A response to the alleged article by Rabbi Rabbinovitch
Belated response I know and I hope readers including CLBakke find it worthwhile. I know he is concerned about the prominence of Jews in the historical intellectual development and leadership of Communism. I argue this is an artefact of the Jews’ very high comparative education historically due to their cultural value on education; the salience of Jewish oligarchs which is a product of their high drive to succeed (this is relevant regarding oligarchs who support Socialist means and causes); and their affinity for minorities or underdogs again a reflection of their historical circumstances. However many Jews are deeply Conservative and in reality other groups and interests are far more implicated in the emergence continuation and renewal of Marxism than Jews. Marxism appeals to narcissists, psychopaths, grifters and romanticists alike and can be a useful tool for oligarchs and power seekers of any background. It is after all a religion that substitutes the pursuit of power for which ever group happens to be currently considered the oppressed in the stead of truth based on assessment of likelihood from material evidence. Marxism is also a very effective lever to unseat governments or weaken those considered enemy societies from within. Richard Poe makes a very good well referenced argument that communist ideology was extensively used by the British to overthrow the French King Louis XVI (Who supported the Americans against the British in their War of Independence) and to eviscerate Russian imperial power. Poe’s book that was recommended by James ’how the British invented communism and blamed it on the Jews‘ is a really fascinating read which has huge significance for the Cold War, modern geopolitics, and the dialectical dirty tricks, media lies and covert Ops we are today so obviously enduring. The information here relating to covert operations by the British against the French and Russians mainly which were disguised with allegations against Jews comes from my summarisation of parts of Richard Poe’s 2024 book How the British Invented Communism (and Blamed it on the Jews) which is a fascinating and very relevant book and I apologise for any errors in my summarisations which constitute most of this post. The Mike Benz lecture to Hillsdale College is also relevant to American covert operations.
In my opinion this article is totally unconvincing for various reasons and likely to be part of CIA/ intelligence and covert operations apparatus efforts to divide and confuse the public. It also serves the bullshit of: “Never do your own research on current controversial issues. Instead, just support or ignore censorship of the internet and don’t listen to ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’. Make sure to only listen to MSM and selected ‘experts’”.
In addition to ‘making the world safe for democracy’ by overthrowing governments whose interests conflict with those of the US State Department and the military industrial complex, America’s secret service agencies have long been keen on subversion of democracy at home to neuter resistance to the administrative state’s economic and political plans at home.
The Blob can use dialectical politics to the advantage of the establishment/corporate militaristic interests. It divides and confuses the populace and makes them easier to control. Most American Jews vote Democrat and anything that looks like a rise in virulent anti-Jewish sentiment within what we could loosely call the Right or economic or cultural Conservatives may well incline those Democratic leaning Jews that were disgusted with the whole pro-Hamas thing to cleave back to the Democrats. Meanwhile it also divides the Right whilst facilitating condemnation of the whole of the Right as ‘extreme’ - and leveraged against the populists that the Blob and the intellectual establishment hate so much to portray these as fascists regardless of their stance on this. And it confuses many people into paralysis.
The article feeds the most extreme anti-Jewish stereotypes and indeed the most extreme white nationalist stereotypes. In my personal view though it is just not credible in terms of Jewish religious principles or of self interest. It trivialises a repeat of the Holocaust as part of a necessary payment towards some ridiculous self-destructive plan which would be more likely to annihilate the Jews than hand them control of the world. In the plan non-white peoples will crush white economic and political power only to then hand it all over to the Jews. The Jews themselves as a people will seamlessly execute a long term plan to completely control the world in totalitarian style despite their reputation for intense internal political differences and indeed their tradition of discussing moral issues.
There is obvious basis for defence of Jews and Judaism. Apart from proper Western reaction against the atrocities of the Holocaust, Judaism is a foundation within Western culture even as it is in some ways in conflict with Christianity historically. Around 9/10ths of Christian scripture is the Old Testament. Christianity is genuinely an Abrahamic faith whereas Islam simply asserts itself as such. Islam claims that the Judaic and Christian Scriptures as referenced by actual Jews and Christians have been corrupted from original ancient pre Islamic versions that were supposedly fully compatible with Islam.
In the shared Old Testament of Judaism and Christianity, God creates man (and subsequently woman) in the image of Himself - in other words all humans fundamentally are to be valued as humans not as members of specific tribes. The creation story in Islam is quite different. Allah creates humans from clay and we are told God does not look like humans. Whilst in various parts of the Torah including the sourjourn of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, God is actually physically present with humans, the Islamic God explicitly requires a master slave relationship with humans and creation generally. In Islamic Scriptures believers are defined in relation to the unbelievers who are wicked and the most wicked crime is to openly question Islamic orthodoxy. Not only is treatment of others secondary to beliefs and rituals - Again and again in Islam the punishment for questioning is stipulated to be death and the emphasis is on Revelation alone not Reason. In Judaism and Christianity there is a role for debate and emphasis on the importance of logic (the Word). Truth is the ultimate expression of God and we know how to value behaviour by outcomes of actions (“you shall know them by their fruits”). In the Old Testament humans are to multiply and use the earth and it’s creatures for their purposes, whilst being stewards of the earth. Personally I see animals as having their own purposes in terms of their own biology and reproduction although we need to do what is necessary for our survival. The point is that our Jewish heritage is not totalitarian or fatalistic. Humans must productively use reason to improve their material lot on earth together and to please God as opposed to accepting a slave order and concentrating only on obedience and the afterlife. This is a Jewish heritage shared with Christians
Another key Judeo-Christian element of morality and practical grounding that inherently works against believers engaging in hubristic and ruthless power seeking is the belief in Original Sin, in the consequent need to recognise sin and work to address it but also belief in God‘s power to forgive sin. The recognition of innate human frailty and the need to struggle with this to address life’s problems - slaps down narcissism and grandiose entitlement whilst recognising the importance of the individual In common with all other individuals. Specific Leaders of Jewish or Christian cultures may be narcissists or imperialists but the religions are not. In Islam Allah creates humans, and other beings as Islamic. The ability to sin comes with free will at puberty. Muslims believe all people are born Islamic but then some of them disbelieve or adopt other religions. Some parents make their children into non-Muslims. In a sense Jews and Christians are considered particularly bad by Muslims because they are believed to have been sent prophets who brought them Islamic scripture prior to Muhammad and instead of accepting this they distorted that scripture and belief away from Islam. A great deal of Islamic scripture expresses condemnation or hostility to non-Muslims or unbelievers and in Sunni Islam at all times a portion of the Muslim community is required to undertake holy war against non-Muslims.
In Exodus or maybe Leviticus God tells Hebrews that they are to treat other peoples with respect because they were once slaves themselves. They are chosen people for obeying a covenant with a strict moral code and they are allowed to occupy certain land. Admittedly that promised land in Genesis stretched from the Nile to Euphrates but in later chapters - critically the return from enslavement in Egypt - this is narrowed to basically modern Israel. The moral code of the Torah is not just certain articles of faith and ritual practices it includes many stretches on treatment of other people. Killing of others is a most heinous sin against God whereas it is not in Islam - where blood compensation payment to relatives according to religious and gender status is encouraged. Unlike the surrounding civilisations of the ancient Middle East the Judaic law in principle was not to distinguish between classes. Debts, including bonded labour were to be forgiven every jubilee period. In short the article does not ring true in any sense
Jews are influential and powerful out of proportion to their numbers because of their cultural value on succeeding in business and educating the young in high-value education - professions such as Medicine, Law, engineering or the sciences. They have had to be survivors for historical reasons and are also very savvy business people. Some successful and powerful people will be both ruthless and dishonest and as such deserve condemnation with no excuse made just because they are or are not of Jewish background. Their success and their status as a permanent minority - and normally with no sovereign territory of their own - has made them easy targets of malice or resentment.
Jews have always been on one level at least an embattled minority - Marx theorised a more Gnostic Hegelianism which focused on the oppressed and most of the key theorists and leaders in Western and Russian communism have been Jewish. But then Jews are disproportionately represented in the investor and professional middle class that has dominated Western intelligentsia and driven Marxist dogmatic development.
Marxist leaders and dogma have always come out of the university educated middle-class. Yet Marxism is a reflection of the human weaknesses of envy, resentment, irresponsibility or naked power seeking which are universal, not specifically Jewish. Hegel was not Jewish, nor Gramsci, Foucault or Mao - Hermeticism and Gnosticism are essentially opposed to the fundamentals of Judaism and Christianity in their rejection of material reality on this earth and their espousal of distortions and lies in pursuit of power.
Machiavelli and Tsun Zu long precede Hegel or Marx. Lies and political and cultural subversion have always attended imperial power politics. Hermetic and Gnostic rejection of categorical distinctions and morality in favour of power as the only truth makes use of the methods of these cults attractive to political elites. Jews do appear to have played a disproportionate role in the development of Marxist theory and it’s successful establishment in Russia and spread into the Westwest. However all these borrowed heavily from non-Jewish Western philosophers such as Rousseau and Hegel, the Idealists and Romantics generally and later the post-modernists. Moreover the oppressed oppressor dialectic has appealed heavily to sections of Christianity and generated liberation theology, Freirian critical pedagogy and radical Baptists. These things are radical distortions of Christianity not genuine Christianity just as Kabbalah is radical Judaism.
Finally other great powers have played the cynical dialectic game of blaming Jews for Communism while actually themselves supporting Communism whenever this served their Imperial interest.
In 1920 Winston Churchill accused the Jews of masterminding both the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution in a full page newspaper article. This moreover followed a 1919 British Foreign Office report known as the Bolshevik Atrocity Bluebook which identified Jews as responsible for the Bolshevik revolution and the Czar’s murder. There is also considerable evidence tying the publication of the 1920 English edition of “The Jewish Peril: Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” in a first press run of thirty thousand copies - to Britain’s war propaganda machine. British newspapers ran a series of articles on the book, exhorting readers to “Read about the evil Jews influence”. Richard Poe argues that this was done to deflect attention from British complicity in the Russian Revolution.
The generally acknowledged founding father of communism was Francois-Noel Babeuf. Babeuf preached a classless society, abolition of private property and the need for revolutionary action in the 1780s as a member of a fraction of French radicals called ” The Conspiracy of Equals“. It was what Marx called “crude” communism and appealed to the pre-industrial sans culottes workers. After they tried unsuccessfully to overthrow France’s last revolutionary government In 1796 Babeuf was put to death. Babeuf sometimes called his followers “communautistes” and his reputed confrere in The Conspiracy of Equals, Restif de La Bretonne, often used the word “Communist” in his writings. Those who called themselves “communists” from the 1830s and 40s in Paris saw themselves as following in the footsteps of the Babeuf. It is significant that Babeuf was very substantially influenced by British mentors who were intelligence operatives and that he corresponded in a French language paper published in London called Courier l’Europe which was owned by a former military officer who had been a high-level British diplomat.
Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette had wanted the French Revolution to result in a constitutional monarchy and blamed the British for its bloody and radical outcome. US historian Micah Alpaugh has found that Frances radical Jacobin clubs were consciously modelled after the London Revolution Society whose nominal goal was celebration of the glorious revolution of 1688 but whos
Watch this full presentation here: https://newdiscourses.com/2022/02/workshop-1-what-is-critical-race-theory/
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 101
DARVO is an acronym that refers to a particular abusive behavior that applies when the abuser is caught or called out. It stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender: DARVO. DARVO takes many forms, but in wedge operations it very frequently takes the form of being divisive and then accusing the people who call it out of being divisive. It fits the mold: Deny: "I'm not divisive!" Attack: "You're divisive!" in such a way that it Reverses the roles of Victim and Offender. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay explains this simple, common, Machiavellian trick used to steal power by divisive elements.
The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Ep. 149
Vladimir Lenin established the Bolshevik Party in 1912 to seize control of the socialist movement in Russia and to plan and execute a violent revolution against the Tsar, and by 1917 he was successful in this attack. Also in 1917, on the eve of his victory, he wrote his thoughts about the organization of the state and how the revolution should proceed, both to box out his socialist competitors and to establish a theoretical baseline drawing from Marx and Engels for how to organize what became the Soviet Union. That document bears the title The State and Revolution, and in this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay reads through the first chapter of Lenin's key work to expose to you what Bolshevik Communists think a state exists to do: repression. Join him to learn how history today is rhyming with Lenin's evil.
New Discourses Bullets, Ep. 100
Communism hasn't died, despite what many would have you believe. It has evolved and adapted for the 21st century. What you see under the CCP in China, that's the Chinese Communist Party, today and what we deal with under ESG and the UN Agenda 2030 in the West is 21st Century Communism, which appears to fulfill Marx, not contradict him, at least in certain ways. In this episode of New Discourses Bullets, host James Lindsay spends a few minutes to explain to you how Communism is presenting in the 21st century and what it means for us and our fight for our and our children's liberty.
So I was desperate for another take on the so-called woke-right that Lindsay has been touting lately on X. I found this. It’s interesting to say the least.
Woke Corruption - Exhibit #22351518
I recently visited a historical location in a very small town, with a historical church and historical road leading up to the church. For a very long time, the road had been painted with rainbow colors, not because of any ideological associations, but because the area suffered very bleak and dark winters, and painting things in bright colors was something the local people did to help deal with that environment.
The beginning of the rainbow road had been painted over with the pattern of the “progress flag”, which of course is just the Woke/Communist flag. I could tell it was fairly recent, and not professionally done, because the original bright rainbow colors could be clearly seen underneath in divots and cracks within the new chevron pattern of intersectionality.
Cultists had appropriated something good in the community and corrupted it to serve their destructive agenda. Of course they did. They can’t help but do that.
Also in the town was a...
I have been observing real challenges for us on team sanity. It's been painfully obvious, say over the past 10 years, that there is a massive set of conspiracies going on. If one in not a conspiracy theorist by now then they are likely just extremely gullible or in on it. This is terribly destructive to a society. I refer to it is the "Boy who cried wolf" trauma and aftermath. It rips a society to shreds, even if all they do is heard sheep. The self inflicted credibility crisis is not only self destructive but causes collateral damage like a drunk driver or drug addict. This means it has to be addressed by team sanity.
Team sanity's second challenge is remaining confident that not everything is a conspiracy all the time. I find myself saddened to see some on team sanity (not here) seem to go down the conspiracy rabbit hole too deeply. "Faked the moon landings?" is one example. If I had to bet lunch money on it I'd bet against fooling the USSR near it's peak in 1969 and later.
It's a ...
I recently read a document released by the CIA in 2005 that describes the New Left and Herbert Marcuse's influence on college campuses. What it reveals is extremely relevant to what's happening on college campuses today.
"Marx, the god; Marcuse, his prophet; Mao, his sword."
In June of 1968, the Current Digest of the Soviet Press released a scathing article, calling University of California San Diego professor Herbert Marcuse a “false prophet.” As a Soviet entity, the Current Digest set out to annihilate Marcuse’s “decommunized Marxism,” for obvious reasons. Marcuse had abandoned “vulgar” Marxism and the USSR’s bureaucratic and administrative terror in favor of his personal flavor of faith: Identity Marxism.
The TL;DR version of Marcuse’s theory goes like this: Free market economies stabilize the working class. Marx predicted the working class would necessarily enter open revolt against the system once their economic and material conditions became too brutal to bear. This, Marx argued, was a scientific prediction, predicated on what activists now call the “immortal science of Marxism.” In other words, just as you can predict that the apple will fall if you let go of it, Marxists predicted “capitalism” would inevitably fall after running its course in advanced industrial societies—it was only a matter of time.
But free market economies adjusted, and by the 1950s and 60s it was clear that free market economies improved the lives of workers. Marxists admitted this, reluctantly. For them, it was a crisis of faith. The “immortal science of Marxism” was clearly wrong, both on a moral level, as revealed by all of the starving and dead people, and on an economic level, as revealed by workers buying nice cars and taking their families on nice holidays.
Marcuse theorized that the working class must mostly be abandoned as first movers in a Communist revolution. The working class was too stable, and revolutions require instability to work. So, he argued, Marxists must place their energy in college kids, “ghetto populations,” criminal aliens (illegal immigrants), and anyone else who might feel marginalized by society, such as gays and lesbians, the unemployed, and war veterans. If you can radicalize these groups and centralize their grievances, Marcuse thought, then you can build a coalition that can break the working class from the inside. As the New York Times would publish in the wake of Marcuse’s death in 79’:
Dr. Marcuse had little belief that the working class would, in affluent, highly technological societies, incite revolution. Rather, he believed, a new coalition of student radicals, small numbers of intellectuals, urban blacks and people from underdeveloped nations could overthrow forces that he saw as keeping workers from an awareness of their oppression.
(For more information on this important point, read “An Essay on Liberation” (Marcuse, 1969).)
The Current Digest was responding to the meteoric rise of Marcuse and his new theory of Marxism when it published “Marcuse: ‘False Prophet of Decommunized Marxism’” in June of 1968. Marcuse and his “vociferous disciples” scared the USSR because they had been converted to a new faith; a new interpretation of Marxism that “[has] special gods” and challenged the USSR’s stranglehold.
Marcuse, Marcuse, Marcuse-the name of this 70-year-old “German-American philosopher,” which has emerged form the darkness of obscurity, has been endlessly repeated in the Western press. In Bonn the name is pronounced Markoozeh; in New York, Markyooz; in Paris, Markyooss. The California resident who has undertaken to disprove Marxism is being publicized as if he were a movie star, and his books as if they were the latest brand of toothpaste or razor blades. A clever publicity formula has even been thought up: “the three M’s”—“Marx, the god; Marcuse, his prophet; and Mao, his sword.”
Marx remained “the god,” but Marcuse was his latest prophet, and the USSR hated his interpretations of their shared doctrine. If Marcuse spent his life in “dark obscurity,” his prophecy—identity-based Marxism rather than economic Marxism as the lever of revolution—wouldn’t have bothered the USSR. But Marcuse had reached astronomical popularity in the tumultuous 60s, and, worst of all, he had adopted the revolutionary strategies of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, founder of the People’s Republic of China.
Mao’s formula of Cultural Revolution proved to be incredibly successful in a gigantic, mostly agrarian society that was the last place Marx would have predicted Communist revolution to take hold. His strategy was straightforward: radicalize the easily brainwashed students and use them as a lever to bulldoze everything and consolidate his own power. Kids are extremely idealistic, and have few defense mechanisms for fighting off the “totalizing” nature of “thought reform,” as Robert Jay Lifton, expert on cult psychology broadly, and Mao’s system specifically, might describe it.
In an interview with Pierre Viansson-Ponte in Paris of 1969, Marcuse said that “certainly today every Marxist who is not a communist of strict obedience is a Maoist.” Marcuse was very familiar with Mao’s “Marxism-Leninism with Chinese characteristics,” and, according to the Current Digest, a central focus of Marcuse’s revolutionary strategy was precisely what Mao had accomplished in China with his Red Guards.
Marcuse replaces the class struggle in present-day society by the “generational conflict.” Flattering the students, he assures them that they are the chief revolutionary force, since, as Nouvel Observatuer wrote in summarizing his “doctrine,” “they are young and reject the society of their elders.” Therefore, “young people in general” must struggle against “adults in general.” Everywhere and anywhere!
Additionally,
It is characteristic that his “interpretation of prophetic revelation for the uninitiated” invariably coincides with the practice of Mao Tse-tung’s group. And what is of the greatest significance is that although this group does not stint on abusive language aimed at the imperialists, the governments of the capitalist states have very tolerant attitudes toward dissemination of its “ideas,” and at the same time toward the activities of Marcuse and his vociferous disciples as well.
What you are seeing on college campuses today is nothing new. If you are curious enough and take the initiative to investigate what’s happening, you will find that Karl Marx is still the god, Marcuse is still his prophet, and Mao is still his sword. There is a reason these kids and their enablers and directors all sound like Communists: they are.
The form of rebellion you are witnessing isn’t the “vulgar” kind you may be familiar with—a great Proletarian Revolution. It is a new kind, one that Marcuse said is, “Very different from the revolution at previous stages of history,” because, “this opposition is directed against the totality of a well-functioning, prosperous society—a protest against its Form—the commodity form of men and things, against the imposition of false values and a false morality.”
For today’s Communists, “the issue isn’t the issue; the issue is the revolution,” as David Horowitz reminded us. Make no mistake—the majority of the college kids revolting on campus have no idea what they are doing. They are in a cult, one with Marx at the top, the doctrinal revelation of Herbert Marcuse in the middle, and Mao’s revolutionary strategy at the ground level. This already happened in the 60s, but we put an end to it. The doctrine has now evolved, updating Marcuse’s prophecies through a “woke” lens (intersectionality, primarily), but it’s all the same strategy.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZGWxkj7xlBw?si=8xCbEzx2FwYHfHJT
“What is culturally relevant teaching?” That is the question I set out to answer four years ago.
Back in 2020, my wife and I were preparing to be parents and I had started researching the state of our educational system. I quickly realized that I knew essentially nothing about what was happening in our schools, despite attending them for the first twenty-two years of my life.
The buzzwords were everywhere – “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI),” “social-and-emotional learning (SEL),” “restorative justice (RJ),” and “culturally relevant teaching,” to name a few. I was completely lost, but I knew that some people on the TV were telling me that DEI, for example, meant teaching kids to respect others and treat people equally. Others were telling me that DEI was “brainwashing.” Clearly DEI was a point of contention, which confused me. How could anyone have a problem with diversity? How could anyone have a problem with equality? How could… wait. Does “equity” mean “equality”? What the hell is equity? I was curious.
After some quick google searches, I learned that “equity” meant “giving all kids an equal shot at the same outcome.” “Well,” I thought, “that’s insane!” I had recently read some Thomas Sowell, and he completely dismantled the “disparities equal discrimination” spell that I had fallen victim to in my early 20s. I knew that all children were different and, for various reasons, should be expected to reach different educational outcomes. The only way to produce equal outcomes between children is to artificially create unequal inputs between children. If you want all kids to cross the finish line at the same time, you must create a custom track for each child. Fast kids get weighted vests and obstacles. Slower kids get rollerblades and a slope.
How did schools get the idea that equality of outcomes was at all possible, let alone desirable? I was curious, so I started researching the “equity” pages of various school websites in my area. It was there that I kept running into “culturally relevant teaching” as an “equitable” practice for schools. Apparently “culturally relevant teaching” was a way to help schools produce equal outcomes between students.
“Ok,” I thought. “Let’s figure out what culturally relevant teaching is.” I was curious. I wanted to know what it was and how it was tied to “equity.” I wanted to know how I had never encountered the term in my early schooling, yet it was now ubiquitous on every district page I looked at. “It had to have come from somewhere,” I thought. Who created it?
I moseyed on over to Google Scholar for the first time in over a decade. I searched for “culturally relevant teaching,” and hit “enter.” I received over three million results in a tenth of a second. Whoa! The results overwhelmed me, so I set my eyes on the two most cited – Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy (over 12 thousand citations); and But that’s just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy (over 6 thousand citations).
Both articles were authored by Gloria-Ladson Billings in the mid-1990s. I started with Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy, the most cited result. It was there that I first encountered the term “critical consciousness,” which Billings identifies as the central learning objective culturally relevant teaching. “Culturally relevant teaching must,” she wrote, “[lead to the] development of a sociopolitical or critical consciousness.” I now know that critical consciousness is the cult belief that everything in society is designed to oppress you, and the only way to come to know “the truth” of the world is to become a Marxist committed to the “prophetic vision of social justice,” to quote Henry Giroux (writing about Paulo Freire’s critical theory of education.) But, at the time, all I knew was that I needed to know more. “Wait… what? The central goal of education is the development of a *political* consciousness,” I thought. “What the hell is going on here?” I was curious.
In But that’s just good teaching, I encountered Paulo Freire’s name for the first time. I learned that culturally relevant teaching is an “approach similar to that advocated by noted critical pedagogue Paulo Freire.” I also learned that “critical consciousness” was something Ladson-Billings wasn’t mincing words about. “Students,” she said, echoing her statement in Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy, “must develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order.”
“Excuse me?!” Culturally relevant teaching was all the rage in every school district I investigated. I now recognized Gloria’s name all over the source documents I found. Why on earth are all of the schools invested in a program that teaches kids to “challenge the status quo of the current social order?” Who is Paulo Freire? What are “inequities,” and why must students learn to “critique the cultural norms, values, mores, and institutions that produce and maintain” them? How did all of this become “good teaching”?
I tell you this story for a purpose, though. A purpose that starts with a question.
I have a nagging question, one that I haven’t been able to shake since the very early days of my research: what happened to curiosity?
I didn’t fall into the rabbit hole that is “woke.” I was dragged into it by my curiosity. I had no choice in the matter. What am I looking at? Where did this come from? Who decided this should be in schools, and what is the objective? These are the questions that broke the cult’s spell over me.
Ten years ago, I was fully immersed in the Woke “cult milieu.” I didn’t ask any questions, I just assumed that I was a “good person” on the “right side of history” because I supported anything and everything that sounded virtuous. It never occurred to me that the language I was using may hide contrived terms and radical agendas; never occurred to me that education today could be extremely different than the education I received 20 years ago; never occurred to me that there may be reasons why six-out-of-ten children in Wisconsin aren’t proficient in reading or math.
According to Robert J. Lifton, an American psychiatrist who has spent decades studying cult psychology, “the most basic feature of the thought reform environment…is the control of human communication.” Cults do everything they can to control what their disciples can see, read, think, hear, say, and write. One of their primary tools cults deploy for killing a bubbling curiosity that may lead someone to stray from cult doctrine is the “thought terminating cliché.”
“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed.”
“But that’s just good teaching!” is a thought-terminating cliché that no longer works on me. It did prior to 2020, but after reading Gloria Ladson-Billings’ work, I now know that, for her, “good teaching” means practicing critical theories of race, sex, gender, and culture on children. That is to say, I now know the “good teaching” children receive in schools is actually systematized brainwashing.
If we’re going to break the spell the Woke cult has caste over our entire educational infrastructure in the United States, we’re going to need curiosity to make a massive comeback. People need to start asking basic questions – the “who, what, when, where, and why” – and follow their curiosity down the rabbit hole.
As I write this, our elite universities are in open revolt. The question of the day is, “How did U.S. universities become so antisemitic?”
Aren’t you curious?
Sources:
- Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491.
- Ladson‐Billings, G. (1995). But that's just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory into practice, 34(3), 159-165.
- Lifton, R. J. (1989). Thought reform and the psychology of totalism: A study of "brainwashing" in China. University of North Carolina Press.
