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Number of Homeschooled Children Increases in America

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By Family Research Council

According to a recent report, homeschooling is on the rise across the U.S. The Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy’s Homeschool Research Lab published data analysis last month looking at how homeschooling is faring across the nation.

“Twenty states either do not collect or do not report homeschool participation data, and we know little about trends in those states,” the report’s author, Angela R. Watson, wrote. She continued, “The other thirty states do collect and report, and we have reports from twenty-one states so far and expect the other nine to report over the next few months. Of those twenty-one states, nineteen reported an increase, but the patterns of those increases are most interesting.”

Watson observed that homeschooling “grew rapidly” when schools were closed due to COVID-19 lockdowns, but students were largely anticipated to “return to more traditional schools” once lockdowns ended. However, the number of homeschooled children across the analyzed states has actually increased, instead of declining or returning to pre-COVID levels. “What we see with the most recent increases in state-reported homeschool participation is something new — these numbers are not driven by the pandemic,” Watson noted.

The report pointed to New Hampshire as an example of what was expected: the state saw a massive leap in homeschooled children, from roughly 3,500 in 2019-2020 to over 6,000 in 2020-2021. Since then, the number of homeschooled children has gradually decreased to slightly lower than before COVID lockdowns.

However, even here, homeschooling may not have decreased so much. Watson noted that “insider reports indicate that the decline in New Hampshire is likely related to the state’s Education Freedom Account (EFA) and how homeschool students who receive public funding are no longer counted as part of the state’s total homeschooling number.” She added, “So, this decline may not truly reflect a decrease in actual homeschool participation, but may be just a change in how students are counted in this state.”

In fact, New Hampshire is one of only two states that showed a decline in reported homeschooling. Three states — Louisiana, South Carolina, and South Dakota — showed evidence of what Watson called “continued, growth,” meaning that there was no decline in homeschooling following COVID closures. In Louisiana, the number of children being homeschooled rose to just over 15,000 during the 2020-2021 academic year, but has only continued to increase.

In South Carolina, the number of children being homeschooled went from just over 20,000 in 2019-2020 to just shy of 30,000 the following year, and has risen to well over 30,000 since then. South Dakota saw over 6,600 children being homeschooled in 2020-2021, up from barely 5,000 the year before, but over 10,000 children are being homeschooled now.

“The other sixteen states show a rebounding trend, meaning that there was a post-pandemic decline, in some cases several years of a decline, and then, in 2023-2024, the number of homeschoolers increased again,” Watson explained. Arkansas had about 22,000 homeschooled students from 2019-2020, but that number rose to over 30,000 from 2020-2021. The number dipped down in 2022-2023 but is on its way back to 30,000 as of 2023-2024. Delaware saw similar trends, rising from approximately 3,000 homeschooled students in 2019-2020 to nearly 5,000 in 2020-2021. Again, the number declined to just under 3,500 in 2022-2023, but climbed again to approximately 4,500 in 2023-2024.

A number of states also reported “the highest-ever number of homeschoolers” on record, Watson noted. She continued, “These include the continuous growth states and North Dakota, a rebounding state that reported a record number of homeschooled students in 2023-2024 and a 24% increase over the prior year.” She added, “Rhode Island, also a rebounding state, reported a 67% increase over the prior year, while Wyoming also hit an all-time high with an 8% increase over the prior year.” Watson also observed that the actual number of children being homeschooled may be higher than what the state reports, adding, “we consider these counts as the minimum number of homeschooled students in a state.”

Watson pointed out that the numbers being reported are the actual number of homeschooled students, not percentages. “So the increase is even more interesting because the overall number of U.S. students is declining due in part to declining birth rates. In other words, ultimately we see that the number of homeschooled students is going up as the total number of U.S. students in going down,” she wrote. She also observed, “While there is a clear growth trend in homeschooling, the reason for that growth is unknown. What is clear is that this time, the growth is not driven by a global pandemic or sudden disruptions to traditional schooling. Something else is driving this growth.”

The Washington Stand asked Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, what might explain the growth in homeschooling trends across the country. “The reason for homeschooling is often quite simple: parents not trusting their children’s education and moral formation to public or private schools,” Kilgannon answered.

“This can be motivated by academic performance, chaotic classroom environments, a child being bullied, or something even more personal like a child’s physical or mental health challenges,” she continued. “As federal, state, and local governments increase regulations on private school and charter school options, more families may find homeschooling the public school alternative that is right for them.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand. ©2024 Family Research Council.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

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Columbia Students Can Support Terrorists, But Can’t Read

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By Judicial Watch

“Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.”

A woke educational system politicizes everything, it also produces functional illiterates who only know how to be outraged at the things they’re told to be outraged at. (This is often mislabeled as teaching ‘critical thinking’.)

The consequences of replacing Shakespeare with Amanda Gorman are more than just wokeness, but a student body that even in Ivy League schools can’t read.

Literally. Can’t read a book.

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

Why are those students even there would be a question. But the answer is pretty obvious. Quite a few of those students are there for reasons other than merit. But beyond that they’re the products of public school systems that pursue every possible gimmick and fad except actually teaching basic skills.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

Why read books when you can go with teacher to a protest rally instead?

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

And they also need their “mental health days”. And their “self-care”. And why should they be expected to do anything anyway?

Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen.

If only we paid public school teachers like NBA players…

In the face of this, the educational system is doing what it always does, lowering its standards.

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American-studies professor at Columbia, now teaches a seminar on short works of American prose instead of a survey course on literature. The Melville segment used to include Moby-Dick; now his students make do with Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” There are some benefits—short works allow more time to focus on “the intricacies and subtleties of language,” Delbanco told me—and he has made peace with the change. “One has to adjust to the times,” he said.

Indeed.

And with some more adjustments, the curriculum will be reduced to toxic masculinity, studies, the 1619 Project and How to Support Hamas.

The public school system is a radioactive mess that does nothing but eat endless money and fund Democrat organizers while radicalizing and tainting young minds.

College today is mostly worthless.

Policy should follow those realities. We need schools, we do not need a public school system. And at this point widespread use of college should be reserved for specialties, not for a liberal arts that is dying off anyway.

AUTHOR

Daniel Greenfield

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Does the University of Arizona Serve Only Hispanics?

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By Craig J. Cantoni

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Editors’ Note: We agree with the author that even determining who is “Hispanic” can be difficult. Moreover, it does not sound very inclusive.  Are we at the point where Irish, German, and Jewish students are made to feel “marginalized” by such designations? Do they feel welcome and safe at the U of A? How much damage is done to them by making them feel they are outsiders? Besides, if we stay with the shibboleths of the Left long enough, we find we have a “Hispanic serving” institution on stolen land.  The Spanish were colonizers. This alone should be enough to give a progressive a mental hernia.

If not, then why is it designated a Hispanic Serving Institution?

A recent Arizona Daily Star story was about the ranking of Arizona’s three state universities on the U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings—rankings which are seen as suspect in some quarters.

The story also said that the University of Arizona is a Hispanic Serving Institution. More on this strange characterization in a moment.

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No Arizona university ranks in the top 100 on the U.S. News & World Report rankings, but the University of Arizona ranks slightly higher than Arizona State University, which in turn ranks higher than Northern Arizona University.

The story said that the U of A’s four-year graduation rate is only 51 percent. It did not say how many students end up deep in debt but never graduate, due to the tuition loan scam that universities benefit from and thus eagerly endorse.

The Wall Street Journal has a different ranking system, which puts a heavy weight on how well graduates do in their career after graduating and what return they get on their college investment. If memory serves, ASU ranks much higher than the U of A and NAU.

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Let’s return now to the subject of the U of A being characterized as a Hispanic Serving Institution. That was a designation given to it by the federal government in 2018, due to the university having a significant Hispanic student population.

Naturally, there is money involved. Schools that get the designation are eligible for federal and nonprofit grants, for the stated purpose of helping Hispanics get into college, do well in college, and have their culture acknowledged.

It’s unclear what ethnocultural groups are considered to be Hispanic or how it is determined whether someone qualifies to be labeled as such.

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If you think that this determination is easy, consider that 25 million Argentinians and 32 million Brazilians have Italian ancestry. Are they Italian, Hispanic, or Latino? For sure, a U of A student of Italian and Argentinian ancestry has little in common with a student of Mestizo ancestry from Sonoran, Mexico—other than their common humanity.

Also consider the history of how “Hispanic” and the other official racial/ethnic categories came to be in America. It’s a sordid history that has little to do with anthropology, sociology, genetics, or social justice, but a lot to do with identity politics, race hucksters, and a racial spoils system.

My son graduated from the U of A with two engineering degrees a decade ago, which was prior to the university becoming a Hispanic Serving Institution. Given his surname of Cantoni, the U of A probably didn’t classify him as Hispanic. Even though the U of A is not an Italian-serving institution, the degrees have served him well.

In any event, there was no chance of my son applying to an Italian-serving institution, because there aren’t any universities designated as such, except perhaps in Italy. There weren’t any even in the early twentieth century, when Italians were seen as non-White and just one step up from Blacks.

That was probably for the better. Italians have done very well without paternalism and pandering, albeit not as well as East Indians, who are at the top of the American income ladder.

My alma mater of St. Mary’s University, in San Antonio, Texas, wasn’t an official Hispanic Serving Institution, because the designation didn’t exist back then. But it had a very large Hispanic student body, or more specifically, a “Mexican” student body, which is how students of Mexican heritage referred to themselves back in the dark ages, before the government’s contrived racial/ethnic categories became widely adopted without question or discernment.

Due to working my way through college and living in the barrio while obtaining two degrees and an Army officer commission, my ROI was sky-high over my subsequent career. My Mexican classmates also went on to do very well without paternalism and pandering.

There were cultural differences between us, but my Mexican friends and I were similar in patriotism, especially those of us in ROTC. Many of us were also similar in having immigrant ancestors who faced poverty, discrimination and hardship when they came to the U.S. In my case, it was my grandparents who had immigrated. My Mexican classmates, on the other hand, were first-, second-, or third-generation; and some of them had ancestors who had lived in what is now the United States when it was part of Mexico. One friend was an exception: He was a Mexican national whose parents were wealthy industrialists in Monterrey.

Mexican and Italian immigrants were similar in still another respect: There was a large criminal element among them, a fact that resulted in the law-abiding being negatively stereotyped, or worse.

The “worse” for Italians included these three historical events:

In one of the biggest mass lynchings in American history, eleven Italians were hanged in New Orleans, in 1891.

On July 14, 1921, Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco, Italian immigrants and anarchists, were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. There was worldwide condemnation of the sentence due to what was seen as prosecutorial racism. The publicity and outrage rivaled the reaction to George Floyd’s death 100 years later.

The Immigration Act of 1924 was passed to stop the influx of undesirable immigrants, with Italians being the largest target. The act was the foundation of immigration policy for 30 years. Tellingly, many Americans know about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 but not about the 1924 act. That’s because it doesn’t fit today’s narrative about White privilege and colonialism for a racial/ethnic group that wasn’t seen as White in the past but is seen as White today to have been treated unjustly.

Italians continue to be fair game for movies and TV shows about mobsters. The “Godfather” movie trilogy and the “Sopranos” TV series are cases in point.

As with other European groups, Italians had nothing to do with the slave trade to North America, but they were castigated the same as the groups that prospered from the trade, namely the English and Dutch. At the same time, in a glaring double standard, Hispanics tend not to be castigated, although the Spanish and Portuguese and their colonies imported more slaves to Latin America than the English and Dutch did to N. America.

Another double standard is the University of Arizona being designated a Hispanic Serving Institution but not an Italian-serving one. No doubt, someone will offer a lame justification for this.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

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Albert Gallatin, the Amazing Swiss-American

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By Lawrence Reed

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Gallatin played a key role in America’s early days. Here are some of his noteworthy accomplishments.

A Tennessee town and counties in Kentucky and Montana are named after him. His statue graces one of the entrances to the US Treasury building in Washington, DC. One of the three rivers that converge to form the Missouri River carries his name. So do a mountain range and a national forest in Montana.

Though these namesakes are notable, the man himself deserves so much more. His name was Albert Gallatin. One of his biographers, Nicholas Dungan, writes that Gallatin “came to America in his youth and, in a lifetime of public service to his adopted country, contributed to the welfare and independence of the United States as fully as any other statesman of his age.”

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Though he is, in the words of another biographer Frank Ewing, “America’s Forgotten Statesman,” it would be challenging to find anyone else of his day with a more impressive résumé.

Born in the Republic of Geneva in present-day Switzerland in 1761, Albert Gallatin was orphaned at an early age. Homeschooled by a distant relative for 7 years, he then entered a private boarding school. He left for America in 1780 at age 19, at a time when America was at war with its mother country.

Though he hoped to make his fortune in buying and selling land, his first real job here was teaching French at Harvard University. He then settled in the mountains of Southwestern Pennsylvania, where the home he built (which he dubbed “Friendship Hill”) stands today as a national historic site.

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Politics soon drew his attention, mainly because so many people who came to know him urged him to seek office. He served as a delegate to the 1789 Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention before winning election to the Pennsylvania General Assembly, where he demonstrated a rare talent for analyzing and managing public finances. He would soon rival Alexander Hamilton as the country’s leading authority on the subject. He quickly became a powerful Anti-Federalist, an eloquent Jeffersonian voice of the Democratic-Republican Party.

Amazingly, Gallatin found himself named a US Senator by his colleagues in the Pennsylvania legislature in 1793. He never sought the seat and even publicly declared himself ineligible because he had not yet been a US citizen for the nine years the Constitution required to be chosen for the job. Nonetheless, he held the office for about two months (December 1793 to February 1794) until the Senate determined that he was right, in that he hadn’t yet fulfilled the citizenship rule.

Frank Ewing, in his 1959 biography titled America’s Forgotten Statesman: Albert Gallatin, wrote:

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[T]his young man by sheer ability and industry had so captivated his colleagues that even Federalists joined with his own party members to give him the greatest office in their power to give. Never before or since in American political history has there been, without fanfare of oratory or partisan emotion, such a recognition of simple merit and ability in the conduct of public affairs.

Gallatin strongly opposed the Washington administration’s whiskey tax but opposed violence against it among his fellow Western Pennsylvanians. Later as a key player in Thomas Jefferson’s cabinet, he got rid of it, as well as nearly every other federal excise tax.

Months after leaving the Senate, and on the very same day in October 1794, Gallatin secured election to both the Pennsylvania General Assembly again and the federal Congress. He kept the two jobs simultaneously—a rare venture then, and unheard of today.

He was subsequently elected to the US House of Representatives for two more consecutive terms, serving there until President Thomas Jefferson tapped him for the post of Treasury Secretary. By that time, writes Nicholas Dungan, “he achieved recognition as an expert in economics and government finance unequaled in his party and perhaps in America.”

To this day, Gallatin remains the longest-serving Secretary of the Treasury in US history (12 years, 9 months), holding the office for the entirety of Jefferson’s two terms as president and then for a portion of the first term of the subsequent president, James Madison.

Gallatin cut federal spending, adopted checks and balances for government expenditures, and financed the Louisiana Purchase. Despite issuing nearly $15 million in bonds for the Louisiana Purchase, he still managed to slash the national debt by half in little more than a decade.

America’s nascent military took a big hit. Jefferson and Gallatin slashed the Army to just 3,000 soldiers and shrunk the Navy to a mere six frigates. They probably overdid it, leaving the country vulnerable to the hostilities that broke out with Britain again in 1812. The United States of the Jefferson-Gallatin years maintained foreign embassies in only three countries: Spain, France, and Britain.

Nobody could credibly accuse the US of “empire building” while Jefferson and Gallatin were at the helm.

After his long tenure at Treasury, Gallatin’s next big assignment was negotiating an end to the War of 1812 between Britain and America. Many historians regard the result as his greatest achievement. Gallatin was easily the principal figure in securing the Treaty of Ghent that concluded hostilities. He proved himself to be a master diplomat.

It would seem natural for the next step in the life of Albert Gallatin to be an ambassadorship. Indeed, he went on to serve as America’s minister first to France for seven years, and then to Britain for one year.

Returning from Europe at age 66, Gallatin resolved to retire from public office. But in the 22 years of life he still had in him, he still managed to become a bank president, founder of New York University, founder of the American Ethnological Society, and a renowned authority in Native American languages. In his “spare” time, he spoke out against slavery and in favor of fiscal responsibility, free trade, and individual liberty. Most people never accomplish a tenth of what Gallatin did in his 88 years. Writes historian Greg May:

The Jefferson administration’s enduring achievement was to contain the federal government by restraining its fiscal power. That was Gallatin’s work. He abolished internal revenue taxes in peacetime, slashed federal spending, and repaid half of the national debt. Heavy spending during the War of 1812 severely tested Gallatin’s system, but his basic reforms created a culture of fiscal restraint that survived.

Given the man’s role in the Louisiana Purchase alone, it is fitting that a river, a mountain range, a national forest, and a county in Montana are named for him. But considering the full sweep of his massive contributions to America, perhaps a state should be named for him as well. Thank you, Albert Gallatin!

How did Albert Gallatin handle Jefferson’s single biggest policy mistake, namely, the disastrous Embargo of 1807? That is the subject of Part 2 of this series, to be published in the coming days. The final installment will examine Gallatin’s key role in the incredible Free Trade Convention of 1831.

*****

This article was published by FEE, Foundation for Economic Education, and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Arizona School Choice Lawsuit Alleges Spending Restrictions Are Unlawful thumbnail

Arizona School Choice Lawsuit Alleges Spending Restrictions Are Unlawful

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By Cameron Arcand

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

The Goldwater Institute is suing Attorney General Kris Mayes over what they believe are overly-stringent restrictions on universal Empowerment Scholarship Account program purchases.

The complaint alleges that there were “legal threats” made by Mayes to Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne asking that purchases by parents made outside of “pre-established curricula” should not be approved.

“The Department has complied with her demand and is now rejecting parents’ purchases of even the most self-evidently educational items including books and copies of the periodic table of elements,” the complaint claims. 

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The program allows parents to use funding originally allocated toward the child in public schools for spending for homeschooling, private school tuition and other related educational expenses. ESA’s were available to all Arizona families after former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey signed the first of its kind expansion into law in 2022. 

“I feel like the AG clearly doesn’t have any interest in what an education looks like for a homeschool child,” plaintiff and Rosemary McAtee stated, as she homeschools seven children through the program. 

Mayes’ office said that the decision to add an extra layer of checks on the purchases is “required by law.” 

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“The law doesn’t prevent parents from purchasing paper and pencils, but it does require that materials purchased with ESA funds be used for a child’s education,” Richie Taylor, communication director for her office, told The Center Square in a statement.

“With instances of voucher dollars being spent on things like ski passes, luxury car driving lessons, and grand pianos, it’s clear that providing documentation on spending is essential to prevent the misuse of taxpayer funds. Attorney General Mayes believes Arizonans deserve full transparency and accountability in how their tax dollars are used and will continue to fight for accountability and oversight in the voucher program,” Taylor added.

Meanwhile, Horne expressed support for the conservative think tank’s legal action.

“The Department of Education concedes the argument of the Goldwater Institute,” Horne stated. 

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“When this issue first arose in July, my concern was that the Attorney General could force Empowerment Scholarship Account holders to return funds if they did not comply with her office’s interpretation of the law. This lawsuit will settle the issue in court and my sincere hope is that the arguments made by Goldwater will prevail,” he continued. 

On the Department of Education website, Horne states that his team believed that if they challenged the law themselves it could lead to more damage.

“[DOE staff] analyzed the statutes on which the attorney general relied, and indicated to me that as a neutral judge, they would rule against me if I made a fight out of it and refused to comply. Getting into a fight and losing, would be much more damaging,” he stated.

There are nearly 79,000 students currently enrolled in the program.

******

This article was published by The Center Square and has been reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Chicago Teachers Instructed to Pass Migrant Students Despite ‘Severe Academic Deficiencies’ thumbnail

Chicago Teachers Instructed to Pass Migrant Students Despite ‘Severe Academic Deficiencies’

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By Family Research Council

Teachers in Chicago are the latest to voice their concerns over how illegal immigration is changing the landscape in America. Or in this case, how it’s shaping what’s happening in the classroom.

According to WGN Radio, teachers in the city have revealed that “they were instructed by school administrators to give their migrant students a 70 percent in every subject and pass them on to the next grade … even if their migrant students displayed severe academic deficiencies.” It appears “Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez assured that migrant students were held to the same standards as Chicago’s American students.” However, it was only last month that a study from the University of Illinois System proved there was not much of a standard to live up to.

Even beyond the migrant students, many of whom reportedly do not speak English, numerous students throughout the city of Illinois “are still struggling to catch up academically from the learning loss that occurred when schools were forced to close” due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the study found, “[O]nly about one-fourth of all public-school students are back to pre-pandemic performance levels in English language arts while even fewer have returned to pre-pandemic levels in math.”

So, while it’s not looking good for the Chicago Public Schools as it is, teachers have further admitted that part of their orders to pass migrant students has led to “deliberately falsifying grades” — which applies to both classroom grades and academic standardized testing scores.

Sylvia Snowden, a reporter who spoke with several Chicago teachers, explained, “When the tests have been proctored, after they’ve been evaluated, the teachers are able to see the scores. And when the teachers saw the scores, they saw that the students were not at grade level, yet they were instructed to give them 70 percent in every single class, which is the minimum C and pass them on to the next grade.” When asked for an explanation, the Chicago Public Schools responded with this vague statement:

“Chicago public schools aims to provide a rigorous, welcoming, inclusive pre-K through 12 environment for all students, including those who are newly arrived in Chicago with their families from around the globe. As a district, we have high expectations for all students and policies and promotion guidelines in place that are modified to serve the specialized needs of our English language learners, and offer in school, after-school year-round interventions developed with the principal/counselor/teacher and parents to target the students described deficiencies.”

As Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, shared with The Washington Stand, “This report of teachers being instructed to pass students should invoke concern regardless of the type of student involved.” She emphasized that “moving underperforming students through the system robs them of their education” because “they are denied the chance to understand, comprehend, and build understanding and command of facts that build culture and the ability to contribute to society and one’s own success.”

But amid the ongoing learning issues at hand and the concerns that go with them, a quick glance at what Chicago has endured in recent years demonstrates how their education department is not the only area tainted by the border crisis.

Millions of illegal immigrants have flooded into the country and Chicago, being the self-designated sanctuary city that it is, has taken in nearly 50,000 migrants since 2022. In only two years, $400 million have gone toward funding the migrants, which has put a significant dent in the city’s money and resources. Nearly all aspects of life in Chicago have been affected by the newcomers, and allegedly, has caused city residents a great deal of frustration.

“People are angry about the lack of resources in their community,” said Richard Wallace, a man involved with organizing community affairs. “People are angry about joblessness. People are angry about the cost of living skyrocketing.”

Evidently, the decisions affecting the American education system and overall quality of life are not free from having long-lasting consequences — particularly for the younger generations, Kilgannon emphasized. Considering the failing test scores and poor learning environments, she concluded, “When Gen Z ‘quietly quits,’ they are simply following the example that was set for them by a public school system that quietly quit teaching them.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

The Fascinating Story of Warren Smith: Critical Thinking is at the core of it… thumbnail

The Fascinating Story of Warren Smith: Critical Thinking is at the core of it…

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By John Droz, Jr.

This is an update as the second video link (right after he was fired) somehow went to the wrong video. It is now corrected below. My apologies…

—> If you have not voted in my prior poll about who you thought won the recent Presidential debate, please take ten seconds and do so now, here. TY! <—

Warren Smith was a Massachusetts K-12 teacher who is now something of a celebrity.

What’s fascinating — and should be of great interest to readers here — is that Warren has become famous for one thing: promoting Critical Thinking to K-12 students!

That a fairly normal teacher is a national poohbah primarily because he is advocating that his students become Critical Thinkers, shows that there is a great deal of pent-up interest in learning and applying that skill. In other words, it is intuitively obvious to even those who are just paying minimal attention, that for the American Experiment to survive — and thrive — we need to have a LOT more Critically Thinking citizens.

Here’s a brief outline of Warren’s story, innocuously starting earlier this year, when he put out a short video where he gave a student a lesson on Critical Thinking.

Watch it: Getting Fired From My School – Warren Smith

Clearly his mini thought process lesson was a success!

A MAJOR part of fixing our K-12 education system is to have a formal part of the K-12 curricula (in the subject area of Science) where students are specifically taught how to be Critical Thinkers. There is plenty of documentation about how to do this, and Warren demonstrates a powerful way, akin to the Socratic method.

Critical Thinking needs to be looked at as a SKILL — like cooking. If you want to be an accomplished chef, which of the following do you think would produce better results: a teacher saying to you that you can be a culinary artist, and —

  1. telling you to go home and experiment on your own. Start with learning how to boil water, etc.
  2. explaining the great importance of food to everyone on the planet (from health to socialization), demonstrating how eating various foods can change your mood, showing how different foods interrelate with each other, describing how the same food (e.g., a potato) can be prepared in numerous creative ways, illustrating how presentation impacts the experience to the diner, making clear the difference between a cook and a chef, etc., etc.

Today in almost all US K-12 schools, option #1 is what is happening regarding learning the Critical Thinking skill. Warren was opening the door to teaching a student how the Think Critically, using option #2. BIG DIFFERENCE!

So what happened? How was he rewarded for his interest and efforts in getting children to become much better thinkers — which means happier and more productive citizens (see here)?

After getting this stunning news, Warren puts out this short video, trying to make sense of this unexpected and irrational development.

What he doesn’t say is that his termination is not a surprise, as the US K-12 education system is formally opposed to teaching Critical Thinking. I’ve written about this multiple times, like here. The Science standards adopted by 49 states actually teach the opposite of Critical Thinking — conformity and compliance.

Fortunately, this story may be headed towards a happy ending. As I tipped readers off at the beginning of this piece, this rather mundane K-12 situation hit the right cord, and suddenly Warren became somewhat of a celebrity. For example, there were some interesting interviews, like —

Piers Morgan Interviews Teacher Who Schooled Student to Think Critically,

Dave Rubin Interviews Warren Smith,

and several more, like this, this, this, etc.

I reached out to Warren and just made a connection. I look forward to communicating with him shortly. Some of the messages I will be conveying are:

  1. he’s on the right track, so don’t be dissuaded by the anti-Americans who want to undermine our K-12 education system,
  2. he should study what’s happening to K-12 Science standards, to get a better idea of the Big Picture and the purposeful attack on Critical Thinking,
  3. he will find my Report on the Amazing Benefits of Critical Thinking to be very interesting,
  4. there soon may be a fascinating job for him in North Carolina,
  5. Etc.

Regarding #4, if enough citizens take the time to understand what the issues are, and who has what position, reform (GOP) candidate Michele Morrow will be the next Superintendent of the NC Department of Public Instruction.

Michele has told me that Warren is exactly the type of person she would seriously consider hiring after she wins the upcoming election, as she is a major supporter of NC K-12 students becoming Critical Thinkers. Warren’s assignment might be “to get the proper teaching of Critical Thinking formally incorporated into the K-12 Science curriculum.”

Job #1 is to get Michele elected, so please make a generous donation for this courageous and competent woman. If you’d like to see her in action, please watch this debate with her Dem opponent, from last weekend.

Let’s be very clear: this is NOT just a North Carolina issue!

Michele winning would be a major shot across the bow to the entire US K-12 public school system that business as usual is no longer acceptable! This is arguably one of the top twenty most important races in the US!

©2024. John Droz, Jr. All rights reserved.

Here are other materials by this scientist that you might find interesting:

I now am offering incentives for you to sign up new subscribers!

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.org: discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info: multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2024 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time – but why would you?

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Australian Government to Ban Social Media for Kids

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By Rebekah Barnett

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Editors Note: This appears to be an attempt to stop a clock by using a sledgehammer. We agree with the premise that social media is damaging. However, both parents and local schools can take the lead on this, and many have done so. The problem is that if the central government can suppress access to communications because they are deemed harmful for kids, that principle can also be extended to adults. In some places, it already has. In the United States our government conspired with media companies to suppress information unfavorable to the Covid lockdown or Hunter Biden’s laptop and the attacks in  Brazil on X. Don’t give your kid a cell phone until they are mature enough. Give them a flip phone, without access to the internet, if they need a line of emergency communication. Regulate all of their screen time, including television. If parents don’t have the courage to raise their children and instead cede this authority to Big Government, where does this trend stop?

The Australian Government is set to impose social media age limits, amid increasing concern over the effect of social media on youth mental health, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced today.

Legislation is to be introduced later this year, and is expected to gain bipartisan support after the leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton, called to ban social media for under 16s earlier this year.

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“We know social media is causing social harm, and it is taking kids away from real friends and real experiences,” said Albanese in a statement today, which also happens to be World Suicide Prevention Day.

“The safety and mental and physical health of our young people is paramount.”

“We’re supporting parents and keeping kids safe by taking this action, because enough is enough.”

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The federal commitment to legislate social media age limits follows similar announcements from the Victorian and South Australian governments, both of which want to ban social media for kids under the age of 14.

The new legislation will build on a report by former High Court Chief Justice, Robert French, released on Sunday. The report, commissioned by the South Australian (SA) Government, includes draft legislation banning children under 14 from social media outright, and requiring companies to gain parental consent for 14 and 15-year-olds to use their platforms.

Recent polling shows strong public support for an age-based social media ban, with 61% of respondents agreeing that the government should restrict the use of social media platforms for Australians younger than 17. Unsurprisingly, support was lower among younger Australians. Only 54% of respondents aged 18 to 24 agreed with the ban.

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Source: ABC

The potential harms of social media for kids have come to prominence in the past decade, particularly with the ubiquity of the smartphone.

Author and psychologist Jonathan Haidt has said social media is “more addictive than heroin,” causing the “great rewiring” of childhood. He is one of many researchers who suggest that the increased uptake of social media and smartphones has created an “international epidemic” of depression, anxiety, and suicide among young people.

Research by Australia’s online safety regulator, eSafety, found that 75% of 16 to 18-year-olds had seen online pornography – of those, nearly one-third saw it before the age of 13, and nearly half saw it between the ages of 13 and 15.

In other research, eSafety found that almost two-thirds of 14-17-year-olds have viewed potentially harmful content in the past year, such as content relating to drug taking, suicide, or self-harm, or gory or violent material.

There are also concerns about children being preyed upon online. Sonya Ryan OAM, the founder and chief executive of the Carly Ryan Foundation, has experienced this personally. Her daughter Carly, was killed in 2007 at the age of 15 by a predator she met online.

Ryan has voiced her support for new laws to protect kids, stating, “In my opinion the only way forward is to create appropriate legislation to protect our children from these harms and regulate big tech companies to include mandatory age verification across all platforms.”

Others are worried that banning children’s access to social media will cause unintended harms.

“Social media is one of the only public spaces where children can communicate directly with their friends – often maintaining connections with distant friends and loved ones that would otherwise be impossible,” said information and technology expert Dr Dana McKay of RMIT University.

Instead of banning kids from social media, the focus should be on making social media safer, said Dr McKay.

“Many of the problems can already be addressed by minimising advertising and detecting and addressing harmful interactions through behavioural analytics, for example,” she said.

Details on how the new age assurance laws and technology will work are hazy until legislation is tabled later this year, but the concept has already been in development for some time.

The Federal Government has invested $6.5 million in a trial of age assurance technology which will be used to enforce the social media age limit, with the technology aspect of the trial currently out to tender.

At the same time, Australia’s online safety regulator, eSafety has given digital industry associations until the end of this year to propose improved industry codes that will be enforceable by eSafety to limit children’s access to inappropriate content online, including pornography and self-harm content.

Both of these initiatives are tied in with Age Verification Roadmap, which in turn is tied in with Australia’s recently legislated Digital ID framework, to which the government has allotted $288.1 million over the next four years.

*****

This article was published by the Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

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Weekend Read: The Ruling Elites Create an Orwellian Reinterpretation of Human Rights

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By Dr. Wanjiru Njoya

Ludwig von Mises depicts the aim of revolutionary socialism as: “to clear the ground for building up a new civilization by liquidating the old one.” One of the main strategies in liquidating a civilization involves dismantling its legal and philosophical foundations. This role is fulfilled by activists who embark upon “sabotage and revolution” by subverting the meaning of words: “The socialists have engineered a semantic revolution in converting the meaning of terms into their opposite.”

George Orwell famously called this subversive language “Newspeak.” Peter Foster describes Newspeak as “a sort of totalitarian Esperanto that sought gradually to diminish the range of what was thinkable by eliminating, contracting, and manufacturing words.”

Mises explains that dictators express their ideas in Newspeak precisely because, if they did not, nobody would support their schemes:

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This reversal of the traditional connotation of all words of the political terminology is not merely a peculiarity of the language of the Russian Communists and their Fascist and Nazi disciples. The social order that in abolishing private property deprives the consumers of their autonomy and independence, and thereby subjects every man to the arbitrary discretion of the central planning board, could not win the support of the masses if they were not to camouflage its main character. The socialists would have never duped the voters if they had openly told them that their ultimate end is to cast them into bondage. (emphasis added)

In the proliferation of Newspeak, the reinterpretation of “human rights” has proved to be one of the most powerful weapons of sabotage and revolution. Activists have seized control of a vast empire of international law, NGOs, and human rights charities with a global network of staff who monitor respect for “human rights.” They wield their significant influence in the human rights industry to undermine human liberty by redefining the meaning of “human rights” to denote the antidiscrimination principle. Under the banner of equality and nondiscrimination, they restrict free speech and other human liberties. In other words, the doctrine of “human rights” now denotes the precise opposite: the destruction of human liberty.

The “human right” to non-discrimination

Human rights no longer mean what many might suppose: the right to life, liberty, and property. The vast corpus of human rights in international law has been categorized by Karel Vašák into three: civil-political, socio-economic, and collective-developmental. These categories are said to encompass negative rights (things the state must not do, such interfering with life, liberty, or property), positive rights (things the state must do, for example, provide citizens with food, shelter, education, healthcare, etc.), and rights of solidarity between citizens such as wealth redistribution through social welfare schemes and equal participation in economic progress through measures such as the minimum wage or equal pay.

Human rights organizations monitor progress against these categories and ensure that the legal system works in favor of socialist goals and against liberty. For example, the United Nations human rights program educates the public on the need to eradicate “hate speech” and interprets “equal protection” of the law, as a fundamental human right, to mean protection from hate speech. The UN says:

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Addressing hate speech does not mean limiting or prohibiting freedom of speech. It means keeping hate speech from escalating into more something more dangerous, particularly incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence, which is prohibited under international law.

From that description, it can be seen that the UN takes a concept which is well-established in the criminal law, namely, prohibiting incitement to violence, and links it to notions of incitement to discrimination and incitement to hostility, which have never before been recognized as crimes. They annex discrimination and hostility to the charge of inciting violence because, if they did not, it would be immediately clear to everyone that criminalizing “discrimination” or “hostility” amounts to nothing less than Newspeakian crimethink.

The meaning of human rights

In his article, “There’s no such thing as Human Rights,” the British journalist Peter Hitchens argues that,

Human rights do not exist. They are an invention, made out of pure wind. If you are seriously interested in staying free, you should not rely on these flatulent, vague phrases to help you.

They are in fact a weapon in the hands of those who wish to remove your liberty and transform society, though this is probably an accident. It is only in the past 50 years or so that radical judges have realised these baseless declarations can be used (for example) to abolish national frontiers or give criminals the right to vote.

In that context, Hitchens is referring not to the ancient liberties protected by Magna Carta, but to the Newspeakian rights now enshrined in human rights instruments, such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. Human rights have been transformed into wooly concepts which merely reflect political and partisan demands.

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Murray Rothbard avoids the ambiguity surrounding the meaning of human rights by defining them as property rights. In the Ethics of Liberty, he explains:

…the concept of “rights” only makes sense as property rights. For not only are there no human rights which are not also property rights, but the former rights lose their absoluteness and clarity and become fuzzy and vulnerable when property rights are not used as the standard.

In the first place, there are two senses in which property rights are identical with human rights: one, that property can only accrue to humans, so that their rights to property are rights that belong to human beings; and two, that the person’s right to his own body, his personal liberty, is a property right in his own person as well as a “human right.” But more importantly for our discussion, human rights, when not put in terms of property rights, turn out to be vague and contradictory, causing liberals to weaken those rights on behalf of “public policy” or the “public good.”

Thus, the Rothbardian interpretation of human rights denotes the universal right to self-ownership and private property that vests in all human beings.

Bureaucratic reinterpretation

In practice, the meaning of human rights is subject to interpretation by courts or other law enforcement officials. Therefore, human rights ultimately mean only what they are interpreted to mean by law enforcement, not what they may theoretically, politically, or philosophically. Lowell B. Mason, an attorney and former chair of the Federal Trade Commission explains the significance of bureaucratic interpretation by observing wryly that:

When in private practice I never told clients what the law was; I always told them what the bureaucrats thought the law was… The legality or illegality of what you do often depends not on the words of a statute enacted by your elected representatives, but on the state of the collective liver of a dozen anonymous bureaucrats.

Being well aware of this, the goal of activists is to ensure that “human rights” are interpreted so as to advance their goals. This explains the concerted efforts to depict “hate speech” as a human rights violation. In this way the commitment of states to protecting “human rights” is transformed, through the prism of the antidiscrimination principle, into an edict to prohibit hate speech. The word “hate” is interpreted to mean having the temerity to disagree with socialists, and similarly, the word “equality” is interpreted to mean wealth redistribution to achieve equality of material conditions.

Mason explains how it is possible for bureaucrats, charged with law enforcement, to reinterpret the Constitution to suit whatever they think the law ought to achieve. No matter how carefully a law is drafted, it will always require interpretation, and this is where the bureaucrats strike as they purport to be applying the “evolving” meaning of the Constitution. Mason explains:

“Of course,” he will reassure you, “the Constitution still stands as a bulwark to liberty but it is a growing instrument that adapts itself to the times, and while it has not been repealed or amended, it has necessarily been reinterpreted so that due process (as it was known in the past) no longer unduly encumbers the administration of the law.”

Through Newspeak, the Constitution itself has been reinterpreted, enabling socialists to claim that they support free speech and also support the prohibition of “hate speech.” Mises explains that this subverts the concept of freedom into its very opposite: “Freedom implies the right to choose between assent and dissent. But in Newspeak it means the duty to assent unconditionally and strict interdiction of dissent.” In that sense, the concept of “hate speech” is not compatible with free speech. In denoting any dissent as “hate,” it is the very negation of free speech and freedom of thought. Through Orwellian Newspeak, ordinary words like “liberty,” “justice,” and “equality”—values that most people would support—have been subverted and harnessed to promote socialism.

*****

This article was published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute and is reproduced with permission.

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When They Say ‘We’re Coming for Your Children,’ Believe Them!

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By Linda Goudsmit

Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses asymmetric psychological and informational warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. America’s children are the primary target of the globalist predators.

Canadian columnist Barbara Kay published an exceptional article, “When They Say ‘We’re Coming for Your Children,’ Believe Them,”[i] in The Epoch Times on July 10, 2023. Kay provides an outstanding analysis of Marxist educational indoctrination in Canada, its parallels in the United States, and the awakening of the public to its catastrophic consequences. It is a thoughtful article that begins with acknowledging Canadians as an extremely tolerant people who have found the limit of their tolerance:

The only domain in which we are witnessing a groundswell of citizen resistance is K–12 pedagogy, where Queer Theory—a gendered form of Marxism that rejects the “normal” in sexuality, including the notion of childhood “innocence”—is systematically imposed on vulnerable minds, with or without parental consent. Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) has become the cynosure of parental disquiet.

A recent video clip of naked Pride marchers chanting “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children” went viral. LGBTQ spin doctors claimed the words were “taken out of context.” Which begs the question of why male drag queens no longer stay in their lane of adult entertainment. What acceptable “context” encourages teaching children to “twerk” (“you just move your bum up and down like that”)—an action simulating sexual intercourse?

A majority of Canadians feel such organized sexualized messaging to young children is a bridge too far. They no longer believe DQSH is “family-friendly” or pure “entertainment.” Some are calling it out for what it is: “grooming,” building children’s trust in men with an agenda that goes far beyond teaching about “diversity.” They are saying so in protests against such events as a four-day drag theatre camp in B.C.

In a news report, a progressive journalist deplored this surge of opposition, in particular some protesters’ use of the word “groomer” as a “homophobic” trope, which, the journalist writes, “advocates say was used to vilify the LGBTQ2+ community in the 1970s and 1980s.” It is true, that a vocal subset of gays was vilified in the 1970s and 1980s. A little research, though, would have uncovered information that might have tempered the journalist’s indignation.

In 1969 the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), a special interest group that advocated for abrogation of the age of sexual consent, became the first LGBT organization in Scotland, branding gay rights activism and child abuse lobbying as closely entwined goals there. From 1974 to 1984, PIE openly campaigned throughout the United Kingdom to normalize pedophilia as a legally and culturally acceptable practice. Such were the sexually freewheeling times, they were taken seriously at elite levels, even winning support from then Labour Health Minister Patricia Hewitt for such policies as reducing the age of consent to 10, and the decriminalization of incest. PIE activists were tactically sophisticated in their networking, branding pedophiles as an oppressed sexual minority, just like gays and lesbians.

Here, PIE’s alter ego is the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), still nominally active, although radically diminished in numbers. Still, as late as 2005, one lawyer dubbed it “a trade school for pedophiles.” In the ’70s, NAMBLA attracted support from prominent gays, such as beat poet Allen Ginsberg, and was affiliated with the International Lesbian and Gay Association until 1994. Finally, the Human Rights Campaign, which would become the biggest LGBT advocacy group in the United States, declared, “NAMBLA is not a gay organization…and we thoroughly reject their efforts to insinuate that pedophilia is an issue related to gay and lesbian civil rights.”

Nevertheless, NAMBLA’s website states that, true to its philosophy, its goal remains “to end the extreme oppression of men and boys in mutually consensual relationships” by “educating the general public on the benevolent nature of man/boy love” through “cooperation with lesbian, gay, feminist, and other liberation movements.” The general public should not be expected to parse the distinction between “not a gay organization” and “cooperating with lesbian, gay…movements.” When the only people publicly promoting pedophilia self-identify as gay, the fact that they are a subset of LGB, and not the norm, might be lost on ordinary people.

A 1983 interview of two PIE representatives on Newsnight offers an insight into the creepiness of their strategy. They didn’t say they were campaigning for the right of 50-year-old men to have sex with seven-year-olds. They talked about children’s right to sexual liberation. Challenged to admit that sex is “shocking” to a child, one of the men says, “Not if they’re properly educated….”

“Properly educated.” Today, under the rubric of Queer Theory—which does not recognize any boundaries of traditional sexual morality, decency, or age-appropriateness—that would be exposure of children, against the wishes of many parents, but with the blessing of pedagogical elites, to what used to be known as porn, such as the graphic memoir, “Gender Queer.”

And of course, defended as “education” about gender diversity and inclusion, children’s continual interaction with drag queens. Amongst the drag queens touring schools and libraries, a small but repulsive roster of sex offenders has been exposed. Alarm bells are ringing, and not just for conservatives. Rational gays and lesbians—LGB—feel tainted by the obsession with children inherent to Queer Theory. It’s noteworthy that no queer theorist of influence has ever condemned the acting out of pedophilic desire. Thus, the laudable (but alas, so far marginal) organization “Gays Against Groomers” was formed to counter the damage Queer Theory is inflicting on the LGB’s hard-earned brand of unthreatening normalcy.

DQSH’s agenda is laid out in a January 2021 paper published in the journal Curriculum Inquiry, titled “Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood,” co-authored by media studies doctoral candidate and drag queen Lil Miss Hot Mess (of “swish swish swish” fame) and trans-identified queer theorist Harper Keenan.

The authors acknowledge that DQSH is meant not only as a model for learning “about queer lives,” but also “how to live queerly.” They write, “The future is queerness’s domain…. The here and now is a prison house.” (Translation: The traditional family home is a prison for children.) And, notably, “It may be that DQSH is ‘family friendly,’ in the sense that it is accessible and inviting to families with children, but it is less a sanitizing force than it is a preparatory introduction to alternate modes of kinship.” (Translation: We are your children’s new family.)

For readers who seek a fully informed, in-depth unpacking of this frank and revelatory journal article, I recommend a seminar with indispensable cultural Marxism expert James Lindsay via his New Discourses podcast episode, “Groomer School 4: Drag Queen Story Hour.”

Forget about “context.” When they say “we’re coming for your children,” believe them.

Barbara Kay’s incisive article is a warning, to parents in Canada and the United States, of the clear and present danger that the UN’s Comprehensive Sexuality Education poses to their children. (CSE is introduced in Chapter 17 and discussed at length in Chapters 19 and 20.) In Canada, as in the United States, denial is not a survival strategy. It is essential that parents understand how their compassion and tolerance are being exploited, and the victims are their vulnerable children.

Child psychiatrist Dr. Miriam Grossman’s warning to American parents in Chapter 35 is also a warning to Canadian parents. The future the globalist predators envision for your children is planetary in scope. It requires the internationalization of both radical ideological goals and educational indoctrination. Both are provided by United Nations Agenda 2030 and its participating organizations, global policies, and initiatives worldwide.

Globalist social engineers are using radical gender ideology, politicized medicine, and associated agencies to groom children and intimidate parents. In America, Dr. Grossman identifies the Department of Education, American School Counselors Association, National Education Association, National Association of Social Workers, National Association of School Psychologists, and the National Association of Secondary School Principals as professional organizations that refuse to disclose a child’s gender identity to parents. Further, Dr. Grossman names GLSEN, formerly the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, as the primary source of America’s educational system capture:

If there is a single organization responsible for transforming your child’s teacher, principal, and guidance counselor into gender warriors, and filling your child’s classroom with trans symbols, books, and flags, it’s GLSEN.

In their own words, GLSEN “strives to dismantle all identity-based oppressions in K–12 public and private schools…. GLSEN provides teacher training, lesson plans, school policy guides, “inclusive” curriculum, and Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) clubs in schools nationwide. They collaborate with associations that accredit private and public schools and maintain a public policy office in Washington.

A priority is recruiting students. This is done through GSA clubs and teacher indoctrination, of course, but also through school programs—always clothed in the language of respect, civil rights, and freedom…. (Miriam Grossman, Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness, pp. 124–125)

Here’s how GLSEN instructs your child’s school to keep you in the dark:

Some transgender and nonbinary students may not yet be out to their parents or guardians…. It is essential to have open communication and plans established with the student to go over potential circumstances. For instance, mail may be sent home with a student’s prior and/or legal name, which may not be their affirmed name. If a student is not yet out to their parent(s)/guardian(s), using their prior name in correspondence may be the desirable course of action, although they use a different name amongst peers and educators in school. Educators and staff should work closely with the student to determine what changes are necessary, and where, to ensure their safety and well-being. (p. 126)

Make no mistake: ideological “educators” are aligning themselves with your child, against you! It is essential for parents to realize that the institutions they always trusted are no longer trustworthy. Dr. Grossman makes painfully clear the fact that schools, guidance counselors, doctors including pediatricians, even churches and synagogues, have embraced gender ideology and cannot be trusted.

Dr. Grossman’s unequivocal opinion is that no one is born in the wrong body. Gender dysphoria is an emotional and psychological issue that cannot be remedied with hormone blockers and surgeries. As a child psychiatrist, she unapologetically identifies mental health as being in touch with objective reality, the world of facts, and mental illness as being out of touch with objective reality. Dangerous ideas are those that reverse mental health standards and definitions of mental health. Dangerous ideas replace the biological facts in objective reality with the feelingsthat govern subjective reality.

Early in her book, under the heading “Puberty Is Not a Disorder,” Dr. Grossman states unambiguously:

Puberty is not only about growing breasts or developing facial hair. It impacts nearly all organs and systems of the body. It’s a complex biological process that we are far from understanding.

Too many of my colleagues have forgotten that the body has its own wisdom. (p. 70)

In 2015 Dr. Grossman joined pediatricians Den Trumbull and Michelle Cretella, leaders of the American College of Pediatricians (ACP)—not the captured American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP)—and wrote a letter to the journal Pediatrics:

We submit that children who dread the development of secondary sex characteristics are emotionally troubled…. In fact, puberty brings relief for the vast majority of children receiving therapy for GID (gender identity disorder) because hormone surges propel the development of their brains as well as their bodies and they come to identify with their biological sex. (p. 70)

Dr. Michelle Cretella was cited in my previous book The Collapsing American Family: From Bonding to Bondage, Chapter 11 (pp. 66–67). I repeat here a section quoted from her 2017 interview with John Ritchie, “Dr. Cretella on Transgenderism: A Mental Illness Is Not a Civil Right“:[ii]

Essentially, transgender ideology holds that people can be born into the wrong body: It’s simply not true. We can demonstrate this by looking at twin studies. No one is born in the wrong body. So, to take that lie and essentially indoctrinate all of our children from preschool forward with that lie, we are destroying their ability for reality-testing.

This is cognitive and psychological abuse. I want to say just a little more about that. The reason it destroys reality-testing is because most children at age three (preschool age) can correctly identify themselves by saying “I am a boy” or “I am a girl” and most children will not understand that a boy grows into a man and stays a man and that a girl grows into a woman and stays a woman. So, when many seven-year-olds see a man get into a dress and put on makeup, they may believe that he just became a woman. The other side is not being honest and not acknowledging that….

So transgender ideology—yes, it’s child abuse because we are gaslighting our children. And now that they’re thoroughly confused, they will think that they really are the opposite sex and will be sent down a medical pathway. As they approach puberty, they will be put on puberty blockers and then on cross-sex hormones. That combination will permanently sterilize most, if not all, of those children and also puts them at risk for heart disease, diabetes, and various cancers. If girls have been on testosterone, which is their sex change hormone, for a full year, by age 16 they can get a double mastectomy. So, gaslighting, pubertal castration and surgical mutilation: It’s institutionalized child abuse….

Dr. Grossman explains to parents:

Puberty isn’t an illness. We cannot presume that interfering with a complex biological process such as puberty, turning it on and off synthetically, can be accomplished without paying a price. Nowhere could the price be higher than with the brain….

It’s like Extreme Makeover: Teen Brain Edition. Before puberty, your son has the brain of a child. It will take about fifteen years, well into his third decade of life, to develop the brain of an adult. The hormones of puberty, estrogen and testosterone, drive puberty’s explosive growth and restructuring of the brain. Puberty blockers interrupt a natural process and could have cognitive and emotional consequences.

Consider the ability to rationally weigh actions, predict results, and balance pros and cons. The prefrontal cortex is the area of the brain that governs these executive functions. Consider it the CEO of the brain. You don’t need a PhD in neurobiology to know the executive functioning of teens isn’t the greatest. They easily forget their actions have consequences, and just how damaging those consequences might be.

The prefrontal cortex is the last area of the brain to fully mature. If it is the thinking and planning part of the brain, the amygdala is the feeling part. It too is transformed by puberty.

Over the years, the prefrontal cortex and amygdala develop and integrate. Puberty puts these systems into balance, helping young adults regulate their emotions, control impulsivity, and make better decisions….

The sole animal study we have suggests puberty blockers may threaten brain maturation and cognitive maturity. Not only that, but puberty blockers also potentially trap kids in a permanent gender-identity crisis. (Lost in Trans Nation, pp. 70–71)

So, puberty blockers interrupt a natural process and can have cognitive and emotional consequences, including a permanent gender-identity crisis. Consider this from a political point of view. Puberty blockers have the potential to weaponize adolescents and young adults by arresting their emotional and cognitive development, freezing them in a permanent state of immaturity. Collectivism’s promise of eternal dependence is eternal damnation in an underdeveloped adolescent mind that is easily exploited.

The medical pathway is a monstrous deceit designed to achieve ideological compliance through emotional regression. Unlike the political medicine of COVID-19, which achieved ideological compliance through emotional regression using its fear campaign, the politics of gender medicine achieves its objective through indoctrination, drugs, arrested emotional development, surgeries, and family rupture.

The medical pathway not only destroys your child’s mind and body, it is designed to shatter your family bonds as well. The gender indoctrination pits child against parent, and offers the troubled child affirmation and affirming care from trusted teachers, counselors, and physicians. The child withdraws from the parents and finds comfort in his new family of choice at school and online.

The catastrophic effects on families are intentional, strategic, and part of the tactical War on America. The enemy understands that the Judeo-Christian nuclear family is the infrastructure supporting American life. Non-woke parents are considered ideological enemies of the state, obstacles who must be either removed or neutralized.

Dr. Grossman is horrified that her profession has been captured by radical gender ideology, and dismayed that both the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP) have embraced the radical gender dogma that puberty blockers and gender affirmation are, as she describes their stance, “the only safe and ethical treatment! If you don’t support your child, he’s at high risk of suicide.” She considers it criminal malpractice for pediatricians to ignore the mediating effects of puberty, and for surgeons to act upon children’s immature feelings with mutilating surgeries.

American medicine and American education no longer serve the interests of the United States of America or Americans. They are pawns of the globalist administrative state, captured institutions advancing anti-American Marxist ideology disguised as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The globalist social engineers are using DEI to collapse America from within so they can Build Back Better and impose globalism’s New World Order.

The infrastructure for worldwide destruction of children’s innocence is already in place within the United Nations organization of international institutions. Barbara Kay’s August 12, 2023, article, “Alfred Kinsey: The Father of Modern Deviancy,”[iii] is a far more detailed exploration of the sexualization of children, not confined to queer theory, but encompassing it. Kay refers to Dr. Judith Reisman’s extensive research that focuses on Alfred Kinsey as the deviant and criminal source of the “children are sexual from birth” doctrine. (See Chapter 17 for an in-depth discussion of Kinsey’s work.) Kinsey’s doctrine is the foundation of today’s radicalized sexual ideology seeking to “liberate” children from the taboo of adult-child sex. What has been traditionally considered criminal sexual contact with children is now being advanced as “liberation” and “sexual rights” of the child! Alfred Kinsey’s deviance was a valuable asset in globalism’s war on humanity.

In her novel Atlas Shrugged, author Ayn Rand famously wrote, “Show me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.” This extraordinary quotation is the key to understanding that power and control constitute the core dynamic of adult-child sexual relations. Men who find children sexually attractive are driven by their psychological need for power and control that is assured in the asymmetric power balance in sex with children.

When they say “We’re coming for your children,” believe them! The globalist social engineers are using pedophilia as a tactical weapon for achieving totalitarian control of society. Pedophilia is the nuclear weapon of mass psychological destruction supported and protected by the globalist leadership for decades. Pedophilia is an essential element of their efforts to groom today’s children for tomorrow’s planetary Unistate.

©2024. Linda Goudsmit. All rights reserved.

Please visit Linda’s Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com.

NOTE: Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is is available in paperback, hardback, and eBook formats on barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com, and directly from Ingram in paperback.

SOURCES:

[i]  When They Say ‘We’re Coming for Your Children,’ Believe Them; https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/barbara-kay-when-they-say-were-coming-for-your-children-believe-them-2-post-5384901

[ii]  Dr. Cretella on Transgenderism: A Mental Illness Is Not a Civil Right; https://tfpstudentaction.org/blog/dr-michelle-cretella-on-transgender-ideology

[iii]  Alfred Kinsey: The Father of Modern Deviancy; https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/alfred-kinsey-the-father-of-modern

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The Third Wave of Journalism

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By Titus Techera

Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

Journalism in America is slowly transforming as old institutions fall apart and old technologies fall into disuse or are taken apart and repurposed. We are in a privileged moment, since journalism in a conventional sense no longer exists—we can now look at the past and try to achieve something more impressive in the future.

Before turning to the past and future, it’s useful to understand our present in light of the collapse of this conventional authority. There are now no journalists of national importance; there is no institution that commands national respect. Not only is it the case that all attempts to persuade or educate through mass media are partisan, but they fail to summon partisan loyalties or reach a wide audience. Moreover, media institutions aren’t even trying to achieve popularity or prestige.

A related sign of this collapse is the crassness of attempts to reimpose authority. The latest example is the significant number of media institutions, both TV and print, asserting in unison that Vice President Kamala Harris was never “border czar” when those same institutions all used the term previously, as digital media like X (formerly Twitter) can easily prove. These stories foster political partisanship, but they also speak to deeper, more important oppositions than liberal and conservative or Democratic and Republican. With regard to the privileged audience, that is, the minority of people constantly concerned with politics, this struggle over authority represents a conflict between older outgoing elites and younger incoming counter-elites who often wear the guise of populism. With regard to the technology and businesses built on it, the struggle opposes older TV to newer digital technology. The very attempt to impose authority through journalism, however, reveals the impossibility of doing so, as well as the deep divisions in American society.

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Self-Knowledge Under Democratic Conditions

We have three kinds of journalism in America. We can analyze them by the technology used to produce stories: print, TV and radio, and the Internet. These successively take us from the introduction of mass literacy to mass access to elite public activities, and now, with the Internet, mass access to the concern of the true elites, knowledge.

We can also analyze them historically as successive products of the democratic revolution of the last two centuries—from the pamphleteering of the Founding Era to the mass democracy of the New Deal to the digital partisanship of the Obama-Trump years.

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We can judge the minority of non-liberal institutions by looking at the major ones, like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and Substack and (thanks to Elon Musk) X accounts. Their audience mostly consists of very old people (older than people as a generation have ever been), rich people (more comfortable than rich people have ever been), and especially young people (more removed from responsibilities than the young have ever been). In each case, we find different advertising and different ideals; all audiences are unified by their status as consumers, but they admire different things. In each case, we find different rhetoric, even when they appeal to the same passions. What it requires to persuade each audience depends on how that audience believes it is misunderstood and mistreated by the other institutions. The rhetoric is inherently polemical, asserting in each case a specific claim to preeminence in the political coalition by denigrating the coalition partners. So although we are talking about the three ages of men—understood politically as those who own the country, those who run the country, and those who will inherit the country—there is no way to bring them together. The business model of our media institutions depends on political dysfunction and social collapse.

One strange thing about the analysis is that, while the fundamental facts are quite obvious, they are studiously ignored. Why is that? It’s related to the shame that prevents public intellectuals from offering this analysis. Our postmodern situation has rendered us nearly ungovernable, which in turn raises questions about our very humanity. Our media, far from enhancing our powers to match the scale and complexity of modern technology, has crippled us and our elites, and the separation of the audience (which is the electorate constituted by another principle) is the key to its impotence—and who wants to bring bad news? The separation bespeaks a major failure in American organization, since it severs not just old, rich, and young, but it also severs speech and deed. The key to the problem of journalism is to look at the art of association and ask what good thing does writing about an event help people achieve: self-understanding.

Journalism must do more than merely address partisans, it must help them achieve political victory in the constitutional arrangement that defines American conflict.

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From a business point of view as well as from a political point of view, this self-knowledge is now almost impossible to achieve. One can tell an audience what they are used to hearing, which is hardly better than flattery, or one can tell the audience what is happening in America. Talent and intelligence are split in a shocking way, resulting in the destruction of political knowledge. Political knowledge means both speaking to the American people in a persuasive, plausible way, while also demanding that they learn some of the major social and political facts about the situation in which they act. Those of us who are political and media insiders talk all the time about things that cannot be said, since they would be implausible; the effects are usually demoralizing, since the very process by which we acquire these secrets deprives us of public support. But behind the desires of insiders for advance knowledge of events lies a secret piety—the belief that the American people will wake up and act, if only they hear the right news.

Propaganda and Enlightenment

Modern morality is all about connecting the two meanings of argument, one of which points to learning the truth and the other to having a fight. Fighting for what’s right only makes sense based on the pursuit of truth—otherwise, it might be mere madness. Politics and journalism both fulfill this function, from their different positions within the modern state-society divide. The difficulty inherent in journalism is that it depends on access to the state for knowledge to offer us mere members of society, but it depends on our interest and indignation to have any success.

The three waves of journalism—the successive attempts to connect political technologies, that is, institutions, to the people, corresponding to the major communications technologies, print, radio/TV, and the Internet—have dealt with this in somewhat different ways. Originally, American pamphleteering was vicious, pompous, and nakedly corrupt—but it was also organized and practiced by the noblest Americans and therefore involved the most serious thinking and the deepest disputes of American politics. Journalism was at the core of the creation and management of the first-party system and also involved the spoils of party victory to feed it.

Elite Americans’ confidence in the imperative of Progress came to prominence with FDR; they promised to exchange all that corruption for expertise. The alignment of party, leader, government, and state in FDR’s presidency-for-life was supposed to also guarantee a permanent alignment of the elite and the people and create something like divine power—providence. This was supposed to give Americans what they had always wanted, which had only been prevented by popular prejudice in favor of obsolete institutions like the Constitution or private corruption among various elite groups who stood to profit from their privileges. Under this new dispensation, the media elite was no longer engaged in the rough-and-tumble brawl over serious political ideas, but saw itself as the “objective” purveyor of truth emerging from the providential alignment of people and state. In reality, it transformed political thought into the increasingly unpolished mediocrity we resentfully receive today. Thus journalism ironically became something increasingly hard to distinguish from the most vicious kind of partisanship, zealotry, with this remarkable innovation, that it would be zealously enforcing the state imperative of the administration of justice.

We have obviously returned to our ancient roots in partisanship and that is to the good, because we can face our problems politically instead of trying to predict the movements of an almost divine state. But we must next learn that to be properly political, journalism must do more than merely address partisans, it must help them achieve political victory in the constitutional arrangement that defines American conflict. It has to be about enlightenment more than propaganda, despite the silly boasting that parades as success nowadays, which is so ephemeral that we see it frittering away as soon as we applaud it. Digital technology allows us to identify with a political opinion and associate with one another on that basis, something the TV era had suppressed. However, we have yet to understand how digital maps of American opinions and interests can be used to encourage belief in leaders as they prove themselves to the public—the proper job of political journalism.

The Education of the Mind

The most interesting fact about journalism in our time is that, of all people, tech billionaires are now agents of Enlightenment, pointing the way to the future. Elon Musk wastes his time posting memes on X, but also does propaganda for Enlightenment by opposing DEI and other mad elite projects such as “transing the kids” (proposing jail for trans-surgery) and talks earnestly to mankind about collapsing demographics. He has become an editor of the first rank, put otherwise. It’s somewhat difficult to distinguish the important things from the inevitable gossip that spreads on social media, but since it reveals again the importance of public sentiment, I suggest judging it in relation to national character. The people don’t always love the truth, but often enough they do and they just need journalists to work out their suspicions of elites in particular cases. The people decide their interests, but cannot do the work of proving their case. His acquisition of Twitter and his transforming it into X have changed American politics—but since journalism doesn’t exist, there is little serious writing done about the transformation of the media landscape and what it suggests for the future. Nor is this simply a problem of intelligence—though journalists are woefully uneducated—since it is also morally abhorrent to most of them that so many people online think of Elon and others as ancient heroes rather than mere capitalist exploiters of the oppressed.

The three waves of journalism have led to an impasse and institutional collapse rather than the construction of a forum where elite and public opinion can meet.

This new development has already become a trend and must later become a movement. Other less impressive tech billionaires are also on X, living not so much in the shadow of Elon as on his generosity. What is Elon selling on X? Reputation. An X account has two sides, depending on how you think of the users. For the ordinary American, there is a timeline—an algorithm has to fit user preferences (this could be judged by clicks, likes, reposts, replies, maybe even time spent, especially on articles or threads) to the available content. Obviously, this can never really work, not just because preferences and availabilities affect each other too much, change too readily, but because they are very vulgar images of more serious ways of achieving self-understanding.

Journalism is part of the project of the conquest of fortune—knowledge of particulars will help us make better decisions, serious reflection on it will help us predict the future, and turning our intelligent students of human affairs to this eminently practical concern is supposed to lend us some of their depth by transforming public discourse and thus public education. The twentieth-century model for achieving such Progress has collapsed; another project is now forming, requiring new leadership.

The secret of X is that for extraordinary Americans, they have a profile that gives them a roadmap for action. Their followers, impressions, and other statistics reflect an effort to assemble and motivate an audience, indeed an electorate. Every new achievement in popularity frees them from the vulgarity of the ordinary users, which becomes refined as a timeline curated by influential accounts, and also introduces them to similar accounts, a 1 percent of a 1 percent, where it becomes possible to associate for common purposes and thus to become representatives of a digital democracy. Success speaks for itself to a considerable extent, so major users can influence public sentiment instead of merely following it and, in some contentious moments, public opinion, by joining the people against elite media. Once they publish their opinions and publicly commit to supporting and opposing political activities, they also become publicly answerable, through community notes as well as ratios, and other mechanisms, and thus they will get the political education most of them missed when they turned to computers. America is the land of second chances, after all …

Maybe we should think of the most famous X accounts as America’s true Congress, hidden in plain sight. They’re certainly more intelligent than most congressmen and work a lot harder to understand what’s happening, so far as their followers are concerned. Elon’s transformation of the liberal seal of approval, the blue checkmark, into a subscription that gives popular accounts advertising money is not only a democratic revolution effected overnight, but also brings the platform closer to what a media business does, including Congress—after all, those guys spend a lot of time fundraising.

The three waves of journalism have led to an impasse and therefore institutional collapse rather than the construction of a forum where elite and public opinion can meet, negotiate, and find those agreements on which we can act. But we have also arrived at the beginning of a new project, to leave post-modernity behind and to use digital technology to help Americans associate again for common purposes, under freely chosen leadership and with a remarkable ability to improve on our worst institutional mistakes, substituting suppleness for the increasing rigidity of public discourse.

*****

This article was published by Law & Liberty and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Weekend Read: Nietzsche and Darryl Cooper Sitting in a Tree. . . thumbnail

Weekend Read: Nietzsche and Darryl Cooper Sitting in a Tree. . .

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By Conlan Salgado

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Tucker Carlson did a podcast with Darryl Copper. Since he is the most important historian (really??) of our times, I need not explain who he is. You already know. People such as other historians, journalists, and twitter emotes rushed to express their resentment, approval, and bemusement. The general sentiment from the mainstream right was: off with their heads.

I viewed this simply as Tucker’s first real attempt at retail punditry. If you’re not familiar with the phrase, it simply means a sort of cheap, persuasive packaging of ideas and thought, generally for the purpose of a mass audience which is fact-impoverished and poor in its ability to interrogate information. And no, I’m not an elitist. I’m an enthusiastic Walmart shopper.

Niall Ferguson wrote a fine article in response; Victor Davis Hanson wrote an even better one. But the best article of all on the topic was written by Mary Harrington, which she titled, “Darryl Cooper: Word War II Historian for the Woke Right.” The title gives you the idea of the thing; rather than shaming the historical sluttiness of Cooper’s assertions, she writes about the philosophy behind Cooper’s right-wing historical revisionism. I quote her at length:

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“And where contemporary Right-wing WWII revisionists set out to challenge the more modern Manichean account, it’s because they see how powerfully it contributes to shaping the contemporary political landscape. No Right-wing victory today is complete without an op-ed lamenting how the moment resembles “1930s Germany”; no debate over the wisdom of international conflict can pass without someone alluding to “appeasement”.  And, more importantly for such revisionists, WWII discourse functions overall as a powerful containment mechanism for the Right.”

There is powerful truth to this: the international Left has turned Nazism into a euphemism for “The Right”; one need only count the grains of sand in the world to know how many times Trump has been compared to Hitler, or MAGA voters to those dirty, racist, nazi, red-hat-wearing (probably) bastards who made up the Repub….., I mean, the Third Reich.

Darryl Cooper in fact admits as much; according to him, real right-wing values became impossible to support after the Nuremberg trials. That is to say, right-wingism itself, implies Cooper, was on trial in Nuremberg, and the International Left condemned it as guilty on all charges. The “manichean” version of WWII is the Left’s story of how the Right became fascist, genocidal, and altogether intolerable.

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Needless to say, I do not view Nazism as the authentic right-wing. However, I am trying to point out that Cooper, as a right-winger, has judged the Left as using WWII for its great story, or “myth”, in which the Right is the great force for evil and Globalism is the great force for Good. In Cooper’s mind, this story has been used to assassinate the characters of populist leaders, nationalist movements, and “right wing” values for 80 years. Thus he is trying to rewrite WWII. In his story, “the Right” is not as bad as everybody says it is. That great figurehead of Globalism, Winston Churchill, patron saint of Neo-cons, (yes, isn’t it ridiculous?), was the real villain of the Second World War.

Harrington has the insight to see Cooper’s project as very much in line with left-wing
revisionism, insofar as it is philosophical. Take, for example, the 1619 project. After all, the great conservative myth is the American Founding. Conservative values are those values predicated, in large part, on the founding. If one successfully destroys a myth, one successfully destroys a religion.

Conservatism is culturally weak because its stories, in the popular imagination, are lies. The American Founding was not a great accomplishment for the rights tradition, nor popular government. It was a compromise which allowed the moral atrocity of slavery, says the Left- wing yarnist with a sly, Darryl Cooper-esque smile.

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And there’s the rub: (Harrington took all my points before I could make them!). Cooper’s project is as postmodern as the revisionists of the left. “It’s also premised on broadly the same set of insights about the relation between historical narratives, ideology, and power as Left-wing “woke” revisionism, and particularly the crucial “woke” insight concerning the operation of power through language, narrative, and ideology.”

To reduce it to Nietzschean terminology, history is a function of power. That’s Cooper in a cracked nutshell. Of course, this says nothing explicit about the responsibility of Cooper’s project. I myself believe it a load of rubbish from the point of view of history, but found it to be primarily interesting as a piece of rhetoric.

I mean, consider this: Carlson and Cooper talked for two hours about terrorism in WWII without once mentioning the Holocaust. This is a strategy so bold, I cannot help but admire from a distance. It is indeed an advanced strategy, one exposited forthrightly in the Associated Press’ handbook for journalists: Elephant? What Elephant?

Consider the absurdity of this revisionist point: Tragic logistical circumstances forced the Nazis to kill 2 million soviet soldiers and tens of thousands of Jews and civilians. Cooper blames the Nazis for not having a plan “to take care” of, at the “end of the day”, these unfortunate millions, even if the Nazis had to invade and violate their non-aggression pact with Russia because of Romanian oil fields and Ukrainian neo-nazis and, like, really bad, bolshevik, crazy, zionist, sneaky, underhanded, jew-type stuff.

How to respond?

Together, let’s try an exercise from Elephant? What Elephant?. I’m going to quote from “Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia” issued by the German High Command, and you have to forget these words were ever written as quickly as you find possible:

“Bolshevism is the deadly enemy of the National Socialist German people. Germany’s struggle is directed against this subversive ideology and its functionaries. . . .This struggle requires ruthless and energetic action against Bolshevik agitators, guerillas, saboteurs, and Jews, and the total elimination of all active or passive resistance. . . .The members of the Red Army — including prisoners—must be treated with the most extreme reserve and the greatest caution since one must reckon with devious methods of combat. The Asiatic soldiers of the Red Army in particular are inscrutable, unpredictable, devious, and brutish.”

Or perhaps let’s try brief excerpts from “The Decree on Exercising Military Jurisdiction in the Area of Barbarossa and Special Measures by Troops”; you’re job is the same: wipe you’re mind without delay:

“Guerrillas are to be eliminated ruthlessly by the troops in combat or while escaping. . . . All other attacks by enemy civilians against the Armed Forces, its personnel and its retinue also will be suppressed on the spot by the troops with the most rigorous methods until the assailants are annihilated. . . .Where such measures were not taken or were not possible at first, suspect elements will be brought before an officer immediately. This officer is to decide whether they are to be shot. . .. Regarding actions committed by personnel of the Wehrmacht or its retinue against enemy civilians, there is no obligation to prosecute, even where the deed is at the same time a military crime or misdemeanor.”

Notice Cooper’s use of the phrase “take care of” the Soviet prisoners. Even if we grant fiction supremacy over fact and acknowledge Cooper’s version of events — that the Nazis were merely underprepared for the number of prisoners and even if we imagine a scenario in which millions of Soviets are not starved or shot, how would the Nazis have taken care of anybody? They Nazis were invading the Russians’ homeland, killing their relatives in uniform, raping them of their land, destroying crops, pillaging the wealth of the land. . . . and we’re supposed to believe that if the Soviets had only been well fed in the prison camps, the Nazis would have been justified for what they did in the East? This is not straight-faced, masculine lying. This is feminine insinuation of untruth. It makes Cooper worse than he would otherwise be in my own view. . . .

Oh well. Enough is enough. Falsehood is like a forest fire. It would be folly to try stamping it out; my one article cannot combat all the lies and half-truths. I can, however, observe elephants when I see them. Especially when they are on such a small table between two people doing a podcast.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

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Let’s Talk Decolonization thumbnail

Let’s Talk Decolonization

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By Bruce Bialosky

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

The new cool kids are all into it. They banter the term around all the time. It is either “decolonization” or “postcolonization.” They like to tell us it concerns their favored terrorist group—Hamas—even though the last colonists there were the Brits. With everyone talking about it, I thought I would look at how decolonization is going.

It worked well for us, the Americans. Pretty well for the Canadians until Pierre Trudeau unleashed his devil child upon them. The Aussies and Kiwis are doing well. Hong Kong was doing great until the barbaric Chinese took it over. Then matters start going downhill from there.

Of course, the rest of the world was ruled by other countries at various levels. There were the Romans, the Greeks, the Mongols, the Turks, the Macedonians, the Ottomans, and a slew of others who were set on ruling the world, but they were not known as “colonists.” The Russians took over Eastern Europe for a while, but they called all those countries under their draconian oversight “satellites.”

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Colonization seems to focus on the activities of European countries from the 16th century onward. It really focuses on any country where the native population is white. That is what the cool kids don’t seem to like – white people. We are used to having self-hating Jews. Now we also have self-hating white people.

I took a look at the countries that are considered to be colonized. They are for the most part in South America, then Asia and Africa. It is wherever European ships sailed and, by definition of the cool kids, took over an area from the ‘enlightened’ native populations and destroyed everything in their path by raping and pillaging the land. That is not exactly how it went, but don’t try and tell the cool kids that.

After doing my own investigation, I asked a series of smart, insightful people which countries were doing well post-colonization. We all agreed that the country that left their former colonies in the best shape was England. That is well defined by the countries identified above. It was a debate as to which country is the worst, Belgium or Holland. Certainly, the Congo is a perfect example of how well Belgium left things.

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I asked them which countries are doing well. The list is short. We agreed Hong Kong was doing great until it was destroyed by the Communist Chinese. We agreed upon Singapore and Vietnam. Not a lot of other countries.

These countries have had anywhere from 60 to 100 years to rule themselves with their enlightened native populations. That is 3-5 generations. Most have gone downhill or directly down the toilet when left to their own means. For example, Venezuela was the #1 economy in South America and now is a failed state. Argentina elected a sane person, but he is still trying to get his hands around inflation that was running at over 250%. Argentina has had more than a few coups after Juan Peron did a number on a country that had a strong economy.

Jamaica is a former British colony that represents a middling status post-colonization. Because of tourism, the country’s residents do ok. There has been a large amount of immigration to Canada, the UK, and the U.S. There are and have been travel warnings for Americans who go outside their resorts. Not necessarily a place you want to live. That is the best you can say for many of these countries.

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There are so many failed states amongst them they are too numerous to count. I carry in my pocket a 500,000,000 reserve note from Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe did a fine job of destroying that country. They finally converted to using U.S. dollars as their primary currency, along with eleven other countries as well.

There is barely a country in Africa that is a thriving, safe democracy. An expert in the area stated part of the reason that Egypt is unwilling to help Israel along the Philadelphi corridor in Rafah, it too is nearly a failed state and needs the revenue being brought in from smuggling supplies to Hamas. Then there is Libya. The Middle East has Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Algeria appears to be a country that had a short colonial period and is currently a successful state.

India has made some strides and this last election showed signs of reestablishing their desire to be a democracy. The neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh are disasters.

There are the current colonizers who are being ignored. Turkey has occupied Cyprus and Pakistan has occupied Kashmir. Then there is China which has colonized Mongolia and Tibet. But none of those countries are run by the dreaded white people.

The countries which were former colonies have had more than adequate time to establish themselves. Many have become autocracies or failed states. This is not a statement that they should revert to being colonies of European states. This is to say that these code words of “decolonization” and “post-colonization” are just excuses for their failures.

How long will the Left harbor that argument? The Left is constantly making excuses for the failings of these people instead of holding them to appropriate standards and blaming them for their own failings. And they will continue to blame it all on white people.

*****

This article was published by Flash Report and is reproduced with permission from the author.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Friends & Frenemies? thumbnail

Friends & Frenemies?

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By Marvin A. Treiger

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Tucker Carlson recently favorably praised and interviewed Darryl Cooper as one of the best historians around and as a podcaster with a substantial following. Tucker’s admired guest spouted off a Churchill-hating, Hitler-loving, anti-semitic distortion of history. For him, Churchill was “psychotic” and largely responsible for WWII, while Hitler was a deeply, misunderstood man of peace. Tucker’s reception of this idiocy in the interview would make Dana Bash blush. You can find the full interview here.

Tucker has made many important contributions to the conservative movement but has gradually, even before leaving Fox, started to drift into questionable positions. He is the proverbial boy who when “He is good, he is very good and when he is bad, he is very, very bad”. Perhaps this emerges in part from his sensationalist style of “journalism”. He often seems awestruck, with mouth agape, rendering his guests more profound than they are, and often succeeds in transferring that sentiment to his audience.

He had bugged me for a while but my suspicions came to a head around his broadcasts on the Russia/Ukraine war. I had understood there have always been legitimate criticisms of Ukraine yet I strongly opposed Putin’s invasion. What got me was Tucker mouthing Putin’s lies in almost the same words I had read and heard from pro-Russian commentators. It wasn’t even “decent” plagiarism.

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Trump, in contrast, went to the heart of it. He declared a quick end to military solutions through a negotiated settlement. He famously promised to end the war starting the first 24 hours of his Presidency with consequences for those continuing it. He wisely maintained strategic ambiguity but you could sense Trump’s hot breath towards Putin.

Putin has now come out for Harris over Trump and suddenly declared himself open for negotiations. To openly support one American candidate over another reveals Putin’s panic over a Trump victory. Tucker’s softball interview of Putin was an assist for the dictator in this battle.

Flash forward to the Cooper interview. Cooper’s phony history is turned to mincemeat in the VDH refutation of Cooper’s take on WWII. I highly recommend it.

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Cooper also posted in August of 2023, the following claim that God sent the Romans “to destroy the leprous temple and put an end to the Israelite religion for all time.” He is a thorough-going anti-semite which is likely to be informing his pro-Hitler views. Or perhaps, it’s the other way around. You can’t always know with these lunatics.

Jew Hatred is the Western world’s most ancient hatred. It rests below the surface ready to emerge with or without provocation. It has zero place in the MAGA movement and always has thanks to President Donald J. Trump and other true, patriotic conservatives. His policies towards Israel while in office, his lifelong behaviors towards the many Jews he has known and worked with and his beloved daughter Ivanka’s conversion to Judaism which he honored all attest to the authenticity of his convictions.

Donald Trump rests firmly in the mainstream of the conservative tradition which sees America as a Christian nation based upon Judeo-Christian values. This tradition goes back to George Washington and the Founding Fathers.

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The MAGA right is the answer to these harmful views in our historical moment. We must always make clear our distance from those such as Candace Owen, a “conservative” who has become a full-blown anti-semite. And we must separate ourselves from retrograde Christian positions so contrary to our mainstream and the authentic message of Christianity.

There is also a practical political reason to draw the line sharply. The left, specifically the communist left, which now operates through cultural Marxism and Wokeness, evokes the principle of the “united front against fascism”. This strategy has guided the left ever since Georgi Dimitrov, Stalin’s henchman, articulated it in 1935. Today it is called intersectionality on campuses. This trope is behind all attacks on the right and on Trump as a fascist or fascist enabler. Any links to Hitler’s beliefs or the holder of such beliefs are used to paint all conservatives with the same brush. It is a key component of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Tucker should quickly and loudly disavow Cooper. He is scheduled to do an interview with J.D. Vance shortly and you can bet that the longer Tucker remains in apparent admiration of a history revisionist Hitler lover, the longer the left will have a field day against the right seeking to fuse us into one big fascist movement in waiting.

*****

Image Credit: YouTube screenshot Tucker Carlson Network

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Harris/Obama/Biden leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Why the U.S. K-12 Education System is Failing: There are no more important reasons than this one… thumbnail

Why the U.S. K-12 Education System is Failing: There are no more important reasons than this one…

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By John Droz, Jr.

There are multiple flaws on our K-12 education system, but the undying one has rarely been discussed, much less analyzed and addressed.

The fundamental premise of the US K-12 education system is basically:

  1. We will teach your children a number of Facts in select subject areas (English, Math, Science, History, etc.).
  2. Spread out over the K-12 period, this will be what we call a Sound Basic Education.
  3. This Sound Basic Education will enable your child to: a) continue on for Higher Education [if they so choose], and b) be a productive, happy member of society.

On the surface this all sounds good and reasonable. However, a more thorough examination exposes the reality that this model is profoundly flawed in several fundamental ways.

  1. Who determines the “Facts” that will be taught? For example, what are the Facts regarding our energy options, climate change, the origins of the universe, American history, gender identity, etc? Our present system has been taken over by Left-leaning academics and activists, so Progressives dictate to K-12 students what the “Facts” are on key issues — even though many of them are in dispute.
  2. Critical Thinking is not taught. No State in the US currently has any statewide subject standards where K-12 students are formally taught how to do Critical Thinking. None. The reason for this purposeful omission is that Progressives do NOT want students questioning the suspect “Facts” they are told to accept.
  3. Worse, the opposite of Critical Thinking is being taught. The pervasive message is that students should be conformists. For example they should: defer to authority, follow what’s politically in vogue, adhere to consensus views, accept what computer models and projections say, etc. In all of these, the message is clear to students: “We do not need or want your thoughts on any societal matters, as computers and smarter people than you have given us proper direction.”
  4. The current Higher Education system is simply more advanced indoctrination. Once Critical Thinking has been squelched and Conformity has become the norm in K-12, it’s child’s play to up the ante.
  5. Nothing about this education system assures productivity. True productivity is based on such qualities as persistent effort, good efficiency, and creativity (part of Critical Thinking). The current system is creating lemmings by instead teaching entitlement and conformity, which are both anathema to real productivity.
  6. Nothing about this education system assures happiness. This can be made a complicated matter, but we are simplifying here. Happiness boils down to having a meaningful life. That comes about by embracing genuine values — e.g., Judeo-Christian. Instead children are infused with the corrosive idea of relativism (via SEL, etc.). This guarantees a mediocre country with inherently unhappy citizens.

Let’s make this very simple. The fight over the purpose of our education system can be boiled down to two radically different perspectives:

  • The Left believes that we should be teaching our children WHAT to think.
  • The Right believes that we should be teaching our children HOW to think.

For a few decades now the US K-12 education system has been following the Progressives Plan — primarily because no major Conservative organization is paying sufficient attention to the curricula issue. In this pivotal battlefield, the Right has surrendered to the Left!

Until this is fixed, America will continue a steady downhill descent.

Tragically we are quickly approaching the point of no return.

©2024. John Droz, Jr. All rights reserved.

Here are other materials by this scientist that you might find interesting:

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.org: discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info: multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2024 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time – but why would you?

22 WORDS is a compelling documentary that delves into the profound consequences of removing prayer and the Bible from American schools thumbnail

22 WORDS is a compelling documentary that delves into the profound consequences of removing prayer and the Bible from American schools

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By Dr. Rich Swier

22 WORDS is a compelling documentary that delves into the profound consequences of removing prayer and the Bible from American schools, as set in motion by a series of landmark court cases in 1962 and 1963.

Theose rulings have contributed to a decline in societal values, marked by rising divorce rates, teenage pregnancy, suicide, violent crime, and the growing acceptance of pornographic content and LGBTQIA+ agendas in schools.

As traditional moral anchors have been replaced by harmful content and agendas, 22 WORDS advocates for a cultural shift and bravely calls for the reintroduction of school-sponsored prayer and the Ten Commandments across the nation.

NOTE: This Documentary Releases on October 3rd at www.iknowGod.us/22WORDS

Subscribe John Amanchukwu’s YouTube channel for more updates on the release of this documentary!

©2024. 22 Words. All rights reserved.

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Artificial Intelligence and America’s Children

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By Linda Goudsmit

Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses asymmetric psychological and informational warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. America’s children are the primary target of the globalist predators.

It is time to take a look at what the globalists have in mind for little Johnny and Humanity 2.0. We begin with a history lesson provided by Dr. Michael Rectenwald in his April 14, 2023, article, “Hacking Humanity: Transhumanism“:[i]

The term transhumanism was coined by Julian Huxley, the brother of the novelist Aldous Huxley and the first director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In an essay entitled “Transhumanism,” published in the book New Bottles for New Wine (1957), Huxley defined transhumanism as the self-transcendence of humanity:

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature.1

One question for transhumanism is indeed whether this transcendence will apply to the whole human species or rather for only a select part of it. But Huxley gave some indication of how this human self-transcendence might occur: humanity would become “managing director of the biggest business of all, the business of evolution….”2 As the first epigraph to this Part makes clear, Julian Huxley was a proponent of eugenics. And he was the President of the British Eugenics Society.3 It was in his introduction of UNESCO, as the director-general that he suggested that eugenics, after the Nazi regime had given it such a bad name, should be rescued from opprobrium, “so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.”4 As John Klyczek has noted, “In the wake of vehement public backlash against the atrocities of the Nazi eugenic Holocaust, Huxley’s eugenics proper was forced to go under-ground, repackaging itself in various crypto-eugenic disguises, one of which is ‘transhumanism.’”5

Contemporary transhumanist enthusiasts, such as Simon Young, believe that humanity can take over where evolution has left us to create a new and improved species—either ourselves, or a successor to ourselves:

We stand at a turning point in human evolution. We have cracked the genetic code; translated the Book of Life. We will soon possess the ability to become designers of our own evolution.6

Transhumanism is simply the latest variation of globalist elitism and supremacist ideology, including its eugenics program disguised as “progress” and “evolutionary biology.” Rectenwald continues with references to Yuval Harari, the writer, historian, and children’s book author discussed in Chapter 33:

In a 2018 World Economic Forum statement, Harari spoke as the self-proclaimed prophet of a new transhumanist age, saying:

We are probably among the last generations of Homo sapiens. Within a century or two, Earth will be dominated by entities that are more different from us, than we are different from Neanderthals or from chimpanzees. Because in the coming generations, we will learn how to engineer bodies and brains and minds. These will be the main products of the 21st century economy.19

No longer capable of mounting a challenge to the elite as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and having no function, the feckless masses will have no recourse or purpose. Exploitation is one thing; irrelevance is quite another, says Harari. And thus, as Harari sees it, the remaining majority will be condemned to spend their time in the Metaverse, or worse. If they are lucky, they will collect universal basic income (UBI) and will best occupy themselves by taking drugs and playing video games. Of course, Harari exempts himself from this fate.

As for the elite, according to Harari, their supposed superiority to the masses will soon become a matter of biotechnological fact, rather than merely an ideological pretension, as in the past. The elite will not only continue to control the lion’s share of the world’s material resources; they will also become godlike and enjoy effective remote control over their subordinates. Further, via biotechnological means, they will acquire eternal life on Earth, while the majority, formerly consoled by the fact that at least everybody dies, will now lose the great equalizer. As the supernatural is outmoded, or sacrificed on the altar of transhumanism, the majority will inevitably forfeit their belief in a spiritual afterlife. The theistic religions that originated in the Middle East will disappear, to be replaced by new cyber-based religions originating in Silicon Valley. Spirituality, that is, will be nothing but the expression of reverence for newly created silicon gods, whether they be game characters, game designers, or the elites themselves.

1. Julian Huxley, “Transhumanism,” New Bottles for New Wine, London: Readers Union, Chatto & Windus, 1957, page 17.

2.  Ibid., page 13.

3.  “Past Presidents,” Adelphi Genetics Forum, August 10, 2022, https://adelphigenetics.org/history/past-presidents/. The Adelphi Genetics Forum was originally named the British Eugenics Education Society and was founded in 1911. It changed its name to the British Eugenics Society in 1926 and changed its name again to the Galton Institute in 1989. In 2021, it changed its name yet again to the Adelphi Genetics Forum.

4.  Julian Huxley, “UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy,” Unesdoc.unesco.org, 1946, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000068197, page 21.

5.  John Adam Klyczek, School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education, Trine Day, 2019, page 207.

6.  Simon Young, Designer Evolution: A Transhumanist Manifesto, Prometheus, 2005, Kindle Edition, Location 273.

19. World Economic Forum, “Will the Future Be Human? —Yuval Noah Harari,” YouTube, World Economic Forum, January 25, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL9uk4hKyg4.

The stunning hubris of the globalist elite is rivaled only by the danger of its collaboration with government. This collaboration between business and government is the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower warned the nation about in his 1961 Farewell Address:[ii]

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions…. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience…. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications…. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist….

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

President Eisenhower predicted the globalist enemy within. His prescient warning is now 21st-century reality and the existential threat to our constitutional republic. Eisenhower’s reference to research and the domination of the nation’s scholars is today’s politicized education industry that includes politicized law and medicine. From preschool to advanced degrees, ideological experts have indoctrinated Americans against America for seven decades. Indoctrinated graduates entered their chosen fields as “experts” who began indoctrinating the next generation, who then indoctrinated the next.

We are in the throes of an informational and psychological culture war. There are no bullets in this war. I often reflect on the saying “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Its profound meaning lies in the fact that thought precedes behavior. If you can change people’s thinking, you can change their behavior. It is the operating principle foundational to educational indoctrination and thought reform––the primary weapons of the information/psychological globalist War on America.

Weaponized education is bludgeoning society with anti-American collectivist ideology in every sector of life. The Marxification of education (Chapter 29) is enhanced with Artificial Intelligence (AI), the prize of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. AI is the medium and the message.

Educational reformer John Klyczek, referenced above in the Rectenwald article “Hacking Humanity,” is the author of School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education.[iii] Klyczek explores the hidden dangers of AI’s robot companions in his June 13, 2023, informational video, “Moxie and the Great Reset: How Moxie the Robot Uses GPT AI to Data-Mine Your Kids’ Socioemotional-Learning Algorithms.“[iv]

Moxie is the latest creation of California artificial intelligence company Embodied, which develops companion robots. Moxie, who looks like Star Wars‘ robotic droid R2-D2 but is able to communicate like the humanoid C-3PO, was originally designed as a robot companion for children with social and emotional deficits. Considered assistive technology, the premise was that the companion robot would help autistic and mentally retarded children with the anxiety they experience in human interactions.

Klyczek explains:

Moxie is marketed as a “Helping Friend” that substitutes human caretakers and replaces them as robo-babysitters that monitor disabled children during parent-therapist conferences…. Of course, over time, just like transhuman ed-tech, robotic AI ed-tech will eventually creep more and more into mainstream classroom integration until it is employed to boost competence outcomes for students classified as healthy and able-bodied.

Klyczek discusses the capability of augmented robot systems (ARS) for children’s storytelling activities. The ARS are able to measure children’s levels of satisfaction, sensory immersion, and media recognition. This is significant because these areas correspond to the CASEL wheel, discussed in Chapter 20, that measures Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). Satisfaction corresponds to interest, sensory immersion to engagement, and media [robot] recognition to empathy.

Klyczek exposes several areas of serious concern to parents:

  • Moxie will be expanded—used in general classroom for SEL goals
  • Data mining of student bio-psychometrics
  • Facial recognition for emotional reactions
  • Replaces human interactions
  • Using children to enhance manufacturer’s own GPT-AI capacity
  • Funded by WEF Partners Amazon, Intel, Sony, Toyota
  • Deeply entrenched in global corporate technocracy network with over 60 overlapping memberships between WEF and Trilateral Commission, Club of Rome, United Nations, World Bank, and Bilderberg
  • Represented at 2023 Bilderberg Meeting by Sam Altman, Microsoft, DeepMind (Google), Google
  • Moxie stores much of its data in Google Cloud
  • Moxie retains text files of whatever the child says before deleting the actual audio file
  • Moxie retains data points of facial expressions before it deletes the actual photo
  • Embodied retains access to all information even though it cannot link it to a specific user

The hidden goals of Moxie, the “Helping Friend,” are data mining your children, enhancing the AI capabilities of companion robots for the manufacturer, and grooming your children for interaction with robots rather than humans, and for life in the 21st-century globalist Unistate. The information collected is a treasure trove of data for social engineering in the classroom, and another surreptitious method of separating children from their parents without parental knowledge.

The political parallels between teaching whole-word reading and using augmented robots for teaching are disturbing. Both began and were marketed as systems to help children with disabilities. Both were (or, in the case of Moxie, will be) subsequently applied to normal children, with catastrophic outcomes, for political gain. As discussed in Chapter 5, the detrimental effects on children’s brains and their ability to actually read the written word in English were known as early as 1955, when Rudolph Flesch exposed the whole-word method as the culprit in his book, Why Johnny Can’t Read: and what you can do about it.

The damage done by the American education industry in its insistence on teaching children to read using whole words is well documented. Yet whole-word methodology continues and has been expanded from whole-word reading to the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child[v] model (WSCC) by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The CDC website describes WSCC in predictably glowing terms. It is essential for parents to recognize the staggering Marxist dualism in WSCC and its 10 Components. Parents are presented with familiar, constructive terms that do not at all mean what parents understand them to mean. For example, “integration and collaboration between education leaders and health sectors” is actually the collaboration between teachers, counselors, psychologists, sexuality instructors, etc., to indoctrinate American children in radical leftist norms. The “student-centered” approach is actually the total immersion of the students in anti-American, anti-family, anti-Judeo-Christian propaganda without parental knowledge. From CDC’s website:

Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC)

The education, public health, and school health sectors have each called for greater alignment that includes integration and collaboration between education leaders and health sectors to improve each child’s cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development. Public health and education serve the same children, often in the same settings. The Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) model focuses on the child to align the common goals of both sectors to put into action a whole child approach to education.

What is the WSCC model?

The Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child, or WSCC model, is CDC’s framework for addressing health in schools. The WSCC model is student-centered and emphasizes the role of the community in supporting the school, the connections between health and academic achievement and the importance of evidence-based school policies and practices. The WSCC model has 10 Components:

  1.  Physical education and physical activity.
  2.  Nutrition environment and services.
  3.  Health education.
  4.  Social and emotional climate.
  5.  Physical environment.
  6.  Health services.
  7.  Counseling, psychological and social services.
  8.  Employee wellness.
  9.  Community involvement.
  10.  Family engagement.

The CDC prides itself on the collaboration between government and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to finance its WSCC initiatives:

Funded Non-Governmental Organizations for Healthy Schools

Through the National Collaboration to Promote Health, Wellness, and Academic Success of School-Age Children, CDC Healthy Schools funds five national non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to complement and strengthen the work of State Public Health Actions grantees. These NGOs support the 1305 granteesand their organization’s constituents to promote and implement proven policies, practices, and programs in at least one of the following school health priority areas:

Priority Area 1—Physical Education and Physical Activity in Schools
Priority Area 2—School Nutrition Environment and Services
Priority Area 3—Out of School Time Healthy Eating and Physical Activity
Priority Area 4—School Health Services for Managing Chronic Conditions

The NGOs that support the following priority areas are:

CDC Healthy Schools also funds the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors (NACDD) to provide technical assistance and professional development activities that will build the capacity of state health departments. This will equip school health and education leaders with greater knowledge, skills, and abilities to implement proven strategies that create healthier environments for students. Initiatives such as these are essential to help leaders from across the country access practical tools and resources to promote the health [including mental health] of their student population.

SHAPE America (SHAPE is an acronym for the Society of Health and Physical Educators) is a particularly notable NGO. Its website, shapeamerica.org,[vi] proudly features its alignment with National Sex Education Standards:[vii]

National Sex Education Standards

SHAPE America is proud to have worked with the Future of Sex Education (FoSE) and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) as a contributor and reviewer in the development of the National Sex Education Standards: Core Content and Skills, K–12 (Second Edition). SHAPE America is also proud to officially endorse the final document.

These latest standards reflect advancement in research regarding sexual orientation, gender identity, social, racial and reproductive justice, and the long-term consequences of stigma and discrimination. Other additions include: advances in medical technology, the emergence of digital technologies and the growing impact of social and sexually explicit media on relationships.

Readers will remember that SIECUS is an ideological and political instrument for social change. SIECUS proudly describes its goals in the acknowledgements section of the National Sex Education Standards, second edition:

Through policy, advocacy, education, and strategic communications efforts, SIECUS advances sex education as a vehicle for social change—working toward a world where all people can access and enjoy their own sexual and reproductive freedom.

Parents need to understand the deceptive way words are being used. The definition of physical health includes sexual health, and the definition of sexual health is inclusive. “Inclusive” is defined by diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) standards, which means sexual health includes presenting transgenderism and every iteration of non-binary gender identification as normal variations on a theme of non-binary sexuality. Male/female heterosexuality is no longer the accepted norm; every conceivable form of sexual behavior, including pedophilia, is presented as a normal variation of inclusive sexual behavior.

There are no restrictions on sexual behavior or gender identity in a society that has been driven into subjective reality, where feelings rather than facts determine social policy. The entire American education industry is collaborating in the usurpation of parental authority by adopting CDC guidelines that are themselves aligned with the United Nations’ internationalized curricula for education, including sex education.

Child psychiatrist Dr. Miriam Grossman (Chapter 31) is an unapologetic and outspoken advocate for children’s mental health. She has written an essential book to help parents understand the horrific ideological collaboration between our weaponized education and judicial systems, particularly Child Protective Services (CPS). Together, they have redefined “mental health” in political terms, and are participating in a joint effort to replace parental authority with government-approved radical gender ideology.

CPS considers the homes of parents whose conservative views insist on the scientific facts of biology to be abusive and unsafe environments for children. CPS is empowered by the state to remove the children from the home and rehome them. This is an Orwellian reality, and extremely dangerous for the children, for their parents, and for America. Biological sex, gender, and sexual behavior have been weaponized in America by the enemies of freedom. The cultural terrorism that Hungarian Marxist George Lucács unsuccessfully attempted in Bolshevik Hungary in 1918 is effectively collapsing America from within in 2024.

Dr. Grossman’s book, Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness,[viii] is an essential tool for parents whose children remain in American schools, both public and private. The book begins with a Dedication:

This book is dedicated to the parents of kids with Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria and to the groups who support them.

I spoke with you from your cars, basements, and bathrooms. You huddled and whispered behind closed doors, as if seeking my help was criminal behavior. You’re not criminals, you are heroes. The criminals are the therapists, teachers, school counselors, and sex educators who indoctrinate your children with falsehoods, and the doctors who then disfigure and sterilize them. They are guilty of crimes. Their day will come. (p. ix)

Before the Introduction, Dr. Grossman includes A Note on Language:

We face a crusade, a juggernaut, that seeks to demolish male and female, and its success hinges on the control of language. Under those circumstances, to call a man “she” is not a kindness, it’s a concession—to a scheme to control our beliefs and advance an agenda, one pronoun at a time.

In this book, I emphasize that male and female, after being established at conception, are permanent. I urge parents to be honest and consistent with their children, and to at all times stay grounded in biological reality. I have always done that in my office, and I’m not going to stop now. (p. xxv)

Dr. Grossman continues:

For me this is a black-and-white issue. Most things in life are nuanced, but this is not one of them. This is—and here’s a word you don’t expect to hear from a doctor—evil. It’s evil to indoctrinate children and young adults with falsehoods and to drive a wedge between them and their loving parents. It’s evil to encourage them on a path that leads to harm. And it’s evil to describe it all as a journey to authenticity, and to entice children with glitter and rainbows….

The trans issue is not a debate with reasonable and moral people on both sides, it’s a war. It’s a destructive, cult-like crusade that targets your children 24/7; there’s hardly a place that’s free from indoctrination, slogans, flags, and emojis. You must gird yourselves with knowledge, confidence, and support and oppose the onslaught as much as possible….

Starting with new names and pronouns and ending too often in the operating rooms, the trans journey is an assembly line. One step leads to another, and it’s difficult to get off, so your goal is to prevent your child from ever climbing on…. (p. xxx)

I regret to inform you that with this matter, the sources you’ve always trusted—your child’s school, pediatrician, and therapist—will likely provide ideologically driven misinformation. They will direct you and your child down a perilous path….

I’ll explain that transgender ideology is a system of beliefs, like a religion. It has a unique language and [10] Articles of Faith. While the language and beliefs are bizarre, they are taught as sacred facts. The core belief––that biology can and should be denied—is a repudiation of reality…. (p. xxxi)

I will explain how the American Psychiatric Association (APA) reclassified gender disorders as normal variations of human expression—another dangerous idea. (p. xxxiii)

Articles of Faith

Behold GENDER IDENTITY; it liberated you from oppression, from the harsh constraints of biology.

GENDER IDENTITY is sacred; thou shalt not question it; thou shalt not turn away from it to hard science, for GENDER IDENTITY is jealous and cannot tolerate the scientific method.

Remember GENDER IDENTITY, to keep it holy. Behold, it is both fixed and fluid; healthy and needing drugs and surgeries; do not admit contradictions.

Thou shalt consider “male” and “female” arbitrary assignments; thou shalt deny their establishment at conception.

Thou shalt affirm all gender identities with all your heart and all your soul, so that you will be an ally and keep your livelihood.

Do not misgender [use a pronoun other than the one chosen by the adherent].

Do not deadname [use the adherent’s birth name].

Thou shalt not explore anxiety, ADHD, trauma, or autism; thou shalt always invoke the minority stress model [the hypothesis that sexual minority health disparities are produced by the social stress faced by sexual minority populations due to their stigmatized status].

Thou shalt honor the self-diagnosis and judgment of minors and young adults. Thou shalt not recognize their emotional and cognitive immaturity.

Gatekeeping is an abomination. Thou shalt therefore scorn psychotherapy, and place your trust in breast binding, penis-and-testicle-tucking, pills, patches, syringes, scalpels, implants, and prosthetics. (p. xxxx)

But of all the lies and dangerous ideas promoted, Dr. Grossman says the most pernicious one is that gender affirmation is the only safe and ethical treatment! If you don’t support your child, he’s at high risk of suicide.

Dr. Grossman explains that gender dysphoria (GD) is a symptom, and symptoms can be caused by a variety of conditions. Further, gender dysphoria is complex and is different at different ages of onset. She distinguishes three types of GD: adult-onset, early-onset in young children, and late- or adolescent-onset in teens and young adults. The resolution of gender dysphoria is called desistance. In 1994, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition, stated that “only a very small number of children with gender identity disorder [as it was called then] will continue to have symptoms…in later adolescence or adulthood.”

In other words, it is a stage of development that usually corrects itself without intervention. Before 2012, the onset of gender identity disorder was practically unheard of. In 2018, Dr. Lisa Littman, a Brown University physician, researcher, and academic, noticed an unusual trend in her small town. “Teens from the same friend group were announcing transgender identities on social media, one after another, on a scale that greatly exceeded expected numbers.” (Lost in Trans Nation, p. 40)

Dr. Littman began investigating and found that adolescents and young adults were suddenly experiencing gender dysphoria for the first time. She coined the term Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) to describe the new phenomenon. Dr. Littman theorized that “these kids may have rapidly adopted a transgender identity as a ‘maladaptive coping mechanism to avoid feeling strong or negative emotions.’” (Lost in Trans Nation, p. 41)

Dr. Littman was worried that the teens were not being screened for pre-existing and current mental health issues. Instead, they were being fast-tracked for gender affirmation and transition. Dr. Littman wrote about “cluster outbreaks” and explained them as “social contagion.” She discussed the limitations of her research, and strongly recommended further study and the careful evaluation of distressed teenagers before the use of treatments that have permanent effects such as cross-sex hormones and surgery.

Dr. Littman went further and confronted the gender establishment narrative, saying that social and medical affirmation may cause “an iatrogenic persistence of gender dysphoria in individuals who would have had their gender dysphoria resolve on its own.” (Lost in Trans Nation, p. 46) Iatrogenic is any harm caused by a medical intervention.

The medical community came out vehemently against Dr. Lisa Littman, in the same way it pilloried British gastroenterologist Dr. Andrew Wakefield when he questioned the safety of the multi-dose measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and its possible connection to autism in children. Instead of appropriately investigating Dr. Littman’s concerns, the medical and gender establishment attacked her and presented gender-affirming care as settled science—a particularly dangerous lie.

Dr. Miriam Grossman courageously exposes the institutional capture of American medicine by radical Marxist gender ideology. She denounces its resultant gender-affirming care as political medicine, which is endangering an entire generation of children with ideological medicine and ideological indoctrination in school.

Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness is an extraordinary examination of the transgender movement, its psychosocial dynamics, and its political purpose. The book concludes with helpful appendices of practical information and important suggestions for parents dealing with schools, CPS, therapists, and the Internet.

Dr. Grossman’s message is heroic and crystal clear: Parents must arm themselves with accurate information in order to protect their precious children from a “perilous social movement that erases ‘male’ and ‘female’ and aims to revolutionize what it means to be human.”

©2024. Linda Goudsmit. All rights reserved.

Please visit Linda’s Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and her website: lindagoudsmit.com

SOURCES.

[i]  Hacking Humanity: Transhumanism, The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda, Michael Rectenwald, World Encounter Institute, 2023; https://mises.org/wire/hacking-humanity-transhumanism

[ii]  Farewell Address; https://wp.lps.org/kbeacom/files/2012/08/Eisenhowers-Farewell.pdf

[iii]  School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education, John Klyczek, Trine Day LLC, 2019; https://www.schoolworldorder.info/

[iv]  Moxie and the Great Reset: How Moxie the Robot Uses GPT AI to Data-Mine Your Kids’ Socioemotional-Learning  Algorithms; https://www.bitchute.com/video/xJhbwYfyvNUG/

[v]  Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child; https://www.cdc.gov/healthyschools/wscc/index.htm

[vi]  shapeamerica.org; https://www.shapeamerica.org/

[vii]  National Sex Education Standards; https://www.shapeamerica.org/Common/Uploaded files/uploads/2021/standards/National-Sex-Education-Standards.pdf

[viii]  Lost in Trans Nation: A Child Psychiatrist’s Guide Out of the Madness, Miriam Grossman, Skyhorse Publishing, 2023;https://www.miriamgrossmanmd.com/about-4-2

*Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is is available in paperback, hardback, and eBook formats on barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com, and directly from Ingram in paperback.

Independent Women’s Law Center Files Amicus Brief in Sixth Circuit Against Ohio Schools’ Forced Pronoun Policy thumbnail

Independent Women’s Law Center Files Amicus Brief in Sixth Circuit Against Ohio Schools’ Forced Pronoun Policy

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By Editors of The Independent Women’s Forum

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Independent Women’s Law Center (IWLC), alongside the Manhattan Institute, on Monday filed an amicus brief before the en banc Sixth Circuit to challenge one of Ohio’s largest school district’s policies that require students to profess the belief that men can become women, including by using “preferred pronouns.” IWLC argues the school board’s pronoun policies violate the First Amendment by forcing many students to speak contrary to their beliefs that sex is binary, and women are biologically distinct from men. The brief emphasizes that using biologically accurate sex-based pronouns is necessary to preserve females’ private spaces.

In Parents Defending Education v. Olentangy Local School District, the pro-parent group sought relief from the policies, arguing they violate the First Amendment. The District Court for the Southern District of Ohio denied the pro-parent group’s request for a preliminary injunction, concluding that biologically accurate pronouns create “a threat of physical harm” among other things. On appeal, a Sixth Circuit panel upheld the decision of the district court, and Parents Defending Education has filed for a rehearing before the entire Sixth Circuit.

“Forcing the use of the biologically incorrect pronouns is the first step towards allowing males to intrude on females’ private spaces, including locker rooms, restrooms, social clubs, and living quarters,” IWLC says in the brief. For example, in IWLC’s case Westenbroek v. Kappa Kappa Gamma, Kappa leadership asserted that “woman” in Kappa’s bylaws meant “man.” The brief continues, “Using female pronouns for males endorses and reinforces the harmful falsehood… that the term ‘women’ can mean men. Males who refer to themselves as female then can and do insist on access to all girls’ and women’s spaces and programs.”

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IWLC argues that saving female pronouns for females preserves women’s sports by dismantling the idea that some males are females. In contrast, the Ohio school board’s “policies would lead to the normalization of boys in girls’ spaces, severely harming those girls,” IWLC concludes in the brief.

“In any society that respects female empowerment, girls should be permitted to acknowledge biological sex in schools, which is not only in line with reality, but is necessary to preserve sex-based spaces, rights, and privacies. Schools cannot force us to play the pronoun game, which only leads to the dissolution of protections for women,” said May Mailman, director of Independent Women’s Law Center. 

“There are two sexes—male and female—and this shouldn’t be a matter of controversy. Contrary to popular myth, no one can change his or her sex, and the movement to erase the legal significance of sex, including the use of biologically incorrect pronouns, leads to the erasure of women,” said Beth Parlato, senior legal advisor of Independent Women’s Law Center. 

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“I’m delighted to partner with IWF on this brief. Schools should simply not be punishing common word usage based on deeply held personal beliefs and scientific evidence,” said Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Mr. Shapiro was recently investigated by his employer, Georgetown University, for speaking on a matter of important public debate and is an advocate for free speech.

A copy of the amicus brief can be found here.

*****

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This article was published by the Independent Women’s Forum and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

A Subscriber’s Perspective on U.S. K-12 Education. With an interesting comparison to our European counterparts… thumbnail

A Subscriber’s Perspective on U.S. K-12 Education. With an interesting comparison to our European counterparts…

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By John Droz, Jr.

I get LOTS of correspondence — typically 200 to 300 emails a day. I try to read most of them, but I do have a life otherwise.

I’ve decided to periodically post an email I receive if it covers something slightly different than I have discussed, and I think it would be of general interest to my Substack readers. Here is a recent good example from a Professional Engineer…

Hi, John,

I greatly appreciate your good work.

My comments are about the NASA article (in your last Media Balance Newsletter) regarding uncreative behavior being learned in school.

In his seminar, “Creative Problem Solving,” the late Victor Papanek (best known as the author of Design for the Real World), told us that 90% of children entering school are inquisitive and creative, and that after first grade, the ratio switches: only 10% retain their inquisitive and creative traits!

In my own family, my mother observed that all three of us children were inquisitive and creative before starting school, but while those traits in me seemed to be accelerated by my school experience, both my brother and sister had traumatic experiences in first grade that resulted in a significant loss of those traits. My mother had the opportunity to investigate two of our teachers some years later. She found that students who had my first-grade teacher typically graduated high school in the top quarter of their class. In contrast, students who had my sister’s first-grade teacher typically graduated high school in the bottom half of their class.

The matter became of direct interest to me when my son was in first grade. His mother and I were able to effectively counteract the destructive methods of his teacher, and were relieved when in second grade his natural creativity was enjoyed and encouraged by his teacher. This positive experience helped him to weather occasional mediocre teachers in the years that followed, and I am happy to report that he continues to be an inquisitive and creative adult.

Partly due to my son’s rough start, I ran for a seat on the school board. During my 12 years on that board, I discussed this topic with several educators, all of whom affirmed that this inversion of inquisitive and creative traits after first grade was well known to them. (My local administrator was the first, and when he nodded in agreement, I immediately asked about the continued assignment of a particular teacher to first grade. I was not the only board member who had been prompted to seek election after having a child experience that teacher.)

NASA broke new ground in the 1960s, with their study conducted by the then-young George Land. After that study was done, Dr. Land did further research, concluding that the problem is systemic and ongoing. He spent his life pursuing ways to remediate the ill effects of public school education. His work inspired others so that today there are numerous post-school programs to help folks regain their natural creativity.

In my view, one of the roots of the problem is the U.S. approach to schooling. Here is an area of public policy where we truly could improve life in the U.S. by emulating the Europeans.

A fundamental difference between U.S. and European public schools is in teacher education requirements. While in the U.S., the easiest course of study at all levels—Bachelor’s to Ed.D—is in education, European nations take an entirely different tack. First off, there is no push to get everyone into the university. On the contrary, every effort is made to make sure only well-qualified and committed students are admitted. The statistics are difficult to nail down, but a case can be made that getting into the universities requires being in the top 5-10% of the student population.

Next, “Education” is not a field of study. All teachers earn degrees in academic fields. The small-town German Mittelschule (not college preparatory) I attended, had at least two teachers with PhDs. My homeroom teacher had a PhD in geography. Our history teacher had a PhD in that field. Our physics/chemistry teacher had schoolmates who were at the Max Planck Institute. To teach a foreign language, one had to earn a degree in it, of course, but also have a year of study at a university in a country where that was the official language. Our English teacher had spent a year at Oxford. Our French teacher had spent a year at Strasbourg.

There were major differences in curriculum, too. Here in the States, we had six periods a day—one of which was a study hall—and every day’s schedule was the same. In the Mittelschule, we had school Monday through Friday and half a day on Saturday. The curriculum was the same for everyone. There were five core subjects, which met five times per week. There was a second tier of subjects that met four times, then there were classes that met twice. All told, we had something like a dozen subjects. This broad curriculum encompassed a well-balanced education: math, science, history, languages and literature, art and music, religious instruction, athletics, and wood shop (for the boys).

[ … ]

One of the subtle side effects of the fundamental difference in academic preparation of teachers, is that ALL the teachers in German schools had been gifted students, while FEW of the teachers in U.S. schools had been. As a consequence, teachers in German schools readily identify and encourage gifted students. Even though my school was not college preparatory, there were gifted students in my class who were encouraged to take the bridge year and entrance exams to attend the university. One is a chemical engineer, another majored in geography, and a third earned his PhD.

In contrast, teachers in U.S. schools generally do not do well with gifted students. I believe this is rooted in the fact that not being gifted themselves, they cannot relate to gifted children. Additionally, the curricula are not encouraging to gifted students.

The result is that gifted students have unmet needs that compound over the years. As a school board member, this was a continuing source of vexation for me. When budget cuts had to be made, the gifted program—such as it was—would be the first thing to get trimmed, until it was finally eliminated altogether.

There are exceptions, of course. The school system that serves Princeton University faculty children is an example. My hometown (Bartlesville, OK) has fallen on hard times, but when I was coming up through school there, the management of Phillips Petroleum Company was intent on recruiting and retaining the top talent from the nation’s best universities. As a result, we had—with the exception of a few teachers, as noted—amazingly good schools, with ample encouragement and opportunity for gifted students.

Clearly, a commitment to good schools by local power brokers helps, but after it got going, in Bartlesville, it was in large measure self-sustaining. My grade school of 400 students had a gymnasium packed with parents for the monthly PTA meetings. My parents got sitters for us, so they could both go. Parents were activists.

Sadly, that was then, and this is now.

What we face nationally goes far beyond a concern with robbing children of their inquisitive and creative traits. There is an organized effort to standardize schools in the U.S. so they share a common curriculum objective. We must be aware of and then closely examine those objectives, which are often hidden.. We must ask who the people and groups are that are doing this. We must ask who is funding them. This is all the more urgent because of what has been found in US K-12 subject standards (like Science) and because of their widespread adoption.

Under the Clinton administration, Congress enacted Goals 2000 in 1994, an outcome-based education initiative that codified certain National Education Goals and offered grants to states that committed themselves to specified reforms.

In 1996, the governors of 43 states, together with one corporate CEO from each state held the National Education Summit which created Achieve, a business organization reportedly “to help states raise academic standards, improve assessments, and strengthen accountability.” Achieve was instrumental in coordinating the development of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) introduced in 2013, which are comprehensive for K-12 school programs.

Nearly parallel to this development was that of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) sponsored by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers and introduced in 2010.

These standards have been adopted by numerous states — 49 in the case of the NGSS. The Achieve organization has been the subject of at least one critical review, “The Organization Named Achieve: Cradle of Common Core Cronyism,” by Richard P. Phelps.

It is well known that leftist political and economic agendas are not popular. To get elected, leftist politicians regularly claim to champion “centrist” positions, even masking their true intentions once in office by various forms of subterfuge. They have several strategies for gaining and keeping power, one of which is to change the nature of the voting population by changing the nature of public education.

Training children to be conformists and to trust the opinions of publicly acclaimed experts helps rid the electorate of folks with critical thinking skills. An examination of the 400± page foundational document (A Framework for K-12 Science Education – 2012) reveals that it heavily promotes compliance with political correctness — e.g., an entire chapter on Equity.

Beyond the 3R’s (readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmatic), the most important objective of an education must be the teaching and cultivation of Critical Thinking. The subject area of Science is the best place to introduce and nurture it. Scientists are naturally questioners, and Critical Thinking is largely about questioning.

To ensure that our children gain the skills they will need to be informed citizens, we must continually assess the curricula in our schools and demand that they not falter in pursuing this objective.

Hope you found this worth reading!

David W. Pennington, PE
Marathon, Florida

ABOUT DAVID W. PENNINGTON

David W. Pennington is a long-time licensed Professional Engineer whose field is mechanical engineering. His experience in school encouraged his creativity, broadened the spectrum of his interests, and provided him with ever more tools with which to pursue them. While employed by a major medical device company he was a part of teams that produced intellectual property covered by 12 U.S. patents. In addition, David submitted over 30 invention records detailing his original ideas.

©2024. All rights reserved.

Here are other materials by this scientist that you might find interesting:

Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.

WiseEnergy.org: discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.

C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.

Election-Integrity.info: multiple major reports on the election integrity issue.

Media Balance Newsletter: a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education, renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2024 Archives. Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time – but why would you?

Why aren’t governments tackling the epidemic of sexual abuse in America’s public schools? thumbnail

Why aren’t governments tackling the epidemic of sexual abuse in America’s public schools?

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By MercatorNet – A Compass for Common Sense

This week the Washington Post ran a long feature about a school police officer in South Carolina who has been accused of several sexual assaults on high school girls. It turns out that more than 200 police officers have been charged with child sexual abuse between 2005 and 2022.

These officers are patrolling schools to prevent mass shootings. But a few bad apples amongst them have been sexual predators. “The Justice Department and many law enforcement agencies and school systems have failed to take basic steps to prevent sexual misconduct and root out abusive cops,” the Post claims.

The tragic thing is that these allegations come as no surprise. It is just the latest in a steady trickle of stories in the media about sexual abuse in American public schools. No doubt the problem is similar in other countries. The difference is that collecting meaningful information about abuse in schools is far more difficult in the US because of its sheer size and the number of jurisdictions – 50 states plus the District of Columbia and other territories, divided into more than 13,000 school districts.

Three articles by journalist James Varney for RealClearInvestigations highlight a massive problem which emerges from time to time but has never been comprehensively studied. He writes: “For a variety of reasons, ranging from embarrassment to eagerness to avoid liability, elected or appointed officials, along with unions or lobbying groups representing school employees, have fought to keep the truth hidden from the public.”

Lack of data is a consistent problem which seems almost insurmountable. Last year a journalist for Business Insider dug into the issue after he discovered that the public high school which had attended in southern California had become “a stalking ground for child predators”. He concluded that “shoddy investigations, quiet resignations, and a culture of secrecy have protected predators, not students”.

How many victims?

How many children have been abused in American schools? It’s impossible to put a number on it. A tally of newspaper reports would leave out the teachers and school employees who have been quietly dismissed or who are never reported.

However, Varney writes that “Given the roughly 50 million students in U.S. K-12 schools each year, the number of students who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees is probably in the millions each decade, according to multiple studies. Such numbers would far exceed the high-profile abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America.”

Millions? This certainly dwarfs the abuse problem in the Catholic Church, which has been pilloried for shielding abusive clergy from the law.

The key study of the prevalence of sexual abuse in public schools is 20 years old and controversial, but it raises questions which remain unanswered.

In 2004, Charol Shakeshaft, of Hofstra University, was commissioned by the US Department of Education to analyse the extent of sexual abuse in public schools. She relied upon surveys by the data collected for American Association of University Women. Her methodology is not above criticism, but what she found is still being used as a reference point. And it is deeply disturbing.

Shakeshaft found that 9.6 percent of all students in grades 8 to 11 reported unwanted sexual misconduct by school employees. “Misconduct” covered a wide range of behaviours, from jokes to touching to leering to rape. If that percentage is correct, she calculated that “more than 4.5 million students are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade”.

Around the same time, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops released the results of an independent study of abuse by clergy. The John Jay Report found that between 1950 and 2002, 10,667 people made allegations that priests or deacons had sexually abused them as minors.

“So we think the Catholic Church has a problem?” Shakeshaft said in an interview with Education Week in 2004. “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.” Presumably she meant the number of victims, not the rate of offending.

The cover-up

Numerous reports have declared that the cover-up of clergy sexual abuse has been worse than the crime itself. The UK’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, published in 2022, is one amongst many. It found that:

“The protection of personal and institutional reputations above the protection of children was a frequent institutional reaction. Statutory agencies were not informed, perpetrators were ‘moved on’ and there were failures by those in authority to thoroughly investigate allegations. Records about child sexual abuse allegations were not kept.”

When a grand jury released a report on sexual abuse in the state of Pennsylvania in 2018, it said that the Catholic Church had developed “a playbook for concealing the truth”. That report was badly flawed, as Mercator pointed out at the time, but the metaphor is a useful one. American public schools are using that playbook. Amongst educators, it’s called “passing the trash” – abusers are quietly dismissed and allowed to move to another school district where they abuse again.

Billie-Jo Grant, of California Poly State University, an expert on school abuse, told Varney that the federal Department of Education (DOE) “does not and never has tracked sexual misconduct committed by adults against students. DOE has never aggressively worked to stop teachers’ unions and administrators from passing the trash. DOE does not hold accountable the many enablers who have created a pool of mobile molesters in our schools nationwide.”

“Passing the trash” is “a shockingly frequent phenomenon in America’s public schools,” according to a 2023 study by the Defense of Freedom Institute. It also cites research by Billie-Jo Grant in which she found that abusive teachers will be passed to three different school districts before they are fired or charged by police and can have as many as 73 victims.

There are laws on the books to ban this practice, but they are ineffective. Activists are lobbying for model legislation called the SESAME (Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation) Act. Progress has been slow; only a handful of states have passed it.

The common thread

Outrage over abusive clergy and cover-ups by bishops in the Catholic Church is understandable. The Church sets the moral bar high for its faithful and they deserve to have exemplary pastors. The vast majority of priests are, and have always been, upright and decent men and in recent years the incidence of abuse has declined sharply. But the scandal of predatory priests, negligent bishops and the ruined lives of children cries out to heaven for vengeance. The Church’s tarnished reputation may be part of its atonement for these offences.

However, it is incomprehensible that public school systems in the United States and other countries, like Australia and the UK, have learned nothing from that disaster and are not scrutinised with the same vigour. This negligence makes one suspect that most governments, federal and state, are more interested in weakening Christian churches than they are in protecting students. This places children at risk. As one activist told Varney, “we are not mandated to send our children to church; we are mandated to send them to school.”

It’s not just a question of fairness. Over the past few decades, an epidemic of child sexual abuse has swept through institutions in Western countries, from churches to the Boy Scouts to public schools. The Catholic Church is definitely not an outlier. There may be a deep cultural problem in our society which we are afraid to face – we no longer understand what our powerful sexual drives are for. As a consequence, they are flailing about like live electric wires and innocent children get burnt.

Until governments come to grips with this and stop using churches as whipping boys, the problem will continue unabated and millions of children will be hurt.

Have you had any experience with sexual abuse in government schools?

AUTHOR

Michael Cook

Michael Cook is editor of Mercator

EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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