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“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” — Hannah Arendt (1966), The Origins of Totalitarianism

Everyone has had encounters with Americans who have advanced degrees and yet have a kindergartner’s understanding of politics and the world in which we live.

How did this happen? How did the United States become such a wasteland of mindlessness, irrationality, and intellectual bankruptcy?

The answer lies in understanding the role played by four foundational pillars that are integral to 21st century post-America society:

• the mass media and its echo chambers,
• the weaponization of education,
• the cult of careerism; and
• a cultural, political, and moral disorientation that is inextricably linked with the multicultural society.

As readers of both the left independent media and conservative independent media are well aware, the legacy media is a huge problem, and with Fox’s dismissal of Tucker Carlson a lone sentient voice has been expunged from the mass media whose minions increasingly march in lockstep on virtually every major issue. 

The mass media exists to spin false narratives and to terrify Americans with bogeymen while distracting them from the things they should really be concerned about.

So instead of worrying about the threat of programmable Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) which would irrevocably end democracy, student loan debt and medical bankruptcies, increasingly psychopathic and potentially omnicidal wars of aggression, the destruction of the middle class, the erosion of the rule of law, the dismantling of the informed consent ethic, and the collapse of public education, we should be concerned about Russians, Nazis (imaginary Nazis, that is, not the real Nazis Washington is giving billions of dollars to in Kiev), anti-vaxxers (people who believe in informed consent), conspiracy theorists (dissidents who exercise their First Amendment rights), sexism and “the patriarchy” (men who have concerns about Feminisis and the threat it poses to the presumption of innocence and due process), and racism in education (Americans who object to the burning of American letters and classics of Western civilization).

The neocon and neoliberal establishment media outlets seek to perpetuate the illusion that there are significant differences between them, when in actuality both insist that FDA, CDC, and the WHO must be obeyed unquestioningly; both are in thrall to the military industrial complex, the CIA, and the drug companies; and both institutions are equally enamored with unfettered capitalism. (For foreign readers that are skeptical of just how bad the inequality is in the US, you should visit the YouTube channel Hoods N Hollers). 

Granted, sometimes the arguments made to justify these policies differ: while the neoliberal media will argue in favor of uncontrolled immigration to cultivate “diversity,” the neocon media will support the same policy to depress wages and abet the looting of state assets by rapacious corporate entities. Neocons favor white oppressors while neoliberals prefer oppressors of color. In this way, white nationalism and anti-white jihad are perpetually pitted against one another in a macabre dance of anarchy, fear, and unrelenting violence.

The dubious claims regularly touted by the legacy media (and especially its neoliberal wing) are parroted ad nauseam by the presstitutes themselves, but also by social media, academia, the literary reviews, and the publishing of contemporary fiction and highly publicized memoirs. This traps malleable minds in a perverse maze of deceitful memes and shibboleths while giving millions of Americans a dangerously distorted sense of reality. Naturally, one of the mass media’s most important duties is to incessantly reiterate humanitarian intervention talking points so as to sell the latest bloodbath for the warmongers in Washington.

The belief that the legacy media zombies have in the inerrancy of the mass media is intertwined with the myth of the meritocracy. Indeed, if one is bewitched by this spell it can only result in blindly following the omniscient ones at The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker Magazine, The Guardian, the BBC, etc.

The myth of the meritocracy has likewise played a huge role in the rise of the Branch Covidians, who believe with every fiber of their sullied souls that the legacy media, the three letter agencies, and the elite medical journals are irreproachable and free from corporate meddling.

The weaponization of education has likewise played a critical role in the rise of the nonsentient human, as American education presently exists to generate student loan debt, incite as much sectarianism and tribalism as possible, deny poor and working class Americans a humanities education, support the burgeoning health dictatorship, use international students to cultivate biochemical automation, foment overspecialization and servility, and facilitate the dismantling of the rule of law through the jettisoning of civics and constitutional history.

The most indoctrinated Americans are not the ones who defend the latest US foreign policy debacle or the latest biofascist atrocity because this was what they were told by the talking heads on television or read in The Washington Post or on Facebook. The most delusional, intransigent, hubristic and fanatical legacy media cultists are the ones who insist that the Ministry of Truth is correct because their professors said so. 

Ultimately, academia’s raison d’être is to generate Adolf Eichmanns who have lost the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and the more prestigious the university the shorter the ideological leash the professoriate will be on. Consider all the physicians that still defend lockdowns, mask mandates, mRNA vaccine mandates, the demonization of the unvaccinated, and the demonization of Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin.

That these policies have egregiously violated foundational principles of medical ethics, have been terribly murderous and destructive, were not science based, and were utterly devoid of any rational risk-benefit analysis fails to trigger even the faintest trace of skepticism amongst the vast majority of American physicians and biomedical researchers.

Like the military academy, medical schools demand absolute subservience and are designed to train their soldiers to conflate legality with morality and to blindly execute the dark machinations of the medical industrial complex. 

In what can be described as an intellectual battered wife syndrome, even the VAERS data, the World Council for Health’s pharmacovigilance report, the 750 scientific papers compiled by Doctors for Covid Ethics that warn of the dangers of the mRNA injections, and organizations that represent the Covid vaccine injured such as React 19 and Real Not Rare invariably fail to inculcate the majority of American doctors and biomedical academics with any misgivings regarding the lies they were fed by “the experts.” As Orwell presciently wrote in 1984, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Should a pre-med student write a personal statement in conjunction with their medical school application denouncing the corporatization of medicine, the Church of Vaccinology, the Cult of Psychiatry, the Branch Covidians, or the trans cult their application would be met with instantaneous rejection. (In actuality, these biofascist cults are domestic humanitarian interventions. Instead of imposing democracy and freedom at gunpoint, health and “the science” are imposed at gunpoint). To get the coveted jobs that follow these degrees requires even more blind obedience; and to hold onto these jobs, yet more still. Indeed, the more subservience displayed by the ruthless careerist, the more they will be subsumed by a shroud of unscrupulousness and spiritual destruction. 

I’m not suggesting that everyone with an elite PhD, law degree, or medical degree is an unthinking automaton. I’m merely stating that the system is specifically designed to separate the wheat from the chaff and to jettison young Americans with critical thinking skills and a strong sense of morality. Like Pavlov’s dogs, American students are increasingly raised in a multiple choice world. This paves the way for the avaricious and ruthless to rise to the top. 

To contradict the official Ukraine narrative and state that the Ukrainian military is suffering catastrophic losses in men and materiel (see here, here, here and here) while employed as an officer in the military or as an agent in the intelligence services will bring about the immediate cessation of one’s career. To publicly question the Branch Covidian putsch as a physician will put the offender’s license at risk; and to do so as an academic will, provided the professor isn’t tenured, result in the academic’s termination for “promoting conspiracy theories” and “spreading misinformation.”

Overspecialization, the deplorable state of the humanities, relentless competition for increasingly scarce jobs that offer good wages and benefits, and the multicultural society which debases national consciousness and the collective memory all play a role in fomenting vocational tribalism and the Cult of Careerism. 

Hyper careerists seldom care about what is happening outside their field which inevitably leads to a disintegration of one’s moral compass.

For instance, an American classical musician, astronomer, or basketball player will often feel that they have more in common with foreigners that share their profession than they do with their fellow Americans. For those who have prestigious jobs, this may all seem well and good, but what are the socio-economic ramifications when what remains of the middle class is a gaggle of technocratic automatons who reside within the confines of their specialty and are largely indifferent to what happens outside of their field? In many ways, their occupation has become their country, and going from an orchestra in Stockholm to an orchestra in Copenhagen to an orchestra in Tel Aviv to an orchestra in Hong Kong can feel like moving from one city to another within the same country.

As transpired in ancient Rome multiculturalism has spawned an epidemic of unreason causing a vast swath of the population to become divorced from reality and to be enveloped by a pall of amorality. In addition to obliterating the middle class, following the end of the Cold War everything the American ruling establishment has done domestically has been geared towards creating the most ignorant, ghettoized, atomized, and dehumanized population; a population that is not only terribly ill- informed, but which is increasingly bereft of even a national identity. 

There is nothing wrong with being proud to have grown up in Bedford–Stuyvesant, South Central Los Angeles, Harlan County, or Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. And yet it can only bode ill when the children that grow up in these neighborhoods have an increasingly tenuous connection to the greater national identity and an even weaker connection to Western civilization itself.

The foundational basis of education is the humanities, and the erasure of American letters and British literature from most public school curricula has left a void which is being filled by specialized job training and the woke indoctrination as embodied by the multicultural curriculum and identity studies. Should this anti-humanities curriculum persist for many years and be coupled with uncontrolled immigration, the cultural fabric of society will inevitably begin to unravel. (American multiculturalism should not be confused with Russian multiculturalism where people that hail from different religions, languages, and ethnicities remain bound together through the Russian language and through a shared Russian history and Soviet heritage).

An education system that attempts to teach children to become literate and articulate in dozens of different languages so as to become “citizens of the world” is doomed to failure, decay, and decrepitude. No such education system has ever existed, and no such education system will ever exist. If Americans of color and immigrant youth are denied a proper grounding in the humanities – a policy zealously promoted by those who love to rant about “racism” – this can only pave the way for more illiteracy, fragmentation, and authoritarianism.

Americans cannot defend their rights if they don’t even know what those rights are, and increasingly the younger generation is taught nothing of the warnings and ideals of American and British literature, the role played by diplomacy in peacefully resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis, the sacrifice made by hundreds of thousands of white Union soldiers who gave their lives to defeat the Slave Power, the New Deal, the civil rights movement (antithetical to identity politics, as it promoted solidarity as opposed to segregation), the Great Depression, the Nuremberg Code, and the anti-war activists of the ‘60s who fought for a just and humane foreign policy. As Beatty, the chief book burner in Fahrenheit 451 says, “If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood.”

Relentlessly berated, deracinated, and deliberately given an atrocious education, Americans increasingly know nothing of their own past. Consequently, they do not possess the intellectual tools needed to understand the biosecurity agenda, the war in Ukraine (along with the growing threat of a direct NATO-Russia clash); and the dangers of living in a Neronian chaos devoid of checks and balances. A younger generation that cannot place current events in their appropriate historical context and whose indoctrination (euphemistically referred to as “education”) revolves around a pathological contempt for bodily autonomy and all things Western and American is doomed to fall into a morass of nihilism and profound moral degradation. 

The demons that surround us are both manifold and formidable. And yet the biggest obstacles are ignorance, a dissolution of rational thought, and even a common language with which to discuss these things. Let us reflect on the opening stanzas of Blake’s immortal “London:”

“I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. 

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear” 

Breaking up the corporate mass media monopolies, prohibiting the executive branch from using the tech companies to censor American speech, restoring the American canon and sound public education for all American children, ending institutionalized bribery and regulatory capture, and implementing policies designed to foster integration would all go a long way towards helping to restore reason, compassion, and American society itself. The alternative is to sit on our hands and wait, either for a third world war, or for things to degenerate to the point where all dissent is criminalized.

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David Penner’s articles on politics and health care have appeared in Dissident Voice, CounterPunch, Global Research, The Saker blog, OffGuardian and KevinMD; while his poetry has been published with Dissident Voice and Mad in America. Also a photographer, he is the author of three books of portraiture: Faces of The New Economy, Faces of Manhattan Island, and Manhattan Pairs. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

Featured image is from TruePublica