“Parenting is tyranny” is becoming the new battle cry of the left.

Sound absurd? Well conservatives better get prepped for the war because no less than a writer at New York Magazine is proudly banging that drum.

Responding to news of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education legislation, better known as the “don’t say gay” bills, Sarah Jones writes in a piece entitled, “Household Tyrants,” that parents concerns over curriculum and teachers unions’ overreach during the COVID pandemic is indicative of a hard right turn by the GOP and an embrace of a tyrranical philosophy that conservatives hope to apply to governing.

To the GOP, the parent exists to enforce the party’s will, as though the parent is simply the local arm of a national entity. Parents who fail to obey may find their powers restricted by the state. Authoritarianism is inconsistent in this way; rights granted to followers are not extended to dissenters. For the latter there exists only punishment, a fate that extends to their children. The GOP is the party of parental rights because it is increasingly anti-democratic. It has become the party of ruthless, cynical power, and children aren’t exempt from its schemes. In fact, they’re key.

The implicit suggestion here, of course, is that the kids need to be saved from their parents’ “schemes.” Jones intimates as much on Twitter in an exchange with Jeet Heer, in which she repeats her assertion that the tyranny of parenting is “in conflict with the rights of the child.”

Heer, as is his way, takes it all the way to the end zone.

Hooboy pic.twitter.com/eQtiKWpz2r

— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) February 23, 2022

Politics is no longer downstream from culture, Heer says. It IS culture. It would appear Jones and Heer are a breath away from saying training children in the proper way to think about culture is the only way to save democracy.

They want your kids because you, conservatives, are anti-democratic in your desire to shelter them and raise them with the values you see fit.

And if there’s still any doubt, just read this piece from National Review detailing how a delegate to the California Teachers’ Union state council and a teacher in Sacramento City Unified School District openly mocked parents in a Facebook post for the crime of wanting to know what their children are being taught in school.

Addressing parents who advocate for their kids at school board meetings as “storm troopers,” [Owen] Jackman jibed that “I have a reason to be concerned about the appropriateness of what your child is learning outside of school.”

Writing tongue-in-cheek, he requested parents provide a play-by-play of the television shows their kids watch, the social media they use, swear words and racial epithets their kids hear each day, the books being read to them, and activities they will participate in for the remainder of the year.

The teacher also asked for a “thorough description of how the relationships among the adults in your child’s life are displayed in front of your child” as well as “tallies” of the motivational vs. judgmental words said to kids in the household.

Mocking parents’ efforts to uncover the radical race and gender ideology being promoted in classrooms, Jackman warned that instructors would “set up a meeting” with parents who don’t report back.

One of great questions remaining in the wake of the pandemic is just exactly how and when educators and teachers unions in this country got it into their heads they were all powerful when it comes to children in their classrooms, who told them they could strip parental rights from people, and how they came by the notion they are entitled to train children in ideology rather than basic education skills.

The nation would do well to begin searching just where teachers and administrtors are learning these things. That process can begin by questioning educators themselves. Meetings can then be set up if they fail to report back.