Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
Jeffery Marshall Ed.D., BG(R) 
Education is at the heart of a web of influence and control that goes beyond the warning President Eisenhower gave in his Military Industrial speech. The education strategy is to control narrative and diaglog.
Education Strategy Gone Amok? Education, we have a problem. The response to an education crisis is to lower standards and implement social justice programs? History since the inception of the Great Society shows these programs do not work. The current education strategy will continue to lower US competitiveness and overall prosperity. It is crazy. Unless …
The teachers; unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) did not always support Critical Race Theory (CRT). It took several punctured equilibriums to make that happen. But they do now with a vengeance. 2015 had several key events that led to a punctured equilibrium that broke their path dependency.
This piece looks at the various “critical” theories. The theory making the biggest splash lately is Critical Race Theory, but it is descended from a group of theories. There is also a Critical Pedagogy/Education Theory that shows how education fits into this systemic approach to question change western society. The “critical” in these theories are not the same as the “critical” in critical thinking.
Threading the Needle to Balance Liberty, Commerce, Justice, and Power Figure TR Threaded the Needle I first discovered the magic of a Mercury Dime in my grandparents’ kitchen playing with a toy slot machine. To my young eyes, they were the most beautiful coins I had ever seen. As I grew older, I understood the …
The unions and MNCs have rallied behind these efforts to re-construct US history. While rank and file members most likely seek what they see as fairness to minorities in education, the leadership and the MNCs see power and control. They have the means, motive, and opportunity to drive the effort.
Part 9 IS THE EDUCATION INSTITUTION A CULT? looks at cults and cult tendencies. While calling an entire institution a cult is a stretch, the education institution does exhibit certain cult-like traits.
But even if we do not call something a cult, examining it within a cult-framework may provide some insights into how to address it. This applies not to just the education institution, but to the Trump campaign. If the Trump campaign honestly looks at itself through the lense of the seven signs of a cult, it may learn something about itself and how to address Trump’s high negativity, especially among independent voters.
Margaret Singer, Ph.D. psychologist author of “Cults in Our Midst” stated:
Deprogramming–that is, providing members with information about the cult and showing them how their own decision-making power had been taken away from them.
Restoring critical thinking and effective decision-making needs to be the foundation of all reform and recovery efforts. It is the first cult sign listed in the table above and at the heart of the other six. It is the only viable way to ensure sustainable liberty and prosperity.
Part 8 looks at the charge in the Hippocratic Oath, “first, do no harm”.
1619 seeks to re-write American history to show slavery is at the root of every institution in the US. CRT aims to show this as well as with the concepts of institutional racism, white supremacy, white privilege, and white fragility. Part 4 of the Maskirovka series covers these issues. The question is whether the Social Justice Warriors (SJW) employ these concepts to excise a cancer or to kill the current social structures and institutions. If they argue racism is permanently rooted in every social structure and institution in America, then they argue for a wholesale restructuring of American society and new institutions that are not tainted with slavery and racism.
This path does harm on several dimensions. Harm that may be far worse than the disease. There are many sites that provide arguments against CRT and 1619, so I will focus on the harm they cause, regardless of any merit they may possess.
Social Justice movements do not try to re-construct American history because they do not like it. They do it to break the historical path dependency and set a new future based on their ideology. The questions are:
Do they have the power to completely break the path?
Will other forces counter-act them?
Reconstructing History, Part 6: Culture, History, and the Future Culture is a difficult topic. For some, any discussion of culture, especially looking at them objectively for the results they produce, is a third rail. I discussed this at length in Part 5—Does Culture Matter? of the Maskirovka series. Part 5 looks at cultural assessment. The …
Part 5 looks at the Education institution and how it has changed. We may want to say this all happened recently since it is now in the open and parents are challenging this transition of the schools’ role and what they teach. But if we look at the radicalization of the students at our colleges and universities, that simply cannot be true. The education institution radicalized them starting in elementary school, long before they arrived at the universities. Sure, some students were radicalized in the 1960s, but they were nothing compared to the widespread radicalization we see today.
Since 2020, the US has gone through a series of trigger events that upset the established order. The two events in 2020, COVID-19 and the George Floyd death, broke a strong path dependency in American history, opening the way for Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project to re-write American history. Then the Virginia elections in Fall 2021 called that newly emerging equilibrium into question. As Americans were starting to sort out these issues, Russia invaded Ukraine, adding further complexity and uncertainty.
The preamble to the Constitution and the self-evident truths in the Declaration Independence are the enduring truths. We may have strayed from them at times, but they have guided the vector of American civilization. They are why Americans dismantled racism and sought fairness while maintaining prosperity. Racial narratives and a re-writing history and destroying the institutions of prosperity are not the way.
Reconstructing History, Part 2: The Maskirovka of History Traditional wisdom is the state has a monopoly the power to enact laws and compel their enforcement. As the Commander of CJTF-180 in Afghanistan once told me, “that briefs well, but can you do it?” Over the relevant range of western civilization since the Treaty of …
The destruction and rebuilding of American history is not an act of eminent domain. However, usurpation of power and control has similar attributes.
The Chinese are sitting in the catbird seat during the Ukraine crisis. With patience and shrewd diplomacy, they can exploit virtually any outcome. They want to maintain their trade with the EU and keep their economic engine running. I suspect they want to see a protracted crisis that bleeds the west and Russia and strengthens their global position economically and militarily, while keeping the trade flowing. The crisis is in their interests, especially if sanctions blowback on the west and weaken them and open the door for a new reserve currency.
Thoughts on Ukraine Part 11: New Equilibrium Figure New Equilibrium Issues The figure above starts as a section of the New Equilibrium portion of the Conceptual Framework developed in Part 1. I have added elements based on developments over the last week. As the central question mark shows, there is still a great deal of …
As experience in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq show, if we do not do a rigorous assessment before an intervention and do not continue to do it throughout the intervention, a nation can bleed itself badly. Perhaps the key screening questions are will the people support the intervention and will they fight?
Thoughts on Ukraine, Part 9: Impact on World’s Food Figure Sunflower Oil and Wheat are Two Key Ukrainian Food Exports One voice missing from the security discussions on Ukraine is food security. The agricultural community certainly understands it, and there is a lot of discussion. But history tells us that hunger is a powerful source …
Part 8 looks at holistic approach to Multi-Domain Operations. These include the military, diplomatic, and financial measures countries and corporations are taking against Russia.
Perhaps a holistic statement of purpose could be “Ukrainian and NATO military operations disrupt and block Russian military aggression, provide sanctions and other financial measures time to create the conditions for change within Russia that will stop its aggression.”