What comes after the Industrial-Education Complex?
“The 20th century Industrial-Education Complex is the single biggest anchor on human ingenuity and freedom in the west. The highest value of this system is compliance. It prepares humans to act as cogs in the vast bureaucracies and factories of the mid-20th century. It was never meant to cultivate the beauty, genius, and freedom of your child.”
Quillette Articles:
A Return to Tradition: Creating a Post-Trump Conservatism
By Bo Winegard
“The conservative movement is in crisis. During the storm and stress of the Trump years, critics in the media and elsewhere have painted its voters as xenophobic know-nothings, its politicians as unscrupulous power-mongers, and its intellectuals as hypocrites and cowards. All its reverential talk about limited government, respecting the Constitution, and the importance of character, its detractors claim, has been exposed as a pleasant-sounding patina disguising an ugly, reactionary Id of bitterness and fear.”
The Value of Knowledge
By Daniel Buck
“To no one’s surprise, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the mind behind the New York Times‘s 1619 Project, has spread a new falsehood. On Twitter, she confidently declared that school choice—a policy that allows families, not zoning laws, to choose their schools—’came about to stymie integration.’ This claim is wrong in at least three ways. First, both John Stuart Mill and Thomas Paine recommended some scheme of school choice long before Jim Crow laws were introduced in the United States. Second, Milton Friedman, the popularizer of the policy, considered it a means to integrate American schools without top-down mandates. Finally, many segregationists came to reject choice, preferring school zoning laws as a means to achieve their racist agenda.”
The Battle for Moral Authority
By Eli Steele
"The progressive narrative of race derives its authority from academic theories which hold that we live in a nation designed by white people who thrived by excluding other races from power. This version of history has accumulated tremendous power and influence in recent years. The progress of countless blacks, including those in my own family, is frequently ignored by true believers who insist that these white systems of power abide in the present day as ‘systemic racism.’ Its adherents point to disparities between whites and blacks in education, crime, wealth, and elsewhere and argue that racism—and only racism—can explain these gaps. But by dismissing merit, individualism, personal responsibility, and capitalism as the racist creations of the Judeo-Christian white male, they have helped to create a world devoid of our greater humanity.
What gives these theorists their enormous reservoir of moral power is the quasi-Marxist belief that the United States can be neatly divided into two discrete categories: racists and antiracists. In a white world plagued by inequality, it is the antiracist’s duty to proactively fight these injustices, even if that means employing racial discrimination to achieve racial equity. And since there is no greater sin than that of racism, moral power lies with the antiracist. Is it any wonder that millions of Americans rushed to declare their solidarity with the antiracist side? Those who hesitated over the wisdom of using racial discrimination to achieve racial equity could soothe their consciences with a cliche: the end justifies the means. And because my father and I refused to endorse these simplistic beliefs, I became a racist in today’s America. Quite the transformation from the days in my youth when I was called a nigger."
Slouching Toward Post-Journalism
The New York Times and other elite media outlets have openly embraced advocacy over reporting.
"During the 2016 presidential campaign, the Times stumbled onto a possible answer. It entailed a wrenching pivot from a journalism of fact to a 'post-journalism' of opinion—a term coined, in his book of that title, by media scholar Andrey Mir. Rather than news, the paper began to sell what was, in effect, a creed, an agenda, to a congregation of like-minded souls. Post-journalism 'mixes open ideological intentions with a hidden business necessity required for the media to survive,' Mir observes. The new business model required a new style of reporting. Its language aimed to commodify polarization and threat: journalists had to 'scare the audience to make it donate.' At stake was survival in the digital storm."