The fight to protect the innocence of children is certainly an uphill battle.
More than ever, social justice advocates who dominate most of the news media, the entertainment industry, and the education system are using their outsized influence to turn young Americans into future progressives with what is essentially a school-to-activist pipeline.
Unfortunately, this cycle is already a well-oiled machine. Whether sitting in a classroom or watching television at home, impressionable young children are bombarded with the idea that they are “oppressed” because of immutable characteristics like skin color and that they can choose to be any gender they want (or no gender at all). Just one example is a recent episode of “Blue’s Clues” featuring a drag queen singing about non-binary and transgender animals. This would have been unthinkable just a handful of years ago.
Unless this cycle is interrupted, the end result will be a generation of Americans who by adulthood will have absorbed these corrupted views that were forced upon them while growing up and then – wittingly or not – do the same to another generation of kids.
Shiva Rajbhandari is a great example of an adult who was influenced by activists as a student and now is working hard to influence more children in a similar way.
Rajbhandari is a board member for the Boise School District in Idaho. He was elected to his seat in 2022 at age 18 while still a senior at Boise High School. In an interview with Education Week, he explained that he had “been involved in Idaho politics since 9th grade as a climate activist and community organizer.” He further complained about “far right attacks on our schools.” In other words, he disagreed with parents fighting for the right to raise their children with their own morals and values, away from radical ideology.
In early April, Idaho Governor Brad Little signed a bill into law banning medical interventions like puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, and surgeries for minors. Rajbhandari vulgarly responded by stating that he would defile the governor’s final resting place. He tweeted: “I pray you live a long life so you can bear witness to the pain you’ve unleashed on Idaho’s children and families today. When you do die though, I’m p*ssing on your grave.”
These were the words of an elected official who is in charge of developing policies and approving curricula for more than 26,000 students. Considering that U.S. News & World Report states that only 40 percent of middle school students and 47 percent of high school students are proficient at grade level in mathematics in the Boise School District, Rajbhandari should have more important issues to worry about.
But advancing left-wing causes is where Rajbhandari’s passion lies as he effectively serves as the school-to-activist pipeline’s poster boy. The Intercept reported that he “was already well-known in the school district as a student organizer on climate, environmental, voting rights, and gun control issues” by the time he ran for office.
Rajbhandari explained to Teen Vogue that he first got involved in politics as a “climate activist” when he was in middle school. “I learned about [this issue] in seventh grade, in earth science, and I was super lucky to live in a district where climate change was part of our science standards, because it wasn’t part of Idaho’s state standards,” he said. He believes so much in the dogma he was taught as a child that he warned anyone who stands against him and his allies politically on the transgender issue is “going down with us.”
And Rajbhandari is just the tip of an immense iceberg.
Maxwell Frost is a young man from the Orlando area who was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives last year at age 25. Frost explained in an interview with MSNBC that he interned with President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. He would have been a young teenager still in school at that time. In March, Frost condemned House Republicans for passing a parental bill of rights and blasted them as “cowards who wasted our time.”
The school-to-activist pipeline is churning out a generation of left-wing ideologues who only grow in power with every passing year. Both Rajbhandari and Frost – and countless others like them – were influenced as children by radical social justice advocates and have every intention to carry that legacy forward. American parents must fight back against this troubling cultural phenomenon before more innocent kids are lured inescapably into it.
Casey Ryan is a staff writer at Parents Defending Education.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.