First they came for the patriarchy, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a man. Then they came for the police force, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a cop. Then they came for PAW Patrol, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a three-year-old. Then they came for me, and there was no one to speak for me, because the men were away having their protective instincts surgically removed at re-education camp and the cops had been defunded. I didn’t even have a dog on my side, since PAW Patrol had been canceled and none of the canines out there wanted to be branded as class traitors. Besides, they’d been reading the New York Times, which cheerfully announced that our (televised) culture had reached the point where ‘The hero itself is a concept under review.’
The whole world groaned, and was amazed to find itself…anarchist.
I never thought I’d find myself defending PAW Patrol, which I gather is a fairly vapid show about a team of doggy first responders revving around town in cool trucks. But nothing is too petty for the Cultural Revolutionaries of the West. The would-be censors of PAW Patrol believe that ‘the effort to publicize police brutality also means banishing the good-cop archetype’, according to Amanda Hess at the NYT. Aha. Now we’re onto something. It’s not individual sinners that the Cultural Revolution wants purged. No, the whole idea of a trained group tasked with preventing crime and maintaining public order has to be scrapped. Oh, and no one should own guns either. And somehow, magically, no one will need to fear for their lives or property. At least, not more than they already do.
For some strange reason — perhaps because they’ve spent 12 years in the socialist training institutions known as the public education system — many adults of apparently normal IQ seem to feel this idea is a good one. But the great thing about attacking PAW Patrol is that its biggest fans are all under the age of six. They haven’t spent enough time in school to absorb socialism properly, and they will not be happy when Chase the police dog is forcibly removed from their lives. Their hapless parents will be forced to endure the resultant tantrums, and on being asked ‘But WHY?!’ for the 10,000th tearful time, will perhaps realize the strangeness of minds that want to cancel a show just because it might make children think authority is to be trusted.
But will they realize that such minds are not just petty, but evil? For it is evil to teach children that ‘the good-cop archetype’ is somehow wrong. Don’t we want our children to learn to defend what’s right, to protect the downtrodden, and to be capable of sacrificing their own comfort for the good of someone else? I don’t know if PAW Patrol actually teaches that, because the only time I’ve ever glimpsed it was by accident, over the shoulder of someone else’s weepy toddler in a hospital waiting room. But fictional good-guy cops, if they’re doing good, are probably better role models than vigilante superheroes that are a law unto themselves, accountable to no one and deciding what’s right and what’s wrong without reference to any outside moral code.
That’s the key to all this. The Cultural Revolutionaries of the West don’t want anyone learning any moral code but their own. The Ten Commandments? An imposition by a God they hate. No one but the ‘people’ (read: its manipulators) gets to define what’s good for humanity. Natural law? It’s anathema too, for it implies that human nature isn’t just an indeterminate amorphous mass to be formed at will, but something with specific, identifiable, and unchanging traits, duties, and privileges. Common law, handed down by centuries of tradition? They loathe tradition, for they recognize that it is the biggest obstacle preventing them from remaking society in their own likeness and image.
When you teach children — or adults for that matter — that authority in itself is dangerous and bad, then you encourage them to cast off all the hierarchical authorities in place that serve as buffers between the individual and the naked, faceless power of the state. Marx believed that the traditional bourgeois family structure could not raise children properly, and on the strength of this philosophy children in Soviet Russia were kidnapped from their parents and raised in government-run communes — directly under the hand of the all-powerful State.
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But parents are not the only authority the Cultural Revolutionaries would like to remove. The authority of God, taught in churches, is another interference between the individual and the state; thus in China under the Chinese Communist party it is illegal for parents to bring their under-18-year-olds to church, and the Catholic Church has been under enormous pressure — to which it has recently succumbed—to tell Chinese Catholics to join the Patriotic Association, essentially a government-run church organization.
Now the very idea of the police has come under attack, and we wonder why? For surely an all-powerful state needs a police force to enforce its rulings. Yes, but not the kind of police force that is filled with ‘good-cop’ types, authoritative, believing in a non-government-issued moral code of good and evil, and believing rightly or wrongly that upholding the law is the best way to preserve order in society. Nope. If you want to reorganize society, then you don’t want ‘good-cop’ types personally responsible for preserving an ‘order’ that you dislike. What you want is brainwashed robot types, without belief in any moral code outside of popular opinion, without a belief in hierarchy, and without a sense of personal responsibility. No heroes need apply.
And so PAW Patrol has to go. It reinforces antiquated notions of good and evil, right and wrong, heroism and duty. None of this ‘Chase is on the case’ and ‘All in a police-pup’s day’ attitude. There’s no room for that in our brave new world. Let our three- and four-year-olds rather learn from Greta Thunberg: all of your troubles are somebody else’s fault, and entirely outside of your control. The best and noblest course of action is to make everyone else feel as guilty as possible about this, in hopes that one day a truly Earth-Saving Totalitarian Government will come along into whose hands the world will gratefully surrender itself, knowing that through this right-thinking state’s all-powerful efforts the planet will be saved and all our troubles come to rest.
