This week, for wondering aloud why we are now approving medication for children with no trial data, medical doctor Steven Bishop was flagged by the Twitter commissars. Now, his tweet is labelled “misleading,” users cannot see any of the tens of thousands of likes and responses accumulated over the week, and further engagement is permanently limited.

Within the same week, YouTube removed Joe Rogan’s recent interviews with Drs. Robert Malone and Peter McCullough, skeptics of the covid regime, both of whom also highlighted the absurdity and abusive nature of the response in regard to children. Throughout history, the old have sacrificed for the sake of the young, Malone suggested in his interview. The way American adults have recklessly mismanaged the lives of young people, he went on, is not only out of line with the natural way of things, but it will likely generate dramatic, civilization-threatening consequences in the near future.

Big Tech must come down on this information for the same reason they have come down hard on Christopher Rufo. It is the kind of thing that can and should galvanize parents. Any parent who has not completely resigned themselves to being, as I put it last week, the “temporary and essentially fungible custodian of state property” would react to this information with righteous indignation. Yes, those parents are a diminishing minority. But the narrative that the managerial elite cooperate to uphold is part of the reason parents feel alone, vulnerable, and totally powerless.

I challenge my readers to think of a single avenue of public life where parental authority remains a legitimate claim over the life and well-being of children. If you can think of one, message me on Twitter. Even (and especially) when the connection between parent and child is so obvious and indivisible as a pregnant woman’s convex belly, managerialism has managed to snake its way through. This week, the New York Times (to the chagrin of abortion advocates) released a study demonstrating that the genetic tests offered through standard prenatal care give false positive results for severe abnormalities 85-95% of the time. It is based on these tests and the subsequent suggestion of doctors that many women electively abort supposedly deformed children. 

As things stand now, from the very beginning, the state and state-sponsored industries drive themselves between parents and children, present themselves as the exclusively qualified interpreters of reality, and therefore in a very real sense make themselves into the drivers of our children’s fate. The list of pejoratives for parents who stand between their children and the managerial state (be it big pharma or the department of education) continues to grow: “anti-vaxxer” for those who notice the myocarditis, “transphobic” for those opposed to elective mastectomies and castration of teenagers, “terrorists” for those who want schools to reopen or remain open thorough bat flu season, “conspiracy theorist” for those who question the implementation of critical race theory-based curriculum in those schools.

The tendency of the obstetric office and that of the school board and that of the pediatrician’s office are one and the same. It is this tendency, exposed by doctors Bishop, Malone, and McCullough, that underpins and upholds the regime. What Burnham identified as the managerial revolution, what Lasch identified as the boundless outsourcing of domestic function, and what others call the administrative state, make a common enemy. They are the strongest enemy of the regime, whose compliance is necessary that the regime would continue to exist: the American parent.