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Teaching the 'Habit' of standing up for kids
Like most political exiles, Alvin Lui and his wife were happy with their life and didn’t expect it to change. His career as an illusionist had made him a local celebrity in the pleasant San Francisco suburb of Dublin, and he took any opportunity he could to give back to the community.
The way he saw it, it was a long-term investment. “My wife and I are planning on staying in this city for quite a while, so it's our privilege to be able to donate our time and money to the very schools our future children will be attending," Lui told a reporter at a 2014 fundraiser to benefit a local educational charity.
Lui and his wife eventually had a daughter. It was when it came time for her to attend the local schools that Lui realized how much everything had changed. Gender ideology — the notion that children should "choose" whether they feel like a boy, a girl, or something in between — had crept into the curriculum for even the youngest students.
For Lui, a first-generation Chinese-American whose parents fled Communist China, this LBGT-powered cultural revolution was disturbingly familiar. So he packed up his family and headed for Carmel, Indiana, lured by the excellent schools and the promise of a sensibly traditional small-town life.
When Lui noticed the same ideology beginning to undermine the Carmel school system, he decided that he had to act.
As president of the parental rights advocacy group Courage Is a Habit, Lui offers educational materials that simplify and expose the machinations of the transgender activists’ playbook.
Courage Is a Habit also fights local legislation around the country that attacks parental rights.
The group recently scored a victory over a bill in Maine that, as Joe MacKinnon reported for Blaze News, "would allow the state to take custody of children whose families refuse to subject them to sex-change mutilations and other irreversible medical interventions."
The narrative surrounding the bill’s collapse was, predictably, head-spinning. The Advocate blamed conservative account Libs of TikTok and other “right-wing extremists online” for targeting “lawmakers who were considering the legislation.”
Yahoo! News reposted another article from the Advocate claiming that the “bill aimed to protect transgender youth’s access to care trigger[ed] outlandish claims of child-snatching as right-wingers wage a war of words on the proposed legislation.” Even local news furthered the myth of “gender-affirming care.”
In this endeavor, Lui has had to contend with EqualityMaine, which he describes as “the most radical transgender cult organization.”
On the national level, he has drawn more formidable, and more well-funded, adversaries, including the Southern Poverty Law Center. That group recently put Lui on its Hatewatch list, arguing that “radical parents’ groups including … Courage Is a Habit also took the opportunity to purchase some ersatz blue-tick legitimacy” on X.
“Each is part of a wave of such parent groups that galvanize followers to attack members and allies of the LGBTQ community, mask and vaccine mandates, and inclusive curriculum, such as critical race theory.”
For his part, Lui remains unbowed. As he often says, “you may not care about politics, but politics cares about your children.” Lui recently spoke with Align about the lure of the Midwest, finding a voice as an activist, and why he believes that courage is a habit.
ALIGN: You grew up in California, right?
ALVIN LUI: I did, I did. I was born in California. I lived there most of my life except for about four years in the East Coast, you know, early on. But other than that, yeah, I'm a California boy.
ALIGN: So it must've been pretty serious for you to pack up everything and move to Indiana.
LUI: Nobody just picks up and moves like that. It's tough, of course. But we didn't want to raise children there for a lot of reasons. I think your audience would probably understand that.
'All parents know how to defend their kids. They've crossed rivers and oceans, deserts to give their child a chance of a better life. So what makes this time so special that someone can point a finger in your face and call you a bigot and it makes you stand down?'
But when I got to Indiana ... people asked me why I would move. Because a lot of people who grow up in Indiana take it for granted. They don't understand how amazing it is to grow up in the Midwest.
Because all they see of California is Hollywood and the media. They don't see how it really is. And so, the easiest way I would [explain it] if I had 10 seconds is I would say, “Well, if I were to raise a daughter there, they would tell her the two most important things in her life are that she's female and she's Asian. And that everything bad that happens to her, every failure she'll ever have is because of one or both of those things.”
And that's just the culture. That's the entire culture of California. And at the time, I didn't understand why. I just knew it was really bad on top of the crime and the sanctuary states and the taxes going to everybody but the taxpayers. Coming to Indiana was like going back in time 20 years ... in a good way, a very good way. So it's been a blessing for sure
ALIGN: Was it a slow boil, or was there a particular incident that changed your mind and made the decision for you?
LUI: It was pretty sudden. [It's like that saying], a fish doesn't know [it's] wet. And so, when you're living in California, you don't realize it until you have a family, until you start being a business owner.
They want to get to the kids very early on. They want to get a 16-year-old to vote. Because you simply have no rearview mirror of life [at that age]. Let's face it: When you're 25, you barely have a rearview mirror of life. And until you start failing in life; until you start paying taxes; until you start building something, then failing, then building again; until you have something to worry about other than yourself; until life knocks that narcissism out of you, you don't really understand. .
[Look at] the way they throw up all this red tape, to make it as difficult as possible for you to be successful and to be financially independent. But if you're a failure, they make it as easy as possible for you to stay a failure.
And those are the policies in California.
For me, it was two things. It was the sanctuary state, sanctuary city, opening up the borders. I know today you and I are having this conversation — today in 2024 and the whole country is talking about it, but this has been a problem in California for 20 years.
And then when transgenderism came again and they started really saturating our young people with it. Your family, your safety, and keeping a child's innocence are the most paramount. You could be poor. You could always make money. But when you rob somebody's physical safety, which is what illegal aliens do, and then you take a child's innocence — those two things. If it goes wrong, you don't get those things back.
A girl in a city right next to mine got killed by an illegal alien in San Francisco walking around with her dad. It was heartbreaking. She died in his arms, and she was in her late 20s.
And I thought, "God, this man raised her through all the barfing and the diaper-changing and then hurting herself and then worrying about her friends and worrying about her grades and making sure she came home on time and graduating high school and maybe she went to college.
"But then she's 27 and he's thinking, 'I've done it, she's a woman and she's moving on with her life and she's doing great.' And they're spending time together walking around San Francisco in Pier 39 — a touristy place — and she died in his arms."
And it was because of an illegal alien who had been was deported five times. They kept letting him come back into San Francisco because it's a sanctuary city at the time. San Francisco was the first sanctuary city in the country, and they would not work with ICE to arrest him. And he shot her.
ALIGN: What you're doing with Courage Is a Habit is offering educational tools to people and letting them decide for themselves. Talk to me about that mission and what pulled you in that direction, where the idea came from, and what you offer with Courage Is a Habit.
LUI: So I guess let's start with the name. When I got to Indiana, I was quite naive, because I really loved Indiana. But [I realized] that the one thing that makes no difference in a red or blue state is public education, K-12.
There's no difference when it comes to red and blue states. The indoctrination is the same, and that's one of the things that parents have a hard time accepting.
So I saw a lot of the same seeds that were planted in Indiana that will eventually grow to the policies that destroyed my old home in California. Obviously to a lesser degree because we're not as far along in Indiana as California, but all the pillars and the foundations were already laid in K-12.
It just hasn't saturated yet into the community and into legislation. It was starting already, and even in the four years that I've been here, we can already see a difference.
This was something people didn't know. So I was very naive when I got here and I said, “Oh, I know what's going on. These people just don't know. I'm a nobody. I'm just gonna say, ‘Hey, look, I'm gonna be super honest. I'm from California and here's the reason why I left: You guys are already having these things in there.'"
And so I thought that if I would just get my dumb ass on the radio and maybe in some newspaper articles and just say, “Hey, I love Indiana. Love you guys. You guys have been great. You've welcomed us. I just want you to know, just to say thank you.
"And, look, you guys aren't racist. Don't fall for that. Don't go down that path. Don't go down that path because this is where it leads.”
I thought that if I said that, people would go, “Oh, man, yeah,” and then they'd rise up and speak out.
I was wrong. People reacted the same way that we did in California when people told us this 25 years ago. It won't happen here, you're fear-mongering, it's just white privilege, it's all that stuff. So I was really taken aback by how afraid people were. How afraid people were to speak up even though the people knew what I was saying was true.
But waiting for it to happen was better than speaking out and having an insufferable white woman in your neighborhood call you a racist and a bigot, right?
So anyway, I found myself starting to go around speaking to parents, mostly focused on education. And I eventually started off my speech with this little blurb.
I said, “Isn't it kind of funny that all of you very wonderful, successful people find yourself on a Friday night or Saturday night in a strange auditorium listening to a stranger from another state tell you how to defend your children? This has never happened before in the history of parenting, right?"
And I said, “Why is that? You know, all parents know how to defend their kids. They've crossed rivers and oceans, deserts to give their child a chance of a better life. This is what the American dream is made out of, inviting immigrants, legal ones, to come here. So what makes this time so special that someone can point a finger in your face and call you a bigot and it makes you stand down? Why is that?”
Then I said, “Well, in order to understand why that is, you have to go back a little bit as to how you got here over the last, let's say, five to seven years.
"And it started with something very simple. Maybe it was at your workplace. They asked you to put up a Black Lives Matter or a rainbow flag, or asked you to take this anti-bias training and said you had unconscious this and unconscious that. And you knew this was wrong. You knew that wasn't true, but you went along with it.
"So over time, you've made fear a habit.
"It wasn't one or two things, it wasn't four or five things, but it was just over time, you made fear a habit.
"So now, they're coming after your kids, and you told yourself, 'When it really counts, I'll be able to stand up.'
"But the problem is, that's not how habits work. If you make fear a habit, even when they come after the thing that you love most in life, which everybody in this room," I said, "obviously it's your children and grandchildren, because you would run into a burning building for them.
"But you wouldn't go fight for them if someone calls you a bigot. And now, you find yourself in an auditorium asking me how you defend your children."
I said, "You know how to defend your children. You just have to make courage a habit. And every time you want to speak up and your heart's coming out of your chest, and you know someone's going to call you a bigot or a transphobe or whatever, and you say it anyway.
"The next time is not gonna feel easier, and the next time after that it won't. And I can't tell you, because I don't know your psychological makeup, how many times it'll take, but I can promise you, one of those times, it might be the 15th time or the 25th time, you will not feel fear any more, because you've made courage a habit instead of fear. But those first six times are gonna suck.
"No matter who you are, those first six times are gonna really suck. But when you can push past that, once you make courage a habit, you will never go back. You will never one day say, you know what, I think I'm gonna shut up again."
So that was how I used to start my little talks in Indiana.
When I saw that this education issue was not just isolated to big cities like Indianapolis, I started to realize that the thing that destroyed California has now escaped from the lab, so to speak.
It escaped Wuhan. And now it's everywhere. Now it's everywhere.
My great-grandfather ran from communism. He was an older man, you know, the Red Guard dragged him out of his little bakery. He wasn't rich; he was just a small business owner. He had two bakeries. They dragged him out and beat him. And he ran from communism so that his family could have a chance of not growing up in China, in Mao's China.
I never thought that I would have to move my family from one place to another because I was fearing the same thing. Obviously, it's nowhere near life and death as it was for my great-grandfather, but the idea was the same thing.
My father always made sure that my siblings and I felt very lucky to be born here. He never let us forget that.
If America goes the way of the Cultural Revolution, your children and my children will have nowhere to go. I wanted to do something that would spread nationally and not just locally, and that's how Courage Is a Habit was born.
When it was time to think of a name, I thought about that little opener I had; I also wanted a name that every time someone said it would give encouragement.
Those are the kind of subtleties we don't do enough of; our opponents do. They see the message in a name. And I wanted a name that every time someone said it, even if in a negative way, it reminded people that you don't need an organization. You know how to defend your children. This is in you.
This is why I very rarely say courage is contagious. That's a great saying, by the way. I love that saying. It's a beautiful saying, courage is contagious. The reason why I don't say it is when you say something is contagious, it inherently means you need other people around for that contagion.
So it means that if you don't have enough people to spread that courage contagion, then you don't have it. Or you might have it, but then when enough people fall away, and you look around and you go, "Oh, I only got like two people that believe me," then you start to be silent again. But when you make courage a habit, it doesn't matter if you have a thousand people behind you or nobody behind you.
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