Teen Magazine Glamorizes Anarchy

It’s time to send up another red flag on Teen Vogue, the magazine that targets young girls between the ages of 13 years old and 17 years old.

I remember a time when such magazines were about hair and fashion, maybe the occasional celebrity interview. Now, the content has become dark and subversive, meant to instill a certain worldview of humanism, completely detached from what was once held as moral and reasonable for our youth.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that if your children are getting the bulk of their ideology from magazines and peer pressure, someone is failing them. More time should be spent with parents who take on the task of seeing that their offspring are raised in a healthy, moral, socially conscious environment.

What Teen Vogue is doing is not that.

The editors and staff of the trash mag have apparently deemed it their purpose to create the next generation of reprobates.

I’ve written in the past about some of the articles featured in the magazine. Of those, there have been articles that give tips on cheering up your gal pal after her abortion, with neat, funky little “abortion gifts.”

There has even been an article instructing the best way to have anal sex.

In a Friday article, the magazine began it’s new phase of outrageous, with a tutorial on anarchy.

The piece, titled, “Anarchy: What It Is and Why Pop Culture Loves It,” was authored by Kim Kelly, an organizer with Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council (MACC), based in New York City.

The article goes to talk in the kind of language that is probably going to be over the heads of 13 and 14 year old girls, but it really sounds like something cool and hip, youth-oriented, independent from parents, the oppressiveness of homework and rules, and totally lends to the belief that kids know more about the world than grownups.

Anarchism is a radical, revolutionary leftist political philosophy that advocates for the abolition of government, hierarchy, and all other unequal systems of power. It seeks to replace what its proponents view as inherently oppressive institutions — like a capitalist society or the prison industrial complex — with nonhierarchical, horizontal structures powered by voluntary associations between people. Anarchists organize around a key set of principles, including horizontalism, mutual aid, autonomy, solidarity, direct action, and direct democracy, a form of democracy in which the people make decisions themselves via consensus (as opposed to representative democracy, of which the United States government is an example).

The emphasis there is mine, as I wanted to make note of the wording.

Can you see how that would appeal to the undeveloped thinking of a kid?

Most of the kids that would read that swill would be reading it from their homes, on computers or the cell phones, obtained for them through the “oppressive institution” of capitalism.

Indeed, the writer was probably not writing this piece from a cardboard box in an alley or the tree house in the rain forest that she built herself from recycled soda cans.

Kelly goes on to write about Karl Marx, the Paris Commune, 1871 Paris, where anarchists and their kissing cousins, communists, took over Paris for a short time.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is generally recognized as the first self-proclaimed anarchist, and his theories continue to influence anarchist thought today — if you’ve ever heard the phrase “property is theft,” that’s straight from Proudhon’s 1840 book What Is Property? But Proudhon was far from the only prominent thinker to advance the cause of anarchy. William Godwin’s 1793 treatise, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, is hailed as a classic of antistate, proto-anarchist thought. Other famous contributors to anarchism’s development include Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Voltairine De Cleyre, Max Stirner, Johann Most, Buenaventura Durruti, and Alexander Berkman. In addition to these names, countless others, whose identities have been lost to history, have helped refine and spread the ideology of anarchism. Today, anarchism is a fully global, intersectional philosophy, with particularly strong roots in Latin America, Spain, Germany, and, as of 2012, the Middle East, due to the 2012 Rojava Revolution in occupied Kurdistan.

Emphasis mine.

Don’t miss that, kids: If you own anything, it’s theft.

Such a dead-end train of thought, yet, I’ve never seen an anarchist protesting in the streets naked.

Clothes are property, the materials used for your signs are property, the homes you return to are property.

It’s like they want to be cool, but nothing about anarchism makes sense.

And they’re hypocrites.

Of course, if your tyke isn’t quite sure they want to jump straight into anarchism, there are so many different genres of the system to link to.

Classic anarchist traditions include mutualism, which is situated at the nexus of individual and collectivist thought; anarcho-communism, which favors community ownership of the means of production, and the abolishment of the state and capitalism; anarcho-syndicalism, which views unions, the working class, and the labor movement as potential forces for revolutionary change; and individualism, which has similarities with libertarianism, and emphasizes individual freedom above all. More recent, more post-modern schools of thought, including anarcha-feminism, Black anarchism, queer anarchism, green or eco-anarchism, and anarcho-pacifism, have found firm footing in today’s anarchist communities.

Anarcho-capitalism, which is interested in self-ownership and free markets, is much rarer, and is considered by most anarchists to be illegitimate because of anarchism’s inherent opposition to capitalism.

The article further tries to draw a dividing line between anarchism and communism, but it’s weak sauce. Anarchy is an absolute tool of communists, meant to break down functioning capitalist societies through chaos and installing communism.

The piece notes all the pop culture references to anarchy, from the 70s punk scene to hip-hop artist Cardi B’s anarchy patch (the circle with the red “A” slashed inside).

Hey, look, kids! Everybody’s doing it!

But what is also tucked inside the piece is the real crux: an advertisement for the domestic terrorist organization, Antifa.

Since fascism is an antidemocratic ideology that thrives on oppression, and anarchism is explicitly against oppression in all forms, and for direct democracy, anarchism is inherently antifascist (much like all anarchists are by necessity anti-police and anti-prison). Not all antifascists are anarchists, but all anarchists are antifascist, and have been fighting against fascist forces for centuries. During the Spanish Civil War, most of the country was under anarchist control, and thousands of anarchists joined the International Brigades, a volunteer militia numbering in the thousands, who traveled to Spain to fight against General Francisco Franco and his fascist forces. It’s no coincidence that there are black flags waving in many photos of masked antifa, who have been very active in widely resisting what they view as oppressive policies across the U.S.

Thanks for the history lesson – and the whitewashing of what Antifa is.

The violent purpose of Antifa today is seen in disruptive protests that have broken out on college campuses across the nation, as the group seeks to shut down any speech they do not like.

In recent weeks, they’ve attacked police officers, journalists, and in one case, cracked open the head of a liberal protester who was basically on their side, but because he held up an American flag, he became a target. That attack from behind send the man to the hospital, where stiches were required.

They are criminals, subversive and reprobate. They are dangerous and the Department of Homeland Security deemed their activities [rightly] as domestic terrorism.

Kelly finishes off her Teen Vogue piece:

Anarchism and anarchists are everywhere, and hopefully now you’ve got a better understanding of what they’re fighting for — and against.

Nothing in her piece shows the violence or bloodshed.

Nothing shows the destroyed buildings or burning cars.

She didn’t mention a thing about their intimidation tactics or other criminal activities.

Nope. Nothing to see here but some crazy, idealistic kids, out to change the world, right?

Teen Vogue has become an insidious weapon of the left in the culture wars, and parents need to be on high alert about what media their kids are consuming.

None of this is ok.