Saul Alinsky was a brilliant man. Evil, but brilliant. Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, everyone on the Left from the President on down is playing by his rules in the political arena. Not all liberals have read his book or know his name, but his tactics have become universal. Sadly for conservatives, when two evenly matched forces go head-to-head outside of a fairy tale, the side that tries to play nice usually ends up with its head in a box. So, don’t lie or become an evil person like Alinsky, but learn from what he wrote and give the Left a taste of its own medicine.
1) Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2) Never go outside the experience of your people.
3) Wherever possible go outside the experience of the enemy.
4) Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
4A) Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
6) A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7) A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8) Keep the pressure on.
9) The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10) The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
11) If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.
12) The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13) Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
NOTE: Alinsky was not brilliant. If you don’t know the difference between right and wrong, you’re not brilliant. A/D
Many Americans saw former policeman Derek Chauvin’s conviction on all counts last week as affirming the principle that no one is above the law. Many others were concerned that the jury was scared that anything less than a full conviction would result in riots, and even violence against themselves and their families.
Was the jury’s verdict influenced by politicians and media figures who were calling for the jury to deliver the “right” verdict? Attempts to intimidate juries are just as offensive to the rule of law as suggestions that George Floyd’s criminal record somehow meant his rights were not important.
The video of then-policeman Chauvin restraining Floyd led people across the political and ideological spectrums to consider police reform. Sadly, there have also been riots across the country orchestrated by left-wing activists and organizations seeking to exploit concern about police misconduct to advance their agendas.
It is ironic to see self-described Marxists, progressives, and other leftists protesting violence by government agents. After all, their ideology rests on the use of force to compel people to obey politicians and bureaucrats.
It is also ironic to see those who claim to want to protect and improve “black lives” support big government.
Black people, along with other Americans, have had their family structure weakened by welfare policies encouraging single parenthood. This results in children being raised without fathers as a regular presence in their lives, increasing the likelihood the children will grow up to become adults with emotional and other problems.
Those at the bottom of the economic ladder are restrained in improving their situation because of minimum wage laws, occupational licensing regulations, and other government interference in the marketplace. They are also victims of the Federal Reserve’s inflation tax.
Many progressives who claim to believe that “black lives matter” do not care that there is a relatively high abortion rate of black babies. These so-called pro-choice progressives are the heirs of the racists who founded the movement to legalize and normalize abortion.
The drug war is a major reason police have increasingly looked and acted like an occupying army. Police militarization threatens everyone’s liberty. Black people have been subjected to drug war arrests and imprisonment at relatively high rates.
Those interested in protecting and enhancing black people’s (and all people’s) lives should embrace liberty. Libertarians reject the use of force to achieve political, economic, or social goals, Therefore, in a libertarian society, police would only enforce laws prohibiting the initiation of force against persons or property.
A libertarian society would leave the provision of aid to the needy to local communities, private charities, and religious organizations. Unlike the federal welfare state, private charities can provide effective and compassionate aid without damaging family structure or making dependency a way of life. In a libertarian society, individuals could pursue economic opportunity free of the burdens of government regulations and taxes, as well as free of the Federal Reserve’s fiat currency.
Free markets, individual liberty, limited government, sound money, and peace are key to achieving prosperity and social cohesion. Those sincerely concerned about improving all human lives should turn away from the teaching of Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes, who advocated expansive government power, and, instead, embrace the ideas of pro-liberty writers such as Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard.
Remember when the economy was booming back in 2019? I remember people saying, “How can the Democrats possibly defeat Trump?” Well, they did it. Not just with fraud. They frightened half the population and mightily annoyed the other half. Either way, they got submission. And they crushed the economy by simply shutting everything down. They hooked millions on unemployment — like heroin or coke dealers hook people on drugs. They made small businesses dependent on federal “rescue” plans for damage generated by the media and government. Nobody, myself included, fully grasped how evil and calculating these sociopaths in charge of our government, universities, corporations, social media companies and entire culture are. We sure know now.
There will be significant pushback. Millions are still bewildered, in denial or simply hope the actual Communists and fascists in charge don’t mean it all (they do). I can’t predict how, when or what form the pushback will take. I only know: Good and decent people will only take so much. There will be a limit.
I have been thinking a good deal recently about Arnold Toynbee’s much-quoted observation that “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” As an historical proposition, I’d say that it was like the story of the curate’s breakfast egg. “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr. Jones!” “Oh no, my Lord, I assure you!” the curate replied. “Parts of it are excellent!”
And yet we all see the pertinence of Toynbee’s point. While there are, as a matter of historical fact, plenty of civilizations that succumb to invasion, occupation, and subjugation, there are also many that wither from within from a failure of self-confidence, of (for the Bergsonians out there) élan vital, of what your philosophy graduate student likes to call thumos: spirit, gumption, “heart,” manliness.
The fact that no one can even speak of “manliness” today without looking over his shoulder these days is an index that thumos is on the endangered species list (along, as it happens, with sperm counts in the Western world). Why this should be is a fraught question—something whose answer is “overdetermined” as our Freudian friends like to say.
One major reason, I submit, is that the dominant ideology of the modern West is an ideology of suicide, what the philosopher James Burnham identified as “liberalism.”
It goes without saying that when it comes to terms being “overdetermined,” “liberalism” is right up at the top. The word has its root in līber, free, which is why it used to be said that tolerance was a defining characteristic of liberalism. Edmund Burke was a liberal in this sense, as was Matthew Arnold, David Hume, James Madison, and other founding fathers.
But that was a long time ago. Nowadays, “liberalism” is distinguished above all by its illiberalism and intolerance. Thus the ideology of “wokeness” and the prevalence therein of the rhetoric of “microaggressions,” “trigger warnings,” and “safe spaces.” If being offended is grounds for interdicting speech then the goal is not tolerance, comrade, but conformity. And it is a short step from that realization to a bureaucracy whose primary aim is the enforcement of that conformity.
I suspect that certain wrinkles in our current political dispensation would have surprised Burnham. I don’t believe that he foresaw the humid, hothouse dimension of “the way we live now.” The more exotic precincts of sexual enfranchisement, for example, would have prompted a raised eyebrow, as would such phenomena as the military provision of “maternity flight suits,” “gender reassignment” surgery, and spurious charges of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” But in essentials, he correctly identified the pathology.
The issue, Burnham saw, is that modern allotropes of liberalism have equipped us with an ethic that is far too abstract and too empty to inspire existential allegiance. Modern liberalism, Burnham wrote in Suicide of the West,
does not offer ordinary men compelling motives for personal suffering, sacrifice, and death. There is no tragic dimension in its picture of the good life. Men become willing to endure, sacrifice, and die for God, for family, king, honor, country, from a sense of absolute duty or an exalted vision of the meaning of history. . . . And it is precisely these ideas and institutions that liberalism has criticized, attacked, and in part overthrown as superstitious, archaic, reactionary, and irrational. In their place liberalism proposes a set of pale and bloodless abstractions—pale and bloodless for the very reason that they have no roots in the past, in deep feeling and in suffering. Except for mercenaries, saints, and neurotics, no one is willing to sacrifice and die for progressive education, medicare, humanity in the abstract, the United Nations, and a ten percent rise in Social Security payments.
Thus it is that Burnham could conclude that the primary function of liberalism was to “permit Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution,” to view weakness, failure, even collapse as not as a defeat but “as the transition to a new and higher-order in which Mankind as a whole joins in a universal civilization that has risen above the parochial distinctions, divisions, and discriminations of the past.”
Sound familiar? Of course, it does. It’s the hit tune that is playing on every college campus, and that echoes throughout the bulletins emitted by HR departments of major corporations, and the bleatings of Hollywood stars, media “celebrities,” and woke personalties whose affluence is matched only by their ignorance and unconscious commitment to mouthing the sanctioned progressive clichés of the moment.
A Two-Pronged Attack
I bring up James Burnham’s contention that the ideology of liberalism is a prescription for civilizational suicide not because I want to argue his case but as a prolegomenon, what Kierkegaard called a “preliminary expectoration,” regarding the curious pincer movement we see at work in America today.
One of the strangest things about the current administration (I hesitate to call it the “Biden Administration” because Joe Biden is clearly just a puppet in the hands of the factions and personalities that engineered his “election”)—one of the strangest features of the administration, I say, is the breathless velocity with which they are proceeding the bring about that “fundamental transformation of the United States of America” that Biden’s predecessor and (possibly) puppet master Barack Obama promised.
The current administration is behaving as if it had a huge popular mandate. In fact, it won, if it won, by the narrowest of margins. (I’ll repeat parenthetically here what I have said elsewhere: I believe Donald Trump actually won but that the concerted efforts of his opponents overturned the election.) And stepping down from the top spot, the election of 2020 was a disaster for the Democrats, though not, I predict, as much of a disaster as the 2022 election will be. And yet here they are behaving as if Karl Marx, if not Mao Zedong himself, had been elected instead of a senile factotum who was supposed to bring back “normalcy,” national unity, and political “bipartisanship.”
How’s that working out? I am going to ignore the disaster at our Southern border, the fiscal nightmare that Biden’s spending and tax programs are causing, and even the brewing international emergency that his supine posture regarding China and Iran (combined with his belligerence towards Russia) are fomenting. I’d just like to mention two prongs of that pincer movement I mentioned above. They might seem like minor, unrelated initiatives. I think they speak to a deep and spiritually unified rot in the American soul. about:blank
The first claw of the pincer was the announcement a few days ago that the state of Virginia was seeking to eliminate special courses in advanced mathematics for high school students before the 11th grade. Why in heaven’s name would they do this? Why, in order to foster “equity,” of course—which is to say, in order to foster the malign spirit of egalitarianism and prevent any students from excelling.
Quoth a Virginia educrat named Jennifer Allard,
Many of our students do not have access to the mathematics that they will need either in their personal or professional adult lives. The issue of inequity in mathematics education makes it essential for us to initiate serious discussions among a variety of stakeholders to achieve the critical mass necessary to catalyze change in school mathematics.
“Stakeholders.” Do you have to read any further? The truth is that some people (not I, alas) are clever at math, others are not. It is a matter of national security that we encourage those who are clever at math to excel. Allard and her colleagues are pursuing the lowest common denominator, a course of action that our opponents in China, Iran, and Russia will only applaud.
Cancerous Critical Race Theory
The attack on excellence and achievement is one side of the pincer movement. The other side is the injection of Marxist ideology, dressed up in a new rhetorical garb, into not only our school but also the workplace and throughout the federal government.
As commentator Stanley Kurtz noted in the New York Post on Friday, “Joe Biden’s Department of Education has signaled its intent to impose the most radical forms of critical race theory on America’s schools, very much including the “1619 Project” and the so-called anti-racism of Ibram X. Kendi (which advocates a massive and indefinite expansion of reverse discrimination).”
What is “critical race theory”? Many readers of American Greatness will know, But I think the documentary filmmaker and writer Christopher Rufo, who has done as much as anyone to expose the toxic nature of the movement, is right: “most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who have, many don’t understand it.”
Although it was born in the fetid corridors of academia, CRT (as it is often abbreviated) has escaped from the laboratory and is infecting the population at large. “[I]t has,” Rufo writes, “increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions over the past decade. It has been injected into government agencies, public school systems, teacher training programs, and corporate human-resources departments, in the form of diversity-training programs, human-resources modules, public-policy frameworks, and school curricula.” But what is it, exactly?
It is radical Marxism, dusted off and given lessons in the new vocabulary of anti-America “resistance”: climate change, “heteronormativity,” and racism, racism, racism. As Rufo observes,
Its supporters deploy a series of euphemisms to describe critical race theory, including ‘equity,’ ‘social justice,’ ‘diversity and inclusion,’ and ‘culturally responsive teaching.’ Critical race theorists, masters of language construction, realize that ‘neo-Marxism’ would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality. But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, critical race theorists explicitly reject equality—the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. To them, equality represents ‘mere nondiscrimination’ and provides ‘camouflage’ for white supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression.
So here we are. There were some people who thought that James Burnham’s identification of liberalism with civilization suicide was hyperbolic. They also tended to scoff at the idea that the primary function of liberalism was to “permit Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution.” I wonder what they would say now?
About Roger Kimball
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine’s Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee).
It’s not an exaggeration to say that if America remains on her current trajectory, she will be unrecognizable in another generation. Lady Liberty will be replaced by a snarling leftist with a blue crew-cut.
We’ve arrived at a tipping point where the foundational beliefs that made our way of life possible are under relentless siege by a radical, Marxist ideology that holds our values, traditions and culture in utter contempt. Today, the institutions of family, church, education, free enterprise, and self-government are mere remnants of their former glory. The Left’s long march through our institutions is nearing its dystopian destination, which we are treated to on these pages daily.
The acceleration of these trends are the result of the Left’s consolidation over our news and entertainment media, combined with the censorship of dissenting voices on social media. Big Tech is wholly owned by the Left and they’re using that power — unprecedented in human history — to muzzle any effective opposition.
The sad part is that Big Tech’s control over the free flow information is almost entirely illusory and based wholly on our submission to it. Much in the same manner that consumers become zealously brand-conscious, we have come to accept that Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have some innate value that makes them indispensable. We forget that Big Tech’s dominance has come about in just one generation and we can track a direct trajectory between the rise of Big Tech and the radical Left’s ascendancy.
To have any chance of reversing this ruinous tide, traditional Americans must awake from their stupor and stop feeding the beast that’s devouring them. Thankfully, that’s much more easily done than say, defeating the British Empire, a bloody civil war to end slavery, or storming the beaches at Normandy. All it takes is a few afternoons at your desk to break the Big Tech habit and transition to emerging Alt-Tech options. But if we’re unwilling to do even that, we’ll prove unworthy of our legacy of freedom and prosperity and will get exactly what we deserve.
Here are some suggestions for escaping Big Tech’s death-grip. A quick disclaimer: while improved privacy and security is an excellent side effect of these suggestions, nothing on the internet is completely secure or private. My main goal here is to provide alternatives that will starve the Big Tech beast.
Ditch Windows and Mac operating systems in favor of Linux. This may seem the most difficult and disruptive action required of your Big Tech jailbreak but it’s far less so than you may think and absolutely essential. By allowing Microsoft and Apple control of your computing ecosystem you allow them to track your activities and collect private information. Once the government has labeled dissent as “domestic terrorism,” you can bet that the lefties in Redmond and Cupertino will be there to help monitor your political beliefs.
Linux is a free, stable, secure, open-source operating system not controlled by Big Tech. Its code is constantly monitored by thousands of privacy zealots on the watch for any backdoors or other vulnerabilities that would allow Big Tech or Big Brother to gain access. There are thousands of free, open-source applications that can meet the needs of a vast majority of users and a huge side benefit is there is no financial motivation to constantly make your hardware and software programs obsolete like Windows and especially Macintosh. You can even give new life to old computers that have been rendered worthless by Microsoft and Apple.
On the web browser front, if you’re using Google Chrome or Apple Safari, you should know that your online activity is being tracked, recorded, and sold to thousands of data brokers. Most of that data is used for marketing, but the sites you visit are a good indicator of your political leanings and activities and the collection of that data is ripe for abuse.
A good alternative is the Brave browser. It has tracking blocked by default and has a built-in, aggressive ad blocker. You can opt to see ads and, if you do, 70% of the revenue from those ads are paid directly to you. The earnings are very modest, but you could take those nickels, dimes, and quarters and contribute them to your favorite pro-American content creators. Leaving the ad blocker turned on, makes your pages load much faster and tax your computer’s memory less.
For the love of God, stop using Google search and Gmail. These two services provide the bulk of Google’s ad and tracking revenue, which they then use to censor Google search results to block content their woke and H1B visa workforce find objectionable. Google search is the most powerful gatekeeper of information ever created and Google unapologetically uses algorithms to promote politicians and ideas they agree with and crush those they oppose.
Good alternatives are DuckDuckGo and ProtonMail. You will find search results of conservative and dissident content on DDG that you’d need to go many pages deep into Google to see — if at all. The exception is pornography, which Google is saturated with, while DDG does a good job censoring from its images and videos — starving yet another beast.
ProtonMail is an end-to-end encrypted email service and does not know nor sell your data — anonymously or otherwise. They offer a free basic plan or a more robust option for $5 per month — a small price I’m more than willing to pay to prevent Google from making money off my private communications.
If Jeff Zuckerberg’s and Jack Dorsey’s promotion and protection of leftist politicians and dogma during the 2020 election hasn’t convinced you to get off Facebook and Twitter, allow me to remind you that, among many outrages, Zuckerberg spent nearly a half-billion dollars subverting the 2020 election and both Zuckerberg and Dorsey censored stories of the Biden crime family’s blatant graft and corruption. Then, after the election, both banned the 45th President of the United States from their platforms for objecting.
More than any other tech service, users seem slavishly devoted to Facebook and Twitter and willing to sacrifice the nation and their freedoms to them. This effect is what empowered Zuckerbeg and Dorsey to offend about half their customers… er, products, without fear of reprisal.
The fact that Big Tech has tried so hard to crush Gab and Parler should tell you that’s where you need to be. Both have been smeared with allowing hate speech on their platforms, when in fact both have a very tiny amount of actual hate speech compared to Facebook and Twitter. I would also suggest MeWe as a Facebook alternative for friends and family.
In the interest of brevity, let me also suggest you quit Google’s YouTubeTV and Netflix, which produced and aired the child sexplotation movie, Cuties, and paid the Obamas $65m to produce a catalog of leftist propaganda. Use Sling or any of the myriad streaming services.
Your transition need not be done all at once but make a list and begin your migration away from Big Tech. Choose tasks that are most easily accomplished and check it off. You will be surprised at how quick and painless the process is and how good responsible citizenship and freedom feels.
Jim Daws hosts Right Now, a podcast on news, politics and culture from an America First perspective
We live in the most unhinged times since perhaps the Middle Ages.
Consider the vaccine. The very same people who called it a “Trump vaccine” last January 19, something they would never allow near their bodies, now consider the vaccine not only desirable — but something that should be mandatory, put into your body whether you provide consent, or not. Evidently this transformation occurred sometime around noon on January 20. The moment Biden was sworn in, the evil Trump vaccine became the greatest, most transformative medical discovery in all of human history.
Millions of your fellow Americans, shockingly, act and speak like they actually BELIEVE that while this vaccine protects them, they still need every single other person on the planet to have the vaccine — otherwise, the vaccine won’t work in their own bodies. And, on top of it, every single person on the planet MUST continue to wear a mask — one, two or even five masks — not just indefinitely, but perhaps forever. All so THEY can be safe.
It’s too irrational to even dignify. That would be like saying: “I have an infection. I’m going to take the antibiotic. But I demand that everyone else on the planet take an antibiotic too. Otherwise, I won’t get well. If you don’t take an antibiotic too — a brand new experimental one, at that — then you are selfish and therefore evil.” Or if I need heart surgery, you must get heart surgery too — otherwise, my heart surgery will have no effect.
Even in the Middle Ages, the term “unhinged” would seem too kind to describe what’s now, in 2021, happening in all of the Western world (not just America). When you’re talking about the twenty-first century in the post-industrialized, wealthy, most technological and most educated civilization that has ever existed, we know the mistakes are far from innocent.
It’s truly mind-boggling.
The same people who think that there should be a lawsuit against the restaurant who sold the coffee if someone spills hot coffee on your lap from that restaurant; or that gun manufacturers should be held criminally liable for the choices of a sociopath who opens fire in a shopping mall … the same people who are SO litigious that they actually believe these things are just FINE with the fact that the vaccine manufacturers have NO LIABILITY WHATSOEVER for anything that goes wrong. The same people who would never, ever drive a car manufactured by a company who enjoyed special legal and criminal immunity from the government are running around telling everyone they can find, “Look at me! I had my vaccination!” — not unlike a five-year-old who just got a gold star for being well behaved in kindergarten. It’s so horrifying to see grown adults act and (not) think this way, it takes your breath away.
The same people who for years have screamed, “My body, my choice” when it comes to things like abortion or sex between consenting adults have no problem whatsoever directly or indirectly (through corporate America) COERCING people into taking part in what can only be described as a medical experiment. Mind-boggling. The same people who will call you a “Nazi” for supporting lower taxes, less government spending, having a police force, permitting people to own weapons or for opposing the outlawing of fossil fuels are more than content to adopt the Nazi policy of forcing people to take part in experimental research for the “sake of society” — which was exactly Hitler’s rationalization for everything he did.
People who opposed President Trump’s “right to try” executive order permitting people to take a risk with new, not-as-tested cancer treatments — and who called you a “Nazi” for supporting his policy — are now quite content to shame or legally sanction you (perhaps even jail you) for refusing to take an experimental vaccine for one version of a virus, a type of illness for which vaccines or other medical treatments have never been effective.
It’s hard to come up with the words to describe what’s happening in this society. And COVID is only one area of insanity. Unhinged? Insane? It’s something worse than that. And it’s far less innocent.
Have the wokesters finally reached a tipping point?
Leftists of multiple stripes have been making public schools horrible places, and now students are bolting.
In California, that’s making news. According to the Associated Press:
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — California public schools have experienced a sharp decline in enrollment this year as the pandemic forced millions into online school, according to data made public Thursday.
The drop came as the state’s school districts dawdled in bringing children back to the classroom, making California one of the slowest in the country to reopen schools.
The California Department of Education data shows that the number of students at K-12 schools dropped by more than 160,000 this academic year, most of them at the K-6 level, to a total of 6 million.
The drop is by far the biggest decline in years and represents the clearest picture yet of the pandemic’s devastating toll on California public schools.
“The annual snapshot of fall enrollment shows a sharp one-year decline as the state and nation grappled with a deadly pandemic that disrupted all aspects of public education,” the education department said in a statement.
In California, it’s white students who are bolting most. The AP reports that they constitute 22% of school enrollment but account for half of the exits. They’re moving on to private schools, whose enrollments are up, or to homeschooling, which is available to anyone with a literate and motivated parent. Or else just moving to a better state. It suggests that poor black and Latino kids, who form far larger demographic groups within the California districts, might just be not bolting because economically, they can’t. They may have a parent who has to work in a low-salary service industry job or else live in a household with no literacy skills to facilitate homeschooling from the adults. Based on other factors, to be cited below, they’d get out if they could, too.
And that’s, according to press reports, all because of the pandemic — which is bee ess right there.
Far from this being the pandemic, which, scientifically speaking, affected children very little, it’s the ruling elites’ barbaric response to the pandemic. That was visible enough in the state-imposed lockdowns on the public schools, and in the outrageous behavior of the rabidly left-wing teachers’ unions and the campaign cash-fattened politicians who love them.
[H]is handpicked director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, said last week that “schools can safely reopen” and “vaccination of teachers is not a prerequisite for the safe reopening of schools,” the Biden White House slapped her down, with press secretary Jen Psaki insisting that Walensky was speaking in her “personal capacity.”
No, she wasn’t. Walensky was speaking in her capacity as a government scientist during an official briefing of the White House covid response team. And her comments came just days after a team of CDC scientists published a review in the Journal of the American Medical Association of numerous studies which show “there has been little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission.”
…they were also terrible for kids. Kids’ grades plummeted, and many never showed up for the online Zoom sessions at all. Worse still, mental health problems rose, and children became depressed, unable to perform the vital task for them of making friends. For kids, that’s a positively critical need, as children are biologically wired at that age with an openness to making friends, quite unlike older people. Child depression rose; child suicides soared. The lockdowns were also exceptionally hard on parents.
The highest declines in enrollments, across all states, and certainly in California, were among the youngest children. Very young children are unusually unsuited to online learning, and anyone who’s ever taught them (and I have) knows they need to physically interact: to touch, to see, to pass around, to feel, to hear, to sing, to smell, to speak, to raise hands, to dance, to participate, to mush clay, to paint, to move — it’s how they naturally are. They don’t do virtual, and they don’t like concept stuff. (It’s why they’re so wonderful.)
That’s just the lockdowns alone. Parents tried to complain, parents tried to say something, but they always got ignored.
To add insult to injury, there were also the teachers’ unions and the school boards in their pocket, which had to be the last straw for a lot of parents.
What’s more, they not only made strange hostage demands, as well as called for more money, but extended and extended, and extended the lockdowns, as they drew higher pay and worked fewer hours, and Zoomed the bunny-slipper commute, as AT’s Andrea Widburg put it. They’ve made some final blackmail payout demands as the governor of California is facing a political recall over the closures of public schools. Reason magazine has them here.
And they had slimey Joe Biden behind them, touting teachers’ unions and proudly holding out his low-achieving wife Jill as a public school teacher now living in the White House. That had to make parents feel powerless.
For Joe, it was more than shilling for this blackmailing bunch; it was moving the goalposts as their puppet. As I noted here:
To the extent that Joe Biden drew votes, a very big reason was the expectation from parents and students that he would re-open the public schools, currently on extended shutdown over COVID concerns. That was his promise, that was a signature issue, with many pixels spilled in multiplespots on Biden’s campaign website supporting the claim that he was serious about re-opening schools.
Now that he’s in office, too bad for those who actually believed him.
Instead of re-opening the schools, Biden’s re-drawn himself a goal line for school re-opening so pathetic, so wretched, so insignificant that it’s actually lower than what’s already going on now in school reopenings.
School re-openings, it seems, no longer mean school re-openings the way normal people see them. In Bidenland, school re-openings mean lots and lots more Zoom school, with just lip service, a little grope maybe, to the idea of re-opening.
Now he’s busy imposing Critical Race Theory on all public schools nationally — that’s the stuff that tells whitey he’s the bad guy, or needs to “try to act less white,” even if he’s just four years old. That likely accounts for at least some of the white exodus from public schools. (Remember: much of California still votes Republican even if Republicans don’t win). It’s a phony education that wrecks some kids’ self-esteem, makes other kids hate their neighbors or think they’re victims, and amounts to propaganda at the expense of education. Who’d want that?
Nice going, Joe. Now that you’ve elevated teachers’ unions, you’ve got declining enrollment. Heckuva Job, Bidie.
But let’s get back to California:
Besides lockdowns and teachers’ union blackmail, California’s schools are turning into outrageous dumps of junk thought, and hellish conditions quite independently of Biden’s White House.
California is the one that introduced Aztec worship chants for the little ones to pledge fealty to, in a naked violation of the separation of church and state.
California is also a big-time supporter of males engaging on equal footing in women’s sports, pretty well telling the female athletes that they can play sports, but they aren’t going to win.
Participation in competitive athletics, intramural sports, athletic teams, competitions and contact sports shall be facilitated in a manner consistent with the student’s gender identity and in accordance with the California Interscholastic Federation constitution and bylaws. Students who identify as nonbinary should be granted the opportunity to participate in athletic activities they find best align with their gender identity.
A third big one, and it’s been boiling for a while, is the leftist bid to shut down charter schools, which are particularly prized by minority students who would otherwise be stuck in failing public schools.
Who’d Joe Biden appoint to his Department of Education? A creature from the San Diego public school bureaucracy named Cindy Marten, whose signature issue is crushing charter schools. Her nomination was opposed by the San Diego–area NAACP, which broke with its national organization on this ground, because, well, they were hearing from people. According to EdWeek, a trade publication:
The San Diego NAACP, which criticized Marten, notably broke from the national NAACP in 2019 when it opposed a national call for a moratorium on charter schools. Several 2020 Democratic presidential candidates cited that national NAACP position when they called for new limits on charter schools.
The national NAACP has also split with its San Diego branch on Marten’s nomination.
That might explain why, as I argued earlier, a lot of minority kids would also like out and simply can’t get out at this point.
Bottom line here is that parents and kids are bailing. Public schools are getting fewer takers despite being “free.”
Leftists have been so “high on their own supply” for so long in this age of the pandemic, which benefits them amazingly, that they’ve failed to realize that people are voting with their feet. They are scrapping for other alternatives, given the public schools’ failures to reflect their values and to care for the mental health of their children and to actually educate. That’s another thing: the failing public schools’ failure to teach is an ongoing problem. Who needs this?
Parents and students bailing out on them is an appropriate ending for this selfish, self-absorbed, child-hating bunch. California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom is attempting to keep school funding at the current levels, despite the drop in enrollment, to shield these perpetrators from any consequences for their atrocious actions, but he’s up for recall now for this awfulness. He knows it. For him, the writing’s on the wall.
It’s also on the wall for these public schools, whether they know it or not.
A reader tells me that her 22-year-old son graduated from college last May and returned home to live. She loves having him here, but also realizes that he needs to get on with his life. In spite of the forest of “help wanted” signs out there, he can’t seem to find a job. He rejects the idea of therapy or counseling, and she asks how he’s supposed to handle this situation. She asks me what she should do.
We’re not supposed to say it any more, but I’ll say it anyway because it’s true: Human beings sometimes feel sorry for themselves. “Poor me. I can’t find a job.” Now don’t get me wrong. I’m the first to be outraged over what our government has done to wreck the private economy. But this isn’t the place for that discussion. We have to deal with reality, and your son is no exception.
We can’t blame it all on “the economy.” Yes, many working-age people are still unemployed, but the others are finding a way to eke out some kind of living. Your son is able-minded and armed with a college degree. He doesn’t yet have a mortgage or other major commitments, but he does have choices. He probably feels, “What else can I do? I can’t buy a car. I can’t pay rent.” Of course he’s perfectly willing to live at his parents’ house. But why isn’t he willing to search for a job – perhaps not in a seasonal resort? Once he finds something, he can ask you for some help until he gets settled in. THAT’S “getting on with his life.”
I won’t speak for you, but if you’re willing to let him live with you rent-free, I’m sure you’d be willing to advance him a couple months’ rent to help him get started – IF he’s willing to put in the effort.
If I were to talk to your son, I wouldn’t let him get away with what psychotherapists sometimes call “stinkin’ thinkin’.” I would challenge him to do the work by writing down, in my presence, all his advantages; none the least of which the fact that he’s young, healthy, has a college degree, and can select any city in which to live. “The economy” might even be an advantage. In economic boom times, he might default to the obvious choice of living and working in the town where he went to college. But in tougher times you’re forced to go where the jobs are. Who’s to say he might not find a new and interesting place and job that he might actually enjoy?
The worst thing your son can do is sit home and succumb to low expectations. You’re right to suggest a counselor (hopefully he won’t hire one of the many who will play into his self-pity). People will often listen to an outsider rather than a family member. Though he may be feeling sorry for himself, he may also be embarrassed to be living off his parents. If that’s the case, then I admire him for not feeling entitled (a popular feeling nowadays, unfortunately). He needs to know that there’s no shame in being stuck, as long as he strives to think his way out of it.
I won’t presume to minimize the reality of economic issues, especially nowadays. But moods and outlook are even more fundamental than economics. Societies don’t get out of their economic slumps unless (and until) they first lift their spirits. What applies to societies also applies to your son. Encourage him to get some help to help himself.
The “sanction of the victim” is the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of the evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the “sin” of creating values.
Then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality—and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan—so throughout the world and throughout men’s history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collectivized countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values—the impotence of death. I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win—and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was “No.”
Every kind of ethnic group is enormously sensitive to any slight. If one made a derogatory remark about the Kurds of Iran, dozens of voices would leap to their defense. But no one speaks out for businessmen, when they are attacked and insulted by everyone as a matter of routine. What causes this overwhelming injustice? The businessmen’s own policies: their betrayal of their own values, their appeasement of enemies, their compromises—all of which add up to an air of moral cowardice. Add to it the fact that businessmen are creating and supporting their own destroyers.
The sources and centers of today’s philosophical corruption are the universities . . . It is the businessmen’s money that supports American universities—not merely in the form of taxes and government handouts, but much worse: in the form of voluntary, private contributions, donations, endowments, etc. In preparation for this lecture, I tried to do some research on the nature and amounts of such contributions. I had to give it up: it is too complex and too vast a field for the efforts of one person. To untangle it now would require a major research project and, probably, years of work. All I can say is only that millions and millions and millions of dollars are being donated to universities by big business enterprises every year, and that the donors have no idea of what their money is being spent on or whom it is supporting. What is certain is only the fact that some of the worst anti-business, anti-capitalism propaganda has been financed by businessmen in such projects.
Money is a great power—because, in a free or even a semi-free society, it is a frozen form of productive energy. And, therefore, the spending of money is a grave responsibility. Contrary to the altruists and the advocates of the so-called “academic freedom,” it is a moral crime to give money to support ideas with which you disagree; it means: ideas which you consider wrong, false, evil. It is a moral crime to give money to support your own destroyers. Yet that is what businessmen are doing with such reckless irresponsibility.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 