My kids are 10 and 13. I homeschooled them for the first three years of the pandemic and during this time brainwashed them (and myself) with communist propaganda. They wanted to go back to school last fall so my spouse (a left liberal) and I let them. My spouse had also been strongly pressuring me to send them back for months beforehand.

It's amazing the influence their lib school and lib friends have on them. My kids are also super into Harry Potter. My 10-year-old listens to the audiobooks (from the library) constantly. We also just got through re-watching and discussing LOTR, which my older kid is now re-reading. A few nights ago my older kid and I got into a heated argument about whether the orcs in LOTR are basically a Nazi vision of Judeo-Bolshevik-Africans. He admitted the next morning that they are. He also seemed disturbed when I kept referring to Tolkien as a Catholic monarchist (which he was).

They also play video games, chat with their friends a lot, and do all kinds of after-school activities. They're good if not great students (I suspect the teachers are just softballing everyone?) and are happy with their social lives. If not for covid and the general horror of amerikkkan imperialism and colonialism and capitalism and patriarchy and climate change and school shootings, there wouldn't be much to complain about. I also didn't really start to think about politics until I was 12 or 13.

So there's strong liberal influences everywhere. Sometimes my kids push back if they see me shouting "Free Palestine" out the car window at people. They don't like that. (I haven't done it with them since the summer when there were more people around; I do sometimes do things like this on my own, picking fights with liberals over Palestine in person in public—especially when I know that I can easily get away—because I have no respect for the indifferent and these fucking pieces of shit should have no peace wherever they go.) But I asked the older one today: "does 'israel' have a right to exist?" He immediately answered no. I then asked: "where should the Jews in 'israel' go once the country no longer exists?" "They can go back to Europe where they came from," he said. (We also have Jewish ancestry.) We talked about how Hamas has said that anyone can live in Palestine so long as they follow the rules. Was he just humoring me? I don't think so. Both of my kids also tell me repeatedly that they are contemptuous of the liberal nonsense their teachers tell them. My older son had to complete a project on the constitution recently. I told him he could mention that the constitution had been written by slave owners. He said that he just wanted to get a passing grade, so he ended up writing what the lib teacher wanted to hear. I have lost all respect for local schools, institutions, teachers, etc., because none of them give a fuck about masking, I've seen them lie to my face, and there have been issues with weird sexual abuse at the school. I also can't stand being anywhere near any of the other parents. I also strongly insist on my kids masking at school, and I know that they don't always do so (all of us have "colds" right now), but I also know that they do it at least sometimes.

Raising communist kids isn't just about forcing them to read communist texts. Communists aim to build a democratic society, which means making things as democratic as possible at home: listening to kids and allowing them to make some decisions at least, even if they conflict with your own desires. And also just loving your kids, encouraging their strengths, being there for them, giving a damn about them.

Feel free to critique me but I'm doing the best that I can. I don't know how they're going to turn out because millions of things could happen from millions of different directions and I can't keep them locked in their rooms forever reading communist texts. (The older one definitely seems to remember all the dialectical materialism I drilled into him years ago.) I have kind of wondered about how communists ended up raising monsters like Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris—were their parents really communists to begin with? Were they too nice, or were they abusive or neglectful? Did their kids become liberals because for some reason they associated their nice communist parents with the nice liberal government? Reich says it's all about sex—that people turn into fascists because their parents physically abuse them into having a really strange relationship with sex (the petite bourgeoisie, the main supporters of fascism, are hostile to extramarital sex because they don't have the resources to support all those kids and don't want to deal with more proletarians). Interestingly, I managed to get my spouse, who comes from a PB family, to watch Starship Troopers with us a year or two ago. She didn't have a problem with all of the gruesome violence in that movie, but she walked out during the shower scene and refused to finish the movie with us.