In 1951, a psychologist named Solomon Asch performed a conformity test to study how willing people are to go along with the crowd, even when they know the crowd is wrong.

Students were told they were part of a “vision test.” Prof. Asch put one naive participant in a room with seven confederates who were in league with the professor. The confederates had agreed in advance how to answer the question in the vision test. The participants were asked to compare the length of lines, in which it was obvious that there was only one correct answer. But the seven confederates would insist on incorrect answers, and in some cases 75 percent of the naive participants would agree to go along with the crowd in giving an incorrect answer even though they knew it was wrong.

To be “Asch negative,” you need to be the type of person willing to go against the crowd, often at the cost of being publicly embarrassed. You must be strong enough in your convictions that you will not be influenced by peer pressure.

In short, you would have to be the type of person not to abandon the Savior in His moment of public humiliation or to abandon Joseph Smith when most people in society hated him.

Most people reading this are saying to themselves that they would never bow to peer pressure, but you may want to consider the story of Peter denying the Savior three times. The reality is that we all are more likely to influenced by peer pressure than we think.

The French philosopher Rene Girard has considered this issue in depth and written extensively on the unfortunate historical tendency of people to engage in witch hunts. Girard sees the Atonement of Christ example of a classic witch hunt in which the leadership of a society used Jesus as a scapegoat for all of their problems. The Pharisees succeeded in stirring up the crowd against Jesus, even though there is no evidence he did anything wrong.

Girard’s point is that this happens in societies all of the time. For a variety of reasons, leaders afraid of losing power often try to find scapegoats to blame for societal ills. Most readers can see how this applied historically to the Jews, who have blamed for societal problems in Spain, Russia, Germany, Eastern Europe and just about everywhere else they lived in the diaspora.

Girard, if he were alive today, would not be surprised by the rise of cancel culture, which he described throughout history. Social media has made cancel culture one of the most prominent features of modern life.

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Christina Wyman is a “public intellectual” and academic who specializing in teaching critical theory. This is about all you need to know to realize she knows nothing about teaching and/or surgery.

It is disheartening to see so many people “liking” this argument because it may be one of the most ignorant statements about education since Terry McAullife’s election-destroying comment: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Let’s start with the easy part: parents ARE involved in surgery. What happens is that the doctors involved in the surgery come to the parents and give them options. I can tell you that the surgeon himself (or herself) will usually discuss the situation with the parents. No surgeon can force the parents to do the operation, and the parents are always allowed to get second and third opinions. Depending on the type of operation, many parents do get second and third opinions, so they are indeed “interfering” with what the surgeon may want to do. And sometimes parents decide not to get surgery at all because the condition makes surgery optional. Very often, surgery is more dangerous than the other options.

Once the surgery starts, it is necessarily closed off for reasons of health and security, but the strict parameters of the surgical process have been set by parent involvement. It is not as if surgeons have the freedom to say they are going to do heart surgery and then decide, mid-operation, to perform transgender surgery.

So, to sum up, it appears that Christine Wyman knows nothing about what happens during surgery.

But unfortunately she also knows nothing about public education. By design, the public school system necessarily involves parent involvement. (Whether or not parents take advantage of this is another question — most of us do not do the due diligence we should). Parents are involved in electing the school board, which sets curriculum and other policy. Parents are involved in seeing the grades that their kids get, these days via on-line portals, and teachers rely on parent feedback to make sure kids are getting assignments done on time. Teachers are available via email or other on-line systems for interaction with parents. And of course there are the old-fashioned parent-teacher conferences that actually are essential to the educational process.

So, in fact, the public school system relies extensively on parent involvement and feedback. I get daily emails from multiple teachers regarding my three kids still in public schools. I get opt-out forms for various classes all the time, meaning the school recognizes that I as a parent can decide whether or not my kids will participate in certain subjects that I might find objectionable.

Need I mention that according to recent US Census figures, 5 to 6 percent of kids nationwide are homeschooled, meaning the parents and the kids together do all of the schooling without government involvement in any way?

The alternate world of the Christina Wymans is a dystopian nightmare in which your children are owned by the state system and are programmed by the critical race and gender theorists to believe a long list of woke talking points. This is what the Christina Wymans of the world want: complete control over your kids so they can be brainwashed away from the influence of parents.

One of the most brilliant protest songs ever.

The saga reveals where we’re at currently, and where we’re probably headed

The Rittenhouse saga has, at least in my own mind, made clear that we no longer live in the United States of my youth and upbringing. I cannot pinpoint precisely when our country was transmogrified into something else entirely, but it happened fairly recently (within the last ten or fifteen years) and the result is that we are, broadly speaking, two radically different peoples living under the same system of government and society. For open and obvious reasons, this can’t continue indefinitely. This is going to get resolved, one way or the other.

Don’t believe me? Then look at the Rittenhouse affair, from beginning to end. From the very inception of the controversy to the end of the trial yesterday with a verdict of Not Guilty, people were viewing two radically different scripts, despite there being only one set of clear facts.1 Kyle Rittenhouse was attacked by thugs with criminal records and he defended himself using lawful and legal means. Yet for the past nearly year and a half, the mainstream media, powerful elites and politicians, and progressive drones all maintained (and continue to do so, despite the not guilty verdict) that Kyle Rittenhouse was a white supremacist vigilante who murdered two people and nearly murdered two others.

These two narratives are so diametrically opposed, and so intrinsically unreconcilable, that one is left to wonder how our society has devolved to this point. I don’t claim to have all the answers. But I have some thoughts on the subject, which I will share in this essay.

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Remember when Sweden was going to be a COVID killing field? Sweden had no lockdowns and no mandates, including no vaccine mandate. In the first year of the pandemic, the trolls who lurk around this blog like ghouls used to send me death reports from Sweden.

Strangely I don’t get those anymore. What could be the reason?

Well, it turns out that Sweden has the virus under control, and much of the rest of Europe does not. Here are confirmed cases:

Here are confirmed deaths:

Let me posit something that might make sense: Sweden was the only country in Europe that approached the COVID pandemic the same way we have approached all pandemics for decades (until the COVID cult took over in 2020): ie, health authorities urged the most at-risk to stay home but encouraged everybody else to go about their business. This led to a large increase in cases and deaths in the short run, but the population developed herd immunity, which is playing out now in very low case and death rates.

It turns out that when it comes to COVID there really is no school like the old school.

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