Please Do Not Adjust Your Child

Indoctrination of Childrenby Daren Jonescu –
Of all the arguments public-school advocates have used to hoodwink generations of parents into condemning their own children to years of state-controlled subservience training, one of the most successful is that without public schools, children cannot be properly “socialized,” and will therefore be ill-prepared for life in the “real world.” Not only is this argument absurd on its face, but that face also reveals the ugliest intention of compulsory schools: the deliberate retarding of human moral and intellectual development.

The basic premise of the argument for public schools as necessary tools of socialization is that learning to get along, or fit in, with children one’s own age is a vital life skill. Is it?

Childhood, contrary to the worst tendencies of democratic thought, is not [Read more…]

Tearing Down Public Education

Education communist brainwashing by Daren Jonescu –
On the subject of public schools, some conservatives and libertarians are inclined to speak as though they cannot wait another moment to spring into action — and then act as though they need the hand of God to point the way ahead before they do what we all know in our hearts must be done. This is not meant as harsh criticism. These good people embody an innate human flaw defined for all time in one of our greatest archetypes: they are Hamlet.

At a moment as historically important as this one, two all-too-human dangers lie in wait for those who understand the seriousness of the situation. The first is that they should undermine their own cause with reckless outbursts and the resulting disarray. The second is that they should cocoon themselves against the clear imperative to act by lamenting the lack of a perfect plan. [Read more…]

Educating Ignorance

University Indoctrination Center by Janice Shaw Crouse –
The best-kept secret in America today is the precipitous drop in the quality of college since the Left seized power in higher education. Every year, various magazines publish a list of rankings for American undergraduate institutions. Forbes assures parents that “Every school with a Forbes grade meets a high standard.” U.S. News and World Reportassures its readers that they consider a wide variety of factors in measuring a college’s effectiveness. While American colleges were once great institutions of learning, those who know higher education today recognize that “high standards” of quality are casualties in the war against traditionalism and American values. Where religion and love of country and family were once revered, radical Leftist ideology now prevails. Traditional values have been replaced by moral relativism, anti-establishment teachings, and the breakdown of the family.

The radicalization of colleges did not happen overnight. What we have now is a product of past indifference and disinclination to do anything to reverse the spread of Leftist trends. [Read more…]

Dumbing Down American Public Education

Dumbing Down American Public Educationby Glenn Fairman –
In thinking about how valuable education is in cultivating the next generation of Americans, my mind took me back nearly twenty years to when I was a graduate student functioning as a substitute teacher at La Puente High School in Southern California. On one assignment, I was to cover a social studies class of some old-timer; he had written down in his instructions that since his classes were on a field trip, my sole duty was to show a movie at 6th period to those who did not attend. What I found that day opened my eyes.

In a dusty corner shelf of the room was a set of thirty-year-old textbooks from the mid-1960s, and although my memory cannot now relinquish their title, their contents burned themselves into my brain. As I flipped through the pages, I was astonished to find what I would now consider an upper-level college textbook under color of what in the high schools used to be termed “civics.” This text contained a very detailed understanding of political theory, constitutional law, macroeconomics, American history, and comparative political systems. I spent the rest of the day in slack-jawed amazement, perusing what a student in a working-class town was expected to know before the mavens of education began tinkering with the curricula of our schools. [Read more…]

The Mythology Channel: Distorting American History

The Mythology Channel: Distorting American Historyby Phil Manger –
I should have known better than to expect anything like real history from The History Channel.  With the notable exception of some of their reality series like Pawn Stars, American Restoration, and Ice Road Truckers — all three of which I admit (somewhat sheepishly) to watching and enjoying — their usual fare consists mostly of dramatizations of history filtered hrough the lens of modern (which is to say, liberal) sensibilities.

At first it looked like The Men Who Built America, History’s new series about the great American industrialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, might be an exception.  In the first two episodes, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie are treated somewhat sympathetically; they are even credited with providing real economic benefits to society.  There are omissions and factual errors, to be sure, and there are the usual annoying anachronisms that plague a lot of History Channel dramatizations (like 20th-century European locomotives pulling trains that supposedly were running on 19th-century American railroad tracks), but on the whole, I thought the series was off to a promising start.

That is, until they got to Henry Clay Frick. [Read more…]

My Country Gives to Me, Sweet Land of Everything is Free

Obamunism Communism in Americaby Ted State –
When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the Republic. ~ Ben Franklin.

What was really lost in this election was not the GOP hopes and dreams of a new future. It was actually a lot more than that. What was really lost was the sense of the American individualist spirit. No more pulling yourself up by your bootstraps (if you are lucky enough to find a store that has them), no more starting a business (apparently we really didn’t build it) and no working hard to get ahead (at some point you have made enough money.) Instead of all that, the people voted to give themselves more at the expense of others and that is a much more serious loss than the mere presidency.

Economists have long theorized that there would come a day where the people riding in the cart would outnumber the people pulling the cart and that day has arrived. Congratulations Democrats. You did it. Free healthcare, free cell phones, food stamps, section 8 housing and a whole host of free goodies are now not only the law of the land, they are what the people have come to demand and worse, what they have come to expect. [Read more…]

America is Going John Galt

America is Going John Galtby James McAlister –
Many of us are numb today. Numb with the implications of what happened last night. Numb with dread.

Endless days and countless lines of print will be expended in the post mortem of the election, from a conservative perspective. Romney’s failures and shortcomings will be examined with electron microscopes. Why didn’t he do this? Shouldn’t he have done that? “For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these…”

But these things don’t really amount to much. Because the real reason for our election results were neatly summarized by Bill O’Reilly at about 7:00 last night, as the faint shape of events to come began to emerge. [Read more…]

‘God,’ ‘Jerusalem,’ and the DNC

Dennis Prager
Dennis Prager
by Dennis Prager –
The most important event at either national convention was the “vote” taken by the Democratic delegates on a last-minute resolution to reinsert the words “God” and “Jerusalem” into the Democratic-party platform.

Regarding God: Since Karl Marx, the aim of the Left, everywhere on earth, has been a godless society. And the Democratic party has evolved over the last half century from a liberal party into a leftist one. So much so that it is now indistinguishable from any of the leftist parties in Western Europe.

Yes, Franklin D. Roosevelt was a left-wing president — as concerned the size of the state and its role in the economy. That is of great importance, of course. But an ever-expanding state is only half of the Left’s agenda. A thoroughly secular society is the other half. And in that regard, Franklin Roosevelt was no man of the Left. [Read more…]

New York’s Marxist Epicenter

Occupy Wall Street communists socialists marxists by Charles Gasparino –
The standard portrayal of the Wall Street protesters goes something like this: Ragtag group of unemployed young adults, venting often incoherent but overall legitimate populist outrage about economic inequality. But go down to the movement’s headquarters, as I did this past weekend, and you see something far different.

It’s not just that knowledge of their “oppressors” — the evil bankers — is pretty thin, or that many of them are clearly college kids with nothing better to do than embrace the radical chic of “a cause.” I found a unifying and increasingly coherent ideology emerging among the protesters, which at its core has less to do with the evils of the banking business and more about the evils of capitalism — and the need for a socialist revolution.

It’s not an overstatement to describe Zuccotti Park as New York’s Marxist epicenter. Flags with the iconic face of the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara are everywhere; the only American flag I saw was hanging upside down. The “occupiers” openly refer to each other as “comrade,” and just about every piece of literature on offer (free or for sale) advocated socialism in the Marxist tradition as a cure-all for the inequalities of the American economic system. [Read more…]

Obama’s Contempt Bordering on Treachery

Obama radical marxist hates America by Steve McCann –
The United States, faced with its worst crisis in 65 years, has at the helm a radical political class, as personified by Barack Obama, who have chosen a path trod by so many despots in mankind’s recent history. Barack Obama and his fellow-travelers are exploiting the fear and desperation of a growing number of citizens amid gaping fissures in American society in order to retain and expand their control over the populace.

Human societies are held together by the most fragile of cords. Whenever unrelenting internal or external challenges abound, thereby placing excessive stress on the foundation of any society, the key determination as to whether chaos ensues is most often in the hands of the society’s leaders. They can choose to exploit the circumstances in order to satisfy their lust for power, or they can embrace a course of action and policies to rally the citizenry into collectively overcoming the crisis at hand, regardless of the fractures in that society.

American society is no longer the cohesive and determined entity that accomplished so much over the past centuries; it is extraordinarily susceptible to manipulation by unscrupulous ideologues. [Read more…]