"You’ve been deliberately dumbed down. That's not a metaphor. That's the plan. And it's been carried out in every classroom, every TV broadcast, every local 'initiative.'"
~ Charlotte Iserbyt, whistleblower, author of The Deliberate Dumbing Down Of Ameica, former senior policy advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education under President Ronald Reagan.
As Long As We Fear Social Exclusion, We’re Controllable
Before we dive into Charlotte, let’s unpack why the world thinks she’s batshit crazy.
It’s about psychological warfare.
The most powerful method of psychological control—short of chains, guns, or gulags—is the threat of social exclusion. Not pandemics, bugs, or aliens - but losing friends.
We’re tribal by design. For millions of years, exile meant death by hyena. Our brains evolved not to seek truth but to spin narratives—internal PR firms working overtime to maximize our odds of staying inside the fire circle. Survival doesn’t reward honesty. It rewards compliance.
And today, the predator isn’t a saber-toothed tiger—it’s the threat of being uninvited. So we contort ourselves into pixel-perfect avatars. We lie through filters and signal with hashtags, not to express who we are, but to avoid being cast out.
The few who question the script, the strange birds who challenge orthodoxy, who refuse the dopamine rationing of social approval—are the key to our future. Not because they’re loud, or even right, but because they possess the most transformational substance on Earth: courage.
For a century or more, we’ve been nudged, herded, softened—taught to mistake compliance for virtue, to believe that questioning is dangerous, impolite, insane. The endgame isn’t national. It isn’t political. It’s planetary: a world so thoroughly managed, so anesthetized, that dissent is no longer punished—it’s preempted. Through psychological exclusion, economic throttling, and spiritual erosion, the architecture of obedience becomes self-sustaining.
Governments dissolve. Parties rebrand. Flags change. But the arrow keeps pointing in the same direction: centralization. Order over freedom. Safety over soul. AI technocracy, that merges social credit scores with digital money, ensuring our forever obedience to the Norm.
Which is why whistleblowers, the outcasts, the “kooks” are not fringe—they’re front line. They risk family, livelihood, their place in the tribe—all to keep the pilot light of liberty from flickering out. The next couple of years mark a historical Tee Minus Zero moment - we can continue the current standard vector, or build a new path through the jungle. One leads to perdition, the other to the unknown.
Years ago, I met Julian Assange. He was already in the eye of the global surveillance storm, hunted for doing the one thing modern power cannot abide: telling the truth. I asked him why he risked everything. He answered with calm intensity: “Courage is addictive.”
Courage is also energy positive, it builds on itself. 1.1 × 1.1 style.
Knowing this, it begins to make sense to gravitate towards individuals who can inspire you to break the comfort zone. And speak without a teleprompter.
This morning, submerged in a salt bath and drifting through algorithms, I discovered Charlotte. She detonated the script—2006, camcorder clarity, no filter. Charlotte Iserbyt. An archetype of defiant.
Who is Charlotte Iserbyt?
They called her a kook. They slapped her with a tinfoil charge and exiled her from the PTA potlucks. She didn’t care. Charlotte Iserbyt went on to torch the edifice—armed with a filing cabinet full of government documents.
She was a diplomat’s daughter turned bureaucratic saboteur—an insider who leaked. A patriot in the belly of the technocratic beast. From Red Cross missions in Japan to dinner parties in Brussels, she bore witness to the disintegration of national will. She saw nuns raped by UN peacekeepers in Katanga. She saw the blood-slick gears of global management churning long before the rest of us realized the chalkboards had been swapped for Skinner boxes. You think education is about learning? She’ll show you the memos where they called it behavior modification.
She wasn’t some fringe lunatic ranting in an echo chamber. She was a policy advisor inside the U.S. Department of Education—fired for leaking a blueprint to digitize and standardize American thought. She read the documents you were never meant to see. She sat in the change agent seminars. She was trained to identify “resistors”—and realized with horror that she was one. She saw the script: create the crisis, offer the solution, restructure the mind. It wasn’t curriculum—it was control.
Iserbyt didn’t whisper warnings. She published the files. The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America was more than a book—it became an indictment, a blueprint, a data dump from the edge of civilizational collapse. They said she was paranoid. She said, read the footnotes.
You don’t have to believe her. You just have to look around.
Her gist?
“The Humanist Manifesto isn't about kindness. It's the blueprint for global, atheistic control--no sovereignty, no religion, just centralized rule through the UN."
"They trained me to identify 'resistors' in my own community--people like me. That was the moment I knew: this was no reform, this was war on the American mind."
"The schools are psychological war zones. It's not about education anymore--it's about behavioral change, attitude adjustment, and moral destruction."
"Every president since the late 1800s--Republican or Democrat--has carried out the same globalist agenda. There is no difference at the top."
"The word 'kook' (or ‘conspiracy theorist’) is the kill shot. That's how they neutralize you. That's how they turn a truth-teller into a leper."
"Reagan could've shut down the Department of Education. He didn't. Instead, he signed the education merger with Gorbachev. That's not incompetence--that's betrayal."
"All these values education programs? They're Trojan horses. Wrapped in words like 'decision-making' or 'character-building,' but they hollow out children's values by design."
"We've been subjected to a 100-year plan--gradualism, dialectics, deception, media, and fake reform--boiling the frog until America doesn't even know it's cooked."
"The new regions being set up? They're not just bureaucratic shifts. They're Soviet-style zones of control. Gorbachev himself called the EU the 'new European Soviet.'"
"You've been deliberately dumbed down. That's not a metaphor. That's the plan. And it's been carried out in every classroom, every TV broadcast, every local 'initiative.'"
For the full delivery, I’ve provided links below. Enjoy. And spread the message.
Full Transcript
“Thank you so much for having me as a guest in your home and for being here with Sovereign Solutions. To begin, let me share how my journey of discovery started. Like many, once I uncovered what's really happening in the world, I've spent my life trying to help others understand so future generations can live in freedom, prosperity, and think and speak according to their own conscience.
My awakening began as a Foreign Service girl, spending 18 years abroad. I worked for the American Red Cross, stationed on Guam and in Japan, not Korea as originally planned during the Korean War. Returning to the U.S. on a third-class French freighter, I sat next to people from North Vietnam and China who had escaped communist regimes. Speaking French, I listened to their stories, which dissolved my misconceptions about Joseph McCarthy's claims of communist infiltration in our government. I realized there was something to be very worried about--that was my first awakening. After six months back in the U.S., I joined the State Department, working as an administrative assistant to ambassadors, first in South Africa, then in Brussels under Douglas MacArthur II, the general's nephew, where I met my husband. I noticed troubling signs about American foreign policy, especially the United Nations' actions in Katanga, Belgian Congo. I saw cables from Elizabethville detailing UN forces committing atrocities, like raping nuns--horrors nobody discusses anymore because the truth is so evil and satanic. A Reality Zone documentary on Katanga, shown on Sovereign Solutions, was a wake-up call. In Brussels, Belgians and my boss, Ambassador MacArthur, were upset with U.S. policy, though he had to follow the President's directives.
After marrying, we returned to the U.S., then went back to Belgium for four or five years, a lovely period where we had one child. My husband, a lifelong yacht captain, bought a schooner in Brittany, and we operated it as a charter boat in Grenada for six years. There, a hardcore Stalinist regime took over, upending every aspect of life--government, economy, agriculture, education. Many Grenadians fled, and the stories of communism in action made Grenada a great case study for college students to learn from. Ronald Reagan's intervention, officially to rescue American students but likely to protect oil lines, benefited our friends there despite being a UN operation.
Back in the U.S. with two young children, I naively enrolled them in public school, unaware of how it had deteriorated during my 18 years abroad. Asking the elementary school principal for the new social studies textbooks, he gave me the teacher's manual for "World of Mankind" by Follett--a mistake he didn't repeat. It revealed a humanistic philosophy tied to the Humanist Manifesto, a plan for an atheistic, international UN takeover, promoting tolerance of everything, no religion, no sovereignty, and world government. The manual instructed teachers to engage first graders in activities like comparing captain's houses to trailers, fostering class warfare by discussing who lives where and what they eat. I complained at a school board meeting, calling it a non-academic, politically charged exercise. The next day, newspapers covered it, and a tenant warned me the community labeled me a "kook"--a tactic used in communist and fascist countries to silence questioners.
I ran for the school board, losing twice but winning on my third try after a recounted vote at the Camden Opera House. As a board member, I eliminated the values-destroying Values Clarification program, even gaining liberal support, and secured five minutes of daily grammar despite the 1970s push to ditch academics like math, history, and grammar for soft, fuzzy methods. A retired teacher, impressed by my letters to the paper, paid for me to attend change agent training in Searsport, Maine, for $100. There, I received "Innovations in Education: A Change Agent's Guide" by Professor Ronald Havelock, a federally funded text with case studies on manipulating communities to implement controversial programs like sex education. I was trained to identify "resistors"--smart people like me opposing sex ed, drug ed, or bullying education, all red flags for brainwashing disguised as education for behavioral change. This training, recalling North Vietnamese and Chinese refugees' tales of resistors being executed, terrified me.
The Guidance Counselor Association's journal on deaf education admitted using it to change students' attitudes about death, just as sex education altered attitudes toward sex--proof of a deliberate destruction of morality and academics. My 700-page book, _The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America_, with documents from the late 1800s to today, shows every president, from Reagan to Bush, advancing this agenda. Reagan, despite his image, signed agreements with Gorbachev to merge U.S. and Soviet education systems.
I learned about regionalism, a Soviet-style council government with unelected councils erasing town, county, and state borders, creating unrepresentative regions. As a school board member on a vocational council, I saw wealthy Camden, Maine, bear the lion's share for other towns--a redistribution of wealth. A communist writer in my book noted the U.S. was too slow on regionalism, which worked in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev called the European Union the "new European Soviet," and the merger of Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. could be the "new American Soviet."
The financial elite, as Carol Quigley detailed in _Tragedy and Hope_, planned since the late 1800s to control both political parties, ensuring no difference between Republicans and Democrats at the top. Americans have been conditioned by a 100-year, five-pronged plan: gradualism (slowly boiling the frog), the dialectic (eroding morals through thesis-antithesis-synthesis), semantic deception (misleading terms like "basic skills"), big money from the Federal Reserve, and media conditioning. The Carnegie Corporation, tasked with destroying American education, declared in 1934 to use schools to shift to a socialist planned economy.
In the U.S. Department of Education under Reagan, as a senior policy advisor, I saw grants worldwide to transform education from academics to brainwashing, adopting Soviet Polytech systems where children are trained for predetermined jobs. I leaked a document on computerizing curricula to _Human Events_, leading to my firing, but I secured critical documents. The National Assessment for Educational Progress, from my office, is 60% politically correct, not academic.
The gravest threat is site-based management, where schools become lifelong community hubs under unelected councils, bypassing elected officials. The UN will direct local levels through groups like the International Union of Local Authorities, rendering state and federal governments obsolete. Community-oriented policing and merging military and state police are steps toward local control.
My final advice: protect elected officials at the local level and reject tax-funded school choice like charter schools, which use Skinner's computer-based training method. Become educated via my websites. The American people have been deliberately dumbed down, but it's not too late to resist this international socialist system imposed region by region.“
….
Charlotte Iserbyt passed away on February 8, 2022, at the age of 91, still holding on to her “kook” title as a badge of honor.
I am someone who is really alone. I’ve (unconsciously) managed to deepen my relationship with my parents so I could have at least people with whom I am being authentic. I have never wanted to be a teacher, especially because I did not want to be a government agent. However, I could not find work in 2019 so I accepted to go teach on a indigenous reserve in Canada. I could do whatever I wanted, and I discovered I was a natural educator. Now that I see a dark future, and still struggles professionnally, I am into planning mode. And I decided to go get my teacher certification (the gov’s stamp!) so a dissident like me could evolve in the system. As a Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society) reader, it will be my sacrifice. And I hope it will give me enough credibility to ultimately built an alternative to schools and drag parents and adults in it.
The promotional material for Charlotte’s book says that it should be required reading for parents.
I feel it should be required reading for every educator or university student considering a career in education.
A difficult read, but eye opening to the point of being painful.
https://deliberatedumbingdown.com/ddd/deliberate-dumbing-down/