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JOE KUHNS-EDUCATION
AND POLITICS
Marxism In America: Changing the Meanings of Words
By Joe Kuhns
Anyone who has read the book “1984” by George Orwell is familiar with the concept of manipulating vocabulary for political purposes. In that classic story, in a communist-style dystopia, the ruling “Party” created a government department called the “Ministry of Truth” to control and manipulate language among the people to further the aims of the totalitarian state. If the people could be made to accept the Party's vocabulary and the meaning of words as dictated by the Party, then the Party's control of society would be set in stone.
What we see going on in our society right now is not entirely dissimilar. We see an effort by the radical political Left to do essentially the same thing on many fronts.
It is the manipulation of vocabulary and the meaning of words to change people's perceptions of reality. The idea is to subtly change the meaning of words in common usage to suit the agenda of the Left. The Left knows that if it can force, cajole, intimidate, or shame people into adopting the vocabulary of the Left, together with the meanings of those words as decided by the Left, then the Left has won the battle.
My first experience with this phenomenon was during the 25 years I spent as a Special Agent of the FBI in New York City. On one occasion, I participated in a large arrest operation in which a few of the people being arrested were illegal aliens. Following the arrests, while I was in the federal courthouse where the arrested were being processed, a woman identifying herself as a lawyer came up to me and asked me what was being done with the “undocumented workers” that were arrested. Immediately realizing whom she meant by this description, I answered that all “illegal aliens” arrested were being shipped to a certain INS holding facility.
Our conversation continued for a few minutes during which she continued to say “undocumented workers” and I continued to say “illegal aliens”. I also noted that she seemed to become more and more agitated by my refusal to adopt her vocabulary. It occurred to me that as far as people like her were concerned, if they could get people to adopt their terminology for illegal aliens, then political attitudes on the subject would change in their favor.
And even today, the Left will never refer to such people as “illegal aliens”, but only as “undocumented migrants”. I have even heard the term “undocumented citizens” used.
As another example, the use of verbal manipulation is particularly evident regarding the issue of abortion. It seems the newest tack being taken by the pro-abortion advocates of the Left is to claim that prior to a baby's birth, it does not qualify as a human being. An unborn baby is not really a baby, but only a fetus. So it is something less than a full human being, and will not become one until the moment of birth. Thus, killing the baby is not murder.
This reasoning is transparently fallacious. It is an established scientific fact that the unborn baby, or fetus, is a living being from the moment of conception. It doesn't suddenly come alive at the moment of birth. And its genetic makeup from conception is that of a human being, thus making it, in fact, a human being. So what is being done here is using the manipulation of language to justify the logically and morally unjustifiable. But just calling it by a different name changes nothing.
This effort to dehumanize the unborn baby to justify killing it is the same as the process used in Nazi Germany to justify the Holocaust. We all know about the Holocaust, but what is unknown to most people is how the Nazis prepared the groundwork for it before it even began. In the German language, the word for human beings or people is Menschen. Most Germans would have agreed that to kill innocent Menschen is murder. So the Nazis used a linguistic sleight of hand to dehumanize Jews in the minds of their people. Nazi state propaganda worked to establish the idea that Jews were not Menschen. Instead, they were Untermenschen, or subhumans. So killing them would not be murder. In other words, by changing vocabulary and getting Germans to accept it, they made it easier to justify killing Jews.
Another example is when abortion is termed “healthcare”. Healthcare for whom? In any abortion, the direct recipient of the procedure is the baby, but he or she is killed. So it is hardly healthcare for the baby.
Healthcare for the mother? When we speak of healthcare for a person, we are usually talking about a procedure to deal with some sort of illness, injury, or physical defect, or threat to the patient's life or health. But pregnancy is not an illness, injury, or physical defect. Nor is it, except in rare cases, a threat to a mother's life. And in those rare cases, modern medicine is usually capable of alleviating the danger without harming the baby.
Something similar is taking place in the promotion of what I would consider to be the greatest insanity of the moment, transgenderism. Specifically, I am talking about the drive on the part of the Left to introduce children into this cult. Adults on the other hand, for better or worse, have the legal right to do as they like with their bodies and their future.
For anyone interested in exploring this with the assistance of a real expert, I would recommend Dr. Steven Levine's writings. He is a clinical psychiatrist and a Professor of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University Medical School. He was the co-founder in 1974 of one of the first gender identity clinics at that university. Thus, he has 51 years of experience in the field.(1)
Dr. Levine is resolutely against either socially or medically transitioning children. Among the important points in his writings on the subject, which many other experts support, are the following:
1. Children cannot give informed consent to a procedure that can fundamentally alter their future. They do not have the maturity to fully understand or anticipate what this process will mean for their lives.
2. Children who report feelings of gender dysphoria typically also have several psychiatric comorbidities, that is, other psychological illnesses which are distinct from gender dysphoria itself. Psychiatric practitioners must deal with these other problems. Furthermore, if children are not socially or medically transitioned but are supported by ongoing psychiatric care, in a vast majority of cases, the dysphoria will eventually resolve itself, and the child will settle comfortably in his biological gender.
Joseph Kuhns was born in Queens, New York City and has lived most of his life on the East Coast. From 1963 to 1967, he attended the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. Following graduation, he served two years as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, during which he served a tour of duty in Viet Nam.
Later, Mr. Kuhns spent two years in Taiwan where he taught English and also studied Mandarin Chinese. Returning to the US, and after further graduate study, he obtained a position as a Special Agent in the FBI, where he had a career spanning 25 years, assigned to the New York Office of the Bureau.
Upon retirement from the FBI, Mr. Kuhns took a teaching position in a Catholic high school, where he taught a history course entitled “Western Civilization” for twelve years until retirement in 2014.
Today, he devotes himself to local political issues, especially those involving education and curriculum.
CONTACT: 201-783-5574
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CONTINUED....Marxism in America: Changing the Meanings of Words.
...Psychiatric practitioners must deal with these other problems. Furthermore, if children are not socially or medically transitioned but are supported by ongoing psychiatric care, in a vast majority of cases, the dysphoria will eventually resolve itself, and the child will settle comfortably in his biological gender.
3. Cases of gender dysphoria are medically very complex and require many sessions with a highly competent psychiatrist. Parental involvement is essential at all stages. But what typically happens is that a child goes to a gender clinic and, after one or two meetings with a therapist, is placed on the treadmill to transition. He is prescribed (depending on age) puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.
4. After hormones, the next step is surgery: “bottom surgery” for both sexes and double mastectomy for girls. Depending on how extensive the surgery is, it can leave both boys and girls sexually neutered. Many of these children who go the surgery route will go on to “detransition” and regret ever consenting to this, but the damage to their bodies cannot be undone. (A case which has gone public is that of a heroic young lady named Chloe Cole from California, who had a double mastectomy at the age of 15, and bitterly regretted it. She went public to warn about this, even testifying before Congress.)
5. No evidence denying children transition will lead to suicide, often the go-to justification for parents to transition their children. Much to the contrary, a study undertaken in Sweden of those people who had transitioned surgically found that their suicide rate was 19.1 times higher than that of the general Swedish population.
I think most rational people would agree, in view of the preceding, that the transitioning of minors is a gross injustice and should be considered as a violation of medical ethics and a crime against children.
Who in our society is driving this transgender agenda? It is, as a rule, the political far Left. Conservatives are against it. The Biden Administration, beholden to the Left, went all out in favor of it. And once again, we see the Left using clever rhetoric to support their position.
Their term for this crime against children is “Gender Affirming Care”. They are not affirming the actual gender based upon objective scientific and physical reality, but rather the subjective gender based upon the child's feelings, which of course are subject to change at any time and as the child grows older. And as mentioned above, if the child is not subject to any transitioning, he or she will probably eventually settle comfortably in his or her biological gender.
If you look at what happened to Chloe Cole and many others, one must ask how sexual mutilation of a child, which the child is not capable of giving informed consent to, and which will very likely result in lifelong regret, can be called “health care”. Isn't “First Do No Harm” a fundamental principle of medical practice?
Finally, one particularly interesting example of the Left's manipulation of language to suit a political purpose is the effort to change the meaning of the word “racism”. The dictionary defines the word racism as “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community or institution against a person or a people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized”.
But this does not serve the purposes of the Left. The thinking of the Left comes from the Marxist paradigm, which bases all social analysis on the division of human society into the “Oppressors' and the “Oppressed”. And all persons are assigned to one group or the other. And what distinguishes the two groups is power. The Oppressors have power, and the Oppressed do not.
So our modern Woke Left has redefined “racism” in line with these ideas. In their minds, the concept of racism is merged with the concept of power as per the Marxist paradigm. The term “racist” can thus only be applied to white people. Since white people as a group are the ones allegedly with all the power, only they can be and are racist, but non-white people cannot be racist since they allegedly have no power.
In the above, I have related only a few examples of the efforts of the radical Left to shift popular attitudes by manipulating vocabulary and the meaning of words. There are many others. I believe it is incumbent on those people, particularly in the public sphere, who realize what is happening, to spread the awareness of it among the general public as much as possible. The mainstream media will never do so, and neither will our institutions of higher education.
(1) https://www.aclu.org/cases/doe-v-madison-metropolitan-school-district?document=doe-v-mmsd-expert-affidavit-dr-stephen-levine
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WHY TRUMP IS MY ONLY POSSIBLE CHOICE
Why Was Trump My Only Possible Choice?
By Joe Kuhns
In the last election, I voted for Donald Trump, a man who is one of the most controversial and, in many quarters, one of the most reviled men of our time. And I would do it again. Why?
Allow me to say at the outset that I am not a fanatical “Trumper”, for whom Trump is a God-like figure who can do no wrong. I know he is a flawed figure, like everyone else. There are things I like very much about him and things I very much don't like. If it had been my choice, there are other Republicans, both men and women, whom I would have preferred.
But there was no choice for me on whom to vote for. While there are many things about Trump that I admire and applaud. I cannot say the same thing about the Democratic Party, which is firmly under the control of its far Left wing. I watched the Biden-Harris Administration in action for four years, and it was clear to me on every level that our country could not survive four more years of their control.
Let us put aside the political propaganda of these many months and look at what the Democrats have done that has damaged our country so badly.
To start with the most obvious and egregious, the Democrats, in violation of the law, effectively abolished the US borders, allowing a steady influx of an estimated ten million illegal aliens to flood into our country. These people were never vetted. How could such a torrent of up to 10,000 people per day possibly be vetted? Our government does not know exactly how many there are, who and what they are, or where they are. But they included hundreds of thousands of criminals and hundreds of thousands of people from countries with governments that are hostile to the United States. Tom Homan, the President's Border Czar, has stated there are approximately 700,000 who have criminal records. And there are, without any doubt many thousands who are criminals but have no criminal records because they haven't actually been caught yet for any of their crimes.
Criminal gangs from Central America, such as Tren De Aragua and MS 13, came in and took up residence in our country. There are members of drug cartels and terrorists. Many American citizens have become victims of rape, murder, and other crimes committed by these criminals.
There is even an organization (Angel Moms) of parents of murdered victims of these criminals. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris created this tragedy, but I did not hear of one instance of either of them ever reaching out in sympathy to these people for what happened to their children, or expressing any regrets over their own actions, which caused the problem. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has met with some of the Angel Moms.
Tom Homan has also stated that there are about 300,000 unaccompanied children who came in and who are unaccounted for. We don't know where they are. One can assume that many of these children are in the hands of sex traffickers.
The Executive Orders from Joe Biden, which set this tragedy in motion, began immediately after his inauguration, which clearly shows that this was all planned ahead of time. Does anyone recall one single word from the Democrats before the 2020 election telling the American people that this was what they intended to do? No, they wouldn't have gotten elected if they had let people know.
Let me state right now a salient point. Nobody who loves this country would knowingly and intentionally do something like this. But it is exactly what the Democrats did.
Joe Biden campaigned on a promise to unite people after years of discord. He came into office and did exactly the opposite. His administration made identity politics the core of its approach to governing, with Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a central part of everything they did. They pushed this idea in schools, the government, and the military. This is designed to divide Americans, not unite them. They teach people to identify not as Americans but as members of racial sub-groups. The point of it all is to cement in the minds of minority members the feeling of victimhood and the belief that big government is their only savior.
Democrats do this at the state and local level as well. Throughout Democrat-controlled Red States and cities, such as my state of New Jersey, state education policy and curriculum put heavy emphasis on identity, deliberately imposing on students the idea that anyone in a minority status, whether because of race or gender identity, is an “oppressed” victim, while white people, and especially heterosexual white people are “oppressors”.
This way of thinking, commonly associated with the “Woke Left” essentially adopts the Marxist (Communist) dynamic of history. Karl Marx saw all social and political movement in terms of an unrelenting struggle between economic classes, with the lower class, the workers or proletariat constantly struggling to overthrow the capitalist upper class.
The Woke Left adopts this dynamic and applies it to race. So now the “oppressor” is all white people and the “oppressed” is all non-white people. By doing this, they indoctrinate the youth in the idea that the US is a bad country. Of course, one thing which they never wish to celebrate or even talk about is the enormous progress this country has made in race relations.
What they achieve by this is the creation of a permanent victim class, which will not see itself as part of the national community. What better way to over time undermine the nation?
In the domestic sphere, what is the primary responsibility of a government? It is to insure the physical safety and security of the people. Within the borders of each state this means to enforce the laws, beginning with the criminal law. If one looks at Democrat-controlled cities across the land such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, one sees city administrations and district attorneys determined to do the opposite. Dangerous criminals are let out with little or no bail, the lightest possible sentences are given, and in some cases prosecutors such as DA Alvin Bragg in New York are more interested in prosecuting those who try to protect themselves and their fellow citizens against violent criminals than prosecuting the criminals themselves.
In some cases, like San Francisco, it was decided that nobody would be prosecuted for stealing less than approximately $1,000 worth of merchandise from a store. This resulted in stores being routinely looted and ultimately being forced to go out of business. Did Democrat city officials know this was happening? Of course, they did, but they were more than happy to let it continue, in the name of “social justice”. Eventually, many voters had enough. As examples, radical DA Chesa Boudin in San Francisco was removed in a recall vote, and radical DA Gascon in LA was voted out in the 2024 election.
Perhaps one of the most insidious things the Democrats have done, both on the federal, state, and local levels, is in the cultural realm. And this entails an across-the-board promotion of gender ideology.
All societies have a cultural basis. That entails a foundation of ideas, attitudes, and ways of looking at the world and reality. It also entails a web of customs that hold a society together. The foundation of American society is Western Civilization, which developed over the centuries in Europe.
And like all civilizations, ours has concepts of accepted truth. In line with these truths, there are accepted barriers and behavioral lines which should not be crossed.
If my goal was to destroy the United States of America as a coherent, functioning society, I would undermine these cultural ideas that form the basis of our society. I would attack all behavioral norms and boundaries. I would first attack all of society's sexual norms, and aim especially at children. I would make sure children were exposed to teaching on sex of every variety, normal and abnormal, starting at a young age. They would be exposed to it in school, in entertainment, in libraries. When traditional sexual norms are attacked and undermined, eventually the family is undermined. This does tremendous damage to any society. And this is what the Left has been doing.
It is in this light, I believe, that we have to consider the Democratic Party's latest cause du jour: transgenderism. It centers on the idea that gender is subjective and unrelated to biological reality. In official circles in Democrat controlled blue states, this idea takes on the qualities of a religion.
Not only is transgenderism their latest obsession, but they emphasizes pushing the idea on children. Why? They will say they want to “support” children with gender dysphoria by “affirming their gender identity”. But if you look at their actions in schools and gender clinics, you begins to realize that the welfare of the children is not the goal. In fact, they care little about the children. So besides profit for gender clinics, what is the larger goal?
I believe that the answer may be found in a book written by former NYU professor Michael Rechtenwald. Previously a left-leaning professor, he became persona-non-grata at NYU because he took a stand against the political cancel culture at this institution. In his subsequent book about academia, “Springtime for Snowflakes”, he identified transgenderism as a manifestation of the philosophy of Postmodernism.
This is a philosophy which denies there is any absolute truth or objective reality. Relativism is the overriding truth. Each person has his own truth. Thus, if I feel and say I am female despite being born a male with the XY chromosome in every cell of my body, then that is my “truth” and nobody has any right to dispute me. Nobody's truth is any more valid than any other person's truth. Everyone must indulge my delusion about being a woman. In this bazaar template for society, feelings are given far more weight than scientifically provable facts.
The insanity doesn't stop there. If I “identify” as a cat, then that is what I am, according to this insane ideology. And everyone has the obligation to treat me as a cat. Thus the phenomenon of “furries”, children who identify as animals and demand others recognize and treat them as such, even to the point of being allowed to use litter boxes as toilets in schools.
Forces on the Left not only go along with this, they also actively promote it, particularly to children. For what reason? A society cannot sustain itself when it adopts a philosophy that requires that unreality be accepted as reality, where feelings take precedence over facts.
Western philosophy, based on Greek rationalism and Judeo-Christian thought, declares that there is an objective reality and objective truth that can be rationally determined. A society that buys into irrationality will come apart and collapse. After all, if people can be persuaded to believe that a woman really becomes a man because she feels like a man, and that a child is a cat because he or she identifies as a cat, then they can be persuaded to believe just about anything, no matter how absurd. Rational debate becomes impossible. What better way to undermine the society that you disdain?
Finally, there is the issue of out of out-of-control budgets and the national debt. Our budget deficits and national debt are out of control. At present, the debt is approximately thirty-seven trillion dollars. Numerous well-respected economists are warning us that the situation of the national debt is becoming critical, and we are headed for a point of no return. We will get to a point where the interest on the national debt will be larger than the budget for national defense.
We cannot sustain this. But the Democratic Party cares little about the problem of the budget and debt. They are addicted to ever-increasing levels of domestic spending, promising everything to every group to lock in voters. Do you have student debt, which you freely incurred yourself? No problem. We will make the taxpayers, who never took out the loans, pay it off for you. How do the Democrats support illegal immigrants? By subsidies directly from the treasury.
There is far more that can be said and far more examples to be given. But the essential point once again is this. The Democratic Party, which is under the control of its far-left wing, does not love this country. Nobody who loves this country would do the things I have described above. So what do they love? They love their imagined future, an America, divorced from its past, organized in the image of the Marxist Left, a one-party state, where their ideology and it alone prevails.
Donald Trump, whatever his faults, loves this country. The left wing of the Democratic Party, which has effective control of that party, does not.
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FORMULA, TO WIN SCHOOL BOARD ELECTIONS IN YOUR LOCAL DISTRICT
A FORMULA FOR WINNING A SCHOOL BOARD ELECTION.
BY JOE KUHNS
OUR OWN JOE KUHNS WAS ONE OF THE PRIME MOVERS IN SUCCESSFULLY TAKING QUALIFIED CANDIDATES TO WINNING BOARD OF EDUCATION SEATS AND WINNING MAJORITIES. THERE IS A FORMULA THAT WORKS. MANY WOKE BOARDS OF ED ARE NOW FLIPPING TO TRADITIONALLY BASED POLICY BOARD MEMBERS. THIS HOW-TO OUTLINE SHOULD BE A LEARNING EXPERIENCE.
How to Run a Successful School Board Campaign
Last November, in the town of Oakland, New Jersey, there was an election for two seats on the regional high school board. The result of the election was to effectively “flip the board”. It put moderate conservatives in the majority by removing a board member who was not sympathetic to conservative ideas regarding education.
The result of the election was a resounding victory for two women who as yet had never been on the board of education.
Oakland is a middle-income suburban town of approximately 13,000 people in western Bergen County. Politically, it tends to be a fairly conservative, predominantly Republican town. If that is the case, how did it happen that there were people from Oakland on the regional BOE who were anything but moderate conservatives? The answer is that many Oakland citizens are like others in that they often don't get out and vote, especially in off-year elections. Or if they do vote, they vote for governmental positions, but not the school board. Many times, voters have to be convinced that even though they no longer have children in school, they should still be very concerned about what is happening in the schools. This lack of participation often allows people who do have a political agenda that does not reflect the community or its beliefs and values.
Very early in the process, one should attend school board meetings to see firsthand what is going on, get a sense of the personalities and factions involved, and understand where they stand on the issues. Look at the district website. This will give valuable information about district policies, budget matters, test scores, and curriculum. Know what is happening in the school and the classroom. (One very important issue is that reading the curriculum alone will not always adequately reveal what is being taught. It is also important to learn about what online instructional materials are being used.)
Talk to people in the town to find out their concerns about the schools. Some people are primarily concerned about how school expenditures will affect their taxes. Some will be concerned with athletic programs and others with how test scores compare with state averages. And today, many people are concerned with ideologies being promoted in the classroom. All of these were issues in our town.
A successful campaign will require financial resources.
In our town of about 13,000 people, we spent between $12,000 and $15,000. I will not go into requirements for handling and reporting on campaign funds, as this will change from state to state depending on local laws.
When the above things are taken care of, how do we get people to get out to vote for our candidate?
Many people think that the key to successful campaigning, even on the local level, is reaching people via social media. While this is useful as an adjunct method, the most important thing is to get a staff of people out to meet and talk with the voters through door-to-door campaigning. Telephoning and especially “robocalling” are not adequate substitutes. Our group of volunteers went out for weeks, knocking on doors, meeting people face-to-face, talking to voters and getting their support. This is most essential when you are promoting a candidate who has never been on the board, who may be largely unknown to the town people, and running against someone already on the board who is well known to people.
It was not possible to knock on every door in Oakland. Since we had about ten people who were campaigning on a consistent basis, it was necessary to determine which voters were worth the time to contact. The County Board of Elections provided lists of voters (through the Open Public Records Act) showing voters' party affiliation and how many times each voter had voted over the last four elections. If a voter had voted in four out of the last four elections, there would be the number 4 next to his name, etc. Since this was an off-year election in which voter turnout is typically not high, to maximize our effort we only paid visits to those voters who were most likely to get out and vote. So we visited all of the voters who were registered Republicans or Independents and had voted three or four times out of the last four elections.
In short, don't waste your time on people who as indicated by past behavior, probably won't vote. Go after those who probably will vote and persuade them.
Our candidate provided us with her business cards with her telephone number. We handed them out as we spoke to people and invited them to call the candidate herself if they had any questions. Most did not, but gestures of this type are very important to establish a connection with the voters.
School board elections in New Jersey are non-partisan contests, and our school board campaign was kept separate from any political party. However, the Oakland Republican Party (ORC) was campaigning to get Republican candidates into several mayoral and town council positions. To increase their chances in these contests the ORC initiated a campaign to get Republican voters to sign up for Vote by Mail. The rationale behind this was that Democrats in our area would typically be well behind in the election day vote, but would often win big with vote by mail and thus win the election.
When election day comes, many people, for one reason or another, fail to make it to the polls. They may be sick, or the kids may be sick. Or they could be delayed getting home from work. The weather might be terrible. In any case, on election day, the window to vote in person is about 14 hours (less for most people, who work a full day). Democrats got people to vote by mail early, and thus “banked their votes”. This advantage of getting their people to vote by mail was often decisive in Democratic victories. In Oakland, the effort by the ORC did not completely close the gap between Republican and Democratic early voting registration, but it narrowed it enough so that the Republican advantage in voting day totals brought victory in all of the town council elections.
In a school board election, the voters who will support candidates with common-sense conservative ideas will be largely Republicans. Thus, the effort to better turn out Republican voters in this way no doubt greatly assisted our school board candidates.
Our candidates also sent out three mailers to every household in the town during the campaign. These should be colorful, hard-hitting, and listing clearly the ideas the candidate is running on. The points should be brief and concise. Do not write too much on the mailer because many people will not take the time to read something too long and wordy.
Also, a campaign letter was sent to every household to coincide with the time that vote-by-mail ballots were being received by those who requested them.
If you are campaigning against a candidate currently on the school board, it is not a problem to list on a flier or handout some of the votes, decisions, or actions the opponent has taken that citizens may find objectionable. This is vital to getting support for your candidate. But avoid mean personal attacks on the opponent. This may have the effect of drumming up sympathy and support for your opponent. Try to always keep it positive.
Lawn signs are important, both the number of them and how they are strategically placed. When we met a voter who seemed very sympathetic to our candidate, we would always ask if we might a lawn sign on his or her property. To the average citizen, seeing a great many signs for one candidate indicates a high level of support in the community. If nothing else, this will engender an interest in that candidate.
Of course, what we did was tailored to our particular town and to the resources we had. These methods we adapted may not be entirely applicable to other towns, which are quite different demographically or politically. The first step is always to analyze your town, and what is the best way, with the resources you have, to get your fellow citizens out to vote for sensible candidates.
A REPUBLIC IN PERIL
by Joseph Kuhns
Americans seem to sense at a very deep level that something has gone very wrong with our country. But most people cannot put their finger on exactly what it is.
I will state right at the beginning of this essay what I believe is the explanation for the social and political chaos enveloping the nation and society. It is the rise of the extreme Left, the Marxist Left, in our society. They have become very influential, and even dominant in many of our vital cultural institutions, especially our education system. This is true on all levels of education, but especially in higher education. They are also influential in journalism, mass media, and Hollywood. And most ominously, the left wing of the Democratic Party clearly dominates the party and its policies.
But from the very start, I want to emphasize one thing. I am not talking about ordinary American liberals, or even moderate Democrats. I am talking about the extreme Left, the Marxist Left, or in our current parlance, the “Woke-Left”.
Where did this phenomenon come from and what are its goals? In explaining it, since I myself have never been a part of this movement, I will defer to a man who was a key member of the extreme Left earlier in his life but then had a conversion to conservatism.
As he related in his book, “Radical Son”, David Horowitz came from a family of leftists. His parents were members of the Communist Party USA. He grew up in a social world populated by leftists. For those like me who lived in the 1960s and 1970s, Horowitz was a memorable character. He was central to the anti-Vietnam War movement while I was in college in the 1960s. All of the people in the movement were avidly reading an anti-war magazine called Ramparts, which was available on newsstands. David Horowitz was one of the two editors of Ramparts.
But in the mid-1970s, shortly after the fall of Vietnam and all Indochina to the Communists, he had a complete change of heart, abandoned the Marxist Left, and gradually became a conservative. Today, Horowitz makes his life's work trying to expose to the American people the threat to our country from the extreme Left. To do this, he founded the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Horowitz makes clear in his writing one very essential fact. The American Extreme Left hates the United States of America and wants to destroy it. It is to this goal that their efforts are directed. This is hard for many ordinary people to come to grips with, but it is true.
Many Americans naturally assumed that after the fall of the Soviet Union and other communist countries, surely American communists would recognize their errors and quietly abandon their communist views. No, Horowitz said, they would not abandon their ideas. They would instead be energized by no longer having to defend the actions of the Soviet Union, which had become like an albatross hanging around their necks. Gus Hall, the head of the American Communist Party for many years, when asked to explain the fall of Soviet and Eastern European Communism, said that there was nothing wrong with his communist ideas. The Soviets had just implemented them incorrectly.
And for those people who would be tempted to say that this hatred for America is a figment of right wing fantasy, or that it might only have been true decades ago, I would point to the present-day activities of Antifa; young leftist radicals who will violently attack those who disagree them on anything. They commonly dress all in black, often carrying flags or wearing clothing emblazoned with the communist hammer and sickle emblem.
When Mark Bray, the author of a book on Antifa was asked during an interview just who the Antifa people were, he replied “anarchists, socialists, and communists”.
In July of this year we witnessed young Americans in Washington DC and other places publicly hauling down and burning American flags during pro-Hamas demonstrations. If that doesn't indicate hatred for our country, what does?
But while they may not have given up communist ideas, most of them did make one change. They no longer publicly call themselves “communists”. Now they are “progressives”. It sounds so much better and less threatening.
I am going to engage now in a mental exercise. I am going to put myself in the place of these radical leftists and ask a simple question. If I were a member of the political far Left and had as my goal to destroy the United States of America, how would I go about doing it? What methods would I use? Let us begin.
1. To start, I would look for the key institutions, ideas, and beliefs that make the America a viable nation, then subvert, and corrupt them however I could. I would look at the civilization that America was a part of and then denigrate and discredit it in every possible way.
Unlike most countries, America is not a nation based in “blood and soil”. It is a country of people whose roots are in many foreign countries, continents, and cultures. The dominant culture is rooted in European or western civilization, but we have people from all cultures and countries. The forging of the country required that immigrants assimilate into the dominant culture, becoming familiar with and eventually adopting its major ways and tenets. That does not mean that they must completely abandon and forget the culture they came from, but rather that they become in every sense a part of their new society by learning its culture and language. We need them to feel a part of America and come to identify with their new country regardless of their ethnic or racial background.
So in my efforts to tear down the US, I would ruthlessly denigrate everything about America, its ideals, its history, its culture, its traditions, and its constitution.
2. I would want to see Americans divided and fighting with each other on the basis of race and ethnicity. Rather than celebrating a common identity, I would want Americans to see themselves instead as primarily members of this or that racial group or other identity group and in an adversarial relationship with other groups within society. I would want as many people as possible to view themselves as victims, and to wallow endlessly in that feeling of victimhood. I would endlessly expound on racial injustices from the past, but never, never talk about the enormous progress made by the country in addressing these evils.
Specifically, I would first do everything I could to promote “Identity Politics”. For identity politics indoctrinates the individual to identify not with the country but with their small part of the whole. If you belong to an ethnic, racial, or religious minority, you would be encouraged to see yourself primarily as a member of that group instead of as an American.
To facilitate this, I would make “critical race theory” central to the whole effort. Critical race theory takes the traditional Communist (Marxist) theory of history and applies it to domestic race relations. You may recall that the Marxist paradigm of history is based on the ideas of class warfare and class oppression. Humanity is divided into an oppressor class, the capitalists, and an oppressed class, the proletariat or workers. All of human history is a tale of the struggle between these two groups. According to Marx's law of history, in the end the workers inevitably win and the capitalists are defeated and suppressed. The final goal of all human history is the creation of the ideal society, a utopia, here in this world. Everyone will be equal. There will be no injustice or suffering. It will be the perfect society.
A core aspect of Marxist thought is that people are not looked upon and judged as individuals but only as members of a social class. If you a member of the upper class (capitalists) or the working class, then that is how you are to be considered, judged, and treated.
This was the basic social and political doctrine which informed the political program of the Soviet Union and all communist countries, as well as communists world-wide, including those in the US. A very stark historical example of this thinking is the advice given by Martin Latsis, one of the first heads of the Soviet Secret Police, when in 1918 he advised his men on how to decide whom to arrest as enemies of the Soviet state. He said “In your investigations don't look for documents and pieces of evidence about what the defendant has done, whether in deed or in speaking or acting against Soviet authority. The first question you should ask him is what class he comes from, what are his roots....”(1)
In other words, everyone was to be judged according to what group in society he came from, and not by his character or personal traits, or even if he had ever done anything wrong.
And people were to be arrested accordingly.
What the Woke Left in America today does is to appropriate the Marxist class warfare doctrine directly to domestic race relations. The white race is the “oppressor” and non-whites or “people of color” are all the “oppressed”. If you are white, you are bad by virtue of this fact. Your only salvation is to admit you are an oppressor and a racist, apologize for your whiteness, renounce your “white privilege”, and become an “ally” of the oppressed.
So people are to be penalized for past American racism based on the color of their skin, despite the fact that they personally had nothing to do with it. There are a flood of reports from schools across the nation of white students being told by their teachers that “whiteness” and white people are bad.
By doing this, they fundamentally undermine this country.
3. All societies have a cultural basis. That entails a foundation of ideas, attitudes, and ways of looking at the world and reality. It also entails a web of customs that hold a society together. The foundation of American society is Western civilization,n which developed over the centuries in Europe.
And like all civilizations, ours has concepts of accepted truth. In line with these truths, there are accepted barriers and behavioral lines that should not be crossed.
If my goal were to destroy the United States of America as a coherent, functioning society, I would undermine these cultural ideas that form the basis of our society. I would attack all boundaries and behavioral norms. I would first attack all of society's sexual norms, and aim especially at children. I would make sure children were exposed to teaching on sex of every variety, starting at a young age. They would be exposed to it in school, in entertainment, in libraries. When traditional sexual norms are attacked and undermined, eventually the family is undermined. This does tremendous damage to any society.
It is in this light, I believe, that we have to consider our society's latest insanity du jour: transgenderism.
Transgenderism is one of the Left's latest obsessions, and in particular, the Left emphasizes pushing the idea on children. Why? They will say they want to “support” children with gender dysphoria by “affirming their gender identity”. But if you look at their actions in schools and gender clinics, you begin to realize that the welfare of the children is not the goal. In fact, they couldn't care less about the children. So, besides profit for gender clinics, what is the larger goal?
I believe that an indication may be found in a book written by NYU professor Michael Rechtenwald. Previously, a left-leaning professor, he was forced to take leave from NYU because he took a stand against the political cancel culture at his school. In his subsequent book “Springtime for Snowflakes”, he identified transgenderism as a manifestation of the philosophy of Postmodernism.
This is a philosophy that denies there is any absolute truth or objective reality. Relativism is the overriding truth. Each person has his own truth. Thus if I feel and say I am female despite being born a male with the XY chromosome in every cell of my body, then that is my “truth” and nobody has any right to dispute me. Nobody's truth is any more valid than any other person's truth. Everyone must indulge my delusion about being a woman. In this bazaar template for society, feelings are given far more weight than scientifically provable facts.
The insanity doesn't stop there. If I “identify” as a cat, then that is what I am, according to this insane ideology. And everyone has the obligation to treat me as a cat. Thus the phenomenon of “furries,” kids who identify as animals and demand others recognize and treat them as such, even to the point of being allowed to use litter boxes as toilets. (This is actually happening in some places.)
Forces on the Left not only go along with this; they actively promote it, particularly to children and for what reason? A society cannot sustain itself when it adopts a philosophy that requires that unreality be accepted as reality, where feelings take precedence over facts.
Western philosophy, based on Greek rationalism and Judeo-Christian thought, declares that there is an objective reality and objective truth which can be rationally determined. A society that buys into irrationality will come apart and collapse. After all, if people can be persuaded to believe that a woman really becomes a man because she feels like a man, and that a child is a cat because he or she identifies as a cat, then they can be persuaded to believe just about anything, no matter how absurd. Rational debate becomes impossible. What better way to undermine a society?
4. If I wanted to destroy this country, I would attack its Judeo-Christian religious foundation. I would not publicly and directly attack religious doctrine. Instead, I would seek to enact policies that fly in the face of most religious belief or sentiments.
