I Made a Big Mistake

By Roger L. Simon

I made a big mistake. If I hadn’t turned away from the left twenty-five years or thirty years ago, I could have made some serious bank.

Who knows? I might even be a tenured professor of “creative writing” at Brown with a three-picture deal at Warner Brothers (not likely but making a point here).

I was reminded of that most obvious of secrets—that communism/Marxism/socialism is really about keeping money, actually growing money and power, in the hands of “elites” with the working class pounding sand—when reading the Undercover Mother’s substack May 3.

The title of the piece was “We Proclaim This the Summer of George! Part Deux!!” and it deals with fancy private secondary schools I have known well because I am a scion of the upper middle class. I dreamed of going to one of them but never did because, at that point, my parents were saving for a house in the suburbs. Such is life.

I would imagine today they would have sent me anyway because public schools are now considered by the upper classes to be worthless, and, for Republicans (my parents were Democrats), dangerous centers of extreme woke indoctrination.

But, as the Undercover Mother shows us, it’s almost the reverse. The so-called elite schools are the true hotbeds of radical indoctrination, the better, as the wolf might say to Little Red Riding Hood, to prepare you for your proper role in society, brainwashing and oppressing the masses. This, parenthetically, is how you will get rich and stay happy.

Undercover Mother also reminds us this is all quite well organized.

“Remember, we told you so? Well before but at least in March 2023. More student uprisings, more demands, more executive changes to federal regulations like Title IX. The predictive programming is at NAIS (National Association of Independent Schools) Schools. NAIS Schools are where activist leaders are trained with curriculum, speakers, camps, conferences, NAIS People of Color Conference (PoCC), NAIS Student Diversity Leadership Conference (SDLC), and the myriad other DEI Industrial Complex consultants and systems. Former Latin School of Chicago (IL) headmaster and NAIS Board Chair Randall Dunn couldn’t lead the student body to refrain from bullying or treat grieving families with respect, but he sure could institute the teaching of public political protesting.”

Where does the money for NAIS (and just about everything else on the left) come from? I would refer you to title of her article. The George, as everybody knows, in this case is not the Georges Seurat of “Sunday in the Park with George,” but the George Soros of the euphemistically-named Open Society Foundation. (It is everything but.)

What NAIS and others are creating in these secondary institutions are essentially feeding schools for the campus chaos we are seeing all around us.

Both these schools and the universities themselves are forms of socialism with the professors profiting from the system. It should be no surprise then that they largely back up and often even applaud the demonstrating students whose puerile beliefs echo what they have been hearing in the classroom.

So who does that mean makes the serious bank I referred to at the top? Again we find a clue at Undercover Mother:

“NAIS Schools are where the leaders of yesterday, today, and tomorrow are programed. Leaders like domestic terrorist Bill Ayers (Lake Forest Academy, IL, Columbia MEd, NY) whom we’ve highlighted numerous times. After retiring from terrorism, Ayers took up the more sinister and effective cause of ideologically capturing institutions and auctioning off fancy home cooked meals. Ayer’s son attended Chicago Lab School(IL) before becoming a professor at Northwestern which conveniently is the first elite school to cave to the Free Palestine drones.”

Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn of the Weather Underground, it’s worth recalling, were said to have been babysitters for Barack and Michelle Obama back in the day. And where is the formerly terroristic Bernadine now? Wikipedia has an answer:

“In 1991, Dohrn was hired by Northwestern University School of Law as an adjunct professor. Her title was ‘Clinical Associate Professor of Law’. She was one of the founders of the Children and Family Justice Center in the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern Law. Because Dohrn was hired as an adjunct (a temporary assignment), her appointment did not require faculty approval. When law school officials were asked whether or not the dean or the board of trustees approved the hiring, the school responded as follows: ‘While many would take issue with views Ms. Dohrn espoused during the 1960s, her career at the law school is an example of a person’s ability to make a difference in the legal system.’[31] She retired from Northwestern Law in 2013.”

Ah, to be rich and Marxist! You get to live a cushy life while pretending to yourself you are doing the “right thing.”

Do I sound jealous? In my darkest moods, I would have to admit that I am. Although I never joined Weather, I knew those who did, or at least sympathized with the bombers.

That was a road not taken for me and thank G-d for that.

But it is interesting to see, and worth keeping in mind, what an upper or upper middle class (i.e., elitist) phenomenon leftism is, from Marx’s time up through ours.

Speaking of middle and upper class revolutionaries, I have been rereading Whittaker Chambers’ magnificent autobiography “Witness.” It describes the same patterns at, not surprisingly, the Columbia University of the 1920s. Chambers, originally a Marxist and even a spy for the Soviet Union at the upper reaches of our government, eventually saw the light through a combination of observing the murderous activities of the NKVD and his own renewed religious faith. At great personal risk, he went to expose President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s close adviser, Alger Hiss, as a Soviet spy. Beginning as a leftist, Chambers, in his later years, was an editor of the National Review.

I doubt that his life or his now classic book that President Ronald Reagan credited as having moved him from a Democrat to a Republican are taught or even mentioned at any of the NAIS schools. Their narrative might go on tilt.

 

First published in the Epoch Times