Saturday, August 01, 2026

The Top 5 Plus (August 1)

You may find of interest 3 very brief Vital Signs Blog posts that I posted earlier this week. You'll find them further down the Vital Signs Blog entries. But for now, here's this week's Top 5 Plus.

1) “Mainstream Education Systems Have Become Modern Marxist Discipleship Centers” (Patricia Engler, Harbinger’s Daily)

From the article -- For years, public education systems have been discipling young people to believe a destructive false gospel. This reality helps explain why youth we know and love may seem to be learning less about reading, math, and science than about activism, sexuality, and liberal ideology. Here’s a quick breakdown of what’s going on and what we can do about it.

Through an approach known as “critical pedagogy,” schools are teaching students to think and act like modern Marxists. This approach has been pervading mainstream education, as a 2015 article in the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies reveals:

"After several decades of existing on the educational fringe, it is safe to say that critical pedagogy has entered the mainstream in the United States. . . . Academic conferences such as the American Educational Research Association regularly feature hundreds of sessions related to critical pedagogy and there are special interest groups solely devoted to scholarship in the field. Critical pedagogy and its left-centrist derivative social justice is also applied to previously untouched contexts, from teaching math to physical education. Social justice has even been incorporated into business and sustainability degree programs, including the concept of servant leadership."

In other words, schools are teaching students to view every subject through a Marxist lens...Put differently, the purpose is to raise up modern communists.

2) “John Adams made a terrifying prediction. America is close to proving him correct: The national debt is pushing close to $40 trillion with no simple options to fix it.” (Les Rubin, Fox News)

From the article -- "Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." John Adams, our second president, wrote those words more than two centuries ago, yet they are relevant today. Adams understood that free societies are not destroyed only by foreign enemies. They can also be weakened from within through complacency, indifference and the gradual abandonment of the principles that made them successful.

America's Founders spent years studying history and learning from the greatest political, economic and philosophical thinkers who came before them. They deliberately created a constitutional republic built upon limited government, fiscal responsibility, individual liberty and the protection of the unalienable rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

That framework produced the most prosperous and powerful nation the world has ever known. For nearly 250 years, it has survived wars, economic crises, political upheaval and countless challenges because it rested on principles that valued freedom and restrained government.

3) “Socialism and Islam: A tale of two psychoses -- A dark night is descending over America.” (Eric Utter, American Thinker)

From the article -- The times, they are a-changin’. Rapidly. And not in a good way. Two separate -- and growing -- psychoses are converging in a perfect highly imperfect storm of authoritarianism to existentially threaten the land of the formerly free and brave.

To wit: In 2000, only 28% of Democrats identified as “liberal.” Today, that figure has nearly doubled. The number who claim to be very liberal has also risen dramatically. In fact, a recent survey shows that 1 in 3 Democrats now proudly consider themselves to be Democratic-Socialists. The party has been fundamentally transformed — and quickly. DSA candidates are now running in elections across the fruited plain … and winning. This would have been unthinkable just a couple of decades ago.

Simultaneously, the number of Muslims in the U.S. has also dramatically increased, from perhaps as low as 1.1 million in 2000, to perhaps as many as 4.5 million today. That would be greater than a 400% increase. In one generation.

4) “With No Opposition, Canada Has Become The Most Radically Progressive Nation In The World” (Breanna Claussen, Harbinger’s Daily)

From the article -- If the two examples above were not enough, Canada passed the “Online News Act” in 2023, which resulted in Canadians being blocked from viewing news reports from outside the country on Meta platforms. This, coupled with the Liberal government’s suppression of Conservative news groups within the country, should set off alarm bells, harkening back to regimes throughout history that sought to control the information accessible to their citizenry. Today, Canada is the only nation in a total and permanent “blackout” from foreign news sources through Meta.

Of all the Western nations, Canada stands out in the worst possible way. Within the last decade, the nation has startled the world by arresting pastors, freezing bank accounts of dissenting voices, suppressing press freedom, killing its most vulnerable, and taking direct aim at religious liberty. Even members of the highly progressive European Union have pushed back against what they view as a “dictatorship” steadily emerging in the country.

Despite the astonishing state of affairs in Canada, it is even more shocking to hear the views of many average Canadians, who routinely express delight that their politics are not as “messy” as those in the United States. By making this claim, they fail to recognize that the so-called “messiness” stems from having individuals willing to push back and defend their freedoms and morality—something which is present in varying degrees in all other Western nations.

When all of your politicians are careening down the same treacherous path, there is no stopping the train. 

5) “The Left's Rotating Loyalty Oath: The left's articles of faith keep expiring because they were never sincere in the first place.” (John Tillman, The Political Vise)

From the article -- A little more than half a decade later, climate has nearly disappeared from the left’s top concerns. Last year, researchers at Yale asked American voters to rank twenty-five issues by how much they mattered to their midterm vote. Global warming came in twenty-fourth. Only 1% of respondents named it as their most important issue. In September 2025, the Searchlight Institute, a think tank aligned with Democratic priorities, advised progressive politicians to stop using the term “climate change” altogether. The weather hasn’t changed, nor has the left succeeded in its aim of getting everyone to turn vegan and ride public transit. What has happened is that the environment has ceased to be what animates those who turn the levers of the Political Vise.

What’s the latest test? Israel. This year, from Maine to California, primary season has witnessed vicious Democratic infighting over American aid to the Middle East’s only democracy. And to that party’s most dedicated activists, one name has become dirtier than Blackwater or Big Oil: AIPAC.

I am not here to weigh in on foreign policy. The government of Israel may or may not be above reproach. What strikes me here is less Israel itself than the fact that until very recently, other issues commanded far more attention on the American left. Israel, like climate change and the Iraq War before it, has suddenly become the one political issue about which reasonable progressives (perhaps an oxymoron) are not allowed to disagree. And so for the left, this summer’s litmus test is denouncing AIPAC, a venerable organization devoted to drumming up support for our embattled ally.

Other Excellent Articles from the Week

* “The Damage Caused By Fauci’s Lies Is Incalculable—And The American People Deserve Answers” (Mike Pompeo, Harbinger’s Daily)

* “Turkish F-35 Stealth Fighter Jets: A Grave Threat to Greece, Israel, the West” (Nils A. Haug, Gatestone Institute) 

* “AI Will Save the U.S. Economy: The pace of innovation is unlike anything we’ve ever seen.” (Jordan Schachtel, American Greatness)

* “The Misplaced Fixation with Israel’s ‘Image’ -- The practical problems with spinning the Jewish state.” (Eric Dezenhall, American Greatness)

* “3 Lessons from Secretary Rubio’s Speech about Leftist Terrorism” (Kathy Athearn, Washington Stand)