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The Weekly Sam: Let the Counter-Revolution Begin! Implementing the Tea Party Agenda By Samuel L. Blumenfeld

(The following article is from Sam Blumenfeld’s archive written in 2012)
The first American Revolution officially began on July 4th, 1776, when the Thirteen
Colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. And it didn’t end until 1781,
when General Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, and the Treaty of Paris was signed
with Great Britain in 1783. In other words it took seven years of hard struggle before
the colonists could become the free and sovereign United States of America.
At first the new government was ruled by the Articles of Confederation, ratified by the
states in 1781, which provided virtually no power to the central government. The leaders
of the new confederation then decided to construct a more efficient and viable form of
government under a new Constitution. The result was a Federal Republic in which power
was effectively separated into three branches: the Executive headed by a President, the
Legislative composed of a Congress with a Senate and a House of Representatives, and
the Judiciary, a federal court system headed by the Supreme Court.

Thus, was formed a government of limited powers in which the basic freedoms of
American citizens were constitutionally protected against encroachment by any branch of
government. All of this worked fairly well until the turn of the last century when
socialists began a long-range conspiracy to change America from a Constitutional
Republic with limited powers into a European style Social Democracy with unlimited
powers, thus abolishing our God-given individual liberties. This was done through
incremental steps that expanded the power of the federal government in all areas
Which brings us to the present. The socialists finally took complete legislative power in
Washington with the election of Barack Obama as President and a Democrat controlled
Congress. Their plan was to end our Constitutional Republic. But what the socialists
didn’t count on was the rising up of the majority of the American people in opposition to
their scheme. That uprising became the Tea Party Movement, made up of ordinary and
extraordinary Americans who are determined to restore America’s form of government to
what the Founding Fathers gave us.

And in November 2010 the Tea Partiers gained control of the House of Representatives,
marking the beginning of their Counter-Revolution. But the socialist revolutionaries
used the lame-duck Congress to push through as much of their agenda as possible.
What should the Tea Partiers do when they take their seats in Congress in January of
2011? First, they must repeal all of the socialist legislation that virtually ended our
Constitutional Republic. This initial effort may be vetoed by our Alinsky-trained
President.

But in 2012 the Tea Partiers may be able to get rid of this Marxist
revolutionary at the top. Next, they must begin to dismantle all of those federal
departments and bureaucracies created by previous liberal administrations to expand the
control of government over the lives and activities of the American people. But where
to start? A good place to start is by abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, created
by Jimmy Carter in 1979 via the Department of Education Organization Act, approved by
a liberal Congress.

Actually, a Department of Education had been created in 1867, but a year later was
reduced to a mere Office collecting education statistics, a minor bureau in the Department
of the Interior. In 1939, the bureau was transferred to the Federal Security Agency where
it became known as the Office of Education.
Upgrading the Office of Education into a cabinet level department was opposed by
Republicans who saw the Department as unconstitutional since the Constitution didn’t
even mention education. But when Ronald Reagan became President in 1981 and tried
to abolish the Department, he was prevented by a Democrat dominated House of
Representatives. He was also sabotaged by his own RINO statists.

During the 1980s, the abolition of the ED, as it is now called, was part of the Republican
Party platform, but President George H. W. Bush declined to implement the idea. In
1996, the Republican Party made abolition of the Department a cornerstone of their
campaign promises, calling it an unconstitutional federal intrusion into local, state, and
family affairs. The GOP platform stated:

“The Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school
curricula or to control jobs in the market place. This is why we will abolish the
Department of Education, end federal meddling in our schools, and promote family
choice at all levels of learning.”

During Bob Dole’s run for the presidency in 1996, he promised to abolish the ED. And
in 2000, the Republican Liberty Caucus passed a resolution to abolish the Department.
But when George W. Bush became President, instead of initiating an effort to abolish the
Department, he joined with liberal Democrat Ted Kennedy to enact the No Child Left
Behind act, which reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965
passed by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society administration.

It was George W. Bush’s big government Republicanism which disillusioned many
conservatives with the GOP and led to the election of Barack Obama. But what makes
the abolition of the Department of Education much more possible now are two things: the
huge federal debt and the need to cut the cost and size of government; and the fact that
the Department has not improved education. In fact, it has made it worse.
Indeed, it was Charlotte Iserbyt, a former Senior Policy Advisor in the Department of
Education during the Reagan years, who blew the whistle on the ED’s nefarious activities
by writing the Deliberate Dumbing Down of the American People, based on
documentation she found in the Department‘s own files. In her expose she proved that the
Department was financing the dumbing down of Americans through grants to socialist
academics in our universities. In other words, the Department of Education had become
destructive of the American mind, and therefore should have long been abolished for that
reason alone. (Iserbyt’s book can now be downloaded free of charge on the Internet  https://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/DDDoA.pdf

So there is now more than enough evidence that the Department of Education is a
destructive force with power to dictate what goes on in American schools. The sooner it
is gotten rid of, the sooner Americans will be able to achieve one of the Tea Party’s chief
goals: a free nation, enjoying the benefits of educational freedom, without federal control
over our schools.

Yet read the Constitution and you discover a document that carefully creates a national
government with limited and enumerated powers. In contrast to state governments,
federal authority is constrained. Washington does not have general jurisdiction, or the
so-called police power, authorizing it to intervene in any matter not explicitly barred by
law or constitution.

None of the 27 amendments expanded federal power in this regard. The 13th, 14th, and
15th Amendments, passed in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, did transform
federal-state relations: the United States went from being a plural aggregation to a single
unit. National power expanded insofar as it protected individual liberty in the states. The
constitutional changes did not expand Washington’s authority to infringe the liberty of the
same individuals.

John McManus writes:

For decades, our federal government has annually poured tens of billions into education
and the product continues to worsen. The same elected geniuses started a Department of
Energy when imports totaled 30 percent. The import total is now 70 percent. Federal
housing policies convinced many Americans they could own a home with little or no
down payment and the resulting housing crisis ushered in the current recession. Other
geniuses started providing food stamps for several hundred thousand in the 1960s while
assuring everyone that the number of recipients would never grow larger. Now, over 40
million — one in seven Americans — are on this form of handout. We could go on. But it
has to be obvious that whatever the Federal government undertakes beyond its
constitutionally authorized powers turns out to be a bust.

 What Shall We Cut?

Abortion may soon be more readily available than ever before, thanks to a new
requirement from Planned Parenthood that more of its centers nationwide offer the
service. At least one local chapter so far has decided to withdraw from the network rather
than comply.
A local office of Planned Parenthood in South Texas is dropping out of the nationwide
network of “America’s most trusted provider of reproductive health care” starting
January 1.

According to local news reports, Planned Parenthood is planning on standardizing all of
its agencies, which includes requiring that every single one offer abortion services. The
CEO of the Coastal Bend office, however, said in a media interview that her center has
never provided abortions in the past, and doing so now is unnecessary.
“Our position is that if that is a need in your community, fine,” said CEO Amanda
Stukenberg. “There are far greater needs in our area than abortion. We feel that women
here have options. We don’t need to duplicate services.”

When contacted by The Daily Caller, Lisa David, senior vice president of Health
Services Support for Planned Parenthood, said that the organization is implementing a
broad “new patient services initiative.”
“From well-woman exams to lifesaving breast and cervical cancer screenings, more
patients will now have access to the full range of Planned Parenthood services,” said
David in a statement. “To meet the needs of our patients, Planned Parenthood affiliates
will now offer a unified set of core preventive services.”

In the next year, according to David, Planned Parenthood will expand immediate access
to testing for HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STI’s). During the next two years,
all Planned Parenthood centers will begin to “provide the full range of birth control
method options, such as the IUD, in addition to well-woman exams including critical
cancer prevention screenings.”

She went on to say that abortion services will be offered in at least one clinic per affiliate.
However, a waiver may be obtained in the case of “unique local circumstances.”
Some, however, argue that the expansion of abortion services is more about lining
pockets than making women feel safe and secure. “Planned Parenthood claims they’re
concerned with women’s health and family planning,” a spokesperson for the Family
Research Council, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that advances “faith, family and
freedom,” told The DC.
“We’ve been hearing rhetoric lately that abortion should be safe, legal and rare, but [with
this requirement] we can see the writing on the wall. The bottom line is there is no place
in the U.S. where a woman would have difficulty getting abortion if they want to.”
The spokesperson went on to say, “This is about expanding services and bringing in more
money…they try to create a public image where everything focuses on STD’s, family
planning, etc, but abortion is a profitable endeavor.”

Right now, Planned Parenthood has 817 health clinics throughout the U.S. One hundred
seventy-three of those already perform surgical abortions, and 131 perform chemical
abortions. The Planned Parenthood network is made up of 87 locally-government
regional centers, which then oversee hundreds of other clinics.
Earlier this month, Planned Parenthood released its 2008-2009 Annual Report, revealing
that it received $363 million in federal funding that fiscal year.

The Blumenfeld Archives

Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown October 19, 1781

Previously, Cornwallis had driven General George Washington’s Patriot forces out of New Jersey in 1776, and led his Recoats in victory over General Horatio Gates and the Patriots at Camden, South Carolina, in 1780. His subsequent invasion of North Carolina was less successful, however, and in April 1781, he led his weary and battered troops toward the Virginia coast, where he could maintain seaborne lines of communication with the large British army of General Henry Clinton in New York City. After conducting a series of raids against towns and plantations in Virginia, Cornwallis settled in Yorktown in August. The British immediately began fortifying the town and the adjacent promontory of Gloucester Point across the York River 

Washington instructed the Marquis de Lafayette, who was in Virginia with an American army of around 5,000 men, to block Cornwallis’ escape from Yorktown by land. In the meantime, Washington’s 2,500 troops in New York were joined by a French army of 4,000 men under the Count de Rochambeau. Washington and Rochambeau made plans to attack Cornwallis with the assistance of a large French fleet under the Count de Grasse, and on August 21 they crossed the Hudson River to march south to Yorktown. Covering 200 miles in 15 days, the allied force reached the head of Chesapeake Bay in early September.

Meanwhile, a British fleet under Admiral Thomas Graves failed to break French naval superiority at the Battle of Virginia Capes on September 5, denying Cornwallis his expected reinforcements. Beginning September 14, de Grasse transported Washington and de Rochambeau’s men down the Chesapeake to Virginia, where they joined Lafayette and completed the encirclement of Yorktown on September 28. De Grasse landed another 3,000 French troops carried by his fleet. During the first two weeks of October, the 14,000 Franco-American troops gradually overcame the fortified British positions with the aid of de Grasse’s warships. A large British fleet carrying 7,000 men set out to rescue Cornwallis, but it was too late.

On October 19, General Cornwallis surrendered 7,087 officers and men, 900 seamen, 144 cannons, 15 galleys, a frigate and 30 transport ships. Pleading illness, he did not attend the surrender ceremony, but his second-in-command, General Charles O’Hara, carried Cornwallis’ sword to the American and French commanders. As the British and Hessian troops marched out to surrender, the British band played the song “The World Turned Upside Down.”

Although the war persisted on the high seas and in other theaters, the Patriot victory at Yorktown effectively ended fighting in the American colonies. Peace negotiations began in 1782, and on September 3, 1783, the Treaty of Paris was signed, formally recognizing the United States as a free and independent nation after eight years of war.

  This is from This Day in History:  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/cornwallis-surrenders-at-yorktown

 

 

The Associated Clergy of Cape Ann: Serving ‘No Kings’ — Not the King of Kings by Alex Destino

 The following was reposted with permission.
 The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) is an openly atheist organization and a major funder of the national “No Kings” movement.  For decades, this same group has fought to remove prayer from schools, crosses from public property, and any mention of God from public life.
 And yet, right here in Gloucester, the Associated Clergy of Cape Ann — a group of local ministers and priests — has chosen to partner with them. This same clergy group is sponsoring the “No Kings” event this Saturday, standing with those who reject the very faith they claim to represent.
If you claim to follow Christ, you cannot walk with those who seek to erase Him from our culture or from our children’s hearts. You cannot serve two masters.
 Scripture calls believers to be bold in faith. The Constitution guarantees our freedom to live that faith openly. Yet these clergy stand with those who reject both — abandoning their duty as shepherds and citizens.
 Where were they when Biden’s FBI spied on Catholics and Christian parents? When Christian pregnancy centers were firebombed? When Obama sued the Little Sisters of the Poor? When chaplains were punished for praying in Jesus’ name, or crosses stripped from federal sites? When the Obama administration ordered Christian schools to open girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms to biological males — in direct violation of Christian teaching and parental rights?
 It seems the only thing this clergy group truly shares with the atheists at the FFRF is their hostility toward President Trump.
People of faith across Cape Ann — it’s time to wake up. Stand for truth. Stand for life. And stand with Christ, not with those who deny Him.

Alex Destino is a businessman who is life long resident of Gloucester, MA.

Get Your Children Out of Public Schools Warns A Public School Teacher: An Interview with Ramona Bessinger

Hal Shurtleff, host of the Camp Constitution Report, interviews Ramona Bessinger, a long-time public-school teacher who is now speaking out against public schools. From her website: Teacher Ramona Bessinger July 2021, I spoke out against the harmful anti-American curriculum platforms that had entered Rhode Island Schools and k12 schools across the nation. It is my sincere hope to raise awareness and educate parents on what precisely is happening in their children’s schools and to offer solutions and ways to work with schools to mitigate any harm that may come to any child affected by these changes. https://www.ramonabessinger.com/

 

President Trump’s Columbus Day Proclamation

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

Today our Nation honors the legendary Christopher Columbus — the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth.  This Columbus Day, we honor his life with reverence and gratitude, and we pledge to reclaim his extraordinary legacy of faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue from the left-wing arsonists who have sought to destroy his name and dishonor his memory.

Born in Genoa, Italy in 1451, Columbus quickly emerged as a titan of the Age of Exploration.  On August 3, 1492, following years of intense study, preparation, and petitioning, Christopher Columbus secured funding from the Spanish Crown to set out on a daring expedition that most believed to be impossible.  Commissioned by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Columbus and his crew boarded three small ships — the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria — to set sail on a perilous voyage across the Atlantic.  He was guided by a noble mission:  to discover a new trade route to Asia, bring glory to Spain, and spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ to distant lands.

Just over 2 months later, on October 12, 1492, Columbus made landfall in the modern-day Bahamas.  Upon his arrival, he planted a majestic cross in a mighty act of devotion, dedicating the land to God and setting in motion America’s proud birthright of faith.  Though he initially believed he had arrived in Asia, his discovery opened the vast frontier and untold splendors of the New World to Europe.  He later ventured onward to Cuba and other islands in the Caribbean — exploring their coasts and engaging with their people.

Guided by steadfast prayer and unwavering fortitude and resolve, Columbus’s journey carried thousands of years of wisdom, philosophy, reason, and culture across the Atlantic into the Americas — paving the way for the ultimate triumph of Western civilization less than three centuries later on July 4, 1776.

Outrageously, in recent years, Christopher Columbus has been a prime target of a vicious and merciless campaign to erase our history, slander our heroes, and attack our heritage.  Before our very eyes, left-wing radicals toppled his statues, vandalized his monuments, tarnished his character, and sought to exile him from our public spaces.  Under my leadership, those days are finally over — and our Nation will now abide by a simple truth:  Christopher Columbus was a true American hero, and every citizen is eternally indebted to his relentless determination.

As we celebrate his legacy, we also acknowledge the contributions of the countless Italian-Americans who, like him, have endlessly contributed to our culture and our way of life.  To this day, the United States and Italy share a special bond rooted in the timeless values of faith, family, and freedom.  My Administration looks forward to strengthening our long and storied friendship in the years to come.

This Columbus Day, more than 500 years since Columbus arrived in the New World, we follow his example, we echo his resolve, and we offer our gratitude for his life of valor and grit.  Above all, we commit to restoring a Nation that once again dares to tame the unknown, honors our rich cultural inheritance, and offers rightful praise to our Creator above.

In commemoration of Christopher Columbus’s historic voyage, the Congress, by joint resolution of April 30, 1934, and modified in 1968 (36 U.S.C. 107), as amended, has requested the President proclaim the second Monday of October of each year as “Columbus Day.”

NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim October 13, 2025, as Columbus Day.  I call upon the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.  I also direct that the flag of the United States be displayed on all public buildings on the appointed day in honor of the great Christopher Columbus and all who have contributed to building our Nation.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this ninth day of October, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-five, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and fiftieth.

DONALD J. TRUMP

The Weekly Sam: Darwin Versus Intelligent Design By Samuel L. Blumenfeld

Back in 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a 1981 Louisiana law which
mandated a balanced treatment in teaching evolution and creation in the public schools.
The Court decided that the intent of the law “was clearly to advance the religious
viewpoint that a supernatural being created humankind,” and therefore violated the First
Amendment’s prohibition on a government establishment of religion. In other words, the
Court adopted the atheist position that creation is a religious myth.

In speaking for the majority, Justice William J. Brennan wrote: “The legislative history
documents that the act’s primary purpose was to change the science curriculum of public
schools in order to provide an advantage to a particular religious doctrine that rejects the
factual basis of evolution in its entirety.”

The learned Justice seemed unaware that some of the world’s greatest scientists were and
are devout Christians and, that dogmatic atheism, not religion, is destroying true science.
Also, though his job requires him to uphold the Constitution, Justice Brennan willfully
ignored the historical fact that, to the Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution, an
“establishment of religion” meant a state church, such as they have in England with the
Anglican Church, which is the official church of England.  Belief in God is not the same thing as establishing an official government-sponsored
religious denomination. Belief in a supernatural being who created mankind is not an
establishment of religion.

What exactly is the Theory of Evolution? For the answer, we must go to the source:
Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the
Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, published in 1859. In his book,
whose racist subtitle has been suppressed in modern editions for obvious reasons, Darwin
claimed that the thousands of different species of animals, insects, and plants that exist on
earth were not the works of a Divine Creator who made each of the “kinds” in its present
immutable form, as described in Genesis (e.g., frogs produce frogs, not princes), but are
the products of a very long natural process of development from simpler organic forms to
more complex organisms.

Thus, according to Darwin, species continue to change or “evolve,” through a process of
natural selection in which nature’s harsh conditions permit only the fittest to survive in
more adaptable forms. However, while controlled breeding can produce varieties inside
the dog species, from Chihuahuas to Great Danes, dogs are still dogs. “Survival of the
fittest” is incapable of turning one species into another. Whatever external conditions we
may provide for a dog, these will not change its basic dog DNA.
Darwin also believed that all life originated from a single source – a kind of primeval
slime in which the first living organisms formed spontaneously out of non-living matter
through a random process – by accident.

The first false idea in Darwin’s hypothesis is that non-organic matter can transform itself
into organic matter. Although this belief in “spontaneous generation” was common at the
time, Pasteur and others have conclusively disproved it. Life does not arise from non-life
at the macro level, and at the micro level all the laboratory experiments that claim to
produce “building blocks” of life have failed to do so, in spite of all the hype to the
contrary. See the book Icons of Evolution by Dr. Jonathan Wells for some eye-opening
debunking of this and other myths still taught in your local school’s textbooks.
Justice Brennan called evolution “factual,” which simply indicates the depth of his
ignorance. There is no factual basis to evolution. The fossil record shows no intermediary
forms of species development. We’ve never seen it happen, either. No scientist has been
able to mate a cat with a donkey and get something in between. And modern genetics has
shown us that we need complex “programs” to grow from a single cell into a human
being. But mutations, which destroy information, can’t add more complexity to
succeeding generations. So neither Darwin’s simplistic belief in the inheritance of
acquired characteristics nor our newer knowledge of genetics provides any way
species-to-species evolution could ever happen.
The enormous complexity of organic matter precludes accidental creation. There had to
be a designer.

There is now a whole scientific school devoted to the design theory. William A.
Dembski’s book, Intelligent Design, published in 1999, is the pioneering work that
bridges science with theology. Dembski writes:

“Intelligent design is three things: a scientific research program that investigates the
effects of intelligent causes; an intellectual movement that challenges Darwinism and its
naturalistic legacy; and a way of understanding divine action. It was Darwin’s expulsion
of design from biology that made possible the triumph of naturalism in Western culture.
So, too, it will be intelligent design’s restatement of design within biology that will be the
undoing of naturalism in Western culture.”

Dembski proves that design is “empirically detectable,” because we can observe it all
around us. The birth of a child is a miracle of design. The habits of your household cat
are a miracle of design. All cats do the same things. These are the inherited
characteristics of the species. The idea that accident could create such complex behavior
passed on to successive generations simply doesn’t make sense. The complexity of design
proves the existence of God. Dembski writes:

Indeed within theism divine action is the most basic mode of causation since any other
mode of causation involves creatures which themselves were created in a divine act.
Intelligent design thus becomes a unifying framework for understanding both divine and
human agency and illuminates several long-standing philosophical problems about the
nature of reality and our knowledge of it.”

So why are the courts and the schools so fanatically opposed to even allowing children to
know there are arguments against evolution? Because evolution provides the perfect
“scientific” excuse for keeping the God of the Bible out of public education. It’s not the
idea of design per se that worries them; it’s Who the Designer is. That’s why the media
are showing increasing support for the “life came from outer space” theory and even the
“life came from intelligent aliens who seeded our planet” theory. Evolution is tottering,
and the search is on for any Designer except the real one.
So, while what the Intelligent Design movement has to say can be helpful, let’s just
remember that the real issue is not whether there was a Designer or just a bunch of
Random Accidents.

(The above article is from the Sam Blumenfeld Archives:

The Blumenfeld Archives

Remembering Charlie Kirk by Sarah Krutov

 

In 2019, I attended my very first  Turning Point USA (TPUSA) event in Washington, D.C. That’s where I bumped into
Charlie Kirk in the exhibit hall and met him for the first time. I remember asking if it was possible
to pursue both music and a career in politics. He gave me an honest answer: “Choose one or
the other.” I chose the latter, but that moment planted something in me that changed my life.
During that conference, I realized I had a genuine passion for politics and for my generation.
From then on, I worked with TPUSA to help countless students find their voices on campus, and
eventually had the honor of serving on the team to help 47 win.

If it hadn’t been for attending TSAS in 2019 and meeting Charlie, I wouldn’t have met some of
my closest friends, experienced the incredible opportunities that shaped my path, or discovered
the conviction to stand firm in my beliefs and use them as a force for good.
Charlie was truly a man of God who loved his family, his country, and the next generation with
everything he had. His mission wasn’t just about politics—it was about people. He wanted to
build a stronger America not only for his children, but for my generation and those to come. He
cared deeply about helping students on hostile campuses find their voices, and about pointing
everyone he encountered closer to Jesus.

Charlie Kirk had a tremendous impact on the lives of millions of young people. He gave Gen Z
the courage to stand up for what they believed in within a system that too often tried to silence
them. He valued conversation and connection, once saying: “When you stop having a human
connection with someone you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to want to commit violence
against that group.”

Charlie Kirk will forever be remembered as a man of strong faith who loved his country and
worked tirelessly to make America a better place. The Christian conservative movement will feel
his absence deeply, but his legacy will continue in all of us who keep fighting for the values he
lived for.

Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk.

(The author was a camper and then served as  a counselor at Camp Constitution.)

 

RIP, Charlie Kirk: “It’s All About Jesus” by Alex Newman

 

Charlie Kirk was an American hero. He was a giant among men. And his legacy as a martyr for Christ and liberty will live on long after we’re all gone.

We need more MEN like Charlie—men who love Jesus, love their wives, lead their families, stand for truth, and are willing to put their own lives on the line for the sake of God and what’s right. I hope this horrific act will inspire millions of American men to do better.

It was an incredible privilege to spend a little bit of time with him on several occasions over the last few years. He asked me to be a keynote speaker at two of his conferences, and I was astounded by how genuine, kind, and down-to-earth he was—not just to me, but with everybody, even those who disagreed with and hated him.

I’ll never forget the first TPUSA Education Summit he hosted in 2023. I spoke right after him on a subject they requested: “Thinking like a theologian.” Not being a theologian, it was intimidating—especially with Charlie and other legends sitting right there.

Trying to break the ice, I opened nervously with: “You know you’ve made it when Charlie Kirk is your warm-up band.” I wasn’t sure how Charlie would take my joke. But I was incredibly relieved that he laughed with everyone else, and even invited me back to give a keynote talk at the summit in 2024 too.

There is no doubt in my mind that Charlie is in a better place right now, in the loving arms of our Lord and Savior. God numbers our days, and He will take each of us home someday. But even understanding in my mind the sovereignty of God and the fact that His plan is better than ours, I must admit that this hit me hard. I literally just sent Charlie an email last night and was hoping to receive a reply today when I learned he had been shot…

Let’s all join together in prayer for Charlie’s loving wife and his precious children—children who will now have to grow up without their father. Let’s pray for our nation. And let’s pray that God’s will be done on Earth and in America, as it is in Heaven.

America was blessed to have somebody like Charlie to speak the truth boldly and courageously. Obviously, he knew this day could come at any time. Let us honor his legacy by redoubling our efforts in the fight for truth, righteousness, and liberty.

Here’s an interview we did with Charlie last year:

https://rumble.com/v593vr1-charlie-kirk-shares-how-to-defeat-wokeism-we-must-act-out-of-obedience-not-.html

 

The Weekly Sam: The Whole-Language Fraud by Samuel L. Blumenfeld

Back in 1955, Rudolf Flesch wrote Why Johnny Can’t Read, which has become a
classic in educational literature. In that book American parents found out for the first
time why their children were having such a difficult time learning to read. Most of the
parents had been taught to read by way of the centuries-old alphabetic phonics
method, and they assumed that the schools were still using the same methods. Thus it
came as somewhat of a shock when they found out that their children were being
taught to read by a new and very different method.

Flesch explained that in the early 1930s, the professors of education changed the
way reading was taught in American schools. They threw out the alphabetic phonics
method, which is the proper way to teach anyone to read an alphabetic writing system,
and they put in a new whole-word, look-say, or sight method that taught children to
read English as if it were Chinese, an ideographic writing system. Flesch explained
that when you impose an ideographic teaching method on an alphabetic writing
system, you get reading disability.

Actually, Flesch was not the first to make this observation. The first man to do so
was Dr. Samuel T. Orton, a neuropathologist who had studied cases of reading
disability in Iowa in the late 1920s. He came to the conclusion that the cause of the
childlren’s problems was the new sight method of teaching reading, and he wrote an
article on the subject which appeared in the Feburary 1929 issue of the Journal of
Educational Psychology, entitled “The ‘Sight Reading ‘ Method of Teaching Reading as
a Source of Reading Disability.” Dr. Orton wrote:

“I wish to emphasize at the beginning that the strictures which I have to offer here do
not apply to the use of the sight method of teaching reading as a whole but only to its
effects on a restricted group of children for whom, as I think we can show, this
technique is not only not adapted but often proves an actual obstacle to reading
progress, and moreover I believe that this group is one of considerable size and
because here faulty teaching methods may not only prevent the acquisition of
academic education by children of average capacity but may also give rise to far
reaching damage to their emotional life.”

Unfortunately. Dr. Orton’s warning fell on deaf ears, and the professors of education
launched their new textbooks on the education market, the most famous of which were
the Dick and Jane basal readers. It didn’t take long for the reading problems to begin
showing up. Parents began to hear of a new reading disorder called dyslexia, which
many children were coming down with. In April of 1944, Life magazine ran a major
article on the subject, reporting :

“Millions of children in the U.S. suffer from dyslexia which is the medical term for
reading difficulties, It is responsible for about 70% of the school failures in 6- to 12
year-age group, and handicaps about 15% of all grade-school children. Dyslexia may
stem from a variety of physical ailments or combination of them — glandular imbalance,
heart disease, eye or ear trouble — or from a deep-seated psychological disturbance
that ‘blocks’ a child’s ability to learn. It has little or nothing to do with intelligence and
is usually curable. ”

The article went on to describe the case of a little girl with an I. Q . of 118 who was
being examined at the Dyslexia Institute of Northwestern University. After her tests, the
doctors concluded that the little girl needed “thyroid treatments, removal of tonsils and
adenoids, exercises to strengthen her eye muscles.” The article concluded:

“Other patients may need dental work, nose, throat or ear treatment, or thorough
airing out of troublesome home situations that throw a sensitive child off the track of
normality. In the experience of the institute these range from alcoholic fathers to
ambitious mothers who try to force their children too fast in schooL”
Strange as it seems, no one at Life seemed to know that Dr. Orton existed or that in
1929 he had identified the cause of dyslexia: the ideographic way of teaching reading.
In fact, Dr. Orton had popularized the term dyslexia.

In any case, by 1954 it was clear to a lot of intelligent people what was causing the
reading problem. Collier’s magazine of Nov. 26, 1954 explained it all in an article
entitled “Why Don’t They Teach My Child to Read?” by Howard Whitman.
He wrote:
“The man next to me in the airport bus entering Pasco, Washington , said “My six-year-old reads words
at school and can ‘t read the same words when I point them out at home in the newspaper. In school today
the children aren’t taught to read — they’re taught to memorize.”
A man in the seat ahead chimed in, “Everything is pictures. My youngest is in the sixth grade. He’ll still
come across a word like pasture and he remembers a picture in his early reader and calls it meadow ”
Neither passenger knew I was making a national study of modern education; they volunteered their
remarks, sharing something they were concerned — and troubled — about. Like them, thousands of other
American parents with first-grade children who are not catching on to reading as taught by the modernists,
and those with upper-grade children handicapped by lack of a solid reading foundation, are concerned
and troubled.

But most of all they are puzzled. Why is reading taught this way? A thousand times one hears the
question, “Why don ‘t they teach my child to read?” How can schools tolerate a method which turns out
many children of eight, nine and older who stare helplessly at a word (not on their memory list) and cannot
make a stab at reading it? What has happened to the method of teaching reading sound by sound ,
syllable by syllable, so that a child can at least make a reasonable attempt at reading any word?
Two basic teaching methods are in conflict here. One is the phonetic approach (known as phonics), the
old-fashioned way in the view of modern educators. They are likely to call it the “spit and spatter” or “grunt
and groan” method, satirizing the way youngsters try to sound out letters and syllables.
The other method, which the modernists have put into vogue, is the word-memory plan — also known as
“sight reading,” “total word configuration” or “word recognition.” It has the more friendly nickname of “look
and say,” since the youngster is supposed simply to look at a word and say it right out. He memorizes the
“shape” of the word, the configuration, and identifies it with pictures in his workbook Often he is taught to
recognize phrases or whole sentences in his picture book, or on flash (poster) cards, before he can
independently sound out and pronounce such simple words as cat or ball.
The fundamental difference in approach in the two methods reaches deep into philosophy and
scientific theory. Thinkers have wrangled for centuriesover which comes first, the whole or its parts (an
argument perhaps as endless as that over the priority of the “chicken or the egg”). The phonics
advocates say the parts come first; the word-memory people say we start with the whole and the parts fall
into place in due course.

The article explained it all quite clearly. The cause of the reading problems crlildren
were having was the teaching method. And what happened to that method after so
much criticism and parental concern? Did the educators change anything? Did they
admit that they had been wrong? On the contrary. They stuck to their guns and
insisted that their new way of teaching was the better way. And if parents didn’t like it
they could lump it. In fact, in 1956, the professors of reading organized the
International Reading Association, which has become the most powerful professional
lobby for the advocacy of the look-say method. In the main, its presidents have been
the authors of the leading reading textbooks used in the schools.

Does that indicate some sort of conflict of interest between professors of reading
who train their students to teach by their methods, who train the directors of reading
who then recommend the books to the school boards, who receive royalties from the
publishers who sell the books to the school districts? These same professors also
control the professional publications that show a distinct bias and hostility toward
phonics. If that isn’t a conflict of interest, then what is?

There is also the issue of deception. Have the educators been deceiving the
parents all these years? They never asked the parents whether or not they wanted
their children to be taught to read English as if it were Chinese. Have they deliberately
foisted on the American people a defective teaching method which has caused
enormous harm to millions of children, many of whom are now adults? Are they not
responsible for our nation’s precipitous decline in literacy?

In the early ’60s, Dr. Jeanne Chall obtained a grant from the Carnegie Corporation
to do an in-depth study of the two reading instruction methods to find out which method
was the more effective. The study was finally published in 1967 under the title,
Learning to Read: The Great Debate. Dr. Chall’s conclusion was that a phonics
approach, that is, decoding, was the more effective teaching method for beginning
reading.

You would have thought that Dr. Chall had settled the issue and that phonics had
won the great debate. But no such thing happened. True, for a time more phonics
was included in whole-word basal reading programs, but the basic ideographic
approach remained unchanged. The professors of reading remained totally
committed to their methodology. In fact, they invented a new term to describe it,
“psycholinguistics. ”

Indeed, it was Professor Kenneth Goodman who formulated the new definition of
reading which he articulated in the May 1967 Journal of the Reading Specialist as
follows :
“Reading is a selective process. It involves partial use of available language cues
selected from perceptual input on the basis of the reader’s expectation. As this partial
information is processed, tentative decisions are made to be confirmed, rejected or
refined as reading progresses.

“More simply stated, reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game.”
That said it all. Moreover, it indicated that the professor made no distinction
between an alphabetic writing system and an ideographic one. And that was the key
to the deception. Some years later Goodman told a reporter from The New York
Times (July 9, 1975) that it was perfectly all right if a child read “pony” for “horse”
because the child had gotten the meaning.

A professor of reading who does not understand the difference between an
alphabetic writing system and an ideographic one is like a mechanic who doesn’t
understand the difference between a horse-and-buggy and an automobile. The
alphabet did for the ancient world what the computer is doing for the modern world. It
made learning to read easy and speeded up the reading process enormously. It was a
far more accurate and precise form of writing. It permitted a tremendous growth in
vocabulary, thereby expanding the use of language and the ability to think. It
enhanced the exchange of information and knowledge. It helped produce better
speech because now language was visible in the form of symbols representing
speech sounds.

And because it permitted man to do so much more with so much less,
It is probably the single most significant invention of man.
To require children to give up all of the advantages of alphabetic writing in favor of
an ideographic theory of reading makes no sense at all. What have we gained by it?
Nothing. What have we lost by it? The literacy of a nation. It is time for the American
people to decide that enough is enough. The experiment has gone on far too long.
The great debate should have been settled a long time ago.
But now, in the ’90s, we are in a new phase of the debate — open warfare. This is
what we were told by Education Week of March 21, 1990 in an article entitled, “From a
‘Great Debate’ to a Full-Scale War: Dispute Over Teaching Reading Heats Up.” The
article states :

In 1967, one of the most prominent researchers in reading instruction, Jeanne S. Chall, analyzed the
controversy that was then raging in the field in an influential book called The Great Oebate.
Today, nearly a quarter of a century later, the Harvard University scholar says the “debate” not only
persists, but has, in fact, escalated to a full-scale war.
The battle lines are drawn between advocates of phonics, who stress the importance of teaching the
relationships betlween letters and sounds, and those of whole-language methodology, who believe
children should be taught reading by reading whole texts.
And so fierce have their arguments become that two recent attempts to find a common ground — a
federally funded study and a proposal for the 1992 national assessment — have not only failed to quell the
debate but may have exacerbated it.

“It’s always been, in reading, that there was restraint with all our fighting,” Ms. Chail says. “Now it’s as if all
restraints are gone.”
And so, we are now in an educational war, dealing with the very same issues
described by Collier’s magazine in 1954 and Rudolf Flesch in 1955. In all this time,
alphabetic phonics has remained alphabetic phoniCS, but look-say has evolved into
psycholinguistics, which has further eVOlved into whole language. Quite an interesting
metamorphosis. What exactly is whole language?

Whole language is an even more extreme form of look-say. It not only does not
recognize any distinction between an alphabetic writing system and an ideographic
one, it doesn’t even recognize that alphabetic writing is a representation of speech. In
a recently published book, Whole Language: What’s the Difference?, the authors write:
“Oral language, written language, sign language — each of these is a system of
linguistic convention for creating meanings. That means none is ‘the basis’ for the
other; none is a secondary representation of the other.” (page 9)

Those statements not only indicate a lack of understanding of what alphabetic
writing is, but a lack of understanding of its benefits.
Whole language is the latest educational fraud being perpetrated on the American
people. In fact, the whole language fraud is nothing less than the usurpation of
primary education by a group of radical, politicized educators whose goal is not the
improvement of reading but the inculcation of children with collectivist, left-wing ideas.

The Weekly Sam: Making Americans Illiterate: A Key Factor in the Deliberate Dumbing Down of America By Samuel Blumenfeld

( The following is a transcript of a speech given by Sam at a homeschool conference in 2009.)

The planned deliberate dumbing-down of America was started in 1898 by socialist John Dewey
with his attack on the primary school’s emphasis on teaching children to read. This emphasis
sustained the capitalist, individualistic system and it produced high literacy whereby the
average American could read anything and think for himself. Dewey wrote in an essay entitled
The Primary School Fetich:

“The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the
great importance attaching to literacy seems to me a perversion … .
No one can clearly set before himself the vivacity and persistency of the child’s motor
instincts at this period, and then call to mind the continued grind of reading and writing,
without feeling that the justification of our present curriculum is psychologically
impossible. It is simply superstition: it is a remnant of an outgrown period of history.”

What Dewey deliberately ignored was the tremendous language learning faculty that every
child is born with, and that teaching a child to read at that early age expands the child’s mastery
of language, which is the key to academic success. A different way of teaching reading had to be developed that would lower the literacy level of the American people. Dewey and his socialist colleagues were determined to change
individualistic America into a collectivist society.
Dewey got his egalitarian, utopian ideas from Edward Bellamy’s novel, Looking Backward, a
fantasy of a socialist America in the year 2000. That book is still being read today in American
universities. Dewey’s plan required that a new educational curriculum should be developed and tested in
private “experiment stations.” He wrote:

“After such schools have worked out carefully and definitely the subject matter of a new
curriculum-finding the right place for language-studies and placing them in their right
perspective-the problems of the more general educational reform will be immensely
simplified and facilitated.”

All of this was being carefully planned by a self-appointed group of socialists who called
themselves “progressives.” They knew that what they were doing was subversive and
treasonous. Indeed, Dewey wrote:

“Change must come gradually. To force it unduly would compromise its final success by
favoring a violent reaction.”

If the changes were so beneficial to America’s children and society, why would they favor a
violent reaction? Obviously, the dumbing-down plan would have to be imposed by stealth,
deceit, and lies. And that is why no progressive educator can be trusted. They have been told
to lie in order to bring about their socialist scheme in our schools.
Did they know that their new teaching methods would create reading disability and dyslexia?
They found out pretty early at the expense of four of the richest boys in America. Believe it or
not John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was a great admirer of John Dewey, and he put his four sons,
Nelson, David, Laurence, and Winthrop, in the Lincoln School, one of the experimental schools
called for by Dewey. Rockefeller donated over $3-million (worth $300-million today) to the
school. The result? All four boys became dyslexic! But of course that didn’t stop the
progressives from implementing their plan. Incidentally, when Nelson was Governor of New York, he wrote in the Reading Teacher of
March 1972:
I appreciate the opportunity to make some observations on the importance of reading
for I am a prime example of one who has had to struggle with the handicap of being a
poor reader while serving in public office.
On many occasions, upon confronting an audience, I have elected to announce that I
have thrown away my speech in favor of giving the audience the benefit of my
spontaneous thouphts. And, usually, I have added: “Besides, I went to a progressive
school and don’t read very well anyhow.” This, of course, is a trial to ~y very able speech
writer as well as a libel upon all the devoted teachers and professors who saw me
through the years of my formal education. It is also usually a rather popular device to
communicate with the audience on a much more intimate basis-but the truth is that it
serves primarily to cover the fact that I really wish I could do a better job of reading a
speech or other public statement. And as you know, Nelson Rockefeller was vice president under Ford. In other words, a
functional illiterate was a heartbeat from becoming President.
David Rockefeller writes in his Memoirs:

“It was Lincoln’s experimental curriculum and method of instruction that distinguished it
from all other New York schools of the time. Father was an ardent and generous
supporter of John Dewey’s educational methods and school reform efforts. . . .
Teacher’s College of Columbia University operated Lincoln, with considerable financial
assistance in the early years from the General Education Board, as an experimental
school designed to put Dewey’s philosophy into practice.
Lincoln stressed freedom for children to learn and to play an active role in their own
education… . But there were some drawbacks. In my case, I had trouble with reading
and spelling, which my teachers, drawing upon “progressive” educational theory, did
not consider significant. They believed I was simply a slow reader and that I would
develop at my own pace. In reality I have dyslexia, which was never diagnosed, and I
never received remedial attention. As a result my reading ability, as well as my
proficiency in spelling, improved only marginally as I grew older. All my siblings, except
Babs and John, had dyslexia to a degree.”

Note that David Rockefeller says he couldn’t learn to read because he was dyslexic, when it was
the progressive look-say reading program that caused his dyslexia.
Returning to Dewey, he advised that a statement by psychologists was needed to give the new
reading instruction program the backing of educational authority. A psychologist by the name
of Edmund Burke Huey, who got his Ph.D. at Clark University under G. Stanley Hall, was chosen
to write the needed book. It was published in 1908 under the title The Psychology and
Pedagogy of Reading. In it, Huey reiterated Dewey’s views on the teaching of reading, and he
provided an idea of how the new whole-word, look-say method of teaching worked. He wrote:

‘It is not necessary that the child should be able to pronounce correctly or pronounce at
all, at first, the new words that appear in his reading, any more than that he should spell
or write all the new words that he hears spoken. If he grasps, approximately, the total
meaning of the sentence in which the new word stands, he has read the sentence….
And even if the child substitutes words of his own for some that are on the page,
provided that these express the meaning, it is an encouraging sign that the reading has
been real, and recognition of details will come as it is needed. The shock that such a
statement will give to many a practical teacher of reading is but an accurate measure of
the hold that a false i,deal has taken hold of us, viz., that to read is to say just what is
upon the page, instead of to think each in his own way, the meaning that the page
suggests.”

There you have the whole-language philosophy of reading well described in 1908, and practiced
today as Huey described it. In other words, the progressives knew in 1908 what kind of readers
their teaching methods would produce. Indeed, Huey’s mentor, G. Stanley Hall had this to say
about literacy in 1911:

“Very many men have lived and died and been great, even the leaders of their age,
without any acquaintance with letters. The knowledge which illiterates acquire is
probably on the whole more personal, direct, environmental and probably a much
larger proportion of it practical. Moreover, they escape much eye-strain and mental
excitement, and, other things being equal, are probably more active and less sedentary .
. . . Perhaps we are prone to put too high a value both upon the ability required to attain
this art and the discipline involved in doing so, as well as the culture value that comes to
the citizen with his average of only six grades of schooling by the acquisition of this art.

Fifteen years later, a neuropathologist at Iowa State University, Dr. Samuel T. Orton, made a
survey of students with reading problems, and came to the conclusion that they were being
caused by the new method of teaching reading. Alarmed, he wrote an article, The “Sight Word”
Method of Teaching Reading as a Cause of Reading Disability, which was published in the
Journal of Educational Psychology in February 1929. The Journal was being edited by the very
professors who were about to impose this new teaching method on all the public schools of
America. Orton wrote:

“I wish to emphasize at the beginning that the strictures which I have to offer here do not
apply to the use of the sight method of teaching reading as a whole but only to its
effects on a restricted group of children for whom, as I think we can show, this
technique is not only not adapted but often proves an actual obstacle to reading
progress, and moreover I believe that this group is one of considerable educational
importance both because of its size and because here faulty teaching methods may not
only prevent the acquisition of academic education by children of average capacity but
may also give rise to far reaching damage to their emotional life.”

What Orton had actually done is convince the educators that their new method of teaching
reading would do exactly what they intended it to do: destroy American literacy. In the next
two decades reading programs like Dick and Jane, Tom and Betty, and others were adopted by
the schools of America.
By 1944, Life magazine could publish an article on dyslexia which, when read today, indicates
the incredible lengths to which the educators had gone to find fault with the children who
could not learn to read by the look-say method. The article reads:

“Millions of children in the U.S. suffer from dyslexia which is the medical term for reading
difficulties. It is responsible for about 70% of the school failures in 6- to 12-year-age
group, and handicaps about 15% of all grade-school children. Dyslexia may stem from a
variety of physical ailments or combination of them-glandular imbalance, heart
disease, eye or ear trouble-or from a deep-seated psychological disturbance that
“blocks” a child’s ability to learn.”

Was this ignorance or deliberate deception on the part of Life magazine? It should be
remembered that Henry R. Luce, a Yale graduate, was a member of Skull and Bones.
Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, some interesting psychological experiments had been
conducted by Dr. Ivan Pavlov, in his Moscow laboratory, on techniques of artificially creating
behavioral disorganization. All of this was well described in a book written by one of Pavlov’s
colleagues, Alexander Luria, The Nature of Human Conflicts, Researches in Disorganization and
Control of Human Behavior, published in 1932. It had been translated from the Russian by W.
Horsley Gantt, an American psychologist who had spent the years 1922 to 1929 working in
Pavlov’s laboratories in the Soviet Union. In his preface to the book, Luria wrote:

“The research described here are the results of the experimental psychological
investigations at the State Institute of Experimental Psychology, Moscow, during the
period 1923-1930. The chief problems ofthe author were an objective and materialistic
description of the mechanisms lying at the basis of the disorganization of human
behavior and an experimental approach to the laws of its regulation …. To accomplish
this it was necessary to create artificially affects and models of experimental neuroses
which made possible an analysis of the laws lying at the basis of the disintegration of
behavior.”

In describing the results of the experiments, Luria wrote:

“Pavlov obtained very definite affective “breaks,” an acute disorganization of behavior,
each time that the conditioned reflexes collided, when the animal was unable to react
to two mutually exclusive tendencies, or was incapable of adequately responding to any
imperative problem.”

One of the reasons why we know so much about Humanistic Psychology today is because of the
defection of one of its major practitioners, Dr. William Coulson, a former colleague of Carl
Rogers and Abraham Maslow. He testified how fraudulent the Encounter Movement was as
science and how destructive it was in practice.   The encounter idea was first developed at the National Training Laboratory (NTL) at Bethel,  Maine, sponsored by the National Education Association. It was founded in 1948 by Kurt Lewin,
a German social psychologist who invented “sensitivity training” and “group dynamics,” or the
psychology of the collective. Lewin’s work was very much in harmony with John Dewey’s
collectivist educational philosophy.
Lewin’s work in Germany in the 1920s was also in harmony with the experiments taking place in
Moscow on techniques of artificially creating behavioral disorganization. Alexander Luria
wrote:

“K. Lewin, in our opinion, has been one of the most prominent psychologists to elucidate
this question of the artificial production of affect and of experimental disorganization of
behavior. The method of his procedure-the introduction of an emotional setting into
the experience of a human, the interest of the subject in the experiment-helped him to
obtain an artificial disruption of the affect of considerable strength…. Here the
fundamental conception of Lewin is very close to ours.” (pp. 206-7)

Lewin died in 1947 shortly after establishing the National Training Laboratory at Bethel, Maine.
Sensitivity training was considered his most original achievement. Carl Rogers considered
sensitivity training to be “perhaps the most significant social invention of this century.”
B.F. Skinner writes in his autobiography:

“In May 1961, Eve and I were members of a delegation of behavioral scientists who
visited Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland under the auspices of the National Academy
of Science and the State Department… . We saw a good deal of Alexander Luria at the
Neurological Institute. … Although Luria was the best known Russian psychologist, he
and his wife, together with his daughter and her husband and an older woman, lived in
three small rooms. He explained that they were near his work and a library. He had a
dacha.”

Skinner discussed the idea of setting up a Walden Two with Luria. Skinner was also well
acquainted with Kurt Lewin. He writes:

“Kurt Lewin was up here a month or two ago [in 1938] … . Have you seen his new book?
He diagrams several lever-pressing situations, and did the same for me for two or three
hours. He is sure we agree, but fundamentally there is the same old ghost of purpose
standing between us.” (p.224)

So it is obvious that Skinner was quite aware of the experiments in artificially creating
behavioral disorganization. The lever-pressing situations relate to Skinner’s animal training
experiments. Indeed, he boasted, “I could make a pigeon a high achiever by reinforcing it on a
proper schedule.” He also wrote in Walden Two:

“We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled, though they are following
a code much more scrupulously than was ever the case under the old system,
nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to
do. That’s the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement– there’s no
restraint and no revolt. By careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior, but
the inclination to behave– the motives, desires, the wishes.”
Skinner also wrote:
“Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.”

The any things now control our culture. And that is why America is in the mess it is.
Skinners colleague Engelman applied Skinnerian teaching principles to Direct Instruction,
Mastery Learning, and to the OBE-Outcome Based Education-curriculum. The reason they
work so poorly is because of the complete absence of the spiritual component which must be
part of education. Godless, atheist education leads to purposeless education. The computer is
the perfect Skinner box because it connects directly with the student and can change his values.
That is why the computer will prevail in the school because of its ability to control the student’s
learning,

Luria’s book describes how dyslexia is created by the clash between phonics and look-say. The
phonics reader, with a phonetic reflex, automatically sees the phonetic structure of the written
word while the look-say reader (with a whole-word reflex) automatically looks at each word as
a picture and cannot see the phonetic structure of the word. The clash of reflexes causes
dyslexia. Skinner also became a member of the Pavlovian Society at Johns Hopkins founded by Horsley
Gantt, Luria’s translator.

By 1955, the reading problem had become so acute that Rudolf Flesch felt compelled to write
his eye-opening bestseller, Why Johnny Can’t Read. It gave the reason in no uncertain terms:
The teaching of reading-all over the United States, in all the schools, and in all the
textbooks-is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense.
And then he explained how the alphabetic phonics method-the proper way to teach children
to read-had been replaced by a look-say, whole word method that was causing untold harm to
the children. What was the reaction of the professors of education? They circled the wagons and created
the International Reading Association which became the citadel of the whole-word method.

And they did everything in their power, through their professional publications, to denounce
and discredit Flesch. In my book, The New Illiterates,      http://blumenfeld.campconstitution.net/Books/New%20Illiterates.pdf I quote the professors ad nauseam. Nevertheless, Flesch’s book awakened many parents, which led to a revival of phonics
programs, but the reaction was not strong enough to derail the dumbing down process in the
schooLS.

In 1961, Watson Washburn, a New York attorney, created the Reading Reform Foundation and
he asked me to become a member of his National Advisory Council. At that time, I was an
editor at Grosset & Dunlap and knew nothing about the reading problem. He advised me to
read Flesch’s book and that’s how I became involved in the reading problem.
I attended all of the Foundation’s conferences, which, of course, were totally ignored by the
reading establishment. However, knowing that millions of children were being denied proper
phonics reading instruction, I decided to write a reading program that any parent could use to
teach their child to read at home. The result was Alpha-Phonics, which I consider to be the
most effective, easiest to use and least expensive reading program ever created.

Meanwhile, the most noteworthy event in the mid-sixties was the completion of Jeanne Chall’s
study of reading instruction methods and its publication in 1967 under the title Learning to
Read: The Great Debate. Three years of intensive research confirmed what phonics proponents
had known all along, that a phonics “code-emphasis” method used in the beginning of reading
instruction produced better readers than methods which began with a “meaning emphasis”
(whole words).

Since Chall’s book was written for the teaching profession rather than the general public it did
not have the impact that Flesch’s book had. She was criticized by the reading establishment
and spent the rest of her professional life in constant conflict with them.
In 1981, Flesch wrote another book, Why Johnny Still Can’t Read, bringing the reading problem
up to date. This time the reading establishment completely ignored him. By then the look-say
method had morphed into the “psycholinguistic” method and finally the Whole Language
method. A new generation parents and teachers were as confused as ever when it came to
reading instruction.

Meanwhile, those parents who were informed enough to know what was going on, left the
public schools and began to homeschool. My Alpha-Phonics program helped thousands of
them teach their kids to read. As for the public schools, reading continued to deteriorate.
By 1981, a Harvard professor, Dr. Anthony Oettinger, was bold enough to tell an audience of
Telecon executives:

“The present ‘traditional’ concept of literacy has to do with the ability to read and write..
.. Do we, for example, really want to teach people to do a lot of sums or write in ‘a fine
round hand’ when they have a five-dollar hand-held calculator or a word processor to
work with? Or, do we really have to have everybody literate-writing and reading in the
traditional sense-when we have the means through our technology to achieve a new
flowering of oral communication?”

“Do we have to have everyone literate?” That’s the attitude of the elite. But then why are we
spending billions on public schools if it is not to make everyone literate?

In 1983, we had the Nation at Risk report, which stated:

“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre
educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of
war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.”

Finally, someone was actually identifying the treason of our educators.
Did this alarming report change anything? According to Parents for Choice in Education:
On the 25th anniversary of this sobering report, the American education system remains
in a state of crisis. We are “A Nation Still at Risk'”

In 2008 the U.S.  Department of Education released a report entitled, A Nation
Accountable: Twenty-five Years After A Nation at Risk, stating:

“If we were ‘at risk’ in 1983, we are at even greater risk now. The rising demands of our
global economy, together with demographic shifts, require that we educate more
students to higher levels than ever before. Yet, our education system is not keeping
pace with these growing demands.”

A year earlier, in November 2007, the National Endowment for the Arts issued an alarming
report on the present state of literacy in America, Reading at Risk. According to the Report, the
number of 17-year-olds who never read for pleasure increased from 9 percent in 1984 to 19
percent in 2004. About half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 never read books for
pleasure. Endowment Chairman Dana Gioia stated:

“This is a massive social problem. We are losing the majority of the new generation. They will not achieve anything close to their potential because of poor reading.  The survey found that only a third of high-school seniors read at a proficient
level. ”

And proficiency is not a high standard,” said Gioia. “We’re not asking them to be able to
read Proust in the original. We’re talking about reading the daily newspaper.”

What was disappointing about the Report is that it did not state the cause of this decline in
national literacy: the refusal of our educators to use the time-tested, traditional phonies
reading instruction programs that once made Americans the most literate people on earth.
And finally, in 2012 the Council on Foreign Relations has gotten into the act by issuing another
alarming report on American education. The CFR Task Force was chaired by Joe I. Klein, former
head of New York City public schools, and Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. Secretary of State in
the Bush administration, two very prominent members of the elite establishment. Klein had
this to say about the reading problem in an interview conducted by Jon Meacham:

“People ask me, what surprised me most about being chancellor? I used to go to public
schools in this city and walk into a high school and ask a kid to read, and the kid could
not read. I don’t even mean comprehend; I mean read the words on a text. How
the hell can a kid be in a school system for a decade and not read?
I mean, so, you know, this kid — now, it may be that financial literacy will incentivize
them, or entrepreneurism, or some ofthe kind of project-driven work that should
happen. But it’s just not going to win in the 21st century to have kids in high schools
who can’t read.”

When Klein was chancellor, I wrote him a letter with a proposal to help solve the schools’
reading problem by using Alpha-Phonics to turn the worst school in the city to the best school
in the city. Some months later I received a very nice letter from Klein who said he appreciated
my interest. And that was all. My proposal was not even considered. Which told me
something about how constricted members of the establishment are in considering true
solutions to the problems they deal with. The solutions must be within politically correct
parameters. And that is why the reforms offered by the CFR task force will get nowhere.

Their main recommendation was for the schools to adopt Common Core Standards.
Concerning the Common Co·re idea, this is what former Secretary of Education Margaret
Spelling, a member of the Task Force, had to say in the Meacham interview:

“I would target the Common Core effort because I do think that’s the way out of the
wilderness. But I wouldn’t do it with — today let’s go try to do, you know, get to millions of
teachers on how to — how to do it.

‘We got to get, you know, very smart and strategic with places like the College Board and
the big publishers, the big technology companies, to get some research-based tools that
are scalable and systematic. And so this idea that we can expect every single teacher,
master teacher or otherwise, many of whom are not capable of doing this in the first
place, to sort of do the magic in their own classroom is just unreasonable, period,
paragraph. And so, you know, we gotta get smarter about that and THEN deploy it. I
mean, I wouldn’t even talk to the teachers about the Common Core at the moment until
we get our act together about what it is and how it works and, you know, materials around
it and assessments built to it. Otherwise, I fear it’s going to be one of those, “we tried that,
and it did not work.”

Considering the difficulties pointed out by Spelling in implementing the Common Core
throughout the education system, we can foresee that educator resistance will kill it. So there
is no possibility of true education reform as long as the nation tolerates a public system of
education that has literally become a highly organized criminal enterprise.

What are its crimes? Its teaching methods injure children’s brains, which is a form of child
abuse. It contributes to the delinquency of minors by pornographic sex ed and the distribution
of condoms. It destroys a child’s religious beliefs and leads many students into atheism,
nihilism or self-destructive Satanism. It pushes powerful drugs like Ritalin and Adderall on kids
in the schools., which, if done on the streets would put you in jail. And it extorts billions of
dollars of the taxpayer’s money on the false pretext that they are educating the children.

So where do we go from here? If enough Tea Party people are elected to Congress in
November, we may be able to get them to close down the Federal Department of Education.
We should work to get the public schools back under local control. We must shut down the
computerized data collection system on all students in America. In short, we must get the
federal government out of the education business and restore the schools to the people in the
communities who pay for them and send their children to them.

We, at this conference, should form a permanent organization which will ride herd on the
legislators not only in Washington but in all the state legislatures. We may be few in numbers
but our message will appeal to the Tea Party.

 

The Blumenfeld Archives