Names, please! I would like to read what those “right leaning educators” have to say. It is just hard to find.
It is very easy to find Far Left “educators” engaged in indoctrination rather than education. That is one of the reasons so many of today’s academic books in many disciplines are worthless. There are a few old Black guys who think straight, talk straight, and try to educate – but it is tough to find many current university “professors” who are courageous enough to wander off the Far Left plantation.
College students do not have ideological beliefs other than those they acquired in school. The educational system is, and has always been, to a large degree a place where societal values are inculcated in students. In the present case, the Regime’s values are largely at odds with the republic’s founding principles.
However, once students leave these indoctrination centers, many have a distressing tendency to adopt heterodox views. Nevertheless, most remain conformist. The departure from (relatively) recent history is that
Universities have become largely unproductive of useful scholarship and contact with reality, preferring instead to toe the ideological line. Like Lysenkoism, this will increasingly have consequences in the real world outside the academy. In short, if 2+2=4 is racist, buildings will start to fall down.
Universities have become unsustainably expensive to operate, largely because the administrator-to-faculty ratio has increased dramatically. Nonproductive staff not only inflate costs, they also throw sand in the gears.
Point #2 is largely a subset of Point #1 since one reason for the bloated administration is to serve ideological, rather than educational, ends. No need to burn it down; it’s enthusiastically burning itself down. The foreign student cash-cow will abandon these institutions once they realize that a degree in gender studies is of little use and engineering departments that are increasingly concerned with DEI are no longer teaching engineering. Lysenko was eventually disgraced, but not before being indirectly responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people.
Media and entertainment in all its manifestations, has a profoundly-greater influence on how most young people think, and they certainly do have ideological beliefs acquired outside of school, based on everything they see and hear.
From what I’ve heard from one student, courses focused on fact-checking, debunking, and counter-acting absurdly-ridiculous right-wing conspiracy theories is trending.
Aww… c’mon. You love to disagree. You can be honest about at least one thing.
The media are simply one head of the Regime hydra. The educational establishment is another of its heads. They are all promoting the same ideological agenda: the mind virus, if you will, circling back to the title of this topic. Switching to the virus metaphor, it has many vectors. A vaccine is desperately needed.
My vaccine was the Nazarene Church. By that I do not mean the socially conservative values of a fundamentalist church immunized me. What immunized me was a combination of the more irrational aspects of the church combined with parents that were loving enough to recognize when it was time to stop cramming it down my throat. So during a critical developmental phase critical faculties were permitted to grow without having to take on the horrors of media and academia. My cohort in liberal denominations were not so lucky. They did not develop those critical faculties organically. They were handed their ‘critical’ faculties by media and academia along with the liberal denominations. So the seeds of the destruction of the mind virus were planted and grew during my college years. That was when I watched my Boomer cohort succumb to their faux critical faculties. I didn’t escape entirely unscathed but I at least retained enough independence of mind that people sometimes mistake me for a genius.
Regime hydra? I think you’re confusing the media and academia with the 3 branches of government, which is the only Regime hydra.
Most of those who are being marginalized and prevented from promoting their own ideological agenda (that the majority of people characterise as ‘backwards’) will always make these sorts of claims about the media, academia, and so on.
I think that may also be why most of them cheer authoritarians and dictators - because those sorts are their only hope for a way to impose their backwards ideology and will on an unwilling majority. For better or worse, majority rule is a core principle of what the founders had envisioned, but which has become corrupted beyond recognition by money. Legislators don’t represent their constituents as was envisioned. Instead, they mostly represent the special interests that pour cash into their pockets (a.k.a, campaign funds). Donald Trump is a part of that problem, not a solution to it. Harris isn’t any better, just another one of them, and that’s why I don’t have a dog in this fight.
One can allow their own discontent with the ideology of the majority of the population to manifest in assorted conspiracy theories like Regime hydra, deep-state, etc., but most reasonable people don’t see things that way, and will view those types of conspiracy claims for what they are - a manifestation of their discontent with the status quo.
I suppose that’s why the right is so quick to embrace and knowingly-propagate all manner of BS conspiracy theories, some that lie somewhere between absurdly-ridiculous and hilarious. Haitians eating people’s pets; aiming hurricanes at republicans; FEMA confiscating people’s land; rigged elections, kiddie porn rings being run out of pizzerias, and so on. If they actually had popular support on the issues they wouldn’t have to resort to flooding the place with BS.
I’ve haven’t so many good laughs in quite some time, so I hope they keep it up.
I don’t think you understand what the Regime is. It’s not as if the nominal government is the only power center in a country. Any self-respecting leftist would know that.
The founders envisioned a republic, not a democracy. The founders also had concerns about the tyranny of the majority, most notably Adams. Majority rule is quite distant from the founders’ vision.
I can see where you might be confused about this since Regime operatives and their sycophants are always going on about Our Democracy. Then again, your confusion is illustrative of the success of the indoctrination to which I alluded.
This seems to be an acknowledgment that the nominal government is not the unique source of governance. On the contrary, apparently legislators are merely the puppets of these special interests and thus examples of the extragovernmental entities that make up the Regime. I’m glad we were able to converge on this point of agreement, albeit inadvertently on your part. Or do you consider special interests to be one of your “3 branches of government”? If so, I’m curious to know what the other two are.
What the founders originally intended, and what he have now are not one and the same.
More correctly, the founders envisioned a representative republic. So, while it’s true they didn’t intend defacto majority rule, it is arrived at by virtue of elections. They wanted a system that incorporated popular input while preventing a simple majority from having absolute control, protecting both states’ interests and individual rights.
The founders also wanted to protect minorities, but at the same time, ensure that no minority (such as the wealthy) could impose their will on the majority.
Ensuring that political corruption was kept in check is where they failed miserably.
Where you are off the mark is collectively characterizing all special interests as being part of a single entity with a clear and common goal (e.g., the ‘Regime’), which is just more of the same right-wing BS that we’re up to our eyeballs in.
Special interests are also fiercely-competing interests. The only thing they have in common, is the color of their money.
Your pedantic correction is superfluous. Representative republic is redundant.
re·pub·lic
noun
a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch.
Oxford American Dictionary
Not at all. Special interest groups are not a single entity. Hence my use of the term hydra: a creature with many heads. However, those many heads may have some objectives in common and others not in common. It’s all pretty easy to understand if you take the trouble to read my comments, with care to understand the meaning of the words used. A dictionary might be a good investment for you.
In any case, I’m gratified that you’ve come agree with my original point that the country is not ruled by the nominal government but, rather, by a multi-headed beast that is not responsive to “popular input,” to use your favored term.
Name-calling is not generally the most persuasive form of argumentation but it might be your most persuasive form.
Your characterization of all special interests as heads on a single body implies that they are all working cooperatively to serve the interest of the single body. In other words, that characterization implies that all the ‘heads’ are part of a conspiracy to assert control over the population and/or achieve a common objective. What would that be?
I think that characterization, expressed in typical conspiracy-theory spirit is unrealistic, mainly because many if not most of those the ‘heads’ have highly-conflicting interests. When two or more of them are at odds, which one prevails could boil down to little more than how much money they spend swaying legislators.
The point about the problem with this government is that we can’t expect it to change because the crooked, influence-peddling legislators are the core problem, rather than your hydra. Humans are fundamentally corrupt. Everyone has their price. I wouldn’t hold my breath until congress enacts sweeping reforms and legislation that effectively-disenfranchises themselves.
In Russia, China, Hungary, etc., there’s only one fox running the hen house. Here, there’s ~548 of them.
Many of my views roughly align with those of Ralph Nader, who unfortunately, got absolutely nowhere. To summarize:
Corporate Influence and Lobbying: Corporate interests have taken over many government functions, prioritizing profit over public welfare. Corporations wield excessive influence on Congress, regulatory agencies, and even the courts, which leads to policy decisions that serve big businesses and other special interests rather than the general public.
Weakening of Regulatory Bodies: Regulatory agencies, intended to protect the public (like the EPA, FDA, and FTC), often end up “captured” by the very industries they’re supposed to regulate. This capture leads to weakened consumer, environmental, and safety protections.
Two-Party System: the two-party system is limiting, as it tends to marginalize third-party voices and alternative viewpoints, reinforcing a self-perpetuating cycle where both parties cater to similar elite interests.
Citizens United and Campaign Finance: The Citizens United decision, which allowed for unlimited corporate spending in elections, makes it nearly impossible for ordinary citizens to have a fair voice in politics. Hence the need for campaign finance reform to limit the role of money in politics.
Limited Political Engagement: Low voter turnout and widespread apathy, attributed to a lack of meaningful representation and the feeling among citizens that their votes don’t matter in a system dominated by money and elite interests, and where they often view their vote as a choice between the lesser of two evils.
Failure to Address Public Needs: Government frequently neglects issues that matter most to everyday citizens, like universal healthcare, income inequality, and student debt. Policy decisions are too often made with the interests of the wealthy in mind.
Different heads can act cooperatively without an explicit conspiracy. The term of art is emergent phenomenon and it can be observed in the murmuration of starlings. While not strictly analogous to human behavior, it illustrates how order can emerge from seemingly unconnected organisms. Of course, sometimes there is a conspiracy, as in the case of JournoList, in which reporters coordinated their responses to unfavorable stories during the Obama campaign of 2008.
Washington is a small town and special interests have a presence. Their common objectives are to increase their wealth and power, including asserting control over the the population. It is not necessary to identify all of their motives in detail. It is enough to see the results of their handiwork, which includes a set of ideological beliefs and policies that are often a odds with the will of most citizens. This paper illustrates how the disconnect happens. Quoting from the abstract:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
Frankly, this is a topic too large to cover in a comment, which is why I direct you to the literature. Your simplistic understanding of political phenomena can use some schooling.
It will gratify you to learn that I had the pleasure of voting for Ralph Nader in 2016. He was part of a slate of candidates for Harvard’s Board of Overseers that advocated the elimination of tuition fees since the University’s endowment is so large. They also favored more transparency in admissions. Alas, these candidates did not prevail even with my vote.
A couple of years before, Nader had published a book entitled Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. Though I’ve not read it, the book’s synopsis alludes to “converging corporate-government tyranny.” How does this convergence happen? Is Mr. Nader forwarding a conspiracy theory? Or is he simply saying that, to use your language, these entities are able “…to assert control over the population and/or achieve a common objective”?
Mr. Nader and I are in agreement on several points. You, not so much. Food for thought.
