Sometimes it isn’t clear whether progressive activists are warning about what they genuinely believe their nemeses will do or explaining what they will do once they have the power.  Such is the case, here:

“When we react to [legislation in Florida],” Equality Florida Nadine Smith apparently tells Disney employees in a virtual meeting, according to a video posted by City Journal writer Chris Rufo, “a lot of us are reacting from the pain we experienced being isolated and stigmatized in school, but we are also reacting from the reality that when they can erase you, when they can criminalize your existence, when they can demonize who you are, the next step is to criminalize you and take your kids.”

Erasing people, criminalizing their existence, demonizing them, and separating them from their children is, in fact, the approach of the Left.  Note Smith’s language; she doesn’t hedge in the least.  Taking children is “the next step.”  In her mind, it’s apparently just what you do once you’ve managed to dehumanize your opposition.

We shouldn’t gloss over the hyperbolic dishonesty about what the Florida legislation actually does.  Progressives trade in this strategy frequently because there’s no downside for them, particularly with the news media and cultural elites on their side.  At best (from their point of view), the mass of people who pay marginal attention to socio-political issues will take them at their word that conservatives are the frothing fascists the progressives claim we are.  At worst, those people will blend the progressives’ supposed fear with conservatives’ expressed concerns about indoctrination in the schools and decide not to take sides.

Even were there room for both-sides-ism, an honest analysis would find progressives much closer to unconscionable actions.  Directly on this point, they have made it policy and law (including in Rhode Island) that government-run schools should actively deceive parents about their children’s experimentations with sexual identity — leading other children and other people in the community in the lie.

While this may be more than one step removed from actively taking people’s children away, it isn’t many.  Moreover, the various statutes, regulations, and policies supporting the deception illustrate Smith’s point about demonization.  The rationale for government schools to step between parents and their children is that the parents might be a threat to the students’ safety if they aren’t sufficiently woke.

Featured image by Iluha Zavaley on Unsplash.