Progressive Education and the Destruction of America: PART 1

In listening to Chris Paul’s interview of Garrett Ziegler on March 17. 2023, I realized they were victims of our terrible education system when they believe : “…Contrary to popular belief there are not 2 or 3 Bogeymen pulling the strings of America’s decline, but rather a legion of hangers on and grifters who rely on Joe and the entire Biden political Mafia for introductions, jobs, prestige and access…” ( paraphrased)

Garrett is uncovering the ‘HOW’ and not the real WHO. Remember Biden was 29 when he first ran for office. He is certainly NOT a ‘king pin’ he is a Gofer just like Epstein was. So I want to go all the way back to the 1800s when John D Rockefeller funded John Dewey’s research into how to turn kids into unthinking sheeple. Then in the second part of this series, I am going to skip ahead to the 1970s turning point I have been documenting and the data that shows how our scientific training and research was poisoned.

HISTORY OF JOHN D ROCKEFELLER’S ROLE IN THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICAN EDUCATION

The destruction of our education system was the first step in the Cabal’s plan. You can not feed a bull-schiff sandwich to a well educated citizenry.

“KILLING THOSE UNFIT TO LIVE” — George Bernard Shaw, Fabian Co-founder

Amazing how Shaw’s politics are never discuss in school when his literature is taught…

….

In writing of John D and the other Power Elite, I am going to start with this quote:

… Over the last quarter-century, historians have by and large ceased writing about the role of ruling elites in the country’s evolution. Or if they have taken up the subject, they have done so to argue against its salience for grasping the essentials of American political history. Yet there is something peculiar about this recent intellectual aversion, even if we accept as true the beliefs that democracy, social mobility, and economic dynamism have long inhibited the congealing of a ruling stratum. This aversion has coincided, after all, with one of the largest and fastest-growing disparities in the division of income and wealth in American history….Neglecting the powerful had not been characteristic of historical work before World War II. https://web.archive.org/web/20090625155849/http://hnn.us/roundup/archives/11/2005/3/

More on the history of the World’s POWER ELITE that is no longer taught in our schools courtesy of Dr. Dennis Cuddy who taught American History at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. LINK

So let’s take a quick look at one of the American Power Elite, John D. Rockefeller, a major promoter of Progressive Education. I will also look at some of his other actions.

We will start with John D’s father, ‘Devil Bill’ who made his living as a real live snake oil salesman.

“When he wasn’t running away from them or disappearing for years at a time, [William Avery Rockefeller] would teach his children the tricks of his treacherous trade. He once bragged of his parenting technique: ‘I cheat my boys every chance I get. I want to make ’em sharp’…

“The world we live in today is the world created in ‘Devil’ Bill’s image. It’s a world founded on treachery, deceit, and the naïveté of a public that has never wised up to the parlor tricks that the Rockefellers and their ilk have been using to shape the world for the past century and a half.”

James Corbett Rise of the Oiligarchs

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By the time he was 40, John D. Rockefeller controlled 90 percent of the global oil refineries. Within another few years (early 1880s), he also controlled 90 percent of the marketing of oil, and one-third of all oil wells. His power and influence cannot be overstated at this point.

He had an international monopoly on what was to become the most important commodity in the world economy.

Following in Rockefeller’s footsteps were a handful of other wealthy families, including the Nobels, the Rothschilds, the Dutch Royal family, and millionaire William Knox D’arcy, who was the first to strike oil in Persia…

Alexander Light – How Rockefeller’s Oil Industry Conquered Medicine, Finance And Agriculture

He leaves out the British Royal Family. The Queen of England was a major stockholder in Royal Dutch Shell along with the Dutch Royal Family. LINK

I specifically mention Shell Oil because Ged Davis is the Shell Oil VP who wrote the Sustainability Scenarios for the IPCC aka Agenda 21. This is seen in the “Sustainable Development (B1)” part of the February, 1998 Climategate e-mail which asks for comments on the attachment: “Draft Paper for the IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios” by Ged Davis.

Another Shell Oil exec Doug McKay was at the IPCC scenario meetings. McKay was also Senior Financial Analyst with the World Bank. Robert Watson worked for the World Bank while Chair of the IPCC.

There are also lots of connections to the World Wildlife Fund, a major public trend setter.

Prince Bernhard of the Dutch Royal Family is the Founding President of World Wildlife Fund (WWF) HRH The Duke of Edinburgh served as International President of WWF for 16 years until his retirement at the end of 1996. John H. Loudon, Better known as “the Grand Old Man of Shell”, headed Royal Dutch Shell from 1951 to 1965…. He was President of WWF from 1976 to 1981. Ruud Lubbers served three terms as Prime Minister of the Netherlands between 1982 and 1994, thus becoming the longest serving Dutch Prime Minister. He continued in Parliament as Senior Deputy Leader, and later Parliamentary Leader of the Christian Democratic Alliance. He became President of WWF International on 1 January 2000, but only served for one year as he was appointed United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from 2001-2005.

Other major Shell Oil stockholders are the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. The Rothschild Investment Trust was formed in 1988 => RIT Capital Partners. Rockefellers and Rothschilds Unite

Back to the History of John D. by Alexander Light

…In his day, John D. Rockefeller was a despised man.

This all changed when he hired Ivy Ledbetter Lee, who essentially invented the public relations industry as we now know it. John D. was filmed handing out dimes to the poor, and was publicly portrayed as a kind and warm-hearted man. While hokey by today’s standards, such simple stunts worked.

Yet, Rockefeller needed to go even further to truly gain the public’s trust….

What John D was trying to cover up was the April 20, 1914  Ludlow Massacre.

A year later “In March, 1915, J. P Morgan and the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, ship building and powder interests and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press in the United States.” — Congressional Record, February 9, 1917

As an interesting aside, Buckeye Steel Castings owned by Frank Rockefeller, brother of John D. Rockefeller, chose Samuel Prescott Bush as General Manager and later  the company’s president in 1905.

 President Hoover appointed Bush to the President’s Committee for Unemployment Relief, based on the recommendations of the committee’s chairman, Walter S. Gifford, who was concurrently the president of AT&T….

Respected for his skills as a businessman, when banker Bernard Baruch was appointing prominent business leaders to key positions for the War Industries Board in the spring of 1918, Bush was made the Chief of Ordinance…

Owing to his own lack of a formal education, Bush was deeply interested in establishing schools that could give kids like him the opportunity to go to school, leading him to help establish the Columbus Academy in 1911 with a group of other like-minded businessmen..

How Samuel P Bush Laid The Groundwork For The Bush Political Family

This control of the media no doubt helped Rockefeller and the other Elite in improving their public image it also helped get the USA into WWI after the Federal Reserve Act was passed. Wars and accumulating debt being a major goal of those profiting from the Military-Industrial-Banking complex.

THE LUDLOW MASSACRE AND PROPAGANDA

On This Day in 1914, US Military Slaughtered Children in Colorado and JD Rockefeller Had Media Cover It Up

n April 19 and 20, 1914, during a miner strike in Colorado, the National Guard killed dozens of people—though the exact number of casualties is disputed, most sources agree that at least four women and 11 children were among the dead. When the workers first went on strike, they were evicted from the company-owned houses in the mining town, so they set up massive tent colonies outside of the towns. The workers were protesting for higher wages and better work qualities but were making very little progress.

The largest of these tent cities was in Ludlow, just outside of John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. The tent city in Ludlow housed over 1,200 people, and entire families, including children, were living in these tents. The strike had been going on for months before the massacre, with tensions rising between the military and the strikers with every passing day.

Then one day, these tensions came to a head and the National Guard set up a machine gun on a hill overlooking the tent city and began raining bullets down on the workers and their families. The Soldiers then invaded the colony and began setting fires to the tents, trapping many innocent people to die inside. When news of the violence spread, miners all over the state began to revolt, and went to war with the coal companies, shooting and attacking soldiers and mine owners, as well as dismantling railroad tracks and blowing mines shut.

Eventually, the Army was called in to quell the uprising and the protesters went back home or back to work.

However, news of the incident was beginning to spread, tarnishing the Rockefellers’ reputation and inspiring more protests. To deal with this problem of public perception, Rockefeller hired public relations pioneer Ivy Lee. Lee was an early influence of Edward Bernays, who would later write the infamous book “Propaganda,” a textbook of mind control for tyrants and aristocrats. Bernays is often called the “father of propaganda.” If this is so, then Ivy Lee is the grandfather.

It is likely that Rockefeller picked Lee for the job because years earlier he came up with an idea that would revolutionize how corporations and governments communicated with the peasant class. In 1906, when a horrible train accident happened in Atlantic City, Lee suggested that the company issued a statement presenting their side of the story to the press—this was to be the first “press release.” ….

“the national guard slaughtered dozens of women and children”

I think these 1914 news articles may have had some influence on the Elites decision to buy up the media in 1915 in order to control the news available to US citizens.

Obviously the  Ludlow Massacre was not a good look for John D. and giving out a bit of money was not going to go far in repair his image. Also long term, control of the news would not produce the mass of obedient workers desired.

As Corbett notes:

“In order to win the public over, he was going to have to give them what they wanted. And what they wanted wasn’t difficult to understand: money.

“But just as his father, Devil Bill, had taught him to do in all his business dealings, Rockefeller made sure to get the better end of the bargain. He would ‘donate’ his great wealth to the creation of public institutions, but those institutions would be used to bend society to his will.

“As every would-be ruler throughout history has realized, society has to be transformed from the ground up. Americans in the 19th century still prized education and intellectual pursuits… with a remarkable 93 to 100 percent literacy rate.

“Before the first compulsory schooling laws in Massachusetts in 1852, education was private and decentralized, and as a result… a solid grounding in history and science was widespread. But a nation of individuals who could think for themselves was an anathema to the monopolists. The oiligarchs needed a mass of obedient workers…”

Alexander Light also mentions

…Other oil-backed schemes to mold and reshape the American education system followed, including a scheme to alter the teaching of American history to promote a view of collectivism, as well as a program culminating in the transformation of the practice of medicine…

The Great Thanksgiving Hoax is an excellent example of how actual US history is twisted to support COLLECTIVISM when the reality is the collectivism experiment in the Plymouth colony was a dismal failure and Governor  William Bradford in desperation in 1623 “…abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with a free market, and that was the end of the famines…”

Each year at this time, schoolchildren all over America are taught the official Thanksgiving story, and newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines devote vast amounts of time and space to it. It is all very colorful and fascinating.

It is also very deceiving. This official story is nothing like what really happened. It is a fairy tale, a whitewashed and sanitized collection of half-truths which divert attention away from Thanksgiving’s real meaning….

The problem with this official story is that the harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hard-working or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves.…

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Not satisfied with the takeover of the oil industry and Education, John D. also targeted medicine and the education and LICENSING of doctors.

The Rockefellers, The Flexner Report, The AMA, and their Effect on Alternative Nutritional (botanical) Medicine

…the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations traditionally worked together almost as one in the furtherance of their mutual goals, and this certainly was no exception. The Flexner brothers represented the lens that brought both the Rockefeller and the Carnegie fortunes into sharp focus on the unsuspecting and thoroughly vulnerable medical profession.” (He Who Pays The Piper – Creation of the Modern Medical (drug) Establishment; G. Edward Griffin)

(This is where the web of control and monopolization seems to be even more intertwined.)

The American Medical Association was founded in 1847 and incorporated in 1897. In the early 1900s the AMA realized that there needed to be some changes in medical education. Medical practice and education in some areas left a lot to be desired (poor training and understaffed medical schools). It created the Council on Medical Education, with the purpose of evaluating countrywide medical training and making improvements where needed. However, they didn’t have enough money to do this. Enter Rockefeller and Carnegie and their funding and popularity. The president of the Carnegie Foundation, Henry Pritchett, met with the AMA and offered to take over the entire Council on Medical Education project….

And speaking of John D and medicine…

Before we leave the Rockefellers, education, medicine and Big Oil… this was done on purpose right after WWII.

History, HACCP and the Food Safety Con Job 

…With World War II, America saw its agricultural system intentionally subjected to political policies that radically transformed it. 

What was once a decentralized system that provided a means to self sufficiency and independence for tens of millions of farmers was purposefully centralized into a capital-intensive fossil-fuel dependent system that restructured local economies, permitting their wealth to be extracted by what are now transnational cartels dedicated to the so-called free market and globalized trade at all costs.

This transformation was the result of organized plans developed by a group of highly powerful ” though unelected ” financial and industrial executives who wanted to drastically change agricultural practices in the US to better serve their collective corporate financial agenda. This group, called the Committee for Economic Development, was officially established in 1942 as a sister organization to the Council on Foreign Relations. CED has influenced US domestic policies in much the same way that the CFR has influenced the nation’s foreign policies…

John D’s son,  David Rockefeller was Chair of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1970 to 1985.

SUBVERTING EDUCATION: ENTER JOHN DEWEY

John Dewey was a president of the Fabian Socialist League for Industrial Democracy (LID) which the London Fabian Society described as “one of our provincial societies.”

Dumbing Down America by Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld

…John Dewey got his education in the new psychology under G. Stanley Hall at John Hopkins University.

In 1887, at the tender age of 28, Dewey felt that he knew enough about psychology to be able to write a textbook on the subject, entitled fittingly 

Psychology.

In 1894, Dewey was appointed head of the department of philosophy, psychology and education at the University of Chicago which had been established two years earlier by a gift from John D. Rockefeller.

In 1896, Dewey created his famous experimental Laboratory School where he could test the effects of the new psychology on real live children.

Dewey’s philosophy had evolved from Hegelian idealism to socialist materialism, and the purpose of the school was to show how education could be changed to produce little socialists and collectivists instead of little capitalists and individualists.

It was expected that these little socialists, when they became voting adults, would dutifully change the American economic system into a socialist one…..

Actually Rockefeller started supporting the University of Chicago even earlier.

Building for a Long Future The University of Chicago and It’s Donors 1889 – 1930

There is something very ironic from that title selected by the University of Chicago.

Rockefeller’s initial philanthropic relations with the new University of Chicago were forged in 1889, when he pledged $600,000 to help launch the new university, provided that its Chicago supporters raise an additional $400,000 within a year’s time. Initially, Rockefeller expected and wanted the University to be a liberal-arts college, not the research university that William Rainey Harper so strongly promoted. Moreover, he never ceased to worry that his own vast fortune would tempt his friends and compatriots in Chicago to look to him to support permanently the entire financial edifice of the University. Hence, Rockefeller was especially sensitive to the need of gaining and retaining substantial support among the members of the Chicago civic elite. In a personal meeting with Rockefeller in April 1891, Gates had found him “troubled and depressed. He has begun to feel that Chicago is lying down on him.”

The great generosity soon displayed by early Chicago donors like Martin Ryerson, George Walker, Sidney Kent, Marshall Field, and others between 1891 and 1896 temporarily resolved such doubts in Rockefeller’s mind…

Rockefellers, Bush, George Walker, Gates…. a hundred years later the same families are influencing today’s politics.

John Dewey’s Plan To Dumb-Down America!

The dumbing-down of America is no accident. It is not the result of uncontrollable natural forces floating in the air we breathe or the water we drink. It is the result of a planned scheme launched in 1898 by Progressive-in-Chief John Dewey outlined in an article titled “The Primary-Education Fetich” (sic). Dewey was a diehard socialist with a deep hatred of capitalism, individualism, and orthodox Christianity. He, and his small army of academic followers, were determined to turn America into a humanist collectivist society and he figured out that the best way to separate Americans from their constitutional freedoms and individualism was to dumb them down.

And the easiest way to do this was to change the way children were taught to read in their primary schools. Get rid of intensive phonics, the foundation of language mastery and independent intelligence, and put in its place a “sight” or “look-say” method that teaches children to read English as if it were Chinese. Have them memorize a sight vocabulary so that they develop a whole-word reflex and cannot see the phonetic structure of our alphabetic words. Thus they will become reading disabled, dyslexic, or simply low-level readers….

Of course, Dewey knew that Americans would not voluntarily give up their economic and individual freedoms, so he told his colleagues: “Change must come gradually. To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction.” And so, wholesale deception became the modus operandi of the progressive movement.

We are reprinting Dewey’s article because it is important for Americans to understand how they’ve been deceived by their so-called educators. The plan to deliberately dumb down the nation has been hidden from the public for almost 100 years. Reading it today is to become finally aware of the deceit and treachery behind this treasonous conspiracy to destroy the intellect of millions of Americans behind the benign façade of Progressive education.

When you consider the misery, frustration, despair and humiliation these teaching methods have caused in millions of American children, it becomes clear that the professional educators behind all of this were diabolically inspired.

Can we repair the damage done by Dewey’s plan? Only if the will is there and Americans are willing to face the fact that they have been betrayed by their educators….

John Dewey is a Fraud

….John D. Rockefeller was the billionaire that nobody liked. His PR experts said, “Mr. Rockefeller, give away one dollar so they let you keep the other nine.” Rockefeller did this to an extraordinary degree, creating universities and many other famous institutions.👉 In particular, he created Teachers College at Columbia University. Wannabe teachers came there to be indoctrinated into the new ways. These teachers — this whole process started around 1910 — then returned to their communities and began work on the raw material known as students….

It’s worth noting that the entire Dewey machine was operating full-speed by 1890, before the Russian Revolution…. top educators were trapped in their lie, in Dewey’s lie. They had to pretend they were interested in education when the real goals were psychological indoctrination and sociological transformation….

John Dewey’s secret scams are the reason why we have 50 million functional illiterates, why high school graduates can’t multiply seven times eight, why most American kids can’t find Japan on a map, why even simple knowledge like “what is a moon” is probably not part of the lives of most Americans.

The progressives who control education deified John Dewey…

Kent Clizbe (former CIA) in his book Willing Accomplices: How KGB Covert Influence Agents Created Political Correctness and Destroyed America describes the next actors in the destruction of US education, George Counts, George Creel and Charles Edward Russell.

Easy Picking—Americans as Suckers

In 1917, U.S. President Wilson used the power of executive order to create the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Wilson turned America’s first propaganda agency over to a Democrat Party marketer—journalist turned Progressive cheerleader, George Creel.

The CPI, widely known as the Creel Committee, was charged with building support in the U.S. for Wilson’s decision to join WWI. Later, the Creel Committee took on the job of influencing foreigners; however the American home front remained its major market for Charles Edward Russell, Dean of Columbia’s Teachers College, fresh from a survey of Russia with the Root Commission, wrote to Wilson, urging the president to target Russia with propaganda designed to appeal “to the Russian’s passion for democracy.” Wilson forwarded Russell’s letter to Creel, with the comment, “It seems to hit very near to the heart of the subject [propaganda in Russia]…”

Creel and his advertisers took to the task with gusto. The iconic “Uncle Sam Wants You” posters were Creel Committee products. The Committee demonized the German foe moving the American public slowly to support the war. The popular image of “the Hun” was a CPI advertising product.

However, Americans were not the only targets of the CPI’s influence campaigns. The CPI had a foreign section. According to the New York Times, in July of 1918, Edgar Sisson was appointed general director of the foreign section of the CPI. The foreign section included “agencies of the committee in Europe, Asia, and South America, the divisions comprised in the foreign section are the foreign cable, foreign mail, foreign films and pictures, work with the foreign born, and the present division of foreign educational work, the last becoming the executive division of the section.”

Sisson, with no experience in Russia, landed in the revolution- torn country in the fall of 1917, just after the Bolsheviks overthrew Kerensky’s Provisional government. On his team, in the foreign educational section, was William F. Russell, dean of a college in Iowa, the son of the advisor to the president who was the dean of Columbia University’s Teachers College. The younger Russell would later serve as both dean and president of Teachers College.

Communist connections to Columbia Teachers College are numerous and puzzling.

Sisson spent all of 90 days in Russia, including time during which he gathered what were later proven to be an Active Measure disinformation forgery operation, the Sisson Papers….

William Russell and the Bolsheviks

The Bolsheviks, during wartime alliances with the U.S., both WWI and WWII, mastered the art of maximizing benefits from the relationship while giving away minimal information. Lenin and Trotsky allowed the Creel Committee to use Russia as a platform for its propagandizing. All the while the communists were observing the Americans, gathering assessment data. The cynical veterans of decades of underground revolutionary espionage activities observed the Americans and marveled at how naïve them Americans really were.

Many Americans left Russia after diplomatic service or service in the Creel Committee with a clear-eyed understanding of what the Bolsheviks were all about. However, many Americans left Russia in thrall to the communists.

One who observed and understood was the Creel Committee foreign educational section member, and future dean of Teachers College, William R. Russell. He was in Russia soon after the Bolsheviks seized power and spent considerable time there, working on Creel propaganda against the Germans, for the Bolsheviks, and later against the Bolsheviks….

Russell’s spot-on understanding of how the communists worked, based on his own on-location observations in Russia during the revolution should have been useful to him during the next two decades of his work at Columbia. Yet, under his nose, communist covert influence agents like George Counts, who was under Russell’s supervision at Columbia’s Teachers College, used the exact tactics he described—talking, publishing, orating and haranguing, breaking down democracy from within, attacking the leaders, making people lose confidence—to destroy American society.

Muenzenberg’s influence op

…The communist covert influence message was intended to change individual and societal morals and values. The result of the Muenzenberg payload’s dissemination throughout American society is now clear. A healthy, happy, productive nation of citizens, blended in the great Melting Pot, had set aside their differences when they became Americans. After Muenzenberg’s influence op, the same people were converted into a confused mass of self-interest groups, torn apart by PC divisions of race, gender, ethnicity, income, class, language, sexuality.

A good fit, or even an exact fit, still does not allow us to know exactly how that message made its way from the mind of the elite Soviet espionage corps to the mouths of American students or screen-writers. A match allows us to show that today’s PC message is nearly identical to the communist covert influence payload from the past.

Let’s examine one DNA match—in the Academic/Education domain. The KGB targeted this domain as one of the main conduits to attack and shape the attitudes of the future—American children.

page 135 – details of Counts targeting US education.

In 1931 Houghton Mifflin published New Russia’s Primer: The Story of the Five-Year Plan, by M. Ilin, translated from the Russian by George S. Counts, Associate Director of the International Institute and Professor of Education in Teachers College, and Nucia P. Lodge, Research Assistant in the International Institute.

We see that Anna Osipovna has transformed herself into Nucia Lodge. And we see that the dapper professor Counts modestly claims that he translated the book, while grudgingly crediting his KGB handler. The payload of this unbelievably brazen covert influence operation is straight out of Muenzenberg’s manual.

Muenzenberg’s payload: “You think the capitalist system is corrupt…You’re frightened…by the oppression of the working man…You think the Russians are trying a great human experiment…”

A quote directly from Counts’ New Russia’s Primer:

In America the machine is not a helper to the worker, not a friend, but an enemy. Every new machine, every new invention, throws out upon the streets thousands of workers. In glass factories one person now makes three thousand bottles an hour. In former times such a task required seventy-seven men. This means that each machine for the making of bottles deprives seventy-six men of employment. And the American worker despises the machine which takes away his bread.

But how is it with us [Russians]? The more machines we have, the easier will be the work, the shorter will be the working day, the lighter and happier will be the lives of all.

We build factories in order that there may be no poverty, no filth, no sickness, no unemployment, no exhausting labor— in order that life may be rational and just…We build in our country [the U.S.S.R.] a new, an unheard-of, a socialistic order.

Of course the FAILED experiment at  the Plymouth colony in the early 1600s shows this is not new idea but an old and failed one.

In 1934, while Joseph Stalin was saying “The Collective Farm Policy was a terrible struggle, Ten million died. It was fearful. “ Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Rexford Tugwell was saying “[Our] future is becoming visible in Russia.” Tugwell was part of FDR’s ‘Brain Trust’ — Rexford Tugwell: Architect of The New Deal. Meanwhile at the same time war reporter Walter Duranty of the New York Times covered up a Kremlin-created famine and  allowed the Left to continue worshipping a mass murderer Duranty’s lies also allowed FDR to acknowledge the Soviet Union as a legitimate government without massive push back by the American people.

It is interesting that while Duranty’s treachery is fairly well known, Count’s has been buried. Without Kent’s prompting and his sending me a PDF of his book I would never have known about Count and his roll in the destruction of US educatio

The newly-minted “Russian expert” from Columbia delivered the KGB payload directly into the cultural heart of America. “Capitalism is corrupt! Russia’s experiment is working!” screamed his text.

The Primer was a selection for Book-a-Month Club members in May 1931, and 46,000 members chose it. Counts’ first influence project was a best-seller for seven months, and ranked eighty-first on the list of nonfiction bestsellers from 1921-1932. Cloaked in his non-partisan, academic-research cover, Counts delivered the anti-capitalist payload into schools, universities, and living rooms across America.

Of course, at the same time that Counts published this covert influence coup, Stalin was in the midst of forced collectivization of huge swaths of Soviet society. Dissenters were rounded up and shot. Or sent to the gulag, where they were worked to death, in the most inhuman conditions imaginable. Counts, who had visited Russia at least twice by 1931, could have witnessed the unimaginably squalid lives of normal Soviet citizens, if he had wanted to do so. Maybe he did, maybe he did not. We’ll probably never know, but we do know that he continued pouring out covert influence payloads for another decade.

Counts cloaked his KGB payload in his work in Education with his participation in “non-ideological” organizations, like the Progressive Education Association, and the Philosophy of Education Society, for which Counts edited the journal The Social Frontier, beginning in 1934.

Counts continued publishing, speaking, and teaching that “the age of individualism was over,” and that it was time to accept “collectivization” in the American economy. Counts continued advancing his KGB covert influence payload, always rejecting any suggestion that he was a communist, or inspired by socialism, cloaking his “philosophy of education” in Progressive terms.

Counts founded the Social Reconstruction philosophy of Education—the root of which was the need to “change America.” A tenet of Count’s approach was that America needed to be changed. He voiced, and repeated, over and over, the KGB’s influence payload of his shock at what was happening in America.

“William R. Russell described how he saw the communists take over a country. We are seeing the same thing happening in the USA today.“

The way they worked their way to the seizure of power was as follows:

Talk about peace, talk about social equality, especially among those most oppressed.

Talk about organization of labor, and penetrate into every labor union.

Talk on soapboxes.

Publish pamphlets and papers.

Orate and harangue.

Play on envy.

Arouse jealousy.

Separate class from class.

Try to break down the democratic processes from within.

Accustom the people to picketing, strikes, mass meetings.

Constantly attack the leaders in every way possible so that the people will lose confidence.

Then in time of national peril, during a war, on the occasion of a great disaster, or of a general strike, walk into the capital and seize the power. A well-organized minority can work wonders.

Russell’s spot-on understanding of how the communists worked was based on his own on-location observations of Russia during the revolution.

We are certainly seeing this Muenzenberg playbook in operation today.

TO BE CONTINUED: