The Patriot Post® · Social Justice Summer Camp

“Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” —Vladimir Lenin

From August 12-23, a Portland, Oregon, group called Budding Roses, self-described as a “volunteer-run collective of educators, students, and activists” will be working to plant an activist seed in children entering fourth through eighth grade next fall.

Their vehicle? Social Justice Summer Camp.

“Our goal is to provide a free, safe and encouraging space for youth to learn, express themselves, and engage critically with the issues they encounter individuals and as a group,” the Budding Roses website states. “We strive to help them cultivate the necessary tools to be active members of our communities through experiences of collective decision-making and democratic education. At camp, youth of all ages play a leadership role alongside adult counselors and make collective decisions about the activities and format of the day. Each day opening and closing assemblies provide a space for youth and counselors to democratically plan activities for the day, resolve conflicts, and build interpersonal leadership skills.”

Really? Here’s the digital flier being sent out by the camp:

PJ Media’s Jeff Reynolds, who received one these fliers, spells out the real intentions of these anarchist recruiters. “The first thing that struck me, before anything else, was the mask-clad, fist-raising elementary school kids in the illustration,” he writes. “Teaching incoming 4th-8th-graders how to riot, become members of antifa, and join a communist revolution seems a bit much — even for Portland, Oregon. Notice the star on the mask and the raised fist. Classic imagery from the USSR, China, and other violent Marxist revolutions in the 20th century.”

Note that there’s no charge for attending the camp. That’s because Budding Roses gets funding from the Black Rose Anarchist Federation, a group that bills itself on its website as an “organization of revolutionaries who share common visions of a new world — a world where people collectively control their own workplaces, communities and land and where all basic needs are met.”

And from whom do they draw their inspiration? Again according to the website, “As those actively seeking to construct this vision we are inspired by the traditions of anarchist-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, especifismo, platformism, feminism, queer liberation, black liberation, abolitionism, anti-racism and their history of global struggle for liberation.”

Note that their graphic is virtually identical to the one used by the camp:

Note further that while the Social Justice Summer Camp is held at St. Peter & Paul Church, Budding Roses makes sure to point out that they are not affiliated with the Church. Rather they are “an explicitly non-religious” organization.

Anyone still remember that Communists in both the Soviet Union and China either banned religion outright or put it in total service to the state when they attained power?

Even more germane, does anyone remember when summer camp was about playing sports, doing crafts, horseback riding, swimming etc.? Undoubtedly for this bunch, such pursuits are either secondary or irrelevant to molding an American equivalent of China’s Red Guard, or Lenin’s very own All-Union Pioneer Organization. Lenin’s organization was also tailored for young children (ages 9-15), and also used summer camps to indoctrinate them.

Daily activities at the camp will include “a combination of community-building activities, discussions on social justice topics, interactive workshops, movies, arts, games, and free time. Workshops and discussions are often held in collaboration with local activists and community organizations.”

In the previous two summers, those community organizations included Critical Resistance PDX, a group that bills itself as a “small group of dedicated prison industrial complex abolitionists;” Deep Undergound (DUG), described as an open-mic collective whose “work is dedicated to creating spaces that provide a sense of safety and freedom for the black and brown community in this city;” the Transformative Lenses Collective, described on Facebook as “a group of organizers working to provide support to survivors of gendered violence, abuse, & its intersecting oppressions;” and the Burgerville Workers Union whose members see their union as “part of a larger vision for a world that centers human need over the pursuit of profit.”

In other words, campers will be marinated in a stew of progressive politics, courtesy of those whose contempt for America’s foundational principles is undisguised.

What is also undisguised is the reality that leftists must teach children — the younger the better — what to think, not how to think. That’s because the latter approach would be tantamount to political suicide. The historical wreckage wrought by Godless collectivism in search of a utopia — and utterly antithetical to human nature — is impossible to ignore. Thus, history — along with reality itself — must be completely obscured by a relentless barrage of politically correct groupthink. Groupthink that must be endlessly reiterated, lest an independent idea rear its “ugly” head.

“Just think how formidable these children will be by the time they reach high school,” writes columnist Elizabeth Vaughn.

Formidable? Angry and miserable is more like it, if this effort to inculcate a permanent sense of victimhood takes hold.

Yet like so many leftist efforts, the Achilles Heel is baked into the mix. Few things are more time consuming — and ultimately exhausting — than maintaining the hubris, the anger, and the arrogance that radical leftist ideological purity demands, especially when those demands are continually expanding. Today’s social justice warrior can become tomorrow’s social pariah in the proverbial blink of an eye, even for the slightest and/or unconscious infraction.

China’s Red Guard self-destructed for exactly that reason, and one suspects even the historically illiterate generations of younger Americans know the Soviet Union has ceased to exist.

What they might not know is that the Berlin Wall was broken down from the inside, not the outside.

The cracks in the progressive wall are impossible to ignore. Their hate, their hysteria, and their need to denigrate rather than debate — when they’re not engaged in full-blown censorship — are indications of many things.

Confidence isn’t one of them.

Nothing confirmed that better than the 2016 election, when leftists themselves destroyed the facade of self-promoted tolerance they had enjoyed for decades. In the frenzy that has ensued ever since, they revealed they are only interested in tolerance — along with fairness, decorum, decency, and the Rule of Law itself — when it is wholly compatible with their worldview. Otherwise, the nation must endure their contempt for “racist,” “deplorable,” “toxic,” “privileged,” “bitter-clinging” Americans, as well as open borders, sanctuary cities, activist judges, rule by unelected bureaucrats, and an attempted coup d'etat.

Social Justice Summer Camp? Good luck, comrades. You’re going to need it.