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September 22, 2023

The only good that came from the pandemic lockdowns was that parents in great numbers finally began to learn what was going on in the public school system as the corrupt curriculum was inadvertently beamed into their homes. This knowledge has given birth to an ever-growing backlash. Although protests and demonstrations are no longer my thing, when notice arrived in my inbox that concerned parents and their supporters were organizing demonstrations across Canada called “A Million March 4 Children” for September 20 I could not resist attending. I expected a sizable protest of diverse concerned parents and their supporters and as well as a strong counterprotest from the transgender lobby. I was not disappointed.

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In her book Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt wrote that the first order of business for aspiring totalitarian regimes is to get their hands on a country’s children. That’s why the German Nazis established Hitler Youth. That’s why Communist USSR set up the Young Pioneers. That is why in Mao’s Cultural Revolution children were made to turn against their parents. And that is why in the early days of the mainly leftist kibbutz movement in Israel children were raised in the so-called children’s homes, apart from their parents. Lenin is said to have written, “Give me a child till the age of seven and I’ll have him for life.” But Lenin wanted to own children through indoctrination — it never occurred to him to do so through drugs and genital mutilation. Indeed, the idea would have appalled him: mutilated children are disabled for life, their ineluctable need for self-care and personal maintenance renders them useless even as useful idiots.

The idea was always to use children to make a break with the past in order to create a brave new world. It’s a powerful idea. Cultural genetics, unlike physical genetics, is a very malleable thing. It is much easier to modify in a deliberate global way than is physical genetics. Thus, in his book Pluto’s Republic the Nobel microbiologist Peter Medawar observed that an entire culture can be transformed in one generation.

The protest in Toronto was supposed to take place at Queen’s Park, but in the downtown area that is a somewhat ambiguous location. In popular parlance, Queens Park is used to refer to the Ontario legislature but it is also used to refer to a fairly large adjacent urban park. When I arrived on my bicycle, I at first encountered the counter-protest, which was marching around the parliament building. It was very large, noisy, and angry, and I feared that it might have scared the parents’ demonstration away. A helicopter hovered overhead and there was a strong presence of police on foot and bicycles ostensibly to keep demonstrators and counter-demonstrators apart but from this vantage point the former were nowhere to be seen. The counter-demonstrators had bullhorns galore and banners from the teachers’ unions and Marxist organizations. Their placards were all about being anti-hate, pro-love, and pro-care, and respecting the rights of children.

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It took me a while to find the concerned parents and their supporters. On the edge of the park, I saw couple of women carrying flyers that said Hands Off our Children, and they told me that the demonstration was in the center of the park. Mishearing them, I was alarmed to hear that the demonstration was being controlled by police on horseback, but it turned out that it was taking place in front of a prominent equestrian statue. When I found demonstration, it was calm, peaceful, and growing. Toronto is probably the most multicultural, multi-ethnic city on the planet and the diversity of dress and skin pigmentation was quite apparent. Predictably, the corporate press had risibly alerted the public that this demonstration would be all white supremacist — oh well, what else would you expect from media that in Canada are bought and paid for by the federal government? The placards, aside from demanding Hands off our Children also cited Big Pharma exploitation, and one of them also claimed that the Iranian ayatollahs were funding the trans lobby. Who knows? In Canada the trans lobby is very well funded and it is not perfectly clear by whom. Back in the day the erstwhile Soviet Union used to fund the North American and European Ban the Bomb movement and it is said that today Russia is funding the climate alarmists.

I heard many foreign accents in the crowd the organizer of the rally turned out to be a woman in a burka. One of the speakers declaimed that Canada is a country of immigrants and that they came here looking for freedom and did not expect to find and ideology inimical to freedom playing such a prominent role. He said that the trans movement did not represent real Canada. As one might have expected there were religious overtones in some of the talks but more along the lines of expecting freedom of religion and noting that the trans movement was not only anti-religious freedom and anti-religion in general but had become a religion unto itself. The demonstrators were exhorted to not be afraid of reprisals such as job loss for speaking up about their concerns.

The crowd looked like normal Canadians. One of the main themes was that our relationship with the government is a fiduciary one. When we send our children to public schools, which are government institutions, we put them in their care because we trust them to care for our children in our behalf and by foisting the trans ideology and indoctrination in general upon them the government is betraying that trust. Parents and their supporters were urged to get active and get involved in school-board elections.

Around twenty years ago I wrote a book about the corruption of the education system but though I had a contract it never got published because my publisher went bankrupt and all the other publishers had already commissioned books by other authors on the same topic. There are many such books out there and they stirred up some discussion and debate over the years but I would venture to say that in the long run none will have had the impact of this unintended consequence of the evil pandemic lockdowns.

Image: One Million March for Children