When Melissa Harris-Perry debuted her famous ode to collectivism a few weeks back, I was content to mock. It struck me as obvious that a talk show host telling parents we have to "break through" the antiquated notion that "kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families" was ridiculous. I didn't think MSNBC would backtrack or anything, but I figured they'd let it die. As Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry pointed out today, my reaction was insufficient when it was not wrong. Any criticism was dismissed by Harris-Perry and her knight in shining armor Chris Hayes as awfulness whipped up by the dread "right wing noise machine." Gobry is gobsmacked:
I still haven’t swallowed the whole fracas over the infamous Melissa Harris-Perry ad on schools. I freaked out when I saw it. I freaked out when I read her tone-deaf, epistemically-closed, petulant (*catches breath*) response to it (apparently if somebody sends you hate mail after you say something in public you can’t be wrong, which given that in the internet age anyone who says something publicly gets hate mail, must mean that everyone is right. (Except Melissa Harris-Perry’s critics.)). I freaked out when I saw the segment Chris Hayes did on the whole fracas. ...
If she can’t even understand why her words would freak out parents, it’s hard to discount claims that her views of education don’t have germs of totalitarianism within them. And I have to live with this crap. I have to live in a country that really lives under the ideology of "your kids belong to us", and with the catastrophic consequences that that entails. I have to live with the gut-wrenching fear that my daughter will see her wonderful brightness and enthusiasm for life extinguished as was mine by being forced to sit in a room and do nothing with thirty-five jerks 30 hours a week and being told that this constitutes "education", and having to spend our evenings unweaving the tapestry of indoctrination that she will be very much subjected to.
You really have to read PEG's whole essay. It is filled with a righteous fury that rarely emanates from his corner of the Internet and is a fine partner to a similar essay of his at the American Scene.
I have to say, I get where he's coming from. It's funny how things just start creeping up on you. For instance, I consider myself to be in the meaty part of the public opinion curve when it comes to abortion: for a variety of reasons, I think first-trimester abortions should be legal while also finding late-term, partial birth abortions to be acutely terrible. So it was with a vague but growing sense of horror that I watched the left's coverage of the Gosnell trial. The contingent disingenuously arguing this was just a backdoor effort to ban all abortions was bad enough. But the real horror show? The real moment where one had to sit up and ask what in the world was going on? That came when the essays started pouring out that the real crime here isn't that Gosnell was committing infanticide but that women were forced to go to shady, evil men like Gosnell to obtain an infanticide.
I darkly joked on Twitter that if you read the Gosnell story and your takeaway is that we need cleaner facilities to sever baby heads, you're probably doing it wrong. But there are a horrifying number of people who are doing it wrong. And the most horrifying part of all? They don't even consider it infanticide. It is an inconvenience for the mother, this little thing that just popped out. It is life unworthy of life. So it's fine to literally flush it down the toilet.
A not-insignificant portion of Americans think children are yours to dispose of until a certain age, when they become the responsibility of the collective to mold, rear, and shape into citizens who will better serve the collective. That incredibly disturbing sentence isn't nearly as absurd to type as it would've been a month ago.