LM#47--What Happened To Our Country? pt3

If there's one question that keeps getting asked by an overwhelming number of Americans, it is this what happened to our country? I don't recognize it anymore. Let's talk about it on this Liberty Minute.

Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, David Kaiser.

Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Liberty Minute. This is part three of a three-part series where we will attempt to answer the question that is on the minds of most Americans what happened to our country? This is a question being asked at kids hockey tournaments, at moms PTA meetings, over beers at the local pub, with the dads just coming off the golf courses. They're all asking about the kids and the schools they attended. What in the world happened to our country over the last 10 to 20 years? Now the short answer to that question is we are undergoing a cultural revolution. In fact, most likely we are in the middle of it Now. Last time I checked, our national and international leadership all around the world is sadly mediocre, mediocre at best. So that poses its own set of problems.

Now to recap on our first episode, we tackled what is arguably the best analysis and diagnosis of what happened to the Democratic Party and a quick recap of that is the party of JFK and Harry Truman and, dare I even say, bill Clinton. That party moved drastically, irrevocably, to the far left, essentially going from liberalism to despotism, as our first author, kevin Slack, and his book, the War on the American Republic, outlined for us so well. Now, in our next episode, part two of what happened to our country, which we covered last week, the intellectual heavyweight Mark Levin, famous radio talk show host, gives us a deep and thorough history of the Democratic Party, going all the way back to Thomas Jefferson. His book is perhaps the greatest actual history of the Democratic Party. The title speaks for itself the Democrat Party Hates America. That sounds quite harsh, but, believe me, he makes the case an overwhelming case in the opening chapter. Just get the Kindle version and you can read the opening chapter for free. Now how the party, how that party fought for slavery, fought for the Jim Crow South, fought against civil rights Our current president was one of those fighters and how they are and have been since the turn of this century, an overwhelming radical, radical Marxist party. They were just waiting to make the long march through the institutions, as Gramsci, the Italian Marxist and revolutionary himself, advised them to do so. Be sure to check out our previous episodes for both of those episodes Now, if you did happen to listen to the previous episodes. Thank you very much. You are well prepared for this final episode, and our guide today is a new up and comer.

Our author is Christopher Rufo. Now when he was at the Claremont Institute I became aware of him, that fine, fine establishment out in California that does great work for conservatives all throughout the country and that's where I came across his writing. But then Chris directed an eye opening documentary. The title of it was called Chasing the Dream Poverty and Opportunity in America. In it he challenged the establishment GOP, showing the decline of prosperity in three different cities Youngstown, ohio, memphis, tennessee and Stockton, california. So be sure to check out that documentary because it's quite good. But now Chris is on. He's in Florida on the board of the new college of Florida that's the actual title where Florida Governor Ron DeSantis asked him to come and clean up that schools out of control, critical race theory and sanity that was taking place, and since he's been there he's been quite successful.

Now, in the meantime he had some time to write this wonderful book and that's going to be the book that we cover today. The book's title is America's Cultural Revolution how Aparpo, how the radical left, conquered everything. And this book is spot on. It's quite, quite good. In fact it's so good that he quickly outlines for anyone trying to catch up and understand what happened to our country. He quickly outlines and gives you exactly what you need to understand the problem. He connects the dots, so to speak. So if there was one book that I would ask you to get of the three that we featured in this series, it would be this one America's Cultural Revolution. He does a great job connecting the dots. You could see how this pathway and roadmap is destroying the country as we know it.

In the book we meet our old friends, the radical, radical left of Herbert Marcus from the Frankfurt School and in that terrible terrorist, angela Davis, and indeed she is a terrorist. But then Chris Rufo keeps digging to tell us about two others that can be joined to the first two. She could become the four horsemen of the Democratic Apocalypse, as one podcast announcer coined the term, and I kind of like that. The four horsemen of the Democratic Apocalypse. Now the other two, in addition to Herbert Marcus and Angela Davis, is Paulo Furey, the Marxist who wrote a book titled the Pedagogy of the Oppressors, which we will discuss later in this podcast. And then the final is Derek Bell, the lawyer and radical CRT specialist whose legal theories we are still battling today. Now, I do like that term. The four horsemen of the Democratic Apocalypse. Now the book America's Cultural Revolution written by Chris Rufo, is divided up into four parts Revolution, race, education and power, and each he features these different figures with a wonderful biography explaining how they got to where they are and how their writings have grabbed the attention of mainstream, the mainstream modern left, turning them radical, if not now despotic.

The one revolutionary that is often missed in many conservative analysis and diagnosis of this cultural revolution is indeed the Brazilian Marxist, paulo Fari. This guy was the real deal, a true, true Marxist. He's widely considered the grandfather of critical education theory. In his book, like we mentioned, the pedagogy of the oppressed was written in 1968. It's his most famous work. It's actually the third most cited book in the world in the social sciences. Just to give you some framework, it sold over 750,000 copies worldwide and that figure was taken from the year 2000. It's the latest figure I could find in my research. Now I'm sure in the last 25 years it's only skyrocketed. That books sales is only skyrocketed because the revolution in America is now in full swing.

Fari called the traditional pedagogy the banking model of education, meaning the students are like empty vessels, like a piggy bank, and they are to be filled with knowledge. Fari's book outlines something different. He argues for a pedagogy that treats the student as the co creator of knowledge. And as you skim this book, you can hear the Marxist class struggle screaming at you, coming off the pages. Now, if you're not aware and most Americans and people listening to this podcast are not aware when you combine Marxist political systems and this pseudo education, and then you overlay it with Christianity, you get a crazy cocktail that the world discovered as liberation theology. Now liberation theology has corrupted and killed a lot of people in Central and South America because it took off in the early 20th century, and it took off especially, most ironically, in the country of Brazil, which is where Paulo Fari is from. But enough about his background for now. Let's go to our book for our first pull quote from this brilliant writer, new on the scene, chris Rufo.

In the fall of 1969, brazilian Marxist educator named Paulo Fari Ferreira I'm sorry, I've been pronouncing it wrong Paulo Ferreira, my Spanish is not so good and the E is actually pronounced in Spanish. The Brazilian Marxist educator named Paulo Ferreira arrived on the Harvard University campus with a suitcase full of clothes and a Portuguese language manuscript of a book he called Pedagogy of the oppressed. He arrived as an exile forced out of Brazil following a right wing military coup and soon became a meshed in the radical political circles in Cambridge, massachusetts. As the weather turned cold for E, ferreira sorry grew a beard and adopted the appearance of a guru, a third world theatrition with the keys to subversion. During Ferreira's short stay at Harvard, where he served as a research associate at the Center for Studies in Education and Development, ferreira and his colleagues translated the manuscript of pedagogy of the oppressed into English, which, over the subsequent decades, helped transform American education. The book sold more than one million copies and is now the third most cited work in the social sciences. It has become the foundational text in nearly all graduate schools of education and teacher training programs. Although Ferreira only spent six months in Cambridge, he departed as a prophet of the intellectual left and identified the education system as a vehicle for the revolution. So if you want to know what happened to our university system of education and our secondary school of education, right there you go. You can see that this book, the pedagogy of the oppressed, is a foundational text in nearly all graduate schools of education and teacher training programs. This happened all the way back in 1968. Let's learn a little bit more about this book.

As a book, the pedagogy of the oppressed is a Rorschach test. At one level it presents a simple, even unconventional or, I'm sorry, uncontroversial lesson Children must be invested in their own education and engage in creative problem solving, rather than be subjected to rote learning and top-down control. This insight is packaged in American schools today as critical pedagogy and culturally repressive, responsive teaching, with Ferreira playing the role of the kindly bearded teacher who wants to cultivate the spirit of social justice. But underneath the surface, there is a deeper, troubling current that runs all the way through the pedagogy of the oppressed. Ferreira bases his pedagogy on the political belief that capitalism has enslaved the population and anethetized the world's oppressed with a series of myths the myth that the oppressive order is a free society. The myth that all persons are free to work where they wish. The myth that this order respects human rights. The myth of private property is fundamental to personal human development. And the myth of charity and generosity of the elites. Ferreira stands ready to offer the solution. Through his work, he reveals a vision of the ideal education system that deconstructs society's myths, unmasks its oppressors and inspires students to revolutionary consciousness.

Ferrera's language of liberation, revolution and struggle is not merely symbolic. The most cited political figures in the pedagogy are wait for it Lenin, mao, goethe, guevara, castro, all whom mobilized violence to advance their political cause. The revolution might begin in the classroom, ferrera told his students, but it would end in the streets. He worshipped the decisive action of the Third World militants and saw the education system as the ideal recruiting ground for a cultural revolution that would overturn the world. Cultural revolution, quote-unquote, takes the total society to be reconstructed, heathundered. As the cultural revolution depends on critical consciousness in the creative practice of the new society, people will begin to perceive why mythical remnants of the old society survive in the new, and they will then be able to free themselves more rapidly of these specters.

Paulo Ferrera imagined himself an oracle, a man who had demythologized the oppressions of his time, but he was in truth a man who would unleash unimaginable cruelties in the name of justice Quote the ideal lies in punishing the perverse, the killers of popular leadership, of countryfolk and forced people. Here and now, he thundered. The smiling bearded teacher was not so much a guru as a fanatic. Even as the Marxist-Leninist regimes revealed themselves as purveyors of great barbarism, he refused to abandon the faith. He clung to his idols of Che, lenin and Mao, even as their own societies repudiated them. But despite the failure of his ideology everywhere it was attempted, his influence took root in a unlikely place, the United States of America, and that is where he would become a prophet. Indeed, he would become a prophet in all the university, ivy League, universities throughout the United States. It would depend on this foundational text, and that is the radicalization of our education system, beginning in the 19, late 1960s.

And the funny thing is is Ferrara left the United States and he would travel all around the world. And all these, he would be invited to all these communist countries and they would implement his policies. And everything failed everywhere he went. And yet nobody in the United States ever had to try and have to reconcile that. Nobody ever pressed him of why these atrocities are happening. Why is everything that he's been advocating for, from his major thesis in his book to all this Marxist and communist thinking, why is all of it being repudiated all over the world? Let's go back to the book to hear how some of that had happened.

Even after the atrocities of Ferrara's heroes were revealed, he continued to idealize them. In 1974, he called China's cultural revolution, which led to the death and starvation and persecution of millions of innocent people. Quote the most genial solution of the century. In 1985, he described Che Guevara's as the incarnation of the authentic revolution utopia who justified guerrilla warfare as an introduction to freedom. Revolutionary violence, for Ferrara, maintain, was best understood as an act of love. Later on we pick him up. Later on we read this For the next 16 years, ferrara would wander around the globe, from the United States to Latin America, to post-colonial Africa, seeking to turn his theories of liberation into practice.

The coup, ferrara said, had radicalized him. The mild mannered humanist from Recife, brazil, had been transformed into the pedagogist for a global revolution. He had abandoned hope and reformist politics and by the time he went into exile, he had been become a committed Marxist, believing that only the total transformation of society would be sufficient to end the dehumanization of the laboring classes. Although his project had failed in Brazil, he believed it could succeed in the Third World Nations where the Communists had secured power, such as Chile, nicaragua, el Salvador, angola, mozambique, tanzania, cabeberde, santome, príncipe and a small country on the west coast of Africa, guinea-bissau. Now we won't get into the train wreck that was Guinea-Bissau, but Ferrara left it in shambles. Everything he did did not work. Country fell into civil war. It was just like I said it was just a train wreck. You can check out the book for that whole story. But let's pick up at the very end of this chapter to conclude this biography on Paulo Ferrara.

Ferrara concluded his work in Guinea-Bissau in 1977, leaving it by almost any measure worse off than when he arrived. Over the next three decades, guinea-bissau ricocheted through a series of election coups, assassinations and a civil war. The countries failed First. Economic policies gave way to scattershot reforms, then to the role of the black market and reoccurring bouts of inflation.

In 1990, pope John Paul II visited Guinea-Bissau and prayed for the nation to move beyond violence and corruption. The Pope encouraged the then-president, yahu Bernardo Ferrara, to reform the national curriculum which, according to Vatican officials, was still shot through with the Marxist propaganda Quote. I pray that the Educative Programs enjoy full success, beginning with genuine literacy, he said, encouraging Guinea-Bissau to resist all that would seek to crush the individual and cancel him in an anonymous collectivity by institutions, structures or a system. Now, as an aside, if you've read anything about John Paul II, you know that what that was right. There was a very kind but firm. You better shape up, because you are endangering the souls of thousands by your lack of leadership, and he would often say that too many ahead of state all around the world.

Coming back to the book today, guinea-bissau is a failed state. South American drug cartels use the islands along the nation's coastline as a drug transit point, smuggling up to 1,000 kilograms of cocaine into the territory each night. Guinea-bissau is sprawling in corrupt military leases, airstrips and naval facilities to the cartels, which paper their way through the bureaucracy with drug dollars. Meanwhile, the population suffers. Guinea-bissau is one of the poorest nations on earth. Nearly 70% of its residents live on less than $2 per day and large swaths of the population depend on foreign aid for basic survival. The territories plagued by slavery, child labor, forced marriage, female genital mutilation and torture of political opposition. And despite the regime's ambitions, guinea-bissau remains an illiterate society 52% of the adults cannot read, including 69% of all women.

In retrospect, ferreras had made a major mistake. He identified a constellation of monsters Colonialism, capitalism, ignorance, oppression but put too much faith in the revolution. Guinea-bissau, ferrera and Karabal had followed their theory to the limits, expelling the colonial power, dismantling the market economy and establishing the one-party state that, through this transformation would only vanquish the old constellations of the monsters, but they unleashed one monster after another. This barbarism, precarity and disillusionment. The Portuguese, who had never extended their influence beyond the coastline, provided a convenient foil. But after their departure, the revolutionaries had to grapple with the complex tribal, economic, linguistic and cultural realities in the country's tangled interior.

For this task, ferrera's theories proved insufficient. After he went Angola, mozambique, nicaragua, el Salvador, Guinea-Bissau the system of colonialism gave way to a system of poverty, repression, illiteracy, mass murder and civil war. Yet despite this string of failures, ferrera's image as the wise, peripatetic guru persevered. His practical work might have been a supreme disappointment. He enabled tyranny more than he taught literacy. But his theoretical project would soon be resurrected in unlikely place, the United States of America. Now, you might be saying to yourself, you might be thinking hey these folks made some mistakes.

You know, nobody's perfect, it's no biggie. You'd see, you misunderstand the true, true radical nature of these Marxists, which Paulo Ferrera and the other three horsemen, Actually we're In fact. Let's conclude with Rufo's analysis of that very question, Because hey, these guys and gals weren't so bad, right? What does Chris Rufo say after studying the subject? The story of America's Cultural Revolution is one of triumph. The critical theories have become the dominant frame in the academy. The long march through the institutions has captured the public and private bureaucracy. The language of left-wing radicalism has become the lingua franca of the educated class. But beneath these apparent victories there is a darkness, a moral void that threatens to reverse these triumphs and turn the revolution into a monster. The warning signs were there from the beginning. As a historical matter, the Cultural Revolution has been a failure everywhere it's been tried.

During the rise of the New Left, Marcus Davis and Ferrara all expressed unalloyed support for their communist revolutionary movements, which were putting their theories into practice. They heaped praise on Lenin, Mao, Che, Castro, Karbal. But this dream quickly changed into a nightmare. Within a few years of the emergence of the New Left, the Cultural Revolutions from Beijing to Havana to Basel devour themselves. Mao's government annihilated millions of its own citizens in pursuit of the Cultural Revolution. Castro's regime degenerated into state tyranny. Karbal's state fell into decades, a decades-long pit of stagnation, failure and dependency. Yet the critical theorists were unrepentant. Marcus defended his support for the violent revolution until his death, arguing quote there isn't a difference between violence and terror. Ferrara never disavowed the regimes of Lenin, Mao and Castro, even as their atrocities had long been a matter of public record. Angela Davis never relented in her support for global communism, claiming that, despite the collapse of the USSR, the Russian Revolution will always retain its status as a monumental historical movement and Marxism will continue to be relevant as long as capitalism survives.

These theories were simultaneously wrong and prescient Now. Indeed, these theories were incredibly wrong because they have wrecked thousands, if not millions, of lives around the world following these despots Lenin, Mao and Castro. If these radicals were repentant, maybe, just maybe, we could talk about how not to govern a society. But no, they are all true believers, die hard Marxist, and they are corrupting another generation of folks and sadly, that is not in Brazil or China or Basel or Russia or Cuba. It's in the United States, it's on our soil. They are corrupting millions in our education system and it's spread like cancer throughout the rolling elites. And Rufo captures this when he says, at the end of the book, these two paragraphs the ultimate tragedy of the critical theories is that, as they govern ideology, they would trap the United States in an endless loop of failure, cynicism and despair.

There is a profound irony that haunts all the leading figures of the movement the solution was always within their sight. Herbert Marcus admitted that the United States was among the freest countries in the world, but still argued that it must be destroyed in order to achieve true liberation. Unbelievable Paulo Ferreira spent decades searching for the secret to literacy, but fell to the myth that education must begin with the suicide of the middle class, blind to the evidence that the opposite is true. Angela Davis succumbed to the illusion that violent revolution was the only path to liberation, while millions of Americans fought for and achieved substantive freedoms by appealing to the declaration and utilizing the democratic process. And Derek Bell surrendered to pessimism in an era of undeniable progress, forgetting the lessons of his own rise, which was made possible by parents and neighbors who prioritized merit, education, family and hard work, while fighting to eliminate all the real two barriers. I'm sorry, all the all the two real barriers and injustices. So in today's last Liberty Minute, in our final episode in this three-part series, answering the question what happened to our country?

Chris Rufo's America's Cultural Revolution is a must-have on anyone's bookshelf who is concerned about the direction of our country. Yes, we are in a cultural revolution for the very life of the American Republic. And yes, there is a world war on that American Republic. And yes, the Democratic Party hates America. But despite all that, America's humble citizens can't overcome this revolution. Once they understand that we're in a war, once they understand who we're fighting, American America's citizens of a Democratic, Free Republic can restore and reform this country. The true revolution of 1776 has provided us this roadmap. The brave patriots across the last 250 years have provided this opportunity. Those are the giants and it's their shoulders that we stand on. Americans are a humble people and its common citizens must take back their country or we will forever lose it.

And as our greatest president said in inaugural address to Congress, in December of 1862 and perhaps one of the darkest, if not the darkest time in our country's history, during our US Civil War, Lincoln submitted these words which every school child should learn and know, because I believe it sits right behind the Gettysburg Address and importance. Here's Lincoln's words Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us the fiery trial which, through which we pass, will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union.

The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save the Union. We even, we hear hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free, Honorable like. In what we give and what we preserve, we shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of Earth. Other means may succeed. This could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous and just, A way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless. Very true words for us to remember in our own day and age. Thank you for listening to this three-part series of what Happened to Our Country, and may God bless the United States of America.

Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on you.