CIVICS REVOLUTION: Conservatives Are Reviving Traditional Education With a Modern Twist.

The classroom subject of “civics” evokes antiquated images of Cold War-era conformity, but Andrew Hart describes a recent teacher workshop on civics with a schoolboy’s exuberance: “It was really refreshing. I was, like, wow.”

The weeklong seminar at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia delved into the writings of Aristotle and Cicero, the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and civil rights titans W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.

“We spent the first full day just talking about philosophy,” said Hart, who teaches history and government at a Florida private school. “It was almost like a graduate course with a professor who is an expert.”

Forty-five states are considering 198 bills related to K-12 civics education.
AP

The Jack Miller Center, a leading civics education provider, organized the seminar, part of a cottage industry that is reviving the tradition of studying the rights and duties of American citizenship, updated for modern sensibilities. After decades of neglect in the wake of the 1960s social upheavals and emphasis on STEM competency, civics is making a comeback. Universities are opening multimillion-dollar civics schools, some with deans and doctoral programs, and more than half the states now have civics requirements or competency tests in K-12. The boom reached a crescendo this summer with 45 states considering 198 bills related to K–12 civic education.

But reintroducing the subject in today’s hyper-partisan climate is not simply about making students learn the ABCs of government and practicing the art of rhetoric. Civics now comes with a warning label – “the most bitterly contested subject in education today,” according to The Atlantic – placing it squarely in the crosshairs of the culture wars.

The tension around civics reflects the national disagreement about the meaning of the United States in the 21st century: Is America a land of opportunity and freedom for all? Or is it designed to award unearned privilege to a select few, and second-class status to everyone else? The answer determines how middle schoolers and high schoolers are taught about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and other key texts of the American experience.

Ideological disagreements over the nation’s identity have led to bitter clashes over curricula, reading assignments, and library books in local school boards and state legislatures.

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Teaching Liberty: Hillsdale College & The Second Amendment

Hillsdale College, founded in 1844 by a group of Freewill Baptists, has established itself as one of the preeminent private educational institutions in the United States, with a particular defense of the traditional liberal arts, as well as a robust focus on the foundational principles of the United States. Of these foundational principles, the college educates its students on the meaning of the Second Amendment in theory and practical application. Watch our “American Rifleman Television” feature segment above to see how Hillsdale approaches teaching the Second Amendment to a new generation of Americans.

“The college, from its origins, was given to four principles or what we call “pillars,” and that is high learning, it’s here to promote and to furnish high learning,” said Dr. David Whalen, associate vice president for curriculum at Hillsdale college, as well as a professor of English. “Faith. The Christian faith is foundational here. Moral formation of our students, so moral character is important. And then finally, freedom. The college, in fact, was said to exist by virtue of gratitude for the inestimable blessing of civil and religious freedom. So freedom is very important here.”

Even as early as the mid-19th century, Hillsdale College practiced what it preached regarding its defense of freedom, liberty and the U.S. Constitution. A higher percentage of Hillsdale College students enlisted to fight for the Union in the Civil War than any other western college. Four Hillsdale college students earned the Medal of Honor. Sixty students gave their lives during the war.

In front of Hillsdale College’s Central Hall, a monument commemorates the Hillsdale students who gave their lives in the Civil War.

“The curriculum here is robust. It’s rich, but it’s also, and this is important, integrated. These courses aren’t designed to provide smatterings of knowledge. They are not designed to create little dilettantes who know a little bit about a lot of the different things,” Whalen said. “Instead, they all presume upon and lean upon each other. They bespeak a unity of knowledge. There’s a kind of integration in these courses, or at least we strive for a high degree of complementarity and integration in these courses so that, you know, you’re not just graduating students who have minds full of clutter, but who have intellects capable of a kind of comprehensive vision of the world at large.”

As part of its core curriculum, a series of courses that every Hillsdale student must take, there’s a comprehensive look at early American political thought, culminating in an intensive look at the U.S. Constitution. Courses also explore the historical roots of Western civilization, as well as the American heritage, specifically in cultivating a greater understanding of the “American experiment of liberty.”

“ As I often tell my students, it’s important to remember that both reason and experience show us that it is true that liberty is not a grant from a government, but is rather a gift from God. And so we spend a lot of time in class talking about what that means,” said Dr. David Raney, NRA Director and professor of history, John Anthony Halter Chair in American History, the Constitution and the Second Amendment. “At a very basic level, in a free society, it’s each citizen’s not just right, but responsibility, to step forward and provide the means by which they can defend all of their God-given liberties. And that typically means the ability to keep and to bear arms.”

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Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it’s too much of a safety hazard don’t see the danger of the big picture. They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use this same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like.
~ Alan Dershowitz

Is Europe Still Safe? Migrant Sex Crimes Surge While Children Face Arrest For Self-Defence

14-year-old girl in Dundee ©Screenshot via Right Angle News Network/Unsplash

From the streets of Dundee to the courtrooms of Düsseldorf, Europe is grappling with a troubling wave of migrant-linked sex crime cases. In a shocking twist, it is often the victims, not the perpetrators, who find themselves punished.

The arrest of a 14-year-old Scottish girl for brandishing a knife in self-defence has sparked outrage and raised an unsettling question across the continent: is Europe still safe, or has justice turned against those it is meant to protect?

Teen Arrested After Standing Up to Alleged Attacker
In Dundee, police arrested a 14-year-old girl who pulled out a knife when confronted by a man near St Ann’s Lane. Officers charged her with carrying a ‘bladed weapon’.

The teenager insists she acted only to protect herself and a friend from a migrant man who was allegedly recording them. Campaigners online said she had been punished for survival, not for committing a crime.

One social media user wrote: ‘She chose not to be raped by an invader, therefore, she was arrested by her own police.’

Her arrest has ignited a fierce debate in Britain. Critics ask whether the justice system is protecting young girls or leaving them exposed.

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Somebody Finally Admits It!
Licensed Citizens are “Responsible Gun Owners”

Here’s something you don’t see every day, especially at a “mainstream” publication such as Axios, where a recent story — which (full disclosure) included a quote from yours truly — featured a stunning acknowledgement from the CEO of the Alliance for Gun Responsibility, a Seattle-based, billionaire-backed gun prohibition lobbying group.

“While we acknowledge more guns pose a greater threat to our communities, CPL holders tend to be responsible gun owners,” Alliance boss Renee Hopkins told Axios.

From an anti-gunner in the Evergreen State, that’s a choking mouthful. Just to make sure it wasn’t a typo, I spoke with reporter Christine Clarridge, a veteran journalist not known for flubbing a quote and was satisfied the remark was accurate.

Which raises the question: If the gun control crowd admits law-abiding, legally-armed citizens are not a problem, why do anti-gun-rights advocates continue pushing legislation which they know will only affect the good guys? The easy answer: They know honest citizens will remain so and they also know trying to get criminals to comply is a dead-end endeavor.

Back in 2021, Dr. John Lott, founder and CEO at the Crime Prevention Research Center, did an essay on just how law-abiding CCW permit holders are. To give readers an idea about where his research went, Lott wrote this: “In Florida and Texas, permit holders are convicted of firearms-related violations at one-twelfth of the rate at which police officers. In the 19 states with comprehensive permit revocation data, the average revocation rate is one-tenth of one percent. Usually, permit revocations occur because someone moved or died or forgot to bring their permit while carrying.”

Dr. John Lott, founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center,
says private citizens licensed to carry are far more law-abiding
than most other people.

He added, “Academics have published fifty-two peer-reviewed, empirical studies on concealed carry. Of these, 25 found that allowing people to carry reduces violent crime, and 15 found no significant effect. A minority (12) observed increases in violent crime. These 12, however, suffer from a systematic error to varying degrees: they tend to focus on the last 20 years and compare states that recently passed concealed carry laws with more lenient states that had sustained growth in permits over the past two decades. The finding that crime rose relatively in such states is consistent with permit holders reducing crime.”

The Axios piece centered on Clarridge’s report about the rising number of concealed pistol licenses in Washington state. I’ve been reporting on this for some years, but the establishment media avoids the story like the Olympic shooting competitions. Nobody on the left wants to acknowledge the Evergreen State has more than 709,000 active CPLs, and that roughly 20 percent of those licenses are held by women. What’s the number in your state, and what percentage of armed citizens are women?
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If we can’t believe prohibitionist gunquacks, who can we believe?

Agenda Once More Bleeds Through in Latest National Gun Policy Survey

They left out “confiscation.” If they ever get these done and they’ll always be back for more. (Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions/Facebook)

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “The results are in! Our new National Survey of Gun Policy reveals that Americans broadly agree on many gun violence prevention policies,” Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions exclaims on X.com. “Check out the 2025 survey findings.”

They present those over at their website, where we find the Center is part of the “Bloomberg School of Public Health,” as in anti-gun (except for the government and his law-skirting security team) billionaire Michael Bloomberg. The use of the pejorative term “gun violence” to stigmatize the inanimate object instead of the willful human aggressor is our first clue as to what they mean by “solutions” and “prevention.”

We’re told it’s a “nationally representative survey” which “found wide support for gun violence prevention policies across political lines and among both gun owners and non-owners.” We’re told they’ve been doing this since 2013.  What we’re not told is any meaningful metric to prove any of their “solutions” have prevented anything except citizens being able to exercise a supposedly unalienable right with a government mandate that it “shall not be infringed.”

The questions, asked of “2,977 respondents, 1,001 gun owners and 1,976 non-gun owners and 959 Republicans and 1,419 Democrats” need to be viewed with two further caveats: The Bloombergians make no attempt on this page to share how the questions were worded (because doing so differently could produce different results), or to establish actual knowledge the respondents had – as opposed to what they’ve been told by the overwhelmingly prohibition-supporting media, and by the Democrat Party.

Why, if it’s “representative,” does the survey include significantly more Democrats than Republicans, especially after the popular and electoral victories Second Amendment-proclaiming Donald Trump attained over gun prohibitionist Kamala Harris? And don’t overlook that just because someone is a gun owner doesn’t automatically put them in the pro-Second Amendment camp, as the Fudds comprising Giffords’ “Gun Owners for Safety” amply demonstrate.

But on to the claims…

We’re told that “74% of Americans support laws that require a person to lock up the guns in their home when not in use.”  What they don’t tell us, and presumably didn’t tell the respondents, is that they also want ammunition locked separately from firearms, meaning if quick access is needed to defend against an intruder, he’ll be on you before you can load your gun. We’ve also seen cases where trained children have successfully defended themselves against intruders, and cases where they could not, with tragically outrageous results. It would also be helpful to see what percentage of homes where untrained children access unsecured guns include criminal residents.

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Signal Breaking Through: Australia ‘Losing Control’ as the Populace Slowly Re-Arms Itself.

[W]hile Australia has long been heralded as the gold standard for gun control, almost 30 years later, the landscape is shifting.

Gun numbers are on the rise – there are now more than 4m firearms in the Australian community, almost double the 2.2m weapons recorded in 2001, after the national firearms agreement, according to a report commissioned by gun safety groups.

At least 2,000 new guns are lawfully entering the community every week.

And while the number of gun licence holders per capita has gone down as Australia’s population has soared, there is now a larger number of guns in the community per capita than there was in the immediate aftermath of the crackdown.

That’s because the number of guns each licence holder has is going up – gun owners now average more than four firearms for each licence. In Sydney New South Wales firearm register data shows that there are more than 70 individuals who own more than 100 firearms. (Crucially, these are not deemed to be collectors, whose weapons are not functional.)

And, despite the Howard reforms promising uniform gun laws throughout Australia and the establishment of a national firearm register, 30 years later this is not a reality.

The states and territories are creeping towards the establishment of a new national firearms registry but the gun lobby is pushing back as the details of how it will operate are still being negotiated.

Other provisions of the national firearms agreement remain unimplemented, the country still has a hodgepodge of state-based laws and a lack of data transparency makes understanding Australia’s gun landscape difficult. In NSW the government is considering enshrining a new “right to hunt” in law, while in WA shooting groups are mobilising against tough new licensing requirements.

There are also growing concerns about weapons that circumvent the gun licensing system entirely. 3D-printed firearms of increasing sophistication are now routinely seized by police as Australians tap into an online ecosystem that glorifies a so-called “unlimited right to keep and bear arms”.

— Sarah Martin and Ariel Bogle in Australia was once the gold standard for gun safety. Experts say it’s losing control

Alleged attempted robber shot during online sale meetup in Dunwoody

DUNWOODY, Ga. – Dunwoody police are investigating after an alleged attempted robber was shot, according to police.

Officers said the shooting happened at the Columns at Lake Ridge Apartments in the 3900 block of Lake Ridge Lane around 3:30 p.m. Saturday. A man who lived in the complex made arrangements to meet two other men there to sell something he’d listed online.

When the three men met, an attempted robbery took place. Then, gunfire was exchanged, according to police. One of the alleged robbers was shot. That person was arrested when officers arrived.

The other man left the scene and police are searching for him.

Nobody else was injured, according to police.

“The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One’s right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections.”
– SCOTUS in West Virginia v Barnette (1943)