Why the Right Wing Is Obsessed With (Our) Kids

Hate Is a Social Construction — And the Future Is, Too

Image Credit: Daniel A. Varela

You don’t have to look very hard to see it. The right — the far right — is obsessed. With kids. With our kids. And there’s something not just creepy about that, but genuinely dangerous, in the truest sense.

Let’s go through a few examples and connect some dots. Down in Florida, the Governor’s obsessed with kids in a particularly sinister way. They’re not allowed to be taught that gay people exist. They can’t learn black history. To its shame, the “College Board” — that’s a private company, but under the tenets of American capitalism, it controls major mechanisms within higher education — has caved, changing its curriculum for AP African American History to please conservatives. When I said dangerous, I wasn’t kidding — this is how easy it is to begin to turn a society genuinely fascist, because the Nazis, too, remember pressured social and economic institutions…just like this.

Meanwhile, figures like Andrew Tate have made fortunes off…kids. It’s not really adults who’ve propelled his ilk to fame and wealth — it’s kids, who are deliberately targeted by what’s become a veritable industry. A hate-industrial complex. They literally offer courses in this stuff — “Hustler’s University.” Kids are targeted, openly. They’re “taught”…what? Enlightenment? No, hate, in all its forms, bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, worse.

Those are just two examples, but I could keep on going endlessly. Think of the way that trans kids are under attack in Red state after state. For what? Why? Even if you “disagree” with their choices…so what? It’s their lives, and if their parents are OK with it — helping them navigate this maze of who to be, and remember how hard that is when you’re young? — what business is it of anyone else’s to say, “no, you can’t live that way”? 

The right — and all that’s really remaining of the right is the far right — is obsessed with kids. Our kids. Maniacally so, and that’s not an exaggeration. A little more every single day. When the Governor of Florida, state after state, and figures like Andrew Tate have all converged on a single target — kids — something’s badly wrong.

At the same time, we’re not doing a very good job of protecting kids from all this — by listening to them.

What do I mean by all that? Let’s begin here. Why is the right — the far right — obsessed with our kids? For a reason that’s hidden in plain sight, which is deeper than you might suspect. It goes right back to one of the great truths of human nature, of us, as people.