American Youth Like Socialism? Why That Makes Sense.

In a way, you can’t blame them.

(If you already know how the media and education system trick young people about socialism, you might want to jump to “Conclusion: Why This is Important!”)

You can’t entirely blame the very young for disliking democracy and capitalism, because they are completing what seems to be a logical tautology. Their conclusion that socialism is good and capitalism is bad is based on what they have observed in their short lives, and on what they have been taught in the leftist public school system.

The logic is:

Our government is a democracy and our economy is capitalist.

Our government is ineffective, dishonest, and unfair.

Therefore, democracy and capitalism are ineffective, dishonest, and unfair.

Therefore, socialism would be better.

You can see the trick, of course. It is in the words and the premises. Leftists change the meanings of “democracy” and “our economy”, to mean the same thing as “our government”. Leftists use their control of the mass media to subtly twist meanings of words. They do that to words like “public”, “people” and “government”. And they have been doing it for a long time.  

In justifying conscription, anti-sedition laws, and a war of Americans against Americans, Lincoln rhetorically said government is “of the people by the people and for the people”. If government is “of” the people then government is the people? Right? No, it’s just word-twisting.

Lincoln is also attributed with saying: If you call a dog's "tail" a "leg", then how many legs does a dog have? Five? No, four. Calling a dog's tail a "leg" doesn't make it a leg.

Calling the people who are ruled by the government “the government” doesn’t make them the government.

The leftist trick works in part because the leftists imply that the government controls the economy, because they say that the government should control the economy. Most Americans grow up believing that government creates the jobs, and government controls the economy. Because leftists believe that is how it should be.

Leftists say that our economy should be a command economy, not a free enterprise economy. Whatever the leftists believe, they believe is the reality. The Marxists say that “the public should own the means of production.” And by the “public”, the Marxists mean, the Government. Not really the populace, but rather the people in the government. The rulers. The U.S. mass media leftists claim that the President creates jobs and prosperity, the Fed controls inflation, and so on. In reality, the government does not (yet) and should not (ever) control the economy. But leftists implicitly claim that the government is the economy, because they want that to be the reality. And they teach children that it is the reality.

And so, in a horrendous mangling of logic and reason, leftists claim that since the government controls the economy and the system is capitalism, and the economy is bad, so capitalism is bad and socialism would be better. To people who have not been taught to think rationally, that makes sense. Young people are taught that problems are caused by not enough government, when problems are really caused by too much government.

What’s the Opposite of Education?

Maybe the opposite of education isn’t ignorance; it is Anti-Education. That is a term used by Ed Thompson in his Substack podcast titled Lord of the Flies. Once upon a time, the entirely local-based American public education system worked. Then as state and federal government intervened in it more and more, the U.S. education system tried to make students more intelligent but failed. Now, the leftist-controlled Anti-Education system tries to make students stupid and succeeds. Being ignorant is to not know the truth. But the Anti-Education system is worse than that; it produces people who believe that nothing is true but leftist lies.

...decolonizers characterize reason and rationality as cultural constructs that ought to be rejected, as these are said to be “based upon epistemological assumptions deeply rooted in the Western philosophical tradition” and therefore “perpetuate hegemonic thinking.” The decolonizers argue that reason and rationality ought to yield to “other ways of knowing” that are said to be derived from non-Western cultures.

Bringing down the West is seen as an essential step in promoting “multiculturalism” and ultimately “social justice.” One of the most surprising features of this movement is that it attacks not only the humanities and social sciences, which might have been relatively unremarkable, but also the natural sciences. Nature offers teachers of science a “decolonizing science toolkit” with “examples of how institutions and scientific departments are recasting curricula and addressing racism’s influence,” further informing us that “we have nothing to fear from the decolonization of mathematics.”

Wanjiru Njoya, "Decolonizers’ Assault on Science" Mises Wire (2024)

Anti-education is not non-education. Anti-education uses lies to attack the structure of Western civilization. Anti-Education is an attack on reason, truth and the very idea that truth exists and can be known.

Untruth about our economic system is far from being the only leftist propaganda that the U.S. Anti-Education System propagates. Young people are perhaps especially vulnerable to the Climate lies, as investigated in the Substack titled “Climate Scam Lures Mostly Young People: Every Youngster Wants to be a World Savior”, by Alex Ilex

The list of lies that the U.S. Anti-Education teaches could, of course, go on. In some U.S. classrooms, elementary school students have pledged allegiance to the LBGTQ Pride flag.

Conclusion: Why This is Important!

We need to be more aware of how effectively and often the leftists change the meanings of words like “government” “people” and democracy” to misuse them as weapons. But understanding that will not be enough. Proving that the leftists’ claims are fallacious, illogical, and false will not be enough. Not as long as the leftists control the mass media and the education system.

We can think of our society as a system. A system that has many subsystems, including some systems for Truth-Discovery and Distribution. One such system is the media; journalism. Another is the court system, which arrives at and disseminates the truth about the guilt or innocence of defendants. Another is science. And, of course, education is a system which should distribute to students the truth about lots of things.

We know that leftists now control all of these subsystems of our society, and use them to distribute untruth. The education system was the first one targeted for takeover in the leftists’ Long March.

The history of education shows that every class which has sought to take power has prepared itself for power by an autonomous education. The first step in emancipating oneself from political and social slavery is that of freeing the mind.

Antonio Gramsci (1935), quoted in Antonio Gramsci - Long March Through the Institutions to Achieve Communism (1977)

Like all leftists, Gramsci was lying about his intentions. What leftists really intended to use the education system for after taking control of it was instituting “political and social slavery”, not freeing people from it.

In 2024, the leftists in the U.S. are nearing total success in their Long March to control all of the systems and institutions in America. What lies at the end of the march? You know the answer. The question is: What can we do about it before it’s too late?

Where Is This Going?

You can see the entire in-progress outline of Anti-Leftism at RightfulFreedom.com, if you’re interested. (Be warned, we may ask you to participate.)

And at the end of Anti-Leftism, we have a proposal for what we, the right, might do to defeat the Leftists and take back our freedoms and our country.