In a state initiative with potential national implications, school districts across California are navigating the complexities of meeting the state’s looming Ethnic Studies requirement. This mandate, based on Assembly Bill 101 (AB 101) signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in October 2021, stipulates that students graduating during the 2029–2030 school year must complete at least one semester of Ethnic Studies. California stands as the first state to enact such a requirement, aiming to ostensibly foster cultural understanding through core concepts of equality, equity, justice, and the study of race and ethnicity, as outlined in the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.

As I reported previously here and here, the Northern California Pajaro Valley Unified School District (PVUSD) took an ambitious approach to implementing this requirement, going beyond the basic framework typically adopted by other districts, incorporating content in English (multiple years across 9th through 12th grades), History, and Art classes. With grant funding, PVUSD hired Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, Founder and Co-Director of Community Responsive Education (CRE), whose controversial model curriculum had previously been rejected by the state for being excessively divisive and antisemitic. Despite public outcry — particularly from the Jewish community — over the district’s reliance on the rejected curriculum, PVUSD persisted through two rounds of consultation with CRE. The third round, however, stalled amidst growing dissent.

In 2024, the Pajaro Valley Federation of Teachers, including supporters of CRE, mobilized to change the composition of the school board in the November elections. They successfully unseated three incumbents, replacing them with challengers ready to renew the contract with CRE. By April, the new board approved the final contract, signaling a shift toward dismissing community concerns. This change was epitomized by radical activist board member Gabriel Medina, who labeled opposition to the curriculum as “propaganda” and accused dissenters of being “segregationists” intent on undermining marginalized communities. Listening to Medina’s characterizations of America in both March and April meetings, one would think we currently live under the rule of the Antebellum South.

Conversely, the Glendora Unified School District (GUSD) in Southern California adopted a more cautious strategy. District staff proposed an Ethnic Studies pilot course outline for the 2025–2026 school year, leveraging the state-approved model curriculum which focuses on four historically marginalized groups: African Americans, Chicano/Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian American/Pacific Islanders. Presented in February by the history and social science representatives, the pilot course adhered to the one-semester requirement.

However, the proposal faced scrutiny from the board for its lack of detailed content and transparency regarding implementation. At the May school board meeting, board members raised concerns about community opposition to perceived influences of Critical Race Theory (CRT) within the curriculum’s theoretical frameworks. While Assistant Superintendent Jennifer Prince emphasized that CRT was not the course’s focus, the board remained wary of its potential influence. Respecting community input, the board voted 3–2 against moving forward with the pilot course, citing the unfunded mandate of AB 101 as well as the need for further clarity and safeguards.

Unlike PVUSD, GUSD’s board demonstrated respect for all viewpoints, emphasizing the importance of community concerns alongside the practicalities of Ethnic Studies implementation. They expressed openness to revisiting the curriculum once AB 101 funding is secured and a more detailed outline addressing community hesitations is developed.

Even though local districts are not required to do so, GUSD leveraged the state’s model curriculum, which explicitly encourages educators adopt a CRT lens as follows: “Teachers and administrators… should familiarize themselves with current scholarly research around ethnic studies instruction, such as critically and culturally or community relevant and responsive pedagogies, critical race theory, and intersectionality, which are key theoretical frameworks and pedagogies that can be used in ethnic studies research and instruction.”

This stance from the state model curriculum highlights the ongoing tension between ideological and non-ideological approaches to the subject. During public commentary, one speaker recommended the Independent Institute’s Comparative Cultures Ethnic Studies Curriculum as a viable alternative. Unlike the state framework, this curriculum examines the diverse tapestry of American history, portraying both its challenges and triumphs to emphasize unity over division.

Although the Comparative curriculum was unavailable at the outset of GUSD’s Ethnic Studies journey, it remains an option worth considering for the district moving forward. As a panelist at its launch last year, I can attest to its efficacy as a balanced, non-partisan resource that aims to foster inclusivity without isolating specific groups. While it may be too late for PVUSD to revise its course, GUSD still can chart a different path — one that prioritizes connection and collective growth over ideological division.

The contrasting approaches taken by PVUSD and GUSD illustrate the complexities of implementing California’s Ethnic Studies mandate. While PVUSD’s path has fueled divisiveness and polarized community relations, GUSD’s measured approach reflects a willingness to adapt and address concerns thoughtfully. As school districts across the state grapple with fulfilling AB 101, GUSD’s restraint and respect for diverse perspectives offer a model for navigating this challenging — but vital — initiative.

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Walter Myers III is a Senior Fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and an adjunct faculty member at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

The Left’s successful rebranding of masculinity as “toxic” didn’t just rewrite a dictionary entry — it rewired the cultural DNA that once produced great men.

In 2018, the American Psychological Association updated its Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men, effectively declaring stoicism, risk-taking, and competitiveness — the building blocks of masculine virtue — “psychologically harmful.”  

Within months, Gillette aired its infamous “We Believe“ commercial, scolding ordinary dads at backyard barbecues while implying every son harbored a bully within. Seemingly overnight, “toxic” became the default adjective attached to manhood.

But this cultural ambush was decades in the making. It has its roots in second-wave feminism, which in the 1960s began reframing male strength as patriarchal oppression. By the ’80s and ’90s, freshly-minted gender studies departments were churning out theses that branded healthy male assertiveness “hegemonic.”

On television, the upstanding patriarch of “Father Knows Best” gave way to the beer-bellied, weak-willed Al Bundy. When clickbait culture arrived in the 2000s, every societal ill — from climate change to mass shootings — found a convenient culprit in “traditional masculinity.”

C.S. Lewis foresaw the danger. “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise,” he warned in The Abolition of Man — adding the punchline our era can’t escape: “We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

The cultural costs are no laughing matter. Today, 17.6 million American children — nearly one in four — grow up without a father in the home. Their odds of suffering are grim: Barack Obama, citing Census data in 2008, noted that such children are “five times more likely to live in poverty… nine times more likely to drop out of school, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.”

If only he did something about it. 

Almost 60 years earlier, Daniel Patrick Moynihan sounded the same alarm, saying, “the deterioration of the fabric of … society is the deterioration of the … family.” At the time, he was dismissed as an alarmist. The empty chairs around dinner tables prove him prophetic.

Classrooms reveal the next domino. The same ideology that pathologized masculine energy has left boys academically stranded. On the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, 8th-grade girls outread boys by nine scale points, continuing an unbroken gender gap that dates to 1992. Overall scores for both sexes hit the lowest level on record. 

College quads tell the same tale. Men have fallen to just 44% of American undergraduates, a gap that’s widened every year since 2011. UNESCO, surveying 140 countries, now calls boys’ lagging literacy a “growing global crisis.” Christina Hoff Sommers captures the cultural headwind: a school climate that “valorizes feelings and denigrates competition and risk…views masculinity as predatory. Natural male exuberance is no longer tolerated.” 

Why did “toxic masculinity” stick? Because it performed a linguistic jujitsu: attach a moral defect to the identity you want to erase, then offer “liberation” through re-education. Courage degenerates into “aggression,” leadership into “oppression,” fatherhood into “patriarchal privilege.” The outcome is predictable: abolish the virtues that civilize male strength, then lament the violence or apathy that follows.

Yet the data refuse to cooperate with the narrative. Children with involved fathers are 40% less likely to repeat a grade, more likely to earn As, and far less prone to behavioral problems. Even the APA guidelines — often cited as proof of masculinity’s hazards — concede that male risk-taking can be “harnessed for good” when directed toward service and innovation.

Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child summarizes decades of research showing that self-regulation and disciplined resilience — traits once labeled stoic — buffer children from stress and reduce lifetime mental-health risk. In other words, the same virtues our culture now brands “toxic” are the ones empirical science says we need.

Trust the science.

Conservatives bear some blame for this inversion. While we tallied marginal-tax victories, Hollywood and higher ed rewrote the story of manhood. Institutions we once guided — churches, Scouts, civic clubs — sat vacant as HR departments filled the void. The cockpit was empty. The Left merely climbed in and took control.

We didn’t arrive here by accident. The cultural collapse around masculinity wasn’t inevitable — it was permitted. While conservatives focused on policy wins and economic metrics, the Left waged a full-spectrum cultural campaign that redefined manhood itself. They infiltrated the classroom, the newsroom, and the writers’ room. They turned moral virtue into pathology and repackaged fatherhood as oppression. And we let them. Not out of malice, but out of misplaced trust — that truth would prevail unaided, that tradition could defend itself, that boys would become men by default.

Now, we stand in the wreckage of that assumption. A generation of boys has been raised to doubt their instincts, to apologize for their strength, and to see their fathers as liabilities rather than legacies. This is not just a political failure — it’s a civilizational one. But it also means the stakes are finally clear. If the conservative movement wants to conserve anything worth passing down, it must begin with this: the restoration of masculine virtue. Not nostalgia. Not anger. But clarity. The recognition that the war on manhood is really a war on order, on protection, on the nuclear family.

We’re not at the end of this story — we’re at the hinge. The institutions may be hollow, the narratives poisoned, but the hunger for truth remains. And in that hunger lies our moment. Not to manage decline, but to name it. Not to tinker around the edges, but to tell the truth loudly enough that our sons can hear it. Before we rebuild, we must remember who we are — and what we allowed to be stolen in the dark.

Masculinity is not toxic — it’s virtuous. When we reclaim that distinction, we invite our sons to stand tall instead of apologizing for existing — and we give civilization the allies it deserves.

Gates Garcia is the host of the YouTube show and podcast “We The People.” Follow him on Instagram and X @GatesGarciaFL.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.