If you care about our children, and I know you do, we have got to teach them how to think critically in the classroom and beyond. It’s not up to our local teachers alone, parents must also actively engage with their children on the major socio-political topics of the day, learning how to separate propaganda from common sense logic.

Does our local Board of Education prioritize critical thinking over memorization for test scores? What can parents do to keep their children from falling into intellectual servitude?

End mob rule

Tell your children if they encounter someone who says, “The science is settled,” or “Follow the science,” or demands draconian measures based upon “scientific consensus,” to hoist the red flag.

Take it very seriously. Critical thinking alleviates the fear of mass hysteria.

Serious scrutiny is necessary. The journal Nature raised the alarm that “in some fields, at least one-quarter of clinical trials might be problematic or even entirely made up,” (“Medicine is plagued by untrustworthy clinical trials. How many studies are faked or flawed?” Nature, July 18, 2023).Another 2021 study “reveals non-replicable data is cited 153 times more because the findings they lay out are deemed more interesting,” (“A new replication crisis: research that is less likely to be true is cited more,” Neuroscience News, May 21, 2021).

The illusion of scientific consensus with the Covid-19 pandemic led to disastrous policies.

The ability to analyze who is rounding up the supposed “consensus” is paramount.

In the case of the pandemic, top National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials used their massive grant funding influence to sway experts in the field to their side. Likewise, the pharmaceutical giants had undue financial control over the federal government bureaucracy and the news media (see how many CDC and FDA officials went to work for Big Pharma).

The consensus quickly became a vicious mob, persecuting the unvaccinated, down-playing the vaccine’s severe side effects in children (new documents reveal CDC had drafted an alert on myocarditis but never made it public), forcing school closures, and ruining the economy, costing us $6 trillion. Public health officials lied about the mRNA vaccines providing protection against contracting and spreading Covid-19, as neither was true.

The prominent philosopher of science Karl Popper admitted that “the growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreements.” Nations like Sweden used empirical evidence, not consensus, and had the lowest rate of all-cause death in Europe.

Turning Anthony Fauci into a demigod (“attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science”) with too much control over the narrative (especially since he circumvented the ban on gain-of-function research) and national research funding was a huge mistake that squelched almost all debate and exacted punitive measures against those who dared to speak up.

Teach your children that the scientific method is fueled by structured scientific debate, not consensus.

Recommended reading: “The real Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health” by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Fight for your children’s rights

Unfortunately, Western Civilization is making a U-turn. Governments are using one-sided reasoning promoted by charlatans like Al Gore and his false climate prophecies (by the way, Gore recently purchased a $9 million villa on the California coast, an inconvenient truth).

No single issue will impact your children more than the climate change agenda.

The intention is to psychologically embed fear of certain death and destruction into the younger generations to create mass acceptance of draconian rule over the population.

Remember when environmentalists would talk about greenhouse gas emissions and the dangers of global warming? Critical thinkers know that did not work as it could be proven or disproven. The histrionic predictions of peak oil, global famine, and submerged cities failed to materialize.

So, how do you win when your predictions fail? You rebrand, of course, and “climate change” was the answer because the climate has always changed since the beginning of time. This enabled the alarmists to label two feet of snow, a flood, a wildfire, etc., as climate change even though similar events occurred well before industrialization.

Biden’s climate guru, John Kerry, says, “Nothing that we are doing, nothing that President Biden has sought to do, has any political motivation or ideological rationale. It’s entirely a reaction to science, to the mathematics and physics that explain what is happening.” That is absurd.

Just like with the pandemic, Kerry and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) howl “follow the science” as they push extreme climate policies and crush debate.

An angry Biden proclaimed, “Anyone who willfully denies the impact of climate change is condemning the American people to a very dangerous future.” The primary purpose of the fear narrative is to cause thoughts of terror and anxiety, causing future generations to capitulate to almost any demands made of them.

Climate alarmism is a matter of perverse interests intersecting with greed and arrogance to produce tragic results at unsustainable costs. Climate disaster hysteria has become the new cash cow with the tech and venture capital elites positioning themselves for the windfall from the required products, services, and technology.

Climate analyst and author Bjorn Lomborg makes it clear, “[It] isn’t the imminent existential crisis of which the media and activist politicians breathlessly worn. They run headlines and give speeches about extreme weather events, though the United Nations’ panel of climate scientists hasn’t been able to document evidence of most of them worsening. The data show that climate related deaths from droughts, storms, floods, and fires have declined by more than 97% over the last century.” He continues, “More people die in traffic accidents in an average week.”

The climate alarmists are targeting changes in agriculture, eliminating automobiles, and creating “15-minute” cities where future generations will be confined.

Lomborg acknowledges, “The latest peer-reviewed climate-economic research shows the total cost will average $27 trillion each year across the century, reaching $60 trillion a year in 2100.”

Let’s be honest, it’s clear leftists do not care about protecting the natural order as they will stoop to surgically and chemically mutilating children if it’s fashionable. A critical perspective shows what they care about is justifying the consolidation and centralization of power through social engineering.

The danger to our children in this Marxist-like revolution relies on the notion of man as God, defining and controlling reality at will. They preach reaching utopia but ignore the mass graves left by communist regimes.

Social engineering only serves the masters as they gain wealth and power while forcing the rest into a deprived state.

The political leaders and billionaires in the World Economic Forum are trying to convince your children to accept that they will own nothing, but they will be happy, just keep following the science. The elites use broad nonsensical arguments on the environment to control the population.

The overwhelming number of regulations they justify through climate change rhetoric like killing off livestock, forced purging of natural gas appliances, adding insect protein to foods, lab-created meat, and the elimination of all fossil-fuel uses is really about funneling money and power to their coalition.

Recommended reading: “Unsettled, what climate science tells us, what it doesn’t, and why it matters” by Steven E. Koonin

Learning to think beyond irrational rhetoric

The fake struggle against racism promotes racial segregation and actively fights to institutionalize it against Asian and white Americans. They claim that to be anti-racist you must be racist.

The leftists accept rolling blackouts on the electrical grid as a condition of their imaginary progress. They elected a demented president who promoted civilizational decline through mandates to abandon fossil fuels by the 2030s.

The nation, like California currently, will be told when to turn off the heat and air conditioning and to stop charging electric vehicles because they are incapable of managing the electrical grid, using climate change as their excuse.

Your children will need to be able to evaluate the priorities of various factions. They will need to recognize the rhetorical traps like “climate change,” a historical given, but not the death of the planet.

Our children must know where to find honest and verifiable resources to comprehend and appraise a situation using relevant facts and information.

The mainstream media is biased. Social media apps are censoring thoughts. Historical context related to the issues of the day is almost non-existent. Can the local schools teach students how to find balance, recognize bias, and locate independent sources?

We can show our children how to build a coherent belief system, using logic and testing claims. But do not think for a minute that the task is easy in the era of “create your own truth,” and having the counter-culture’s followers, devoid of values or morals, pelt our next generations with accusatory insults such as racist, anti-democratic, denier, and [insert term]-phobic everything.

Failing at this task will be catastrophic.

Resource: 9 Great Critical Thinking Books for Children and Teens, https://www.commonsenseethics.com/blog/7-great-critical-thinking-books-for-kids

[Brown is a former mayor of Peachtree City and served two terms on the Fayette County Board of Commissioners. You can read all his columns by clicking on his photo below.]