25 Apr They’re (Still) After Your Kids…
I’ll start today with three apologies. First, I apologize for the tardiness of today’s note. I know that the “Morning Call” hasn’t been delivered in the morning in probably five or six years, but today’s is later than usual. Second, I apologize for being absent most of this week. I was traveling, observing and learning from some of the smartest people in the country who have dedicated their careers to preserving and protecting the interests of taxpayers, pensioners, and investors. Finally, I apologize today for the quote/citation at the end of this piece. It is one that I have used countless times before, in these pages, and in The Dictatorship of Woke Capital. Nevertheless, it fits the subject of this note so perfectly. Indeed, it confirms that Melcher and I have been right to worry and opine about the subject of this note for twenty years or more.
As you well know, one of the ongoing battles in American culture right now revolves around the sexualization of American children. Normal people – on the Right, the Left, and in the middle – think that it’s repulsive to sexualize children and that anyone who would do such a thing is morally reprehensible. By contrast, the majority of elected Democratic officials, nearly the entirety of the educational establishment, and almost everyone in the mainstream media believe that children should be taught sexual themes early and often. They don’t ever explicitly say why they think it’s a good idea – or at least they didn’t until now.
The other day, in a Twitter/X thread, Laura Powell, a civil liberties attorney, recounted some of the details found in arguments made before the Supreme Court recently. The following is an exchange between Alan Schoenfeld, an attorney for the Montgomery (MD) County Public Schools, and Justice Neil Gorsuch. The subject is the sexually explicit book Pride Puppy, which is among the materials parents want the schools to quit foisting on their kids. Schoenfeld makes a remarkable admission:
SCHOENFELD: Pride Puppy was the book that was used for the pre-kindergarten curriculum. That’s no longer in the curriculum.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: That’s the one where they’re supposed to look for the leather and things—bondage, things like that, right?
SCHOENFELD: It’s not bondage. It’s a woman in a leather—
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Sex worker, right?
SCHOENFELD: No. That’s not correct. No.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: I thought—gosh, I read it.
JUSTICE BARRETT: It’s a drag queen in drag.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Drag queen in—drag queen?
SCHOENFELD: So, correct. The leather that they’re pointing to is a woman in a leather jacket, and one of the words is drag queen in this—
JUSTICE GORSUCH: And they’re supposed to look for those?
SCHOENFELD: It is an option at the end of the book, correct.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Yeah. Okay. And you’ve included these in the English language curriculum rather than the human sexuality curriculum to influence students, is that fair? That’s what the district court found. Do you agree with that?
SCHOENFELD: I think, to the extent the district court found that it was to influence, it was to influence them towards civility, the natural consequence of being exposed to—
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Whatever, but to influence them.
SCHOENFELD: In the manner that I just mentioned, yes.
Schoenfeld concedes that the point of this exercise, the entire purpose of making PRE-School kids read material Pride Puppy is to “influence” them. That, apparently, is the “natural consequence of being exposed” to this stuff at an early age. The cultural Left wants to influence kids. Period.
Although Mr. Schoefeld tries his best to argue that all of this is meant to “influence” kids to be civil, Justice Gorsuch doesn’t care, and neither should you. This is merely an after-the-fact, court-sensitive rationalization for the schools’ actions. In truth, the schools are trying to influence kids to believe whatever they tell them to believe. It just happens, in this case that the schools want kids to believe that traditional morals and practices are ugly, hateful, and woefully “uncivil.” How do we know this? Mostly because the cultural Left has been trying to exert this type of “influence” for more than 100 years, and its tactics haven’t changed much. From The Dictatorship of Woke Capital:
While the Hungarian Soviet Republic proved to be short-lived, it nevertheless produced one towering figure, György Lukács, an intellectual and erstwhile Romantic literary critic whose conversion to Communism came just in time to join Kun’s Communist Party and to serve as the deputy people’s commissar for education and culture in the new Hungarian Soviet Republic. In his biography of Lukács, Victor Zitta described the efforts the education and culture commissar undertook during his reign to ensure the “proper” education of the next generation of Hungarian Communists as follows:
Special lectures were organized in schools, and literature printed and distributed to “instruct” children about free love, about the nature of sexual intercourse, about the archaic nature of bourgeois family codes, about the outdatedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasure. Children urged thus to reject and deride paternal authority and the authority of the Church, and to ignore precepts of morality, easily and spontaneously turned into delinquents with whom only the police could cope. . . .This call to rebellion addressed to children was matched by a call to rebellion addressed to Hungarian women.
Lukacs, you see, also wanted to influence the children, and he also wanted to use sex and sexual themes to do it. And he wanted to do so to break the cultural hegemony, undermine the prevailing morals of society, and, thereby, to destroy traditionalism and traditional thinking. He didn’t want to do this to make them more “civil,” of course, but then, unlike today’s nihilist Leftists, he had a goal in mind. He wanted a full-blown revolution and the complete destruction of everything that came before. That’s the only difference between Lukacs and today’s “educators.” He wanted to immanentize Marx’s vision of the eschaton, while they just want affirmation for their lifestyles and personal behavior or…whatever.
Many on the cultural Right these days have taken to warning parents about the Left that “They’re after your kids!” That’s true. But they’ve been after them for more than 100 years.
