Connection Between Riot-Prone Mobs and Cult-like Education

February 13, 2017 | Culture, Education, Free Speech, Political Correctness, Politics, Propaganda, Society

One of many mobs of agitators, angry about the US election results. (Wikipedia)

My article in The Federalist this morning — “Today’s Riot-Prone Mobs are a Product of Today’s Cult-Like Education System” — examines the growth of mindless group think that is fueling so much of the street theater we’re seeing these days.  I believe public education has developed a lot of the hallmarks of cult-like indoctrination, including coercive thought reform, the cultivation of emotional reflexes, and relational aggression against anyone who expresses an unauthorized thought.  Sadly, the agitators have been deployed as cannon fodder to serve the agendas of power elites who are hostile to any truly civil society in which real public discourse can take place.  And the radical education reforms of the past 50 or so years have played a huge role in bringing us to this moment.

Here’s an excerpt from my piece:

“Let’s face it. Today’s street theater is the culmination of decades of radical education revision. The radical Left’s systematic attack on the study of Western Civilization has essentially been an attack against the study of any and all civil societies. It is an attack on the features that make a society civil and free. Those features include freedom of expression, civil discourse, the Socratic method of figuring out truth, value of the individual, and a common knowledge of the classics of history and literature that help us understand what’s universal in the human experience. All of that had to go.

“Now, as we see students marching to demonize as “fascists” proponents of free speech, their ignorance is in full view. This is really a full frontal attack on the rule of law, the Constitution, and a system of checks and balances that guards against the consolidation of centralized power.

“That’s the whole point of the education these students have been fed. In fact, a lot of 1960s agitators, including domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, decided to place their bets on radical education revision. For at least 40 years, Ayers has been devoted to transforming schools from places of actual education to places of coercive thought reform. As Andrew McCarthy recently pointed out in National Review: “It was a comfy fit for him and many of his confederates, once it dawned on them that indoctrination inside the schoolhouse was more effective than blowing up the schoolhouse.”

“If you review the history of radical education reform, it’s clear these agitators have been committing mind arson on the children, undermining their ability to think independently and clearly.”

When you Suspect Propaganda, Here are 10 Questions to Ask Yourself

February 8, 2017 | Free Speech, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Society

Bolshevik Vladimir Lenin, agitated the masses and spread propaganda, basically to get people to disempower themselves.

Yesterday I was interviewed about an essay I wrote for the Intercollegiate Review, called “Truth or Propaganda?” and you can click here to read it.  (I’ll post a link to the podcast when I get it.) I wrote the piece in order to help people — particularly college students — understand some of the hallmarks of being propagandized. What does it feel like? How to detect it?

Quite often you can discern propaganda — or political correctness — simply by the shut-in feeling you get when being confronted with it.  So, I came up with a list of ten questions to ask yourself whenever you feel pushed to censor yourself. The first step to overcoming this oppressive state of affairs is to recognize it.  If more people got in the habit of recognizing and then confronting propaganda, we can begin to rebuild a civil and free society.

So, here are 10 questions you might ask yourself when you’re trying to determine if you’re having a real discussion with people or if you’re being propagandized:

  1. Is your natural curiosity being suppressed?
  2. Are you being threatened with slurs or labels?
  3. Do you feel you will be ostracized if you ask a question or express a politically incorrect view?
  4. Do you notice a “herd effect” as people shift their opinions to adapt to a politically correct opinion?
  5. Are you being pigeonholed as a result of your question or opinion?
  6. Do you sense that if you express ideas freely, you will be labeled a nutcase?Do you sense relational aggression at play?
  7. Will others be “triggered” by your opinion?
  8. Are you expected to trade in reality to prop up somebody’s illusion?
  9. Are you tempted to self-censor to avoid social punishment?Or are you tempted to falsify what you believe to gain social rewards?
  10. Do you feel like you’re stuck in a cult?

 

About Blog Dormancy

February 3, 2017 | Books, Culture, Education, Free Speech, Friendship, Political Correctness, Politics, Propaganda

Asleep at the keyboard. (“Sheila the PC Cat” @ Wikimedia Commons)

My lulls in social media use and posting to my blog come down to two things: aversion and fracturing.

First, I’ve built up quite an aversion to social media. Have you? The sad fact is that we live in an increasingly uncivil society, and the trend line only shows that the vulgarity and hostility fueled by political correctness is getting worse.  That’s not constructive for getting anything done.

The second issue is that extensive internet use — and social media in particular — is disruptive to the process of deep thinking. Constant mental gear shifting has a fracturing effect on the mind. You can read about this phenomenon in Nicholas Carr’s excellent book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. I’ve been trying to avoid the constant browsing that the internet and social media require, because so much of what I am trying to explore in my writing requires a very deep focus.

Our age is distracting enough, especially with the growing attacks on civil discourse.  The recent rioting intended to shut down speech at UC Berkeley and NYU have shown beyond a doubt that we’re in a bad way in that department.  So it’s more important than ever to nurture one’s ability to think clearly and deeply. And independently. Then we should try to spread that habit to others so that they and all of society can flourish in an atmosphere of civility.

I thank all who sent me messages through the contact form.  I very much appreciate your thoughts and support.  If I missed getting back to you about a question you had, I regret that. (Correspondence has become a bit more unwieldy too.)

Going forward, I hope to intensify my efforts on the subject of propaganda awareness.  Propaganda — along with its latter day spawn, political correctness —  is anathema to independent thinking, which means it is hostile to human conversation and friendship.

In the future I hope to post regularly at least twice a month.  Please subscribe if you’re interested!

Please Support Professor Jordan B. Peterson, a Shining Light for Free Speech

October 25, 2016 | Bureaucracy, Culture, Free Speech, Language, Law, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Transgender

If you’re looking for a modern day hero (and who isn’t these days?) one you should check out is Jordan B. Peterson.  He is a tenured professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, and also has a clinical practice.  He is a brilliant lecturer, with several insightful TEDx talks posted on youtube.   I wrote about Professor Peterson last week at The Federalist, and I hope you’ll check out my piece here: “Professor Ignites Protest by Refusing to Use Transgender Pronouns.”

The thought police is after Professor Peterson because he is waging a valiant war against political correctness in Canada. The University of Toronto is challenging him to adhere to speech codes, but he is not backing down.  Bravo!  Check out the video below to see how aggressively anti-speech activists disrupted his attempt to talk about the importance of free expression in a free society.  They fed noise into the sound system to overtake his microphone.  They tried shouting him down.  They pushed and shoved.

Since then, the University of Toronto Adminstration has written to Professor Peterson, essentially demanding he self-censor.  But, thank God, he will not, you can watch his reply to that letter here.    (Professor Peterson has a fantastic Youtube page, which you can access here.  His Twitter feed is here.)

Now, the fact that Professor Peterson won’t use pronouns that play into the gender identity industry is secondary to all of this. Gender politics actually have little to do with gender or sex. Gender identity “non-discrimination” is the cover story, of course.  But the primary effect — and, I believe, the purpose of gender ideology — is the disruption of language.  It’s the disruption of our ability to communicate with one another on a human level.  This is always the first step in thought reform, since words are basically symbols for thought. And if you think about it, pronouns serve an essential function in the structure of the English language.  This structure transcends how we perceive of ourselves as individuals.  The structure of language is paramount to communication.  So to have unelected judges and bureaucrats dictate the structure of language — at their own whim as well as the whim of anybody and everybody else — is really a recipe for chaos and cult-like thought reform.  Such schemes force citizens to self-censor before they open their mouths about even the most mundane things.

Most unsettling is how so-called “social justice warriors” swarmed Professor Peterson simply because he wanted to have an open conversation about what it means to have a real conversation.  In other words, to talk about the importance of freedom of expression. Personally, I don’t believe they even understand what they are doing. They seem programmed in much the way cult recruits are programmed.

The saddest thing about the war against free speech is that it is essentially a war against friendship.   If we cannot speak openly to one another, we can’t have real relationships, can we?  As I’ve written before, that’s really what this power game of shutting down speech adds up to: state control of personal relationships.

 

Propaganda and Agitation in the Aftermath of Orlando

June 21, 2016 | Christianity, Culture, Free Speech, Propaganda, Religion, Society

Today I talked with Professor Robert Oscar Lopez, about how the Orlando tragedy is being shamelessly manipulated by the LGBT lobby.  Its propagandists immediately shifted the blame for the massacre from the murderer and his stated motives to the claim that “homophobia” among Christians caused it. Such a wild fabrication amounts to the cultivation of hatred, pure and simple.  It was obviously calculated, and an act of war.  Demonizing Christians — and the attempt to institutionalize that demonization —  is alarming.  It serves only to polarize society further.  It’s a dangerous path which, in the end, only serves power elites.  You can listen to the podcast here:

GOP Governors Enlist with Transgender War Against Science, Human Rights, and Consent

March 4, 2016 | Biology, Children, Culture, Family, Free Speech, Gender, Language, Law, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Religion, Society, Transgender

The symbol of the transgender movement combines astrological symbols for male (Mars) and female (Venus) with shades of blue and pink.  (Wikimedia Commons) Even if I didn’t know what it stood for, I’d take pause because it just feels so swastika-ish.

The other day I published an essay at The Federalist about the political significance of South Dakota Governor Dennis Daugaard’s caving to the mafia-style tactics of the LGBT lobby.  He was the latest in a string of GOP governors who are shrinking from laws that protect freedom of conscience as well as children’s privacy.  You can read it here:  “South Dakota’s Governor Tucks Tail, and Runs from LGBT Mafia.”

After the South Dakota legislature passed a bill to allow schools to maintain separate restroom and locker room facilities for males and females, Gov. Daugaard actually vetoed the bill. His veto was basically the result of the craven cronyism that has saturated the corporate world.  Big business has been infused with the LGBT agenda for decades now, and their leaders at Chambers of Commerce everywhere generally do the bidding of the LGBT lobby. In addition to corporate pressure, Daugaard personally met with transgender activists who no doubt played victim while making clear that anything less than a veto would get him publicly tarred and feathered.

That article followed on one I co-authored last week with with Joy Pullmann: “The Transgender War Against Science, Human Rights, and Consent.”   In it we investigated legislation – such as that passed by South Dakota’s legislature – that would allow access to school children’s restrooms and locker rooms to continue as it always has: according to anatomical sex. Another South Dakota bill was aptly titled “An Act to Ensure Government Nondiscrimination in Matters of Religious Beliefs and Moral Convictions.” In other words, if you have serious beliefs about sex, marriage, and children, you needn’t be forced to perform acts that violate your conscience or totally gag yourself for fear of being fired.  But that bill was tabled, which is a grim sign for the future of freedom of conscience.

We had high hopes that Governor Daugaard of South Dakota would stand strong on principle and sign that legislation into law — or at least take no action and allow it to become law.  But between the well-monied LGBT lobby and the business world it controls, it seems a pipe dream to expect any official to stand on principle these days. The irony is that probably 90 percent of the population is on board with the South Dakota legislation to support freedom of conscience and privacy.   But the heckler’s veto can be a strong one if good people remain silent in the face of it.

Here are a few excerpts from that article on how the LGBT heckler’s veto works:

Their prescription was to first de-sensitize the public. Then to “jam” or suppress every word of dissent. Finally, everyone must convert. This cultivates a conditioned population. Once we are conditioned in this manner, we end up accepting agendas and programs that we’d at least question if our society respected clear and free thinking. Instead, people either self-censor or conform to the party line out of hope for social acceptance.

Representative government requires the citizens, who are themselves the source of our government’s authority, to be able to openly discuss social questions among themselves and consequently direct their representatives.

If we are afraid or taught not to speak, representative government cannot happen. Tiny factions like the LGBT lobby wield power over an unwilling populace, which breeds resentment against government for not aligning with our priorities. Political correctness therefore eviscerates government by consent; under it, government operates based on brute force, which escalates public disapproval in a constant cycle until the social repression is broken—sometimes with (God forbid) violence.

 

 

The Transgender Movement is a Vehicle for Censorship and State Power

February 28, 2016 | Biology, Community, Culture, Family, Free Speech, Freedom of Association, Gender, Language, Law, Loneliness, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Society, Transgender

All transgender law involves state-sponsored censorship. (Image: wikimedia commons)

Few people have considered my thesis which is stated in the title above.  Most assume the transgender movement is just a simple matter of protecting from discrimination a tiny demographic —  .03 percent of the population who consider themselves transgender.  Far from it.  When you consider the enormous degree of state-sponsored censorship that is required by the movement — and the punishments meted out to people of conscience by each and every one of the laws its activists seek to pass — a far different story reveals itself.

Last week I spoke about all of this to an audience at the Family Research Council in Washington.  You can watch the video by clicking on this link:

http://www.frc.org/events/bruce-or-caitlyn-why-everyone-should-care-about-the-transgender-movement

My goal was not to discuss the finer points of “gender identity” and what being transgender means for any particular individual. Instead, I focused on the broader and bigger picture of what the transgender ideology means for society at large.  Transgenderism is an ideology that is based on the presumption that all human beings have something called a “gender identity that may or may not match the sex they were assigned at birth.”  Notice how the word “assigned” is used to hide the reality that your biological sex is based in physical reality.  This premise is written into every gender identity non-discrimination law. It basically aims to legally erase male and female sex distinctions. It applies universally — to each and every one of us.

The implications are vast — for our language, for our relationships, for preserving a free society. There can be no question that all of the gender identity anti-discrimination laws amount to little more than censorship laws, intended to modify everybody’s behavior and everybody’s language on pain of punishment.

So, in short, the transgender movement is operating as a vehicle for conformity of thought. And in the end, that means it is a vehicle for dismantling freedom – in the name of freedom – and for building the power of the State.  In the end, it puts laws into place that abolish the right to free expression and suppress independent thought.  The power of the state enters that vacuum, as it always does under such circumstances.

I’ve identified four features of the transgender movement that serve as indicators of its role as a vehicle for state centralization of power:

  1. Transgenderism is such an extreme form of individualism that accommodating it in law will only create a vacuum for State power.  By its very nature it demands that an individual’s inner sense of reality trump any commonly held understanding of reality.  This makes it unsustainable.  Its extreme individualism demands the breakdown of society’s mediating institutions – such as family, faith, and private associations — that serve as buffer zones that protect the individual from State meddling.
  2. Transgenderism sows chaos into the language, requiring us all – universally and without exception – to accept a seismic change in the definition of what it means to be human, and what relationships mean, particularly family relationships.  Freedom of speech and association are casualities.
  3. It requires a very aggressive program of censorship in order to sustain itself and prop up its illusions over any commonly understood reality.
  4. It depends on a very aggressive campaign of agitation and propaganda to condition people to get with the program.

It thereby sows the conditions for totalitarianism.   We have no choice but to speak out in the face of its censorship. For more, see my talk at the link above.  And let’s never forget that free speech is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition.

Political Correctness is an Agitprop Tool that can be used to legalize anything

February 3, 2016 | Culture, Free Speech, Language, Law, Political Correctness, Politics, Propaganda, Society, Transgender

Public opinion is increasingly a reflection of what people are willing to say based on their sense of social rewards and punishments for expressing an opinion. (Graphic source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Social-media-communication.png )

If we revisit the example of the “quick public opinion shift” on same sex marriage — which was basically an implausible idea 15 years ago — we might ask: why did the activist push for it became so fast and furious? Couldn’t the idea withstand real public discourse and stand on its own merits without extreme public shaming of anyone who had doubts?  Couldn’t it have come about through the legislative process without an activist judge overturning the referendum results of an entire state? Or Supreme Court justices claiming that those opposed were filled with “animus?”

The answer is a resounding “No.”  In a previous post, I mentioned how availability cascades — opinion cascades, particularly on ideas that seem implausible — rely on a great deal of propaganda and agitation, through political correctness. They are very fragile things.  The survival of such opinion cascades requires a lot of tweaking and teasing and discipline and balancing acts by those pushing them, including activists, politicians, celebrities, academics, media moguls. This is the way you get masses mobilized to pretend they’re impressed with a naked emperor’s new clothes. It’s all about conditioning.

The process has a limited life span, and must be applied to public policy before the window of opportunity closes. Polls actually showed that public opinion for same sex marriage had already peaked by the time the Supreme Court made it a done deal in the Obergefell decision last year.  But we can’t really know what people believe when the environment for free speech on such an issue is so hostile that most who disagree would be loath to express it.

You may recall how Brendan Eich was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla, essentially for a thought crime. When activists discovered that Eich had made a private donation to the Proposition 8 referendum in California to preserve the legal definition of marriage as one-man and one-woman, they “outed” him and set him up for a virtual public hanging.  The point was not only to get him to recant — which, to his credit, he did not do — but to warn the public that free exchange of ideas on this issue was forbidden.

Through propaganda and agitation, you get behavior modification on a mass scale. Yesterday it was same sex marriage.  Today it is transgenderism.  Tomorrow? It could be absolutely anything at all.

What if there was an opinion cascade about pet rocks?

January 13, 2016 | Culture, Education, Free Speech, Hollywood, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Society

“Availability cascade” is an academic term that basically has to do with manufacturing public opinion approval for a policy of some sort.  Any kind of policy at all.  In fact, think about how you might make an implausible idea seem plausible in public discourse, an idea no one ever even considered before.  Next, think about how to create a public opinion “cascade” in favor of that strange idea.  Availability cascades involve injecting a new idea into public discourse, which makes the idea more “available” to people to consider.  If you saturate the media with praises for the idea, and add just the right celebrity endorsements, you may well get a bandwagon effect and even get a majority to go along with it.  It can involve a lot of hype, but with political correctness it can also involve push back against those who don’t go along with the hype.

Let’s take an apolitical example of how an availability cascade might work.  In the 1970s there was a silly fad called “pet rocks.”  The pitch was that you didn’t have to feed or care for your rock, so it was the perfect pet!  Below is a youtube video that revisits the sort of narrative that would have gone with the sale of pet rocks.

Obviously, the pet rock was just a marketing gimmick and a passing fad.  The whole thing was tongue-in-cheek.  But just imagine what might have happened if anyone who called the idea of pet rocks “silly” was labelled and publicly smeared in the media as a “bigot.”  Repeatedly.  Imagine if Hollywood made films seriously praising the merits and the heroics of pet rocks and cast skeptics as villians.  Next, imagine if you could be fired from your job or socially shunned if you didn’t start talking respectfully about pet rocks and honoring them. My guess is that a lot of folks would start taking pet rocks very seriously, even if they privately found the whole thing ludicrous.  They would refrain from passing judgment.  They’d shut up about the silliness.  Or, to gain public approval, they might express great admiration, just as the crowds admired the Emperor’s non-existent New Clothes. And with a surging opinion cascade and great public acclaim for pet rocks, everyone would “ooohh and aahhh” before them, enthusiastically praising them, and giving them a special protected place in public policy.

Sure this idea seems far-fetched.  But we should consider how easy it is to get people to climb on board such a bandwagon.  Because with certain propaganda tools and insights into human behavior, it’s far too easy to do that.  Especially given a citizenry unaware of how propaganda affects them as individuals, which makes them even more vulnerable to psychological manipulation.  There are many social psychologists (virtually all on the political Left)  who study and measure the process of opinion cascades and how propaganda tactics can be used to tease out improbable trends.  (One such trend currently is the saturation of the media with agitation and propaganda to get the population on board with the transgender project.)

So an “availability cascade” is a bandwagon effect in public opinion that can be teased out through just the right propaganda and agitation techniques. More next time. . .

A Conversation with Robert Oscar Lopez on Campus Insanity

December 9, 2015 | Children, Culture, Education, Free Speech, Gender, Language, Marriage, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Society

Please listen to a podcast I did with Robert Oscar Lopez, Professor of English at Cal State Northridge, by clicking here: https://soundcloud.com/militant-de-lenfant/cogwatch-13-morabito-on-the.

Professor Lopez and I discussed the current unrest on college campuses.  Why do so many students today seem unable or unwilling to engage other points of view?  Why do so many feel the need to retreat to “safe spaces” whenever they encounter a word or thought that “triggers” negative emotions?  Why are they so incoherent? So hostile? So blindly obedient to leftist agendas?  So divorced from reality?  To explore these questions, listen in!

Professor Lopez, author of Jephthah’s Daughters: Innocent Casualties in the War for Marriage ‘Equality’ has been targeted and harassed for the past several years by the LGBT lobby.  This is not only because of Lopez’s stance against same-sex marriage, but because he has a compelling story of his own:  He was raised by lesbians and identifies as bisexual.  (He may also be the object of their scorn because he has been faithfully married to the mother of his children for 15 years.)  The “diversity” bureaucrats at Cal State Northridge have worked tirelessly to concoct a case against Professor Lopez.  The video clip below will give you a brief summary of Professor Lopez’s insights:

You can also explore some of the related links on my site.  Here’s a post on the program “Bonds that Matter” that Professor Lopez hosted at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library last year. And here’s a previous podcast with Prof Lopez and me on the parallels between the LGBT lobby’s tactics and Bolshevism.  Also, here’s a brief review of mine of Jephthah’s Daughter’s.   Please order your copy from Amazon today!