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WOOF tracks down the worst of the American bullies!

Take a simple premise like: “everybody despises a bully,” okay? And consider that for a moment. If you’re anything like us, you are probably amenable to that premise. In fact, for well over 200 years, Americans have been opposed by tradition and by visceral reflex, to bullying. One might go so far as to say, it was the bullying of the colonies by King George III that resulted in the founding of our Republic. We not only resisted bullying by going to war with the greatest military power on earth in 1776, we got fed up with subsequent bullying at sea by the British navy and went to war with England a second time in 1812– a monumentally injudicious act that resulted in our capital being burned by the redcoats– and talk about bullies! The British admiral, Cockburn, was such a sore head that he went out of his way to demolish the office building of the D.C. newspaper National Intelligencer because the paper routinely referred to him as “the ruffian.” He even ordered his troops to destroy all the typeset for the letter “C” so that the paper, once reconstituted, could no longer criticize him. These points in mind, how could WOOF resist joining in the national bully bashing this October? October, by the way, was first declared national “bullying prevention month” way back in 2006!

Historically, by the way, things would have gone from awful to totally awful for our nation in the War of 1812, were it not for the Supreme Being, who intervened in Admiral Cockburn’s brutish business by hitting the city with a thunderstorm that quenched the flames, followed in short order by a hurricane that drove the redcoats back to their badly battered ships, but not before spinning off a tornado that tore into the redcoats attempting to occupy Washington DC. This should not have astonished Cockburn who, as a student of the Old Testament, might have realized aforehand that the Lord has a history of punishing bullies—just ask Goliath—oops, you can’t, he’s dead.

So, as we said exordially, almost every red-blooded American, no matter what his other affiliations or beliefs, instinctively despises bullies. And given this happy concordance of opinion, how very fortunate that our nation’s schools are focusing on this despicable phenomenon in their class rooms and school yards from sea to shining sea, right? And it can hardly have escaped the attention of any parent (or school child) that one of the most significant learning activities in our nations schools nowadays involves this very issue. This is important, one gathers, because according to the National Association of Elementary School Principals, “at least 28 percent of students between the ages of 12 and 18 are bullied at school.” In fact, the NAESP goes on to say, “As much as 6 percent of students report having been threatened with harm.” WOOF sees a bit of sunlight in these statistics, because when we went to school almost all bullies threatened whomever they were bullying with harm, so perhaps a kinder, gentler species of bully is evolving? But at any rate, the NAESP concludes that “Maintaining a safe, nurturing school environment for students is any school leader’s top priority.” And we at WOOF could not agree more.

But there is a certain lack of substance in the pronouncement from the NAESP, don’t you think? Like, okay, what exactly are we going to do about these bullies when we locate them, and what do they look like—just who are they? Is there a typological commonality that we can screen for? It appears that this in not the recommended approach, although the new Common Core educational system will be recording facial-metric readings of our children—perhaps this is intended to weed out inchoate ruffians? Meanwhile, from all the school-oriented literature on this subject that WOOF studied, it appears that the only means of correctly identifying a bully is to observe him bullying someone, or to receive a report of him bullying someone. When this occurs, the general idea seems to be that school officials should listen with empathy and compassion—and let the student or the student’s parents (depending on who is reporting the incident) know that reporting the incident was the right thing to do. And just in case this doesn’t immediately fix the problem, developing a school safety plan for the bullied individual is highly recommended, perhaps insisting on different seating arrangements in the class room or on the school bus. If this still doesn’t fix the problem, the NEA (as well you may have suspected) has some concrete suggestions for kids who find themselves confronted by a bully. From the NEA website, here they are in the order proposed:

Five Ways to Handle a Bully

Stay calm and alert. Consider the options and do nothing to escalate the situation. Walk away. Fighting isn’t worth it. You do not have to prove yourself by fighting. Take a non-violent stand. Speak respectfully: “I don’t want to fight you.” Report it to authorities, but discuss with them how you will be protected from retaliation. Get away. Find safety or call for help.

Oh, and it turns out that sometimes bullies themselves may lack sufficient instruction from their parents on the inadvisability of being bullies! And since the NEA seems firmly of the opinion that all parents of bullies will wish to address the situation immediately and responsibly, it turns out there is plenty for them to do too! For instance, they should see that their child apologizes to the victims he bullies and undoes any damage, such as replacing stolen or destroyed property, or maybe paying for any medical expenses the victim incurred while being bullied? The NEA also advises Parents of bullies to be more careful whom their child hangs out with, and if he is hanging out with a particularly rum lot—like say the Sharks or the Jets or the Symbianese Liberation Army, they should “encourage new friendships.”

“I feel angry right now!”

Pearson, the subversive textbook publisher that supplies Common Core with the propaganda-laden texts and additional materials requisite to the cold-blooded vitiation of American secondary education, has also been looking into the bullying situation and come to some interesting conclusions. Did you know that kids who are bullied are often loners, or independent types with few friends “and therefore easily isolated?” Okay, you probably did know that–but here’s a twist: Contrary to popular belief, research indicates that bullies frequently have very high self-esteem, although their victims tend to have lower self-esteem, be physically weaker than their tormentors, and lack social self-defense skills.

Some victims skip days of school or are driven to eventually drop out altogether to avoid their tormentors, perhaps because the development of that school safety plan so highly recommended by the NAESP has yet to be fully implemented for them. More encouragingly, special training is being offered school bus drivers and educators on how to employ a marvelous new methodology developed by school psychologists known as “conflict resolution,” although lots more training seems in order considering the amount of school-bus beating videos we keep seeing on the news. Trainees will receive curriculum guides for elementary, middle and high school students as well as informational posters. These guides will alert them to creative techniques for dealing with peer pressure, how to stage an effective cooling off phase for both parties, and how to develop those “active and reflective listening skills” so beloved of humanistic psychology. Trainees will also hone their anger management skills and master the use of feedback exchanges beginning with “I statements” such as “I feel angry right now…” or maybe, “I think you just broke my nose.”

Meanwhile, Pearson reports that “Nearly every state has passed legislation defining and prohibiting bullying, often authorizing, encouraging and even requiring local school districts to identify methods to decrease and document bullying, and to find nonviolent methods of conflict resolution.” Another problem solved by the academic and legislative branches of progressivism, one might understandably surmise, n’est ce pas?.

Studies indicate….

With such arduous effort put into the elimination of bullying in our nation’s schools, Americans might naturally wonder how bullying in any shape or form can possibly have survived. Well, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the percentage of students aged 12-18 who reported being bullied at school has increased by 24.5 percent since 2003, with the latest data samples released in 2007. Now that strikes WOOF as somewhat odd, because this seems to correlate rather exactly with the rise of anti-bullying campaigns—is it possible that these magnificent programs are having little if any of the desired effect? Might they even be stimulating what scatter chart analysts call a positive correlation? WOOF turned its cyberspacial attentions to some university libraries packed with scholarly research and unearthed a meta-analysis of these programs performed by Ferguson, San Miguel and Kilburn of Texas A&M in Criminal Justice Review, Volume 32 Number 4, which concluded that “although anti-bullying programs produce a small amount of positive change, it is likely that this change is too small to be practically significant or noticeable….Results were best for programs that specifically targeted high-risk youth, although even here, the overall effect size was small.”

More recently, this September in fact, the University of Texas Arlington released a study that found that bullying prevention programs in schools typically increase incidences of physical and emotional attacks among students. The study’s lead scientist, Dr. Seokjin Jeong, explained that “The school interventions say, ‘You shouldn’t do this,’ or ‘you shouldn’t do that.’ But through the programs the students become highly exposed to what a bully is and they know what to to do or say when questioned by parents or teachers.” In short, Jeong’s study shows that students in schools with anti-bullying programs are more likely to be victimized than in schools without them. “This study raised an alarm,” declared the perceptive Dr. Jeong. “Usually people expect an anti-bullying program to have some impact — some positive impact.”

Is somebody promoting bullying? And if so, are they concomitantly promoting submissiveness to bullies? And why on earth would this be going on? Well, the answer is best sought in the philosophies of Karl Marx. Now there’s something we don’t get to say everyday! Let’s look at a quick history of conflict resolution with bullies: Was it ever successful? As a matter of fact, didn’t it used to be a considerably less complex process than it is today? What accounts for the mammoth increase in incidents? Basically, the same factor that accounts for the massive increase of disciplinary problems across the public school systems and the considerably worsened learning scores that nobody in the field of education seems to be able to explain sensibly. It can be stated rather simply: Nobody has the authority to do anything to anybody in a way that really matters. And why is that, gentle readers? Why are the worst in our midst permitted to walk around cussing out their teachers, pounding the faces of their peers, dressing like refugees from an off-Broadway revival of O, Calcutta, fornicating in the hallways, and using language that twenty years ago would have resulted in their being dragged by the scruff of the neck to the Principle’s office and paddled on their hinder parts? What happened to the grown ups?

The children of the 60’s “grew up” and had children, dear readers, and when narcissistic dope-smoking overpaid under-educated technocrats, lawyers, and yes, college professors have children, you may rest assured they will enjoy the full protection of the most litigious and utterly solipsistic generation in history. In short: Little Arthur may have told his homeroom teacher to eat s*it and die, but that was little Arthur’s first amendment right—you know, he spoke truth to power. And when his red-faced homeroom teacher threw a stapler at him, it was only right that she was charged with first degree assault and removed in handcuffs. Arthur could have been seriously injured. That woman was lucky to get off with a suspension! This is a far cry from the schools your gramma and gampa went to, Woofketeers. Perhaps very different from the school you yourself may recall attending, but the first rule that ramified from the liberalization of education was the law of the sacrosanct student. You may keep him after class, or deny him a few silly tokens, or deprive him of recess, or send a note home, but you may never do anything seriously impressive to him. That would be fascism! (Besides, that’s what the bullies are for!)

Now here’s an odd fact—did you know that while teachers are often heard to bemoan their powerlessness over the renegade nihilists who reduce their classrooms to chaos nowadays, the teachers unions have traditionally been in lockstep with the litigative classes in promoting such protectionism? Why on earth would that discrepancy exist? Okay, think about this: Why do most beat cops appreciate an armed citizenry and will even give tips to armed citizens on lawful firearms use in the event of crisis, but their police chiefs and commissioners revile the 2nd amendment and speak out against it at every opportunity? Because the standard communist technique for infiltration has always been from the top down, preferably by appointment. And appointees make more reliable allies than the rank and file—because you don’t have to spend a lot of time suborning them; you just locate fellow travelers who are already naïve enough or consciously subversive enough to advance the progressive agenda—and appoint them! Why grow a radical when you can simply insert him or her?

The Blackboard Archipelago

Time to pay a little visit to Siberia—just to make a point. We won’t be long. Remember how in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (we think it’s in volume one, but we’re too lazy to check) he talks about the “Zeks” (the political prisoners) being placed under the control of the ordinary criminals who are given a degree of authority over them in the destructive labor camps? He explains that the ordinary criminals were considered mere victims of oppression; but the political prisoners were the real louses, they having murmured against the collective and been packed off to gulag as traitors. Thus, the criminal was an exemplar of the Marxist principle of alienation, while the intellectual or common citizen was a hated counterrevolutionary who spoke treason against the state. See the difference? Even the dullest Commissar could figure out whom to put in charge of whom!

To oversimplify for the sake of brevity, we shall hurriedly point out that Karl Marx wrote that the law is the mechanism by which one social class (the ruling class) oppresses all other classes, thus retaining them in positions of disadvantage. Pretty basic right? It will surprise no one, we trust, if we iterate here that Marxists are critical of the ideas, values and norms of capitalist ideology (our society, even now, as perceived by communists). Marxism characterizes the modern democratic state as being under the control of the “holders of the means of production”…you know, the “ruling class.” Okay, so where are we going with this? Well, it’s really more like where Marx goes with it. See, to make things even harder on the dispossessed, communists argue that political power is used to reinforce economic inequality by embedding individual property rights in the law so the right people stay poor and miserable and subjugated. And this generates criminal behavior simply as a means of survival. The cure for crime, therefore, is socialism, (what else?) but in non-socialist countries like ours (sort of) honest citizens become alienated and experience “anomie” which is really bad. And anomie is (well it’s a word, obviously, but…) from a communist standpoint it’s: the chief cause of crime in non-communist countries! See, Comrade Joe Six Pack is just going about his daily life in the capitalist hell hole called North America, trying his best to get along on the crumbs tossed him by the capitalist pigs who exploit him in conjunction with the theory of surplus value (but we digress), when whamo, he runs smack dab into a bad case of anomie. Now, in English, anomie just means the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community– the fragmentation of social identity and consequent rejection of personal adherence to social mores. So, to translate from communist, Comrade Joe Six Pack is so oppressed, frustrated and alienated because of being constantly exploited by the capitalistic ruling elite, that he just suddenly robs a bank, or shoots a stranger on a beach, like that Camus dude. Let’s make it simple and say that Joe steals a Slim Jim because he’s hungry because the capitalistic system that oppresses him doesn’t allow him sufficient subsistence to fully assuage his hunger—or maybe just to strike a revolutionary blow against the ruling class. Okay, so if Joe gets caught, the ruling class will use its system of laws to punish Joe, because they see him as criminal. But to the more enlightened Marxist observer, Joe is a revolutionary hero—or at very worst a victim.

And all this having been now explicated, we have one half of the answer to why all the bullying programs aren’t stopping the bullying. They are no more expected to stop bullies than the Gulag was expected to discourage bullying. They are meant to ensure that the right people get bullied!

Remember the fat kid named Casey?

Remember the fat kid by the name of Casey from a couple of years ago who was bulled so much that the punks took turns bullying him while the others taunted him and video taped it? The video went viral when Casey decided he’d had enough and grabbed the aggressive little twerp who was throwing punches at him and flipped him over his shoulder, landing him on the school walkway with a thud. Seemed like an effective interaction to us, but remember the result of that encounter? Casey was suspended. The bullies were not punished. This is a classic example, Woofketeers. The “zeks” are not supposed to interfere with the criminal classes whose resentments stem from legitimate social alienation!

And who are today’s experts on bullying? One of the best known is the author of It Gets Better, Dan Savage, who is by almost anyone’s standard a fairly accomplished bully himself. Mr. Savage is dedicated specifically to helping homosexual kids who get bullied, and WOOF is fine with that, but he achieves this by angrily denigrating the Bible and Christianity whenever he lectures. Recently, he drove several students out of the National High School Journalism conference and reduced some of the departing girls to tears. As they left the lecture room sobbing, the anti-bullying authority yelled, “Pansies!” and explained to his audience that leaving amid his fusillade of hate speech was “pansie-assed!” In fact, the main themes of Savage’s anti-bullying lectures are that “the Bible is BS” and “Everyone should be using birth control!” And these sentiments have so endeared Mr. Savage to Our Beloved Helmsman that the Obama administration has made Savage the center piece of its own crusade against bullying. Orwellian, no? In fact, the White House website not only praises Savage, it connects to his recommended reading list, which has been conservatively (no pun intended) described as hyper-sexualized, running as it does from recommendations on recreational masturbation techniques to insights into how one can increase one’s self esteem by becoming a prostitute. How any of this prevents bullying remains nebulous.

Calling Count Dante!

Thus, the average American student who finds himself bullied continues to be offered only the most nominal assistance, almost no portion of which is designed to stymie actual bullying. Bullies are permitted to flourish with only the most superficial efforts initiated against them while the help given victims seems either entirely inapposite or of a nature conducive to a nation of Little Lord Fauntleroys—kids who complain to officialdom (if they survive) and rely on centralized authority to solve their problems. About the only certain way to get expelled or suspended as the result of a bullying incident in an American public school is to be bullied and attempt to defend oneself! The days when kids sent a couple of bucks to John “Count Dante” Keehan (who was actually an excellent karate black belt despite all the theatrical hoopla) to obtain a copy of The World’s Deadliest Fighting Secrets, or worked out at a gym throwing jabs and hooks in order to master the manly art of self defense, are as long ago as sock hops and hot rods. And this leads us to the second secret of contemporary bullying programs: To accustom Americans to being bullied. To move them from the era of latchkey kids who settled their differences, often quite bloodily, in the parking lot after school, to their new role as doormat kids, who accept the pounding in the sure and certain knowledge that somebody in officialdom will take a report and file it, and see that it is crunched statistically to determine whether current policies are proving efficacious.

Remember Dr. Jeong’s remark? “Usually people expect an anti-bullying program to have some impact – some positive impact.” But Dr. Jeong missed the point. The programs are delivering exactly as intended, because the ostensible anti-bullying emphasis is in reality a training ground for the appropriate style of bullying—the kind best evinced by the likes of Dan Savage, and intended for use by servitors of the “Fundamentally Transformed” States of America. The programs serve merely as conditioning exercises for obsequiousness in the face of bullying—ensuring that none dare respond in the traditional American way…with a solid right cross. No, instead Johnny is being taught to chant his peace mantra, dialogue respectfully with the aggressor, and if necessary, “tell an adult.” Unfortunately, as Diana West demonstrated in a recent book, there aren’t any adults available any more. Only educators, counselors, sociologists, and the usual assortment of progressives sipping latte in the faculty lounge while discussing “social justice.”

Now you know the second secret of contemporary bullying programs: To accustom Americans to being bullied, because being bullied is soon to become the new normal. Ask Joe the Plumber who had the audacity to ask candidate Obama a question he mishandled back in 2008. Obama admitted wanting to “spread the wealth around,” and for just a moment the reptoid was visible beneath the attractive human mask. Unforgivable! Poor Joe was savaged by the pro-Obama Democrat media as though he were Squeaky Fromm! (In fact, when Fromm attempted to shoot Jerry Ford her coverage was comparatively sympathetic!)

Ask the Rhode Island family of a seventh-grader who was suspended for three days for having a miniature toy gun on his keychain. Ask Ben Carson who experienced harassment by the IRS after embarrassing Our Beloved Leader at the now legendary prayer breakfast (and who was forced to resign his position as chief pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins for putting a frowny face on Our President). Ask the many CIA employees who were anxious to testify about the Benghazi massacre but were threatened into silence at the behest of the Administration, some even relocated…(making them, admittedly, somewhat harder to ask). Ask an American hero and whistleblower named John Dobson whom WOOF initially reported on back in May [just click here]. This courageous ATF agent revealed the truth about Eric Holder’s plan to undermine the 2nd amendment by illegally running more than 2,000 American guns to Mexican drug cartels and was nearly imprisoned for his efforts to tell the truth. Now that his book about what really happened is about to be published by Simon and Schuster, the Justice Department (still under the criminal mismanagement of Eric Holder) has denied him permission to publish the book “because it would have a negative impact on morale.” (Read: Eric Holder’s morale!)

Meet the REAL bullies!

So who are the most frequently encountered bullies in our society—not the punks beating kids up for milk money on the way to school, no, they’re bad all right, but we mean the bullies we grownups have to contend with routinely—the ones who wield just enough authority that applying it abusively amplifies their personal sense of importance. You run into them whenever you deal with a government operated bureaucracy. Even if you are poor, a minority, and live in government subsidized housing, you still run into these bullies because they are not respecters of persons—in fact, if you are a poor member of a minority population you probably run into them a lot more often because you have to spend a lot more time at social services. They inhabit Social Services offices, MVA buildings, and virtually every other government bureaucracy…they are the ones who tell you to go to the other line because the little dictator in the first line gave you the wrong color form, which turns out to be the right color and you are sent back to the back of the line you waited in for an hour to be told you had the wrong color form, which was wrong. You know how it goes. And now that we have Obamanomics and Obamacare we are going to see this species of bully multiply like fruit flies. But who is an even nastier bully–and one that most Americans have had some degree of unwanted interaction with?

Yes, the Internal Revenue Service, gentle readers, that’s who. And The Internal Revenue Service is now in charge of your health care. That’s right—whether you live or die is up to the tax man. The good folks who pounced on Benjamin Carson, who attempted to ruin the beautiful and talented Michele Bachmann, who successfully blunted any attempt by Tea-Party groups to participate as non-profit organizations in the 2012 presidential election, and who cheerfully conspired with the Federal Elections Commission to stymie conservative fundraising efforts in the recent election year, are now in complete control of your health care, and will shortly be in complete possession of your medical history. Meanwhile, the NSA will have a file of every Internet or cell phone cal l you ever made waiting quiescently. They may never need to examine that file, but then again, it might come in handy if you get out of line—like what if you’re a Supreme Court Justice about to declare Obamacare unconstitutional? But even this kind of bullying isn’t the scariest. It’s just the most inevitable at this point.

Scarier is that a 15 year old kid named Benji Backer is bullied mercilessly by faculty members at Appleton North High School because he stands up for conservative values. (The School District is investigating his claims, ahem, ahem.)The savage rantings of Michigan State University Professor William S. Penn would have remained mere rumor had campus conservatives not managed to tape one of his outbursts. His assertion that “Republicans have raped” the country and are working to keep minorities from voting are two of his tamer allegations. His blanket denunciation of senior citizens is available on you tube. Professor Penn, by the way, was supposed to be teaching English.

On the subject of scientific inquiry into the hypothesis of global warming, Kari Norgaard, a sociology and environmental studies professor at Oregon University, recently contributed her view that anyone who doesn’t believe that global warming is real and results from human technology is “sick” and needs to “be treated.” She went on to compare global warming skepticism to racism and reiterated that “cultural resistance” to man-made global warming is “sick,” and “must be recognized and treated!” She stopped short of insisting on electroshock. This is reminiscent of Al Gore’s insipid comment that the “debate is over” on the global warming issue, because of “consensus,” which is as distal from the standards of scientific inquiry as Harry Reid’s recent remark to Speaker Boehner that “there’s no need for conversations” is distal from the parliamentary ethos.

Professor Darry Sragow of the University of Southern California was also secretly taped by a student during one of his typical harangues during which he called Republicans old, white, racist, and losers. He went on to recommend ways that his students could illegally suppress voting by known Republicans. “You lose their information on the election in the mail,” he told an enquiring student, adding “I mean there is lots of ways you can do it.” (Clearly Professor Sragow does not teach English. Rather, his billingsgate is what passes for Poli Sci at USC.) One can, by the way, visit such invaluable cites as Campus Reform [just click here}for endless examples of this type of proctoral sedition, thus WOOF will permit you, gentle readers, to sample further instances of university-level bullying as your capacity to endure the repugnant may allow.

So are the bastions of Ivy League liberal arts education taking heed of this lunacy within their hallowed halls? Apparently so! One clear bit of evidence that the recurrent accusations not only of liberal bias, but of ranting, seething liberal bullying, were beginning to give the doyens of higher education pause came in the form of a statement from Jonathan Cole, the former provost of Columbia University, who rose to the occasion a few years ago and exclaimed that, “A rising tide of anti-intellectualism and intolerance of university research and teaching that offends ideologues….is putting academic freedom – one of the core values of the university – under more sustained and subtle attack than at any time since the dark days of McCarthyism.” Uh-ohhh! You know they’re scared when they bring Joe’s name into it, Woofketeers. It’s Progressive-speak for “boogah- boogah!” And do we correctly understand from Cole’s complaint, that objecting to academic bullying is now McCarthyism? This is also historically silly since Joe never harassed university professors, who were typically targeted by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee of which Joe was no part, but with which liberals obsessively conflate him. The only professor famously accused by McCarthy was Owen Lattimore, and Owen Lattimore was a communist. In fact, McCarthy once remarked that one should practice forbearance in assessing the loyalty of college professors, “because a lot of them are just nutty.” Next case?

You and especially your children are being groomed to live in the wonderful new “fundamentally transformed” America– transformed fundamentally into a socialist state. And the only way redistribution of property can be enforced in such a state is by bullies. Obama and his controllers are remaking us into the kind of country in which educationists harangue you until you vote radical leftist, despise Christians and wear your American citizenship as a badge of shame, and accept the sophistical tenets of socialism unquestioningly. Most college students (in case you haven’t noticed) already do! This will bring to fruition the kind of land in which malignant narcissists like Nannie Bloomberg decide how much soda can be ingested by the adult citizens of New York, and assign nurses to berate new mothers caught bottle nursing their babies in hospitals, even as our First Lady insists that school officials ransack children’s lunches for evidence of sufficient broccoli and tofu. You and your children are being conditioned to live in a craven new feudalism of limits, sanctions, and restrictions. Coal will be eliminated, nuclear power will be declared too dicey to retain on line, and your automobile will be targeted for extinction (you must learn to use mass transit, comrades)! You are getting a taste of the Bullyocracy as the Regime cherry picks which services to curtail during the President’s “government shutdown”—as war memorials are capriciously closed to veterans and public parks are surrounded by frowning police officers. Orange cones obstruct highways so that Mount Rushmore is not viewable by the public (which sounds like a Billy Wilder comedy, but it’s happening for real). Initially, the President ordered the Amber Alert system closed to show the folks how heartless Republicans were in not accepting his total budgetary demands—but when enough of us called foul, he discovered the funds necessary to reopen it. Death benefits for the families of fallen soldiers were also targeted for elimination during the “crisis,.” but have been restored thanks to private donors! All this is mere rehearsal. Soon your thermostat will be “smart,” and how warm you are in winter or how air-conditioned you are permitted to be in summer will be decided by some faceless apparatchik, not by your personal tastes and the size of your dirty capitalistic wallet.

The style of government we have twice elected to encumber ourselves with requires only two classes, roughly, the bullied and the bullies. Right now, the most conspicuous and the most proximal phalanx of bullies is in our schools and colleges. They are not knife-wielding kids in DA hairstyles driving hot rods, oh no! They are the paunchy, balding, but-pony tailed Marxists driving Mercedes sedans and Volvos who are joined in a conspiracy to make our children into tomorrow’s nomeklatura or zeks. Those of us who wish our children to reject both labels and seize instead upon the high ground of patriotism and liberty will have to expose these propagandists; Fortunately, our kids are showing us how: tape them! Use the Internet to make their travesties manifest. Find out where the small pockets of conservative resistance are located on campuses and conspire with them, advise them, fund them if you’re able! Confront the tenured Castro-ites in their offices and lounges, join the counterrevolution. Video tape your school’s Common Core orientation and place the re-educationists on record! Remember, (ahem) Thomas Jefferson once shot a man on the White House lawn for treason; so only minimal courage is requisite to peaceably calling these trolls out intellectually in their sanctums of febrile perfidy! We can change academe and return the liberal arts to the study of classics, art, music, and literature. We can challenge academe and return poli-sci to fair-handed inquiries into the intricacies of political theory and its origins. We can prevail upon English teachers to teach syntax and mathematicians to teach calculus—why, we can even persuade history teachers to teach history if we put our minds to it! And we can do it non-violently in the very arenas they inhabit.

So if you want to campaign against bullying this October, locate the real bullies—you have a target rich environment! Check in at your University or your kid’s University and tell the silver pony tail brigade that you aren’t impressed, and let the petty bureaucrats know that you have limited patience with studied insipidity. And when you have a moment, consider imparting the ancient wisdom of the American race to your kids, many of who are authentically harassed by schoolyard punks. Sure, go ahead and complain to the educationists. By all means, discuss matters with the problem child’s parents, and if you like, offer some suggestions on walking away or talking things out—but while you’re at it, take the time to teach them what Kenny Rogers figured out all the way back in the 1970s: “Sometimes you gotta fight when you’re a man.”