May 19, political pundit Dave Rubin appeared on the Buck Sexton Show to talk about his New York Times bestseller Don't Burn This Book.

Buck and Dave sounded gloomy because liberals are so thoroughly wrecking the country.

Buck said plaintively, "But what can we do about it??” Dave responded in a similar tone, "What can we actually do??”

Naturally I was screaming at the radio: “A lot!” Most important, know your enemy and understand how they became so successful. What is the killer MO that could cripple this powerful country?

Starting more than 100 years ago, John Dewey and his Progressives articulated a long-term plan for taking over the US. First, obtain billions from John D Rockefeller to build and control lots of ed schools. Use them to indoctrinate an army of new teachers; who would then be sent out across America to transform public school children into young socialists.

The Big Lie was that these maneuvers were intended to improve academic education. Not at all. These maneuvers were the sort of social engineering schemes that Socialists live for. Educrats announced that American teachers had learned innovative new methods for instructing children. No way. Typically, the newfangled methods were not only inferior but destructive, the most egregious example being sight-words as a substitute for phonics, thereby guaranteeing an illiteracy crisis.

To promote their bad ideas, and to roll over any resistance, Progressives created a culture of deceit. Think for a moment how many lies are told each day by CNN, the New York Times, MSNBC, etc. That same level of dishonesty is, I suspect, the norm throughout liberal-land and especially so in the educational system.

Aggressive lying is a powerful advantage against any enemy. For one thing, most parents never imagine that education professors and bureaucrats would be so sinister as to use this leverage against American families. Wrong conclusion. Year after year, Progressives promote their lame theories and malevolent methods as the best in the universe. In fact, each of these gimmicks is sophistry, not authentic teaching. For example, Common Core is full of weird complexities that make children fail, and cry; Constructivism forbids direct instruction and forces students to figure out everything for themselves.

Do even our smartest leaders understand what horrors are going on in the K-12 schools? There is a gray fog of ignorance over the whole society. Universities aren't helping. Foundations are silent. Most troubling, the media look the other way. The public expects the media to protect them from ideological bullies. Not today. Now, if victims are screaming in the night the media will fastidiously pretend not to notice.

Buck Sexton and Dave Rubin want to know what we can do? We should do a one-eighty. Progressives started by taking over the school system. That was their launchpad, that's where the conservative counterattack has to begin. Understand the phony substitutes and then eliminate them one by one. Bring back proven traditional methods. Schools should once again be educational enterprises, not social engineering boondoggles. That's how we take back the public schools and then the country.

American public education is now a huge, dumb entity, sort of a gigantic Frankenstein lumbering about the landscape. Its primary mission is to persuade the public that dumb is normal, thus Charlotte Iserbyt’s phrase "the deliberate dumbing down of America.”

The Education Establishment dumbs down public schools to whatever level each community will accept. Memo to American families: stop putting up with garbage from your local school system. There are hundreds of videos on the Internet showing how little our high school graduates know There should be a constant uproar about the pervasive emptiness. Think of all those thousands of hours in the classroom but many Americans don't know who won the Civil War, how many stars are on the flag, or where Alaska is on a map.

Finally, there's little mystery about what the Left does in the schools every day. They slowly drain away intellectual content. They replace it with low-calorie filler. Anything intended to improve character is discredited and discarded. Welcome to Slave New World.

Buck Sexton asked how people working at some of the famous liberal organizations (such as Media Matters) can sleep at night. Likewise how can people in the Education Establishment keep tens of millions of Americans from learning to read and still sleep at night?

Well, let me introduce you to the people at the top. They are best understood as little Bolsheviks who get up every morning asking the big question, is this the day I destroy capitalism? That's what Bill Ayers, a professional terrorist and professor of education, reported about himself. These people are without humor or, finally, kindness. But they are exceedingly industrious. I don't think they take vacations. That's what we're up against.

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Bruce Deitrick Price’s newest book is Saving K-12.