It looks like a harmless word. At one time it was. It merely denoted a way of doing something, like the equally dreaded word process. And to be fair, there are times when it doesn’t stiffen my neck hair or move my hand to my sidearm. But that’s not what I have in mind this fine Friday morning.
When a surgeon-to-be is instructed in a way of freeing a patient of his savings a tumor, or a gangrenous or necrotic appendage, the method is called a procedure. Later in life, when that surgeon persuades a patient to agree to the operation, he speaks of “scheduling the procedure” and what is to come. Of course, the undertaking is intended by all to be beneficial, an improvement in the patient’s health and well-being. Yeah yeah, every now and then a surgeon will remove the wrong organ or amputate the wrong limb, but hey, they’re people, y’know? They make the occasional mistake just like the rest of us.
But that’s enough sarcasm. The procedure I have in mind this morning is of another nature. It’s malevolent in intent and maleficent in outcome. And it’s done its evil magic to many an institution already.
Yesterday, Divemedic cited a terribly disturbing family controversy:
Sophie, an 11 year old girl, was abducted by her dad because of a “bitter custody dispute.” They were eventually found in Mexico, and police successfully reunited the girl with her mother and her mother’s new fiancé. The father is facing felony charges and will get up to 3 years in prison, if convicted.
Please go to Divemedic’s site to read the rest. I can’t excerpt it further fairly to him, nor to the subject matter. But after I delved into the matter, one element of the thing stood out rather starkly: the awesome, wholly extra-Constitutional power of the “family courts.”
The father in this contretemps, Michael Long, claims that he fled with his daughter Sophie to save her from ongoing sexual abuse by his ex-wife Kelly’s new fiancé. Sophie has several times tearfully backed up her father’s claims. While I can’t say I’ve gotten all the way to the bottom of the charge, what I’ve found suggests that the fiancé, Jacob Wayne Bellington, is not a good guy. But that deserves a lot more investigation, and a lot more disclosure by the authorities at issue. What really lit my boiler was ex-wife Kelly’s demand that the court imprison ex-husband Michael for two and a half years without a jury trial to determine his guilt or innocence.
Apparently she, at least, believed that a family court has that power. Whether or not it has such a power de jure, any ex-husband peremptorily jailed over an alimony or child support dispute will tell you: it definitely has it de facto.
And the family courts, which routinely exercise such power, are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the American Left.
I hope you’re securely seated, Gentle Reader, because a sharp turn is coming. The next segment will be about a highly positive-looking development: the recent sharp increase in the percentage of American families that have chosen to homeschool their children. Stephen Kruiser writes:
Home schooling is a powerful arrow in the quiver of those engaged in the school choice battle. The teachers’ unions have been denigrating home schooling seemingly forever, because their continued existence relies on convincing parents that their kids don’t stand a chance in life unless they go to a public school. Even though the pandemic was a boon to most nefarious leftist plans, it was rife with unforeseen consequences for the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the National Education Association (NEA), and their ilk.
Recent estimates put the number of families homeschooling their kids today at about 5,000,000. That’s well up from the pre-COVID numbers. Moreover, the trend hasn’t yet dry-tanked:
[T]he pandemic boom in home schooling is still booming. The results can’t be seen just yet, but this is a direct shot at the public school behemoth. In a recent VIP article, my colleague Ben Bartee asked whether public schools are “finished” because of the post-COVID popularity of home schooling. Obviously, we’re not there yet, but this is a good start.
The “educators’ unions” are apoplectic about this. As those selfsame unions were largely responsible for the protracted closure of the schools, the irony should not be lost. Yet the right to homeschool has been established by the Supreme Court as Constitutionally protected. And, as with another exceptional American characteristic – our right to keep and bear arms, which is essentially unique among the nations of the world – the unions and their boughten politicians are railing against homeschooling as a threat to everything but the price of tea and the flavor of cheese.
The Left is threatened by this trend. They’re about to unleash against it. Their weapon will be the procedure.
There are actually two forms of the procedure. I and others have written about the more conspicuous form:
- Identify an institution with power over the bodies or minds of Americans and infiltrate it.
- As the early infiltrators work their way into the institution’s hierarchy, they will strive to import other Leftists to work alongside them. This is the colonization phase.
- Once a substantial colony of Leftists has been established within the institution, it will use noise, disruption, contentiousness, and other methods to increase its influence over policy decisions. This is the subversion phase.
- During the subversion phase, the colony undertakes active measures to drive ideological opponents out of the institution. As this proceeds, new candidates are ever more openly screened for ideological compatibility. This is the purification phase.
- Presently the institution is effectively under Leftist control. If some non-Leftists remain, they are pigeonholed and isolated from meaningful policy discussions and decisions.
That form of the procedure has successfully captured the media, the entertainment industry, and the educational institutions. It can be used to subvert any institution that must replace its members over time. It works because Leftists possess a kind of unity around their goals – to say nothing of their total lack of morals or ethics – that amplifies their effective power. Note how they’ve used it to capture such seemingly non-ideological and harmless institutions such as the World Science Fiction Convention.
The procedure is the mechanism behind Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics:
Any organization not explicitly right-wing
Will sooner or later become left-wing.
Examples abound.
Homeschooling, being an activity confined to the family, is immune to that form of the procedure. But the Left has more than one arrow in its quiver. It can use already-captured institutions that wield influence over the opinions of legislators or regulators to put great pressure on families to conform to its will. Sometimes that will be coordinated with public-opinion-manipulation efforts to demonize the families it targets. If such an effort is not yet in progress, I doubt we have long to wait.
The second form of the procedure:
- Identify the targeted behavior.
- Make the extinction of that behavior the priority of Leftist lobbying and donating groups.
- Marshal those legislators and regulators who depend financially on Leftist funds. Make consent to the priority a condition of further financial support.
- Identify legislators who are ideological opponents and mount a public-relations campaign against them founded on their opposition to the priority. For best results, the campaign should appear to arise from a multiplicity of sources, such that countering any one of them will seem pointless.
- Wield “grass-roots” tactics against granular targets – e.g., particular homeschooling families – that can be plausibly accused of some heinous wrongdoing. Make their supposed misbehavior synonymous with the priority.
- Keep the pressure up until legislators or regulators ban or rigidly constrain the targeted behavior, whether de jure or de facto.
The synergy between the first and second forms of the procedure is evilly beautiful. Institutions and agents captured by the first form become additional weapons the Left can use in its second-form campaigns. When some of those institutions and agents wield usable power – here again, I have the family courts in mind – they can accelerate the process through the inculcation and encouragement of fear in the targeted populace.
I consider homeschooling to be one of the biggest threats to the Left’s program, if not the biggest of them all. The Left has depended so greatly on the subversion of the schools that without it to cement the messages from the media and the entertainment world, its whole edifice might collapse. Their fierce grip on boards of education, government departments of education, and “educators’ unions” nationwide testifies to the importance thereof. Their efforts to eliminate homeschooling throughout the Western world provide additional evidence. They’ve largely succeeded…except in America.
But the procedure is infinitely applicable, and difficult to counter. The best defense against it is radical decentralization: literally, the elimination of sizable institutions in favor of far smaller ones. As for the best methods of combatting it once it’s in action, research must continue…hopefully not by me alone.
