My friend, filmmaker Gloria Z. Greenfield, started a blog last month called "Deep Dives into Critical Issues" at her Doc Emet Productions website. This month I'm honored to be the contributor. Check it out below, and check out her site while you're there. Most of all, check out her important documentaries like 'Fight of Our Lives.'
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In a revealing 2013 network promo, then-host Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC caused a stir by declaring, in the context of children’s education, “We’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: ‘Your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility.’ We haven’t had a very collective notion that these are our children… We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”
Conservative critics such as Glenn Beck pounced on this eyebrow-raising statement as evidence that the left is hostile to the sanctity of the nuclear family and has ideologically predatory designs on our children. Harris-Perry tried to backtrack, dismissing these concerns as overreactions and claiming she merely meant that we should all take responsibility for ensuring that our kids grow up in safe neighborhoods and good schools.
Had she phrased it that way in the promo, no one would have objected; who doesn’t want our kids to have safe neighborhoods and good schools? But she didn’t. She clearly, explicitly stated that our children and society are better served if we break the private bonds of the traditional family model, and instead adopt the collectivist view that kids should be shared by the entire community. In other words, as then-First Lady Hillary Clinton put it in a 1996 book title, “It Takes a Village” to raise our children.
Harris-Perry, who has a Ph.D. from Duke University and taught political science at Princeton, is no dummy. You don’t get to host your own political talk show on a major cable TV network unless you are skilled at articulating your messaging. And this was undoubtedly a carefully-scripted and -vetted network promo, not an off-the-cuff remark. It is difficult to believe that both she and MSNBC were clueless or careless about the content of its message. On the contrary – Harris-Perry’s disingenuous reassurances notwithstanding – this promo was crafted to signal to MSNBC’s Progressive audience that she and the network represent their forward-looking vision, as opposed to the hidebound worldview of the capitalist oppressors at Fox News.
Today’s Progressivism is simply rebranded communism, a central strategy of which was what Karl Marx openly labeled “the abolition of the family.” For Marx, the bourgeois family structure was inextricably linked to “private gain,” both of which must “vanish” to liberate humanity from its serfdom. “The family deprives the worker of revolutionary consciousness,” wrote Marxist theorist Aleksandra Kollontai, and therefore must be discarded. Marx’s co-author Friedrich Engels wrote that when the proletariat revolts and transfers the means of production to common ownership, “the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not” [emphasis added]. This is the utopian ideal Melissa Harris-Perry was hinting at in her promo (the tagline for which was “Lean Forward”).
Communists single out the family for elimination because, as the fundamental bond of humanity, it is the most formidable line of defense against totalitarian state control, which is the inevitable end of any attempt to fashion a collectivist utopia. To destroy the family, the American left has undertaken a decades-long campaign to denigrate marriage and motherhood, to obliterate gender distinctions, to delegitimize traditional masculinity – and perhaps most importantly, to indoctrinate younger generations into a new, “woke” worldview that is at irreconcilable odds with the capitalist, Judeo-Christian value system of their parents and grandparents.