It also drives people like Beni Sanders. He’s never run anything in his entire life or built anything or done anything out of a political office. But he thinks that he could make a socialist system work. “True Socialism has never been tried” is the rallying cry. Been tried on every continent except Antartica and Australia and it came close to the latter. What they are really saying is those other dumb guys couldn’t do it but I’m so smart that I can do it. He can’t.

The trouble is that is the way they all think. I am so much smarter then fillintheblank that I can fillintheblank where the other fillintheblank couldn’t. That’s why it lives eternal and no matter how many failures and dead bodies it racks up.

You can vote yourself into it, but you generally have to shoot your way out of it.

There are occasional exceptions (USSR, anyone?), but that’s not the way to bet.

https://cbradleythompson.substack.com/p/the-fundamental-issue-of-our-time

America’s moms and dads are mad as hell, and, apparently, they’re not going to take it anymore. They have risen up to assert their rights as taxpayers and their first amendment rights to assemble and speak their minds. More fundamentally, though, they are also asserting their rights as parents.

In reaction to this spontaneous, grassroots rébellion des parents, America’s Ruling Class has been forced to reveal for the first time* its deepest philosophic and political commitments.

Who Has the Right to Educate America’s Children?

On September 28, Terry McAuliffe shocked voters in Virginia and around the country when he said in a gubernatorial debate with his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Virginia voters understood immediately the meaning of McAuliffe’s statement. The aspiring repeat Governor seemed to be saying that parents do not and should not have a “right” to determine what their children are taught in school, which means that America’s Education Establishment (i.e., the state and federal departments of education, teachers’ unions, teacher-training institutions, school board associations, textbook and curriculum companies) has the “right” to determine the content of your child’s mind.

The moment was clarifying. In an instant, all of the particular education issues that Americans have been debating for the last few years (e.g., mask mandates, online learning, Common Core, CRT, transgenderism, pronouns, bathroom policies, and pedophilic pornography, etc.) became secondary to a more fundamental question: Who should determine the cognitive content of America’s children, parents or government officials? More to the point, the question is: Do parents have an unalienable right to determine how, in what, and by whom their children will be educated, or should the government have that right?

There is no more important question in American politics than this one. Our answer to it will determine the fate of the republic.

The American Left (aided and abetted by some conservatives) believes that the government, not parents, should determine the content of a child’s mind—their ideas, their principles, and their values. A few weeks after McAuliffe’s tone-deaf faux pas, two authors writing in The Washington Post summed up the Left’s position in the title of their op-ed: “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.” Parents should have neither the right nor the authority, according to the Post’s writers, to determine the ideas taught to their children. This task should be left to the “experts”—to the experts of the Education Establishment. The authors go on to claim that “education should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of their parents.” The question never addressed by the authors, however, is what happens when young people want to think for themselves and learn about ideas different from those taught by the government?!?! This option is, of course, strictly verboten.
….
The purpose of this Star Chamber [Biden’s DOJ in response to NSBA letter that they crafted themselves] will be to “determine how federal enforcement tools can be used to prosecute these [imaginary] crimes.” To be clear, the primary “crimes” committed by these parents include asserting their rights to free speech and assembly in order to oppose what is being taught in the government schools.

This is almost certainly one of the worst abuses of government power in the history of the United States. The Biden Regime has turned the full apparatus of America’s Security State against ordinary American citizens who are challenging the hegemony of the Education Establishment.

But this story is actually worse—much worse—than I first reported here last month in my essay, A Declaration of War. It turns out that the NSBA wrote its letter with the assistance, if not at the behest, of the White House! This means the Biden White House almost certainly organized and launched a coordinated attack against American parents.

But the question is, why? Why would the Biden administration want to unleash the full force of the Leviathan State on regular parents voicing their opinions at school board meetings?

The answer is simple: because the Left’s single most important ideological-political possession is its control of America’s K-12 ** education system, and the only thing getting in the way of its total hegemony over the minds of America’s children is America’s parents, who are now asserting their rights and their authority over the minds of their school-age children.

It’s Do or Die

This is why the single most important issue in American politics today is the question of “rights” and education. To repeat the fundamental question: Do parents have an unalienable right to determine how, in what, and by whom their children will be educated, or does the government have the right and authority to educate America’s children?

The answer to this question represents America’s Alamo. This is where the final battle will be fought. If we lose this battle, the republic is gone. If we win, we can begin to reclaim the rights and freedoms that have been taken from us over the course of the last century.

Thompson fills the ellipses with other examples, exhortations, warnings, and so forth.
Worth a read & a ponder & a passing along.

*of course, this is not the first time their machinations were revealed — cf. Dr. Dodd 1953 — but it may be the first time THEY have broadcast their intentions without subterfuge.

**which they now want to extend even further, into pre-K and childcare, since they already own higher education.

Just more rationalize China and rank down America. Not impressed. And more of your “Muh ‘muh Constitution’.”

It’s an easy game to play. If you want intelligent and informed debate, I suggest you start at home.

Also you might consider that GloboHomo is arm-and-arm with China. At some point I don’t see how your arguments in favor of China don’t lead to favoring GloboHomo and making the trains run on time here, once American conservatives are pragmatically crushed in favor of national stability.

Gleichschaltung, Baby! It’s supposed to work in the other direction if my memory is correct.

Mind you, this notion that you *can* teach children objectively is why you keep losing. You cannot. It’s back to Who Whom. If you don’t teach the little @#$^ers highly subjective material which advances your agenda, well then someone else will teach them highly subjective material which advances their agenda(s).

You can’t *not* have a state religion or ideology. If you have a state religion of ‘Open-mindedness’ it just means that you’ll be over-run by heretics whom your religion does not permit you to burn. Very Silly.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/11/how-much-lower-can-higher-education-sink.php

This is what Bella Dodd said in her Congressional testimony in 1953. It only takes one generation to skew an institution, and we have now had several.
It’s a long excerpt, but it describes a lot of the situations that we’ve been discussing the last few years about the decline of education in general.
[the numbers are reference points in the transcript, and I didn’t fix all the weird line breaks]

https://unconstrainedanalytics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Bella-Dodd-June-July-1953-HUAC-Testimony-1.pdf

Mr. CLARDY. Did Communists, and did you when you were working with the Communists, make use
of teachers to infiltrate political organizations?
Dr. DODD. Teachers are an extremely valuable part of the Communist Party.
First, they are great people for raising money and contributing money to the party. Secondly, they are an articulate group and good to look at. You can send them into any organization, and they can
stand on their own two feet and speak up and be heard. One of the things we did was to use teachers in the various political parties.
In New York State, we used them in the American Labor Party, and in the Progressive Party. There have been places where we sent them into the Democratic Party or the Republican Party to operate as Republicans and Democrats, you know, but to operate as Communists within their organizations.
Mr. CLARDY. How do Communists on a college campus function? [1767 – 1768]
Dr. DODD. Where there was a unit of at least three or more members, they would meet regularly and
function as a unit. They would get instructions from the person in charge of the county or city on
which the campus was located. They would pay their dues to that person. At their meetings, they would discuss first the party line, get education on the Marxist-Leninist line and, second, they would discuss the question of how to penetrate other organizations. …. The party has to get out a lot of literature. Much of the research was work done by the members on the campus to be sent in and used as the party saw fit.
If the party wanted to issue something on the monetary system or on the question of immigration, or some other question or whatever it might be, the people who were specialists on the college campus were asked to send in research material.

Mr. KUNZIG. How would the Communist professor attempt to influence students and other people?
Dr. DODD. Well, as I said before, communism is a way of life, and it is almost like a religion. It becomes a part of you. It affects your entire thinking. It affects your attitude toward your students, toward your
government, affects your attitude toward things that are happening day by day. Most Communist college professors begin by being very much interested in their students, and if they have a Communist philosophy, they pass it on.
Many of them try to influence their students to become Communists. Any number of students have become Communists because they admired a professor who was going in that direction. Then he functions within all the other organizations on the campus in affecting their thinking, the question of choosing books for the library, the question of establishing curricula for the college.
For instance, if you go through the catalogs of various colleges of America, you find from the period of 1925 to about 1948 or 1949 that most of the colleges, for instance, have dropped all their courses on ethics or religion; you will find most of the colleges dropped their courses — even the law schools dropped their courses — on constitutional law. …. If your law schools drop their courses on constitutional law, how much more do the
liberal arts colleges do it? Within the Constitution, within the Bill of Rights, we are very fortunate in that they were written at a particular time by a particular group of men. We have the whole [1768 – 1769] genius of the American type of government. Unless the American people understand it and appreciate it, they can’t fight to defend it. When the Communists come along with something that seems so superior,
they have nothing with which to oppose it.

….

Mr. KUNZIG. Why are teachers, above all, so desired by communism?
Dr. DODD. Well, I guess the Communists know that the old people living in America today are not
going to make the revolution. They are not the people who are going to count. They count on the young people, and those who control the youth are the people who control the future of this ountry.
Mr. CLARDY. That is the reasoning that Hitler used, isn’t it?
Dr. DODD. That is the reasoning that any people have who are out to control.

Mr. CLARDY. Seize the minds of the youth, and you will have them in due course to control the Nation?
Dr. DODD. For better or for worse. I am for the Americans seizing the minds of the youth and giving them standards to live by which are part of the western culture.
….
Dr. DODD. I certainly believe the American people have got to stop fooling around with just fighting
communism in the abstract. They have got to know what the thing means, why they are against it, and
how to fight it.
….
Mr. CLARDY. I learned one thing in the hearings at Los Angeles that still has me staggered. It was to the effect that the Communists [1769 – 1770] actually took nursery rhymes and treated them to follow the party lines so they might seize the mind of youth even in the kindergarten stage?
Dr. DODD. That is not unusual, is it? After all, if you are going to seize the minds of children, you seize
them as early as possible.

That is one of the things the Communists have done. I am for nursery schools for working women,
certainly, but the Communists have come out with a program for nursery schools for everyone.
In the nursery schools, you begin by affecting the children by emphasizing material values. You
eliminate, for instance, from the nursery school rhymes and anything that has to do with religion.
….
Dr. DODD. There is no doubt about the fact that the first enemy of the Communist is a belief in the fact
that you are created by a Divine Creator. That they have to get rid of before anything else. If they
can wipe that out, then it is easy, because if you don’t believe in a God, all you believe in is better material advancement, and the Communists promise greater material advancement for all.
…
Mr. KUNZIG. Dr. Dodd, teachers, then, obviously play an important part in the Communist scheme of
things in teaching youth. ….
Dr. DODD. But, by and large, teachers are used. Intellectuals are used because the Communist Party distrusts all bourgeois education. ….
While they use it all the time, they are contemptuous of bourgeois education. … If you had an education, you really became a little embarrassed about it.

I remember at that time asking Alexander Trachtenberg about this phenomena, and he said that was just so much talk, that Stalin studied for the priesthood, and Lenin was a lawyer. That gave me a sense of the dishonesty of it, then, that they would constantly belittle themselves to emphasize the fact that proletarians were capable of rising to leadership.
Mr. KUNZIG. Did you try to infiltrate not only teachers in universities and also infiltrate teachers’
schools — in other words, teachers who taught the teachers?
Dr. DODD. The rule was, wherever possible, you made contacts and you tried to place people into
positions of influence.
Communists don’t like to be in jobs which don’t have influence. They don’t like ordinary workers’ jobs.
Mr. CLARDY. They are seeking after power, aren’t they?
Dr. DODD. Yes. Teachers’ institutions are very powerful institutions because if you are teaching teachers, and they go out and teach others, the realm of your influence is very great.
Mr. CLARDY. That sucker list theory, just xpanded?
Dr. DODD. That is right.
….
Dr. DODD. There is no doubt in my mind that I influenced students. I was teaching economics; I was teaching political science, history. These are subjects which are very easily influenced by a Marxist-Leninist approach. I was teaching during the period of the depression, and during that period the Communists said the reason for the depression was the breakdown in the capitalist system and the only thing which would obviate any future depressions would be elimination of the system. Change the system, and you would have no more depressions.
Unfortunately, there were no other answers being given at the time. The Communist answer was the easiest answer to give. It was easy to just push the students in that direction.

Mr. CLARDY. Wouldn’t you say. Doctor, that it is just simply impossible for a genuine Communist to
divide himself, more or less, and isolate the Communist thinking from his other thinking when he goes into the classroom?
Dr. DODD. It is impossible for him to divide himself. He is a Communist primarily.
Mr. CLARDY. When he goes in the classroom, he is entirely a Communist and anything he thinks is
bound to influence what he does and says about things, isn’t it?
Dr. DODD. And what he influences the students to do.
Mr. SCHERER. He can’t teach objectively?
Dr. DODD. It is impossible. You talk to your students; you can’t tear yourself apart.

China Today. USA Today.

Going on about Mao’s Megadeaths is like having a Holocaust Fetish. Both happened. You know… Like Past Tense and all. And guess what… Chinky also said Never Again. Just that he didn’t hire Edward Bernays to write the press releases and TV Commercials. This constant harping BACK: It’s a way to avoid engaging with issues in the here and now.

I’m interested in 2021. And whose rulers and conglomerations of perverse incentives are doing more or less to drive us all toward various precipices. Nobody is innocent in this game. Not the USA and not the PRC. Not anybody.

My contention (which I encourage intelligent and informed debate about) is that in the current year, Western Liberalism and the driven need to stick noses in where they don’t belong all over the globe is the mad insane jihadist ideology that y’all so busily *projecting* about 🙂

Compared to GloboHomo, the Chinese mindset in 2021 is Less Insane. Less Wrong. That is all.