"Watchdogs or pit bulls?" I was asking over 30 years ago, as TV newsrooms were turning into kangaroo courts and bully pulpits for journalists of the left, waging war on Western culture.  I wished that an electronic virus could flash a message across the screen whenever a newscast was about to begin: "What you are about to see and hear may be pure bunk.  Discretion advised."  Why shouldn't such a warning precede the flow of partial truths and outright lies from the mouths of apparently intelligent people with pleasant faces?  The regular doses of distortion, misinformation, and smearing were calculated to build a case against America's fundamental values and blur the public's perception of their country and the world they lived in.  I called it then, and I call it today, treason.

The washing of American minds with leftist BS became a late 20th-century feature of mainstream publishing, school programs, entertainment, and church sermons.  "It's the '90s now!" was a popular cry, generally understood to be an excuse for brewing cultural chaos.  In this sound bite with its corny ring against "the past" lay the justification for any and all BS in the name of "progress."  

Americans had been primed for a leap into a leftist new age decades before the '90s.  Hadn't the Supreme Court helped prepare for it by inventing justifications for trashing time-honored values, redefining even murder according to rules of political instead of moral correctness?  Intentional killing of children in the womb and murdering abusive parents and spouses became justified for the first time in American history.  I don't recall this revolutionary change in justice ever making it to the History Channel or explained in any mainstream journal.  And hadn't schoolkids been taught that what they felt was right for them was OK, while filling their minds with acceptable OKs?  In this educational legerdemain, progressive educators were tapping the left's "value-neutral doctrine."  The (intended) result of making values valueless was necessary for reprogramming young minds and making the newer generations ready for the "new age."  If, to get there, what is right one day becomes wrong the next – and what is wrong one day becomes right the next – what of it? 

With value devalued, except for what pleases, even brainwashed church leaders were dropping "sin" from their vocabulary and reserving places in Heaven for everyone in their flock who obeyed the "acceptable OKs" coded in the Politically Correct Commandments.  The mainstream news media, all too happy to report on this  progress in spirituality, applauded.

The wisdom of 1960s hotshots knowing more than all who came before them had at last enlightened the collective "we" of Americans, now finally getting things right.  It was time, was it not, to open the gates of that golden age predicted by Marxists at the time our grandparents were toddlers – that "new world order" harped on by globalists of whatever political persuasion at the end of World War I.  Yes, the world would at last be free of war, free of want, free of hate, free of God...

...well, not all of us agreed with this trip to Global Oz.  Most of us saw the bull in it, early on, and knew that the Yellow Brick Road was being paved by people who hated America, God, and family.  It was clear to us that any goal that destroyed what makes us human was a call for a fight, not an embrace.

Building a new social order for a new world order kept men like John Dewey busy inventing and pushing methods for turning schoolchildren into compliant adults, able, willing, and ready to live in a socialist society.  Progressive education was designed to weaken dependence on self and strengthen dependence on group, shifting loyalty away from family and toward policies in keeping with the godless, purely secular goals of the first Humanist Manifesto (1933).  That the process was manipulative and dishonest meant nothing to these pioneers of deconstruction and reconstruction of the minds and hearts of children for the purpose of establishing a secular, god-free, collectivist society.  If the new schooling dulled minds, lowered expectations for achievement, created problems of "self esteem," weakened individual responsibility for one's actions – to mention some of the side effects of "progressive" education – what of it?

With growing unease, reaching a point of alarm for me and many others in the 1980s (I was in my fifties then),  I witnessed the young think and speak less clearly, saw them lose self-direction, watched them rely increasingly and more heavily on peer identity, drugs, counseling, digital props, and substitutes for the real world.  I was stunned when, for the first time in my life, I heard a young adult tell me with a straight face that he "didn't like to think."

As we approached the 21st century, it was plain to me and others with intact memory of recent history that our culture was in mortal danger and that a future fit for human beings was fading from sight.  The "new social order" planned by amoral social reformers in the early decades of the 20th century was in place, ready for the Global Oz they called "progress." 

Progress?  It was interrupted a long time ago.

Anthony J. DeBlasi is a Korean War veteran and lifelong defender of Western culture.