Casualties of the Culture War

15

It struck me recently that there’s a strange war going on these days, a secret war. It’s unobtrusive, tends to be fought parallel to other news stories and current events, but nevertheless permeates through commentary from the Left on a regular basis. I’m referring to the war on our kids.

What troubles me is that the media, academia and government entities, while championing any number of progressive causes, seem to regard our children, at best, as convenient lab rats, useful pawns in their ideological crusade to undermine basic Western values and common sense. The progressive left knows very well the adage of get ‘em while they’re young.

I was copied into this article yesterday from our old friends at The Guardian, entitled “What do you say to a four-year-old white supremacist?”, purporting to be an account from the Muslim author of an exchange with a four-year-old boy and his dad in Jackson, Mississippi in 2015. Apparently, after being seated at a table in a restaurant next to the pair, the author was greeted with: “White skin don’t marry brown skin, but it’s OK, you can sit here anyway” from the boy.

Racially charged stuff indeed, straight out a redneck manual. Naturally this exchange then surfaces as the root of a polemic about race, the South, Islamophobia, oppressive prejudice, legislating change, the list goes on. Apparently, the author and her companions even engaged in an hour-long discussion about race with the four-year-old white supremacist while the dad sat there in silence.

Come again?

Does that sound remotely realistic to anyone? Anyone at all? Even with the gift of a wild imagination, does anyone believe that a down home, “raycist” Southerner would allow their four-year-old son to be subjected to an hour-long lecture about race relations from the target of their supposed hatred while they’re eating at a restaurant?

Not bloody likely. But she goes on.

The article also cites by way of backstory the 2015 murder of three young Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who were known to the author. This she denotes is indicative of a broader trend of racial hatred towards Muslims in that part of the world. A five-minute Google search into the history of that case however reveals that the murderer in question had had a long-running neighbourly dispute with the victims about parking spaces, and had basically “snapped” – with the Washington Post of all outlets reporting that race or religion likely had nothing to do with the crime.

Of course, why spoil a good narrative about #MuslimLivesMatter or the supposed racist utterances of a four-year-old child at a restaurant, when you can use them to hurl invective about how racial attitudes amongst white Southerners continues to be problematic.

Of course, my cynicism towards this sort of dross is amplified by the never-ending stream of fake “hate crimes” and discrimination cases launched by so called victims, ranging from Ahmed the Clock Boy, the case in New York shortly after the US election involving the alleged attack on a young Muslim woman by Trump supporters that became emblematic of ‘Trump’s America’, to any number of false claims and spurious accounts now categorised via threads like this on Reddit. None of this surprises me of course; when it comes to the capacity of the Left to amplify any and all interactions with evil ol’ Whitey, they never miss a beat.

So why does The Guardian publish divisive rubbish like this? Maybe it’s for the same reason that HuffPo and the rest of the lefty legacy media publish the over-dramatised account of an 8-month-old baby dying in the latest paid Palestinian protests over the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem, when, all legitimate sympathy aside, it’s patently obvious to anyone with half a brain that the real question they should be raising is: “Who brings their 8-month old baby to a violent protest, knowing full well that Hamas has declared their intention is to provoke a violent reaction from Israel?” More to the point, what sort of mindset from a political leader or an ideology encourages or allows that to happen?

Maybe the same mindset that’s proven time and time again that certain children hold little value – such as in 2016 when jihadi brides in Mosul used their children as human shields during Isis’s last stand against advancing Iraqi government troops to retake that city, or in the almost identical case in Raqqa last year? Maybe there’s a similarity to the instance of young girls sent away to be suicide bombers by the likes of Boko Haram or Isis, or closer to home in Indonesia?

I have always wondered what the Left’s obsession is with Islam, given the Left’s propensity to apologise for all manner of atrocities committed in its name and to push the unrelenting Islamophobia and “hate crime” narratives to the fore in the West at every occasion. But suddenly there it was in front of me – the Left and Islam, radical Islam in particular, are to a large extent kindred spirits, because they both treat their children the same way – as collateral damage in their ideological struggles.

Nowhere does the argument play out more on the Left than in the domain of sexualising our children, from the insidious Safe Schools programme, to the fawning adulation aimed at progressive parents raising their children as they-bys, to the constant barrage of useful idiot celebrities parading their children’s gender neutrality to the world.

But it’s the feminist academics, gender studies professors, and progressive psychologists such as noted in this report about gender neutral preschools in Sweden that really take the biscuit. Apparently, their studies show that removing the concept of gender altogether from children of preschool age makes them more successful.

Given that this experiment started two decades ago in Sweden with the introduction of gender neutral pronoun policy in schools, I would suggest that the current cultural malaise in that once great country has meant that these children, now young adults, have at least become more successful at two things: submission to feminism and Islam – but this is tempered by reports of a massive increase in the number of them feeling the anxiety of feeling trapped in the wrong gender. Seriously, who could have foreseen that messing around with 100,000 years of evolutionary biology and the very core of who we are as human beings could have any negative consequences for a generation of Swedish children?

But that’s the price worth paying for an open society that’s tolerant of ‘choice’, right?

When I read related reports such as this from the BBC about rising teen suicide rates in Canada, hoping to find some decent research about the trends, I’m instead greeted by insights concerning the disparity in suicide rates between indigenous and European girls, with experts quoted as saying “we should be paying more attention to this disparity, and the effects that gender and colonialism have on young indigenous women”, whom [the expert] says experience “double oppression”.

Another genius from the same report reckons that sexism, a lack of opportunity and rigid gender roles may have something to do with increasing rates of young female suicides in Third World countries such as India. Well, no kidding, maybe that has to do with the fact that, unlike the Anglosphere, these countries have a culture that treats women as second-class citizens, or even as chattel, so one hardly needs a degree in psychology to figure that out.

(Makes me wonder then what importing vast numbers of Third World migrants and their customs into the Anglosphere is going to do for youth suicide rates moving forward, but then, progressives could hardly be said to be logical in their methods and I’m sure would blame systemic racism in any event.)

These experts are quite literally allowing young people to be sacrificed on the collectivist alter of gender fluidity and political correctness, fuelling their deluded fantasies and promoting the idea that happiness is linked to simply shrugging off one’s sexuality like an old jumper, or overcoming imaginary oppression.

No wonder this is happening when we have education bodies in the UK blaming bullying for the fact that half of supposed trans pupils have attempted suicide, because to call it gender dysphoria is now considered transphobic. No wonder, too, when the Canadian Paediatric Society releases guidelines encouraging parents to “accept and reinforce their kids’ gender confusion” and “seek out opportunities to show your child that gender-diverse people exist”.

Progressive insanity has created two generations of progressive parents and children burdened with intersectional guilt, not knowing why none of their “normal and healthy” choices from the gender spectrum is making them happy.

Of course, what critique of the way progressives treat children would be complete without the wonderful idea of Drag Story Time events around the world.

Growing up a few decades ago, children were rightfully kept out of the loop on serious political and cultural issues – irrespective of how they were raised, childhood was, and should always be, a time of learning and growing, of play, exploration and above all innocence.

These days, the innocence has been stripped away and school has become an ideological battleground where children as young as six get to learn about “white privilege” and “gender identity” before they learn about their ABC’s.

Progressive educators and academics are desperate to establish this breathless morality play around raising toddlers to be non-racist, as if somehow only the white children of white, western parents could be guilty of this sin, as this article implies. But it’s really the progressives themselves who focus and agonise so much about race (and gender) when it comes to discussing the interactions that their children have with the world, bemoaning the lack of diversity in children’s books and blogging about the ‘profound discomfort’ they feel worrying about whether their 3-year-old will say something racist or transphobic to a person of colour or a man in drag. Because it’s they that project their resentment and insecurities onto their children, forgetting that the ludicrous intersectional garbage that they obsess about has nothing to do with raising healthy kids at all.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Just as a Palestinian mother or an Isis bride use their children as emotional and political weapons, just as certain ideologies think nothing of martyring children as young as six to further Jihad, so the gender crusaders and the cultural Marxists push their spiteful ideology onto our children. For every Palestinian mother I see wailing on the public broadcaster about her dead child, I can read several articles about a “brave” family raising their child as gender neutral. In reality it’s the parents that deserve the focus, having been so utterly brainwashed by the messaging they’ve received through school, university, the media, and their political leaders, that they’re desperate to not be seen as reinforcing negative gender stereotypes, and even more desperate to receive the gushing plaudits of the liberal elite as they pump their children full of hormone blockers.

Make no mistake – I predict a radical uptick in suicides, drug use, runaways, self-abuse, delinquency, psychiatric visits and even home shootings as this generation of confused children and their parents realise the consequences of adopting the Left’s radical gender and racial experiment. Tortured by a cocktail of anti-depressants, hormone therapy, confusion, resentment and anger, they will learn that gender cannot be engineered or assigned, no matter how often the ideologues and activists pretend it can, nor can race relations be improved by constantly undermining the concept of meritocracy and demonising white kids.

But worse, I fully expect the latter to make the most of this; as families, schools and communities struggle to cope with the fallout, the “brave” parents of suicided trans kids and victims of inter-racial crime will be paraded in front of the media as the “real victims”, citing the cis-gendered, racist patriarchy and their lack of empathy as the root cause.

What’s a few thousand damaged kids when the ideological struggle against traditional gender roles and the patriarchy needs to be won?