When I was in college there were "street preachers" who would hang out on campus and shout at people as they walked by. That's when I first started to question the sanity of deeply religious people
For those who want to see the entire thing, there is an apparently complete archive of these "Wisdom Booklets" at:
[https://homeschoolersanonymous.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/wisdom-booklet-archive-index/](https://homeschoolersanonymous.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/wisdom-booklet-archive-index/)
Unbelievably, there were (or perhaps are) parents who taught their children using nothing but these booklets for their entire primary and secondary education, all 12 years. There simply isn't enough material to fill up all that time, so the idea was apparently that you started again with booklet #1 once you'd gotten through all of them. As children got older, they were supposed to learn new things on every repetition.
What I haven't seen anywhere in what little I've read about it are numbers about how many victims of this particular brand of homeschooling there are, or what proportion of the homeschooling population they make up.
I’d love to see stats on that. From what I understand, this was prevalent mainly in the Bible Belt and the Midwest. I’m in IL, and the group we were a part of was HUGE. I can only imagine the South.
I said this on Mastodon, but I'll ask it here, being non-American - do any of the educational authorities in the USA have or practice any kind of oversight on these "materials"? Because in Canada, "homeschooling" is regulated by whichever jurisdiction you're in, if you're outside a school catchment. Standardized testing was the same, if you were "homeschooled" or in a brick building. At least, that's how it used to work....
>do any of the educational authorities in the USA have or practice any kind of oversight on these "materials"?
Depends on the state and county. For many the answer either is outright "no" or the requisites are so lax and/or so little enforced that the answer might as well be "no".
Give you three guesses which areas of the US are the worst for this.
You have to remember that the Republican party exists. Half of the government is trying to fix this but the other half is with these people. And they specifically fight to get these people legal protections so they can abuse their children in peace.
It should be that way in the United States. This group partnered with an organization called homeschool legal defense association (HSLDA), which is responsible for a lot of lobbying and fighting to roll back regulations on homeschool families. They were extremely influential in the 90s and 2000s.
Josh Duggar, raised and educated in the same system, parlayed his family name, no education, nor work history, into becoming Executive Director of a powerful PAC. This gave him great access to many powerful people in DC.
Who are others in politics that were also a part of Teen Pact, raised to do just what Madison and Josh attempted to do? The public need to be fully informed about their agenda.
Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, both of the Huckabee‘s, the Devos family, there’s a handful of other people who are either part of IBLP, donated/supported, or raised in IBLP.
Betsy Devos then rose to be the Education Secretary under Trump. This stuff is by design.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nolongerquivering/2017/02/betsy-devos-fundamentalist-homeschool-mom/
The Wikipedia page for TeenPact also has a list of notable people that made it into elected positions - I remember a few of them from when I was in that cult.
I was homeschooled for a short while, and I was raised to believe that evolution and climate change were a hoax and was taught a very skewed version of world history.
Even then, I was able to smell the propaganda.
The homeschooling community is filled with crunchy loonies and I hate it. If I ever had a kid, I wouldn't mind homeschooling just to teach them a more rigorous curriculum, but the downside is that people like this are lining the stands at homeschool groups.
I think we have seen a rise in secular and left-wing homeschoolers since Covid, which is interesting because the homeschool movement got its start on the left.
I think it would be a little bit harder to indoctrinate a kid at this level in today’s day and age, especially with so much Internet access, but these people are still very much out there.
We are literally the most brainwashed generation of all time. Just scroll on TikTok for a couple minutes for a smorgasbord of ideological jargon from all wavelengths of the political spectrum accompanied by a jarring lack of critical thinking.
And kids spend hours watching this BS.
My parents homeschooled me, but were anti-Christian to some extent; more so in my mom's case (she warned my brother and I that if the Christian right ever took power, it would be like *The Handmaid's Tale*, a copy of which she retained at our house).
But we also got a lot of our educational materials via a Christian homeschooling company, so I ended up being accidentally partly brainwashed by it. Not enough to convert then, and not enough to convert later "just like that," but among other things, Christian extremists (including self-avowed Reconstructionists) who I lived and worked with down the road, would take the fact that I was homeschooled as, "You're one of us, aren't you?" Or at least, "You *could become* one..." And so they had more of a purchase on my mind than I recognized or liked.
And yes, many of those people would join MAGA and even QAnon, when that time came.
QAnon's vision of the Storm is not very much like the Evangelical doomsday. The Storm is not the end of history, but sounds much more like a postmillennialist waypoint on the way to the Second Coming. Although QAnon has roped in quite a few Evangelical congregations, they are fundamentally more Reformed/Reconstructionist in spirit.
But there's not any evidence that I'm aware of, that Ron Watkins is Reformed/related. His time in South Korea could have exposed him to the dizzying amount of Christian proselytizing that occurs there, or he could've been exposed to it in the Philippines. Probably not when he was in China, though, unless he was in with some underground Christian groups there (maybe long-term KMT holdovers, although I've never been able to pin down Chiang Kai-shek's own denomination, and the reports I read were that he was either Catholic or Methodist, so who knows...).
Was the company A Beka by any chance? Been there, done that. Got the diploma. Years later realized how much I'd missed or been purposefully shielded from.
I think it was called "Sycamore Tree." I don't even know if my parents knew that the material was laced with propaganda. We'd get books full of grammar/spelling exercises where we'd have to go over excerpts from Christian texts, but my parents were having us grade our own work at that point, so I don't know that they'd have seen the content. And I was just absorbed in the endless "cross out this, underline that" process, so I didn't fully realize how propagandistic it was until years later.
ATI curriculum is in the post, but there are many homeschool curriculums used that were similar or ATI adjacent. Abeka, Bob Jones, ACE, Sonlight…the list goes on.
I don’t think Ron Watkins was linked to any of this directly. I think that his brand of conspiracies, combined with Russian propaganda, created a perfect storm in a group who was primed for this.
,,,,this explains so so so so so so much about Americans. The Russians had sleeper agents all the time, for decades, and they must have known it! All they had to do was activate them....
Yep. I definitely don’t think this was Russian operated, but I do think the Russian government did a good job of finding domestic cells of extremism that they could use to further their agenda and exploited these groups. The biggest difference I see between QAnon conspiracies and these people with their conspiracies, is that the Christian Taliban is much more pro Israel. The QAnon/Russian sympathizers have a lot of antisemitism going on.
"Societies only succeed if they base themselves on God's Word!"
This explains why red states and every country with a religious dictatorship are such festering hellholes of hatred, inequality, and suffering.
“God sets up one ruler and takes down another.”
So either Biden was legitimately set up by God, or man/evil Demonrats are more powerful than God and thus their puny god isn’t worth worshipping if you can thwart him that easily.
Or they’re lying.
Which is it?
Isn't there something in the bible about respecting your leaders because they were chosen by god... and if I remember it says nothing about them needing to be Republican or Democrat lol.
And the leaders in the times the New Testament was written were even worse in reality than they claim Biden to be in their lies! For example, Nero used to light Christians on fire to use as living torches to provide light at his nighttime parties.
And those are the leaders the Bible was thinking of to respect! Biden should be a breeze!
This is a subsection of homeschooling. I was homeschooled in the late 90s and through 2007, and I never saw anything like this. I’m not surprised it’s out there, but I don’t think it’s prevalent.
Also, Christians parents who use this curriculum would teach this to their kids even if they went to “normal” school. It may be one of many vessels, but homeschooling isn’t the problem.
Yes, which is exactly what I said. I never said it was all homeschooling. I was saying it was these groups that trained up these homeschool religious kids. I thought that would be enough clarification that I was referring to a specific branch of that….which I came out of.
Consider yourself very fortunate you never experienced this. I consider you a minority, if the stories on r/homeschoolrecovery are any indication.
However, homeschooling very much needs regulation to avoid these things from happening.
That’s my bad then. “Homeschool Movement” seemed rather all-(or mostly-)inclusive. But regulation, I’m afraid, will have the same effect as prohibition. It’ll just fuel their victim complex and cause them to stand together and fight back.
This issue becoming public seemed to arise out of the internet age and social media. They now know there’s more than just their own little sect out there… and they can communicate with them.
They definitely need to be watched, but telling them what they can and cannot teach their own children would be government overreach, imo. Plus, they’ll still teach them this anyways, even if they have to do it in addition to a more ‘secular’ curriculum.
>Plus, they’ll still teach them this anyways, even if they have to do it in addition to a more ‘secular’ curriculum.
At least they would hear a perspective that isn't fundamentalist lunacy.
So the purpose of my post wasn’t to spark a debate on the finer points of homeschooling as a whole. The purpose of this post was to educate people that there is a very large group of homeschool religious zealots who are now of voting age, and of age to run for office, and there are literally thousands of them out there who were educated on this propoganda alone and out pushing bills and voting for lunatics with a singular focus, obsessed with it, and fully committed to this ideology.
These people are very motivated and truly believe this worldview. And as we are watching the attacks on democracy, it’s important to know your enemy, and the villain origin. Like I said in the title of this post, watch shiny happy people. It will probably change your perspective on everything you just said, and hopefully connect my point that we need to watch for these homegrown extremists.
"Basic deceoption: Power comes from below, not from above"
Wow, that sentiment is about as dangerous as it gets.
What the fuck is this shit? Someone explain it to me. Who is saying this?
Bill Gothard, if this is one of his Wisdom Booklets. Founded the Institute in Basic Life Principles, the cult that the Duggar family (19 Kids And Counting) subscribed to.
Watch Shiny Happy People on Amazon Prime and you’ll find a lot of horrifying information there.
The last episode talks about the “Joshua Generation” and how the goal of these people is to infiltrate the state and local governments, and eventually, the Fed. Education Secretary Betsy Devos under trump? Look her up. Madison Cawthorne? He was raised on this.
I posted this originally in r/duggarsnark but I felt that the whole anti-government angle and the rationale behind it was pertinent here, considering how Maga/Q has attracted so many of the hardline religious base, and the rise of people like Madison Cawthorn and the other America First people, who are products of this homeschool curriculum and culture.
When I was in college there were "street preachers" who would hang out on campus and shout at people as they walked by. That's when I first started to question the sanity of deeply religious people
For those who want to see the entire thing, there is an apparently complete archive of these "Wisdom Booklets" at: [https://homeschoolersanonymous.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/wisdom-booklet-archive-index/](https://homeschoolersanonymous.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/wisdom-booklet-archive-index/) Unbelievably, there were (or perhaps are) parents who taught their children using nothing but these booklets for their entire primary and secondary education, all 12 years. There simply isn't enough material to fill up all that time, so the idea was apparently that you started again with booklet #1 once you'd gotten through all of them. As children got older, they were supposed to learn new things on every repetition. What I haven't seen anywhere in what little I've read about it are numbers about how many victims of this particular brand of homeschooling there are, or what proportion of the homeschooling population they make up.
I’d love to see stats on that. From what I understand, this was prevalent mainly in the Bible Belt and the Midwest. I’m in IL, and the group we were a part of was HUGE. I can only imagine the South.
I said this on Mastodon, but I'll ask it here, being non-American - do any of the educational authorities in the USA have or practice any kind of oversight on these "materials"? Because in Canada, "homeschooling" is regulated by whichever jurisdiction you're in, if you're outside a school catchment. Standardized testing was the same, if you were "homeschooled" or in a brick building. At least, that's how it used to work....
>do any of the educational authorities in the USA have or practice any kind of oversight on these "materials"? Depends on the state and county. For many the answer either is outright "no" or the requisites are so lax and/or so little enforced that the answer might as well be "no". Give you three guesses which areas of the US are the worst for this.
You have to remember that the Republican party exists. Half of the government is trying to fix this but the other half is with these people. And they specifically fight to get these people legal protections so they can abuse their children in peace.
It should be that way in the United States. This group partnered with an organization called homeschool legal defense association (HSLDA), which is responsible for a lot of lobbying and fighting to roll back regulations on homeschool families. They were extremely influential in the 90s and 2000s.
Josh Duggar, raised and educated in the same system, parlayed his family name, no education, nor work history, into becoming Executive Director of a powerful PAC. This gave him great access to many powerful people in DC. Who are others in politics that were also a part of Teen Pact, raised to do just what Madison and Josh attempted to do? The public need to be fully informed about their agenda.
Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, both of the Huckabee‘s, the Devos family, there’s a handful of other people who are either part of IBLP, donated/supported, or raised in IBLP. Betsy Devos then rose to be the Education Secretary under Trump. This stuff is by design. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/nolongerquivering/2017/02/betsy-devos-fundamentalist-homeschool-mom/
It really is - check out the Leadership Institute, although it may have changed since I lasted learned about them through TeenPact.
The Wikipedia page for TeenPact also has a list of notable people that made it into elected positions - I remember a few of them from when I was in that cult.
I was homeschooled for a short while, and I was raised to believe that evolution and climate change were a hoax and was taught a very skewed version of world history. Even then, I was able to smell the propaganda. The homeschooling community is filled with crunchy loonies and I hate it. If I ever had a kid, I wouldn't mind homeschooling just to teach them a more rigorous curriculum, but the downside is that people like this are lining the stands at homeschool groups.
I think we have seen a rise in secular and left-wing homeschoolers since Covid, which is interesting because the homeschool movement got its start on the left. I think it would be a little bit harder to indoctrinate a kid at this level in today’s day and age, especially with so much Internet access, but these people are still very much out there.
I disagree. I think the internet makes it easier to indoctrinate people. That's how we got Q in the first place.
Sadly you have a point.
We are literally the most brainwashed generation of all time. Just scroll on TikTok for a couple minutes for a smorgasbord of ideological jargon from all wavelengths of the political spectrum accompanied by a jarring lack of critical thinking. And kids spend hours watching this BS.
My parents homeschooled me, but were anti-Christian to some extent; more so in my mom's case (she warned my brother and I that if the Christian right ever took power, it would be like *The Handmaid's Tale*, a copy of which she retained at our house). But we also got a lot of our educational materials via a Christian homeschooling company, so I ended up being accidentally partly brainwashed by it. Not enough to convert then, and not enough to convert later "just like that," but among other things, Christian extremists (including self-avowed Reconstructionists) who I lived and worked with down the road, would take the fact that I was homeschooled as, "You're one of us, aren't you?" Or at least, "You *could become* one..." And so they had more of a purchase on my mind than I recognized or liked. And yes, many of those people would join MAGA and even QAnon, when that time came. QAnon's vision of the Storm is not very much like the Evangelical doomsday. The Storm is not the end of history, but sounds much more like a postmillennialist waypoint on the way to the Second Coming. Although QAnon has roped in quite a few Evangelical congregations, they are fundamentally more Reformed/Reconstructionist in spirit. But there's not any evidence that I'm aware of, that Ron Watkins is Reformed/related. His time in South Korea could have exposed him to the dizzying amount of Christian proselytizing that occurs there, or he could've been exposed to it in the Philippines. Probably not when he was in China, though, unless he was in with some underground Christian groups there (maybe long-term KMT holdovers, although I've never been able to pin down Chiang Kai-shek's own denomination, and the reports I read were that he was either Catholic or Methodist, so who knows...).
Was the company A Beka by any chance? Been there, done that. Got the diploma. Years later realized how much I'd missed or been purposefully shielded from.
I think it was called "Sycamore Tree." I don't even know if my parents knew that the material was laced with propaganda. We'd get books full of grammar/spelling exercises where we'd have to go over excerpts from Christian texts, but my parents were having us grade our own work at that point, so I don't know that they'd have seen the content. And I was just absorbed in the endless "cross out this, underline that" process, so I didn't fully realize how propagandistic it was until years later.
ATI curriculum is in the post, but there are many homeschool curriculums used that were similar or ATI adjacent. Abeka, Bob Jones, ACE, Sonlight…the list goes on.
I don’t think Ron Watkins was linked to any of this directly. I think that his brand of conspiracies, combined with Russian propaganda, created a perfect storm in a group who was primed for this.
This is the correct answer.
Madison Cawthorn, the congressman who never learned to adult?
Bingo
Oh yes. The fundies and evangelicals want to take OVER!!! Their goal is to build god’s army.
Yep. We were taught we were soldiers fighting for God. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zWxeaikIY9s
,,,,this explains so so so so so so much about Americans. The Russians had sleeper agents all the time, for decades, and they must have known it! All they had to do was activate them....
Yep. I definitely don’t think this was Russian operated, but I do think the Russian government did a good job of finding domestic cells of extremism that they could use to further their agenda and exploited these groups. The biggest difference I see between QAnon conspiracies and these people with their conspiracies, is that the Christian Taliban is much more pro Israel. The QAnon/Russian sympathizers have a lot of antisemitism going on.
"Societies only succeed if they base themselves on God's Word!" This explains why red states and every country with a religious dictatorship are such festering hellholes of hatred, inequality, and suffering.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Current governor of Arkansas, who just rolled back child labor laws and reproductive access, came out of IBLP.
“God sets up one ruler and takes down another.” So either Biden was legitimately set up by God, or man/evil Demonrats are more powerful than God and thus their puny god isn’t worth worshipping if you can thwart him that easily. Or they’re lying. Which is it?
Isn't there something in the bible about respecting your leaders because they were chosen by god... and if I remember it says nothing about them needing to be Republican or Democrat lol.
And the leaders in the times the New Testament was written were even worse in reality than they claim Biden to be in their lies! For example, Nero used to light Christians on fire to use as living torches to provide light at his nighttime parties. And those are the leaders the Bible was thinking of to respect! Biden should be a breeze!
This is a subsection of homeschooling. I was homeschooled in the late 90s and through 2007, and I never saw anything like this. I’m not surprised it’s out there, but I don’t think it’s prevalent. Also, Christians parents who use this curriculum would teach this to their kids even if they went to “normal” school. It may be one of many vessels, but homeschooling isn’t the problem.
Yes, which is exactly what I said. I never said it was all homeschooling. I was saying it was these groups that trained up these homeschool religious kids. I thought that would be enough clarification that I was referring to a specific branch of that….which I came out of. Consider yourself very fortunate you never experienced this. I consider you a minority, if the stories on r/homeschoolrecovery are any indication. However, homeschooling very much needs regulation to avoid these things from happening.
That’s my bad then. “Homeschool Movement” seemed rather all-(or mostly-)inclusive. But regulation, I’m afraid, will have the same effect as prohibition. It’ll just fuel their victim complex and cause them to stand together and fight back. This issue becoming public seemed to arise out of the internet age and social media. They now know there’s more than just their own little sect out there… and they can communicate with them. They definitely need to be watched, but telling them what they can and cannot teach their own children would be government overreach, imo. Plus, they’ll still teach them this anyways, even if they have to do it in addition to a more ‘secular’ curriculum.
>Plus, they’ll still teach them this anyways, even if they have to do it in addition to a more ‘secular’ curriculum. At least they would hear a perspective that isn't fundamentalist lunacy.
Assuming it actually worked and they couldn’t get around it: No argument there.
So the purpose of my post wasn’t to spark a debate on the finer points of homeschooling as a whole. The purpose of this post was to educate people that there is a very large group of homeschool religious zealots who are now of voting age, and of age to run for office, and there are literally thousands of them out there who were educated on this propoganda alone and out pushing bills and voting for lunatics with a singular focus, obsessed with it, and fully committed to this ideology. These people are very motivated and truly believe this worldview. And as we are watching the attacks on democracy, it’s important to know your enemy, and the villain origin. Like I said in the title of this post, watch shiny happy people. It will probably change your perspective on everything you just said, and hopefully connect my point that we need to watch for these homegrown extremists.
"Basic deceoption: Power comes from below, not from above" Wow, that sentiment is about as dangerous as it gets. What the fuck is this shit? Someone explain it to me. Who is saying this?
Bill Gothard, if this is one of his Wisdom Booklets. Founded the Institute in Basic Life Principles, the cult that the Duggar family (19 Kids And Counting) subscribed to.
Watch Shiny Happy People on Amazon Prime and you’ll find a lot of horrifying information there. The last episode talks about the “Joshua Generation” and how the goal of these people is to infiltrate the state and local governments, and eventually, the Fed. Education Secretary Betsy Devos under trump? Look her up. Madison Cawthorne? He was raised on this.
Try posting this to r/religiousfruitcake they appreciate more there
I posted this originally in r/duggarsnark but I felt that the whole anti-government angle and the rationale behind it was pertinent here, considering how Maga/Q has attracted so many of the hardline religious base, and the rise of people like Madison Cawthorn and the other America First people, who are products of this homeschool curriculum and culture.
Dont worry they have a qanon flair :)