ENVIRONMENT
Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to COntrol Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them Steven Milloy
Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Activists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed Christopher C. Horner
Censors are sometimes skillful, but never wise. The more they suppress stories like Hunter Biden’s emails or the questionable seriousness of the COVID virus, the more we talk about the very things they would rather suppress to advance their own political narratives. Even government censors, in the end, learn that no matter how hard you try, you cannot extinguish truth–or reality.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
In a speech at Hillsdale College, Sec. DeVos conveyed that in American education, the fight has just begun to restore choice and freedom to every family.
As most of the nation is transfixed on the looming presidential election, Sec. of Education Betsy DeVos remains laser-focused on the job at hand. “Education is the means by which we secure the God-given blessings of liberty,” DeVos told a gathering of more than 250 at Hillsdale College, in her home state of Michigan. Whether she has three months at her post, or the possibility of another four years, will be determined in the coming weeks. Regardless of the outcome on Nov. 3, however, DeVos has made it clear that while she’s happy with what the administration has accomplished, there is still work to be done in the fight to restore America to its founding principles.
“The COVID crisis has laid bare a lot about American education,” DeVos said. “Parents are more aware than ever before how and what their children are — or are not — learning. And far too many of them are stuck with no choices, no help, and no way forward.”
DeVos vowed to fight for America’s students and their parents, and to fight against anyone who would seek to have government usurp the role of the parent.
The solution to much of the current problems facing America, argued DeVos, is to embrace the family as the sovereign sphere that it is, remembering that the family predates government altogether. “The family is not only an institution,” DeVos said, “it’s also the foundation for all other institutions. The nuclear family cultivates art, athletics, business, education, faith, music, film — in a word, culture. And just as the family shapes its culture, it also shapes its government.”
After making it clear schools exist to supplement families and not to replace them, DeVos laid out her vision for the next major initiative she’d like to champion: an expanding and robust school choice program across the nation. “I like to picture kids with their backpacks representing funding for their education following them wherever they go to learn,” DeVos outlined.
The main thrust of the program would be parents having control over how their tax dollars are spent on the education of their children. Ideally, education spending should follow their children wherever they want to learn — a position most Americans now agree with. Indeed, a recent RealClearOpinion survey found 3 out of 4 families with children in public schools sought full school choice, including 73 percent of black families and 71 percent of Hispanic families.
DeVos is bolstered by the rising public support for school choice, education freedom scholarships, and vouchers, but still yearns to further “devolving” of the Department of Education, believing that states and localities can best determine how to address the educational needs of their communities. “When I took on this role, I said from day one that I’d like to work myself out of a job. That I’d work to empower parents, not politicians.”
In the meantime, DeVos recalled the good that has been done during the last four years:
We restored state, local, and family control of education by faithfully implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act, by ending Common Core, and by urging Congress to put an end to education earmarks by consolidating nearly all Federal K-12 programs into one block grant. … We expanded the in-demand D.C. voucher program by 50 percent … supported the creation of more public charter schools … [and] reformed the tax code so families can use tax-preferred 529 savings accounts for expenses related to K-12 education.
DeVos reiterated her support for the bipartisan School Choice Now Act put forth by Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., that would directly fund families and empower them to choose the best educational setting for their children. For DeVos, Scott’s inspiring story “demonstrates how education can change lives.”
The secretary explained how scholarships could be used to enhance distance learning, pay for costs tied to educating children at home, or help cover tutoring, technical education, or transportation to a different school. “Scholarships could support students attending the school that best meets their needs or matches their values. At the end of the day, we want parents to have the freedom, the choices, and the funds to make the best decisions for their children,” DeVos explained, adding, “The ‘Washington knows best’ crowd really loses their minds over that.”
In her speech, DeVos conveyed the value of English language arts, math, or science in education. A large and purposeful focus, however, was devoted to how schools teach history. Rekindling the spirit of 1776 and 1787 is, in many ways, the key battleground in the effort to have a citizenry able to defend liberty and stand up against encroaching tyranny.
“It’s ignorant to hate capitalism when you don’t really know how communism hasn’t worked. It’s ignorant to hate freedom when you don’t really know how tyranny hasn’t worked,” DeVos said. “The unholy mob thinks our economies need redistributing. It thinks our Constitution needs rewriting. It thinks our families need restructuring.” As DeVos would later remind the audience, these dangerous beliefs aren’t entirely new, but taken “right from the old Marxist playbook.”
When questioned by The Federalist for an update on President Trump’s 1776 Commission to promote patriotic education and counter the revisionist history of the dangerous and ahistorical 1619 Project, DeVos assured that work on the Commission continues. “We’re working through putting the ‘meat’ on that. Stay tuned.”
Instead of giving in to the temptation to rewrite American history or to cancel culture, DeVos charged those in attendance to challenge the culture with education. “Instead of rewriting our Constitution, let’s return to its timeless words, and restore the power of “We the People,” Devos said. “We don’t believe in retreat. We believe in redemption.”
The great work still to be done in reforming and restoring a healthy, vibrant, and educated American populace, begins, as DeVos argues, by reasserting a fundamental truth: the family is the “first school.”
“If we recognize that, then we must also reorder everything about education around what the family wants and what the family needs. Make no mistake: America cannot win the future if we lose the rising generation,” she said.
Public concern about higher education is clearly widespread. The causes are many: ugly treatment of visiting speakers, a stifling political uniformity resulting in ideological extremism and hatred, and fringe radical ideas seeping out of the campuses into the wider world. Less publicly visible are numerous recent studies that tell us how little most recent graduates have benefited from higher education. They record astonishing deficiencies in reasoning, writing, reading, basic knowledge, and civics.
But with all this, the public is still uncertain. Most see the symptoms but don’t quite know what to make of them, and so continue to send their children to college. Because they don’t have a firm grasp of the extent or nature of the rot, they pay up and hope for the best.
Yale University (photo credit: Ad Meskens, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
How then can the public reach the clearer understanding of what is going on that they need to make sensible decisions? They can start by grasping the enormous difference between two kinds of people. https://lockerdome.com/lad/9371484590420070?pubid=ld-8832-1542&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com&rid=www.americanthinker.com&width=692
The first is the academic teacher. His job is to get students to think independently and analytically. Analytical thinking means looking at all sides of an issue so that students get the habit of examining both the strengths and weaknesses of an idea, always comparing them with those of competing ideas. Analytical thinking must be flexible thinking, always ready to respond to new evidence. It can’t be static: it’s always on the move. To power this constant movement, a motive force is needed: intellectual curiosity. That’s what academic teachers must instill in their students. It’s the force that will keep them exploring with open minds. That’s how genuine academic teachers operate.
The second type — the political activist — is the polar opposite of all this. He doesn’t want students to evaluate ideas, but instead to accept his and not question them. He doesn’t want them to examine the strengths and weaknesses of competing ideas because for him there is no competition: one is right, the others wrong. He doesn’t want intellectual flexibility but instead a firm adherence to an ideology. Greater understanding is not the point — political loyalty is. Intellectual curiosity? Seeing things from different perspectives? All of that would be dangerous because it might lead to independent thinking that strays from the political ideology he is promoting.
It’s hard to imagine anything farther removed from the mindset of an academic teacher than the political activist’s. And herein lies the core of the problem of present-day higher education, the fundamental reality that the public needs to grasp: where fifty years ago the first type were the overwhelming majority among college faculty, today the controlling majority is of the second type. And since those are the very last people we should ever want as college faculty — because what they want of students destroys higher education — we have before us a national crisis.
In theory, an academic teacher could be politically left or right-of-center and still excel at teaching students to think for themselves, and a political activist could be either left or right oriented. And so, in principle there’s no reason why both liberals and conservatives shouldn’t want their children to be taught how to think productively and independently. This ought not be a partisan issue. But in today’s world it is radical left activists who have successfully colonized the campuses to promote their ideology. Senseless radical ideas (e.g., defunding the police) are becoming mainstream in large part because academia breeds and exports them to the wider world. The colleges are doing real social damage.
The campaign trail and the ballot box are the proper place for political activists, not the college campus — so what are they doing there? Long ago, the radical left despaired of succeeding at the ballot box, and so decided to cheat; they’d infiltrate the campuses and shut down the intellectual development of immature students in order to recruit them to their cause. It took about fifty years to realize that goal. To do it, they had to dismantle higher education, but political radicalism has no conscience: all that matters is its imagined Utopian goal — the one it never reaches because all attempts so far have produced hell on earth.
What is to be done? Some have suggested new rules to protect visiting speakers from abuse, or to stop classroom politicizing, but those remedies have a fatal flaw: they leave in place all those anti-academic political activists who now hold academic positions. The essential sickness of the campuses would remain untouched. Once you have grasped the stark difference between the two kinds of people who are involved, it’s clear that there is only one way to restore higher education. The wrong kind of people must be replaced by the right kind. Political activists must be replaced by academic teachers. We can’t keep paying huge sums for something we are not getting. We need higher education. We must stop funding the grotesque travesty that it has become and return that funding to its proper use.
John M. Ellis is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Santa Cruz and the author of The Breakdown of Higher Education: How it happened, the Damage it Does, and What Can Be Done (Encounter Books).
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EDUCATION
Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, 10th Anniversary EditionJohn Taylor Gatto
Weapons of Mass Instruction: A School Teacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory SchoolingJohn Taylor Gatto
The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher’s Intimate Investigation into the Problem of Modern SchoolingJohn Taylor Gatto
A Primer on Libertarian EducationJoel Spring
Inside American Education Thomas Sowell
Education: Assumptions and History Thomas Sowell
Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to RealityCharles Murray
The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Getting AheadCharles Murray
If there is a philosophical Atlas who carries the whole of Western civilization on his shoulders, it is Aristotle. He has been opposed, misinterpreted, misrepresented, and—like an axiom—used by his enemies in the very act of denying him. Whatever intellectual progress men have achieved rests on his achievements.
Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history’s brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind. The Aristotelian revival of the thirteenth century brought men to the Renaissance. The intellectual counter-revolution turned them back toward the cave of his antipode: Plato.
There is only one fundamental issue in philosophy: the cognitive efficacy of man’s mind. The conflict of Aristotle versus Plato is the conflict of reason versus mysticism. It was Plato who formulated most of philosophy’s basic questions—and doubts. It was Aristotle who laid the foundation for most of the answers. Thereafter, the record of their duel is the record of man’s long struggle to deny and surrender or to uphold and assert the validity of his particular mode of consciousness.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Biden is being criticized for buying votes after he unveiled a new plan to give anyone who votes for him a seat on the Supreme Court.
“Anyone who votes for me will be appointed to the highest court in the land,” he said in a speech Monday to seven riveted rally attendees. “One vote = one seat. It’s that simple. That’s how it used to be in my day. We’d gather around in the town square and everyone would vote on whether to allow a new general store or saloon. The person who got outvoted, well, they got run out of town on the back of a goat. It was a real hoot. Gosh, I miss those days.”
Many say this is a clear case of court-packing. Not so fast, says the media. “Actually, this is just court rebalancing,” wrote every single journalist on Twitter simultaneously. “See, conservatives have gotten more picks in recent years, so adding 60-70 million seats to the Supreme Court is just correcting an imbalance.”
Since Biden is up in the polls, the Supreme Court has begun renovating its building to accommodate the new justices, with SCOTUS annexing Newfoundland to house them all.
Babylon Bee
For three years, and without evidence, The New York Times falsely claimed that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. Thereafter, their hopelessly biased executive editor, Dean Baquet, decided to switch gears. After the Mueller report imploded, at Baquet’s direction, the Times would shift its focus of its coverage from the ‘Trump-Russia affair’ to the president’s ‘alleged racism.’
“We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well,” Baquet said, apparently unaware of the historically profound idiocy of his statement. “Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.” Through daily bogus reporting, the ‘newspaper of record’ would now seek to expose ‘the racism’ of Donald Trump and America in general.
A Myth for All Time
From 93% to 96% of American media is controlled by leftists, considering book and magazine publishing, major newspapers, Internet tech giants, television, etc. The Left dominates in our schools, Hollywood, and popular culture. The only domains in which the Right has dominance are radio, and perhaps YouTube and blogging.
An enduring Democrat myth propagated for decades, and ramped up since Donald Trump became president, is that the Republican Party is racist. Democrats are able to maintain this myth in part because they dominate public discourse and because most Americans, daily, are concerned with making a living and caring for their families, not with scrutinizing history. Joe Biden tells the Charlottesville “fine people” lie at every appearance, despite video footage to the contrary and Trump’s 20+ denunciation of white supremacist groups.
Even a cursory review of American history, however, starting with Abraham Lincoln, and the Emancipation Proclamation, reveals that it is the Democrat Party that has practiced and still exhibits fiery racist behavior.
Who formed the Confederate States of America? Was it Republicans? No, it was Southern Democrats. President Lincoln, the 16th in U.S. history, was shot and killed while watching a play, “Our American Cousin,” at Ford’s Theater in Washington DC, on April 14th, 1865 by John Wilkes Booth.
Lincoln was 56 years old, had just been re-elected to his 2nd term and, along with millions of other Americans, was celebrating the end of the U.S. Civil War, which occurred on April 9. Wilkes, a leading actor of that era, was not a Democrat, but was sympathetic to the Democrats and their opposition to Lincoln.
The Dawn of Civil Rights
Who murdered John F. Kennedy, the 36th president of the U.S., in Dallas, on November 22nd 1963? Unquestionably Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot and killed JFK. This is explained in intricate detail by Gerald Posner in his landmark book Case Closed (1993). Mr. Posner dislodged every conceivable stone in reaching his conclusion. After illuminating Posner’s work in a 25-page feature in its publication, U.S. News & World Report declared it would never review another book on the topic because the case was closed. Oswald was a Leftist, who viewed communism favorably and espoused Marxist theory.
Hesitatingly, JFK championed civil rights. “He ordered his attorney general to submit friends of the court briefs on behalf of civil rights litigants.” He appointed African Americans to positions within his administration. He selected Thurgood Marshall for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. He backed voter registration drives. In a second term, JFK, influenced by Martin Luther King, Jr., was contemplating civil rights legislation.
Who murdered Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? On April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray, a southern segregationist, assassinated MLK in Memphis, TN. Ray, who fled to England, was subsequently captured.
In summary, the murderers of Lincoln, Kennedy, and King, were politically Left, and certainly not Republicans. Lincoln, Kennedy, and King, each of whom had great potential for expanding the rights and acceptance of African Americans, were cut down in their prime.
A Sordid History
Prior to the Civil War and for 27 months past the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, who owned slaves? Democrats. Republicans, with a few exceptions, did not own slaves.
Who lynched at least 5,400 blacks, from 1882 to 1968, primarily throughout the South, with the annual peak occurring in the late 1800s, when one party acted to enforce white supremacy? In a word, Democrats.
Who created the Ku Klux Klan? Politifacts says: “Back in the mid-19th century, various Klans in the South acted as a ‘strong arm’ for many local Democratic politicians…” A Confederate general, “believed to be the KKK’s first Grand Dragon even spoke at the 1868 Democratic National Convention.” Democrats didn’t launch the KKK, but they played along.
Who blocked and delayed women’s suffrage, for some 79 years? At the critical times, it was Democrats.
Who upheld segregation throughout the early 1900s, during World War II, and into the 1950s and 1960s? Democrats. Who posted signs that said, “Colored drinking fountain,” or, “Colored bathroom?” Democrats.
Who stood at the doorway of high schools and institutions of higher learning and said to African-Americans you may not attend? Democrats.
Who interned Japanese American citizens during World War II, for three years? President Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat.
The Party of Racism, Bias, and Prejudice
Malcolm X once noted, “Both parties are racist, and the Democratic Party is more racist than the Republican Party.” What would prompt this learned man, with vast experience in politics and racial prejudice, to make such a statement?
For 200+ years, Democrats have revealed their racism, bias, and prejudice. Yet, with a Democrat-controlled mainstream media, which party is cast as being racist and biased? Which presidents and politicians are deemed racist? Republicans.
Throughout time, Republicans have not always acted as saints, but they can’t hold a candle in our society to the Democrat party when it comes to racism, bias, and prejudice.
Jeff Davidson
Vice President Joe Biden recently asked: “Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is reelected?”
My question: Do Joe Biden and Democrats think there will be no unrest if they are elected? No resistance? Will they roll the tanks over us, without so much as a whimper in response? Will we willingly hand over our guns in compulsory “buyback” programs? Will we wear masks even in our own homes, and uncritically accept a questionable vaccine, because President Biden says we must? I honestly don’t know. But how can Biden be so sure he will be able to rule without massive dissent, civil disobedience or even violence from the other side?
Trump supporters have lives. People with lives have something to lose. We tend to eschew protest. But our lives will be radically altered once we get huge tax hikes, totalitarian regulations, fossil fuel prohibition via a Green New Deal, and the replacement of real police with political police, like Hitler’s Gestapo. There will be less to lose by coming out and fighting back, if the fascist policies of Biden’s party carry the day.
Leftists are often losers; and are always neurotic, even when achievers. Leftists either live in their parents’ basements, or feel guilty over what they have achieved. Or they are narcissists and sociopaths in search of power over others, to fill their empty, shallow souls. Why else would anyone be a Communist? Healthy, decent people embrace and cherish liberty. Leftists may care for their own property, but nothing for property rights. Their guilt turns into anxiety, and their anxiety into hatred. Check out what Antifa just did to Trump supporters at a San Francisco rally. The hate is ALL on the left.
I don’t know what resistance under a Biden-American Communist regime would look like. I hope not to find out. All I know: Maybe Joe and his smug totalitarians shouldn’t be quite so complacent.
Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason
The upcoming election presents Americans with two clearly distinct visions for the future. Indeed, President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden are perfect proxies that highlight diametrically opposed policies. Correctly understanding our history properly frames the competing agendas so we can make informed decisions.
Since the inception of our Constitution, citizens have debated the proper role and scope of the government. Because the Preamble of the Constitution defines “We, the people” as the source of government’s authority, it has been the responsibility of the American people to establish its legitimacy within the Constitution’s framework.
Americans have always had a healthy distrust of government, because history is replete with examples of its abuse and the collateral subjugation of people. But there is evidence that relative peace and economic security have lulled us into complacency, where we’ve effectively become indifferent to government’s growth, from its modest beginnings to the Leviathan that currently controls so much of our lives. Is the exchange of our freedoms for an ever-expansive government culturally and morally healthy, or is it a Faustian bargain?
Let’s begin with instruction from James Madison, the father of the Constitution. In Federalist 51, he provides the principal justification for government by stating, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” He argued for a government structure of checks and balances designed to provide countervailing influences of each branch against the other two, the “separation of powers” we’re all familiar with. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison wrote, and the degree of countermeasures was meticulously calculated based on the potential severity of abuse.
There is strong evidence that the Founders preferred limited government, but if the balance of power among the branches is skewed, government is vulnerable to unchecked growth — and abuse. To wit, the Founders would be shocked that their implicit trust in the Constitution has been progressively circumscribed by a bloated bureaucracy that rules by Federal Register. That has transitioned us from citizens to subjects, thereby rendering the quaint notion of government by consent of the people a functional fiction.
Combined with a federal phalanx of recently minted agencies, from the Department of Education to the Environmental Protection Agency, that have no constitutional foundation, the sovereignty of the States as enshrined in the 10th Amendment has been essentially nullified.
Because our public education system has failed to maintain a curriculum based on First Principles, we’ve become numb to the incremental encroachment of our hyperactive federal government. Therefore, what would have been summarily rejected as unwarranted abridgements on our freedoms decades ago is now blithely accepted.
Our Founders deliberately enshrined the Legislative Branch in Article I of the Constitution because they correctly understood that in a republic — which is not a democracy — laws and appropriations must originate with elected officials. However, in modern times, Congress has been unduly deferential to the Executive and Judicial Branches, which has led to laws and regulations effectively written by executive or judicial fiat.
For reasons best left to cultural anthropologists, over the past several decades, the left has willfully rejected the core principles of our Founding Fathers as expressed in our Constitution. More alarming is their ignorant reanimation of socialism, a deeply flawed system that has left millions in abject poverty and despair.
The left’s growing trust in big government, from the oxymoronic universal health care to the Green New Deal, as well as leftists’ willingness to abridge our First and Second Amendment rights, should profoundly shock the sensibilities of Americans who cherish liberty.
All our presidents have had personality quirks and moral failings, and President Trump certainly fits that mold. However, he has also upheld our core freedoms and been a tireless defender of our nation in ways no president, Democrat or Republican, has done in recent memory.
It’s become a serial cliché that every election cycle is deemed the most critical. At the risk of abusing that sentiment, it’s clear that the fragile liberties we’ve naïvely taken for granted are endangered and, depending upon the election’s outcome, may be extinguished. A vote for President Trump is our best hope of keeping the torch of liberty burning brightly, today, and for future generations.
Philip Mella writes on politics and history and has been published in The Wall Street Journal, American Thinker, and Townhall. He is former mayor pro tem of Woodland Park, Colorado and currently serves on the 4th Judicial Nominating Commission.
