Tax-Funded Group Sends Anti-White, Pro-Trans Board Books To Wisconsin Daycares

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A tax-funded organization sent “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Belonging Kits” to 300 daycares in Wisconsin this year that push leftist activism and expose very young children to racial hatred and queer relationships. The kits included nearly two dozen identity politics books for toddlers, “multicultural” play dough in six skin tones, a “Chilean rain stick,” and 12 “Diverse Family Structures” posters from Kaplan Early Learning Company that depict homosexual couples with children.

“It’s okay to wonder: Am I a girl? Am I a boy? Am I both? Am I neither?” says one page of Being You: A First Conversation about Gender, a board book in the kit sent to daycares that parent children as young as four weeks old. “Today I feel like a boy!” exclaims one character in the book by Megan Madison, Jessica Ralli, and Anne/Andy [sic] Passchier, a “nonbinary” illustrator who describes herself as “very queer.”

The kit worth approximately $600 came from the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association (WECA), according to a daycare owner who received one, Elise Wiegert, co-owner of Little Rainbows Day Care in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

At first, she was excited to receive the kit, Weigert told The Federalist in a phone call during the naptime of the eight small children she and her husband tend. It came to her house in a heavy box approximately three feet square. She was thrilled to open and share it with the children, Weigert said — until she previewed the books.

“I’m gonna tell you, it was shocking,” she said. “… They were not appropriate for children.”

Animosity Against Christians, White People, and Sexual Reality

Being You further tells babies: “Some babies grow into a different gender than the one that grown-ups called them … Some people are girls. Some people are boys. Some people are neither. Some people are both.”

It also tells tiny children, “For a long time, many people have said and believed untrue things like: ‘You are either a boy or a girl’ … People who work together to change unfair rules about gender are called feminists.” The board book approvingly depicts an activist child changing a sign on a girl’s bathroom to say “All gender” instead of “Girls.”

Amazon reviewers say they’ve used the book to teach three-year-olds about “in-betweeners” and shore up gender dysphoria in their autistic transgender toddlers.

Another book in the kit, by Madison, Ralli, and illustrator Isabel Roxas, is titled Our Skin. It tells babies and toddlers, “A long time ago, way before you were born, a group of white people made up an idea called race. They sorted people by skin color and said that white people were better, smarter, prettier, and that they deserve more than everybody else.”

Later, it tells small children, “Racism can be a way we’ve done things for a long time, like how there aren’t as many books written about people of color.” It positively depicts people participating in a Black Lives Matter protest.

A third book in the kit, also by Madison, Ralli, and Passchier, is Together: A First Conversation about Love. It shows a man wearing a princess mermaid costume holding a little girl’s hand, a gay wedding, and multiple homosexual couples. It tells children, “not every family is loving … If someone hurts you, and anyone says it’s because that person loves you, they’re wrong.”

The book does not note any exception for loving actions children may wrongly think “hurt” them, such as when adults put unwilling children to bed, discipline a child for biting, or deny a child soda.

This book’s section for adults claims, “Ideas about the superiority of the nuclear family are deeply connected to the origins of white supremacy, Christian hegemony, and settler colonialism.” The superiority of the nuclear family for reducing just about every life risk for children is one of the best-documented realities of social science.

Together could also give babies and toddlers the idea that boys who love their uncles and grandfathers are “gay.” It tells babies, “I’m a man who loves other men. I’m gay.”

“Anybody can love anybody,” it says. “And there are lots of different words you might use to talk about who you are and who you love romantically when you get older.”

In its section for adults, the book says, “Patriarchy, cissexism, transphobia, homophobia, and the gender binary are baked into the culture of the United States and have manifestations around the world. In order to undo these systems, we must actively participate in movements for gender justice.”

Race and Religion Discrimination Is Illegal

Taxpayer-funded entities might violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by promoting racially divisive claims like these, said attorney Dan Lennington. Amendments to that law plus the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution also prohibit governments and publicly funded entities from discriminating against Americans based on their religion and speech. State law also allows charging with a crime anyone who exposes children to “sexually explicit” material, noted Lennington, deputy counsel at the nonprofit law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.

“WECA funded these optional toolkits using non-governmental (private) funding sources,” said Jamie Keehn, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families who puts pronouns in her bio, in a statement to The Federalist. “Most child care centers are independently owned small businesses operated by licensed providers, who determine their own curriculum and materials.” DCF is Wisconsin’s daycare licensing agency, and it contracts with WECA to the tune of millions of dollars a year.

Even if the kits were not tax-funded, as federal funds recipients WECA and DCF are subject to federal antidiscrimination laws across their programs, said Lennington. Not only WECA but also many Wisconsin daycares receive federal funds through the Child and Adult Care Food Program.

Weigert, 71, pointed out that, as licensed daycare providers, she and her husband are mandated reporters. That means, Weigart said, if she knew a person had introduced babies or toddlers to sexual information like that in some of these books, she would be legally and morally obligated to report it to authorities as potential child abuse.

“Children don’t think of sex in terms of adult realities, not at all. That is why we call them innocent,” Weigert explained. “They are sheltered from war and sexuality and all those complex issues. We protect them — or so I thought.”

After she received the kit and thought it over for some time, Weigert said, she contacted DCF. Despite a lengthy conversation with a supervisor and a follow-up email, Weigert said, as far as she knows the department hasn’t taken any action on the kits.

DCF’s Keehn did not respond to The Federalist’s questions about whether it had gotten complaints about the kit, what it had done about those complaints, whether DCF funds or consults with WECA’s DEI personnel, and whether DCF policy allows funding organizations that urge partisan political activity.

Big Corporations Pushing Identity Hatred

The First Conversations series that includes the three books quoted above is published by Penguin Random House. The company has sued Florida for refusing to use taxpayer dollars to purchase its queer sex books for children, endangering a major revenue stream for every publisher: school and public libraries.

“Penguin Random House provides ‘antiracism’ training for employees and hosted a company-wide book discussion based upon the writings of the leftist author Ibram X. Kendi. The company opposed various state and local legislation intended to protect parental rights, girls’ sports, bathroom facilities, and gendered spaces,” notes the 1792 Exchange’s Corporate Bias Ratings.

First Conversations illustrator Passchier, whose Etsy site says she is “very queer” and whose website is AndyPasschier.gay, claims numerous large corporate clients such as Disney on her “about” page. The large activist organization Human Rights Corporation requires corporations to contract with queer individuals and feature transsexuality in their advertising to gain top marks on their leftist shakedown tool, the Corporate Equality Index.

A nonprofit organization, WECA functions essentially as a private arm of government. To be licensed for business in Wisconsin, daycare providers in certain parts of the state must take a pre-licensing class with WECA. WECA also provides continuing education for daycare providers, who must take at least 15 hours of such training every year to maintain their state license.

WECA also distributes taxpayer-provided grants and administers food welfare. For example, its 2022 IRS 990 form says the organization distributes funding to those pursuing an early childhood career via a contract with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s Child Care and Development Fund. It also administers a daycare food program funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

According to WECA’s latest annual report, 95 percent of its $32 million in annual income in 2023 came from taxpayers via state and federal grants. According to federal tax records, Executive Director Ruth Schmidt earned $149,444 in compensation from WECA in 2022, a 52 percent increase from her $98,127 in compensation from the organization in 2018.

Schmidt and WECA DEIB coordinator Tanya Johnson did not respond to multiple Federalist requests for comment.

Nobody Asked the Parents

When she showed the kit to the parents of the children she cares for, Weigert said, they were also shocked. The Weigerts’ is the only five-star-rated daycare in their ZIP code, she told The Federalist, and they’ve been running it for 29 years.

The Weigerts feed the children they care for local, grass-fed beef, lamb, and bison, raw-milk cheese made by local farmers, and wild-caught salmon, Elise said. They’ve cared for children with cancer and other high-risk conditions, so their home has all-wood cabinets and flooring, no microwave, no cell phones, and no Wi-Fi.

Their openings are booked out to 2027, Elise said. Some of their families even conceive babies based on when the Weigerts will have an opening. Elise, 71, has now cared for two generations of children from the same families. She and her husband wake each morning at 5 a.m. to make the children fresh bread, Elise said. Some days she gets five to six calls asking if they have an opening.