- A Virginia public school gave 12 and 13-year-old students a compilation of recommended books to choose from that contained violent and sexually explicit content, a reading list for the school’s English class shows.
- One parent shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation that she believes this reading list shows that teachers are more focused on indoctrinating students than actually teaching.
- “When I was in China, we didn’t have freedom of speech. Now I feel like in the United States we are losing our freedom of speech,” the parent told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
(Daily Caller)—Cooper Middle School in McClean, Virginia, gave students an age- inappropriate reading list for their 7th grade English class this year, a concerned parent told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Students in the English class were assigned a wide variety of books on topics that spanned from illegal immigration to Black Lives Matter (BLM), according to a copy of the list. Although the reading list clarifies that students will not have to read every single book, one teacher at the middle school said students would have to choose books to read from the provided options unless a parent offered an alternate, school-approved book, an orientation video welcoming students to the class showed.
“The first time I got this syllabus was after the open house,” “Jane,” a parent who immigrated to the U.S. from Communist China and who requested anonymity so her child would not be bullied by teachers and students in the class, told the DCNF. “I didn’t think much of it at the time because I thought it was about teaching English. But. . . when I saw the second page, there were some words that looked completely unrelated.”
The list specifies eight core concepts the students will study by reading a “variety of books” over the course of the year to “challenge” them and let them “explore universal concepts”: Identity, community, the unknown, loyalty, justice, ethics, perspective and change. Students received slightly different book assignments depending on if they were in the honors-level course or the regular class, but both lists contained controversial books with explicit sexual or violent content.
“My parents were little during the communist revolution,” Jane told the DCNF. “Every textbook was about indoctrination, whether about physics, math or Chinese language. There was politics everywhere. . . Now it looks like this ‘English’ class has become indoctrination.”
“The thing is, the whole state, the whole country has something wrong. Every person is like a small screw in a big machine. I wonder if the teachers really know what critical thinking really is,” Jane added. “When I was in China, we didn’t have freedom of speech. Now I feel like in the United States we are losing our freedom of speech. It’s not just about speech. It’s about thinking.”
Both syllabi contain “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You,” a book by controversial author Ibram X. Kendi, who has advocated for the idea that every white person is inherently racist and compared anti-lockdown protesters in 2020 to slaveholders. “Stamped” is a “kid-friendly” remix of Kendi’s original book, “Stamped From The Beginning,” and gives a simplified explanation of his racial theories while encouraging students to “build an antiracist America” by “recognizing America’s racist past,” according to an excerpt from the preface.
“I saw the author [of one of the books], Kendi, and I read a report about him before,” Jane told the DCNF. “When I saw a book by him on the list, it was like an alarm to me. I started to Google books, and there are some on the honor’s list that are not on the others. There were some books promoted by BLM.”
“I don’t think schools should be giving these books to 7th graders in classrooms,” Jane added. “This curriculum is made to integrate an ideology about identity. I don’t think it’s correct for a teacher to promote their political agenda at a public school. They’re on the taxpayer’s money, we pay their salary.”
Parents have raised concerns about controversial reading lists across the country over the past few years, as more public schools and libraries have attempted to introduce LGBTQ and BLM ideology into the classroom. Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana read aloud sections of books at a Sept.12 Senate hearing that revealed the extremely graphic nature of the stories public schools have recently assigned to young students.
Happy first day of school!@langleyfcps @CooperMS_FCPS @SpringHillFCPS @MarshallRoadES @CedarLaneHS @CunninghamPark pic.twitter.com/aeMoc9qNFH
— FCPS Region 1 (@FCPSRegion1) August 21, 2023
The list provides students with several other books that promote BLM ideas: “The Hate U Give,” “Dear Martin,” “All American Boys,” “Ghost Boys,” “Just Mercy,” “New Kid” and “A Good Kind of Trouble.” Each book uses a fictional narrative to introduce students to concepts like “microaggressions,” modern-day white supremacy, police brutality and inherent racism.
The school does not have a specific policy on allowing parents to opt their children out of books with extreme violence or overly politicized ideas, although the Fairfax County Public Schools system (FCPS) told the DCNF that parents have a right to opt their students out of an assignment if they are “uncomfortable with any books on any of our school reading lists.” FCPS administrators told the DCNF that all “controversial” books go through an extensive committee review process before being assigned to students.
Jane expressed concern about some of the books she claimed had an ulterior agenda or had sexual themes that are inappropriate for children who are 12 or 13 years old. She pointed to one book, “Gracefully Grayson,” which is about a young boy who decides over the course of the story that he is actually a girl and that he wants to transition.
“The students are vastly growing, not just with their bodies but with their minds,” Jane told the DCNF. “They [public schools] want to interfere with our children, and they want to make our children follow them, to accept their ideology. Identity is important. But discovering identity is a lifelong journey.”
Other books focus more on the purely sexual side of the LGBTQ world, like “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe” and “They Both Die At The End.” Both books present two teenage boys as their protagonists, and both novels have extremely graphic descriptions of the boys making out and wanting to have sex.
Other stories, like “Shatter Me,” “Uglies,” “The Fifth Wave” and “Five Feet Apart” focus on characters that want to have physical contact or sex but are not able to for varied reasons. “Shatter Me” in particular focuses on eroticism to emphasize to readers that the main character cannot touch anyone because she has the power to kill people on contact.
“His hand. On me,” a passage at the very beginning of “Shatter Me” reads, describes the first time the main character is touched by her male cellmate. “2 tips of 2 fingers graze my cloth covered shoulder for less than a second and every muscle of every tendon in my body is fraught with tension that clenches my spine.”
When the DCNF asked FCPS why they assign borderline pornography to young students, the administration pointed to their policy that requires teachers to inform parents at least 30 days in advance if their students will be reading a sexually explicit book in class. Parents can choose to opt their student out of reading those books and can also suggest alternate books they would rather have their child read.
Jane told the DCNF that she worried about her child’s literature education, especially since the classroom functions as a “book club” style discussion format. She also said she was concerned the school would not approve her book choices if she chose more classic literature or conservative-leaning nonfiction.
“One thing I was worried about: My daughter, my child, may be persecuted in her class,” Jane told the DCNF. “I want her to have the opportunity to actively participate in the learning activities. But some of the learning material that is provided is concerning. But how do you participate when the material is inappropriate?”
Cooper Middle School, the school’s principal and the three teachers overseeing the English class did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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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.
IMHO America has been under communist rule since at least 2000, it has only become blatantly obvious recently! In 2000, the Soviet supported member of the Gore family, Al Gore, ran against the pro–CCP Bush —- among those two and Ralph Nader, the candidate who stood out as the most capitalist was Ralph Nader and I believe recent history has proven me correct!
Today the Biden regime is doing everything possible to destroy America and any who refuse to see this are completely insane! At the same time we have an idolized–by–some Trump, who refuses to acknowledge his major mistakes as a past president, thereby exhibiting a zero learning curve —— the situation is not looking positive!
During the Clinton presidential terms, he rendered all power to the banks, including the exponential extension of their money creation entitlement through credit derivatives and that colossal insurance scam called Credit Default Swaps! The Group of Thirty, the international lobbyist group for the central bankers, wielded far too much power over Clinton, and their agents Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers acted accordingly!