​​As a parent, the speed that Western society and culture is descending into hysterical self-hatred makes me worry for my children

I don’t want to bring my children into a world where they are supposed to loathe themselves because of the colour of their skin, be forced to endure drag queen story hours at school and be taught distorted, woke history lessons.

The Western world as it is today (what we might call the American empire) has undergone drastic cultural changes in recent years, changes which appear to be escalating in speed and drama. 

As someone who has lived in two different Western countries (Canada and Ireland) for equal lengths of time, I have observed that this transformation is occurring universally, the only variable being the rate of change (Canada, I can affirm, is further along than Ireland). 

I am now in middle age with four young children, and I sincerely wish I could say that I felt at ease with these changes and that I was not concerned about their direction and impact upon the younger generation. But I cannot.

I am increasingly nervous about raising my children in this Western culture which seems to despise all boundaries and I would guess that I am among millions who feel similarly – millions who are somehow without any say in its direction. 

Both of the nations I have called home have become largely unrecognisable from the ones I knew in my youth. While traditional or classic Western culture still exists, it does so only as a kind of ghost, sensed in the few remnant castles and cobbled streets now surrounded by industrial urban sprawl. While you can still find here and there the canon of great Western literary work, there is an understood tension in discussing it, a caveat that their ideas are outmoded, of no further value and require ‘updating’. The old cobbled streets are slowly swallowed by postmodern block architecture, and the old books and films are forgotten, forbidden or revised beyond recognition. While this alone is a tragic loss, it is merely the foundation of more active and aggressive social pressures. 

These pressures manifest as a cultural self-hate which (amazingly) enjoys unanimous support from the American state, the education system, the media and global big business. Thus, we have the riots and statue removals related to Black Lives Matter, a somehow global movement based on events from a specific corner of one nation. 

Not satisfied with just that, we now have critical race theory (CRT) being implemented in many American schools, where it seems they will raise their children to celebrate an endemic, incurable guilt. Educating on a basis of blame or penance cannot be a good thing, for anyone.

Here in Ireland they are still making inroads with such extremes in education but rest assured, they are slowly and surely chipping away with mild, targeted revisionism. This takes the form not of lying but seeking and exaggerating incidental outliers in history, in the name of equity, or of teaching ‘a history we would prefer to see’. 

I recently noticed that my kid’s lesson on the 1969 Moon landing was almost entirely about Margaret Hamilton, a woman who was part of a team that wrote the flight software. Surely it is confusing to them, as they read the lesson, that a single software programmer from a large team who happens to be a woman now outshines the actual event of landing men on the Moon. There is, in this sense, a general climate of anti-masculinity, fervent enough to result in a commonplace relativism (altering of perspective). Something which will, quite obviously, only expand into richer and more complex outright lies.

Yet, of all the hard and fast media-stoked social pressures, there is of late an extremely acute and aggressive propaganda from the LGBTQ+ agenda. Much of it is aimed directly at children.

While I have yet to see it here in Ireland, drag queen story hour is a phenomenon in America and the UK (meaning it’s only a matter of time before it is here).

“The aim of the program is to give kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models,” Michelle Tea, the founder of Drag Queen Story Hour said. 

To the current system, any fatherly doubts as to the true educational value of a drag queen story hour are at best ignored and at worst considered controversial. Opinion simply cannot conflict with a trend which can successfully attach itself to perceived historic grievance, regardless of who is bullying whom.

Many children’s cartoons now openly include gay and ‘gender non-binary’ characters and storylines. These include ‘She-Ra’, ‘Scooby Doo’, ‘Spongebob’, ‘Sesame Street’, ‘Adventure Time’, ‘Steven Universe’, ‘Blue’s Clues’, ‘Clarence’ and many more.

The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus recently published (then soon unpublished) a music video titled: ‘A Message From the Gay Community Performed by the San Francisco Gay Mens Chorus’. This included the proudly sung lyrics:  

“You think that we’ll corrupt your kids, if our agenda goes unchecked. Funny, just this once, you’re correct. We’ll convert your children. Happens bit by bit. Quietly and subtely, and you will barely notice it…..(We’ll make them tolerant and fair)  Just like you worried, they’ll change their group of friends. You won’t approve of where they go at night (to protests). We’ll convert your children, yes we will. Reaching one and all. There’s no really no escaping it cause even grandma likes RuPaul.” 

Naturally, most people do not wish to be hateful towards alternative lifestyles and opinions. However, when it comes to the wellbeing of children, and their innocence, we must surely show caution and reserve. The above examples show that there is an interest in specifically targeting children, and no self-titled victim group need feel oppressed for simply not being permitted to propagandise sexual content to minors.

“The agenda of homosexual activists is basically to change America... thus propagandist advertising can depict all opponents of the gay movement as homophobic bigots,” said (gay rights activists) Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen in ‘After the Ball’.

Sadly, these cultural transformations in the West amount to a society which removes the family as its cornerstone. This attitude is synonymous with the endless inventions of gender theory, collapsing fertility and the destruction of the middle class. To even question if this is a good thing has become provocative. Allowable opinions are not diversifying, Western society is not opening up, it is closing in.

Legacy media outlets remain a powerful force in shaping global public perception and are becoming increasingly unquestionable. They claim to be the mouthpiece of ‘universal agreement’, but their cultural mandates always include accusatory language and implications of social repercussions. They control the divisive cultural and moral direction which becomes policy across the Western world. Enormous shifts in ethics and law seem to occur virtually overnight, too fast for anyone to reflect upon and impermissible to doubt, even if they could. 

The American media (and social media) machine appears to be oblivious to, uncaring of, or encouraging these rapid changes and their implications upon the innocent. In the space of a few short years, they have transitioned from proudly self-styled ‘guardians of free speech’ to perhaps the world’s strictest authoritarian censors. Globally there is shocked concern at the willingness of this machine to silence its perceived political adversaries and critics.

And what of the world that I used to know, which I can no longer provide to my children? I am aware that no place or time remains the same, that the past is a foreign country. But the speed and extreme language of this cultural shift betray its inorganic nature: it is forced, patently unhealthy, stark and tinged with hysteria. It is not a natural evolution, and I know without a doubt that things will be tougher for my children than they were for me. Imagining them trapped in this authoritarian madhouse of limitless manufactured civil unrest is concerning, to say the least.

Yet, expressing concern is criticism, and increasingly no criticism will be allowed.

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