The Magic Show

The Perfected Magician sets his audience expectations, so when he actuates his trick, they will be much less attentive to details.

Progressivism is not about saving lives; it is not about equanimity and protecting the poor; it is not about tolerance and open mindedness. It is about ruling the world. But what is being taught to our children in progressive formatted schools is centered on the idealism and benefits of saving the planet and making things fair for all people. All authoritarian regimes in history started out the same way, trolling people with visions of nirvana, then herding them into social cages constructed of political correctness and feeding them drugs and entertainment to squelch their anger and resentment.

If you were watching Earth from a space platform, you might think that is exactly what's happening today. Our culture has been reduced to concerns about the cost of cell phones, video games and cable TV. Our collective attention span has devolved to a matter of minutes. Our relationships are expressed in text form. Our babies are raised in a virtual reality. And when you question the ethics and morality of any of it, you are dismissed as a disgusting white nationalist.

Progressive politics is the art of misdirection.

As any Magician will tell you, performing successful tricks requires you to develop a strong connection with the audience. Progressives do the same thing with policy initiatives. They embrace the environment (everyone wants to save the whales and hug the trees); They champion women's rights (we all want women to feel involved and recognized); They pander to the poor and disenfranchised (especially minorities), promising to make them a part of The American Dream. Sound good? Follow me...

Then they demonize anyone who questions their authenticity. The Perfected Magician sets his audience expectations, so when he actuates his trick, they will be much less attentive to details. Making it much more likely that his sleight of hand actions, misdirection and distractions will effectively disguise his illusive movements to pull the rug over the audience's eyes.

How many times have politicians promised to lower taxes, only to raise them? Or to give all Americans an education, while tuition costs keep skyrocketing? Progressives consistently promise to eradicate inequality in law enforcement, in housing, in wages, in healthcare and childcare...it never happens but they come back in the next election cycle making the same promises, over and over, year after year.

The Magic Show that Progressives put on doesn't have an audience as much as it creates and maintains a contingent of victims.

At some point they begin to need to be victimized. It becomes part of their identity, and the Magician has them in a sort of Hypnotic State of Attention. eagerly awaiting their reward, the completion of some sort of 'miracle' or transformation.

Assuming the identity of a Progressive is akin to becoming a 'Made Man' in the Mafia: It gives a person a sense of entitlement and a sense of belonging to a righteous and powerful movement that cannot be challenged. The latest iteration of this is the 'Woke' movement. This term has morphed from inner city slang meaning being "woke from the man." Translated into english it is being conscientious, dedicated and active against the threat from authority and the racially motivated injustices of white society.

Now it is being used to assign 'Made' status to qualified Progressives who have demonstrated their 'Woke" awareness and commitment to progressive justice through their community activism.

"This is the heart of what it means to be “woke.” The masses of black folks who were lulled to sleep by economic opportunity have now awoken to the fact that race is, and will remain, a central part of the black experience. Yet there is disagreement about who is allowed to be woke and what is expected of those who have now entered into this new existential state of being." - Lawrence Ware, TheRoot.com

For a movement that is supposedly open minded and tolerant, asexual, unbiased and sensitive to social bullying, Progressives embrace profiling, economic antagonism, and the politics of skin color. But, like the Magic of David Copperfield, the left is deft at making themselves into something they are not.

Many Americans have been awakened, or 'woke' up to, the Illusion of Progressivism.

Over time, the emptiness of their promises of social harmony and economic equanimity have overcome the mesmerizing messages of the FrankenMedia. Conservatives have gone along to get along for a quarter of a century. Many of them voted for Obama, hoping for 'Hope' to prevail. They may not have liked Obama or his policies, but they let him have some space to implement his solutions. They objected to his ideas about guns, abortion and immigration, but they rarely used social media to display images of his severed and bloody head, or suggested his kids should have been aborted. His second term proved that many middle Americans wanted him to succeed and were willing to give him the opportunity to make his liberal policies work.

And all of this time all of the programs designed to increase integration, assimilation and diverse cultural tolerance have utterly failed. Public school graduation rates went backwards, unemployment skyrocketed, welfare roles ballooned, and a sense of hopelessness spread across the country. Just as had happened during the Jimmy Carter administration, the country was falling into a "malaise".

Malaise is so antithetical to Americanism, because freedom in its purest form promotes action, risk-taking and entrepreneurship. When Americans universally feel unmotivated, uneasy or threatened, they make political changes. They use the rights endeared in our constitution to reassert control and right the ship. A faltering economy is by any definition a threat to our autonomy and freedoms. So Donald Trump was elected to turn things around. But Progressives keep screaming that it is Republicans who support President Trump that are a threat to our constitution and our liberty.

As poorly as our schools perform scholastically, they are excellent at embedding progressive social theory in students that are otherwise unmotivated and disenfranchised. Students in public schools are treated like sheep. They are herded into classrooms and inculcated with lectures on social justice, sexual inequality, gender choices and the heritage of white male imperialism and oppression of indigenous people. They have their patriotic identities de-programmed.

I have made the corruption of our school systems a centerpiece of my efforts to wake up my fellow Americans to the threat from within. I have felt very lonely for many years. There have been some excellent books about this subject both positive and negative about the effectiveness of "educating" our youth. No matter what the issue is, you can always find intellectuals who will weigh in with reams of statistics and surveys to support their theories.

But parents are the real judges, and for the past half century the price of admission to the best colleges and universities has increased exponentially. So it is easy to assume that the customers are satisfied with the product. At first glance, perhaps.

But a few years after graduation when Junior still can't support himself, or when there is a family dispute over drug usage and Dad insists Junior must move out, that is when the reality sets in that Junior never really learned to be an adult. In fact, he was taught to adopt the persona of the victim; to see the world as unfair and corrupt. To blame his incompetence on the system and on his parents!

He was permanently rebuilt by the progressive educational system to be a dependant teenager. Leaving Mom and Dad with a sense of failure, a sense of responsibility and guilt that they do not deserve.

Not all students fall for the progressive boot-camp regimen. Students who have been brought up with a stable family, a sense of self worth and a strong moral foundation, can and do circumvent the indoctrination process. They reject from the get-go that their parents are incompetent and inherently racist. They will often just play along, do the best they can and get the heck out of the indoctrination compound as fast as they can. So there are millions of young people who are doing great and contributing to society and building strong and independent identities and families.

I thank God my two children fall into that category.

Many of the professional schools of medicine, engineering and the sciences have escaped the invasion of uber liberal professors. Progressives have a hard time adopting their 'feel-good' curricula to scientific and empirical research. There are no alternative answers to questions of chemistry or computer coding. The disciplines of geothermal engineering can be difficult for kids who have spent most of their learning years watching movies or building construction paper storyboards about the Boston Tea Party.

Those kids are going to state colleges and studying to become elementary and high school teachers themselves. Why not, the work is predictable and the retirement plan is golden!

Some of the most successful corporations pay enormous fees to recruit the best and the brightest to come to work for them at salaries that were unheard of just 25 years ago, even for the most highly compensated executives with decades of experience. Much of the math can be explained by the internationalization of commerce, the vast expansion of markets and corporate profits. Just like on the ballfield, you have to pay to attract the best players. Those recruits will do fine.

Still others have developed extensive training programs to bring newly graduated and recently hired employees up to productive standards. FedEx, the leading worldwide delivery service, has had to innovate since day one. Initially, they had to track packages by paper labels, which required extensive written data and handling. They had to teach those skills to every new employee because that was not something they learned in high school or college.

Now, FedEx is recognized for operating one of the most sophisticated human resources divisions that train new employees in dozens of languages and working within varying cultural environments to provide their insatiable need for growth. They have essentially built their own college system.

So the big boys can take care of themselves.

I am more concerned about the small and midsized companies, who must rely on newly graduated seniors with degrees in business or journalism, or advertising and marketing. I am concerned about the 80% of students who went to school for four years and have never really held a nine-to-five job. They spent $100K on tuition and will be lucky to find a job that pays $35K annually for openers. The truth is, many of them will, after only a few days in a new job, quit. They cannot handle the pressure of showing up on time everyday, writing coherent reports every week, and simply being accountable to a superior.

This is the vast majority of the millions of students that come through our nation's advanced educational system. The question is, can they balance a checkbook? Can they identify their local congressional representative? Do they know what the GDP is? Can they open an account on the NYSE? Do they know what the Earned Income Tax Credit is? Can they survive the workplace without being offended by some inane comments or cultural conflict?

And even more importantly, which party do they identify with?

At this point in time, it is clear that most graduate students identify with Progressivism, and the Democrats. They are by far the strength of the Democratic party. Do you think this is a natural outcome of the learning process? That if a person is well educated they will naturally migrate towards the left politically? That is what the talking heads on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, and most of the major networks will tell you. The nighttime talk shows make this point every night.

“It just so happens that almost every talk show host is liberal and that’s because it requires a level of intelligence...” - Jimmy Kimmel

Comments like Kimmel's is why Trump was elected. People who work for a living in the middle class suburbs, in small businesses, or on their own, are tired of being characterized as dumb. Moderates and conservatives are the backbone of the country and limousine liberals like Jimmy Kimmel, Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert are insensitive jerks who dismiss half the population because they want to be 'Made Men' in the "Woke Movement" promoted by the Progressive Jihad.

Note: This essay was first published in my 2020 book, “Trump’s Reckoning: Bulldozing Progressivism, Rebuilding Americanism”…