The Weekly Sam: How to Dumb Down a Free Nation by Sam Blumenfeld

Easy. Destroy its literacy, and you’ve dumbed it down. And once dumbed down, it
becomes the potential victim of any unscrupulous power that wants to dominate it.
Recently I had occasion to read several bound volumes of the Century Magazine,
published in the early days of the last century. The quality of the articles and the diversity
of subject matter revealed a general literacy of a very high order. They were written for a
public that not only could read but had great curiosity and interest about the world. In
those days, Americans had independent intelligence and an insatiable appetite for
knowledge in all fields.

Today there are few magazines that still cater to a dwindling literate population. And
none of them have the breadth and depth of what was published a hundred years ago.
And while our technological advances have given us marvelous gadgets for
communication, most of them are used today to record and play popular music, create
video games, and send emails. Nobody writes letters anymore. We either send emails or
greeting cards with messages for every occasion. The American brain just doesn’t
function the way it used to. It’s been replaced by emotion, ignorance, and wishful
thinking.

If you look at the most illiterate nations on the planet, you find that they are ruled by
despots, live in abject poverty, and have no hope for a better future. That doesn’t mean
that literate nations, like Germany, can’t produce political monsters. But when they do,
we know that satanic influences are behind it. Literacy is not immune from evil. It can
be used for evil purposes. But a Constitutional Republic is supposed to be so constructed
as to make evil unlikely to prevail.

America, from its beginning, was arguably the most literate nation on earth, and the result
was positive in every respect. Why was it so literate? Because the people were governed
by the precepts of the Bible, and biblical literacy was paramount in the education of the
nation’s children. But once Americans succumbed to government schooling, which eliminated God from
the curriculum, it became possible to introduce teaching methods deliberately intended to
dumb down the nation.

All of this was done in the early days of the last century by our Progressive educators who
no longer believed in the religion of their fathers. They now put their faith in science,
which explained how the material world worked; evolution, which explained the origin of
living matter, organisms spontaneously created in some sort of primordial soup; and
behavioral psychology, which gave the educators the means to remove the soul from
human beings and control their behavior like animals. And the Progressives have
succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

And these Progressives were also Socialists. Why? Because they had to deal with the
problem of evil, and they decided that evil was caused by our capitalist system in which
competition and the pursuit of wealth were driving forces. But Socialism would
eliminate evil, by eliminating competition, making everyone economically equal, and
eliminating social injustice. And so the Progressives embarked on a long-range program to convert America from a
capitalist, individualistic society to a collectivist, egalitarian society. And after a hundred
years of unremitting effort, they have finally captured the machinery of political and
economic power.

The question is: are there enough Bible believing, individualistic Americans, willing to
do whatever it will take to preserve our Constitutional Republic? I recently watched a
video on YouTube about how Cesar Chavez became dictator of Venezuela. He promised
to take money from the rich and give it to the poor. Naturally, the poor became his chief
supporters and they have bought the socialist promise of equality and social justice hook,
line and sinker. As long as he has oil money he can shower the poor with goodies. The
ultra rich could make deals with the dictatorship. But the middle class has found it
impossible to survive under Chavez, and anyone with any ambition is leaving the country.
And where are many of them going? To the United States.

But what if the United States goes socialist? Where will Americans go? One solution is
for conservatives to move en masse to one of the states that did not vote for Obama and
create a truly conservative state government that will resist the socialist pressures from
Washington. Which state would that be? But perhaps that will not be necessary if in 2010 the American people get rid of the
present left-wing Congress in power, and replace the socialists with conservative lovers
of Constitutional government. A prospect devoutly to be wished.

(This was written in 2009.  For more of Sam’s timeless and important work, please visit, sign-up and share the archive with others:  https://campconstitution.net/sam-blumenfeld-archive/