On Wednesday morning on “Morning Joe,” Joe Scarborough dismissed a Princeton University professor’s explanation of Bernie Sanders’s electoral appeal despite Sanders’s open, lifelong admiration for socialist dictators.
“Who is telling him to continue to defend Castro, to continue to defend the Sandinistas, to continue to defend the Soviets? I think he can check the [polling] crosstabs, it’s doesn’t play well in Charleston,” Scarborough said.
“I think two things,” responded panelist Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. “One, I think it’s Bernie Sanders being true to his brand, that he’s consistent, he’s authentic, that there are particular segments of folks who fought the battles of the 1960s and held particular positions around the revolutions around the world — particularly those revolutions that were about decolonization, right, fighting back against the West.”
Note that Glaude is spewing the Communist Party line here about Communist-incited and -funded proxy conflicts during the Cold War. It not incidentally is the perspective shared by the 2.6 million-copy-selling “A People’s History of the United States,” by Howard Zinn, which is common in U.S. classrooms despite compounded factual errors and rank political indoctrination.
While the U.S. government still considers Communist Party membership a disqualifying factor for U.S. citizenship, elites like Zinn and Glaude are cultivating its perspectives among the native-born. As I’ll show below, they’ve been successful.
“So he’s got that 2 percent on his side, alright, what does he do with the other 98 percent?” Scarborough interjected.
“The other 98 percent, what [Bernie] should do is say, what is it about — he shouldn’t talk about necessarily defending Castro’s betrayal of the Cuban revolution, or defending the brutality of the Sandinistas in some ways, what he should be talking about what he values,” Glaude responded. “What is it about the campaign for literacy that was valuable, what is it about the doctors that…Cuba sent around the world to help in the Caribbean…’What I value is that everybody should have a good education, everybody should have health care, everyone should be able to not only dream dreams but make those dreams a reality.'”
“The problem is, though, he has, he has an affinity — and you look at the tapes, he has an affinity for these communist dictatorships,” Scarborough replied.
Joe Scarborough needs to get out a little bit more. Hatred for the West is strong, and rising, especially among the young who are Sanders’s most ardent supporters.
This is directly due to componded generations of increasingly atrocious public education. The anti-America trend started at the university level, but has now trickled down to K-12 public schools through decades of university miseducation of those who teach in and lead those schools.
Not only have American public schools now failed for generations to bestow a knowledge of and respect for their own country’s magnificent political achievements and uniqueness, they have begun open political indoctrination that feeds this ignorance with lies. The United States is now host to large numbers of citizens who believe that theirs is an evil country, with no exposure to facts and viewpoints that contradict this opinion.
It has been long known that American “education” institutions are spectacular failures at teaching the rising generation about their birthright to self-governance. The famous 1983 report “A Nation at Risk” declared it a national crisis that “In many schools, the time spent learning how to cook and drive counts as much toward a high school diploma as the time spent studying mathematics, English, chemistry, U.S. history, or biology.” Things only got worse.
Today, 4 in 10 Americans who are younger than 39 disagree that the United States “has a history we should be proud of,” according to a 2019 poll by FLAG/YouGov. The poll also found that half of all Americans agree the United States is a sexist and racist country, including two-thirds of millennials. Millennials showed the lowest level of agreement with the statement, “I’m proud to be an American.” Thirty-eight percent of “younger Americans do not agree that ‘America has a history that we should be proud of,'” according to the poll.
2019’s annual poll from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that 37 percent of millennials think the United States is “among the most unequal societies in the world.” Despite their curricula’s obsession with so-called multiculturalism and diversity, they clearly have zero sense of what life is like in most of the world, and how that contrasts with the United States’ singular freedoms and opportunities.
The VOC poll found that 70 percent of millenials said they are likely to vote for a socialist. It also found that “57% of Millennials (compared to 94% of the Silent Generation), believe the Declaration of Independence better guarantees freedom and inequality over the Communist Manifesto.”
That poll also found that large percentages of younger Americans said communism was presented favorably in their elementary, middle, and high schools. The survey didn’t ask about favorable presentations of socialism, but since socialism is regarded as “nice” communism, it’s likely favorable presentations of socialism in public education today are at much higher numbers.
It gets far scarier. Thirty-five percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 said in a 2019 Cato poll that sometimes violence against the rich is justified. Violence. In the poll, people who supported socialism of any age group were more likely to agree that sometimes violence against the rich is justified. This poll, like others, found that support for socialism is strongest among the young.
This support for socialism, communism, and political violence dovetails with mass ignorance about America’s unique political system of constitutionally secured natural rights and limited government. In the FLAG/YouGov poll, for example, more than 80 percent of Americans ages 39 and younger could not say what rights the First Amendment protects, and three-quarters or more couldn’t name any authors of The Federalist Papers. Not incidentally, during its reign the Obama administration ended nationwide U.S. history and civics tests, which for several decades consistently showed similar civic ignorance.
This ignorance isn’t remotely new. A decade ago, a survey of American adults found, according to NBC News:
over twice as many people know Paula Abdul was a judge on American Idol than know that the phrase ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ comes from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The study finds that only half of U.S. adults can name all three branches of government, and just 54% know that the power to declare war belongs to Congress.
The Northwest Ordinance, one of the four “organic laws” that created the United States, is the only one that mentions education. The very reason that the United States has public schools is to ensure the continued strength of our historic experiment in republican self-government under the rule of law. An ignorant people are incapable of governing themselves.
The Ordinance expresses the broad commitment of America’s founding fathers to broadening literacy and education for the key purpose of perpetuating our nation in fidelity to its original design. It states, “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
Notice here how one of the nation’s supreme laws defines the civic purpose of education: to uphold religion, morality, and knowledge. If a nation maintains an education system that encourages vice, apostacy, and ignorance, how can it possibly justify either those institutions or the funds spent on them? And how can a nation whose education institutions use public resources to attack their own people, form of government, and history long expect to endure?
