Childhood Under Attack

A speech given at the Rescue the Republic Rally on the National Mall

This is the text of the speech that I delivered at the Rescue the Republic rally on the Mall in Washington D.C., on September 29, 2024. My assignment was to speak to one of the eight pillars that Rescue the Republic had identified, specifically the “Development Industrial Complex.” Unlike the “military” in the Military Industrial Complex, however, “development” is older than human institutions—indeed, older than humans themselves. Development is that period of an organism’s life between birth and adulthood: broadly speaking, development is childhood. There are many factors that are attaching themselves parasitically to children and childhood in modern America. I address some of them here.

(The complete livestream was taken down by YouTube, because that is the kind of thing that they continue to do. This button delivers you to a clip of my speech.)

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Thank you all for being here today. Here. You are here, born in remarkable times, in a remarkable country. This is the time and place where you exist, and it is your sacred duty to embrace reality, and choose between abdication of your rights and duties, and engagement. You are here.

Each of you an improbable creature on an improbable planet in an improbable cosmos.

We humans have the longest childhoods on the planet. This is not happenstance. It is not luck. Dragonflies don’t need to learn how to be dragonflies—it’s all hard wired in, no childhood necessary. Mice need to learn how to be mice, a bit. Crows, though, crows and wolves and dolphins and elephants and all the great apes, including us—we all need to learn to be what we’re going to be. Humans most of all. Born utterly helpless, human babies are all potential and opportunity, so many years of development ahead of them, during which to explore, imagine, create, play, experiment, make mistakes, and learn. We are improbable, and marvelous, and utterly human. We are right here.

To be born an American baby, in much of the latter half of the 20^th century, was a lucky thing. The schools were good, and you could learn real things. Mothers were as likely to tell their rambunctious youngsters to “go play outside” as anything else. Healthy children were not medicated. Sick children were rare.

Life was not perfect then; it never can be. But children had time.

• Time to climb trees, build hideouts, and have battles with sticks and cones.

• Time to sit with friends and talk.

• Time to think, and to be alone with their own thoughts.

• Time to imagine—imagine the most amazing things—and to sometimes go deep into those fantasies, and maybe even begin to believe them.

• And nobody confused imagination with reality. Not the adults. Parents understood that it was their job to provide a structure, with honorable rules, within which their children could explore, and take risks. And parents had the full authority to do their job.

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Now, though. Now:

The children of America are once again learning to be suspicious of each other based on the color of their skin. The Democratic party, which supported slavery, then transformed itself into the party who brought us Civil Rights, has transformed itself once again, to become the party of Racism, preaching that the color of your skin is proof of what is inside your head.

Now, the children of America are learning to be scared of one another, scared of disagreement, scared of exploring both landscapes and ideas. They are locked down in the name of safety, kept from anything that might bring harm their way—restrained in much the same way that a straitjacket restrains a violent mental patient. Our children are being treated like mental patients…and many of them are thus becoming mental patients.

Our children are being drugged and drugged and drugged some more—drugs to “treat” normal childhood variation. Speed to make the active young boy more compliant in the classroom. Anti-anxiety meds to quiet the concerns of the sensitive girl, and make it far more difficult for her to learn how to soothe herself down the road. Children are not normally sick, but American children are, and ever more so. We are a chronically sick people, and our children are following in our footsteps.

The solution to this is not, as the Blue Team would have us believe, to negotiate with pharma to make the drugs cheaper. Most of what ails America’s children cannot be solved with pharmaceuticals.

President Biden claimed this Summer that “we have finally beaten pharma after all these years.” Hardly. What the Biden-Harris administration did with their Inflation Reduction Act was to lower prices for prescription drugs, instead of asking why so many children—and their parents, and most Americans—are on so many pharmaceuticals in the first place. It’s unprecedented. We must and we can Make America Healthy Again, starting with our children. The solution does not lie with pharmaceuticals.

The solution lies, in part, with food. Real food, grown by real farmers, not sludge dreamed up in a lab and put together in a factory.

Our children are being made sick and miserable by what they eat. Most of it is not food. It is hyper-processed, full of agro-chemicals, lacking nutrition but full of addictive potential.

So many American children are now diabetic or pre-diabetic, have metabolic syndrome, autism—this is new. These are new problems. Half of American children are overweight, nearly half of those (21% total) are obese. Children. And yet Ozempic and its pharmaceutical relatives, the newest magic pills with which to disappear your ills, are being given to children as young as six years old. Instead of medicating children to treat their brand new illnesses, we need to address root causes. And keep Big Food and Big Pharma far away from our children.

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Corporations are being allowed to contaminate our children’s bodies, and get access to their brains—to advertise to them. Meanwhile, the schools are indoctrinating them.

Our children are being indoctrinated into a new religion, a religion called The Science. The new religion called The Science has no bearing on actual science, but because it comes wrapped up in a package with a nice name, the new religion is trusted and believed. The Science teaches fantasy. Fantasy like:

• boys can become girls, and girls can become boys.

• frosted mini-wheats are healthier than eggs.

• the only way to be healthy in the face of a new pathogen is to submit yourself to the authorities, comply with their orders, and take into yourself new technology that is, we are now well aware, neither safe nor effective.

Meanwhile, the children of America are learning nearly nothing of actual science—of its wonder and expansiveness, of discovery and uncertainty and hypothesis and excitement and that tingling in the back of the brain when you’re on to something, but…what is it? What is it? I can’t quite….wait. There it is. Eureka! Our children are being denied their moments of discovery. I did not know. But now I do. I figured it out!

Children are naturally full of wonder, asking questions, forming opinions, abandoning beliefs in the face of new information. They do not, by and large, accept that there are things they cannot know, or cannot ask about, unless they are beaten down. The human spirit is inquisitive and creative.

America’s children need to spend time off their screens and in the dirt, growing food and flowers; they need to spend time with pen and ink and color and clay, learning to represent their world; they need to spend time moving their bodies with speed and with skill; they need to spend time observing the world around them and being encouraged to ask questions of it—

• Why are there so many colors of flowers?

• How do eyeglasses work?

• What’s it like on Mars?

—and they need to have classrooms with teachers who are not afraid of saying

• “I don’t know” and

• “how would we figure out the answer?” and

• “no, we’re not going to google it.”

Gardens and art and sport and actual science. These are some of what the children of America need, and which precious few are getting. Instead of gardens and art and sport and actual science, our children are getting gold stars for everyone, rainbow flags, declaring one’s pronouns, and a pathological focus on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

The human spirit is inquisitive and creative. But the human spirit can be beaten down.

The schools are doing just that, becoming centers of ideology and control. The schools are very successful at beating down the human spirit.

In the new religion called The Science, being advocated for by the Democrats, there is nothing new under the sun, no hope and no wonder and no excitement.

It’s not science, it’s technocracy.

Everything is already known. The experts have the answers. The experts will deliver you what you need—processed food, a pill and a shot, a screen and endless apps in which to waste your days.

This is life for children in 21^st century America.

A life lived through screens, pharma, and fake food, rather than one lived through creativity, exploration, and the fruit of the land.

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It is the parents’ job to model and teach honesty and integrity, loyalty and kindness, determination and courage. Parenting comes with the responsibility to restrict your children, to establish and enforce honorable rules—and to gradually loosen those binds, and allow the children to take risks that are appropriate to them.

It is also a parent’s job to provide as much opportunity as possible for their children, and to teach their children that any opportunities that did not come to them, or that they lost, they need to find for themselves.

But parents aren’t being allowed to parent. Parental rights are being taken away. The very core of humanity is under attack.

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When rioters were allowed to take over many American cities in the Summer of 2020, including Portland, Oregon, where I then lived—it was the Black Lives Matter movement that was at the forefront. Black Lives Matter didn’t turn out to be about Black Lives Mattering, but about enriching the founders of the movement through graft, and overturning much of what Americans hold dear. Included among the principles that BLM had on its site in June of 2020 was this: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.”

The rioting that was spearheaded by BLM was allowed by democratic mayors and governors, encouraged even. They said it was the compassionate thing to do.

The attack on the family has been written into the very principles of activist organizations that are adored and promoted by democratic leaders, among them Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

The attack on parental rights shows up in myriad ways, both direct and indirect.

In states from Indiana to Texas to Montana, parents are losing custody of their children because they dare to try to protect them from the fantasy, propagated by The Science, that boys can become girls, and girls can become boys.

This Summer, following the Biden-Harris administration’s sweeping new “reforms” of Title IX, which now explicitly provides protected status to the fantasy concept “gender identity,” California became the first state in the nation to allow schools to keep such information about children from their parents.

And in Minnesota, Governor Walz signed legislation allowing the courts to take “temporary emergency jurisdiction” of children when “gender-affirming care” isn’t forthcoming.

These are direct attacks on children, on parents, and on families.

The indirect attacks are no less brutal. They may not look like attacks, but that is what they are. A parent, usually a mother, becomes convinced that, in the name of kindness and compassion and that religion called “The Science,” they should abdicate responsibility for their children, hand it over to teachers and activists on social media who tell lies, lies like

“if you don’t help trans your child, he will kill himself.”

In fact, when your boy wakes up in the morning and says he’s a girl, it is not time to embrace his fantasy. You did not just get a daughter. You have a boy who is exploring identity, and it will pass, if you let it. Explore and imagine is what children do.

These confused parents are told that it is the loving thing to do, to allow their children to be destroyed with drugs and surgery, drugs and surgery they do not need, drugs and surgery from which they can never fully return. Under The Science that the Democrats have brought us, a technocracy masquerading as the Enlightenment, parents’ fears are being played, convinced that if they don’t follow the newest thing—the latest expert, advice, or drug—their child will suffer.

You don’t want your child to suffer do you? You do love your child…? Well then – do what we say, and everything will be fine.

Do not fall for it. Do not affirm. Do not comply. This is not the loving thing to do.

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Family culture, traditions, and rules are what help children learn how to be. Parents having and enforcing rules about screen time or curfews, food or gaming or porn, are doing what they are supposed to do.

But parents are being told that they must abdicate their responsibilities, for the good of the children. This is not good for children. It is exactly the opposite.

The way that children are living now—

• kept inside because the outdoors is dangerous,

• so scheduled that none of their time is their own,

• sedentary,

• socializing through technology that is curated by algorithms,

• high on processed foods and pharmaceuticals—

They’re effectively prisoners. Prisoners in their own lives.

We can set them free. We must set them free.

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Bobby Kennedy said, as he stepped down from his run for the presidency in August, “We need to choose to love our kids more than we hate each other.”

Yes. Yes we do.

Now—look around you, at all these beautiful and courageous fellow Americans with whom you stand, and meet them. Say hello. Offer a hand. Learn something of them, their humanity, their story. Where do they come from, and how do they find themselves here? Do that, too, with people elsewhere, on all of your days, and find, again, I hope and I believe, how much more unites us than divides us.

Remember, finally, that you are here, to embrace what is real and what is right. You are here to seize hold of your autonomy, and of your authority, and to resist any who would dispossess you of truth.

Thank you.