Posted on 05/17/2019 4:12:38 AM PDT by Louis Foxwell
Government Experiment Brainwashes Children to Manipulate Conservative Parents
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
#C02Kult.
That’s the hashtag for it in Germany, where they know a bit about mass hysteria and brainwashing. It shows up every time students are manipulated into another school strike for the “environment”.
The Joan of Arc of C02Kult is Greta Thunberg, the daughter of two Swedish celebrities, and a 15-year-old suffering from Aspergers, who became a popular lefty figure for leading environmental school strikes.
“I overthink. Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad," Greta said. "I remember when I was younger, and in school, our teachers showed us films of plastic in the ocean, starving polar bears and so on. I cried through all the movies. My classmates were concerned when they watched the film, but when it stopped, they started thinking about other things. I couldn’t do that. Those pictures were stuck in my head.”
Greta claims that she began to suffer from depression when she was only 8-years-old because of global warming. She claims to have gotten her mother to stop flying and her father to turn into a vegetarian.
The autistic teenager spends a lot of time being afraid and sharing her fear. “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day,” she told leaders in Davos.
As with all child activists, some see a passion for social responsibility, while others see child abuse.
Had Greta been born in another time and place, she might have been just as afraid of witches or subversives. Terrified teens who were encouraged to act on their fears were responsible for everything from the Salem witch trials to the crimes of the Cultural Revolution. The fault lies with the adults who traumatize children and then unleash them on society to win their political battles.
There’s a name for that. Child soldiers.
A recent paper in Nature is titled, “Children can foster climate change concern among their parents” which suggests that the best way to influence adults is by brainwashing their children.
Or, as its abstract states, “Child-to-parent intergenerational learning—that is, the transfer of knowledge, attitudes or behaviours from children to parents—may be a promising pathway to overcoming socio-ideological barriers to climate concern.” The ideological barriers are conservative politics.
What was put into practice was an “educational intervention designed to build climate change concern among parents indirectly through their middle school-aged children in North Carolina, USA.”
That reads like the title of a KGB project from the Cold War, but it’s an academic paper in America.
The study found that “parents of children in the treatment group expressed higher levels of climate change concern than parents in the control group. The effects were strongest among male parents and conservative parents, who, consistent with previous research, displayed the lowest levels of climate concern before the intervention. Daughters appeared to be especially effective in influencing parents.”
They used to be your children and grandchildren. Now they’re a “treatment group”.
Some of the 10-14 year olds being targeted were exempt from human experimentation because they were in the “control” group. 166 students and 199 parents did get the “treatment”. After two years of this, the paper gloated that “parents who identified as male or conservative more than doubled their level of concern about climate change”.
Danielle F Lawson, a grad student at North Carolina State University, credited the level of trust between parents and children. It’s exactly this trust that environmentalists and all totalitarian ideologies exploit.
"We also found that the results were most pronounced for three groups: conservative parents, parents of daughters, and fathers," Lawson is quoted as saying in an NCSU press release.
This, the NCSU release informs us, “was noteworthy because conservatives and men are typically among the least concerned about climate change.”
"There's a robust body of work showing that kids can influence their parents' behavior and positions on environmental and social issues," Lawson asserts.
Scientific American’s article on the study is illustrated with a picture of, who else, Greta Thunberg.
The release thanks the Department of Interior's Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center for its support.
Lawson’s bio claims that she’s looking to build “climate literacy” through “intergenerational transfer in familial and community groups”. It’s not a new idea. The USSR’s educational system was built on the conviction that brainwashing children was an effective tool for controlling their parents.
The North Carolina grad student lists Kathryn Stevenson and Nils Peterson as the professors she's working under. Both of their names appear on the Nature paper. Lawson’s activities are creepy, but not original. Stevenson’s research reeks of a disturbing obsession with figuring out how to manipulate children into accepting her views that we would associate with the USSR or Communist China.
“Our findings suggest convincing teachers that climate change is real, but not necessarily human caused, may have profound impacts on students,” Stevenson insisted after the release of, "How climate change beliefs among U.S. teachers do and do not translate to students."
Her articles and publications obsessively focus on middle-school students and how to manipulate them into accepting her belief system. A 2015 article delves into "fostering climate change hope and concern and avoiding despair among adolescents". Another one explores "psychological factors". A third delves into the "role of significant life experiences" while a fourth explores the role of "friends and family".
A future article seeks to develop a "causal model for adolescent climate change behavior."
One of Stevenson’s favorite targets are the children of conservative parents. Or as one piece describes them, individualists as opposed to communitarians. “Kids are just developing their worldviews, their political ideologies," Stevenson says. The study is titled “Overcoming Skepticism With Education”. Its abstract admits that it targets children because "worldviews are still forming in the teenage years" and therefore "adolescents may represent a more receptive audience."
Not only is NCSU a public research university, but much of this creepy obsession with manipulating children into supporting a destructive partisan agenda is funded through massive government grants.
Kathryn Stevenson’s “Ensuring Readiness For Climate Variability And Change By Leveraging The Power Of Younger Generations” was a grant proposal funded by the USDA to the tune of $149,997.
An upcoming proposal, involving both Stevenson and Peterson, requests $120,000 for "Improving environmental decision making in coastal communities through giving children a voice".
The children don’t have a voice. The adults cynically manipulating them are the only ones who do.
The child soldier of the leftists running the Soviet Union was a boy named Pavlik Morozov who, Communist propaganda claimed, had been killed by his parents for informing on his father. In reality, the boy was murdered by other teens. But the leftist regime massacred most of the dead boy’s family, including his brother, and used his myth to encourage other teens to turn Thunberg.
Child soldiers have their youth, their sense of security and their future stolen from them. And it’s all done when they are still too young to understand the crime that has been committed against them.
Children don’t choose to advocate for political agendas. That choice is made for them. Sometimes those decisions are made by their parents. Other times it’s made by a totalitarian machine lubricated by hundreds of thousands in grant money stolen from their parents in order to brainwash their children.
Greta, depressed, terrified, angry, and traumatized, is the intended outcome of that machine.
A child soldier.
* * *
Photo by Anders Hellberg at Wikimedia Commons
Front Page mag - A Project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center
Daniel Greenfield Ping List Notification of new articles.
I am posting Greenfield's articles from FrontPage and the Sultan Knish blog. FReepmail or drop me a comment to get on or off the Greenfield ping list.
I recommend an occasional look at the Sultan Knish blog. It is a rich source of materials, links and more from one of the preeminent writers of our age.
FrontPage is a basic resource for conservative thought.
Lou
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
To get on or off the Greenfield ping list please reply to this post or notify me by Freepmail.
Louis Foxwell
Insidious!
Can you put me on your list please?
Years ago my daughter argued against the global warming crap (5th grade?) We were called in, and the teacher was concerned that she would get picked on as she went counter to everyone else in class, and for her to not be so argumentative. We laughed. “She can take care of herself.”
A few months later they had the science poster thing. She did hers on why Man made Climate Change wasn’t real.
That same teacher gave her an A! (I think that the teacher didn’t believe the climate change B.S. either, and really was just concerned that our daughter would get picked on.)
Welcome to the USSA, comrade.
Not gonna happen! Jesus loves me!
When mentally ill people (progressives) work, socialize and live with other mentally ill people exclusively, sane people must appear, to them, as ill.
Our local institutions were a little better at brainwashing. I just asked simple questions when they got home. One kid wasn’t interested in thinking, but another is likely to end up at least as conservative as I am.
[[Government Experiment Brainwashes Children to Manipulate Conservative Parents ]]
Yeah, the ‘great experiment’ is called K-12, then continues into higher ‘education’
Excellent analysis
It's no longer an "experiment." It's protocol.
They took it right out of Goebbels' playbook concerning the youth of a country. That's how, and why, they now control the nation.
This is peripherally related, but I believe things are only going to get worse.
A part of the ACA (Obamacare) I have seen little discussion about outside the health care industry is that one of the goals is parity of “behavioral health” services with regular medical services. This is going to happen through something called “integrated behavioral health”. HRSA is pushing this to all their grant recipient organizations, and if you’re in a rural or semi-rural area, they’re probably funding any healthcare org you visit.
I’m just beginning to understand the implications. It sounds wonderful when described, but I think there are serious problems. Essentially, primary care will have a mental health component in the future. To some extent it already does - patients are routinely screened for depression and substance abuse (sometimes obviously, sometimes not so). But what’s coming is you will be treated by a “team” that includes your primary care provider and a mental health “professional”, whether you’re aware of it or not.
It’s going to be a boom time for mental health people as clinics have to stock up on them. And, of course, insurance will be billed. I predict this will be rolled out at school clinics first, “for the children” you know.
I encourage you to read more about this, although info is hard to find and obscured by plenty of psychobabble. The key is that the government is on board and pushing for it, so it’s going to happen.
Maybe I’m outside of the mainstream on this, but I don’t consider mental health to be on parity with other medical services. Frankly, the whole field is lacking in rigor, oversight and competence, IMHO. It also has a pretty pathetic track record. I’m skeptical about their diagnoses in general, and even more so about their treatment even when they get the diagnosis right. Frankly, to me, the power they will have is scary and they are itching to use it if my observations from inside the healthcare industry are accurate.
I recall reading about a scene in the 1984 movie “The Killing Fields” in which children were instructed (in a Khmer Rouge school) to go up to a chalkboard drawing of a family holding hands together and erase the connecting hands.
here’s more evidence they are a ‘treatment group’ - with an snapchat app, “ for putting the notion of gender fluidity on youngsters’ radar” (snapchat allegedly used by 44% of teens)
Happens all the time.
For example, there are campaigns in schools to get children to conserve water. Then the children fuss at their parents when they leave the water running while brushing their teeth.
Parents are “guilted” into complying to set a good example. We must save the Earth!
These campaigns are promoted by progressives and the government. They are designed to “create a culture of conservation,” which means indoctrinating the next generation.
So: is teaching kids patriotism the same thing? Who decides what the kids are taught?
We should be teaching them how to think, not what to think.
That’s the real battle. And progressives are winning.
Schools showed "An Inconvenient Truth" to students over and over again for years.
It was acceptable curricula for Science, Social Science, Health and English classes.
The results are evident in people in their thirties now (see: AOC).
Ideological brainwashing rarely leads to positive outcomes (see: Wahhabi Islam).
On the other hand.....
When my daughter was a Junior in HS, she came home one night and just ripped the family about global warming, our carbon footprint, our wasteful food practices, our use of energy and on and on. I asked where she had gotten her information and she said that it was from her history teacher (?).
The next day was a Friday and she was running late as usual. She came to me said, “We gotta go, I have to go to school.” I told her that I had been thinking about what she had said the previous evening and told her that I was going to work from home that day in an effort to reduce our carbon footprint. She said, “But Dad, I have a Bio test today, we have to go.” I told her that saving the planet was more important than her Bio test. She was livid, and called some friends to see if she could get a ride. No luck. She stayed home that Friday.
I suggested she spend the weekend doing some research on global warming and energy use and see if what her teacher seemed right. She did and spent two days writing a paper for her history teacher that debunked human caused global warming. It was not an assignment but she gave it to the teacher anyway. It came back with a note at the top that said “I'll have to think about this.”
I seem to remember that she was able to take her Bio test on Monday, but the perspective and discernment she gained was more valuable than anything.
Good job!
See post 17. Similar story.
Nothing akin to “the fear of God”.
I recall, during the “energy crisis”, “oil embargo”, “fuel shortage” etc, of the early 70s a young cousin of mine berating his parents for driving over the 55 MPH speed limit.
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.
