HOW TO DESTROY A DEMOCRACY

Donna Dufresne

First:  Go after the schools by undermining public education.

• You create a punitive, high-stakes testing system which further divides communities by race and economic diversity, pushing us back into segregation and widening achievement gaps.
•  You publish district test scores in the newspaper, which leads to an insidious type of red-lining, a secret code used by realtors implying that high test scores mean good schools, (a racist code meaning white, middle class).
• Then you punish the under-achieving schools further by emphasizing the test scores and imposing remedial solutions to improve. You take away the arts, science and social studies to improve the test scores.
• You do away with talented and gifted programs and school-wide enrichment, thus destroying talent development and further disengagement.
• Then you impose a data-driven business model which requires so much management and time, administrators and faculty have nothing left to give for creativity and critical thinking, especially since their students’ performance on the test is linked to teacher evaluation.
• Meanwhile, you spin a culture of anti-intellectualism, a mistrust of academics, and especially those teacher unions. You emphasize underachieving schools in the inner city, and you now have the data to prove that teachers and public schools are not doing their job.
• Then you offer a brilliant business solution – privatization in the form of Charter Schools. Being semi-private, these schools can bypass teacher unions, hire & fire whomever they want, ensuring a transitory staff of young, inexperienced teachers who are cheap labor. The business plan drains school districts of their limited funding, while increasing your profits.
•  Then you keep moving the goal post, making it harder and harder to achieve, because teaching is now driven by the test and cramming for success. The culture of cramming makes it impossible to meet curriculum standards, because you have removed critical thinking from the curriculum by taking away the arts, science and social studies in elementary schools. Test scores continue to plummet.
• Now that you have dumbed everyone down and whipped those errant, mostly liberal academics back in place, you’ve created the perfect conditions for privatization of public schools.
• Underachieving schools begin to experience BRAIN DRAIN, as parents who are sick of the emphasis on data and testing, and who can afford the time and resources, seek out alternatives.  Some fight like hell to get their children into Charter and Magnet schools, (which often don’t offer transportation), while others opt to home-school. Private schools are thriving. The achievement gap widens, and segregation deepens.
• Those remaining struggling schools teeter totter on the edge of extinction with budgets being drained by tuitions for the local Magnet or Charter school, and, let us not forget the insurmountable cost of testing and the technology which supports it.

• While the local Magnet and Charter Schools seem to be rolling in dough, the old neighborhood public school which is within walking distance, is now crumbling. Lead pipes, bad water, flaking paint and ancient text books are only the tip of the iceberg, pushing us back to the segregated south in the 1950’s. The Magnet school gets enrichment programs, monthly assemblies, field trips to the science center. The old school gets more administrative positions, teaching coaches to monitor the data and teacher performance. Kids get more intervention and remediation, but little if any enrichment.
• Now that you have created and nurtured a culture of anti-intellectualism and mistrust of public education, you can get on with the real business at hand. Without all that liberal nonsense, like social studies and critical thinking, you have created an uneducated populace who knows nothing about Civics and History. You have properly anesthetized them with reality shows, and mindless games on their devices. Now they are ripe to blindly follow and never question. You can spin whatever reality you choose to deepen your pockets.
• Because children were not taught anything about black history in elementary school, they know nothing about civil rights, and systemic racism. Ignorance is bliss for those who wish to further the racial and class divide.

Next: Go after the free press.

• First you create a divisive alternative to main-stream news media, a conglomerate ready to monopolize struggling newspapers. Your business model thrives on their failure; therefore, you must ensure that they will fail.
• You create internet alternatives to newsprint, free downloads of news bytes on social media and alternatives to local newspapers. There are no rules. There are no fact checks or hardcore editors reminding the writers that their business is to report the news, not construct it through opinion.
• You are savvy enough to know that Americans will believe anything in print if it supports their own belief system (one which you have carefully cultivated by the sheer genius of spin).
• Once you have removed the small local newspapers from the equation, you go after television and radio. You buy small, struggling radio and T.V. stations, and begin to monopolize local news with your conservative spin. The hardcore broadcast stations will not give in. The old standby national newspapers, the Times, the Washington Post, continue to slug on with their old fashioned, fact-checking, old-school reporters.

• You can’t quite infiltrate the so-called liberal press, so you create your own news conglomerate as an alternative. It is stunningly brilliant. A new bobble of distraction. You are poised like the fox that you are, to prey upon the populace by telling them what you think they want to hear. At first, they bristle. But then they begin to believe that your spin on the so-called news IS what they want to hear. It is addictive, and divisive.
• Now you can spin a culture of fear. Fear of other.  You name the other in your nightly broadcasts. The other is the Muslim, the immigrant, the artists and athletes who stand up and kneel for justice.  While you continue to cultivate anti-intellectualism, fear and hatred, you begin to name the enemy.
• You cultivate mistrust of the free press. You call the press “The Enemy of the People”.  You name what you fear most – Liberalism. You do not want a free-thinking society which can liberate itself from you.

Then:  Erode our inalienable rights, especially free speech

• Now that you have created a conglomerate of State-news, you can manipulate the truth. You know how to spin and market ideas. You think you know us, because you have created us from scratch. You have us in the palm of your hand.  But not all of us. Therefore, you must divide and conquer.
• Every chance you get, you spin the idea that the free press is the enemy of the people, liberal democrats and liberals in general are not to be trusted, and those who protest racial injustice, and hate are un-American.
• You spin the idea that nationalistic pride trumps Constitutional rights such as freedom of speech, unless that speech benefits you and your narcissistic cause.
• You herald nationalism, as demonstrated by massive military parades, flag waving, the singing of a national anthem, and unfailing worship of political leaders.
• You identify our worst fears, and you prey upon them by dividing us into factions and tribes. You become the cheerleader for hate.
• You build up the confidence of an underground army of white nationalists who will exercise hatred and do your dirty work of suppressing truth and justice.
• At every opportunity, you rile the masses into frenzied hatred for the “Other” on the daily menu, taunting women who speak out against sexual assaults, making fun of disabled people, insulting immigrants and people of color.
• You convince your followers that kneeling for justice is un-American.
• You further divide us by spinning the untruth that if “Black Lives Matter”, then other lives do not. You especially further divide us from the police force, making anyone who stands up for justice an enemy of the State, and the police.

Finally:           You erode the Constitution

• You take away our rights
• You rescind amendments that were meant to protect us
• You deny us of the right to an equal education
• You obliterate the rights of immigrants to naturalize
• You clamp down on the Press, and their ability to report the truth
• You imprison peaceful protesters, or worse
• You suppress dissention
• You divide the classes even further, making the rich richer, and the poor poorer
• You deny the populace the right to pursue happiness, because your rich friends have shipped all the jobs overseas to increase profits
• But for some reason, you do not take away our guns