The Right’s War On America’s Children

Kids Are Under Attack On Multiple Fronts

The right wing in America killed 16-year-old Nex Benedict. They may not have personally bullied this child or even known of Nex’s existence, but the conservative movement’s collective decision to demonize transgender and non-binary people – not a new position for the intolerant – led to the hostile culture that precipitated Nex’s death.

It is not an isolated case. The conservative movement has had America’s children in its crosshairs for decades and it long predates the openly crude and cruel rhetoric of Donald Trump. Trump wasn’t around in politics when Ronald Reagan singled out Black mothers for his attacks on “welfare queens.” It wasn’t Trumpism that has pushed Republicans in Congress and the White House to push for cuts to health care, school lunch programs, and education.

The right wing in America expresses its hostility to children in so many ways it is nearly unquantifiable. They refuse to enact overwhelmingly popular gun safety measures, even following repeated bloody school massacres from coast to coast enabled by America’s freewheeling NRA-approved gun culture. The right makes children vulnerable to all manner of preventable dangers, from tainted foods to polluted lakes and rivers to a wide spectrum of climate disasters.

Education is a central hub of the right’s callous indifference to America’s children. Either they’re pushing fairy tale nonsensical history on them to lionize right-wing extremist ideas and figures, or they’re banning books. Either they’re underfunding education – frequently threatening to destroy the entire Department of Education – or they’re pushing against increasing teacher pay and labor protections. They don’t even want to give those same students any sort of relief from crushing college debt when they become adults.

The right has decided that they are the final arbiters over children’s bodies and the people who profess to be for “freedom” have imposed their will on what kids and adults can express as their gender identity. While they’re busy banning abortion for women, conservatives hold up the fig leaf of protecting girls and women’s sports by regulating transgender participation. Some on the right have even proposed genital inspections for children so they can better police bodies that are not their own.

When Republicans vote to repeal health care laws or refuse to fund health insurance sign up periods (as Trump did), this harms children. It particularly puts the welfare of minority children at risk and based on the conservative movement’s decades-long hostility to racial equality, it is right in line with the lineage of the movement from Barry Goldwater to George W. Bush and to the present age of Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and Trump.

For too long liberals have collectively allowed ourselves to cling to the delusion that the right doesn’t really want to hurt kids. Surely, we lie, they have their hearts in the right place they just don’t know any better. But this is fantasy.

The outcomes of conservative ideas for our children are all around us every day. They don’t necessarily grab headlines like the death of Nex Benedict, but the evidence is unavoidable. In the last few years we had concrete evidence, for instance, that the expenditure of federal dollars in President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan significantly reduced childhood poverty. Their lives were better. But because of sunset provisions inserted by the most conservative “Democratic” senators – Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema before she flipped – the program ended. And Republicans refused to vote for even that limited relief.

That attitude is pro-suffering. And it targets kids.

We need to end this. The right-wing war on children is being waged on multiple fronts, from harmful cultural conservatism to destructive conservative policy embraced by Republicans. On every front it must be repealed and overrun with a progressive mindset that values the young people who are the only way we can have a decent society in the future.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Threads @owillis1977

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