Hurting Children is the Point: The Right Wing Authoritarian Mindset

The motivation that hides in plain sight is the key to understanding what's happening

Dispatches From A Collapsing State depends on your support and needs it desperately. If this work has resonated with you or helped you, please become a paid subscriber to keep this project going

---

You can barely breathe for it.

The internet is saturated with stories and revelations from the Epstein Files. Social media “detectives” either connecting dots or else lying for engagement. Sometimes, in quiet moments, you’ll find yourself doing something and suddenly you’ll think of what’s been exposed and maybe mutter to yourself, “What in the hell are we doing?”

It takes a toll and for anyone who has survived this kind of abuse, it wears on you.

I’m exhausted by it. Knowing the world is run by the kind of people who either abused me and possibly you and so many others as kids or the kind of people who would enable them is simultaneously exhausting and demoralizing and infuriating. This isn’t how it should be. We all know that and it would serve us well if we lived in a world where sometimes we just stopped what we were doing and screamed it at the top of our lungs.

This isn’t how it should be.

There is a lesson here that we should learn. It’s disturbing and seems contradictory at first, but, regardless, it is true.

At the heart of fascism and authoritarianism and capitalism itself is an obsession with hurting children.

We tell ourselves an incredibly comforting story in the United States of America. Children are our future. Our greatest resource. You’ll hear politicians from both sides of the aisle say as much. If you tune into some hyper-bright, brain-numbing morning talk show, you’ll probably hear it before the first commercial break.

But would a country that actually cared about children allow 11 million of them to live in poverty? Would we live in a country where schools are drained of resources and teachers are forced to work for next to nothing? Would we enable a genocide that leaves children starving or orphaned or dead? Would we enjoy an economy that requires children around the world to toil in sweatshops or live in slavery? Would we do nothing about climate change or allow economic inequality to grow if they serve to destroy the future of those children?

It is something we say to make ourselves fell better. Cope. Denial. Delusion. Rather, the powerful in this country see children as exploitable and disposable. What you see in the Epstein Files is simply that worldview at its most obvious and observable. For a system like ours that hurts people like it does to work requires the participation of people who refuse to extend basic empathy to you and me and the countless children they hurt. That we continue to get these results and that things continue to worsen shouldn’t surprise you. Garbage in, garbage out.

The idea of “childhood” is a relatively new phenomenon and one of the greatest achievements of humanity. We take it for granted now, which is one of the reasons why things are going as badly as they are, but the idea that children should be protected, should be educated, and should be allowed to live a life of relative whimsy was fought for. America’s industry was built on the broken and battered bodies of children who were used for labor and abused.

Now, those advances, like so many others, are being rolled back, which is the purpose of fascism. Schools are being destroyed. Vaccinations discarded. Right Wing influencers are constantly normalizing abolishing age of consent laws. The GOP has already granted the wealth class its wish to have children back working in factories and slaughterhouses. No one in power is doing anything to stop school shootings, leaving children to spend their days being trained to survive a literal war in their classrooms.

But why?

Rationally, this doesn’t make sense. Who would want to hurt children and who would want to destroy the notion of childhood?

This is the ugly secret at the heart of fascism and the Right Wing in general: one of their main unconscious motivations is to make sure children suffer as they have suffered.

This, unfortunately, has come to define so much of our painful culture. The Right Wing authoritarian mindset is often developed from an experience, as a child, with authoritarian and abusive figures and communities, including parents and religious groups. They learn early on that something is “bad” about them, some belief or desire or worldview, and then, over time, they learn to suppress that idea in order to avoid abuse or banishment. They become subservient to authoritarian figures as they perform “strength,” creating sycophantic attachments and bootlicking tendencies. They come to see abusers and dictators as parents to be adored and worshiped because they never became adults who saw their own parents as flawed human beings. They project the parts of themselves they hate and have been taught to repress onto others, leading them to attempt to destroy “evil” where they have projected it.

And, unfortunately, they are obsessed with ensuring that future generations of children are hurt like they have been hurt.

This is why many Right Wing figures have based their entire public performance on “saving the children” and have later been caught hurting children. This is why they are drawn to conspiracy theories that distract from what their favorite elites like Donald Trump are doing and then destroy schools, attack mental health services and professionals, and lionize physical and emotional abuse in parenting. The idea that children should be prevented from the type of abuse they suffered as children is one of the strongest and most threatening fears they have. It offends them. It undermines the story they have had to create for themselves, that their parents or community should not have hurt them or abused them.

And why? Because that would mean facing the reality that their parents or communities were wrong. It feels as if doing that would mean death because their entire lives and entire identities have been built on the irrational belief that the abuse was necessary and that they deserved it. This cycle has created a deep, unfillable hole in the authoritarians and fascists that cannot be sated with wealth or power or fame or adoration. Unless it is healed, it just eats up everything and hurts everyone they encounter. Remember this the next time you see Trump or Elon Musk or any of the fascist oligarchs and when you know what to look for you’ll never be able to unsee it again.

Simply put, these drives are self-destructive in people’s lives and self-destructive in politics. We are being ruled by some of the most dangerous and most unwell humans imaginable. That feeling you get in your gut when consuming the news and the ascendance of fascism is your nervous system communicating to you. The revulsion is earned. The desperation for change is earned. This can’t be reformed. You can’t vote your way out of it. It must be torn out by its root and something better planted in its place. It must be burned to the ground so something can be built on its ashes.

That something better has to be something that values children and protects them here and around the world. It isn’t enough to speak these tired phrases about valuing children while relying on them to build your goods or allowing them to live under authoritarianism in order to keep the status quo going. We cannot allow tens of millions of children to go to bed hungry at night just because we don’t know them or see them or because the status quo is treating us decently as the moment. This inherently rots the system and delivers us to this point.