Category: Big Thoughts

“I’m sorry, I believe in good grooming.” – The Simpsons

I was outbid trying to buy a shopping center.  I guess the old saying is right:  you just can’t win a mall.

The biggest part of a dictator’s ability to control a people is the control of their thoughts.  Sure, a large supply of bullets is nice, but if you use that method, sooner or later you run out of people to control.  How, then, is that sort of mental crowd control done in a nation that once staged a rebellion over a tax on whiskey?  The answer is simple –a little bit at a time.

The first step in that is to program the people.  The easiest way to do that is to control their education and their entertainment.  In the modern world, it is that combination of education and entertainment that form our modern-day mythos – the very definition of who we are and what we stand for.

Education was the easiest part, and, by necessity, the first.  The problem (from the standpoint of those that would set the world up for dictators) is that educators aren’t swapped out yearly.  No, educators often are in a classroom for decades, watching hundreds of their children move from grade to grade.  I think my kindergarten teacher was old enough to have known Moses personally, though in her defense I was probably more of a handful than those James and Younger brothers she told stories about.

True fact:  They charge a $6 entry fee to see Karl’s grave.

That’s why the real Leftism (as far as I can tell) didn’t start showing up in the classroom until, perhaps, the 1960s.  That had given them time to infiltrate the colleges and begin to sway the way that teachers were taught.  I knew something was up when I told one teacher I was struggling with a class.

“Who, the Bourgeoisie?” she asked.

An aside – teachers often slant Left/Globalist anyway – they work for a government, after all.  The teacher unions are strongly Leftist in political leanings.  Educating a group of teachers and then placing them in the schools only changes the schools slowly.  But after a while, a critical mass is achieved, and government schools become indoctrination centers for Leftist thought.

To be clear – government schools have always been indoctrination centers.  The previous versions prior to the 1960s had (in my opinion) more innocuous indoctrination, putting memes like these in the heads of the students:

• The United States is a force for good,
• Christopher Columbus was alright,
• The Inalienable rights are: life, liberty, and the pursuit of PEZ™,
• Hard work is important,
• If you pee on the playground you have to go see the principal,
• Religious values are one of the things that make the United States strong, and
• There is a morality beyond mere legality that keeps society cohesive.

I could keep going on this list.  But the values that the kids were programmed with led to a prosperous society that, generally, was also a society where you trusted your neighbor and, even though he might have voted for the other guy, was still on the same team.  Was it perfect?  No, of course not, and a lack of skepticism led to all manner of government shenanigans being ignored – MK Ultra, I’m looking at . . . what was I saying?

Is it just me, or is that glowing?

The change in schools was the vanguard of that Leftist.  Ideas were infiltrated that began to chip away at the idea of values.  Equity in education became a buzzword even in the 1970s, decades before managing the equality of outcomes became the goal.  Heck, you could even teach math and give grades back then.

Of course, the Leftist ownership of education wasn’t the only thrust at that time.  Movies and television began to change as well.  I didn’t see first-run episodes of Leave it to Beaver nor All in the Family, but I could see the shows couldn’t have been more different as I watched them on reruns.

Leave it to Beaver was a show about kids going through typical kid problems, and also dealing with that oily Eddie Haskell.  That also led to the Funniest untrue rumor ever:  Eddie Haskell was played by a young Alice Cooper.  It would have been far more interesting if Eddie had a guillotine.

I did hear that Rob Halford did move to a Tibetan monastery.  I guess that makes him a Buddhist Priest.

All in the Family, though, was a show that could have been called All in on the Narrative.  All in the Family was simply a tool to move the narrative to the Left, plus it showcased that family-dividing character – the ever-bumbling incompetent father.  Later shows in the 1970s moved the father to a position of irrelevance: single-parent households became a staple of sitcoms.

Sitcoms were used because nothing is better at attacking power than comedy, since it allows the comedian to poke fun at the weakest parts of their enemy.  I wonder why comedy is out of style . . . hmmm.  Oh, wait.  Amy Schumer.

I could go on about movies, but they were playing their role in pulling the narrative along.  There’s a reason that The Exorcist, The Omen, Halloween, and Friday the 13^th all had monsters that were young – essentially the monsters were all children (or, started out as kids in Halloween or Friday the 13^th). . . Gen X age.  No wonder my kindergarten teacher called me a little monster!

The propaganda in both television and film was the same:  show the most sympathetic case of (insert movement – divorce, abortion, gay rights, et cetera) and then milk it for everything that it was worth.  It didn’t matter that the case represented the very edge of reality, that small 0.01% of cases – no, publicize it and create an emotional backstory.

Why?  To program people.  When I look back at many (not all!) movies from that time frame there are places I can see the Narrative Programming being implanted.  Heck, when I was a kid I wondered why people on the Right couldn’t be funny.  They can be – P.J. O’Rourke taught that to the world.

I saw one bee I thought was drunk.  Turned out he was just buzzed.

I don’t think it was a coincidence that church attendance started to go down in the 1970s.  I don’t have a lot of data on why – perhaps single-parent households are less likely to go?  Regardless, there’s plenty of data that shows when.  The 1970s.

The Left focuses on identity and has since before the 1970s.  The big reason for this focus is that class never really existed here in the United States in any sort of formal fashion.  We never had Lords and Ladies and Kings, just rich people and poor people.  And most poor people think there’s at least a hope that they’ll become rich people, which is why the lottery is still a tax on people who can’t do math.

So, that left only identity.  The playbook on the Left was to let every identity group know that they were a victim.  Women’s Lib.  The 1967 riots.  Certainly, there were legitimate grievances in some cases, but the Left wanted to create division between groups – and it’s possible to show how every group has been treated unfairly.  Except for the Dutch.  They had it coming.

Their answer was simple:  normalize the victim status of nearly every group in order to fragment society.  What is normal changes, first slowly, then all at once.

Joe walks into a bar and sees a hot woman and asks her, “So, do I come here often?”

Joe Biden in 2008 was against gay marriage.  Joe Biden in 2022 wants to make it illegal for states to stop kids from getting hormone blockers.  Yes – the same man who said that “marriage is between a man and a woman” only fourteen years ago now wants minors to receive powerful hormones that will unalterably change their bodies.  On a whim.

What is normal now changes in a heartbeat, which is easy once the fixed morality of religion is gone.  Then, the only standard becomes the law:  if it’s legal, it must be moral.  And in a dictatorship, who makes the laws?

Next Up:  There’s more to come in this series, but I’m waiting on some reference books to show up.  See how hard I work for you?