(The Daily Signal)—As students across the United States struggle to master basic reading and math skills coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, some schools are dedicating the first week of February to “Black Lives Matter at School” in a “Week of Action.”
Tina Descovich, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, urges parents to see whether their school district is engaging in that program and to speak out against it if it is.
“I think most Americans are starting to tune in and understand that we are in a crisis in America in public education,” Descovich tells “The Daily Signal Podcast.”
“We have the lowest test scores since the 1980s in reading and the lowest-ever math scores,” she notes. “Yet we have organizations like Black Lives Matter in Schools that are setting aside a whole, entire week, the first week of February—[the] 5th through the 9th—to drive their ideology.”
“If you look at their 13 guiding principles and their four demands, one of them is to upset the nuclear family, to break down the nuclear family,” the Moms for Liberty co-founder notes. “They have other things like affirming transgenderism and focusing on globalism. Many things that I don’t agree with and don’t want my children learning, things that are divisive and will work to destroy our culture and our country.”
Black Lives Matter at School’s 13 guiding principles include “Restorative Justice,” “Globalism,” “Queer Affirming,” and “Transgender Affirming.” The 11th principle, “Black Villages,” states: “We disrupt the narrow Western prescribed nuclear family structure expectation. We support each other as extended families and villages that collectively care for one another, especially ‘our’ children.”
Descovich says schools push this divisive material as “a cover-up for public education failure,” citing poor proficiency levels in math and reading.
For example, she notes that only 5% of black fourth grade students in Milwaukee Public Schools—which celebrates the Black Lives Matter in School’s Week of Action—could read at grade level, according to the National Advancement of Educational Progress.
“Milwaukee Public Schools right now, they’ve put out information for their teachers on how to teach some of the 13 guiding principles that Black Lives Matter in Schools are promoting, and yet look at what’s going on in Milwaukee Public Schools,” Descovich says. “Tyler, 5% of black students in Milwaukee Public Schools are reading on grade level in the fourth grade. That means 95% of the black children in Milwaukee cannot read. That is sentencing them to a life of real struggle.”
“They’re not teaching kids to read or do math, and they’re spending time on things that cause division and break down the things that we do know work in society, like the nuclear family,” she adds.
Descovich urges parents not to be complacent. She recounts that, even though she served on the school board in a conservative county, the divisive racial ideas behind Black Lives Matter at School made their way into her county’s school system.
She urges parents to “go to your school or your school district’s website and just look.”
“Are they celebrating Black Lives Matter in School Week of Action? If they are loud and proud, it will be out there, front and center,” Descovich explains.
If parents see it on the website, they should contact a teacher, contact the principal or go to the school board. “If your district is hiding it, which is very possible, you can do a public records request,” she notes. Moms for Liberty has resources to help parents file those requests. Such a request may turn up race-based trainings, which parents should raise with the school board.
Descovich also encourages parents to check if there is a Moms for Liberty chapter in their county, and if there isn’t, to start one themselves.
She also takes the time to “set the record straight” on the Moms for Liberty chapter in Williamson County, Tennessee. That Moms for Liberty chapter criticized the “Wit and Wisdom” curriculum, which, among other things, assigned the autobiographical book “Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story.”
She recalls that a second grade biracial child in that county told his mom “something about hating his white part” when he returned from school one day.
“Our chapter took the time; they spent a thousand hours,” she says. “They picked every book that has that set in the curriculum, every lesson plan. They even got a hold of the teachers manual, and they read every sentence, and they mapped it out, and you really had to do that to see the problem.”
“There were little things dropped in kindergarten, added on into first grade, and then in second grade. They actually had a nine-week social justice segment in their English language arts curriculum,” Descovich explains. The biracial boy had been in the middle of that program.
“You know, the curriculum included the book ‘Ruby Bridges Goes to School,’ and there’s absolutely nothing wrong in that book,” the Moms for Liberty co-founder says. “But there was a teachers manual that went along with that, that spent time with those second graders pointing out the ‘N-word’ and how it was in the background of one of the pictures in the book.”
“The teachers manual … didn’t direct the teacher to teach it in a way that showed Ruby Bridges as a hero, as brave, as what she did is amazing and she had courage. It taught it in a way that was divisive,” Descovich explains.
“I have children. If anyone would have taught them the ‘N-word’ in second grade, I would have been irate,” she says. “And if I had a biracial child sitting in that classroom, learning that Ruby Bridges was more of a victim than a hero, that’s very upsetting to me.”
Listen to the interview with Descovich below.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email [email protected], and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
America is a communist nation under communist rule — these simpletons once wanted to argue about the pro–CCP Bush family being “conservative” —— does anyone still believe that?!?!
Quit sounding so eternally wishy washy! If one cannot use the familial terms of “mother” and “father” at the military service academies —- situation long ago went to DefCon 1!!!
Nonsense.
Why do our children need “a week of action”?? FOR GOD’S SAKE, MAKE A WEEK OF ACTION LEARNING HOW TO ADD, SUBTRACT, SPEAK ENGLISH AND LEARN ABOUT FREEDOM.
REMOVE YOUR CHILDREN FROM THE SCHOOLS
Our education system must be defunded,
Enough of the BLM, they only lie, cheat a steal.