The authorities spend a lot of time trying to control young people, so it isn’t surprising those authorities often turn abusive. It’s not just bad parents causing the problems. Sometimes it’s monarchy, high finance, or hip-hop—or all three. Take Sarah Ferguson, for example.
Now, I’d hate to suggest doxing a member of the British royal family, who probably have the resources necessary to kill people who really annoy them, but I can’t help thinking researchers trying to get to the bottom of stories about elite international child-abuse networks could do worse than to direct their investigations toward Sarah Ferguson, especially with the Trump administration not looking like it’s going to be any speedier exposing Epstein’s networks or the royals than it has been revealing UFO secrets. As usual, the private sector must step in.
Ferguson is—as far as we know—the only prominent person alleged by one biographer (though Ferguson denies it) to be the former lover of both Epstein associate Prince Andrew and hip-hop artist Sean “P Diddy” Combs, each man apparently a living factory of underage sex incidents in his own right. Might she know or have seen more than she has thus far admitted? (I can’t help recalling that Prince Andrew’s alibi—his alibi!—for one night when he was accused of being with an underage girl was that he couldn’t have been there because he was at a pizza party at the time.)
It may seem paradoxical (at least to non-anarchists) that the British establishment is simultaneously molesting kids and yet so protective of them that it does things like make it illegal for anyone born after 2008 to smoke. But—terrible, stupid, dangerous, gross habit though smoking is, indeed the leading preventable cause of death—the paradox vanishes if you assume that neither the molestation nor the regulation arises out of some form of love but rather out of a deep-set desire to control. Preventing lung cancer is incidental. Those kids must obey, and they offer their controllers easy targets.
The U.K. could use fewer bossy, abusive authority figures and more organizations like the Campaign for Freedom in Everyday Life, which like its leader Josie Appleton has respectable leftist roots but a tendency to find practical, libertarian solutions to the problems the semi-socialist Brits are all too often tempted to micromanage with cops and fines, problems ranging from loudly politically campaigning to swearing in public.
While the political bigwigs argue about central-government budgets and major wars, there’s plenty of impatience with the political class among the public at the local level, waiting for freedom-fighters to tap into it. And it’s no compliment to be treated like children by the authorities (especially when you see how they treat actual children). If you want a paternalistic government to ban all bad things and promote all good things, you’re a totalitarian whether you’re on the right or left. Perhaps humanity’s first step on the road to maturity and self-reliance should be escaping you.
I met Appleton two decades ago when I was an editor for the American Council on Science and Health, which similarly tends to seek laissez-faire solutions to the problems all too many public health organizations are eager to regulate heavily. I’m delighted to see another figure who was tied to ACSH (then on its board of trustees), Betsy McCaughey—who also founded the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and was lieutenant governor of New York under Pataki to boot—is now running for governor of my old home state of Connecticut, facing the Republican primary on August 11 before going up against popular Democratic governor Ned Lamont.
The charismatic McCaughey is anti-tax, anti-smoking, and anti-germs but also anti-bans and anti-lockdowns, a combo that seems hard for most politicians to grasp, wanting one centralized solution imposed instead of the moderate, reasonable method of dispensing advice and then letting free individuals choose. McCaughey used to keep a copy of Atlas Shrugged at her bedside. Perhaps she still does. But don’t panic over that, New Englanders: In tone, she’s more Pataki than wacky. It would be great to see her running Connecticut (if someone must). It might even reduce my parents’ pessimism about their whole geographic region.
Mentioning my parents is a reminder that the young do need guidance, if not government. I was saddened, then, to see that a piece by Griffin Eckstein in the NYU student newspaper Washington Square News just called for preventing a commencement speech there by (intelligent and mild-mannered) psychologist Jonathan Haidt (even though I’ve criticized him a bit myself in the past). Eckstein argues Haidt does not share the students’ interests or (I swear) speak to their “ennui”—presumably because Haidt’s built his career around encouraging debate and free speech as basic elements of learning and achieving adulthood. Trying to silence him is a shameful, cowardly stance from an intolerant young journalist.
Then again, in a slight shift in emphasis, Haidt has lately been so critical of the psychological pressures caused by online youth culture that he encourages government-imposed usage restrictions. I don’t deny the thought of children bombarded with propaganda and worse is troubling, but maybe if the Net were truly an anarchic free-for-all with no government monitoring, sheltered kids wouldn’t grow up to fear that Haidt speeches and ennui are threats to their fragile little minds.
But in any case, I wouldn’t trust the political elite to decide what’s palatable for young minds. Back before his turn toward libertarian causes, Haidt was a campaign advisor to Sen. John Kerry, and now Rep. Ro Khanna (one of Kerry’s fellow Democrats) wants to summon Kerry to testify about why he apparently lied about having dined with Epstein. It appears Kerry did so on Epstein’s island with other, younger members of the Kerry family—not that there’s per se anything wrong with dining, just lying.
The Democrats don’t lately tout the likes of Kerry as psychological role models for youth, though. They’re more likely to praise someone hip like Kamala Harris’ androgynous, bony, fashion-designing daughter Ella Emhoff, who admits she’s been on antidepressants since about age 11. If you were around politicians, the fashion industry, or media figures like Sean Combs from a young age, though—and frequently advocating for trans people—you might be on antidepressants too.
Luckily, for those desiring a future in which neither right nor left corrupts the minds of youth, there are small ways of opposing Trump without rushing into the arms of the crazy left. If, as seems entirely possible, Nancy Mace wins the South Carolina Republican gubernatorial primary on June 9 without Trump’s endorsement, it would underscore her status as an antiwar, pro-Rand Paul, pro-Thomas Massie, pro-Epstein-disclosure, pro-UFO-disclosure candidate (regardless of whether the UFOs turn out to be a military psy-op or yet another immense child-abducting scheme)—a candidate both more conservative and more libertarian than Trump, which is something it’s getting easier and easier to be as Trump becomes more autocratic.
And at least Mace hasn’t called what’s almost certainly footage of a paraglider a possible image of the ancient Near-Eastern angel Shamash, as Rep. Luna has in reaction to that latest wave of government UFO videos. Grownups are welcome to speculate but should avoid leaping to mythological conclusions. That would be childish.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey