Defending Faith, Family and Freedom Podcast

Guest (Male): You're listening to Defending Faith, Family and Freedom, featuring Gary Bauer, Senior Vice President of Public Policy at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. And now, here's Gary.

Gary Bauer: Welcome everybody. This is Gary Bauer, the Vice President for Public Policy at the James Dobson Family Institute, and this is our podcast, Defending Faith, Family and Freedom. I hope you're enjoying listening to these podcasts as much as I enjoy doing them.

There's so much going on in America that Christians need to be aware of and on top of. Unfortunately, there's no shortage of outrageous material. We're doing something a little bit different today. I'm going to share something with you that I think you need to know about. We're also putting together some video on our conversation today, and we'll be using that in various ways down the road.

The subject today is a podcast I came across, not my own. Quite frankly, I'm a little envious of the podcast I'm going to mention because they've got a load of people listening to them and watching them. It's called "I've Had It," and it's co-hosted by two women. One's name is Jennifer Welch and the other one is Angie Sullivan. They're both, and I want to choose my words carefully here, to say that they were liberals would probably be insulting to liberals. They've gone way beyond liberalism.

These two ladies are way, way out there in left field. In fact, the title of the podcast, "I've Had It," comes from the fact that they have had it. They're tired of and they've lost their patience with the left and the Democrat Party not being crazy enough. I'm not pulling your leg on this. They think that there ought to be more rioting in the street and more demonstrations and more of all the things that most Americans of both parties look at and go, "Gee, that's not really normal."

All these things that we're seeing happening and the things we're seeing said. "Let's get rid of the police." Is that a normal idea? I don't think that's a normal idea. Maybe it's just me. Then I heard one of these leftists the other day say what we really need to do is abolish the prisons. I guess you don't need police if you're going to abolish the prisons.

But I digress. The reason this particular little part of their podcast got my attention is that they were talking about an education issue, specifically about those terrible people known as homeschoolers. I know a lot of homeschoolers. I think they're great people, but I also have a very specific interest in education.

Just to remind some of you, I was honored and privileged in the Reagan administration. I had a number of assignments under President Reagan, but one of them was I was the Undersecretary of the Department of Education. That was the number two person in the department. I think Bill Bennett, my old friend who was Secretary, would probably agree I was actually running the department while he did the more glamorous things, giving speeches and being on the Sunday talks and so forth.

I did a lot of work on the education issue. Even back in the 80s, we were talking about the failures in American public education, and homeschooling was beginning to get a lot of attention. It became very apparent to us that homeschool kids were doing darn well being taught by their parents. They were even doing better than a lot of public schools, sadly, were doing.

But these two ladies with their podcast, "I've Had It," as you will hear, have a completely different view of this. Let's play a little bit, and I'll try to control myself and be rational about this. But if you hear anybody counting to ten, that's probably me trying to cool off. Listen to some of this wisdom.

Ellie: Hello, Jennifer. Hello, Pumps. Hello, Kylie. This is Ellie coming to you from Minnesota. What I have absolutely had it with is watching some of the stupidest people I went to school with decide they're qualified to homeschool their children. These are the people who couldn't hand in a single homework assignment, coasted through every group project, and were proud members of the D-honor roll.

Now they're writing these Facebook manifestos laden with spelling and grammatical errors about how public schools are evil and full of indoctrination. As a result, they're going to be homeschooling their precious little peanuts. These idiots' competence-to-confidence ratio is absolutely off the charts. It's the blind leading the blind.

It feels like this has only gotten worse in Trump's America, which I'm sure is no coincidence, where being uninformed somehow is a personality trait that we're passing on to our children. I can't stand these morons attempting to homeschool their children when they probably shouldn't have even had children to begin with. That's all.

Gary Bauer: I wish that I took phone calls on my podcast because if I did, maybe the lady that just called in from Minnesota might have made the mistake of calling me. I would love to have responded to that lady who was obviously a very educated woman, unable to express herself without dropping the F-bomb.

The whole attitude, if you have a chance to watch the video in one of our other formats, while she's saying these outrageous things, these two co-hosts who have nearly two million followers are having a great time hearing this know-nothing lady in Minnesota smear countless families across America that homeschool their children. It is just so funny. They're laughing their full heads off. Let's listen to what Angie Sullivan says in reaction to this mental giant that just called into their podcast.

Angie Sullivan: You wouldn't believe how many people in Bible study homeschool their kids. You just think, "Oh, I worry about that." Then you see those witness booklets or whatever they're called that the Duggars used and they top out at eighth grade. I just think homeschooling is a bad idea from soup to nuts. I don't care if you're a nuclear physicist. I think it's just weird that you want your kids around you all day, every day, and all night. Just the socialization. For me personally, it was that I would have gotten up on my hands and knees and strapped them to my back and crawled to get them to school.

Gary Bauer: We all like a little bit of time away from our kids, but she really wanted to get rid of her kids and pawn them off to the local school as she said she would strap them onto her back if that was what was necessary and crawl to the school with them. But then this notion that there's something wrong about being around your kids all the time.

Does this lady have any idea that actually the big problem children have in America is not that they're around their parents all the time? The big problem children have in America is that many of them don't have two parents that are around them at all. Many of them only have, sadly, one parent trying to do the job of two.

But Angie, get those kids out of there. What's wrong with these people? "It's always wrong," she said. I bet she doesn't know this. A lot of homeschoolers are Christians and conservatives. There are a surprising number of homeschoolers that are leftists. They started homeschooling their children because they thought the public schools weren't woke enough, if you can believe it.

Then does Angie and her sidekick Jennifer remember this little thing called COVID? COVID resulted because of pressure from the teacher unions that are run by people like Jennifer and Angie. The teacher unions insisted that the schools be shut down. So parents found their kids home with them whether they liked it or not, whether it was convenient or not.

A number of those parents, apparently tens of thousands of them, said, "My kids are doing better when I'm teaching them than they are when they're in school." What I think really is bothering these two very left-wing ladies is that they want all of your children, our children, in those public schools as much as possible because they don't want anybody with your values and my values getting more hours with our kids than is absolutely necessary.

They don't like the things we teach our children. There's an insinuation she's making, well, it's more than an insinuation, that somehow homeschool kids don't measure up. Quite the contrary. As we can talk about a little bit later, they do better on almost any measurement, any test measurement, any standardized tests, than public school educated children are doing, sadly for our country and sadly for those children.

That's particularly true in America's urban centers, where often low-income and minority children are not being served by the public schools. In fact, they're coming out of those schools not knowing the basics, and it's going to contribute to all the things we're worried about in America: the wealth gap and many other things.

I want to go to Jennifer Welch, but before I do that, one quick thing about Jennifer Welch. This is not a nice lady. She looked familiar to me. I checked her out a little bit. She gets a lot of airtime. She's on almost every network morning show with some regularity. But here's something that jumped out at me, told me everything I had to know about Jennifer Welch.

After Charlie Kirk was killed, Jennifer Welch said he was a hate-monger, a racist, a misogynist, and a homophobe who trafficked in cruelty. Then a little later, if that wasn't disgusting enough, she called his mourning widow a grifter. That tells you probably everything you need to know about Jennifer Welch, and I would say we shouldn't waste any of our time with her. But the problem is there's a couple million people listening to Jennifer Welch, so let's listen to her for a second here to remind us of what we're up against.

Jennifer Welch: There is a through line on all of this. The Duggar booklets that you're referring to teach that dinosaurs and man lived on Earth at the same time. These are people who fear critical thinking.

Gary Bauer: These are people who fear critical thinking. Really, Jennifer? How many genders are there, Jennifer? I bet you say a number higher than two because I've seen people like Jennifer all over the country. I know what her mindset is. Critical thinking? Jennifer probably believes there are 57 genders.

In fact, if I do a little research, I'll confirm that. But I've seen her writings in a whole host of areas. I bet she thinks a man can get pregnant. I bet she does because this is what the radical left and people in the public schools are teaching our children.

But Jennifer thinks when we as parents get involved with our kids, we don't teach them critical thinking. It's the fact that we do teach them critical thinking that's got Jennifer in such a huff. Go on, Jennifer, continue.

Jennifer Welch: I made Ds, as our caller said, Ellie. The dumbest people she knew in college were homeschooling their kids. This is trickle-down stupidity. This is MAGA on steroids. This is MAHA. This is unvaxed and un-jacked. America has a crazy Christian problem.

Gary Bauer: I've got to get a woke dictionary. About two-thirds of those things she was throwing out, I'm not sure exactly what they meant. But I sure understood that last statement. You heard it, right? She thinks we're crazy Christians.

This is the problem. I know all of us want to be able to reason together. By the way, that's what Charlie Kirk was doing when they killed him. He would go onto these university campuses and he would say to all the students, "Come and talk to me. I don't care if you agree with me or disagree with me."

Many people don't know this. Charlie would put a reserved area in the front of the audience for the college LGBTQ club to sit because he particularly wanted to engage with them. Remember a little while ago, the other lady called him a homophobe. He was more than willing to talk to the gays and lesbians and tell them why their political agenda was wrong.

But I want to go back to what Jennifer Welch said. She's a Christian-phobe. She hates Christians. If Jennifer Welch was Secretary of Education under some future left-wing president—and don't laugh, folks, this lady's got a big following, she talks about education a lot, she very well could be a future Secretary of Education—she would keep Christianity as far away from anything to do with public policy, education, and teaching children. This is the type of person that wants us all gone. She's pretty clear about it, and again, a lot of people love every word she's saying. Let's listen to a little bit more.

Jennifer Welch: Now, those of you that are listening that are Methodist or Presbyterian, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about the freaks of the mega church. I'm talking about the ones that have schools that are these crazy indoctrination factories.

Gary Bauer: Crazy indoctrination factories. These people, she said, that have schools, she's talking about Christian schools, that are indoctrination centers. What do we think is going on in not only universities, where the research shows there are more identifiable Marxists on university faculty than there are faculty members who are registered Republicans?

But let's take it back to the high school and the junior high. They are indoctrination centers increasingly, particularly in the big universities. They don't teach American history; they teach anti-American history. They don't begin the school day in most of these schools with the Pledge of Allegiance anymore.

They certainly can't read a verse from the Bible or ask the students to quietly bow their heads while a small prayer is said. We stopped doing that all the way back in the 60s. But she calls Christian schools indoctrination centers.

No, Christian schools are where parents send their kids when they don't want them to be indoctrinated in the kind of globalist, secularist, Marxist claptrap that these two ladies have devoted their lives to. Let's go on and listen to Jennifer a little bit more. I can take it, folks, if you can. Give us another shot here, Jennifer.

Jennifer Welch: And then when that hit isn't strong enough, then they go to homeschooling. I just think it's a huge problem. I cannot stand these people. But again, it's a pretty big red flag when somebody tells you, "I was homeschooled." You're like, "Oh, okay."

Gary Bauer: It's a pretty big red flag when somebody hears a young person say, "I was homeschooled," and they both got these grins again. If you're getting ready to hire somebody and they say, "I was homeschooled," you can pretty well be certain that that employee is going to say, "Yes, sir," and "Yes, ma'am," and come in early and stay late.

They will be really good at interacting with his fellow employees and want his business that just hired him to do well. The reason I can say this with certainty is that all those years I was at the Department of Education and since, I have dealt with many employees. I've talked to people that regularly hire people.

I have heard over and over again from businessmen and women, from big corporations all the way down to the local business, that when somebody comes in and they've been homeschooled, I know nine times out of ten I have a winner. I have somebody that's going to play by the rules, somebody that I don't have to worry about locking the cash register up because I know they're not going to steal from me.

But to these two, a homeschooled kid is a red flag. I think they're really upset that it's probably a red, white, and blue flag because homeschooled kids tend to love America, and these two clearly don't. Let's go on for a little bit more.

Jennifer Welch: Honestly, I'm just going to say this. I think it's selfish for parents to push a religion on a child and make them believe just one before they're old enough to hear about all of them or none of them and decide for themselves.

Gary Bauer: I was going to say let's pause, but even I have my torture level. Maybe we should end there before I do or say something that will get me kicked right out of the James Dobson Family Institute studio. Selfish, she says it's selfish when you homeschool your child.

This Jennifer Welch has no idea what all of you out there, the sacrifices you make to homeschool your children or to work extra jobs to get your child into an evangelical school or a Catholic school. She's clueless, absolutely clueless about it.

Then she really shows her true colors when she says that it's inappropriate or not right to expose your child to your religion before they're old enough to understand. That's the problem in America, right folks? The problem in America is that just too many children in America are being told by the adults in their lives that God loves them.

They're told that God made them, that they're made in the image of God. That's a big problem. I'm being sarcastic. That's what Jennifer Welch thinks is a big problem: telling them that God loves them so much that He sent His only Son to die for them, and that when they inevitably fall short and make mistakes, that Christ has taken that sin on Himself.

We can't have a child hearing something like that, can we? Well, I could go on, but I'm about ready to lose my lunch. I can only imagine what you may be experiencing because you don't often, I suspect, hear this kind of leftist, radical, secular—I call it really a form of communism and Marxism, it's cultural communism and Marxism—you probably don't hear it directly as much as I do.

But it's out there, folks. It's growing. These two ladies are very influential. The sidekick here that we heard a little earlier, Angie Sullivan, she's by her own words a fallen-away Christian. She used to be a believer. She left and stopped being a follower of Jesus Christ and she went to the other team. I would argue she went to the dark side.

Well, I guess there's nothing really we can do about these two ladies. They've got their podcast. A lot of people are listening to them. They'll probably continue to grow because there's something loose in America right now that's very bad, and it doesn't show any sign of peaking.

But I wanted you to hear these two ladies. They're not senators, they're not congressmen, they're not certainly in the White House. But they have influence. America, at the end of the day, is going to either be run by people like these two ladies or it's going to be run by those of you who wanted to tune in today and by people that I work with every day at the James Dobson Family Institute.

I can tell you, Angie talked about, "I will crawl to the school with my kids strapped on my back" to get them out of the house. I'll tell you something that Angie will crawl to do this November, and Jennifer will do the same. She will crawl over glass to get to a voting booth to vote to instill her values and force them on you and your family.

They're going to show up. We need to show up. If we care about religious liberty, defending faith, family and freedom, and saving our children, we need to be there every day with our kids, every day at the kitchen table, every day watching what's going on in the classroom, and on election day, making sure people like Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan don't get anywhere close to having influence on how we are governed.

God bless you all. Thanks for being here today for our little time with Angie and Jennifer. I look forward to being back with you next week. God bless.

Guest (Male): Subscribe to Gary Bauer's Defending Faith, Family and Freedom wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Just hit the subscribe button to ensure you receive every episode.

Guest (Male): You're listening to Defending Faith, Family and Freedom, featuring Gary Bauer, Senior Vice President of Public Policy at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute. And now, here's Gary.