Child Protective Services: the grotesque tyrannies of petty bureaucrats

The little tyrants at Child Protective Services suggest that, when full-blown tyranny comes to the West, it will be death by bureaucracy, not gas chambers.

Child Protective Services Sad Child Boy Lonely Please pardon my silence today. I spent several hours helping a friend edit a petition challenging the Child Protective Services agency active in his community. It was harrowing work just describing what Child Protective Services did.

I cannot go into detail, of course, but I can tell you that several agency employees, due to laziness and bad attitude, refused to act on multiple, specific, and provably true reports that a child was living in a dangerous situation. When the petitioner called them on that behavior, they doubled down, manufacturing evidence and hiding facts in order to convince the court that their earlier refusal to act was valid. Again, none of this is conjecture. The facts are there. To make the whole situation even worse, when the petitioner went to the political body governing this local Child Protective Services agency, the employees continued their lies, the petitioner proved that they were lying, and the political body did nothing.

I wrote once before about Child Protective Services tyranny. In that earlier post, I focused on the flip side of the situation here. The same employees who will not act to remove a child from a physically and mentally dangerous situation enjoy using their power over diligent and loving parents who somehow managed to get caught in the agencies’ webs.

Things are worse in England. As we’ve seen there with Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans, the agencies tasked with child welfare would rather see a child die than have parents challenge their power.

Thinking about these petty bureaucrats’ deadly, destructive tyranny, I realized that, if the Left succeeds in bringing full totalitarianism to America (and when the Left succeeds in doing the same in England), we’re not going to end up with Hitleresque death camps. The government will not march thousands, tens of thousands, and millions of people off to gas chambers. That’s not how it works in countries that were once liberal democracies (which Germany never was) that eventually transferred all power to unaccountable bureaucracies. Instead, we going to die, one at a time, at the hands of lazy, petty bureaucrats who will use the enormous power at their backs to protect their fiefdoms.

Please note, by the way, that I’m not talking about the “we know best” nanny-state fascism that Jonah Goldberg so wonderfully describes in Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Rather than the beneficent power play, I’m describing the viciousness of every petty bureaucrat who protects her turf or flexes his muscles.

Put another way: In the West’s totalitarian future, we won’t have death camps; we’ll just have agency waiting rooms. Our ends will be Kafkaesque, not Hitleresque.

Photo creditAll alone, by Tommy Fjordbøge. Creative Commons; some rights reserved.

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