The World is locked today in a fierce war of ideologies, in some ways strangely resembling the wars of religion in the Middle Ages. The doctrinal points at issue in those wars have become unintelligible to most of us today, and there are some equally strange paradoxes in the present ideological war.

The Communists, who started it, not only know precisely what they are against — Capitalism — but precisely what they are for. On both questions the party line is laid down for them from the top. There can be no deviation, on pain of ostracism, penal servitude, torture, or death. But on the other side, most of those who do not accept Communism did not realize, until belatedly, that there even was an ideological war going on; and that no appeasement, no conciliation, no mutual attitude of live-and-let-live, was possible, because the Communists were determined from the start not to permit it. The non-Communists had no idea that they were engaged in a life-or-death struggle.

But this brings us to other paradoxes. The non-Communists are still not even united as anti-Communists. For there is still an influential group who say: “True, we should not allow the Russians to impose Communism on us, but neither should we try to impose our system on the Russians. Capitalism (or Democracy) is probably the best system for us, and Communism for them. If we stop arming against the Communists and talking against them, their suspicions will gradually dissolve, and each of us can live peaceably in his own way.” This view persists, in spite of its untenability, mainly because it is a wish-fulfillment.

Disunited Anti-communists

Moreover, even the anti-Communists are not united. They are all “against Communism.” But they have no common definition or concept of Communism. Few of them realize that Communism is primarily an economic doctrine. Most of them regard it primarily as a political or a cultural system. What they hate about it is the despotism, the total suppression of freedom — political, religious, or artistic; the cruelties, the forced confessions, the systematic lying, spying, and plotting, the relentless campaigns of calumny, the existence or threat of military aggression.

All these things are indeed hateful. But what most anti-Communists still fail to see is that they are merely the inevitable consequences of the basic economic doctrine of Communism. These are what Karl Marx, writing of Capitalism, would have called the “superstructure.”

The anti-Communists are also deeply divided in their ideas of the economic system they would prefer to Communism. They range from champions of the free market to left-wing Socialists, with every variety of New Dealer, planner, and statist in between. The New Dealers seem as eager to repudiate “laissez faire Capitalism” as they do Communism. And when it comes to the basic economic organization they propose, the Socialists are actually at one with the Communists against Capitalism.

These violent divisions within the ranks of the anti-Communists have led to conflicting ideas concerning the proper “strategy” against Communism. There are those who think that “anti-Communism” is itself a sufficient ground for unity. Communism, they say, is not a doctrine that needs to be dissected, but a conspiracy that needs to be suppressed. What we must do is to ferret out the Communists — in the government, in the armed forces, in the U.N., in the schools and colleges — expose them and get rid of them. Anything else, they contend, is either unimportant or a diversion.

Is “Democracy” Enough?

There is another group that is not satisfied merely with being against Communism, which concedes that the opponents of Communism must have a common positive philosophy, but which thinks that belief in “Democracy” is enough. This has been substantially the position of the State Department and the Voice of America under Truman. It is the position of the major part of the American press.

What Is Democracy?

It does not stand up under serious analysis. “Democracy” is one of those sweepingly vague words that mean too many things to different minds. It can be stretched or compressed, like an accordion, to meet the controversial needs of the moment. “Democracy” as a unifying concept has come to be, in fact, little better than a semantic evasion. To some it means a political system under which the government depends upon the uncoerced will of the people in such a way that it can be peaceably changed whenever the will of the people changes. To others it means anything down to a system of unrestrained mob rule in which everyone is declared by fiat to be equal in merit and influence to everyone else; in which a minority has no rights that a majority is bound to respect; in which anyone’s property can be confiscated at will, and distributed to those who did nothing to earn it; in which incomes are to be equalized in spite of glaring inequalities in ability, effort, and contribution. This second concept of Democracy must lead inevitably into a Communist system and not toward a free one.

“Democracy,” therefore, has not only come to be so vague as to be almost meaningless; it has lost nearly all its value even as a semantic weapon. The enemy has taken it over and used it for his own purposes. The Communists call their own system (tautologically but beguilingly) a “people’s democracy,” and argue that capitalist democracy is a contradiction in terms.

Even if the concept of “Democracy” did not suffer from a fatal ambiguity, it would still refer primarily to a political system. But Communism stands primarily for an economic system, of which the political accompaniment is mainly a consequent or superstructure. Therefore “Democracy” is in any case a false antithesis to Communism. It is like declaring west to be the opposite of north, or cold to be the opposite of black.

Communism vs. Capitalism

The true opposite of Communism is Capitalism. The Communists know it, but most of the rest of us don’t.

This is the real reason for the ideological weakness of the opposition to Communism, and for the ineffectiveness of most of the propaganda against it — particularly the official propaganda, up to now, of the State Department and the Voice of America, and of the Western governments generally. All these set up “Democracy” as the antithesis of Communism, partly because they are confused enough to believe it is, and partly because they have neither the will nor the courage to defend Capitalism.

There are several reasons behind this reluctance. To begin with, the very word “Capitalism” was coined and given currency by Marx and Engels. It was deliberately devised as a smear word. It was meant to suggest what it probably still does suggest to most minds — a system developed by and for the capitalists.

The overwhelming majority of bureaucrats in the Western countries do not really believe in the basic principles of Capitalism. The economic freedom it involves is alien to their minds. It is not natural for the people in power in government to believe in less governmental power. Moreover, they do not really understand what makes Capitalism work, or what measures are conformable with it. Their natural tendency is to favor the incompatible system of the government handout. Hence they plump for huge foreign aid programs, Point Four, the International Monetary Fund, and interminable United Nations meddling. They do not realize that these measures and institutions actually retard or prevent the freedom of trade and the free international flow of private investment upon which real recovery, economic growth and productivity depend.

Finally, even when an American official understands and favors Capitalism, he is embarrassed by the fact that several of our most important European allies are addicted to Socialism. Therefore he does not dare to praise Capitalism in specific terms for fear of offending our Socialist allies by implication. The real case against Communism hardly even gets itself officially stated.

What Freedom Does

It is in large part because of the connotations built into the smear word “Capitalism” that, while millions are willing to die for Communist delusions, nobody has been willing to die for Capitalism — certainly not under that name. But Capitalism is merely the Marxist epithet for the system of the free market, for competitive private enterprise, for the system under which each is permitted to earn and keep the product of his labor — in brief, for economic freedom.

It is because of its freedoms and securities that Capitalism is incomparably the most productive system in the world. It does not have to “prove” its superiority to Socialism or Communism. It has already proved that a thousand times over, whether the standard of comparison is productivity or personal freedom. Capitalism is not the best system because it is best for the employer or for the rich. It is the best system precisely for the worker and for the poor. Under it the status, wages, and welfare of the worker have improved historically at a rate and to an extent that before the Industrial Revolution would have been considered incredible. They are still improving, at, if anything, an accelerative rate.

The answer to Communism, in brief, is Capitalism. And once we understand this, the problems of “ideological strategy” which we have been confusedly debating begin to melt away. We do not have to discuss whether we have been “merely talking to ourselves” or not. The very question is based on a false analogy — the analogy of the lawsuit, of “our side” versus “their side.” This analogy unconsciously swallows the Marxist theory of a real clash of interest between economic “classes” — employers versus workers or rich versus poor. But once we recognize that the system of Capitalism is the only workable one, the only one that promotes the interest of both employers and workers, while it provides the maximum of opportunity for the poor to conquer their poverty, then the real distinction is between those who understand the system and those who do not. A man who is known to understand a problem is never merely talking to himself; all those who sincerely wish to understand it can be counted on to listen.

Another problem which melts away is whether we should confine ourselves to combating Communism, because it is a conspiracy and a military menace, or whether we can disregard Communism, on the ground that it has been sufficiently exposed, and concentrate on combating socialist measures because there is so much more real likelihood of their being adopted at home.

The solution is simple. There is only one right answer to the sum of 2 and 2, and an infinite number of wrong answers. Once we have shown that 2 and 2 make 4, we do not have to provide separate proof that every other answer is wrong. Communism is just one wrong answer to the basic social problem — though the worst and most dangerous. Socialism (which proposes the same basic economic measures as Communism) is merely another wrong answer, in the long run only a little less bad and a little less dangerous. “Planning,” price control, inflation, Keynesianism, are still other wrong answers. As in arithmetic, there are an infinite number of such wrong answers. But once we have found the right answer, we can explain what is wrong with the other solutions from that basis.

In the social and economic realm, we must base our criticisms on a positive program. That program is the improvement and purification of Capitalism.

Henry Hazlett, author of the classic “Economics in One Lesson”

It’s crunch time for the challenging Democrats.  We’re coming down to blastoff-like countdown numbers ’til November 3.  The real leaders of the Dem Party — not those shock troops carrying placards in the streets, but the real mavens of policy, who call the shots from behind their desks — are starting to sweat.  They have smarts.  How long before their candidate goes completely off the wall and is no longer able to be protected by the accommodating media?  Biden has already twice repeatedly claimed to nationwide audiences that he’s running for a Senate seat.  His behavior to both fans and interviewers has increasingly shown his mean side.  He’s ready to implode under the pressure.  In addition, Trump’s almost miraculous recovery from the coronavirus and the massive crowds cheering him on at his open-air rallies indicate another 2016-like disaster for the left.  Leftists know it.  And this frightens them.

Throw in the exposure of Hunter’s exploits that have his dad’s fingerprints all over the scandals that are slowly leaking out and raising the awareness to those who have yet to cast their ballots.  The laughably rigged “polls” reminiscent of those in 2016 are fading in relevance.  It’s clear to the left’s top brass that the Donald Trump of today is nothing like what he was when he faced off against Hillary.  He was then a big question mark in the mind of every citizen.  He had no political history at all.  He ran solely on promises, which politicians rarely keep once they attain office.  Trump kept his — every one.  People noticed.  Not only did blue-collar Democrat workers retain their jobs, but employment opportunities increased.  America became not onlyenergy independent, but the major producer and exporter of such power sources.  Trump lowered taxes, made peace in the Middle East, rebargained trade agreements in our favor, sent shivers down the spines of dictators, hung Putin out to dry, and is pulling out of our age-old wars.  All this and much more in less than four years with the Democrat jackals at his throat 24/7.  Throw in the ludicrous spectacle of his impeachment by the House, which began a few days before his swearing in — which, unfortunately for the left, raised his stature as a winner. 

The unruly and unprofessional recent handling of the NBC Miami “town hall” by Savannah Guthrie, that went off the wall, did not sit well with the crucial voters on the fringe.  Amy Barrett’s hearings unveiled the bias of the left toward her Christian beliefs.  Christian voters, especially those millions who sat out 2012 because of Trump’s brashness, noticed, nodded, and have been inspired to vote.

The foundation of Biden’s campaign is cracking.  Something drastic has to be done, now at the finish line, to panic the voters, to short-circuit the voting process, to divert voters’ attention, to basically destroy the election and eventually declare the outcome null and void.  How to do this and what to expect in the days ahead?  Nothing’s off the table for the radical left.

Look for those vandalous thugs in the armies of the BLM and Antifa, who, in recent years, were in Spring Training, to be called out in the next two weeks to strike fear into the hearts of America.  If polling places were to be vandalized and destroyed prior to November 3, could there not be a demand by the Schumers and Pelosis to call the election null and void due to “the denial of voting opportunities”?  If vehicles toting completed ballots were hijacked, what then of a reliable count?  Do you recall the two Black Panthers in Philadelphia during the 2008 voting process who physically and verbally intimidated voters in front of a polling station to vote in support of Barack Obama?  They were exonerated by Obama’s wing man, Eric Holder.  It worked then for the Democrats, and look for more like that to happen before November 3rd.

The Democrats cannot afford to lose this election. If they do, they have no one else to blame but their leaders.  The effrontery to all of us to put an obviously ailing and incoherent Joe Biden for the top spot and for the V.P., Kamala Harris, who couldn’t even carry her own state in the primaries, indicates their lack of judgment.  They are at wit’s end and will risk the destruction of the nation to regain power.  They are capable of anything.  And that’s scary.  Watch out!

Alan Bernstein, American Thinker

The violent riots, looting, arson, and even public execution of Trump supporters over the past six months has been primarily the work of the self-described communist revolutionaries associated with “Antifa” and Black Lives Matter (BLM).  Mug shots of some of the Antifa/BLM criminals that have appeared in the news and online show that some of them are seriously mentally deranged; some are hardened criminals with long criminal records; there seems to be a preponderance of convicted sex offenders and pedophiles among them; and what seems to be hundreds of pyromaniacs.  They are always accompanied by mobs of rather ordinary, run-of-the-mill, urban underclass looters, the products of the state’s life-destroying and crime-infested inner-city government schools, its family- and work-incentive-destroying welfare state, and its war on drugs.

Then there is the large army of useful idiots – the thousands of mostly white college-age or slightly-older kids.  They don’t seem to dominate the criminal mug shots published by urban police departments, but they appear to have comprised at least half of many of the mob scenes broadcast on American television over the past several months.  I lost count how many times I watched the boob tube as a chubby white girl dressed like a masked homeless person screamed in the faces of black police officers about “white supremacy” and racism, as though these mostly middle-aged black men were unaware of racial discrimination.  Then there’s that Ivy League co-ed whose parents own several multi-million dollar homes who was arrested for setting fire to police cars during one of the riots in New York City.  One suspects that she was not the only one who fit that description.

The criminals and the underclass looters are in it (rioting) for fun and profit, but the white college kids are there because they think they are being good Marxist revolutionaries by associating themselves with BLM, whose founders have proudly proclaimed that “we are trained Marxists” (and who also advocate the abolition of the family, as did Karl Marx himself).   How on earth, one may ask, have so many college students and graduates been convinced that totalitarian communism, of all things, is what they want for their future?

I am not speaking of all college students and recent graduates, of course, but a very large and vocal segment of that population – the so-called social justice snowflakes.  The answer to this question is obvious:  They have been thoroughly indoctrinated by the socialist indoctrination academies known as “American colleges and universities,” and also by their middle-school and high school teachers who themselves were indoctrinated there first.  They have been indoctrinated in textbook Marxism, in techniques and ideologies that were pioneered by Marx, Engels, Lenin and others, and carried forward first by the “60s Marxist radicals” and then by the radicals’ students who now dominate nearly every university.

Socialism Means Destructionism

Ludwig von Mises wrote in his 1922 classic, Socialism, that “the socialist idea is nothing but a grandiose rationalization of petty resentments” and “destruction is the essence of it,” the “spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created.”  Private property, free enterprise, the rule of law, the civil society, constitutionalism, religion, the family, tradition, history, are all today routinely denounced and destroyed by the useful idiots rioting in American streets.  What else would one call the riots, looting, arson and mayhem in certain American cities but Marxist destructionism?

Everything Mises said about the “revolutionary Marxists” of the early twentieth century applies to the American Left today.  “Instead of refuting” his critics, Mises said of Marx and Marxists, “his disciples have faithfully imitated the master’s example, reviling their opponents but never attempting to refute them by argument.”  This is one Marxist creed that today’s college students are very well schooled in indeed.  It is now almost routine that if a student group invites a conservative or libertarian speaker to campus he will be met with a loud mob shouting insults at him, prohibiting him from speaking, and, in the case of the University of California at Berkeley, home of “the free speech movement,” setting campus buildings on fire.  Consequently, very few dissenting voices are ever invited to campus in the first place.  Only the “oppressed” classes deserve the right of free speech, today’s college students are taught from the writings of twentieth-century Marxist academic crank, Herbert Marcuse.  Everyone else is to be smeared, libeled, and slandered as a “racist, “sexist,” “fascist,” etc., etc.  The “oppressed” classes are defined by today’s academic Marxists as everyone except  white heterosexual males who are not outspoken Leftists.  All white people are assumed to be inherent racists according to today’s Left, but being an outspoken campus commie earns one a get-out-of-jail card.

The “socialist parties” of Mises’ time perfected “the technique of agitation, the cadging for votes and for souls, the stirring up of electoral excitement, the street demonstrations, and terrorism.”  There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to being a Marxist revolutionary, in other words.  The purpose of “revolutionary socialism,” wrote Mises, “is primarily concerned to clear the ground for building up a new civilization by liquidating the older one.”  Of course, the whole history of Marxist revolutions is that the older civilization, which may have evolved over centuries, is in fact destroyed and then replaced with nothing but totalitarian thuggery, corruption, violence, and mass killing.  Today’s college students learn little or nothing about this – the real history of socialism – but are well schooled in utopian pipe dreams such as The Communist Manifesto.  I once used the Manifesto in a class called “Capitalism and its Critics” where I treated it as an historical artifact.  One student complained that it was the fourth time he was assigned to read it during his college career, but the first time it was not portrayed as a roadmap for the future.

Many Americans were not surprised when the revolutionary Marxist rioters, looters and arsonists (RMRLA) began toppling statues of Confederate soldiers and said nothing.  Many mocked President Trump when he predicted that the mob will move on to Thomas Jefferson and other founders. They were (and are) befuddled, however, when the same gang began destroying statues of Christopher Columbus, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, New England abolitionists, and just about every other kind of statue commemorating America’s past.  They have chopped off the heads of Virgin Mary statues at Catholic churches and spray painted vulgar graffiti on countless churches.  Once again, this is all textbook Marxism as taught to your sons and daughters in the institutions of “higher education.”  Tradition is merely “a tool of the bourgeoisie,” said Marx.  “In bourgeois society the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past.”  Marxists will have none of that business about learning from the mistakes of history for they – and only they – know all the answers.

Marx and Engels called for the “Abolition of Religion” in The Communist Manifesto along with a plea to “abolish the present state of things.”  “The forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions” was their goal.  “Communists everywhere support the revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things,” they said, something that was probably said many times over in American university classrooms in the past year.

“Ruthless criticism of all that exists” was also called for by Marx, who bloviated that “the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”  Communism “abolishes eternal truths,” Marx boasted, and “acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.”  As F.A. Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom, in a totalitarian society truth is not determined by research, investigation, discussion, debate, and education but is handed down by the state in the form of statist platitudes.

Today this is called “critical theory” in the academic world and is quite prevalent.  When a business school professor (actually a lawyer hired to preach left-wing politics to business students) initiated a new course called “Critical Thinking” at my former university I asked her what academic discipline she would be drawing on – philosophy, logic, political philosophy, economics, etc.  Her answer was “Oh none of that; we will just criticize people like you.”

Talking with many of her students over the years I have learned that they were taught nothing about how to structure a criticism by using logic, facts, and theory.  Instead, they are taught to condemn, slander, libel, denounce, and smear anyone who voices disagreements with any of the standard leftist platitudes that all college students are bombarded with and have been since elementary school.  Ruthless criticism, in other words, just as Marx himself advocated.

“Communism begins where atheism begins,” wrote Marx and Engels, and “communism is incompatible with religious faith.”  Marx would be proud indeed of his contemporary American minions.  A June 1 Catholic News Agency article reported that “churches in 6 states were damaged by violent protests.”  Cathedrals were defaced and damaged and spray painted with “God is Dead” and “There is No God.”  In Europe, some 3,000 Christian churches and other buildings were vandalized, looted and defaced in 2019.

While American parents slept, university Leftists have turned millions of their children into uneducated, empty-headed, slogan-chanting useful idiots for the most despicable political tyrants and would-be dictators on the planet.  Way to go, American parents.

Thomas DiLorenzo

Public schools are passing students who can’t read at any level — all to avoid blaming teachers, lawmakers, and bureaucrats.

Public schools from coast to coast are failing to teach young students the most basic skill they need to succeed in school and life: reading. This failure is widespread, tragic, and mostly unnecessary. We know how to teach reading, but many school administrators refuse to use the proven methods.

The extent of this self-inflicted catastrophe, which has ruined countless lives, was driven home to me again when the new school year began several weeks ago.Top Ar

Some 20 years ago I founded the Roger Bacon Academy (RBA), which manages a family of four charter schools in southeastern North Carolina. This year, for the first time in RBA’s history, the schools enrolled large numbers of students who transferred from the traditional county public schools.

Of the 168 first- and second-grade transfer students, 75 (approx. 45 percent) could not pass the basic readiness assessment to begin kindergarten-level reading instruction. Not only could they not read at any level, but their spoken vocabularies were insufficient to understand reading instruction if it were taught to them. Therefore, the 51 first-graders and 24 second-graders are now taking a kindergarten preparatory course called Language for Learning (L4L) that must be mastered before effective reading instruction can begin.

Unfortunately, the prevalence of nonreaders moving through our public-school systems is widespread. Here in North Carolina, in a typical year such as 2017–18, 55.7 percent of public-school students in grades three through eight fail North Carolina’s end-of-grade reading test. On the most recent reading tests administered by the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), our so-called Nation’s Report Card, just 36 percent of North Carolina fourth-graders “performed at or above the NAEP proficient level.” Sixty-seven percent performed at the basic level — meaning that a third of all students did not. Lest you think this is a North Carolina problem alone, both measures were on par with, and in fact a little above, the national average.

The significance of this can’t be overstated. If students haven’t learned how to read proficiently (or in some cases read at all) by the time they enter fourth grade, it may be all over for them. As the National Conference of State Legislatures pointed out in a report at the end of last year, citing research by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, “third grade has been identified as important to reading literacy because it is the final year children are learning to read, after which students are ‘reading to learn.’”Biden Says He Will Not Release Supreme Court List to Avoid Politicizing Court 

North Carolina Superior Court Judge Howard Manning, in the course of his oversight of a 20-year education lawsuit (Leandro v. State of North Carolina), made a determination that such failures amount to “committing academic genocide.”

“Everybody seems to agree if you are not reading by the third grade, you’re screwed,” Judge Manning told TV news anchor David Crabtree on WRAL in Raleigh on August 26. “From the evidence, there is no reason in the world — if teachers and principals follow the assessments as they are supposed to — that a child should not be reading by third grade. . . . I get mad about this.”

We Know How to Teach Reading

It is not as if teaching reading has been ignored in the United States. Teaching reading successfully is a straightforward, well-documented process, and most children, given proper instruction, should be successful readers by the end of kindergarten.

The federal government began a ten-year, billion-dollar effort called Project Follow Through in 1968 that tested various methods for teaching reading to at-risk children in grades K–3. It compared 22 curriculum models in 178 communities with 200,000 children. The Direct Instruction (DI) model, the study found, “produced the best results in all areas: basic skills, problem solving, and self-esteem.”

In 1997, after 20 years of ignoring Project Follow Though results, Congress asked the director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), in consultation with the secretary of education, to convene a national panel to evaluate existing research and evidence to find the best ways of teaching children to read.

The panel was chaired by the late Dr. Donald N. Langenberg, then chancellor of the University of Maryland. The resulting National Reading Panel report of 2000 identified the five key skills that must be taught for reading, all of which are integral to the Reading Mastery (RM)/L4L curriculum our schools use — which, it should be noted, has been widely available since the 1970s.GET THE CAPITAL LETTER

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Instead of embracing these methods, most of the education establishment — superintendents, principals, schools of education, and, as they are taught, the teachers — snub them. The result: Year after year, significant numbers of nonreaders advance through the public schools. I’m not talking about students who aren’t reading at grade level; I’m talking about students who can’t read at any level.

Reading Mastery provides a carefully sequenced series of 160 lessons that teach beginning nonreading kindergarten students to read connected text fluently. Each fifth lesson has a built-in assessment to ensure that the student has mastered the material before moving on. Before beginning the series at RM-1, Lesson 1, Language for Learning is sometimes required to teach young children the basic vocabulary, concepts, and sentence forms used in typical classroom instruction. L4L also is carefully sequenced to introduce simple concepts at the beginning, building up to more advanced concepts later. Because children come in with widely differing levels of oral vocabulary, L4L has a placement test that allows teachers to start the program at a lesson matching each student’s readiness level.

The placement test uses 45 simple verbal instructions, such as “Show me your nose” or “Point to the wall” or “Put your hand on your head.” Some refer to pictures the student is shown and ask such questions as, “What is the person doing?” If a student can correctly answer at least 73 percent of the simple questions (33 of the 45 questions) the student is allowed to proceed to Reading Mastery 1, Lesson 1. Scoring below 73 percent requires the child to start L4L before reading instruction begins.

The fact that 24 second-grade transfer students — students who already had spent two years in local public schools — were unable to pass (that is, score 73 percent or better) the kindergarten L4L Placement Test should raise profound concerns among parents, public officials, taxpayers, and the media. What are North Carolina citizens getting for their investments in education?  How can school-district officials tolerate such outcomes? And remember, North Carolina fourth-graders scored slightly above the national average in the most recent NAEP national reading exam.

This is not to say that the Language for Learning/Reading Mastery curriculum and other available direct instruction programs provide a magic bullet. Some students, although fluent readers, still struggle with comprehension. At our four schools, for example, the overall percentage of students in third grade and above whose reading comprehension is at or above their grade level are 74.4 percent, 67.3 percent, 75.2 percent, and 56 percent. The statewide average is 57.2 percent. But I’ll add a defensive footnote: Even in our poorest-performing school, Wilmington’s inner-city Douglass Academy, the percentage was 73.3 percent among students who have been with us since kindergarten, while neighboring inner-city schools had passing percentages in the 20s and 30s.

I became involved in education by accident. I’m an electrical engineer by profession. After establishing and leading the bioengineering section at the University of Texas’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and later starting (and selling) a business, I retired and volunteered as a science teacher at Wesley Elementary School, a low-income, predominantly African-American school in Houston.

Wesley’s then principal, the late Thaddeus Lott, taught me what works in education: the proper curriculum executed with discipline, order, high expectations, and committed teachers and administrators.

I later moved to Wilmington, N.C., where — inspired by Dr. Lott — I helped establish the four Roger Bacon Academy schools, which currently have 2,500 students. All four are Title 1 schools, meaning 40 percent or more of their students are economically disadvantaged. Three of the four schools are among the top-ranked in their respective counties — despite the fact that the state tests our students are required to take are based on the Common Core standards used in most traditional public schools, not the classical, direct-instruction curriculum our schools use. Douglass Academy — named for 19th-century civil-rights icon Frederick Douglass — has been outperforming neighboring public schools, and I’m confident it’s on the way to becoming a top-ranked school as well.

Before writing the application for Charter Day School, the first school we opened, a colleague and I visited two other charter schools using direct-instruction methods and the Reading Mastery program: Franklin Academy, in Wake Forest, and Rocky Mount Charter.

Rocky Mount was, and is, an inner-city minority school, and the board was very gracious in hosting a tour for us. During the tour, our escort was called away, and we were left by ourselves in a hallway. We stopped a passing teacher and introduced ourselves and asked about her experiences at Rocky Mount with direct instruction.

She seemed flustered at the question. She took a breath and, pointing toward a window, said she had taught first and second grade for 14 years at a nearby public elementary school. Every year, she said, many students would be promoted to the next grade though they couldn’t read. She always had assumed it was a developmental issue about which she couldn’t do anything. At Rocky Mount, where direct instruction is used, she said every child was reading.

She began to tear up and, barely managing to talk while weeping, explained that these were just like the children she had passed along as nonreaders at her previous school. She told us how guilty she felt when she realized that she’d needlessly failed to teach so many students to read those many years. She hurried away down the hall as our escort returned.

Why Are the Successful Methods Ignored?

The establishment ignores Language for Learning (L4L), Reading Mastery (RM), and other proven reading curricula because to do otherwise would shift blame for nonreaders to teachers, administrators, the schools of education, and the lawmakers who ignore or make excuses for the public schools’ failings.

To understand the depth of the problem, look no further than the fate of a law passed here in North Carolina in 1996, General Statute 115C-81.2., “Comprehensive Plan for Reading Achievement.”

The law states:

The plan shall be based on reading instructional practices for which there is strong evidence of effectiveness in existing empirical scientific research studies on reading development.

It states further:

The General Assembly believes that the first, essential step in the complex process of learning to read is the accurate pronunciation of written words and that phonics, which is the knowledge of relationships of the symbols of the written language and the sounds of the spoken language, is the most reliable approach to arriving at the accurate pronunciation of a printed word. Therefore, these programs shall include early and systematic phonics instruction.

The law directed the State Board of Education to modify “the standard course of study and to emphasize balanced, integrated, and effective programs of reading instruction that include early and systematic phonics instruction” and to “review, evaluate, and revise current teacher certification standards and teacher education programs within the institutions of higher education that provide coursework in reading instruction.” The law contained no penalties or sanctions for noncompliance and after being ignored by the State Board of Education for ten years was repealed in 2017.

We’ll rescue the 75 nonreaders who escaped from the local district schools this fall. Millions of others around the country aren’t so lucky.

Baker Mitchell

COMMUNISM.

“It depends on the state of the nature of the vaccine when it comes out and how it’s being distributed,” Biden said.

“But I think that we should be talking about, depending on the continuation of the spread of the virus, we should be thinking about making it mandatory,” Biden said.

He admitted it is not enforceable but hinted at banning Americans from certain activities unless they comply with the mandate.
[Breitbart]

What the hell happened to “my body, my choice”? Evidently it applies to abortion … and absolutely nothing else.

Joe Biden not even asked about Hunter Biden’s incriminating emails by leftist media in the propaganda exercise labeled a “town hall.” More evidence that the Democratic Communist media is acting EXACTLY as state-run media would behave under a dictatorship. WILLINGLY. The people who watch CNN, MSNBC and all the others for “objective journalism” are begging to be lied to — and ruled. In America? It’s shameful beyond expression.

Michael J. Hurd

Some Americans are discriminated against because of their race, but it is not who you think. 

The clearest definition of “racism” is treating people differently according to their race. Systemic or institutional racism is racism “expressed in the practice of social and political institutions.” null

Many American policies and laws are designed to ensure that people of all races, creeds, ethnicities, genders, and sexualities are treated equally, such as the Sixth Amendment, guaranteeing the right to “a fair and speedy public trial by jury,” the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, the Fifteenth Amendment, prohibiting the denial of the right to vote based on race, the Nineteenth Amendment prohibiting the denial of the right to vote on the basis of gender.

President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925, following up similar earlier orders by Presidents Roosevelt and Eisenhower, required government contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated during employment without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” It established the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (PCEEO). Title IX of the Education Amendments Act forbids unequal treatment based on sex (gender) in federally funded programs. 

But everything changed with subsequent orders, such as President Johnson’s, that required “contractors with 51 or more employees and contracts of $50,000 or more to implement affirmative action plans to increase the participation of minorities and women in the workplace if a workforce analysis demonstrates their under-representation, meaning that there are fewer minorities and women than would be expected given the numbers of minorities and women qualified to hold the positions available.”

President Obama followed, and upped the ante, with “Executive Order 13583– Establishing a Coordinated Government-wide Initiative to Promote Diversity and Inclusion in the Federal Workforce.” null

Notice the transition from “without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin” to “increase the participation of minorities and women,” from color-blind to race and gender preferences. Between the Johnson and Obama directives, specification of qualifications—“qualified to hold the positions”—disappeared, and in its place, the unlimited instruction “to recruit, hire, promote, and retain a more diverse workforce.”

Today “underrepresented” is not based upon the pool of capable applicants, but in relation to the percentage of the general population. What this means in practice is that people of certain races and genders are given preferences and benefits, and are thus “more equal” than people of other races and genders.

During the eight years of the Obama-Biden administration, “diversity and inclusion” became the guiding principle of governments, federal, state, and municipal, of industry, and of colleges and universities. It was an ideological tsunami, washing away the universalistic standards, such as the colorblind assessment of achievement and merit, in favor of racial, gender, sexuality, and ethnic preferences.

The Supreme Court refused to stand for principle, and waffled about educational benefits, allowing preferences to remain. Sixty-five percent of Americans disagree with this decision. Sixty-three percent of blacks and sixty-five percent of Hispanics disagree with the Supreme Court decision. 

In Canada too, preferences and special benefits were justified for particular racial, gender, sexuality, and ethnic populations. While according to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Section 15(1), “Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.”null

This principle is negated in the following section of the Charter, in the interests of preferred sections of the population, for whom special privileges and benefits are granted,

Section 15(2), “Subsection (1) does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.” Canada has Human Rights Commissions and Tribunals that prosecute any complaint about discrimination in housing, employment, and commercial service, and also suppresses any speech that offends someone. 

What “affirmative action” and “diversity and inclusion” mean in practice is that in university admissions, hiring, promotions, funding, and organizational activities (living arrangements, social gathering, eating, and ceremonial activities), in government and business hiring, funding, and promoting, certain races and genders are given preference while others are low priority or excluded totally.

In a perfect example of the bigotry of low expectations, African American and Hispanic applicants with poor academic records are given university places, while whites and Asians with much stronger academic records are refused places. It is well established that in the sciences female hires are preferred, which of course means that male candidates are excluded. White male applicants and candidates, whatever their merits, are at the bottom of everyone’s list. For every “inclusion” based upon race and gender, there is an exclusion based upon race and gender. This seems a pretty clear case of official, systemic racism and sexism. null

Americans dislike racial and gender preferences. According to the Gallup poll, “Americans continue to believe colleges should admit applicants based solely on merit (70%), rather than taking into account applicants’ race and ethnicity in order to promote diversity (26%).” Fifty percent of blacks and 61% of Hispanics say that college admissions should be based on merit alone. It seems likely that hiring, funding, and other functions would reflect similar views. 

Previously marginalized minorities, who suffered under prejudice, discrimination, and legal restraint, are no longer welcome in the fields in which they excelled. Jews and Asians, highly “overrepresented” in medical, professional, and academic fields, are now no longer welcome. Jews today are deemed to be “white,” now that being white is regarded as a bad thing.

Asians, themselves people of color, have offended by being too successful, and have to be excluded to make room for preferred minorities. The new marginalization of Jews is reminiscent of the 1930s when elite universities excluded Jews through strict quotas, because they were not “Christian gentlemen” and they studied too hard. As for white men, you are the wrong sex and the wrong race, so good luck trying to get a place or post or funding in our feminist dominated universities. 

What justifies the establishment of two classes of citizenship, the preferred and protected and the unpreferred and excluded? In one discussion of “systemic racism,” the justification is disparities regarding wealth, income, criminal justice, employment, housing, health care, political power and education, among other factors. The assumption is that “disparities” are unjust and intolerable, that we must jettison ideas of equality before the law and equality of opportunity in favor of equality of results and outcomes, so that every individual, group, and category of people is exactly the same.null

Why are “disparities” unjust? According to race and gender theorists and activists, disparities are unjust because they are the result of prejudice and discrimination. Furthermore, these theorists and activists believe that no further evidence of prejudice and discrimination is necessary; the disparities themselves prove discrimination, because without discrimination everyone would be represented according to their percentage of the population. 

There are many reasons that disparities–individual, group, and category–exist. People differ from one another, have different capabilities and interests. If people do different things, it is not usually because of discrimination. For example, Asian-Americans are “underrepresented” in the jobs of forest ranger, lumberjack, and truck driver, not because they are discriminated against in these occupations, but because they are motivated to pursue higher education and enter professions. Females are “underrepresented” in the jobs of fisherman, telephone and utility pole workers, and roofing, not because they are discriminated against, but because they prefer safer, cleaner, and more comfortable jobs in offices.

Females work fewer hours, fewer days, and fewer years than men, not because they are discriminated against, but because they prefer to spend more time with their children. Whites and Asian-Americans are heavily “underrepresented” in some professional sports, the NFL and NBA, not because they are discriminated against, but because African Americans have successfully competed for those jobs.null

Females are “underrepresented” in engineering, the physical sciences, and mathematics, not because they are discriminated against, but because they prefer academic fields that deal with people, such as the social sciences, humanities, education, and social work, where they are vastly “overrepresented.” 

Different groups and categories of people also have different community and family cultures and family structures. Some communities are highly education-oriented and push their children to gain educational attainment, while others are less so. Some communities have strong, two-parent family structures, while others have weak, one-parent family structures. Weak families lead to detrimental consequences for children in academic performance and risks of crime and incarceration. 

To claim “discrimination” as an explanation for individual and group outcomes is to ignore individual and group differences. “Discrimination” becomes an excuse artificially to impose equality where no equality exists other than in basic humanity. The imposition of “affirmative action,” in which members of some categories of people are favored, and members of other categories unfavored and excluded, is a clear case of systemic racism and sexism. In this system, population statistics determine the outcomes, and no individual receives his due, what he has earned. They can call racial and gender preferences “social justice,” but there is no clearer case of injustice. 

Philip Carl Saltzman, PJMedia

Behind the anti-American hate seen in the current rioting, arson, and looting is the long term undermining of America carried out systematically in our universities. Various social movements—the counter-culture movement of the 1960s, the feminist movement from the 1960s, the revival of Marxism in the 1970s, the race activists from the Black Panthers to Black Lives Matter, the gay liberation movement, the Palestinian anti-Israel movement—have been adopted and absorbed in universities in their most extreme and maximalist forms. Professors have ceased to see themselves as scholars striving for impartial and objective knowledge, choosing instead to be advocates of preferred groups and movements, and activists advancing “progressive” and far-left causes. Teaching has become largely political indoctrination, and administration includes ideological control and suppression of unwelcome opinions. null

In the mid-20th century, most American colleges and universities had Western Civilization courses or programs. By the end of the century, most of these had been jettisoned. Western Civilization was no longer viewed as the font of great scientific and technological discoveries and achievements, of brilliant literary and artistic works, of advanced development of democratic institutions, of recognition of civil and human rights. Instead, Western Civilization was characterized as imperialistic, colonialistic, capitalist, sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and Islamophobic, the work of evil white men who should be expunged from memory. 

The work of evil white men was banned in favor of works by lesbians of color, indigenous natives, gays and transsexuals, Africans, Arabs, Indians, and East Asians. No more would students be sullied by the disgraceful works of the Jewish Bible, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, the Gospels, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, and, skipping over many, Yeats, Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Camus. 

The only Western author honored in contemporary American universities is Karl Marx. In fact, Marx’s class-conflict model of society has been adopted throughout the social sciences, humanities, education, social work, and law, ranging females against males, people of color against people of white, LGBT++ against heterosexuals, indigenous natives against “colonialists,” Muslims against Christians and Jews (as always throughout history), disabled against abled, poor against well off, and unsuccessful minorities against Asians. The goal is the socialist utopia run by females, people of color, and transsexuals. https://0d06ff49fa173401899151a643841889.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

In Defense of Reading Dead Rich White Guys … Like Shakespeare.

Universities celebrate non-Western authors who attack Western Civilization. Throughout the latter part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, the toast of universities, the recognized king of the new anti-American truth, was Edward Said, an immigrant from Egypt who claimed Palestinian ethnicity. Raised to a professorship at one of America’s elite universities, he used his platform to vilify Western Civilization. In his book Orientalism, assigned to millions of university students in social science and humanities courses as the latest version of God’s Truth, he became the most influential intellectual in American universities. 

Said’s central argument was that Western understanding of the Middle East—the region’s tribalism, religious fanaticism, imperialism, slavery, and oppression of women—did not really have anything to do with the nature of the Middle East, but was a projection of Western sins on the Middle East, in order to justify Western imperialism and colonialism in the Middle East. This theory came to be known as “post-colonial theory.” It was widely adopted in American academia and believed to be a definitive debunking of Western approaches to non-Western lands and cultures. 

Said never offered any alternative picture of the Middle East, of its tribalism, religious fanaticism, imperialism, slavery, and oppression of women; he offered no more than a debunking of the Western view. But he was ill-prepared to do what he claimed. Said was a professor of English and a specialist in the writings of Jane Austen. He had no background in the history or anthropology of the Middle East. About the Middle East he had nothing to offer beyond a crass pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel partisanship and activism. For serious students of the Middle East, his writings are useless. null

Nor did Said have a historical background in Western Civilization beyond English literature. So, it is not surprising that he was incorrect about the Western view of foreign cultures; more than any other civilization, Western Civilization was more curious about, more systematic in investigating, and more careful in its portrayal of foreign cultures. Nonetheless, his superficial and biased work was and is welcomed and celebrated in American colleges and universities as a serious debunking of Western Civilization. 

One further example is from American anthropology, which champions all other cultures in the world, but can never extend its understanding and sympathy to American culture (or Israel’s). A popular ethnographic study of Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa read over decades by literally millions of students in anthropology courses (including mine) was promoted to shame America, on the grounds that these hunters and gatherers, and indeed all hunters and gatherers, better than America exemplified American values of gender equality, the prominence of female contributions, peaceful resolution of conflict, and prosperity, even “affluence.” Feminists celebrated. This account seemed to be true, until the historical and ethnographic details were examined closely. The prominence of female contributions was exaggerated, as was gender equality. These folks were very peaceful, unless they had to eliminate a troublesome fellow or faced encroachment of others. As far as affluence goes, there was a lot of leisure in good years and a lot of starvation in bad ones. In short, it was all bunk. But it provided an excuse, however invalid, to shame American society and Western Civilization, and to advance the partisan interests of those who profit from undermining American culture. null

It rather amazed me when I was teaching in an elite university how many of my colleagues proudly proclaimed that they were communists, offered North Korea as a model to be followed, championed Communist China, and how few found American culture and Western Civilization achievements to be proud of. In fact, they seem to take pride in undermining America and the West. Like the mainstream media—the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC—working furiously to paint America as negatively as possible, American colleges and universities (with the exception of STEM disciplines) are enemies of America and the American people.  

Philip Carl Saltzman, PJMedia

When President Reagan was in office, he had a close working relationship with then Speaker, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill. They met regularly in the evenings at the White House, talking politics and policy over tumblers of Irish whiskey.

One evening, nearing the vote on the Reagan tax cuts, they hashed things out, amicably, over tumblers of Irish whiskey. The President said, “Mr. Speaker, I want a 30% income tax reduction spread out over three years. 10-10-10.

Speaker O’Neill responded, “Mr. President, I’ll give you 5-10-10.”

President Reagan responded, “I can accept that. But, I want ninety House Democratic votes.

The Speaker responded, “Mr. President, you shall have your ninety votes.”

Now, here we are, almost 40 years later and the Speaker won’t even talk to the President, let alone hashing out compromises and delivering the votes.

The Artful Dilettante

Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness—to value the failure of your values—is an insolent negation of morality. A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.—Ayn Rand

With the presidential election nearing, it’s important to remind ourselves of an important fact, one that Democrats and Republicans and their supporters in the mainstream press fail to realize: Democracy is not freedom.

Democracy enables people to elect public officials. That’s all. That’s in contrast to countries that are ruled by people that are not democratically elected, such as kingdoms or militarily controlled regimes.

But the right to elect one’s government officials doesn’t guarantee a free society. Freedom is determined by the powers wielded by the government. If government’s powers are limited to their legitimate function, then people in that society will be free. And that’s true whether government officials are democratically elected or not.

In other words, theoretically an unelected regime could result in a freer country than a democratically elected one. An unelected regime, for example, could implement a free-market economic system while a democratic one could implement a welfare-state, managed-economy system. Or an unelected regime could establish a system with a small military and no CIA or NSA while an elected regime could establish a national-security state.

The only real benefit of a democratic system is that people can peacefully change public officials, especially when there is a change in overall philosophies within society. With unelected regimes, the only way to change officials is through revolution, which can be costly in terms of life, property, and money.

There is something else that is important that Democrats and Republicans and the mainstream press are oftentimes unaware of: Democracy can actually be a grave threat to liberty.

In fact, the Bill of Rights was designed specifically to protect the country from democracy. Consider, for example, the rights enumerated in the First and Second Amendments. Even if 99 percent of the American people and 99 percent of the members of Congress wish to enact a law requiring everyone to send their children to church, they lack the power to do so.

No democracy there. The rights of the one percent who oppose being forced to send their children to church are protected. The idea is that freedom means that people’s fundamental rights are not subject to majority vote.

Notice something else that is important, something that even some libertarians forget: There is a critical difference between a government that is prohibited from wielding certain powers and a government that wields such powers but is exercising them in a wise and prudent manner.

For example, the federal government doesn’t enact laws requiring people to send their children to church because it believes it unwise or imprudent to do so. It doesn’t enact such laws because it simply lacks the power to do so. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights prohibit the federal government from wielding such power. That’s what freedom requires.

Now, consider the coronavirus crisis. There are many libertarians carping and complaining that the government is not exercising its powers over healthcare in a wise and prudent manner. They are saying that the government should have done this or that and that it shouldn’t have done this or that.

But that mindset is not a freedom mindset — that is, the mindset that undergirds freedom of religion. The freedom mindset holds that government should not have the power to manage, control, or regulate healthcare at all, just as it lacks the power to manage, control, or regulate religion.

Once people delegate the power to manage, control, and regulate peaceful behavior to government, more often than not the government is going to exercise such power — and in ways that are going to displease at least some of the people. At that point, fights break out over the things the government is doing and not doing. In a genuinely free society, those kind of fights don’t occur because government lacks the power to involve itself in such areas.

If we are to achieve a free society, it is incumbent on us libertarians  to lift our visions — and the visions of our fellow Americans — to a higher level — one that involves the removal of powers from the government rather than simply calling on the government to exercise illegitimate powers in a wise and prudent manner.

This post was written by: Jacob G. Hornberger

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.