The Philosopher of Antifa

DINESH D’SOUZA

The typical socialist today is not a union guy who wants higher wages; it’s a transsexual eco-feminist who marches in Antifa and Black Lives Matter rallies and throws cement blocks at her political opponents.

We see it in the riots and looting sweeping the country in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. The socialist left today is concerned less with worker exploitation by the bourgeoisie and more with the race, gender, and transgender grievances of identity politics. I call it identity socialism.

Today’s socialists want an America that integrates the groups seen as previously excluded while excluding the group that was previously included. “If you are white, male, heterosexual, and religiously and/or socially conservative,” writes blogger Rod Dreher, “there’s no place for you” on the progressive left. On the contrary, it should now be expected that in society “people like you are going to have to lose their jobs and influence.”

In other words, for identity socialists and for the left more generally, blacks and Latinos are in; whites are out. Women are in; men are out. Gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, together with other, more exotic types are in; heterosexuals are out. Illegals are in; native-born citizens are out. One may think this is all part of the politics of inclusion, but to think that is to get only half the picture. The point, for the left, is not merely to include but also to exclude, to estrange their opponents from their native land.

How did we get here? To understand identity socialism, we must meet the man who figured out how to bring its various strands together, Herbert Marcuse.

Marcuse defined the problem in the same way Lenin did: If the working class isn’t up for socialism, where can one find a new proletariat to bring it about?

Marcuse’s Revolution

A German philosopher partly of Jewish descent, Marcuse studied under the philosopher Heidegger before escaping Germany prior to the Nazi ascent.

After stints at Columbia, Harvard, and Brandeis, Marcuse moved to California, where he joined the University of San Diego and became the guru of the New Left in the 60s.

Marcuse influenced a whole generation of young radicals, from Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers to Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman to Tom Hayden, president of the activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Angela Davis, who later joined the Black Panthers and also ran for vice president on the Communist Party ticket, was a student of Marcuse and also one of his proteges. It was Marcuse, Davis said, who “taught me that it was possible to be an academic, an activist, a scholar, and a revolutionary.”

Marcuse egged on the activists of the 1960s to seize buildings and overthrow the hierarchy of the university, as a kind of first step to fomenting socialist revolution in America. Interestingly, it was Ronald Reagan—then-governor of California—who got Marcuse fired. Still, Marcuse retained his celebrity and influence over the radicals of the time. He did not, of course, create the forces of identity socialism, but he saw, perhaps earlier than anyone else, how they could form the basis for a new and viable socialism in America. That’s the socialism we are dealing with now.

To understand the problem Marcuse confronted, we have to go back to Marx.

Marx saw himself as the prophet, not the instigator, of the advent of socialism. We think of Marx as some sort of activist, seeking to organize a workers’ revolution, but Marx emphasized from the outset that the socialist revolution would come inevitably; nothing had to be done to cause it. The Marxist view is nicely summed up by one of Marx’s German followers, Karl Kautsky, who wrote, “Our task is not to organize the revolution but to organize ourselves for the revolution; it is not to make the revolution, but to take advantage of it.”

But what happens when the working class is too secure and contented to revolt? Marx didn’t anticipate this; in fact, the absence of a single worker revolt of the kind Marx predicted, anywhere in the world, is a full and decisive refutation of “scientific” Marxism. In the early 20th century, Marxists across the world were fully aware of this problem. Lenin solved it by assembling a professional cadre of revolutionaries. If the revolution would not be done by the working class, he insisted, it would have to be done for them.

Marcuse defined the problem in the same way Lenin did: If the working class isn’t up for socialism, where can one find a new proletariat to bring it about?

Marcuse knew that modern industrialized countries such as the United States couldn’t assemble the types of landless peasants and professional soldiers—the flotsam and jetsam of a backward feudal society—that Lenin relied on. So who could serve in the substitute proletariat that would be needed to agitate for socialism in America?

‘Raising Consciousness’

Marcuse looked around to identify which groups had a natural antipathy to capitalism. Marcuse knew he could count on the bohemian artists and intellectuals who had long hated industrial civilization, in part because they considered themselves superior to businessmen and shopkeepers. These self-styled “outcasts” were natural recruits for what Marcuse termed the Great Refusal—the visceral repudiation of free-market society.

The problem, however, was that these bohemians were confined to small sectors of Western society: the Schwabing section of Munich, the Left Bank of Paris, Greenwich Village in New York, and a handful of university campuses. By themselves, they were scarcely enough to hold a demonstration, let alone make a revolution.

So Marcuse had to search further. He had to think of a way to take bohemian culture mainstream, to normalize the outcasts and to turn normal people into outcasts. He started with an unlikely group of proles: the young people of the 1960s. Here, finally, was a group that could make up a mass movement.

Yet what a group! Fortunately, Marx wasn’t around to see it; he would have burst out laughing. Abbie Hoffman?

Jerry Rubin? Mario Savio? How could people of this sorry stripe, these slack, spoiled products of postwar prosperity, these parodies of humanity, these horny slothful loafers completely divorced from real-world problems, and neurotically focused on themselves, their drugs and sex lives and mind-numbing music, serve as the shock troops of revolution?

Marcuse answered: By “raising their consciousness.” The students were already somewhat alienated from the larger society. They lived in these socialist communes called universities.

They took for granted their amenities.

Ungrateful slugs that they were, they despised rather than cherished their parents for the sacrifices made on their behalf. They sought “something more,” a form of self-fulfillment that went beyond material fulfillment.

Here, Marcuse recognized, was the very raw material out of which socialism is made in a rich, successful society.

Perhaps there was a way to instruct them in oppression, to convert their spiritual anomie into political discontent. Marcuse was confident that an activist group of professors could raise the consciousness of a whole generation of students so they could feel subjectively oppressed even if there were no objective forces oppressing them. Then they would become activists to fight not someone else’s oppression, but their own.

Of course it would take some work to make selfish, navel-gazing students into socially conscious activists. But to Marcuse’s incredible good fortune, the 60s was the decade of the Vietnam War. Students were facing the prospect of being drafted. Thus they had selfish reasons to oppose the war. Yet this selfishness could be harnessed by teaching the students that they weren’t draft-dodging cowards;


WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES


A group of Antifa members march in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 11, 2018.


YANN SCHREIBER/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES Protesters take part in a march to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on June 10, 2020.



rather, they were noble resisters who were part of a global struggle for social justice. In this way, bad conscience could itself be recruited on behalf of left-wing activism.

Marcuse portrayed Ho Chi Minh and the Vietcong as a kind of Third World proletariat, fighting to free itself from American hegemony. This represented a transposition of Marxist categories. The new working class were the Vietnamese “freedom fighters.” The evil capitalists were American soldiers serving on behalf of the U.S. government. Marcuse’s genius was to tell leftist students in the 1960s that the Vietnamese “freedom fighters” could not succeed without them.

“Only the internal weakening of the superpower,” Marcuse wrote in “An Essay on Liberation,” “can finally stop the financing and equipping of suppression in the backward countries.”

In his vision, the students were the “freedom fighters” within the belly of the capitalist beast. Together, the revolutionaries at home and abroad would collaborate in the Great Refusal. They would jointly end the war and redeem both Vietnam and America. And what would this redemption look like? In Marcuse’s words, “Collective ownership, collective control and planning of the means of production and distribution.” In other words, classical socialism.

Today, socialist indoctrination is the norm on the American campus, and Marcuse’s dream has been realized.

Transposing Class

OK, so now we got the young people. Who else? Marcuse looked around America for more prospective proles, and he found, in addition to the students, three groups ripe for the taking. The first was the Black Power movement, which was adjunct to the civil rights movement. The beauty of this group, from Marcuse’s point of view, is that it would not have to be instructed in the art of grievance; blacks had grievances that dated back centuries.

Consequently, here was a group that could be mobilized against the status quo, and if the status quo could be identified with capitalism, here was a group that should be open to socialism. Through a kind of Marxist transposition, “blacks” would become the working class, “whites” the capitalist class. Race, in this analysis, takes the place of class. This is how we get Afro-socialism, and from there it’s a short step to Latino socialism and every other type of ethnic socialism.

Another emerging source of disgruntlement was the feminists. Marcuse recognized that with effective consciousness raising, they too could be taught to see themselves as an oppressed proletariat. This of course would require another Marxist transposition: “Women” would now be viewed as the working class and “men” the capitalist class; the class category would now be shifted to gender.

“The movement becomes radical,” Marcuse wrote, “to the degree to which it aims, not only at equality within the job and value structure of the established society ... but rather at a change in the structure itself.” Marcuse’s target wasn’t just the patriarchy; it was the monogamous family. In Gramscian terms, Marcuse viewed the heterosexual family itself as an expression of bourgeois culture, so in his view, the abolition of the family would help hasten the advent of socialism.

Marcuse didn’t write specifically about homosexuals or transgender people, but he was more than aware of exotic and outlandish forms of sexual behavior, and the logic of identity socialism can easily be extended to all these groups. Once again we need some creative Marxist transposition. Gays and transgender people become the newest proletariat, and heterosexuals—even black and female heterosexuals—become their oppressors.

Roots of Intersectionality

We see here the roots of “intersectionality.”

As the left now holds, one form of oppression is good, but two is better, and three or more is best. The true exemplar of identity socialism is a black or brown male transitioning to be a woman with a Third World background who is trying illegally to get into this country because his—oops, her—own country has allegedly been wiped off the map by climate change.

These latest developments go beyond Marcuse. He didn’t know about intersectionality, but he did recognize the emerging environmental movement as an opportunity to restrict and regulate capitalism. The goal, he emphasized, was “to drive ecology to the point where it is no longer containable within the capitalist framework,” although he recognized that this “means first extending the drive within the capitalist framework.”

Marcuse also inverted Freud to advocate the liberation of eros. Freud had argued that primitive man is single-mindedly devoted to “the pleasure principle,” but as civilization advances, the pleasure principle must be subordinated to what Freud termed “the reality principle.” In other words, civilization is the product of the subordination of instinct to reason. Repression, Freud argued, is the necessary price we must pay for civilization.

Marcuse argued that at some point, however, civilization reaches a point where humans can go the other way. They can release the very natural instincts that have been suppressed for so long and subordinate the reality principle to the pleasure principle. This would involve a release of what Marcuse termed “polymorphous sexuality” and the “reactivation of all erotogenic zones.” We are a short distance here from the whole range of bizarre contemporary preoccupations, from bisexuality to transsexuality and beyond.

Marcuse recognized that mobilizing all these groups—the students, the environmentalists, the blacks, the feminists, the gays—would take time and require a great deal of consciousness raising or reeducation. He saw the university as the ideal venue for carrying out this project, which is why he devoted his own life to teaching and training a generation of socialist and left-wing activists. Over time, Marcuse believed, the university could produce a new type of culture, and that culture would then metastasize into the larger society to infect the media, the movies, even the lifestyle of the titans of the capitalist class itself.

Marcuse’s project—the takeover of the American university, to make it a tool of socialist indoctrination—did not succeed in his lifetime. In fact, as mentioned above, he got the boot when Reagan pressured the regents of the university system not to renew Marcuse’s contract. In time, however, Marcuse succeeded as the activist generation of the 1960s gradually took over the elite universities. Today, socialist indoctrination is the norm on the American campus, and Marcuse’s dream has been realized.

‘Repressive Tolerance’

Marcuse is also the philosopher of Antifa. He argued, in a famous essay called “Repressive Tolerance,” that tolerance is not a norm or right that should be extended to all people. Yes, tolerance is good, but not when it comes to people who are intolerant. It is perfectly fine to be intolerant against them, to the point of disrupting them, shutting down their events, preventing them from speaking, even destroying their careers and property.

Marcuse didn’t use the term “hater,” but he invented the argument that it’s legitimate to be hateful against haters. For Marcuse, there were no limits to what could be done to discredit and ruin such people; he wanted the left to defeat them “by any means necessary.” Marcuse even approved of certain forms of domestic terrorism, such as the Weather Underground bombing the Pentagon, on the grounds that the perpetrators were attempting to stop the greater violence that U.S. forces inflict on people in Vietnam and other countries.

Our world is quite different now from what it was in the 1960s, and yet there is so much that seems eerily familiar. When it comes to identify socialism, we are still living with Marcuse’s legacy. Dinesh D’Souza has had a prominent career as a writer, scholar, and public intellectual, and has also become an award winning filmmaker. His new book is “United States of Socialism: Who’s Behind It. Why It’s Evil. How to Stop It.”

the problem with capitalism is the uneven distribution of wealth

the problem with socialism is the even distribution of misery

Winston Churchill

Capitialism sorta sucks.... but its the best damn economic system ever invented

Welcome to Maoist America

ROGER L. SIMON

You could say the shaming of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for failing to pledge to defund the police in his city—“Go home, Jacob! Go home!” the crowd chanted in unison as Frey slunk away, head bowed—signaled the beginning of an American version of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

But you would be wrong.

Frey’s defenestration—the crowd promised to put him out of office; they all but put him in a cultural revolutionary dunce cap and paraded him around—was more of an apotheosis than a beginning.

This American cultural revolution began decades ago on our campuses and in our media. Now, it’s taking over our streets.

But it’s our schools, primarily, that have been the instigators of this. In far too many cases, they have gradually turned into institutions resembling indoctrination camps. This is true from kindergarten through Ph.D. and from the Ivy League to barebones community colleges.

Viewpoint diversity is a thing of the past, with faculty meetings morphing into our own versions of Maoist “struggle sessions,” teachers and professors first shutting their mouths if they disagree, then exercising what amounts to “self-criticism” to save their jobs or just to gain some peace.

This American cultural revolution began decades ago on our campuses and in our media. Now, it’s taking over our streets.

Students have gotten the message, writing their papers and editing their classroom speech in a manner not to offend the politically correct faculty, administration, and fellow students that surround them.

And what is politically correct often changes from day to day, but, no matter what, conformity rules. You have to be part of the program, or you’re out. Even basic math is under assault.

With our children educated this way for years, no wonder, as adults or close, they are out on the streets mercilessly ridiculing an ultra-liberal, actually progressive, urban mayor for holding an opinion that was totally normative last week.

Our media, of course, are products of the same educational system and have long been prepared to ratify and amplify these same behaviors and views. The communications and journalism departments of our universities are literal fonts of groupthink, training students to be propagandists for the glorious new future.

(As I type this, it was announced that New York Times Editorial Page Editor James Bennet has resigned in shame for having the temerity to publish an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton

(R-Ark.) in the paper—talk about Cultural Revolution.) The results of our educational system are the primary cause of what we have been seeing in Minneapolis and across the rest of the country. Our campus social justice warriors have taken to the streets, taken them over, actually, and are trying to enforce the same extreme leftist claptrap they do in the schools.

And they’re doing a good job of it.

Where will this end? According to Wiki- pedia, “The Cultural Revolution damaged China’s economy while tens of millions of people were persecuted, with an estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to 20 million.”

That’s not as bad as Mao’s previous adventure, the Great Leap Forward, during which an estimated 18 million to 45 million died, making the Great Helmsman the greatest mass murderer of all time, outdoing Stalin and Hitler.

That catastrophic result is unlikely to happen here, but it will be bad enough anyway. Groupthink has other consequences that were illuminated by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley as the road to a modern form of fascism.

Inscribing “Black Lives Matter” in bold letters dominating the route to the White House, not to mention naming a square in the capital after it, is sloganeering straight out of Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” (“Black Lives Matter good. All Lives Matter bad.”) Those who do it recognize a simple truth. While for Mao, social class was the lever of control, in America, it’s almost always race.

Our situation may ultimately be the more perilous. While you can become de-classed by changing your work and financial status, racism is a more lethal accusation because it’s impossible to prove you’re not a racist. All manner of people have been accused of it without evidence. It can be literally endless.

Look what happened to the hapless Frey. He’s a racist now, too, despite having wept over the casket of George Floyd.

America is poised on a precipice. Nevertheless, there’s some cause to be optimistic in the long run. Things often return to the norm, eventually. The Cultural Revolution, like the semblable French Revolution in its bloody Robespierre period, finally became ineffective in its excesses. It burned out.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of rubble to be cleared away after. Sometimes, years of it.

The most important rubble we have to clear out is that bias in our school systems. Only then will our young people be truly educated citizens and be able to realize the dreams of our founders as free people. Roger L. Simon is The Epoch Times’ senior political analyst. He’s also a prize-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and the co-founder of PJ Media. His most recent books are “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (non-fiction) and “The GOAT” ( fiction).

Socialism....
The politics of parasites.

3 Lessons From the Pandemic and the Lockdown

MARK HENDRICKSON

The pandemic and subsequent governmentmandated lockdowns and their devastating economic effects have affected Americans differently.

The relatively affluent and financially secure have been free to engage in introspection and personal growth. While that might not have been their first choice, for most it wasn’t nearly as challenging a period as it was for Americans who have been scrambling (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) to keep from going broke.

Regardless of the impact of this cluster of crises, this spring has taught us (or should have taught us) three major political lessons that will affect us all going forward.

Lesson No. 1: The CCP Threat

The threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to our country and the whole world has become impossible to overlook or ignore.

With varying degrees of clarity and concern, Americans have been aware of the CCP’s ruthlessness. Most of us recognized that China has been waging war against American businesses, stealing their intellectual property, and targeting them for destruction.

A smaller group of Americans know about the CCP’s persecution of their Muslim Uyghur minority—the arrest of over a million of them without trial, forcibly separating them away from their families and depositing them in “re-education” camps. Similarly, too few Americans have heard about the CCP’s horrifying practice of killing political prisoners by harvesting vital organs from their bodies. A higher-profile example of CCP evil has been its naked attempts to trample and extinguish the rights and freedoms of the residents of Hong Kong since last summer.

But now, there’s no excuse for the mass of Americans to be oblivious to the unmistakable malevolence and the clear and present danger posed by the Chinese regime. So arrogant have the Chi-coms become that they no longer even try to hide their aggressive goals. The way they have conducted themselves during this global pandemic should remove all doubts about them.

The CCP made a cold-blooded policy decision not to warn the rest of the world about the emerging coronavirus; instead, they allowed infected citizens to travel and to spread the virus around the world. What was that, if not a hostile act?

The contempt that the Chinese communists have for everyone else is unmistakable. It has gotten so blatant that the editor of The Global Times (a mouthpiece for the CCP regime) responded to Australian concerns about the Wuhan/CCP virus by publicly insulting Australia, writing that that free nation is “like chewing gum stuck on the sole of China’s shoes.” Their public relations offensive against the United States has been even more offensive— making the outrageous claim that the United States spawned the pandemic.

None of this hateful behavior should surprise us. Remember: Vladimir Lenin himself openly taught, “Hatred is the basis of communism.” Some naïve

people think all we have to do is be nice to the Chinese regime, and they will respond in kind. Sorry, but communists aren’t like that—it’s against their (atheistic) religion. American food aid averted mass starvation in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, and the Soviet regime repaid our kindness by marking us as their No. 1 enemy.

Lenin once scornfully asserted that the capitalists would sell the communists the rope with which the latter would hang the former. But communists would not be so foolish as to sell us things that we vitally need, such as crucial pharmaceutical drugs or masks needed during a pandemic.

The bottom line: We need to understand that the communist virus is many times more lethal than COVID-19, and we need to rethink every aspect of our relations with China.

Lesson No. 2: Incompetence of Socialism The U.S. government’s policy response to the pandemic illustrates the clumsy incompetence of socialism in practice. Central economic planning simply isn’t viable. Unsurprisingly, then, the implementation of emergency relief measures has been a veritable comedy of errors: 1) Tax-paying Americans have been given stimulus checks, but then ordered to avoid most stores, resulting in money sitting in bank accounts—unless the recipient has become unemployed and is using the checks to pay the rent and other expenses that would have been spent anyhow.

2) Unemployment benefits for many workers exceed their take-home pay. This has created massive disincentives to return to work, which, in turn, jeopardizes the survival of the small businesses (and the jobs they provide) that Congress hoped to save.

3) Thousands of loans were issued to ineligible recipients. The Small Business Administration alone issued more loans in 14 days than it had in the previous 14 years. Can you imagine how many billions of dollars were wasted and dispensed inappropriately?

4) Lending institutions were ordered to suspend collection of mortgage payments without any guidance for how they were to be made whole at some future time, and with meager protection against future prosecutions to punish them for doing what Congress ordered them to do.

5) American business owners were arrested for daring to open their businesses before getting a government green light, at the same time those governments were releasing convicts from jail to protect them from the virus.

The bottom line: Socialism is economic poison, not some mythical panacea for people’s economic needs.

Lesson No. 3: Radical Greens

Lesson No. 3 is related to No. 2. It was both stunning and appalling to hear how radical greens exulted in this spring’s economic slowdown.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres publicly stated in late March that “the pandemic could create an opportunity to rebuild the global economy along more sustainable lines,” Scientific American reported.

We need to understand that the communist virus is many times more lethal than COVID-19.

In other words, in the name of their destructive obsession with reducing carbon dioxide emissions (emissions that are environmentally beneficial), greens would like to slow down economic activity to an even greater extent than what we have experienced as a result of the pandemic. It doesn’t concern them that economic prosperity goes hand-in-hand with fossil fuel consumption.

The bottom line: If you like living like you have the past few weeks, then vote for green politicians. But if you prefer healthy economic growth, then the greens aren’t for you.

The coronavirus and its aftermath have highlighted vitally important lessons about the dangers of the Chinese Communist Party, domestic socialism, and green fanaticism. These are dear-bought lessons. Let’s not squander the benefits of these lessons by ignoring them after having paid so dearly for them. Mark Hendrickson, an economist, recently retired from the faculty of Grove City College, where he remains a fellow for economic and social policy at the Institute for Faith and Freedom.

Rise of ‘Fed Ed’ Accelerated Demise of Real Education

ALEX NEWMAN

This article is part 10 in a series examining the origins of public education in the United States.

The U.S. public school system was collectivist from the start, as this ongoing series on government education has extensively documented.

But as the feds got involved, it quickly went from bad to worse, with the slow and steady decline in education turning into a precipitous collapse.

Today, the schools are a disaster, even by the government’s own measures. Consider, for instance, that the latest scores from the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed that more than two-thirds of eighth-graders aren’t proficient in any core subject. It would be hard to do worse. The U.S. government bears a big part of the blame. And there should be no doubt that it was deliberate, experts and former insiders tell The Epoch Times.

Because the U.S. Constitution delegated absolutely no power over education to the federal government—and because the 10th Amendment specifically reserves all non-delegated powers to the states or the people—it wasn’t easy for the federal camel’s nose to get under the tent. Indeed, it took almost two centuries for Washington to get seriously involved in public schools.

But communists worked diligently toward that goal for decades. In his 1932 book, “Toward Soviet America,” Communist Party USA leader William Z.

Foster boldly outlined the agenda for his fellow revolutionaries. The goal: A U.S.

Department of Education that would eventually replace patriotism and Christianity in school with communism and globalism.

“Among the elementary measures the American Soviet government will adopt to further the cultural revolution are the following: the schools, colleges, and universities will be coordinated and grouped under the National Department of Education and its state and local branches,” Foster declared, an idea that was almost unthinkable to Americans of the day.

He also outlined what this anticipated U.S. Department of Education would do once in charge of schools.

The U.S. Department of Education has existed because it is about control and not about children.

Sheri Few, founder, US Parents Involved in Education “The studies will be revolutionized, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology,” he said. “The students will be taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism, and the general ethics of the new Socialist society.”

Of course, it took a long time to make that a reality. But anyone who has studied even briefly what is going on in the federally controlled public schools of America today can see that Foster’s agenda has been thoroughly implemented in every respect, all over the country.

Unless dealt with, the disease will likely prove fatal.

Federal Involvement Begins

Aside from a few insignificant offices to collect statistics over the years, and Congress recommending Bibles printed by Robert Aitken of Philadelphia “for use in the schools” in the late 1700s, the feds played virtually no role whatsoever in education in America.

Indeed, it wasn’t until the 1960s, long after the government school system created by collectivists had started destroying traditional education, that the federal government took its first major steps into education.

It began in 1962 and 1963, as documented in this series, with two U.S.

Supreme Court rulings declaring that it was somehow a violation of the First Amendment to

have prayer or Bible readings in public schools. These lawless opinions, as admitted by one of the justices in his dissent, replaced Christianity at school with the collectivist “religious humanism” of John Dewey, one of the socialist founders of America’s public school system.

Well-educated Americans would have instantly recognized the absurdity of the ruling. After all, when the First Amendment was written and ratified, most of the states had established churches. The idea that this amendment, designed to prevent a national religion, was supposed to prohibit states and communities from having prayer or Bibles in schools, would have been laughed at even in the 1940s or ‘50s.

But by the ‘60s, public education had already been in place for generations, dumbing down Americans and erasing their understanding of history to the point that such an outlandish anti- constitutional ruling became feasible.

Not long after that rogue court ruling, Congress—almost certainly emboldened by the high court’s flagrant constitutional intrusions into state and local education— launched the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson under the guise of “helping” states to “educate” all “disadvantaged” students, this statute opened up the floodgates of federal funding to K-12 public schools.

As the old cliché goes, with federal funding comes federal control. And in exchange for federal taxpayer money, first released under ESEA, schools were forced to accept a growing array of federal regulations. At this point, the feds have effectively nationalized the public school system; globalizing it is the next frontier.

There are more than 100 subsidy programs now in place under the department, which has a budget approaching $100 billion including “discretionary” and “mandatory” spending. Everything from discipline and academic standards to lunches, data collection, and even the gender of textbook writers is now subject to federal intrusion.

Once the camel’s nose was under the tent, it didn’t take long for the entire smelly beast to shove its way in. The relatively new U.S. Department of Education, which has centralized control over education in an unprecedented manner, has also played a crucial role in weaponizing America’s public education system against individual liberty.

Established in 1979 under President Jimmy Carter, the cabinet-level department was basically part of a quid pro quo agreement with the socialist-controlled National Education Association (NEA).

The powerful union, which named the socialist and humanist Dewey as its “honorary life president,” was already acting as a sort of national ministry of education.

With the birth of the actual department, it sealed the deal.

By the time the U.S. Department of Education was established, Congress’s investigative committees charged with exposing communists and preventing infiltration of the federal government had long since been disbanded. As such, it’s difficult to determine how many actual communists worked within the department.

But as the Bible says, “by their fruits, ye shall know them.” And the fruit coming from the Department of Education has been rotten to the core from day one.

Whistleblower From Belly of the Beast

From the start, using grants and other means, this unconstitutional behemoth began working to bring all education in the United States under federal control.

Worse than that, it worked to systematically dumb down the American people and transform the values of children, according to whistleblower Charlotte Iserbyt, who served as a senior policy adviser on education in the Reagan administration.

All of it was in line with what the massmurdering Soviet regime was doing.

Indeed, from its earliest days, the U.S.

Department of Education was involved in helping to “sovietize” the American public school system, Iserbyt told The Epoch Times in an interview. This agenda has been extremely successful in facilitating the disaster now unfolding in America, she explained.

Upon taking up her post at the Department of Education, Iserbyt found documents revealing that public schools in America were introducing Soviet quackery and curricula in the classroom, with help from the major foundations.

In response, the patriotic Iserbyt began leaking the official documents to the press in an attempt to blow the whistle and stop the madness. She eventually compiled the smoking-gun evidence in her explosive book, “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.”

“When I was there, what I saw, I realized in retrospect, ‘The Nation at Risk’ report was very important,” Iserbyt said, referring to a government report commissioned by Reagan arguing that the U.S. education system threatened America’s future. “They needed that to convince America that we had terrible schools so they could bring in the reforms they wanted.”

Pointing to the Soviet education system and the forces that worked to bring similar schemes to America, Iserbyt is also convinced that communism was the goal. U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell “wanted to put in the communist system,” Iserbyt argued. “I believe he was a communist. If you read in my book the things he said, there is no way to come up with any other conclusion.”

Among other schemes, Iserbyt said Bell was the one responsible for bringing in the methods of “education” advocated by anti-Christian behaviorist B.F. Skinner and Soviet “psychologist” Ivan Pavlov to American schools.

“These Pavlovian and Skinnerian methods destroy free will by treating people like animals to be trained and to give reflexive responses to stimuli,” said Iserbyt. “This is animal training, not education.

This is what was being used in communist countries to train and brainwash their populations, not educate them.”

Continued on A20


PAMELA AU/SHUTTERSTOCK


The Department of Education building with the Milford School Bell in the front, in Washington, on Oct. 1, 2016. TIM BOYLE/GETTY IMAGES


A teacher assists a student in her third-grade class during summer school in Chicago on July 2, 2003.



Rise of ‘Fed Ed’ Accelerated Demise of Real Education

CONTINUED FROM A19

Because of the Department of Education, it’s being used all over America, too.

“Their agenda was to have absolute control of the American population through these changes in teaching and instruction being brought into the schools through the Department of Education,” she continued, pointing to the important role of the Carnegie Endowment in negotiating with the Soviets on education. “So they claimed all these national reforms were needed to change education from what you know in your head, to what you can do, which is Soviet-style workforce training.”

Iserbyt also witnessed how great educators with valuable experience who loved liberty, such as Edward Curran, who led the National Institute of Education at the U.S. Department of Education, were purged and driven out. Meanwhile, collectivists and quacks continued moving quickly up the ranks.

“The political appointees—most of them were rotten,” said Iserbyt.

To impose the radical “reforms” on America, Iserbyt said she witnessed the Department of Education handing out all manner of enormous grants to fund dangerous quackery, data-gathering, and “efforts to transform the values of children away from traditional Americanism” through education.

“I believe these were very abusive toward traditional values,” she said, pointing to her important short publication, “Soviets in the Classroom, America’s Latest Education Fad.”

The Extremism Continues

Today, even with a Republican president in the White House, the Department of Education remains firmly under collectivist control. During the 2016 presidential election, for example, an analysis by The Hill revealed that 99.7 percent of all political spending by Department of Education bureaucrats went to Hillary Clinton—the highest of any federal department.

Even after Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos took up her post, the left-wing extremism from the department continued to spew forth. Indeed, on Feb. 12, 2017, the department’s Twitter account posted a quote by Communist Party USA member W.E.B. Du Bois—with his name misspelled, no less, drawing national ridicule.

Among other absurdities, Du Bois claimed the USSR, led by one of the most brutal and murderous regimes in human history, was

the “most hopeful country on earth.” During the darkest depths of the “Great Leap Forward,” Du Bois even held multiple meetings with massmurdering communist Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, and the two were always pictured with smiles on their faces.

In exchange for federal taxpayer money, first released under ESEA, schools were forced to accept a growing array of federal regulations.

These are some of the people who control U.S. education. Under the previous administration, the department, using “stimulus” money to bribe states into compliance, even imposed Obamabacked national standards on the nation— standards that are aligned with international schemes, too. Common Core will be dealt with in a future article in this series.

With around 4,000 employees, the Education Department’s budget has been ballooning since it was created.

And that’s despite President Ronald Reagan promising to abolish it, and President Donald Trump saying on the campaign trail, “If we don’t eliminate it completely, we certainly need to cut its power and reach.”

There’s currently a bill in Congress, H.R. 899, to abolish the department. When asked why the bill was needed, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), the chief sponsor, replied in an interview, “How much time do you have?”

“The left understands that this is where you win or lose—in the schools and in the teaching of the children,” the Kentucky congressman continued.

Massie also noted that under the current administration, there’s a tremendous opportunity to make abolishing the department a bipartisan endeavor. Liberals and progressives, of course, don’t want Trump in charge of their children’s education, any more than conservatives want Obama or Biden running it.

“Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development,” Massie said. “States and local communities are best positioned to shape curricula that meet the needs of their students.”

The group U.S. Parents Involved in Education (USPIE) is working to end all federal involvement in education, too.

“Although this experiment with federal control of local public schools has gone on for

half a century now, it has failed,” USPIE President Sheri Few told The Epoch Times. “The U.S. Department of Education has existed because it is about control and not about children.

“We need to stop treating children like guinea pigs in some social engineering laboratory.”

The U.S. Constitution and common sense both demand that the federal government gets out of education. That would be a great step forward. However, as this series has documented, the government education system has been controlled by collectivists from the very beginning. That means getting the feds out, by itself, won’t solve the systemic problems plaguing education in the United States today.

Still, ending all “Fed Ed” may be a decent place to start. And with Trump in the White House, perhaps both sides of the aisle could work together on this, as a first step to much more far-reaching reforms. Alex Newman is an award-winning international journalist, educator, author, and consultant who co-wrote the book “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.” He also serves as the CEO of Liberty Sentinel Media and writes for diverse publications in the United States and abroad.

socialism cannot happen in the us but poor countries and middle incomed countries like india.

What the U.S.A is experiencing isn't Socialism, it's out and out subversive Trotskyite Communism and they are burning your cities and destroying your historical monuments. Wake up and defend your Republic.

The Left Pushes to Finally Take Down America

DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

MICHAEL WALSH

Decades in preparation, the future United States of America that the international left intends to fashion is near at hand. Since the arrival of the Frankfurt School of Marxist philosophers, cranks, crackpots, and creeps on our shores in the 1930s, the Enlightenment foundations of our nation have been under constant attack.

Wielding their pseudo-intellectual doctrine of Critical Theory as a battering ram, men like Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Wilhelm Reich saw it as their duty to undermine every legal and social American institution, from the family, to traditional sexuality, to academe, pop culture, government, and even the military. Nothing was safe from their iniquitous inquisition.

At first, they seemed vaguely ridiculous, a bunch of nutty professors with Dr. Strangelove accents. But don’t be fooled.

Reich, a Freudian psychiatrist who often treated his patients in the nude, invented the “sexual revolution,” later popularized by Hugh Hefner in the pages of Playboy. His quack theories about sexuality were called “a fraud of the first magnitude” by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and he died, intermittently psychotic, in federal prison in 1957. Adorno, who had been a “modern music” composer and critic back in Germany, moved to Los Angeles and hated everything about it, including the weather.

Worst of all was Marcuse—whose pomposity was gleefully skewered by Joel and Ethan Coen in their 2016 comedy, “Hail, Caesar!”—a social destabilizer who first penetrated the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, forerunner of the CIA), then corrupted generations of American college students at Columbia University (where the expat Frankfurters first found refuge), Harvard, Brandeis, and finally the University of California at San Diego.

It was Marcuse who invented the theory of “repressive tolerance,” which might best be described as tolerance for me, but not for thee: “The realization of the objective of tolerance would call for intolerance toward prevailing policies, attitudes, opinions, and the extension of tolerance to policies, attitudes, and opinions which are outlawed or suppressed.”

What he didn’t mention was that tolerance toward such inimical aberrations as Marxism would only last until it triumphed, after which “tolerance” would be abolished.

(For more on Critical Theory, and the Frankfurt School and their wholly deleterious effects on American and Western civilization, please see my 2015 book, “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,” and its 2018 sequel, “The Fiery Angel.”) And so we’re experiencing now the full fruition of the Frankfurt School’s cultural revolution and what the German communist Rudi Dutschke, referencing Mao, famously called “the long march through the institutions.”

What the Soviet Union failed to do economically and militarily during its losing 20th-century confrontation with the West, cultural Marxism has come close to realizing: the collapse of Western Civilization via the destruction of what the Russian communists used to refer to as the “principal enemy”—the United States.

Setting Kindling Ablaze

Having drilled several generations of students in Marxist cant—whenever you hear words like “systemic,” “struggle,” “structural,” “change,” “fundamental transformation,” et al., you know you’re dealing with Marxists—the tinder was laid, and all the new left needed was a match.

The election of Donald Trump four years ago at first shocked and then galvanized them, birthing the “resistance” and unleashing the “Russian collusion” hoax, the Ukrainian impeachment

charade (Lt. Col. Vindman, anybody?) and, with the death of an ex-con named George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody in late May, an unchained Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, along with its largely white auxiliaries (and Marcuse’s bastard children), Antifa.

Presto; the national media now marches in Stalinist lockstep with the shibboleths of BLM, beginning with the demonstrably false accusation that cops are targeting young black males for extinction.

In a trice, riots have broken out, monuments to American heroes, including some of the Founding Fathers, have been pulled down a la Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War, and whole areas of American cities are suddenly occupied by violent anarchists. How quickly the illegal COVID-19 lockdowns were forgotten in the name of “social justice”—and yet how long their unconstitutional effects have lingered.

It is as if somebody had given the signal, and suddenly, in “blue” cities across the land, not only BLM and the Antifa punks have risen to show their true colors, but the politicians who run those cities as well.

The white mayor of Seattle, Jenny Durkan, has been content to watch her city burn, its downtown illegally designated as the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” or, latterly, the “Capitol Hill Organized Protest”—although she now says it will be taken back by the authorities.

Meanwhile, the black mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, seems indifferent to the weekly death toll of young black Americans, murdered by other young black Americans. On June 22 alone, 41 Chicagoans were shot, six of them fatally. Apparently their lives don’t matter, as they serve no political purpose.

‘White Supremacy’

Make no mistake: This assault has been planned and coordinated for years to strike America where she is weakest: in her innate sense of rightness and fair play. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement was heavily penetrated by the Soviets, who cynically felt they could manipulate American emotions while appealing to the better angels of our nature. But how quickly we have moved from King’s plea that we judge a man by “the content of his character” and back to “the color of his skin.”

How quickly we have moved from

King’s plea that we judge a man by ‘the content of his character’ and back to ‘the color of his skin.’

Marxists see the world in categorical terms: You are not an individual ( individuals are too difficult to control), but a member of a group (mobs are easy), subgroup, or even many subgroups (hence the proliferation of sexual categories from the genuine 2 to 46, by one recent count). Meanwhile, the enemy remains the same: the white, probably Christian, male.

Accordingly—and with astonishing rapidity— Western civilization from Aquinas to Mozart to Ronald Reagan now effectively equals “white supremacy,” and therefore must be destroyed.

Monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Francis Scott Key, and even Teddy Roosevelt have fallen or been marked for removal. Never mind that Roosevelt was the first president to host a black man, the great Booker T. Washington, at a dinner party in the White House (an event memorialized in Scott Joplin’s now-lost ragtime opera, “A Guest of Honor.” Joplin, who was black, also saluted Roosevelt in his rag, “The Strenuous Life,” after Roosevelt’s 1899 speech of the same name). He must go.

Which is also why statues of both Robert E. Lee, who led the principal Confederate force, the army of Northern Virginia, and the man Abraham Lincoln selected to crush him, the Ohio-born heartlander Ulysses S. Grant, are both being pulled down. It doesn’t matter that they were antitheses in

life. What matters is that they are both significant figures from the past of a country that in the left’s eyes has no future, because it doesn’t deserve one.

‘Critical Theory’

Don’t look for logic in the Marxists’ selection of targets. “Critical Theory” seeks to undermine our self-knowledge and cultural self-confidence by insisting that everything is a “construct,” a plot by the “privileged” against the “oppressed.”

It holds that there is no received tenet of civilization that shouldn’t be questioned (the slogan “question authority” originated with the Frankfurt School), attacked, and destroyed. Our cultural totems, values, and taboos are declared either arbitrary, or the result of a longago “conspiracy,” steadfastly maintained down through the ages.

But where is the pushback? Republicans, the heirs to Lincoln and Grant, have fled the field. Led by the feckless

(Left) A 1970’s-era poster of activist Angela Davis hangs at a boarded up and closed Seattle police precinct in Seattle June 21, 2020, where streets are blocked off in what has been named the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest zone.

former House speaker and failed vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, the Republicans ceded the lower chamber to the Democrats in 2018.

Partly as a result, President Donald Trump is in the fight of his life. Should he lose to the semi-animated hologram of a gibbering Joe Biden, and the Democrats recapture the Senate (very possible), who will be left to defend the nation?

Something to think about as we head into campaign season. Michael Walsh is the author of “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace” and “The Fiery Angel,” both published by Encounter Books. His latest book, “Last Stands,” a cultural study of military history, will be published in December by St. Martin’s Press.

You've got that right; one day soon the **** will really hit the fan and the scum that are out looting and tearing down monuments will meet the so far mostly quiet orginized and armed Americans.........it won't even be close.