Comedian Bill Maher called out Democrats for pushing woke indoctrination in classrooms on his HBO show, saying what some schools are teaching is "outrageous" and "somebody needs to answer for it."
Fox News' Greg Gutfeld argued on "The Five" Monday that Maher's larger point was highlighting how certain political parties control certain areas of culture , like how Democrats control the education narrative.
He said the left's war on education is falling apart because they are "staking out the most irrational positions on stuff."
One example, Gutfeld argued, is some liberals' support for puberty blockers and transgender surgery for young children.
"You don't have to take that position. Right?" Gutfeld explained. "The most reasonable position for gender affirmation surgery is that you shouldn't perform it or any irreversible operation on a healthy child who has no firmly developed brain structure yet."
"Our government actually believes that you're a transphobe if you want to get between a child, a healthy child, and an activist with a scalpel. We got problems," he said.
"The Five" co-host added Maher was getting at the fact that for a progressive like himself to "exist, to survive and to thrive," there have to be "standards," "biology" and "math."
"If you take that all away, then there is no way to be able to tell if you're making any progress at all," he said. "So instead, you have a government that is actually saying no, kids should have the right to have their genitals mutilated before they even have a firmly structured brain to understand it. That's crazy."
"Five" co-host Jesse Watters agreed, adding that teachers are "fighting a proxy war against the parents."
Jessica Tarlov pushed back on the whole argument, saying the Biden administration is "not in" on transgender indoctrination.
"I would not want anyone giving my child puberty blockers without consulting me. I am not against the idea of having a conversation with kids about gender fluidity, which is one of the main targets of these book bands that are coming around now," she said, referring to several Republican-led states limiting explicit and political books in children's schools.
"If you want to live in Ron DeSantis' Florida – and there are a lot of people who do want to – but the reason that it will not be such a cakewalk, as many Republicans think, is they're doing things like this, like banning the teaching of AP African-American history," she highlighted.
"The Department of Education said, ‘It teaches students about activism, intersectionality and encourages ending the war on black, trans, queer and gender and nonconforming and intersex people.’"
"If you are a teacher in Manatee County, Florida, you now are not allowed to choose the books in your own libraries. It has to go through a media literacy person or librarian for them to choose. There are teachers now who are having to cover up or remove all of the books that they have hand-selected for their classrooms because of this assault by the government of Florida," Tarlov argued.
Gutfeld disagreed, saying, "Just because people do not want that stuff because it's age inappropriate does not make them transphobic."
Gov. Ron DeSantis' press secretary Bryan Griffin said in a statement that the Florida Department of Education rejected the AP course because it "lacks educational value and historical accuracy."
"As submitted, the course is a vehicle for a political agenda and leaves large, ambiguous gaps that can be filled with additional ideological material, which we will not allow. As Governor DeSantis has stated, our classrooms will be a place for education, not indoctrination."
