Public Destruction

The political far right in America has mastered the art of destroying everything that's valuable to society, while making it sound like they're saving humanity. And they do it by waging a culture war.

There's an expression that succinctly explains the root of many of the conspiracy theories that are so prevalent among the right wing these days; "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." It still astounds me to see so many people fall for the most obvious lies about leftists and progressives, chief among which is the belief that the ideas behind the culture war are real, and that this war was instigated by the political left. But the political right has waged a very effective propaganda war, resulting in many people believing that there's a shadowy cabal of communists and Marxists taking over the institutions that shape American culture. Marxists are destroying the American Way of Life, and they're after your children; that's what they want you to believe, and they're succeeding...

Consider this: in Presidential elections the Republicans have only won the popular vote once since 1988. That was 2004 when George W Bush defeated John Kerry. And that was only on his second try; in his first election in 2000 he lost the popular vote. In 2004 Bush Junior could still ride the wave of becoming a "war president" after the 2001 terrorist attacks made him popular. The last time a Republican won the popular vote on his first try was H.W. Bush in 1988. Despite that abysmal performance in general elections they are still the party that was able to stack the SCOTUS and overturn Roe v. Wade, severely limiting the freedom of half the population to have sovereignty over their own bodies. Their campaign against abortion rights began immediately after the popular 1973 Supreme Court ruling, so it has taken them 49 years to accomplish their mission; this should tell you something about the fundamentalist Christian right's fanaticism, extremism and endurance.

In the same way they've been fighting against public education. You see, they don't like this public education system at all. Schools are places where children leave the nuclear family and are exposed to ideas and people that don't look or think like them; growing up means being able to deal with people outside your immediate family, their belief systems and race. You can draw a straight line from the end of racial segregation to the current outrage against critical race theory in public schools. It's all part of the libertarian far right's campaign to make people distrust government-funded public institutions in favor of privatized institutions. And they do it slowly, methodically, taking their time to convince people by using fear, by painting a picture of a shadowy, Marxist and Satanist cabal out to ruin the minds and bodies of their children.

Let's take Fox News, the Republicans' main propaganda outlet, as an example. First they ran endless segments hyping the myth that school teachers were indoctrinating kindergartners to hate white people with CRT. Then they focused on how cultural Marxists made white people feel guilty about being white people. Next came the outrageous claims that schools that accept LGBTQ+ teachers and students were "grooming" children to be sexually abused by pedophiles. In their rhetoric they speak of "sexualizing" the children, when that language should be reserved for institutions that actually do that, like the "Miss Teen USA" pageant. To make a long story short, the strategy is to make public schools scary. The right wing propaganda machine behind this dangerous fear-mongering doesn't care an iota about children or their education; it's all to demonize public schools in an effort to sway public opinion into accepting the idea of doing away with them completely in favor of privately funded education, so conservative parents can keep their children away from all the "wokeness" that's infecting education and society at large.

And it's working. We regularly see angry parents screaming and shouting at school-boards, demanding that the CRT and liberal sex-ed end, when in fact CRT has never been part of any curriculum below university levels of education, and sex-ed is exactly what keeps children safe from actual groomers. And the saddest part is that these blue-collar conservatives won't be able to pay for the private education and home-schooling that's the ultimate goal of the propaganda-campaign they've fallen victim to. All the criticism against Biden's student-loan debt forgiveness is also rooted in this dangerous libertarian and right wing opposition against publicly funded education. In the above linked video you'll find a discussion with such a libertarian who thinks that people should only choose studies that guarantee their future ability to repay their student-loan debts. That's such a poor argument, as it will exclude poor and working class people from choosing a study in the humanities or poetry or archaeology; only rich children will be free to choose what they want. Linked below is a video commenting on an interview of Jordan Peterson with Christopher Rufo. The latter is the Republican-hired Manhattan Institute propagandist who started the whole CRT outrage in 2020, and who's now opening up a new line of hysteria about public schools, saying they are "turning our children gay/trans":

Rufo wants to destroy public schools and replace them with publicly-funded school choice: religious schools, private schools, homeschooling–anything but community-owned and community-led public schools. He wants your public dollars to pay for religious schools that indoctrinate children, for private schools that discriminate against the children they don’t want, and for home schools where education is defined by the knowledge or ignorance of parents. He actually doesn’t care about education at all. He doesn’t want to see young people inspired by knowledgable teachers. His goal is destruction.
_{source: Diane Ravitch's blog}

The above quoted blog includes a recent tweet by Rufo saying: "We're building the narrative that public schools are translating the principles of academic Queer Theory into the K-12 curriculum. Our Portland story generated 25+ million media impressions this week—and we're going to drop another story every Wednesday through September." Rufo is very open about it all being a publicity stunt, a propaganda campaign, and he's very open about the intentions of his corporate masters; the destruction of anything that's publicly-owned and community-led. Public destruction, that's their goal.

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