Secession is Occurring: Part 4: Censorship and Political Indoctrination

By John R. “Buck” Surdu

In Part 1 of this multi-part article, I asserted that we are becoming two distinctly different Dis-United States. One is an America based on our Constitution, institutions, law and order, freedoms, common view of civics, commonly interpreted history, and shared culture. The other is an America transformed into a Leftist, woke, Marxist repressive regime in which all our institutions must be destroyed to rehabilitate an inherently evil nation. In Part 1, I discussed redrawing boundaries, Blue-state refugees, and efforts by the Biden administration to increase disunity and drive a wedge between Blue and Red America. In Part 2, I discussed manifest clashes of ideology and how the Leftists in power exploit crises to oppress the people. In Part 3, I discussed the breakdown of law and order in the Disunited States and the weaponizing of once-trusted institutions to oppress We the Sheeple. In this installment, I will discuss Censorship and Political Indoctrination.

Censorship

The Bill of Rights was created to satisfy the anti-Federalists and to guarantee God-given rights to all Americans. Among these are freedom of speech and assembly (curtained by fascists during the plague panic). Yet the Left has a view of America in which only woke ideas may be thought or spoken. Democrats, Leftists, and the Woke (I am being redundant) support social media expelling a sitting President and conservative commentators because they don’t like their speech. If conservatives don’t want to listen to you, they may argue, walk away, or change the channel. Leftists (not real Liberals) want you de-platformed, demonetized, silenced, doxed, swatted, bullied, or threatened. Apple, Google, and Amazon colluded to de-platform Parler for specious claims that Parler was inciting violence. Media outlets buried stories about Hunter Biden, and Facistbook blocked posts about his laptop to protect the Biden campaign. “Journalists” at CNN have supported banning Fox News (that’s right, “journalists” advocating censorship!). Facistbook routinely “fact checks” conservative posts, but not those of Leftists. Being “fact-checked” by the Left has become a badge of honor among conservatives; you aren’t a real conservative unless Facistbook censored you. I recently got a message from Fascistbook that a sermon from a priest in Maryland that I posted two years ago violated “community standards” and was deleted — along with a stern warning that future infractions could get me blocked or banned.

More troubling, the Biden junta and the DC swamp have encouraged social media to censor free speech, calling anything that the Left doesn’t like “disinformation” or “misinformation.” We recently learned that even after the DHS’s “Ministry of Truth” was shot down, they continue to engage in unconstitutional censorship. The Washington Examiner reported,

Rather, the department has acted as a “coordinator” of sorts. Historically, government agencies have mostly managed to do this successfully and remain uncriticized as others do their dirty work .

Until this year when the Department of Homeland Security made the mistake of standing up the official Disinformation Governance Board, its politicized efforts went largely unchecked.

And under this administration, its efforts have increased exponentially.

Now that many of us have learned the breadth and depth of our government’s efforts to censor free speech and suppress truth, let’s not let up on our demands for freedom of speech and accountability.

In an August interview with Joe Rogan, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Fascistbook, admitted that the FBI encouraged them to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, and they complied. Joe Biden himself made a public plea to social media companies for more censorship in January 2021, saying, “I make a special appeal to social media companies and media outlets — please deal with the misinformation and disinformation that’s on your shows. It has to stop.” The New York Post reported how at least forty-five federal officials of the Biden junta have collaborated with social media tech tyrants to censor disfavored information. The article also described tactics used to force social media to engage in proxy violations of the Constitution by Biden’s minions.

Social-media companies have a First Amendment right to exercise editorial discretion. But that’s not what is really happening when their decisions are shaped by implicit or explicit threats from the government.

The White House mentioned a few of those threats last week: “antitrust legislation,” privacy regulation and “fundamental reforms” to the law that shields platforms from liability for content posted by users. Given the broad powers that the federal government has to make life difficult for social media companies, the administration’s “asks” for stricter moderation are tantamount to commands.

Federal officials expect obsequious compliance, and that is what they get. This largely surreptitious exercise in censorship by proxy, practiced by an administration that preaches transparency while practicing opacity, is especially troubling because it targets not only demonstrably false claims but also speech that the government considers “misleading” or contrary to the prevailing “consensus.”

It is unclear whether threats against social media companies are necessary, given their overt Leftist, Marxist, woke, and Anti-American cultures and leadership.

American Military News also reported on government collusion to use third parties to do its dirty censorship work.

The Biden administration colluded with social media companies to censor Americans in an effort that involved at least 45 federal officials at the White House, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, State Department, Treasury Department, U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and more.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said in a statement on Thursday that a lawsuit filed earlier this year forced the Department of Justice (DOJ) to reveal emails exposing at least 45 federal officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the Office of the Surgeon General who “communicate[d] with social media platforms about ‘misinformation’ and censorship.’”

Of course, the big problem with government-imposed or government-encouraged censorship, apart from being Unconstitutional and illegal (but that never stopped the Democrats before), is that in many cases, what the government has called “misinformation” has turned out to be true. Last week, Pfizer officials admitted that they lied and never tested whether their vaccine would affect the transmission of the disease. Numerous reports have confirmed what many said about the ineffectiveness of mask mandates and lockdowns. The four-year-long Russia collusion story turned out to be a hoax. The Governor Whitmer kidnapping plot seems to have been a false-flag rehearsal by the Secret Police (a.k.a. FBI and Injustice Department) for January 6^th. Yet the Biden junta worked with media giants to censor inconvenient thoughts about COVID measures and vilified people who did not want to take the COVID vaccine, firing them from their jobs, and declaring a pandemic of the unvaccinated.

Democrats in Congress have proposed that the Tech Tyrants more aggressively censor the Internet (<== read this article!). Conservative groups must be censored, but overseas terrorist groups can spew hate at will on social media. Congresswoman Hirono (D-HI) brazenly asserted on camera that conservative channels and social media should be censored because they are more popular than Leftist ones. In a large field of strong contenders, it is hard to find a member of Congress who is more vacuous than Hirono. Increasingly our schools teach children what to think rather than how to consider both sides of an issue, weigh objective evidence, and think critically.

Fascistbook has been reported censoring articles about the recent study published in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics. This report indicates the risks of dangerously high carbon dioxide intake in masked schoolchildren. The Fascist book “fact checkers,” funded by George Soros, disagree with the study’s assertion and have taken it upon themselves to censor it.

In the meantime, Texas and Florida have passed anti-censorship bills to fight against tech tyranny.

I have often asserted that the Conservatives are the real Liberals. We have allowed the Left to corrupt the term “liberal” and “progressive.” There is little that the Left demands that are either liberal or progressive. What the Left wants is, in fact, fascist and regressive. Conservatives believe in true Liberal values, such as the freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights that Leftists and Democrats oppose.

We have a Blue America that believes there is a right never to be offended, an America in which only one viewpoint is even thinkable, in which only speech and words that toe the party line is permitted, where you can be set upon by wild dogs and tarred and feathered for being slightly out of step with the woke narrative. We have a Blue America that thinks it makes sense to dig 30 years into someone’s past to find some activity that was okay at the time, but it is now forbidden and judge that person by the woke standards of our day — standards that change almost daily. We have Red America, which believes in free speech, free assembly, and the free exchange of ideas. It is an America in which rational people can disagree on issues but still consider themselves Americans. Governors of sovereign states are passing laws to protect their citizens from federal abuse. We are increasingly seeing the federal government and the Biden administration treat those Red states as rogues and pariahs — as if they were in another country, not fellow Americans with a different viewpoint.

Education

I have previously published a three-part article on the rampant wokeness in our schools. While inflicting harm on our children through unnecessary lockdowns, teachers’ unions, school boards, and the Department of Education are not interested in teaching our students how to think critically. Instead, they are interested in brainwashing our children with racist claptrap like critical race theory and the 1619 project and teaching students that communism is good and that they should hate America. Since critical race theory is becoming widely unpopular among parents, Democrat politicians are trying to claim that it isn’t being taught in our schools, but critical race theory brainwashing is occurring. Laura Ingram recently noted,

The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association recent pursuits may be wearing thin. These teachers’ unions are using COVID-19 to promote online-only learning in order to prevent returning to actual physical classrooms. The NEA and AFT are powerful forces, but they only remain so, I think, if Americans continue to believe that public education is still worthwhile. By refusing to teach, by politicizing curricula, by jeopardizing our childrens’ mental and physical well-being, they are showing us how nonessential they are becoming. But one gets the sense the virus fearmongering is beginning to wear thin,” Ingraham went on. “More families see the need to move on to preserve what we have while still protecting the most vulnerable. Even The New York Times seems to think the unions have maybe overstepped and risk alienating millions of voters.

Town Hall recently reported,

One of the unintended consequences of teachers using COVID to refuse to do their jobs in 2020 is that their students suddenly had to take classes remotely — within earshot of Dad. A mother at a fancy New York City private school told me that the wokeness curriculum was nothing new, but mothers never made a fuss about it. Then the fathers overheard their kids’ remote classes — and all hell broke loose.

Now that the teachers’ anti-white agenda has been exposed (thank you, fathers of America!), the left is spinning a series of increasingly hilarious defenses of “critical race theory,” which is just a more boring version of the left’s usual hatred of Western civilization.

Their current position is that they simply can’t discuss CRT with you because it’s too complex and can only be understood by high-level graduate students after years of study.

So, we parents are too stupid to understand critical race theory, but it is okay to indoctrinate our kids with racist propaganda. Critical race theory is pretty simple:

• • America is racist!
  • All white people are racists! And probably Asians and Jews too!
  • Criminal law is racist!
  • Policing is racist!
  • Standardized tests are racist!
  • Showing your work in math class is racist!
  • Meritocracy is racist!
  • Perfectionism is racist!
  • Making good choices is racist!
  • Mortgages are racist!
  • You don’t need a graduate degree in ethnic studies to understand that!

We have a Red view of America that the government, teachers, school boards, and teachers’ unions work for parents who pay their salaries through forcibly extracted taxes. But those organizations don’t see it that way. They are more able to determine what is suitable for our children than we are. Despite the views of parents, these teachers and unions have taken it upon themselves to indoctrinate our children in anti-American, racist, Leftists, Fascist, and woke ideologies.  (And if you oppose these ideas, DHS brands you a domestic terrorist!)

As stated in the Washington Examiner, critical race theory indoctrination is deepening the Red/Blue divide in the US.

Critical race theory argues that America is a systemically, irredeemably racist country and that everyone must work ceaselessly to deprogram themselves of the racism embedded within them. The concept currently is championed by race scholars-turned-celebrities such as Ibram X. Kendi and the widely debunked 1619 Project’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, but an overwhelming majority of people disapprove of this philosophy’s polarizing racial activism. 

Despite its broad unpopularity, critical race theory has found its home in the American education system, with training beginning as young as kindergarten and reaching a crescendo in higher education. At Wake Forest University, the department of mathematics and statistics has begun implementing its “anti-racist math” coursework. In the spring 2021 semester, the University of New Hampshire launched its “racism in science” class. And the University of Pittsburgh’s medical school even recently added a vow against “systemic racism” to the 2,500-year-old Hippocratic oath. 

American education, which once strived for a meritocracy without regard to race, has exchanged academic rigor for race-based social engineering. In many places, this shift has been state-sanctioned through public funding. Many states, however, are pursuing legislative and administrative means to stop this. The divide is a stark red-blue one, with Democratic-controlled governments pushing critical race trainings in public schools and other government agencies, while Republican-led states have sought to curb the use of taxpayer funds for such racially divisive purposes. 

This is exacerbating the de facto secession that I assert is occurring. Blue states are embracing these lies and even passing laws requiring the teaching of “ethnic studies.” (Personal opinion: any major that ends in “studies” is a useless waste of resources and dollars.) Red states are passing laws and taking other measures (identified in the Examiner article, I encourage you to read the whole thing) to combat the cancer of critical race theory and other racist “anti-racist” indoctrination. Critical race theory is so unpopular among Americans, not of the Leftist, fascist ruling class and their acolytes in education, that Democrats and other Leftists are claiming it isn’t being taught in schools — even though it is being taught in our schools and both the AFT and NEA have vowed to teach it in all fifty states. The NEA resolution includes the following provisions:

• Implement Critical Race Theory in ALL 50 states,
• Make it impossible to fire teachers for teaching Critical Race Theory,
• Create a multi-million-dollar slush fund to sue districts and states that get in their way, and
• Conduct “opposition research” on enemies of Critical Race Theory (you know, like every single sane parent in America.)

Public schools want to indoctrinate our kids with far-left propaganda, teaching them to hate America and to judge each other by their race instead of their words and deeds.

The Wall Street Journal recently noted,

A majority of American fourth- and eighth-graders can’t read or do math at grade level, according to the Education Department. And that assessment is from 2019, before the learning losses from pandemic school closures.

Whenever someone asks me about critical race theory, that statistic comes to mind. What’s the priority, teaching math and reading, or turning elementary schools into social-justice boot camps?

Given that black and Hispanic students are more likely to be lagging academically, it’s a question that anyone professing to care deeply about social inequality might consider. Learning gaps manifest themselves in all kinds of ways later in life, from unemployment rates and income levels to the likelihood of teenage pregnancy, substance abuse and involvement with the criminal-justice system. Our jails and prisons already have too many woke illiterates.

Leftist writer Kevin Drum, in his article If You Hate the Culture Wars, Blame Liberals said, “Democrats have been moving further and further away from the median voter for years.” Along those lines, Eric Levitz, another Leftist, wrote,

Black conservatives and Hispanic conservatives don’t actually buy into a lot of these intellectual theories of racism. They often have a very different conception of how to help the Black or Hispanic community than liberals do. And I don’t think we can buy our way out of this trade-off. Most voters are not liberals. If we polarize the electorate on ideology — or if nationally prominent Democrats raise the salience of issues that polarize the electorate on ideology — we’re going to lose a lot of votes.

Maybe that explains why the Democrats are so intent on opening our southern border and admitting millions of illegal immigrants. Citizens oppose their Leftist ideologies, so they must import new voters.

Peggy Noonan wrote in the Wall Street Journal,

The word now is radicalized. So many people feel pushed to the edge and are pushing back. Go to social-media sites and search “school board meeting” adding descriptors like “explosive,” “outrage” and “chaos.” Parents are rising up. New York Democrats just picked an anticrime former cop as their mayoral nominee. Other signs that suggests a spirit of having been radicalized: Longtime alliances based on natural affinity are loosening. Conservatives by nature support and respect the military. That’s changing among some of them, or at least becoming less reflexive, under the pressure of charges of political correctness and a woke brass. Conservatives have begun detaching from traditional support for corporations over the idea they’re too woke, too big, and feel no particular loyalty to America, which made them, when the China market beckons.

It is true. I spent my life in the Army. Most of my family served in the military. But the woke brass are turning me into someone who no longer supports the military reflexively — certainly not the woke senior leadership. If there are senior military officers who don’t buy into Secretary Lloyd Austin’s and General Mark Milley’s racist lies, they are not making their voices heard. (Perhaps Austin and Milley should have spent more time thinking about Afghanistan than pursuing wokeness and rooting out imaginary white rage.). Both my parents were teachers, but when I meet teachers today, I automatically assume they are Leftist, Marxist, Fascist, woke, political indoctrinators unless proven otherwise. It is sad. But stereotypes all have some basis in reality. If there are conservative, non-woke teachers, they are not making their voices heard effectively or are Quisling collaborators.

While it saddens me that the ruling elitists have become so disconnected from society and so bent on indoctrinating children in their woke ideology, it is probably healthy that some are proposing to put cameras in classrooms if and when the unions allow our kids back in school. Leftists in the classroom are playing the long game to destroy America by filling our children’s heads with lies and poison. This is the only way parents can hold teachers accountable for brainwashing their kids. Parents will have the same exposure to the lies and abuses of teachers once they return to the classroom they have now with virtual classrooms. Of course, the unions oppose this idea! Teachers’ unions have universally opposed anything that improves education or benefits our children. This is the only way that we will be able to ensure that teachers don’t thumb their noses at anti-indoctrination laws being passed in Red states and teach those lies anyway.

Once again, we see two very different visions of America. The Blue view is that any thoughts inconsistent with the current, accepted narrative must be censored, de-platformed, or punished. In Red America, freedom of speech is a right that cannot be impinged. Blue America uses the tools of Marxists and Fascists to censor dissenting opinions and indoctrinate our children with racist lies. We are becoming two disparate nations, pitting Red vs. Blue and the increasingly overreaching, tyrannical, and unconstitutional Federal government. We are becoming two separate nations.