Recently, Marvel Studios released a new show on Disney+ titled Secret Invasion. It’s a tale of alien shapeshifters attempting to take over the Earth, but I’m not writing to inform you about the latest in pop culture. What if I told you that there’s a real invasion, a secret war going on against our children in some American schools? Thanks to a report from the UK’s Daily Mail, plotters of this war here in the Midwest were recently exposed working on transitioning our kids “subversively and quietly,” as one progressive educator explicitly put it. The wagers of this war are not aliens—they’re activists disguised as friendly teachers and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) officers, and their often-subtle agenda of “gender affirmation” in classrooms is but one front of the larger war destroying our children while pitting them against their parents. 

Earlier in June, the Daily Mail obtained access to an online private workshop attended by dozens of teachers from states including Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, and more. The federally funded four-hour event was hosted by the Midwest and Plains Equity Assistance Center (MAP), a subgroup of the Great Lakes Equity Center, and focused on how teachers can further push LGBTQ doctrine on students amidst recent red state policies on “gender, pronouns, parents' rights, bathroom access, and sports teams.” Also, as MAP specialist Angel Nathan said during the seminar, the group discussed ways to “remedy” what they believed to be the policies’ “marginalizing effects” on transgender students.

Reading the report, it’s clear that this wasn’t a vague discussion about these teachers’ general convictions or support for the LGBTQ movement. This workshop was more akin to creating battle plans for introducing young people to progressive ideas about gender and sexuality- without informing parents.

Listen to what Kimberly Martin, a Michigan school district DEI coordinator, had to say during the meeting: “We’re working with our record-keeping system so that certain screens can't be seen by the parents ... if there's a nickname in there we're trying to hide…” Additionally, Shea Martin, an Ohio teacher “who writes a ‘socialist, feminist, and anti-racist’ blog called Radical Teacher, said she worked against ‘laws that prohibit or restrict trans advocacy’” and commented, “I think that requires working subversively and quietly sometimes to make sure that trans kids have what they need.” Later, Shea Martin talked with other educators about engaging elementary students as young as five years old in discussions about sexuality and stated that “teachers should be wary of treating 'reinforced heterosexuality as the norm.’”

That’s not all. Besides trying to hide children’s gender identities from parents, there were other concerning comments made. School counselor Jennifer Haglund from Ames, Iowa, touted her LGBTQ activism and protested Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds’ recent law preventing males from participating in female sports. She went on to say, “I know that I have my own right code of ethics, and that doesn't always go along with the law.” And Yesenia Jimenez-Captain, an Illinois education director, bashed teachers from a nearby district who were against a Democrat effort to put menstrual products in boys’ bathrooms, and she described a related controversial local school board meeting discussing the issue as “violent.”

It's also startling that MAP “serves 11.2 million students in 7,025 school districts” across the Midwest, operating in Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Wisconsin, so the group possesses a large influence over our children’s education. 

As this exposed workshop shows, these ‘educators’ aren’t just ‘indoctrinators,’ as some would like to say. They’re activists bent on raising our children according to their twisted vision, not just training them in math or liberal arts as teachers should, but transitioning our children away from their families and God-given identity and eventually transforming them into who knows what.

Nothing highlights this phenomenon better than an article I stumbled upon about a teacher’s poster in an Eau Claire, Wisconsin school. With a DEI rainbow in the background, the poster reads, “If your parents aren’t accepting of your identity, I’m your mom now” and includes “#freemomhugs” at the bottom. It’s clear from this poster that the teacher believed his or her role extended far beyond that of an educator, now presuming to be the rightful guardian of his or her students.  

Here's another example. A bill advancing in California would consider gender affirmation legally necessary to a child’s “health, safety, and welfare.” This would mean that not affirming your child’s gender confusion could be considered child abuse. This didn’t much digging to find out since Lori Wilson, the bill’s co-author, gave up being incognito and just said the quiet part out loud:

So this particular bill adds the very important factor that affirming a child’s gender identity is in [parents’] best interest… by saying and rejecting it in wholesale, then you are essentially rejecting your child, and that is not in the best interest of the child. We should be affirming our children in every possible way and getting them whatever appropriate care they need.

If this bill became law, the government—not parents—would have the final say in how to raise children in the state of California, and in child custody cases, they could take children away from parents who don’t affirm their kids’ false identities.

A final example of this war against the family was highlighted by Mike Pence during an event hosted by Minnesota Family Council and True North Legal earlier this year in Minneapolis. He mentioned the ongoing case Parents Defending Education (PDE) vs. Linn-Mar Community School District, which came about after PDE filed a lawsuit against the Iowa school district for hiding students’ gender identity from parents.

Pence then laid out a simple truth we must all remember:

One of the most ancient liberties in existence is the right of parents to direct the upbringing of education and care of their children… For thousands of years that principle has set into motion our very civilization. And family is a sovereign sphere that predates all forms of government. Family is more than an institution—it’s the foundation of all institutions. To undermine parents’ rights is to undermine a cornerstone of our civilization.

The attempt by the rainbow brigade to undermine parental sovereignty is not a battle for children’s rights—it’s a war on children’s identities and an invasion into the family. We know from Proverbs 22:6 that God designated parents to “train up a child in the way he should go.” Unfortunately, progressives have deceptively created a false dichotomy between children and parents to split families and wedge their agenda down the middle, and we hear statements claiming that children “know best” or have the “right” to determine their own gender. But instilling lies into the minds of children and removing their guardrails is not only manipulative, it’s hateful, as proverbs 13:24 hints at. Children need parents’ guidance and discipline, and they need to hear the truth. Love can only be grounded in truth, and a society without either truth or guardrails will descend into chaos.

This all sounds bleak, but Americans are waking up to the secret war on parental authority taking place in our schools. Look at the recent school board meeting in Osseo, Minnesota, where parents and teachers showed up in protest of the district’s “gender inclusion” policy, LGBTQ resolution, and sexually explicit books. According to a recent survey, only “seven percent of Americans believe it is suitable for early elementary schools to teach the concept of non-binary identity,” and 53 percent of Americans agreed that “public schools interfere too much with parents’ rights to determine what their children are taught.” Finally, a Gallup poll found that 69 of Americans are against men in women’s sports, which marks a 7-point increase from a similar survey taken two years prior.” Parents are done with the nonsense, and the tide is changing.

I’ll conclude with a statement Pence made during his Minneapolis speech I think instills the duty we have in modern-day America, including Minnesota: “It wasn’t our choice to start the left’s culture war, but now we have no choice but to win it, for the sake of our children and grandchildren, and we will win this fight.” The aliens are being unmasked. Let’s continue to reclaim our schools for our children, one school board at a time.