A teacher allegedly attended a pro-Israel rally in Queens on Oct. 9. Students at the Hillcrest High School in Jamaica – where the teacher is employed – reportedly found out that the instructor participated in the pro-Israel demonstration. Someone purportedly found the teacher’s Facebook profile that had a photo of the instructor at a pro-Israel rally in Queens holding a sign that read: “I stand with Israel.”
Just after 11 a.m. on Monday, the students reportedly stormed the hallways of the school to protest the teacher having a pro-Israel viewpoint. The pre-planned protest allegedly deteriorated into a riot. The pro-Palestinian students reportedly attempted to barge into the teacher’s classroom despite school staffers guarding the room.
The New York Post reported, “School administrators and the NYPD, which responded to the school at about 11:20 a.m., got wind of their plans just in time to rush the teacher into an office and lock the door, another educator said.”
A senior told the outlet, “Everyone was yelling ‘Free Palestine!'”
A ninth-grader said, “Everyone was screaming ‘(The teacher) needs to go!’ They want her fired.”
A student said that teens had found out where the teacher lives, her phone number, and other personal information.
A video of the unrest at the school was posted on social media.
One comment on a TikTok video called the teacher “cracker ass bitch.”
The NYPD’s counterterrorism bureau was reportedly asked to investigate possible threats against the school.
City Councilman James Gennaro (D-Queens) said, “Whether it was one student or multiple students who did or said something, whatever the trigger was, something happened. And I know from my many years on the City Council that the counterterrorism task force is not engaged unless they believe it is potentially a serious situation.”
The teacher – who didn’t want to be identified for her own safety – told the New York Post, “I have been a teacher for 23 years in the New York City public school system — for the last seven at Hillcrest High School. I have worked hard to be supportive of our entire student body and an advocate for our community, and was shaken to my core by the calls to violence against me that occurred online and outside my classroom last week.”
The teacher added, “No one should ever feel unsafe at school — students and teachers alike.”
“It’s my hope in the days ahead we can find a way to have meaningful discussions about challenging topics with respect for each other’s diverse perspectives and shared humanity,” she continued. “Unless we can learn to see each other as people we will never be able to create a safe learning community.”
New York City Mayor reacted to the anti-Semitic unrest by saying:
The vile show of antisemitism at Hillcrest High School was motivated by ignorance-fueled hatred, plain and simple, and it will not be tolerated in any of our schools, let alone anywhere else in our city. We are better than this. NYC Schools is already conducting a full investigation into how this incident took place, and, this week, Project Pivot teams will begin outreach with students at Hillcrest to ensure they understand why this behavior was unacceptable. No student, teacher, or staff member should fear for their safety in our schools.
Democratic Councilman Robert Holden said, “I don’t know why these students are so misinformed, so intolerant and so radicalized. They don’t even know the history of the Middle East. They haven’t been taught that.”
(WARNING: Explicit language)
The scene at Hillcrest High School in Queens as a Jewish teacher hid in her locked office for hours while students demanded she be fired for attending a pro-Israel rally. pic.twitter.com/jzVCEofvJS
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Tenth-graders at a Missouri high school last week had to watch a slideshow on “oppression and privilege” that may violate state law by using information from a Planned Parenthood affiliate that lists abortion clinics on its website.
The class of sophomores at Webster Groves High School near St. Louis watched a slideshow titled “Being an Ally,” which lists so-called oppression categories as “racial,” “class,” “gender,” “sexual orientation,” “religion,” and “immigration status.”
“It’s wrong to teach that different categories of human beings are either inherently oppressive or oppressed,” said the mother of one student, who provided a video of the presentation to The Daily Signal.
“This rhetoric is divisive in nature and creates undeserved mentalities of guilt or victimhood,” said the mother, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her child’s privacy.
In an apparent violation of Missouri state law by the Webster Groves School District, the end of the Oct. 18 slideshow included a barcode and link to the website for Teen Health Source, a subsidiary of Planned Parenthood Toronto.
Teen Health Source calls itself a “sexual health information service run for and by youth.” Categories listed on its website include “Birth Control,” “Gender Identity & Sexual Orientation,” “Pleasure,” “Pregnancy,” “Puberty & The Body,” “Sex,” and “STIs” [sexually transmitted infections].
The presentation to 10th-graders isn’t out of the ordinary for Webster Groves School District, which enrolls almost 4,500 students in the suburbs of St. Louis. Last September, a parent read the transgender-promoting children’s book “I Am Jazz” to a second-grade class without the school’s first informing other parents. Starting in kindergarten, students in the school district learn to “examine issues of social justice and equity within an anti-bias framework.”
Two school employees, counselor Carrie Aschinger and social worker Anne Gibbs, presented the “privilege and oppression” slideshow to the 10th-graders, a video of which later was uploaded to an online learning platform.
“Being an ally means using your privilege to help support people who are facing oppression that you might not experience yourself,” Aschinger told the 16- and 17-year-old students, according to the video.
The presentation included tips on listening to those who are oppressed by navigating factors such as “gender pronouns.” Gibbs told the students that “allies” need to go through “unlearning,” which “involves questioning and rejecting oppressive beliefs you might have held for a long time.”
“As you learn about your privilege as a non-oppressed person, try to be honest with yourself about how that privilege has affected your life and who you are,” Gibbs told students, according to the video posted below.
This is a direct attack on Christian homes. Jesus said (John 3:19-21) that human beings love the darkness, instead of the light, because they know their believe system, philosophy, theology, sociology, et., al., is wrong. Their real aim is to take young Christian students away from God and their parents upbringing.
Aschinger and Gibbs didn’t respond to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment for this report. The Webster Groves School District also didn’t respond.
The mother who leaked the video of the slideshow to The Daily Signal said a public school shouldn’t ask children to evaluate their privilege.
“The district knows that many parents disapprove and continues to push these lessons anyway,” she said.
The “About” page for Teen Health Source, linked in the presentation to the 10th-graders, says it is “non-judgmental, sex-positive, pro-choice, and inclusive.”
Missouri law requires school districts to notify parents of the “basic content of the district’s or school’s human sexuality instruction to be provided to the student.” It also specifies a “parent’s right to remove the student from any part of the district’s or school’s human sexuality instruction.” However, the school mom who saw and leaked the video of the slideshow said she wasn’t informed in advance.
In a letter to the state association of school boards, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey promoted a model resolution with which school districts could pledge to “uphold Missouri law on human sexuality instruction in public schools.”
Bailey’s draft resolution for the Missouri School Board Association notes that “issues of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression are inextricably intertwined with human sexuality.”
To enforce the laws as written and protect children across the state, I directed a letter to the Missouri School Board Association, urging them to call on their members to adopt a model resolution pledging to uphold Missouri law on human sexuality instruction in public schools. pic.twitter.com/kg5pzfotOO
— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) January 31, 2023
On its website, Teen Health Source defines abortion on its website as “a safe medical procedure that ends a pregnancy.” The website also says medical abortions “use medication to stop the growth of a pregnancy and then expel the pregnancy tissue from the uterus” and a surgical abortion “remove[s] the pregnancy tissue from the uterus.”
“Pregnancy tissue” apparently is a euphemism for “unborn baby” or “fetus,” words that don’t appear there in regard to abortion.
The Teen Health Source website has descriptions and links to abortion clinics in the Toronto area. It doesn’t list any pro-life pregnancy resource centers.
Teen Health Source also suggests “trangender care” clinics that offer minors sterilizing hormone therapy and referrals for transgender surgery. Other services listed include support for teenagers who want help “coming out” or are “questioning gender identity and/or sexual orientation.”
Some clinics recommended to Teen Health Source’s audience, which encompasses ages 13 through 19, provide HIV testing, birth control prescriptions, and abortion pills.
A section of the website, called “Navigating sex and gender dysphoria,” defines gender dysphoria as “a term for stress, conflict, or negative feelings people can feel in relation to their bodies, gender or how others perceive their gender.” It defines gender euphoria” as “a term for the joy, comfort or connection people can feel in relation to their bodies, gender or how others perceive their gender.”
A page on gender dysphoria advises teens who are questioning their gender on how to have “affirming sex” and remind themselves that their “body and gender is awesome and is the gender and sex that you say it is” [sic].
A post on “porn literacy” tells teenagers: “Porn can be good for inspiration.”
“Lots of people use and enjoy porn,” Teen Health Source’s post reads. “Some people are concerned about how they use it. They may worry that they’re using porn too much or that they’re addicted to it, but there’s no one ‘normal’ or ‘right’ amount to use porn.”
“Linking students to any website that publishes articles about gender identity, sexual pleasure, ‘porn literacy,’ and abortion should not occur without notifying parents,” the anonymous mother of a sophomore told The Daily Signal in an email. “They are sneaking in sexual education when some families may have opted out.”
A post on “Sex, Gender, and Sexuality” says: “Some people are transgender, which means their gender identity doesn’t align with their biological sex.”
“Your gender identity may be fluid and can change throughout your life,” the post reads.
Teen Health Source’s webpage titled “Hookups” describes what it calls “casual sex encounters.”
“Sex is not something that happens only when people are in committed relationships,” the post reads. “There are many different kinds of sexual relationships and sometimes it can be confusing to sort them all out.”
The slideshow presentation that refers to Teen Health Source makes her want to remove her child from the school district, the concerned mother told The Daily Signal.
“The decision-making by district administration and the Board of Education have become increasingly predictable and politically-driven,” she said in an email. “How can parents feel comfortable sending their children to school where they are fed a constant stream of one-sided political propaganda?”
The mother said she believes the Missouri school district violated state law by encouraging students to visit a website associated with Planned Parenthood that contains materials on sex education.
“I would really like to see Webster Groves School District drop the politics from their decision making and curriculum,” she said. “But unfortunately, I don’t see that happening, as they’ve been accelerating in the opposite direction.”
A Missouri law, passed in March, will allow students to transfer from their school district to eligible schools starting with the 2024-2025 school year.
“School choice is just around the corner in Missouri, and I think people will be shocked at the number of families who pull their children from the district, given that opportunity,” the mother said.
A former high school snowboarding coach filed a federal lawsuit last week alleging his First Amendment rights were violated when he was fired for expressing his views on transgender-identifying athletes. The 31-page complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — a faith-based legal advocacy group — on behalf of David Bloch, along with a motion for preliminary injunction seeking Bloch’s immediate reinstatement.
“On February 8, 2023, Coach Bloch and his team were waiting in the lodge for a competition to start. That day, his team was to compete against a team that had a male snowboarder who identifies as a female and competes against females,” the lawsuit states. While in the lodge, Bloch says he overheard a conversation between two of his student-athletes and briefly joined in.
Bloch “affirmed that as a matter of biology, males and females have different DNA, which causes males to develop differently from females and have different physical characteristics.” He added that “biological differences generally give males competitive advantages in athletic events” — something you must pretend is deeply controversial, despite the fact that a large majority of Americans agree.
According to a new Gallup survey released in June, nearly 70 percent of U.S. adults believe transgender-identifying athletes “should only be allowed to compete on sports teams that conform with their birth gender” as opposed to their “current gender identity.” Meanwhile, a Pew Research Center study from last year found that 6 in 10 Americans “say a person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth.”
“The conversation was respectful among all parties and lasted no more than three minutes. It took place entirely outside the presence of the transgender-identifying snowboarder,” the lawsuit states. “Coach Bloch’s team and the team with the male who identifies as a female competed without incident. After the competition, the two teams and their coaches, including Coach Bloch, shared a bus home.”
But it didn’t matter. Bloch had committed wrong-think.
The coach was allegedly handed a notice of termination the very next day by Windsor Central Supervisory Union Superintendent Sherry Sousa. He was accused of violating the school district’s harassment, hazing, and bullying (HHB) policy as well as a related policy of the Vermont Principals’ Association (VPA), which oversees high school sports in the state. Bloch was also “barred from future employment” with the district.
“No one should lose their job for speaking the truth. The First Amendment protects the rights of all Americans to peacefully share their beliefs without fear of government punishment. This means that government officials cannot terminate an employee simply because he expresses a belief that they do not like,” ADF said in a statement.
Specifically, the lawsuit argues that the HBB and VPA policies, as well as a Vermont statute requiring school boards to adopt such policies, “contain content and viewpoint discriminatory, overbroad, and unconstitutionally vague definitions of harassment that … censor protected speech.”
The complaint notes that Bloch is “a practicing Roman Catholic who believes that God creates males and females with immutable sex. His understanding of science complements his religious beliefs. Coach Bloch believes, based on scientific evidence, that there are only two sexes, which are male and female, and that sex is determined by a person’s chromosomes.”
Views like these terrify elites and the corporate press. In a May article, The Washington Post bemoaned that “Most Americans don’t believe it’s even possible to be a gender that differs from that assigned at birth” and worried that (God forbid) some in the country “have become more conservative on these questions.”
It’s worth highlighting the irony that those requiring you to deny the reality of sex today are often the very same people who spent the past three years demanding you “follow the science!”
Suffice to say, these are not good-faith actors; they’re liars and propagandists interested only in advancing a political agenda. Regard them as such.
Kiyan Kassam is a conservative writer. Follow him on Twitter at @kiyankassam.
Image source: Instagram video screenshot via @the_typical_liberal
A Huntington Beach, California, city council member and some parents took time during a local school board meeting earlier this week to blast a Pride video recently shown to students. A clip that’s been circulating on social media shows students purportedly in an Edison High School math class watching the Pride video and reacting with jeers and boos.
The teacher gives an initial warning for unruly students to “stop!” But when the negative reactions continue, the teacher adds, “Hey, I’m warning you guys now, if you’re gonna be inappropriate, I will have supervision down and give all of you a Saturday school for next year. So knock it off.”
“At no time was the teacher concerned with the student’s visceral reactions as they watched the video clips of couples in intimate positions and poses,” Councilwoman Gracey Van Der Mark said during Tuesday’s Huntington Beach Union High School District board meeting, according to Voice of OC. “In my opinion, it was not the students who were being inappropriate in that video.”
Van Der Mark added that she’s received emails demanding that she apologize for calling on parents to speak out against the teacher and the video shown in the class, the outlet noted.
“I will never apologize for encouraging parents to express their concerns any time they are worried about their child’s safety or well-being. Never,” she said, according to Voice of OC.
The outlet said some parents spoke out, too.
The Daily Pilot reported that one parent described the Pride video as “indoctrination,” which drew cheers from some in the crowd. The parent also accused “activist teachers” of trying to push their values on his children, the Pilot added.
While many have reacted harshly toward the teacher in question as if airing the clip was her idea, conservative commentator Robby Starbuck — who posted the clip on Twitter — noted in a subsequent tweet that “some 10th grade students came forward to tell me that this video was played in ALL classes that day, not just math class. They’re upset about it and want the school to refrain from playing videos like this.”
Another Twitter user — @inminivanhell — made a similar claim on Twitter, saying the clip was shown in all classes and actually is from the student news channel. The Daily Pilot added that it was from an episode of a student-produced show called “Bolt TV.”
That Twitter user added, “In an effort to control the class, the teacher can be heard warning the students if they can’t behave they will receive Saturday school. This teacher is now dealing with her picture & name being posted all over the Internet — because she asked them to behave in class.”
That same Twitter user also noted the following: “Further context: the student news video was 10 mins long, it shared graduation information, interviews with students, sports recap, and videos reflecting on their school year. This video clip about Pride was a 1-min segment during the episode.”
Another Twitter account posted what it claimed is the Pride clip shown at Edison High School:
Here is the video that was shown at Edison High. It’s a simple explanation of #Pride month and does not show two women kissing, just their heads together. The message of this video is to love and accept everyone on campus. That is all. #BoltTV@EdisonChargerspic.twitter.com/EcWN5YofM9
— Exposing_Huntington_Beach (@exposing_hb) June 12, 2023
The Huntington Beach Union High School District on Monday didn’t immediately respond to TheBlaze’s request for comment on the initial story.
The Daily Pilot also reported that residents about a mile away from Edison High School found anti-LGBTQ, anti-Jewish flyers the morning after the school board meeting.
Councilwoman Natalie Moser told Voice of OC that a resident sent her a photo of the flyer.
The flyers feature a pentagram, star of David, and the words “The LGBTQ+ movement is Jewish” in a rainbow-colored font, the Daily Pilot said, adding that Mayor Tony Strickland said their distribution was limited to a small, “isolated” area.
Van Der Mark told the Voice of OC that the flyers don’t have anything to do with the Pride video, and she also issued a statement against the flyers.
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A letter from a Vermont school district to parents expressed a policy change to use “gender inclusive phrases” in place of words like “boy” and “girl” in a curriculum unit about human reproduction. The letter appeared on social media and went viral.
“It is time for our science/health unit about the human body focused on puberty and the human reproductive systems. This unit will take place during the last few months of school,” read the letter from Founders Memorial School Principal Sara Jablonski.
“In an effort to align our curriculum with our equity policy, teachers will be using gender inclusive language throughout this unit. With any differences, we strive to use ‘person-first’ language as best practice,” she added.
The letter outlined some examples of the new politically correct language.
“Person who produces sperm in place of boy, male, and assigned male at birth,” the letter explained.
“Person who produces eggs in place of girl, female and assigned female at birth,” she added.
The letter said the curriculum was going to “focus on the physical and emotional changes that occur during puberty” and also introduce the “basic structure and function of human reproductive systems.”
Many were extremely critical of the new policy and called on parents to pull their kids from schools and homeschool instead.
“ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Stop it. Stop focusing on sex and gender and focus on EDUCATION. No wonder kids are confused. No wonder they lack grammar skills. No wonder they are lost. They go to school to learn. You can’t learn in that word salad environment. Homeschool your kids in VT,” read one response on Twitter.
The letter was widely circulated and garnered almost 60k views in less than one day.
Here’s more about the transgender school agenda:
Megyn Kelly: Why I Took My Son Out of His School www.youtube.com
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A so-called literacy coach near Chicago is testing the bounds of her free speech rights by creating several videos in which she rails against concerned parents and other “right-wing conspiracy theorist nut jobs” and then posting the condescending videos to TikTok.
Heather Marie Godbout, whose job title claims she is a “literacy coach” at Crete-Monee High School, has posted a series of education-related videos on TikTok under the handle @thatliberaleducator. In various videos, she excoriates conservatives as “people who could know better if they could get out of their own little bubbles” and accuses them of “trying to bring down our democracy and create a Christian nationalist theocracy.”
In one particular video, which has the phrase “Indoctrination? Yes please!” emblazoned at the top and is replete with furrowed brows and audible lip smacks, she claims that it’s “[t]ime to own up to” indoctrinating students.
“All you right-wing conspiracy theory nut jobs who seem to think the teachers are out here just indoctrinating children into some sort of woke agenda that you can’t actually define, I’m just going to come clean,” Godbout begins.
“I am, in fact, indoctrinating your children,” she admits.
She then spends another minute or so clarifying what her version of indoctrination entails.
“I’m indoctrinating children into understanding their own agency and learning how to think critically about the issues that impact their lives,” she says after claiming to foster a love of “reading and books.”
She then appears to have a clarifying moment of self-awareness when she claims to teach students to “not just accept whatever some crazy person on the internet says at face value” but to “do their own research.”
She concludes the video by claiming that her work teaches students “to be loving, kind, compassionate human beings” who will make the world “a better place.” She implies that she presents herself to students as a living model of such behavior.
When viewers criticized Godbout’s condescending approach, she created a follow-up video in which she said she will always refuse to be respectful to people who disagree with her politically — whom she derisively refers to as “those people” — because “they’re talking about legislation that will literally unlive people.” She also accused one of her critics of “tone-policing” and of shutting “down conversation, especially from people in marginalized groups.“
Godbout elsewhere stated that she does not fear reprisal from her employer for the videos, claiming, “[M]y administrators fully support my First Amendment rights to free speech on my own social media platforms.“
Two dynamics are at work: the conformity impulse and the manipulation of that impulse by power brokers to promote the illusion that their view is the majority opinion.
Our survival instincts are going to get us all killed.
I’m specifically referring to our hard-wired conformity impulse. That’s what causes us to go along with politically correct absurdities like pronoun protocols. It also causes people to join mobs, and to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid at the command of a cult leader. In primitive environments, the herd instinct serves as a means of survival. If some sense danger and rush to safety, all follow. But how does such a conformity impulse work in a high-tech society like ours? It doesn’t really.
Sure, a certain level of conformity is normal for a society to function. But an unchecked conformity impulse in a technological society like ours acts more like slow-motion suicide than a survival mechanism. We think we’re saving ourselves by conforming, but in the long run the opposite is true. In fact, our instinct to conform has become a weapon tyrants use to control us by threatening social isolation for those who don’t obey. This is especially the case when a monopoly of tech overlords can broadcast propaganda to the herd, instantly and globally. In such cases there is no “wisdom of crowds.” When the masses obey the propaganda to avoid social punishment, they only prop up propaganda and thereby spread social turmoil.
Propagandists Manipulate our Conformity Impulse
We should be aghast at the high level of American conformity to the demands of propagandists: Mask your toddler! He’s a girl and she’s a guy! Mind your pronouns! He’s a white supremacist! And so on. Nobody is safe if we can’t challenge the truth of what the elites who presume to rule us are saying.
Meanwhile, they keep pushing the envelope to get us to say things we know are false and to do things against our own interests. Demonizing those who hesitate to comply fosters a mob mindset that protects their narratives. Hence, people with different views feel alone and tend to be intimidated into silence. This is how resistance to tyranny is eroded.
Demonization campaigns are key to this process. Suddenly, you’re a bigot if you don’t celebrate men invading women’s sports. Or you’re an “insurrectionist” if you don’t applaud punishing people with 24/7 solitary confinement (without a trial date) for “parading” around the Capitol for a few hours on January 6, 2021.
Or you’re selfish if your toddler isn’t wearing a mask. Or you should be expelled as a Yale law student if you don’t take part in shouting down a conversation about free speech at Yale Law School and then sign a statement intended to abolish freedom of speech.
The Conformity Impulse Is Juvenile and Deadly
Teenage girls provide an especially clear-cut example of how the conformity dynamic works. Too many of them are notorious for engaging in relational aggression, a type of bullying that damages someone’s social status, causing others to shun and isolate the victim. This type of aggression is inherent to mob behavior.
For example, pundit Kathleen Parker’s recent hit job on Ginni Thomas in The Washington Post is infused with a smug little middle school flavor. It includes a huge dose of projection, such as Parker’s hallucination that Thomas has a sense of self-importance, when it’s obviously the Parker girl who’s infected with egotism.
Hillary Clinton is perhaps the ultimate case of the “I’m important and you’re not” mentality. The subtext of Clinton’s 2021 wistful reading of her 2016 acceptance speech is that Americans were obligated to elect her because she wanted to be president ever since she was a little girl. Men with a similar mentality include MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough, Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and humorless late-night “comics” like Stephen Colbert.
Their followers imitate and repeat what they’re told by the approved talking heads. They laugh at unfunny lines on cue, regurgitate the assigned opinions, and label the non-compliant with the “eewww” factor. Many are eager to become “influencers” so they too can dictate what others must say and do on pain of being socially rejected.
The Secret Laws of Social Psychology
Far too many have been marching in lockstep with media-pushed narratives, and too few seem to be speaking out. Two dynamics are at work: the conformity impulse and the manipulation of that impulse by power brokers to promote the illusion that their view is the majority opinion.
To resist this absurd state of affairs, we must first learn about the dynamics and understand our vulnerabilities. The information is out there, but it doesn’t get much circulation.
Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing once observed that people are dangerously ignorant of the laws of mob psychology. In 1987 she recommended everyone be schooled in them, especially children. She speculated that power elites are invested in such ignorance. If such knowledge were widely understood, people would be insulated from the manipulations of propagandists.
A lot of the research on conformity was the result of scholars asking how small groups of fanatics could take over whole societies — e.g., Bolsheviks in Russia and Nazis in Germany — resulting in millions killed while the vast majority of the population sat back in silence and fear.
In the 1950s psychologist Solomon Asch conducted his famous experiments on the conformity impulse. At least 37 percent of the time people would deny the evidence of their own eyes — about the obvious fact of a line’s length — if everyone else gave an incorrect answer. The experiment has been replicated thousands of times with the same or worse results. Here’s a video of that experiment conducted in the 1970s:
Stanley Milgram later took that study to a new level with his famous “shock machine” experiments. When Adolf Eichmann said he was “just following orders” while on trial for his leading role in the Holocaust, Milgram wondered how often ordinary people would inflict harm if told to do so by an authority figure.
Participants in that experiment were told it was a study about how punishment affected learning. If the “learner” gave an incorrect answer, the “teacher” was supposed to shock him in increments. The learners were actors who could not be seen but, although not really shocked, would scream in “pain” from the next room. The “teacher” was the subject.
Sixty-five percent of the subjects gave the highest voltage shock when asked to “please continue” by the administrator. For more background, watch “The Experimenter,” a 2015 film about Milgram. Other related research includes the Robbers Cave Experiment; Robert J. Lifton’s research on thought reform and totalitarianism; and Margaret Thaler Singer’s research on cults. All illustrate how elites can manipulate our urge to conform.
Everybody needs to learn about the dynamics of conformity. Blatant censorship, hostility to free speech, and campaigns to demonize mainstream American views were all unthinkable scenarios for most Americans just a few years ago.
But here we are. When we start self-censoring because we’re afraid of not fitting in, we open the door to oppression and social chaos. That unchecked urge to “fit in” can kill us all, and we need to stop.
Stella Morabito is a senior contributor at The Federalist. Her essays have also appeared in the Washington Examiner, American Thinker, Public Discourse, Human Life Review, New Oxford Review. In her previous work as an intelligence analyst, she focused on various aspects of Russian and Soviet politics, including communist media and propaganda. She has also raised three children, served as a public school substitute teacher, and homeschooled for several years as well. She has a B.A. in journalism and international relations from the University of Southern California and a Master’s degree in Russian and Soviet history, also from USC. Follow Stella on Twitter.
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