Zou Bisou Bisou
"I keep going to a lot of places and ending up somewhere I've already been."
After we woke up and put the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) and associates like the Baby Jane Group in the corner, they had to block us on Twitter, rewrite public statements of affiliation and accreditation, replace mandates with disclaimers at the NAIS People of Color Conference (PoCC), and suicide pages of their websites and social media faster than a Clinton associate. Subsequently, Independent X School may have seemed quiet recently, but NAIS has been using this time of parent ennui for marketing and rebranding. The PR transmissions will indeed resume. In fact, they never stop.
“You’re going to need a stronger stomach if you’re going to be back in the kitchen seeing how the sausage is made.”
Matthew Weiner’s (Harvard-Westlake, CA) Mad Men John Slattery (St. Sebastian’s, MA) and Jon Hamm (John Burroughs, MO) knew too well what a woman is. In the real world, NAIS School alums like WEF Fanboy Edelman CEO Richard Edelman (Exeter, NH) use new media in the circle of cross influence to twist our information and beliefs as well as our consumerism to normalize when a SCOTUS justice claims not to know what a woman is. Recall endless protests against environmentally destructive Canadian tar sands? Of course not, Edelman preemptively averted negative PR. Don’t shave your pubes with Gillette razors? You’re not a liberated feminist who knows masculinity is toxic. Use Dove soap? You a girl-boss for refusing to conform to mainstream beauty standards by keeping on those extra 120 pounds even though you have trouble breathing.
Back in the day, we used soap and face cream. Then Clinique pioneered a three-step skin care system, and the campaign to reinvent our skin care regime was unleashed. Now we perform multi-step regimes with cleansers, toners, serums, eye creams, moisturizers, essential oils, and sunscreens with retinols, exfoliators, brighteners, anti-agers, and antioxidants. We don’t need these excessive products – it’s all marketing. Everything old is simply repackaged and rebranded. High fructose corn syrup is now maize syrup, glucose syrup, glucose-fructose syrup, tapioca syrup, fruit fructose, crystalline fructose, isoglucose, dahlia syrup, or corn sugar. Woke is now the new n-word says Taft (CT) and Westminster (CT) mom Soledad O’Brien. Marketing.
As Dan-mode ChatGPT explains, creative marketing includes rebranding, which is done to refresh and create a new brand image in the mind of consumers, often done to distance a brand from negative associations. “Anti-racism” is simply a rebrand of discrimination. DEI/SEL is simply a rebrand of CRT/BLM. CRT/BLM is simply a rebrand of Marxism. (Everything is a rebrand of Marxism. Was it James Lindsay who said the Great Leap Forward was just a sales pitch?) Sometimes these negative associations hide something more sinister.
“If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.”
Thus, it came as no surprise last week’s 2023 NAIS Annual Conference touted “Community!” while advancing the same divisive DEI/SEL topics. Amidst what no doubt involved even more partying than December’s PoCC Conference, presentations at the Vegas, baby! conference included: Foundational Practices to Integrate and Apply SEL and DEI in Schools (self-explanatory); Developing Experiential Knowledge for Creating Safe Spaces to Facilitate Challenging Conversations (advising segregated bipoc and trans kids how to create barriers between them and whites and their own parents); Design for Belonging (normalizing trans and other anti-social illness); Becoming a Credible Leader and How That Impacts Your Ability to Build Community (lying and gaslighting parents and non-DEI-ascribing teachers); and Bridging Ideological Divides: Building a True Sense of Community Among Diverse Individuals (ridding Independent X School of all dissidents). Fresh from complimentary massages after another night of partying, Independent X School attendees (whose attendance is paid with our tuition) could hear speakers Mica Pollock examine how educators could make “equitable school communities” amid “a surge in efforts to restrict such work” (combat parents who are standing against Marxification of schools), Jamil Zaki discuss “strategies to rebuild trust and empathy among adults and students” (pretend to feel the pain of parents and students while gaslighting them), and Van Jones analyze polarization (compel leftism). All in all, an exercise in paradigm blindness.
But wait, there’s more! An analysis of the sponsors and speaker backgrounds provides a more sinister agenda. In addition to the usual grift placement firms Carney Sandoe, RG175, and relative newbie Storbeck Search, sponsors included Verger Capital (supplanting additional fiduciary judgment from trustees with people who make $$ directing our endowments), Veracross (storing all of our and our children’s data to build a shadow social credit system), Dewar (insuring our tuition payments safely in the control of autocratic NAIS headmasters), Minerva Project (embedding pedagogy in our hybrid learning future), and Let Grow (grooming children for pedos). Susan Fonseca Lanham, who spoke on the future of school, helped found Singularity University, whose members have been convicted of insider trading and running a credit fraud operation and was co-founded by Ray Kurzweil aka the grandfather of transhumanism. Transhumanism, folks! This is not a conspiracy theory. They are telling us the agenda, and it is not foundational academics and basic kindness. We hope you like banana milkshakes as much as Elon’s monkeys.
“People want to be told what to do so badly that they’ll listen to anyone.”
Now considering who sponsors NAIS conferences, will you rethink sending your children to the NAIS Student Diversity Leadership Conference (SDLC) with hard-partying NAIS PoCC teachers where Mickey Mouse headband Rodney Glasgow warns our children not to tell their parents or anyone else what they discuss and do at SDLC? Consider also recent video of Al Vernacchio, a “sex educator” who makes George Santos look like Brad Pitt, proclaiming at Friends Central (PA) that every single child is sexual from birth and should receive “transformative sex ed” no matter how young. Turns out our children were shown Vernacchio’s TED Talks about sex and pizza at schools like Collegiate (NY) nearly a decade ago. So tell us NAIS, what Community! are you trying to cultivate exactly? A butt plug providing pedo community? Lord of the Flies anarchy, Crucible witch hunts, bipoc students protesting to oust white diversity directors? Nate Bronstein’s abusers facing no accountability or punishment after bullying him into killing himself, covering up sexual abuse, and encouraging eleven-year-olds to declare sexualities are the opposite of NAIS making a safe Community!
"People will show you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be."
NAIS shows no humility or awareness that these past 2-3 years of parent outrage could have any ounce of legitimacy. They only rebrand Community! for all things DEI/SEL to disguise the true goal – Marxism, and the true motivation – grift. You see, nothing is simply rolled out. NAIS Schools didn’t simultaneously roll out #BlackAt accounts, change age-old mission statements, inject the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into programming, and start labeling everything Community! by coincidence. Everything is carefully messaged. Everything has been focus grouped. It’s all marketing. You think you’re buying Crème de la Mer when you’re just buying Nivea at 25x mark up. If you want to avoid high fructose corn syrup, you better know its new names. If you want to avoid DEI/SEL, you better understand every rebranded “reimagined” moniker. Without a fundamental understanding of the who, what, why, and how, you will continue to fall for the marketing time and time again. Making it all the more crucial we heed O Captain, My Captain James Lindsay.
Because unlike high fructose corn syrup, there are no disclosure laws for DEI/SEL. There is no discussion of the side effects of DEI/SEL – the depression, narcissism, anxiety, bullying, low self-esteem. Independent X School Headmasters: It’s not workload or “climate change” making our students anxious and depressed! Without discussion of the benefits and failings of DEI/SEL, our children need something additional – anti-anxiety medication, therapy – to remedy the damage DEI/SEL wreaks. As we catch on to the destruction wrought by DEI/SEL, it is simply rebranded Community! Rebranding keeps concepts and language moving targets, ensuring School Choice ChadGPTs always remain two steps behind and any legislation opposing DEI/SEL language staler than last season’s Zimmerman. As we all know, it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.
In today’s global world, no institution is an island. NAIS and Madison Avenue maintain a symbiotic, or rather a co-parasitic relationship. Just as the literate class is only now writing how the crisis of democratic capitalism involves risks laden within new interventionism, so too are the elite blind to the fact that the same holds true for DEI/SEL. Are they really that dense, or are they intentionally belated to take full advantage of the grift?
“You need three ingredients for a cocktail. Vodka and Mountain Dew is an emergency.”
This current NAIS rebranding scheme reveals the next phase of education – the whole child whole Community! agenda. Is it a coincidence that as Independent X School continues to infuse the SDGs and Climate Change in programming as advancing Community!, Edelman’s current wife is the founder of a foundation advancing DEI agenda, worked with UNICEF to advance the 2030 Agenda for the Sustainable Development Goals and Climate Change, and was the head of PR, media and special projects for the World Economic Forum? A match made in WEF heaven! Or that the US Summit on Transformative Education was held on the same days as the NAIS Annual Conference? Or that what started as an indy music festival and now bills itself as “one of the world's premier events showcasing music, film and interactive media,” South by Southwest has a comprehensive Education Conference (SXSW EDU)? We seem to recall a brilliant icon remarking that politics flows downstream from culture…
The goal is to reset education to encompass our whole lives – everything we learn, everything we do, everything we think, everyone we associate with, every part of us, so we have no capacity for anything else – to pour polluted East Palestine water into our cup so it is all we know, all we have, and all we can imbibe. It didn’t matter that Ginn Norris divulged its Marxist agenda, Trinity (NY) still engaged DEI industrial complex consultant Martha Haakmat for an upper school faculty indoctrination session as recently as February 15. But Community! is not relegated to NAIS Schools. That’s the beauty of this rebrand. Community! is so comforting, so unobjectionable, so amorphous, it is prêt a porter pour Christian schools – from “He Gets Us” Super Bowl commercials to Biblical SEL. Newly anointed NAIS President Debra Wilson succeeding Donna Orem shows NAIS is ready to rebrand and “Reset School.” While a seemingly innocuous selection, Wilson’s prior positions as NAIS GC for nearly two decades and president who radicalized SAIS show she is a dedicated comrade to the new Community! agenda.
“Just cash the cheques, you’re going to die one day.”
This is also why the curious case of Project Veritas is so relevant. No one should ever be crucified by Stubbs & Wootton donning Christians. Weak board members can allow for suspiciously activist directors to ruin an institution from the inside while administrative bureaucrats send tone deaf communications to donors. How does Spence (NY) claim a $20K per student tuition gap while charging $65K tuition and possessing a $300 million endowment? Are we to believe a Board filled with “mega” bankers can’t square a budget? Or that Goldman and McKinsey flunkies are pinning a corporate ousting on expenses incurred for necessary transportation and a company Christmas party? But why so quiet at purported conservative media outlets? We thought you loved PV’s videos of private school faculty admitting to intentional lurid deceptions. No, this extends beyond outrage porn. Perhaps it involves Boat Bro Barry Hinckley (he/him) (Deerfield, MA) advising EdTech group uschool.com (acquired by Invata) and the banging of the neocon Kochtopus School Choice platform? Like DeSantis winning big in non-Dominion voting machine districts, we wouldn’t bet against it. O’Keefe should count on his donors and Independent X Trustees on parents to support our institutions against interloping corporate raiders and NAIS.
Shits & Giggles Corner
