PRISONERS OF LANGUAGE: Racism, my third-grade teacher, the big pool of life ... and reading

Especially within a school setting, we are all potentially prisoners of language.

The first day of school at Wilson Elementary School in Fishersville, Virginia, in September 1964: it was a different world, although we didn’t yet know it. 

I was beginning third grade. 

Wilson Elementary was a red-brick, single-story, one-hall school (an extension would be built between my sixth and seventh grade years, turning the rectangular building into an L-shaped structure). It housed about 500 kids in Grades 1-7 (no kindergarten in rural Virginia in the early 1960s, and few junior high schools). It was an artifact of such a completely different time and American culture than we inhabit today that it is almost impossible to portray it in any meaningful fashion.

I have often told my college students that it was one of the only elementary schools they would ever hear about that could have had a student parking lot. In 1960s Virginia there was no social promotion yet, so it was not unusual for some of the sixth or seventh-graders to be sixteen, or even seventeen, years old. 

On the other end of the scale, our principal took all the boys in each new first grade class to the restroom to explain how to flush the toilets and carefully distinguished between urinals (which many had never seen) and water fountains. “One is to pee in, and the other is to drink out of,” Mr. McChesney said. “Remember that all the drinking fountains will be in the halls, not in here.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP'S TRANSGENDER EXECUTIVE ORDERS ARE MEANINGLESS: Resist and do not comply

The lynchpin to the Republican anti-transgender crusade is President Trump's January 25, 2025 Executive Order entitled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government."

This EO puts forth three critical "arguments" (better characterized as "assertions") that form the foundation for the enforcement of the order and all other EOs regarding transgender American (not competing in athletics, etc.)

It is important to understand that most of this Executive Order is either window dressing (an opinion section at the beginning about, grunt, grunt, scratch, scratch, "transgender bad") or are specific directives to the State Department regarding transgender and nonbinary documents. The first opinion section is legally meaningless in all senses except propaganda. The directives section only has force of law if (a) it falls within the scope of the President's power to administer the government AND the legal assertions underpinning the directives are sound (or at least make some kind of approach toward being rational).

In this case the President would probably win the argument that he has the requisite authority over the State Department issuance of passports, since former President Biden permitted the change in gender markers on such documents by Executive Order in 2022.

On the other hand, the legal representations in the body of the Executive Order are utter and complete garbage, Just ask conservative Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, since he wrote the majority opinion in Bostock v Clayton County in June 2022.

Here are the three key contentions in President Trump's "Defending Women" EO:

PUBLIC EDUCATION IN REPUBLICAN CROSSHAIRS: This is one battle we can definitely win

But to win we need to be paying attention ...

It is critical not to let important attacks on American institutions slip by simply because they don't involve a racist, illegal South African immigrant and his merry band of youthful incels.

Consider the threat to public education, which is essentially two-fold: (1) financial and (2) thought control.

But what you have to understand, critically, is that the legacy media, both because it needs "pants on fire" pieces to sell advertising, and because it's scared too death of the Republicans, is not going to be covering this story.

For that you have to into the increasingly important "alternative media" on the left. That's where I have drawn most but not all of the information for this post.

THE FINANCIAL THREAT

The Coming of the Climate Oligarchs and the end of the United States

THINKING IT ALL THROUGH

THIS WILL READ LIKE BAD SCIENCE FICTION OR THE WORST CONSPIRACY THEORY EVER. IF SO, IT MIGHT AT LEAST ENTERTAIN YOU.

BUT THERE IS A SMALL CHANCE IT WILL RESONATE, AND IF I AM RIGHT AT ALL, THAT SMALL CHANCE IS CRITICAL. SO I WILL RISK LOOKING LIKE A DELUSIONAL FOOL.

While they are flooding the zone we are mostly (and appropriately) all concerned with defending what we can in terms of people, processes, and institutions, with a secondary objective of throwing the Republicans into the outer darkness once and for all.

If this were The Lord of the Rings, this would be the part at the siege of Gondor where Gandalf looks out and says, "There will be no dawn." If this were an Avengers movie, this is where Nick Fury disintegrates into dust at the end of "Infinity War."

In both of those situations, however, the good guys had a strong force working for them that we cannot depend on: the author or scriptwriter.

We have to write our own script and fight our way through without any assurance anywhere that "it is always darkest before the dawn."

So I thought that it's time to take a moment to present a thesis to explain everything at a large-scale level in order for you to understand that our end game cannot simply be to protect the status quo ante and throw the bums out.

I'm going to suggest that the underlying intent here (intent of whom I will make clear in a bit) is nothing less than to create a situation that would appall Thanos himself.

The people pulling the strings here have literally accepted "the need" and "the inevitability" of 80-100 million American deaths in the next two decades and the total destruction of the political entity known as the United States of America.

There are three chief element driving this process: climate change, the billionaire survival instinct, and white supremacy.