As you might remember from school, not all members of Columbus’ crew were as keen about their little experiment as was their captain. When success was snatched away from the jaws of defeatists, these defeatists didn’t give up. They are still with us today. I’ve seen them at work in the schools, and sadly at the school of the nearby prison where some inmates are desperate to get a high school diploma and better their lives.

Good luck with that, as the history assignments I saw there after having been offered a teaching job dealt only with America’s lowest points and failures, such as slavery and the Indian wars. The teachers said they saw inmates as victims, not of their own wrong choices, but of an oppressive victimizing society, a typical leftist view, and one prone to increase violence, hopelessness and recidivism.

The whole operation is run out of San Francisco, and the staff wanted to make it clear that one of their own called themselves Amerika, yes with a “k.” How edgy, how cool, how naive. Your Amerikan tax dollars at work.

The teacher’s metaphoric ancestors could have been part of Columbus’ mutiny-planning crew. Waiting for his expedition a little farther away was an incredible forest primeval, stretching from the New World’s shore’s to the Mississippi, the future setting of one of history’s greatest physical, political and spiritual struggles for goodness, for right over wrong, a struggle that continues to this day.

Totally overlooked by the members of the crew’s “fifth column” and their generational offspring, they chose then as now to focus on a few diseased and dying trees. These trees still fill their every thought. I wonder if such undying need only to criticize and condemn relates to feelings of being unloved and unnoticed, or possibly self-hatred?

In any case, these mutinous, perpetual spoilers acknowledge only the negative results of Columbus’ exploits and so miss, metaphorically and actually, the magnificent forest for the few sick trees.

These negative aspects of our history were and are caused by “human nature” rather than racist claims of “European nature.” For instance, later arriving tribes had to take a break from fighting earlier arriving tribes over their territory to take on the yet newer tribe from Europe. Such human nature is redeemable only by interaction with the “divine nature.”

At its root, leftism despises this redeeming nature and also the deity of the Judeo-Christian moral system, and so rejects such possible redemption. This, despite leftists’ insistence that others treat them according to the immovable objective standard of that moral code, and despite that code allowing them the type of life they demand.

The disinformation campaign is evidently near completion. I attended a city council meeting where people got up in front of the council to say that when they look at the council, they don’t feel eligible to be in that same office because the council members don’t look like that speaker, ethnically speaking, rather than, I assume, species speaking. The brainwashing that parents pay for when they send their kids to many universities is almost complete.

Well done, parents. Talk about foolishly paying for the destruction of all the values they raised their children with, or more likely, their own parents raised them with. These bemoaning citizens before the council never learned (from MLK, et al.) that one’s identity and significance should have nothing to do with their race or color of their skin. They should have looked at the council and thought, “I can do that job; they are simply American citizens, just like me. I have the character and American values it takes.” But that never dawned on them, thanks to the leftist indoctrination of the schools, the news media, social media, entertainment and the courts. The leftist justices are choking the life out of our blood-bought liberties and are appointed due to liberals voting for leftists.

What’s the difference between liberals and leftists? Liberals, like conservatives, love this country because they love our Constitution and liberty, and they value the efforts and ideals of our founders and framers, if not the men themselves. Leftists, on the other hand, hate our country, our founders and liberty specifically, and Western civilization in general.

Did you ever wonder why the left, who are so vocal about women’s rights and gay rights and are against the death penalty are simultaneously silent about female mutilation, honor killings and horrendous human sacrifice by way of beheadings brought to us by intolerant radical Islam?

It’s because such real evils are not what the left feels are their enemies. We Americans, we of the West, are what the left sees as their enemies. They hate the very things that grant them the right to vocalize their hatred, while at the same time denying our founders’ claim of such rights being endowed by their Creator, and therefore not to be rescinded by a human entity.

They also hate success and the successful, unless the prosperous and successful happen to be espousing leftists. They want neither to advance nor reform our nation, but rather to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.”

If they even “liked” our country, such thinking would be illogical and contradictory. As it is, their thinking is also evil, because historically such unjustified “transformations” invite tyranny, not liberty.

Leftists don’t have to threaten to move to the “Great White North” to show their disdain for America and its institutions, as they have seceded long ago in every way but physically. Not unlike how a twisted cancer cell becomes deadly but doesn’t remove itself. It’s not that they don’t think like middle America; it’s that they don’t think correctly at all, and in fact, can’t. Their foundation is false, so how can anything be built upon it that is true? They have nothing to offer but anger, hatred and violence, because the only people they ever listened to were their leftist professors.

“What are you rebelling against?” Brando’s character was asked in “The Wild One,” to which he replied, “Whatdaya got?” Exactly, and perfectly, adolescent.

We all know how the world-wide socialist movement worked out, give or take 60 million to 100 million innocent lives taken by their own secular governments. (Kids please note: Wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt does not make you look hip, it just makes you look either mis-educated, or ignorant, or well-educated but stupid.)

How to know if you’re a leftist: When I referred above to the Great White North, a leftist would have automatically and perhaps autonomically heard the term “white” and thought of Canada as the land of privileged Caucasians rather than the “land of snow,” which is what the term “Canada” really means. No, not really, but what does it mean? “The promised land of pop prima donnas who don’t allow work crews to speak to them or make eye contact?” (No, that last one, sadly, and pathologically, is true.) For the rest of this article and their existence on Earth, I am renaming leftists (as opposed to well-meaning, America loving liberals) “wrongists,” because getting everything wrong is the one thing they do right.

Wrongists want all of California to secede from the Union because it would make a bigger splash in the adult’s pool than leaving individually, which they are free, but evidently too immature to do. While a wrongist may question whether they can even emotionally survive a presidency they voted against, anyone above the emotional age of 12 is able to ask the following: Will Californians appreciate not having the United Stated of America come to their aid if say, something like a huge, devastating earthquake were to occur? A tsunami? Major fires? If a San Andreas event severed the aqueduct, who would help rebuild it in time to save countless lives? Will Californians be charged more for water coming from neighboring desert states now belonging to another country, after California has emancipated itself from it former, “unworthy” family that it has run away from home from to escape? Won’t water prices have an effect on the price of our food? Will Californians call on its recently renounced former fellow citizens to then help with rebuilding roads and “very slow high speed rail to nowhere” projects? Can we support not one, but two university-indoctrination systems without federal funds? What do you think – the price of gas, up or down? Maybe we can plan it using Michael Moore’s approach and just figure it out as we go, without a plan. Maybe a whole new system.

They forget that there is nothing new, and no new system under the sun, and what we have is so greatly superior for the 99 percent, for the “everyman” (man as in “mankind,” OK?) than anything else conceived. Just ask Winston Churchill, Great Britain’s prime minister during World War II, who remarked that our system was the worst form of government, except for all the others. Churchill despised socialism, and was also the man of the century because for years he stood alone against something wrongists say they hate, and yet act like they love, namely fascism. The wrongists are changing decent society’s vocabulary a la 1984’s dystopia and shutting down opposing views. That’s fascist, and while it is politically correct, it is morally incorrect (not that that bothers wrongists) and a real evil, a thing the wrongists never fight, because they’d be fighting against their own ideology.

Wrongists desire ever bigger government and dependence on the state that they look to as “the answer” and “savior” to their desire of staying perpetual children. They want to run away, to secede, only because they are upset they don’t always get their way. The wrongists are anti-liberty and pro-compliance. They don’t desire self-control and self-government, so they are left needing to run away to live with a Big Brother, which is not the choice of grown-ups.

Another leading climate scientist has recently mutinied against the mutineers, blowing the whistle on the misinformation campaign used by wrongists that has also helped politicize government funded science. The wrongist media said and wrote nothing about it. They continue to believe that “the science is settled,” despite the fact that the scientific method is always open to new information and therefore never final. Otherwise, doctors today would still not be washing their hands or surgical instruments as was the case not long enough ago. Germs? No such thing as germs that you can’t see – are you, crazy? How dare you make us scientists question things?

Truth is not a value of the wrongists. Al Gore makes one hysterical prediction after another and winds up with a Nobel Prize and an Oscar for Best Wrongist Movie of the Year, despite his predictions not having come true. No, the seas didn’t rise to flood the ocean front estate he bought and can no doubt point out, as he flies over in a non-environmental friendly private jet. Nay, let’s call his hysterical mistakes about carbon footprints what they really are, the prints of a jackboot worn by those either desperate for control or suffering from OCDG (obsessive compulsive disorder, g for green.) And the media says nothing about this lock-step polluted science, because they agree with Gore.

The same media giggled like little girls when Quayle misspelled “potato” in an attempt to save someone else from embarrassment, but when their recent hero misspelled “respect,” or when he said Hawaii, where he grew up, was part of Asia, or when he referred to “my Muslim faith, uh, Christian faith” or when he talked of America’s “57” states, or when he promised we all could keep our health plans, or when his Speaker of the House said “we have to pass the (healthcare) bill so you can find out what’s in it …,” or when Gore said our national motto completely backwards – “Out of One, Many,” the wrongist media slapped hands over their collective mouths, ears and eyes. They “see, hear and speak no evil” of their own. They care about appearances, wanting to be accepted by those they preach to, while not being at all concerned about being truthful. Like adolescents, they’d rather not stand out as one of the “un-cool” kids holding unpopular views. What they should be concerned about is standing out as just plain kids.

To the wrongist media, the past President was brilliant, because he, like they, believed their America hating professors, the fascists of the left. Now they expect a Bernie-esque free ride, and free everything, as hopeful perpetual wards of the state. Then they rebel against the adults who must tell them “no.” Maybe it’s how they get their significance and identity, or maybe it’s just their level of adolescent development. Or, it could be a hardened heart, spiritually speaking.

Like addicts, wrongists project their own prejudice, their own temptations and obsessive urges on everyone’s motivations. Their imbedded impulses categorize everything they see and the motivations behind them, as Dennis Prager points out, as based on race, gender or class. This unholy trinity took root due to nature abhorring a vacuum. The wrongists siphoned off millennia of accepted wisdom and spat it out, leaving nothing to fill that vacuum but lies. Lies about God, family, men, fathers and life, not to mention life’s meaning. Their wrongist politics are their “replacement God” for the real and true and good God they’ve been taught to hate, or at the very least, reject.

Wrongists, instead of seeing racism only where it exists, claim to see it everywhere and in everyone they disagree with. This, despite their having swallowed the poisoned doctrine of “subjectivism,” the idea that all values and cultures are morally equal, and therefore unjudgeable. Yet, this would include American values and culture, which they both judge and despise, a pretty neat trick. Yet they rightly judge Nazi Germany as evil when they themselves not only mock the very idea of evil, but then call America evil, after saying there are no superior or inferior aspects to any culture or country. And still the wrongists accuse anyone of racism who disagreed with the recent attempt to “fundamentally transform” a country they simultaneously claimed to love. A neat trick, delusion, or another lie?

As the wrongist foundation is cracked, they can’t but pervert the truth and all that is good and decent about mankind. They can’t believe that you don’t see, as they do, races rather than humans. They can’t believe you don’t see gender or class rather than decent or indecent people. They have chosen the curse of becoming what they say they hate. i.e., people full of hatred. All they do is project their own race-centric, gender-centric, class-centric bigotries on the majority of right thinking Americans who refuse to live in opposite-day insanity, who know that up isn’t down, that that right isn’t wrong, and that it definitely is not “left.”

Can things get any crazier? Why yes, yes they can. The wrongists who bring you all the above and a great deal more lunacy no longer allow you to compliment another culture’s contribution to the fashion world. Hear that beatniks? No more goatees, sandals or bongos, as that would not be cultural appreciation, but rather “cultural appropriation.” I wonder if these University-paid candidates for straight jackets put on the same cultural straight jacket they want the rest of us to wear when it comes time to eat some salsa (or dance to it), or order out for deli or Chinese food. Forget about listening to reggae, or using foreign phrases like “ouch,” let alone learning a new language. English itself, which is used by these accusers, is an amalgam of other culture’s languages. When will the wrongists let us alone? Never, not even when they have poisoned every well of civilization, decency and logic. This is because wrongists are truth-phobes.

Despite the wrongist belief that they are the true progressives, C.S. Lewis was correct in saying, “If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.” The wrongists’ temper-tantrum journey on their path paved with good intentions cannot result in their desired destination of a utopian “Swiss Family Robinson,” but rather a post-Constitutional, child-led “Lord of the Flies” hell.

So, to the inmates at our prison who are on their own voyage of discovery to a better life in their own New World, God Speed. Like Columbus, don’t be afraid of the new and unknown, but beware of the mutinous attitudes of the ungrateful, and therefore unhappy guides hired to teach you distorted history within a curriculum of victumhood. If undetected, they can crush your destinies like uncharted rocks and undetected shoals, dragging you down and sinking you.

And parents, congrats on hiring those math tutors and on your kid’s high SAT scores – they helped get them accepted to the prestigious indoctrination centers of your choice. The kids may never use that algebra, but learning how to think for themselves and think things through, might have kept them from becoming, and staying, such easily led lemmings. Forget about what Churchill and others have said about reading history and learning from it. Onward, progressive left. Wrongists unite. Forward, to the glorious cliff of victory.

Richard Hood is a retired history teacher and Valencia resident.