The Assault on Children

I’ve written something that should be out soon about MAGA’s years-long obsession with predator Jeffrey Epstein and how it is very much not about protecting kids.

How MAGA sees and treats children deserves a broader discussion, however, at this dangerous moment — because using them as political tools is a hallmark of this administration and today’s GOP as it has been for other authoritarian regimes.

Applying the Us/Them Mindset to Children

MAGA’s us/them mindset makes it unsurprising that its leaders have been willing to ignore or exploit the vulnerability of children — depending on who those children are.

Red states have removed child labor protections, allowing kids, especially in low-income areas and migrants, to work long hours in hazardous jobs. Draconian abortion laws endanger the lives and health of girls, including victims of trafficking, rape, and incest. The GOP tax and spending bill slashes food assistance for needy families and schools. Medicaid cuts strip schools of dollars for nurses and psychologists and will make it harder for rural families to get pediatric health care. Trump’s DOE fired the staff that distributes funding for students with disabilities under IDEA.

These are just a few examples of MAGA pols treating some children like they aren’t children, in other words, humans worthy of special care.

Just as it chooses how to narrowly define who counts as a “real American,” MAGA decides who is worthy of the rights and protections all children deserve. This can depend on who their parents are, as MAGA works out the perceived sins of the parent on the child. If the parent is undocumented, then they can find — as did 15-year-old Juan Martinez — their mother snatched by ICE, have no idea where she is, and be left behind to care for younger siblings. If their family relies on threads of our shredded social safety net, such as free lunch programs, kids are painted by MAGA as participants in an intergenerational welfare scam.

Instilling Fear in Kids, Especially “Them”

Trump and MAGA appear increasingly intent on impressing upon children — the next generation — the power of the state.

The second Trump Administration announced early that it would leave no safe spaces for children: not schools, not hospitals, not churches, not homes.

Baldly contradicting its claim to be targeting the worst criminals, the administration is now pursuing mass deportations in ways blunt and brutal, indiscriminate and inhumane. Andrea González-Ramírez at The Cut described the made-for-TV horror ICE recently brought to those living in a Chicago apartment building:

Witnesses say the agents rappelled from helicopters onto the roof of the building. As the agents worked their way through apartments, they kicked down doors, threw flash-bang grenades, and detained adults and children with zip ties, according to residents. Thirty-seven people were arrested, officials said. Additionally, four of the children detained were U.S. citizens, a DHS spokesperson told CNN.

They zip-tied children.

A new report on US immigration policy and mental health confirms what should be obvious: mass deportations are deeply harmful to children in migrant and mixed-status families. And when masked men grab a parent from the school car line or the corner coffee shop, all students in that school or neighborhood are subject to trauma and made to understand: The state can make people disappear. It is to be feared.

And it’s not just those children who see and fear, as the AFT’s Fedrick C. Ingram told Alvin Buyinga of Word in Black: wherever young people live across the nation, MAGA knows, images of often choreographed state violence are reaching them via social media.

Militarized occupations of entire cities communicate a message long sent to Black and brown teens but deafeningly loud right now, that your existence is suspect, likely criminal. Tanks and armed soldiers in the streets broadcast to those children and their younger siblings: Your country is at war with you.

When Trump addressed US military leadership last month, his usual garbled syntax conflated the youth of Washington, DC with vicious foreign gangs, presenting them as “the enemy” and thus appropriate targets of military action. He celebrated violence by US soldiers toward “kids”:

This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won’t get out of control, once you’re involved, at all. They all joke, they say, oh, this is not good. You saw it in Washington. We had gangs of Tren de Aragua, say 10, 12, 15 kids. And these military guys walk up to them, and they treat them with disrespect, and they just got pounded. They just got pounded…

Rewarding Conformity and Raising Future MAGA

Trump’s work to paint overwhelmingly nonviolent protests against his mass deportations and antidemocratic actions as criminal and violent — and using these protests to justify military and paramilitary occupations — tells America’s children that political dissent is dangerous to them and their families.

MAGA’s efforts to censor LGBTQ+ identity in schools and libraries and to criminalize trans healthcare teaches children to conform to traditional gender expression. Children in immigrant communities are afraid to go to school lest they or their parents be taken; soldiers on streets and on transit and in parks forces kids inside. The message: Being visible is dangerous to themselves and their loved ones. Better to stay quiet, obey, disappear, hide than to be used as children are used in Putin’s Russia, as weapons against their parents to force conformity and quell dissent.

Not all children in MAGA’s America are meant to live in fear. As other authoritarian regimes have, this one believes in children’s ability to become propaganda tools and political actors.

The Soviets indoctrinated and politicized children through youth groups including Komsomol, Young Pioneers, and Little Octobrists, which helped create a distinction between good Communist children and the rest, “them.” The Nazis also had “ideological confidence in the political agency of children themselves. Thus, the strong value of children, which was usually a positively held attitude in Nazi Germany and even led to the granting of moderate social autonomy to groups such as the HJ...”

So too is MAGA willing to afford political expression to those children it deems sufficiently American and ideologically aligned, even as it bans books in schools by Black authors centered on Black youth, closes LGBTQ+ clubs, shuts down student affinity groups it has designated as “DEI.”

Right-wing donors have poured millions of dollars into organizations like Turning Point USA, which boasts over a thousand clubs in high schools. The assassination of TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk and MAGA pols’ and pundits’ response to it has lifted TPUSA’s profile and encouraged more chapters.

Belief in the political agency of children can fuel the desire of some MAGA parents to keep their own children under tight control, either by sending their students to private, often religious schools or pursuing homeschooling — and by trying to control what and how other people’s children learn in the public schools. MAGA leaders are facilitating these moves by expanding voucher programs and bringing religion into public schools.

And the Trump Administration just announced a major national K-12 propaganda initiative directed by far-right groups including Heritage Foundation, Hillsdale College, Moms4Liberty, Faith and Freedom Coalition, Turning Point USA, and PragerU.

The Christian nationalism driving MAGA, sociologist Samuel L. Perry summarizes, “has been and remains linked with prioritizing obedience to authority, deprioritizing independent thought, and endorsing the corrective use of violence, not only just for civil society but also those most vulnerable to coercion.”

Children are, of course, “most vulnerable to coercion.” As this regime ratchets up violence and coercion, there is no group more vulnerable to it than the children of America’s most marginalized groups. When we get tired or succumb to doomerism, it is these who will suffer the most and the longest from inaction. Remembering this should move us to fight and fight harder.