Sometimes one has to take a step back and look at different phenomena to realize that they are part of an integrated whole. In looking at various aspects of leftist ideology, it becomes clear that the Left in America has declared war on children.
While it may not be overtly evident, when one evaluates different areas of life and views them as part of a comprehensive whole, we can see that there is indeed a war on children, and it’s bad. Because many leftists are parents themselves who no doubt love their children, it makes the leftist war on children even more tragic.
Abortion
Just making the transition through the birth canal is a challenge, with the Left’s manic insistence that abortion is a fundamental right; that abortion is “healthcare”. By their demands that taxpayer-funded abortions be available to virtually the moment before birth, we can see that the Left places zero value on the lives on unborn children.
As I wrote about in my essay Anti-Life – Democrats, Abortion and the Supreme Court, over the past few decades, the Democratic party has increasingly become the party of abortion on demand, evolving (or maybe I should say “devolving”) from the position that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” to “abortion is healthcare”. We’ve seen that there is no room in the Democratic Party for “pro-life” politicians, and we’ve seen that they are literally willing to burn down the country to preserve the mythical “right” to kill unborn children.
Because of this, a child has a real chance of not even transitioning from being a fetus to being an infant. If that’s not hostility, I don’t know what is.
Child Mutilation and Sterilization
When I was growing up, the idea that a boy could be a girl or a girl could be a boy was completely foreign to us. It was literally unheard of. While it’s natural to be curious about what it would be like to be the opposite sex, and while many children exhibit tendencies that society associates with one sex or another, nobody in their right mind thought that Timmy was really a Tammy. And if Timmy had expressed the idea that maybe he was really a she, he would have (hopefully) received psychological counseling and would have most likely grown out of it eventually.
Sadly, in the modern day, a child who is uncertain about what sex he or she is or should be more often than not does not receive psychological counseling. They receive “gender-affirming” care, which starts with opposite sex hormone treatments, “social transitioning”, and finally “gender-affirming” surgery, which in reality is child mutilation.
Go outside of the entire transgender construct and think about what this “gender-affirming” surgery really is: a medical doctor anesthetizes a child and cuts off her healthy 16-year old breasts. Or her vagina is closed up and skin grafts from her arm are fashioned to become an ersatz “penis” that will never work and will never be the real thing. Or a boy will go into surgery and have his penis cut off, and a fake vagina fashioned in its place. As a result of sex-change surgeries, transgender children become adults very likely to be incapable of reproduction.
Think about what excruciating pain and suffering, both mental and physical, must result from the social pressure to have the surgery, and then the actual surgery itself. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to be convinced that I was really a woman in a man’s body, and to put myself through the surgical changes necessary to pretend to be something I’m not and never will be.
And what about the cost of gender transitioning? Pam Long, in her essay The $1 Million Cost Per Person for Gender Transition outlines the various costs involved with “gender-affirming care” which include counseling, hair removal, special clothing, makeup, surgery and lifetime hormone therapy. All of these costs add up, and they can quickly run into the tens or hundreds of thousands and even more. While some of the costs may be funded by insurance companies, most are not, and people have to take out loans to pay for their “gender-affirming care”.
Incidentally, Democrats are going all-in on making sure that this “gender-affirming care” will be paid for by taxpayers. They’ve already started, with President Biden (D) adding access to this “care” for federal employees. In January 2022, the “…U. S. Department of Health and Human Services proposed a rule that would add sexual orientation and gender identity language to the 2010 Affordable Care Act. According to the department, these amendments will ensure that those who identify as LGBT receive “medically necessary” care. This includes “gender-affirming” surgeries and hormone “therapy.”” This would have the effect of forcing more insurers to cover more of this type of “care”. The Left won’t rest until everything is taxpayer funded.
When adults are undergoing these treatments and paying for it themselves, that is one thing. But when children under 18 are feeling the need to drastically modify their bodies and embark on a lifetime of medical support that will cost an enormous amount of money, that is a cause for concern and something that should be made illegal.
Recently, Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire led a rally to end child mutilation in Nashville, TN.  I call upon lawmakers in Colorado, Oklahoma, and every other state to enact legislation in the next legislative session to prohibit the barbaric practice of child mutilation disguised as “gender-affirming care.”
Education and Indoctrination
Why was universal pre-kindergarten so important to the Left? Why is full-day kindergarten so important to them? Why is there a movement underway to make schools year-round?
Because to the Left, education is for indoctrination, and our public schools have become leftist indoctrination centers.
Funded by taxpayers, run by teachers’ unions for the benefit of the teachers – not the students or the parents – who contribute campaign funds to Democrat politicians, public schools have become a real problem in modern day America.
Don’t take my word for it. Read the words of a former teacher, who said “Your children are being indoctrinated. The education system designed to teach them how to think critically has been weaponized by the radical left to push an anti-American agenda.
As someone who has worked in education for four years, I have seen firsthand how your children are being ensnared by the left and their teachers.” He goes on to describe the ways in which schools use propaganda and normalization of leftist views and positions as nonpolitical.
This dominance by the Left of the public school systems in America is the result of an intentional strategy.
Emerging from the radical left’s appearance in the 1960s, Mike Klonsky founded the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) in 1971.1 Â
Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the Weatherman – whose manifesto “…stressed that America is evil”2, and Klonsky both received doctorates in education and became professors.1
Realizing that indoctrinating children in the new Third Left3 ideology was the key to long term success, Klonsky, Ayers and other 1960s and 1970s radicals began a quiet takeover of America’s educational system from kindergarten through college. As the late professor Barry Rubin describes in his excellent book Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance,
“Although they had entered the system, tens of thousands of ideologically oriented professors and scientists or politicized journalists; environmental, feminist…foundation and think-tank officials; artists, filmmakers, and other cultural producers; government and trade union bureaucrats; and even politicians still remained radical activists.”4
And so it came to pass that “…the Third Left used the public school system to do the work as parents paid taxes and tuition for the dubious privilege of having their children indoctrinated. This new insight into “progressive” education was really not so original and certainly not liberal, having been practiced by radical dictatorships for centuries.”4
Your Kids Belong to Us
In 2013, MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry created quite the stir when she said “We have never invested as much in public education as we should have, because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children, so part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.” [Emphasis mine]
Now, Ms. Harris-Perry may not still believe that, but President Joe Biden (D) clearly does. According to Newsweek, Joe Biden told a gathering of teachers on April 27, 2022 that “They’re all our children…They’re not somebody else’s children…” Further, “According to the president, the government has a sphere of sovereignty over children into which parents cannot intrude.”
Former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe insisted during a debate that he didn’t think that parents should be in charge of their kids’ education, which is why he is the former governor of Virginia.
With schools telling children to not tell their parents about what happens in “Art Club” or when parents can have their children taken away from them if they don’t “affirm” their socially implanted transgender beliefs, it’s clear that to the Left, children do indeed belong to the State.
Who else thought that children belonged to the State? Hitler and Stalin. In National Socialist Germany, children were indoctrinated into Nazi ideology via their schools, the Young Folk and the Hitler Youth. In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party had a “cult of childhood”, which held that “They [children] represented not only the innocence of youth, but also the promise of the socialist future; in order for the international Marxist Revolution to succeed, the youth had to be treated well and educated politically…Primarily, the Communist Party fostered a cult of childhood, much like Stalin’s cult of personality, which idealized Soviet childhood. The Communist Party formalized this cult through youth organizations such as the Komsomol, Young Pioneers, and Little Octobrists.”
Unfortunately, some people are bad parents who abuse their children or otherwise fail to take proper care of them. There exists a state role – in the context of government’s proper function to protect life – in removing children from adverse environments. But the idea that the children belong to society as a whole is antithetical to our American heritage and thousands of years of human history.
COVID School Closures
The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) coronavirus disease introduced to the world by China in December 2019 was an extremely illustrative event in how governments, even in Western democracies, can turn into quasi-dictatorships virtually overnight. Between shutting down businesses to stay at home orders, to expanding the size and spending of government, to shutting down the schools, it was a frenzy of government overreach that is only now starting to be pared back.
Even though children are in the lowest risk group of serious illness or death from COVID-19, schools across the world, including the United States, were shut down, and stay-at-home or “virtual” learning became the norm.
Now, let’s face facts: this was not done to protect the children, but at the instigation of the teacher’s unions to protect the teachers and other administrative personnel (so many of them!) who work in the schools. While that may have been a laudable goal, the effect on children was devastating.
According to Forbes magazine, a study by the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) found that concerns over the well-being of children because of school closures were well founded. “Researchers examined the findings of 36 studies carried out in 11 countries around the world, involving around 80,000 children and 18,000 parents, to assess the effect of lockdowns and school closures in the initial phase of the pandemic. A number of studies recorded increased levels of anxiety and depression, including a U.K study that found almost half of teenage girls and six in 10 teenage boys shows symptoms of anxiety and one in five of both sexes reported symptoms of depression.”
And while school closures happened in both red and blue states, red states (defined as those who voted for Trump) offered in-person learning at nearly twice the rate of blue states. It is also this author’s impression that red states were faster to reopen the schools than the blue states were.
Instilling Climate Change Fear
One of the most pernicious aspects of the Left’s war on children is the way that climate doomsayers are causing children to grow up fearing the fiery apocalypse the climate doomsayers been predicting for decades now. We have an elected official like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) stating that climate change will “destroy the planet” in 12 years if we do not address it.
In 2019, that darling of the Left, then 16-year old Greta Thunberg addressed the United Nations and angrily excoriated the adults in the room, saying “How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”
A few points are in order here. The child in question was 16 years old at the time. She was not a climate scientist. She was not a sage or a prophet. She was a child being cynically used by the elites who stand to gain from the promulgation of the climate change mass hysteria. And while people may be suffering and dying, it’s not due to climate, because in our current era we have greater climate mastery than ever before.
This hysteria, the fear of climate change, has young people growing up “under the shadow of a ticking clock”, as National Geographic puts it. In the same article, NG outlines how people in their 20s are weighing whether or not they should have children due to the “threat” of climate change.  Increasing suicides are attributed to climate change, whereas I think that it is the incessant fearmongering about climate change that causes more young people to feel hopeless enough to commit suicide.
Destroying the Traditional Family
As part of their overall war on reality itself, the Left wants to destroy the traditional family. By incentivizing single motherhood via government handouts, the Left has caused countless children to grow up without fathers. Another tack is by the overt sexualization of children via “drag queen drag shows”, pornographic literature and the explosion of gender ideology being taught in schools.
Why destroy the family? Because everything the Left does is done with one goal in mind: to gain and maintain political power. As New Zealand parliament member Dr. Muriel Newman observed:
“…weak families with damaged children are in greater need of the help of the state. As a consequence they are far more likely to support left leaning governments which promote more generous welfare.Â
On the other hand, strong families with confident, successful children are far more likely to support centre [sic] right parties that have as their goals prosperity and personal independence from the state.
As a result, the battle-ground over the family is a battle for political power: the weaker the family becomes the more votes that will go to the left, while the stronger families become the more the votes will go to the right.”
Anti-Reality
This war on children is but a part of the overall nihilistic war against Reality itself that is being waged by the Left. This war can be seen on many fronts: by denying the life-giving and human flourishing benefits of fossil fuels and promulgating the climate change mass delusion, they propose a life which would be radically degraded from the one we currently enjoy in the West. By using words that mean things other than what they really are – for example, calling a climate-related spending bill the “Inflation Reduction Act” when it has nothing to do with reducing inflation and will in fact increase inflation, they are negating the actuality of what those words mean, and by the way, clearly showing they think voters are stupid.
Because the “progressive” (Marxist-Leninist) Left is demonstrably wrong on EVERY major policy issue, it is clear that their worldviews and policy proposals are in contradiction of real life in the real world. It is for this reason that we must fight for the truth and reality every way we can and protect this and future generations from the Left’s war on children.
1 Rubin, Barry. Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance, New York, 2014. Kindle page 69
2 Ibid, page 62
3 According to Rubin, the “Third Left” arose from the ashes of the “New Left”. Rubin explains that “Many people don’t believe that a far left can exist without the apparatus of red flags, Marxist jargon; a centrally directed, disciplined Leninist party; and all the other apparatus of history’s Communists and New Leftists. These things were now not only unnecessary but actually fatal to success in twenty-first-century America. Instead, New Left veterans created the “Third Left” based on the understanding that they needed a totally different approach….Only by portraying itself as liberal or “Progressive” could the far left adapt to twenty-first-century America.” Ibid, page 69
4 Ibid, page 71
Responses
I would add making schools into gun-free zones and the normalization of criminality to the above. Children have borne the brunt of most of the mass shootings that occur in schools. Normalizing criminality makes the world a dangerous place, especially for the children.