For years the border crisis has been a problem, but it’s not until thousands of illegal Haitian migrants hit the border in the past week that Al Sharpton shows up.
Everyone knows that “resist we much” Sharpton is is one-trick pony, using racial grievance as his financial profession. His effort today, at the Del Rio border encampment, was met with strong pushback by the local community. WATCH:
It's the calm before the storm, folks. Enjoy it. I don't know for sure of what will happen tomorrow, but my gut feeling is that it has the potential to be huge.
Here's tonight's news:
Deterrence is the ancient ability to scare somebody off from hurting you, your friends, or your interests—without a major war.
Desire peace? Then be prepared for war. Or so the Romans believed.
It’s an easily understood concept in the abstract. But deterrence still remains a mystical quality in the concrete since it is only acquired with difficulty and yet easily forfeited.
The tired democracies of the 1930s learned that lesson when they kept acquiescing to Hitler’s serial aggressions.
Hitler’s Germany foolishly later attacked a far stronger Soviet Union in 1941, given Moscow’s lost deterrence after its lackluster performances in Poland and Finland, its pact with the Nazis, and its recent purges of its own officer corps.
Deterrence is omnipresent and also applies well beyond matters of war and peace. The current crime wave of murder and violent assault in our major cities is the wage of loud efforts to defund the police and contextualize crimes as somehow society’s rather than the criminal’s fault.
As a result, lawbreakers now believe there is a good chance that robbing people or hurting or killing them might result in monetary gain or at least bloody satisfaction. They no longer fear a likely sentence of 30 years in prison. So, they see little risk in hurting people. And innocents suffer.
With a border wall, an end to catch and release, and tough jawboning of the Mexican and Central American governments, a new American deterrent stance in 2019-20 discouraged once unstoppable waves of illegal immigrants.
Northern bound migrants knew that even if they reached and crossed the border, there was a good chance all such effort would be for naught, given quick apprehension and deportation.
So, in their rational calculations, illegal aliens waited at home for less deterrent times. And they found them when Joe Biden stopped construction on the wall, renewed catch and release, and eased pressures on Mexico to interrupt caravans headed northward.
Abroad, Donald Trump restored the strategic deterrence lost by his predecessor.
Barack Obama had dismissed the murderous ISIS as “JVs”—and they thrived. He shrugged when China stole territory in the South China sea to build military bases. He dismantled missile defense in Europe to coax Vladimir Putin to behave during his own 2012 reelection campaign.
Obama loudly announced redlines in Syria while never intending to enforce them. He gave the Taliban back their incarcerated terrorist leaders in exchange for the return of the American deserter Bowe Bergdahl. And he sent the Iranians nocturnal cash to coax them to conclude an appeasing Iran Deal. Aggression followed as U.S. deterrence eroded.
As an antidote to all that, Trump destroyed the ISIS “caliphate.” He obliterated an attack of Russian mercenaries in Syria. He took out terrorist masterminds like Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and the ISIS cutthroat Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
To dangerous actors, an unpredictable Trump appeared likely to strike back if provoked. As a result, America’s enemies become fearful of challenging the United States. And its friends and neutrals were more ready to join a power again deemed not just reliable, but willing to take reasonable risks to assist in their safety.
Key to deterrence is for all parties to know beforehand the relative power of each and the likelihood that it may be used. When strong powers unfortunately transmit signals of weakness, whether deliberately or inadvertently, then weak powers are confused and come to believe their rivals may not be so strong as their armed forces appear. Often, unnecessary wars are the unfortunate result.
These are quite dangerous times because Joe Biden has cut the defense budget. He withdrew recklessly from Afghanistan, leaving behind American citizens, our Afghan allies and friends, and tens of billions of dollars worth of modern weaponry and equipment.
He angered our NATO partners who were abandoned with some 8,000 troops, in a country which the United States had once implored them to enter. He has politicized the military into a caricature of an elite woke top brass at odds with traditionalist enlisted soldiers.
The result is that our enemies—Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the Chinese Communist apparat, the Iranian theocrats, the lunatic North Koreans—are now pondering whether Biden’s reckless laxity is an aberration. Or is it now characteristic of his administration? Or does it even signal a new weaker and confused America that offers enemies strategic openings?
Like the would-be felon, or the potential border crosser, our enemies know the United States has the power to deter unwanted behavior, given its vast military, huge economy, and global culture.
But they may have contempt that with such strength comes such perceived confusion. And thus, in the manner of an emboldened criminal, or illegal immigrant, they try something that they would otherwise not.
In sum, deterrence at home and abroad is now dangerously lost. And it will be even scarier trying to recover what was so rashly and foolishly thrown away.
Why Bureaucrats Are Sitting on So Much Money-Losing Real Estate
The very size and scope of the United States federal government is likely something that Ludwig von Mises could not have imagined, despite writing the book which foretold the results of such a behemoth, Bureaucracy. Early on Mises wrote, “Congress has in many instances surrendered the function of legislation to government agencies and commissions, and it has relaxed its budgetary control through the allocation of large appropriations for expenditures, which the Administration has to determine in detail.” That was in 1944.
For instance, the federal government makes the simple process of disposing of government properties into a kafkaesque nightmare. “The federal government has long owned more real estate than it knows what to do with—buildings that sit empty and sites that are underdeveloped—but it must jump through hoops before it can sell its holdings,” writes Jane Margolies for the New York Times. “So surplus properties languish while taxpayers foot the bill for maintenance.”
In 2016 legislation was passed so the government would get a move on in liquidating its vast decaying real estate portfolio. The Public Buildings Reform Board was created to oversee this task. Moving at the speed of government, it took three years for five board members to be sworn in, while two seats remain vacant.
After finally selecting a board, the Government Accountability Office determined that the group did not adequately document how it went about selecting properties for sale. Then the board was sued for attempting to sell a Seattle building which is a repository of important tribal records. And, it turns out, the Government Services Administration (GSA), the agency which does the actual selling, doesn’t follow the board’s advice.
Only one property approved for sale by the board has been sold. One.
The GSA is the government’s landlord. However, the agency occupying a building must declare it as “excess” before the GSA can sell. But, what’s in it for an agency to have a building sold? There is no economic incentive. In private business, “There cannot be any question of clinging to unprofitable lines of business if there is no prospect of rendering them profitable in a not-too-distant future,” Mises wrote.
But, as Ms. Margolies explains, in the world of government, “It might cost an agency less to maintain a building on an annual basis than to relocate employees to a smaller space and prepare the old building for sale, even if it makes sense in the long run to get the property off its books. And agencies may not benefit financially from a sale because the proceeds often go directly to the Treasury Department.”
And the red tape does not end there. Other agencies get first crack at vacant properties. If there are no takers, buildings must be made available to the homeless or other nonprofit uses. Of course, these decisions aren’t made overnight, so the process can take years.
“In the federal government’s 2015 fiscal year,” writes Margolies, “agencies reported more than 7,000 excess or underutilized properties, according to the Government Accountability Office.”
Also in 2016, the Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act, known as (don’t laugh) FASTA, was passed. High speed and skirting procedural hoops were the buzzwords for FASTA. Total projected earnings over a six-year period were projected to be $7 billion. The board even resorted to hiring an outside brokerage firm to sell the high-valued properties in bulk to make their goal.
However, being a bureaucratic agency, the board members changed their hive mind and decided “to sell the properties itself, one by one, on its auction website—the same place where it unloads used forklifts, office furniture, railroad spikes and combat boots,” Margolies explains.
Last year, the GSA sold fifty-nine properties for $52.59 million, or less than 1 percent of FASTA’s goal. But it must have been close enough for government work, because Christina Wilkes, an agency spokeswoman, told the Times, “G.S.A. determined that offering properties based on an individual asset sale, rather than in a bundled portfolio sale, was the best course of action.”
So far this year, “eight of the FASTA properties have been put up for auction; of these, a parking lot in Idaho Falls, Idaho, has been sold for $268,000,”
“It is frequently asserted that bureaucratic management is incompatible with democratic government and institutions,” wrote Mises. “This is a fallacy.”
Entrepreneurship is nowhere to be found in government. “Bureaucratic management means, under democracy, management in strict accordance with the law and the budget,” Mises explained. “It is not for the personnel of the administration and for the judges to inquire what should be done for the public welfare and how the public funds should be spent.”
The Public Buildings Reform Board is putting together a list of properties to be listed for sale in December. Reportedly lessons have been learned. In order to make the process more efficient, “the board has beefed up documentation.”
“We learned a lesson,” board member Angela Styles said. “Communication is just absolutely critical.”
It’s clear this bureaucracy, like all others, is incapable of learning. The board has given itself until 2025 to reach its goals.
The Biden administration and the corporate media’s lies about the border are collapsing and neither institution is prepared to do damage control.
While the White House frantically repeats lies about the administration’s handling of the border — including that officials are expelling migrants under Title 42, even though federal authorities are releasing thousands of illegal aliens into the U.S. — even Politico admits that “Everyone’s mad at Biden over migration.”
For months, Republicans have called out the Biden administration’s incompetence at the border. Just this week, 26 Republican governors begged Biden to “take action to protect America, restore security, and end the crisis now.” But even more telling than the GOP’s cries for action is the lack of approval from U.S. adults on President Joe Biden’s immigration policy. In a mid-September Reuters/Ipsos poll, only 38 percent of those surveyed said they approved of Biden’s handling of the border crisis his administration created and exacerbated.
While the White House does damage control and tries to win back public approval points by claiming that the administration is using Title 42 to deal with an influx of illegal aliens in Del Rio, Texas, it’s also fighting off the increasingly progressive sect of congressional Democrats who are demanding the administration “immediately put a stop” to deportations.
“Right now, I’m told there are four flights scheduled to deport these asylum-seekers back to a country that cannot receive them. Such a decision defies common sense. It also defies common decency and what America is all about,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told his congressional colleagues on Tuesday.
Schumer did not hold back any criticism from the administration for keeping what he called a “hateful and xenophobic” product of former President Donald Trump.
Even Biden’s corporate media allies who go to great lengths to cover up his other failures are noting the White House’s inability to fully address the humanitarian and political sides of this crisis. MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle condemned Vice President Kamala Harris, who Biden appointed to address the “root cause” of illegal migration to the U.S., this week for ignoring the mounting problems in Del Rio.
“How about the message from our vice president, where is she? She was supposed to be in charge of all of these migration issues, going to those Northern Triangle countries that’s obviously not Haiti, that was one of her first international trips with the message do not come here illegally,” Ruhle said on MSNBC. “People aren’t listening. What is she saying now?”
Similarly, CNN’s anchor Brianna Keilar pressed Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on why he is still refusing to call the months-long struggle at the Southern border a “crisis.”
“This is really — this is something we haven’t seen before. A — this camp inside of the United States, with thousands of people, what is the reticence to call something that is so clearly a crisis a crisis?” Keilar asked.
“I call it a heartbreaking situation, a tremendous challenge,” Mayorkas said.
'Domestic Terrorism' Fears Will Be Used To Justify Increased Snooping and Harassment
(zz/STRF/starmaxinc.com/Newscom)
After the pro-Trump demonstrations and breach of the Capitol on January 6, the Biden administration is promising a new era of FBI snooping, harassment, and provocateuring.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs in a statement released on Tuesdaythat his FBI "has surged resources to our domestic terrorism investigations in the last year, increasing personnel by 260 percent." Those remarks are bad news for anybody who is worried about federal overreach.
The events of January 6, Wray said, prove "a willingness by some to use violence against the government in furtherance of their political and social goals." Furthermore, "the insular nature of their radicalization and mobilization to violence and limited discussions with others regarding their plans," Wray said, "increases the challenge faced by law enforcement to detect and disrupt the activities of lone actors before they occur."
Of course, experience shows us that when it comes to the FBI, "detect and disrupt" often means "encourage and then arrest" people who were no real threat until the FBI itself goaded them. Deciding beforehand that a set of people with certain beliefs inherently require more probing federal investigatory eyes all but guarantees a repeat of the sort of harassment of Muslims in the U.S. that followed 9/11.
As reported in The Huffington Post:
The FBI has more than doubled its domestic terrorism caseload in little more than a year and a half…"from about 1,000 to around 2,700 investigations," Wray said….The Biden administration is seeking more than $100 million in new Justice Department spending to address "emerging domestic terrorism threats," including $45 million for the FBI to add more than 80 new special agents and nearly 100 new FBI positions to help "detect and disrupt domestic terrorism (DT) threats nationwide."
Federal law enforcement officials and their allies often fret about the lack in many cases of specific "domestic terrorism" statutes that can be brought to bear when people commit certain crimes against a person or property. But in America, this is as it ought to be: Crimes against persons or property should be punished by law without worrying overmuch whether someone had a particular political thought or belief that motivated the crime.
Indeed, despite how the protests and Capitol breach on January 6 have been used as a prime example of a domestic terror threat and inspired Wray's anxieties, the 650 arrested so far for their actions on that day have been charged just with the specific crimes they are alleged to have committed, without being formally characterized as domestic terror. For the 62 who have pled guilty already, the majority pled to "Parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building" (though at least 50 of the other arrested face charges related to violent assaults on officers). That the charges for January 6 involved what the accused did and not what they believed is the right approach.
Still, increased law enforcement focus on domestic terrorism predates January 6 and the Biden administration. America already saw in fiscal year 2020, as reported by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), "183 domestic terrorism prosecutions filed by U.S. Attorneys' offices around the country—the highest total since government tracking began a quarter of a century ago. This compares with 69 such prosecutions in fiscal 2017, the first year of the Trump Administration, 63 domestic terrorism prosecutions during FY 2018, and 90 such prosecutions during FY 2019."
Those prosecutions involved a variety of underlying behaviors for which the "terror" designation was basically an add-on. As Syracuse's TRAC reported, "cases U.S. Attorneys' offices categorized as domestic terrorism were brought using a variety of lead charges, including….assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers or employees….threats against the President and successors….knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building or grounds….the importation and storage of explosives….civil disorders….interstate communications; and…making threatening communications. In addition, regulatory violations were sometimes the lead charge, such as failure to comply with official signs or creating any hazard on property to persons or things."
In other words, most of these "domestic terror" cases did not involve acts that the average citizen would fear as on par with the colloquial definition: actual deliberate destruction of life or property for a political cause.
A discussion from earlier this summer on the Lawfare blog helpfully summed up just how intrusive federal law enforcement is going to be in the name of fighting domestic terrorism:
the newly established Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships (CP3) [within the Department of Homeland Security] is intended to leverage community relationships in order to empower neighbors, friends, and family to recognize the signs of radicalization and report them to the appropriate authorities…. Along with the newly minted CP3, DHS established a new domestic terrorism branch within its Office of Intelligence and Analysis in May. The primary goal of the branch is to improve intelligence gathering on domestic terrorism, especially through social media monitoring.… [T]he department is now working to survey social media postings for indications of domestic attacks or DVE-related activities.
That this sort of law enforcement, concerned as it is with crimes that have not yet occurred, requires unlovely levels of snooping is clear from Wray's statement to the Senate on Tuesday that "the problems caused by law enforcement agencies' inability to access electronic evidence continue to grow." In other words, Wray is worried that any citizen can communicate to anyone anywhere without the FBI snooping on them.
These are worrying developments that can and should be checked before Americans find themselves the victims of a massive expansion of the national security state just as they did after 9/11.
It’s a rule in the national media that vaccine hesitancy is worthy of shame and scorn, right up until it collides with their most precious cause, the Black Lives Matter movement.
Hesitant (white) nurses? Outcast.
Hesitant (white) Facebook moms? Shun.
Hesitant (white) Trump supporters? Guillotine.
But there’s oddly been no prescription for the Black Lives Matter crew in New York who are accusing the city of racial discrimination by mandating vaccines for public, indoor activity.
Hawk Newsome, the co-founder and chairman of Black Lives Matter Greater New York, was quoted Saturday in the New York Times saying that restaurants “are using vaccine mandates to enforce their racist beliefs and excluding black patrons.”
At a protest Monday in front of New York restaurant Carmine’s, Chivona Newsome, also a co-founder of the group, said of the vaccine mandates, “What is going to stop the Gestapo, I mean the NYPD, from rounding up black people, from snatching them off the train, off the bus?”
She further issued the threat that BLM was “putting this city on notice that your mandate will not be another racist social distance practice” and that “Black people are not going to stand by, or you will see another uprising .” She said vaccine verification “is not a free passport to racism.”
The catalyst for those remarks was an incident at Carmine’s last week wherein three black women from Texas were charged for assaulting a hostess at the restaurant, allegedly over a vaccine verification dispute and, as a lawyer for the women subsequently claimed, because the hostess, who is of Asian descent, used a racial slur.
A lawyer representing Carmine’s has disputed the allegation about a racial slur. Video footage of the incident includes no audio, but what can be seen is that the three women were being led inside the restaurant by a member of staff who was not the hostess. But once inside, the hostess is seen exiting to return to her post, when all three customers turn to follow her back outside. One of them approaches the hostess from behind and begins speaking as the others circled. A fight ensues.
Lawyers for both sides agree, though, that the dispute was not over the vaccination status of the three women, but over additional members of the party, several men, who did not have vaccine cards.
The details are kind of beside the point, though. Black residents make up a higher rate of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in New York City than white residents. They’re also vaccinated at a lower rate, with 45 percent of New York City’s adult black population having been fully vaccinated, versus 56 percent of white adults.
I don’t care if anyone, regardless of race, chooses not to receive a vaccine against COVID. That’s their dice to roll. But imagine a white Trump supporter saying his right to dine indoors among strangers shall not be infringed.
Dr. Leana Wen would be on CNN for 24 hours straight assuring us that there is no constitutional entitlement to Restaurant Week.
But because we’re talking about Black Lives Matter, which can do no wrong in the media’s eyes, suddenly vaccine mandates aren’t so pressing an issue. Suddenly, groups of people with a specific demographic raging against mandates aren’t so worthy of ridicule.
Remember that the next time a mousey CNN correspondent does one of those ungodly long segments on harm to “public health” caused by vaccine hesitancy in rural communities (Trump supporters). This isn’t about public health. It’s about politics.
Clarence Thomas and the Declaration of Independence
Source: Erin Schaff/The New York Times via AP, Pool
Last week, Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas arrived at the University of Notre Dame to speak about the Declaration of Independence.
Speaking invitations like this that Thomas accepts are few and far between.
Anyone who cares about our country and listens to this address will wish that he would agree to speak more.
His presentation was a brilliant and profound articulation of what America is about at its core.
It is what every American needs to hear in these troublesome and divisive times.
Thomas tells his own story and how his life's journey led him to understand what America is about.
He grew up poor near Savannah, Georgia, raised by his grandparents, under the tutelage of his grandfather, a devout Catholic and American patriot.
Thomas' grandfather understood that the injustices of the country were not about flaws in the country but about flaws in human beings in living up to ideals handed down to them. What needed to be fixed were the people -- not the nation.
This insight strikes at the heart of the divisions going on today that are so bitterly dividing us.
But Thomas left his grandfather's house and went to college in the midst of the civil rights movement. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and Thomas became filled with bitterness and the sense that America is an irredeemably flawed, racist nation, which is so much in the spirit of the times today.
In his own words, "What had given my life meaning and sense of belonging, that this country was my home, was jettisoned as old-fashioned and antiquated. ... It was easy and convenient to fill that void with victimhood. ... So much of my time focused intently on our racial differences and grievances, much like today."
"As I matured," Thomas continued, "I began to see that the theories of my young adulthood were destructive and self-defeating.....I had rejected my country, my birthright as a citizen, and I had nothing to show for it."
"The wholesomeness of my childhood had been replaced with an emptiness, cynicism, and despair. I was faced with the simple fact that there was no greater truth than what my Nuns and grandparents had taught me. We are all children of God and rightful heirs to our nation's legacy of equality. We had to live up to the obligations of the equal citizenship to which we were entitled by birth."
As he continued work in the federal government, Thomas became "deeply interested in the Declaration of Independence."
"The Declaration captured what I had been taught to venerate as a child but had cynically rejected as a young man. All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights."
"As I had rediscovered the God-given principles of the Declaration and our founding, I eventually returned to the church, which had been teaching the same truths for millennia."
Despite the strident voices dividing us today, Thomas observes "there are many more of us, I think, who feel America is not so broken, as it is adrift at sea."
"For whatever it is worth, the Declaration of Independence has weathered every storm for 245 years. It birthed a great nation. It abolished the sin of slavery. ... While we have failed the ideals of the Declaration time and again, I know of no time when the ideals have failed us."
The Declaration of Independence "establishes a moral ideal that we as citizens are duty-bound to uphold and sustain. We may fall short, but our imperfection does not relieve us of our obligation."
Thomas' message about the Declaration may be summarized: There are eternal truths; they are true for all of humanity; and it is the personal responsibility of each individual to live up to them.
Thomas' detractors are those who reject these premises. This defines the culture war that so deeply and dangerously divides America today.
Much of the analysis surrounding Joe Biden’s downfall has centered on national approval ratings. RedState has covered that issue extensively, noting that the president appears to have no support floor. That makes him much more like George W. Bush and less like Donald Trump.
But underneath the national discussion lies the environment that truly matters as we head into 2022, and it’s not looking good for Biden and his cohorts.
Biden faces dismal job approval ratings in several battleground states, including Michigan, Virginia, and Iowa, where the president garnered the lowest score since George W. Bush in 2008 in a survey this week.
Fewer than one-third of Iowans approve of Biden’s job as president at 31%, compared to 62% who disapprove, according to a Sept. 12-15 poll for the Des Moines Register/Mediacom by Selzer & Co. Seven percent said they were unsure.
The Des Moines Register poll is a “gold standard” poll. It’s the one everyone watches during the presidential primaries because it’s always so accurate, and they have Biden down at 31%. Things aren’t any better in Michigan, a state that has a Democrat governor and two Democrat senators. A recent poll has the president at 39% approval there, with those who “feel strongly” about their disapproval doubling those who strongly approve.
Then there’s Virginia, where Glenn Youngkin is making an unexpected comeback in the upcoming race for the governorship against Terry McAullife. As the Examiner points out, Biden won that state by 19 points in 2020. Now, Youngkin, who was left for dead a month ago, has closed to within six points and leads with independents.
That race will be a major barometer for 2022. If Youngkin loses by less than 10 points, that’s a major shift away from Democrats compared to just a year ago. And if the Republican somehow pulls off the upset, it’ll be a ground-shaking victory that sets the stage for an absolute Democrat wipeout next year.
Regardless, all of these state-level data points show an upcoming buzzsaw for leftist dreams. While Biden isn’t personally up for re-election in 2022, if the GOP retakes just the House, it effectively ends his presidency. Further, if they retake the Senate, it ends his ability to add radicals to the judiciary. That would complete the collapse of power.
If I’m making predictions, I think Democrats have passed the point of no return. I can not fathom what event could happen that would turn around the current trajectory. Republicans just have to shut up and let the left continue to implode and they will win the House by default next year. If they show some spine in opposing the Biden agenda, including during this upcoming shutdown and reconciliation fight, I think the Senate will be in play as well. GOP voters are out there. They are just looking for some motivation to really blow things out of the water.
The Biden presidency is in a total freefall, and all of it is completely self-inflicted. History says the first mid-term is almost always a political graveyard for the party in power. Couple that with redistricting and these terrible state-level numbers and things are looking bleak for the Democrats. But I believe the final nail in the coffin is what’s happening at the border. Normal Americans are seeing scenes they’ve never seen before while the White House spends its time lying about CBP agents and whips. The disconnect is too stark, and it will matter.
Remote Learning Killed The Myth That Homeschooled Children Are The Ones Who Lack Socialization
After more than a year of remote learning, students in New York City finally went back to school. Sadly, the city’s Department of Education fear of COVID-19 and servitude to teachers’ unions means that these schools will more closely resemble Siberian gulags than places of learning.
A recent opinion piece in the New York Post details the ridiculous lengths that many of Gotham’s schools are going to in order to defeat the virus, including “masked and distanced” recess, health concerns over many sports and other extracurricular activities that require “increased exhalation,” and the cancellation of field trips, group projects, and class parties. Despite returning to school, New York City kids are still forbidden from connecting meaningfully with their peers.
Ask any homeschooling parent to discuss the pushback that he’s received from friends and family over the years and he’ll tell you that the need for his children to be “properly socialized” has topped the list of concerns. “How will your kids learn to interact with different kinds of people if they don’t go to school?” these mostly well-meaning people ask, implying that learning at home will doom your children to a life of misanthropic isolation.
The long-standing myth that homeschooled children grow up to be socially awkward is easily debunked because it proceeds from the false (indeed, patently absurd) premise that, prior to the advent of mass public schooling in the mid-nineteenth century, children did not learn to get along with either their peers or other social groups. This myth persists despite multiple studies that reveal that a majority of homeschooled children are just as well-socialized (or even better socialized) than their public school peers. The socialization process is somewhat different for homeschooling parents, but these differences (largely in parental supervision and diversity of age range in social groups) are key benefits of homeschooling, not flaws.
For decades, members of the educational establishment have used the need for socialization to argue that kids are better off in government-run schools than being taught at home. Recent developments in American education during the Age of COVID, however, reveal that this argument is not just fundamentally flawed, but officially dead.
Claims about the social benefits of modern K-12 education never made much sense to begin with. In this model, instead of organically meeting and interacting with others through a variety of community institutions (neighborhoods, churches, etc.), children spend most of their social time being forced to engage with a very small subset of individuals: those who were born within a few months of them. This artificial social situation exists nowhere else in American society; only in schools do we see such limits imposed on human interaction. As Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, wrote in 2012, “There is nothing natural about segregating kids by age. That isn’t how families work; it isn’t what the world looks like and it runs counter to the way that kids have learned and socialized for most of human history…”
In response to COVID-19, most schools have doubled down on this artificiality by imposing further strictures on their young charges, such as mask mandates and social distancing. Leaving aside the question of whether such strictures are even necessary given the low risk that COVID-19 poses to children, there is little doubt that they interfere with the school’s supposedly important mission of socialization.
The masks touted as a sine qua non by the CDC and teachers’ unions blockchildren’s recognition and understanding of vital nonverbal communication cues, especially at younger ages. Social distancing expectations limit their interaction in school-based nonacademic situations, such as recess and extracurricular activities. As for remote learning, the educational “nuclear option” against the spread of the virus, one need only look at the various pre-pandemic studies on the damaging effects of screen time on child development to see the problems with this approach to both education and socialization.
When parents speak up regarding these matters, the educational establishment usually replies with some variation on “Hey, kids are resilient.” This is certainly true, but the fact that the educrats are willing to blithely dismiss these legitimate concerns reveals that any claims about the vital role of schools when it comes to proper socialization are hollow at best.
But that didn’t stop the educrats from claiming otherwise in order to maintain their power over American children. As schools started to emerge from lockdown at the end of 2020, stories about the lockdown’s negative effects on the mental health of students began to appear. The social isolation caused by remote learning, these articles said, confirmed the important role of government-run schools in the proper socialization of students.
Yet as any student will tell you, not all social interaction is positive. Bullying (both physical and digital) is on the rise in our schools, resulting in a documentable correlation between the beginning of the school year and feelings of depression and even thoughts of suicide in students. Is such emotional turmoil really a sign that our schools are providing proper socialization?
Common sense suggests that a socially well-adjusted student should be able to weather temporary bouts of social isolation by relying on other mental resources. Given the struggles of students during the pandemic, what passes for socialization in schools is more of a crutch for students to lean on than a set of tools for preserving their mental health. Take that crutch away in a lockdown and the students collapse.
Homeschooled children are certainly not immune from depression or other forms of mental illness, but their situation allows for greater social stability and positive interaction in the face of COVID-19. Their social circle is founded not on a massive faceless institution, but on the more intimate confines of the home and family. The greater degree of control that responsible parents have over the social circle of their homeschooled children both expands the number and types of people they interact with while limiting negative socialization.
As homeschooling continues to grow, we should expect the educational establishment to continue to push aggressively for children to return to the “care” provided by government schools. Because these schools have clearly failed to provide opportunities for healthy and effective socialization both prior to and during the pandemic, homeschooling parents can feel free to ignore the socialization argument that educrats will inevitably put forward.
Article by Oleg Atbashian in The American Thinker
Today I came across this quote:
"Freedom is the right to inequality."
—Nikolai Berdyaev, a Russian Christian philosopher (1874–1948)
The quote was accompanied by an anonymous comment in Russian, which I'd like to translate here. It pretty much echoes my own thoughts, laid out in Shakedown Socialism.
People, by their nature, are not uniform. We are all different, and immediate equality among us can only be achieved by forcibly bringing us to the lowest common denominator.
- Equality between the rich and the poor can only be achieved by confiscating the riches.
- Equality between the strong and the weak can only be achieved by emasculating the strong.
- Equality between the smart and the stupid can only be achieved by casting intelligence as a defect.
Thus, a fully equitable society would be a society of the poor, the weak, and the stupid, held together by force.
Let's not forget that the word "equality," coming from a leftist, implies, first and foremost, material or economic equality. It is not the same as "equal rights," but that distinction is never mentioned, as leftists thrive on this confusion in terms. If you accept equal rights, they want you also to automatically accept equal outcomes. On the flip-side, they want you to believe that those who repudiate the idea of equal outcomes also hate the idea of equal rights.
Now, how about an equal right to be unequal?
This conundrum explains why all leftist experiments, starting with the French Revolution, end up in self-destruction: their slogan "freedom and equality" is an oxymoron made of mutually exclusive propositions. Forced economic equality destroys freedom to make life choices, and freedom to make life choices destroys economic equality.
Attempts to reconcile freedom and equality by brute force destroy both freedom and equality, leaving such a society with nothing but the brute force of ruling elites.
