A morality tale of a 13-year-old boy joining the alt-right!

Larry Kummer, Editor

7 years ago

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.

ID 115370099 © Ivan Shidlovski | Dreamstime.

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.