When a president signs an executive order making it easier for schools to punish kids without equity oversight, we're not just talking about "classroom discipline." We're watching the machinery of government bend toward an ideology that values control over compassion, punishment over fairness, and power over children's futures.
And let's not kid ourselves: this ideology doesn't come out of nowhere. It flows straight from outfits like the Heritage Foundation, the architects of Project 2025, now being implimented in real time by the Trump administration. They've dropped the mask and openly push for a white ethno-Christian nation state. Education, in their worldview, isn't about helping kids flourish. It's about shaping obedient citizens who will protect the establishment hierarchy, aka the "Deep State", as conservatives like to call it.
Hypocrisy has become Policy.
I grew up in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Spent time during my Navy service in Illinois, California, and Florida. I've seen this nation from coast to coast. I've seen the playbook in action that is taking place before our very eyes. Folks who wear their Sunday best, warming pews and singing hymns, were the same ones drinking, doing drugs, gambling, partying, and cheating their way through the weekend. Come Sunday morning, they slapped on holiness like their favorite brand of cologne.
That's not faith. That's Pascal's Wager cosplay, living however you want, then hedging your bets with ritual in case God's keeping score, so you can obtain that "Get Out of Hell Free" card. Beneath that "virtue" there was always a current of prejudice. Racism, sexism, classism, all wrapped in a veneer of "family values" and "respect for authority." When a black kid spoke up, he was "disrespectful." When a white kid did the same thing, he was "confident." Guess which one got detention.
Discipline without justice.
This new executive order strips away the only guardrails meant to protect kids from that exact bias. It tells schools: don't worry about disproportionality, just punish "bad behavior." Sounds fair in theory, until you remember that bias decides what "bad behavior" even looks like.
Black students are already 3.5 times more likely to be suspended than white peers for the same actions.
Disabled students face double the discipline rates.
Subjective charges like "defiance" or "disrespect" are tailor-made for abuse by authority figures with a chip on their shoulder.
Now, imagine those numbers after the feds green-light harsher rules. It's open season for teachers and administrators whose politics already tilt right, disproportionately punishing kids from families that lean left.
The ugliest truth is this isn't about Jesus or Christianity. It's just about TRIBALISM. It isn't even about Christianity AT ALL. The Jesus of the gospels preached about humility, compassion, care for the poor, and forgiveness of enemies. The Jesus invoked by these policies is a mascot for domination, a logo for tribal identity. It's not Christianity. It's the ethno-tribal nationalism with a Jesus bumper sticker.
When the government power is wielded to enforce that twisted gospel, kids suffer. Families suffer. Our entire nation suffers. The entire democratic experiment suffers.
So here's the sting: if you sit in a pew on Sunday while cheering for policies that give schools more leeway to disproportionately punish children of color, you're not living the gospel. You're living the hypocrisy. Don't preach "family values" while voting for politicians that are enacting laws that tear families apart, particularly minority families. Don't preach "order" while executing and enabling injustice. Don't preach Jesus while practicing Caesar.
At the end of the day, kids deserve classrooms built on fairness, dignity, and opportunity, not the fake moral virtues of a nation stumbling backward into authoritarianism.
