First, watch the video; then read below.
Roughly speaking, the boilerplate ‘conservative’ reaction to this video is as follows:
The pastor is based. He is brave. Good for him for standing up against the filth they are intentionally pushing on our children. Good for him for standing up to wokeness. Good for him for standing up to authority. Shame on the school board. Shame on the police for enforcing the school board’s decision to evict him from the meeting.
All of that is true. I agree with all of it. But it does not go nearly far enough.
Stopping there indicates a fundamental error: the presumption that the system itself is legitimate, good, and fixable.
It is not any of those things.
But we just have to work harder, and we can throw the tyrants out!
We just have to vote the good guys in.
Our Founders were geniuses—we just need to restore their ‘original vision.’
At best, you get arguments for why we need school vouchers, so people can send their kids to private or parochial school.
In other words,
Either…
We go hat-in-hand to our school boards and beg them not to indoctrinate our children and poison their minds with propaganda, lies, and filth…whereupon they tell us to get bent and then have us forcibly evicted from the meeting (and the FBI labels us “domestic terrorists”),
Or…
We go hat-in-hand to government and beg them to give back some of the money they have taken from us by force so we can educate our children in a school of our choice (which will also be, to some extent, subject to capture by government).
Is that what you want? To be Oliver Twist forever begging for a bowl of gruel from your masters?
You want to be really based? Stop acting as though any of this is okay. Stop perpetuating the system by legitimating it.
Stop saying, Wow, that pastor was a badass—now all we need to do is throw the bums out in the next election.
Start saying, School boards and school taxes are morally and ontologically impermissible violations of human rights.
Now THAT’S based.
If you have been reading here for a while, you know that I have already spilled a ton of ink explaining why our system is neither legitimate nor good. I have also touched on why it is not fixable, but let’s take one more look at that.
Stop and think. Really think. Do you believe, in your heart of hearts, that it is possible to “vote the bums out” in sufficient numbers to make a difference…and to maintain any such condition for any length of time?
Why do you believe this? Has it ever happened? Or have school boards been on a unidirectional slouch towards exactly where we are now…punctuated only by brief periods where that momentum is arrested a little bit, for a short time?
You know the answer. You know that government positions tend to attract the worst people. You know that even massive electoral success would only replace a few people, and it would not last for very long.
I have already explained why democracy (even our constitutional republican kind) is not a good thing. Why it is not consensual. Why it does not actuate the principles that animated the Founders, even though it is the system they themselves created.
But set that aside and just confront this question: Why do you persist in the belief that it is fixable? All the evidence points the other direction. The trajectory has been plain since 1789.
Is it just hope? Inertia? Fear of trying something new? Inability to conceive of alternatives, or ignorance of the alternatives conceived by others?
You tell yourself a story about how this can be fixed because it is scary to contemplate the alternative—that the only system you have ever known, the only system that your ancestors knew going back for generations, is unworkable and morally impermissible. Admitting that is tough.
But you have to admit it because it is true, and the truth will ultimately set us free.
If you would like to take a deeper dive into this subject, here are excerpts from two pieces I wrote back in April:
The Slippery Slope of Democracy
A defender of democratic systems1 might offer a reasonable reply along these lines:
But look—videos of those school board meetings have gone viral, and as a result, several school boards were flipped in the last election. We just need to do more of that.
When that possible response first occurred to me, it did seem reasonable for a moment. But then I started to project my thoughts not forward in time to the possibility of winning future school board elections, but backward in time to everything that has led up to this point.
So let’s do a brief review…
Over a century ago, a small number of leftist ideologues decided to transform the American education system. Their goal was not the boilerplate pablum we hear in defense of public school today. Their goal was to use the education system to remake America in the socialist/leftist/collectivist blueprint. Full stop.
They then used the vaunted systems of “democracy” to force this on everyone.
Don’t like the word force? Perhaps you think that because we were able to vote on this, we “consented” to it.
Did we? Did you? Can you escape it? It has existed for a century. Do you see it going away any time soon? Milton Friedman was talking about school choice and vouchers over a half century ago. In that time, only a smattering of locales have passed even the most modest of school-choice programs.
Look, we just passed a school-choice bill. We’re winning!
Are we? At the rate we are going, we will have gotten school choice everywhere by the year 7000.2 And all we will have gotten is a clunky, flawed solution to fundamentally rights-violative system…
Right now, you pay to use your own property (property tax). Then they tack on school taxes, which you pay whether you have kids or not, whether you have kids in school or not, and whether you think that public schooling is a good idea or not. Refuse to pay and lose your house. And the holy grail for defeating this monstrous system? A voucher system in which the government—if finally forced to do so if your area after 5,000 years of “democratic action”—will generously refund you some of that money to send your children to a school that you choose. So long as the government approves of that school.
Wow. I feel so free.
For decades, the cost of public education has steadily risen, yet outcomes (math, reading, science, writing, etc.) have stagnated and begun to fall off. Our children have been losing ground to the rest of the world for years. Even if that weren’t the case, public schools would still violate the human right of choice, but the fact that it is true is appalling and inexcusable.
Schools today have become sex-reassignment indoctrination facilities. The leftists who created the public school system (John Dewey et al) may not have anticipated this exact outcome, but this outcome was nonetheless inevitable. (And this is but one of myriad ways in which public schools are not good for children: indoctrination… leveling effects…what they did during covid—don’t even get me started!)
Don’t think it’s a healthy environment for your kids? Don’t want men in dresses reading stories about sexual orientation to your toddler?
Haven’t you heard? YOU have a say in how these schools are run. It’s called democracy, hater.
You can vote on your local school’s budget. If you vote no, they will hold another vote and another vote until you vote yes. (They do this in my district.) Democracy!
Not enough democracy for you? Okay, well they’ve also given us—oh, and you’re gonna love this…wait for it…
SCHOOL BOARDS!
You can run for school board. You can vote for school board members. You can go to meetings. Show me what democracy looks like… THIS is what democracy looks like.
Yeah, except here is how it has worked out in practice…
Leftist ideologues have taken over school boards. Leftists are, by definition, more interested in activism and change; conservatives are more interested in just getting on with life. Thus, leftists are always going to be drawn into fields that give them power. Those leftists run the show.
Parents are busy. Parents don’t know the true nature of the people for whom they’re voting, or the details of what is really going on in the schools. They’re not there, and their kids cannot always provide accurate accounts. Parents don’t want to have to show up at school board meetings. (And why should they have to?)
And then, when what has been going on for decades (and ramping up to fever pitch in recent years) finally comes to light and they start showing up to school board meetings, they are dragged out by police and investigated as domestic terrorists by the government.
THAT is what democracy looks like.
######
We have all been steeped, like a soggy bag of tea, in two centuries of reverence for democracy and inured by ten millennia of submission to the involuntary state. Critique of either as fundamentally flawed is usually met with horror or derision. When the dust settles from that, this is usually the best one can hope for:
Hey buddy, all we need to do is win some elections and we can fix this!
That tragically misses the point. Elections got us here. All the vaunted procedures of democracy led us to this point. Even the genuinely brilliant mechanisms of our constitutional republic were unable to stop this. The system, by its own nature, not only allows itself to be gamed by the left—it invites it.
We could call it an anomaly if it were only happening in America, but it is happening in democracies across the globe. The only Western democracies that are not dying of this cancer are in Eastern Europe, and I strongly believe that the only reason is because they still have people alive who remember the horrors of two generations under communism. As soon as that memory, and those people, die off, those democracies will be ripe for the picking too.
And it's not just the left who are gaming the system. Democracy is designed to be slow and inefficient—to keep from radical lurches or accumulations of power. The concept makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, this inefficiency allows democratic countries to be controlled behind the scenes by shadowy figures who are not constrained by the strictures of the democratic system—an oligarchy of billionaires, creepy globalist weirdos, leftist ideologues, corporate bigwigs, and the like, all pulling strings behind the scenes. The administrative state continues to grow, creating byzantine pathways for the exercise of that power—pathways we normal people have never seen and will never tread.
And we continue to tell ourselves that because we can vote, all of this is somehow consensual. We continue to believe that we can fix this with more democracy—that all we need is the right people and the right laws. We fail to notice that we got here not in spite of democracy, but because of it.
I realize that the most likely response here will be, Okay, smart guy—what’s the alternative? Millennia of statist propaganda, plus a sensible skepticism about human nature, leave us all feeling that there are NO alternatives other than monarchy or chaotic, Hobbesian anarchy. That isn’t so. There are alternatives. Carefully worked-out ones. Provocative ones. Now is not the time to go into all that, but reasonable, workable possibilities do exist.
My only point here is to get you to think not just about the gains we might make in the next election, but the losses over the last two centuries. How do they compare?
And also to think about the fundamental immorality of the system itself.
What if I don’t want to run for school board?
What if I don’t want to go to school-board meetings? What if I don’t want to have to fight with radical leftists and maybe somehow stop them from putting sexually explicit gender-indoctrination materials in the hands of my third-grader? What if I don’t want to be dragged off by police who are rather mindlessly doing the bidding of this system?
What if I don’t want to send my kids to such schools at all?
What if I don’t want my money forcibly taken from me to pay for all of this?
What if I want to choose where I send my children to school with what little money I have?
WHY SHOULDN’T ALL OF THIS BE MY CHOICE?
Why are we acting like democracy, as a system of political organization, is somehow consensual and free…when it so obviously is not?
Trans-Radical Activism Fueled By Public Schools
Where is the rancor coming from? Yes, parents have every right to be livid about all these issues, but let’s look deeper than that. Why are they forced to deal with these issues in the first place? The answer is easy:
Public schools.
We’ve been jammed into these circumstances for so long that when casting about for solutions, we only consider what tweaks we can make to the existing system. We need more oversight. We need to pay more attention to school-board elections! We fail to consider that the system itself might be the source of the conflict.
The problem can be summed up simply: the absence of choice…
Step 1: Establish one-size-fits-all government schools (with an obvious ideological agenda).
Step 2: Force people to pay for those schools. Technically, people are “free” to send their kids to other schools (so long as they are government approved, naturally). However, since most people cannot afford to pay school taxes AND private-school tuition, they will have to send their kids to (the left’s) government schools. (And if you think these schools are not firmly in the hands of the left, you have not been paying attention.)
Step 3: Form unions for public-school teachers. These unions will negotiate with government on behalf of teachers, like this:
Union (A) goes to politician (B) and asks for more money and benefits for teachers.
Politician (B) asks for votes and campaign support in return.
A and B shake hands and make Taxpayer (C) pay for all of it.
Taxpayer (C) is not allowed into the negotiations.
Oh, silly goose, didn’t you know—the taxpayer is involved in the negotiations at election time. Hey can vote the bums out any time he likes!
Great.
The public schools will still exist. The teachers’ unions will still exist. The schools will still need to be funded. The mechanism by which they are funded, and the ways in which those negotiations take place, will not change. The incentives will still be the same. The taxpayer still won’t be in the room. The political parties won’t change. The union negotiators will be the same people, and with an over 90 percent incumbent-reelection rate in every election, so will nearly all the politicians. Power to the people!
Step 4: Create school boards to establish (the illusion of) democratic oversight of schools. You can run for school board. You can vote for school board members. You can go complain to school boards. Democracy in action! I hammered this issue Monday, so no need to more than briefly revisit it…
School boards don’t have to listen to parents. They have to pretend to. Most of the time, most parents have neither the time nor the inclination to show up to school board meetings. Board members can pay a little lip-service to the few complaints they receive from intrepid parents…and then do nothing of substance about them.
Occasionally, however, issues crop up that inspire parents to take an interest:
socially transitioning their children to live as the other sex, and to convince them to get permanently disfiguring surgeries;
telling children that if they are white, they are inherently guilty because of their very identity;
allowing rapes to take place in bathrooms by boys who identify as girls but still have the hormones and genitals of boys.
Y’know, silly stuff like that. But when that happens and parents get involved en masse, all that schools need to do is complain to the government that they are being harassed by “domestic terrorists.” Whether anything substantive is done or not, parents eventually have to go back to their jobs and lives. Sure, a few school boards might get flipped in the next election, but the overall trend-lines do not change.
Do school-board members feel threatened by the parents? Sure—the parents are furious. Given the issues at hand, the parents have every right to be enraged. But the issues are the symptom, not the cause. The. System. Is. The. Cause.
The absence of choice is the cause.
We are all forced into this conflict. Parents’ money is forcibly taken from them, forcing them to put their children in one-size-fits-all schools. These schools tend to be run by people who range from moderately LEFT to toys-in-the-attic, mentally unstable LEFT to three-hot-meals-away-from-becoming Maoist guerillas LEFT. The only oversight is this clunky system of school boards and elections that purport to offer control, consent, and choice, but deliver mostly just the illusion of them.
Take all that away and give parents choice, and 95 percent of the problem would vanish overnight.1
You’re absolutely correct. I know this, and have preached it since I left school 40 years ago, in my own way. I have however, never put it together and brought it to its root problem like you just did. F’ing brilliant. The Overton window has kept up squarely focused on irrelevant “tar baby” fights that can’t be won. Time to focus out and see if I can’t see more of the forrest... thank you!
This is awesome! Very well stated! I agree 100% - The. System. Is. The. Problem!!!