California governor Gavin Newsom recently signed into law Assembly Bill 1955 (the SAFETY Act), which holds that no school employee can face consequences for withholding from parents information about their children’s gender identification if they do so “without the pupil’s consent.” In other words, ideologically driven schools and troubled children have preempted parental rights:
The law states that school employees “shall not be required to disclose any information related to a pupil’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the pupil’s consent unless otherwise required by state or federal law.”
That law was one of the reasons Elon Musk decided to move SpaceX’s and X’s headquarters from California to Texas. Musk had suffered immense grief from unwittingly agreeing to the sexual transitioning of his son in California by a progressive school, which he says was effectively the “killing” of his son by “woke-mind virus.”
Image: Children in Kibbutz Dan (1939). Public domain.
We must see this intrusion of the federal and state government for what it is: an ideological campaign to replace parents with the dictatorship of the proletariat. That is a Marxist effort to create a community without parents, in which everyone is an equal “person.” Marxism teaches that eliminating the family, in which children are the property of the parents, is a pillar of the worker’s paradise.
I became redpilled to that ideological campaign while living on a kibbutz in Israel during the early 1970s. I lived on Kibbutz Sasa in the Galilee for several months. I was attracted to the Kibbutz’s commitment to creating a community in which everyone is equal and the community owns all property. While living there, I learned the kibbutzim’s history.
In the late 1890s, the Zionist movement emerged in Europe among Ashkenazi Jews. Beginning in 1910, the kibbutzim movement’s founders first used Sigmund Freud’s ideas as the ideological glue for their community, so everything was about free love.
In this first era, they promoted a community without sexual morals, without marriage, without commitment between men and women. Anyone could have sex with anyone; children born from those sexual escapades belonged to the community. “Parents” were not allowed to meet their “children.” “Husbands” were prohibited from living together with or developing love relationships with “wives.”
Needless to say, that did not work out well. Men and women fell in love. They longed to be together with their children as families. They demanded that the ideology for the kibbutzim movement change. Rather than reverting to traditional values, in the 1930s, the kibbutzim turned to Karl Marx for guidance.
Adopting the ideology of Karl Marx, the Kibbutz permitted men and women to form monogamous relations as husbands and wives; that is, to live together. Their relationship could be ended or changed at any time without formality. Adultery and plural relationships were accepted. Children, however, still belonged to the community, not the parents. Severe laws prohibited naming children, acknowledging them, or living with them. Children belonged to, lived in, and were raised by the community “schools.”
Naturally, that could not continue as well. Mothers, especially, demanded to know, live with, and raise their children. They refused to permit the community schools to take their place. Inevitably, this Marxist socialist experiment failed. Over time, the kibbutzim movement gravitated toward a community that permitted property ownership and encouraged families while emphasizing the importance of community life. (For a detailed discussion, read the kibbutz chapter in Joshua Muravchik’s masterful Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism.)
Eventually, Israel developed two forms of kibbutzim—secular and religious. Over time, the religious communities proved the most enduring. Children chose to remain on these kibbutzim and raise their own families. Meanwhile, secular communities had a much more difficult time maintaining continuity and community.
America’s federal government and California’s state government are infecting people with the woke-mind virus, campaigning to create a community without fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, parents and children. They want community schools to become our parents while the state owns all the property. They promote sexual license and choice of gender. The leftists in both the federal government and California’s government should take a lesson from the history of the kibbutzim movement. That will fail.