Columnists, Media, Mike Rosen, National, Politics, Uncategorized

Rosen: A look at systemic leftist indoctrination

Systemic leftist indoctrination endangers America

It’s taken about a half century but the radical left-wing and Marxist America-hating faction of academia has succeeded in playing a major role in tearing this country apart in the name of “social justice” and its handmaiden identity politics. While their number may not constitute a majority of faculty members across all instructional disciplines, the leftist faction dominates the political discussion with an outsized influence in the absence of a significant number of conservative faculty members with opposing views. And the culture of higher education, encompassing its faculties, administrators and indoctrinated students, mostly aligns with the leftists.

Leftist academia has spawned a philosophy and related movements of social engineering. The lexicon of its ever-expanding list of grievances and hypersensitivities includes terms like diversity, multiculturalism, intersectionality, non-binary gender, toxic masculinity, trigger warnings, micro aggressions, cultural appropriation, wokeness, systemic racism, white privilege and many more. To take issue with any of these leaves one open to the fury of the cancel culture.

Asao Inoue, a professor at Arizona State University has declared that conformity to Standard English, grammar and even the grading of students are racist weapons of “white supremacy.” On another issue, to avoid the wrath of the political correct Gestapo, you had better accommodate those with a non-binary gender persuasion who demand you refer to them by their chosen personal pronoun, certainly not by he, she, his or her. Those pronouns are only for the cisgendered (their term for almost all of us who go by our anatomical and chromosomal sex at birth). Instead, you must use they, zie, sie, ey, ve or dozens of other affectations. Sorry, I’m a holdout for Standard English. I can’t bring myself to say something like, “Just who do they think they is?”

The academic left’s collective, welcoming utopia of fairness, tolerance, inclusion and social justice is hypocritically intolerant of dissenting viewpoints. And especially unwelcoming to conservatives and others who espouse individualism, limited government, capitalism, and freedom of speech and thought. Students who stand up to these tyrants have been shamed, harassed, tried, convicted and punished before kangaroo courts of administrators, faculty and student vigilantes who deny them due process and the right to confront their accusers.

This divisive and destructive mentality has metastasized and filtered down to K-12 education in public schools where most teachers and administrators share the progressive ideology of academia. School curricula is increasingly politicized with a distinct leftist bias. A glaring example is the adoption of A People’s History of the United States as a high school textbook in many schools across the country. The author, the late Howard Zinn, was a radical left-wing scholar and social justice warrior with a Marxian mentality of perpetual class warfare. His book, an exercise in anti-American propaganda, paints a distorted and inordinately negative picture of American history, obsessing on our shortcomings and minimizing, distorting or ignoring our virtues. Progressive educators call this “critical thinking.”

K-12 education is dominated by powerful teacher unions which leverage their influence and resources to recruit, fund and elect like-minded candidates to school boards. Those unions, the NEA and AFT, are wholly committed to the Democratic Party, and Democrats return the favor, supporting the unions’ self-serving collective bargaining demands and legislative agenda. The teachers are overwhelmingly progressive Democrats, themselves. The minority of conservatives and Republicans within their ranks tend to keep a low profile if they hope to be welcome in the teachers’ lounge.

It’s no wonder that students develop a leftist bias. Idealistic but as yet inexperienced young people are particularly susceptible to this kind of ideological indoctrination, reinforced and cemented in college. One measure of that is their preference for socialism over capitalism as reported by pollsters.

The former Soviet Union, Communist China, Cuba, North Korea and other socialist dictatorships clearly understand the value of indoctrinating impressionable young minds with their ideology in their government schools, as do our own progressive educators and politicians.

Social Justice warriors have little regard for property rights, meritocracy, free speech with which they disagree or a free-market economy. They’re coercive utopians who take production and the creation of societal wealth for granted and care only about the redistribution of it through government taxes, controls and regulations. Moreover, they’re monopolists in the war of ideas. They invented and enforce today’s cancel culture.

Education, Hollywood, TV, pop music, the news media, social media and pop culture are all dominated by the left. Unless millennials and the next generation somehow come to their senses, there may be no hope for the future of America.

Longtime KOA radio talk host and columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Mike Rosen now writes for CompleteColorado.com. 

SUPPORT COMPLETE

Our unofficial motto at Complete Colorado is “Always free, never fake, ” but annoyingly enough, our reporters, columnists and staff all want to be paid in actual US dollars rather than our preferred currency of pats on the back and a muttered kind word. Fact is that there’s an entire staff working every day to bring you the most timely and relevant political news (updated twice daily) from around the state on Complete’s main page aggregator, as well as top-notch original reporting and commentary on Page Two.

CLICK HERE TO LADLE A LITTLE GRAVY ON THE CREW AT COMPLETE COLORADO. You’ll be giving to the Independence Institute, the not-for-profit publisher of Complete Colorado, which makes your donation tax deductible. But rest assured that your giving will go specifically to the Complete Colorado news operation. Thanks for being a Complete Colorado reader, keep coming back.

Comments are closed.