Special Report

In certain minority circles, everybody's talking about the majority who's so dumbed-down that they no longer care about perjury, obstruction of justice, or gross misuse of power. It's almost as if barbarism was a new political trend. Of course some are pointing to the media as a cause. And you probably have heard the collective media described as the propaganda wing, or "Fourth Estate" of American government. But while most of us realize that the media has effectively become the Fourth Estate, it's only beginning to dawn on us that there has also long been a Fifth. We're talking about the American system of education, both public and private. We're talking about grades K through Twelve. We're talking about those A's, B's, M's, and P's attached to the names of individuals who have ran the gauntlet of upper academia. We're talking about the PC facilitators. We're talking about the Fifth Estate.

Locked in the narrow detention of their own denial—like virtually everyone else incarcerated in even the most comfortable American prisons—limousine liberals and plush corporate contract members of the media hold themselves innocent. Innocent at least, of political bias. Although to anyone capable of tying his own shoes, the charade of the majority of talking heads and syndicated quill pushers has become as clear as Waterford Crystal. Nearly ninety percent of the Washington press-corps admits being Liberal, and Hollywood doesn't even pretend. And if the bias of the Fourth Estate is evident to the point of popular cynicism, the same is true of the Fifth Estate. After all, that's where most of the Manhattan media anchors and Hollywood visionaries got their education.

From a certain point of view then, the American system of education appears to be the training ground for those tending a pure propaganda engine for progressive political ideologies. So much so that it has become a political force in its own right. There are presently 760 federal programs that deal with education. And even as we speak the central government is trotting out long-legged new plans for huge increases in spending. Voracious instructors and academic administrators pant obsequiously with tin cups ready. But there's nothing new about this trend in America. Long before political correctness became politically correct, foundation facilitators were busy planning.

"The term 'planning' is mostly used as a synonym for socialism, communism, and authoritarian and totalitarian economic management. Sometimes only the German pattern of socialism—Zwangswirtshaft—is called planning, while the term socialism proper is reserved for the Russian pattern of outright socialization and bureaucratic operation of all plants, shops and farms. At any rate, planning in this sense means all-around planning by the government and enforcement of these plans by the police power."
—Ludwig von Mises, Planning For Freedom

Look Out for the Truant Officer

Frederick Gates, Chairman of the General Education Board, a private institution funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, remarked about their hopes for public education as far back as 1902. In the Board's Occasional Letter he wrote, "In our dreams, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand."

This must be the molding hand that lent itself to the systematic destruction of the American ideal of individual liberty and personal accountability in favor of our current "kleptocracy." And it must be the progressive hand that's now dangerously flirting with that wretched seductress popularly described as American Fascism.

One thing's for sure. It is a trend. And it's a trend that also appears to include a smug effort to use education as a vehicle for cultural destruction. The primary target has long been the stabilizing force of traditional Western values that works through individual conscience. Specifically, these are the values of the ancient Jews and their gentile Christian progeny. At the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, David Horowitz described it as a blend of Judaic law and Hellenistic philosophy. It's the historic alloy of law and value, of personal liberty and individual accountability, of faith and reason. While Jesse Jackson chants, "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture's gotta' go," his multicultural followers reject the very values that gave the world the Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, and the Declaration of Independence. And the destruction of that value system clearly appears an orchestrated means to reduce the public to a new barbarism, with the primary purpose of rebuilding the collapsed culture under authoritarian socialism. That notion was considered in greater depth in The Meaning of Original Sin.

"It's not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it's because their consciences are weak."
––John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, III:178

In A Common Faith, John Dewey wrote that he didn't know, "...how any realization of the democratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual ideal in human affairs is possible without surrender of the conception of the basic division to which supernatural Christianity is committed." Dewey was a socialist ideologue who is sometimes known the Father of Progressive Education. But more than merely rejecting the supernatural or personally intrusive aspects of Christian culture, Dewey was rejecting the "basic division" to which the culture was committed. A division that was ideologically opposed to nihilistic moral relativism on the basis of a logical pragmatism. The cannons of Western Culture are every bit as much documents on sociology, anthropology, and history, as they are liturgical tracts.

Accordingly, in 1932, the Fabian Socialist George S. Counts wrote in Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order, that, "Teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest...[toward the end of]...careful planning, and private Capitalism by some form of socialized economy." He taught at Columbia University's Teachers College. The progression of this trend, and all the related social fallout, has continued almost unabated for the entire twentieth century.

And in the 1960's—almost as if there was a systematic decision that since the Fabian method wasn't getting them there fast enough—they went with Gramsci. It's almost as if they envisioned a day like today, where the public virtue would be so thoroughly degraded that a breaking point would be reached and Gramscian "normalization" would finally be at hand. In the January/February 1983 issue of The Humanist Magazine, John J. Dunphy, summa cum laude graduate of the University of Illinois-at Edwardsville, echoed that trend. He declared that, "The battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom... Classrooms must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new—the rotting corpse of Christianity... and the new faith of Humanism."

If Ronald Reagan's moral majority is in fact dead, as Free Congress Foundation's Paul Weyrich said in the aftermath of President Clinton's "acquittal," then the particular educators described above are the kind of liberals who set up the kill. If we accept President Washington's admonition that liberty is most easily destroyed through licentiousness, then the death of American morality signifies the mortal aging of our liberty. And if we believe de Tocqueville when he told us that America was great because America was good, then we're probably witnessing the end of American greatness. And it will probably be seen as a great achievement by her spiteful, envious ideological enemies, both without and within. At least in the short term.

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
—President John Adams, second President of the United States addressing the U.S. military, October 11, 1798

The failure to remove an impeached president from office is spun by the Left as a rejection of the "repressive" value system of Western Culture. They obsess on the sensible axiom that insists the state has no business in the bedroom. And while most of us are in agreement, the question is whether thoroughly separating the traditional flag-bearers on the Right from the political process is any wiser than allowing the smug brats in the spoiled counter-culture a completely free hand on the Left.

What's really personal life anyway? Did anybody catch reports of the recent stunt of rolling a motor home full of copulating gay men through States retaining anti-sodomy laws? Do you remember Maplethorpe's splash on the cultural scene by tapping the National Endowment for the Arts to give us such thrilling little gems as a photograph of a man with a bullwhip stuck up his anus? Does anybody really think that throwing it up in our faces like that is really a socially productive or politically sensible? Roman Emperors committed oral copulation with suckling infants. Should we embrace that too? Should we challenge the proscription against "snuff films" on the basis of the First Amendment? Should we keep our hands off the purveyors and the morbid clients who find stimulation watching men have sex with women while actually choking them to death or slicing their throats? I mean, come on.

History suggests that once a culture goes off the deep end, unless a miraculous force acts against it, it rarely stops until it pounds its way into the earth at the bottom. Rejection of the foundations of traditional value is much more than merely dumping the prohibition against getting naked with some exotic dancer named Baby Oil and wallowing in worship at the putrid feet of Larry Flynt. It's actually a rejection of the very value system that protected us from the tyranny of totalitarianism.

Dancing With the Sweetheart on my Left

Just how prevalent is this Politically Correct trend in American academia? Judge Bork recently reminded us that way back in 1964 there were 40 law professors at the Harvard Law School when he was being considered for a position. Thirty-nine described themselves as liberal, and one as conservative. Administrators were hesitant to hire Bork, because they felt that two conservatives on a staff of 41 would upset the balance between political views.

And a recent Rocky Mountain News survey of the political affiliations of liberal arts professors at the University of Colorado reflected 184 Democrats and only six Republicans. The History Department contained 27 Democrats and zero Republicans. In Philosophy there were 12 Democrats and zero Republicans. The English department polled unanimous as well. Every one of the 29 professors were registered Democrat.

Listen to the authors of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses: "What remain of the '60s on our campuses are its worst sides: intolerance of dissent from regnant political orthodoxy, the self-appointed power of self-designated 'progressives' to set everyone else's moral agenda, and, saddest of all, the belief that universities not only may but should suspend the rights of some in order to transform students, the culture, and the nation according to their ideological vision and desire." They went on to state that, "The result has been an emerging tyranny over all aspects of student life—a tyranny that is far more dangerous than the relatively innocuous parietal rules of ages past. It is a tyranny that seeks to assert absolute control over the souls, the consciences, and the individuality of our students––in short, a tyranny over the essence of liberty itself."

"The brand of Fascist political correctness we see on American campuses today is representative of some of the most intolerant closed-mindedness this side of Beijing."
—Joseph Farah

Theater instructor Jared Sakren was recently denied tenure at Arizona State University because he loved Shakespeare. Faculty members insisted that Shakespeare was "sexist." He would have to change such insensitive works as The Taming of the Shrew if he wanted to present them to students. After Sakren's dismissal, the department chair claimed that she planned to "kill off the classics." While Shakespeare may be too controversial for us these days, students are able to enroll in courses as bizarre as Colorado’s "The Social Construction of Reality," Harvard’s "Fetishism," and Oberlin’s "Queer Acts." The course description of the latter read: "Drag will be encouraged, but not required." How comforting for those heterosexuals wrangled into taking that class as a prerequisite to obtaining their Social Science degree.

In 1994, homogenized radical student leaders on the University of Massachusetts campus demanded that the university drop the "Minuteman" as the school mascot on the grounds that these revolutionary heroes were "racist, sexist, white, gun-toting males." Never mind that their socialist, student-counterparts in Vietnam and China embraced Mao Tse Tung who said, "Political power emerges from the barrel of a gun." Or that their very own Marx wrote in 1848 that the "Slavic riffraff...as well as the Czechs, and Croats, are retrograde races whose only function in the world history of the future is to be cannon fodder." Or that their icon Engels wrote in the same year that, "World war will make whole reactionary peoples disappear from the face of the earth. This, too, is progress. Obviously, this cannot be fulfilled without crushing some delicate national flower." Should we nudge these self-indulgent academic mavens of the progressive elite and admonish them that it might be their very own delicate national flower that could next be violated? And that the "reactionary peoples" that may disappear could include their friends, loved ones, even themselves? Should we bother?

And it gets worse. Our Clintonesque culture is advancing with the Goals 2000 program well underway. The new history standards issued in October of 1994 featured sheer political correctness and historical revisionism. New textbooks virtually ignore individuals such as Betsy Ross, Thomas Edison, Paul Revere, Alexander Graham Bell, Albert Einstein, the Founding Fathers, and even crucial historic American events like the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Commenting on the Goals 2000 policy in USA Today on October 28, 1994, Joel Urschel said, "This is surely the most absurd extension of the victim culture mind-set afflicting the nation...Better, I guess, that we study the lives of those who didn't fight for their beliefs, avoided political debate and muddled through life without a creative accomplishment or an original idea. This is egalitarianism reduced to a philosophy of simplistic nonsense that even the socialists in the old Soviet Union couldn't swallow."

In his book Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, John Taylor Gatto tells us that, "No sane human being hasn't judged the value of instruction based on outcomes...[OBE is] a pedagogical manifestation of 'managing by objectives.' It's too difficult to control all the behavior of the herd, so you set these goals and get the herd to behave the way you want by leading them to these goals." Among the things OBE is said to apply significantly reduced emphasis are spelling, multiplication, history, and geography. And this must be good news for high school graduates who already can't read a map to find out where they live, or don't know the difference between being chaste and being chattel. But it's not such good news for those who have to compete with the hardened-by-fire children of modern Laogai China.

The darkest side of OBE is manifest by tracing its promoters. James Guines helped design Chicago's proto-OBE program, and was a disciple of the infamous B. F. Skinner. Guines noted in the Washington Post, "If you can train a pigeon to fly up there and press a button and set off a bomb [as Skinner had done during W.W.II], why can't you teach human beings to behave in an effective and rational way?" Guines agrees with Skinner that teaching a pigeon to commit suicide is a rational act for the pigeon if it's unaware that the action will lead to its mortality. It's good news for the goals of the totalitarian teacher, but bad news for the hapless student.

We have to recall Skinner's book Beyond Freedom and Dignity to really appreciate his philosophy. He describes the obstacle to behavior modification by noting that, "Freedom and dignity illustrate the difficulty. They are the possessions of the autonomous man of traditional theory and they are essential to practices in which a person is held responsible for his conduct and given credit for his achievements. A scientific analysis shifts both the responsibility and the achievement to the environment...A technology of behavior is available...but defenders of freedom oppose its use." His point appears to be that he feels it's necessary to deprive humanity of traditional notions of "freedom and dignity" in order to bring about the triumph of what thinkers of his era called "scientific world Humanism."

In criticism of the traditional, non-Humanist view of freedom and dignity, Marxists Theodore Adorno published a study called The Authoritarian Personality. The social commentator Christopher Lasch notes the Adorno report would solve America's social problems by, "Subjecting the American people to what amounted to collective psychotherapy—by treating them as inmates of an insane asylum." In other words, if someone values his dignity and freedom more than the excesses of post-modern socialism, then he's insane and the benevolent state will have to step in and heal him.

Only those who managed to induce the American people to surrender their Constitutional heritage without even being aware it happened, exceeded the cleverness of the pop-culture rant. But we've got news for the myopic American Left: It's all been done before. From the Soviet manual on Psychopolitics:

PSYCHOPOLITICS: The art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaus, and masses, and the effecting of the conquest of enemy nations thorough "mental healing."

Does anyone remember the venerable Alexander Solzhenitsyn's commencement address at Harvard University in 1978? The one where the soft, snobbish brie-and-baguette crowd berated him for challenging their humanist Tower of Babel? He said the incident hurt him more than the eight years he spent laboring over the Gulag Archipelago in the camps, writing snippets on toilet paper and matchbook covers. This was from Harvard, the school that gave the world the likes of the venomous neo-Pharisee Alan Dershowitz. Here's a sequence of excerpts from Solzhenitsyn's address warning us about the conquest of enemy nations through mental healing:

"The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy. But the fight for our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil have begun their decisive offensive, you can feel their pressure, and yet your [TV] screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised glasses.

"Two hundred, or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic.

"There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.

"It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.

"Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction."

Still having trouble making the distinction between license and liberty? The economy's fine, so why should we worry about personal life, about an absurd anachronism like virtue? A recent study claimed it revealed that 40 percent of the students at Harvard Business school admitted that after they graduate they would not hesitate to cheat their prospective employers if they believed they could "get away with it." This implies that four out of ten of those polled who end up working for you either in the private or public sector, are willing to cheat you whenever they think they can. And of course, many of them already are. They're cheating you out of not only your labor and your money, but your ideological and literal heritage in liberty as well.

And Then There's Leno

So give it to me straight, Doc. Just how bad is it? Well a 1990 survey of 200 major corporations found that 22 percent of companies had to teach their employees to read, and 41 percent had to teach employees to write. Ninety million American adults could not write a letter complaining about a consumer billing error. The Hearst Corporation conducted a poll revealing that 45 percent of those asked believed that the Marxist slogan, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," is part of the U.S. Constitution. And while every recent graduate may know how to use a condom or recognize Patricia Ireland, only four out of ten polled adults could correctly identify the Bill of Rights.

A recent Associated Press poll placed Monica Lewinsky eighth on the top-ten list of most-admired American women, barely below Mother Teresa. Hillary Clinton was number-one. The same poll placed Bill Clinton above the Pope, and a Washington Post poll in late January gave Larry Flynt higher numbers for trustworthiness than Henry Hyde. And the State of the Union address claims that the federal government can ameliorate this tragedy by throwing more of your money at the problem and producing more drag queens with Ph.D's.

"When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already.'"
––Adolf Hitler

From the ever popular icon of American culture, The Tonight Show, host Jay Leno occasionally walks the streets outside the NBC studio in Burbank California polling people with a live camera crew. On August 8, 1995, he displayed pictures to teen-agers he stopped at random. Shoving his wireless microphone up in their faces, he showed the likeness of Joe Stalin next to the fictional cigarette advertisement cartoon character Joe Camel. None of the young adults could identify the man who Solzhenitsyn says was responsible for the deaths of 60 million who resisted "mental healing," but everyone recognized Joe Camel.

Leno then displayed Caesar Augustus and the Little Caesar's pizza chain cartoon character. The results were the same. He went on with Napoleon Bonaparte and Captain Crunch, then Colonel Qadaffi and Colonel Sanders, and finally former president Jimmy Carter and Mr. Peanut. No one could identify even one of the real historic characters, including a recent president of the United States. Virtually everyone knew the advertising characters. The audience was hysterical. Young adults all know peanuts, pizza, and the mechanics of sodomy, but only 41 percent can identify their own Bill of Rights.

What's the matter, man? Can't you take a joke? We're the new barbarians, and damn proud of it! We love them dumb. That way they yield themselves with perfect docility. You understand what I'm talkin' about, dude?

I'm talking about a culture war over a sovereign political prize that may already be lost. And if it is, I'm talking about kissing the traditional American concept of liberty goodbye. I'm talking about the possibility that the Fascists may have won without firing a shot, aided and abetted by the arrogant, vapid cretins on the intellectual American Left. And I'm talking about our morally bankrupt system of education at the very heart of this tragedy. I'm talking about the Fifth Estate.

article reposted from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 9, March 1, 1999

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