The Washington Standard
This year started with a bang. The nation was treated to yet another circus sideshow which was portrayed as a vote for the new house speaker. The joke was truly on us as twenty republicans were shown holding out in a fight against McCarthy becoming speaker, only in the end, to see him win the nomination anyway. Did anyone really believe it was going to end differently? The most entertaining part was watching Matt Gaetz call McCarthy the king alligator of the swamp, then putting on a show of his own with a defiant vote for Trump, while in the meantime Trump himself, endorsed McCarthy. What a joke. The biggest problem with this is the attention it gets from the American people. The federal government is not supposed to play such a central role in our lives. Not compared to what happens at the local level. We should be far more concerned with our governors, mayors, and city councils than the federal government. Somewhere along the line, however, the role of the federal government changed, and for the most part, this change was accepted by the American people. The big talking point of the latest fiasco was that a speaker needed to get elected so they can get on doing the work of the American people. What work? The federal government is supposed to secure our borders, protect our natural rights, coin our money and handle foreign affairs. If things were going as they were intended, we would barely be aware of the federal government’s existence, let alone be treated to the constant barrage of endless propaganda designed to define what we should be thinking about. Instead, we have a federal government that is the largest employer in the nation, controlling nearly every institution that has a direct impact on our lives. The most concerning, and perhaps this may explain why Americans place such importance on the workings of the federal government, is the control they have over education. Public schooling has been used as a tool of social change for more than one hundred years. Much of what we see occurring in education today isn’t new, or the beginning of an agenda, it is the result of or the culmination of something that started decades ago. It is great to see parents showing up at school board meetings, and demanding accountability from the school boards over the rampant, sexually explicit material being shown to our kids. Unfortunately, they are merely reacting to a school system whose very existence is meant to incrementally transform our nation from one of freedom to a “social democracy.” Changing our nation has little to do with the circus sideshow we watched on Fox News and CNN this month and much more to do with ripping the control they have over schooling from their deprived, power-hungry minds.
Education has become so normalized in everyday life that no one really bats an eye at it. Nothing will change that like a school being exposed for inviting a drag queen to perform at an elementary school function while declining to tell the parents, but I digress. Parents today are looking at what is happening while referencing the time they were in school. Sure, as a fifty-year-old I can attest that I was taught there were only two genders, the trees took in carbon dioxide and produced oxygen and the United States was the victor in both world wars. I certainly do not remember any discussions concerning homosexuality, or the idea that gay children are oppressed victims. Parents who went to school in the 1990s would have seen an introduction to this idea. The promotion of homosexuality was gradually introduced under the guise of aids education. Once this gained acceptance the agenda continued to incrementally advance to what we have now. A school system that actively encourages your children to believe the gender binary is oppressive and it is perfectly fine for boys to call themselves a girl and use the girl’s bathroom. The bigger point being made here is that these changes are gradual, almost generational in their implementation that they go largely unnoticed. Until Steven comes home and says his name is Sally and he has joined the girl’s soccer team, and you as the parent, are a bigot for opposing his true identity.
The part that parents are missing today is the role these same processes played in the formation of their worldviews and behaviors. Anyone who attended school since 1969 was subject to the use of “operant conditioning” as a behavior modification technique. The U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare released a document called Reducing Problem Behaviors: An Operant Conditioning Guide for Teachers in 1969. Operant conditioning is simply the idea that desirable behaviors can be reproduced through the use of rewards and punishments.
