Jefferson thought as much, thinking the common public was too daft to effectively vote.

Here’s the problem: We have no good way to decide who is savvy enough for civic engagement and who isn’t, and because of that ambiguity (and maybe without it) such a test would absolutely get corrupted for political purposes.

Part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is to develop an army of MAGA-minded clerical workers to replace all the bureaucrats that run the deep state since they’re not willing to follow illegal orders. Every power-seeking authoritarian movement seeks to weed out all those who disagree with them.

I’m not a parent, a point that has informed my relationship with my stepdaughters and grandson. When we lived in the same household, they still had their respective dads, for better or worse, and I couldn’t replace them. As a friendly adult, my role was to affirm to my wife’s kids that their feelings are valid even when they couldn’t express them with the sturm und drang they warranted.

Of what I’ve seen of parents, including my own, their jobs commonly leave them far to exhausted to actually parent (or run a household, or relax, or engage in their civic responsibilities). Industry has long driven society to intergenerational mental illness, and kids are often having to confront adult situations early.

But yes, events and policy in Florida and Texas have shown us that it is en vogue in places to withhold information from children, not so much to protect them, but to keep them from questioning the values of their parents, teachers, ministers and officers who direct them. Efforts to obstruct access to porn turn quickly into efforts to obstruct access to health information, to LGBT+ content, to the darker chapters of US and western history, to alternatives to capitalism, to even the beatitudes.

To be fair, Moms For Liberty and the adults making scenes at PTSA (PTA?) meetings don’t represent all parents, and I actually kinda hope they aren’t parents (or as you noted, progenitors) themselves. But we naked apes don’t typically choose to breed for the benefit of our spawn, but because we want the cute thing, not thinking about the outraged, frustrated teen they will grow into, or the struggling, beleaguered adult struggling to fit into a society that wants to use and discard them like an expendable mechanical part.

Kids don’t know the difference between ignorance and innocence. That is a projection placed onto them by society, and I think kids should have the same access to information on the clitoris or plantation economics or communism or Sappho of Lesbos as they do Alexander Hamilton, the steam engine, Christopher Columbus and Washington Irving.