Leftists demand safe spaces for themselves, but take them away from children.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
From Greta Thunberg to children put on puberty blockers, the victims of the war on childhood are everywhere. They show up at environmental or gun control rallies holding up giant signs in their little hands, they’re indoctrinated at school to enlist as child soldiers for the latest cause.
Adults tell them that unless they save the world, they won’t even live long enough to grow up.
At the heart of the exchange of political buzzwords of the culture war is a simple question about whether childhood should exist. Leftists believe that no one may evade political commitments, and that therefore the idea that childhood should be a space apart from adult causes and concerns is a privilege that it is the job of teachers and popular culture to shatter into pieces.
And that is the war on childhood that we see all around us waged from Disney to kindergarten.
What this is really about is the leftist conviction that children cannot be allowed to be children, occupying a separate world of imagination and wonder, but must be indoctrinated into the fight as soon as possible with The Anti-Racist Baby Book and Baby Loves Green Energy. The only way to save the world is by politicizing childhood and turning children into little adults worrying about microaggressions, experimenting with sexuality, and fearing that the world will end.
Utopia, the fantasy land of progressive adults who act like children, has no room for children.
It is the job of adults to save the planet, assuming it needs saving, to debate political causes, to explore whatever sexuality needs exploring, and to build or wreck their lives how they please.
And it is their primary job to protect children from living in that threatening adult world.
Play is the business of childhood. From the Victorian era onward, civilized societies worked to create safe spaces for children to grow and learn before that became a term for whiny adults. Reformers and muckrakers took children out of factories. Growing prosperity enabled the rise of a children’s culture in which a multitude of toys and books meant for children filled shops.
Adults protected children, preserving their innocence while they developed into unique people.
Baby Boomers, a generation whose name is of an era of progeny, may have enjoyed the last golden childhood in American history. And many never grew up. The generations that followed came of age during the breaking of the American family and now the very idea of family. The indirect damage done to children is now being eclipsed by the direct assault on childhood.
The radical leftists who demand safe spaces for themselves are taking them away from children. Children are being put to work again, not in factories, which would be kinder by comparison, but in radical causes, they are being told that they are on the verge of death, that their country is evil, and the world is about to be destroyed if they don’t do something at once.
That’s where the traumatized children screaming angrily at rallies come from.
Children, especially young children, implicitly trust adults and their parents. If they’re told that the world is about to end, that they’re racists, or have to experiment with gender, they believe it.
The adults who deprive them of their innocence and their childhood are the monsters.
Instead of growing up feeling safe and protected, leftist children are traumatized at an early age by being forced to think of the world as a dangerous and evil place their parents can’t protect them from, but that they must take on the responsibility to change or else everyone will die.
The “parentification” of children began as Baby Boomer despair in the wake of the end of “Camelot”, the death of leftist culture heroes, and the collapse of the counterculture, followed by the conviction that the next generation had to take over and fix things. Adults who acted like children insisted that children had to become adults. And these days the precocious children and the immature adults are all around us. They’re also two halves of the same tarnished coin.
Adults who lacked a safe childhood assert the privileges of childhood as soon as they’re economically secure enough to supply themselves with one. They surround themselves with toys, exclusively pursue the most direct pleasures, and clamor for safe spaces and trigger warnings, for the emotional security they lacked as children. But they deny that emotional security to actual children and selfishly traumatize them for their own actualization.
Teachers on TikTok freely assert that their feelings matter more than the safety of children.
The aggressive push to embed sexual politics into elementary schools is how dysfunctional adults, including some teachers, prioritize their own sexual identity over the welfare of children.
It’s also on a par with pushing politics in general on children at the youngest possible age.
The transgender war on children is only the latest in a series of assaults on childhood by politicising everything. When African warlords enlist 8-year-olds to fight for their causes, we think that’s monstrous, but when leftists turn Greta Thunberg, an unstable teenage girl, into a heroine and encourage even preschoolers to protest over global warming, that’s activism.
Activism is how the educational war on childhood began. Now the war is not just about how children see the world, but against their bodies. Child soldiers are expected to be willing to die. The sexual identity political movement expects children to have their minds damaged and their bodies mutilated, taking away their ability to have their own children, as a political commitment.
Even African warlords would find that unfathomably barbaric.
The ancients sacrificed children to the fires of Moloch while progressives sacrifice them to their passion for wokeness. Either one is a symbolic assertion that the obsessions of the adult are more important than the safety of the child. Civilized adults don’t act this way. Barbarians, which is another way of saying children who inhabit the bodies of adults without the disciplined ethics of adulthood, do things like this because they live in a Lord of the Flies world of emotional turmoil, fearful insecurity, and angry selfishness. They see every encounter as a threat to their fragile identities, their insecurities surround them with humiliating microaggressions, and they retreat from their conviction that the world is a threatening place by escaping into fantasies.
Fantasies are supposed to be the business of children, but in the post-modern age, fantasies, supernatural, conspiratorial, political, and utopian, are all around us. And adults sacrifice children to utopian ideologies that promise that a better world is just around the corner.
All it will take is destroying childhood and then children.
mortimer says
Daniel Greenfield wrote: “Leftists demand safe spaces for themselves, but take them away from children.”
Couldn’t be said better. The Frankfurt School neo-Marxists are at war with the traditional family so they may brainwash the young with their opportunistic fantasies.
gravenimage says
+1
tim gallagher says
Yes, there’s a lot of child abuse around these days mainly from young children being filled with absolute dread that climate change is going to kill everyone, but also this teaching young children about how gender is fluid and other such crap. and, from what I hear in Australia, the level of anxiety and serious mental health problems among young children and teenagers are skyrocketing, although I suppose the past two years of Covid outbreaks and lockdowns and lack of normal social interactions have been a major factor. These scum from the left are certainly trying to tear down the reasonably pleasant, decent societies we used to inhabit and bring in a far worse type of society.
somehistory says
My young granddaughter saw little kids doing that explicitly sexual thing that is called twerking and wanted me to know…she didn’t know what it was all about.
The scum about which Mr. Greenfield wrote, only want to use kids for their own lust for whatever they are lusting.
In the Bible, God says that “children are gifts” from Him and all who expect to have mercy in their Judgment, should be careful in their treatment of children. Like Jesus said, “For anyone who stumbles one of these little ones, it would be better to have a millstone tied around the neck and be thrown into the sea.”
Infidel says
These days, I find it harder to think of an argument against a Christian theocracy here in the US – even though I’m not a Christian!
somehistory says
thank you very much, Infidel. I appreciate it, and I’m sure others will too.
gravenimage says
Things used to be a lot saner in the US, and we’ve never had a theocracy here.
tim gallagher says
Yes, childhood must be quite weird these days, somehistory. Kids don’t seem to be left to enjoy their early years as much as in the past. I know that children’s mental health problems are talked about a lot here in Australia. I think that kids are being stressed too much. We have had a couple of school children’s rallies to demand more action on climate change here in australia and the TV news has shown a few young teenage girls at the rally in tears and more or less hysterical about how they are all going to die because of this climate change. Maybe they were neurotic kids anyway, but it was sad to see them so worried because of the propaganda they cop at school. Australia has only 25 million people and, as is often pointed out, we have bugger all effect on the climate no matter what we do. We could de-industrialise our economy and fall into poverty and it would have effect on the climate at all. Anything Australia does would be just symbolic.
gravenimage says
Yes, Tim–I think some of this stuff about “Climate Change” edges over into child abuse.
Even some who believe this is an issue recognize that hysteria over it is harmful:
“Stop Telling Kids They’ll Die From Climate Change”
Many young people feel like their future is in peril. To make progress on climate change we must move past doomsday scenarios.
https://www.wired.com/story/stop-telling-kids-theyll-die-from-climate-change/
Infidel says
It’s interesting that people like Obama and Bill Gates, who ostensibly believe in climate change, live in huge oceanfront properties in Martha’s Vineyard and Seattle. If they really believed that the oceans would rise and claim a lot of coastland, they’d have moved to states like Colorado, which would not be underwater due to climate change
somehistory says
Some years ago, tim, I was reading about stress on children and that many don’t realize that little kids five and under can be depressed and think about suicide. The article I esp recall gave an account of a five year old who tried to kill himself due to being depressed.
Just as new babies can exhibit signs of having head pain, and sometimes cry due to stress, little kids pick up on the stresses in the people around them. Add to that, the deliberate stresses put upon them, and it is truly destructive. Child abuse is so rampant…it’s easy to read of new cases of people being arrested for abusing and murdering their kids every day.
tim gallagher says
Yes, gravenimage, I guess that the people who feed the children this alarmist position on climate change do believe that the world really is in huge trouble. But it seems a shame to terrify these young kids. I honestly don’t know what to think about climate change, but I am fairly sceptical about it. Then this shoving all this crap about sex and gender fluidity onto young children definitely seems to be abuse to me. Let them be children and enjoy life. Mind you, when I was young I was terrified by some of the Christian Brothers that taught me. Sadistic creatures some of them were. A couple of them terrified me, that’s for sure. Infidel, what you said there about Gates and Obama is similar to a major climate alarmist, Dr Tim Flannery, here in Australia. He was always warning about the disaster we would face and he bought a house right on some body of water. He is infamous for a totally wrong statement he made years ago that it would pretty much never rain again. lately it won’t stop raining out here (really bad floods) which is depressing everyone (due to the la nina weather effect) and Flannery’s hopeless prediction is often mentioned. I don’t think he’s ever explained how he got it all so wrong. the leftist media still treat him as some kind of knowlegeable person. I agree, somehistory, and the commentators I watch on Sky News often say that terrorising young kids is definitely child abuse. That is extraordinary and terrible that any 5 year old would try to kill themselves. To give up on life so young is truly terrible.
gravenimage says
So true, Infidel. If they *really* believed this they wouldn’t buy property that is supposed to be underwater in a couple of years…
James Lincoln says
gravenimage says,
“Many young people feel like their future is in peril.”
Yes, and it’s impossible for young people to plan for the future – if they feel that there may not be one.
gravenimage says
The Left’s War on Childhood
………..
Grimly spot on piece by Daniel Greenfield. The infantilization of adults is also linked to forcing children to grow up too early.
Childhood should as much as possible be a safe space–but increasingly it is not, but is more and more politicized. Leftists, especially, know that if they get to children early that they may have them for life.
Mike says
pass it on to friends and family
do know control the children control the future Hitler wrote this in Mine Kompf
OLD GUY says
If you teach the children to follow an ideology at an early age you can control their thoughts and lives for most of them. Herd immunity isn’t just a medical idea, Herding the masses is the plan of the left. Individualism and freedom will become a thing of the past.
David says
The “childlike” adults is an interesting observation.
A pastor I knew once went to Saudi Arabia, and noted that some of the muslims acted “in an unusual way”, that at the sounding of the prayer call to allah/hubal, grown men would grab hands with eachother and run to the temple/mosque
On the flip side, I taught my kids (whilst quite young) the 10 commandments and the law of the gospel and now we can talk about issues together, and I can ask them, based on the 10 commandments and the law of the gospel, what does God think of these thing?
They now have a consistent moral framework to judge things in this world.
I personally grew up without such a framework and I will say that it is MUCH more confusing not to have this framework, because MORALITY is taught, and is not natural to humans (we have a conscience, but it needs to be informed).
God bless you all!