Within the US, K12 education is rapidly becoming a new frontier. The passing of universal ESA legislation, first in AZ, then Utah and Iowa, with 15 other states with legislation pending. This movement is creating a market for new entrepreneurial initiative and new forms of education not beholden to the WMV. It is critical that new educational institutions financed by ESAs should not be required to hire certified teachers nor be accredited institutions. Both teacher training/certification and mainstream accreditation agencies are deeply contaminated by the WMV.
If we can continue to accelerate universal ESA adoption without contamination by WMV, we have the greatest hoping of launching new Renaissance we are likely to see in the near future. It is an opportunity to provide creative, entrepreneurial career opportunities for ambitious young people; they in turn can craft new curricula and pedagogies that support a new idealism; while also taking market share from teachers unions and the rest of the K12 blob, currently a leading vector for WMV contamination.
It is a reasonable aspiration to envision fewer than 50% of American students attending zoned public schools in 10 years. That would include public school choice, duel enrollment, charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling. But as choosing one's child's education becomes the widespread norm, as opposed to defaulting to a neighborhood school and having one's home equity tied to that school's perceived quality, we'll see an even greater acceleration towards choice. In such a market, ESA funded educational options that are not tied to the blob will have an even greater advantage in growing market share.
Currently fewer than 50% of students attend zoned public schools in Phoenix, Tucson, NOLA, Gary, Detroit, Flint, and DC. With the universal ESA passed in AZ, it is likely that AZ will reach this point statewide soon. With potentially 15-25 states passing ESA legislation in the next few years, the crack in the dike is about to crack wide open.
When it becomes more widely known that government schools are actively hazardous to children (e.g. teen suicides increase 15-20% every year during the school year, fall off over summers and holidays, the pattern stops upon graduation), the establishment model is toast.
The CDC notes that "school connectedness," basically the idea that a child feels as if someone at school cares about them, cuts suicide rates almost in half. Will private options ensure that every child feels cared for? Yes, this is not rocket science.
In ten years, as the evidence for mental health damage from public schools becomes more widely known, parents even in blue states will be rushing to get their kids out of public schools. This will provide an immense boost to the new Frontier of educational innovation. As a trillion dollars shifts from indoctrinating young people in WMV, ineffective development of academic skills, and damaging the mental health of a generation to entrepreneurial schools promoting optimism and a can-do attitude, world-class skills, and a healthy mind, heart and spirit, we'll revive the US by means of this critical new Frontier.
In 2010, I attended the [then Intel, now Regeneron] International Science and Engineering Fair. Seeing all these high school students' inventions and research was transformational. The following year, I was hired to create the educational program for a new high school in Florida, where I implemented my vision for a program based on inquiry. In just our first two years, our high school students obtained patents, won the ISEF, Broadcom Masters First, and the $100,000 Siemens Award; published in peer-reviewed journals; presented at national conferences; wrote hundreds of novels, and more.
I fought the powerful forces of tradition to eschew all the pre-packaged programs that teach to the test, like the Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and GCSE programs. We were told our students would never be admitted to top universities. Instead, they were admitted to all the Ivy and Ivy Plus, even MIT and CalTech.
I wrote about this in Engage!: Setting the Course for Independent Secondary Schools In the 21st Century. This is the Frontier. We CAN and must "do school" differently. Having in-hand and instantaneous access to more information than anyone in the history of humanity, and now AI tools must necessarily prompt consideration of how and what we teach and why. The AP/IB/GCSE are retrograde and obsolete. Students need to know how to interpret, analyze, and evaluate information, not memorize it, which is what we still insist they do.
Visionaries in education are suppressed because WMV ensures that equal outcomes supersede excellence. Imagine what we could accomplish if we gave 1:1 instruction to gifted students like we do to the cognitively impaired. This would require acknowledging the empirical fact that cognitive ability is a heritable trait, like height or eye color, but we insist on the fantasy that all students can achieve the same level, which they can if we continue lowering the bar, the easiest and fastest way.
I think what we are going to find instead is that a huge gulf is going to open up between Red States and the rest. Passing school choice (where school choice basically means getting half or so of K-12 per pupil spending back, sometimes with strings) is difficult even in red states. In Purple states it's a no go and in Blue States forget about it.
People attend private schools in Detroit because publics are flat out unsafe. There have also always been ad hoc voucher programs for poor black and brown kids in urban areas, but rarely do they let middle class people have them.
You will mostly see the effect in something we already see, families moving to the Sunbelt.
Joe, I suggest that you have placed too much emphasis on the frontier as a metaphor (or at least too many of your readers have taken that focus) rather than on the crucial importance of failure and accountability. In everything from participation trophies to too-big-to-fail, many have come to believe that it is evil to recognize failure. In truth, success is meaningless unless there is a real prospect of failure. The real losers are not those who fail, get up, figure out what went wrong, and try again, but rather those who fail to try, because they fear they might fall short. Rarely ever does great success come on our first effort.
I did not have time to give the article my full attention, but before I go a note that seems important to the topic:
Basically you're describing the feminization of society. We conceeded too much safety to women, and as with anything women will continuously ask for more. Thus we have more and more safety less and less risk tolerance thus less and less progress.
It's as simple as that.
Or so it appears a couple pages in. Hopefully I will have time to finish this later, but if not I thought it was important to apply every bit of lunkhead I could muster. It is always a good policy to apply maximum stupid to intellectual articles and maximum smart to lowest common denominator entertainment.
Rulers make rules. Rules hold back builders, so they move to the frontier where there are no rules. But those builders become rulers, and rulers make rules. Eventually there are no frontiers, and there are no builders, only rulers and the ruled. Malthusian feudalism.
Who were the frontiersmen? They were Europeans. Are you going to fight to end Affirmative Action, banish all of the Civil Rights programs that allocate resources based on race and leave the descendants of the pioneers to foot the bill? And what of the replacement migration and anti-white discrimination that is a) evil and b) a toxic, demoralizing and incentive inverting perversion of our nation's founding credo?
We must also remember that the frontiersmen weren't just wild west pioneers. They had a cultural heritage, religion, strong families and carried with them a wealth of civic institutions that they re-established as they went West - from the first beacheads on the Atlantic Coast to San Francisco Bay. Only people who are grounded, strong and buttressed by a rich and flourishing culture and heritage, buttressed by a core can send out pioneers. This is as true of the first colonists buttressed by mother England, Spain and France as it is of the frontiersmen buttressed by the core in both the European continent and the more established East Coast of the New World.
We must restore freedom of association. We must admit that egalitarianism is a failure and banish the egalitarians. We must reconstitute the core. The core is the Anglo/Germanic/Nordic-European people and culture built on top of the Greco-Roman pillars of Western Civilization. Restore the Romans and they will build the new Rome. Restore the Vikings and Normans and they will chart and sail the new unknown seas.
Well reasoned. Well written. Thoughtful. Thought provoking. How does one integrate the notion of “surplus elites”, nightly educated, resentful, and mostly “woke” (AOC being the poster child) mesh with the Frontier/Center. They are a Frontier in many ways, but they disparage and demean every notion that is not their Center
A great read is an article call The Fate of Empires from 1975. It describes so much of what is happening in your country. Not sure that it can be stopped but sure hope so….
I agree with much of what you say but the idea that all technology innovation comes from Silicon valley is just patently absurd. Lotus 123 came from Cambridge MA and Ben Rosen (Who was at Morgan Stanley) was the mover behind Compaq computer. (for those who don't remember the first mass produced portable). Bay Networks was the original basis for what became Cisco and and the formula for the valuation of stock options came from Fisher Black and Myron Scholes what they were at CRA in Cambridge. What about Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. whose work led to the development of the internet? Numerous software companies most of which have been acquired came from western Virginia as well.
"Let’s abolish the papacy of the FDA and pioneer new models of drug discovery and regulation. Let’s break the FDA and NIH into a dozen pieces, make them compete, crown the winners — and fire the leaders of the losers." Nobody gives power willingly, ever human. So what, start bloody revolution? Who are "we" you are talking about? From my experience living in this country for more than 20 years there is no unity or sense of "we", actually less and les each year. Milton
The good 'ole USA has indeed become close-minded and conservative. I remember how surprised I was 36 years ago when, coming from multilingual tiny Switzerland, to study economics in Colorado, I learned that there was a strong political movement in the Colorado legislature to promote English as the sole State language, in order to block the growth of Spanish ! How strange, did I think, that parents don't want their kids to be bilingual, when a whole continent and market lays waiting in the south ! Surely, the pioneer spirit must be gone. Now, many years later, I think the US deep cultural knots, brought by history (genocide, slavery, puritan religious sects) are strangling it. Too many huge problems (guns, drugs, prisons, health care waste, illegal immigration, pensions bankruptcy, and I am surely forgetting many others) cannot be solved because they are not tackled with results in mind (then of course they can't be any accountability). Instead, narrow political fights and ideological beliefs are guiding everything. Fundamentally, the roots of the problem surely is in culture & education. Tough to fix when, as I remember well, there already were strong political movements in many States to force schools biology curricula to give equal weight to the Bible and to the Theory of Evolution...
Gerald, why is providing another perspective of an issue a cause of concern? An open discussion of the creation event in the Bible has led me to a much fuller understanding of the Universe and its workings. I am curious, however, why you did not go back to Switzerland after studying here. Seems to me that the good 'ole USA must have had some things going for it in your eyes. Just remember, also, that slavery was abolished here and abroad, in no small part, because of the puritanical religious sect you mentioned.
I recommend highly the book "The Storm Before The Storm" (Mike Duncan) which outlines the 100 year deliver of the Roman Republic.
The core started the takeover over when the frontier (Carthage) was destroyed. Then they seesawed between the Optimates (old conservatives) and Populares (old style populists) until Caesar took over... For a while...
Great example of taking an old, discredited bit of American Mythology (the Frontier Thesis) and recycling it for a new, but ignorant and niave, generation. The frontier was not the engine of progress that romantics like Lonsdale like to make of it. The real history was the pushing westward of Civilizaiton -- law, order, religion and the stutifying conservatism that still characterizes the rural parts of the US, and the deep red western part in particualar. To be sure, the Territories out beyound the Mississippi appeared to be free (Land, lots of land, under starry skies above, don't fence me in....) as ong as you didn't starve, freeze or die from disease, snake bite or bandit. Pioneers drawn west by adverstisments by the railroads about the quality of the land along the right of way that the railroad would sell you (and then strangle you by charging outrageous prices to ship your crops and livestock.
America great and dynamic, and there is truth in that. I live in Alaska and there is an independent and libertarian ethos that is uncommon elsewhere. But it isn’t woke to recall that the frontier of American was partially made possible by slavery, and genocide of the
Indigenous peoples who already were here. Let’s recall history correctly and judge that the frontier was great for some and a nightmare for others. On the far right we must fight the fundamentalist mind virus that is ideological in scope, and prevents any rational discussion of how the United States could live up to its promises as outlined in its constitution. I see the FMV as an equal threat to our republic.
To go on...it was the cities then and now that were the real source of innovation and progress. It was the city that drew the farm boys and the immigrants off the land into the factories. It was the cities, first on the East Coast and then later the ones that pop up along the lakes and rivers, that are the centery of innovation, of entreprenuership, of the arts and culture. Its the city where bright country boys went to make their fortune, not the wide open spaces or farms. Then as as now it was the city the drove America forward and the sparsely populated counties of rural American in which reaction and ignorance flourished.
American cities, from the 500 year old colonial eastern cities to the many which didn't even exist 200 years ago, were founded by pioneers, farmers, explorers and traders. They were founded from nothing, by the English gentry cooperating with or solely by the ignorant rubes you disdain. All across America, farmers and country and town people were great explorers, inventors and tinkerers.
It was, as was true in England, the countryside and small town where the inventors toiled in obscurity and with a cost structure and selective pressure that facilitated risk taking and ingenuity. The scale of the inventions and ingenius techniques that came from farms, and rural and small town America is breath taking. Also, many did create farms and created for themselves a fortune - by farming and by incredible innovation in agricultural techniques and technological development. Others, like Les Paul, single handedly invented the modern music recording industry. He learned his foundation in electronics informally in flyover-land from the kind tutelage of a townsman. He then applied his self-made genius throughout his life. It was the country, not the city, that made Les Paul and the millions like him. In the case of Les Paul and millions like him, it was the country that made the city. I met him. He loved his family and his home countryside and town.
Silicon Valley itself was, just 5 decades ago, orange groves and fruit orchards. San Jose, Palo Alto, Menlo Park and even LA were once just small towns. They became cities on the backs of the small town and rural inventors. You cannot have the city without the country. Those country boys honor their roots, their homelands and their families even if they come to the city to peddle their inventions, finance, or hone them. I doubt they consider their parents and family ignorant reactionaries.
Today, the cities are the core of the Core that Lonsdale speaks about in this article. The cities are where the vacuous status seekers and credential flashers congregate. They are where the parasites strip mine the country through zero sum transacting and financial engineering. They are where the, "Creative Class", invents problems so they can, "sell", a government funded solution or some debauched and crass cultural artifact that is more product than art. They are where they proudly parade their degeneracy and rot and sanctimony. They are where they train the future judiciary and lawyers to hate our civilization and indoctrinate them in a hateful and nihilistic inversion of the legal genius of Western Civilization - the Anglo/Nordic/Germanic legal tradition in particular.
They are the Core where the hangers-on and the now-that-this-is-a-thing crowd rush for self validation and status by association. They are where they elect their diverse and inclusive governments that are nothing but a filthy rabble of incompetent and feckless hustlers. They are where the subversive parasites hide behind these elected pets and their veils of virtue to greedily pillage.
They are where they blight culture and write and attend their dishonest, revisionist minstrel shows like Hamilton. They are where they are so uncultured that instead of honoring the traditions of our European high arts, they blight them with race quotas, dishonest land acknowledgements, ugly re-interpretations and imagination free conceptual designs. If they even attend it is as a bored and uninformed dilettante, putting on airs of being cultured, but really desperate to get to the foodie bar or sports lounge and bounce around to the techno beats of the indolent before a soulless Sex and The City hookup. They are the core of where the heritage of our nation and civilization is scorned and destroyed. They are where the statues of titans are graffiti'd and torn down.
The parasitical Courtiers of The Core may win this war and burrow ever deeper into it. But, they will be rightly held in contempt for the rot and ruin they created no matter how many accolades and congratulations they hand themselves. They will rightly be held in contempt for the contempt they hold for wrongly assuming that the rural people are ignorant and reactionary rubes. They cannot hide from history. Japan knows. China knows. The enlightened rubes of the Core may not, but the humble, the meek and the future victors see clearly.
Many are leaving the cities now. Some are leaving to get away not just from the crime, stagnation and rot, but from the stupidity of the destructive, performative compassion of the Courtiers of the Core. They are tired of the sneering contempt, sanctimony and judgement of the courtier class and enjoy the common sense, kind heartedness, charity, humility and work ethic of rural people. May they leave their yard signs, flags-of-degeneracy-and-treason and pussy hats behind in the city.
The rubes in the countryside and their posterity may well survive the contempt driven onslaught the parasitical Core wages against them. If they do, they will someday return to the city, renewed of purpose and filled with the blood and Faustian spirit of their pioneering ancestors. The Courtiers of The Core better be ready.
ESG is the WMV of business. We must unshackle the Frontier from the metastasis of institutional rot: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-raise-your-esg-score
Within the US, K12 education is rapidly becoming a new frontier. The passing of universal ESA legislation, first in AZ, then Utah and Iowa, with 15 other states with legislation pending. This movement is creating a market for new entrepreneurial initiative and new forms of education not beholden to the WMV. It is critical that new educational institutions financed by ESAs should not be required to hire certified teachers nor be accredited institutions. Both teacher training/certification and mainstream accreditation agencies are deeply contaminated by the WMV.
If we can continue to accelerate universal ESA adoption without contamination by WMV, we have the greatest hoping of launching new Renaissance we are likely to see in the near future. It is an opportunity to provide creative, entrepreneurial career opportunities for ambitious young people; they in turn can craft new curricula and pedagogies that support a new idealism; while also taking market share from teachers unions and the rest of the K12 blob, currently a leading vector for WMV contamination.
It is a reasonable aspiration to envision fewer than 50% of American students attending zoned public schools in 10 years. That would include public school choice, duel enrollment, charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling. But as choosing one's child's education becomes the widespread norm, as opposed to defaulting to a neighborhood school and having one's home equity tied to that school's perceived quality, we'll see an even greater acceleration towards choice. In such a market, ESA funded educational options that are not tied to the blob will have an even greater advantage in growing market share.
Currently fewer than 50% of students attend zoned public schools in Phoenix, Tucson, NOLA, Gary, Detroit, Flint, and DC. With the universal ESA passed in AZ, it is likely that AZ will reach this point statewide soon. With potentially 15-25 states passing ESA legislation in the next few years, the crack in the dike is about to crack wide open.
When it becomes more widely known that government schools are actively hazardous to children (e.g. teen suicides increase 15-20% every year during the school year, fall off over summers and holidays, the pattern stops upon graduation), the establishment model is toast.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/childrens-risk-of-suicide-increases-on-school-days/
The CDC notes that "school connectedness," basically the idea that a child feels as if someone at school cares about them, cuts suicide rates almost in half. Will private options ensure that every child feels cared for? Yes, this is not rocket science.
In ten years, as the evidence for mental health damage from public schools becomes more widely known, parents even in blue states will be rushing to get their kids out of public schools. This will provide an immense boost to the new Frontier of educational innovation. As a trillion dollars shifts from indoctrinating young people in WMV, ineffective development of academic skills, and damaging the mental health of a generation to entrepreneurial schools promoting optimism and a can-do attitude, world-class skills, and a healthy mind, heart and spirit, we'll revive the US by means of this critical new Frontier.
In 2010, I attended the [then Intel, now Regeneron] International Science and Engineering Fair. Seeing all these high school students' inventions and research was transformational. The following year, I was hired to create the educational program for a new high school in Florida, where I implemented my vision for a program based on inquiry. In just our first two years, our high school students obtained patents, won the ISEF, Broadcom Masters First, and the $100,000 Siemens Award; published in peer-reviewed journals; presented at national conferences; wrote hundreds of novels, and more.
I fought the powerful forces of tradition to eschew all the pre-packaged programs that teach to the test, like the Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and GCSE programs. We were told our students would never be admitted to top universities. Instead, they were admitted to all the Ivy and Ivy Plus, even MIT and CalTech.
I wrote about this in Engage!: Setting the Course for Independent Secondary Schools In the 21st Century. This is the Frontier. We CAN and must "do school" differently. Having in-hand and instantaneous access to more information than anyone in the history of humanity, and now AI tools must necessarily prompt consideration of how and what we teach and why. The AP/IB/GCSE are retrograde and obsolete. Students need to know how to interpret, analyze, and evaluate information, not memorize it, which is what we still insist they do.
Visionaries in education are suppressed because WMV ensures that equal outcomes supersede excellence. Imagine what we could accomplish if we gave 1:1 instruction to gifted students like we do to the cognitively impaired. This would require acknowledging the empirical fact that cognitive ability is a heritable trait, like height or eye color, but we insist on the fantasy that all students can achieve the same level, which they can if we continue lowering the bar, the easiest and fastest way.
I think what we are going to find instead is that a huge gulf is going to open up between Red States and the rest. Passing school choice (where school choice basically means getting half or so of K-12 per pupil spending back, sometimes with strings) is difficult even in red states. In Purple states it's a no go and in Blue States forget about it.
People attend private schools in Detroit because publics are flat out unsafe. There have also always been ad hoc voucher programs for poor black and brown kids in urban areas, but rarely do they let middle class people have them.
You will mostly see the effect in something we already see, families moving to the Sunbelt.
Joe,
Thank you for this novel assessment with a sprinkling of classical examples. Assessing English and British Imperial history may provide more fruit
What is the new American frontier?
As an 12th generation American and someone who grew up in the now-defunt wild west, I ache for the new horizons and the possibilities they inspire.
Joe, I suggest that you have placed too much emphasis on the frontier as a metaphor (or at least too many of your readers have taken that focus) rather than on the crucial importance of failure and accountability. In everything from participation trophies to too-big-to-fail, many have come to believe that it is evil to recognize failure. In truth, success is meaningless unless there is a real prospect of failure. The real losers are not those who fail, get up, figure out what went wrong, and try again, but rather those who fail to try, because they fear they might fall short. Rarely ever does great success come on our first effort.
demographics rule
I did not have time to give the article my full attention, but before I go a note that seems important to the topic:
Basically you're describing the feminization of society. We conceeded too much safety to women, and as with anything women will continuously ask for more. Thus we have more and more safety less and less risk tolerance thus less and less progress.
It's as simple as that.
Or so it appears a couple pages in. Hopefully I will have time to finish this later, but if not I thought it was important to apply every bit of lunkhead I could muster. It is always a good policy to apply maximum stupid to intellectual articles and maximum smart to lowest common denominator entertainment.
Rulers make rules. Rules hold back builders, so they move to the frontier where there are no rules. But those builders become rulers, and rulers make rules. Eventually there are no frontiers, and there are no builders, only rulers and the ruled. Malthusian feudalism.
Who were the frontiersmen? They were Europeans. Are you going to fight to end Affirmative Action, banish all of the Civil Rights programs that allocate resources based on race and leave the descendants of the pioneers to foot the bill? And what of the replacement migration and anti-white discrimination that is a) evil and b) a toxic, demoralizing and incentive inverting perversion of our nation's founding credo?
We must also remember that the frontiersmen weren't just wild west pioneers. They had a cultural heritage, religion, strong families and carried with them a wealth of civic institutions that they re-established as they went West - from the first beacheads on the Atlantic Coast to San Francisco Bay. Only people who are grounded, strong and buttressed by a rich and flourishing culture and heritage, buttressed by a core can send out pioneers. This is as true of the first colonists buttressed by mother England, Spain and France as it is of the frontiersmen buttressed by the core in both the European continent and the more established East Coast of the New World.
We must restore freedom of association. We must admit that egalitarianism is a failure and banish the egalitarians. We must reconstitute the core. The core is the Anglo/Germanic/Nordic-European people and culture built on top of the Greco-Roman pillars of Western Civilization. Restore the Romans and they will build the new Rome. Restore the Vikings and Normans and they will chart and sail the new unknown seas.
Well reasoned. Well written. Thoughtful. Thought provoking. How does one integrate the notion of “surplus elites”, nightly educated, resentful, and mostly “woke” (AOC being the poster child) mesh with the Frontier/Center. They are a Frontier in many ways, but they disparage and demean every notion that is not their Center
What you call the Frontier I call capitalism.
A great read is an article call The Fate of Empires from 1975. It describes so much of what is happening in your country. Not sure that it can be stopped but sure hope so….
I agree with much of what you say but the idea that all technology innovation comes from Silicon valley is just patently absurd. Lotus 123 came from Cambridge MA and Ben Rosen (Who was at Morgan Stanley) was the mover behind Compaq computer. (for those who don't remember the first mass produced portable). Bay Networks was the original basis for what became Cisco and and the formula for the valuation of stock options came from Fisher Black and Myron Scholes what they were at CRA in Cambridge. What about Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. whose work led to the development of the internet? Numerous software companies most of which have been acquired came from western Virginia as well.
"Let’s abolish the papacy of the FDA and pioneer new models of drug discovery and regulation. Let’s break the FDA and NIH into a dozen pieces, make them compete, crown the winners — and fire the leaders of the losers." Nobody gives power willingly, ever human. So what, start bloody revolution? Who are "we" you are talking about? From my experience living in this country for more than 20 years there is no unity or sense of "we", actually less and les each year. Milton
The good 'ole USA has indeed become close-minded and conservative. I remember how surprised I was 36 years ago when, coming from multilingual tiny Switzerland, to study economics in Colorado, I learned that there was a strong political movement in the Colorado legislature to promote English as the sole State language, in order to block the growth of Spanish ! How strange, did I think, that parents don't want their kids to be bilingual, when a whole continent and market lays waiting in the south ! Surely, the pioneer spirit must be gone. Now, many years later, I think the US deep cultural knots, brought by history (genocide, slavery, puritan religious sects) are strangling it. Too many huge problems (guns, drugs, prisons, health care waste, illegal immigration, pensions bankruptcy, and I am surely forgetting many others) cannot be solved because they are not tackled with results in mind (then of course they can't be any accountability). Instead, narrow political fights and ideological beliefs are guiding everything. Fundamentally, the roots of the problem surely is in culture & education. Tough to fix when, as I remember well, there already were strong political movements in many States to force schools biology curricula to give equal weight to the Bible and to the Theory of Evolution...
Gerald, why is providing another perspective of an issue a cause of concern? An open discussion of the creation event in the Bible has led me to a much fuller understanding of the Universe and its workings. I am curious, however, why you did not go back to Switzerland after studying here. Seems to me that the good 'ole USA must have had some things going for it in your eyes. Just remember, also, that slavery was abolished here and abroad, in no small part, because of the puritanical religious sect you mentioned.
I recommend highly the book "The Storm Before The Storm" (Mike Duncan) which outlines the 100 year deliver of the Roman Republic.
The core started the takeover over when the frontier (Carthage) was destroyed. Then they seesawed between the Optimates (old conservatives) and Populares (old style populists) until Caesar took over... For a while...
Great example of taking an old, discredited bit of American Mythology (the Frontier Thesis) and recycling it for a new, but ignorant and niave, generation. The frontier was not the engine of progress that romantics like Lonsdale like to make of it. The real history was the pushing westward of Civilizaiton -- law, order, religion and the stutifying conservatism that still characterizes the rural parts of the US, and the deep red western part in particualar. To be sure, the Territories out beyound the Mississippi appeared to be free (Land, lots of land, under starry skies above, don't fence me in....) as ong as you didn't starve, freeze or die from disease, snake bite or bandit. Pioneers drawn west by adverstisments by the railroads about the quality of the land along the right of way that the railroad would sell you (and then strangle you by charging outrageous prices to ship your crops and livestock.
The frontier is romanticized as what made
America great and dynamic, and there is truth in that. I live in Alaska and there is an independent and libertarian ethos that is uncommon elsewhere. But it isn’t woke to recall that the frontier of American was partially made possible by slavery, and genocide of the
Indigenous peoples who already were here. Let’s recall history correctly and judge that the frontier was great for some and a nightmare for others. On the far right we must fight the fundamentalist mind virus that is ideological in scope, and prevents any rational discussion of how the United States could live up to its promises as outlined in its constitution. I see the FMV as an equal threat to our republic.
To go on...it was the cities then and now that were the real source of innovation and progress. It was the city that drew the farm boys and the immigrants off the land into the factories. It was the cities, first on the East Coast and then later the ones that pop up along the lakes and rivers, that are the centery of innovation, of entreprenuership, of the arts and culture. Its the city where bright country boys went to make their fortune, not the wide open spaces or farms. Then as as now it was the city the drove America forward and the sparsely populated counties of rural American in which reaction and ignorance flourished.
Actually,, Europe was (and remains) far more urban than the U.S., yet it was America that was more dynamic
American cities, from the 500 year old colonial eastern cities to the many which didn't even exist 200 years ago, were founded by pioneers, farmers, explorers and traders. They were founded from nothing, by the English gentry cooperating with or solely by the ignorant rubes you disdain. All across America, farmers and country and town people were great explorers, inventors and tinkerers.
It was, as was true in England, the countryside and small town where the inventors toiled in obscurity and with a cost structure and selective pressure that facilitated risk taking and ingenuity. The scale of the inventions and ingenius techniques that came from farms, and rural and small town America is breath taking. Also, many did create farms and created for themselves a fortune - by farming and by incredible innovation in agricultural techniques and technological development. Others, like Les Paul, single handedly invented the modern music recording industry. He learned his foundation in electronics informally in flyover-land from the kind tutelage of a townsman. He then applied his self-made genius throughout his life. It was the country, not the city, that made Les Paul and the millions like him. In the case of Les Paul and millions like him, it was the country that made the city. I met him. He loved his family and his home countryside and town.
Silicon Valley itself was, just 5 decades ago, orange groves and fruit orchards. San Jose, Palo Alto, Menlo Park and even LA were once just small towns. They became cities on the backs of the small town and rural inventors. You cannot have the city without the country. Those country boys honor their roots, their homelands and their families even if they come to the city to peddle their inventions, finance, or hone them. I doubt they consider their parents and family ignorant reactionaries.
Today, the cities are the core of the Core that Lonsdale speaks about in this article. The cities are where the vacuous status seekers and credential flashers congregate. They are where the parasites strip mine the country through zero sum transacting and financial engineering. They are where the, "Creative Class", invents problems so they can, "sell", a government funded solution or some debauched and crass cultural artifact that is more product than art. They are where they proudly parade their degeneracy and rot and sanctimony. They are where they train the future judiciary and lawyers to hate our civilization and indoctrinate them in a hateful and nihilistic inversion of the legal genius of Western Civilization - the Anglo/Nordic/Germanic legal tradition in particular.
They are the Core where the hangers-on and the now-that-this-is-a-thing crowd rush for self validation and status by association. They are where they elect their diverse and inclusive governments that are nothing but a filthy rabble of incompetent and feckless hustlers. They are where the subversive parasites hide behind these elected pets and their veils of virtue to greedily pillage.
They are where they blight culture and write and attend their dishonest, revisionist minstrel shows like Hamilton. They are where they are so uncultured that instead of honoring the traditions of our European high arts, they blight them with race quotas, dishonest land acknowledgements, ugly re-interpretations and imagination free conceptual designs. If they even attend it is as a bored and uninformed dilettante, putting on airs of being cultured, but really desperate to get to the foodie bar or sports lounge and bounce around to the techno beats of the indolent before a soulless Sex and The City hookup. They are the core of where the heritage of our nation and civilization is scorned and destroyed. They are where the statues of titans are graffiti'd and torn down.
The parasitical Courtiers of The Core may win this war and burrow ever deeper into it. But, they will be rightly held in contempt for the rot and ruin they created no matter how many accolades and congratulations they hand themselves. They will rightly be held in contempt for the contempt they hold for wrongly assuming that the rural people are ignorant and reactionary rubes. They cannot hide from history. Japan knows. China knows. The enlightened rubes of the Core may not, but the humble, the meek and the future victors see clearly.
Many are leaving the cities now. Some are leaving to get away not just from the crime, stagnation and rot, but from the stupidity of the destructive, performative compassion of the Courtiers of the Core. They are tired of the sneering contempt, sanctimony and judgement of the courtier class and enjoy the common sense, kind heartedness, charity, humility and work ethic of rural people. May they leave their yard signs, flags-of-degeneracy-and-treason and pussy hats behind in the city.
The rubes in the countryside and their posterity may well survive the contempt driven onslaught the parasitical Core wages against them. If they do, they will someday return to the city, renewed of purpose and filled with the blood and Faustian spirit of their pioneering ancestors. The Courtiers of The Core better be ready.