National Politics Is the Red Cape. The Hidden Sword Is Tax-Funded Education. You're the Bull.
Approximately 85% of children in school today, kindergarten through 12th grade, are in the public schools.
The vast majority of Americans who call themselves Christians send their children into these schools. So do the vast majority of those who call themselves conservatives and libertarians.
The public schools are the most important welfare agencies in America. They are by far the most important propaganda agencies of the Left. They are regarded as sacrosanct.
In 1963, my father-in-law's book, The Messianic Character of American Education, was published. In that same year, a book by a liberal Protestant historian was published, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America. In one of those strange coincidences, both authors described the public school system as America's only established church.
From 1837, when the state of Massachusetts set up a state Board of Education to govern the tiny tax-funded public school system, the Left has been in control of the curriculum. The public schools are by far the most successful open conspiracy in American history. I contend that they are the most successful open conspiracy in the West over the last two centuries. They have been the means by which statist humanists have gained control of the thinking of each successive generation of voters.
The schools are morally wrong. They extract money from a majority to subsidize the deeply religious and highly political agenda of a tiny minority. Christians are forced to pay taxes to the public schools, and this money is used to indoctrinate generations of children in anti-Christian presuppositions and policies. Yet the Christians go along with it. The Left has spun this web of control in the name of neutrality, when in fact there is no neutrality.
No other system of welfare redistribution has been as popular for as long as the public schools have been popular.
The schools are controlled locally. They are not controlled by the federal government. The federal government does not supply that much money to the public schools. The public schools are supported primarily by local property taxes. The federal courts, primarily the Supreme Court, over the last four decades has made it illegal to teach creationism or anything except evolution in the public schools. Christianity has been kept out in the name of neutrality. Christian voters buy into this obvious subterfuge. This control has been indirect: the courts. These are not controlled by Congress or the President.
Christians are blind to the immoral confiscation of taxes of the masses to support the agenda of self-certified, self-credentialed leftist elite. This blindness has led to the triumph of the Left in education, from kindergarten through graduate school. The Christians and conservatives have supported this financially and philosophically.
The closest analogy I can come up with is this: both the Communists and the fascists, when they took over a town militarily, would arrest suspected resistance leaders. They would take them out to an open field. They would hand them shovels. The leaders would dig a mass grave: a trench. Then the Communists or fascist troops would line them up at the front of the trench and shoot them. The force of the bullets knocked their bodies into the trench. Then the troops would have subordinate leaders shovel dirt over the corpses of the primary leaders. The message got through, loud and clear.
But the analogy breaks down. Coercion was involved. Coercion is not involved in the public school systems in an open way. The voters keep voting to fund the school systems.
How can this be? Because parents don't want the moral and legal responsibility of funding their children's education. They want to pass that responsibility to other voters. Parents also want free babysitting. They want to have a justification for this, so they use free education as this justification. They get their hands inside their neighbors' wallets so that they don't have to take care of their children during the day. This creates a problem every summer. The result is latchkey children. These are unsupervised children, or children supervised by teenage siblings. This breaks down adult authority. Given the extent of free pornography on the Internet today, this is a serious problem.
The reality is this: the bait of free babysitting that has been placed on the hook of the religion of humanism has persuaded the vast majority of Christians to swallow the bait. Of course, this is not a good metaphor, because the hook goes into the jaws of their children.
Now I will use another metaphor: the bullfight. The bull is lured into focusing its attention on the red cape. It is the sword behind the red cape that is deadly. Rarely does a bull figure this out in time.
THE RED CAPE
The red cape is national politics. It's the Republicans versus the Democrats.
Every four years, voters are persuaded that something fundamental is at stake in the outcome of the November elections.
The big changes socially, politically, and economically have always come with war. This began with the American Revolution. It was extended in 1860 with the Civil War. The election of 1916 was conducted primarily on the issue of keeping America out of war. Woodrow Wilson campaigned on this slogan: "He kept us out of war." He was inaugurated in January 1917, and he took us into World War I in April. Franklin Roosevelt ran this scam again in 1940. His anti-Japanese policies conducted in 1941 led to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December. Both men had campaigned on the promise to remain neutral on the war in Europe. Both of them were lying through their teeth. Both of them wanted to take the country into the war on the side of the British. Both of them got what they wanted.
So, the Punch and Judy show of the 1916 and 1940 elections was a sham.
The Republican candidate was Charles Evans Hughes. He had stepped down from the Supreme Court in order to accept the Republican nomination. In March 1917, he joined with a group of northeastern Republicans to pressure Wilson to declare war on the central powers. Wilson did that one month later when he persuaded Congress to take the country into war.
It was even worse in 1940. A former internationalist Democrat, Wendell Wilkie, got the nomination for the Republican Party. He was ready to take us into war anyway. He made Roosevelt look like the peace monger. In 2019, this puff piece was posted on the blog of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Seventy-seven years ago this summer, Wendell Willkie did something remarkable. The failed Republican presidential candidate, defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, embarked on a round-the-world tour that helped expand America’s horizons and propel the nation toward a policy of internationalism that shaped the postwar global order. Undertaken at FDR’s behest, Willkie’s 49-day odyssey captured the American imagination and lifted his country in thought and spirit.“One World,” his hopeful account of that trip, quickly became one of the best-selling nonfiction books in American history, with a print run of more than 2 million copies. Its thesis was plain: The world had “become small and completely interdependent,” he wrote. “There are no distant points in the world any longer.” The United States had no choice but to grasp the leadership that history had bestowed upon it. Fortunately, he had found in every country “a gigantic reservoir of good will towards us, the American people.”
Nearly eight decades later, “One World” remains essential reading, as an antidote and rejoinder to the Trump administration’s cynical, nativist, protectionist, isolationist and unilateral foreign policy.
The full article is here.
In 1940, the Republican faithful were grouped into excitement by the possibility of defeating "that man." Republican isolationists shouted "We want Willkie!" at the national convention.
The Punch and Judy show has worked every four years ever since 1912. The last real choice that Christians had to elect an openly confessional fundamentalist was in 1908, and the choice was the politically far-Left populist, William Jennings Bryan. He was a fundamentalist Presbyterian. Bryan was the farthest Left-wing politician ever to get the nomination of a major political party (1896, 1900, 1908), and he said so openly.
CHRISTIAN REPUBLICANS NEVER LEARN
A site member posted this statement yesterday:
Yes, the problem is bipartisan. The Republicans were never wonderful. Presently the neocons dominate the leadership and funding of the Republicans. They care nothing for Christian morals or conservative social positions. And worse, despite this, many Evangelical Christians support them because they agree with the neocons' messianic foreign policy.But ... Republicans must answer in part to the conservative, Christian element in the electorate to get elected. And there are Republican politicians who have decent instincts. This has provided a moderating influence, largely amounting to a rear-guard action.
Given the lately rabid nature of the Left, if the next election wipes the Republicans out, the Left will be free, and morally feel free, to permanently change the electorate, and the rules, to overwhelm all traditional Christian influence. There will be no going back if this happens. And dissenters will be endangered financially or even worse.
I have heard this every year since 1960. I'm not exaggerating. I have been told this by Christian Republicans every four years ever since 1960. It is their mantra. Nevertheless, even if the Democrats win, the Republican conservatives keep fighting. It really wasn't the end of the world after all. It really wasn't the point of no return. It really wasn't the last train out. "Yes, we can win! Yes, if we just send our money to the Republican national committee, we can take back America! It's never too late!"
They are correct. It is never too late. But, in the three months leading up to the November elections every four years, they forget.
They always come back, four years later, as if nothing had happened. Once again, it will be the last train out. Nobody pays any attention to the fact that, four years earlier, these hard-core Christian conservatives said that it was the end of the world looming in November. Everybody knows that nobody really believes this except for four months every four years. Yes, for four months they say it. They insist on it. They rally around the flag in terms of it. But then, whenever the vote goes against them, and when Congress doesn't change, and the Supreme Court doesn't get conservative, and the national debt is several trillion dollars larger, they go up into the attic, get out their "end of the world" slogans package from the previous election, dust them off, raise the flag, and go into verbal battle again.
I have seen it for 60 years.
Meanwhile, Christian conservatives do nothing about the public schools locally. Meanwhile, they don't put their kids in Christian schools or homeschool them. Meanwhile, they take the free babysitting handouts from the local public school system. They see nothing inconsistent in all this. It's one consistent package as far as they are concerned.
This is why I am not impressed. I ceased being impressed after Kennedy defeated Nixon in 1960. Those two World War II junior Naval officers were friends in the Senate. They shared the same worldview. There really wasn't a dime's worth of difference between them.
Supposedly in 2008, Obama was going to change America. The Democrats took both houses of Congress. And what did Obama get out of it? ObamaCare.
At least he pulled the troops out of Iraq. That was something beneficial.
Who got us into Iraq? George W. Bush.
Bush promised to keep us from the horror of Al Gore. Yet he started two wars, neither of which we could win. He pulled an FDR. He pulled two of them. He did it all in the name of a policy announced in 2000 of not indulging in nation-building. In one of the debates, Jim Lehrer of the PBS News Hour asked the crucial foreign policy question.
Jim LehrerThe use of the military, there -- some people are now suggesting that if you don't want to use the military to maintain the peace, to do the civil thing, is it time to consider a civil force of some kind that comes in after the military that builds nations or all of that? Is that on your radar screen?
George W. Bush
I don't think so. I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I'm missing something here. I mean, we're going to have kind of a nation building core from America? Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win war. That's what it's meant to do. And when it gets overextended, morale drops. I strongly believe we need to have a military presence in the peninsula, not only to keep the peace in the peninsula, but to keep regional stability. And I strongly believe we need to keep a presence in NATO, but I'm going to be judicious as to how to use the military. It needs to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear, and the extra strategy obvious.
Al Gore Jr.
I don't disagree with that. I certainly don't disagree that we ought to get our troops home from places like the Balkans as soon as we can, as soon as the mission is complete. That's what we did in Haiti. There are no more than a handful of American military personnel in Haiti now. And Haitians have their problems, but we gave them a chance to restore democracy. That's really about all we can do. But if you have a situation like that right in our backyard with chaos about to break out and flotillas forming to come across the water, and all kinds of violence there, right in one of our neighboring countries there, then I think that we did the right thing there. And as for this idea of nation building, the phrase sounds grandiose. And, you know, we can't be -- we can't allow ourselves to get overextended. I certainly agree with that. And that's why I've supported building up our capacity. I've devoted in the budget I've proposed, as I said last week, more than twice as much as the governor has proposed. I think that it's in better shape now than he generally does. We've had some disagreements about that. He said that two divisions would have to report not ready for duty, and that's not what the joint chiefs say. But there's no doubt that we have to continue building up readiness and military strength. And we have to also be very cautious in the way we use our military.
The Republican rubes keep buying this, decade after decade. So do the Democrat rubes. Are U.S. troops still in 150 nations? Of course.
Republicans enthusiastically voted for him again in 2004. He won. The Republicans' Skull and Bones member defeated the Democrats' Skull and Bones member. Whoopdie-do!
THE "BURCH SOCIETY"
Over four decades ago, an obscure professor named Philip Burch began researching what turned into a three-volume book, Elites in American History. He began with the Federalists in 1789, and he ended with the Carter administration. No one had ever heard of him or the publishing company that published his books. His book traced the advisors in major presidential administrations. The book showed continuity. An elite has run this country from the beginning.
Burch remains an enigma. There is no Wikipedia entry on him. This is as much as I have been able to find. It took me 40 years to find it. It is from a short obituary in 2016. It was published in a local newspaper.
He served his country as a lieutenant in the US Air Force in Korea, then returned to school on the GI bill, receiving a Ph.D in Political Science from Rutgers University in 1959. In 1962, Professor Burch joined the Center for Government Services at Rutgers University. During his 38-year career there, he performed research in many areas related to public policy in New Jersey, including transportation, public health, industrial safety, educational policy, and water quality. Professor Burch also published a number of books analyzing the American power structure, the relationship between economic and political elites in American government, and the rise of right-wing forces in recent decades. His works include Elites in American History (1981), a three-volume study analyzing the key economic forces in each presidential administration from George Washington through Jimmy Carter.
The book received almost no attention, even from revisionist historians. Murray Rothbard knew about it and footnoted it, and so did I, but almost nobody else ever did. Even today on Amazon, there is one lone book review.
The John Birch Society never picked up the historical trail hacked through the political forest by Philip Burch. A pity.
REPLACING THE FAMILY'S AUTHORITY
There is nothing that the crazies who demonstrate in the streets are campaigning for that was not taught to them in the American public school system.
To think that anything significant is going to change because Trump is reelected or the Republicans maintain a majority in the Senate is living in a political fantasy world. There is nothing new going on. We have seen similar presidential elections before.
I wish it were accurate to say this: "The battle has been in the public schools since 1837." But there has been no battle. The spread of tax-funded compulsory education has been the single most relentless fact of American cultural life since 1837. The jurisdictional conflicts between American denominations has been a sideshow compared with the spread of the public school system. The political battles that are waged every fourth year for the presidency have been nothing compared to the relentless spread of humanism by way of the public schools.
To think that something different is going to emerge because of the outcome of an election in November is naïve. But American politics is based on comprehensive, ingrained, intergenerational naïveté.
The powers behind the throne, meaning the graduates of the Ivy League universities, Harvard Business school, Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, and graduates of about three dozen other colleges and universities have maintained unbroken control over the policies of every President since 1912. Look at the cabinet posts. It has been CFR team A versus CFR team B. This has been true ever since 1929. (The CFR was created in 1921.) Doubt me? Read this. If you have a few years of spare time, click the links in that article and read the books.
Look at who has been the Secretary of the Treasury over the last 30 years. See if he is connected with Goldman Sachs.
I am too old to be persuaded by any of the rhetoric regarding American presidential elections. I have seen too many of them. I have heard the conservative rhetoric for too many of them. I have read too many books on American political history.
Forget about the red cape. Keep your eye on the sword.
IT WAS DESIGNED
With this as background, you are ready for John Taylor Gatto's assessment. Three times he was New York City's teacher of the year: 1989, 1990, 1991. He won New York state's teacher of the year in 1991. Then, in 1991, he quit. He became an advocate of home schooling.
He wrote The Underground History of American Education (2000). It's hard to obtain. The chapters are here, free:
This is the sword. It was forged in Prussia in the late 1700's and imported here . . . beginning in Massachusetts. It was modified around 1900 to fit the new employment arrangements of industrial society. Here is how the social engineers did it. This is from 2003.
Now you understand why the Ron Paul Curriculum begins 9th graders with a 2-year program on starting a business. We offer an 8th grade course on personal finance. We offer a 9th grade course on public speaking. We want them independent . . . early.
CONCLUSION
The election is of marginal importance, as always. What is crucial is the response of parents to the crisis in the public schools created by COVID-19 and the lockdowns. The schools are adopting online education. They have no choice.
A great opportunity for educational change is looming. Parents have a degree of authority today that they have not had in over a century. The window of opportunity opens this month. Parents who are serious about a national moral crisis had better not let it close.
Avoid the sword. Ignore the red cape. You cannot do anything about the red cape.