Is Decentralization the Healing Salve that Will Save Us?

American ingenuity to the rescue!

My intent for this article is to illuminate an emerging trend toward decentralization that is pushing through the tired, worn out soil of our modern culture like new daffodils in spring. After slogging through two long years of hell, do we dare hope? 

I believe so.

I’m not pedaling the kind of hope we hear from politicians we’re tempted to aggrandize like Hollywood superheroes, or little upticks in optimism we get from rumors about who is secretly behind bars at Gitmo.  I’m referring to a bonafide shift in culture, across the board.

In order to understand how miraculous decentralization can be when it’s initiated by citizens, we must take time to understand why centralization is the societal cancer that has nearly killed the American republic.

Let’s use public education as an example, since it’s the primary focus for the Silver Chord Project.  For almost 250 years, from the beginning of the American colonies up until the Civil War, children were educated in a private, decentralized manner. Parents in populated areas created more affordable choices for educating their children than we have today. However, accompanying those choices were responsibilities that most of us have shirked for the sake of convenience.

Before the Civil War, children were educated one of four ways:  homeschool, tuition-charging private schools, charitable schools established by philanthropists or churches, or “common schools” that were set up as a collaboration between parents and “district” teachers hired by the parents. These common schools were funded through a combination of local taxes and tuition from parents who also chose the textbooks, hired the teachers and determined the curriculum. Neither the state or the federal government had any hand in the process.

This parent-driven form of education is how all of America’s founding fathers (and mothers) were raised.  A child’s education was as unique and varied as his/her parents were. 

Imagine yourself as an early American parent—proud to be living in the first democratic country, free of any tyrannical monarch and at liberty to dream unencumbered by the European class system. With that sort of hope undergirding your dreams, would you not be more driven to educate yourself and your children than any other time in history? 

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America that the Americans were “the most enlightened people on earth. Even on the frontier where population was sparse and libraries were in short supply, one-room cabins hidden deep in the woods typically contained a copy of the Bible and multiple newspapers”.

Most of us grew up watching episodes of Little House on the Prairie, which were based on the memoirs of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Many girls of my generation cherished her books.  Most of Wilder’s stories revolved around the schoolhouse and the intimate relationship parents had with the teacher they hired for the township—more historical proof that Americans valued their responsibility to educate their children. 

According to my new favorite author and fellow Substacker, C Brandley Thompson, The Redneck Intellectual “early Americans had the highest literacy rates of any country in the world,” and no wonder! We were the least governed people in the world. 

But not for long...

Fast-forward to 1836.  The Civil War won’t be fought for another 30 years. Calvin E. Stowe and his wife Harriet Beecher Stowe are living in Ohio, which has only existed as a state since 1803. Harriet will write Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 20 years. And Calvin is working in some capacity for the Ohio Legislature, who have asked him to head up a fact-finding expedition to Prussia to observe their public education system, which was a novel idea for Americans. 

Now we have to asked ourselves, if early Americans were so good at self-educating why would the Legislature be interested in taking on the burden of managing and funding public education?  To understand this we need historical context.  The psychology of sovereigny is still fresh and untested for early American legislators. Their understanding of how to organize a democratic society is caught in a tug-o-war between the European class system they were accustomed to, and the American free-for-all social climate that celebrated the individual above all. The magic of free enterprise and capitalism is all but intoxicating. We were a country of natural born rebels, mostly out for ourselves.   This presented a real problem for Americans bent on a career in governance. How do you make an orderly and obedient nation out of a country of proud individualists?

The answer, apparently, was to study what the King of Prussia did when he inherited a young country.

Back up a bit to 1716 when King Frederick William I is crowned the second king of a fledgling Prussia.  The country was still not quite recovered from war and its poor citizens suffered from identity confusion, or collective oppression—depending on your perspective. Were they happy about being a new country? Were they German, or now Prussian?  Apparently, the nicest thing Freddy could do for his oppressed/confused citizens was to get them all on the same page about their feelings. The King wanted a population that was easily ruled and easily programmable. He invented a system that would create “group think” over generations—thus the idea of centralized government-run schools was born.

Generations later, Prussia’s notoriety for churning out obedient little soldiers spread across the pond. Americans learned about Prussia’s model of government-run schooling from a German philosopher named Johann Fichte, who said the goal of the new system was to “mold the Germans into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individual members by the same interest.” This new national system of education, Fichte argued, must apply “to every German without exception” and every child must be taken from parents and “separated altogether from the community.” Fichte recommended that the German schools “must fashion [the student], and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will,” so that the pupil might go “forth at the proper time as a fixed and unchangeable machine.” Children should therefore be taught “a love of order” and the “system of government must be arranged in such a way that the individual must . . . work and act, for the sake of the community.”

Did you get that? He suggested that students be “fashioned” in such a way that they cannot will otherwise than what you wish them to will. He is suggesting that the teacher, or the State, usurp the child’s free will!

Is it any wonder that Germany fell under communist rule quickly thereafter?  Fichte sounds like he’s quoting Plato’s description of the Guardian class in Republic. To read about Plato as the father of Globalism, read my last article here.

Remember, dear readers, the best way to convince a population of a bad idea is to lace it with a few minor good ideas. A persuasive mix of truth and lies is the number one criterion for effective propaganda. Who wouldn’t like to instill in our children the idea of “working and acting for the sake of the community?” I’m sure it was an easy sell to early American politicians who were tired of managing us like the melting pot of misfits we were.

Post-Civil War America was teeming with waves of new immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe, as well as Catholics fleeing Ireland.  Everyone came to the Americas fueled with the emotion that comes years of oppression.  Like animals freed from centuries of captivity in a zoo, you can imagine why the West was called Wild! Some of our governors were probably highly tempted to adopt any system that might douse the fire of individualism with something more collectivist in nature, something that extolled the virtues of self-sacrifice, compliance and conformity.

So, you can imagine what Calvin saw when he visited Prussia—children lined up in orderly rows, in no-frills, standardized classrooms, showing off their ability to read, write and regurgitate memorized government propaganda. How impressive it must have looked!  Calvin came back to Ohio all lit up and convinced the Ohio legislature to adopt the model.  Many other states followed soon thereafter.

Now we fast-forward to 1919, seventy years after Prussia’s model is installed in the US. Not all Americans are excited about what they have seen play out in Prussia. Thomas Alexander, a professor of elementary education at the George Peabody College for Teachers wrote “The Prussian citizen cannot be free to do and act for himself; that the Prussian is to a large measure enslaved through the medium of his school; that his learning instead of making him his own master forges the chain by which he is held in servitude; that the whole scheme of the Prussian elementary school education is shaped with the express purpose of making ninety-nine out of every one hundred citizens subservient . . . The elementary schools of Prussia have been fashioned so as to make spiritual and intellectual slaves of the lower classes.”

Despite these dire warnings of the homogenizing outcome of government-run schools, the United States continued to implement the system. Next came compulsory attendance laws and associations of unelected leaders who mandated a common curriculum.  These tools of enforcement were implemented slowly over the last century, all under the guise of providing a “good education” to the nations next generation.  

Now it is 2022 and what is the result of Calvin’s great idea to bring Prussian philosophy to a country once teeming with freethinkers? Our teachers’ unions have mandated not just common curriculums but a common political ideology, a common interpretation of morality and a common viewpoint on sexuality. Under the guise of “social and emotional learning” our children are also force-fed a common interpretation of proper mental health. Public schools are no longer houses of academia. They are factories for state-dictated culture. And they are meant to usurp our role as parents.

If you think this is all a very recent trend, think again.

In 1865 the Wisconsin Teachers’ Association declared “children are the property of the state.”

The U.S. Bureau of Education stated in 1914: “The public schools exist primarily for the benefit of the state rather than for the benefit of the individual.” 

And this week Joe Biden said to teachers “They’re not somebody else’s children. They’re like yours when they’re in the classroom.” You can read the context of our president’s statement here.

Why are we just catching this now?

Because the Globalist Agenda was never so blatantly in our faces as it is now. The amorality we see brazenly displayed in media used to be clandestinely hidden behind closed doors or tucked away on places like Epstein Island.   The Globalists knew that it would take at least a few generations to brainwash away the family values and fierce individualism of the American spirit. But alas, we have arrived at the appointed time in history when enough young people are so ignorant of the past that they are ripe for the implantation of anything-- from Communist propaganda to artificial intelligence. This was their “long game” all along.

But I promised you hope and hope I shall give.

This week American news, both alternative and mainstream, is awash with stories about a new American Revolution: Patriot Parents vs. Leftist School Boards.   Never before in history have parents shown up to school board meetings in such huge numbers and in EVERY state across the nation, united in their outrage against government overreach. Critical Race Theory, Comprehensive Sexual Education, and Social and Emotional Learning are three blatant Globalist propaganda campaigns that are the perfect example of lies mixed with truth.  For a few years the propaganda was so subversive that we didn’t notice and we let it slip right past us. But now the agenda is so blatant that it’s instigated a wave of parents waking up, and fully recognizing the cancer of centralization. Hallelujah!

Last year in Washington state 55,000 children were taken out of the public school system to be taught the way our founding fathers were taught: in decentralized co-ops, home schools, and private schools. And when parents were fed up with private schools capitulating to government mandates, they formed their own solutions with like-minded parents in their local communities.

Decentralization is not just a trend in education.  Cryptocurrency is being sold to us as the future of the economy, all based on the miracle of decentralized blockchain technology. For the record, I was recently told by a retired Boeing engineer that the unhackable nature of blockchain is a total myth, so the jury is still out for me on crypto. I’m sure the truth will be revealed soon enough. 

The CCP has China in a horrifying lockdown, and as citizens starve in their homes nothing is coming in or leaving the Shanghai harbor. According to www.marinetraffic.com 1800 cargo ships are sitting idle today, mostly in Chinese ports. Supply chain specialists are warning us to prepare for empty store shelves in the coming months.  If we do experience food shortages it is 100% due to our willingness to let a few food manufacturers own a monopoly on that which we depend on to survive.

Again, drastic circumstances were necessary to wake us up to the power of diversifying the sources of our needs.  Patriots on telegram channels are all talking about growing gardens, raising chickens in their backyards, and changing their shopping habits to buy from companies that manufacture and ship their products inside the continent.

I recently attended a gathering of friends who are changing many of their household products to a company called Melaleuca—which sources 95% of their raw materials from North America. The company’s growth tripled in the last 2 years. Why? Because they refused to sell out to big name monopolies and kept their manufacturing local.  When other companies who sourced from overseas were experiencing supply chain issues during Covid, Melaleuca was selling their surplus of locally-sourced raw materials to them.  They receive very tempting buy-out offers constantly, but refuse every offer.  They know that if they sell they’ll get sucked into another centralized corporate giant, just like Burt’s Bees, who is now proudly owned by none other than Clorox.

This week Elon Musk bought Twitter. Did he just destroy the centralized stranglehold that Big Tech has on social media? Again, the jury is still out on Elon. Time will tell.

For decades CNN has represented the epitome of centralized control on mainstream media. But last week their new streaming service, CNN Plus, announced that it is closing up shop after only 21 days in business.  After spending millions on their launch, they never had more than 10,000 users online. Compare that to the hundreds of amateur citizen journalists streaming on Rumble, Bitchute and YouTube who now attract tens of thousands of viewers for a livestream from their living rooms.

One of my favorite examples of the power of decentralization was the way that Patriots helped each other stay out of hospitals during the last two years of the Scamdemic. Americans quickly identified the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute of Health as three voices of the same central propaganda machine. Despite this three-headed monster’s attempt to carry out genocide in corporately-captured hospitals, or deny us the use of preventative drugs like Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, American were scrappy and figured out how to skirt the rules. Millions of lives were saved.  We found HCQ and Ivermectin from smaller companies in other countries or figured out ways to make home-made versions of HCQ. When hospitals tried to kill our loved ones with Remdesivir and ventilators, our only recourse was to pretend we believed that our family members were dying and demand that they be released to us for at-home palliative care.  Then we put them on safe, cheap, time-tested drugs that were now considered “grey market”, and natural protocols that saved their lives.  

 Ranchers who have used Ivermectin on their animals for decades spread the news of its safety and soon half the country was eating Ivermectin horse paste. It was the only version of the drug still sold in the US during the height of the scam. I watched the price of Ivermectin for horses triple over the last few months.  Just this week I joined a Telegram group with 54,000 subscribers all sharing stories of micro-dosing Ivermectin to help them heal everything from diabetes to heart disease.  There’s even a new Ivermectin-based diet. Kill the parasites that make you crave sugar and you’ll be able to eat less! Some are even experimenting with liquid Ivermectin on age spots. Pay attention, Oil of Olay! You might be put out of business by some outspoken farmers on Telegram.

My dear readers, the attempt to dampen the American spirit may have worked for awhile. But it appears as though the government-run school system meant to usurp our free will and turn us into mindless automatons has seen its heyday. The jig is up! We are awake, not “woke”.

 American ingenuity is returning. We are back, and we are rebels with a cause. 

Decentralization is the way forward.

P.S. Folks, since the masks have come off in school and the WA Department of Health voted to not put Covid vaccines on the children’s vaccine schedule for next year, parent participation has dropped at our district meetings for Washington Parents Alliance. This has also affected donations to support my work. This is a natural reaction from parents. We have had a few wins and we’d much rather be planting our gardens and planning our summer than attending meetings. But there’s so much more work to do to take back our rightful place as the authority in our children’s education. If you’re subscribing for free, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription at $7/month to support my ability to travel the state and continue speaking. If I can reach 1000 paid subscribers I can continue this work full time. If you’d like me to speak to your group of parents, email me at washingtonparentsalliance@gmail.com.