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No, Democrats, These Are Not Your Kids


BY: DAVID HARSANYI | JUNE 15, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/06/15/no-democrats-these-are-not-your-kids/

Joe Biden talks to little kids

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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.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books—the most recent, Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.

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You’re Not Crazy. The New Left Really Is at War with Reality


COMMENTARY BY: MIKE GONZALEZ | FEBRUARY 01, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/01/youre-not-crazy-the-new-left-really-is-at-war-with-reality/

Marx's grave, London

In debates about critical race theory and other manifestations of identity politics, Americans are being confronted with a particularly virulent form of Marxism, which some call cultural Marxism. Its adherents think they can create a new reality, because at bottom they do not believe in objective nature. Conservatives engaged in an important conversation over the exact proportion of natural law and natural rights must ensure their attention is not diverted from sworn opponents who deny the existence of either.

Very roughly, the natural-law crowd emphasizes society’s “common good,” while those on the natural-rights side stress individual liberties. They have bigger problems than each other though.

Adherents of a new left have no time for fundamental truths, but believe that each era’s conceptual framework is what creates reality. Man may apprehend natural phenomena through his senses, but he can only comprehend the world through society’s reigning concepts.

Marxist Belief

Marxists believe those in power create this perceptional superstructure. “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class,” Marx himself wrote in “The Communist Manifesto.” Max Horkheimer, the neo-communist who led the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and ’40s and first came up with Critical Theory, was as usual more wordy, but essentially said the same thing.

“The power of healthy human understanding, or common sense … are conditioned by the fact that the world of objects to be judged is in large measure produced by an activity that is itself determined by the very ideas which help the individual to recognize that world and to grasp it conceptually,” Horkheimer wrote in a foundational 1935 essay.

To critical race theory, an American mutation of critical theory, that powerful conceptual framework is white supremacy. In fact, the first task of CRT, wrote the editors of the 1995 collection of essays that serves as the theory’s tablet (which they refer to as “The Big Red Book”), is “to understand how a regime of white supremacy and its subordination of people of color have been created and maintained in America.”

It is embedded in the “‘ordinary business’ of society,” wrote Richard Delgado in his far slimmer primer on CRT.

Man Creates Reality

The obvious implication is that, if you eliminate the conceptual framework — presto! you change nature and reality. Horkheimer says this is what happens with each passing historical era: “There are connections between the forms of judgment and the historical periods. A brief indication will show what is meant. The classificatory judgment is typical of prebourgeois society: this is the way it is, and man can do nothing about it…. Critical theory maintains: it need not be so; man can change reality” (italics added for emphasis).

From this, we can extrapolate why members of this new left believe that man can change his sex, which is just “assigned” at birth: because they are both Godless and materialist, they believe man is omnipotent. Things are not as they are because God or nature made them that way. Things are as they are because we conceive them so. Man creates reality.

This turns philosophy and theory on their head. Philosophy studies the true nature of things. But since there is no fundamental truth, philosophy becomes the motor to create a new reality.

Marx himself, once again, started it, writing in 1843, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Five years later, he added in the Manifesto, “Communism abolishes eternal truths. It abolishes all religion and all morality.”

CRT’s Goals to Dismantle Society

About a century and a half later, Harvard University’s Derrick Bell, the godfather of CRT, wrote, “As I see it, critical race theory recognizes that revolutionizing a culture begins with the radical assessment of it.” The works of CRT are suffused with calls for “theoretical deconstruction” and the like.

These are the true foes of those who want to conserve what is good about America (i.e., conservatives). They see all of American society as an oppressive hegemonic narrative that should be destroyed and replaced with a counter-narrative. “I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society,” says Alicia Garza, a founder of Black Lives Matter, a force that has already done a lot of cultural dismantling.

But starting in late 2020, a force has risen to push back: parents. “It didn’t take long for parents of all races to figure out that their children were being indoctrinated into a repellent ideology. Since the implementation of CRT at the school level began, genuine parental resistance to it bubbled up,” writes Abe Greenwald in a Commentary piece chronicling the counter-revolution.

Conservatives Shouldn’t Forget Common Enemy

Bright conservative minds engaged in an intellectual debate over the future of conservatism cannot forget this other fight against our common enemies. On one side of the conservative debate (and this is an oversimplification) are some who believe the emphasis should be on natural law (the eternal precepts that govern man’s action); on the other are those who stress the natural rights, or the individual rights, that man has because of his nature.

As Catholic University’s Melissa Moschella recently told me, they are tied at the hip, however. We have a natural right to free speech because our nature permits us to speak, but also because free speech is a prerequisite for discovering truth, an aspect of human flourishing. Our nature also permits us to commit murder, but we have no right to exercise that capacity because it is contrary to human flourishing, and therefore to natural law. These distinctions, let me assure you, are lost on Marx, Bell, or Garza.

I have good friends and mentors on both sides of the conservative debate. They are intelligent, patriotic, and courageous. Their issues do matter. But let’s remember who are the real enemies of fundamental truth, and not become immersed in internal debates over theological principles, as the Byzantines did in 1453 when the Ottomans were at the gate.

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