17 Comments

Thank you! Your analysis is very persuasive. You connected many dots for me and I am appreciative. I just keep learning.

Adults fall for this film-flam too . . . and if you're interested and haven't read it, Anthony Pratkanis's essay "How to sell a pseudoscience" might be of interest to you. It's short and outlines certain facets of human nature that make us all vulnerable to falling into believing untruths. https://tinyurl.com/2cznk5x3

Expand full comment

Thank you for the link. On the topic you may also want to check a classic Influence by Robert Cialdini https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/1863501568/ref=mp_s_a_1_7?

Expand full comment

You're welcome. That link was a game-changer for me. I realized how easy it would be to trap me into believing flim-flam. So I've approached (or tried to approach) my decisions with my human weaknesses in mind.

And thank you for your link.

Expand full comment

Once again.

Reality Check: Who won the election?

Expand full comment

Reality Check: Who won the election?

Expand full comment

“The development of a child’s “self-expression” is therefore enhanced through participation in various group activities. Indeed, it is identical with it. For Dewey, the “chief stimuli” in the development and realization of individual “personality” is society—the “unified spirit of the community.”

I had no idea our progressive school was training our kids for groupthink and conformism. It should have been obvious when our kids came home with one sided lessons on topics that are manifold, or shared that they didn’t feel comfortable sharing opposing views with classmates. What you describe here is the prepping of a generation into malleable little soldiers. Can’t thank you enough for your insights and knowledge.

Expand full comment

It's amazing that as the education career field has become more regularized and "professionalized" with PhDs in education, etc., our school results have gotten worse. I teach JROTC at a high school and so I'm not a career teacher. Half the time when we do continuing education on how to teach, I can't understand a damn thing they are talking about (and I have a Master's degree and flew B-1 bombers, so it's not like I'm not smart enough). It's so full of jargon and vernacular it's almost unintelligible to an outsider, which is probably the point. The stuff I do understand seems highly suspect though.

Expand full comment

Looking forward to Part 3, but hoping that you make an effort to address the other elephant in the room: international comparisons. Speaking as a fellow Canadian emigré, your argument suffers from a lack of explanation for why *American* teen boys are "so full of anger, resentment, and nihilistic rage" since progressivism in public education, i.e. government schools, also exists in many other countries, particularly within the OECD. The US is about a quarter of the OECD population, but accounts for half of OECD mass shootings, and I think even disproportionately more school shootings. How is your argument different than the violent-TV-and-video-games argument you dismiss when progressivism in public education is just as prevalent across the OECD?

Expand full comment

Excellent question. It's a hard one, to be sure. Equally difficult is the question asking why there aren't more shootings in America, where some 50 million kids are indoctrinated with Progressive education. If I had some research assistants helping me, these are questions that I'd like to explore.

Expand full comment

There is a need to better understand the current processes of youth radicalization, across the entire political spectrum and including the possible contribution of progressive education. I suspect there are buckets of grant money available for researchers coming at this from the right via Heritage, Cato, the DeVos family and other such groups. The challenge for a researcher not pre-committed to merely generating ideological grist—someone with intellectual integrity, in other words—is how to structure a legitimately open proposal to those sources given they will want politically conformant results. Can't find that watching lots of Fox News is a key factor, for example. Maybe put out feelers to FAIR, FIRE and/or Heterodox Academy to see if there's someone on the left who wants to meet in the middle as a starting point? I think the money is out there on the right. It just comes with parallel ideological baggage in our current tribal frenzy.

Expand full comment

This is a great article! I've been saying it like this: If you teach a child they have no significance, because we are all just accidents of nature, and Survival of the Fittest is the law of the land, then school shootings are a natural result. You're adding in the whole-word reading and the progressive math adds fuel to their fire. You can't offer a child nihilism and then be surprised when he takes you up on it. Please come to our Playbook for Home Learning Conference! SamSorbo.com/UndergroundEducation/ for deets.

Expand full comment

Oh, stop it! The conservative need for macho and the adolescent behavior of conservatives make it necessary for stupid kids to kill others. Look at their movies, all with "action", meaning self-righteous violence. The worship of guns and acceptance of lies make it a deadly combination.

Expand full comment

This is all quite simple. Leftists are totalitarians, totalitarianism always causes anger and violence.

Expand full comment

Bring up this argument to a progressive and they laugh at you and say "Ohhhh! THOSE POOR BOYS!!!" and show absolutely zero f's given for them. The elites just don't care.

Expand full comment

And this: https://amidwesterndoctor.substack.com/p/how-the-fda-buried-the-dangers-of?s=r

The Midwestern Doctor makes a strong case for the role of psychiatric meds in mass shootings.

Expand full comment

Thank you for this!

I'd like to suggest that none of what's happening is happenstance. School shootings, CRT, BLM, Covid-19, the attempt (as happened in my town) to get pornographers to read to school children in a public library (Drag Queen Story Hour-- the local chapter had blatant pornography on a public website,) the supposed catastrophe of CO2 warming, the purging of dissenters in the medical community as personnel who refused to get the shot were fired, the financial system, etc., etc. It's all related.

This implies a plan in the making for decades to undermine freedom and clear thinking to make the masses suitable to be molded into a collective that can be controlled by those who know what's best for everyone. No, three years ago I'd have said to pay no attention to Agenda 21 or whatever. However, Covid-19 has revealed that these folks will do anything to gain power, including releasing a pathogen, withholding effective and safe early treatments, and outright lying to the good people of the world and to Americans in particular.

They want to take away our guns because that would make it so much easier. Ask: why was the door left open in Uvalde? Why, as soon as the police heard of shots fired at the funeral home, didn't the police call the school and have them secure the doors? If the police did, why weren't the doors secured? And so on. The timing was so convenient. Shooter arrives, door left open ....

Why are we hearing about monkeypox and bird flu? Why is Bill Gates buying up farmland? What's the one way a dictatorship can be installed in America without the people realizing it? How about through a medical police state, supposedly justified by the 1905 Jacobson decision?

Why has catastrophic CO2 theory persisted for years, despite that the theory is essentially pseudoscience? When we read Klaus Schwab's book, "Covid-19: The Great Reset," we understand. The entire Great Reset is premised on the need to "stay safe" from catastrophic global warming. It's "medical necessity" writ large.

Why are we hearing that "narrative" is truth, and that logic and reason are just a white man's trick? Why did the US propose that the WHO would have global control over all future pandemics, able to overstep national governments in order to "stay safe"?

Are we in the midst of a massive world war orchestrated for years to control the population through fear, and prepared for years by making the people stupid? What is Covid-19? Control through fear. School shootings? Control through fear. Climate change theory? Control through fear. Monkeypox? Control through fear.

Who killed JFK? It matters. Did these folks just go hide in the woodwork, or have they been active since?

My reading of the folks who frequent such websites as WUWT and Climate Etc. is that many of them get it: Covid-19 was/is pseudoscience just like catastrophic CO2 warming is. And it's all related to the Great Reset. https://winteroak.org.uk/2020/10/05/klaus-schwab-and-his-great-fascist-reset/ It looks to me like "school shootings" might just be part of the plan-- maybe. After all, they really do need to take away our guns. We've seen what they did during Covid-19-- it was blatantly obvious to anyone who could tear away from the 24/7 fear porn. So we should put nothing past these folks. Remember what Schwab said of Covid-19: "we're never going back to normal." He meant it, if he and the Davos crowd get their way.

For them, the end justifies the means. They'll do anything. It's war.

Expand full comment

I know my comment falls somewhat into the category of tin-foil conspiracy theory. But what's happening is so unbelievable that many people can't believe it. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/globalists-takeover-food-system-control-cola/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=790cca51-9e9d-40ec-afe9-602c981e0790

It may be all wild conspiracy theory, but trust me that a lot of people are seeing this-- people who prior to Covid would've dismissed this as wild conspiracy theory, as I did. Read Dr. Malone's substack ('Who is Dr. Malone'), for example, or Naomi Wolf, or 'Tessa Fights Robots' or all of the above.

Well, it may just be wild imaginings. On the other hand, we should look, examine, think about things, and maybe ask ourselves if any of this makes any sense, and if all these things happening at once are mere coincidence. After all: this is exactly what the good folks promoting the Great Reset want, in their hopes of creating a world where "we're never going back to normal." In order to "build back better" (coincidentally the slogan of so many governments) the old ways first need to be destroyed.

Whoever said that WWIII would be fought with guns?

Expand full comment