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Ep 333 | School Choice Is Making Incredible Progress | Guest: Corey DeAngelis
01:00:18
Matt Kibbe talks to Corey DeAngelis, author of “The Parent Revolution,” about the great strides parents are making in taking control of their children’s education.
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- [00:01]
Matt Kibbe
Welcome to Kibbe On Liberty. Cory DeAngelis is back with us today with great news, updating us on a tsunami of school choice legislation happening in places like Texas, Tennessee and elsewhere. And some really interesting things that are happening at the federal level. Get this at the Department of Education. Who knew? Check it out. Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. Corey, how's it going?
- [00:55]
Cory DeAngelis
Hey, doing well. Thanks for having me.
- [00:57]
Matt Kibbe
As I recall, the last time we spoke, you were optimistically speaking about potentially what might happen in the election. And now we have mostly lots of good news to talk about, to report on. And I want to go through all that stuff. But I was thinking about your good friend Randy Weingarten and her current apology to her. She wants everybody to know that she wasn't in fact in favor of prolonged school closures, even though there's I don't know how many dozens, if not hundreds of clips of her doing exactly that. They think that the Internet's not forever or something. But the question, and I think you probably know what I think the answer is, but the question is, is she now like a political albatross around the necks of Democrats and government school advocates?
- [01:50]
Cory DeAngelis
I mean, you got to think she is. And I would keep her away from any politician trying to win election because she goes out and endorses them and they lose. She's all in favor of Kamala Harris. And guess what happened with Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump election. Everybody kind of knew that Trump won all the seven swing states. We know that. But he also won the parent vote by 9 points. That was a seismic shift to the right, 15 points since 2020. And he also beat Kamala on the issue of education, which that never happens for Republicans. We saw a glimpse of this with Glenn Youngkin beating Terry. I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach. McAuliffe. Back in 2021 in a blue state that went 10 points to Biden just the year before, Glenn Youngkin won with education voters by six points. And that was the number two issue in that election. And then with Trump versus Harris on two occasions by Atlas intel, the most accurate pollster from the last two elections in America, he beat her on education. And Democrats have had a decades long double digit advantage on education. And so one of the things is that it used to be a conversation about who's going to throw more money at the problem. It's the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. We've poured more money into the system. Things haven't gotten any better. They've gotten worse. Since the federal inception of the Department of education in 1979, which it was a political payoff by Jimmy Carter to the teachers union, the nea, the largest labor union in the country. They've spent about $3 trillion at the Department of Education. And for what? They just have thousands of people pushing paper, bureaucrats in D.C. they don't employ a single teacher. They don't educate a single child. But now it's instead of being about who's going to spend more money to. Who's going to respect my right as a parent to direct the upbringing of my child. And Randy Weingarten, the teachers unions who control the Democrat Party, they believe that your kids belong to the government. They want the state to control the education of your child.
- [03:53]
Matt Kibbe
They.
- [03:53]
Cory DeAngelis
They don't. They think it takes a village. We heard this from Hillary Clinton. They think that your kid is not your kid. It's society's kid. It's communist gobblegook. And the GOP has basically emerged as the parents party. And, you know, that could be because they read the political tea leaves. They saw that the numbers are in favor of parents because parents are going to fight harder than anybody else for their own kids and the right to raise them. And it's become a political winner. It's become a litmus test issue on the GOP side. And Randi Weingarten. Yes, she's trying to rewrite history on the school closures. Everybody with half a brain cell knows she was lobbying the CDC to make it more difficult to reopen schools. She had her local affiliates in Chicago tweeting out it was racist to reopen schools. Their board member was also vacationing in Puerto Rico, thousands of miles away, but somehow it was not safe enough to go back to work. But she was partying poolside in Puerto Rico, posting pictures on Instagram. So Randy Weingarten was complicit in all of this. They held children's education hostage to secure billions of dollars in ransom payments. They don't give a crap about the kids. They see the government school system as a jobs program for adults more than an education initiative for kids. And Randy Winegarden doesn't care about you or your kids. She cares about herself. She makes over $500,000 to go around on her apology tour to pretend that she didn't fight to close the schools, when if she was fighting so hard to close, to keep them open, why were they closed?
- [05:28]
Matt Kibbe
I think that the tipping point for me noticing her potential liability was the week before the Virginia governor's race. And she put everything in and she was so tone deaf. I think she probably is personally responsible for a good percentage of that. That seismic shift towards, towards Yonkin.
- [05:52]
Cory DeAngelis
And she was stumping for McAuliffe the night before the election. I remember sharing it on social media. People were like, oh no, why did she do this? Yeah, I mean, well, they have to let her, though. That's of death.
- [06:03]
Matt Kibbe
That's the problem is they're captured. I mean, 99% of her political funds go to the Democrats and they're. They're captured. I mean, and she, for her, it's. It's big business. Right. She makes a lot of money and she reminds me a little bit of Anthony Fauci. She's got that same patina of arrogance, like who are you to question me Kind of thing. But it's fascinating because I think you mentioned that the Republicans are now the Parental choice party. That's kind of a new thing too, because I know plenty of great Republicans who have been laboring at giving parents more choice for generation. And it was always that margin of Republicans who were also captured by teachers unions. And I think starting in Virginia, that was the shot across the bow to Republicans. And we've seen this sort of culminate. You know, one of the top battlegrounds has been in Texas, the place that should have fixed this problem long time ago.
- [07:00]
Cory DeAngelis
They should have been leaders. We've been basically last on the issue of universal school choice. And this is my home state. The school choice evangelist couldn't get it done in his own state. State for this long. Well, the Senate was voting to get it done for over a decade. They always passed the bill. And then the House a couple years ago, they had 21 Republicans join all the Democrats. They vote against their own party platform issue and killed school choice, even though it was the main priority from the governor. Voters in the primaries were making their voices clear. They said in 2022 on the ballot on a proposition in the primary, the Republican voters said 88% of them supported school choice, whether they were in rural areas or urban areas or suburban areas. It didn't matter what background, location. And you know, after the primaries though, 2/3 of those 21, 14 of them were gone. They either retired, they lost their seats, and basically the parents were. Became a political juggernaut in the equation and held politicians accountable. And so there were seven left. And guess what happened this year? Seven of them who remained who previously voted against. Six of those seven voted for school choice. So the political winds have shifted in favor. They may not have thought it in their heart. Even this year. You had Drew Darby. He was going. And I shared a clip of him on social media. He went to TPPF's free market think tank out in Texas, Texas Public Policy Foundation. He went to their policy summit and he was on a panel saying that he's just against school choice. And he wasn't. It wasn't going to get across the finish line this year. He was wrong. He. And he ended up voting for it. So it might. Milton Friedman said it best. It's not about getting the right people into office. It's about creating a climate of opinion where it becomes politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. And we had six of the seven wrong people from last time do the right thing this time. So I wish Milton Friedman were alive today to see his ideas coming to fruition. Finally, on the issue of universal school choice, he also famously said that only a crisis, whether it's perceived or a real crisis, produces real change. And the response to that crisis depends on. And the change that happens depends on the ideas that are lying around at the time. So for decades. And we had Milton Friedman fighting for it, we had other thought leaders fighting for it. We were only making incremental reform very small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. Not very many people were eligible. But we've gone from 0 to 100 real quick on the issue because it has crystallized. Republicans have to vote for this because there's so much left leaning ideology in too many public schools. And why do we know that? Because of Randi Weingarten herself. She fought to close the schools that hurt taxpayers in the short run. They thought they were getting a good deal on the union side, but they stepped on a rake. It hit him in the face because that showed families. Wait a second, what's going on here? They're saying this about gender ideology. They're saying this about my kid. They're going to be a failure just because of their immutable characteristics. What's this Marxist ideology? Dividing kids based on the color of their skin. That's. That is a very racist ideology. And so parents who had their kids in a rated school said, where did I miss the mark here? They showed up at the school board meeting. What happened then? We saw how democratic accountability works. Hint it does it. They were labeled domestic terrorist. They had their mics cut off just for reading the same books that they didn't want in the classrooms. For some reason it was okay for Kids to learn about these things and hear these ideas around other adults that weren't their parents. But. But all of a sudden, if the parents want to bring it up at a public school board meeting with adults, it's not okay. That tells you something's not okay with the schools. And so when democratic accountability didn't work, families figured out we need real accountability from the bottom up. We need to vote with our feet. And school choice does that.
- [11:08]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah. You helped us with a documentary we made during lockdowns called Sick Year, where we followed the journey of various moms who. Who went through that process that you're describing. Because, you know, first they knew that lockdowns were bad for their children, but once they were locked down, they had access to the curriculum that was actually being taught and even the methods, like the sort of, you know, I compare it to sort of prison culture where kids are not taught, they're just regimented and marched from class to class.
- [11:41]
Cory DeAngelis
And it's a Prussian model from modern day Germany that Horace Mann imported. He's the first Secretary of education in Massachusetts, the father of public education. You know, I talk about school choice hypocrisy all the time, where you have Joe Biden against school choice, but then he sent his own kids to private school. You see this over and over again. Terry McAuliffe was against school choice.
- [12:03]
Matt Kibbe
You document this every day, everywhere.
- [12:05]
Cory DeAngelis
Gavin Newsom, you just. You'd start to see it, and it is literally everywhere. Elizabeth Warren, when she was running for the Democrat party in 20, in the primary in 2019, she disclosed on a survey that she went to public schools, but then didn't answer the second part of the survey asking about where she sent her kids, which was a red flag. She would have bragged about it if it was a public school. I had exposed her back in 2019 for lying on camera to a voter saying that she sent her kids to public schools, when actually she sent her son, Alex Warren, to a private school. But just total hypocrisy. Horrible course, man. It started from the very beginning. The father of public education, he thought we needed this mass system of compulsory education, of government schools for the masses, because I guess they couldn't figure out how to teach their own kids. But what did he do? He homeschooled his own kids. So school choice for me, but not for the. It's this elitist mentality that they know better than you because they have more money than you, because they have the PhD or education, doctorate after their name, that they're somehow better parents. Than you. No, that's completely wrong. The experts don't really know what they're doing. The so called experts. You look at the colleges of education, they have some of the easiest programs. They have the lowest standardized test scores going into these colleges of education and they're the ones teaching our kids. Parents. If you take one thing away from this podcast today is that you should have more confidence in yourself. You know better than the people in the public school system. And more importantly, you care about your kids more than anybody in the public school system. And that's also what a lot of families saw during COVID when they got a taste of homeschooling. I mean, the system was telling parents over and over again, you're not smart enough, you can't handle it. So they had no confidence. But when they were forced to try to start to homeschool, some parents didn't work out. But a lot of people who weren't even going to ever try that to begin with, they switched to homeschooling. Now we've seen at least a doubling of homeschoolers since pre pandemic level. So it's another silver lining thanks to.
- [14:02]
Matt Kibbe
The somebody has to go first. And then you realize that all of the mysticism and mythology about teaching you realize, and you mentioned it, incentives. I think, you know, I'm picking on Randy Weingarten, but I think it's the entire education industrial complex that is the political albatross around.
- [14:19]
Cory DeAngelis
I think that's why we all just rolled over and took it during COVID.
- [14:25]
Matt Kibbe
Thank you for joining me today on.
- [14:27]
Unknown
Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week my organization, Free the People partners with BlazeTV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce the these honest conversations with interesting people. Now let's get back to it.
- [14:56]
Cory DeAngelis
I mean we've had mass factory model schooling at a large scale in the United States for a very long time. In every state we have compulsory education laws. In just about every state we have 90% of kids or so going to government run institutions each year. That's about 50 million kids nationwide for 13 years of their lives, for seven hours a day getting brainwashed and beaten into submission, forced, getting, getting creativity forced out of their systems. Just learning to comply and listen to authority figures who have no real authority. It's just the kids are Stuck there with other adults who aren't their parents and they have to listen to them and they think they're going to get in big trouble if they don't. And so when they told us, oh, we're going to have a lockdown, oh, we're not going to open back up. Oh, and you got to get this shot that hasn't been tested. And oh, even though it might have these side effects, you got to do it if you still want to work. Oh, we're going to close the restaurants, but we're going to have the grocery stores open. And if you want to go to the restaurants, you have to have a vaccine passport. And, oh, we're going to open the bars at one point, but then we're going to keep the schools closed for the lowest risk people in society, the kids. It was all about political dynamics. It was all a political decision to, not a health decision. It was all about control. But then people just rolled over and took it. We all know it was stupid. We had data at the time showing that the schools were the safest things in society. The first things that should have opened, but they were the last because they were controlled by the unions and the politicians who just wanted to extort more resources from the taxpayer. Had nothing to do with health, had nothing to do with safety. It had zero to do with the kids. The private schools were open. Why? Because they knew their customers could walk and take their money somewhere else. So I hope we learned something about all this disaster that unfolded starting five years ago.
- [16:49]
Matt Kibbe
It is the crisis that Friedman talks about. It's the teachable moment. And parents were given an opportunity to discover what was really going on. And that is not just happening in Texas. Now. I know Tennessee just did a big thing thing. Give us a couple other. Let's, let's do a victory lap about some of the other states.
- [17:09]
Cory DeAngelis
We could take the rest of the podcast doing the victory lap. We're winning so much. I'm almost getting tired of winning. No, I'm just kidding. We got to get Virginia and blue states on board, too. But I'll tell you, this is seismic shift in the amount of states and just the velocity of how quickly we're moving on the issue of school choice. In the past four years, we've had more advancement on school choice than in the preceding four decades. It has been so much momentum. The wind is at our backs. We're not slowing down. But this year, I mean, we had a lot of rural states going on all in on school choice. We've had total since 2021. 16 states go all in on school choice. This year we had Wyoming, Tennessee, my home state of Texas, and we had a couple other rural states as well. North Dakota got close, but their RINO governor who said in his state of the state address that he was going to support school choice and specifically education savings accounts, he vetoed his own promise, basically. I guess the teachers unions got to him. He also vetoed a bill to protect kids from sexually explicit books in public school libraries, which I don't know why you would do that as a Republican at this point, but I get, I think in some states they get so far controlled by one party that there, there starts to become factions within that party. Whereas in more purplish states, like if Virginia were to like slowly swing right by a couple of seats, I bet you they'd quickly pass universal school choice because they know the Republicans all got to band together to get things done. Whereas you get a place like North Dakota, 90% of the chambers, Republicans. So then you get kind of these, you know, if you're going to be the only one voting against school choice, that's going to be a problem for you in a state. But if you can find 10 others to band together, it becomes easier for you to get off the platform issues.
- [19:00]
Matt Kibbe
I'm assuming this is true in North Carolina, but my experience in state capitals, when it's one party dominated, it's a closed echo chamber system and they think that the lobbyists that track through their office every day represents their constituents and you actually need some competition to break out.
- [19:18]
Cory DeAngelis
Yeah, and North Carolina is one of the, it's probably the, it's the closest to a purplish state that went all in on school choice A couple years ago. They had a Democrat governor. But in North Carolina you don't need a 2/3 majority to override a veto. You just need a 3/5, 60% majority. And guess what happened a couple years ago. They had a Democrat in the House named Trisha Cotham, and while she was a representative, she switched parties to the GOP on the issue of school choice. She became the primary bill sponsor for their universal school choice bill and that gave them just enough votes. She was this the, the three fifths, the last vote they needed to get that majority to override a veto from Roy Cooper, who's another hypocrite, sent his daughter to a private school. I don't blame him for doing that. More power to you. But he's such a freaking hypocrite that he went out with, went on his official governor website and all read at the top an emergency declaration. No, I'm not talking about the hurricane from recently. He was talking about an issued emergency declaration for school choice. Talk about an abuse of emergency powers. Talk about fear mongering. It may have been an emergency to his special interest to control him. It wasn't a real emergency to families. The real emergency is kids being stuck in failing government schools. They have zero percent proficiency rates. They're trapped there. They have to move houses to get to a better public school. We shouldn't call them public schools. They're government schools because they're not public in the economic sense of the word. They're not. They are rivalrous. They are excludable. They do exclude kids. Take for example in San Antonio, Texas where I live, I'm next to a district called Alamo Heights Independent School District. They're one of the better public school districts. They're probably woke still. They lobbied against school choice bill. I found out last year that you could theoretically transfer into that school. So they could say they have some form of school choice. But they can kick you out based on your academic records. They can kick you out based on disciplinary records. They reassess you every year. And guess what? You have to pay over $10,000 in tuition at a public school on top of what you're paying for the school you're not going to use through the property tax system. You have to pay twice to go to this so called public schools. These are government run institutions. They are exclusive and they discriminate on the basis of zip code.
- [21:40]
Matt Kibbe
So this same wave and the wake up amongst Republicans who are just going to go. They probably know what the right thing to do is on education. But they're afraid of all of the special interests that have driven this process and created the mess that we're in. But that same wave is happening at the federal level and there's some fun stuff going on. I just talked to my friend Glenn Jacobs about his old boss Linda McMahon and I feel like her experience in WWE is perfect.
- [22:11]
Cory DeAngelis
She's got to get in there and body slam that unconstitutional department once and for all. It'll be fantastic. The thing is I wish the executive branch had more power when it came to tearing things down and reducing government control. Control. But we have this thing called the filibuster. Because who's going to be one that is determined whether government is increasing or decreasing? You got to have a 3/5 majority in the Senate. 60 votes to overcome a filibuster to do something that they call invoking cloture. Well, guess What? There's only 53 Republicans in the Senate. You need seven Democrats to come along to basically do anything and to even do something as simple as this 8020 issue of Protecting women's spirit sports. That bill failed because although every Republican voted in favor and they had a simple majority, all Democrats unanimously voted against this 8020 issue of keeping biological boys out of girls sports, and they blocked the bill that way. So now there's a proposal in Congress to get something done on the school choice front through the reconciliation budget package. You only need 51 votes for that. 51%.
- [23:16]
Matt Kibbe
Oh, interesting. So it's basically part of the tax bill.
- [23:19]
Cory DeAngelis
Yes. So a lot of stuff gets done in Congress. As a Libertarian, I don't really like it all that much, but as a.
- [23:26]
Matt Kibbe
Realist, this is part of the big, beautiful bill. I'm a former budget economist, and I worked on the House Budget Committee, so I geek out a little bit on reconciliation. And this is the problem with Linda McMahon and Donald Trump have said that they want to get rid of the Department of. Of Education. You can't do that unless you actually deauthorize it.
- [23:48]
Cory DeAngelis
And that's where the system requires an act of Congress, because it was created by an act of Congress. They are taking a death by a thousand cuts approach, which is the next best thing. So, yeah, they can defund it through the reconciliation process. They've already fired about half of the staff, which is over a thousand people. Oh, we're halfway there. Hopefully we can get them all gone pretty soon. But these. And things haven't really changed since they fired a bunch of people. Which raises the question of what were they actually doing?
- [24:18]
Matt Kibbe
What were they doing? Not much of anything, I presume that. I mean, since it has a positive budgetary impact, you could defund the Department of Education down to the last dollar. I hope that's in the big, beautiful bill. The spending numbers are not things that are inspiring me to confidence on that. But she has reduced staff. And, you know, the risk, of course, is that the next Democrat just brings them all back.
- [24:44]
Cory DeAngelis
Yeah. And there's a more light approach, a more politically feasible approach in Congress right now by Senator Mike Rounds. He's a Republican out of South Dakota, and using Trump's language, it's something called the Returning Education to Our States act, which I think is a smart rhetorical play, too. Right. Like, it gets people fired up, especially libertarians and Republicans and staunch conservatives, to say, let's abolish the Department of Education. But when you're campaigning, that's more of like a negative thing that you're bringing up. You're getting rid of something voters, it.
- [25:16]
Unknown
Sounds like you're adding, sounds like you're.
- [25:18]
Matt Kibbe
Getting rid of education.
- [25:19]
Cory DeAngelis
Right. And so when you say returning education to the states in this bill, what it actually does, and Trump and Linda have been consistent on this message and so has have others in the Republican Party. The administration is to send the money that's already being spent at the federal level, block grant it back to the states and let them to determine how to spend the money on their constituents as they see fit. It allows for more local control. It's still not as far as I'd like to go. I'd say give that money back to the taxpayers, give that money to the parents. That's the most local form of control that exists. The family unit deciding for their own kids. But hey, I'll take a, you know, step forward in the right direction. The word education is not in the Constitution. We should get rid of it. It should have never been born in 1979 when Jimmy Carter was giving a payoff to his buddies in the nea. But this bill is not as seismic of a change as what the Democrats are fear mongering on right now. And Randy Weingarten's going saying this will defund education. If anything, it might actually increase the amount of money that's being spent on education for your kid in the classroom. And because the money's going back to the states, it's not going to bureaucrats in D.C. who are skimming some off the top so you'll have more money in the classroom. And then they're saying that things like special needs will go away. No, it won't. You look at the proposal. Read the dang bill. This is why we got to abolish the Department of Education. You guys probably went to public schools and have no idea how to read a bill. But in the bill, it says that vital programs like special needs programs would go under the Department of Health and Human Services. Student loans would go under Small Business Business Administration. Trump has already made that announcement. So as a libertarian, I'm like, yeah, it just seems like we're kind of just shuffling things around. But I still see it as a step in the right direction towards restoring more local control and getting away from federal bureaucracy. And maybe the more that things are moved around to other agencies, it becomes less of a political lift to actually delete the apart the Department of Education once and for all.
- [27:18]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, if you made it this far.
- [27:20]
Unknown
Into the show, it means I must be doing something right. Key Beyond Liberty is just one of the amazing products we create at Free the people. We tell emotionally compelling stories and produce educational videos for the Liberty Curious. Our award winning documentaries personalize all things liberty, independence, creativity, hard work, integrity and perseverance. After the show, check out our work@freethepeople.org and if you like what you see, donate to support what we do. That's freethepeople.org now back to the show.
- [27:56]
Matt Kibbe
I think it's probably more constitutionally feasible given that she's sort of rearranging deck chairs. I do think that there's probably a more aggressive strategy that could be done through reconciliation, like putting it back to the states and, you know, claiming some sort of budget savings premium to make it germane under the, under the rules. But we'll see what they do. I, I'm trying to figure out what's in the big beautiful bill.
- [28:25]
Cory DeAngelis
Well, there is this nationwide school choice proposal that was called the Educational Choice for Children Act. It made its way into the reconciliation package. The big beautiful bill on the House side, which is stalled right now. It got stopped in one of the committees, but that happens all the time. The budget's gonna pass. And school choice is not the budget buster that's causing any concerns among Republicans. It's only a proposal for a tax credit of about $5 billion. So that's pennies when you compare that to the trillions of dollars that are spent at the federal level. So the holdups that I hear about other things, and if anything, Trump has made it a priority, so has Senate leadership and House leadership, to include school choice in this package. And you can also abolish the Department of Education while still passing this federal tax credit because it's not federal money following the student, it's a tax credit keeping your money, not giving it to the government. And this program is neither run nor regulated by the federal Department of Education. So Trump could theoretically accomplish both of his campaign promises of abolishing the department while also advancing nationwide school choice. I will say it's only $5 billion, which again, is only a small trickle in the amount of spending we have at the federal level. So it won't unleash education freedom for all families. But what I think is the biggest win that will happen is that, you know, the red states are already passing school choice left and right. We already know that. That's where most of the magic happens, because 90% of education funding is at the state and local level. Anyway, this would allow families to have a little more couple thousand more to use on scholarships in addition to their state programs. But in states that don't have school choice, like California, New York, Virginia doesn't really have any meaningful school choice. And I mean they only have seven charter schools or so in Virginia. In North Carolina they have hundreds. Virginia has a rule to where last I heard I don't think they changed it, is that the school district can veto the the start of a charter school. It's basically like Burger King getting to say that McDonald's can't open up nearby your competition getting to determine whether you can open. Of course they're going to say no. They're going to have all these different reasons as to why you cannot open and they'll pretend it's about something else, but it's really about their self interest and greed. But families in California, New York, Virginia and so on and so forth will also get a taste of school choice. They'll be able to circumvent their union controlled legislatures. And by the way, as you mentioned, 99% of the campaign contributions from Randy Weingarten's union goes to the Democrat party each year. That is a money laundering operation. It ought to be illegal. We should ban public sector unions entirely, especially teachers unions. And maybe if they get a taste of school choice and see it's not burning things down, which has never happened, the public schools always get better in places that have school choice because of course competition, it's a rising tide that lifts all boats. But maybe they'll say look, it's actually not that bad. Maybe the constituents will say, hey, I want, instead of $2,000, I want, you know, your public schools are spending 20, maybe you give me $10,000. So they'll be more likely to pressure lawmakers to expand school choice. And if they don't listen, maybe the blue states will become red states. Or better yet, if the Democrats are smart, they'll see this opportunity, this football that the Republicans have picked up, starting with Glenn Youngkin on the issue of parental rights. And the Democrats will start voting for school choice too. That's what I predicted in my book called the Parent Revolution was actually endorsed by Trump as well, later turned into a national bestseller maybe because he endorsed it. But that is how Democrats are going to come along. It's going to be because they have to, not because, you know, you make them feel good and tell them left behind.
- [32:16]
Matt Kibbe
Well, I mean there's no particular like I'm old enough to remember when rank and file Democrats would have been the core constituency for school choice. And I think the institutional corruptions you're talking about, the way that government employees create unions that lobby the government to give them more money. They've captured the Democratic Party. And I'm sure there's plenty of Democrats that would love to be free of that albatross. But as it is, it's going to have to be to your model. It's going to have to be parents pushing past the machine. And that's happening. And just to pick on Senate Republicans, and I won't name names, and you're free to if you want to, but I'm not so confident that a majority of the Republican caucus in the Senate actually wants to do school choice.
- [33:06]
Cory DeAngelis
And if they don't, then they should lose their seats, they should lose their reelection. And what's great about social media is a lot of downsides of social media. It takes up too much of my time. By the way, I have my phone on the desk right now. I'm surprised I haven't picked it up and checked it during the interview. But it's like my coffee in the morning. I don't have to drink coffee anymore. You wake up and you check your cell phone. I wouldn't recommend it. But the, the upside is that there's so much sunlight now, it's the best disinfectant. It helped us push for school choice in one way, in that you see videos from Libs of TikTok where the public school teachers are admitting that they are brainwashing your kids with left wing ideology. They're bragging about it, they think it's a good thing. And then they get exposed for saying these things. And that gets parents to say, huh, maybe my schools aren't as great as they thought they were. Maybe they're not focused on the basics. They're focused more on the LGBT's than the ABCs. I should fight for that money that's meant for my kid to go to a school that's actually aligned with my values and not conflicting with everything I'm trying to do to teach my kids and raise my children right in the household. So I'm going to go do something else. And so although the schools are open now and we don't have the Zoom school where we're seeing these problems, we see kids recording things online, we see emails that go out to parents, we just get people at school board meetings complaining about what their kids are being subjected to. And all this is spreading in a viral manner. There's no secret Social media. Same thing applies to the primaries too. Now we know if a Republican votes against school choice, ha. Good luck for you because you're going to lose your seat.
- [34:43]
Matt Kibbe
So you mentioned some of the craziness in schools and social media, magnifying that. This is how I discovered the legislation that Jared Polis just signed in Colorado. And then I groked it and really dug into it. And it's insanity to create penalties for misgendering or dead naming kids in schools and public places and businesses. And it seems like just a fundamentally anti first Amendment, anti American kind of thing. Because of course, misgendering and dead naming and intent they're talking about what if you don't know?
- [35:27]
Cory DeAngelis
What if you don't know?
- [35:28]
Unknown
What if you don't?
- [35:29]
Cory DeAngelis
How do you know my intent? Yeah, it's straight out of 1984. I mean, if you call some, if you live in reality and you call a biological man a man, and that's what you believe, you can be criminalized for doing that they, they call a discriminatory act. Now in Colorado, the bill was even worse than when you saw it earlier. They had a version that passed out of the Democrat controlled house that said that if you misgendered your own child, a three year old or four year old, that you could lose your child in a custody, custody dispute. Not just that the courts may consider this, but that they shall, they must consider whether you misgendered your child or not within a custody dispute. So if your wife says your little boy wants to wear a dress and she's adamant that it's actually a girl, the boy is actually a girl, and then you guys decide you're going to get a divorce later and you believe, rightly that your boy is a boy, that's going to be used against you. But they, they got that stripped out in the Senate version. But it's still dystopian. I mean, it's still straight out of 1984.
- [36:34]
Matt Kibbe
It's still a hammer, right?
- [36:35]
Cory DeAngelis
Speech. It's completely compelled speech. And I think it's gonna lose at the Supreme Court. There goes Jared Polis chances at ever running for president. I mean, this will be used on campaign ads over and over and over again. And we need to stop calling Jared Polis a libertarian. He is not a libertarian. He's against free speech. We just saw it. He's against private school choice. We heard about that a couple years ago as well. I think he talked about it to John Stossel attacking private school choice. So he's not a Libertarian, He's a Democrat and he's trying to appeal to more voters.
- [37:06]
Matt Kibbe
Is this legislation out of the range of blue state sanity or is this normal in other states? Like does California do something this crazy? Do you know?
- [37:18]
Cory DeAngelis
Yeah, California does have crazy stuff like this too. And the other state that's on my radar for blue states is Illinois. So Illinois, they're Democrat dominated. They have J.B. pritzker as their governor. Democrat who went to private school and sent his kids to private school. He's a hypocrite on the issue. Two did nothing to save their school choice program. Even though in 2022 when he was running for reelection, even though he was up by double digits in the polls, he responded to a survey I believe by Chicago Tribune asking if he supported the private school choice program. I even wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal because he answered yes, that he supported the scholarship program for serving like 10,000 students. At the time they were all low income kids. They were mostly non white kids, minority kids. And he did nothing to save that program. It sunset it after a few years and he completely kept quiet. He knew that he had to signal support for it. But when it really the rubber hit the road, he let school choice die in Illinois and that program was eliminated in 2023. Democrats are total hypocrites on the issue. You fast forward to this year, 2025, they pushed forward a bill to regulate homeschooling to make you sign up with the state. You could have criminal punishments attached if you didn't sign up like within three days, if you don't fill up, fill out the paperwork to raise your own kids, you'll. The state will be coming after you. And so they did that after they killed school choice, which I wrote about in the Wall Street Journal this year as well about this issue of how school choice, some homeschoolers may be concerned about regulatory kind of overreach into the private sector. And I pointed out Illinois is a perfect example that school choice isn't the problem. It's authoritarians in office who want to control the minds of other people's kids. The same people who fight to end school choice. Those are the same politicians who fight to take away your homeschool freedom. Politicians can walk and chew gum at the same time. The, the Republicans do too. You look over in Wyoming this year, right after they expanded a bill to restore homeschooling freedom and reduce homeschool regulations, they passed universal school choice in Wyoming. The same people you look In Ohio in 2023, they passed the bill for universal school choice. The same session they deregulated homeschooling. You're sensing a pattern here. You go over to Missouri. Last year, they signed a bill for expanding their school choice program. In the same bill, they deregulated homeschooling. Specifically, before this bill was signed, they had a provision in Missouri where the school districts could weaponize the police departments and they could sic them on their competition, the homeschoolers, and send the police to homeschoolers homes. In that bill, they got rid of that provision so that the districts didn't have as much power from the state over the homeschool population. And so look, school choice is not in conflict with homeschool freedom. They move in the same direction. Politics is all about organized interests pushing for what they want. And so when you have school choice, you build a broader coalition to fight back. More people on your team to go against these authoritarians, and you'll reduce the likelihood that these people get in power. Because look at what happened in, in Florida, for example, with DeSantis. He barely won in 2018. The Wall Street Journal the next day said that school choice moms tipped the governor's race in Florida. They were talking about exit polls from CNN showing that black moms in particular came out in force for DeSantis much higher than the expected rate. And that's because right before the election, his opponent, Andrew Gillum, he's a black guy, a Democrat, called to get rid of the scholarship program that was already benefiting over 100,000 kids at the time. It was disproportionately non white kids, low income kids. And guess what? Those parents said, to hell with this. I want my kid to get a better education than I had. I want this opportunity. I want this scholarship. And that turned into a single issue. They might have disagreed with DeSantis on every other issue, but this became a litmus test for those parents when it came to the politician they were going to support. Fast forward to today. Florida has what? It's not a purple state anymore. Trump won Florida in a landslide. DeSantis won his reelection by 20 points. And Florida now has super majority Republican control of both chambers. So look, Republicans, if you want to win reelection, if you want to win a seat, you should lean into parental rights as a political winner. And Democrats, it's going to start to become more politically detrimental for you to oppose parents because parents have woken up and they're never going back to sleep.
- [42:04]
Matt Kibbe
So let's go back to the federal level and Linda McMahon has announced recently, but it's really just a culmination of a process of mostly coming out of HHS and NIH of defunding Harvard University. And I grok this too. And Harvard has an endowment of $50 billion, $53 billion.
- [42:29]
Cory DeAngelis
Where the heck did they get all this money? A lot of people are surprised that we even have taxpayer funding of Harvard. And what's interesting to me is the same Democrats who say public money for public schools when they fight against school choice, they're all up in arms about private Harvard University losing their so called public taxpayer dollars. They just want to fund the institutions that align with their values and not conservative values. And if you look at Harvard, look at follow the money. 95% of their campaign contributions, you look it up on Open Secrets of people who are affiliated with Harvard University go to Democrats each year. It's another left wing political institution. It's not an educational institution. Their own student magazine, the Harvard Crimson actually put out a survey a couple years ago and asking their faculty, their political persuasions, fewer than 3% of their professors at Harvard identify as conservatives. This is a one, this is a one sided ideological institution. They don't have any diversity of thought and look, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. They also announced that the President, Allen, whatever his last name is, is going to take a 25% pay cut. And they expect us to have some sympathy for him. I have zero sympathy for him. He already makes over $1.1 million a year in salary alone. And so you do the math on that. Even if he takes 25% off of that, he's still making over $800,000 a year. And what did he do? He ran that institution into the ground. They have anti Semitism running amok on campus. And it goes further than that. I think they won't reverse course and they're trying to fight this in the courts because they know that all this stuff is just the tip of the iceberg. And if they backpedal on a couple of things, that's not going to stop there. They're going to have all these other things exposed of these Marxist DEI policies. In fact, Chris Ruffo from the Manhattan Institute, he just put out on X a long thread of official documents from Harvard showing that in their hiring practices they discriminate against white people and, and males. That is against, that is against the law, that is unconstitutional, that is discriminatory on the basis of race and sex. So Harvard has bigger issues than what they're dealing with now with Trump cutting about $4 billion in funding, but funding Harvard at all is regressive. I mean, look, why should ordinary people who don't go to college have to pay for these dorks at these elite institutions to go out when they're paying out of pocket $60,000 a year in tuition to go to Harvard? They're making a lot of money when they go out into industry. We shouldn't have to subsidize that. They can do it on their own. They're a private institution. And taxpayers shouldn't be on the hook for adults making consensual decisions about what kind of. I mean, if you don't want to pay $60,000 for Harvard, don't go to Harvard. You don't have to go to Harvard. And maybe Harvard will lower their tuition at some point. But look, it's a regressive policy. Hopefully they're defunded and I hope Harvard's just the first shoe to fall. Hopefully we shouldn't be funding any of these universities at Kibbe on Liberty.
- [45:38]
Unknown
Freedom is a lifestyle, 247 something you.
- [45:42]
Matt Kibbe
Live and breathe and wear every day.
- [45:44]
Unknown
If that describes you, you need the very best liberty swag in the market today. Just like this shirt I happen to be be wearing. Go to freethepeople.org kol and check out our exciting merch. You too can love Liberty and look cool.
- [46:01]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, I was going to say like when I did a deep dive on the pandemic industrial complex with Jay Bhattacharya and Rand Paul, you discover that all of these elite institutions are extremely addicted to NIH funding and they're doing the bidding. Then it was Anthony Fauci, but they were doing all of this pandemic research that ultimately led to the pandemic. And Harvard has a huge amount of money coming from the NIH on that stuff. And then layer on top of that all these same elite universities who created these censorship centers. I don't know if Harvard has one. I assume they do and that's also federal funding. So they become tools of the state control of people. And my only beef, I have some problems with the Trump administration's approach on so called anti Semitism and we can get into that. But my beef is why just Harvard.
- [47:10]
Cory DeAngelis
Why are keep it going.
- [47:11]
Matt Kibbe
Why are we sending money to any of these start well endowed institutions? They should sink or swim on their own merits.
- [47:17]
Cory DeAngelis
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And that's hopefully when you start with Harvard, it's a high profile institution, you get the ball rolling. So I think this is more of an incremental approach that could become something bigger. Those are my hopes. And look, you can make an argument for taxpayer funding for children at the K12 level. I don't think it's a very good argument. If anything, if we were to fund K12 education through coercion, through taxes, it should be for the least advantaged. I mean, think about how we do with groceries, something very important like food, more important than education. We don't fund it for everybody. We have food stamps for all and we have government grocery stores that people are assigned to. Instead we say, okay, well let's just recognize that there are some people who might need some help and so let's have food stamps for the least advantage. We should probably do the same thing for education. If we had to start from scratch, it's not going to happen anytime soon. It's not politically feasible. There are too many people benefiting from the system right now to get to this place. But just from a theoretical, philosophical standpoint, we wouldn't be funding Bill Gates education in a government run school.
- [48:23]
Matt Kibbe
Well, it gets worse than that because any dollar we send to Harvard University is by definition probably paid for kids that didn't get to go to college. Yeah, and they certainly didn't get to go to Harvard. So it's a huge transfer of wealth from the have nots to the haves.
- [48:39]
Cory DeAngelis
And these are adults we're talking about, not children. They're making their own decisions. And at the end of the day, you should be able to consent to. And same thing with the student loans. Why is the government involved in the student loan business at all? I mean, we have trillions of dollars in student loan debt. Because people like Joe Biden say, oh no, I feel sorry for you, you don't have to pay. But look, first of all, K12 institutions at the government school should not be pushing. Everybody needs to go to college. I think that's part of the problem. But people need to be responsible for their actions. And you know, once people see that, hey, if you go to college for four years and you're jumping through these hoops and you're still ending up as a barista. No offense to baristas, but it costs a lot of money to go to some of these colleges and you're not being able to pay that off over time, you got to look in the mirror and say, is this a good investment or not? Especially when you have trades and people making a lot more money. They don't have the student loan debt, they get a start on their career earlier, they get an advance in life, they can start a family Earlier. I mean, there's so many benefits to not going to college. And if we're putting our thumb on the scale by stealing money from taxpayers and nudging people into that sector through funding and through incentives and through rhetoric at the K12 level, I think we're hurting people more than we're helping them. And so, yeah, let's start with Harvard, but let's take them all down. Let's let the universities stand on their own merits. And if they're actually giving you real skills, which I highly doubt that they're actually doing that. Brian Kaplan at GMU in this area has written a great book on it co called the Case Against Education. Where, you know, if you graduate, if you, if you leave college with, and you don't finish that last class, do you get any of the job market returns? No, you don't. Because it's all about signaling. It's the piece of paper that you get, not the skills that you actually retain from the college.
- [50:38]
Matt Kibbe
It's credentialing.
- [50:39]
Cory DeAngelis
Yeah, it's credentialing. It's, it's, you know, people. Yeah, it's, it's, it's the credentialing treadmill. And it's something that we shouldn't be forced to pay through taxes, whether through student loans or otherwise. And yeah, we're sticking it to Harvard right now, but these problems are deep in other institutions.
- [51:04]
Matt Kibbe
I think it probably as well, yeah, it probably starts with that disastrous hearing where the heads of Harvard and I forget ISIL and somebody else at least.
- [51:13]
Cory DeAngelis
Stefanik, was calling them out.
- [51:15]
Matt Kibbe
They weren't able to explain the contradiction of their own policies, where on the one hand they're allowing pro Palestinian protesters not just to speak, but to do violent things. And I'm with fire on this. There's a bright line between free speech on campus or blocking Jewish kids from going to class. That's a form of violence. And it got worse than that. And I would draw a bright line. So I hope that we're holding them accountable for the violence and not the speech. But either way, they're foisted on their own petard because they're the ones that were anti speech. Speech was violence. Right. And then when it comes to actual violence on their campuses, they seem to sit on their hands. So I sort of enjoy that they're bearing that bitter fruit. But I also think, I don't. I'm with Thomas Massie. I'm not really interested in the government bullying, even really bad campus presidents from prohibiting speech. We should bully them into actually Defending free speech. I don't know if you can do that, but you know what I mean.
- [52:22]
Cory DeAngelis
You remember Harvard's last president, Claudine Gay? She got caught for plagiarism.
- [52:28]
Matt Kibbe
That's right. Yeah.
- [52:29]
Cory DeAngelis
They've got a great track record over there at Harvard at the very tip the of be top. I mean, if she would have stayed, I think she still.
- [52:34]
Matt Kibbe
That might have been a DEI hire.
- [52:36]
Cory DeAngelis
I mean, imagine going into her class and her telling you, you can't plagiarize. Oh, I'm going to give you an F. Wait, wait a second. I saw this thing where you got to. I mean, I think she's still making the same salary. She's still making about a million dollars at Harvard, the last time I checked. I mean, it's been a while, but what's really interesting to me in this whole Harvard debate is this kind of mental gymnastics that I've seen recently from the left. I got a. I got attacked. Or I guess I got. I didn't get attacked. That's invoking violence. I didn't get physically attacked. I got a quote tweet from a Stanford professor. I forget his name. He had like 800, 900,000 followers. So I should know his name, maybe. But he quote, tweeted me and said, oh, well, defunding. Harvard is propping up the Chinese Communist Party. I'm just over here. Like, what are you talking about? He's saying that we're not going to be as competitive as them because they have more funding for higher education. It's like, wait, so you're telling me you want to emulate the Chinese Communist Party? You're really letting the mask slip, aren't you? Communists, You. You want us to be more like the Communists, but if anything, I mean, Tom. Tom Cotton from Arkansas, Republican senator. He sent a letter to Marco Rubio to open an investigation into Harvard and their potential ties to the Chinese Communist Party. So if anything, funding Harvard by that logic could actually prop up the Chinese Communist Party indirectly. And, oh, by the way, as far as America being competitive on a global level, maybe we should start at the K12 level, where you have a quarter, only a quarter of kids proficient in math. You have places like Chicago, you have a 0% proficiency rates in about 50 schools, despite them spending about $30,000 per student per year. And oh, by the way, their teachers union boss, Stacy Davis Gates, sends her own kid to a private school that only cost half that amount, about $15,000 per student per year. That is school choice for me, but not for the. They Know their institutions that they staff with, their unions are failure factories. They know better than anybody else. That's why they don't send their own kids there. They go somewhere else. And so look, when you have divisive concepts, when you are teaching young adults in college that only one political ideology is the right ideology. And we all know what they're doing with this left wing indoctrination on the campuses. It starts at K through 12, but it ends at the higher education institutions as well. And in the media and so on and so forth. But when you're telling people to hate their country, that's what makes America less competitive. Not defunding elite institutions that have a 53 billion dollar endowment that charge 60,000 a year. I think they're going to be okay with funding their education. Maybe not funding as many administrators, but that's just too bad. We have too much administrative bloat and DEI hires in higher education already. So I think it'll actually help to reduce funding of Harvard and other institutions, institutions.
- [55:35]
Matt Kibbe
So bottom line, parents, if you're listening to this, no pressure, but it's all up to you. Because I don't trust either Republicans or Democrats that do this unless they step up and demand that they do it.
- [55:45]
Cory DeAngelis
Yeah, politicians don't care about logic too many times. They care more about power dynamics. And for a long time the only special interest was the teachers unions in education. And they had an iron grip on the Democrat party, but they also had enough Republicans to block their own party platform issues of school choice. Trust me, I know this. I live in Texas. This is ground zero for this happening. They picked off enough rural Republicans and gave them an excuse. They said, oh, you don't have a lot of private schools out here. But you know what? That was the dumbest argument against school choice, by the way, because they would also say that school choice is going to defund their fantastic rural public school. But if it's true, you can't go anywhere else and schools are funded based on enrollment. Well, if you can't go anywhere else, your school is not going to lose any money. It can't be both of these things at the same time. It's like the two button meme where the guy's sweating. You can't say these things are logically incompatible with one another. But they would tell the rural legislators these two things to try to fear monger and give them an excuse to give them cover, to have their cake and eat it too. To say they were still Republicans while voting with all the Democrats while voting With Randy Weingarten. Well, voting with people like Joe Biden and that's not going to fly anymore. And the more that the Republicans crystallize on this issue, Democrats better come along if they want to stay in some of their offices, if they want to keep as many seats as they can. But it all does rely on the parents because if the parents didn't do anything, we say it was Covid, but it was really the parents. The problems were always there in the school system. Covid didn't break the public school system. It was already broken. Families saw what was happening. We had sunlight. It was the best disinfectant. It opened up the eyes of parents. They were never able to shut their eyes again. They felt so powerless. In 2020. Parents don't want to feel powerless like that ever again. And so they're fighting for change and. And you can't stop. Yeah, we've had some victories, but we're only 16 states in. We have 34 more to go. Yeah, and if we've passed the nationwide school choice bill, that'll be a great federal tax credit, but it's a small portion. We're estimating about a million kids would benefit. That we have 50 million school age kids in America. That's only about 2%. Don't check my math on that. I went to government schools but I believe it's about 2% of the school age population. So we gotta keep fighting. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. And I'm glad to have you, Matt, on my side in this fight.
- [58:22]
Matt Kibbe
You are a good source for parents to get that real time knowledge about where their legislators might be. Tell people again how we find Cory DeAngelis because even your ex feed is just a daily resource for me.
- [58:37]
Cory DeAngelis
Thank you. I'm on it too much. But you can follow me on x it at D angeliscorey. Just my last name, then my first name. If you want to check out the book, I wish I had an extra copy today. I'll send you one, Matt, but it's called the parent revolution. Rescuing your kids from the radicals ruining our schools. And if you watch this right after we record it, it's currently on Amazon for 48% off. It's get them while they're hot. It's a great deal. It was a USA Today bestseller. For some reason the New York Times people didn't put me on the list but Trump endorsed it and my home state senator Ted Cruz endorsed it as well. And if you look on the back, he says you can ruin Randy Weingarten's day by reading this book. I also dedicated it to her for overplaying her hand and inadvertently doing more to advance school choice and homeschooling than anyone could have ever imagined. It's called the Parent Revolution. Get it, get it now all the time.
- [59:31]
Matt Kibbe
Okay, thank you for an optimistic episode.
- [59:33]
Cory DeAngelis
Thank you, Matt. Good to talk to you and I'll chat with you again when I'm back in dc.
- [59:37]
Matt Kibbe
Cool. Awesome.
- [59:39]
Unknown
Thanks for watching. If you liked the conversation, make sure to like the video, subscribe and also ring the bell for notifications. And if you want to know more about Free the people, go to freethepeople.org.