The Biggest Bully in the School Just Might Be … the School

Of stink eye and knuckle sandwiches

There was a time when the biggest bully in school was a kid with a bad haircut and a mean streak. In my day we called him … my brother.

No more, big brother. You and your kind are small potatoes now. These days, in too many places, the biggest bully in the school is the school itself.

That is to say, we forget sometimes that education is not merely instruction, it is expression. Curriculum is expression, and so is school discipline. What a school permits and what it forbids likewise heads to the heart of free association. As Columbia University law school professor Philip Hamburger says so well, education itself is speech, and so when the state controls education, and controls it absolutely, it controls speech itself. And when it threatens a knuckle sandwich when parents and students don’t comply, that’s bullying of the highest order.

Unfortunately, especially since the pandemic, and with school choice gaining popular momentum, monopoly government schools have grown increasingly brazen in suppressing dissent. Parents questioning woke policies are looked at as if they are wearing white hoods. Students expressing equally unfashionable views are not merely painted as far-right fanatics to be shunned, they are publicly browbeaten and rhetorically whipped in the coliseums of social media.

Not that the stink eye is altogether new. When I was in high school my friends and I published a newsletter called The People’s Voice. Every week we catalogued the current left-wing talking points, not understanding a word we wrote, and for that, school officials treated the entire student body to propaganda films warning about newspapers and publications that included “The People’s” this or that in their title. That would be a communist publication for sure, they warned the students.

Well, OK, it was a fair point—that is what we thought we were. But here’s the thing: Not once did the highly conservative school in South Carolina try to shut us down. These days, if you disagree with the authorities—that would now be a conservative thing to do—you are not only shut down, but the police may be on their way to your house.

And we’re supposed to believe that things haven’t changed in this country, that we don’t live in a quasi-Orwellian chapter of history that is just a page or two away from unabashed authoritarianism. But we do, and, now that Biden and his censors are gone, the nation’s schools are the best proof that we have finally reached the fateful point of turning that dog-eared page.

There is, first of, the reality on the ground. Classrooms replete with Marxist slogans and upside-down American flags are common, indoctrination is the preferred curricula over the teaching of critical thinking skills, and athletics has become a performative staging area for the return of a pervasive leftist misogyny, aptly represented by a pitifully self-mutilated patriarchy. The bigger problem with that agenda, beyond its flesh-and-blood lunacy, is that those who hold power want to maintain it by imposing state-sanctioned mutilation—physical or ideological or both, choose your poison—on everyone else, children included.

That is what makes them so dangerous.

Of course, Trump has pushed back on all this admirably since winning the election, not to mention that the school choice and parental rights movements posed a growing resistance to woke totalitarians even before his re-election last November. Glenn Youngkin’s election as governor in Virginia was a particular testament to the growing pushback, especially by parents rebelling against woke schools that in turn accused them of being domestic terrorists.

Youngkin is gone in Virginia, sadly, and, as Roger Kimball wrote in The Spectator this past week, so are most of the good things he did. Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger took “about 15 minutes to return Virginia to la-la land,” Kimball wrote in his exceptional piece “The Deep-State Vampire”:

I naturally never miss a moment to make exactly that point, and it is especially true in the nation’s school systems. To be sure, there’s no better time to call attention to it than right now, just after national School Choice Week because, despite executive orders and court decisions, schools continue to allow boys to participate in girls sports, to hide gender mutilation and so-called “transitioning” from parents, and in general to insist on carrying high the banner of a far-left anti-institutional agenda that paints the United States as systemically racist and fascist.

If anything, many woke school districts are doubling down, countering the administration’s agenda by venue-shopping lawsuits in the courts of activist judges. They take dead aim at parents and students who do not comply, primarily by violating their First Amendment rights, parading the heretics in social media show trials designed to stain their young lives and their parents’ credibility, and backing it all up with the threat of prosecution.

We’ve come a long way since The People’s Voice, folks. It is institutional bullying, by a factor of terror.

In chilling displays of raw authoritarian power in school districts across the land, the forces of government schools are engaging in outrageous and unconstitutional conduct. The unconstitutionality of it all is unconscionable on its face, but the move to censor dissent in our nation’s schools does incalculable long-term damage by teaching through its conduct—through the authorities’ own expressive speech—that the U.S. constitution is no longer a valid document that must be respected, and it mortally wounds any possibility of parental control over education. The abolition of free speech in schools is the moral and even the legal equivalent to surrendering absolute custody of our children to the government.

Two ongoing cases—one in North Carolina, one here in Wisconsin—lay bare what is happening in public education. Let’s take a look.

The Spirit Rock

One morning not too long ago, the parents of a passionate young high school student at Ardrey Kell High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, woke up to find this in their inbox: 

“We are aware that the spirit rock in front of our school was painted this weekend with a message that was not authorized or sponsored by the school or the district. Acts like these are considered vandalism to school property and are in violation of the CMS Code of Student Conduct. Law enforcement has been contacted and we are cooperating with the investigation.”

Now imagine your reaction when you realize that the message is about your child.

The accused vandal was junior Gabby Stout, who had painted her school’s “spirit rock” with a patriotic tribute following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. To progressives, what she wrote on the rock were really subversive alt-right things, dangerous incitements to insurrection, like “Freedom 1776”; “Live Like Kirk—John 11:25”; along with a United States flag and a heart.

Well, the progressive powers in the school district apparently blew their proverbial morning shots of Kool-Aid when they saw it. No! This cannot stand!

It’s important to know that Stout did not sneak onto campus or deface property. In fact, as Stout’s ongoing legal complaint against the district describes, at the request of her mother she had called the school for permission first. And she had received it. When she mentioned she was thinking of “something USA themed” and “something for Charlie Kirk who recently passed,” the school employee reportedly responded: “That would be very nice.”

Within hours of painting the tribute, though, the school district didn’t think it was so nice. They painted it over. And the next day the school principal, Susan Nichols, sent the school-wide message labeling it vandalism and announcing law enforcement’s involvement.

Then things escalated even more.

According to her lawsuit, Stout was pulled from class, ordered to write a statement, and compelled to show her phone logs to administrators, all without being advised of her constitutional rights and without prior parental consent.

“G.S. and her two friends did not want to write out any statement regarding their efforts in painting the spirit rock,” the complaint by Stout’s attorney at the Alliance for Defending Freedom, Travis Barham, states.

The constitutional malice inflicted on a minor child without parental presence or even notification, not to mention ongoing public abuse, shows just how much power schools think they have over minor children, but there’s a whole lot more.

Indeed, the lawsuit documents that the same spirit rock had previously been painted with Black Lives Matter slogans and political messaging, which school officials permitted and even praised.

“For example, in 2020, students who aligned with Black Lives Matter painted the Ardrey Kell High School spirit rock to express their personal and political views, painting the ‘black power’ fist symbol along with the names of individuals they believed were the victims of police brutality,” the complaint states. “Defendant and its officials permitted the students to paint the Ardrey Kell High School spirit rock to express a Black Lives Matter message pursuant to their policy and practice.”

When other students painted over the Black Lives Matter message, the complaint continues, school officials held an emergency meeting to coordinate parents and staff to undo the painting over of the Black Lives Matter message.

“But the students who wanted to express the Black Lives Matter message instead painted the spirit rock again to express the same message this time with clearly political slogans…,” the complaint states, “When school and District officials heard that the students who wanted to express a Black Lives Matter message had repainted the rock with their message, the officials praised the students for delivering a lesson in persistence.”

In Stout’s case, the ADF asserts, the district rushed to adopt a new “Revised Spirit Rock Speech Code” banning “personal, political, or religious messages,” and further required that messages must “reflect positive school spirit and uphold inclusive values of our school community.”

None of that was defined, ADF points out, not what constituted political or religious messages, not any criteria determining what was a positive school message and not anything about what messages would uphold the school’s inclusive values and what messages would not. In other words, ADF argued, it gave the school district “unbridled discretion.” Not that they hadn’t already used such discretion, only now they were codifying it.

And here’s the kicker. Weeks later, the district issued a statement claiming there wasn’t anything to look into in the Gabby Stout case. Basically, the district said, nothing to see here: “The incident in question was not an act of vandalism,” the school stated. “Law enforcement was not contacted to conduct an investigation.”

Yet earlier communications stated explicitly that law enforcement had been contacted and an active investigation was underway.

The lawsuit against the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education for violating Stout’s constitutional rights is ongoing but there’s a crucial point. These cases of harassing and bullying conservative students are in one sense merely brazen attempts to silence and terrorize those students and their families at any give time. That’s evil enough, but the larger motivation is worse. It is to stamp out and delegitimize any and all parental rights in education, which in turn would be fatal to our republic.

That’s because a student’s freedom of speech is inevitably tethered to parental speech and choice. A minor does not exist legally as an independent entity. The parent authorizes, guides, and influences their speech, and, as such, suppressing the student is functionally suppressing the parent. In the case of a minor, the child’s free speech rights and civil liberties are an extension of the family’s free speech rights and civil liberties, whether the child’s specific viewpoints march in lockstep with the parents’s views or not.

It is not the uniformity of family viewpoints that matters, it is the inseparability of their civil rights that is crucial. Minus parental abuse of those protective rights, parental authority must trump.

In his 2022 paper “Education Is Speech,” Hamburger, who is also the New Civil Liberties Alliance founder and CEO, made that point in a paper in which he argued that effectively compelling parents to send their children to government schools substitutes government speech for their own.

In other words, when the government educates your child, it is speaking to your child in your place. What’s more, Hamburger wrote, states use a variety of mechanisms—mandatory education statutes and tuition-free schools—to “pressure most of the non-wealthy into state schools and so tend to standardize them in line with government teachings.”

“Put another way, it is important that parents cannot be pressured into accepting government educational speech, as only in this way can Americans be protected from government homogenization of children,” Hamburger wrote.

In the same way, stripping a student of his or her voice and threatening legal action over the expression of a dissenting point of view within a public school accomplishes the same forced acceptance of government educational speech, and it excises that right from the parents as well. The entire family is robbed of its voice, and that weakens the family as an independent force in society, especially when no alternatives to government education speech are readily available or affordable.

“Parental freedom of educational speech secures not only familial independence under parental authority but also the layered or federal quality of America,” Hamburger wrote. “In an increasingly individuated society, children are especially in need of individualized teaching, chosen by those who know them best. Yet this is difficult when children are pressed into common schools serving common ends. The system is designed for uniformity, conformity, and even homogenization. So the chances of meeting the particularized needs of particular children are inevitably much diminished while children are stuck in the system.”

And stuck in a system in which they are not allowed to speak.

Cases like those of Gabby Stout bring all this into sharp relief. As Hamburger states, discussions about parental freedom are often undertaken in the abstract, but in the Gabby Stout case there was a manifest connection. The parent approved of the student’s idea to honor Kirk, encouraged that child to seek government approval of her speech, and even helped her paint the rock. The silencing of Gabby was the simultaneous silencing of her parents.

It denied them agency. With education at the heart of modern society and family life, school censorship becomes an existential threat to parental authority and, indeed, to family independence from government. It imperils individual liberty.

“But when the authority of parents is examined narrowly but concretely as their freedom of speech in education, it becomes clear that the freedom of education speech is necessary for protecting the independence of families and thereby limiting the power of government to shape the people,” Hamburger wrote. “Parents have a constitutional right not to be pressured by government into substituting government educational speech for their own. This speech right is important not only for its own sake but also to vindicate essential ideals. It preserves parental authority, it limits government-imposed conformity.”

The inability of a family to choose a non-government school is no different that the inability of that family to choose a nongovernmental narrative, and the consequences for society are the same. To censor the student is to silence the parent. It is that proverbial last stop before entering a domain in which the state, not the parents, raise the child as its own.

Cease-and-Desist

Closer to home, as the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) reports, in Pittsville, Wisconsin, a mother, Amanda Vogel, posted a TikTok video of her disabled daughter seated separately from classmates during a school music program.

The post expressed concern about the welfare of her daughter. The mother said: “We did not plan to homeschool. We tried our best to set up a good foundation for her to be successful and included at school. Unfortunately, there is only so much parents can do on their end. Watching her be placed off to the side while her peers stood together, and realizing no one noticed before the concert, was it for us. If something this visible was going unnoticed, what else was being missed when we weren’t around?”

She used hashtags like #inclusionmatters and #inclusiveeducation.

That sent the school district and its lawyers into a frenzy. The district sent police to her house to ask that the video be taken down, and then the district’s attorney sent a cease-and-desist letter accusing the mother of “harassing and defamatory” language and—get this—demanding that she not harass the district any further.

Defy the district at her peril, the attorney cautioned the TikToking mom because they would sic the police on her again: “If you ignore these demands, the district will report your conduct to law enforcement and explore pursuing appropriate legal action against you, which includes, but is not limited to, seeking a court order prohibiting you from continuing to defame the district and recovering da representing mages related thereto,” the attorney wrote.

WILL responded on the mother’s behalf, pointing out that, for one thing, under the First Amendment, the school district, as a governmental body, could not make a claim for defamation.

“As a governmental body, the School District of Pittsville violated her First Amendment rights by sending the police to her door to tell her to stop speaking in public about the district … and by hiring you to send a letter intended to intimidate her,” WILL attorneys Cory Brewer and Daniel Lennington wrote.

The mother’s post contained opinion and subjective concerns, not false statements of fact, the attorneys wrote.

“Can you please tell us which of the words in that post you claim to be defamatory under Wisconsin law? If you do not, we will assume that you cannot because none of the words are actually defamatory,” they wrote.

WILL’s final point was the most salient one: “Ms. Vogel hopes the School District will reflect on this situation and consider how it engages with parents who raise concerns about their children, particularly ensuring that parents are free to express their views without being threatened or silenced.”

Note the common strategic themes of each case.

In North Carolina, a student expressed a conservative religious message, was accused of vandalism, leading to a threat of police involvement, and finally to a rule change and a denial that the incident even happened. In Wisconsin, a parent criticized the school’s treatment of her disabled child, which prompted a police visit, a defamation threat, and legal intimidation.

Different states. Same playbook.

In 2026, the fact that school districts are sending cease-and-desist letters to mothers on TikTok and are bullying students and parents alike with threats of police action because of their speech alone is the most Orwellian punctuation of the nation’s state of affairs that I know.

In the Wisconsin incident, the suppression of parental speech—and input into school policy—was direct. In North Carolina, the child became the conduit of a school district’s attempt to deny her family its parental role. The excision of the child’s voice was the excision of the family’s authority in her education, and, dare I say it, in a major part of her life.

It deserves saying one more time: to censor the student is to silence the parent; to silence the parent is to subordinate the family; and a free republic cannot survive if families are subordinate to the state.

The only way to end to this subordination is universal school choice. That’s free speech and real education. Please, Wisconsin, make it so.