This isn’t a free speech issue at all.
Soviet schoolchildren, 1954. They belong.
Prof. Perry, an MSNBC talking head, has the same right to make inflammatory, un-American statements that any of us do—and that is the kind of statements she regularly makes—but she is a Marxist. Her ideas and words are cultural poison. A cable network that promotes them is irresponsible.
Now, this is MSNBC, the network that allows Al Sharpton and Ed Schultz to broadcast their hateful rants to the nation, so we knew it was irresponsible, I suppose. These two buffoons, however, are not preaching concepts alien to core American values, and Harris-Perry is. Their presence on the network is unprofessional and obnoxious. Hers is unforgivable.
In a recent MSNBC promo advertising its house communist, Perry, scripted and saying exactly what she intended to convey, is heard saying that Americans..
“…haven’t had a very collective notion that these are our children. We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to their communities…Once it’s everybody’s responsibility and not just the households, then we start making better investments.”
Here’s the video:
She was shocked—shocked!—that these words were controversial and widely condemned. She took to her blog to condemn her critics and, she claimed, “double-down” on her statement. She did not double down, however. She lied and obfuscated, just as any good communist, radical and totalitarian must.
” I have no intention of apologizing for saying that our children, all of our children, are part of more than our households, they are part of our communities and deserve to have the care, attention, resources, respect and opportunities of those communities, ” she wrote. Well, that’s good, Melissa, because you didn’t say that in your spot. You very clearly and intentionally said the nation has “to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to their communities.” “Belong” implies control and ownership, and the statement means that Harris-Perry believes that the state, not parents and families, own a nation’s children and thus have the power and right to control what they learn and what they do, and not those children’s parents.
Saying that society has “responsibility” for the health, safety, education and welfare of children is hardly revolutionary or out of the American mainstream. But responsibility does not require or imply ownership or control. This woman, a professor, speaker, pundit, media host and author who understands the language well, said very clearly that children do not belong to their parents or their families. That is Sparta, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Mao. That means indoctrination, and state-determined values. That is all it can mean. Harris-Perry’s supposed doubling down was really deceitful backtracking, never retracting what she said, but merely obfuscating it.
Her spot really is a magnificent example of rhetorical dishonesty and sleight of hand:
” I have no designs on taking your children. Please keep your kids! But I understand the fear. We do live in a nation where slaveholders took the infants from the arms of my foremothers and sold them for their own profit. We do live in a nation where the government snatched American Indian children from their families and “re-educated” them by forbidding them to speak their language and practice their traditions.”
Isn’t that great? She just switched to standard America-bashing rhetoric, even though she was the one who said that children shouldn’t be considered as belonging to their parents. She’s throwing powerful images into teh discussion like firecrackers, designed to confuse and distract, and to connect her critics to racism and genocide. This is an old SDS trick from the Sixties: I remember it well. I would be arguing with some campus radicals that they had no business shutting down my classes because they were afraid of getting drafted, and the next thing I knew I being accused of defending the napalming of kids. Damn good trick.
Then Harris-Perry says, “But that is not what I was talking about, and you know it.” Well, you know, Melissa, it really is what you were talking about, your dishonest rhetorical jujitsu notwithstanding. You weren’t talking about those specific versions of past authoritarian abuses you deem useful to demonize those who are on to you, but your spot focused on spending more on “public education,” all the better to make sure those kids who belong to the community are properly trained and indoctrinated according to the government’s prevailing ideology, without any of that annoying interference from their parents.
The ideology that Harris-Perry advocates and teaches has led to the deaths of millions in other nations, and outright cultural catastrophe. Radio talk-show host Mark Levin reasons that MSNBC puts her on the air to stir the pot, cause controversy and increase ratings. Maybe that’s better than if the executives really believed her nonsense, but I’m not sure. I think her ideas have been proven to be dangerous, and giving her a forum to promote them on national TV is no less irresponsible than featuring a white supremacist, an anti-gay zealot, a Holocaust denier, or someone trying to foment an armed rebellion.
Which is to say, slightly more irresponsible than giving a forum to Al Sharpton.
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Source: MSNBC
Graphic: Live Journal
Ethics Alarms 
I will have to ask a few of the homeschooling parents whom I know, about their impressions of Harris-Perry’s statements. I would be surprised if those parents did not perhaps feel threatened in some ways – ways that, say, perhaps some women feel threatened about restrictions on abortion. Promises of womb-to-the-tomb nanny-statism can seem simultaneously so comforting and threatening. Where’s my 20-ounce Dr. Pepper…?
There’s absolutely nothing comforting about the promises of a womb-to-the-tomb nanny state.
To you and me there is nothing comforting about the promises. That is why I said “can seem.” It depends on who is suckered by the promises.
Indeed
I always switch the channel when Perry comes on because I find her whiny and soporific. But Commie? No.
I understand her to mean, not that our kids aren’t ours, but that we, as part of a community, bear a responsibility for all the kids in the community. So even if we can afford, for example, to send our kids to expensive private schools, we still have a responsibility, AS A COMMUNITY, to see that public schools are available and good.
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As Jack illustrated, “We have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to their communities..”
is very different from
“…all of our children, are part of more than our households, they are part of our communities and deserve to have the care, attention, resources, respect and opportunities of those communities.”
Words mean things. As an intelligent,educated person she knows this.
This sort of stuff is like Hillary saying “it takes a village to raise a child.” Absolute nonsense. It takes good parents. Both Hillary and Melissa Harris Perry are at a minimum socialists. They’re elite intellectuals who want to run the country because they’re smarter than everyone else. “Socialist” or “Communist,” it makes no difference. It’s very un-American and dangerous thinking. It’s the kind of thinking that has led to the murder and mistreatment of millions and the enrichment and entitlement of a few. Why the left and intellectuals are still enthralled by Marxism is a mystery. But Jack’s absolutely correct. This sort of TV programming verges on the criminal and is certainly irresponsible.
Well, for someone who makes a living as a talking head, she is really inept at saying what she means.
Not inept. She meant what she originally said. She didn’t expect an outrage.
I meant that sarcastically, I have to try harder 😉 I’m getting sick of newscasters, talk show hosts etc saying stupid things and then shifting responsibility to viewers and readers. We misunderstood, we took it out of context….Harris-Perry says her mailbox was filled with ‘conservative reaction’ to her statements. Really? Blame it on bias? It’s sickening.
I think from Harris-Perry’s perspective she is the ethical one and we are the monsters. Just like the FAU professor who assigned the “stomp on Jesus” assignment in her communications class. People who agree with Poole and Harris-Perry find their ethics and actions perfectly consistent and just. I think it is increasingly clear that the US no longer shares a common ethical foundation. We don’t even share common terminology to discuss our differences. So Harris-Perry’s call for the nationalization of children seems creepy and dangerous to us. To her and her supporters the nationalization of children is part of a moral crusade to make the world and better place by eliminating want and inequality.
Yes, it is like my college days all over again. I spent years of having to endure this tripe, always fearful that if I disagreed too strenuously, I would be failed or thrown out of school (my school, like any good liberal institution, had a speech code that forbid opinions contrary to liberal doctrine). I realize the strategy all too well. In this case, she realized she had gone to far. You can’t let the public know the final goal of their indoctrination, you have to do it slowly. Hillary started with the “it takes a villiage” and this is the next logical step, but she wasn’t aware that the mass of people weren’t ready for it yet. Baby steps.
You can convince a society that anything is acceptable if you do it slowly and cautiously enough. A good example is the Netherlands. You can really see how a dedicated strategy to change a society’s values can have dramatic effects. They are almost at the point that they are OK with polygamous marriage and euthanizing 15 year olds who are suicidal.
The fuller statement is different from the partial statement you quoted, Jack.
“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: “Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility.” We haven’t had a very collective notion of, ‘these are our children.” So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it everybody’s responsibility and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”
In context, it’s clear she’s calling for more public investment in public education, not for communist stormtroopers to yank children out of mother’s arms.
Good point. Obvious. At least to anybody willing to actually hear what she was talking about.
It’s not a good point; it’s a shockingly distorted point. As I just explained, to read her statement as you apparently want to (but why?), you have to ignore language, parallel construction and context.
No, its clear she is saying that the state can indoctrinate children over the wishes of their parents, and should. I am genuinely shocked—really and truly—that your, Ed’s, Jan’s and Bob’s philosophical proclivities would blind you to such an obvious endorsement of the vilest form of statism. You are all twisting yourselves into knots parsing and spinning the obvious. Fine, take the whole statement—I did include the video, so it is unfair to suggest I was engaging in deceptive editing, by the way.
“We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: “Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility.” We haven’t had a very collective notion of, ‘these are our children.” So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it everybody’s responsibility and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”
1. “We have never invested as much in public education as we should have” is on its face ridiculous, and offensive as an assumption rather than a supported argument.
2. “…we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children”…OOH, ick, PRIVATE. Mustn’t have that. She regards private as an insult; that’s how she’s using the word.
3. “We haven’t had a very collective notion of, ‘these are our children.”…when a blatant socialist-statist-communist like this woman uses collective in this was, she isn’t using it innocently. She’s endorsing Borgism..she’s again slamming individualism and liberty. Why are you spinning for her? Never mind that this statement too is a lie. State governments do a tremendous amount for children—other than protect them from being aborted, which Harris-Perry has no problem with. If you can look at everything the government currently does regarding child welfare and say the nation is unconcerned and doesn’t think of them as the nation’s children, then you can only be advocating a massive change in attitude in which the state is the primary, not the secondary, caretaker. In Russia, parents judged neglectful just have their kids taken away (and put in miserable institutions). That’s the kind of thing Harris-Perry must be applauding, because, as the NPR series about federal aid to parents having children with “disabilities” shows, we currently have and waste a tremendous amount of money on well-meaning but ill-conceived pro-child programs. So either she is lying, intentionally, or she really doesn’t believe all these programs show that the nation believes “these are our children” in the sense you claim she does.
4. “So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents,”…there’s that baaaad “private” again. Do you really misread the woman when her meaning is so obvious? I find it…I don’t know, frightening? Are you guys really shills for this kind of a) veiled statism and b) collectivist bile? Truly? Horrifying. “Our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families,”…how can you, Jan, Ed and Bob seriously come on here and argue that it is “sane” to let Harris-Perry off the hook by reading an imaginary “only “ into this unambiguous statement TWICE, when If Harris-Perry meant that, she would have damn well said it? How? “So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong ONLY to their parents or kids belong ONLY to their families,” fine. That’s a useful point, and one she didn’t make, but to let her and MSNBC off the hook, you all are claiming it’s implied. It isn’t implied! What IS implied is that this is NOT the meaning she intended, because it’s not what she said, and she is an articulate woman who was scripted.
5. “…and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.” Of course they do, and in an isolated version of this statement coming from a non-statist, non-socialist, non-advocate for collectivism, which Harris-Perry is not, the meaning you are claiming would be defensible. But Harris Perry understands parallel construction, as do I (ED, apparently, does NOT.) Whatever belongs means, it must mean the same thing in all three instances in the same statement. You four ludicrously argue that that “belongs” means “belongs” as in “belongs to a club” when she says kids belong to whole communities, but she just finished saying that kids do NOT belong to families. Obviously they do…if that was the meaning she meant. But she didn’t, and couldn’t have…unless that imaginary “only” was there…AND IT WAS NOT, because that meaning of “belong” was not HER meaning of belong. You are really arguing that belong means “sole ownership” in the first part of the sentence, but only means “membership” in the second. And that’s unsupportable. It can only be explained by mass confirmation bias, because I can’t believe you are propagandists.
6. “Once it everybody’s responsibility and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.” Again, she’s either denying reality—What the hell does she mean, it’s not everybody’s responsibility? I pay taxes for a very expensive and lousy public school system in Alexandria that my kid didn’t attend–what is THAT, if not shared responsibility?—or she is endorsing something radically different from the current alignment of power to determine how children are raised. No, she’s saying that I shouldn’t have the right to home school my own kid, because she won’t be able to fill his head with a Marxist, anti-capitalist “community-endorsed” education. Of course that’s what she means, and it is obvious BECAUSE of the context.
It’s a very, very, clear statement and a sinister one. It is you, not I, who are ignoring both the words and the context. I agree…if she were just endorsing more investment in public education, that would be benign…stupid, but benign. And Barry, you really think, trying to put out edgy commercials about Harris-Perry–I’m not even dignifying the later one about how high achievers should be able to keep ” a little more” (No, Bob, She’s no Commie, why would anyone thing that?) with a post—MSNBC decided to launch with one that had Harris-Perry making a milk-toast argument that we need to invest more in school? Yeah, boy, THAT will cause a buzz! That’s not what they wanted, that’s not her image, that’s not WHAT SHE SAID, and that’s not what she meant to say.
Bravo
Oooohhhh. THAT is what she meant. And public education is such a success!
Several people here seem to be insisting that when Harris-Perry uses the word phrase “belong to their communities,” she means it in the sense of literal ownership. To those people I would say that you’re doing something kind of weird in order to spin her comments into their most unfavorable light.
She uses the word “belong” three times. If she means “own” in one instance, she means it all three times. So she’s only advocating for the seizure of children by the government if she believes they are currently being held in a sort of hostage situation by their parents and families? Is that what she believes? If it is, then what you say she’s advocating isn’t much worse than what she thinks is currently the case.
What the outcry in this post seems to be doing is assuming that she meant “belong” figuratively in the first two cases (which I think is the sense in which we all intuitively understand that word) but then shifted to the literal meaning by the end of the sentence.
That’s the only way I can make sense of the vituperation, unless I assume that most of you believe that American children currently are and absolutely should be owned and controlled by their parents.
Personally, I don’t think children should be the property of anybody, but then that’s not how I understand it when somebody says that children “belong to communities.” I think of that as meaning that in a civil society, the education and care of children, and the encouragement of their independence, are collective responsibilities. But maybe that makes me an anti-American radical. I guess that’s something I’ll have to live with.
Thanks, Ampersand and Edward, for some rational comments. I, too, listened to the entire spot and interpreted it the same way. If you guys are anti-American radicals, then so am I.
So that makes four of EthicsAlarms fans on the side of reason.
If “reason” means “in the thrall of crippling confirmation bias an excuse-making for a statist radical,” yes, I guess so.
Didn’t mean to leave you out, Bob. Sorry!
Ed, you are a skilled writer and a fair guy, and I challenge you to take off the tinted glasses and see how absurd your argument is here. If a writer uses a word three times in a sentence, it must mean the same thing in each case. In this sentence—“So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities” the only single meaning that can be applied throughout is “own”, as in the definition,“to be the property of a person or thing —used with to, as in “the book belongs to me.” Why? Because the other meanings make no sense in the statement challenging whether kids “belong” to families. If you’re using the definition of belong meaning membership in a group, that’s an impossible statement. Members of a family by definition BELONG to that family in the membership sense—“family” is the description of a group that includes children.
Harris-Perry can’t possibly be challenging the belief that kids “belong” to the family in that sense. No, she is and has to be using the other meaning, implying ownership, which means, in the case of children, the power to determine how they are raised until they reach adulthood. She says that parents and families don’t have this authority, but the COMMUNITY, that is, the government and the state, does. As I wrote at length above, it is troubling to me that you, Bob, Barry and others, who are so capable of better, would allow yourselves to mangle logic and language to defend this extreme leftist and her authoritarian, anti-family, anti-Democratic views. To what end? I would accept an argument that Harris-Perry, via MSNBC, was just being provocative and didn’t mean what she said in her ad, but that would necessitate admitting that she was lying through her teeth in her “double down” post, and that MSNBC was irresponsible to promote state child-rearing by airing the ad—which is what I posted about.
Heaven forbid that you have to take a progressive to task by accepting that she said exactly what her words mean.
Very disappointing.
I do not belong to the Melissa Harris-Perry fan club. I belong to my parents, I belong to the NRA, I belong to MADD, I belong to the Westwood Condo Owners Association. I belong to the human race. (That’s five.) Oh, there’s a sixth, Jack: We belong to a mu-tu-al ad-mir-a-shun so-CI-ety.
I surrender. (But I still think Jan, Ampersand, and Ed got it right.
I’ll hand you back your white flag when someone credibly explains how and why she used “belong” to mean two different things in the same paragraph.
I think there’s a difference, though subtle, between “surrender” and “giving up”…
What do you expect, they talk and talk… and accomplish nothing. Successful people in the USA (and most of the rest of the world) are all self made. Hard work, morals, ethics and the ability to to say “NO” and walk away from people like this. Community taking care of your chiildren?, YEA right, see how that works out for you! Thats why the prisons are full. School and college system is an absolute joke!, I could have learned everything I needed to know in one year. Learned more in the first six months in the Army than in K through 12th public schools. Face it, most families teach kids to be lazy. I was homeless at 16, No whining, I got to work, paid cash for my first house at 23, Worked for everything I have, retired at 52. Kids today have computers and “Smart Phones? but they are so stupid, they can’t even count change back! They actually know how to do nothing constructive. Hell, hand them a shovel and you would have to show them which end to use. All the government does is enable these young morons to become mired in debt through college continuing education loans, not teaching any money management skills. It’s not about education or what your family backround was, It’s about shutting off the reality shows, turning off the computer, getting off your lazy ass and do something, anything, everyday. Thats how you get ahead.