As Mao Zedong took over China with his communist revolutionaries, he sparked one of the largest mass migrations of the 20th century. Between 1948 and 1950, an estimated 2 million Chinese refugees fled Mao’s regime and escaped to Taiwan and other countries around the world. While Mao was razing and restructuring Chinese culture and society, these refugees were able to begin new lives in safer and freer countries.

While the Chinese mass migration makes the history books, a similar 2-million-in-2-years migration is currently happening—across educational borders. An analysis published by Harvard’s Education Next Institute (EN) recently announced that, between the spring of 2020 and the spring of 2022, “Our polling data indicate that district-operated schools lost 4% of student enrollments to other types of schooling between 2020 and 2022.” EN went on to say, “If that percentage is accurate, it means that nearly 2 million students have shifted from traditional public schools to alternative school arrangements.”

Individual examples of the recent dramatic shift in educational choices are not hard to find. While New York City (NYC) public schools have been steadily losing students over the past five years, they lost 10 percent of their remaining students during the COVID-19 epidemic alone. Those children are not expected to return, and the NYC public school system is now at a 15-year enrollment low. California’s state school system is at a 20-year enrollment low; over 270,000 students have left since COVID. Los Angeles alone lost more than 10 percent of students. The Chicago government school system is projected to have lost 100,000 students—more than 25 percent of total enrollment—by the end of the ten-year period between 2015 and 2025.

And states such as Michigan, Rhode Island, and Minnesota have all experienced drops in enrollment, continuing even after the initial COVID-19 year. Now, EN does caution that “the overall picture shows less change than media reports portray,” and that these trends do not constitute a “mass exodus,” but the statistics are nonetheless remarkably significant.

Harsh lockdown policies and virus mitigation measures have surely been significant in shifting the nation’s educational choices. According to Education Next’s analysis:

“In November 2020, Education Next polling data revealed widespread parental worries about the learning loss, social isolation, emotional distress, and physical inactivity induced by school closures, online learning programs, and other measures designed to prevent Covid spread.”

However, the presence of COVID-19 lockdown policies can’t be the only factor; EN also points out that when pandemic measures were relaxed, their polls showed a notable improvement in parent satisfaction. “By spring 2022 … parental distress had subsided.” Yet enrollments continue to decline. Something else must be up.

As the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) suggests, what started as “pandemic pods” during the thick of the crisis eventually became co-ops and “microschools,” which many families have found to work better for them than government schools. Catholic schools and private schools were more likely to remain open during the pandemic and thus received an influx of students. In short, FEE assesses, “Parents are recognizing that they have many more options for their children’s education and are continuing to abandon government-assigned district schools.”

This change is notably visible in EN’s data. Contrary to their government schools over the same two-year period, private schools (8 to 10 percent), charter schools (5 to 7 percent) and homeschooling (6 to 7 percent) all boasted shares of enrollment greater than when the pandemic started. And the enrollment numbers match the parental polls:

“Parents expressed higher levels of satisfaction with their child’s school if their student was attending a private or charter school rather than a district school.”

This change in the nation’s educational landscape has provoked a range of reactions from the nation’s leaders—on the one hand, no fewer than 18 new states over the past two years have passed laws broadening education choice. However, not all government officials have been as friendly to the widening school choice trend; the U.S. Department of Education recently considered instituting new hurdles for charter schools to receive government funds, inciting bipartisan protest and raising the hue and cry of even powerful liberal advocate Michael Bloomberg. Government reactions to parental choices will likely continue to unfold along one or the other of those two lines, and for Christians, who are commanded to pray for our leaders (1 Timothy 2:1-2), this is both a timely and an important area to focus on.

In a plummeting culture such as ours, educational choice is becoming increasingly imperative. Former governor of Virginia Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, inadvertently expressed one reason why: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” This is a stark departure from the biblical model of education, in which parents are responsible for teaching their children (Deuteronomy 6:7, Ephesians 6:4). Schools help parents accomplish that goal; parents don’t abdicate their responsibility to the school system, and neither should that responsibility be divested from them by force of law.

When parents decide that their child would be better served by a private school, charter school, homeschooling, or online learning, it should not be the authority of the school district, local, state or federal governments to tell them otherwise. Doing so flips the biblical model on its head, and comments such as McAuliffe’s are foundationally wicked, because they imply that schools, not parents, are the ultimate authority over the education of children.

Education freedom should be championed in every state in the Union. Make no mistake about it, parents who want their children to attend government schools should be able to do so. However, the rising migration across educational borders—only accelerated by the the pandemic—also means “we, the people,” must work to reduce all barriers to education choices so that parents, not the government, are enabled to make the best decisions possible about their children’s development. This should be a consideration in picking candidates to vote for in this upcoming election, and in every future election we participate in.

Schools are filled with teachers that want the best for their students. However, in recent days schools have become a political bastion for the leftist agenda. Although some teachers and the teachers’ unions have become warriors for the leftist agenda, others are fighting, upholding standards as the last vestige of conservative Judeo-Christian values slips from the public school system. Many parents have become familiar with the idea of Critical Race Theory, also known as CRT, and recognize the harm it causes to their children. However, what is not recognized is that they are coming for the teachers next. Teachers refusing adherence to the policies of CRT, the NEA, and the teacher’s unions are soon targeted, not unlike the events that occurred during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Recently, Xi Van Fleet of Leesburg, Virginia, made several comments at a school board meeting for the Loudoun County school district, describing herself as a survivor of the Chinese Communist regime under the control of Mao Zedong. She expressed her concern over the grooming of children into social justice warriors and the rhetoric used in China now appearing in the public schools within the United States. Her concerns regarding the indoctrination of students are warranted. What is needed too is a thorough discussion of exactly how CRT will affect teachers that refuse to promote Marxism.

Parents and educators will only understand what is coming by understanding how Marxist and other totalitarian leaders treated educators in the past. In the Cultural Revolution that Xi Van Fleet survived, a movement known as the Red August of 1966 changed education dramatically. Chairman Mao Zedong, paranoid following the failures of the Great Leap and fearing members of his own party, called for the elimination of religion, traditions, and the educators teaching those traditions. He recruited youth starting in colleges but then extended the program to high school and middle school children. The student group was known as the Red Guard. The Red Guard, made up primarily of teenagers, quickly became the militant arm of the Maoist regime. Leaders told students to report any individual not following the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and their philosophies. Violators faced public humiliation and beatings by their students. Many were murdered.

Although physical violence is unlikely here in the United States, character assassinations started this spring. In New York City, private school teacher Paul Rossi was fired after expressing his concerns with CRT and the division of Zoom meetings by race. In Chicago, Palatine High School terminated teacher Jeanne Hedgepeth for comments she made on her personal social media accounts. She is now in the process of suing the school district for violating her First Amendment rights.

A Portland teacher, Katherine Watkins, who supports the teaching of CRT, recently claimed that teachers refusing to teach CRT are akin to pedophiles, actions warranting dismissal for abuse. So, we see the labeling and name-calling have already begun. Teachers are losing jobs and reputations as they oppose the leftist agenda of indoctrination. It will not end with name-calling and job loss. Cancel culture ensures every area of the individual’s life is annihilated simply for disagreeing with the regime.

The teacher’s unions jumped on the bandwagon as well. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten has promised a fund of $2.5 million for the legal defense of any teacher that uses CRT in the classroom in states where the theory is banned. Will the teacher’s unions defend the rights of teachers who oppose CRT? That is highly unlikely. Weingarten has compared those opposed to CRT to Holocaust deniers.

Parents, conservative teachers, and Christian leaders must come together if there is any hope of defeating the leftist onslaught against our students and their teachers. Sacrifices must be made,  forcing teachers into leaving behind good paying public-school positions, teaching instead in the less lucrative private school setting. It may mean parents removing their children from government schools and paying tuition in private schools or transitioning to homeschooling. Some should give up their time, money, and privacy to run for a school board. It is time to be involved, attend school board meetings, join the PTA, and make your voices heard. Your teachers need your support and your resolve. Most importantly, teachers must resolutely teach the truth even as the new Red Guard of the NEA seeks to humiliate them and cancel their employment.

We saw it during the Super Bowl on Sunday, as many of the commercials fell flat. We saw it with the cancelling of the Washington Redskins name, only to replace it with the Washington Football Team. And now we’re seeing it with the replacing of the Aunt Jemima brand with – get ready – the Pearl Milling Company. (You heard that correctly.) The cancel culture is stifling creativity.

As for the Super Bowl, the New York Post cited Bill Oberlander, co-founder and executive creative of ad agency Oberland on January 24. He said,

“There is trepidation around Super Bowl advertising this year. For the Super Bowl, you generally go big or go home. I think brands are going home rather than spending tens of millions of dollars and not getting it right. They’re saying, ‘Let’s wait until this s—storm clears.’”

Simply stated, there were too many minefields to navigate. Best to play it safe rather than offend. The results on Super Bowl Sunday, for the most part, were quite bland.

Speaking to this very situation, but from a different, artistic perspective, British actor John Cheese of Monte Python fame, noted that cancel culture “misunderstands the main purposes of life which is to have fun.”

He explained, “Everything humorous is critical. If you have someone who is perfectly kind and intelligent and flexible and who always behaves appropriately, they’re not funny.” He added that

“there’s plenty of people who are PC [politically correct] now who have absolutely zero sense of humour. I would love to debate, in a friendly way, a couple of ‘woke’ people in front of an audience. And I think the first thing I would say is, please tell me a good ‘woke’ joke.”

In reality, the joke is often the woke culture itself.

When it came to the renaming of the Redskins, had there been a genuine outcry over the name from a significant number of Native Americans, that would have been one thing. (Different polls yielded different results, with some indicating strong Native American support for the Redskins brand.) Just imagine what would happen if a Gentile sports team named themselves the Jewboys. Or if a white sports team used the n-word in its name. Enough said.

The problem with the Redskins name is that, to my knowledge, most of the outcry came from the woke left rather than from the Native American community itself. And, since the woke, cancel culture does a better job of tearing down than building up, the Redskins name was, for the moment, replaced with nothing. “Go, Washington Football Team!” Better safe (and bland and generic and lifeless) than sorry.

Thanks, cancel culture, for nothing (literally).

As for Aunt Jemima, had the image and name been exploitative, that would have been one thing. Had it glorified slavery (or even minimized the horrors of slavery) or caricatured African Americans, that would have been good enough reason to rebrand. But that was not the case.

As noted by Bryan Preston at Red State,

“Nancy Green was born a slave in Kentucky but thanks to pancakes she became an advertising pioneer. Green one of the world’s first brand influencers. She brought the Aunt Jemima character to life back in 1893 and made a good living portraying Aunt Jemima until her death in the 1920s.”

Indeed,

“Not only was she free, America would make her famous, and products with her face on them would be in just about every kitchen in the country.  Green was an overcomer who used her position and the money it paid her to become an activist and a Christian missionary when she moved to Chicago.”

He rightly asks, “Why throw her away?” (See his article for more on Nancy Green’s successor.)

There was actually something personal and positive about the Aunt Jemima brand, putting a face on a product. And this was not done in a demeaning way. Instead, the message was, “What I’m cooking is so good that you want to buy my brand.”

And so, millions of Americans bought that brand for decades, until now. I wonder what Nancy Green would say about all this today?

In the end, the cancel culture actually cancels culture, demolishing everything it finds offensive and replacing it with uncreative blandness.

Interestingly, an article originally published March 2017 stated that, “Research shows that the political ideology of communism restricts innovation, which is the panacea for economic growth and long-term prosperity today.”

And on an artistic, creative level, I wonder how much beauty and art and innovative writing and new musical composition can be traced back to Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China or Kim John-un’s North Korea.

It looks like the cancel culture has a soulmate.

This article was originally published at AskDrBrown.org.

Videos have been circulating of young bestial thugs—whites and blacks, women and men—shrieking in the faces of al fresco diners, commanding them to raise a fist in solidarity with BLM/Antifa totalitarians. To leftists nothing says freedom quite like coerced performative acts. See for yourself the future of the Democratic Party:

Maybe these young bestial thugs never learned about Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the Red Guard composed of young people that Mao used to intimidate, humiliate, and attack his political enemies. The New York Times described the Red Guard’s efforts:

Students who answered Mao’s call for continuing revolution … targeted political enemies for abuse and public humiliation. … Under a campaign to wipe out the “Four Olds”—ideas, customs, culture, habits—they carried out widespread destruction of historical sites and cultural relics.

Or maybe today’s totalitarian culture-destroyers are inspired by the Red Guard, whose salute they mimic.

Before Chairman Mao thought to use easily indoctrinated youth to advance political oppression, the Nazi Regime had mastered the tactic. Here’s an eerily relevant description of the Nazi Party’s exploitation of German youth to advance the pernicious Nazi cause:

Millions of German young people were won over to Nazism in the classroom and through extracurricular activities. In January 1933, the Hitler Youth had approximately 100,000 members, but by the end of the year this figure had increased to more than 2 million. By 1937 membership in the Hitler Youth increased to 5.4 million before it became mandatory in 1939. The German authorities then prohibited or dissolved competing youth organizations.

Education in the Third Reich served to indoctrinate students with the National Socialist world view. Nazi scholars and educators glorified Nordic and other “Aryan” races, while labeling Jews and other so-called inferior peoples as parasitic “bastard races” incapable of creating culture or civilization.

After 1933, the Nazi regime purged the public school system of teachers deemed to be Jews or to be “politically unreliable.” Most educators, however, remained in their posts and joined the National Socialist Teachers League. 97% of all public school teachers, some 300,000 persons, had joined the League by 1936. In fact, teachers joined the Nazi Party in greater numbers than any other profession.

In the classroom and in the Hitler Youth, instruction aimed to produce race-conscious, obedient, self-sacrificing Germans who would be willing to die for Führer and Fatherland. Devotion to Adolf Hitler was a key component of Hitler Youth training. …

Schools played an important role in spreading Nazi ideas to German youth. While censors removed some books from the classroom, German educators introduced new textbooks that taught students love for Hitler, obedience to state authority, militarism, racism, and antisemitism.

Since some Americans—particularly leftists—struggle with analogical thinking, let’s paraphrase that description to make its relevance easily comprehensible:

Millions of American young people were won over to socialism/Critical Race Theory/“LGBTQ” theory/feminist theory in the classroom and through extracurricular activities. By 2020 membership in or support for what became known as the Intersectionality Regime had increased dramatically. Dominant leftist cultural forces had persecuted youth organizations like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts into reinventing themselves to align with the Intersectionality Regime.

Education in America served to indoctrinate students with the socialist/racialist/feminist/pansexual world view. Race, sexuality, “gender,” and Marxist scholars and educators glorified people of color, homosexuals, opposite-sex impersonators, and Marxists while labeling whites, men, heterosexuals, conservative Christians, and capitalists hateful oppressors and bigots incapable of creating culture or civilization.

The race/“gender”/sexuality/class Intersectionality Regime purged the public school system of teachers deemed to be members of the oppressor classes or to be “politically unreliable.” Most educators, however, remained in their posts and joined the race/“gender”/sexuality/class Intersectionality Regime. In fact, teachers joined the Intersectionality Regime in greater numbers than any other profession.

In the classroom, corporate boardrooms, social media, the arts, the mainstream press, and organizations like BLM™ and Antifa, instruction was aimed to produce race-conscious, class-conscious, man-hating, sexual-deviance-supporting activists who would take the fight to the streets. Devotion to the Intersectionality Regime was a key component of cultural conditioning.

Schools played an important role in spreading Intersectionality ideas to American youth. While censors removed some books from the classroom, educators introduced new textbooks that taught students love for socialism, racism, feminism, homosexuality, the “trans” ideology, and anti-Christianity.

Co-founder of the Toronto chapter of BLM™, Yusra Khogali, once tweeted, “White ppl are recessive genetic defects. this is factual. … black ppl simply through their dominant genes can literally wipe out the white race if we had the power to.” She tweeted, “Please Allah give me the strength to not … kill these … white folks out here today.” In 2015, she tweeted, “whiteness is not humxness. infact, white skin is sub-humxn.”

Kinda, sorta, maybe sounds like a Nazi talking about Jews.

Compulsory performance of the Sieg Heil/Red Guard/Black Panthers/BLM salute is part of the effort to compel freethinkers to pretend to embrace the ideas of slave reparations, systemic racism, and collective guilt, which hold individuals culpable for sins they have never committed.  The notion of collective guilt for the past sins of other individuals is both unbiblical and poisonous.

In a speech delivered in 1988 in Vienna on the 50^th anniversary of the Nazi occupation of his home country of Austria, Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl warned against the dangerous idea of “collective guilt”:

[M]y father … died in Theresienstadt Camp; my brother … did not return from Auschwitz; my mother … was killed in the gas chambers of the same camp; and my first wife[’s] …  young life came to an end in Bergen-Belsen Camp. And yet at the same time I will ask you not to expect to hear from my mouth a single word of hatred. For whom should I hate? I knew only the victims; I do not know the perpetrators—at least, not personally. And I categorically refuse to attribute collective as opposed to personal guilt.

There is no such thing as collective guilt. Believe me, today is not the first occasion on which I have said that. I have been saying it since the day I was liberated from my [fourth and] last concentration camp. It is my conviction that anyone who assigns collective guilt to every Austrian [or German] citizen between the ages of zero and fifty is committing a reprehensible and insane act. Or, to put it in psychiatric terms: it would be reprehensible if it were not insane–and it would be a relapse into the Nazi ideology of collective family guilt [the difficult German word Sippenhaftung here refers to the dangerous Nazi dogma of kin liability, tainted blood(line), or genetic guilt by association]. Let this be said to all those who believe they have the right to expect people to feel guilty or even ashamed of something they did not do or fail to do but something their parents or grandparents had to answer for. …

I’ll tell you I think there are only two ‘races’ of people: those who are decent people, and those who are not. That distinction goes right through every nation, and within nations right through every political party and every other group. Even in the concentration camps here and there we came across more or less decent people who belonged to the SS. And in the same way there were also scoundrels amongst the prisoners.

The decent people are in the minority; they have always been in the minority and, I think, always will be. But the danger lies elsewhere. The danger is to be found in a regime or a system which brings the scoundrels to the top; in other words which puts the reins of power in the hands of the worst representatives of the people. Therein lies the true peril. And no nation … can claim to be immune from such danger. Which is why I presume to say that in principle any country is capable of perpetrating the holocaust.

… In my view there are only two … types of politicians. The first is the politician who believes that the end justifies the means—any means, even terrorist means. The second type is profoundly aware that there are means that can desecrate even the most sacred ends.

[T]he need of the day … is that all men of good will should finally reach their hands out to each other across all the graves and divisions.”

One of my daughters once expressed disappointment that I hadn’t saved any of my clothes from the early 1970’s. I explained that although styles return, they never return in exactly the same form. Same goes for history, which explains why even remembering history doesn’t guarantee we won’t repeat it. Today’s cultural revolution has all the earmarks of past revolutions, and yet too few Americans recognize those earmarks because on the surface this one appears different.

Unless we tear the blinders from our eyes and look clearly at the big picture, the republic as we have known it will be gone in a short time. The children and grandchildren of Millennials will grow up in a world of oppression and depravity the likes of which America has never known but civilizations around the world and throughout history have.

Viktor Frankl points to the solution to evil in our midst:

[P]lease remember one thing: Resistance always requires heroism. And there is only one person of whom anyone has the right to expect heroic acts. And that is oneself.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/BLMs™-Totalitarian-Youth.mp3

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