Here is an utterly un-American quote from President Joe Biden:
These are our kids. These are our neighbors, not someone else’s kids; they’re all our kids. And our children are the kite strings that hold our national ambitions aloft. It matters a great deal how we treat everyone in this country. LGBTQI+ Americans, especially children: You are loved. You are heard. And this administration has your back.
Now, perhaps the phrase “they’re all our kids” sounds like an innocuous platitude to some woke White House speechwriter, but to me it sounds like a totalitarian notion.
Years ago, P.J. O’Rourke correctly described the purpose of Hillary Clinton’s detestable book on the same subject: “It takes a village to raise a child. The village is Washington. You are the child.” It’s no accident the head of the nation’s largest and most powerful teachers union praises op-eds with headlines like, “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.” That’s also the position of the institutional left, including the president, who argues that American values are at risk if parents dare demand kids’ libraries exclude books describing incestual rape, celebrating gender dysphoria, and depicting 10-year-old boys having oral sex.
Marx also saw the traditional family as an antiquated unit. The first Soviet welfare ministers complained about the “narrow and petty” idea of the nuclear family in which reactionary bourgeois parents, selfishly wrapped up in their trivial anxieties, were “not capable of educating the ‘new person.’”
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe Joe Biden is going to ship parents to Siberia. Nor am I suggesting that the president’s handlers are sitting around thinking about the Frankfurt School. (They arrived at a similar philosophical destination organically, I suspect.) What I’m saying is that the White House is teeming with wannabe authoritarians who believe the state would do a better job raising kids by filling their impressionable heads with corrosive, immoral ideas. And that the institutions to achieve that goal already exist.
Public schools, some of them excellent and many of them disastrous, are not voluntary, communal places. In most municipalities, parents have little choice, and their kids are in a captive audience. State-run schools, conceived to educate and forge patriotic, civic cohesion, have often become places of left-wing indoctrination — from “universal pre-k” until they go off to college, where credentialed halfwits and leftist ideologues who detest the “national ambitions” of a constitutional republic run the place.
You pay for all of it. But you also get to shut up.
It’s important to remember that totalitarian states do not stop citizens from participating in political life, they demand it. Everything one does in these societies is drenched in ideology. Sports. Movies. Academia. Books. Commerce. Morality. Family. Sex. Schools. Which very much sounds like the goal of contemporary leftism.
It’s none of our business who you sleep with or what sex you cosplay as, but it is our business that government-run elementary school kids are running around waving flags celebrating sexual identification and gender dysphoria like little soldiers in history’s dumbest Cultural Revolution.
Why wouldn’t they? Elizabeth Warren says things like, “Black trans and cis women, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people are the backbone of our democracy…” At the White House the other day, the self-anointed pontifex maximus of true Americanism raised the pride flag to the same level of reverence as the Stars and Stripes, a flag that exists to represent all of us. Though, to be fair, most contemporary leftists seem a lot more comfortable standing under a rainbow flag than an American one.
Let’s start by pointing out that there is absolutely nothing uplifting or patriotic about allowing doctors, operating under the patina of (pseudo)science, to forever mutilate confused kids. The state’s duty to your children is to protect them from violence and abuse. Those who allow that cruelty, even celebrate it, do not, in fact, have “your back.”
Yet, the White House hangs a flag that implicitly endorses this barbarity, and then demands you do too. Indeed, reactionary parents, believers, traditionalists, normies, contrarians — culture warriors — unwilling to salute an ideology that grates against their religious, moral, and/or scientific beliefs are smeared as “cruel” enemies of “democracy” and “diversity.” As the great Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (what a name) argued decades ago, despite all its rhetoric about inclusivity, the left is the “enemy of diversity and the fantastical promoter of identity. Uniformity is stressed in all leftist utopias, paradises in which everybody is the same, envy is dead, and the enemy is either dead, lives outside the gates, or is utterly humiliated.”
Of course, even if pride flags were completely unobjectionable, your kids are not “kite strings that hold our national ambitions aloft.” They are human beings with rights, parents, and unique ambitions, not platitude-spouting automatons who should be categorized by skin color or gender “identification.” In a truly diverse and free nation, we have an array of aspirations and very different ideas about what constitutes “national ambition.” That’s why politics exists. That’s why neutral principles of governance and inherent rights (are supposed to) exist.
And we already have a flag for all of that.
