America’s future is in doubt. It is under attack from within.

In past weeks this column has addressed the increasing weaknesses, outright failures, and attacks on once-stable components of our culture and our nation.

The deteriorating education system, particularly at the college level, but increasingly at the K-12 levels, has resulted in millions who have not learned about their country and its history. Lots of them have instead been, and are being, indoctrinated with distinctly un-American political ideology. And some professors and teachers willingly abandon their professional integrity to do this.

The latest big push is to fight what some call the “systemic racism” of the United States by seeking to convince members of one race that they are inherently evil, and members of the other races that they are perpetual victims.

News journalism is becoming more and more agenda driven. Relevant and important stories are often not presented by many news sources. Some who play the part of journalists will pass items off as news that are manipulated to benefit a political agenda. Some items presented are misinformation and are not researched for accuracy, because they advance the political agenda, as written. 

In the political sphere, where dishonesty exists, loyalty to partisan agendas has replaced forthright service to the American people for many office holders. The “progressives” are working hard to change things so that they will be in power forever.

The broad benefits to our culture of the two-parent family, and its educational and stabilizing effects on children, have been seeping away over recent decades. In 1960, 87.7 percent of children under 18 lived with two parents. In 2020, was 70.4 percent, almost 20 percent lower.

Concerns for protecting people’s oversensitive feelings have replaced responsible behavior as the guidepost for living a good and productive life. Efforts to make everyone equal in terms of outcomes — equity — to protect feelings, defy nature. Some people are simply stronger than others, faster than others, smarter than others, etc. It’s part of being an adult to accept our strengths and deal with our weaknesses.

The rise in violent crime in many American cities reflects the lack of appreciation for life, and the failure of families and schools to teach basic humanity and life lessons to millions of young people. Lots of these under-educated people are now adults.

An example of what results when families and schools fail is this: An adult male recently brought a pregnant 12-year-old girl to a hospital in Tulsa, OK because she was in labor. He told the people there that he was the father of the baby-to-be. He had no apparent recognition that impregnating a child of 12 is a crime, not to mention its immorality. 

This situation of improperly trained youth has been made worse by enacting truly foolish ideas. The idea of defunding the police is responsible for much if not most of this new pandemic of criminality, as police officers retire, quit, or back off of doing their job because they no longer have the backing of the local government.

And soft-headed “progressive” prosecutors who do not prosecute the accused, and the equally silly idea of no bail and immediate release of persons arrested for serious crimes, invite those criminals to hit the streets and commit more crimes. Every day criminals released or not prosecuted are availing themselves of this foolishly provided opportunity.

The rising acceptance of socialist, communist, and Marxist ideals results from the failure of families, and the education system, which is increasingly shoving un-American ideals down the throats of the young people it is intended to help learn important subject matter, like English, math, science, geography, the arts, and real history.

Today, many without a solid background in American history say they prefer socialism, because they apparently don not understand how it has failed every time it has been tried, with Venezuela and Cuba as current shining examples.

The southern border crisis is dramatic evidence of what happens when goofy “progressive” ideals replace the sensible and successful design of our federal government. Each day tens of thousands of people enter the country illegally, with the permission and assistance of the government, and not just from Cuba or the Northern Triangle countries, but also from Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil, Haiti, Colombia, Turkey, Russia, and China.

As the government continues to strongly encourage vaccinations to fight Covid, and hint at renewed restrictions, thousands of illegal immigrants are ushered across the border and transported around the country with no concern about how many of them are infected with the virus.

A friend sent an email of a Facebook post, which read, in part: “I was born in 1942, almost at the midpoint of the 20th century – the American century. America’s prestige and influence were never greater. 

“Thanks to the ‘Greatest Generation,’ we won a World War fought throughout most of Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. We reduced Germany to rubble and put the rising sun to bed. It set the stage for almost half a century of unprecedented prosperity. We stopped the spread of communism in Europe and Asia and fought international terrorism.”

Today, America is a mere shadow of that great nation. And many of its people are working hard to change it further.

Renewable energy to replace fossil fuels? Will that be much better?

We have been told for years about the damage to the environment of burning fossil fuels, and the marvelous benefits of renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Steps have been taken and more are being put forth to reduce the amount of CO2 we produce, on concerns of “climate change.” America, incidentally, has led most, if not all, of the world in reducing CO2 in recent years.

And, regardless of whether humankind is really harming the environment to a serious level, we can agree that wind and solar energy are far less polluting when they are in use than machines that burn oil, gasoline, diesel fuel and natural gas.

But when you look at what happens in the process of turning these sources into useful products, and what happens to them after their useful life is over, a very different story emerges.

The details of these processes and products were explained in a Prager University video featuring Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who discussed the environmental costs of using these energy sources.

First, windmills and solar panels, and the batteries to store the electricity they produce, are made from non-recyclable materials, Mills said. And after some 20 years since the wind and solar energy technologies were born, and after billions of dollars of subsidies, those two sources provide less than three percent of the nation’s power. 

Mills explained that the maximum rate that wind can be turned into electrons is about 60 percent, and the maximum for sunlight is about 33 percent. As of now, we can convert 45 percent of blowing wind and 26 percent of shining sun. Technology is now able to get a little more than half the possible electrons from the wind and the sun. That will likely increase as technology advances.

Since the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine all the time, excess electricity must be stored in batteries. Mills put that into perspective: The world’s largest battery plant, created by Tesla in Nevada for its electric vehicles, would need 500 years to make enough of the batteries it makes today to store enough electricity for just one day of current U.S. demand.

Of course, more battery plants will gradually be built, and perhaps the capacity and efficiency of batteries will also increase. But this presents a tremendous challenge if the U.S. is to end using fossil fuels, as we are told we must, in favor of renewables.

The processes to enable wind and solar energy to produce electricity, he said, are quite expensive, in environmental terms.

One electric car battery weighs half a ton. But to acquire the materials to produce it, 250 tons of earth from somewhere must be mined and processed.

One 75 mega-watt wind farm powers 75,000 homes, and requires 30,000 tons of iron ore, 50,000 tons of concrete, and 900 tons of non-recyclable plastic. And a 75 mega-watt solar farm requires 150 percent more materials — concrete, steel and glass — than a wind farm.

The rare earth and other metals needed — lithium, cobalt, copper, iridium and dysprosium — will require a massive increase in mining activity: from 200 to 2,000 percent of the mining now occurring.  Rare earth materials are mostly not available in the U.S., but must be acquired from other countries Some of them, like China, are hostile to us. In 2019, China was responsible for 80 percent of rare-earth materials.

And, the equipment and processes used in acquiring and refining the materials, and constructing and installing the windmills, solar panels and batteries are powered by fossil fuels.

After about 20 years of production, these windmills and solar panels will have exhausted themselves, leaving millions of tons of non-recyclable waste behind that must be put somewhere.

Mills also said that the plastic waste from these sources will total more than twice the amount of all existing plastic waste.

Using the sun and the wind to our benefit makes perfect sense. The more seasoned readers may remember fondly your grandmother or mother hanging freshly washed clothes on the line in the back yard to dry in the sun and breeze. And then electric dryers came along.

The idea that transitioning from burning fossil fuels to wind and solar energy to produce electricity will be cleaner is false. We will trade polluting the air for producing tons of solid waste.

Too much of anything can be harmful: too much vitamin C, too much water, too much sun, too much oxygen, and too much CO2. But the environmental cost to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar power might be as expensive, or more expensive, than the cost of burning fossil fuels, in terms of the waste that is produced.

Geologist and earth scientist Professor Ian Plimer, who is called a “climate change denier” by some, said our “climate is cyclical,” and that Earth is heading to an ice age.

“We are getting towards the end of the warm period, the peak of the warmth was about 5,000 years ago and we are heading for the next inevitable ice age,” he told Sky News.

If so, someday we may want and need more CO2, not less.

The debate between educators and parents over CRT heats up!

Critical Race Theory (CRT), which has Marxist origins, is a version of America’s beginnings that is strongly at odds with the history of our country as it has been taught in public schools for more than a hundred years. The nation’s two largest teacher unions — the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — support this version.

There are charges that CRT has sneaked into public education in recent years, that some teachers are teaching it, and that some school systems are preparing to start. AFT president Randi Weingarten, who calls CRT the “honest history” of America, denies that CRT is being taught below the college level, but said her union is prepared to defend any teacher accused of teaching it.

There are teachers, administrators and school boards that agree that CRT should be taught in schools now. But many parents and many other Americans strongly oppose it, believing that CRT pits people against each other and destroys the view of their country that generations of Americans have been taught and believe.

Questions arise: Is it appropriate for one or a few teachers, or a school faculty, or a school’s administration, or even a county school board to unilaterally make such a dramatic change in the history curriculum in public schools that are supported by taxpayers without first gaining broad support of the public?

At what stage of the education process should a new and radically different view of the nation’s history be implemented? 

It seems that CRT and other new ideas are right now considered more important than other aspects of education.

As some school teachers, administrators, board members and politicians push hard to justify CRT for children as young as the early grades, the U.S. continues to falter among the world’s nations in successfully educating students in important subjects.

For example, the U.S. placed 11th out of 79 countries in science, and did worse in math, ranking 30th, according to the Program for International Student Assessment tests of 15-year-old students around the world, administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2018.

The U.S. scored below the OECD average in math of 489 with a score of 478. Asian nations placed 1st through 5th: Singapore - 569, Macao - 555, Hong Kong - 551, Taiwan - 531, and Japan - 527. Since only four of China’s provinces participated in the assessment, it was not included in this ranking.

The United States scored a 502 in science, above the OECD average. However, the top five scoring countries were: Singapore - 551, Macao - 544, Estonia - 530, Japan - 529, and Finland - 522.

Pearson.com, in its latest assessment, shows that the United States has a “cognitive skills and educational attainment” score of 0.39, fourteenth out of forty countries that it ranked. The top ten countries and their scores are: South Korea - 1.30, Japan - 1.03, Singapore - 0.99, Hong Kong - 0.96, Finland - 0.92, United Kingdom - 0.67, Canada - 0.60, Netherlands - 0.58, Ireland - 0.51, and Poland - 0.50.

What does it mean when our education system finishes so far down in the rankings of nations? Poor performance in languages means many or some will not be able to communicate effectively. The poor performance in math and science indicates that U.S. students are not prepared for high-tech jobs in an increasingly high-tech world.

Silicon Valley has achieved great success in the high-tech industry. That success is due to excellent software engineers. But many of them are foreign-born. If Americans are unable to perform well in these important, high-paying jobs, those jobs will instead go to people from other countries who work here, or worse, to companies in other countries.

It seems that the primary function of helping our children learn the basics of language, mathematics, science, social studies and the arts is suffering, and needs immediate attention. That is far more important than suddenly, and in some alleged cases, secretly trying to overturn the long-standing historical account of the United States, in favor of a highly disputed version of how the nation came to be.

Based upon America’s low rating in international educational performance, it seems U.S. educators have plenty of work to do to get our performance level up where it belongs, and where it once was, before they turn the system upside-down with a radical transformation of our history.

Stuffing controversial ideas — Marxist CRT, transgenderism, diversity, and other such things disguised as harmless ideas — down the throats of the children of the numerous parents who disagree with those ideas is a very divisive thing. Those parents will surely want, need and deserve better choices of schooling for their children. 

And since state and local taxes pay for much of public education, there should be a mechanism to financially assist those parents, who will likely have to pay for an alternative to public schools in order to have their children educated as they choose.

Not all teachers, administrators, schools or school systems are adopting this destructive belief system. But far too many of them are, and many people believe they are a threat to this country.

July 4th, and the reason true Americans celebrate that historic day

Two days ago, as most everyone knows, the United States celebrated Independence Day, the day in 1776 that the Continental Congress declared that the thirteen American colonies were united, free, and independent states, and no longer under the thumb and subordinate to the British monarch, King George III.

For most of my many years the Fourth of July has been something nearly all Americans understood and observed with respect and gratitude. Sure, there were some who didn’t share that respect, and there were periods where some even protested what the country was doing.

Times like the 1960s and 70s when those who proudly served their country in the military were roundly scorned and subjected to disrespect and hate from the anti-war crowd. But those people were not a majority, and their negative feelings ran their course, and normality was eventually restored.

Today, the number of people who do not really know America and think it is a systemically racist country is staggering. This failure of families and schools to teach young people about America has resulted in millions of misinformed younger people who do not understand or appreciate their country.

That negative storyline is getting far more play than the traditional one that sees America as “a shining city on a hill,” to quote former President Ronald Reagan.

But to provide a picture of how and why America has been so highly respected for so long, we have the testimony of some who came to America the right way, and became true Americans. 

Quang Nguyen came here as a 13-year-old boy who left South Viet Nam seeking political asylum 46 years ago. He spoke to a Freedom Rally in Prescott Valley, AZ in 2010. Here are seven excerpts from his address. His views are far more representative of reality than what is getting so much attention today.

“Man, every morning I wake up thanking God for putting me and my family in the greatest country on Earth. I just want you all to know that the American dream does exist and I am living the American dream. I was asked to speak to you about my experience as a first-generation Vietnamese-American, but I’d rather speak to you as an American.”

“I am a proud US citizen and here is my proof. It took me 8 years to get it, waiting in endless lines, but I got it, and I am very proud of it.”

“Thirty-five years ago, I left South Vietnam for political asylum. The war had ended. At the age of 13, I left with the understanding that I may or may not ever get to see my siblings or parents again. I was one of the first lucky 100,000 Vietnamese allowed to come to the U.S. Somehow, my family and I were reunited 5 months later, amazingly, in California. It was a miracle from God.”

“If you haven’t heard lately that this is the greatest country on Earth, I am telling you that right now. It was the freedom and the opportunities presented to me that put me here with all of you tonight.”

“I also remember the barriers that I had to overcome every step of the way. My high school counselor told me that I cannot make it to college due to my poor communication skills. I proved him wrong. I finished college. You see, all you have to do is to give this little boy an opportunity and encourage him to take and run with it. Well, I took the opportunity and here I am.”

“In 1982, I stood with a thousand new immigrants, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and listening to the National Anthem for the first time as an American. To this day, I can’t remember anything sweeter and more patriotic than that moment in my life.”

“You see, America is not just a place on the map, it isn’t just a physical location. It is an ideal, a concept. And if you are an American, you must understand the concept, you must accept this concept, and most importantly, you have to fight and defend this concept. This is about Freedom and not free stuff. And that is why I am standing up here.”

What a contrast to U.S. hammer thrower Gwen Berry, who recently placed third at the Olympic trials. She turned away from the American flag and displayed an “Activist Athlete” tee shirt as the National Anthem played while she and the two other female U.S. athletes stood on the podium. The other two appropriately honored the Anthem. Berry later said, “The Anthem doesn’t speak for me. It never has.”

Being born here, perhaps Berry didn’t notice the good things about America as she grew up, as opposed to Nguyen. Having grown up in and fled from a poor, war-torn nation to America, he saw the difference between America and South Viet Nam and so many other countries. He worked hard to become a citizen, and proudly tells the story to others of how much America means to him.

Berry, on the other hand, worked hard to earn the privilege of representing America, and then publicly disrespected it.