The activities of the New Aryans to undermine democracy are not difficult to see, particularly in public education. It is just that they learned to employ the Tobacco Institute model of propaganda to speak in code words that distort reality sufficiently for people to attribute their activities to other more benign motives. Cripple the public schools but call it higher "standards."
Despite these rather obvious efforts by the New Aryans to create the circumstances for a Straussian world where an economic elite essentially manipulates democracy to create a Laissez-faire system that enriches the rich instead of the common people, from tax cuts for the rich to corporate socialism, there is seemingly no recognition of this reality. And the Straussians taunt that reality is no longer important.
From the efforts to promulgate Creationism to the Fox News distortions of political issues to the efforts to undermine the public schools, there is a consistent persistent attempt to discredit reason and substitute a rote manipulated form of emotional terrorism based on a public fear of knowledge and intellectual expertise.
We talk about it all the time. Al Gore wrote a book titled "The Assault on Reason" and yet no one recognizes this as a coordinated process to poison the public discourse in the same way the Tobacco Institute sought to poison the public understanding of the science about smoking.
As noted in the prior parts of this series, four U.S. Presidents, from Thomas Jefferson in the beginning, to Teddy Roosevelt during the Robber Baron years, to Franklin Roosevelt during the "Business Coup," to Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address, each has warned the American people of the danger to democracy of what TR called "the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politicians."
And yet we now have a major party of the American political establishment whoring after corporate money and declaring that government should be doled out to private interests until it becomes weak enough to "drown in a bath tub." Far from attempting to restrain the looting of the public, they espouse a doctrine that "Greed is Good" and measure success not by honor nor public stature, but by dollars. Success is whatever those with the most money say it is.
The dictionary defines "stupid" as "lacking intelligence or reason" and yet we witness all around us the efforts of a political party to specifically deny intelligence or reason. They created a news network to counter the "that's the way it is" efforts of traditional reporters and to instead espouse propaganda devised by an economic elite.
They amplify fringe believers in Creationism into a major political effort. The importance of Creationism is nothing more than the insistence on denying facts and reason. The efforts to make it a political movement derive from the New Aryan need to create a stupid society that will resist facts and reason.
As such, Creationism represents a form of allegiance, a badge of ignorance that resonates with the triumphant pronouncement in 2002 of a "senior adviser to [President] Bush" that New York Times reporter Ron Susskind quoted as stating:
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Susskind attributed this to a Bush worldview without recognizing it being a New Aryan worldview. Susskind still thought of Dubya as being the leader of the presidency instead of just a manipulated figurehead of the aides around him, particularly of Cheney and others who were Straussians.
Susskind began his essay quoting Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, who told him of a deep conflict in the Republican party. "The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion."
But again, Susskind did not correctly interpret this. He saw it as a promulgation of a political struggle between modernists and a somewhat atavistic fundamentalism, like the Muslim and Christian fundamentalists denying science. It was just a difference in worldview that was the same among the terrorists and the Bush administration. He failed to see the finger prints of the New Aryans hijacking the party, but he clearly enunciated that the Bush administration promulgated non-reason. He could not explain why, but he distinctly pointed out it was a political party opposed to reason.
In the July, 1997, issue of Reason magazine, Ronald Bailey wrote in an article titled "Origin of the Specious" about the attacks by Straussian neoconservatives against evolution:
At the heart of the neoconservative attack on Darwinism lies the political philosophy of Leo Strauss. Strauss was a German political philosopher who fled the Nazis in 1938 and began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1949. In an intellectual revolt against modernity, Strauss focused his work on interpreting such classics as Plato's Republic and Machiavelli's The Prince.
Kristol has acknowledged his intellectual debt to Strauss in a recent autobiographical essay. "What made him so controversial within the academic community was his disbelief in the Enlightenment dogma that `the truth will make men free.'" Kristol adds that "Strauss was an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some [emphasis Kristol's] minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and political order, and that the popularization and vulgarization of these truths might import unease, turmoil and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion with utterly unpredictable, but mostly negative, consequences."
Bailey ascribed the political support of Creationism as fearing a breakdown in social order, rather than a more sinister manipulation of the populace. But Strauss and Kristol were all about establishing a class of New Aryans, an economic supra-national class that would determine what truths the populace should be allowed to know.
The crucial point is that central to the recent Republican agenda is the undermining of reason and the promulgation of a culture that denies facts and reason. A culture based on allegiance to stupidity, to organizing people who will support the most absurd conceptions as proof of their allegiance.
The concoctions of the Fox News absurdities from "Death panels" to chanting "keep the government out of Medicare" to an almost endless litany of stupid pronouncements, are not ignorance nor stupidity on their part. Their part is the creation of credulity for stupidity among the populace. For creating politicians like Congresswoman Michele Bachman who can gain national attention for making the stupidest comments and rake in political contributions.
The assault on reason that Al Gore lamented, should not be taken as some strange aberration. It is, in fact, the concerted political machinations of a class of supra-national New Aryans who pay the bills of these promulgations in order to slowly undermine democracy to where it can be manipulated to enthrone this economic elite.
Television commentator Bill Moyers, writing in the January 22, 2007, The Nation magazine (For America's Sake) articulated it quite well:
Reagan's story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control - a Jeffersonian ideal at the root of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and the license to buy the political system right out from under everyone else, so that democracy no longer has the ability to hold capitalism accountable for the good of the whole.
And that clearly involves the undermining of the public schools. It is only when one can see the broader role of creating stupidity in society as the machination of a supra-national elite that benefits from an assault on reason that one can begin to recognize that the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) program is part and parcel of the same effort.
It makes no sense for an elaborate Tobacco Institute model of propaganda designed to create ignorance and stupidity for them to then ignore and allow a public school system to teach reason and intelligence. It is absurd to think that NCLB as promulgated by the Bush administration and neoconservatives is designed to do anything other than transform children into stupid adults. And the evidence is overwhelming.
Children under NCLB are to learn only what the New Aryans want them to learn. To this end they created "standards" and high-stakes tests that put such great emphasis on two subjects, reading and math, that nothing else gets taught. Professional educators lament the "narrowing of the curriculum" but are studiously ignored. Yet even they never seem to grasp that the narrowing of the curriculum is precisely the point of the illogical testing program in the first place.
In an interview in the Learning First Alliance publication "Public School Insights" (February 17, 2009) former congressman Lee Hamilton, who represented an Indiana congressional district for 31 years with enough prestige to be named Vice-Chair of the 9/11 Commission, was asked about what schools should do about "young Americans who don't necessarily know what it means to be an American."
The article "Partisanship, Consensus, and Civic Education: A Conversation with the Honorable Lee Hamilton" prefaced the interview by noting:
Now president of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and director of Indiana University's Center on Congress, he sits or has sat on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the President's Homeland Security Advisory Council, the FBI Director’s Advisory Board, the CIA Director’s Economic Intelligence Advisory Panel, and the Defense Secretary’s National Security Study Group.
He obviously had seen and dealt with many concerns that affect the United States. He was serving as co-chair of the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools when interviewed. Here is one of the things he focused on:
I'm very concerned about what's happening today in our schools. You see so much emphasis upon math and science, and I'm certainly not opposed to that. We need that emphasis. But in many respects I think the emphasis there, in part because of the requirements of federal law, are reducing--diminishing--the amount of time that is spent on social studies. On history. On learning to participate in a democratic society. I think it's just as important that we have good citizens as it is [that we have] good mathematicians.
Later in the interview he noted that the lack of citizenship training in the schools was a threat to the very existence of democracy, noting:
I look upon civic education not as an extra subject. I think it's the very core of making this country function properly. We can turn out the world's greatest scientists, engineers, mathematicians and artists, and I'm all for that, and we need to emphasize those things. But if we neglect teaching young people how to be good citizens, then we jeopardize the future of the country.
The threat to democracy is real but the threat is not some obscure deficiency in the public schools. As Lee Hamilton clearly pointed out, it comes from the narrowing of the curriculum promulgated by the NCLB focus on math and reading to the exclusion of the rest of the community. Yet even he did not address it as an intentional threat.
But there is just too much involved here to be coincidence. The corporate education reform effort is part and parcel of the effort noted in the prior diary in this series by business to react to the public political programs such as consumerism and environmentalism to protect the lives of the common people rather than the profits of corporations. They have no intention of improving public education that might threaten their effort.
Perhaps the most crucial example was the promulgation of the Reading First effort launched in conjunction with NCLB. The Reading First program was designed to stop the teaching of reading for understanding and instead entrench the teaching of phonics, which employs nonsense words in order to teach children to "read" without thinking about what they are reading.
It is important to understand there is copious scientific empirical evidence that teaching phonics interferes with children learning to extract meaning from text. The official Reading First Impact Study evaluation report (NCES 2009-4038) demonstrated that:
"Time spent on phonics in grade one, however, was significantly and negatively related to student reading comprehension. In particular, a one-minute difference per daily reading block in the time spent on phonics per daily reading block was associated with a –0.10 point difference in student test scores. In grade two, time spent on phonics was significantly and negatively related to student reading comprehension. Similar to the finding in grade one, a one-minute difference per daily reading block in the time spent on phonics was associated with a –0.15 point difference in student test scores." (page 45)
The National Center for Education Evaluation (NCEE) evaluation of an after-school academic program using phonics to teach reading to below grade second through fifth grade students (NCEE 2009-4078) found "two years of the enhanced reading program has a negative and statistically significant impact on their total reading scores." (page 3) This was in comparison to the reading scores of regular after-school programs.
As far back as the 2000 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) Reading report noted that:
"Help with breaking words into parts had a consistent negative relation to fourth-grade reading performance as demonstrated on the NAEP assessment. As shown in table 3.4, the more frequently students received this help the lower their average score; whereas fourth graders who reported that their teachers never helped them break words into parts had the highest average score." (page 52)
There was also a bullet point in the Executive Summary (page xii) which summarized:
"Fourth-grade students who reported that their teachers never or hardly ever helped them bread words into parts scored higher that their peers who reported receiving such help daily or weekly."
A 2007 paper in the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy "The logographic nature of English alphabetics and the fallacy of direct intensive phonics instruction" (vol 7:3) noted (page 315):
"The students in the two phonics based programs produced a significantly higher percentage of miscues that resulted in a loss of meaning. Furthermore, they were significantly less likely to attempt self-correction of their miscues, even when they did not make sense in the text."
The same paper noted
"Furthermore, a significant negative correlation was found between phonics and retelling scores, such that the higher the phonics scores, the lower the retelling scores."
Which indicates that students taught with phonics not only are unaware that what they say makes no sense, but are unable to even explain (retell) what they have read.
Thus the scientific research indicates that phonics programs are detrimental to children understanding what they read. Reading instruction should focus on teaching children to extract understanding from text. But politicians over-rule professional educators for the purpose of forcing them to use phonic programs that cripple children's abilities to extract meaning from text. And yet educators are completely oblivious to this being intentional. The political effort to require phonics to be used for instruction is thus ipso facto an attempt to make children unable to read sufficiently to acquire new ideas and thereby question what they are told.
In other words, it is blatantly obvious to everyone that the corporate led educational effort narrows the curriculum and uses tests that reward superficial rote regurgitation from short term memory rather than real understanding and higher level thinking skills, and promulgates a reading instruction known to cripple the ability of children to extract understanding from text. Yet apparently no one can even conceive that the whole point is just another part of their assault on reason to deliberately create a stupid citizenry?
The entire point of the corporate led educational reform is to prevent the education of those who might challenge the New Aryans and might act against the creation of stupidity that keeps the common people tractable. The New Aryans must ensure that the teaching of history and citizenship becomes a cliched sideshow where people are taught the past as folly and governance as failure.
Everything taught in school now must solely serve the interests of producing "labor inputs" for the New Aryans, creating a new serfdom for the new feudalism. Knowledge must be taught in tightly controlled silos where irrelevant math and meaningless "reading" dominate in order to prostrate the populace to stupidity.
Then there is the claim that privatization will reform public education. We have already had privatization in education for decades in the production of textbooks for children. The result is exactly what you would expect: corrupt useless politically manipulated tripe. Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, famous for demonstrating that the Challenger disaster occurred because of low-temperature rubber seals, wrote such in his memoirs "Surely you jest, Mr. Feynman" from his experience on the California textbook selection committee.
Feynman studiously read all of the textbooks and concluded: "I don’t know why, but the books are lousy; UNIVERSALLY LOUSY!" Feynman gave examples of the publishers trying to give him favors to curry his support. He noted that it apparently worked with many committee members, citing an example of a three volume textbook that was under consideration. He told the committee that he hadn’t seen the third volume. An official explained that the third volume had not been completed and thus was a blank volume. Feynman wrote: "It turned out that the blank book had a rating by some of the other members! ... In fact, the rating for the missing book was a little bit higher than for the two others. The fact that there was nothing in the book had nothing to do with the rating."
That is what privatization gets you under normal circumstances. When decisions are made by people who do not have to live with those decisions, you end up with decisions that benefit themselves rather than those for whom the decisions are made. For years it was just pure corruption, but now those who benefit are an economic elite whose primary interest is to create stupid adults. The textbooks are no longer just lousy, but sinister.
Couple that with the support for vouchers which seemingly always involves some member of the economic elite financing a major propaganda campaign to gain voter approval. Why are these financiers so concerned over public education when most of them never even attended public schools and their children rarely do. I can understand that there is some element of revenge after discovering that public school children grew into adults who ate their lunch in business. But there is more to it than that.
Why would the New York Times run a major article in December 2009 about wealthy Wall Street financiers sponsoring charter schools? The simple explanation is that they know their part in destroying public education will enrich their class.
They know it quite well and they promulgate whatever will further that goal. Some people scoff at there being such a large conspiracy at work, and yet only a few years ago Jim Crow was a similar conspiracy against African-Americans. A conspiracy that transformed under the influence of the New Aryans into the subjugation of all the common people, not just those with Black skin.
A subjugation by making people stupid, to refuse to think and to deny reality. To deny what is clearly happening, what was clearly foretold would happen. The public schools are being discredited and taken away from the control of parents and local community leaders elected to governing boards. There is no way they would ultimately allow children to become little more than eggs to be harvested and graded for labor inputs. So they have to go. The public schools have to go. And democracy has to go.
Stop being stupid. Look around and stop denying what is obvious. Major liberal leaders such as Bill Moyers and Lee Hamilton point out that it is happening. That is not the question. The question is whether enough people will take the blinders off their eyes and fight back against the New Aryans to maintain their fundamental rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that democracy is designed to secure.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that the European royalists were wolves and their common people were sheep. The public educators have clearly become sheep in the present attack by the wolves of the New Aryans. Like the poet said: this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.