Students from Trimmier Elementary School and soldiers from 4th Attack Reconnaissance Battalion, 227th Aviation Regiment, 1st Air Cavalry Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division, cheer and shout patriotic slogans during the school’s annual Freedom Walk. The walk is in remembrance and conjunction with the events of 9/11. Photo by MSG Nathan Hoskins, released by DOD, public domain.
While writing this, a child of perhaps tens years of age knocked on our door and asked if we wanted to buy an American flag to put out front. While tabling for Bernie, children often showed up to our table. One asked me if I didn’t like Trump…I said that was right. While kids start out with open minds, it does not take long for cultural indoctrination to take place.
The future is the children. During her run for president, Marianne Williamson had a proposal to create a Department of Children and Youth. With the impending doom of climate catastrophe, the future is not bright for any of us, but the children will be hit especially hard. They may never know a summer without forest fire smoke. As psychologist Lev Vygotsky wrote, “In the process of development the child not only masters the items of cultural experience but the habits and forms of cultural behaviour, the cultural methods of reasoning.” The indoctrination into white supremacist capitalist culture begins early in the United States. For a better future, this indoctrination must be countered in all the forms it takes.
This advertisement for the Tuttle Twins might be one of the worst things I’ve ever watched. “How the free market is the key to prosperity?” “How kids can be entrepreneurs?” The parents of these children need to be reported for child abuse for forcing them to make this video. This is child exploitation.
The Tuttle Twins website is full of lies and misinformation including the following statement:
To make matters worse, the public school system, the mainstream media, and the entertainment industry aren’t helping. They are openly pushing socialism into the minds of our kids every day.
If only this were true. Once again, the right wing has gone off the deep end. When was the last time the public school system, mainstream media, or entertainment industry pushed socialism? This is similar to the manufactured outrage over Critical Race Theory, which I discuss with my co-host Erin in the latest episode of Crawdads and Taters. These institutions exist to prop up the capitalist system and have never been proponents of the socialist revolution needed to transform our society yet the right wing acts like the world is going to end when they even mention systemic racism in school.
A spectre is haunting the United States — the spectre of communism. All the powers of the US have come together to exorcise this spectre: Republican and Democrat, politician and pundit, Proud Boys and police. Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
The Tuttle Twins books are written by libertarian author Connor Boyack of the Libertas institute. They also have a Podcast, with over 100 episodes, including real hard hitting topics like:
Why are capitalists always the villains?
Was Scrooge really the bad guy?
Why is Ayn Rand Important?
Is healthcare a human right?
The answers to these questions don’t really require a podcast - yes, capitalists are always the villains, Scrooge was the bad guy, Ayn Rand isn’t important, and healthcare is a human right. I made the great sacrifice and listened to Is inequality bad? whose thesis was that inequality is special. In this episode, equality is portrayed as dystopian and Jeff Bezos is portrayed as a hero. It never actually addresses economic inequality or the capitalist system, because if it did, they would expose their own hypocrisy. I expect the rest of the episodes are just as terrible and uninformative.
It is easy to dismiss the Tuttle Twins indoctrination program as absurd and unrealistic, but hundreds of thousands of parents are buying these books for their children. If the next generation grows up believing the lies peddled in these books, there won’t be another generation after them. The free market will decide the fate of the human race…
Indoctrination all around us
This is a seemingly harmless Sesame Street video, but it brings up several issues - not the least of which being Jill Biden’s warmongering husband, whose administration just oversaw a drone strike in Somalia. This is ignored as it has been by much of the media. As part of a series entitled Racial Justice Resources for Military Families, this video is just a part of another indoctrination campaign.
According to the Office of the Army Demographics, in 2016 the Army was made up of the following demographics. Active duty -enlisted: 53% white, 24% Black, 16% Hispanic, 4% Asian, 3% other. Officers: 72% white, 11% Black, 7% Hispanic, 6% Asian, 3% other. According to the 2016 Census, the general population was made up of the following: 60.7% white, 12.3% Black, 18% Hispanic, 5.5% Asian.
The other category includes Native Americans. According to the Military Times, “Since 9/11, nearly 19 percent of Native Americans have served in the armed forces, compared to an average of 14 percent of all other ethnicities.” Why does the military recruit disproportionately from minorities? The answer is simple, the military relies on the most exploited classes as their primary recruitment pool. The New Republic has covered this in great detail here. In the same Military Times article, Jeff Means, a Marine corps veteran from the Oglala Sioux tribe gave his reason for joining the military as:
My reasons were financial. I had been kicking around since high school doing really a whole lot of nothing.
Cultural indoctrination has been a tool used by the ruling class not only for control but also for genocidal projects. Boarding schools were a tool to eliminate Native resistance and assimilate them into settler colonial white supremacist culture. More than 180 Natives died at the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania before it closed in 1918. Thousands more died at other schools across the United States and Canada and those who survived the experience were traumatized for life.
In Indian civilization, I am a Baptist, because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked - Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle School
Inmates at the Carlisle School c. 1900 - author unknown.
The lasting and profound impacts of the federal government’s boarding school system have never been appropriately addressed. This attempt to wipe out Native identity, language and culture continues to manifest itself in the disparities our communities face, including long-standing intergenerational trauma, cycles of violence, and abuse, disappearance, premature deaths, and additional undocumented physiological and psychological impacts. - US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland
Back to the Sesame Street clip, where we have the Mexican-American muppet, Rosita, whose father is a veteran who is confined to a wheelchair, talking about being proud to be in a military family. It makes one wonder if this is a racial stereotype considering that minorities are more likely to be recruited to the military…and the First Lady says, “Military friends are some of the kindest, bravest people I know.” This may well be the case, but it does nothing to actually address what military service means for these families. It does not mention the abnormally high suicide rate among veterans or the other traumas created by military service.
This indoctrination is nothing new. In 2006, Sesame Street deployed Elmo’s father, Louie, to what was likely a war torn Iraq or Afghanistan. But this was not explicitly stated, rather Louie says he has to “go help some people” and is doing very important work. There’s even a song about how Louie is going away to “help some friends in need.” The truth would be to say that Louie was helping open up Iraqi oil or Afghani mineral wealth to extraction by transnational corporations. And in order to do so, he was killing brown people. This is what helping friends in need means to the US military. Their friends are wealthy capitalists who need to make more money from third world resource extraction and exploitation of slave-like labor conditions there.
Rumaila, Iraq (Mar. 28, 2003) -- Builder 3rd Class Terry Grace assigned to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion One Thirty Three (NMCB-133) mans an M-60E3 7.62mm machine gun while manning a convoy through the Rumaila oil fields. Photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Jacob Johnson, released by US navy, public domain.
And no discussion of the military would be complete without mentioning their role in climate change. Multiple studies have confirmed this role:
If the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.
The DOD is the single largest consumer of energy in the US, and in fact, the world’s single largest institutional consumer of petroleum.
This role of the US military must be front and center in any discussion of climate change yet it is often overlooked and ignored by the media.
In this clip, in a rare moment of truth telling Kamala Harris admits that wars are fought over oil and will soon be fought over water. How about not fighting wars at all? The Boys and Girls Clubs of America state on their homepage that:
We are committed to ensuring equity and inclusion for all young people
Our mission centers around nurturing the enormous, equal potential inside every young person. Every kid and teen deserves access to experiences and opportunities that change their lives for the better– regardless of their socio-economic status, color of their skin, or other factors that contribute to inequity in the U.S. today.
This sounds great, but the BGCA has been partnered with the US military for thirty years. One of their primary sponsors is Raytheon. Where is the social justice in selling $23 billion in arms to the United Arab Emirates? These weapons will be used to support the war on Yemen, which has resulted in the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time. There is a great hypocrisy in being sponsored by arms manufacturers and claiming to support social justice and equity. The Military Great Think white paper released by the BGCA says:
But given federal budget constraints, we need to look beyond government-supported programs in order to fulfill the needs of military families.
The United States military budget is the largest in the world, yet they cannot find money to support military families? This is absolutely absurd. There are no federal budget constraints on war, the questions of how do we pay for it only comes up when it would actually benefit the people.
The report concludes:
America’s military families sacrifice so much – sometimes everything – to secure our nation’s future. We are therefore duty bound to help them secure their children’s future. And, together, there is no doubt that we can.
The only way to secure our children’s future is to cut the military budget and confront global climate catastrophe. The military is preparing for the climate wars, but doing nothing to confront climate change. There is no way that the capitalist system which is based on profit and infinite growth can address the climate crisis. The future of the human race must take precedence over the future of the nation. The US government and military stand in the way of this future.