The DeSantitizing Agenda of the "Joke Mob"

In his masterpiece, The Authoritarian Personality, Theodore Adorno overlooked one unlikely possibility that has, indeed, emerged in our current political theater.  And that is, of course, that at least one current authoritarian aspirant to the White House demonstrates that one can display all the characteristics of authoritarianism without having any personality at all. Enter Ron DeSantis, stage right.  

What occupies Ron's psychic space where personality resides in real people is a closed circuit of  uncontrolled neuronal firings that consistently manifest as rage, hate, and socially-detached megalomania. Even the simple act of eating apparently does not escape the pattern.  As a DeSantis staffer told The Daily Beast, “He would sit in meetings and eat in front of people, always like a starving animal who has never eaten before… getting shit everywhere.”

But before this thin-crusted authoritarian bully gains his rightful place in history's permanent dustbin of American fascist fascinations, he is sure to do lots of damage, particularly in his home state of Florida. For even though the declared enemies of the "woke agenda" can't tell you what "woke" means, there remains, nonetheless, actionable connotations that allows and encourages terminally-ignorant followers of the corporate media hate channels to keep their torches lit and their pitchforks sharpened.  And vague connotations for a word that can't be defined leaves the field open for every fascist wannabe to choose his own favorite bigotry to advance by attacking any effort to reduce bigotry.

DeSantis knows that Fox and its spawn can be counted on to maintain a 24-hour IV drip of hate--enough to keep white economically-oppressed viewers focused on protecting, at all costs, the ideological cryptocurrency of white male protestant capitalist plutocracy (WMPCP). 

Rupert Murdoch and his oligarch pals have arrived at a foolproof formula to rake in billions of dollars for making the ignorant more ignorant, the angry angrier, and the hateful homicidal.  In short, Murdoch is responsible for creating and maintaining the basest of the Republican base, which gives cover for humorless despots like DeSantis to busy themselves dismantling democratic institutions and snuffing out democratic aspirations in order to undergird social and economic control by the WMPCP.

To create the dystopian fascist future that had remained only a John Bircher wet dream prior to the coming of T---- in 2016, DeSantis as T---- 2.0, along with his army of social DeSantitizers, e. g., Moms for Liberty, have chosen a censorial and abusive strategy to bulldoze democratic principles and practices, equality and equity goals and initiatives, institutional power sharing, and free thought and expression. 

Exhibiting the charm of a Florida gator and the subtlety of a bull shark, DeSantis's utterances ooze the rank musk of toxic masculine politics mixed with the smarmy chronic whining of a pampered bully brat. Repulsive, yes, but also effective. 

Witness the latest "joke mob" success in Tallahassee, FL, where a tiny band of vigilante parents on the hunt for any potential threat to theocratic fascism have succeeded in having a charter school principal fired for allowing Michelangelo's David to be viewed in a middle school classroom.  

From the NY Post:

While Tallahassee Classical is reportedly required to teach about Renaissance art in the 6th grade, three parents spoke up about the lesson’s contents and claimed it upset their children.

Two parents said they wanted to be notified about the lesson before it took place and another parent slammed it as pornographic, [Principal] Carrasquilla said.

She told HuffPost one parent was “point-blank upset” and “felt her child should not be viewing those pieces.”

So now with the DeSantitizers in charge of school curriculums across Florida, even the Hillsdale College curriculum, permission must be granted by every parent, apparently, for any element of curriculum to be offered.  This episode exposes the ramifications of this kind of anarchistic upside down form of authoritarianism now made operative at the institutional level.  

The clip below is from a Slate interview with Tallahassee Classical Board Chair, Barney Bishop, which quickly went off the rails when Alice in Wonderland logic of this approach was made clear by the interviewer:

Just to be clear, last year you sent a notice to parents warning them that students were going to see Michelangelo’s David?

Yes. This year, we made an egregious mistake. We didn’t send that notice. Look, we’re not a public school. We’re a public charter. Parents, after they saw all the crap that’s being taught in public schools during COVID, decided of their own that they didn’t want their children to be taught that. Here we teach the Hillsdale Curriculum, focusing on civic and moral values. We teach a traditional, Western civilization, liberal classical education. And if there’s controversial topics or subjects, we tell parents in advance. We’re going to be sensitive to everybody at the school.

I tend to think of a classical education as being the mode in the 17^th, 18^th century, where you study the Greeks and Romans, and Western civilization is central. A tutor or teacher is the expert, and that teacher drives the curriculum. You’re describing something where it seems the parents drive the curriculum. How does your classical education differ from the classical education as I think of it?

What kind of question is that, Dan? I don’t know how they taught in the 17^th, 18^th century, and neither do you. You live in New York?

Virginia.

You’ve got a 212 number. That’s New York.

I lived in New York when I got the cellphone, many years ago. Now I live in Virginia.

Well, we’re Florida, OK? Parents will decide. Parents are the ones who are going to drive the education system here in Florida. The governor said that, and we’re with the governor. Parents don’t decide what is taught. But parents know what that curriculum is. And parents are entitled to know anytime their child is being taught a controversial topic and picture.

Parents choose this school because they want a certain kind of education. We’re not gonna have courses from the College Board. We’re not gonna teach 1619 or CRT crap. I know they do all that up in Virginia. The rights of parents, that trumps the rights of kids. Teachers are the experts? Teachers have all the knowledge? Are you kidding me? I know lots of teachers that are very good, but to suggest they are the authorities, you’re on better drugs than me. . . .

How to Make Sure Christian Nationalist Charter Schools Stay Out of Your State

For now, Larry Arnn and the Christo-fascists of Hillsdale College have retreated from Tennessee after local citizens in three different counties showed up to say "we don't want your Bircher propaganda schools here."

The other reason for the hasty retreat has to do the enduring scrutiny of Governor Bill Lee's central role in plans to turn over taxpayer funds to establish and maintain the re-education schools intended to radicalize the next generation of anti-democratic authoritarians at public expense.

But you can bet that Hellsdale will be back knocking on Nashville's door after the election if the hereford-pestering Bill Lee is re-elected as governor of the state.  So how do you keep the pseudo scholar at Hillsdale out of the state?  

Get to work electing a decent man, Dr. Jason Martin, who supports public funds for public schools, citizens' rights to make their own health care decisions, expanding health and dental care to those who now qualify for Medicaid funds that are blocked by TN Trumpists, and the renewal of American democracy to include everyone, regardless of disability, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or religion.

Why White Nationalist, Larry Arnn, Says Professional Teachers Are the "Dumbest"

In 2011 the neo-conservative website, Human Events, published its list of the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.  Coming in at #5, right between The Kinsey Report and Das Kapital, was Democracy and Education by John Dewey.  While it may be obvious why wealthy white supremacists would flag Marx and Kinsey, why John Dewey, you may ask.  

The giveaway is in the title, of course, because Dewey's posited that the American democratic aspirations made explicit in the Bill of Rights and other founding documents might be achieved only through the practice of democratic living, which would include, of course, democratic schooling. 

Rather than modeling an embryonic form of democratic living, as Dewey would have schools do, elite paternalists like Arnn want schools to promote an extreme conservative mash-up of protestantism, capitalism, and jingoistic patriotism.  And since 2011, conservatism has become even more narrow, more strident, and more hostile to public institutions that promote democracy.  

The conservative movement has known for decades that the inevitable browning of America and the continued secularization of the Western world would eventually endanger America's 400-year rule by white protestant male elites, and so it comes as no surprise to see Arnn's employer, Hillsdale College, pushing hard to 1) seed its right wing corporate charter schools in as many parts of the country as possible, and 2) attack, diminish, and smear the concept and practice of public education whenever possible.

Before coming to Hillsdale College as President, Arnn spent 15 years as President of the Claremont Institute (1985-2000), which is the intellectual home of John Eastman, who most recently provided the "legal" argument upon which the 2001 Trump insurrection was based. Today Hillsdale serves as a training ground for future Institute "scholars" like Eastman and his fascist collaborators at Claremont.  

This closed circuit between Claremont and Hillsdale that Arnn now oversees constitutes the politically-indecent pseudo-intellectual circle jerk that remains one of the leading threat to American democracy and the rule of non-sectarian law in this country.

Arnn also serves as education advisor to Tennessee's governor, Bill Lee, who you will see in this video sitting quietly on the stage and sipping from his water bottle as Arnn entertains a closed-door meeting of like-minded crusaders with the most outrageous insults and lies about teachers, teacher preparation, and public education in general.  

Since Arnn's comments last month, Lee has said nothing to repudiate Arnn's insults. Last Wednesday Lee did say that he has conversed with Arnn since then, and that "he talked, and I listened." Sounds about right. 

Hillsdale College Proudly Published Putin Paean

Just after Putin helped elect D----- T---- as President, higher ed's highest bastion of Trumpism invited Christopher Caldwell, Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, to deliver the keynote at the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Phoenix, Arizona on February 15, 2017, less than a month after the T---- inauguration (remember the record crowds?).

The speech was entititled "How to Think about Vladimir Putin." The President of Hillsdale College leadership was so impressed that, when he returned to campus, he had the College's ideological organ, Imprimis, to print an adapted version of the speech.

Below is a tiny excerpt, but it offers a strong whiff of the corrupt, xenophobic, white nationalist, anti-intellectual stench that attracts corrupt, xenophobic, white nationalist, anti-intellectual governors like Bill Lee from hundreds a miles away:

Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] is not the president of a feminist NGO. He is not a transgender-rights activist. He is not an ombudsman appointed by the United Nations to make and deliver slide shows about green energy. He is the elected leader of Russia—a rugged, relatively poor, militarily powerful country that in recent years has been frequently humiliated, robbed, and misled. His job has been to protect his country’s prerogatives and its sovereignty in an international system that seeks to erode sovereignty in general and views Russia’s sovereignty in particular as a threat.

. . . if we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the pre-eminent statesman of our time. On the world stage, who can vie with him? Only perhaps Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey.

. . . .

Why are American intellectuals such ideologues when they talk about the “international system”? Probably because American intellectuals devised that system, and because they assume there can never be legitimate historic reasons why a politician would arise in opposition to it. They denied such reasons for the rise of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines. They do the same with Donald Trump. And they have done it with Putin. They assume he rose out of the KGB with the sole purpose of embodying an evil for our righteous leaders to stamp out.

The Hillsdale Curriculum: Adult Mythology as Children's History

For the antiquarian curriculum crafters at Hillsdale College, it's never too early for children to start absorbing the lies and distortions that have warped American history to conform to the self-imposed ignorance of white Americans who refuse to admit the truth. Therefore, the mythologized glories of our past are to be administered beginning in kindergarten and continuing throughout high school and college. Below is the Introductory page from the K-2 unit on the Civil War era:

Now if all this seems a little ambitious for first graders, you'd be right, of course.  But child development is not a specialty or even a concern for the classical masters who reconstructed this 19th Century historical mythology for the special "benefit" of kindergartners who end up unfortunate enough to be enrolled in schools that utilize the kind of blatant propaganda that Governor Bill Lee would like to feed to Tennessee schoolchildren.  

This curriculum is built on discarded and/or discredited renditions of America's past that seek to sanitize the American history, beginning with the American founders and their Puritan forefathers.  You may see for yourself by downloading the curriculum for free.

Below is an example of the developmentally inappropriate "approaches" that the curriculum wizards at Hillsdale have put together.  I have circled one of the many examples of discredited and discarded historical distortions that minimize the systemic nature of humans owning other humans and the role that that reality played in slave owners' desire to go to war to preserve the perversity of that economic and social arrangement. 

In this example below, teachers are urged to take the "approach" with K-2 children, no less, that most Southerners were not slaveholders and that they were actually fighting to preserve "states' rights."  I know, you probably thought that rotted chestnut had been discarded. Think again.

This is what Governor Bill Lee wants Tennessee elementary school teachers to provide our students. 

Just for the record, the 1860 U. S. Census shows that 30 percent of Southern families owned other humans.

Who Gave $184 Million to Hillsdale College in 2019-2020?

 Below is a clip from Hillsdale's 990 for the period ending June 2020:

Really? $184,000,000 in contributions and grants in one year to a small "liberal arts" college in a single year? Where, oh, where could all that money have come from?

We do know that the Kochs' Americans for Prosperity has an interest in Hillsdale's "classical" education model, as seen in this interview by AFP Foundation Florida's Lee Dury as he finds out more about Hillsdale's Barney Charter School Initiative from Hillsdale's Assistant Provost, Dr. Kathleen O'Toole. The money trail remains a mystery, however.

The same year that Hillsdale reported $184 million in contributions and grants on its 990, Governor Bill Lee traveled to Hillsdale to find out more about the Hillsdale Charter School Model. According to Hillsdale's President, Larry Arnn, Lee was so impressed that he asked Arnn to bring Tennessee some of that white Christian 19th Century book learning:

All of the classical schools with which we are involved, which number close to 50 now, pursue the aims in this Honor Code. There are wonderful citizens all over the country who have taken the lead in founding these schools alongside the College. Some of them are in public office, and here I single out Governor of Tennessee Bill Lee. About two years ago, he visited Hillsdale College to sit in my Aristotle seminar for two and a half hours and to learn more about our work with K-12 education. With the encouragement of the governor, we have undertaken to found several dozen schools in Tennessee alone. This is a mighty work. We will continue to help extend it everywhere.

Who sent Aristotelian Gov. Bill Lee to Michigan with an order for 50 new charter schools that Lee would like to place in TN public schools, rent free? Inquiring minds want to know.

 

TN's Bill Lee Plans $32 Million for White Christian Nationalist Charter Schools

 . . . [Hillsdale] College values the merit of each unique individual, rather than succumbing to the de-humanizing, discriminatory trend of so-called “social justice” and “multicultural diversity,” which judges individuals not as individuals, but as members of a group and which pits one group against other competing groups in divisive power struggles (Hillsdale College 2018-2019 Catalog, p. 15)

Located since 1853 in Hillsdale, Michigan, Hillsdale College (HC) is a small Christian liberal arts college (think Greek, Judeo-Christian, and American traditions almost exclusively) with just under 1,600 undergraduates.

On the Hillsdale College 2021 catalog page headed "Hillsdale College Faculty Statement On Academic Freedom," the page is heavy with references to the College's commitment to "ordered liberty" and "moral order." Though "ordered liberty" is never defined, context clues point me to conclude that faculty are free to practice academic freedom as long as it coincides with the dictates of an administration bound to uphold a politically-conservative view of Trump-approved Christian principles and a staunchly Spartan conception of ordered liberty:

Hillsdale College affirms that academic freedom is bound up with a valuable legacy of other freedoms and duties. Among these are the following aspects of ordered liberty to be considered with their related moral and social obligations: freedom of worship; freedom in work; freedom in politics; freedom in the economy.

Hillsdale College affirms that all these freedoms are dependent upon the maintenance of a moral order; and that academic freedom in particular requires attachment to a body of truth, made known through the order and integration of knowledge. Of such truths the College is the conservator and renewer, and the primary function of the College is to transmit, through these truths, some measure of wisdom and virtue.

In short, if you want your students to read Marx, rather than a Hillsdale-approved detractor, you'd better ask the President first. 

Back in the good old days when white patriarchy, unregulated capitalism, and scientific racism went unquestioned, Hillsdale College, which was given its name by Freewill Baptists in 1853, was free to run the lives of its students as Baptist clergymen saw fit. Male and female students, for instance, who wanted to walk together on campus during the 1850s, had to first seek permission from the College President or the Dean of Women to do so.

In some ways, though the upstart Hillsdale College in the early days was a progressive outlier.  Its founders were largely abolitionist teetotalers, and one faculty member was active in the formation of the Republican Party in 1853. More importantly, anyone, "irrespective of nation, color, or sex" could seek an education at Hillsdale. Many of its students fought for the Union Army during the Civil War, and Hillsdale was the first in Michigan and the second in the U. S. to “to admit women on an equality with men.”  

Today, enrollment numbers show pretty equal representation between women and men (just under 1,600 total), even though 90 percent of students enrolled in Hillsdale's only PhD program in Political Thought are men.

By the 1960s and 70s, however, any vestiges of progressivism were swept away when students at Hillsdale and elsewhere began receiving federal college assistance.  With federal aid came requirements for federal record keeeping and accountability, which Hillsdale refused to do when faced with the mandate to file reports required under Title IX.  

Hillsdale went to court, and in 1984 the College was handed a final defeat in the courts on the matter of federal reporting requirements. Having grown increasingly hostile to federal reporting requirements, the Trustees decided to cut ties with any federal funding, which included refusing student attendance when that attendance required students to pay their way with federal grants or loans.

You can imagine how this decision made Hillsdale's white student body even whiter. But we really don't know how white, unless we go there and do a head count, since HC does not report any racial or ethnic numbers publicly. (After a search through most of the web pages of HC's website, I could find zero photos of black or brown students, though I did see one Asian student).

In terms of faculty diversity, HC ranks 3,627 out of 3,790 American colleges, according to College Factual--which puts HC in the bottom 10 percent.

Today, the progressive outlier that was once Hillsdale has morphed into and defensive bastion of white right-wing Chritian activism.  Its early Republican founders who were largely abolitionists have been replaced by Goldwater, Nixon, and T---p era Republicans devoted to preserving white rights under the guise of liberty and freedom, which is essentially anti-government when government is involved in enforcing federal statutes and regulation in ways that chafe against the "freedom" to discriminate . 

Here is some representative rhetoric from HC's page, "Civil Rights in American History:"

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Rise of Affirmative Action

The understanding of civil rights in America has been transformed fundamentally since Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The view that every individual has a right to equal treatment under the law has been replaced by a system of affirmative action that demands race be taken into account in the pursuit of equal group outcomes.

Identity Politics Today

Identity politics holds that America is fundamentally and irredeemably racist. This ideology, which has become dominant in American public life, requires discrimination in order to elevate and privilege the identities of the oppressed.

To alleviate any doubt about the partisan nature of Hillsdale College's efforts to free itself from the bondage of federal mandates such as the Civil Rights Act, Title IX, ADA, U. S. Equal Employment, LGBT protections, etc., here is the latest affirmation of Hilldale's hostility to any such encumbrance.  Note that the Obama Administration is called out, specifically:

Resolution of the Board of Trustees

WHEREAS the Board of Trustees and Administration of Hillsdale College have been entrusted with, and are determined to uphold, the original and great principles and mission of the College as set down over 165 years ago by its founders; and

WHEREAS those principles and that mission require the College to provide “sound learning” to all willing students, and to do so in a way that perpetuates the “blessings of civil and religious liberty” and “intelligent
piety” in the land; and

WHEREAS the entanglement of the federal government in the financing of colleges and universities, and the consequent regulation of these institutions by federal agencies, violate the idea of limited government embodied in the Constitution; and

WHEREAS such violations are inherently corrupt, as seen in attempts of the Department of Education to compel Hillsdale College to count its students by race, in direct violation of the noblest principles of the College and of America; and

WHEREAS the Obama Administration and Congress today appear, even more than the worst of their predecessors, bent on extending federal control over American higher education and other areas of American life; now therefore be it

RESOLVED that Hillsdale College will continue zealously to defend and uphold, against all threats and inducements, its independence from federal government financing and federal government regulation; and be
it further

 
RESOLVED that the Administration of Hillsdale College, with the support of the Board of Trustees, will continue to provide not only the finest liberal arts education, but also national leadership in promoting the principles of liberty across the land, and to pursue these aims in strict avoidance of all subsidy from the federal taxpayer.

Now it is obviously difficult to square this high-sounding resolution, especially the last sentence, with the College's tax-exempt status, which relieves it from federal and state tax obligations on any of its net assets worth more than $1.25 billion. There's lots of dark money going to Hillsdale each year.

Hillsdale College's president is Larry Arnn, who was paid $1.2 million in salary and bonuses in 2019.  Arnn received his Masters and doctorate from Claremont Graduate School.  After being granted a PhD in 1985 from Claremont, he founded and served President of the right-wing Claremont Institute for the next 15 years. He remains a Trustee of the Heritage Foundation.

Hillsdale's resolve to pursue "strict avoidance of all subsidy from the federal taxpayer" is particularly puzzling, since Hillsdale is now providing the T_____-approved curriculum and instructional model for charter schools that could not exist without the public per-pupil expenditure that the Hillsdale Model charter schools receive.

Do you remember the 1776 Report, which was the work of T____'s 1776 Commission to attempt to undercut the 1619 Project?  The 1776 Report provided a partial K12 social studies curriculum that was meant as the whitest of whitewashes on the Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project, which had successfully spawned a K12 curriculum that includes the actual history of slavery in the story of America's past.  

Besides conservative ideology and a palpable animosity to cultural diversity, affirmative action, and social justice, what pedagogical expertise undergirds the 1776 Curriculum? And what is the connection to Hillsdale?  To the first question, we must answer, not much; to the second question, almost everything.  

T----'s Chairman for this 1776 Report was none other than Hillsdale President, Larry Arnn, who chose Carol Swain, retired right wing Vandy professor of law (think Clarence Thomas in a dress), as his Vice-Chair.  The Executive Director is Arnn's right-hand man at Hilldale, Mathew Spalding, who is Hillsdale VP in charge of Hillsdale's DC operations.

The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission
Larry P. Arnn, Chair
Carol Swain, Vice Chair
Matthew Spalding, Executive Director
Phil Bryant
Jerry Davis
Michael Farris
Gay Hart Gaines
John Gibbs
Mike Gonzalez
Victor Davis Hanson
Charles Kesler
Peter Kirsanow
Thomas Lindsay
Bob McEwen
Ned Ryun
Julie Strauss

The 1776 Report provides the ideological foundation for the 1776 Curriculum, which is meant to provide an antidote to the fact-based inclusive portrayal of American history.

Dr. Kathleen O’Toole, Assistant Provost for K-12 Education at Hillsdale College, gave NWEF a statement about the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum: 

“The Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum represents a culmination of the endeavors of decades of forming and honing curriculum at Hillsdale College, Hillsdale Academy, and its dozens of associated K-12 charter schools, bringing together and producing a content-rich curriculum that covers both American history as well as American government, politics, and civics,” O’Toole said.

If you haven't already figured out why Gov. Bill Lee would choose this particular outfit as his unqualified choice to lead his new charter school initiative that would drain 32 million pubic dollars from the public schools just to get 50 new charters up and running, then you haven't been paying attention to Lee's complete subservience and unqualified fealty to the former President. Lee believes that schools must produce more patriots, and patriots must be miseducated by conservative propaganda.  

Bill Lee must be sent packing in November.  You think?