This is a very good opinion piece and I think Brandon is nailing the end goal.
By Brandon Smith
The past week the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the US, issued guidance on the use of leftist activist symbols in public school classrooms. As part of their advice to teachers, they recommended violating district and state rules and hanging items such as pride flags and BLM flags. This is generally cited as a means to “start a conversation,” a way for teachers to circumvent school rules. They might not be able to spend each day spinning lessons on woke concepts, but if a child asks a question about the flags in the room, then they can provide “context.”
The NEA has been one of the primary driving forces behind the intrusion of woke ideology into the public school setting. Around 97% of their political fundraising goes towards Democrat candidates. They seem to be obsessed with the grooming of children into the leftist fold with lessons focused on Critical Race Theory, gender fluid propaganda and socialism. If you want to know where the sudden surge in social justice cultism came from in terms of America’s kids, leftist teachers and the NEA are to blame.
Keep in mind that the teachers unions are encouraging their members to break the law and lose their jobs, just to double down on political indoctrination. Contrary to popular belief, teachers do NOT have free speech rights while at work. Woke teachers might fantasize about being Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society fighting against the system, but the the truth is they ARE the system. There are numerous reasons why rules for teacher behavior are necessary.
Narcissistic teachers are parasites that view the classroom as a place where they are owed affirmation. They see the children in their class as a captive audience that they can feed off of to gain attention, admiration and justification. They look down on parents as inferiors and treat students as their own personal puppets for molding and controlling.
In their minds, the kids don’t belong to the parents, the kids belong to “society.” Progressive educators see themselves as the benevolent shepherds chosen by the collective to condition the minds of the next generation. Teaching academics is secondary – Manufacturing new leftist recruits is more important to them. This is the hill they have chosen to die on and they will not back away from it. They have made it clear that the targeting of children is their paramount concern.
To be sure, the woke cult is losing steam lately. Even the kids are starting to fight back against it, with the largest spike in conservatism among high school boys that the US has seen in a long time. They are getting fed up. But there is definitely good reasons why leftists are implementing psychological warfare against America’s youth. Lets examine what I feel are the top three…
Reason #1: Young People Are The Most Economically Vulnerable
The political left relies on exploitation of economic disparity in order to maintain power. The better the national financial situation is, the less leverage they have to keep the population in line. They rail against issues like “class inequality” all the time, but really, the greater the wealth gap the more power leftists often have.
Gen Z, for example, has been thoroughly sold since childhood on the idea that they were born into a time of historic economic despair that generations before them never had to deal with. Many of these kids are in their 20s and just exited college only to discover they have a useless degree in a field with low employment prospects, and on top of that they owe tens-of-thousands of dollars in student loans. They feel like they’ve been conned, and in a way they were.
They were fed a narrative which tells them that once you hit adulthood you’re entitled to a living wage and solid career prospects, and that a college degree is a golden ticket to prosperity. They think that they’re supposed to jump into home ownership quickly and that life simply adjusts to their needs. They think that this is how it was for Baby Boomers and Gen X, and that they’ve been handed the meager leftovers of a more prosperous era that previous generations squandered.
This is nonsense.
The fact is, young people from every generation are economically vulnerable simply because they have near-zero life experience and have had no time to accumulate savings and property. Most people in their 20s don’t jump right into a career and a home or even a livable wage. Every single generation had to deal with financial strife. Gen Z is not special.
But what about inflation? What about economic crisis? Yes, there are numerous fiscal threats prevailing over the past several years and stagflation is making life difficult for everyone, not just the young. These conditions are not unprecedented, though.
Baby Boomers and Gen X saw a decade long stagflationary crisis through the 70s and early 80s along with the Vietnam War. My own grandfather lost millions in his freight business due to exploding interest rates in the early 1980s. The Greatest Generation dealt with the Great Depression, WWI, WWII, and the Korean War. Young people today need to get a grip on reality and understand that they don’t know what true struggle is, at least not yet.
At bottom, some of us are born into times of uncertainty. Previous generations sought to rise to the challenge. Gen Z (and Millennials) are the first generations to suggest that they’re owed recompense for their discomfort. This isn’t an attempt to diminish their problems, just put those problems in historic perspective. Leftists use predatory tactics to lure the young in with claims that their lives are unfair – but the fact is, life is unfair and always will be.
You don’t go into the working world with no skills and no experience and a worthless college degree expecting to become an immediate success. You live paycheck to paycheck, grow as a person and eventually find your niche. If you are smart, resourceful, responsible and are willing to put in the effort you will find a way. If not, well, then you don’t deserve prosperity.
Reason #2: Young Adults Are Driven By Sex And Impulse, Not Accomplishment
I should specify that young people in the western world are sexually oriented more than accomplishment oriented. In many other societies the young are pushed to strive for personal success BEFORE pursuing relationships, marriage or sex. In the west, sex is purely recreational and IS the driving force for teens, twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings. Specifically, sex without consequences.
I suspect this is why American innovation, work ethic and academic excellence have been on a perpetual down-slide. Technology has taken up some of the slack in terms of productivity, but the newest generations seem to be the most unimpressive in terms of ambition and excellence. There will be no Albert Einstein or Richard Feynman or Kurt Godel or Nikola Tesla or even a Steve Wosniak produced by Gen Z. They are too preoccupied with being victims and getting their rocks off…
The political left is eminently aware of this dynamic. They know that the minds of young people are easily distracted with thoughts of sexual revolution, generally because they think it means more easy access to sex without responsibility. Teens and young adults are more likely to support sexualized policies for this reason, and not surprisingly they’re more likely to support abortion. Leftists know that sex sells and making it easy for people to kill off unwanted pregnancies is one way to sell sex.
The interesting thing that is happening lately, though, is that the political left is growing more and more hostile to straight sex. Free love for everyone used to be the progressive mantra, but not anymore.
Masculinity is now admonished as predatory and women are encouraged to treat male advances as a threat. The left is systematically de-sexualizing straight people. At the same time, they are hyper-sexualizing LGBT people to the point that Pride Parades are applauded for grotesque displays in the streets in front of children. Young straight men are entering into a dating world which tells them that if they have no interest in “trans women” they are bigoted and evil.
The goal is to maneuver young people into the LGBT fold as the only place where sexual “freedom” is accepted. As long as you don’t want kids or can’t have kids, the leftist establishment is happy to promote a world without restraint. The woke talk often of freedom, but what they really mean is hedonism – The pursuit of pleasure at the expense of conscience and moral compass.
Reason #3: Young People Are Desperate To Find Meaning
For those that can remember back to their teens and twenties, it’s common to be obsessed with personal destiny almost as much as sex. In western society a lot of value is placed on celebrity as well as social legacy. Everyone has dreams of being well known, well liked, leading a movement that changes things for the better, making their mark. The truth is, statistically speaking, the vast majority of people will do very little to make a mark on the world in the way they imagine.
Probably one of the most terrifying realizations for the average person in their teens and 20s is the fact that they are not special. They are not born with a built in greatness and are not fated for messiah status. If they want to do something extraordinary as individuals they will have to work hard for it. In fact, most people that do great things are not necessarily smarter than the common citizen, they just put in the work that others refuse to do.
Then there are those that cut corners. The allure of instant purpose and instant attention has never been more powerful than it is today in the digital age. Rebels without a cause used to be isolated from each other and thus less inclined to do anything stupid. Now, these people are connected to each other within micro-seconds and can organize into mindless mobs at the drop of a hat.
Leftists make finding a purpose easy – You don’t have to accomplish anything. You don’t have to struggle or persevere. You don’t have to be creative or inventive. You don’t have to compete or climb to the top of the heap. All you have to do is destroy. All you have to do is stand on top of the structures that other people built and burn them to the ground. That’s it. It’s simple.
A political movement with no shame is a difficult movement to defeat, if only because right and wrong are no longer a factor in participation. When justification is based on subjective feelings, impulse and self aggrandizement rather than reason and conscience, there is no way to dissuade those activists from their goals. When destruction is the only ideal, diplomacy and debate are unthinkable. It’s like trying to negotiate with a time bomb, or a brain tumor.
Destruction is the easiest motivation for a movement. Creation and conservation are hard. Leftists know that the young are not inclined to ponder ten moves ahead on the chess board. They would rather throw the chess board to the ground and then strut around like they won the game.
The problem is, if meaning is only found in derailing and burning, and legacy is only found in vanity, then the arson must continue into infinity. What happens when there’s nothing left to destroy? There are only two possible outcomes: The leftists in their blind fervor go on to destroy each other, or, the establishment tricks the next generation into constructing their own gulag. The latter seems to be the end game for progressive elites and globalists – Use young useful idiots as a weapon to forcibly introduce massive social upheaval, then lock them up in a slave camp and call it Utopia.