In my last post I barfed up over 2000 words about how leftist ideology is making everyone miserable and destroying society — trans insanity, socially mandated racism, mind-altering pharmaceuticals, the willful destruction of culture. I hinted that the examples I brought up all came from my own personal experience over the past few years, and that is true. The proximal way that all of these issues have directly affected my family, is that they collectively contributed to our decision to homeschool our children. Every one of these issues came up during our kids’ time in the public school system in some direct way, causing us to either have to stand up to a school administrator, supplement our kids’ learning at home because the curriculum the government was peddling was either blatantly false or grossly incomplete, or have absolutely insane conversations with our kids to try to fix the hurt that some school-based message caused. Imagine trying to explain to a six-year old that they aren’t bad people because of their skin color, or to explain to a pre-pubescent girl that liking video games doesn’t mean she’s really a boy who needs hormone treatments to keep from growing breasts. If you can’t even get away from that shit by moving to rural Alabama, things have gone too damn far.
In the language of evolutionary biology, these ideas have become so common because they spread like viruses – specifically, they are memes, or brain viruses – and they do so not because they are true, nor because they are good for the brains that house them, but simply because they are neatly packaged in a way that spreads efficiently from one brain to another. The best way to think of them is as information pathogens; they are thoughts which occupy “clock cycles” in one’s brain for their own purposes and, left to run free in one’s mind, will cause pain and suffering and may be incurable. (These should be distinguished from information hazards, which are generally a good thing.) To our thinking, homeschool gives us an opportunity to immunize our children against these pathogens. Indeed, classical education probably functioned as a type of psychic vaccination, where exposure to diverse thoughts, including really bad or evil ones in their most undiluted form, in a relatively safe environment at a young age protected one against the weaponized propaganda that one is likely to encounter as an adult. If I wrestle fairly with the arguments of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Adolf Hitler, or any other of history’s greatest villains in a non-partisan classroom before I am forced to contend in real life with the harsh realities that motivated such people, I am far less likely to succumb to flat, extremist ideologies, childish “good guy bad guy” narratives, or to lose the capacity to understand, and compromise with, those with whom I disagree.
One might argue that education obviously doesn’t prevent political extremism, because all the worst examples of it come directly from our universities; indeed, the universities are all absolutely lousy with raving political loonies. But I would argue that is because universities only half-educate people now. Most Western people have only the vaguest exposure to the liberal arts and a depressingly shallow grasp of their own culture; they are shoe-horned into increasingly narrow majors that either train them for some specific career (most STEM programs), or else indoctrinate them to become some variety of left-wing political activist or NGO apparatchik (the “humanities”). The latter have little grounding in tangible reality and so have no reason to find Foucault less plausible than Darwin; the former have little grounding in history or morality or ethics, and so have no real reason to question the wisdom of gain-of-function microbiology, or artificial intelligence research, or autonomous drone bombers, or face-recognition security software, or deploying leaky vaccines in the middle of an active epidemic, or whatever other technological horror they can dream up. No – a fully-educated person studies all of this, and should start at it early. That’s why we don’t harp on math and science exclusively, and give equal time to a rich and detailed study of history, literature, and philosophy for our teenage kids. They are not likely to get this level of exposure to the Western canon anywhere else; so it’s up to us to vaccinate them with it against whatever parasitical memes the enemy flings at them later on. Such a person might nevertheless become a political extremist — I mean, we do live in pretty extreme times — but at least they will do so for reasons, as opposed to merely at the whim of random brain parasites chewing away at their neurons.
Other right-wing writers (well, really just David Cole) have lambasted the idea of giving up on institutions like public schools and ceding them to the enemy. I guess there is something to be said for making a scene at school board meetings and fighting for every inch of intellectual real estate before giving it up — but to be honest the decay is so deep-set it’s hard to know even where to start. How could Critical Theory really be “banned” from schools? Even if you could somehow legislate it, how would it be enforced? The problem isn’t the ideology, so much as the people who believe in it, who are a fanatical cult and are dug in like lice at all levels of the education system; without figuring out some way to purge them en masse from the school system, there’s next to nothing that can be done. The first goal has to be to stop the damage, and the only way to do that is to prevent the Woke from having any access to your children, just like you would keep your kids away from any other kind of pervert or psycho. Which means you move to a place where it’s easy to homeschool or have access to an affordable, non-woke charter school of some sort (move to Red states, sane people, and drive out the Woke like St. Patrick drove out the snakes!). Those of us with school-age children have little choice. Yes, you have to re-organize your entire life to make it happen, but yes, it’s worth it. To be quite honest teaching my kids has been the most rewarding experience of my life, and has made me a better person (and a better scientist) in so many ways.
But this doesn’t mean we have to abjectly surrender the school systems to the enemy. All of you who don’t have school-age kids, there’s stuff you can do as well. If your kids are grown or you don’t plan to have any, take up the burden of scrapping with the school board for your like-minded friends or coworkers — your property taxes are paying for the damn things so you deserve a say even if your kids aren’t currently using them anymore. If you’re really pushy, maybe you can browbeat your state legislature into considering giving you back some of your taxes to cover homeschool expenses, like Alabama is considering this session*. If you have grandkids, volunteer to help homeschool them — my retired mother takes care of math for our kids, for instance. If you don’t have kids yet but want them, plan your own life around the high likelihood you’ll have to homeschool them when you do have them — make sure you get yourself into a stable marriage, move to a Red state, and start educating yourself in the Western canon so you’ll be prepared to teach it when the time comes (not to mention all the other ways that completing your own cultural education will benefit you, both practically and spiritually). If you’ve got some money to spare, donate to a charter school or a charity that supports homeschoolers. If you’re active in your religion, suggest starting something to assist homeschoolers in your church family.
The enemy’s entire power structure is dependent on viral memes to maintain its control. Well-educated people are virtually immune to them, so the greatest threat to their power is the homeschooler, who is vaccinated against the Cathedral’s dark magic. It’s absolutely subversive — in my opinion, the most effective resistance (and the least likely to land you in prison) is simply to keep these horrid people away from your children, and dedicate yourself to preserving the knowledge of our ancestors through whatever is coming our way in the next few years by making sure it gets taught effectively to your own kids.
* The Alabama law under consideration would let people recoup $6500 of their state taxes (that’s a flat amount, irrespective of their income level) to cover expenses associated with moving kids out of public schools. That could go to private schools, charter schools, or homeschool expenses, as best as I can tell. One thing it apparently doesn’t allow is for homeschool parents to pay themselves a small salary, which is a shame, because it’s quite difficult (i.e. impossible) to manage homeschooling without one of the parents leaving the so-called “work force”, or at least seriously curtailing their hours, which of course has a sizable financial cost. Seems like something that advocates for women (i.e. “feminists”) ought to care about, right? Right? Then why do the Democrats oppose it so vehemently — oh right, can’t have people bettering their lives or attaining happiness or stability….
The Antisocial Darwinist 