Family Violence is a State Thing

This news from Maryland, and the courtoom of Judge Paul Grimm (above), is a shocking sign of the times:

A judge on Thursday dismissed a complaint against the Montgomery County school board by parents who alleged that the system’s student gender-identity guidelines violated their state and constitutional rights.

Three parents, who filed anonymously in 2020 against the Montgomery County Board of Education (MCBE), argued that the guidelines curtailed their ability “to direct the care, custody, education, and control of their minor children,” under the Fourteenth Amendment, according to a memorandum opinion.

The parents said that the Montgomery County Public School “2020-2021 Guidelines for Student Gender Identity” were designed to work around parental involvement “in a pivotal decision” in their children’s lives and that the guidelines enable school personnel to allow children “to transition socially to a different gender identity at school” without parents’ notice or consent.

More:

In the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Judge Paul W. Grimm sided with the MCBE’s argument that the guidelines advance the state’s goal of protecting students’ safety and privacy, according to the memo. In the memo, Grimm stated that

“MCBE has a legitimate right to provide a supportive and safe environment for all MCPS student including transgender students. “And the Guidelines are certainly rationally related to achieving that result.”

Do you want it? Do you? We have here a federal judge — an Obama appointee — ruling that the State has the right to deceive parents about whether or not their children are choosing to live as the opposite sex. Parents can be deceived by the State, in the form the local school board.

Under Communism the State seized the family. From the very beginning, it was just like this. Here is Alexandra Kollontai, a leading Bolshevik revolutionary, explaining why in a 1920 essay. Excerpt:

All this goes to show that the responsibility for the child is passing from the family to the collective. …

Communist society considers the social education of the rising generation to be one of the fundamental aspects of the new life. Petty and narrow families that are only concerned with their children and have no interest in the welfare of the child, will not be able to educate the new person. It is not possible to educate the “new person” in a narrow and petty family where parents are only interested in their own children. …

The woman who takes up the struggle for the liberation of the working class must learn to understand that there is no more room for the old proprietary attitude which says: “These are my children, I owe them all my maternal solicitude and affection; those are your children, they are no concern of mine and I don’t care if they go hungry and cold – I have no time for other children.” The worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine; she must remember that there are only our children, the children of Russia’s communist workers.

This is all in Live Not By Lies — the warnings that people who grew up under Communism are sounding to us in the West today! Over the weekend I met a young American woman, who had just graduated from the top Western universities. The college’s Chinese students were all diligently filling out weekly reports to the Communist government detailing what they saw, their interactions with others, and what they heard. She said that the amazing part is that they didn’t give any indications that they did so because of pressure. This was what they believed to be right and good. They would explain calmly that what they had learned from the Party was true when they were challenged about a particular point in Chinese history or political affairs.

From Life Not By Lies:

In his 2019 book, We Have Been Harmonized–China’s term for neutralizing citizens as a threat to the social and political order–veteran journalist Kai Strittmatter, who spent years in Beijing reporting for a German daily, reveals the techno-dystopia that modern China has become. Interview with a Chinese teacher named “David” who is dejected about his country’s future.

“People born in the 1980s and afterwards are hopelessly lost,” David says. He continues:

The brainwashing starts in nursery school. For us, it was different. We were called a lost generation, as many were not able to get an education and schools were shut down. In reality, however, we are the fortunate ones. We were the ones who fell through the cracks. We didn’t survive the brainwashing. Everyone wanted China to be free, open and reformable.

The state’s information-control apparatus has demolished the ability of young Chinese to learn facts about their nation’s history in ways that contradict the Communist Party’s narrative. The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, for example, has been memory-holed. It is something we won’t have to experience in the West.

However, the situation of youth in China’s consumerist China seems more Huxley-like than Orwell. Neil Postman, an American media critic, once stated that Orwell was afraid of a world where people wouldn’t be allowed to read books. Huxley, on the other hand, was afraid of a world where no one would ban books because they would not be wanted. David says that China is today’s China. Students don’t seem to care that much about the information they have access, even though there is a lot of it.

” My students claim they don’t have the time. David says that they are distracted by many other activities. They don’t get me, even though I am only ten years younger than them. They are living in an entirely different world. Their education and Party propaganda have perfectly controlled them: My students are consumed by consumerism, and they ignore all other aspects of life. They ignore reality; it’s been made easy for them.”

American people, wake up: this is us! The brainwashing on gender and sexuality starts now in kindergarten in many places. Schools and news media are teaching children to believe the following lies: that their body and gender is a joke, and that their parents are their enemy. They also believe the State to be their friend and ally. Children are being mutilated in major hospitals. We have a federal judge who declares that the State is allied to the sex and gender revolution against families. He says, for Kollontai’s purposes, “offer an atmosphere in which a child could grow up as a conscious communist.” Or whatever New American Man should be.

How explicit should it be? A malign class wants to control our family and take the hearts of our children. The truth is simple. It is up to us to defeat these criminals with all the resources we have as citizens. But we also need to develop strategies now to safeguard the lives of our children and defend truth. This is what my books The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies are about. Many people dismiss the books as alarmist. But let me assure you that if Judge Grimm’s decision doesn’t make you feel alarmed, you will be in complete denial.

Again, the state — this federal judge, the schools — thinks your children are its. They believe you as a parent or mother pose a threat to their child’s safety if your views differ from gender ideology. You have no right for the public schools not to tell the truth.

This. Is. Totalitarian. Straight up. Protecting children from the state is my opinion, and it’s almost as important. We should vote for those politicians that are honest and openly support families in such matters, rather than the State. These schools and media will soon be promoting young people to become the majority of the voters. We will not be able to resist this fate if we don’t prepare for it and prevent it from happening.

Do you remember what time it really is? Judge Grimm, the revolutionary inventor of timekeeping knows. Why wouldn’t you?

UPDATE: If you don’t subscribe to Wes Yang’s Substack, Year Zero, you really should. His views are strongly feminist and he has an excellent sense of the larger meaning of this revolution. Here is a quote from a subscriber-only interview with Leon Sapir, a Manhattan Institute fellow and scholar of the administrative state. Yang is told by Sapir that he strives to understand the inner workings of government, including the implementation and enforcement Title IX regulations and the subsequent regulation governing transgenderism. Excerpts:

You know, one of the consistent features of administrative government is that the higher up you go, the more abstract and platitudinous the directives are. This is why incentives make sense. President Biden wants to state that the Secretary will ensure that policies are in place that support LGBTQIA youth. Who’s to disagree with that statement? The whole issue is, in essence, which policies are beneficial and which are harmful. In effect, he is delegating the responsibility of the details to different government agencies. The devil in this case will be found in the details. The higher you descend in the bureaucratic hierarchy, the more concrete your decisions will be and the more compromises you’ll see. The more shaky the reasoning, the worse. This is what it allows: the higher you climb the government ladder, the more public officials can evade responsibility by saying, “No, no. I did not mean that policy.” You have to be inclusive, I said. You must be inclusive. It didn’t imply that all state therapists must affirm, affirm, affirm immediately and prescribe puberty blocking drugs. These details don’t exist in the executive orders and it’s no coincidence. This is not an accident. It’s how we run our administration government today.

And:

I do want to emphasize one thing in regards to the topic-because I think it’s really important and worth emphasizing-and that is the central importance of institutions, and the role that they have played in the transgender revolution. It’s natural to be drawn towards culture and philosophical arguments. I’ve written a lot about them. But the notion that politics flows from culture is wrong seems to me. The transgender revolution is a good example of why this is true.

Talk with them. When I was teaching in college I had office hours and spoke to students. I also talked to my colleagues and friends. I spent five minutes talking to their thoughts about gender and other metaphysical ideas. Within a matter of seconds, they turn into therapeutic cliches. These ideas are not supported philosophically by them. It just leads to a total relativism that says everyone should do whatever makes sense and feels good for themselves. If we disagree with them, they will experience subjective distress and eventually, they may even want to commit suicide.

It’s not like gender ideology isn’t important here. It really does. It’s amazing how fast all this can give way to unhinged compassion and empathy and concern for the suffering of others. It’s also important to have a plan for action to fight it. Recognizing what is driving it, and that compassion and empathy are unhinged by rational introspection is key to unlocking the way to help other countries.

I’m telling you, it’s worth it to subscribe to Wes’s Substack even for just one month, to read the transcript of this interview, and learn how the revolution advances through captured institutions. This rabbit hole is so deep that I have no idea how to recover. But I can tell you: It’s worth it to subscribe even for one month to Wes’s Substack. To read the transcript of this interview and learn more about how this revolution advances through captured institutions, I will not vote for Donald Trump.

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UPDATE: Here’s another terrifically instructive passage from the Yang-Sapir discussion. Subscribe to Yang’s Year Zero Substack

Wesley Yang: I hear what you’re saying in terms of the way things are now, but when you have a generation of kids who are raised from infancy on the belief that gender ideology, or their gender identity, is just a matter of subjective identification, and that no one else can see it, some secret that’s hidden inside of you, that you have access to, and that others cannot see. Which is, you know, I think it’s foundational to the form that gender ideology takes, that’s now being taught-it’s going to lay the foundation for a vast expansion of other-those who have been primed since early childhood to be taken in by gender identity, and, you know, for themselves and for others…

Leor Sapir: So that’s true, but just to push back a little bit, talk to these kids, Wesley. Talk to them. When I had office hours in college I spoke to students. I also talked to my colleagues and friends. I spent five minutes talking to them about their thoughts on gender and all of the bizarre and kooky metaphysics. Then it’s time to get into therapeutic cliches. These ideas are not philosophically defended by them. It just quickly gives way to a full relativism that says everyone should do whatever makes sense and makes them feel good. And who am I to judge? If we disagree with them, they will experience subjective distress and eventually, they may even want to commit suicide.

It’s not like gender ideology isn’t important here. It really does. It’s amazing how fast all this can give way to unhinged compassion and empathy and concern for the suffering of others if you look beneath the surface. It’s important, I believe, because it gives us an action plan for fighting it. One new study shows that affirming your sexuality with puberty-blockers can actually lead to suicide. This social transition, which is using the preferred pronouns or names of a person, may not only be a nice, kind and compassionate thing to do but could also cause a temporary condition that will never go away if it’s left alone. Recognizing the root cause of this problem, which is empathy and compassion unaffected by rational introspection, is key to unlocking the potential for us to move forward in other countries.

Wesley Yang: So there’s also like, two key, sort of, inflection points that I see, both when it comes to our conception of rights and then our conception of therapy. You will make the person adjust to the world beyond his own will and subjectivity because there was an idea you had. Right. Now, the opposite idea is that you cannot remake the world. You must make the entire world believe the patient’s beliefs. The idea that not only do I have the right to believe whatever I like, but also that others must affirm my belief is valid. This seems to be a significant and important step towards the advancement of rights. Although it evolves naturally from it, it turns the entire concept upside down at the same.

Leor Sapir: Yeah, I think that’s right. And this is a problem, I think, inherent in the American style of relativism, that we wanted to say, you know, to use Justice Kennedy, in that Planned Parenthood v. Casey case-we all have the right to define our meaning of existence. Of course, our subjective view of existence isn’t the only thing we desire to believe, but we also want it to be true. All of us want to believe in something that is more than a false feeling. Our feelings should be rooted in something real and more lasting. It is important that we recognize the subjective meanings of others, and to be able to live in our own reality. Subjectivism can easily become a form of totalitarianism where there are no limitations to our freedom or our desire. The classical liberal solution to this problem is to accept that people are not only wrong but also condemned to hellfire and corrupt their children. These are those who have deeply flawed theological and moral beliefs. But you can let them continue to live their lives. That is no longer the case. That’s my opinion. Now the question is: Can we get a bit back? I believe the transgender movement, whether that’s what you call it, is so important because it serves as a case study for how we will handle this new kind of freedom and self-expression. It creates a war between all, where the strongest survives.

And I will add one thing. It is deeply ironic to me that those who have lived, subjective experiences, are the ones that dominate our culture. They also benefit from the support of the corporate parties and the power of federal courts. That is a true irony. You could be an alien from space and do a sociological study of American society. I believe you’d find that transgender Americans are the most powerful group in America. They make up a tiny fraction of America’s population, yet their opinions can cause paranoia. You see, ironically, that power is based on how you feel.

The totalitarianism that is therapeutic. It is happening.