Project 2026
A Long-term Anti-Progressive Agenda
1.) RECAPTURE THE TEACHERS’ COLLEGES
2.) FIX THE SYSTEM OF SCIENCE/RESEARCH PRODUCTION
3.) REFORM THERAPY AND PSYCHOLOGY
I’m not too concerned with your political label or your voting affiliations or your algorithmic preferences. Do you think law and order is the most important aspect of domestic government policy? Do you think the market is a uniquely robust and dynamic engine for generating technological advance and economic growth? Do you think a controlled border is a basic aspect of nation-statehood? Do you want science to be a reflection and discovery of objective reality, rather than a tool to shape the future of our culture into a progressive direction? Do you think art and books and products should only be lucrative endeavors if they appeal to viewers and readers who have freedom and alternatives? Do you think there’s beauty in old legends and in traditional conceptions of masculinity and femininity and values such as courage and self-sacrifice? Do you think religion includes compelling lessons and moral wisdom which should be incorporated into our society? Do you think the family is the basic unit of civilization AND culture, and the most important element of most normal humans’ lives (and that this is a good thing!)?
It’s time to begin weeding our garden
If you answer to yes to most of these questions then I’m talking to you. I satirically named this essay ‘Project 2026’ simply to poke a bit of fun at the pre-election hysteria. This whirlwind of fear and exaggeration formed at the confluence of two trends: the issuance of a conservative wish-list agenda document by the Heritage Foundation, and the need of the Left to portray any Trump potentiality as a kind of post-Weimar era Handmaid’s Tale, full of FASCISM (but not the kind characterized by close collusion between large businesses and the government, for that’s our condition right now) and TOTALITARIANISM (but not the kind which is connected to government’s desire to control information flow and beliefs, and to keep the larger society affirming obvious lies-that’s our condition right now). (Actually: totalitarianism is a rarely-used epithet by the Left. Could it be they understand on some level that the point hits a bit too close to home?).
These are the things our society needs to do to root out the pervasive and malign tendrils of Critical Theory: recapture the teachers’ colleges, fix the system of scientific/research production, reform psychology and therapy.
These are all policy goals. There are many things a person can do to improve society: speak to your neighbor in a friendly and constructive way, tutor boys, build the strength of your family or community, reduce reliance on addictive and pathological goods and services. These ends are complementary to the three policy aims above.
Additionally, these policy goals are fundamental and basic-that is their value. Law schools have been fairly captured by social justice ideology, but this has been made much easier by the fact that most rich(er) kids have been swimming in a pool of strange and counterintuitive ideas for many years by the time they begin their 1L course load. Reforming that requires reforming the ideas and philosophy of pedagogy, and that requires reformation of the teachers’ colleges. God knows how much social damage has been wrought by activist K-12 teachers but it is vast. Sociology and law and debating societies should try to address and amend ‘wokeness’, but the project should begin with the teachers’ colleges. Similarly, science & research production and therapy & psychology are fundamental components of our society, with downstream implications for many other things. I think
has done his share; if there are any activist anti-Critical Theory organizations out there I recommend beginning the work. What use is control of the government when the younger generation has been trained to regard your ideas with revulsion?
Recapture the teachers’ colleges
I consider this area to be the most important effort of the three, by far.
Education is the deep basis of Critical Theory’s power, and the vector through which it replicates itself. As
writes:Some facts are so shocking that you don’t want to believe them. And if you do believe them, there’s a tendency to forget, downgrade their importance, and often have to be reminded of them again. Here’s one fact that falls into this category: The American education system, or at least the field of education itself, was taken over by literal communists. Those entrusted to teach children and young adults have as their greatest intellectual inspirations lunatics who would clearly have massacred their fellow Americans if they had the chance.
We know this because during the Cold War, some of the leading lights of modern academia were openly in favor of distant regimes that were engaging in mass killings in the name of equality. Some of them, like members of the Weather Underground and Angela Davis, personally participated in violent acts themselves. Instead of locking these people up and throwing away the key, we made them into tenured professors, and some of the most highly cited scholars in the world. They now are major intellectual figures in education schools, which train future teachers and administrators and ultimately control what kids learn, along with the DEI bureaucracies that exert so much control from within our most powerful institutions.
Wokeness is at its most deranged and pathological in the teachers’ colleges. Paolo Freire, a Brazilian communist who dreamed of turning all teachers and students into activists before all else, is the author of the most cited pedagogical papers (easily by a factor of 5). Gender ideology, anti-racism, and efforts to ‘decolonize the classroom’ are so systematic and insistent that it’s not an exaggeration to say that for most teachers in the United States this material represents a significant portion of what is taught and it is the most urgent part.
The entire field of pedagogy has been almost fully captured by utopians who scoff at any data or logical structure which contradicts their pre-conceived ideas. These ideas are being fed, half-digested, to millions of schoolchildren. I remain worried about the potential effects of introducing gender ideology to young children (for whom the sex binary is a key heuristic through which to learn about themselves and each other and their culture). I would love to see some data on this… but I’m not going to hold my breath for that. Just as with science/research any study or data set which contradicts the ideological imperatives will be stigmatized, or suppressed… or just never generated in the first place. Gender ideology is an a priori benefit, so we can never arrive at a conclusion or generate a study which indicates that it’s risky or harmful. This type of thinking runs all through the teaching of teachers.
We need evidence-based pedagogy (based in rigorous social science) and an emphasis on fundamentals. We need a reconceptualization of teachers as catalysts for critical thinking and curiosity, not ‘critical’ (social justice obsessed) perspectives or activism. Kids don’t know enough about the world to be effective activists and it’s never a teacher’s job to steer them. We need scholarships, schools, and training resources outside and against the massive encrustation of radicalism which are the teachers’ colleges and accreditation organizations and teachers’ unions.
Fix the system of scientific/research production:
Despite a profusion of papers and conferences and ‘findings’, science is in trouble. It could be dying. Sabine H. is saying it.
is saying it. is saying it. Each of them is tugging on a different leg of the elephant… and, alarmingly, each leg turns out to be rotten. Physics has been stuck in time for 40 years, in some ways. String theory and particle physics nonsense (for which I highly recommend the YouTube videos of Sabine Hossenfelder) have, by now, wasted hundreds of billions of dollars on casuistical inquiries which have no possible connection to reality. Psychopharmacology is now embracing psychedelics… but the old regimens of SSRI’s/anti-psychotics/benzodiazepines & sedative-hypnotics have barely been improved upon in decades. In many cases, we still barely know how they work. Lifespans in the United States are now declining. Climate science produces a huge amount of research for motivated actors, who are very obviously seeking a particular outcome. Pharmaceutical research is, in many cases, barely separable from government regulators.In many places there are gluts of researchers working academic bare earth. In many cases the areas of research inquiry are somewhat predetermined and constrained by political imperatives or cultural sensitivities. Publishing careers are getting shorter and researchers are less cited and less disruptive than they once were. Many fields (anthropology/sociology/women’s studies/psychology/ethnic studies/”fat studies”/etc. etc.) are choked with garbage research, with no real peer review, or even any connection to the real world. These departments and fields are vast, theoretical houses of cards-fake epistemologies devoted to developing and expanding invalid premises and finding some cultural relevance. The only real aim of these fields is to produce more “researchers”, more papers, more conferences, more complaints. If you asked them they would probably claim to be activists but they’re simply fragile and fussy people holding expensive sinecures, play-acting as revolutionaries.
The problems are almost too numerous to list, even briefly.
It’s important to note that academia and the science production machine are different entities but they’re inextricably intertwined and it’s often difficult to find where one ends and the other begins. They share bad incentives, they are both being funded to produce subpar (but ideologically palatable) products, and they both include too many people who are fragile and who take a moralistic view towards anything they don’t recognize or with which they don’t agree. These are less than useful traits for researchers to possess. Ultimately, science runs on money, and our system has been polluted by bad training, and bad standards in academia and publishing, and bad financial incentives on the research side. That’s how we come to
saying this:The NIH and NSF are supposed to be overseeing the funding of science; instead they, too, are in bed with big pharma (note a trend?), and also so bolloxed up that they don’t know science when it hits them in the head. They are funding politicized garbage which often doesn’t meet the basic expectations of science. Covid revealed the rot in medical and pharmaceutical research, but the rot is everywhere. Politically popular answers are generated by power brokers behind the scenes, and then research is funded and conducted to arrive at those answers. This “science” is conclusion driven, rather than hypothesis driven, and is therefore not science at all. Actual science that arrives at different answers—atmospheric Carbon is not the only thing responsible for our changing planet; puberty blockers are not safe for children—is disappeared
The examples are endless.
writes:explains how (public) academic censorship and un-personing works:A new paper is just out claiming that climate change is increasing the damage associated with U.S. hurricanes:
“US hurricane damage, normalized for changes of inflation, population, and wealth, increases approximately 1% per year. For 1900–2022, 1% per year is equivalent to a factor of >3 increase, substantially but not entirely, attributable to climate change.”
As they say — Big if true.
Alas, it is not true. Stop me if you’ve heard this before — some researchers found a fake Excel “dataset” online and decided to use it in a peer reviewed paper, favoring the fake dataset over data in the peer reviewed literature of known provenance and subject to decades of scrutiny.
The authors of the new paper assert of their work with the fake dataset:
“These results contradict the previously published work”
Indeed.
again, writing about one example of the doleful state of science journalism:What our hersterical academics demand is for all of [his] papers to be “retracted”. This is the word academics use for shunning. Retraction is a purely performative act these days, because once papers are released into the wilds of the internet, there is no possibility of pulling them back. But it would allow academics to avoid naming Lynn. They want his name erased from history. So that theirs appear brighter.
All right, we have our Victims and a plaint. Now how to tie it to global warming, now called “climate change”?
Vox to the rescue with this hilarious headline: “The bizarre link between rising sea levels and complications in pregnancy: Exposure to salty water can rob women of their reproductive organs and pregnancies.”
…
Well, do you know what water has salt in it? Right. The ocean.
And do you know what global warming, now called “climate change”, will effect? Right. The ocean.
…
I’ll tell you what angst and excessive drinking of salt water causes: complications in pregnancy. And complications in pregnancy can rob women of their pregnancies.
We’re done! We have the outline of a standard science article on how global warming, now called “climate change”, can harm Victims in a twist no one saw coming. All that’s left is to throw some fancy graphics on it, quote a scientist or two about the evils of global warming, now called “climate change”, and get plenty of Victim quotes expressing their horror over what is to come.
This isn’t science per se, but when the academic and political and journalistic megastructure is very obviously interested in the reinforcement of conclusions like these (and other prejudices) what will be the result? Anyone who denies that ideological bias in universities and academic journals and federal agencies is malforming science is probably part of the problem.
disscusses perhaps the most flagrant and cartoonish area of scientific failure… gender ideology.Our latest misuse of statistics producing midwit science is found in the peer-reviewed paper “State-level anti-transgender laws increase past-year suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary young people in the USA” by Wilson Y Lee and others in Nature: Human Behavior.
…
There are only words about people, addled by incessant propaganda and who self-selected into the effort to discuss the effects this propaganda had, who claimed they tried to commit suicide. (About delusional people who commit suicide we already know: what’s unstudied is the culpability of Experts.)
Did they? How do you know? Shall we take this self-selected sample’s word for it? Remembering, of course, these folks start at mentally troubled, and that they might want to show displeasure at laws which do not pander to them. Why should we believe them? Because Feelings? Because How dare you question me, suicide is terrible!
The entire effort is of no value. Except as yet another exhibit in how science has become ideologically captured.
‘The Reformers’ is an excellent films series by
about a tight-knit and rebellious group’s attempts to open up and expose the rot in liberal arts and sociology (etc.) departments nationwide, which is almost total on many campuses.
Here are some of the things I’ve already written about systemic weaknesses in academia and research institutions (with a focus on the-particularly absurd-social science & humanities departments). They were hilariously revealed by the Sokal Hoax, and then the Grievance Studies Affair:
More to come there…
Theoretical physics has wasted decades on string theory. Particle physics has regressed to the point where making unscientific speculations and then dreaming of testing scenarios (with not indication that they would be informative) now absorbs a truly massive amount of time and money. Pharmaceutical research lacks effective oversight due to regulatory capture by the giants of the industry. Economics has been (partly) penetrated by wokeness. Social Science has been inundated by a flood of p-hacking and null hypotheses and flawed conclusions, such that I more often read a bad paper than not these days. Sociology? Literature? L:iberal Arts (None of which are science but all of which are academic disciplines)? Please.
:Back in 2011, when I was in graduate school, I remember asking some friends in the humanities what the social purpose of their job was. I was just teasing, but their answer was interesting. They said that the purpose of the humanities was activism — pushing politics in an egalitarian direction by uplifting the voices of the marginalized.
These testimonials are endless. In fact, they’re almost universal. There’s now a massive corpus of work documenting the leftward veer of research and teaching institutions and the effect this has on science and society.
In a related essay,
has this to say:I must note that the rot of the universities is a complex process. It would be unwise to suggest a monocausal story. My goal here is to make the case that reverse assimilation played a role.
Recently, City Journal ran a symposium on higher education. Editor Brian Anderson highlighted… problems:
progressives and radicals rule the collegiate classroom, outnumbering right-of-center faculty by 12 to one on some estimates, and exerting control over what can be said.
…the entrenchment of a vast, well-paid university bureaucratic class, dedicated to the racist and anti-American ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
How did it get this bad? Follow the money. If trillions of dollars are sucked from citizens’ pockets to generate ‘science’ and the pressure on that science is to be ideologically conformist rather than rigorous or worthwhile then you will get a flood of bad science. If researchers and professors and prize-winners are selected on any basis other than merit then you will end up with less impressive and more entitled luminaries, constantly fighting a very real (and valid) sense of imposter syndrome. Do you think Claudine Gay really feels like a ground-breaking researcher?
The issues in physics and publishing and pharmaceuticals are only tangential but they are all related: elite institutions are protecting their funding and their class privileges rather than promoting ethics and discipline in their fields.
Ask yourself this: if there’s a social science paper which could have marginal benefits for education… but the paper is smeared as ‘racist’ (based purely on its data), do you think it would be published? Reviewed? Employed in policy-making or agency reviews? We already know what the reaction will be toward national and comprehensive evidence reviews when they run afoul of gender ideology-look at the Cass Review.
The people telling you to trust the science are the same ones corrupting the institutions and suppressing inconvenient data. These people are dangerous.
We need to restore our truth-finding apparatus. We need to restore science. Funds could be established to compensate and reward scientists who end up being cancelled. DEI must be resisted. Alternate institutions and funding sources must be established. We need to fix the system of science and research production.
illustrates the concerns of scientific researchers and publishers nowadays:will close this section for us:“The Science” is not doing O.K. It recently endorsed Kamala Harris—or rather its representatives, the editors of Scientific American, did so on The Science’s behalf. They cited among their reasons Harris’s devotion to such principles as taxpayer-sponsored healthcare, easy abortion access, and gun restrictions, none of which I recall finding discussed in Bacon’s Novum Organum or Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery.
But, say the editors, “the evidence is clear” that Trump’s policies will cause disaster, meaning that voting against them is not simply a matter of preference but of science denialism. By “evidence” the editors refer to social science studies akin to those invoked by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who defended affirmative action on the grounds that black doctors contribute to society by virtue of being black. “For high-risk Black newborns,” wrote Jackson, “having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.”
A statistician who writes under the name “Crémieux” explained that the study in question failed to control for a major confounding variable (birthweight), which the authors seemingly knew would skew the results. Yet the study was published anyway, in none other than the Proceedings of the National Academy of…you guessed it: Sciences.
Those of us who lived through the COVID era are no strangers to motivated reasoning and tendentious politics traveling under cover of “Science.” But we still haven’t come fully to grips with why fraudsters and bureaucrats should want to frame their specious arguments as data rather than simply as morality or good policy—that is, why they think the mere word “science” itself will command assent.
Science is becoming power politics, where might makes right. Not everywhere, no, but in bulk, and certainly in its main funding methods. Here’s proof.
I wrote many times (blog, Substack) that scientists will create entire subfields of activity, just because they think other scientists think the area is paper-worthy. Scientists are just as prone to fads as anybody else. The mass of papers that develop in the subfield becomes truth-as-vote. Scientists reason that because so many are working in this area, and are being funded, the basic claims must be true.
As proof of that contention, here is a Nature article boasting about the number of “climate change” papers, and using the increase as proof that therefore the claims of “climate change” must be true, and must be acted upon. We have, you and I, dear reader, over the years looked at enough of these papers to see that most are worthless to harmful, a prime (and, sadly, enduring) example of science-as-vote.
Reform psychology and therapy
I have perhaps the most to say about this section. I’ve benefitted enormously from therapy and mental healthcare, but I understand its weaknesses: as a service often provided by radical true believers (women, mostly) and funded by customers themselves (through employers and insurance companies) the incentives are very amenable to a Leftward drift, and for increasingly self-indulgent emphases. Few people want to pay to be instructed in why and how they should be more disciplined and rational and humble (all legitimate aims of real psychology, in my opinion). Many end up paying credulous and themselves dysfunctional professionals to help ‘process’ their feelings and validate their impulses and (as we say in recovery) “co-sign their bullshit.”
Our society lacks any conception of virtue and character seems to be consistently downplayed by psychologists (despite it being an important element in every successful case of therapeutic/psychological intervention I’ve witnessed).
There are two approaches one can take in response to the pain and trouble of the world: blame the world and retreat, swaddling yourself in affirmations and denial… or toughen yourself up and change your habits and behaviors to become more adaptive.
It’s not even that I see therapists as the biggest problem. Where are the professionals associations and researchers, warning about compulsive social media use and contagion?
is doing his part… where is the APA? Where are the professionals fighting the ‘affirmation only’ model of gender dysphoria treatment… and the laws which have been passed in multiple countries? Where is the open and sincere alarm about the state of our kids, and our society? Why is Jordan Peterson being investigated by the professional association of his country?Elites get their credentials and their job security and their (sometimes exorbitant) compensation and a life of generally comfortable work. In return they should be honest and ethical and active. Right now every psychologist in America should be before the public, warning about the dangerous social contagion of gender dysphoria symptoms among teenage girls. The fact that few are is a profound indictment.
We need a psychological model which takes spirit and virtue and character seriously as not just personality traits but as powerful catalysts for change. We need a praxis focused on making people better, not happier: better friends, workers, spouses… You can scarcely imagine the sneering responses I’ve gotten to that idea on many message boards but think about it for a moment: aren’t these the signs of mental health? Can a person really be psychologically unhealthy if all of their relationships are full and flourishing? We currently treat the individual (on the medical model) but psychological health is a social phenomenon and no happy individual is a unitary entity. The bad news is that we scarcely even have a language or a framework upon which to develop these ideas.
The good news is that a resurrected therapeutic praxis and science of psychology can be a powerful tool in public policy and education and criminal justice… and in politics. It’s time to bring balance back to the era of subjectivity and to heal our society, as a society, using the things we know about ethics and humanity from thousands of years of recorded history.
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Some additional interesting pieces in this vein:
Yup. The Teachers' Colleges are a root cause of progressivism's infiltration, for sure. Same with all those degree programs that you mentioned. I'd love to see those programs eliminated as I don't see that they have any value unless I'm missing something. The Teachers' Colleges... ugh. Take a C- student and create an indoctrinating bot. That's it in a nutshell. We need content specialists in the basics: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Perhaps all that's needed is a criminal background check, a mental health evaluation, proven content knowledge, and a successful track record of actually teaching successfully (not rate my teacher style where grade inflation comes in). I understand most middle school teachers can't do math. Lovely.
One question. Do you believe that a causal link between childhood autism and vaccination has been proven because our new Secretary of HHS does? So much for science.