Official Child Abuse By Philip Carl Salzman
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/philip-carl-salzman/2022/06/18/official-child-abuse-n1606365
“Apparently, no abuse of our children is too extreme when it serves narratives that signal virtue, even though the narratives are false and unscientific: “public health” that imposes useless material impositions on populations that would not need them even if they worked; unsubstantiated critical race theory that is little more than reverse racism; and trans theory that requires denial of biology and of the well-being of troubled youth. This abuse of our children is a disgrace, and we should all be ashamed that we have let it happen.”
Powerful American institutions have brought their power to bear on our children, to the children’s detriment. Rather than nurture children, these institutions have taken our children as fodder to advance their own power and ideological agendas.
The CDC in collusion with self-serving teachers’ unions imposed a mask mandate on school children and continued that mandate even when adults were no longer required to wear masks. This imposition on children was made in spite of the long-known and well-documented fact that children were the segment of the population least vulnerable to COVID-19 and thus not really in danger. The death rate (probability of dying if infected) for children 0-9 years was 0.0, i.e. no deaths, while for children (including those with comorbidities) 10-19, 0.2%, young adults (including those with comorbidities) 20-39, 0.2%, with an increased death rate for older segments of the population. In short, children were at little risk from COVID.
New York Health provides confirmation that deaths of individuals without comorbidities ages 0-17 was 0.0% of all deaths, ages 18-44, 1.0% of all deaths, with the percentage of deaths increasing, e.g. age 75+ comprising 14.2% of all deaths. Taking into account all deaths, including individuals with comorbidities, deaths of 0-17 make up 0.04% of total deaths, while 75+ made up 47.7% of deaths. Once again, the risk to children was minuscule.
Still, one might argue that mandating masks was worthwhile as “an abundance of caution.” Certainly, N-95 masks, used in operating rooms, would have provided some protection. But no children wore N-95 masks; they wore cloth or paper masks. It has long been known and extensively documented that cloth and paper masks provide no protection from the tiny COVID virus which goes right through them (see also here, here, here, and here). As well, children could not keep their masks closed around their faces, nor did they ever change or wash their masks. So the “benefit” was only children having difficulty breathing, inhaling their own dirt and germs, and the social liability of reduced visibility and contact with others.
A special recognition should be given to teachers’ unions whose culpability goes far beyond the sadistic mask mandates for children to intentionally depriving children of education by closing schools for years on end. The hopes on the part of the public for school reopening were leveraged by the unions for huge COVID relief funds, which have not been spent on their designated purposes, for higher wages and more indulgent conditions, and, in some jurisdictions, such as Los Angeles, political demands such as defunding the police. Classroom education was replaced by electronic distance education, which proved to be no education at all for children (see also here, here, and here), although parents learned a lot (see below). An instructive contrast was Sweden, where schools were not shut and were not vectors of COVID, and students did not lose years of mental development and substantive education.
What parents did learn from remote schooling was what was in the curriculum that they never expected to hear. There were three unexpected lessons offered to their kids: America is a bad, nasty, racist country, and always has been, and that our founding fathers were bad, bad men and their constitution equally bad; black and brown Americans are helpless victims of evil, predatory, oppressive whites, and whites need to step aside in favor of people of color; and some boys are attracted to other boys and girls are attracted to girls, and that’s really cool, and that there are 57 varieties of genders, and you can choose to be a girl or boy or something in between. Further, you can pledge allegiance to the flag, as long as it is either the BLM, sickle-and-hammer, or rainbow flag. Many parents were stunned by this discovery and were not best pleased.
The school system is downstream of our Marxist universities and the radical extremism of administrators and faculties of education and departments of grievance studies (gender studies, ethnic studies, queer studies, black studies, etc.). State and county and provincial departments of education, school boards, school administrators, and teachers have all been thoroughly trained in neo-Marxism and anti-Westernism, radical feminism, and “anti-racism.” For example, the most popular theory in the social sciences is “postcolonial theory,” which argues that all of the troubles in the world are due to Western imperialism as if history started in the 16th century and all the world was a pristine utopia, and there were no local and regional political hierarchies and cultures.
School children are thus perceived by the education system as cannon fodder for the coming revolution that will overturn white supremacy, systemic racism, capitalist oppression, LGBTQI++ phobia, and cis-heteronormativity. Pupils are thus being groomed to become “allies” of all gender varieties as well as to try out a new one and to become activists on behalf of the virtuous revolution. “Anti-racism” requires the temporary or permanent separation of pupils into “affinity groups” defined by race; this is the new, good segregation (see also here). “Gender justice” requires that all pupils be “allies” of gay, queer, trans, bi, intersex, etc. individuals and celebrate their “choices.” Meanwhile, as students are groomed to make the “transition” by being encouraged to pick new names and pronouns, being provided trans-closets of clothes for their new gender, and being given access to clinics that prescribe puberty-blocking hormones, all this is hidden from parents, pupils being counseled to say nothing to them.
When homosexuality was being legalized, some people claimed that, if made legitimate, they would come after our children. This was laughed off by most of us, arguing that only the ignorant confused homosexuality, between “consenting adults” after all, with pedophilia, which had nothing to do with homosexuality. Well, how wrong we were, for now they are coming after our children, not perhaps as sex partners, but as recruits. Schools are not alone in this, although the declarations by school teachers on “Libs of Tik Tok” shows what is going on there. “Woke” corporations pandering to children, such as Disney, have joined the grooming enthusiastically. According to Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute:
my sources at Disney leaked a video to me of an hour-and-40-minute company-wide meeting about the controversy. And what did the video reveal? In a series of unedited clips that I released on social media, an executive producer at Disney said that she had been inserting what she called a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” into children’s programming, targeting kids as young as two years old, and had experienced no pushback. A production coordinator said that he had created a tracking program to make sure that the company was including enough transgender, non-binary, and asexual characters. The president of Disney’s general entertainment content referenced a Disney initiative declaring that “50 percent of regular and recurring characters across Disney General Entertainment will come from underrepresented groups.”
An even more egregious imposition on children is the gender transition campaign carried out by transition enthusiasts among teachers, school counselors, school administrators, wokerati in school boards, departments of education, government officials, and legislators. There appears to be a determination to turn little girls into boys and little boys into girls. This is justified by claiming it is supporting the mental health of children who allegedly are suffering from a troubling gender dysphoria. Transition enthusiasts, including the President of the United States, insist that the only safe response to gender dysphoria is “affirmation” and immediate steps in the transition process: social transition (adoption of cross-sex name, pronouns, and clothes), puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and plastic surgery (breast removal, castration, constructed genitalia) to emulate the opposite-sex body. Deleterious health effects of these treatments, including sterilization, are ignored or denied.
Transition enthusiasts, which include The American Academy of Pediatrics and the President of the United States, often argue that without full affirmation and rapid transition, the child sufferers of gender dysphoria would commit suicide. Hesitant parents are asked whether it is better to have a dead boy or a healthy girl. The alternatives are put in stark terms: transition or death. This formulation neglects a number of pertinent facts, such as that many children claiming gender dysphoria desist in adolescence, that many children who have undergone transition treatments regret the treatments, that many de-transition and return to their biological sex, and that there are many suicides after transitioning. Also ignored is rapid-onset dysphoria in which groups of adolescent girls decide that they are all going to transition to being boys, which is increasingly becoming the bulk of transitioners, as documented in Abigail Schrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Meanwhile, the transition lobby actively tries to suppress criticism and even scientific research.
What contributes to the enthusiasm for gender transition? First, it fits neatly into the “progressive” Marxist narrative of a society based on oppressor and victim classes, by providing another “marginalized and underserved” victim category. Second, at the same time, it undermines the family and traditional cultural values by the very effective means of making self-sterilization popular. Undermining the family and making the population entirely dependent on the government is a long-term progressive and Marxist goal. Third, a great deal of money flows into trans activism from those who wish to undermine society and culture. That money is put to work by advocates who have successfully injected trans culture into the schools. But, fourth, much money is to be made through transgenderism from the “consultants” who provide trans propaganda for school pupils to the pediatric “clinics” and the “doctors” who charge very high fees for their trans services to the big pharma companies to sell large amounts of expensive, off-label drugs to advance transition. Maybe this is part of the reason that “affirmation” is insisted on and counseling is often pro-forma, and no alternatives are offered.
Apparently, no abuse of our children is too extreme when it serves narratives that signal virtue, even though the narratives are false and unscientific: “public health” that imposes useless material impositions on populations that would not need them even if they worked; unsubstantiated critical race theory that is little more than reverse racism; and trans theory that requires denial of biology and of the well-being of troubled youth. This abuse of our children is a disgrace, and we should all be ashamed that we have let it happen.
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