Just as de Becker describes the issue of intuition and real fear, I was not frozen. I acted, but not by throwing myself against the door. I said nothing more, walked through a short hallway and around to the front door, and walked out of the house. As the front door closed, I heard Brenda fire the shot to her head that took her life.
At first, too afraid to go back into the house, I went to neighbors in an attempt to get help and to call the police (this was well before cell phones), but it was midday, and no one was home. Having no option, I summoned the courage and went back into Brenda’s house and called the police. There was no movement in the bathroom, and the shadow under the door indicated she was on the floor. While waiting, I discovered a lone shoe box on a couch in the room attached to that bathroom. The box contained sheets of paper with handwritten notes. It was almost like a random diary in single pages outlining the suffering Brenda was experiencing, complaints, anger, guilt, and hopelessness. It was a crushing exposé of overwhelming psychic pain.
And then there was a note apologizing for killing me.
The note about the would-be murder didn’t surprise me. That was what I sensed would happen just minutes before. I don’t know why Brenda didn’t come out of the bathroom to enact her plan or even shoot through the door. I can only surmise that she wanted both of us in the bathroom. Or perhaps, when it came right down to it, she had simply changed her mind.
It’s difficult to assign logical decision-making to someone who has already transcended all instinct and decided to kill herself or others. To this day, I don’t understand it. It will always remain an incomprehensible and unsolvable mystery.
This experience has compelled me in the decades that followed to want to know more and understand why people do what they do, and what can be done to mitigate the emotional and psychological pain afflicting too many of us, and women in particular.
My personal experience has helped shape my political and media work to focus on helping people understand what’s happening in our lives and why. I suppose I am continuing to educate myself in the process. I am especially determined to make sure those who create and use the pain of others for their own benefit are exposed and defeated.
Looking back at that horrible day in April 1982, I understand now how my personal experience on the micro level with fear and anxiety allowed me to walk into an environment of existential danger. And it was the power of my “intuition” (finally allowing myself to connect the dots I had been ignoring) that broke through right when it was necessary, allowing me to not be a victim. All of us can have that breakthrough personally, politically, and culturally. Overcoming the impact of malignant forces is possible in every part of our lives.
Fear and anxiety afflict all of us at times in our lives. Our challenge is to understand their causes and overcome their consequences, all while learning more about ourselves and our environment. Read on, and you will gain insights into our collective and individual fears that will serve you well.
Chapter 4 Indoctrination Centers
Our leaders must remember that education doesn’t begin with some isolated bureaucrat in Washington. It doesn’t even begin with state or local officials. Education begins in the home, where it is a parental right and responsibility.
—PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN1
The activists who have seized control of most American schools and colleges have rejected the admonition by President Ronald Reagan, above, and turned it on its head. They have transformed educational institutions into centers of indoctrination and propaganda dedicated to brainwashing young people from kindergarten through graduate and professional schools, erasing their individuality and dictating to them what to think.
The Thought Police running schools today are as intolerant of dissent as were their fictional counterparts in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Leftists are fervently committed to hunting down apostates. They brand the nonwoke as heretics and generate fear to pressure them to repent and submit to tyrannical Big Government control.
Today’s inquisitional left seeks to create an environment of perpetual fear—not just in schools, but in every institution in our society—to destroy the individuality, independence, and autonomy of each of us, beginning in childhood. This has the potential to turn the American Dream into the American Nightmare, where we all live in perpetual fear of being canceled, ostracized, or punished in other ways if we dare deviate from rigid, woke dogma.
Make no mistake: the sinister goal of the leftist indoctrination centers masquerading as schools is to impose groupthink on students so they become social justice warriors in a bureaucratic army battling to transform America into an imagined Marxist utopia. They call it a utopia not because they believe it, but to cloak their ultimate goal—a totalitarian hell on Earth, which is always good for bureaucratic tyrants, and bad for everyone else. Schools have weaponized fear as a tool to take control of impressionable young minds and stop them from thinking for themselves. This also trains children to accept this sort of “schooling” after elementary grades.
Parents are the obvious obstacles to the success of this programming, so the true-believer educators do all they can to usurp parental rights by calling into question the intention and capability of mothers, fathers, and even the concept of family in general. The populace must be convinced that parenting is best left to professionals outside the home. Parents are still needed to procreate and feed and house their offspring. But the woke believe mothers and fathers should have little role in overseeing the education of their sons and daughters. Instead, the radicals believe that agents of the state (public school teachers and administrators) should be the primary influencers of children, for which the nuclear family must be maligned and smashed.
Napalm, Rubble, and Ash
As scrutiny of school curricula heated up during the COVID-19 lockdown and parents became more involved and vocal about what their children would be taught, the outright hostility by the left and the education establishment against parental rights and involvement became clear. An October 2021 opinion piece in the Washington Post titled “Parents Claim They Have the Right to Shape Their Kids’ School Curriculum. They Don’t,”2 argued that parents insisting on being in charge of their children’s education were using a “political tactic” to stop young people from thinking independently.
The authors of the article, an assistant professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and a freelance journalist, ask and answer their own question: “When do the interests of parents and children diverge? Generally, it occurs when a parent’s desire to inculcate a particular worldview denies the child exposure to other ideas and values that an independent young person might wish to embrace or at least entertain. To turn over all decisions to parents, then, would risk inhibiting the ability of young people to think independently.”3
In other words, the progressive agents of the state think their agenda is more important, smarter, safer, and better than what any pesky and intruding parent has in mind. Moreover, they insist that a parent providing guidance and a value system to a child is isolating and dangerous, yet somehow the stranger in a classroom deciding what is to be “inculcated” is noble and freeing. Ignore Mom and Dad, and bow down to Orwell’s all-powerful Big Brother.
Watch out if the teachers’ union doesn’t get its way! Letting loose with the scourge of war analogies, they then warn that “conservatives are bringing napalm to the fight. . . . But as with any scorched-earth campaign, the costs of this conflict will be borne long after the fighting stops. Parents may end up with a new set of ‘rights’ only to discover that they have lost something even more fundamental in the process. Turned against their schools and their democracy, they may wake from their conspiratorial fantasies to find a pile of rubble and a heap of ashes.”4
Yikes! Leftists want us to believe that parents ending up with scare-quoted “rights” are a threat to democracy and will only deliver a war-ravaged hellscape of rubble and ash. Okey-dokey. If anything, this screed confirms why strangers with a political agenda should be nowhere near the impressionable minds of children.
None of this is normal. Leftists rely on fear-based arguments about what will happen to children and society, if wokeism does not prevail. One has to wonder, when did parents become the enemy who must be excised from their children’s lives? At about the same time Marxist theory was securely implanted in much of the critical political and cultural infrastructure in this country.
Authoritarian movements have long believed that planting ideas in the minds of children can turn them into obedient adults to perpetuate even the most toxic beliefs far into the future. Once beliefs take root in young minds, they grow and strengthen over the years like an oak emerging from a seed, and the more they are woven into the child’s identity, the more difficult it is to change them later in life.
Totalitarian regimes spend a great deal of time fostering this investment in future control. The Russian Bolsheviks created the Young Communist League, the Nazis created Hitler Youth, and Mao Zedong created the Red Guards. In 1976, the totalitarian Cambodian Khmer Rouge ordered all children over the age of seven to be “separated from their parents to live communally with Khmer Rouge instructors.”5 Unsurprisingly, Pol Pot, the Marxist genocidal leader of the regime, gravely warned: “Mothers should not get too entangled with their children.”6
All these diabolical regimes tightly regulated what was taught in schools. Their goal was to indoctrinate young people and teach them to be more loyal to their political masters than to their own parents. This allows Big Government to rob us of our freedoms and turn us into obedient servants. It is a fundamentally anti-American effort because, in America, government has always been the servant of people—not the other way around. We must not let this change.
Behind the Zoom Glass
Many Americans were unaware of just how far off the deep end leftists had gone in their efforts to turn schools into assembly lines churning out woke robots until 2020. That’s when COVID-19 lockdowns closed schools, forcing students to struggle to learn remotely, often using the Zoom platform from home on computers, tablets, or smartphones.
Parents—many of them working from home or newly unemployed due to the pandemic—gained the ability to watch their children in these remote classes and were shocked to see the leftist garbage that teachers were feeding students in the name of “education.” The teaching of race essentialism through the poisonous Critical Race Theory, books about sex acts, children “transitioning” gender in secret, the denigration of patriotism, and the view that America is inherently racist, sexist, imperialistic, environmentally destructive, and a force for evil abounded. Millions of parents were rightly outraged.7, 8
Obviously, we all understand that America is not and never has been perfect. No nation can claim the mantle of perfection, but our freedom of thought and speech makes it possible to try to become a better people and nation and allows us to determine when we make progress.
Children certainly need to be taught about slavery and racial discrimination, mistreatment of American Indian tribes, discrimination against women, and our other challenges. But they also need to be taught that these issues of the past have been largely corrected, and we remain vigilant about them in our continuing quest to fulfill the mission of the Constitution to “form a more perfect union.”9 They also need to be taught about other nations and peoples that have committed similar injustices—including the ones that still do today.
Above all, children need to be taught that the good in America far outweighs its shortcomings, and that America is the greatest nation that has ever existed. Much like what we tell our children and even ourselves as we get older—yes, we’ve had problems, made mistakes, and have regrets, but it’s how we respond that matters, which is informed by our character. As individuals, the good in us also far outweighs the difficulties.
Many of us know the lifelong and dreadful impact of growing up in abusive homes where adults reinforced our negative self-view and berated us as “irredeemable.” The Marxist agitprop and conditioning being unleashed in our education system is a haunting simile of what happens in an abusive home and has the same deleterious impact on the young minds subjected to it. Children growing up in fear become anxious, unfocused, and unsuccessful at personal relationships. Does that sound like any young adults you know? Moreover, a study from the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child at Harvard University reports that “early exposure to circumstances that produce persistent fear and chronic anxiety can have lifelong effects on brain architecture.”10
The United States is a nation that replaced rule by kings, queens, and dictators with a representative democracy in which the people rule. A nation that provides us with more freedom and rights than any other. Moreover, it is exactly the negatives we have overcome and defeated that illustrate the power of freedom and the decency of the American people and the American Dream.
If America was the terrible place leftists make it out to be, people would be leaving here in droves. Instead, America is the home to more immigrants than any other nation—about 45 million people, making up 14 percent of the US population.11 They come here specifically because of our past and what we strive to become: a strong and compassionate nation that is the leader of the free world militarily and economically. Those of us lucky enough to be born in the United States should honor, love, and appreciate it even more than the people desperate to come here.
Most American parents want their children to learn these facts in school so that young people understand how lucky they are to live in the United States and embrace patriotism to preserve our liberty for themselves and for future generations. Most parents also haven’t been sitting at home, wringing their hands about Marxist theory, because they haven’t had to until recently. It has been unthinkable for parents that sending their children to public school would endanger their moral authority over their own family and their right to guide their sons and daughters in the fashion that best suits their hopes for the future.
But here we are, in an upside-down world where politicians, union organizers, social workers, and activist teachers from kindergarten through graduate schools are shifting from teaching people how to think, to what to think.
Identity Politics and Triggering Genocide
The immediate demonstration on college campuses across the country celebrating the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hamas’s genocidal slaughter of unarmed civilians, including children and infants, in Israel on October 7, 2023, reveals an important truth about the mind-killing agenda.
