The Brainwashing Bunch

American news outlets (well at least those not in Barack Obama's lap) are filled with criticism on the Department of Education plans to bring Obama's agenda into our nation's classrooms. The ploy to reach and teach our children through a presidential speech and through instruction guides (little red books?) appears to be stalled for now as parents -- if nor educational unions -- resist the idea of brain-swaying our children into writing paeans to Obama and his agenda. However, few have wondered how such an idea ever emerged in the first place. We do have some clues and they are unsettling.

I have previously reported that this idea of inculcating revolutionary goals in our children's minds stems from the philosophy of Bill Ayers, Obama's friend, collaborator, and campaign supporter. But Obama's ideological mentors appear to reach farther back to an influential radical Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci.

Barack Obama ties to Ayers are personal as well as professional. Obama chaired the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an educational effort that blew through tens of millions of dollars of foundation money with little to show for its efforts. Ayers headed up a key operating body of the Challenge. Stanley Kurtz writes that Obama "clearly aligned himself with Ayers's radical views on education issues".

Bill Ayers, former Weatherman bomber and now professor of education, sees teachers as the vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat. He propounds that view though his teaching, textbooks, and speeches.

The authors reference to William Ayres, Saul Alinsky, and Antonio Gramsci prompts me to note that the last is one of the original henchmen of The Frankfurt School. Many of you will know That the Frankfurt School has been a particular hobby horse of mine now for some years. In this post which follows, written and posted I emphasize before the election, I try to connect the dots from the Frankfurt School of 1923 to Saul Alinsky and his, Rules for Radicals, to William Ayres, and on to the man who would become president, Barack Obama. Here's the concluding portion of the post:

This means there is nothing to stop a "Manchurian Marxist" from taking over almost total control of the American economy. If this scenario obtains, Republicans will not even have resort to the filibuster to defend the Republic. Because there will be no check or balance, Obama's socialist policies, as they fail, will be compounded with more socialist policies to rescue the failures.

Worse, Obama has displayed a frightening tendency to enlist the power of the state to squelch free speech. His gang of Democrats in the House and Senate share his views and have already threatened talk radio. Obama has invoked the threat of prosecution against radio stations and in general, evidently, in the state of Missouri even against private citizens. The Kerry campaign intimidated television stations running the Swift boat film. Conservatives have every reason to fear that the country may enter a new dark age under a Putin like administration.

Nor can we sleep well expecting the courts to come to our rescue. There's not the slightest realistic hope that any federal court will declare the bailout unconstitutional as an impermissible usurpation of powers. We have already seen the court waffle on matters such as campaign finance reform so, we are entitled to nourish but little hope that free speech, if not the free market, will be protected.

Across the board of American life there is virtually no institution apart from government which could stand up against the power of an engrossed state. Our educational institution is corrupted from top to bottom with leftists. The higher the learning and the more prestigious the institution the greater the departure from common sense. Our great charitable institutions such as Ford or Rockefeller have been thoroughly infiltrated and are now controlled by leftists. Witness Bill Ayers and Barack Obama's plundering of the Annenberg foundation, originally founded by a conservative. It is now so commonly understood that the media is so given over to leftism that it requires no comment or proof here. Apart from a remnant of the Roman Catholic Church and the Evangelicals, the American Christian Church is best exemplified by the United Church of Christ which is practically a leftist front. The executive branch bureaucracy, not excluding the CIA and especially the State Department, are largely given over to undermining conservative principles and policies which are the expressions of our democratically elected leaders.

Take away talk radio, and the void leaves the playing field to the leftists virtually unopposed.

This is the specter that awaits us the day after the election.

These are the nightmares which prompt some of us on these threads to become testy at times when we see posts which are nothing but cheerleading and boosterism. These are the times which call every one of us to dig deep and face courageously the realities that confront us. I am not in the slightest deterred by replies to this post which recite that I am a defeatist. It may be true that I am an alarmist but I believe we have much to be alarmed about. Small wonder that we could become testy when we see a campaign slipping away or an opportunity missed. The stakes are really and truly high this time. It is my hope that Freepers, knowing that the barbarians are really at the gate, will turn their collective genius toward averting a catastrophe

later, in the same thread I added the following thoughts:

At the end of the day we see the thefts of property through thuggery. A good Marxist like Saul Alinsky-or Mao Tse Tung for that matter- are never above easing the travail of their own lives with such perks, but their ideological goal is the distruction of the concept and sanctity of property. There is a reason for that ideological goal.

The basic institutions of Western society which come out of the Judeo- Christian tradition and which were hammered out in our culture over the millennia and refined in the Enlightenment and in the American experience have served as bulwarks against the advance of communism. Foremost among the institutions which stand against the advance communism are the family, the church, the rule of law, the school, private property, and the military with its commitment to patriotism.

Saul Alinsky in his book, Rules for Radicals lays out a guerrilla against these institutions which frustrate socialism. Barak Obama was an acolyte of -indeed he was an instructor for- Saul Alinsky's operation.

To complete the picture, someday a conservative historian (presuming they are allowed to publish) will draw a straight line to Barak Obama which passes through Saul Alinsky, showing feeder lines off to people like Bill Ayers, and originating in The Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School was expressly founded by a George Soros like figure in 1923 in Germany for the express purpose of providing the intellectual methodology to destroy the institutions which protect Western civilization. These intellectuals did provide rationalizations which today motivate the Barak Obama's of the world. The rationalizations are called: feminism; critical theory; conservationism; world order; political correctness; economic democracy, etc. and they all find their origin in The Frankfurt School.

When I say the barbarians are at the gate, I do not mean to diminish the sophistication of the enemy. We must make no mistake, we are dealing with an extremely crafty and dedicated foe whose ultimate aim is and remains despite the fall of the Soviet Union to break through the gates. Indeed, "barbarians at the gate" and "breaking through the gate" are the wrong kinds of imagery. The war is not being fought at this point with violence. It has been fought and mostly won by the other side by infiltration into the institutions which I mentioned in my previous post including the churches, the charitable foundations, the education establishment, the bar, and, as you point out, the unions.

If these people get their hands on the levers of power in America they will not let go.

Thank you for the kind words which prompted me to take a look at your about page which in turn led me to your speech where I saw a reference to B. F. Skinner.

One of my first posts here on Free Republic had to do with Skinner and very recently I had occasion to refer to him again. I think the the philosophical and spiritual views, our Weltanschauung, are endlessly fascinating in themselves but also because how we see the world and how we see the nature of man ultimately determines our politics. I set forth the two posts relating to Skinner. I would value your reaction :

GOD AND MAN IN THE SKINNER BOX

Attending college in the 60's, I was exposed to the writings of BF Skinner in a mandatory Psychology 101 class. At the time I was struck by the time and energy the department devoted to this man and his theories. Essentially, he put a chicken in a box and taught it to play baseball by rewarding it with feed. When the chicken pressed a lever on cue, or ran a base, it got a pellet. Skinner was able to train animals to a remarkable degree with this method of positive reinforcement. He also demonstrated that negative reinforcement, such as electric shocks, was not as effective as positive reinforcement in controlling animal behavior.

So far, Skinner has not done the world much harm and perhaps he has even contributed something useful if you are Siegfried and Roy. But it soon became clear that Skinner and my psych professors had ambitions grander than dog and pony shows when they required a reading of Skinner's Walden Two. Here Skinner extrapolates his findings from chickens to people and causes real mischief. Essentially, he postulates that the humsn animal is a TABULA RASA, neither good nor evil, which can be conditioned into good behavior. There are no evil people just poorly conditioned behavior. All that is required to have generations of well behaved human chickens is a grand enough Skinner box to positively reinforce positive behavior. Of course, it does not take a socialist to see that it would take more than a village, indeed it would take a federal burocracy, to build and maintain a big enough box.

The mischief comes in when this thinking invades the penal (whoops, I mean corrections)system or the educational establishment and so on. Praeger, in his wonderful essay, has alluded to the effects on education of this baleful presumption about the nature of man. He is absolutely right when he says:

No issue has a greater influence on determining your social and political views than whether you view human nature as basically good or not.

...................................................................................................................................

How we see the world determines how we conduct our politics.

Do we see the world vertically or horizontally? Do we believe in a Higher Power who endowed us with natural rights which are sacred and inviolate or do we believe in the self? If we accept a Higher Power we tend to accept a vertical structure, indeed a hierarchy, in which the individual finds fulfillment and self expression within the framework of the natural order which is eternal and benign. If we live in the world of the self, we see the world horizontally as a place where we must carve out our role relative to our fellows. This can be a Hobbesian world which is malevolent and therefore requires restructuring.

Put simply, do we believe in God or are we God players?

If you fall into the former category, you are content with the political world the way the framers set it up in which you can enjoy life because you have liberty and you are free to pursue happiness. If you fall into the second category, you're offended by the way the political world is and you regard the institutions created by the framers to be obstacles to your righteous quest to set the world straight. The believer wants government to call balls and strikes, the God player wants to exploit the apparatus of government shape the world.

A good analogy is the Skinner box. Leftists see themselves as the masterminds of a Skinner box big enough to hold the whole world in which they administer stimulus and, if necessary, punishment in order to condition behavior to make the Skinner box perfect. Professor Skinner put chickens in a box and by inflicting rewards and punishments he was able to make them run around bases like baseball players. He was the God of the Skinner box.

Liberals say, and actually believe, that they moved by compassion to do justice. Actually, they are driven by ego to play God. If the 10th amendment frustrates their ambitions, as you say it should and we both agree that it should, they simply change the gestalt of the Skinner box, just as they changed the list of the 10 Commandments by eliminating the first two Commandments outright. If they cannot win when an issue on the city level they will move it to the state level, and vice versa. If they cannot win an issue on the state level that will move to the federal level. If they cannot win an issue at the electoral level they will move it into the courts. If they cannot win an argument over the United States Constitution they will move it into an international treaty. If they cannot win an argument over censorship of free speech on talk radio, they will move it into an issue about race and gender ownership of the stations. The point is that so long as they can control the shape of the Skinner box they can control you and me. Since they are God players, control is the whole purpose of their lives.

So if the founders have placed a constitutional impediment to Leftists' desires, it is overcome by any number of rationalizations which permit them to shape society as they like. Equally, there are likely to kill the golden goose which marvelously produces golden eggs which they seize in order to finance their God play. You rightfully point out, there comes a time when the capitalist system can no longer sustain a socialist parasite grown too large. You and I think that Obama has pushed well past that point. Why does he not desist? Why do not a reasonable liberals of his own party stop them from killing the golden goose?

Because for them the point is to play the game. If they stop tinkering with society and with the economy it means they are dead. They are driven to do what they do. They tell us they are moved by compassion, but they are driven by their egos. Virtually all socialists believe that 100 million dead and failed socialism all around the globe occurred only because the wrong socialists were in charge. They believe this time, because they are doing it, they will get it right.

So we are grappling as reasonable men to comprehend the phenomenon which has been understood since Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden for the same reason. The individual issue is only today's drama. The hard truth is that the practical realities you raise have no more effect on their ambitions than if you had told them that the world is flat. They do not care if the world is flat or round, they only care if they get to run it.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.