August 15, 2023
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment focuses on “Weakening of Values,” one of the eight major reasons for the decline of the Roman Empire. The excerpts clearly show a decided trend to change traditional values of the United States. These trends have been accelerated with the advent of wokeness ideology and its adoption by the Biden administration with the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies.
The values and trends include:
The segment ends with a very interesting Wall Street Journal poll on American values and how they have shifted since 1998.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
This segment focuses on “Weakening of Values,” one of the eight major reasons for the decline of the Roman Empire. The excerpts clearly show a decided trend to change traditional values of the United States. These trends have been accelerated with the advent of wokeness ideology and its adoption by the Biden administration with the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies.
The values and trends include:
- Curbing Freedom of Speech so subjective self-esteem and elimination of “hate-speech” can flourish, in part via censorship?
- Big government has become biased against marriage and the Traditional Family values in order to support progressive concepts of reduced parental rights and indoctrinating progressive ideology educational curriculum.
- Shifting efforts to minimize economic oppression and redirect them to racial Victimhood.
- Shifting Meritocracy and Equal Opportunity to equity and equality of outcomes.
- Changing the definition of Empathy from treating people as individuals capable of free choice and deserving of equality under the law to defining Empathy as expressed agreement with someone else’s specific feelings and shaping policies around assuaging those feelings.
- Patriotism: Supporting the American creed set forth in the virtues of liberty and opportunity and the desire to preserve it to rejection of the American creed and the desire to tear it down and start over.
- Supporting American Corporations being apolitical to forcing them to be “stakeholder-capitalists” in support of woke ideology and climate change.
The segment ends with a very interesting Wall Street Journal poll on American values and how they have shifted since 1998.
Happy Learning,
Harley
SEEKING WISDOM FOR AMERICA – SEGMENT 6
ROMAN DECLINE #2: WEAKENING OF VALUES – EXCERPTS
TEAR EVERY SYSTEM DOWN: While progressives argued throughout the 20th century that government was the solution to all of humanity’s ills another, somewhat contradictory idea began to take root on the American Left. This idea agreed with the progressive thesis that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were past their sell-by dates. But it went further: it suggested that virtually every system in America had to be torn down to the ground in order to achieve true justice.
This meant that traditional American freedoms would have to be curbed. Freedom of speech would have to die so that freedom of subjective self-esteem could flourish. This held true especially for minority groups, who could assert their power only by striking back against the system. This was the contention of so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT). According to CRT, every institution in America is rooted in white supremacy; every institution is “structurally” or “institutionally” racist. “It is white power that makes the laws, and it is violent white power that enforces those laws with guns and nightsticks.” The predictable result: institutions would have to be torn down to the ground.
Source: The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro (2021)
THE TRADITIONAL FAMILY: Big Government’s bias against marriage and family isn’t an unforeseen quirk in the tax code, and the collapse of the traditional family is already well advanced. It’s part of a conscious Big Government strategy. It’s in logical, strategic support of its mission – to expand government and diminish everything else. How’s it going? Well, 40% of American children are now born out of wedlock -- a majority of Hispanic babies, 70% of black children, and 70% of the offspring of non-Hispanic white women with a high school education and an income under $20,000. Entire new categories of crime have arisen in the wake of familial collapse, like the legions of daughters abused by their mom’s latest live-in boyfriend. In an America of fewer jobs, more poverty, more crime, more drugs, more disease, and growing ethnocultural resentments, the shattering of the indispensable social building block will have catastrophic consequences.
Source: After America by Mark Steyn (2011).
VICTIMHOOD: What happens when a nation of underdogs becomes a nation of victims? When a nation peaks- especially when an empire does – its focus shifts from producing wealth to arguing over how to distribute it. This fixation on arguing over how to split the pie goes hand in hand with victimhood complexes; arguing that you’re more oppressed than someone else is a powerful way to claim you deserve government largesse more than they do.
This causes national decline by making the economic pie smaller as everyone focuses on grabbing as much of it as they can instead of growing it. American national success breeds laziness through the abundant flow of easy money, and that laziness in turn breeds victimhood as the idle argue that they deserve to receive money without working for it. As citizens squabble over who most deserves government beneficence, the nation declines culturally through division and economically through lack of productivity. Then at a certain point when both types of decline become noticeable, the nation’s fall becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as everyone loses confidence in it. As the rest of the world doubts our stability, we lose our economic advantage.
Source: Nation of Victims by Vivek Ramaswamy (2022).
MERITOCRACY: In traditional America, achievement in human endeavors that are valued by society earn rewards which are commensurate with the degree of effort, courage, or skill underlying the specific achievement; those who accomplish more, earn more rewards. This system not only provides a natural mechanism encouraging people to pursue success, to develop their talents, and to make valuable societal contributions, but it creates a competition for novel ideas, products, and services that businesses and end-consumers value. Thus, while “all men are created equal,” they do not remain so over the course of their lives; some, based on a combination of natural talents and often life-long labors and struggles, achieve much more than others. In short, such a system merits and rewards achievement.
Meritocracy is efficient at developing and channeling the best and the brightest toward opportunities where they can contribute the most to the collective societal good. Thus, while in such a society people focus on maximizing their personal gain, because the accomplishments they produce are valued as measured by society, people concurrently contribute to society overall. Meritocracy produces a better society for us all.
It is important to differentiate and distinguish between the traditional Marxist ideology of equality of outcomes and the perspective of treating humans equally before the law and with respect to other attributes of equality. Equality of opportunities and equality of outcomes (equity) are markedly dissimilar concepts. [NOTE: The latter is the concept of progressives and a current objective of the Biden administration]
Source: American Schism by Seth David Radwell (2021).
The scientific community is supposed to be a meritocracy: those who do the best research ought to receive the most commendations. But when wokeism infuses sciences, the meritocracy falls by the wayside: the composition of the scientific community becomes subject to the same anti-scientific demand for demographic representation. Professional racists Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones explained that the standards for entrance into the scientific community ought to be changed in order to achieve demographic parity. Kendi told the AAMC – which administers the Medical College Admission Test – that standardized tests are racist, because standardized tests tend to weed out black and Latino students. “Either there’s something wrong with the tests, or there is something wrong with the test-takers,” Kendi said. And, of course, to suggest that not all individuals perform equally well on tests is to suggest that there is something wrong with some of the test takers – which would make you racist. All of this supposedly “antiracist action,” Hannah Jones agreed, is part and parcel of choosing “to undo the structures that racism created.”
More than insulting, such ridiculous race-based thinking is dangerous. After all, if the alternative to a meritocracy is wokeism, wouldn’t that necessarily mean the admission of less-than-qualified people to the highest ranks of science? [NOTE: the military, commercial pilots, surgeons, etc.?]
Source: The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro (2021).
THE INEQUALITY OF ‘EQUITY’: Ibram X. Kendi, the chief expositor of the new Democratic “racial equity” theory, explains that “Racial equity is when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing.” Because race is a social construct the chief indicator that two races are on unequal footing can be found not in proof of differential treatment by race but in differential outcome by race. To prove racial inequity, therefore, one need not show animus or discriminatory policy. All one must show is an unequal outcome. Any policy not explicitly designed to rectify unequal outcome is therefore racist.
This philosophy is both idiotic and perverse. It’s idiotic because all human groupings – literally all of them—will result in different outcomes. Draw a line down the middle of any room in random fashion and the result will be unequal income distribution, criminal records, educational histories. When culture takes a hand, disparities can be more deeply rooted than random chance. Discrimination would still not be the sole cause of such disparity. As a basic logical matter, discrimination is not the cause of all disparity. Unfortunately, this idiotic and perverse philosophy has become the root of Biden administration policymaking. Susan Rice, Biden’s domestic policy adviser explained, “We’re focused on racial justice and equity … It’s for everybody who has not had the benefits of a system that has not served everybody.
Equity requires freedom to be curbed. It’s therefore a national tragedy to watch equality of rights abandoned in favor of equity. If freedom is discarded to achieve equality of outcome, we no longer live in an America defined by the Declaration of Independence. We live in an America defined by tribalism and leveling, in short order, tyranny.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022).
THE CRISIS OF EMPATHY: The American crisis of empathy rests in a simple fact: America is now divided over two mutually exclusive definitions of empathy. That divide is unbridgeable, and it’s tearing the country down the middle. One group of Americans defines empathy as treating people as individuals capable of free choice and deserving of equality under the law. In this view, empathy manifests in respect for the capacity of other human beings, and in understanding that they make different decisions than you would. This version of empathy doesn’t require that we agree with anyone’s decisions, but that we understand that it is not our job, absent significant externalities, to rule them. For the other group of Americans, empathy means expressing agreement with someone else’s specific feeling, refusing to assess whether those feelings are merited or justified and then shaping policy around assuaging those feelings.
The battle between the first group and the second group creates a massive political asymmetry. That’s because the first group acknowledges that while people may disagree over policy, that doesn’t mean they are uncaring or cruel. But for the second group the opposite is again true: If policy is directly correlated with empathy, failure to agree represents emotional brutality and cruelty. Not only that: There can be no agreeing to disagree, because to suggest that people bear consequences for their actions is in and of itself uncaring and unempathetic. It lacks solidarity.
The empathy gap is a crisis. If you believe that empathy means treating people as individuals capable of reasoning and acting under neutral rules, we can have a society. If you believe that empathy means shaping policy around solidarity with subjective feelings, rules become kaleidoscopic, variable and fluid – and compulsion is necessary in order to effectuate such rules.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2021).
PATRIOTISM: The American creed sets forth the virtues of liberty and opportunity, and the desire to preserve it instills a third: patriotism. Together these virtues make America exceptional. When we uphold them and bring them into harmony in our souls, America flourishes. We unleash the boundless energy of millions of individuals, tempered by patriotic and civic duty. When we don’t all else suffers. Our economic, military, and diplomatic might rest on a foundation of sand. On each account, we stand out when compared to other countries, and though we have often violated them, we are distinguished by our willingness to discuss our failings openly and by how far we have come to rectify them over time.
Source: Superpower in Peril by David H. McCormick (2023)
“America is a racist, imperialist, evil, greedy country that is more responsible than any other for war, injustice, cruelty, inequality, and terror around the world. We will never rest until American capitalism is overturned, the American military and police state are dissolved, and American democracy is exposed as nothing more than a corrupt sham.” Question: If you had to bet, to whom would you attribute this quote? A North Korean television broadcaster? An Iranian government cleric? A professor at Columbia? A U.S. congressperson? My guess is you’d probably wager as little money as possible on such a bet because it’s genuinely too hard to know!
Source: While Time Remains by Yeonmi Park (2023).
EDUCATION: This Independence Day (2021), a poll from Issues & Insights revealed that only 36% of adults aged 18-24 said they were “proud to be American,” compared with 86% if those over the age of 65. This shouldn’t be surprising. America’s children have been raised in a system dedicated to the proposition that American is evil, a repository of discrimination and bigotry, a country founded in sin and steeped in cruelty. This week, for example, the National Education Association, the single largest teachers union in the country, passed a resolution pledging to “Share and publicize … information already available on critical race theory (CRT)”; “Provide and already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cis-heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society. But this completely misreads both the purpose of American education and the state of American education.
First, the purpose of public education is to create “well-informed and discerning citizens.” But “citizens” is a specific word with a specific definition. According to Aristotle, a “good citizen” is a person who upholds the Constitution of his particular polis. If we teach our students to be bad citizens in the Aristotelian sense – citizens who disparage the polis with lies, who engage in tribal politicking rather than civic friendship, who insist that truth be subsumed in favor of intersectional sensitivities – we will wind up as a country with no future.
Second, American public education has all-too-often become a tool of those who wish to produce anti-citizens; those who wish to tear down the systems in the name of some higher or lower purpose. No society can survive this in the long term. K-12 public education was not designed to be a free-for-all; standards and practices must be established. The only question is whose standards and whose practices. For the past several decades, the answer seems to be the radical left’s standards, undermining key American principles like individual rights and equality before the law in favor of a utopian redistribution of outcome based on group identity. That must stop. Good citizens have an obligation to stop it. Now Americans are banding together to fight back against the indoctrination of its children. States have begun to ban the indoctrination of CRT in schools, for example.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2021).
FREE SPEECH and CANCEL CULTURE: A large segment of American society now believes that free speech is a public and private threat. The right to not feel offended, the right to be protected from unpleasant realities and difficult ideas, the right to feel safe from people who disagree with you – these are of course not rights at all, but they have come to supplant the legal rights enshrined in the First Amendment. And because no American is actually entitled to deny any other American their First Amendment rights under the law, many have come up with an extralegal strategy for suppressing speech they don’t like: what is known as “cancel culture.”
The real power of cancel culture is the fear that it instills in the minds of millions of ordinary people, convincing them to think twice about expressing themselves freely or else risk having their lives destroyed by real and/or online mobs. There is a term for making people second-guess every word or gesture for fear of losing their livelihoods. It’s called “dictatorship of the mind.”
Source: While Time Remains by Yeonmi Park (2023).
For most Americans, the true dangers of social media don’t even lie in the censorship of news itself: the largest danger lies in the roving mobs social media represent. The sad truth is that the media, in their ever-present quest for authoritarian rule, use social media as both their tip line and their action arm. They dig through the social medical histories of those they despise or receive tips from bad actors about “bad old tweets,” and proceed to whip the mob into a frenzy. Then they cover the frenzy. The same media that declaim their hatred for misinformation and bullying engage in them regularly when it comes to mobbing random citizens with the help of social media.
CORPORATIONS: America’s corporations used to be reliably apolitical. If anything, the business world trended toward conservatism. Now, today’s corporations are bastions of authoritarian leftism. During the Black Lives Matter summer, nearly every major corporation in America put out a statement decrying systemic American racism, mirroring the priorities of the woke Left. Nearly all of these corporations put out internal statements warning employees against dissent.
Corporation after corporation mandated so-called diversity training for employees – training that often includes admonitions about the evils of whiteness and the prevalence of societal white supremacy. Dissent from this orthodoxy could be met with suspension or firing.
The civil rights movement that once sought to treat people by individual merit rather than group identity has been turned on its head – and corporations, which supposedly used to stand for meritocracy, are pushing that moral inversion. Many are doing so under the guise of so-called stakeholder capitalism.
The true power inside corporation doesn’t lie in their hands at all; it lies with the media. All it takes is one bad headline to destroy an entire quarter’s profit margin. Corporations of all types are held hostage to a media dedicated to the proposition that the business world is doing good only when it mirrors their priorities. And so, corporations live in fear.
Source: The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro (2021).
WALL STREET JOURNAL VALUES POLL: The poll, released March 27, 2023, was conducted earlier this month by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and funded by the Wall Street Journal. The findings are as follows:
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
ROMAN DECLINE #2: WEAKENING OF VALUES – EXCERPTS
TEAR EVERY SYSTEM DOWN: While progressives argued throughout the 20th century that government was the solution to all of humanity’s ills another, somewhat contradictory idea began to take root on the American Left. This idea agreed with the progressive thesis that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were past their sell-by dates. But it went further: it suggested that virtually every system in America had to be torn down to the ground in order to achieve true justice.
This meant that traditional American freedoms would have to be curbed. Freedom of speech would have to die so that freedom of subjective self-esteem could flourish. This held true especially for minority groups, who could assert their power only by striking back against the system. This was the contention of so-called Critical Race Theory (CRT). According to CRT, every institution in America is rooted in white supremacy; every institution is “structurally” or “institutionally” racist. “It is white power that makes the laws, and it is violent white power that enforces those laws with guns and nightsticks.” The predictable result: institutions would have to be torn down to the ground.
Source: The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro (2021)
THE TRADITIONAL FAMILY: Big Government’s bias against marriage and family isn’t an unforeseen quirk in the tax code, and the collapse of the traditional family is already well advanced. It’s part of a conscious Big Government strategy. It’s in logical, strategic support of its mission – to expand government and diminish everything else. How’s it going? Well, 40% of American children are now born out of wedlock -- a majority of Hispanic babies, 70% of black children, and 70% of the offspring of non-Hispanic white women with a high school education and an income under $20,000. Entire new categories of crime have arisen in the wake of familial collapse, like the legions of daughters abused by their mom’s latest live-in boyfriend. In an America of fewer jobs, more poverty, more crime, more drugs, more disease, and growing ethnocultural resentments, the shattering of the indispensable social building block will have catastrophic consequences.
Source: After America by Mark Steyn (2011).
VICTIMHOOD: What happens when a nation of underdogs becomes a nation of victims? When a nation peaks- especially when an empire does – its focus shifts from producing wealth to arguing over how to distribute it. This fixation on arguing over how to split the pie goes hand in hand with victimhood complexes; arguing that you’re more oppressed than someone else is a powerful way to claim you deserve government largesse more than they do.
This causes national decline by making the economic pie smaller as everyone focuses on grabbing as much of it as they can instead of growing it. American national success breeds laziness through the abundant flow of easy money, and that laziness in turn breeds victimhood as the idle argue that they deserve to receive money without working for it. As citizens squabble over who most deserves government beneficence, the nation declines culturally through division and economically through lack of productivity. Then at a certain point when both types of decline become noticeable, the nation’s fall becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as everyone loses confidence in it. As the rest of the world doubts our stability, we lose our economic advantage.
Source: Nation of Victims by Vivek Ramaswamy (2022).
MERITOCRACY: In traditional America, achievement in human endeavors that are valued by society earn rewards which are commensurate with the degree of effort, courage, or skill underlying the specific achievement; those who accomplish more, earn more rewards. This system not only provides a natural mechanism encouraging people to pursue success, to develop their talents, and to make valuable societal contributions, but it creates a competition for novel ideas, products, and services that businesses and end-consumers value. Thus, while “all men are created equal,” they do not remain so over the course of their lives; some, based on a combination of natural talents and often life-long labors and struggles, achieve much more than others. In short, such a system merits and rewards achievement.
Meritocracy is efficient at developing and channeling the best and the brightest toward opportunities where they can contribute the most to the collective societal good. Thus, while in such a society people focus on maximizing their personal gain, because the accomplishments they produce are valued as measured by society, people concurrently contribute to society overall. Meritocracy produces a better society for us all.
It is important to differentiate and distinguish between the traditional Marxist ideology of equality of outcomes and the perspective of treating humans equally before the law and with respect to other attributes of equality. Equality of opportunities and equality of outcomes (equity) are markedly dissimilar concepts. [NOTE: The latter is the concept of progressives and a current objective of the Biden administration]
Source: American Schism by Seth David Radwell (2021).
The scientific community is supposed to be a meritocracy: those who do the best research ought to receive the most commendations. But when wokeism infuses sciences, the meritocracy falls by the wayside: the composition of the scientific community becomes subject to the same anti-scientific demand for demographic representation. Professional racists Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones explained that the standards for entrance into the scientific community ought to be changed in order to achieve demographic parity. Kendi told the AAMC – which administers the Medical College Admission Test – that standardized tests are racist, because standardized tests tend to weed out black and Latino students. “Either there’s something wrong with the tests, or there is something wrong with the test-takers,” Kendi said. And, of course, to suggest that not all individuals perform equally well on tests is to suggest that there is something wrong with some of the test takers – which would make you racist. All of this supposedly “antiracist action,” Hannah Jones agreed, is part and parcel of choosing “to undo the structures that racism created.”
More than insulting, such ridiculous race-based thinking is dangerous. After all, if the alternative to a meritocracy is wokeism, wouldn’t that necessarily mean the admission of less-than-qualified people to the highest ranks of science? [NOTE: the military, commercial pilots, surgeons, etc.?]
Source: The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro (2021).
THE INEQUALITY OF ‘EQUITY’: Ibram X. Kendi, the chief expositor of the new Democratic “racial equity” theory, explains that “Racial equity is when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing.” Because race is a social construct the chief indicator that two races are on unequal footing can be found not in proof of differential treatment by race but in differential outcome by race. To prove racial inequity, therefore, one need not show animus or discriminatory policy. All one must show is an unequal outcome. Any policy not explicitly designed to rectify unequal outcome is therefore racist.
This philosophy is both idiotic and perverse. It’s idiotic because all human groupings – literally all of them—will result in different outcomes. Draw a line down the middle of any room in random fashion and the result will be unequal income distribution, criminal records, educational histories. When culture takes a hand, disparities can be more deeply rooted than random chance. Discrimination would still not be the sole cause of such disparity. As a basic logical matter, discrimination is not the cause of all disparity. Unfortunately, this idiotic and perverse philosophy has become the root of Biden administration policymaking. Susan Rice, Biden’s domestic policy adviser explained, “We’re focused on racial justice and equity … It’s for everybody who has not had the benefits of a system that has not served everybody.
Equity requires freedom to be curbed. It’s therefore a national tragedy to watch equality of rights abandoned in favor of equity. If freedom is discarded to achieve equality of outcome, we no longer live in an America defined by the Declaration of Independence. We live in an America defined by tribalism and leveling, in short order, tyranny.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2022).
THE CRISIS OF EMPATHY: The American crisis of empathy rests in a simple fact: America is now divided over two mutually exclusive definitions of empathy. That divide is unbridgeable, and it’s tearing the country down the middle. One group of Americans defines empathy as treating people as individuals capable of free choice and deserving of equality under the law. In this view, empathy manifests in respect for the capacity of other human beings, and in understanding that they make different decisions than you would. This version of empathy doesn’t require that we agree with anyone’s decisions, but that we understand that it is not our job, absent significant externalities, to rule them. For the other group of Americans, empathy means expressing agreement with someone else’s specific feeling, refusing to assess whether those feelings are merited or justified and then shaping policy around assuaging those feelings.
The battle between the first group and the second group creates a massive political asymmetry. That’s because the first group acknowledges that while people may disagree over policy, that doesn’t mean they are uncaring or cruel. But for the second group the opposite is again true: If policy is directly correlated with empathy, failure to agree represents emotional brutality and cruelty. Not only that: There can be no agreeing to disagree, because to suggest that people bear consequences for their actions is in and of itself uncaring and unempathetic. It lacks solidarity.
The empathy gap is a crisis. If you believe that empathy means treating people as individuals capable of reasoning and acting under neutral rules, we can have a society. If you believe that empathy means shaping policy around solidarity with subjective feelings, rules become kaleidoscopic, variable and fluid – and compulsion is necessary in order to effectuate such rules.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2021).
PATRIOTISM: The American creed sets forth the virtues of liberty and opportunity, and the desire to preserve it instills a third: patriotism. Together these virtues make America exceptional. When we uphold them and bring them into harmony in our souls, America flourishes. We unleash the boundless energy of millions of individuals, tempered by patriotic and civic duty. When we don’t all else suffers. Our economic, military, and diplomatic might rest on a foundation of sand. On each account, we stand out when compared to other countries, and though we have often violated them, we are distinguished by our willingness to discuss our failings openly and by how far we have come to rectify them over time.
Source: Superpower in Peril by David H. McCormick (2023)
“America is a racist, imperialist, evil, greedy country that is more responsible than any other for war, injustice, cruelty, inequality, and terror around the world. We will never rest until American capitalism is overturned, the American military and police state are dissolved, and American democracy is exposed as nothing more than a corrupt sham.” Question: If you had to bet, to whom would you attribute this quote? A North Korean television broadcaster? An Iranian government cleric? A professor at Columbia? A U.S. congressperson? My guess is you’d probably wager as little money as possible on such a bet because it’s genuinely too hard to know!
Source: While Time Remains by Yeonmi Park (2023).
EDUCATION: This Independence Day (2021), a poll from Issues & Insights revealed that only 36% of adults aged 18-24 said they were “proud to be American,” compared with 86% if those over the age of 65. This shouldn’t be surprising. America’s children have been raised in a system dedicated to the proposition that American is evil, a repository of discrimination and bigotry, a country founded in sin and steeped in cruelty. This week, for example, the National Education Association, the single largest teachers union in the country, passed a resolution pledging to “Share and publicize … information already available on critical race theory (CRT)”; “Provide and already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cis-heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society. But this completely misreads both the purpose of American education and the state of American education.
First, the purpose of public education is to create “well-informed and discerning citizens.” But “citizens” is a specific word with a specific definition. According to Aristotle, a “good citizen” is a person who upholds the Constitution of his particular polis. If we teach our students to be bad citizens in the Aristotelian sense – citizens who disparage the polis with lies, who engage in tribal politicking rather than civic friendship, who insist that truth be subsumed in favor of intersectional sensitivities – we will wind up as a country with no future.
Second, American public education has all-too-often become a tool of those who wish to produce anti-citizens; those who wish to tear down the systems in the name of some higher or lower purpose. No society can survive this in the long term. K-12 public education was not designed to be a free-for-all; standards and practices must be established. The only question is whose standards and whose practices. For the past several decades, the answer seems to be the radical left’s standards, undermining key American principles like individual rights and equality before the law in favor of a utopian redistribution of outcome based on group identity. That must stop. Good citizens have an obligation to stop it. Now Americans are banding together to fight back against the indoctrination of its children. States have begun to ban the indoctrination of CRT in schools, for example.
Source: If It Ain’t Woke Don’t Fix It by Ben Shapiro (2021).
FREE SPEECH and CANCEL CULTURE: A large segment of American society now believes that free speech is a public and private threat. The right to not feel offended, the right to be protected from unpleasant realities and difficult ideas, the right to feel safe from people who disagree with you – these are of course not rights at all, but they have come to supplant the legal rights enshrined in the First Amendment. And because no American is actually entitled to deny any other American their First Amendment rights under the law, many have come up with an extralegal strategy for suppressing speech they don’t like: what is known as “cancel culture.”
The real power of cancel culture is the fear that it instills in the minds of millions of ordinary people, convincing them to think twice about expressing themselves freely or else risk having their lives destroyed by real and/or online mobs. There is a term for making people second-guess every word or gesture for fear of losing their livelihoods. It’s called “dictatorship of the mind.”
Source: While Time Remains by Yeonmi Park (2023).
For most Americans, the true dangers of social media don’t even lie in the censorship of news itself: the largest danger lies in the roving mobs social media represent. The sad truth is that the media, in their ever-present quest for authoritarian rule, use social media as both their tip line and their action arm. They dig through the social medical histories of those they despise or receive tips from bad actors about “bad old tweets,” and proceed to whip the mob into a frenzy. Then they cover the frenzy. The same media that declaim their hatred for misinformation and bullying engage in them regularly when it comes to mobbing random citizens with the help of social media.
CORPORATIONS: America’s corporations used to be reliably apolitical. If anything, the business world trended toward conservatism. Now, today’s corporations are bastions of authoritarian leftism. During the Black Lives Matter summer, nearly every major corporation in America put out a statement decrying systemic American racism, mirroring the priorities of the woke Left. Nearly all of these corporations put out internal statements warning employees against dissent.
Corporation after corporation mandated so-called diversity training for employees – training that often includes admonitions about the evils of whiteness and the prevalence of societal white supremacy. Dissent from this orthodoxy could be met with suspension or firing.
The civil rights movement that once sought to treat people by individual merit rather than group identity has been turned on its head – and corporations, which supposedly used to stand for meritocracy, are pushing that moral inversion. Many are doing so under the guise of so-called stakeholder capitalism.
The true power inside corporation doesn’t lie in their hands at all; it lies with the media. All it takes is one bad headline to destroy an entire quarter’s profit margin. Corporations of all types are held hostage to a media dedicated to the proposition that the business world is doing good only when it mirrors their priorities. And so, corporations live in fear.
Source: The Authoritarian Moment by Ben Shapiro (2021).
WALL STREET JOURNAL VALUES POLL: The poll, released March 27, 2023, was conducted earlier this month by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and funded by the Wall Street Journal. The findings are as follows:
- Hard Work is less important today than it used to be: 67% said it was very important, compared with 89% in 2019 and 83% in 1998.
- Patriotism: 38% in 2023 said “patriotism” is very important, compared with 70% in 1998 and 61% in 2019. The poll also found that only 23% of Americans under 30 said patriotism was very important, compared to 59% of seniors 65 and older.
- Marriage: Only 43% said marriage is very important (this question was not asked in 2019)
- Children: Only 30% of 2023 respondents overall said having children was very important to them, compared with 59% in 1998 and 43% in 2019. Less than a quarter (23%) of younger Americans deemed having children very important, while 32% of seniors said the same.
- Money: The only value that increased in importance in respondents’ minds from 1998 to 2023 was money, which increased from 32% to 43%
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| america_6l_weakened_valures_--_segment_6.pdf |