The little kids walking through the airport or the state fair wearing leashes disguised as monkey backpacks signal every parent’s worst nightmare: losing their child.

That nightmare increases ten-fold when the loss is inflicted upon parents via so-called authority figures such as Child Protective Services or other agencies with allegedly good intentions. Unfortunately, such an event may soon be par for the course in many American homes if the opinions of PBS attorney Michael Beller become mainstream.

In an interview with the undercover journalists at Project Veritas, Beller loosened up and advanced the need for “re-education camps”—or the more friendly-sounding “enlightenment camps”—for the children of Donald Trump supporters, arguing that they will “be raising a generation of intolerant, horrible people—horrible kids.”

Clearly recorded before the election, Beller lays out his plan: “Even if Biden wins, we go for all the Republican voters, and Homeland Security will take their children away. What do you think about that? … And we’ll put them [Trump supporters’ children] into re-education camps.”

If chills just ran down your back reading that, then take heart, for Beller doesn’t intend to mistreat these relocated children. Instead, they will have the best of care, watching PBS and learning in classrooms filled with Sesame Street characters. What could be better?

Shortly after this video surfaced, PBS released an official response, saying that Beller “no longer works for PBS,” and that his comments were not in line with those of the organization. Yet while it seems unfathomable that Beller or anyone else—liberal, conservative, or otherwise—could even entertain the idea of forcibly extracting millions of children from their homes just because the political ideologies of their parents are different, such an idea has been advanced before by a very prominent historical figure: Karl Marx.

Writing in The Communist Manifesto, Marx noted that the destruction of the family, particularly the separation of children and parents, was a main goal of communism.

“Abolition of the family!” Marx prescribed, noting that “Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.” Yet this was the goal, for Marx believed the traditional family was built “On capital, on private gain” and would “vanish with the vanishing of capital.”

The father of Communism takes direct aim at the parent-child relationship in his next words: “Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.”

Marx embraces the idea of “destroy[ing] the most hallowed of relations,” replacing the education of children in the home with a social form of the same, noting how Communists seek to co-opt schools as a means of intervention and indoctrination toward their way of thinking.

Is such a plan resurfacing under those who advance a new totalitarian government? Sure, Beller no longer works for PBS, but seeing as he flippantly passes off his opinions, it’s hard to imagine that he thinks his views are not socially acceptable in his circles. Thus, those who will not submit willingly to the new “woke” totalitarian way of thinking must be made to conform to the mold, and if not themselves, then most certainly their children.

So what do we do? Do we sit back and wait for the inevitable? Do we fight to the death to keep our children and train them in our values and beliefs?

Most of us would surely do the latter. But what if even that fails? How do we prepare our children for the time when—God forbid—they may be forcibly separated from us and indoctrinated with ideologies that we can’t and won’t accept?

Two answers to that question are offered in the concluding paragraphs of W. Cleon Skousen’s 1958 book, The Naked Communist:

If the challenge to our youth today is a war of ideologies, then it is time for us to take the offensive. We should not sit back and wait for our boys and girls to be indoctrinated with materialistic dogma and thereby make themselves vulnerable to a Communist conversion when they are approached by the agents of force and fear who come from across the sea. For two generations an important phase of American life has been disintegrating. As parents and teachers we need to recognize that if this pillar of our culture collapses, our own children will be the casualties. This disintegration must stop. …

 

Of course, we must do more than merely teach correct principles—certainly we must practice them. I therefore close with the words of Francis Bacon who said: ‘It is not what you eat, but what you digest that makes you strong. It is not what you earn, but what yousave that makes you rich. It is not what you preach, but what you practice that makes you a Christian!’ 

Teach and do. Simple words, but incredibly challenging to put into practice. The challenge is worth it, however.

So teach your children history. Train them to value things like truth, family, and morality. Take them to church and instill Scriptural principles in their hearts. But don’t just impress such things upon them. Personally adopting these practices and modeling them for your children will go much further in helping them stand strong in the possible event that one day, they may be brought under the influence of those whose values are in direct opposition to yours.