For some time, I’ve been wanting to write about the fruits of liberal/left-wing parenting, originally because of the job Joe Biden did with Hunter.
When your son has serious drug and fidelity problems, rewarding him with a trip to China on Air Force Two and the opportunity to make lucrative deals with communist regime-allied businessmen is the opposite of what any father should do.
But it’s not just the Bidens. The zeitgeist since the 1960s has consistently been working against passing on even basically decent and responsible values between the generations and now, in a very real sense, the chickens are coming home to roost.
You see it all over. The message that’s being passed, parent to child, is “We’re cool, so you be, too. Smoke a joint; have a laugh. Do what you want when you want. You might even get rich in the process. It’s all going to be OK.”
Only it’s not. It’s run off the rails with a current generation that’s so lost morally and socially that most of them likely will never be found again. It’s a tragedy of parenting and, needless to say, a tragedy for our country and a greater part of the world.
The Bankman-Frieds—parents of alleged mega-felon Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX scam fame—are the latest salient example. Both of these people are Stanford law professors, of all things.
What kind of message did they impart to their son? Do what you can get away with, commingle as many funds as you’d like as long as you’re making donations to liberal politicians as a cover? (The New York Times and others say loudly he was also donating to Republicans, but unsurprisingly, that greatly lesser number was all going, predictably, to RINOs in opposition to Trump, DeSantis, and so forth—a distinction without a difference.)
One wonders how the parents can live with themselves now.
And yet, the Bankman-Frieds were down in the Bahamas trying to get their child out of jail for a bail that was ridiculously low, since he’s so obviously a flight risk or, at least, to fight his extradition to the United States, where he will have to face a variety of charges. This was only more of the same style of parenting. My sweet child, you will never have to pay for what you did, as long as we, your parents, are here.
“Some inmates developed bedsores from lying on bare ground. Sanitation was a general problem, and cells were infested with rats, maggots, and insects.” SBF now wants to be extradited.
We'll soon learn more of the whole sorry story, but I suspect we already have the essence.
We’ve also known for some time that this essentially lazy dolce far niente approach to child-rearing was destructive to the children and to society. We just did it because it was the easy way out, to go along to get along. (I don’t exempt myself here.)
How long have we known this? Well, as a friend reminded me, it was Plato who said that coddling kids undermined the Republic.
It’s happening again, obviously, but we can stop it. It’s all in our hands. Tough love has a lot to recommend itself. Just look at what the president has with done his son and do your best to do the opposite. Don’t let it get nearly that far; head this behavior off at the pass, even if the child hates you. It may be the greatest political and moral act of your life. It’s certainly the essential one.
Friends Read Free