Won't somebody please think of the children?
Today, not tomorrow.
On December 4, 2016, 28-year-old Edgar Welch entered a pizza restaurant in Washington DC armed with a military-grade assault rifle and opened fire. If he was aiming at any person in particular he missed all his shots, but his motivation was clear: he was there to bust open an underground paedophile ring operating from the pizza restaurant and free the children imprisoned within.
There was only one issue with his plan: the paedophile ring was fictional. It was a myth spread online as part of a campaign of disinformation to discredit the Democratic Party. Welch was imprisoned for four years. The Democrats lost.
In 1974, an anti-sex education activist in West Virginia took umbridge at the books proposed by her children’s school board. She embarked on a campaign to ban the books she perceived as being anti-Christian and anti-white. The campaign was supported by the local Reverend Marvin Horan, who called for firm action to protect local children. As part of this campaign, Horan arranged to have elementary schools bombed, a school bus attacked with shotguns, and rocks thrown at children who did not comply with a school boycott. He was imprisoned for three years. Between 2023 and 2024, more than 10,000 books were banned in public schools in the US.
In 2022, Florida passed the Parental Rights in Education Act, commonly referred to as the Don't Say Gay law, which forbids the conversation of sexual orientation in schools in Florida. As part of the discourse prior to the passing of the bill, advocates claimed that it was for the protection of children, decrying opponents as ‘groomers’, ‘perverts’ and ‘paedophiles’ and prompting LGBTQ communities to flee Florida in what rights groups described as a ‘mass migration’1.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a key supporter of Donald Trump, has turned his attentions to the UK recently. After the safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips, rejected a request for a government-led inquiry into a decade-old child sex abuse case - arguing the local council should commission an inquiry instead - Musk posted a tirade of tweets accusing her of being “pure evil”, calling for Phillips and the Prime Minister to be imprisoned, and for “America to liberate the tyrannical government of Great Britain.”
In January alone he has posted on X no fewer than 200 times about the issue. Notably, he hasn’t mentioned any of the child abuse scandals in any other countries around the world - or even in other organisations within the UK like the Church of England - but the use of his social media platform as a weaponised barraging of misinformation has succeeded in dominating the headlines and the current political discussion with the topic of his choice.
Historically, the argument calling for people to ‘think of the children’ refers to labour rights. Bill Clinton, speaking to the International Labour Organization in 1999, once pleaded for people to “Think of the children...freed of the crushing burden of dangerous and demeaning work, given back those irreplaceable hours of childhood for learning and playing and living.”
Of course, there is much to be said and done for the children, to give the marginalised and the defenceless a voice and levels of protection not granted to adults. NSPCC research suggests 1 in 10 children in the UK alone have been neglected, 1 in 14 have been physically abused and 1 in 20 have been sexually abused2. Organisations around the world work tirelessly to champion children’s rights.
As we’ve seen, it’s easy to bring ‘the children’ into a conversation to lay down an often illogical and unrelated argument. It’s a tried and tested debate-ender. The emotionally-charged plea that cannot be reasoned with, argued against or challenged. If you disagree, you hate children. And crimes against children are crimes against society. To be anti-children, you are anti-society, and therefore not to be listened to. This makes it a favourite argument for advocates of censorship looking to control the discourse. It’s cheap, it’s lazy, and immensely effective.
It is impossible for any rational thinking adult to claim that bombing schools and shooting up school buses is being done for ‘the protection of children’, because it’s not - it’s nothing short of domestic terrorism, championing right-wing political causes. But ‘the children’ are dragged into the culture wars time and time again as a justification for monstrous actions.
Today is no different. And as Musk and the Republicans clamour for the protection of children, shaking their fists in the name of justice, they prepare to systematically dismantle as many of the environmental laws and regulations in the US they can lay their hands on. Laws which control air quality, emissions, pollution - all of which exist to protect the health and wellbeing of children.
Businesses are already preparing a strategy of appeasement to keep themselves out of this new government’s firing line. In preparation of escalating hostility towards climate regulation, six of the US’s biggest banks have quit the global banking industry’s net zero target-setting group, all but abandoning their own climate policies to avoid political backlash3.
Since the election results I have tried to prepare myself for the emotional pains of watching America turn its back on climate policy, made all the more terrifying in the wake of 2024 being the world’s hottest year on record and a breach of the widely-regarded ‘safe temperature limit’ of 1.5°C. But it’s still difficult to watch how quickly the cowardly turn their backs to protect their profit margins, and how easily ignorance can dominate conversation uncontested.
Planet Earth is not so quick to forget and forgive.
Just ten days into 2025, it turned one of the world’s major cities into charcoal. At the time of writing, 24 people have died. That number will increase significantly - both from the toxicity of the hostile environment left smouldering, and from suicides of those who have lost everything they have spent their lives building.
The fingers are already pointing every which way, and the same people who advocate for the protection of children by banning books, bombing schools, and interfering with democratic processes are turning a blind eye to the effects of rampant fossil fuel expansion. Instead they are waging a war against nature they have no hope of winning, creating a world inhospitable to all human life.
As the flames die down and the people of Los Angeles return home to pick through the wreckage, the ashes will reveal nothing but progress in reverse, and the blackened faces of children at the mercy of a climate that homo sapiens has never experienced before. The burning of California is tragic, but is just a little taste of the world our children will grow up in without immediate climate action.
You can’t bomb a school or shoot up a restaurant and rationally claim your actions are to protect children. But imagine what humanity could achieve if that level of fanatacism was applied to a genuine desire to change the world for the better.
If protecting children is truly at the heart of political will on all sides, it should begin with deep, meaningful climate action. Without it, the rest is just smoke on the wind.
So well written Thomas with such an important message.
A sobering and sensible write.