Trump 2.0: Prepare for the further dumbing down of America

No, it’s not Communism! It’s the privatization of education. “School choice” takes away from government spending for public schools!

Source

Trump Chooses Longtime Ally Linda McMahon to Run Education Dept.

President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday tapped Linda McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive who ran the Small Business Administration for much of his first term, to lead the Education Department, an agency he has routinely singled out for elimination in his upcoming term.

In part because of her recent policy role and her experience as the small business administrator, Ms. McMahon had been discussed as a possible pick to lead the Commerce Department until the role was officially offered to Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street executive and a chairman of the Trump transition team, earlier in the day.

Ms. McMahon will be in charge of overseeing what is widely expected to be a thorough and determined dismantling of the department’s core functions, as Mr. Trump and many of those in his orbit have questioned the agency’s purpose and disparaged its work as overregulating schools on political and ideological terms.

Other than a brief appointment in 2009 to the Connecticut State Board of Education, where she served for just over a year, Ms. McMahon has no experience in overseeing education policy. She would assume the role at a time when school districts across the country are facing budget shortfalls, many students are not making up ground lost during the pandemic in reading and math, and many colleges and universities are shrinking and closing amid a larger loss of faith in the value of higher education.

While Mr. Trump has repeatedly called for an outright dissolution of the agency, any effort to shutter it would require congressional action and support from some Republican lawmakers whose districts depend on federal aid for public education.

But the America First Policy Institute has set out a more immediate list of changes it says could be achieved through vastly changing the department’s priorities. Those include stopping schools from “promoting inaccurate and unpatriotic concepts” about American history surrounding institutionalized racism, and expanding “school choice” programs that direct more public funds to parents to spend on home-schooling, online classes or at private and religious schools.

Read More »

Purge at the Pentagon! 

Purge at the Pentagon!

Purge at the Pentagon! Reuters reports that the incoming Trump administration is drawing up a list of generals to be fired. These are generals associated with former Chairman of the JCS Mark Milley and anyone else branded with a scarlet “W” for woke. The current Chairman, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, may also be fired, as some within the Trump camp suspect he may have been a DEI hire.

As Army officer Paul Yingling famously wrote (“A Failure in Generalship”), a private is severely punished for losing a rifle but generals get promoted for losing wars. I doubt this is going to change. Instead, under Trump it appears the firing of generals is another leg of his vengeance tour, a purge of those who are perceived as disloyal.

H/T: Der Friedensstifter

Don’t Blame Karl Marx for ‘Cultural Marxism’

Don’t Blame Karl Marx for ‘Cultural Marxism’

You might think that a history of cultural Marxism would start with Marx, but the poorly coiffed Prussian has almost nothing to do with this tale of insidious infiltration. Instead, the theory took off in the late 1990s due to speeches, essays, and books by William Lind, then with the Free Congress Foundation, and Patrick Buchanan, the firebrand conservative columnist, TV talking head, and sometime presidential candidate. (The idea, though not the name, was hatched earlier, in a 1992 monograph called “The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and Political Correctness.” It was written by a disciple of the noted conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche.)

Related:

The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism

Free Congress Foundation:

Read More »

Reflections on war propaganda

I told myself that I wasn’t going to listen to these “think tanks” for a while. I guess I wasn’t ready, as the following angered me. This is just normal thinking inside “The Blob,” though.

Full video

Wikipedia:

Demonizing the enemy, demonization of the enemy or dehumanization of the enemy is a propaganda technique which promotes an idea about the enemy being a threatening, evil aggressor with only destructive objectives.

Read More »

Personal: Dad, USN

Originally titled, “Does anyone recognize this flag?”

I was going through my father’s photos (see after the cut), last night, from when he was in the US Navy during the Vietnam War. I had assumed that he was an E-5, but he may have only been an E-3. We kids were told not to mention his service because of his PTSD, so I never asked him. I thought that I had his service records (I know where to request them, if I have to) because I found out which ship he was on many years ago. Unfortunately, it slips my mind now. I have a T-shirt in storage, with their patch on it. I’ll have to look for it, soon.

Read More »

An open and free Indo-Pacific, or stability at home?

Source

The Voice of America, in an article about why the Quad met in Washington this week, claims that the aims of the Quad are to create an open and free Indo-Pacific. Biden, in a prepared remark, suggested his Administration believes “Xi Jinping is looking to focus on domestic economic challenges and minimise the turbulence in China’s diplomatic relationships, and he’s also looking to buy himself some diplomatic space”.

An open and free Indo-Pacific, or stability at home?