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As we have often considered here, it is the left’s long march through the institutions that is destroying the Republic. Toxic, explicitly Marxist enormities have been worked into and preached from an ever-larger array of the institutions of our cultural life.

Scott Shepard

Scott Shepard

Now that the marchers have threatened their way into – and are in significant control of – corporate boardrooms, the movement poses a direct threat to investors’ portfolios and economic security. So-called ESG provisions are simply the enactment of hard-left priorities by businesses, when the polity has indicated that it will not support those destructive policies through the political process.

Stakeholder capitalism is just the transference from government to industry of the Wilsonian doctrine that lefty “experts” must be in control – not the great unwashed (voters, shareholders).  As the COVID debacle has made clear, that official encomium, “expert,” is granted not for actual merit or for rigorous understanding, but in response to the grantee’s enthusiastic endorsement of whatever the hard left wants at any given time.

Only that could explain why Black Lives Matter anarchy should not, according to these experts, cause COVID transmission, while Trump rallies surely would; or why President Biden and Governor Newsom and Speaker Pelosi and Mayor Breed and Mayor Lightfoot and former President Obama and Doctor Fauci himself could all ignore their own mask-and-distance mandates, but your kids (for whom COVID is pretty much a cold) must be rigorously masked.

Government experts are too often hacks; their science is propaganda and religion and graft. And now this “expertise,” and demand for citizen deference to haxperts (hacksperts?), have been transplanted to corporations and shareholders.

But this direct threat is a culmination of a long process, not a stand-alone phenomenon. So while we are on the front lines of the fight against woke capture of corporate America – and while we’re eager for all the allies we can get – to save the economy and our investments in the short term, we must also pay attention to the future. We must, as it were, secure the blessings of liberty not only for ourselves, but for our posterity.

That means running for your local school board.

The woke poison would be restricted to the battier departments of higher education, and the more tedious Hollywood enclaves, as it long had been, had it not captured public education generally.

It is in the public schools that our little ones are being taught to hate themselves, their peers and their country and its manifold virtues in the service of the sprawling new domains of discrimination (e.g., the New Racism posing as its opposite) and collectivist twaddle (e.g., that economic and cultural spoils should be distributed on the basis of race and sex without consideration for unique people and their individual merit – so long as the current rich-and-powerful who toe the leftwing line for others get to exclude themselves from its mechanisms).

If the kids weren’t taught the nonsense there in their youths (and were we to move, collectively, away from the twin errors of helicopter parenting and trophies for everybody), they wouldn’t be primed to respond in hysterical agreement when presented with it at college, but would instead argue back or shrug it off. It was the capture of “lower” education that allowed the woke contagion to escape its fetid petrie dishes and get out to infect the broader world.

The direct line between the catastrophe in public education and the hijacking of American corporations by socialists and frauds could not have been made clearer than by a recent plea by the Superintendent of Schools in Loudon County, Virginia to local businesses, asking them to support taxpayer-funded instruction in the New Racism.

He covered the true nature of this request with a lie, of course. “Our detractors would have you believe that we are teaching and indoctrinating students with Critical Race Theory in our schools. That’s something that’s simply not happening,” Superintendent Ziegler said. “What we in education call equity and equity training, which I define as the practice of acknowledging culture and respecting and affirming identity. It’s what you in business would call diversity training.”

The lie is that there’s any meaningful difference between critical race theory and “equity training.” As we have considered here before, equity is just another world for discrimination. Equity means racial spoils, the erasure of individuality and merit, and the condemnation of white students for the sins of other people’s similarly pallored ancestors as a means of denying non-white students (and others) any personal responsibility at all. With “equity,” everybody loses.

Of course, Virginia generally has been a hotbed of woke-education lunacy in recent months. Former Governor Terry McAuliffe, who oozed to Richmond out of the depths of the Clinton Administration’s corruption pit, recently told voters that parents shouldn’t have any say about what their students get taught in public schools. The Fairfax County school district is suing parents for the sin of releasing to the public incriminating public records that the parents had received from the school district itself. And both the school board and the teachers union turned against a fine young teacher who dared to stand up for science and sense against the (completely manufactured) trans hysteria. Only the commonwealth’s Supreme Court saved his job, while the union demonstrated its fidelity not to its members, but to leftism.

So: you want to protect your portfolio, the economy and the Republic? Run for school board. Fight the unions at every step, and reduce their power as far as possible. Monitor what’s being taught in the classrooms, and ban any teaching of the new racism or America-Last-ism, under whatever guise you find it. Require curricula that teach young people that the world does not run according to – in fact, does not even stoop to notice – the absurd demands and wild theories of teenagers. Keep the administrators constantly to account, firing any of them whom you find doing the bidding of the hard left rather than the wishes of the people who pay their salaries. And withdraw your school from the National School Boards Association – or stay in, fight hard, and force it to tell Attorney General (and fascist monster) Merrick Garland to pound sand.

Oh, one more thing: stop coddling the kids. Toughen them up so that they’ll be ready to treat their hyper-leftist college professors with the same mixture of challenging bemusement and amused dismissiveness with which we were armed in earlier generations.

 

Scott Shepard is a fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research and Director of its Free Enterprise Project. This was first published at Townhall Finance.

Author: The National Center