The Trigger: The Lie That Changed the World

1048 Pages·2019·23.637 MB·English

by  David Icke

Acknowledgements
No work such as this arises from a vacuum without personal experiences or the insight and
assistance of others. In addition to our own experiences and research, we are grateful to Dr.
Scott D. deHart for looking over this book in its earliest phases and for providing numerous
insights and suggestions.
Among those who have provided us with memes and insights into the mentality of the
modern administrative national security state, we are in particular grateful to Catherine Austin
Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the administration of George
Herbert Walker Bush, who provided the key insight that Common Core’s individually adaptive assessment
process was the other half of ObamaCare, and deliberately designed to supplement and expand the power of
the surveillance state, and is its complement to harvest that last remaining part of the local economy, in
education and health care.
Finally, we would like to thank the numerous researchers, only a narrow handful who are cited in this
work, who have sought to raise the alarm at the growing power of corporations and the now evident
disastrous effects their policies have had on American education over the last century, of which Common Core
and its assessment process are only the final end.
Joseph P. Farrell
Gary Lawrence
2016
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Catherine Austin Fitts
Preface
Part One: The Historical Matrix of the Public School and the Standardized Test
1. Measurement Mania, Or, Tales from the Dark Side: Measuring the Measures and Measurers
A. Inside the Testing Corporatocracy: Whistleblower Todd Farley Talks
1. The Resemblance of Standardized Tests to Electronic Surveillance
2. The Human Factor: The Scorers Themselves
B. Farley’s Details of the Testing Devil
1. Getting the Feet Wet: Farley’s First Test Scoring Experience
2. “The Committee Said…”: The Banality of Edubabble
a. “Calibrating the Group”
b. The Correct Adjective for the Flavor of Pizza (and Ice Cream)
c. Determining the Rubric: Was that “Fizzes” or “Fizzles”?
3. The Unreliability of the Reliability Numbers
4. Interpreting the Rubric, or Rubric Creep
5. Eliminating the Human Factor
2. The Twitification of America: “Facilitators” and the Standardized Test
A. Hoffmann, the Standardized Test, and the Punishment of Individual Brilliance and Creativity
1. Jacques Barzun’s Foreword
2. “Simple” Questions, the Problem of Interpretation, and the Punishment of “the Finer Mind”
3. Testing the Tests
B. The Real Goal?: Hoffmann vs. the Educational Testing Service on Questions of Science
1. Deeper Ambiguities and Analogies
2. The Use of Statistics by Test-Defenders
3. The Strategies and Tactics of Defense of Standardized Tests in Practice: The Science Questions
and Hoffmann’s Battle with the Educational Testing Service
4. An Appendix
3. Elites, Educators, Facilitators, and Foundations: Part One: Wundt, Americans and Teachers as
Change Agents
A. Common Core Standards and the Common Core Assessment Process: Two Different Things, and a
Clever Strategy
B. The Education Episcopacy, the Testing Theocracy, and the Wundtian Succession
1. Conant and the Revolutionary Transformation of the American High School
2. “The Leipzig Connection”: The Stimulus-Response Cosmology and the Redefinition of
Education and the Teacher
C. Dewey, Counts, and the Rockefellers
1. The First Wundtian Succession: Wundt, Hall, and Dewey
2. The Second Wundtian Succession: Wundt, Russell, Thorndike, and the Columbia Teachers
College
3. The First Wundtian Succession Again, and George S. Counts
4. The “Edugarchy”: Standardized Testing, and the Cosmology of the Global Skinner Box
A. The Dumbed-Down Elites and Quackery at the Heart of Quackademia: Abraham Flexner, the
Rockefeller General Education Board, and the Lincoln School
1. Flexner and the Beginning of “Allopathic” Medicine
2. Flexner’s Lincoln School: Dumbing Down the Elite Themselves
B. Conant, Chauncey, and the Testing Theocracy
1. Education for “World Citizenship”
2. Henry Chauncey and the “Census of Abilities”
3. A Coup d’État via Social Engineering and Standardized Testing
4. The First Dirty Little Secret: The Designer of the SAT was a Eugenicist
5. The Invention of the Markograph and Computerized “Objective” Evaluation, and the Emergence
of the Educational-Industrial Complex
5. “The Business Model” of Billionaire Busybodies: Foundations and the Educational-Industrial
Complex
A. The Technology Factor and the Education-Industrial Complex
1. The Computer, Standardized Tests, and Operant Conditioning of the Student
2. Teacher Evaluation of Operant Conditioning
3. Schools as Change Agents: Social Engineering, “Lifetime Learning Accounts,” and the
Harvesting of the Individual
B. The Foundations Factor
1. Tests, “Deschooling,” and Governance
2. The Power and Unaccountability of Foundations
a. The Short-Lived Cox Committee, and its Findings
b. The Reece Committee Enabling Resolution
3. The Reece Committee Findings
a. The Historical Parallels and Medieval Foundations
b. Substantive Findings
c. Methodological Findings
4. The Dirtiest Connection: The Edugarchy, Mind Control, the National Security State and the
Surveillance Culture
6. “More” Is Neither Better Nor Necessary: Concluding Remarks
A. The Modern Classroom
B. More of What?
C. Ineffective Solutions Offered
1. More Time
2. More Homework
3. More Summer Assignments
4. More “Group Work”
5. More Technology
6. More Teacher Workshops and “Professional Development”
7. On-Site “Professional Development”
8. Off-Site Conferences for “Professional Development”
9. What is Effective Teaching?
Epilogue — Our Wings Are Melting: Artificial Intelligence and the Enslavement of the Human Mind
Bibliography
Foreword
by Catherine Austin Fitts
It took me two decades to face the enormity of what is happening in our educational system.
I am an investment banker and advisor by trade. I have arranged over a billion dollars in financing
for major universities and educational institutions. I served on the boards of the private school and
university I attended. I served on the boards of a prestigious teachers college and the government-
sponsored enterprise that securitizes student loans. I started a data servicing training center and
invested significantly in relational databases that informed the relationships between local education
and real estate and property values. Despite those opportunities, I confess to being slow to see the writing on
the wall.
My wake-up call started in 1998 when a group of senior employees at the CIA tried to persuade me to
support George W. Bush, then governor of Texas, for President. He was going to be, they said, “the education
president.” I had worked in his father’s campaign in 1988. George H.W. Bush had also wanted to be “the
education president” but never seemed to get anywhere with it.
It did not strike me as strange that government-funded employees at the CIA were working to get Governor
Bush elected. I believed that the CIA had actively worked to get Bush’s father elected Vice President after he
served as CIA director. Vice President Bush was responsible for running the national security, intelligence and
enforcement government lines, so I had also assumed they were instrumental in also supporting his campaign
for President.
So the notion that senior CIA personnel were actively working for the son just seemed to be the natural
flow of events in Washington. Presumably, they had chosen education because it would help to get him
elected. It was a political strategy—something to be discarded after the candidate was elected.
I remember receiving e-mail at the time from a woman who worked in a senior position at the CIA. She
sent me a speech that Governor George W. Bush had given on education. Wasn’t it terrific? I shot back, no, it
was terrible. She replied, challenging me to explain why. I wrote back a long e-mail about what I would have
said instead.
Imagine my surprise several weeks later when I opened up the paper and there was an article about
Governor’s Bush’s latest speech on education, including an entire paragraph essentially from my e-mail, as if
it were his own.
Looking back on that day, I am amazed that I did not see the dangers approaching.
When litigation with the federal government meant my company had to stop financing our data servicing
training and work center in a community in Washington, I was amazed at the speed at which the Gates
Foundation moved in and rebranded the project as their own. But I still did not focus on the fact that private
fortunes were amassing and, in partnership with the U.S. government, were working hard in the trenches to
engineer a top-down revolution in American education.
A year later, I moved to a rural area and started to hear the complaints of caring, concerned teachers
struggling with efforts to drug and vaccinate children and centralize control of curriculum.