How a Dad Becomes Dissident

Some things are supposed to be sacred.

It was the Fall of 2020 when I got the red pill, though I didn’t have the language for it then. Trump was out, and derangement syndrome was dissipating. In its wake, many center-left normies—the go-along-to-get-along people, the people on the right side of history—were beginning to notice flies in the ointment. The Hunter Biden laptop story. Immigration policy. Mostly peaceful protests. Antifa. Covid and its origins. Masks.

For those cozy in the bosom of the tribe, this was mostly ignorable. Then came Matt Yglesias’s story about being pushed out of Vox, and Bari Weiss’s story about being pushed out of the New York Times. Later, Donald McNeil’s “resignation” from the Times, and, most disturbing to a (not-yet-dissident) dad, Paul Rossi’s account of teaching at Grace Church School in New York City, where students were racialized and privilege ideology imposed.

I forwarded Rossi’s piece, published by Bari Weiss’s still-new outfit, to my kids’ head of school. “This can’t happen to us,” I wrote.

I watched with dread as a DiAngelo/Kendi “Antiracism” was adopted across sectors—law and medicine; media; journalism; corporations. Even the military. Gender theory and pronouns galloped right behind. Taking my ten-year-old for an appointment at a world-renowned hospital in our area, I felt an icy horror at the intake form, adjusted so that “sex” was now “sex assigned at birth.”

When?! How?!

The “smart people,” the people whose status proceeded from rigor and empiricism, were incorporating catechisms of a fringe and perhaps even farcical theory. Worse, the banality of the intake form signaled that our cognoscenti planned to leverage their considerable power to impose this ideology—a faith system at best—on anyone who stumbled within their purview.

At my kids’ school (a small private), a picture book was read to first graders that suggested an essential connection between skin color and life outcomes; a “sex ed” program invited fourth graders to play-act being another gender, and showed first graders an illustration of a sexless “every child” that was doughy and soft, with an angled thatch of short hair that would surely have been blue if the illustration had been in color; the school’s administration mandated social-transition pronouns; picture books were circulated that included the phrase “a boy, a girl, both, or neither,” a mantra designed to spike and splinter young minds; classrooms displayed a bastardized version of a banner once called Pride, now corrupted by the forced wedging of an imaginary political coalition.

Meanwhile, states have passed laws that back parents into corners—“affirm” your child’s declaration of gender identity or risk bureaucratic interruption of your home and family. A federal administration imposes “rules,” via agency fiat, updating Title IX, with downstream consequences for what is considered “real” about biology and sex. Corporations openly endorse America’s ancient dance partner, race-and-sex-based discrimination in hiring and promotion.

It's upside-down world. Clown world. On my worst days, I fear it is Abomination. And our children hang in the balance.

Liberal parents, startled to find themselves suddenly on the political Right, are beginning to grok that otherwise good and decent people are able to violate boundaries and disregard covenants previously thought inviolable. In our arrogance, we believed we’d progressed beyond such nightmares. Turns out “progress” is a false god, and the marketplace of ideas a dream. In this, Progressivism has proved true: the game isn’t principle; it’s power. We must wipe the sleep from our eyes, and see.

Parents, stand strong. No teacher or expert or official knows your child or has a right to them. Ours is a sacred duty, to shepherd our young humans along their haphazard, idiosyncratic, wondrous paths to adulthood. Along the way, we give them the gift of our families’ unique and particular culture, the child’s foundational home. Protect it. Enfold your children in it. This is the first and most important tribe. It is the ground beneath your children’s feet.

In our strength, we can and will outflank the tyranny, insanity, and absurd monotony of Clown World. The worm is already turning, for zealotry cannot sustain against truth and beauty.

It is inevitable. The simple force of the irresistible Real must prevail.