READ HOW LIBERALS ARE SHUTTING DOWN FREE SPEECH INSIDE AMERICA’S SCHOOLS STARTING IN KINDERGARTEN RIGHT UP TO THE PhD LEVELS.

The Liberals and the Left are against America. They believe, wrongly that the Constitution gives them the power to regulate everything via “Big Government”. They took over America’s civics education, with the goal of redefining civics education as “progressive” meaning radical left political activism aka Political Organizing.

The pioneers of this movement, originally members of the 1960s radical left, took advantage of the demolition of the old civics curriculum in the 1960s. The Old Civics focused on basic civic literacy —knowledge about the structure of our government and the nature of America’s civic ideal –so as to prepare young men and women to participate in the machinery of self-governance.  The 1960s radicals replaced the Old Civics with a “New Civics” devoted instead to preparing young men and women to be progressive activists.

The latest in centuries of proof that the Left deliberately targets and enlists students in its efforts to “Revolutionize America” comes from a huge 525 page report recently put out by the National Association of Scholars. It chronicles the seemingly overnight rise of “the campus fossil-fuel divestment movement”, which is a boring way of saying leftist groups are stoking and channeling uninformed young people’s hatred of free markets and “agitating them into demanding collectivism”. The National Association of Scholars also puts the lie to “SUSTAINABILITY” in yet another series of in-depth reports.

Remember November 2016? High-school students around the country walked out from school to protest the election of Donald Trump Their “youth development leaders see the youth-led walkouts
as a highly positive form of civic engagement.” Ben Kirshner, the director CU-Boulder’s New Civics program
CU Engage, thinks these protests “are a really important statement of dissent.” But he’s only in favor of street protest so long as the protesters don’t express “racist or sexist ideas.” Amy Syvertsen of the Search Institute specifies that “When people make public statements that are driven from a place of hate, and when they minimize the political and civil rights of others, that is a negative Radical left
protests intended to delegitimate Donald Trump’s presidency before it begins are civic engagement, but any support of Donald Trump crosses the line. It’s their line, … the line that supports their cause, not America’s causes, their efforts to “Revolutionize America”

When someone tells you redistribution is “nice,” if your mind doesn’t immediately go to the law of unintended consequences, the ideas of incentives and tradeoffs, labor camps in Soviet Russia or Communist China, or brownshirts in Fascist Italy, you are more susceptible to being used as a pawn.

And pawns many young people are, even as they believe they’re educated because they went to Swarthmore or Yale, and they got a 4.0 and perfect SAT score. This arrogance this credentialed ignorance engenders is dangerous–and highly useful to dissemblers.

Materials from the report, which contains information from hundreds of documents and interviews, say, “Student activists report that the purpose of divestment is to ‘politicize and radicalize students,’ not to defund the fossil fuel industry.” Note that the latter is the stated purpose, but as the report also points out, this effort does little to actually accomplish its stated goals. That’s because the stated goals are a cover for the real ones, which is mobilizing an army of angry, uninformed college students to pester government officials into progressive policies.
In many ways, the campus organizing the Left has been doing in divestment has helped foster the mentality and infrastructure becoming a contagion on campuses regarding other topics, such as the recent Yale and University of Missouri protests. A 2010 “Swarthmore Mountain Justice” group has become a model for hundreds more agitator cells across the country.

One of several tactics is making a tiny fringe group look a lot bigger and more mainstream than it is. Also recall the test drive this spring: “In Spring 2015, students at 11 campuses held sit-ins for divestment,” the report says. “At Swarthmore, students camped in the finance office for 32 days, envisioning themselves as counterparts to the champions of democracy in the Arab Spring.” Leftist funders and activist organizations are basically working to replicate the campus contagion so it can spread more easily.

It’s also uncanny how the divestment movement uses tactics similar to those of Black Lives Matter activists.
In May 2013, Swarthmore activists hijacked a board meeting with more than a hundred students, grabbing microphones away from board members and ranting about the need for “radical emancipatory change.” When one student rose from the audience and asked the meeting to return to order, the activists clapped her down and told her to leave. In October 2013, board members at another meeting took the precaution to lock their doors; Swarthmore activists filled the hallway and yelled their demands through the door.
Given all the striking similarities between these political-academic agitators, people who want to counter their anti-free-speech and anti-deliberation tactics from obliterating public discourse should read the full report. This isn’t just a campus thing. The Left used similar tactics in, for example, Wisconsin, during the union protests that made Gov. Scott Walker a national figure.

We can expect more of this kind of agitprop, not just on college campuses, but in all of political and public discourse. If you’re used to having your Facebook discussions shut down by that one annoying and really rude guy (or gal) who wants to hurl invective rather than actually sift ideas, even just the short summaries of this report (here) will give you many aha! moments. Realizing that it’s a deliberate tactic, and understanding its particulars, is the first step towards overcoming it.

The New Civics is now endemic in higher education:

• The presidents of more than 1,100 colleges, with a total enrollment of more than 6 million students, have signed a declaration committing their institutions to “educate students for citizenship.”

• The American Democracy Project, an initiative of the American Association of State Colleges and universities (AASCU) in partnership with the New York Times that now includes 250 AASCU-member colleges and universities, seeks to “produce graduates who are committed to being knowledgeable, involved citizens in their communities.”

• Seventy-one community colleges have signed The Democracy Commitment, a pledge to train students “in civic learning and democratic practice.”

• More than 60 organizations and higher education institutions participating in the Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement Action Network (CLDE) have submitted statements committing them to “advance civic learning and democratic engagement as an essential cornerstone for every student.”19

• The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching awarded a “Community Engagement Classification” to 240 colleges and universities in 2015.20 As of 2016, the “civic engagement” movement—a combination of federal bureaucrats, nonprofit foundations, and a network of administrators and faculty on college campuses—has already succeeded in replacing much of the old civics education. It now aims for a broader takeover of the entire university. The goal is to give every class a “civic” component, and to make “civic engagement” a requirement for tenure. The advocates of “civics education” now aim to insert progressive politics into every aspect of the university, to advertise progressive causes to the student body in every class and every off-campus activity, and to divert even larger portions of the American university system’s resources toward progressive organizations.

You can see Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Mussolini and Adolph smiling.. We’re not and neither should you.

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