Summary: Bien pensant liberals see the results of their social engineering hurting their friends and relatives, and trashing long-held values. How they resolve these conflicts will play a big role in setting the course of US politics in the next generation.
Liberals watch America changing as a result of their efforts during the past few generations. The Southern Poverty Law Center has abandoned its mission, instead manufacturing McCarthyite propaganda. Campuses shut down conservative speakers, abandoning their core mission. Harvard Law School abandons a core principle of the law profession – that all accused are entitled to an attorney – by firing their Dean for daring to defend Harvey Weinstein, a man declared guilty by feminists without the need for a trial. And schools have abandoned basic standards of fairness and due process. The last is the most telling, since their sons, husbands, and families are getting lynched.
The result: cognitive dissonance, as liberals; ideology collides with reality. How will they square the circle? Here is an attempt by a Jewish mother to do so.
“What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right“
By “anonymous” at The Washingtonian, 5 May 2019.
“A Washington family’s nightmare year.”
“The problems had started when Sam was 13, barely a month into eighth grade. In the taxonomy of our local public school, his close group of friends was tagged edgy and liberal: One of them came out as gay during a class presentation; another identified as trans for a while. Their group-text chain pulsed 24-7 with observations about alternative music and the robotic conformity of other classmates. Standard stuff for sensitive middle-schoolers.
“One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s mentioned a meme whose suggestive name was an inside joke between the two of them. Sam laughed. A girl at the table overheard their private conversation, misconstrued it as a sexual reference, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of ‘breaking the law.’ Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was ‘illegal,’ hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a ‘statement of guilt.’
“No one called me as this unfolded, even though Sam cried for about six hours straight as staff members parked him in vacant offices to keep him away from other students. When he stepped off the bus that afternoon and I asked why his eyes were so swollen, he informed me that he would probably be suspended, but possibly also expelled and arrested.
“If Kafka were a middle-schooler today, this is the nightmare novel he would have written.
“At a meeting two days later with my husband, Sam, and me, the administrator piled more accusations on top of the harassment charge – even implying, with undisguised hostility, that Sam and his friend were gay. He waved in front of us a statement from the girl at the table and insisted that Sam would need to defend himself against her claims if he wanted to prove his innocence. But the administrator refused to reveal the particulars of the complaint (he had also blacked out identifying details, FBI-style) and then hid the paperwork under a book. He declared that it was his primary duty, as a school official and as a father of daughters, to believe and to protect the girls under his care.
“In an out-of-body moment, I imagined that this very episode would be cited by some future cultural critic on the limits of liberalism, or perhaps we’d show up in a sociology dissertation about the collision of childhood and technology. Except, coming back to reality, I realized there was nothing theoretical about this. Our son sat pale and trembling as he made his case. I wanted to reach out and hold his hand, but he was at the other end of the large conference table – a raft, it seemed to me, floating unprotected in a stormy sea.
“The meeting didn’t go well. My husband walked out after the administrator parsed a line in the county’s code for student conduct in a particularly absurd way, and Sam and I soon followed. Later, from the principal, we learned that school staff had just completed a mandatory training on spotting sexual assault – and the principal acknowledged that perhaps the stress of finishing that course had caused colleagues to overreact.
“Sam agreed, reluctantly, to write a letter of apology to the girl who’d reported him so that the debacle would come to an end. But no hoped-for resolution materialized. Instead, Sam’s sweet earnestness, his teenage overconfidence, even his tremulous determination in the face of unjust authority drained away, replaced by …nothing. He lost all affect. He stopped eating and sleeping, complained of headaches, and regressed in disturbing ways. He couldn’t concentrate, turned in no homework, and didn’t even pick up a pen when it was time to take a test. One of his extracurricular instructors – a woman who had recently lost a student to suicide – overheard him talking to friends and called me to express concern. He didn’t say much to us, but it seemed obvious enough that he felt betrayed by the adults he’d trusted.”
This is a commonplace story in modern America, a lynching of a young man by Leftist school administrators. “Sam” then joins the alt-Right. He finds enlightenment, pride, and comradeship. Mom is horrified. Conflict grew in the anonymous household.
“I did try to clear my own mind enough to understand some situations as he did, such as his belief that the men’s-rights movement restored justice to the world. Sam pledged fealty to the idea of men’s rights because, as he said, his former administrator had privileged girls’ words and experiences over boys’, and that’s how all of his troubles had started in the first place. I’d never in my life backed the ‘masculinist’ cause or imagined that men needed protecting – yet I couldn’t help but agree with Sam’s analysis.
“These moments where Sam and I found common ground became increasingly rare, though. Although he had legitimate reasons to feel aggrieved, it was impossible for him to make sense of his situation or to trust that time would heal the hurt. The chasm between us grew. Head down, eyes averted, he trudged straight to his room after school, responded that he wasn’t hungry when I called him down for dinner, and went to bed without saying goodnight.”
Another 2200 words follow describing the horror of the alt-Right. But the story has a happy ending!
“I left a stack of these articles on Sam’s bed when he wasn’t around. The story about how the alt-right purposely recruits depressed kids was on top. …Before long, Sam was at my door. …’Did you hate me when I was hostage to the cult?’ he asked. I’d never heard him use that phrase before. ‘I didn’t hate you,’ I said after a minute. …’I hated myself,’ he admitted. ‘I felt trapped. And now I feel so stupid.’ He started sobbing, raggedly, struggling to catch his breath. “Why would adults want to do that? Why would they want to fool kids? How could I fall for it?’ …
“But one mystery remained. I asked him, point-blank, why he’d finally broken from the online alt-right. ‘I’d always had my doubts,’ he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. ‘I knew liking them was wrong. But I wanted to like them because everyone else hated them.’ …
“{But} my fears came roaring back when Sam and I heard on the radio one day that another ‘Mother of All Rallies‘ was taking place on the Mall that very weekend – and Sam asked if we could go. Together. My breath caught. He must have seen my face change. ‘As counterprotesters?’ he asked, eyes gleaming.”
Fixing cognitive dissonance.
Analysis and the fun conclusions
We can only guess at the truth of this story. It has the form of a classic morality tale. The lost sheep is found again. The prodigal son is seduced by the heathen (or gentiles), but returns to the faithful. These tales are written to build faith in the community.
More interesting are the values displayed by the anonymous mother. She harbors few ill feelings for the school administrators who unjustly did such damage to her son. But the alt-Right “cult” are the evil ones in her morality play. She has integrated stories of false accusations of sexual harassment into her world view without changing her political views one iota. It is quite an accomplishment. One that I expect we will see quite often in the next few years.
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It is a classic morality tale. As you point out it ends with support of the current feminist hierarchy.
Reminds me of some of the squaring of the circle that the Catholic church is engaged in.
The part that makes it seem to be a tale rather than the true story is that mothers and fathers react very negatively to abuse of children. They don’t just walk out; they sue. And they should win, IMO.
An underlying theme is that staying in the Church of Feminism, not matter if your MALE child is abused, is better than suffering hell, known as critical thinking.
Truly, this kind of blind liberalism is a gift to our rulers.
John,
The part of the tale that seems most likely fake, imo, was the boy’s conversion back to the true liberal faith. The dialog with him was a mother’s dream, but unlike actual conversations with children.
I’ve raised two boys, and had countless conversations with 13 year old boys in my long career as a Boy Scout leader.
“this kind of blind liberalism is a gift to our rulers.”
That nails it.
Hard to imagine a 13-year old boy saying “Did you hate me when I was hostage to the cult.”
Curiously, mom doesn’t seem all that upset that her son had suffered a pretty serious injustice, only that he had strayed from the fold. She should have been furious about his mistreatment, and understanding when he realigned politically. An impressive feat of willful blindness.
But that’s the Left in a nutshell. Failing to get it on an epic scale; clueless yet absolutely convinced of their rightness.
Scott,
Those points also struck me as odd.
“Failing to get it on an epic scale; clueless yet absolutely convinced of their rightness.”
That points to a difference between the modern Left and Right. The Right is often misinformed about larger matters, such as their faux history and faux economics. But the Left has weird, often destructive, beliefs about their and their family’s personal lives. The often have experimental personalities, like people testing new drugs on their family.
Reminds me of this but without the happy ending.
“PART 1 OF A NEW SERIES ABOUT A BOY” by JENNIFER PERCY at Esquite, 1 March 2019.
Sven,
Long ago Esquire billed itself as a “men’s magazine” and published many interesting things (usually trendy, often bogus). Then it got woke and I stopped reading it. Note how it has adopted the Cosmo style of USING ALL CAPS for the IMPORTANT parts of the TEXT, since they assume their readers ARE IDIOTS.
What about that story did you find interesting?
I liked how the girl provoked him and he got all the punishment. How rough it is to be a boy these days, yet girls get away with everything
Sven,
“I liked how the girl provoked him”
How did she provoke him? This was a simple case of a snitch reporting something she overheard, probably misinterpreting it – and misreporting it to the school authorities.
Sven – follow-up
Here is a description of the series: “Esquire criticized for white ‘American Boy’ cover during Black History Month” in The Guardian – “Magazine profiles a Wisconsin teen growing up in era of ‘social media, school shootings, toxic masculinity and a divided country’.”
‘Youth groups are very useful engines; youth have energy, sincerity, and ignorance. They have all the qualities that would make them valuable to professional agitators who want to bring in IngSoc.”
— Anthony Burgess in 1985 (see Wikipedia). IngSoc is Newspeak for “English socialism (from Orwell’s 1984).
Ruby,
That’s a great quote. I’ll be using it (think of Greta, the Swedish 13-year old believer in climate extinction). Thanks for posting it – and the pointer to 1985. I’ll take a look at it.
Ruby – I edited your comment, giving the full quote from 1985.
It is a good one, which is probably why I held on to it for 34 years. I appreciate seeing the correct quote, even if my words are lost. Congrats on finding it.
1985 has a few good lines in it, though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the book.
I, of course, find myself applying it too the broader Millenial discourse.
Ruby,
My apologies for that sloppy editing! The quote was so good, I just had a moment but wanted to get it up. Again, thanks for posting it.
Boys and boyishness is under assault by feminists and degenerates who want to make girls out of them.
Longtrail,
“Boys and boyishness is under assault by feminists and degenerates who want to make girls out of them.”
I disagree. Rather they just want to break them, putting them in a subordinate status. As I’ve described, that’s a common theme in TV shows. The alpha protagonist is broken, season by season, into a beta orbiter of his increasingly wonderful – and dominant – female partner. “Silk Stalkings”, “Castle, and “NCIS LA” are prominent examples.
I suppose it does not matter if its real or not, i guess that’s not the point. The role of this article is to raise submerged concerns of liberal parents as to if they are fucking there male children over or not. The article raises this concern in a safe environment, ie there is a happy ending in which liberal pities are preserved, no thought crime occurs and the obligatory far right boogieman is vanished, and the school is blamed for over zealousness.
This article gives me some hope, 3 or 4 years ago this would have been some bullshit where some girl manged to join a school wrestling team and over come some kind of misogyny, you know the type.
The fact that such concerns were even raised is interesting, obliviously to avoid being being crucified by there peers online and in print they had to slay the Alt-right dragon. It reminds me of a communist era self analysis where under the watchful eye of the party members are encouraged to critisise aspects of communist policy within the overall framework of Marxist thought, at the end of the meeting, concerns safely raised, the imperialists are condemned and everyone heads home singing the international.
Gerard,
“It reminds me of a communist era self analysis”
I see a lot of communist-era behavior lately. Mass hatred at designated enemies of the people, described by Orwell as “two minute hate sessions.” Social enemies forced into public confessions (this has become common punishment for boys at woke high schools). And, as you note, these carefully curated morality plays – attempts to reconcile discordant aspects of leftist thinking and their real world effects.
I would have liked to share this article on Facebook – as I did with quite a few of your articles since I discovered this website a few months ago – but find no box to click on. Has the Marxist Facebook censor been active?
Koen,
I still see Facebook in the “share this” bar at the bottom of the article.