I’m writing this as both a Californian and an investigative journalist who’s spent years watching how governments wrap control in the language of protection. California’s Assembly Bill 715, introduced in February 2025, passed the State Assembly on May 29, cleared the Senate later that summer, and was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom on October 7, 2025. On the surface, it’s framed as a civil-rights measure to combat antisemitism in schools. In practice, it gives the state power to define acceptable thought and punish institutions that fail to enforce it.
This isn’t just a California issue. It’s part of a global pattern—governments everywhere using education to standardize belief and condition obedience. What follows is my commentary and analysis of how AB 715 functions as a case study in state-driven re-education, and why it matters far beyond California. I’m writing from the standpoint of voluntaryism, self-ownership, and black-flag anarchism—because any system that compels belief through force, funding, or fear deserves to be exposed.
AB 715 is sold as protection. In operation it is a compliance machine. The statute expands discrimination definitions inside California K–12, commands investigations through the Uniform Complaint Procedure, and ties institutional funding to proof of obedience. That is the spine. If a district cannot show it has corrected what the state defines as bias, the state can audit and tighten the screws. Money is the lever. Bureaucracy is the weapon.
Civil-rights compliance here means enforcement against institutions to produce behavior in individuals. That is not a theory. It is the structure. Administrators rewrite codes of conduct. Teachers attend compulsory “anti-bias” sessions. Students who say the wrong thing are sent to “counseling.” The euphemism translates into re-education. Call it what it is. Correcting thought. Shaping speech. Conditioning belief. The safest path for any school under this system is over-compliance. That is how you get uniform narrative by financial pressure, not persuasion.
A record exists for every step. Complaints, interviews, findings, sanctions, parent meetings, follow-ups, training rosters. FERPA and state code claim to protect it, yet protection here is procedural, not absolute. Digital records are indexable. Indexed records are queryable. Queryable records become policy tools. Once data exist, they can be cross-referenced, audited, compelled by court order, and shared under interagency agreements. That is not speculation. That is how modern governance operates.
Outside vendors write the catechism. State offices rarely author the training themselves. They contract it. Big civil-rights nonprofits and professional consultancies deliver the manuals, slides, and “best practices.” The government outsources orthodoxy, then grades schools on how faithfully they repeat it. Advocacy manufactures the rubric. Bureaucracy enforces the rubric. Careers and budgets depend on the rubric. That is a closed loop.
This is the cultural move from education to indoctrination. Children are not taught how to think, they are taught what not to say. Teachers do not model inquiry, they model risk management. Administrators collect paperwork as proof of ideological hygiene. The classroom becomes a compliance checkpoint. The student learns the lesson that matters: survival requires repetition.
Orwell mapped this terrain. Newspeak shrinks the vocabulary until dissent becomes inexpressible. AB 715 performs the same reduction through policy. Punishment is renamed counseling. Censorship becomes safety. Re-education becomes training. Doublethink is the daily posture. “We value critical thinking” while penalizing the practice. Thoughtcrime is recast as bias incident. The Two Minutes Hate is repackaged as assemblies and mandatory reflection circles. The memory hole is a curriculum committee striking out material that threatens the narrative. None of this announces itself as coercion. It calls itself inclusion.
From the standpoint of self-ownership, this is a moral trespass. No person owes their mind to a committee. No child’s conscience is the property of a district. Consent cannot be extracted by threatening a school’s budget. Coercion does not become legitimate because it is routed through an audit. A voluntary society requires voluntary belief. Compelled belief is counterfeit.
The pattern is broader than one statute. Governments invoke security, safety, or anti-hate to centralize speech control. In the same breath they criminalize dissent abroad and sanitize it at home. The subject here can be Israel. It can be any state power or sacred cow that the ruling apparatus shields from scrutiny. The point is not which doctrine is protected. The point is that a doctrine is protected by force of policy and purse. When a government’s conduct produces global condemnation, investigative mandates, or international court findings, a healthy culture debates it openly. A managed culture punishes the debate by redefining terms and surveilling speech under the color of civil rights.
Re-education is not a metaphor. It is the plain function of mandatory counseling and compulsory training as deployed here. Correcting thought. Taking away critical thinking. Incentivizing silence. This is how behavioral compliance replaces scholarship. This is how the next generation learns to self-censor and to equate virtue with submission. You do not need bars on windows when children internalize the guard.
There is a way out and it does not run through the ministerium of state schooling. Build parallel structures. Voluntary learning pods. Independent networks. Self-funded curricula. Refuse the money that comes with strings. Refuse the strings that come with money. Exchange ideas freely and judge them on merit, not on their compliance score.
AB 715 is the case study. The mechanics are clear. Enforcement by funding. Re-education by counseling. Surveillance by paperwork. Orthodoxy by contract. The result is obedience with a smiley-face sticker. If you want free minds, pull your consent from this machine. Teach children to question creeds, not memorize them. Teach them that truth does not need a rubric, and that no bureaucracy has jurisdiction over their thoughts.
Even the process of drafting, correcting, and proofreading this article was flagged and throttled by automated systems for so-called “hate speech.” To be clear, nothing in these words targets people or faiths—it challenges power structures, coercive governance, and enforced ideology. The very act of questioning authority, grammar-checked and spelled correctly, still tripped the same digital tripwires that silence dissent. That irony perfectly illustrates the problem this article exposes: control systems now extend even to the words we use to describe control itself.
Reference:
California Legislature. Assembly Bill No. 715 — Educational Equity: Discrimination: Antisemitism Prevention.
Chaptered October 7, 2025, as Chapter 428, Statutes of 2025.
Available at the official California Legislative Information website:
👉 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB715