Seth Barron joins Brian Anderson to discuss his new book, Weaponized: The Left’s Capture and Destruction of America’ s Sacred Institutions.

Audio Transcript

Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks Podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show today is Seth Barron. Seth is a New York City-based reporter and editor who covers local and national politics. He serves on the editorial board of the New York Post and he’s been an associate editor at City Journal and a regular contributor who’s actually written well over 200 pieces for City Journal over the years. He’s the author of The Last Days of New York: A Reporter’s True Tale and has a brand new book called Weaponized: The Left’s Capture and Destruction of America’s Sacred Institutions, which he’s here to discuss today. So Seth, always good to talk with you and thanks for coming on 10 Blocks.

Seth Barron: Again. Oh, thanks for having me on, Brian. 200 articles. That’s amazing.

Brian Anderson: Yeah, I just looked today. It’s quite a track record. Most recent of which was a excellent review of Lionel Shriver’s new or recent novel. So this new book, the subtitle, refers to the capture or destruction of America’s “sacred institutions.” One of those would have to be education, I think. And it may be where the institutional capture you’re describing the book may be most obvious. You write that the left has unionized education and teaching and used its kind of centralized power over the system, not only to accrue money to itself through union dues, but also to exert a kind of monopoly control on public school curricula. I wonder if you could describe this and just how much damage it’s doing to education in America.

Seth Barron: Sure, Brian. The way I see it is that the left views children, and by the left I mean the teachers’ union, but the left generally, the same way they view money, which is that all of it belongs to the state and they let you keep some of it. In the same way, children belong to the state. You’re familiar with the phrase, “It takes a village to raise a child.” “All children are our children.” Or as Randy Weingarten likes to say, “Teachers want what kids need.” All children’s best interests flow through the teachers’ union. So whatever the teachers want is what the children want. So children belong to the state. Parents have the responsibility or the pleasure of raising them, feeding them and hugging them and so forth. But as far as their minds go, that belongs to the school and only the school. It’s funny, Randy Weingarten wrote a book last year called Why Fascists Fear Teachers. This wasn’t a widely read book, although apparently the union I think paid for a lot of it. They gave a million dollars to various people for ghostwriting and fact checking and legal checking. Brady Weingarten has one funny part in the book where she says there are four things that teachers provide that make fascists so angry. One of those is they teach kids things. Two is they provide community. Three, they open up opportunity. Fine. Those three you could have guessed. But the fourth thing they do is they anchor a labor movement that provides a model for working people in the country. And this is what she says schools and teachers do. Essentially, what she’s saying is that the teachers’ union is the justification for schools.

Brian Anderson: Yeah, it gets things exactly backward.

Seth Barron: One would think, yes, that schools exist and children are taught in order to give the teachers something to do and the teachers’ union excuse to exist. So this is kind of where I start from, I guess. I mean, it goes deeper than that, obviously.

Brian Anderson: Yeah. In the school setting, there has been a pretty extensive school choice movement that has made ground in recent years. You do have a lot more people in America that are considering homeschooling as an option. What is available within the system though that might improve things or do parents really have to look to these alternative kinds of education models?

Seth Barron: Look, there’s always going to be good teachers and good schools that do the right thing and are primarily interested in teaching children and helping them develop as individuals and members of civic society, so forth, the old traditional purposes. So you can find these examples here and there. I would say it’s not the rule and even the exceptions in a sense prove the rule. I mean, there was a school in Wisconsin that put up a sign that said, “If your mother won’t affirm your choices, I’ll be your mother today,” referring to the trans ideology. And this, I think, is one of the clearest examples of how the schools and how the Teachers’ Union have taken fairly fringe ideology and mainstreamed it. The idea being that trans is an identity that everyone that many people naturally have and it’s frowned upon by society and that’s why schools need to be the locusts of permitting it, fostering it, helping it flourish. So you’ve seen schools set up like closets where, gender fluid closets, where changing rooms, where kids can go and try on outfits that they wouldn’t be allowed to wear at home and rules that schools are not allowed to tell parents what their children are up to gender-wise. I think the whole gender thing, yes, on one level there are people who for whatever perverse reason find it like amusing or titillating to have children play around with their gender and so forth. I think there’s something more pernicious about it, which is that gender and sex roles are so essential and so I guess hardwired into culture, biology, society across time and place, I mean everywhere that if you can disrupt that, if you can convince people that there’s no such thing as boys and girls, well, you can convince them of anything.

Brian Anderson: Yeah, it really is an extraordinarily radical cultural project that was nowhere to be found 20 years ago. The idea that schools have become the leading edge of promoting this ideology is remarkable because it puts the school in the place of the family and really forces the school to take on a kind of political project in a way that I think is antithetical to education and certainly to the social order. This is one area where we’ve long been proponents of much more educational pluralism and providing parents with options that allow them to escape this kind of ideological propaganda really.

Seth Barron: Sure. I mean, I do think that of all the institutions I talk about in the book, I talk about public safety and the border, civil society, and I talk about housing. I do think education is one area where people have fought back and have carved out exceptions where you and your family can find a space away from this centralized unionized monster. As you said, homeschooling remains a viable option. It’s funny, if you look at the Supreme Court, this has been tested before the Supreme Court for over a hundred years. And if you look at the decisions from the ‘20s, I believe it was in Iowa, the Supreme Court says basically it’s not the job of the state to regiment its citizens. You can’t deprive families of the right to raise their children as they see fit. And it’s a remarkably ... I mean, it sounds like some kind of free-spirited ‘60s style vision, but it’s really about affirming the centrality of the family to American society. And that’s another thing I get into in my book is that in our republic, power is rested in the individual. The individual is sovereign and power flows up and it’s not something that we should let be taken away from us lightly. We see it happening.

Brian Anderson: You mentioned the policing issue and the question of citizenship and immigration. These are areas that have been at the heart of our national debate in recent years. Certainly they were part of the campaign of the Donald Trump campaign for this second round. The Left’s approach in these areas of citizenship and immigration and policing does seem to have a common thread, which is again, seeking to delegitimize what have been American cultural norms and without regard for the corrosive social effects of doing so. How did progressivism, if we want to call it that, come to champion criminals, illegal migrants favoring them over law abiding citizens and more narrowly political sense, why does this continue to be the left’s approach? Do they believe that it’s a political winner for them because there doesn’t seem to be much polling evidence to suggest that that’s true?

Seth Barron: No, it’s not. Well, here’s the thing. The way I trace it is what we have in the left today is an unholy marriage of two trends of political thought. One is classic progressivism, which I date back to the 1880s and Woodrow Wilson’s screed like the Science of Public Administration, where essentially he wants to model society as on the Prussian model with experts essentially running everything. Let’s depoliticize government staffing. Let’s bring the important matters out of the Democratic realm. And then I think that what it’s been married to is an anarchist vision, which actually dates from around the same time in the 1880s that sees law as essentially corrupt. Law is what protects capital. Law is simply an excuse to allow the powers that be put their boot on your face. And admittedly, these two things don’t seem like they should go together, but I mean, think about the Leninist vision where a vanguard of experts essentially, like the conscious revolutionaries, they rule according to the dictates of history.And that being the case, that justifies everything. Wilson and Lenin have more in common, I think, than a lot of people would first assume. So in my book, I talk about Angela Davis as kind of the through line for bringing this revolutionary communist, third-worldist, racialized vision and marrying it to traditional leftist forms, American leftist forms. It’s interesting, Angela Davis is the only surviving recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize, which the Soviets used to give out. She’s a remarkable figure. So I get into her in some depth.

Brian Anderson: The left seems increasingly to link its key issues together into a kind of omni-cause progressivism, which sees all forces of oppression as interchangeable. Mayor Mamdani, Zohran Mandani can claim, for example, that “queer liberation means defund the police.” This seems ridiculous on its face because these various causes are intention, but how does this type of amalgamation of causes help the left to weaponize institutions to use that term? Why do some people anyway seem to buy it despite the incredible incoherence of “queers for Palestine” or things like that?

Seth Barron: It’s a great question. I mean, in my book, I call this six degrees of exhortation where every cause melds into every other cause. So you’ve got Sheldon Whitehouse on the floor of the Senate saying that trans rights is an economic justice issue. Every issue is every other issue. Well, I think one reason it’s a successful tactic is because it’s so slippery, it illudes argument. You can just enthememically tie anything to anything. Trans rights are environmental justice. Environmental justice is health policy. Until recently, everything was about climate change. Now everything has become about Palestine. You can just point to, I mean, Palestine now just closes any argument because you can say, “Well, there’s a genocide going on.” And again, I think this comes back to the idea that chaos and confusion is the purpose. If you can confuse people so they don’t even know what’s what, what they’re protesting about or what they’re arguing for, well, then half the battle is one if what your goal is, is permanent revolution and overturning society, which frankly seems to be the goal at this point.Melting down American society, they’re open about it.

Brian Anderson: I think we’re seeing that it’s the most powerful force within the Democratic Party these days. It certainly seems to be the force with most energy as moderate Democrats are disappearing from the landscape. You write in the book that the left is incapable of minding its own business because progressives tend to identify so strongly with politics that it becomes a kind of identity politics. They consider it their right to be interested in you and so to mind your business as you put it. So has this omni-cause progressivism, the left’s radicalization made it harder for everyday Americans to be kind of centrists anymore? Is it pushing everybody into polarized camps?

Seth Barron: I mean, I would say so. I mean, with politics, look, there’s two sides. You alluded to this. There’s this saying, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. Well, I think that when conservatives hear that they think, okay, well, politics is interested in me. That’s great. I’m not interested. I have other things to do. I have my job, I have my family, I have my church or I have my community, I have my house, I have all sorts of things to do. To a lot of the left, politics is everything. Politics is religion. Politics is love and marriage. Politics is family and increasingly politics is their job either in government or in NGO world. So to them, they’re kind of ahead of the game. They’re always doing their passion, which is politics. They like to have meetings. They like to have meetings before and after meetings.It’s fun to them. This is their life. So in a sense, the left is way ahead and so they have ratcheted like the Overton window idea. They’ve just shoved it over so that being a centrist now essentially puts you on the far right to the point where just wanting to mind one’s own business and go about life puts you in the... I mean, that is essentially the conservative viewpoint, I would say, just trying to maintain things. I would say the left is not really interested in maintenance so much as they are in destruction and then repair, meaning to rebuild. I mean, you’re a Burkean. I don’t know if that’s really, if my instincts are correct there, but I think they are.

Brian Anderson: Yeah. Well, last question, Seth, I don’t know if you looked at this, but we just saw recently the Democratic Party’s autopsy of the 2024 election defeat and none of it seems to grapple with the party’s far left positioning on issues like border security that that might’ve had something to do with their loss to Donald Trump. I wonder in the context of your book what you think about that and whether that is another sign that the Democrats are going to have a hard time finding the middle again, which to me would improve their electoral chances dramatically, especially in presidential races.

Seth Barron: It’s funny you bring up the autopsy because I did notice that in the same way that Democratic politics and the whole uni-cause thing offers something for everyone, autopsy offered nothing for everyone because it wasn’t specific at all about what it was about. So because it didn’t name the issues that the Democrats had founded on, it led, for instance, the Palestine people to say, “Oh, the autopsy didn’t even mention Gaza. This shows their blind spot.” But it also didn’t mention open borders. It didn’t mention trans. It didn’t mention COVID. It didn’t mention a million things. So it’s funny the autopsy let you read anything you wanted into it. I mean, the Democrats seem like they’re set on returning to their old model with kind of this new patina of trying to reclaim the working-class perspective. To me, it seems like more of the same. I mean, maybe they’ll squeeze out the percentage here and there that you need to win a national election, but who knows?

Brian Anderson: You do see with Mayor Mamdani that the honeymoon period, such as it was, seems to be over and his poll ratings, his approval ratings aren’t particularly great right now. I think running a city is really a very difficult thing and you do have to address very practical problems like policing and picking up trash. So we’ll see what this experiment in democratic socialism looks like very soon. Seth, great to talk with you. The book is called Weaponized. It is out from Humanix Books. Seth is again at the New York Post on the editorial board there and a longtime contributor of City Journal. Great to talk with you and everybody should check out the book. It’s a compelling and fast read.

Seth Barron: Thanks so much, Brian.