome, and it has rotted his peanut-sized brain,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle told Fox News Digital in a statement.

Carville had other strong words for the president.

“You’re so screwed,” he warned, before referring to a New York Times article.

“They’re leaking on you like crazy,” Carville said.  “You can’t trust anybody. Your staff is leaking on you. The Pentagon is leaking on you. The State Department is leaking out here. Everybody is dumping all over you, loser. And, you know, this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

He also warned the president about Vice President JD Vance’s loyalty, and later said, “you’re done, dude. You’re really done. No one fears you anymore. Your own staff doesn’t fear you.”

“But, dude, you and I know something,” Carville continued. “We got a little secret between me and you. You’re done. People hate you. Trust no one. Be as paranoid as you possibly be, because you can’t be paranoid enough.”

READ MORE: Will ‘Sputtering’ Trump Ever Learn His Lesson?: Columnist

 

Image via Reuters 

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Will ‘Sputtering’ Trump Ever Learn His Lesson?: Columnist

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As his tenuous ceasefire approaches the 48-hour mark, President Donald Trump remains a “foolhardy and unpredictable executive-in-training” who got “schooled” by Iran, writes Trump biographer and Bloomberg columnist Timothy L. O’Brien.

In addition to costing American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, Trump’s Iran war has cost the lives of American soldiers, and thousands of Iranians. The economic tab may soon approach $100 billion, says O’Brien. But there have also been enormous “reputational, civic and strategic costs” for America.

“In the run-up to a two-week ceasefire announced on Tuesday evening, the president took to social media and the airwaves to warn Iran and the world that ‘a whole civilization will die’ and he intended to bomb the country ‘back to the stone ages.’ He brushed off questions about whether he was willing to commit war crimes by noting that Iranians are ‘animals.'”

Trump’s “dangerous and reckless flexes” may have just been him “bluffing, but sophisticated dealmakers know that undeliverable threats backfire when your bluff is called” — and Iran “called Trump’s bluff.”

READ MORE: Where Were Republicans as Trump Zigzagged on Iran War and Peace?

Now, writes O’Brien, Trump is, “essentially, a downed power line. If he is left to his own devices, sputtering, further conflagrations could consume the Middle East.”

O’Brien reminds that once elected, presidents “should come to the job with tangible aptitudes for management, leadership, policy, rationality and decency,” and not need the White House to be their “finishing school.”

But “largely uneducable,” Trump faces an Iran ceasefire that “is a recess of sorts for the world’s most powerful and incendiary pupil, and he may return to class having failed to absorb his studies.”

Trump is a “blinkered, close-minded leader,” charges O’Brien, and “a serial bankruptcy artist” who, before entering the White House, “was never an adept dealmaker.”

A “serious student” would try to learn from the ceasefire. But a cornered Trump may become “even more dangerous and thuggish.”

Ultimately, Trump “will be measured by whether he defines his Iranian studies by weeks of failed exams — or commits himself to years of mindless and cataclysmic classwork.”

READ MORE: Trump Rages in Incoherent Truth Social Rant

 

Image via Reuters 

 

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Bill Kristol Diagnoses Trump’s ‘Conquistador’ Complex

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Conservative commentator Bill Kristol suggests President Donald Trump has a “conquistador” complex — which is a complete reversal from how he campaigned in 2024, on “no new wars.”

“If Kamala wins, only death and destruction await because she is the candidate of endless wars. I am the candidate of peace. I am peace,” Trump declared during his 2024 campaign.

“These war hawks, they want to draft your kids to die in wars, and they will never fight themselves,” Trump said, days before the 2024 election.

The night he won, Trump told supporters, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”

Kristol writes at The Bulwark, “We haven’t heard much talk recently from the president about wars we’re not getting into.”

“Will one consequence of his humiliating failure in Iran be a return to such a stance? Perhaps the difficulties of the last two weeks have diminished Trump’s interest in foreign excursions?” he asks. “Appears not. A taste for foreign adventures seems to have lodged itself in Trump’s brain.”

READ MORE: Trump Rages in Incoherent Truth Social Rant

He points to Trump just weeks ago saying, “Cuba is ​next by the way.”

Just yesterday, Trump returned his focus to Greenland.

“NATO WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM, AND THEY WON’T BE THERE IF WE NEED THEM AGAIN. REMEMBER GREENLAND, THAT BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Thursday night, Trump appeared to threaten Iran again, declaring that all “U.S. Ships, Aircraft, and Military Personnel, with additional Ammunition, Weaponry, and anything else that is appropriate and necessary for the lethal prosecution and destruction of an already substantially degraded Enemy, will remain in place in, and around, Iran, until such time as the REAL AGREEMENT reached is fully complied with.”

He concluded: “In the meantime our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest. AMERICA IS BACK!”

Kristol notes that it is unusual for an American president to “proclaim ‘Conquest’ as his goal. In his June 6, 1944 D-Day prayer, President Roosevelt said that American soldiers ‘fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate.'”

But for this president, “the dream of foreign conquest seems to have become a more central part of Trump’s personal sense of grandiosity, not to say megalomania, than it was earlier in his career.”

READ MORE: Trump Administration Wants Protected Health Records of Federal Workers

 

Image via Reuters 

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