How did Germany manage to exist for more than 70 years without a queer commissioner? Many may be forgiven for not having pondered this question, especially during a pandemic which has decimated the civil rights of a third of the population.

Sven Lehmann, Member of the Green Party, has announced that he wants to make Germany a pioneer in the fight against discrimination against transgender, homosexual and other sexual minorities. “Everyone should be able to live freely, safely and with equal rights,” he declared on Wednesday. Except of course the unvaccinated.

The federal government appointed the Green politician as the first commissioner for the acceptance of sexual and gender diversity. The new government will in future “pursue a progressive queer policy and also align family policy with the social reality of different types of families,” Lehmann announced. The SPD, Greens and FDP had already announced this plan in the coalition agreement.

The fact that nothing like this has ever existed, apparently weighed heavily on some.

“The protection of people on the basis of their sexual and gender identity must be ensured in the Basic Law and the fundamental rights of trans, inter and non-binary people must finally be fully enforced.” That is why Lehmann is planning a national action plan to protect “queer” people together with the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs.

In addition to their diets, federal government officials receive an allowance of around 43 000 euros per year. Lehmann sits in the German Bundestag for the Cologne constituency.

Female crash test dummies or just female dummies?

Germany has been busy cancelling itself proactively: In October last year, Hamburg’s deputy mayor called for “gender-neutral mobility”. The Green politician wanted crash tests in the auto industry to be carried out with female dummies in the future. This already raised the question: When will dummies for transgender people, non-binary people and people defining themselves as queer follow?

Deputy mayor Fegebank demanded that “female” dummies be used. Because although women drive almost only half of the average kilometres covered by men, about half of all road accident victims are female, as the Merkur reported.

The reason for this is not bad female drivers but that new cars are tested with “male” crash test dummies that have a standardised height of 1,75 metres and a weight of 78 kilograms.

Cars are less safe for mostly small and less heavy women, who have to push the seat forward to reach the clutch or the brake, for example, than for the “average man”, who is considered the template for the dummy, according to Fegebank, and female crash test dummies are to be introduced in the Hanseatic city to ensure “gender-neutral mobility”.

According to the Green politician, car manufacturing and accident research should address the differentiated requirements of women, men, old and young people as well as people with disabilities. She said dummies that are equal to the “prototype man” should be crashed as soon as possible.

These “protective” measures from a leftwing coalition in power are deemed necessary in a country which experiences more political violence categorized as “left” than comparable acts from the right spectrum. This has emerged from a response by the federal government to a small question from the AfD parliamentary group, which asked about politically motivated acts of violence.

According to the information, from January to September 2021 there were exactly 836 left-wing politically motivated violent crimes, the majority of which were physical, and 715 right-wing political violent crimes.

Some 94 violent crimes are to be assigned to the phenomenon of “foreign ideology” and 40 to the area of ​​”religious ideology”, a further 786 are not to be assigned at all.

A total of 2471 politically motivated acts of violence were counted from January to September. Leftwing violence is clearly on the rise: According to the government, 3 365 acts in this crime area were recorded in 2020 as a whole, while in 2019 there were 2 832 cases registered.

Conspiracy theories?

Unwanted political, historical, philosophical and scientific interpretations are dismissed by German politicians and the mass media fully in the grip of mass formation psychosis as “conspiracy theories”. They seem to come from the “edge of society”, where, according to the semi-official version, all sorts of dubious thoughts are exchanged.

In truth, it’s the other way around: the most powerful conspiracy theories come from above. Hollywood promotes them, the BBC and CNN, and German politicians and media are trotting out the same fantasies as their Anglo-Saxon “diversity” role models.

The fact that Corona will mutate and thus become less dangerous and that the pandemic will end as soon as a less dangerous variant prevails and infects the population, is currently considered a dangerous “conspiracy theory” repeated by incorrigible opponents of vaccination. They are blocked on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

But this is exactly what Isabella Eckerle, the head of the Center for Viral Diseases at Geneva University Hospital – an eminent virologist – said in the first half of December 2021.

According to German Health Minister, a 2G-Plus rule must apply to access to cafes and restaurants. “Gastronomy is a problem area. You often sit for hours without a mask,” said Lauterbach told RTL on Thursday evening. Many people infected each other with the Omicron virus in these establishments, he said.

Omicron is believed to be even less deadly than flu. But according to Lauterbach, “this assessment is a misconception”. He could not resist the temptation to spread more panic adding that “of the unvaccinated, many will die“.

Lauterbach is the most popular politician in Germany. Surveyed by the opinion research institute infratest dimap for ARD, 66 percent of those surveyed said they were satisfied with the fear monger, ahead of Chancellor Olaf Scholz (60 percent).

It is worth remembering that Germany has already required medical grade masks and N95’s with extremely high compliance, and nevertheless suffered significantly more deaths than Sweden for all of 2021.

As The Experts move the goalposts to surgical or N95 masks, it’s worth remembering that Germany has already required medical grade masks and N95’s with extremely high compliance, and reported significantly more deaths than Sweden for all of 2021

They are literally always wrong pic.twitter.com/3jc2nlFOZX

— IM (@ianmSC) January 5, 2022

freewestmedia.com

Who decides what is taught in the public schools that are paid for with the tax dollars of the parents who send their children there?

By Patrick J. BUCHANAN

Virginia is a newly blue state, with a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators, that Joe Biden won by 10 points. Hence, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe was an early and solid favorite to regain the office he vacated in 2017. But if McAuliffe loses Tuesday, the defeat will be measured on the Richter scale.

For if he does lose, it will be because of an elitist belief McAuliffe blurted out during a debate with Republican rival Glenn Youngkin: “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions. … I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Yet, during his own term as governor, one Virginia school district pulled copies of To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn out of the schools because of the books’ use of racial slurs.

What McAuliffe was saying was that the knowledge, truths, and beliefs imparted to children in public schools are to be determined by school officials and teachers alone. Parents have no role and should butt out.

Complain about critical race theory all you want. The regime has made clear that you don’t get a say in education.

By Declan LEARY

Aradically progressive ideology is being imposed from the top down on American schoolchildren in a dangerous mix of ideological experiment and social engineering. A supposed interest in equality of outcomes is paradoxically paired with a widespread and avoidable decline in actual outcomes for just about everyone involved. Parents, fed up with their children’s use as pawns in the schemes of political actors with no real skin in the game, have started pushing back. Those parents’ pushback, at times, has gotten rowdy, commensurate with the enormity of the radicals’ senseless treatment of the children entrusted to their care. To get them back in line, local police and the federal leviathan are being mobilized to impose the will of national elites against the interests and over the objections of people on the ground.

It’s 1975 again.

The world of half a century ago is at once familiar and strangely distant. The federal Department of Education did not even exist yet, and would not until 1979. The post-’60s civil rights regime that now defines the educational landscape was still just taking hold and was, in fact, the impetus for that earlier and (as yet) more dramatic turmoil. Photos of the last crisis, for the most part, come to us in black and white—some of the last relics of a recent past made to seem, by the mode of its presentation, impossibly far removed from us in time.

In 1965, a new wave of liberal legislators displacing Massachusetts’ Democratic old guard had passed the Racial Imbalance Act, which mandated that any public school deemed racially imbalanced would be forcibly corrected by the government. Oddly, the law defined “racial imbalance” as any case in which “the percent of nonwhite students in any public school is in excess of fifty per cent of the total number of students in such school.” Besides ensuring that the white suburbs would not experience any blowback from the experiments to come, this very strange definition established as a standard for racial progress the imposition of a white majority in every public school within the Commonwealth.

Because people largely lived in close proximity to others of the same racial and ethnic identity—a not insubstantial portion of which was then attributable to the enduring effects of de jure segregation—and because the primary factor in public school assignment is geography, schools in predominantly black neighborhoods came nowhere near the white-majority requirement.

Under the leadership of populist firebrand Louise Day Hicks—a trailblazing lawyer and mother from a well-respected South Boston family—the Boston School Committee effectively ignored the new law, which could not have been enforced without massive, destructive upheavals in the functioning of the city’s communities. In 1974 the activist judge Wendell Arthur Garrity Jr., a suburbanite appointed by LBJ to the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts, took it upon himself to reorganize the Boston school system, implementing a scheme of citywide forced busing first proposed by the statewide Board of Education.

The results were disastrous. Thousands of kids, black and white, simply didn’t go to school. Even among those who did, physical violence and other conflict broke out at alarming rates. Educational quality didn’t actually improve for anyone, white or black. (When the dust had settled in the ’90s, citywide standard test results were abysmal.) Rather than solve any of the very real problems in the city’s school system—majority-black schools, for instance, really were underfunded—Garrity’s power-grab just stacked dysfunction on top of dysfunction.

On top of the educational consequences—and perhaps more far-reaching—were the social ones. The compelled disjunction of children from their physical communities played no small part in the social unraveling from which those urban neighborhoods still have not recovered. Racial animosity ignited by the Garrity operation spilled over into the streets, with incidents of both white-on-black and black-on-white attacks directly traceable to the forced busing program.

Countless protests—not to mention dozens of riots—arrested the city in the ensuing years. Parents and community leaders did everything they could to express their opposition to the judicial reorganization of their children’s schools. Governor Sargent responded by calling in the National Guard. In 1975, there were five police officers for every four students in attendance at South Boston High School.

Those who could afford and bear to leave their longtime homes picked up and fled to the safety of the suburbs. By the end of the crisis, enrollment in the district had plummeted from 93,000 to just 57,000 students. Today, the vast majority of Boston’s public schools are a disaster, and neighborhoods that were vibrant just two generations ago now lie in near or total ruin.

All this—taught as a key chapter of local history when I was growing up in Massachusetts—has been on my mind lately as I’ve watched the recent dustups over race and gender ideology being pushed in public schools across the nation.

Though I don’t live in Virginia, I live close enough that the television ads for Virginia elections have been inescapable these last few months. Ten times a day for the last couple weeks—and mind you, I don’t watch much TV—I’ve been confronted with Terry McAuliffe’s ham-fisted remark that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” a blunder that transformed long-shot GOP nominee Glenn Youngkin practically overnight into a serious contender for the governorship of a major state that’s quickly turning blue.

McAuliffe’s answer was moronic, but more importantly it was entirely unsurprising. We already had the debate, decades ago, over whether the state or the parents should be the primary decision-maker in a child’s education. We lost. Where we are now—not just McAuliffe’s campaign, but the nationwide status quo of education in service of the regime’s ideology—is merely a predictable consequence of the battles of the 1970s, in which Goliath knocked David down and kicked him in the face, all the while denouncing him as a racist.

History repeats itself in interesting ways. The most prominent critics of the busing regime—most notably Hicks and the (later legendary) state legislator William Bulger—were city-dwellers themselves, and parents. Those pushing forced busing, meanwhile—Garrity, U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, outgoing Governor Frank Sargent, former state legislator and incoming Governor Michael Dukakis—hailed from suburbs that were disproportionately white, disproportionately wealthy, and almost entirely insulated from the repercussions of their own radical policies. McAuliffe, himself a keen supporter of educational progressivism, likewise made sure his own kids were safe from the consequences, sending all four to expensive private schools.

I’m certainly no opponent of private schooling, but skin in the game matters. It’s worth asking why the champions of these radical reforms never seem willing to subject their own children to them. But they’re perfectly happy to test things out on your children. In 2021 as in 1975, American children of all races are needlessly disadvantaged by the interventions of the Ted Kennedys and Terry McAuliffes of the world.

The difference is that 50 years ago you could just move out of the city, if you were willing to uproot yourself and your family. Now the new generation of limousine liberals are taking the fight from the cities to the suburbs, and anywhere else they have to. The further we retreat, the further they’ll advance. Eventually we’ll find ourselves with nowhere left to run.

theamericanconservative.com

The oligarchic empire is working harder and harder to bolt down our minds in service of its agendas.

Silicon Valley is working more and more openly in conjunction with the US government, and its algorithms elevate empire-authorized narratives while hiding unapproved ones with increasing brazenness.

The mass media have become so blatantly propagandistic that US intelligence operatives are now openly employed by news outlets they used to have to infiltrate covertly.

NATO and military institutions are studying and testing new forms of mass-scale psychological manipulation to advance the still developing science of propaganda.

A transparently fake “whistleblower” is being promoted by the US political/media class to manufacture support for more internet censorship and shore up monopolistic control for institutions like Facebook who are willing to enforce it.

Wikipedia is an imperial narrative control operation.

They’ve imprisoned a journalist for exposing US war crimes after the CIA plotted to kidnap and assassinate him.

I do reporting on some really disconcerting topics, but the research I did for this is some of the most terrifying I’ve done in my years as a journalist:

NATO is developing “cognitive warfare,” waging a “battle for your brain,” to “make everyone a weapon”https://t.co/z40x6k96OW

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) October 11, 2021

The powerful work so hard at such endeavors because they understand something that most ordinary people do not: whoever controls the dominant narratives about the world controls the world itself.

Power is controlling what happens; absolute power is controlling what people think about what happens.

If you can control how people think about what’s going on in their world, if you can control their shared how-it-is stories about what’s happening and what’s true, then you can advance any agenda you want to. You’ll be able to prevent them from rising up against you as you steal their wealth, exploit their labor, destroy their ecosystem and send their children off to war. You can keep them voting for political institutions you own and control. You can keep them from interfering in your ability to wage wars around the world and sanction entire populations into starvation to advance your geostrategic goals.

This status quo of exploitation, ecocide, oppression and war benefits our rulers immensely, bringing them more wealth and power than the kings of old could ever dream of. And like the kings of old they are not going to relinquish power of their own accord, which means the only thing that will bring an end to this world-destroying status quo is the people rising up and using the power of their numbers to end it.

Yet they don’t rise up. They don’t because they are successfully propagandized into accepting this status quo, or at least into believing it’s the only way things can be right now. Imperial narrative control is therefore the source of all our biggest problems.

And they’re only getting more and more aggressive about it. More and more forceful, less and less sly and subtle in their campaign to control the thoughts that are in our heads.

Many of those who have this realization see it as cause for despair. I personally see it as cause for hope.

They work so hard to manufacture our consent for the status quo because they absolutely require that consent; history shows us that rulers do not fare well after a critical mass of the population has turned against them. And they’re working harder and harder to manufacture that consent, even as extremely influential people begin questioning whether we’re being deliberately deceived about everything.

They used to look like someone using a bucket to bail out water from a leaky boat. Now they look like someone treading water, barely managing to get their mouth and nose high enough to take gasps of air.

They’re working harder and harder because they need to.

The fact that the propagandists have to work so hard to keep our society this insane means the natural gravitational pull is toward sanity. They have to educate us into crazier and crazier ways of thinking from the moment we go to school until we die, because otherwise we’ll collectively awaken and shake off their shackles.

It takes a lot of educating to keep us this stupid.

You think you’re struggling? You should see the people trying to manufacture consent for a status quo that is both plainly insane and self-evidently unsustainable. They’re the ones doing all the heavy lifting in this struggle. They’re the ones fighting gravity.

Hope is not a popular position to take in a world that is being abused, exploited and being driven mad by manipulative sociopaths. Which is understandable.

But I just can’t help it. I look at how hard they are struggling to keep the light from bursting in and driving out the darkness, and I can’t help but think, “Those poor bastards can’t keep that up much longer.”

caityjohnstone.medium.com

A recent school shooting in the United States indicates that the judicial system and the U.S. media are fully prepared to forgive and apologize for acts of violence – if they are carried out by minority groups.

On October 6, Timothy Simpkins, 18, shot four people inside of Timberview High School in Arlington, Texas following a reported altercation with another student. The very next day Simpkins, at the very same time one of his victims was in a coma following surgery, was out of jail after his family posted a $75,000 bond. That was just the first phase of the young Black man’s smooth journey from being a school shooter to a freed man in less than 24 hours later.

After a lengthy manhunt across northern Texas, Simpkins was charged in court not with ‘attempted murder,’ as might be expected in such a case, but rather with three counts of ‘aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.’

The suspect has been taken into custody without incident and charged with multiple counts of Aggravated Assault with a gun. Most students have been safely evacuated from Timberview High School. Thank you for everyone’s help. pic.twitter.com/h9Zs8Zxpze

— Arlington Police, TX (@ArlingtonPD) October 6, 2021

Aside from the leniency shown by the courts (Simpkins faces up to 20 years in prison, however, given the clemency that the U.S. justice system has been showing towards the perpetrators of such acts of violence, it is likely Simpkins will serve a mere fraction of that time, if any), the mainstream media presented a sympathetic portrait of the shooter, saying Simpkins was the victim of “bullying” at school.

“Timothy Simpkins went to live with his grandmother in an Arlington neighborhood where he excelled in school, aspired to be an engineer and enjoyed driving his Dodge Charger around town,” the Dallas Morning News reported, quoting relatives and friends. “He fought back on Wednesday by pulling a handgun from his backpack and firing at his alleged attacker in an Arlington high school classroom. In addition to striking the 15-year-old who had just pummeled him, the bullets hit another student and a teacher who intervened to break up the fight, police said.”

So here we have the media endorsing the story of an 18-year old being “pummeled” by a 15-year old “attacker,” one Zacchaeus Selby, who was struck four times during the gunfire, and who was hospitalized in an induced coma.

When asked why he was being bullied at school, the family said because “he had nice things.” Like, for example, the .45 caliber handgun that Simpkins pulled from his schoolbag and shot Selby with? Those sorts of “nice things?” When police went to Simpkin’s home with a search warrant, they found more firearms. The media, however, never clarified what type of weapons and how many.

The question that must be asked after reading the media’s apologetic explanation for the shooter’s violent behavior is: ‘would the liberal mainstream media show the same sort of apologetic tone for a white student who had just shot four people in a school, leaving one in a coma’?

In these post-George Floyd, Black Lives Matter times, the answer to that question leans heavily towards ‘not a chance in hell.’ In fact, the story of Timothy Simpkins has already vanished from all mainstream media sites. Had this been the story of a white teenager firing a gun in school, allegedly to protect himself from a much younger “attacker,” the liberal media would never have given the shooter the benefit of the doubt. Instead, they’d have been running with the ‘white supremacist, let’s rewrite the Second Amendment’ narrative.

A very disturbing trend has emerged in the United States ever since Black Lives Matter and other activist organizations, flush with over one billion dollars in donations from Corporate America, commenced on a cross-country smash and burn campaign following the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer on May 25, 2020.

The activists, motivated to rage by the media script that asserts ‘all white people are racists (as opposed to the much more likely ‘police are overworked’ narrative), enjoyed more than just cart blanche support from the usual suspects. They enjoyed – and continue to enjoy – a judicial system that has been largely ‘radicalized’ by financiers like George Soros, who has been pay-rolling the elections of radical progressive attorney generals since at least 2016.

“Democratic mega-donor George Soros has directed his wealth into an under-the-radar 2016 campaign to advance one of the progressive movement’s core goals — reshaping the American justice system,” Politico reported back in 2016 when Black Lives Matter was just a flash in the pan. “The billionaire financier has channeled more than $3 million into seven local district-attorney campaigns in six states over the past year — a sum that exceeds the total spent on the 2016 presidential campaign by all but a handful of rival super-donors.”

The result of that usurpation of the courts by radical leftists became painfully obvious last summer as progressive judges, in cahoots with Hollywood, which helped pay the bail of arrested BLM and Antifa activists, saw to it that criminals were released back onto the streets. This is what is known as “criminal reform” by the progressives and their lapdog media.

One such beneficiary of Soros cash is Kimberly Gardner, the prosecutor for the city of St. Louis, Missouri. The news program 60 Minutes summed up her work since entering office in 2017: “She went right to work. She stopped locking up non-violent offenders, dropped low level drug cases and ended cash bail – a system that hit Black citizens hardest. But less than a year into the job, her hopes of building trust in police suffered a setback…”

So how are those progressive reforms working out for the city of St. Louis? Basically the same as they are in liberal-run cities across the nation – horrendously.

In 2020, St. Louis recorded 262 murders, its worst rate in the past 50 years. Nationwide, 21,570 Americans lost their lives last year by homicide, the largest single-year increase in murders since the FBI began tracking crime statistics six decades ago.

The tragic reality is that with young Black men largely incentivized to carry out acts of violence by a defunct court system that is more interested in the rights of criminals than the victims, the United States can expect its current crime wave to continue unabated. And with the U.S. economy appearing to be headed for the abyss, this is news that will make any future economic downturn all the more unsightly and extremely dangerous. America must get its streets and courts back in order before it’s too late.

“Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.” So declares the opening sentence of a Wall Street Journal piece that is creating quite the buzz.

Here are some of the eye-popping statistics: Women now account for 59.5% of college students in the United States. They also earn 58.5% of master’s degrees and 52.9% of Ph.D.s. Women have been earning the majority of doctorates for 13 straight years. In the 2020-21 academic year, a million more women than men applied to college.

You can be forgiven if you find these numbers startling. The popular press focuses on the challenges women face, not on their achievements. We are constantly warned about silencing girls’ voices, discrimination against female athletes, glass ceilings, pay gaps, “mansplaining” and the paucity of women in the top ranks of corporate America. There are innumerable programs, scholarships and inducements to increase the share of girls and women who study STEM subjects (the only fields where men continue to earn more Ph.D.s than women). And the assumption persists that it’s a man’s world.

But that’s debatable. While it’s true that men still outnumber women among law firm partners, CEOs and college presidents, that may well be an artifact of age. The rising cohort is lopsidedly female, and the ranks of women managers and partners have been expanding accordingly. Top leadership will likely follow eventually (although it should be noted that women more frequently than men forgo the corner office in order to balance family and career — a subject I discuss in my 2018 book “Sex Matters.”)

Seventy percent of high school valedictorians are girls. They make up such a disproportionate share of qualified college applicants that admissions committees have been practicing sub rosa affirmative action for males for many years. “Is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely,” Jennifer Delahunty, a college-enrollment consultant who previously led the admissions offices at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, told The Wall Street Journal. “The question is, is that right or wrong?”

There is no simple answer to that question. Colleges are admitting men with lower grades and scores, but it’s not because they’re attempting to prop up a flagging patriarchy. No, the reality is that women are less likely to enroll in a college with a 60/40 ratio of women to men than one that’s more evenly balanced.

Some might note this female preeminence and shout hurrah for feminism. But I’d keep the champagne corked, because, let’s face it, women like to marry men who are their equals or superiors in education and income, and if this trend of women vastly outperforming men in education continues, a fair proportion of women are not going to be able to find compatible men.

I can hear the scoffing already. How Victorian! As if women need to worry about going to college to get their “MRS” degree!

That, obviously, is not the point. Marriage remains a life goal of most people. In a 2013 Gallup survey of American adults, only 5% of the respondents said they had never been married and didn’t want to marry someday. (For young adults aged 18 to 34, that figure was slightly higher: 9%.)

Americans are right to want marriage, which is associated with greater happiness, health and wealth for adults and with pretty much every advantage you can think of for children. Just one example: 75% of students who graduate from highly selective colleges were raised by two married parents.

This brings us to a bit of social science research that deserves a lot more attention. It’s not news that marriage has been in decline for decades. In 1960, about 5% of births were to unmarried women. Today, it’s 40%. It is well established that children raised in single-parent families are far more likely to live in poverty, perform poorly in school and become vulnerable to life-derailing mistakes like getting into trouble with the law or dropping out of high school.

But here’s the part that deserves more study: It seems that growing up in a single-parent home is not as damaging to girls as it is to boys. Comparing Florida brothers and sisters who grew up in single-parent families, an MIT study found that “growing up in a single-parent home appears to significantly decrease the probability of college attendance for boys, yet has no similar effect for girls.” Boys raised without fathers or father figures tend to be less ambitious and less hopeful than girls raised without fathers or father figures, and tend to get into more trouble at school.

There is much other research finding similar effects. Richard Reeves, co-director of the Brookings Center on Children and Families, has said that when it comes to thriving in less-than-ideal family settings, “girls may be more like dandelions, while boys may be more like orchids.”

The gender gap that has emerged in educational attainment may be an effect of splintered families. Boys who grow up without the steadying influence of two parents struggle more than girls. So, hats off to the gals who are killing it in schools, but for both sexes to be their best and happiest, we need to revive the norm of marriage.

creators.com

What Covid has made clear is that the future doesn’t need to look like the past.

By Stephen BLACKWOOD

When will things return to normal? all of us have asked, plaintively, more than once, as we’ve seen the repeated delays, new variants, and so on perpetuate the cloud of Covid yet another season. A return to normal for the paradigmatic activities of human life—for weddings and funerals, for breaking bread with our friends, for work and worship and business; for these a return to normal can’t come soon enough.

But then there are other domains—activities, industries, systems—where Covid has been not so much an inhibiting muzzle on normally flourishing activities as a spotlight revealing sickness, dysfunction, and decay.

In these domains, the rot was generally perceptible pre-Covid but the pandemic brought it unignorably into view. Pandemic preparedness, for example, and the inexcusable failure of the CDC spring to mind. Or the vulnerabilities of supply chains—the insanity that medications keeping millions of Americans alive were dependent on foreign manufacture, for example. Or the determined narrative control by the media, increasingly brazen over the last years, but intensified further still with masks, vaccines, and lockdowns; the policing of what you are allowed to say and what you can’t; and the deeply disturbing politicization of public health.

But perhaps above all Covid has revealed profound dysfunction in education: local officials, teachers’ unions, the whole system at large, have been a disaster. Many children lost more than a year of school and associated core function development; worse still, that cost was borne especially heavily—and will be in the future, too, as the deficit compounds over time—by the most vulnerable, by those with the least help or ability to adapt.

But that systemic failure in education was less a result of the pandemic than it was the manifestation of longstanding disease. Average outcomes have been weak to mediocre by nearly any measure for decades. And those average outcomes, mediocre though they are, hide much worse, more broken, and sadder realities still. There are vast numbers at the bottom: millions of children with life-alteringly low levels of literacy, numeracy, and civic and cultural education.

The system has been failing for decades. But then, during the pandemic, we didn’t have even that! Schools were closed, or open only intermittently, for more than a year.

But how did we get to a point where something of such paramount importance as the education of the young was left in the hands of those who cared—or at least were able to do—so little about it?

In higher education, too, the handling of Covid has been disastrous, as students were essentially defrauded by institutions that pretended their remote offerings were of adequate or even equivalent value to the in-person education they replaced. The hubris of this pretense was breathtaking.

But they overplayed their hand.

There are times when you might continue to put up with a dysfunctional relationship or system just because you’ve gotten used to it, and were unaware there were alternatives: thinking, “this is just how relationships are, people are abusive and mean,” or that “this is just how food is, stale and overpriced,” or “this is what a home is, ugly and dark.” But then along comes a bracing encounter—perhaps things get suddenly worse, becoming consciously intolerable; or perhaps you have an experience of real love or beauty or belonging—that jolts you into recognizing that things were not as they were meant to be, that there must be another way; that you were made for something more.

For many, the pandemic was such an event. At the primary and secondary level, the failing educational system to which we had been accustomed—even that, suddenly was gone, with parents completely powerless to bring it back.

But if you starve people long enough, they’ll start growing food again. The suppression of even a failing and exploitative system led to the recognition for many parents that they could do it themselves. Why send my kids into the hands of an essentially abusive and wildly ineffective system at all?

Faced with the frustrations and inconsistencies of school shutdowns, I know several parents who simply got together with a few other families, pooled their money to hire a teacher and started their own one-room school houses in their living rooms.

When you can hire a Ph.D. in physics as a math tutor, a classicist for Latin, both for modest expense over the internet, then mix in some history and music, a lot more literature and free play, and thereby offer your children an education superior to any school in the country—why not just do that?

Those, I know, were options not everyone had. But my point is that although the situation had been bad for decades, it was only the shutdowns that finally necessitated a search for alternatives and broke the psychological hold of the status quo.

Many of these trends, of course, were well underway in K-12 before the pandemic hit: home schools, classical schools, charter schools, even unschooling—but the systemic failure during Covid, combined with the bandwidth revolution, have fundamentally changed the game.

So too in higher education. Why pay $50k for an online education that could be had for a small fraction of that? Why submit to the low-grade credentialing and soul-diminishing indoctrination in the first place?

What the past year has revealed, in other words, is that we’re under no obligation to return to the status quo. We will, of course, at last resume the too-long suppressed activities of weddings and funerals and of breaking bread together, and so on; many of us have gone far too long without those.

But there is no reason to return to an essentially abusive and exploitative and madly ineffective educational system, wasting our money and demeaning the souls of our children and youth and fundamentally betraying our country and culture.

No. What Covid has made clear is that the future doesn’t need to look like the past.

In fact, not even the past looks like the past. Our bloated, ossified, high-cost, unresponsive and ineffective system is in fact highly anomalous by historical standards.

Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Dante, Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, William Shakespeare, Johann Sebastian Bach, Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Ben Franklin, Jane Austen, Abraham Lincoln, Ada Lovelace, Steve Jobs, and Maya Angelou: These people had diverse material circumstances, educational backgrounds, and lived in very different times. But do you know what none of them had? A four-year college degree.

Is it not possible that the experiences and institutions that shaped them—from homeschooling to apprenticeships to tutors to vocational schools to religious organizations to boarding schools to self-instruction to a year or two of college—might serve as models for the cultivation of talent again today?

Our current one-size-fits-all approach to higher education—rigid, four-year degree programs steeped in activist ideology, all at exorbitant cost—has been failing badly and for too long.

Tuition has increased 500 percent in the last 30 years, nearly eight times faster than wages. Meanwhile, the effort to increase access through federally-backed student loans has only incentivized further increases in cost and corresponding debt—perversely saddling those least able to carry it with the heaviest burdens and the worst outcomes.

Nor have we lacked for clear-headed assessment of the problems. William F. Buckley sounded the alarm in 1952 with God and Man at Yale. Christopher Dawson’s The Crisis of Education in the West, which could have been written yesterday, followed in 1965; Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind in 1985; while Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, a history of the academy’s ideological takeover, and the long march through the institutions it made possible, appeared more than 20 years ago.

But while the problems of higher ed have been apparent—and seemed intractable—for nearly a century, three major historic developments have lined up to create the conditions now for widespread reimagination and reform

First, there is the quickly growing awareness of the corruption and cost, the ineffectiveness, and debilitating indoctrination of our institutions of higher education; of their upstream influence over every other aspect of our culture from the media to the boardroom; and of the failure of efforts to reform from within. We have reached a tipping point.

Second, there is a bandwidth revolution: the technological breakthroughs in the transfer of information. The internet and accompanying technologies enable us to do things we never imagined possible, to connect people anywhere, and at very low cost. It is bigger than Gutenberg.

Third, there is the crisis of meaning: We live at an historic inflection point in which millions of people are seeking answers to the loneliness and fragmentation, the degradation and alienation of our world. One needn’t look further than my friend Jordan Peterson to see how great that yearning is—for deeper forms of self-understanding, and more spiritually substantial forms of life. There is a tidal wave of demand.

Each of these is a major historic development of its own; but together they create unprecedented conditions for revolutionary innovation and reform.

Young people—and the not so young—are clamoring for alternatives. How indeed could it be otherwise? Our deepening civic alienation and cultural degradation have people of all ages starved for understanding, for depth and purpose worthy of their own sacred lives.

The pandemic has revealed deep dysfunction, but the real story isn’t Covid-19, but the state of fatal disrepair it has revealed. For at stake in education is not a mere component of our cultural infrastructure, but its most vital activity, its lifeblood: at once the means of individual realization and of the handing on of memory, of knowledge and wisdom from old to young.

Inaction in the face of educational failure is thus the sign of ultimate surrender: the end of the road.

And yet, from slumbering fatalism, and decades of passivity in the face of deepening crisis, we now have a chance to emerge. But that opportunity is also an existential necessity. The realization of each individual, those living now and those yet to come, and the life of our culture, our civilization itself, all depend upon it.

theamericanconservative.com

When 19^th century elite universities were transformed into 20^th century’s mass university to eventually become 21^st century’s neoliberal universities, manic Managerialism and Academentia started to hold sway. Yet, universities have also been converted by today’s managerial apparatchiks from places where one wanted to go into places which have to be endured in order to get a job.

The keen observer may be familiar with the term Managerialism. Yet a more recent concept is that of Academentia. The term “Academentia” combines “academia” (post-secondary education) with “dementia” (progressive impairments to memory, thinking and behaviour which negatively impacts on a person’s ability to function). In short, Academentia describes a state of organisational insanity in which academics can no longer function as scholars.

Academentia is the outcome of a severe loss of touch with the scholarly reality of universities due to an environment shaped by the ideology of Managerialism and Neoliberalism. Such an often rather toxic environment is run by a university’s very own managerial apparatchiks. This is a hierarchically structured management body with several layers ranging from line managers to CEOs. The latter are still called Vice-Chancellors and university presidents.

Sydney University’s new boss, Mark Scott, for example, is getting $1.15m. As one would expect, in the USA this has reached even more obscene levels. The boss of University of Southern California rakes in a cool $7 million a year; the boss of Chicago University: $6 million; Jefferson University: $5.3 million; Columbia University: $4.5 million; Harvard University: 3.5 million and University of Pennsylvania: $3 million. The list goes on.

Overseen by top-dollar-receiving University bosses, below them a huge apparatus opens up that creates Academentia. This is an entire new condition that is formed by excessive and manic Managerialism. It destroys next to all scholarly creativity and intellectual endeavours.

Academentia downgrades what once defined the very existence of a university – the academic faculty – into some kind of over-stressed semi-academic factory workers. Simultaneously, real academics have been side-lined by managerial apparatchiks. Under Academentia, those academics dedicated to scholarship have lost next to all input in university policy-making.

Just as dementia describes, the rule of managerial apparatchiks over academics at neoliberal universities have negatively impacted on academics’ ability to function as academics. For managerial apparatchiks, academics are an (unfortunate) necessity.

They are a cost factor still needed to operate a university until online teaching can be made the norm and research can be outsourced. For Managerialism’s apparatchiks, the rather innocent words “cost factor” automatically implies: a burden, something negative and a cost to be reduced.

To the innocent observer, it may indeed appear as if there is a loss of the human dimension within the all-encompassing bureaucracies. Yet reality is rather different. Firstly, there is no loss of the human dimension under Managerialism. Managerialism does not have a human dimension – it has a managerial dimension. Human beings are reduced to human resources, tools, implements and chattels. Secondly, university Managerialism no longer operates bureaucracies.

Bureaucracies existed in organisations that administer a public entity for the benefit of its people and the public good. Under Managerialism, things are different. A so-called as-if ideology reigns.

This means that the management of neoliberal universities has taken on significant features from companies and corporations such as, for example, strict hierarchies, a quasi-dictatorial managerial authority (no democracy), the self-invented right of management to manage, performance management, KPIs, etc. This, of course, means that managerial apparatchiks invent structures and plans while individuals are responsible to perform.

Most of these initiatives come from the private sector. They come like a fast-advancing invasion force destroying everything in its way. Along the way, they create Academentia in virtually all parts of a university. Much of Managerialism’s conversion of academics into Academentia operates as a so-called “as-if” operation.

This occurs when managerial apparatchiks pretend that universities are like real companies and corporations. In other words, today’s neoliberal universities no longer have bureaucracies. Instead, they are run by full-scale management systems as overseen by managerial apparatchiks.

In today’s neoliberalism, the state’s role is to create an institutional framework appropriate to reduce government spending which is deliberately designed to turn academics and workers into income-generating productivity units. Texas A&M University, for example, calculates a profit and loss statement for each faculty member, weighing annual salaries against numbers of students taught and research grants obtained. In HRM, this is known as a balanced scorecard.

Its goal is to create Academentia – an automaton fulfilling the automaton’s pre-designed role through behaviour modification (read: behaviour manipulation). The managerialist’s goals are to be achieved through a process known as MBO: management by objectives.

These Academentia-creating goals of managerialists are used to manipulate the behaviour of those HR-managers call “underlings” or “subordinates”. Such MBO goals are minutely laid out on an Excel spreadsheet that is invented, overseen, assessed and controlled by managerial apparatchiks. Its function is to control human behaviour.

In order to create Academentia, contemporary Managerialism applies what Jerry Mander calls the Rules of Managerial Behaviour. One of these rules demands that managerial apparatchiks reduce everything to that which can be measured. Under Academentia, the individual becomes a purely measurable unit.

Only what is measurable is recognised – publication output, student numbers, student surveys, grant applications, industry funding and of course, the all-important impact fetishism enshrined in the infamous h-index. In Academentia, researchers are reduced by managerial apparatchiks to a function in a mathematical equation:

This rather inhuman but managerially-pushed system punishes employees and frustrates students. Hence, one suffers (academics) while the other one endures (students). Unknown to the simple- minded managerial apparatchik employed as a “Willingman” or as a willing executor of neoliberalism, university Managerialism follows what Greek historian Thoukydides (472-400BC) described as, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

This is the “us-vs.-them” version of top-down Managerialism. Much of this is based on mindless Managerialism that measures academic impact by means of ticking boxes on Excel spreadsheets. Hence, academics now report to managers and the managers are instructed by the People of Worth (PoW). PoWs consist of university’s overseers’ class, the upper echelons of Managerialism, the top managerial apparatchiks and their CEO.

Worse than that is, that much of this has created a mind-numbing reporting culture furnished by endless report writing, box ticking and form filling. These are sent to those who neither understand research and teaching nor have any interest in research and teaching. Their interests are checking forms, overseeing and assessment. They file reports for those with a bigger desk – at least until they themselves get a bigger desk.

Of course, much of this operates with the Peter Principle which explains why managers rise up to the level of incompetence. In Managerialism this makes perfect sense – incompetency rises to the top. Yet, and to the annoyance of managerial apparatchiks, universities still need researchers and lecturers. University management will need people who can do the teaching, can research and can publish.

In short, those with competencies cannot be promoted into the higher ranks of managerial apparatchiks. They are needed to do the work. Beyond that, university apparatchiks claim to still need more managers (mostly middle-management) who can manage, oversee, access, monitor and, most importantly, control those who can do research and teaching. This is for the simple reason that they themselves cannot do either one of the two.

As Corporal Klinger once said on MASH 4077, those who can’t, manage those who can. A particular evil heretic might have said, the higher a monkey climbs, the more you can see his butt. Others might prefer to follow Matsch’s Maxim: a fool in a high station is like a man at the top of a mountain – everything appears small to him and he appears small to everybody.

Largely or fully freed from research, teaching and form-filling, these high-up university apparatchiks or PoWs initiate university mission statements, invent business plans, research strategies, teaching policies and work – always very hard in endless business meetings – on university branding.

University branding is a badge it gives a university institutional personality. On institutional personality, some people might say, I know people on crack-cocaine who make more sense than this. Yet for Managerialism this makes perfect sense. As academics are deprived of what philosophers call personal identity or personhood, the Orwellian ideology of institutional personality is installed to camouflage the inhumanity of Managerialism.

Of course, the inventors of mission statements and institutional personalities represent a new generation of PoWs in top management now earning stratospheric salaries, even in the face of widespread student poverty.

Not to show their real character, managerial apparatchiks are quick to install “well-being programmes” for their subordinates and underlings, and “safe spaces” for students while sitting in air-conditioned office towers (top floor, of course), enjoy a private car park, drive corporate cars (i.e. university owned) and fly business class.

Beyond that, managerial apparatchiks are also busy with one of Managerialism’s all-time favourite instrument: restructuring – a very common and handy thing to do for university apparatchiks. Une idée fixe is the following: never let any institutional sector settle while creating the impression of transformation by endless (and often fruitless) restructuring.

Restructuring is like being on a treadmill that more often than not goes nowhere – and, is a mechanism enabling managerial-led centralisation of power. Going nowhere is precisely the point. Going somewhere is not the point of restructuring.

One of key ideas behind eternal restructuring is that it provides a great and very useful reason for management to fire people. Today, firing people is framed as letting you go, setting you free and free to seek other opportunities (HR-talk). One of the most obscene version is delivered by Amazon: to graduate. Furthermore, PoW aspirants, in order to secure worthy positions, thus ensure that bureaucracies expand constantly and that work expands to fill the time available.

This remains one of the core principles of Managerialism. Managerialism beefs up the importance of managerial apparatchiks and their Academentia-creating apparatus – collateral damage included.

This, of course, also means that officials make work for each other. They also make work for everyone else and hijack time that was previously available for productive activities. This is another feature of Academentia. Real academics are hampered in what they used to do before Managerialism arrived. Now they fill in forms for managerialists ranked above them. This is the ailment of Academentia where academics can no longer function as scholars.

Now they work for educational Fordism suffering on an education production line with plenty of managerial apparatchiks measuring and assessing their output. This also means that managers and administrators outnumber academics at many institutions sometime by a factor of 2-to-1. Perhaps Forbes magazine was asking the right question in 2020, who is running our universities? Forbes also found the answer, Administators!

For these Willingmen and managerial apparatchiks, work means going to meetings and generating more work for academics that need to be done at night and weekends after the meetings are over. Some have and continued to rebel saying, I refuse to waste a morning justifying my employment by mindless form-filling.

Rest assured the punishment will be forthcoming: no promotion or even demotion, put on a PIP (a performance improvement plan which is the first step to dismissal) and in severe cases, immediate dismissal.

In milder cases, it means organisational isolation, being made an outcast, seen as being recalcitrant, stamped as a trouble-maker, as not joining the great cause, etc. Worse, managerial apparatchiks and administrators set unrealistic targets but they are never themselves responsible for ensuring throughput. This is made to fall onto academics. And when they fail, Managerialism is there to punish them accordingly.

Self-evidently, the first law of academic mismanagement applies here too, namely, it punishes the academic sector for problems not of their own making. This fits to the second law of Managerialism, always blame others when things go wrong and always take credit when things turn out great even when you have done nothing to achieve such positive outcomes.

Gone are the days when departmental deans supported academics. Today, they are part of the body managerial apparatchiks. They are the Willingmen – the willing executors of Managerialism. Gone are the days when deans represented academics and not just authority, as they do now.

When two world- class economics professors got dismissed from an English university, one said to me on the way out, stay away from the Dean! After all those years, I still remember that. Of course, they found employment elsewhere. Both of them continued to be world-class economics professors until one retired while the other one still appears in the international press.

Only a few days ago, one appeared on www.bloomberg.com. While they got the chop, the remaining managerial apparatchiks who did engineer the dismissal are still there. Perhaps this little episode represents Imhoff’s law: the organisation of any bureaucracy is very much like a septic tank. The big chunks rise to the top.

In the end, the virus of Managerialism is like influenza – it is extremely difficult to treat with any sort of vaccine, largely because vaccines are effective only against specific and individual mutations. Yet, university apparatchiks and their ideology of Managerialism aren’t some sort of individual mutation. It operates very much in the same way in virtually all universities. Managerialism has a few common features found in next to all of today’s universities. Overall, Managerialism’s success has two basic ingredients.

The first ingredient is a state or country hooked on the ideology of neoliberalism. This creates the ideal condition for Managerialism to grow like a cancer. In many cases, the apostles of neoliberalism have deliberately engineered the right environment for Managerialism to take over universities.

Secondly, and perhaps even worse is the fact that many academics think along the path in which they are trained. They tend to assume that managerial apparatchiks can be convinced to support real scholarship by using rationality and logical arguments. In many cases, they know that they have the intellectually superior arguments. In science this makes perfect sense.

Unfortunately and rather sadly for those professors of science, this does not make sense in the realm of Managerialism. Managerial apparatchiks know that they are intellectually inferior to scientists. Crucially, Managerialism is something that operates with its own internal logic, rationality and above all, with its own ideology. The fight against Managerialism and against managerial apparatchiks cannot be won with ration arguments. In short, don’t bring a knife to a gun fight!

The fight against university Managerialism can only be won with the only thing the managerial apparatchiks of Managerialism understand: well-organised and overwhelming power. As a consequence, academics can only face up to Managerialism and managerial apparatchiks through power.

The only institution that gives academics organisational power to challenge Managerialism is their trade union. It is as simple as that. This is not rocket science. Yet, rocket scientists need to use the power of trade unions to fight Managerialism and managerial apparatchiks.

counterpunch.org