I was, for a short time during college, a volunteer fireman, and my responsibility was to operate the equipment while more experienced firemen entered the burning building.  Following a fire at one house, another student who had gone inside told me how he stood in the smoke-filled kitchen spraying water at the flames to no avail.  It wasn’t until he realized that he was facing a mirrored wall and that the flames were actually behind him that he turned and was able to extinguish the fire.  As long as he was sending water in the wrong direction the fire continued unabated.

With every mass shooting in America there is a repetition of the same demands from the Left to take “substantive” action against guns and gun owners to stop such tragedies.  These demands go nowhere because sensible people understand that, like spraying water at a mirror instead of the fire, such actions will not and cannot make a difference.

You will never solve a problem so long as you are aiming at the wrong target.  We are not dealing with people who are under the control of God or law.  In other words, good people do not kill each other and do not need gun control!  As Paul wrote in I Timothy 1:9, the law is made “for the lawless and insubordinate, for the ungodly and for sinners. . . for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers. . . . “

Tragically, murder has been with us from the very beginning of human history.  I expect we are all familiar with Cain’s killing of Abel.  And in the approximately six thousand years since, things have not improved.  Cain did not need a firearm to kill his brother, and the absence of such weapons has never been an obstacle to those who are bent on killing someone.

So, is there a “Christian” view of guns?  Does the Bible give us any indication of what God might say about such things?  A former president mocked traditional Americans for relying on their “God and guns.”  Clearly, Leftists delight in throwing Scripture texts or generalities into our faces thinking they can embarrass us into yielding to their demands.

But their efforts are based upon twisted understandings of the Bible, passages taken out of context, or simply ignoring important relevant texts.  Superficially, one might think that God would frown on the existence and use of guns in general, but to conclude this would be to overlook a large body of Scripture.  And it is clear that the only people who would benefit from taking firearms from law abiding Americans would be criminals and tyrants.

A thorough examination of the subject would require writing a book, so the best we can do here is to hit a few high points.  God’s heart can be seen in the fact that the first environment He created for us was that of a garden, symbolizing both beauty and serenity.  It was mankind who introduced discord and violence to creation, and we learned immediately that God disapproved of that violence.

While allowing Cain to live following his killing of his brother, God, shortly thereafter (Gen. 9:6) instituted the death penalty for murder, declaring that murderers were to be executed.  Thus, God’s justice requires that violence be met with violence.

Interestingly, there is no evidence in Scripture for a wholesale surrender of peaceful people to violent people.  “Turning the other cheek,” which we read of in Matthew five applies in the context of Christ’s Kingdom (which was rejected then but will be established in the future) where God will take revenge for His people.  Therefore, if God approves of meeting violence with lethal force, if necessary, it only makes sense that guns are not forbidden by Him.

It is certainly applicable to the topic to consider that David, a “man after God’s own heart” used a high-velocity projectile (slingshot) to take out the giant, Goliath.  Modern studies suggest that a stone released from an ancient sling would have the approximate killing power of a  44 magnum!  David became the progenitor of the Davidic dynasty, from which Christ, the world’s future Ruler has come, and it was he who noted that God taught his “hands to make war.”

God is not anti-war when there is an evil, mortal enemy to fight.

Third, the Apostle Paul addressed the responsibility of a man to his family.  In I Timothy 5:8 he wrote that if a man does not provide the essentials for his family, “especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”  The idea that providing for one’s family includes food and a roof over their heads but not their protection against intruders is ludicrous.

Virtually whatever a man needs to keep his family safe is legitimate, and with the weapons available to criminals, one has no alternative but to be able to meet force with force, if need be.  This would include firearms.

Finally, the US Constitution provides in its Second Amendment a protection of the individual’s God given right to own firearms for the express purpose of protecting “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” and only the naïve would say that this amendment provides merely for hunting.  Rather, its intention was for the citizen to protect himself and his family from a tyrannical government, which the colonists had just defeated in a bloody war.

It is precisely for this reason that Leftists beat the drum for more gun control.  The most significant obstacle to their achieving a strangle hold on the American public is the citizens’ right to “keep and bear arms.”

Therefore, all who love liberty and life and understand that these are God given rights, will not yield an inch in the battle for the Second Amendment.  What we must understand is the Left’s willingness to allow and even create suffering for the nation’s citizens in their quest for power.  They cynically believe that if enough innocent people die, eventually tender-hearted citizens will change their minds and allow the government to disarm the public.  Once the public is sufficiently disarmed, our chains will be forged and we will be subjugated, just as they are in China, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, and other socialist countries.

Do we understand that the Left has no interest in stopping these killings?  There are substantial things that could be done to reduce the killings without violating the Constitution, but the Left fabricates reasons to oppose them all.  We who are truly concerned about the deaths of innocent people struggle to accept the fact that Leftists, whether politicians or academics, don’t care!  Every week in cities like Chicago there are killings equivalent to a mass shooting, yet those in charge do nothing.

There are also over one hundred thousand drug related deaths annually in America, and the Left’s response is to make those drugs more available and curtail efforts to interdict the narcotics crossing the southern border.  Their utter lack of concern for these tragedies underscores the fact that Leftists, regardless of their rhetoric, do not care for America’s citizens, even the children.

What can be done?  The evidence is that training and arming teachers and other staff at every school would be one quick and effective improvement.  But you will get no encouragement from the Left in this.  And there are other available options we won’t get into here because I would like to go to the two most important and effective tools in the tool chest, both of which are hated by the Left.

First, reintroduce students to God and the Bible.  “We can’t have a state church,” you say.  Well, we already do, it’s called Humanism, its priests are teachers, and its cathedrals are the public schools.  But, even at that, the expression “separation of church and state” is seriously misunderstood.  Few Christians want a state church, but all desire to see the principles of righteousness that are sourced in Christianity taught to the Nation’s children.

There is a great difference between a “state church” and teaching morality and goodness to children.  Under the guise of “protecting” children from a state church Leftists have thrown out the principles that are essential to a healthy culture, good citizenry, and safe neighborhoods.

Leftists hate Christianity so virulently that they would rather have the chaos and death across the culture than to hear someone proclaim, “Thus saith the Lord!”  They deeply resent being told that lying, cheating, stealing, and adultery are sinful, but they have no problem declaring that traditional values are evil!

They claim that children are “damaged” by being told about God and their accountability to Him.  Apparently, having a sense of guilt (for which Christianity also provides relief) is worse to Leftists than dying of violence or a drug overdose!   Regardless, the issue is not whether somethings are good and some evil, but rather, who decides what is good and what is evil!

The Left went public with its war on God and the Bible in the 1960s, and that war has only escalated over time.  The horrific violence witnessed daily across America is just one consequence.  One could ask, “America, how is this war on God working out for you?”  The best thing America could do to encourage a God-consciousness in young people.

The second thing we must do, which is related to the creation of a cultural God-consciousness, is to reinvigorate the traditional family.  The chaotic culture we now have is clearly the opposite of a safe, stable culture that would not produce these mass shootings.  The single most important factor in a safe, stable culture is intact, traditional families.  This is indisputable.  Just as darkness cannot exist in the presence of light, chaos cannot exist in a stable society! Duh!  Only a brainwashed Leftist would seek to dispute this.  But it is in fact the very reason for the Leftists’ war against the family.

They understand that the public would never yield to their tyranny if we were experiencing a safe, stable, and prosperous culture.  Understand this: the violence, unrest, and destruction we have witnessed over the last several years are not the natural manifestations of a normal culture.  It has all been orchestrated to achieve a simple objective: the subjugation of the American people.

Opponents of liberty seek to shame those of us who love America’s freedoms with false narratives regarding love.  No, love is not tolerant toward those who would destroy that which is good and right.  A good man does not sit idly watching intruders victimize his family.  As long as predators exist, good men will protect those they love!

“Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD,” is not merely a pleasant platitude.  It is the one most essential element for a peaceful, prosperous nation.  I again call on all Americans to repent and submit to the Holy, yet gracious Lord and God, Jesus Christ!

Sadly, so long as fallen mankind and tyrants run things here, weapons will be necessary to protect one’s life and liberties.  When Christ, the Prince of peace reigns, however, we will see such things come to an end and weapons will be repurposed into plows and pruning hooks!  Eden will be restored!

Will you be there?

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Academics are fast becoming a thing of the past in public schools.

In their place are behavioral psychology and “social and emotional learning” (SEL) designed not to educate but to transform children’s core values, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.

Once upon a time, education meant learning how to read, write, do math, and think. It meant learning history and science as well.

That is barely happening now, as government data show.

Perhaps more importantly, once upon a time, school children all over the nation also learned the Ten Commandments—do not murder, do not lie, do not steal, and so on.

They learned the Golden Rule, too: Treat others as you want to be treated.

But those “good old days” are largely gone.

Today, government schools use advanced methods including SEL to instill in children a radical new and oftentimes contradictory “politically correct” value system: radical environmentalism, radical feminism, critical theory, Marxism, social justice, LGBTQ-plus, population control, socialism, hyper-racialism, class struggle, and more.

There’s also an occult connection to it all that would shock most secular observers—not to mention Christians, Muslims, Jews, and adherents of other traditional faiths.

SEL: The Mechanism for Transformation

In public schools across the United States today, from pre-K through 12th grade and beyond, children are being subjected to what is seemingly just the latest educational fad—silly, perhaps, but no more harmful than anything else—at least on the surface.

The education establishment refers to it as “social and emotional learning,” “social-emotional learning,” or just SEL for short. Generally they speak only in vague generalities using soothing language while dealing with the public.

And it’s true, some of what falls under the SEL umbrella is fairly harmless.

But then again, the food pellets that contain rat poison are fairly harmless, too—at least until the poison, which is just a trace component in the pellets, is digested by the intended victim.

Similarly, SEL all seems innocent enough at first glance.

“Social and emotional learning (SEL) is the process through which children and adults understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions,” explains the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), one of the leading outfits promoting SEL.

The way proponents explain it, SEL is simply aimed to help children do well emotionally and succeed.

What could be wrong with that?

Well, CASEL’s website, a review of SEL programs, and educators themselves reveal a great deal more about the agenda. And it’s not pretty.

Political Extremism and Radical Values

Behind the nice public facade lurk swarms of psychologists, psychiatrists, “educators,” and radical leftists hoping to exploit a century of psychological research for the purpose of molding children’s beliefs and “deconstructing” the values parents seek to instill.

“With a growing number of partners, CASEL is creating a more comprehensive approach to education, one that will lead to a more equitable, just, and productive society,” the organization’s website boasts under the headline “SEL as a Lever for Equity,” hitting multiple key buzzwords associated with the far-left “social justice” movement.

In other words, one of the purposes of SEL—as its leading promoters admit—is to reform society.

Among the webinars offered there are “SEL as a Lever for Equity and Social Justice,” and also a lecture on how to use SEL to “support antiracist practices.” Another webinar outlines how to use policy to “dismantle inequities.”

Again, the leftist buzzwords are everywhere. And that isn’t an accident.

Under SEL Competencies, CASEL drops multiple bombshells acknowledging the far-left globalist indoctrination taking place under the guise of “social” and “emotional” learning.

“SEL competencies can be leveraged to develop justice-oriented, global citizens, and nurture inclusive school and district communities,” it states, adding that the programs will involve getting children to “assess power dynamics” and confront “issues of race and class across different settings.”

The children are also expected to “develop an understanding of systemic or structural explanations for different treatment and outcomes.”

In short, they are expected to believe the highly controversial hypothesis that America is awash in “systemic” and “structural” racism, and that only massive government-led social engineering can fix it.

The children are also expected to accept and agree with the artificial divisions being fomented along “race” and “class” lines as part of the now-obvious effort to “divide and conquer” America.

Put simply, this is all blatantly Marxist “critical theory” rhetoric masquerading as “education.”

It’s extremely dangerous.

In Practice, Educators Shine the Light

A review by The Epoch Times of a wide range of SEL programs used across the United States found that all contain similar extremism, along with highly controversial teachings on sex, sexuality, gender, race, racism, class, economic liberty, family, marriage, and more.

Interviews with educators and a review of their writings on the subject were also very revealing.

In short, the real goals of SEL go far beyond “helping” children socially and emotionally. And it isn’t difficult to find that out.

In fact, in practice, SEL is frequently and explicitly used in public schools to instill certain attitudes and values in children that many parents, if not most, would find controversial at the very least.

For example, public-school teachers in Florida, to comply with SEL mandates, were ordered to show a number of videos to their middle school students.

These included propaganda videos promoting homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, “diversity,” “inclusion,” and more.

Regardless of one’s views on these subjects, countless parents—especially those from faith traditions including Christianity, Islam, or Judaism—would find the effort to obliterate traditional sexual morality and even biological sex in children’s minds to be objectionable.

Numerous other highly controversial political, religious, economic, and worldview positions are treated as “correct” by the forces behind SEL.

More than a few self-styled SEL educators are very open about how they intend to use SEL to brainwash children.

Open Circle Director Kamilah Drummond-Forrester, who supports “social and emotional development for children,” wrote openly at EdSurge.com about weaponizing SEL to indoctrinate children with her hyper-racialist views.

“Teaching [white children] to be aware of their racial identity would allow them to better understand the privileges that accompany that identity,” she wrote, adding that this would help them dismantle the “concept of ‘whiteness.’”

“Social and emotional learning (SEL) has an important role to play in that education.

“One of the core competencies we focus on, as a necessary foundation for the others, is self-awareness. That self-awareness must include race,” she continued, without acknowledging that many parents probably don’t want their children obsessing about “race” or being propagandized by a far-left activist posing as an educator.

In an article for EdTech Magazine on peddling SEL to students amid coronavirus-inspired online learning, writer Adam Stone touts “SEL-oriented teaching materials from the Zinn Education Project.”

Howard Zinn, of course, is the far-left pseudo-historian whose dishonest and politically motivated narratives were most recently debunked by historian Mary Grabar in the book “Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America.”

Zinn described himself as “something of a Marxist,” his biographer recounted.

According to EdTech, though, the “SEL-oriented” propaganda from Zinn is supposedly “aimed at nurturing empathy and compassion.”

In the real world, Marxism has everywhere and always nurtured hatred, death, slavery, torture, starvation, shortages, political repression, religious persecution, and other evils.

And yet under the guise of SEL programs and “nurturing empathy and compassion,” millions of children are having their minds poisoned by being force-fed actual Marxist propaganda and fake history.

And perhaps even more alarming, Stone urges educators to use surveillance tools that give “insight into students’ online behaviors—both inside and outside the virtual classroom—to enhance SEL.”

One of the recommended total surveillance tools offers educators “a holistic view of online activity across search engines, social media, email and web apps,” Stone said, adding that an artificial-intelligence engine would perform “real-time assessments” to “flag online behaviors that indicate emotional distress.”

As explained in an earlier segment of this series, Orwellian technology is used to monitor and track “progress” on adjusting children’s attitudes, too. That data is being compiled and saved forever under the label of “emotional intelligence.”

The Big Brother technology is also used to determine whether further “interventions” are needed to coerce the child into holding the desired attitudes, values, and beliefs about the issue in question.

And, as U.S. Department of Education documents make clear, it will also be used to predict “future behavior and interests” of the children.

Educators Speak Out

Of course, educators who have seen through the agenda reject SEL as a massive threat to America’s children.

One of those who spoke out against the SEL abuses taking place in her school, Jennifer McWilliams of Indiana, was even fired for being too vocal about it.

“The thing I find to be the most disturbing about social emotional learning is how well it disguises its true sinister motives,” she told The Epoch Times. “Parents do not understand that SEL psychologically manipulates children to question (and eventually rebuke) any Christian or conservative beliefs that may be taught in the home.”

While parents are led to believe that SEL is like teaching children The Golden Rule, “it is quite the opposite,” McWilliams said.

“Social emotional learning is rooted in progressive, social justice ideology that divides anyone who questions the radical groupthink agenda,” she said. “From my personal experience, not only do parents not understand it but teachers and administrators don’t either.”

SEL also represents the “brainwashing of our children,” McWilliams continued, noting that it trains children to “compromise on everything” with no consideration of what is taught in the home.

“These programs rely on a bombardment of propaganda, conditioning, and role playing to separate children from God and the nuclear family,” she said, saying SEL was the vehicle used to get children to accept as truth the narratives behind Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) and Black Lives Matter (BLM).

The popular SEL program used in McWilliams’s school, Leader in Me, was designed to “shift the culture of the school to influence children’s morals and values based on progressive social justice standards,” she said, adding that it became ubiquitous on campus.

When she began publicly speaking out about it on social media, she was fired for supposedly making the school look bad.

“Parents must speak up and take back control of the influence in their children’s lives. If not, the kids will pay with their freedom,” McWilliams said.

The Occult Origins of SEL

The story behind SEL is even more troubling.

According to a history of SEL by CASEL, the term “social and emotional” originated in a meeting at the Fetzer Institute, a shadowy New Age powerhouse created by wealthy New Age guru and late media baron John Fetzer.

One of the founders of the SEL movement, David Sluyter, served as president and CEO of the organization.

“Our mission is to help build the spiritual foundation for a loving world,” the group states on its website, adding that it is working toward a “transformative sacred story for humanity in the 21st century.”

According to Brian Wilson’s book “John E. Fetzer and the Quest for the New Age,” Fetzer was, among other things, a public and fervent devotee of Alice Bailey, the controversial occultist who founded the Lucifer Publishing Company (now known as the Lucis Trust).

So obsessed was Fetzer with Bailey that he and his people would regularly recite her “Great Invocation,” which she claimed was given to her by spiritual beings known as “ascended masters,” Wilson documents in his book.

The Fetzer Institute didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. CASEL initially suggested it would make somebody available for an interview, but didn’t follow up despite multiple requests.

More than a few other prominent names in education were similarly enamored with Bailey’s bizarre teachings from supposed spiritual entities.

United Nations World Core Curriculum author Robert Muller, for instance, who served as assistant secretary-general of the U.N., said in the teachers’ manual that his U.N.-backed global school curriculum was based on the teachings of Bailey and one of her “ascended masters.”

The values being taught to children under Fetzer-inspired SEL programs feature remarkable similarities to those taught by John Dewey, a man almost universally known among educators as the founding father of America’s “progressive” education system.

Dewey, who was inspired by the Soviet educational system, was a co-author and signer of the Humanist Manifesto, a religious document rejecting God and prescribing collectivism as the cure for society’s ills.

For at least 12 years—more if they go to college—American children are indoctrinated into the collectivist values of Dewey’s religion, which was essentially just warmed-over communism and atheism hiding behind a religious facade.

Interestingly, as early as 1898, Dewey himself expressed an understanding of the need to utilize psychology, a discipline then still in its infancy, if the plan to re-shape Americans through “education” was going to succeed.

Even more interesting, perhaps, is the fact that Bailey, citing her ascended masters, recognized the importance of Dewey’s educational schemes in achieving her goal of a one-world order with a global religion.

“Our problem is to attain the kind of overall synthesis that Marxism and neo-Scholasticism provide for their followers, but to get this by the freely chosen cooperative methods that Dewey advocated,” Bailey wrote in her book “Education in the New Age.”

Funding and People

Even a brief review of the funding and individuals behind SEL also reveals a great deal about the agenda.

On its website, CASEL lists, among other financiers, billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Gates, who has a friendly relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping, put almost $300 million behind the Obama-backed Common Core standards, which formally nationalized and helped globalize America’s education system.

Before that, Gates signed a deal with UNESCO, the subject of part nine in this series, to work on globalizing the world’s education systems.

Also listed among the financiers of CASEL is Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which CASEL said “provides generous funding to CASEL to support school districts and their capacity to promote social and emotional learning.”

For some background, the recently deceased patriarch of the family, David Rockefeller, wrote in The New York Times in 1973 that “the social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.”

Rockefeller also boasted in his autobiography “Memoirs” of “conspiring” with a “secret cabal” of globalists, “against the best interests of the United States,” to build a “One World” political and economic system.

Aside from its financiers, CASEL’s leading super-stars also suggest something is amiss, to put it mildly.

Consider the involvement of radical Stanford educator Linda Darling-Hammond, a board member emeritus of CASEL and known associate of communist terrorist turned educator William Ayers.

Ayers’s Weather Underground group set off bombs across America in cooperation with communist Cuban intelligence. The FBI operative who infiltrated the group’s leadership, Larry Grathwohl, revealed that the organization’s leadership was plotting to exterminate millions of Americans in camps.

Interestingly, Darling-Hammond had an opportunity to test out her educational quackery unimpeded in the Stanford New Schools. The results are now in: In 2010, Stanford New Schools placed in the lowest-achieving 5 percent of schools in California, according to multiple reports.

More than a few other colleagues of Ayers are or were also involved with CASEL and SEL, with his University of Illinois at Chicago being central to the scheme. At least 3 of 13 members listed on CASEL’s website came from that university’s Department of Education and Psychology.

SEL was formally unveiled in the late 1990s. However, the real history behind it goes way back to Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist who studied how to effectively brainwash children to become good communists.

Vygotsky’s contributions in laying the foundations for SEL are widely acknowledged among practitioners and even in the academic literature (pdf).

Interestingly, Vygotsky was a close colleague of Ivan Pavlov, the Soviet psychologist famous for his behavioral-conditioning experiments on dogs.

Vygotsky had been inspired, in part, by American psychologist and educational researcher E.L. Thorndike, a student of close Dewey-ally and associate James McKeen Cattell of Columbia University.

In fact, Vygotsky wrote the foreword to the Russian translation of Thorndike’s “Principles of Learning Based Upon Psychology” published in Moscow in the mid-1920s.

Thorndike didn’t bother to conceal his views on education: Children should be educated like circus animals, and it should be so arranged that the child will be incapable of not doing what the trainer wants.

Vygotsky, too, had grandiose ideas about how Soviet “education” and “psychology” would be used to fundamentally transform the individual, and ultimately, mankind.

“It is education which should play the central role in the transformation of man this road of conscious social formation of new generations, the basic form to alter the historical human type,” Vygotsky wrote in 1930 in the journal of the All-Union Association of Workers in Science and Technics for the Furthering of the Socialist Edification in the USSR.

“New generations and new forms of their education represent the main route which history will follow whilst creating the new type of man,” he added.

SEL is simply the latest tool of the collectivist education establishment in its fiendish drive to create this “new type of man”—a collectivist man who will mindlessly submit to the tyranny of his overlords, without the intellectual ability to effectively resist.

Conclusion

Today, while most educators and parents have little understanding of what is going on, SEL has become ubiquitous in government schools across the nation.

National Education Association (NEA) Foundation Global Learning Fellow Wendy Turner, a second-grade teacher and self-styled “SEL warrior” quoted in an article on the NEA’s website, explained that SEL is now the top priority for schools.

“SEL is the foundation, the heartbeat of the classroom,” she said. “It’s about connecting everybody and making them feel safe and secure before you get to the academics.”

In a U.S. Department of Education report, a “review” of existing studies called for subjecting “the entire student body” to constant SEL programming “in order to reinforce social and emotional learning not only in the classroom but also on the playground, in the cafeteria, and in hallways.” Parents should also “reinforce” it at home.

But the facts are now clear: The SEL craze is an extreme threat to America’s youth—and to individual liberty.

The scheme isn’t about helping children at all. Instead, it’s about manipulating and conditioning America’s youth to hold the values and beliefs that the education establishment wants to instill.

Unfortunately, those values and beliefs are incompatible with individual liberty, Western civilization, the U.S. Constitution, the nuclear family, religious liberty, and other key values that underpin the United States.

Parents and policymakers must urgently protect the nation’s children from this dangerous threat.

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This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

Understanding that future generations are the key to building political power and lasting change, socialists and totalitarians of all varieties have gravitated toward government-controlled education since before the system was even founded.

The communist “Frankfurt School” was no exception in its affinity for “educating” the youth.

Almost 100 years ago, a group of socialist and communist “thinkers” led by Marxist law professor Carl Grünberg established the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. From there, they would move to the United States. And from their new home in New York City, the subversive ideas they espoused would eventually infect the entire planet like a deadly cancer—mostly through the education system.

A Cultural Revolution

The group actually had its genesis in Moscow before officially being founded in 1923. By the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks—as Antonio Gramsci would later conclude from his Italian prison cell—realized a change in tactics was needed. The much-anticipated violent revolution of the proletariat predicted by Karl Marx to bring about communism, it turned out, would be much more difficult in Western Europe and the United States than previously anticipated. In fact, it wouldn’t be possible at all without first breaking down the cultural barriers to collectivism, they reasoned.

As such, the Communist Internationale and mass-murdering Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin’s minion Karl Radek arranged a meeting at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. Among the participants, according to historical records, were Soviet secret police boss Felix Djerzhinski, Hungarian Bolshevik “cultural commissar” Gyorgy Lukacs, and Communist Internationale (Comintern) bigwig Willi Muenzenberg.

At the Moscow meeting, the conspirators decided that what was needed was a more gradual “cultural revolution,” or what eventually came to be known as “cultural Marxism,” in the West and beyond. To advance that program, the subversives agreed on a sinister but brilliant plan. This would involve the destruction of traditional religion and the Christian culture it produced, the collapse of sexual morality and the deliberate undermining of the family, and a wrecking ball to infiltrate and demolish the existing institutions.

Some of these men had experience. For instance, Lukacs, who served as “minister of education and culture” in the Bolshevik Hungarian regime of Bela Kun, had introduced all manner of perversion and grotesque “sex education” in public schools, starting in elementary school. It was part of a campaign to destroy “bourgeois” Christian morality and sexual ethics among the youth. The objective was to eventually de-Christianize Hungary, thereby facilitating a total communist restructuring of the human mind and all of society.

Moving to America

A key tool of these conspirators in Moscow would come to be known as the Frankfurt School. From the Institute in Frankfurt, and later in New York, these cultural revolutionaries would promote feminism, communism, atheism, mass migration, globalism, humanism, multiculturalism, nihilism, hedonism, environmentalism, and all sorts of other “isms” that tended to undermine individual liberty, traditional culture, and morality. Rampant morality-free sexuality and Freudian pseudo-psychology were central to the agenda.

To anyone who has studied America’s public education system today, which spends far more time peddling these “isms” to captive children than providing actual education, the stench of the Frankfurt School’s machinations is unmistakable. In fact, the whole system reeks.

Despite some differences, the group maintained close ties with the Soviet Union. Ironically, though, analysts have long argued that the work of the institute peddling Nietzsche and others helped lay the foundation for the National Socialist takeover of Germany. As the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler gradually parted ways with the more internationally minded socialist tyranny of the butchers in Moscow, the civilization destroyers at the ISR fled to the United States.

There, with crucial assistance from socialist and humanist “education reformer” John Dewey and his disciples, these characters attached themselves to Columbia University’s important Teachers College in 1934. Dewey had been a leading “philosopher” and “educator” at Columbia, retiring just a few years before the Frankfurt School influx was in full swing. Others settled at Berkeley, Princeton, and Brandeis.

With Rockefeller money, Dewey would play a key role in helping the Frankfurt School’s operatives put down roots in America. More on the role of the major foundations in subverting American education will be detailed in an upcoming piece of this series.

The importation of Frankfurt School luminaries was a match made in totalitarian heaven, as Dewey and his disciples had much in common with the cultural Marxist social revolutionaries.

As previously recounted in this series on education, for instance, Dewey was a devoted fan of the Soviet model. In fact, he wrote glowing reports about the supposed successes of Soviet communism in the “New Republic” magazine. Dewey was especially infatuated with the indoctrination centers masquerading as schools—and particularly how they were instilling a “collectivistic mentality” in the children. Dewey’s collectivist, anti-Christian “religious humanism” also appealed to the Frankfurt operatives.

Once the institute’s minions set up shop at Columbia and other prestigious U.S. academic institutions, the Frankfurt School’s rhetoric had to change, at least superficially, as Americans were still ardently devoted to God, country, family, and individual liberty. And so, instead of speaking openly of Marxism and communism, Frankfurt School subversives spoke of “dialectical materialism.” Instead of attacking the family, they attacked “patriarchy.” But the agenda remained the same.

Fighting ‘Fascism’

Almost as soon as they arrived, they began plotting the destruction of America’s traditional values, religion, and form of government under the guise of fighting “fascism.”

Indeed, the luminaries of the Frankfurt School, who represented a wide variety of disciplines, used “education” as a crucial tool for advancing their totalitarian, civilization-destroying philosophies. But they infected much more than just the education system, with their sick ideas spreading out like a poison throughout the intellectual veins of America: the social sciences, entertainment, politics, and beyond.

One of the ways in which Frankfurt School operatives and academics advanced their desired social changes via education was through so-called critical theory. In his 1937 work “Traditional and Critical Theory,” ISR Director Max Horkheimer argued that critical theory—a neo-Marxist tool used to demonize the market system, Christianity, and Western civilization—was aimed at bringing about social change and exposing the alleged oppression of people by capitalism.

Another useful tool for undermining freedom and traditional society was the 1950 work by key Frankfurt School theorists known as “The Authoritarian Personality.” These social “researchers” claimed to discover that the traditional American male and father was actually “authoritarian” because, among other reasons, he held traditional values. Thus, the “patriarchy” and the traditional family—among the most important barriers to tyranny—came under relentless attack as a precursor to “fascism.” Public schools were viewed as tools to combat this alleged problem, and they did so vigorously.

Influence

To understand just how central Teachers College (infected by Frankfurt School and Dewey ideas) would become to the public education in the United States, consider that, by 1950, estimates suggest that a third of principals and superintendents of large school districts were being trained there. Many of these left the college with radical ideas about reality, government, society, family, and economy that came straight from Dewey and the Frankfurt School.

Of course, the damage to America from anti-God, anti-freedom German “intellectuals” began even before the Frankfurt School migrated to Columbia. In fact, Dewey was trained by G. Stanley Hall, who was among the many Americans to study under professor Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig University.

Among other notable highlights, Wundt pioneered the idea of the human being as a soulless animal. Essentially, he viewed people as biological stimulus-response mechanisms that could, and should, be trained in a manner similar to circus animals. This Darwinian, materialist view of the human being reigns supreme today in the education system but has been catastrophic.

Fringe left-wing extremists who support the Frankfurt School’s anti-American agenda have dishonestly attempted to paint criticism of the relevant institutions, academics, and their ideas as “anti-Semitic.” But in reality, the dangerous ideas pose a major threat to Judaism, too, and so countless patriotic and liberty-minded Jews have also joined the fight against the Frankfurt School’s poison.

The threat of these subversives and their cultural Marxism has been recognized at the highest levels of the U.S. government, even recently. Former National Security Council Director of Policy and Planning Richard Higgins, for instance, blasted it in his now-notorious 2017 “Higgins Memo” to President Donald Trump about the ongoing war against the administration and the United States.

The wars against Trump and America “cannot be separated from the cultural Marxist narratives that drive them,” warned Higgins, saying cultural Marxism was most directly tied to the Frankfurt School. “The Frankfurt strategy deconstructs societies through attacks on culture by imposing a dialectic that forces unresolvable contradictions under the rubric of critical theory,” he warned. Higgins then quotes Herbert Marcuse, a leading Frankfurt thinker, on how to crush the political and cultural right through persecution and phony “tolerance.”

To this day, reflecting the ISR influx of the early 1930s, Teachers College remains a leading purveyor of socialist poison masquerading as “education.” Its recently released book list includes titles by Bill Ayers, the communist terrorist whose terror group Weather Underground, working with communist Cuban intelligence, bombed the State Department, the Pentagon, Capitol Hill, police stations, and more. The Teachers College Press fall selection also includes endless nonsense on “social justice,” racialism, multiculturalism, and other “isms” with roots in Marxism and Frankfurt School strategies.

With society and civilization becoming increasingly unstable as the final vestiges of traditional education are destroyed, the Frankfurt School and its American allies such as Dewey would be pleased with their handiwork. After all, cultural Marxists including Gramsci and ISR thinkers believed that once the old order was destroyed via a “long march” through society’s institutions, Marxism could eventually triumph. On the education front, they now appear largely victorious.

But their overall victory is hardly assured. What comes next depends on whether Americans can be roused from their slumber in time to restore civilization. As the socialists and totalitarians understood well, education will be the key either way.

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This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

Widely recognized as the founding father of America’s “progressive” public education system, John Dewey was a man on an unprecedented religious mission. With more fervor and devotion than many Christian missionaries or Islamic jihadists, he set out to win America over to his religious worldview.

Like the collectivists whose shoulders he stood upon, government-controlled education was Dewey’s weapon of choice. And now, more than a century after he began, it’s clear that Dewey and his disciples are winning—big time.

When Dewey launched his crusade to erode the faith and individualism of Americans, the United States of America was among the most devoutly Christian nations that the world had ever known. Church and the Bible were an inseparable part of life and education for virtually everyone.

A Christian Country

In 1643, in the Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies, the earliest settlers in America declared, “We all came into these parts of America with one and the same end and aim, namely, to advance the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ and to enjoy the liberties of the Gospel in purity with peace.” (Emphasis added)

Centuries later, that was still the prevailing sentiment. In 1856, for example, the U.S. House of Representatives, which represents the people more directly than any other federal body, put it this way: “The great vital and conservative element in our system is the belief of our people in the pure doctrines and divine truths of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” Numerous similar declarations came from Congress before and after that.

In 1892, meanwhile, even the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Holy Trinity Church v. the United States that America “is a Christian nation.”

As recently as the 1970s, nine out of 10 Americans still identified as Christians. Today, however, just two-thirds of Americans identify as Christians, with those numbers plummeting further every year.

Even in the Bible Belt today, significantly less than half of Americans attend church weekly, with church attendance dropping to less than 20 percent in some states.

And even among those self-proclaimed Christians, studies and surveys by the Nehemiah Institute and other organizations reveal that the vast majority reject the Biblical worldview that defined Americans for centuries.

With the decline of Christianity and the biblical worldview among Americans, the free political institutions they gave rise to have eroded, too.

Probably the most important single figure responsible for the rapid implosion of Christianity in America and across the West more broadly was Dewey.

Humanist Manifesto

In a previous article in this series, Dewey’s well-known collectivist views were documented, including his fascination with the Soviet Union and his desire to radically transform the United States into a socialist nation.

The foundation for this transformation was laid in the early 1800s by communist Robert Owen, whose writings on education inspired the Prussian government to take over education. Decades later, Massachusetts Secretary of Education Horace Mann, a collectivist and utopian, would import that statist system to America.

Finally, Dewey would seize control of that architecture, mix it with Soviet ideas and psychology, and provide an enormous boost to its effectiveness in fundamentally transforming America.

Part 3 in this series focused primarily on Dewey’s views on politics, the economy, and education. But Dewey’s religion—often described as “atheism” but, in reality, going beyond that—is a crucial part of the puzzle as well. It’s also inseparable from his views on everything else.

The high-profile reformer didn’t seek to conceal his religious views from the public, and in fact, he was a key player and one of the first signatories behind the first “Humanist Manifesto.” This important religious document essentially fused faith in the non-existence of God with a fanatical devotion to socialism and communism, creating potentially one of the most dangerous religions of all times.

The very first tenet of this “new” religion was a direct and open attack on the Bible and the prevailing religious orthodoxy of the time—in particular the notion that an omnipotent and omniscient God had created the universe and the Earth as described in Genesis 1:1, the Bible’s very first verse.

“Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created,” reads the first tenet of Dewey’s religious manifesto. Note the honesty: Dewey and company recognized that their belief system was, in fact, a religion.

Beyond the giant implications for religion, the political and economic significance of this statement is profound, too.

Socialist Aims

America’s Founding Fathers argued that is was a “self-evident” truth that God had created people and endowed them with certain inalienable rights, as explained clearly in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, the very purpose of government, they said, was to protect these God-given rights—life, liberty, and so on.

But under Dewey’s religion, there is no God. And if there is no God, then there can be no God-given rights. In fact, Dewey was openly hostile to the view that anyone had an inalienable right to private property or anything else. After all, if there is no God to prohibit stealing private property, or even murder, there is no transcendent reason why anybody should have inalienable rights to anything. This is a recipe for totalitarian rule.

The socialist and collectivist mentality behind this was all spelled out clearly in the Humanist Manifesto itself.

“The humanists are firmly convinced that existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate and that a radical change in methods, controls, and motives must be instituted,” they wrote. “A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible.”

This is the exact same rhetoric used by every communist tyrant of the 20th century: The profit motive is bad, so radical change, including collective ownership of the means of production, must be instituted. This has been the guiding vision of such luminaries as Castro, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Chavez, Maduro, the Kim dynasty, and many more. Countless millions have died as a direct result of these ideas being imposed.

But individualist American Christians with a devotion to God and God-given liberty were hardly going to just give up their ingrained beliefs, their hard-won freedom or their property rights without a fight. So Dewey and his disciples—often funded with capitalist Rockefeller money, ironically—understood that “education” would be crucial to changing people’s attitudes.

It had to be done quietly, though. “Change must come gradually,” Dewey explained in an 1898 essay calling for schools to place much less emphasis on reading and writing, and much more emphasis on collectivism. “To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction.”

A National Religion

Charles F. Potter, a fellow signer of the “Humanist Manifesto” and a Dewey associate, spelled out explicitly what few Americans were willing to see or understand at the time. “Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every public school is a school of humanism,” he wrote in his 1930 book “Humanism, a New Religion.”

“What can theistic Sunday school, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teachings?” Potter asked rhetorically. Of course, the answer is practically nothing, as the humanists well understood.

A few decades after Potter’s bombshell, the U.S. Supreme Court would formalize it all. After centuries of being at the center of American education, the Bible and prayer in schools, as mandated by state and local authorities from the time public education came into being, were suddenly found to be “unconstitutional.”

Supposedly, Bible and prayer in local schools represented a violation of the First Amendment’s prohibition on Congress passing laws respecting an establishment of religion. The legal “logic,” or lack thereof, required the court to twist itself into pretzels.

A well-educated public would have seen right through the deception. After all, when the First Amendment was written and ratified, and long afterward, most of the states actually had established churches.

But after decades of declining educational standards and humanist propaganda in schools, the monumental decision that would transform America was meekly accepted by much of the populace.

At least one justice, Potter Stewart, understood what was really happening.

“Refusal to permit religious exercises thus is seen, not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism,” he wrote in his dissent, using the term “secularism” to describe what Dewey and his cohorts would have referred to as humanism. (Emphasis added)

In short, under the guise of upholding the Constitution, the U.S. Supreme Court did the very thing the Constitution was supposed to prevent Congress from doing: It established a national religion and compelled Americans to support it with their taxes, and more significantly, with their children.

The reason for the First Amendment was clear—the Founders were worried that some denomination of Protestant Christians might try to establish itself as the official national religion. They never would or could have imagined less than two centuries after creating the new Christian nation, that the institutions they established would force anti-Christian humanism on the American people via public education and judicial fiat. But that’s exactly what happened.

Government schools across the United States to this day pretend to be “neutral” on matters of religion, even while they indoctrinate children into believing in humanism, as if humanism were not a religious belief system. Dewey and his fellow humanists recognized it as a religion, though. And federal courts have, too.

As recently as 2014, a federal court in Oregon declared as much. “The court finds that Secular Humanism is a religion for Establishment Clause purposes,” wrote Judge Ancer Haggerty in the ruling, which didn’t concern schools in this case but was nonetheless highly relevant to education.

Today, Dewey’s totalitarian religion of humanism is being inculcated into the mind of every child attending public school, often by unwitting teachers who don’t even realize it. Polls now consistently show over half of young Americans identify as socialists.

Dewey would be proud. But Americans should be outraged

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This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.