GOP Immigration Fear-mongering and Defending Secular Public Education

[0:02] The Republican Party, headed by a convicted felon, devoid of any real policies to help people this election season, instead dusted off the illegal immigrant trope to scare white grandma and grandpa and low-IQ MAGA faithfuls into voting for them. Then we look at a toolkit developed to fight back against Christian nationalists trying to infect our children with extreme religious beliefs in the middle of the school day. I’m Doug Berger. And this is Secular Left.

[0:39] Music.

[0:59] Well, if we know the Republicans during the election, recent elections, we know that they’re going to go for a gimmick. I believe in 2020, it was a caravan of illegal immigrants were coming to the United States. They were in South America, and they were all jumping on trains and their cars and coming up to the United States to flood our country. Now they’ve kind of tweaked it a little bit because there are no caravans, mass caravans of migrants headed this way. And that’s easily disprovable anyway, and it was back in 2020. So what they’ve decided to do now, and it also helps them in their efforts to overturn any election that they don’t agree with, is now mass illegal immigrants are voting in our elections, which is not the case either. It’s factually wrong.

[2:10] There is a federal law that prohibits undocumented people voting. And non-citizens from voting in presidential elections. They can’t vote for president. They can’t vote for the Congress. And many states, including Ohio, we have laws that prohibit undocumented people and non-citizens from voting in state elections.

[2:35] And then there was recently, for some reason, a constitutional amendment here in Ohio that prohibits undocumented people and non-citizens from voting in local municipal elections. In some cities they can, like in San Francisco, Washington, D.C., they allow undocumented people to vote in municipal elections. So they get to vote for school board members. They get to vote for dog catcher, mayor, council, which is how it should be because undocumented workers still pay taxes. They pay sales taxes. They contribute to the community. So they should have a say. But, you know, we get these bigots like the Republicans that believe that anybody that’s not from around here is out to get us. And they do this. Like I said, they do this just to be divisive and as a gimmick. They’re trying to scare Mom, Pa, Kettle down the street to vote for them because they don’t want these brown people voting and enacting Sharia law or whatever ridiculous stuff that they come up with.

[3:58] And so a lot of the Republican state lawmakers across the country are taking up this mantle and complaining about illegal immigrants voting.

[4:10] Again, it’s not true. Here in Ohio, Frank LaRose made a big deal about purging non-citizens from the voting rolls. And in fact, he caught at least two people that we know of that had become citizens. But they were still purged from the voting rolls because they run a computer program and they don’t check the names or anything like that. And then the other thing that Frank LaRose was talking about was requiring people to prove that they’re a citizen in order to vote. So how would you do that? Now, people will say, well, you’d use a state ID or a driver’s license. Well, in some cases, undocumented people can get driver’s licenses and state IDs.

[5:05] So you know yeah it would probably prove citizenship maybe but it doesn’t say at least on my license my ohio license it doesn’t say that i am a citizen it’s a ridiculous thing it’s a ridiculous thing to demand that somebody prove their citizenship in order to vote if you don’t have a way of them to do that because you know the republicans are just not going to take your word for it. They’re going to want some documented proof. So now when you go to vote, you’d probably have to take a birth certificate maybe. But even then, that won’t prove that you’re a citizen. These people just act so weird.

[5:54] I was reading an article the other day that that Mike Johnson, the current Speaker of the House, is going to cave to his more radical Freedom Caucus members, and they were going to force a vote on keeping illegal immigrants from voting, which is already against the law. But they want to doubly do it and put it in a continuing resolution to fund the government. And so the Democrats have already said they’re not doing it. So that’s what they’re looking for. They’re looking to shut down the government to force a vote for something that’s already against the law. And these people want to be in charge. These people want to be the government. And they don’t even know how government works. And so they’re using this undocumented persons, non-citizens thing as a gimmick to try to gain election for Trump.

[7:11] And, you know, just like that bipartisan bill that would have secured the border, which was giving the Republicans everything that they wanted on it. And Trump still told them to not pass it. Because it would give Biden a win, and he didn’t want Biden to have a win. So I don’t know how much more you need to see that Trump is only in this election for himself. He is not in this election for you or other people in this country. He is just in it for himself, what he can get out of it. And so that is one of the things, you know, I get these flyers from Derek Marin. I got them during the primary and getting them some more here. Also, Bernie Moreno has been doing the ads about the hordes of people coming over the southern border. They had the Republican Party had a seminar for people talking about why an open border impacts Toledo. Even though we’re thousands of miles away from the southern border, even though we are in a border patrol jurisdiction.

[8:32] During the pandemic, they had border patrol boarding buses on the Ohio Turnpike, getting people, this was when Trump was president, to get people to prove their citizenship. You’re riding on a bus, and you get stopped by the cop, and they want you to prove your citizenship. You know, how does that make you secure? How does that make the country secure? Sure.

[8:59] You know, it’s a gimmick when they’re talking about undocumented people, non-citizens, or as they call them, illegal immigrants. It’s it’s the scaremongering. It’s the old scare the white people. Playbook that the Republicans do the same thing that they do when when Trump talks about Kamala Harris being black and wondering why she’s black now and wasn’t black before. That’s a dog whistle. You know, they’re trying to scare white people. And so, you know, when I was talking about Frank LaRose, the Secretary of State here in Ohio, he goes on national TV and says how secure Ohio votes are. But he plays that game. He’s talked about illegal immigrants voting, and he referred 138 cases to the Attorney General out of 8 million voters in Ohio. 138 possible people. And again, these are people who are registered to vote.

[10:12] There is no proof that they actually voted. And that’s the other game that these bigots play, is they equate registering to vote with voting. I work the polls. I am a poll worker during elections. There have been the last couple of years in my county. You know, and if somebody and they are required to have an ID and if it doesn’t show that they’re a citizen, then.

[10:44] Then they’re not going to vote. You know, you don’t have this mass horde of undocumented people voting because they know it’s illegal. They want to stay in this country. They want to work. They want to make money. They want to send that money home. They want to lay low. So there isn’t a horde of illegal immigrants killing innocent, And it’s usually white girls, white young women. Now, you know, there’s been some people that have gotten in trouble that turned out to be illegal immigrants, undocumented people. But the studies have shown, the science has shown that undocumented people aren’t any more likely to commit crimes than citizens. And they said, in fact, that citizens are slightly more likely to commit crimes than undocumented people. And again, it’s because they know, the undocumented people know, they can get kicked out if they get arrested, if they get in trouble for something.

[11:56] You know, they can get deported. If they murder somebody, they can get deported. So not only do they spend time in prison if they get caught, but then they get deported. And like I said, a majority of the undocumented people that come to this country just come here for a better life for them and their family, just like everybody else wants a better life for themselves and their family.

[12:21] You know, and so this bigotry, this welfare queen cartoon version of these hordes that, you know, Reagan used to call people on welfare, welfare queens to make people mad at them. And that’s what the Republicans are doing, is they’re trying to gin up their base because they don’t have any policies. They don’t have any policies that will help people. They don’t have any policies that will deal with inflation. All they’re talking about is not spending any more money. And that’s been their mantra for decades. Spending cuts, tax cuts, that’s all they got. And so what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to gin up their base by claiming these hordes of brown people are invading. And they’ve used that terminology that they’re invading. They’re voting illegally. Biden is shipping them in by airplane.

[13:27] And it’s just ridiculous because it’s 99.9% not true. And like I said, here in Ohio, the state election guy, Frank LaRose, referred 138 cases out of 8 million possible voters for voting illegally. And even then, that’s just, they’re saying that they were registered. And that doesn’t mean anything. And that’s the other thing, too, is they want to make it a crime to register to vote if you’re not eligible to vote. So can you imagine that? Can you imagine that, that you find out that you’re ineligible to vote in some place because of residence requirements or whatever, and you mistakenly register? Sister, you know that they’re going to use that law against you. So the next time you see on the news where they’re talking about illegal voting, just remember it’s all a gimmick and it’s not true. For more information about any of the topics covered in this episode, check out our show notes at secularleft.us.

[14:40] Music.

[14:48] Hello, this is Doug, host of Secular Left, reminding you that I like to be validated. If you like this podcast and want to thank me, feel free to buy me a coffee. Go to buymeacoffee.com slash secular left and donate some cash to help make this a better show and validate me as a person. You’ll feel better in the morning.

[15:16] Regular listeners of this podcast should know that I’ve been covering what’s called Release Time Religious Instruction. That is a time at a public school where, with permission from parents, students can leave campus to attend some kind of religious education class or a Bible class or something like that, and are able then to return to their public school the same day and not get in trouble for leaving school. It was originally ruled constitutional, these programs, in 1952 in a Supreme Court decision called Zorak V. Clausen.

[16:07] And one of the things that we have here in Ohio is we have a particular law. It is Ohio Revised Code that allows school districts to have a release time policy. And one of these evangelical extremist groups called LifeWise Academy has decided to manipulate that state law for its own ends and provide for mass leaving of kids from school in the middle of the school day. In order to have what they call character-based education. It’s not character-based. That’s just a veneer that they put on it. What they’re doing is they’re teaching the Bible. They’re trying to convert children to Christianity.

[17:07] But I would check out some of, you know, I had an interview with the founders of the Parents Against LifeWise group. So if you want more details about why LifeWise is a problem, You know, check out one of those previous episodes. I’ll have links to that previous episode up in the show notes.

[17:28] But what I wanted to talk to you today is that through my participation in the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie, I got to participate in a group, or I’m still part of a group, a working group, that’s through the Honesty for Ohio Education Advocacy Group here in Ohio. And they’re the ones, they’re the watchdogs of things like RTRI and bathroom bans and keeping trans women out of women’s sports, that sort of thing. They keep an eye out on that stuff. And so they had this working group that decided to create what they call a toolkit. Now, for people that are in advocacies, progressive areas where you’re trying to support something and trying to fight the government or right-wing groups, people like to have a toolkit. kit. And basically it is a multi-page document that just has hints and tips about what you can do about a particular issue.

[18:44] And so I worked with this group for a few months, and we released the toolkit the last week of August, August the 29th. And I got to help with the presentation. I had a few remarks. And so what I wanted to do in this segment is kind of go over the toolkit, or just give a brief, not brief overview for this segment, but just kind of talk about some of the major parts. Um, the link has a, uh, there’s a link to the document. Uh, you can download it, uh, print it out for later. You can put it on your phone and read it, read it later. It’s approximately 28 pages, 27, 28 pages. And it has a lot of good information. Um, it’s always changing. The information tends to always be updated. And having it, what they did was they put it on an app called Canva. So they’ll be able to always update it. So you’ll always be able to find an updated version on their website.

[19:56] And so it says the toolkit was prepared for Ohio parents, educators, school board members, and community members. And then it has a table of contents. There’s an overview explaining what RTRI is, LifeWise Academy, and the two bills in the legislature right now that concern RTRI. It’s House Bill 445 and Senate Bill 293. And I don’t know if I’ve talked to those, talked about that before, but House Bill 445 and Senate Bill 293 would only change one word in the current Ohio Revised Code. And what it would do is it would require schools to have an RTRI policy. Right now, it’s up to the school districts.

[20:46] And these bills, these bills that are currently under consideration, don’t fix any of the other problems with the RTRI law. One, that it wasn’t made for groups like LifeWise Academy. Then there’s the liability issue. There’s the vetting of people that volunteer for the group. There literally is no serious vetting. Just recently in August, earlier in August, or it might have been the end of July, a LifeWise program in Northeast Ohio fired their executive director after they found out that she had lost her teaching license for sending nude photographs to a student when she worked as a teacher. And LifeWise was like, well, it didn’t come up in our background check because she was never charged with a crime. Well, that doesn’t matter.

[21:50] You know, the teachers that get in trouble anymore, they get reported to the state. And if they lose their license, that does, if a school district is checking on a school teacher, a possible hire, they get that information. And so LifeWise does not do that kind of background check. And my feeling is if you are not allowed to teach in a public school you should not be participating in groups like LifeWise that are around public school students, that’s my view of it.

[22:28] So like I said 445 and Senate Bill 293 they don’t fix any of the inherent problems with the Ohio Revised Code, And then in the next section, the toolkit talks about messaging and how to contact your legislators and what to talk to them about and some sample testimony if these bills ever come up again in the committee. The way that our Ohio legislature is working currently is it’s a supermajority of Republicans, so they could introduce these or attach them as amendments to bills already under consideration. They could even pass these laws within the budget. All they have to do is just connect it to some kind of money, and they can pass it as a budget. And the reason why that’s a problem is because in the state of Ohio, you can’t have a citizen’s initiative to repeal something that was passed as part of a budget. You can’t repeal the budget. So the Republicans really like to use the budget to get some of these more controversial laws passed.

[23:47] They did that for the targeted regulations for abortion clinics for a long time. They passed probably nearly a dozen regulations through the budget process so that people couldn’t get up petitions and have it voted on in an election and have it repealed. So, there’s that. And then the next section of the toolkit talks about how to operate in your school district about RTRI. First, how to find your district’s policy, if they have one. What you can say to the local school district. You can get petitions together. They have community talking points.

[24:32] Building a local coalition. And that’s very important when you’re dealing with school districts is, you know, get together with parents and like-minded people and form a coalition. And then there’s the bit, it’s called the model policy. And this is an important part of this toolkit. Personally, I want to see RTRI go away. I don’t like it at all. But a lot of people that I worked with on this project, they’re fine with RTRI. And in most cases, I mean, RTRI has been operating, at least in Ohio, at least since the 1950s, different groups. I know I was doing some research in a group in Hancock County, where I’m from. It’s been around since the 1940s. And a lot of these groups, they respect the school districts, the schools, and their time. And they have their programs before or after school, like it should be. I still want to see RTRI go away, but what we worked on in the Honesty for Ohio Education was a model policy.

[25:41] And basically what that would do is that would, if the school district did not have a policy, we would recommend them not to have a policy. And then if they did, we would suggest that they require it to be before or after school, the life-wise be before or after school, or during lunch and recess.

[26:04] And then there’s points to address the safety considerations, such as provide and assume full liability for the students. Because one of the bones of contention currently with LifeWise is according to Ohio Revised Code, the vendor, the provider of the religious instruction, has to assume the liability for the students when they’re off campus. us. And what LifeWise is doing, many of the LifeWise programs, is having parents sign waivers, liability waivers, that absolves LifeWise of any liability and puts it on the parents. That’s what they say. They’re putting it on the parents. If the parents choose their student to attend LifeWise, then the liability is on them.

[26:58] But I’m not a lawyer, but in talking to some people that have experience with these issues, the school is still going to have liability, whether or not the state law says that they don’t or not. And the fact that LifeWise is trying to get out of liability, That tells you all you need to know about how much safety they take in caring for students. Another thing that’s suggested in the model policy is to conduct background checks for all staff and volunteers, at least annually, and provide them to the district upon request. The other thing says provide the district with full financial records before being approved. approved, act as a responsible party for transportation students. Transportation should be aligned with district transportation standards. Yeah, that’s a little bit too watered down.

[27:55] You know, that’s what they put in there. But what I had was I had some talk to some people that are part of this thing, and they had some different considerations. This is not in the toolkit. But some of the things was, and some school districts have already started doing this, is that they’re stating that all classes in school are considered core classes, not to be missed or skipped. That would force somebody like LifeWise to have to only have their program for lunch and recess. Or maybe library time.

[28:38] We want to require the same level of background checks for all volunteers and employees of third-party groups wanting to use RTRI that an employee of the district would require. I mean, if you’re going to have people, random people off the street working with your children, don’t you want them to have the same background checks that they require for district employees and teachers? You would think. The other thing, the other good one that I like that some people suggested was require that students only be released to a parent or guardian each time a student attends an RTRI program. Right now, a parent signs a permission slip and then LifeWise comes and picks them up for their class. Well, what this suggestion that I had would do is force the parent or guardian to go to the school, pick up the kid, and take them to LifeWise.

[29:39] Yeah, they would not appreciate that. And the other one that some people suggested I like says, would require that the program accept all students who have permission to attend and that students can opt out with or without parents’ permission. mission. There’s been some stories that we’ve heard from different districts in Ohio of children being forced to attend once their parents wanted them to attend, but the kid didn’t want to go.

[30:14] And so the school then gets in the middle of it, which they’re not supposed to be doing, and forcing the kid to attend something that they don’t want to go to themselves.

[30:31] Then the other thing that came up when it’s talking about in the toolkit under the model policy about providing meals in line with district meal standards is that somebody, one of the people in the Parents Against LifeWise group, complained to the United States Department of Agriculture. culture. They’re the ones that give federal dollars to school districts for lunch, student lunches. And somebody complained and wanted to know what the USDA’s idea was, because what they were hearing was that the school was providing lunches, the public school was providing lunches to students who then took them with them to LifeWise. And the USDA came back and said that Under the rules, the USDA rules for the school lunch program, that off-site meal consumption can only be done for official school activities, like a field trip.

[31:38] Not our TRI programs. So what that would mean is that the school is providing the lunch, they would not get reimbursed for it. So they would have to charge the child the full cost of the meal in order to provide it. And then to top that all off, what we found out this week was that the state has decided to reimburse schools who provide the funding. The state has decided to reimburse schools for providing the meals instead of the federal dollars. But the Ohio Revised Code for RTRI programs is clear that no public funds can be expended. So that’s another bone of contention. I think they’re violating the state law. But anyway, so that toolkit is available. The other thing is they have some social media graphics you can share.

[32:39] It tells you how to publish news stories and letters to the editor. It has a sample letter to the editor you can use to start. There’s a section on working with the press, how to get your story out. And then the final section on page 24, which is something I really liked and we worked on for several months on this part, was that Joel Penton, the founder of LifeWise, likes to cite this study that LifeWise paid for by the Thomas P. Miller and Associates that claimed that the statistical evidence of LifeWise’s positive impact on school attendance and discipline rates is strong. And what Honesty did is they had some people that were experts on.

[33:35] On statistics and how to do these different types of studies and things like that, and had them check the math, basically, from LifeWise Study. And the quick takeaway is that the claim by LifeWise doesn’t hold up. The first thing to remember is LifeWise Study was not peer-reviewed. And so then they looked at the data. For example, LifeWise claims its program improves attendance over three years. However, their study includes the attendance rate for only the first year. Based on their data, no such conclusion can be drawn about attendance. Another point that they found was the predictive modeling they used in their study inconsistently uses percentage rates versus actual numerical data across variables. And then the people that reviewed the study said, we see this as an effort to manipulate the data to fit LifeWise’s narrative.

[34:47] It says, point number six, the program is opt-in with students and or parents choosing to participate. This creates a selection bias in the results. You know, because you’re only going to be talking to people that are already in the program, that already have a positive idea about the program. So you’re not going to get any negative feedback. And then they say, based on their own data and modeling, only Model 2 could claim to be statistically significant. But because they didn’t include all the veritables, even Model 2’s results are questionable. And then the most important part of their study that gets debunked is it does not address the impact of COVID or post-COVID attendance-related measures. Because what they’re saying is that they studied pre-COVID, post-COVID, and they’re saying attendance went up because of LifeWise. Well, attendance probably went up because the COVID restrictions were lifted. Right.

[35:51] And it says, LifeWise’s report is nothing more than a market research analysis with cherry-picked data to falsely assert proof of LifeWise’s claims about its programming. And you don’t have to be an atheist to know that it is a stretch to say, hey, religion improves your life. For some people, it probably does. But it isn’t something that we should be teaching kids during the middle of a school day. So, if you’re interested in this toolkit, again, I’ll have the link in the show notes, but it’s at the Honesty for Ohio Education website. Just look for the link to the Release Time Religious Instruction section, House Bill 445, Senate Bill 293.

[36:42] Thank you for listening to this episode. You can check out more information, including links to sources used, in our show notes on our website at SecularLeft.us. Secular Left is hosted, written, and produced by Doug Berger, and he is solely responsible for the content. Send us your comments, either using the contact form on the website or by sending us a note at comments. At secularleft.us, Our theme music is Dank and Nasty, composed using Amplify Studio.

[37:29] Music.