Normal Channels: Blocked or Compromised - Chapter 2 is Live!

'A Prescient Diagnosis' and the Origins of My Analytical Framework

In Chapter 1, we saw the “One Minute Per Month” lie—a clear example of a compromised bureaucratic channel.

The logical question is: Why was I, a teenage staffer, positioned to see that? How did I develop the analytical framework to even recognize it?

The answer is in Chapter 2, which I am publishing today. This chapter is the origin story of this book’s central theme. It is not a political analysis, but a multi-generational family history that shows how I learned to identify these “contrived” events and compromised systems.

The chapter begins with my father’s bizarre, blocked attempts to join the military, and my mother’s legacy of resistance.

It then moves to my own first encounter with a significant institutional contradiction.

It was 1976. I was a six-year-old in first grade at the Chabad Hebrew Day School. A sharp dichotomy emerged in my reports.

My Jewish studies teacher, Ella Milikowsky, provided this glowing evaluation:

She stated I was “consistently at or near the top of the class” and that my “eagerness and enthusiasm for his studies affected not only his classmates but also me.”

However, my secular studies teacher, Mrs. Pearlmutter, held a diametrically opposed view. She informed my parents that she believed I might be, as the term was then used, “retarded.”

This incident planted the seeds that would eventually make me suspect a “teaching-disabled institution” whenever I heard claims about a “learning-disabled child.”

Faced with this institutional contradiction—one channel reporting high achievement, the other suggesting severe deficiency—my parents sought an outside, expert assessment. That expert’s analysis was, in retrospect, astonishingly prescient.

The full chapter, “A Multi-Generational Framework,” is below.