When Hillary Clinton released her (probably ghostwritten) 1996 book It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us, the publisher summarized its central thesis thusly:
For more than thirty-five years, Senator Clinton has made children her passion and her cause. Her long experience — not only through her roles as mother, daughter, sister, and wife but also as advocate, legal expert, and public servant — has strengthened her conviction that how children develop and what they need to succeed are inextricably entwined with the society in which they live and how well it sustains and supports its families and individuals. In other words, it takes a village to raise a child.
Back in those blissfully naïve days, one may have been forgiven for assuming it was just a folksy take on the value of community.
In fact, it was the rhetorical opening salvo in the upcoming decades-long propaganda campaign by the corporate state to convince parents to give up responsibility for raising their children and hand them to the state.
New York Magazine columnist Sarah Jones continues the rhetorical jihad against parenthood. She predictably demonizes the fully natural, evolutionary drive to protect children from poisonous social influences (just like parents prevent them from eating poison mushrooms), and conflates it with transphobia and a slew of other Social Justice™–isms.
Protection of the young is hardwired behavior in any animal; anyone who has approached a springtime goose with a gaggle of goslings understands it’s as natural as sunshine.
But if you grew up in a dystopian Brooklyn studio apartment or wherever, like most New York Magazine columnists, you may have never encountered baby geese in the wild. Lessons from nature are never taught.
Via New York Magazine (the article in its entirety is rambling and interspersed with conspiracy theories tying parental rights to issues like child labor, so I have excised the most pertinent parts and highlighted the takeaway):
Conservative interest in the child extends beyond a traditional hostility to LGBT people…
Like any piece of property, a child has value to conservative activists. They are key to a future the conservative wants to win. Parental rights are merely one path to the total capture of state power and the imposition of an authoritarian hierarchy on us all…Taken to extremes, the concept of parental rights can be dangerous and even deadly for children…
Children aren’t private property, then, but a public responsibility. To expand our democratic project to children is to grant them the security the right seeks to deny them: education, health care, shelter, food. A better America begins with the child.
The parental rights movement actively threatens the safety and wellbeing of children and by extension, democracy itself: https://t.co/kGW6sVSh7v
— Sarah Jones (@onesarahjones) April 8, 2023
To fully separate the child from its family, the natural and healthy instinct to protect must be pathologized so as to be excised.
Here’s my prediction: at some point, when a new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (the psychiatry “Bible”) is released, parental protectionism will suddenly appear as a newly minted psychiatric disorder, in need of pharmacological intervention.
The patient will then be prescribed psychotropic medication. Pfizer will then monitor the patient’s intestines to ensure that she has taken her drugs as prescribed.
The parent’s eyes will then glaze over, and her child will be turned over to TikTok for uninterrupted Chinese state-sponsored social conditioning on the merits of transgenderism or whatever new social engineering project is most fashionable.
