Democrat Presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, want to insert government into every aspect of your life, from education and health care to the kind of car you drive—and they’re not alone.
Townhall reports about the disastrous state of education for children living in the United States
The real question isn’t whether these socialist tendencies exist, but rather why they exist. How is it that the same generation that has benefited more from capitalism than any other in human history is also the generation most willing to destroy it?
One of the most commonly expressed answers to these questions is that America’s higher education system has turned into a bastion for leftist thought. A 2018 study of more than 8,600 tenure-track professors by Brooklyn College professor Mitchell Langbert found registered Democrats outnumber Republicans at 51 of America’s leading liberal arts colleges by a ratio of 10.4 to one.
As important as bias on college campuses is, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Much of the problem goes back much further, to K–12 schools, where only 27 percent of teachers identify as Republicans, according to a national survey by the Education Week Research Center. Not only are K–12 teachers more likely to vote for Democrats and favor left-wing causes, socialist ideas permeate nearly every aspect of government-run schools.
From their earliest days, young students are taught by modern state curriculum standards to be cogs in the societal wheel rather than independent thinkers. The educational focus is often placed on performing well on standardized tests and memorizing facts, not learning how to make difficult moral choices or cogent arguments with classmates. Young children are constantly told “sharing is caring,” and students routinely “earn” participation trophies for merely showing up.
Most children no longer extensively read the literary classics, which include a wealth of resources, and many high schoolers spend little time enrolled in civics or history courses compared to classes that focus on mathematics, science, or technology. And when they are in history classrooms, they are often bombarded with left-wing historical revisionism that turns American heroes like George Washington into racist moral monsters.
And these examples are just the subtle forms for educational socialism. In many public schools, teachers are outright hostile to conservative ideas and openly embrace radical left-wing positions like single-payer health care.
Given the state of the current educational system, it’s not surprising that many young people identify with the collectivist principles of the far left and not with the rugged individualism that has been the foundation of American life for centuries. Our children aren’t being taught the same principles the American Founders were taught when they were kids; children today don’t even read the same books the Founders read. Is it any wonder then that they don’t think the same way John Adams and Thomas Jefferson did?
It shouldn’t surprise anyone then, that in a new survey only Bernie Sanders could love, spoiled brat Millenials who have never experienced a period of true adversity, are openly embracing Socialism and even Communism.
According to Market Watch – A new survey released by the Washington, D.C., nonprofit Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation reflects that, if the younger generation gets out and votes in 2020, those running for office on the far left have reason to be hopeful.
According to YouGov, which conducted the poll, capitalism, amid a widening divide between the haves and have-nots, has plunged in popularity from a year ago, with one out of every two millennials — ages 23 to 38 — supporting it.
Meanwhile, 36% of millennials polled say that they approve of communism, which is up significantly from 28% in 2018.
“More than a third of millennials polled approve of communism”
Socialism, a dirty word to the president and many of his supporters, has shown a decrease in favorability in all age groups except the Silent Generation (age 74+) and millennials, of which 70% say they’d be likely to vote for a socialist candidate.
Marion Smith, executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, says he’s troubled by the findings of the poll.
“The historical amnesia about the dangers of communism and socialism is on full display in this year’s report,” Smith said in a statement on Monday. “When we don’t educate our youngest generations about the historical truth of 100 million victims murdered at the hands of communist regimes over the past century, we shouldn’t be surprised at their willingness to embrace Marxist ideas.”
Other nuggets from the report include that 22% of millennials believe “society would be better if all private property was abolished,” and that 45% of Generation Z members and millennials believe that “all higher education should be free.”
Following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, the sociopolitical doctrine of communism claimed its first state. Despite a massive military intervention in 1918 which featured soldiers and sailors from the British Empire, the United States, France, Serbia, and Belgium, and despite the Japanese occupation of Siberia and Sakhalin Island that lasted until 1925, the communist government in Moscow managed to survive.
Maxtop 10 – Following World War II, communism spread beyond Russia’s borders to Eastern and Central Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. Although not all communist states were alike, each were totalitarian dictatorships, and almost all of them had in place “reeducation” systems that subjected political prisoners, criminals, and everyday citizens to horrific physical and mental abuse. Some of these penal systems, such as the Soviet Union’s gulags, are well-known in the West. Others have been all but forgotten, and in some communist states today, camp horrors still exist.
Laogai
According to Wu, one of the more gruesome torture methods used by these labor camps is the tiger chair, which is a bench where prisoners have their hands tied behind their backs, their mouths gagged, and their legs bound tightly with rope. Bricks are then placed underneath the legs, thus elevating them. Prisoners tied to the tiger bench are shouted at by guards and are forced to hold these uncomfortable positions for hours and sometimes days.
Such inhumanity should not be shocking. After all, the architect of these camps, Mao Zedong, oversaw the Great Chinese Famine (1958–1961), which may have killed 30 million people out of a population of 650 million. The famine was caused by the Great Leap Forward, which was an attempt to rapidly modernize China into an industrial society. This mass starvation was followed by the Cultural Revolution, which saw radicalized college students (“Red Guards”) publicly denouncing their teachers and family members as “counterrevolutionaries.” Through show trials and struggle sessions, in which the accused were forced to confess to a litany of anti-communist crimes, counterrevolutionaries were sentenced to labor camps or were executed. The total number of deaths during the period (1966–1976) is not known, but most estimates say that somewhere between 1.5 and 7.7 million people died.
