One of the hallmarks of any totalitarian society is an unremitting hatred of the nuclear family. So long as the family remains the primary educator of children and the primary building block of society, totalitarianism can never take root because success requires the individual’s primary loyalty to be to the state. This is not a secret. One of the elements in the Communist Manifesto, right before the abolition of the nation-state, is the abolition of the family.

We’ve seen a gradual chipping away at the health of the family under the guise of good intentions. We’ve created a society where out-of-wedlock births are the norm rather than the exception. Where state provided daycare and before- and after-school programs act in place of parents. We have a school system that actually believes it knows best, and so you, the parent, can’t send your kid to school with aspirin without the royal assent of school administrators, but school officials can arrange for your child to have access to birth control devices. The hostility of the public school mafia to homeschooling is often packaged as one of competition for resources. It isn’t. It is about control of what your child learns and what they imprint as values. Just as the Hitler Youth scheduled activities for Sunday mornings to be in direct competition with church attendance, we are seeing that youth athletic leagues in this country do the same thing with increasing frequency.

In totalitarian societies, real and imagined, children betraying their parents to the state has been held up as behavior to emulate. The Soviet Union went so far as to actually create, in the best traditions of Comrade Ogilvy in the novel “1984,” a fake child-hero, Pavlik Morozov, who was supposedly killed by his own family for informing on his father. (The real truth is a lot muddier, but the fact that turning your father over to the secret police was held up as a sufficiently laudatory character trait to cause a national hero to be created is the point.)

Orwell alludes to this child-as-snitch role model dystopian novel 1984:

‘Who denounced you?’ said Winston.

‘It was my little daughter,’ said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride. ‘She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don’t bear her any grudge for it. In fact I’m proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.’

It isn’t like the USSR, or Nazi Germany were outliers in their efforts to destroy the nuclear family. China had an actual plan for it that was ruthlessly implemented and successful.

They beat her, bound her and led her from home. She knelt before the crowds as they denounced her. Then they loaded her on to a truck, drove her to the outskirts of town and shot her.

Fang Zhongmou’s execution for political crimes during the Cultural Revolution was commonplace in its brutality but more shocking to outsiders in one regard: her accusers were her husband and their 16-year-old child.

More than four decades on, Fang’s son is seeking to atone by telling her story and calling for the preservation of her grave in their home town of Guzhen, central Anhui province, as a cultural relic.

We’re seeing the same trend towards the government attempting to enlist children as informants here. Over Thanksgiving, we were all told by the pandemic-mongers to not visit friends and relatives but, rather, cower under our beds with facemasks and cold porridge (for the Facebook fact-checkers, that is just sarcasm and not a claim of an actual event). To ensure that we took it all very seriously, some governors, like Vermont’s Phil Scott, ordered schools to quiz returning students on what their families did for Thanksgiving.

Unfortunately, we know some will still get together and schools have asked for help. @VTEducation will direct schools to ask students or parents if they were part of multi-family gatherings and if the answer is yes, they’ll need to go remote for 14 days or 7 days and a test. 9/

— Governor Phil Scott (@GovPhilScott) November 24, 2020

READ: Vermont’s Republican Governor Urges Kids to Narc on Families About Thanksgiving Activities

Now we’ve moved on to the creation of a full-fledged communist icon.

You have to ignore CNN’s chyron because, as usual, it doesn’t tell the real story.

Two days after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, Jackson Reffitt’s father, Guy W. Reffitt, returned to the family’s home in Texas. He told his son that he had stormed the Capitol, according to an F.B.I. affidavit.

Then his father leveled a threat: If Jackson, 18, reported him to the police, he would have no choice but to do his “duty” for his country and “do what he had to do.”

In interviews with investigators, Jackson Reffitt said his father told him: “If you turn me in, you’re a traitor. And you know what happens to traitors. Traitors get shot.”

But he had already reported his father to the F.B.I. weeks before the riot.

“He would always tell me that he’s going to do something big,” the younger Mr. Reffitt said in a phone interview on Saturday. “I assumed he was going to do something big, and I didn’t know what.”

This is the best part.

The elder Mr. Reffitt, who was arrested on Jan. 16, faces charges of obstruction of justice and of knowingly entering a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority. He could not be reached on Sunday, and it was not immediately clear whether he had a lawyer. The F.B.I. was not immediately available for comment on Sunday.

Mr. Reffitt said he was unsure if his father knew yet that he had reported him to the federal authorities.

“I am afraid for him to know,” he said. “Not for my life or anything, but for what he might think.” But he said he was hopeful that his relationship with his father could be repaired.

“We’ll get better over time,” he said. “I know we will.”

He said his mother and two sisters “had no idea what I had done” until they saw a CNN interview he did with Chris Cuomo.

I doubt much will get better over time. His father will end up with some kind of criminal conviction. The entire family will know they are living with a noxious little communist enforcer who will sell them out to further the cause, for attention, and for profit…wait…did I just say profit? Of course, I did.

The police had scarcely dragged his father out of his home when our young stool-pigeon was on Twitter appealing for donations to his GoFundMe.

After the interview gained traction online, Mr. Reffitt said on Twitter, “Yes I’m the kid on cnn.”

The tweet garnered thousands of likes and retweets, and he said he was flooded with messages asking him to set up a GoFundMe, so he did.
“Every penny is another course in college or me saving it for years to come,” he wrote on the crowdfunding platform. “I might be kicked out of my house due to my involvement in my dad’s case, so every cent might help me survive.”
…When asked if the money would cover the rest of his undergraduate education, he said: “Oh man, you have no idea. I’m going to go on to a university now.”

His windfall is nearly $140,000.

Naturally, he was not alone:

For four years, Helena Duke, an 18-year-old high school senior in Massachusetts, had been growing further apart from her mother over their political views. She marched in protests for racial justice to her mother’s outspoken disapproval, she said. All the while her mother, a longtime Democrat, became ever more supportive of President Trump.

Then last week, a cousin of Ms. Duke’s sent her a video clip that had been going viral on social media. A Black woman is seen in the middle of a crowd of Trump supporters in Washington, D.C.; a white woman swings her hand at the Black woman’s face, the Black woman hits her in return; then the crowd angrily confronts the Black woman.

Ms. Duke immediately recognized the people at the center of the scene: her uncle, her aunt and her mother, who was the one who was hit. Her mother had never told her she was going to Washington, she said. Ms. Duke found all of it infuriating.

“I remember seeing the F.B.I. tweets saying that anyone who knows anything about the people that were at the Capitol or anything like to put their names out there,” she said. “After a lot of thought, I was like, this is really the right thing to do.”

hi mom remember the time you told me I shouldn’t go to BLM protests bc they could get violent…this you? https://t.co/9ZkbAq0ehO

— Helena Duke (@duke_helena) January 7, 2021

Guess what…she, too, has a GoFundMe.

Totalitarian politics. The complete absence of any sense of empathy for those outside that political sphere. Approval of a mob amplified by social and legacy media. Cold cash. It is hard to think of a more potent means of attack on that vital building block of civil society, the nuclear family, than creating fear and distrust in every interaction between parents and children.