ICYMI: Where's Your Suit Edition (3/2)

The White House reached a new critical mass of bullshit this week with the public mugging of The Ukraine in favor of new bestie Russia. A lot has been written about it, and I won't be including any of that here because that's not what you come here for. But I do like to put down markers now and then so that later, I can tab back to special moments. After all, some day, someone is going to have to explain to future generations why the country couldn't keep its act together long enough for them.

Nobody can deal with all of it. But those of us who have been advocating for public education can keep doing that, because lord knows it's on the chopping block, just like every other piece of government that involves taking care of other people. So here we go. And I don't care if you're wearing a suit or not.

Children with disabilities swept up in DEI fight, advocates say

Lexi Cochran reports from Sioux City's KCAU about some of the collateral damage with the various diversity bans.

Why Are We Getting Rid of the Department of Education Again?

Jennifer Berkshire gets to the heart of the drive against DEI-- the real target is equality.

Cruel to Your School

Jennifer had a productive week. Here's a big picture piece about Trump's attack on public education that was published in The Baffler (and referenced in the above post).

Five Things Your Child’s Teacher Accomplished Last Week

President Musk managed to inspire Nancy Flanagan this week. What are five things teachers accomplished in your school?

U.S. Department of Education sued over letter on race-conscious practices in schools

A story I expect we'll be following for a while, as the courts try to figure out what the vague handwaving at race stuff is supposed to mean--and if it's even legal.

Michigan Department of Education responds to request to end 'racial preferences' or have federal funding cut

Meanwhile, Michigan's Department of Education actually pushed back on the directive.

To Make Ed Tech More Secure, Software Companies Need to Step Up

There's much to be concerned about in this The74 story, but "the average district now uses 2,592 edtech products" is certainly something.

School Choice Vouchers Led To Lower Academic Achievement, Researchers Say

Want some more research showing that vouchers lower test scores? Here you go.

Alabama’s Ten Commandment’s bill: A power grab disguised as faith

Bill Britt, editor of Alabama P{olitical Reporter, calls out the state's attempt to inject religion into classrooms.

Is it "Book Banning" to Ban Books?

Supporters of South Carolina's book banning laws are trying to support them. Syeve Nuzum points out how they are failing.

Most banned books feature people of color and LGBTQ+ people, report finds

Gloria Oladipo reports for the Guardian on the latest PEN America study that shows only certain sorts of books need to be banned--and it's not necessarily the sexy ones.

Florida: Where Essays are Both Written AND Graded By AI

No surprise here. Sue Kingery Woltanski reports that Florida's writing assessment, already a waste of time, is now approaching the singularity involving no humans at all.

What a 30-Day Break From AI Taught Me About My Teaching

Both depressing and encouraging, as this teacher figures out that maybe having ChatGPT do his thinking for him is not great.

Nobody's Business

Audrey Watters is essential reading every week on technology in ed (twice a week if you pay for your subscription) and it's always worthwhile. Here she opens with the quote "If you're so rich, why aren't you smart?"

Linda McMahon’s ‘Elegant Gaslighting’ of Democratic Senators

For The Progressive, Jeff Bryant has a great analysis of Linda McMahon's hearing.

Trump's expanded ICE raids are causing big problems for some schools

USA Today covers the mess created by sending armed police after children. Who could have predicted?

Teach Truth

Thomas Ultican gives us a look at a new book by Jesse Hagopian about the struggle for anti-racist education.

School Vouchers and the Threat to Religious Freedom

Anne Lutz Fernandez looks at a subject near and dear to my heart. Yes, it's bad for schools to have religion injected into them-- but it is also bad for religion to be commandeered by the state.

This week at the Bucks County Beacon, I wrote about a state auditor report that shows just how badly we in PA need cyber charter reform, and at Forbes, a survey that shows 40% of two year olds have their own digital devices. Yikes!

Do join me on substack, where my newsletter of stuff will always be free. 

OK: Vouchers For The Wealthy

Oklahoma voucherphiles pitched a tax credit scholarship program for years, with a variety of pretty promises.

In 2020, Senate President Pro Tempore tugged on heartstrings:

“Where there are kids that lack opportunity, my heart pains for them,” said Treat, R-Oklahoma City. “We need to make sure they are not forgotten.”

Expanding the program will get poor kids into religious schools, or help poor kids escape bullying. 

Governor Kevin Stitt pushed in 2023, proclaiming "Now we're gonna put the parents back in charge." Also, competition will raise all boats. And poor kids will be rescued. 

Yessiree-- the Oklahoma Parental Choice Tax Credit program would help poor families get their kids into super duper private schools. "This is an every kid wins policy and funding plan," said House Speaker Charles McCall back in 2023, when the bill passed. 

Just barely. A similar bill tanked in 2022, opposed by rural Republicans who didn't want to see their schools drained of funding, and they didn't want to see taxpayer money going to unaccountable private schools. So the tax credit version was born. The idea was that instead of draining the general fund, taxpayers could contribute to vouchers instead of paying their taxes (which would, you know, cut revenue for the general fund.)

Lawmakers were a bit upset by what turned out to be the mechanics of the tax credit. They expected that it would come in the form of a line on tax returns (like any other tax credit). But no. In what may be the laziest attempt to maintain the fiction that these vouchers aren't a way to send public tax dollars to private religious schools, the Oklahoma system sends the voucher money directly to the school--but in a check that is made out to the parents. The parents come in to the school to endorse the check.

This baloney allows the Oklahoma Tax Commission to say, with a straight face, “No checks were issued by the Oklahoma Tax Commission to private schools."

Said some legislators, "We would not have voted for this if we thought this was how it was going to work." It took station KFOR to find out this was what was happening. 

Now the data shows there is yet another unfulfilled promise behind the vouchers. The OTC released details of who was receiving the voucher benefits.

30% of vouchers went to families making less than $75,000.

Slightly less went to families making between $75,000 and $150,000.

17% went to families making between $150,000 and $225,000.

And almost a quarter of the funds ($22.6 million) went to families making over $225,000 a year.

Oklahoma's median income is $60,000.

Governor Stitt told a press conference, "It's working like we wanted it."

State Rep. Melissa Provenzano said that the vouchers are going "overwhelmingly" to students already enrolled in private school. 

None of this should be remotely surprising, as it is exactly how vouchers have played out in other states. No mention yet about the students who were rejected by private schools. 

One thing sure to be a factor-- the voucher program immediately led to private schools hiking tuition prices. Ruby Topalian at The Oklahoman reported on the issue, offering as a specific example

The Parental Choice Tax Credit Program started in December, promising parents a tax credit of up to $3,750 per student for spring tuition. Global Harvest Christian School responded by raising its spring tuition to $3,500.

 Janelle Stecklein of Oklahoma Voice had some harsh words for the supporters of the program.

There’s a terrible stench that smells a lot like bull excrement emanating from the halls of our state Capitol right now, and Republicans are hoping that Oklahomans plug their nose and pretend their highly touted voucher-like program doesn’t stink to high heaven.

Many are also likely hoping that their constituents will suffer from a convenient bout of amnesia when it comes to recalling the promises made — and not kept — in 2023 about their Parental Choice Tax Credit Act.

As it turns out, Oklahomans were sold a sham when legislators sought to convince us why our hard-earned tax dollars should be used to pay for children’s private school educations even while their local public schools continue to struggle financially and academically.

And more to the point 

Legislators would have you forget that they want to use public money to continue to subsidize the costs of a small subset of rich children whose parents have fled the public school system that 700,000 children rely on. The exodus further exacerbates the gap between the haves and have nots.

To further rub salt in the wound, many private schools used the new “tax credit” to raise tuition. An Oklahoma Watch analysis found that about 12% of 171 participating private schools capped tuition rates near $7,500, the max a family can receive. Some schools raised tuition rates 100%.

At this point, there's no state legislator anywhere that has any excuse. All of these issues have well documented in each of the universal voucher states. Vouchers are an expensive entitlement for the wealthy that try to hide behind a fig leaf of helping a few select actual non-wealthy folks. 

But then, Stitt doesn't seem inclined to learn much from others' experience. He's busy these days touting a "path to zero" plan for cutting all state income taxes, having apparently missed the lesson of Sam Brownback's disaster trashing of Kansas in what turned out to be the ultimate debunking of supply-side economics. Good luck, Oklahoma. 

Common Core, Diversity, and the Lessons of Rebranding

The biggest unforced tactical error made by the folks behind the Common Core was giving it a brand name (well, second biggest, right behind creating a crappy bunch of standards in the first place). They added to this error by not sticking around to defend and gatekeep their brand. 

And before you could say "David Coleman is a twit," folks were slapping the Common Core brand on every stupid education thing they didn't like. Common Core supporters were increasingly frustrated about having defend their brand both from legitimate attacks and from stuff that was made up and unrelated to the actual standards.

They eventually caught on and dropped the actual brand in favor of vaguer language about college and career readiness. It's not snappy and makes for limp marketing, but it's also hard to poke back. It pushes everyone in the direction of arguing about whether or not Policy X actually helps students prepare for college and a career, and it lets us have pointed discussions about whether or not education should provide more than vocational prep (spoiler alert: it should). 

Right wing folks have been applying similar lessons for several years now. First it was shortening Black Lives Matter to BLM, then turning around to apply BLM to anything they found objectionable. Then it was Critical Race Theory (again, shortened to CRT, because initials can mean anything) and a ploy that was so transparent because Chris Rufo announced explicitly what he would do-- take the term and redefine it to mean "anything anyone might object to." 

As he infamously tweeted, "The goals is to have the public read something crazy in the news and immediately think 'critical race theory.' We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans."

So now it's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion-- again, more easily attacked as initials. Adam Conover (the Adam Ruins Everything guy) has a post in Bluesky today that gets to the point:

So now the feds are bringing a full-on attack on DEI to schools, including a website for turning in a teacher or school "to report illegal discriminatory practices" to the education department, because "DEI" means whatever they want it to mean. 

In fairness, a generation of half-assed, ill-considered corporate DEI programs had already sullied the brand. But it wouldn't have mattered, any more than it mattered that critical race theory was never really discussed outside of university classrooms. Branding creates a shorthand that cuts both ways. Just as critics can attack and redefine the label while ignoring what it stands for, schools and corporations can pay lip service to DEI without addressing the values it's supposed to represent.

Rebranding is no solution. The far right is already anticipating that, pre-emptively feinting at SEL. Vice-President Trump already warned that attempts to rebrand DEI would be punished. All labels, all branding, have the same built-in weakness.

It's time to unbrand. Let's just talk about diversity. Make the opponents of diversity (because that's what they are) explain why they are against persons who are not like them. Let them explain in plain words that they are against anything that doesn't result in their domination of diverse persons. Let them explain why a school that serves a diverse student population should act as if it does not. 

It will not settle things quickly or easily. They're going to argue that we should focus on what unites us ("get behind me and agree with me") and recognizing diversity just highlights differences. Diversity is a historical strength of this country, but not everyone sees it that way. Make them say why. 

Instead of getting sucked into arguments about what DEI "really" means, argue about those things. Never mind DEI-- tell me why you're opposed to being inclusive in this school, and while you're at it, point out to me the students who shouldn't be included and tell me why. 

Create programs that recognize the many different sorts of students in the school, create ways to make sure they get the education they deserve, and actively seek to make them part of the school. And don't brand these programs with a snappy name. Stand up for the values and principles. Labels are just convenient targets. 

Department of Education Has a Diversity Tattling Site

The Department of Education wants you to narc on all the ideologies and indoctrinaters out there in your local school district, because apparently the folks currently operating what's left of the department are unfamiliar with the internet.

The website has the nifty url enddei.ed.gov, and its text is short and... well, it's short. Under a big bold heading "Schools should be focused on learning," we get this copy:

The U.S. Department of Education is committed to ensuring all students have access to meaningful learning free of divisive ideologies and indoctrination. This submission form is an outlet for students, parents, teachers, and the broader community to report illegal discriminatory practices at institutions of learning. The Department of Education will utilize community submissions to identify potential areas for investigation.

The press release for this portal comes with a quote from Tiffany Justice, one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty, a group well-known for its interest in civil rights for all:

“For years, parents have been begging schools to focus on teaching their kids practical skills like reading, writing, and math, instead of pushing critical theory, rogue sex education and divisive ideologies—but their concerns have been brushed off, mocked, or shut down entirely,” said Tiffany Justice, Co-Founder of Moms for Liberty. “Parents, now is the time that you share the receipts of the betrayal that has happened in our public schools. This webpage demonstrates that President Trump’s Department of Education is putting power back in the hands of parents.”

It's all one more trip through the looking glass to that magical land where the only civil rights that are being damaged are put-upon conservative christianist white folks, where a four star general and an experienced naval officer are DEI hires, but a mediocre talk show host is a champion of merit. 

But now this thing exists. Fill in your email, your school district name, the zip code, and your description of whatever "discriminatory practice" is making you feel bad. You can even attach a file, and do your part to stop whatever illegal discrimination against straight white males is going on in your neighborhood. 

We have seen this movie before. Previous Lt. Governor and Current Failed Candidate Mark Robinson tried this stunt in North Carolina, and Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin tried it in Idaho. Oh yeah-- Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita tried it just last year. These are the kind of performative actions one can expect from middle aged people who are not familiar with how the collective wisdom of the internet works (Hey there, Boaty McBoatface). They ended poorly. 

Who knows-- maybe the site will bring in all sorts of serious posts from people leaping to defend students from being taught Scary History or Naughty Books or Things That Make Certain People Clutch Their Pearls. Maybe it will have the desired effect of chilling classrooms and making teachers think twice before they commit crimes against the Cultural Revolution. 

But what it deserves is to drown in reports that treat the anti-diversity initiative with all the respect it deserves. After all, witch hunts have historically always turned out well for this country. 

At any rate, here's the site. It's right here. So if you have anything to report, just click on this link. I trust you to do the responsible thing.

Crypto-Education

I have put off trying to educate myself about cryptocurrency, but finally gave in, read a book, and golly bob howdy, if it isn't the same guys, the same grift, and the same bullshit as education privatization.

The book was Easy Money: Cryptocurrencym Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, written by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman, and if McKenzie's name sounds vaguely familiar, that's because you used to watch The OC on which he played Ryan. But before he was an actor, McKenzie graduated from the University of Virginia magna cum laude with a degree in economics and foreign affairs. Silverman is a journalist who covers tech, crypto and politics. 

The book is tied together by the narrative of McKenzie's growing interest and his concurrent growing sense that crypto was an emperor with no clothes, a burning building for which nobody was pulling the alarm. It's clear, compelling, and easy to understand even for those of us with no economics background. 

It is also, if you've been deep in the education debates, oddly familiar, sometimes in ways that I found illuminating. Familiar themes include--

Techbro awesomeness

The techbros driving the movement are absolutely certain that they Know How It Is, that they possess all the wisdom and know-how to engineer a complete replacement for the system already in place. People who stick up for that system are just showing that they aren't as smart as the bros. See also: Bill Gates on education. 

Ignorance of the past. 

If you're smarter than everyone, you don't have to listen to anyone, including people who know the history of the field you want to disrupt. The techbros driving the movement are sure they are pioneering bold new uncharted territory. "Behold! I have invented a new piece of technology! I shall call it [drum roll] The Wheel!!" 

But as the authors point out, the idea of launching a "decentralized" currency backed by nothing but charm and big brass balls has been tried in this country back in the mid-19th century. Spoiler alert: it did not work. See also: Mr. Lancaster's System by Adam Laats.

Frauds and scamsters

McKenzie and Silverman mention several times that having been scammed is seen as a regular and normal part of the crypto landscape. It is so pervasive that most of the folks they talked to freely talked about their own losses as if being scammed was a rite of passage. The underlying assumption-- that scammers and fraudsters are just part of the price of "freedom" and that it's up to the marketplace to do their homework and avoid getting fleeced. Fraud is how we know we're really free, I guess.  See also: complaints that school choice must not be hampered by regulation or oversight.

Lies about Decentralization and Power

Crypto is supposed to do away with the idea of money controlled by some central authority-- "government money," if you will. The power will be decentralized, declare crypto stans. Except that it isn't so much decentralized as simply moved. And it's not moved to the people who will supposedly benefit, but to a new, small set of people. And unlike a government, these people do not have to answer to anyone. They do, however, use the power and money they accumulate to make sure that elected officials and legislators stay friendly. 

But the notion that this disruption is somehow creating more freedom and opportunity for the ordinary citizen is a fiction. Instead, by removing a trusted third party, they create an unregulated marketplace where the real power is in the hands of a few rich folks, and the average person is a sheep ripe for shearing--and no recourse should such a shearing happen. Without a trusted third party in the mix, the rich and powerful are free to set rules that serve them. See also: the entire school voucher biz.

Some of the stories are just astounding, like the folks who lost millions of dollars because when market fluctuations became extreme and investors went to cash in, the exchange simply shut down so that they couldn't until the moment had passed. Yes, crypto shares certain folks' naive faith in tech. 

McKenzie and Silverman travel through many of the halls of crypto-land and talk to many of the major players (some of whom are remarkably willing to reveal to talk). In the end, you have to conclude that however bad, scammy, and fraudulent you thought crypto might be, it is probably way worse than that. And many of its worst features echo the school privatization movement. 

Crypto uses the language of known, trusted stuff-- it's "currency" and "coin"-- to get folks to offer trust to something that has no basis in anything other than its creators' will to make something out of thin air that can be used as a foundation for grift. Sure, there are some people involved in good faith, but the whole edifice is built on smoke and mirrors. 

Radical Solution to NAEP Score Drop

Some real outside the box thinking here.

The NAEP results have been a big talking point, a way to trumpet the "failure" of the public school system. Will changes in US schools raise the scores? 

We may never know, because the NAEP is now one more victim of Trusk spending cuts.

“The U.S. Department of Education has decided not to fund the NAEP 2024-2025 Long-Term Trend Age 17 assessment,” Marcie Hickman, project director of the NAEP Support and Service Center, said in an email to state officials. “All field operations and activities will end today, February 19, 2025.”

I would have expected more squawking, but so far only The74 and Education Week have reported on this. 

The test is federally mandated, which means President Musk shouldn't be able to legally cut it off, but we all know how much that means these days. Ed Week reports that "the decision appears to have been made without the approval of the National Assessment Governing Board," which seems about par for the course. 

What has actually been canceled at this point is the test for 17-year-olds that was supposed to happen in the near future. Nobody seems to really know whether this cancellation will also affect all other future NAEP testing, but since Musk has gutted financing for the Institute of Education Sciences, the data wing of the education department, it sure doesn't look good.

So much for all those fun conversations folks were going to have while parsing the test scores and arguing about what they meant for public schools in a post[sic] pandemic world. 

Regular readers know that I have no deep love for Big Standardized Tests, but the whole School Criticism Industry has depended on these scores, and I don't know what the heck they're going to do with themselves without the data.

Perhaps the next phase will involve the Musk Method that has been used so expansively in the DOGE process. Never mind talking to experts, don't try to look at actual data, but just kind of eyeball things and make declarations based on how you personally feel about it, unhampered by any actually reality. Boy, those are going to be some fun times. 

AI Techno-Bullshit

Like most folks, I can no longer complete the simplest written objective without some degenerate descendant of Clippy trying to butt in. Want to wish a friend a Happy Birthday on Facebook? There's already a draft completed. Did someone just email you? Here's a selection of replies you can send. Writing a document? Sure you don't want some help with that?

No, no, and no. In fact, now I'm going to craft a Happy Birthday wish that not only says "Happy Birthday," but also "I took the trouble to do more than just click on the pre-written wish."

Words matter, and how we use them matters. The deepest existential challenge of being human is that we are consciousness, ideas, feelings, memories and grasping comprehensions, all trapped in a singular isolated body with no way to directly communicate or share any of what we are to any of the other meat-trapped spirits in the world. Over millennia we have crafted art, music, movement and, most of all, language to try to bridge that unfathomable gulf between human beings. 

So, yeah. Language is a big deal to me. It is how we are our best selves, how we are fully human in the world. It is how we access love and trust and the impossible beauty of connection with creation. 

And like any powerful tool, it can be misused. A hammer can build a house or break a window. Language can be used to lie. 

There are plenty of shades and shapes and definitions of lying (omission, commission, white, dark, etc) but for me, it comes down to this-- communicating things you don't believe are true in order to control somebody else's behavior. I like the wikipedia definition of bullshit-- "statements made by people concerned with the response of the audience rather than with truth and accuracy."

Our country is used to being awash in bullshit, from the casual lies of marketing to political lies-of-all-size. No, my congressperson did not personally send me an e-mail because they are alarmed and want to hear form me, and no, the US wasn't winning the Vietnam War, and no, Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election. No, that's not what that famous person really looks like. 

The explosion of technology has given us whole new gushing rivers of communication, and that turns out to mean bullshit with an intensity, frequency, and quantity unlike anything ever seen before. Use tech to collect tons of data that reveals where peoples' buttons are, then craft some techno-bullshit to push those buttons. It looks like communication, like human beings trying to bridge the gap between them, but it is not. It is something else, something morally empty. It's a lie.

It becomes most obvious when we consider that most modern form of lying-- trolling.

Trolling is anti-communication. It is a simple observation-- when I say or do X, people jump. Somebody throws up a white power ok symbol or, hell, an actual Nazi salute, and a host of people mistake this for an attempt to communicate. Is this guy really a fascist? Is he not really a fascist? The question is beside the point--he's a guy who has figured out that if he makes this symbol, a whole bunch of folks freak out and react and he has some by God power over them. He can make the puppets dance, and feel powerful inside his sad little isolated meat sack. 

It's an exhilarating lesson-- your words don't have to mean anything exactly in order to get reactions out of people. Or they can mean many things. Or they can mean what you decide they mean. Language isn't a means of bridging the gap between yourself and others; it's a tool for manipulating those others. It's a weapon for exerting control. Once you let go of the idea that words are supposed to mean something, that language is supposed to be anchored within you on your own truth and intention, you are ride the Nihilism Express all the way to the Land of Do As You Please.

Generative AI, chatbots, Large Language Models make excellent tools for bullshit. Where most humans have to work to disconnect their language from anything in their actual consciousness, LLMs arrive fully unmoored from any such baggage, making them excellent tools for creating language-shaped sticks with which to poke other humans. Computers and technology have a useful place, but it's up to humans to decide where to find the limits.

Language disconnected from a human intent or consciousness is a morally empty exercise. I don't mean to suggest that everyone who disconnects in this way is evil or even terrible, but I do think they've lost the plot. For people who have lost that plot, who have drifted over to thinking that language is mostly a tool one uses to prod other humans in a particular direction, LLMs will seem like a perfectly natural next step. If you're not using language for personal, conscious, intentional expression, then why not outsource the job?

For those who think our human task is not to communicate with other humans, but to dominate and subjugate them, language generated by algorithm must seem like the ultimate refinement of language-as-tool. When Mike Johnson excitedly tells us that Elon has "cracked the code" and algorithms will crawl through the data and "transform the way the federal government works," these must be exciting times. "Data," he says Elon told him, "doesn't lie." But automated language does, and easily, at that. 

Automated language production is by its nature disconnected from human intent and consciousness, and as such is not a means of communication, but a tool for other things, like various forms of bullshittery, manipulation, and trolling. Maybe there's a non-zero number of times that this is okay. Maybe. At a point in our history when bad actors have shown a willingness to reduce language to a tool for separating rather than connecting humans, quick and easy morally empty mimicry of human communication is worrisome.

The undermining starts early. On social media, a teacher opined that since her students have trouble coming up with ideas, she just has them ask ChatGPT for essay ideas, as if the actual thinking part of writing is a minor feature barely worth considering. The calls to incorporate AI into the classroom is loud and relentless, a cacophony of marketing bullshit marketing marketing bullshit.

Maybe some of it is Not So Bad, like the miles of AI-generated marketing bullshit that is replacing and outpacing old fashioned human-generated marketing bullshit. Maybe there are social conventions that merely require an exchange of language-adjacent artifacts. maybe some folks really want to be governed by AI instead of other humans. 

But it's both scary and sad. Here we are, vibrating spirits in our isolated fleshy vessels, trying so hard to connect with other humans because it helps us understand the world and it helps us understand ourselves and it fulfills a basic human need to see and be seen. How shitty to grab one of those bridges of language and discover at the other end... nothing. Not a consciousness to be seen and heard, nothing but dead empty eyes staring not at you, but at nothing, and no connection to make at all. I can't help thinking it is a misuse of a fundamental human feature. 

I often describe education as the process of becoming your best self, discovering what it means to be fully human in the world. It seems, to me, to be the most foundational human activity, and yet so much of what surrounds us seems designed to thwart it, from authoritarian mock versions of leaders to empty technological mock humans. 

What to do? Be human. Search for your truth and then put it out into the world, aimed at other humans. Make real connections. When you see bullshit, point and laugh. Try to stay true; I know that's not always easy, but as I used to tell my students, life is too short to sign your name to a lie. This is not woo-woo fuzzy advice, but a down-in-the-dirt practical goal-- more practical than believing in magical algorithms that create the illusion of human interaction with no humanity attached.