Do Whatever You Want

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Do whatever you want. Get loud, get crazy. Laugh loudly, like an asthmatic donkey, like a hyena, like a supervillain, like the Wicked Witch of the West. Be rude, be bold, and be disobedient. Curse loudly and swear like a sailor. When your parents tell you tomorrow they’ll spend time with you, demand today. When your parents tell you they’ll spend time with you today, demand tomorrow as well. This is your life, your time, and your springtime. Your life is yours to enjoy, yours to destroy, yours to burn, yours to fulfill, yours to love, and yours to live. They cannot stop you. **Like in all my works, the word youth is used to refer to people ages 0–18, specifically those under the age of majority. The words kids, child, and youth are used interchangeably, but they all mean ages 0–18, more specifically, under the age of majority.

The Natural Morality of Kids Kids are inherently moral. Parent-slavers love to propagandize about how kids are little savages and little terrors and how they need to be taught right from wrong. Kids apparently “don’t know right from wrong” while also simultaneously “being little shitheads or goblins.” Parent propaganda says that kids are innocently guilty— that they are innocent of wrongdoing and yet morally wrong. The truth is that kids are naturally moral. It is designed into us, and the brainwashing that parents force onto kids is entirely unethical. So what if a 4-year-old youth won’t share their toy? It is, after all, their property. So what if a different 4-year-old took someone else’s toy? Does that make them unable to understand morality? No, they are just being a jerk. Adults take things that don’t belong to them all the time, much more regularly than youth. Adults constantly punish kids for being innocently guilty and try to instill values in them that they already have. Adults have already decided that kids are guilty of immorality, and that propaganda gives them the excuse to punish kids as they see fit. Youth are born with the same morality that adults have hardwired into them. Youth and adults are both people, just separated by age. The only thing that youth lack is the information that adults have. To claim to educate kids on how to be “good kids” or “bad kids” is to treat kids like evil savages who have to be reformed. Nothing is further from the truth. It is the adults who treat kids like they are morally incompetent who are much closer to immorality.

The Natural Curiosity of Kids Kids are born curious, putting different things in their mouths every five seconds, babbling, screaming, and crying until they learn how to talk all on their own, constantly asking questions, pushing for a reaction, walking off to places they’ve never been, and leaving their controlling parents in red-faced fits of anger. Kids are born learning what they want to learn and what they need to learn. It is only the

schoolteacher who says that kids are not smart enough to learn on their own. Kids will learn whatever they need to in order to survive, and that is really the test of intelligence. To survive as a human being takes cunning, cleverness, hard work, intelligence, curiosity, courage, and a massive amount of detective work. Kids are like the clever heroes in folktales who trick the trickster and outwit the big monster in order to win the day. Parent propaganda tells us that kids need to be taught how to learn. They stick kids in classrooms where they are forced to obey for seven to eight hours a day. The classroom kills their curiosity, and in time it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it is a prophecy that is easily broken. All kids need is the freedom to do what they want, and they naturally go back to their curious state. All kids need is the breaking of the slavery that is school, where they are forced to perform “educational” labor for seven to eight hours a day for no pay, and they will again start doing what they want to do.

The Natural Intelligence of Kids Kids are naturally intelligent. Parent propaganda discredits youth as being stupid and thoughtless, driven only by their immediate needs and wants, but this is far from the truth. Youth believe their parents when they tell them things like “we will always look after you,” “we will prevent any harm from coming to you,” “mother/father knows best,” “just trust us and everything will be fine,” or “things will always turn out alright.” While these may seem like nice things to say on the surface, what they really do is exempt youth from understanding their personal responsibility for both their betterment and survival. Kids may run into oncoming traffic without looking both ways, not because they’re too stupid to realize that getting hit by a car would hurt, but because they have been told that “everything will be alright.” Parents may point to this gullibility as a sign of weakness, but it is actually a sign of intelligence. Kids know that their parent figure is the most important figure in their lives, whether they like it or not. The parent gives food, water, clothing, shelter, and attention. The parent makes the rules (although not for long; liberation will come). The parent provides these things, and the kids know this instinctually; what foolish person would openly distrust a person who controls them so fully? Kids are not stupid; they simply have decided to take the path of least resistance when they are controlled by a person many times bigger than them who could kill them simply by denying them food, water, and shelter. They have chosen obedience, whether consciously or unconsciously. However, actions determine thoughts, and a child’s decision to trust their parents means that the parent has the power to make them take actions against their own self-interest. This is why kids do things that people say are dumb. They have chosen to believe their parents, a very

smart decision considering the power imbalance. That choice to believe, however, has left them vulnerable to sweet phrases like “everything will turn out alright,” which keep them from looking after themselves. That propaganda that the parent will fix anything is a powerful poison against smart and responsible decisionmaking. It is parents who have exploited the naturally intelligent nature of kids and turned their strength against them. It is parents who have exploited one of their best human qualities and made it a handicap. The truth remains, buried deep but still alive. Kids are just as smart as adults.

Nonviolence is both Virtue and Strategy Youth liberationists must choose nonviolence over violence and destruction. The fact is that youth are outgunned in everything from money to legal power to basic rights. Youth liberationists must not choose violence as a strategy against their own parents. To do so would not only be folly but also be against the spirit of the movement. Youth seek a relationship with their parents that is not based on domination but on love; in order to have a lovebased relationship, they must remove the slave laws and age restrictions that allow parents to dominate youth. While it is both justifiable and righteous to feel hatred towards your parents because of your own oppression, it must be understood that a violent and destructive movement can only end with tears on our side and a massive setback for the movement. Nonviolent protest and civil disobedience are the way to political change, not violence and destruction. There is no denying that parents have used the law to enslave their own children, disenfranchise them, and sabotage them at every turn. Despite this, youth liberation seeks a relationship built on love with parents. For that loving relationship to happen, youth slavery laws and age restrictions on the vote must be repealed; the only way that those laws will be repealed is through nonviolent protest. There is no denying that there is love in the relationship between youth and their parents, but violence and destruction will destroy what little there is. Youth liberationists must pursue their freedom and political right to vote from birth with all their might, but violence and destruction will only give them the political support they need to hurt youth on a scale never seen before.

Youth Liberation, not Anti-Parenthood Youth liberationists are not against parents. In fact, they are all for the positive aspects of parenthood. Parents provide food, water, shelter, and sometimes empathy. However, power has corrupted parenthood and turned it into an evil, twisted mockery of what the parent-child relationship is supposed to be. The days when parents could speak for their children as if they were mute, dumb, or too incompetent to speak for themselves are now over, because now is the time we stand up for our own liberation. The days when parents controlled the narrative around their own families are over, because now we start to control our own stories. Youth liberation will reform the family dynamic into a relationship based on love instead of slavery, coercion, and propaganda. Parents are not the friends of their children; the

power they now possess has corrupted their minds too much for that. Despite this, we believe that one day we'll be friends with our parents. We believe that one day, when the laws of youth domination are lifted, parents will be able to trust us as equals. One day we will be best friends, and they will be as honest and trusting towards us as we are towards them.

We Will Rage It is important for youth liberationists to remember that a commitment to nonviolence does not mean a commitment to passivity. Make no mistake, no matter how many kind words we say or how much we try to show them that we are responsible, there is no substitute for a loud, angry protest. There is no substitute for many loud, angry protests. The fact is that we must force parent-slavers to give in, force them to give us the right to vote, force them to give us freedom from slavery as human property, and force them to free us from slavery in forced schooling. It is important for us to realize that without strikes, protests, sit-ins, and demonstrations, off-line and in the streets of the real world, our slavery, disenfranchisement, and complete lack of rights will never end. It is important to realize that even if parents fully agree with us that the current slavery of youth is bad, they will never vote to change it, and they will never protest to change it. It is important to realize that if we don’t get angry and loud and break the rules that our parent-slavers push on us to oppress us, we will never be free. It is important to realize that for all our talk of love and nonviolence, the word parent is legally synonymous with parent-slaver everywhere on earth. There is no country, no province, no city where parents do not both legally and effectively own their children as property. We must remember that there are no “good ones” that they are all our enemies* until we secure our place as free people, fully enfranchised, with all adult rights. It is important to recognize that they will continue to dominate us, each and every one of them, no matter how good their disposition or what ideology they subscribe to. No shift in public opinion, no platitudes, no “teen representation,” no amount of branding or social media talk in their political discourse will ever change the reality of our oppression, other than protest. The only thing that will free us from slavery as property and slavery in forced schooling and give us the right to vote is protest. It is the slave laws that allow parent-slavers complete and absolute power over youth; it is the slave laws that give them the hunger and drive to

dominate us. While we must not stoop to violence, looting, or destruction of property in order to achieve our aims, that does not mean we cannot get angry. We must get loud, we must get angry, we must shout and scream and rage and protest down every street, road, and highway. We must occupy businesses, restaurants, high rises, skyscrapers, apartments, and houses with sit-ins and demand justice. We must occupy every building—every courthouse, every town hall, and every post office. We must come together in plazas, in town squares, and in empty fields. We must hold demonstrations, give speeches out in the open, and disrupt the peace. We must break the law by way of civil disobedience and cause as big a stir as we can. We must make it impossible for them to ignore us; we must make it impossible for them to refuse. Our protest, our movement, must go on for months, years, and decades. We will triumph, fellow liberationists. All we need to do is fight for what’s ours. All we want is what is rightfully ours, and that is never too much to ask. *Opponents, opposition, whichever term feels more comfortable to you. What it means is that they have the opposite of our personal interests at heart and that their interests in domination and slavery cannot coexist with our interests in being both enfranchised and freepeople. ~Liberationist111

Parent Propaganda Youth liberationists need to know how to identify parent propaganda if they plan to avoid co-option. Parent propaganda is an argument or idea that justifies the legal ownership and control that parents have over youth. Parent propaganda can also be rhetoric that argues for parental legal ownership or control over youth. Even propaganda that argues for legal ownership or control over youth that does not explicitly mention parents is parent propaganda. This is because the source of this propaganda is both the voting parents and the politicians who represent them, catering to their support base. This propaganda is always either incentivized by, propagated by, or created by parents, and that is one of the reasons why it is called parent propaganda. An example of scientific-sounding parent propaganda is The Teen Brain, a set of conclusions that were based on bad research. The general idea is that teenagers make dumb, risky, and criminal choices because their brains are still developing. The Teen Brain is propaganda that states that because their brains are still developing, youth are unable to control themselves. The teen brain has been thoroughly debunked by both experts and researchers. The idea of the teen brain catered to parents’ hunger for power over their kids and justified both the current and further controls put in place over their children. It rebranded the increasing parental control over youth as “for their own good.” An example of biblical-sounding parent propaganda would be “honor your father and mother.” While this single line can be interpreted in ways that do not demand obedience from youth, that is not how it is being used. It is commonly interpreted as a divine command to obey your parents. This line further justifies the control that parents have over kids and justifies the legal slavery of youth as the property of their parents. This line also justifies the assault and sabotage that parents frequently inflict upon their own children by pretending they are acting by the will of a divine being and not their own hatred and cruelty. An example of financial-sounding parent propaganda is the line “parents have invested so much in their children,” “I do so much for you,” and “repay your parents for all their kindness.” It views the kid as a financial investment, as an object rather than a person. The kid is required to pay back their parent, and their only value is a financial and time investment, so it is the right of the parent to control their investment to make sure it “does well.” This is an example that very directly justifies the slavery of youth because it demands that parents have absolute control over their children. It is evil because it masks slavery under the guise of “your best interests,” “having a good future,” and “being successful.” This strain of thought equates kids to a bank account; food, shelter, water, and clothing come at the price

of providing value to the parent. It is very dangerous slaver propaganda—the reduction of a human life to dollars and hours spent.

How to Write about Youth Liberation If you’re reading this, you care about youth liberation. That’s good, because it’s what you need to get started. However, it’s hard to get started. It’s so much effort. Here is my gift to you that will help you overcome that block and write about youth liberation as often as you want. This is a method that I designed when I was trying to stretch myself and see the limits of what I could do. It has helped me very much, and I know that it will help you too. I call it “the method,” and it is broken down into four steps. Step 1: Write a little bit on youth liberation. Limit yourself to writing down a whole thought or maybe a sentence or two at most per day. This will feel like too little, and you will have things you want to write about. Don’t cave to the feeling. Continue Step 1 for 41 days. Step 2 (optional; you can move onto Step 5): Increase the amount you write. Instead of 5 to 6 words or a sentence, write two whole thoughts or three or more sentences, anything greater than step 1. Continue Step 2 for 41 days. Step 3 (optional; you can move on to Step 5): Increase the amount you write. Instead of three sentences, write four, or maybe even five. Keep it to a limit that you can write in a day while feeling confident that you can continue the same for tomorrow and the days after that. Continue Step 3 for 41 days. Step 4 (optional; you can move on to Step 5): Increase the amount you write. Instead of three and a half or four sentences, write five or six sentences. Again, keep your feeling of needing to write more under control. Don’t give in. Continue Step 4 for 41 days. Step 5: Continue repeating until you find the minimum number of sentences or words you need to write every day. It doesn’t even need to be specific, just a general ballpark. Once you’ve found that number, write every day, and if you feel like going over that number and writing a few paragraphs or more, go ahead, but don’t overdo it. This way, when you feel tired or don’t have a lot of time, you fall back to that minimum, but on the days when you feel really inspired, you can write a whole bunch. Remember, even when you feel inspired, don’t overdo it too much, or you’ll be back to square one. This method has worked out extremely well for me, and I know it will work out well for you too. I personally only use Step 2 as my minimum, and yet I am a very prolific youth liberationist writer.

By this point, you should have all the tools you need to write about youth liberation. The method is designed to ease you into writing by taking it very slowly. When many people start new commitments like running, writing a book, or writing on a topic they feel strongly about, they do a lot on the first day and maybe even for the rest of the week. Then they get tired because they actually did too much too fast; they’re completely capable of keeping it up, but that’s not what’s happening. Their brain is actually getting cold feet and rejecting their new habit. You have to ease your brain into it, and to do that, you need to use the least effort possible every day. Remember, the least effort possible. People feel good about writing about their own opinions, but not good enough that they suddenly start spending a lot of time each and every day writing about them. The method is designed to get you into youth liberation by helping you balance that good feeling that you get when you write about something you care about against the drain you feel from pushing yourself too hard.

This method also works for things like running and swimming; you just have to replace writing with running or swimming and slowly ease into it. In fact, it might work for almost anything. I’ve just tested it on a few things like running, swimming and writing (youth liberation) that I care about.

Trapped Liberationist Policy Youth liberationists need to figure out how to tell trapped youth liberationist policy from the real deal. For example, a law that gives free full school meals, three times a day, to all youth ages 4–17, but the tax money for which comes solely from the very companies that supply the food. A second example is that the money for the meals comes solely from the wealthiest 5% of Americans. A third example is that the money comes solely from the major corporate donors for the opposing party. In the first two cases, these groups would swiftly lobby to repeal or strip the meat off the free school meals policy, and in the last case, the opposing party would simply repeal the legislation once in office. While free school meals is a liberationist policy, the details of the policy matter a lot. This is what we call trapped liberationist policy, because there is a trap set into the details of the policy that leads to its undoing or ineffectiveness. The mark of good liberationist policy is that it has been well thought out before liberationists even stand up to protest for it. Shouting “free youth from slavery” won’t make a difference if a politician passes a trapped liberationist policy that changes the wording and terminology around parental ownership of youth while the effect, the de facto policy, remains the same. Youth liberationists need to write out the policy they want, understand where the money is going to come from, choose what they want the specific legal wording of the policy to be, and close as many possible loopholes and remove as many traps as they can find.

Politicians will try to sabotage youth liberationist policies. When youth stand up and demand enfranchisement, politicians will pass or try to pass a hollowed-out version of enfranchisement that makes it extremely hard for youth to get enfranchised but theoretically grants the right to vote from birth. When this happens, youth will stop protesting because they think they’ve won, but they’ve actually been tricked. Instead, youth need to stand up for three things. First, the automatic non-optional registration to vote upon the birth of a person (the person the baby will grow up into can choose not to vote if they want to, but attempts to disenfranchise youth will not be tolerated). Second, the right to vote online for free and without a complicated voting process that causes voters to miss voting or lose interest in voting. Third, the right to vote from birth, regardless of the will of the parent or whoever is feeding and taking care of the baby. Finally, when politicians inevitably try to sabotage enfranchisement, youth must continue to protest with just as much dedication and passion to show politicians that the heat is not off and they had better deliver or face losing reelection to office due to the PR debacle. In summary, youth need to literally write out exactly the legal bills or executive orders that they want their government to pass; otherwise, politicians will find a way to sabotage them. Protest holds politicians accountable to youth, but it doesn’t make them honest. If youth don’t plan out their policy beforehand, they will end up ending their protests before they have gotten the policy that they want passed. Youth need to set out strict boundaries for what constitutes accountability by writing out their desired public policy in its entirety beforehand. In this manner, youth will know when to stop protesting when their desired public policy has been passed. Youth need to take a proactive approach to youth liberation, not a reactive one.

Fake Liberationist Policy Youth liberationists must be able to spot fake liberationist policy. Fake liberationist policy gets passed when agents of co-option try to derail the movement by offering policies that enforce youth oppression rather than getting rid of it. Fake liberationist policies often serve as their own propaganda, sounding good on the surface but serving to oppress the youth they claim to “help.” A first example of a fake liberationist policy is teen representatives in Congress, school boards, and advocacy organizations. While it may sound good to have a teen in charge, it is important to remember that youth are human beings. This means that they are susceptible to greed, bribery, and blackmail, and no doubt positions of political power come with all three. The fact is that political incentives for politicians are so overwhelming that teen representatives will act just like any other politician once in office. The only thing that putting teen representatives in organizations designed to dominate youth will do is convince youth that they are being represented, when in fact they are just putting a friendly face on youth oppression. In fact, parents use teen representatives as the face of their more heinous policies in order to prevent mass protest among youth. They are nothing more than figureheads. Teen representatives are a targeted ploy meant to distract youth from the fact that they have no political power. It is not teen representatives that youth need, and voting them in will not change a thing. No, youth need real political power for all youth—the power to vote to change policies in every organization, whether it be the government, school, youth housing organizations, or nonprofits that serve youth. It is not one youth that needs political power for things to change; it is each and every one. A second example of a fake liberationist policy is the ability of youth to “choose” their home through a court decision. While this seems like a step forward from the past, in reality it transfers youth from one slaver to another. It is unmasked as the transfer of human property from one owner to another. Just because a kid chooses a slaver does not mean the slaver is held accountable. They actually cannot be held accountable since the kid cannot choose to leave at any time and cannot disobey without “punishment.” It is just another master-slave relationship with the added propaganda that it is somehow better or that the kid is somehow freer for choosing the person they want to own them. A slave who is able to choose their slavemaster once, a few times, or even many times in their life is not anything other than a slave. Lastly, the fact that the kid needs the court to sign off on movement to another home is a demonstration of power and dominance, a warning that the kid cannot escape the grasp of their master. These court decisions serve as a reminder that no matter where they end up, they will still be bound by the same slave laws as before, still unable to leave, and still owned by the new appointed guardian.

A third example of a fake liberationist policy is group homes, which are run by “safe adults,” or “people of God,” or “trauma-informed specialists.” These predatory agencies are designed to put out propaganda that pretends they are accountable to youth, when in reality they are some of the most brutal living environments. They are designed to not be accountable to youth because youth are disenfranchised in these homes and cannot even vote on the policies of the group home. They cannot vote on where money is being spent or what the bylaws are. Naturally, this disenfranchisement lends itself to oppression. The beating, starvation, and rape of youth is much more common inside these group homes than in the general youth population. Youth who speak out against this mistreatment are “troubled,” because they couldn’t possibly dislike the generous “free” housing and “safe” and “healing” living space that the group homes provide. In this way, group homes oppress youth while also providing their own propaganda to discredit those who speak out against them.

How to Disobey Your Parents One mistake that youths make in trying to disobey their parents is that they start too big. Parent brainwashing is powerful, and the fear of punishment is very strong. Youths think too big and end up never stepping foot out of line. That’s a shame, because disobedience is a wonderful thing that should be celebrated. It is the start of independence, personal identity, and freedom. The best way to start disobeying your parents is to take small steps and keep it secret. This example only works if you live on the ground floor of your house and have a bedroom window. If your parents say that you’re not allowed to go outside at night, poke your head out the window at night so that you’re technically disobeying them. After a few weeks of doing that, put your foot outside the window so that your foot is on the ground outside. Now you’ve officially touched the ground outside. You’ve taken another step forward in your quest for disobedience. A few weeks later, plant both feet firmly on the ground right outside your bedroom window. Now you have officially broken their rule. It might seem small, but a journey of a thousand miles begins with just a single step. For youth who are not allowed to use swear words in the house, learning swear words in a different language is effective at breaking the taboo against disobedience. This way, youth can disobey the no-swearing rule while avoiding confrontation with their parents.

In general, if you want to disobey your parents, use ‘The Method’ (detailed in DWYW, Issue 3). We can model it here for eating food when you are told not to eat food outside of certain times (like dinner or breakfast). Step 1: Eat one or two peanuts (we will be using small bags of peanuts for this analogy). This will feel like too little, and you will want to eat more. Don’t cave in to the feeling. Also, don’t eat the peanuts in front of your parents. Disobeying their rule in front of them will get your disobedience shut down quickly. Continue Step 1 for 41 days. Step 2 (optional; you can move onto Step 5): Increase the amount of peanuts you eat, maybe four or five. Continue Step 2 for 41 days. Step 3 (optional; you can move on to Step 5): Increase the amount of peanuts you eat. Maybe five or six, maybe ten. Continue Step 3 for 41 days. Step 4 (optional; you can move on to Step 5): Increase the amount of peanuts you eat. Instead of ten peanuts, maybe twenty. Again, keep your feeling of needing to write more under control. Don’t give in. Continue Step 4 for 41 days. Step 5: Eat more than 20 peanuts, or the entire bag of peanuts (assuming it’s more than 20 peanuts but not more than double). Once you’ve completed this step, you have officially broken the rule of not eating when your parents don’t want you to. Congratulations! You have achieved a small degree of bodily autonomy. Now that you have used the method to break the “noeating outside of dinner rule,” you don’t have to eat peanuts every day; that would get old quickly. Now, you only eat when you feel like it. You’ve deliberately and systematically broken the rule your parents set out for you, and now you are successfully disobedient. You’re probably waiting for a bunch of trumpets and fanfare, a pat on the back by someone else, or at least a rush of exhilaration. None of those will happen, except maybe the rush. For some people, there will be a rush. For others, there won’t be. The rush is not the point; the point is that you now have options open to you that you didn’t before. With your first step into disobedience, you can start doing things that adults can do. With disobedience, you can do some cool new things, as long as you keep them secret. With disobedience, you gain the ability to sneak out after dark, to eat ice cream when your parents tell you not to, to hang out with friends when they want you to be at home studying, to have relationships, to watch PG-13 and R movies, to gossip and swap secrets, to sneak food from the pantry, to talk about how terrible your parents are, and to go to sleep whenever you want. Remember, just be sure to keep your disobedience secret, or your parents will tighten control over

you and dole out worse punishments than you thought they were even capable of. Disobedience is part of a larger story of youth finding their own identity. Virtually every child is ordered to do things that have no purpose other than to enforce obedience. Don’t stick out your tongue, don’t swear, don’t be rude, don’t spoil your dinner, don’t wear that skirt, don’t wear that dress, don’t go out at night, don’t leave the table until you’ve finished your food, and so on and so forth. By breaking these rules, youth learn that they can have a lot more control over their world if given the chance. They understand the oppression that parent-slavers create, but only once they push the boundaries. By understanding so much of how wrong their parents are, youth begin to explore the world for real. They understand that they are not owned, that their own company is a privilege, that their worth is unaffected by whatever their parents feel or say, and that parents are indisputably terrible at making decisions for kids. Rather than being a sign of a “troubled” youth, disobedience is the birth of all things good.

Bad behavior from parents is not excusable as “stupidity” Parents often sabotage youth. They say things like, “I won’t allow you to go out with friends that I don’t give the green light to first,” and then refuse to give the green light to any friends or only one(s), who they like. Some say, “You’re not allowed to eat outside of dinner,” but if the kid doesn’t eat at dinner, they are forced to go hungry. They say, “The world is a nice place, and everyone is here to help each other,” and then tell their kids that they are liars when they complain about bullies at school. They yell at and insult their kids, then pretend like their kids are having mood problems when they become anxious and depressed. They constantly speak for/about their kids as if their kids are greedy and ungrateful and mean and they themselves are devoted and selfless and unloved, which effectively prevents later accusations of child abuse from being believed. They punish their kids in cruel and unusual ways, and then when the kids complain, they say, “My blood pressure is rising,” “You’re stressing me out,” or “You’re damaging my mental health.” When these behaviors are ever called out by someone of greater standing (not kids, but an authority figure), parents claim ignorance. They say, “I didn’t know, I didn’t realize that I was hurting my child by vetting their friends/making my kids eat at a certain time/giving them tough-love” and proceed to go on a huge guilt trip about how they are a loving mother or father and all they have ever done is for their kid, and “woe is me, I’m just an overworked and abused parent struggling with ungrateful, needy kids trying to survive in this tough economy.” These behaviors are the definition of dishonesty, the definition of malice, and are too evasively

nefarious to be done with good intentions. They are the definition of weaseling, backstabbing, and sabotage. These behaviors are sadistic. Yet, every generation, parents play the same old games, hurting youth and then backpedaling and bemoaning their circumstances and complaining about how very devoted and self-sacrificing parents they are. This is a game as old as humans, not unique to any parent. This time, however, we have the power to change that. With the spread of electronics, we now have the power to catalog and document this behavior and post it online for future youths to see. Now, youth can read about these behaviors online and see through them when their parents try them. While parents have played this game for all of human history, the time when that behavior will be seen as benign is over. The time when the manipulation tactics that parents use on youths are unknown is coming to an end. We youth liberationists form the beginning of a great avalanche. We gather in size and speed as we hurtle downward, already unstoppable. That avalanche is youth liberation. Liberation will come.

*Like all my works, you will need to have read The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith to understand the messages that follow. Also, a reminder that the definition of youth used here is people under the age of majority. In the US, that’s people ages 0–17.

Protesting for Youth Liberation Youth liberationists must know when and how to protest, how to make their protests effective, and their civil liberties when protesting. Knowing when to protest is important for youth liberation as a cause. The ideal time to protest is at the beginning or end of a politician’s elected term. It’s at these times that the winning coalition is most open to change and political leaders are most vulnerable. Once firmly entrenched in power, however, political leaders are less likely to respond to protests simply because they don’t need to do so to keep office. Knowing how to protest is important for youth liberation as a cause. First, protesters must take to the streets to protest, waving signs and yelling loudly for change. Writing open letters to senators, spreading “awareness” online, and doing various flashy demonstrations like gluing yourself to the sidewalk are completely ineffective. What matters is not the creativity of the protest; what matters is the intensity, the commitment to nonviolence, and the raw numbers of youth that the protest fields on the streets. Protesting is a hungry job. Benefactors who have a stake in youth liberation should equip youth protestors with free or very discounted food and water items so that protestors may continue to protest throughout the day. Youth who can bring extra food might bring food to help sustain other protestors. Catchy, short slogans can be beneficial for protesting. While they are not essential to a successful protest, catchy, short slogans help protestors send a clear and defined message to onlookers. This management of public appearance is important, as protests with unclear goals get zero results. Protest is not just about marching through the streets and loudly waving signs. Protesters need their protests to be effective, and for that, they must have the laws that they want already in hand. Protestors should have a clear, written-out legal policy that they want passed. Otherwise, they will disperse as soon as the government grants a policy that looks good without bothering to check the fine print. This prewritten legal policy should also be posted online before the protest starts, with a QR code printed out for protestors to scan. This way, they know what they are protesting about. High-level organization is not required, but open negotiation between protesters on what policies they want is necessary. Otherwise,

politicians will pass half of the demanded policy, and half of the protesters will go home, their needs having been met. Understanding the different aims of protestors is important for organizers to prevent sabotage. Protests also need to be long-term (months to years). In effective protest movements, protests usually happen every day or week for months or years on end. It has become fashionable for people to come to a “protest” march one day a year, and that is a completely ineffective strategy. At best, that shows a token interest in a specific policy but not enough to refuse to reelect incumbent politicians. Organizers should inform protestors that protests will not see immediate gratification. Protests are not a way of informing the government as to the people’s desires, but a serious warning that they will not be reelected if they refuse to meet the demands of the protest. Knowing our civil liberties as youth protestors is important for youth liberation as a cause. Civil liberties vary from country to country, from province to province, and from city to city. Understanding the local laws that allow and restrict your civil liberties is important to planning and organizing a protest. In the US, the civil liberties of youth in school are extremely limited. However, youth must engage in civil disobedience if they want to end compulsory schooling. With all effective protests, there will be arrests both by school truancy officers and the regular police. There may even be armed forces called in to shut down youth liberationist protests. However, these agents of oppression have to behave themselves on camera (at least more than they do off-camera; no guarantees), and protestors can exploit that. Endeavor to keep your protests in well-lit, open areas where people can watch, and it will be harder for them to brutalize you.

Keeping a Journal All kids face parental abuse in their lives. Most kids will experience parental abuse daily or many times a week. However, most kids don’t have a solid grasp on how to avoid their parents’ abuse. Understanding how their abuse works is the first step to successfully avoiding it. One way that you can monitor abuse is journaling. Abuse creates obedience, and obedience changes your thoughts. What this means is that once you act obedient, you think more positively about abuse, and it simply “wasn’t that bad.” Your change in behavior literally causes you to forgive and forget, and that’s not healthy when you have someone in your life who is repeatedly hurting you no matter what you do. If you don’t journal about your home life, you might never really know what your parents are like because you won’t have an outside perspective. Journaling is also great for your home life outside of the adversarial parent-child relationship. Let’s say that you want to get your parents a birthday gift. Keeping

track of their hobbies and what they seem interested in can create a healthier relationship and give you some birthday gift ideas. The bottom line is that understanding your parents through journaling can both make your relationship healthier and help you avoid abuse. Journaling can also be great for many other purposes. If you want to change as a person, you can rely on journaling to understand how much you’ve changed. As a general rule, actions influence your thought process. The more different you behave, the more different your thoughts are going to be. If you write those thoughts down in your effort to change the way you behave, then you’ll have a pretty good picture of where you were then as opposed to now. Let’s say that you want to start telling jokes but are too afraid to do so. You should write down what you think both before you tell a joke and when you’re actually doing it. As you continue telling jokes each day, continue to write down your thoughts. Eventually, you’ll get to a point where your perspective starts to shift so much that it’ll be hard to remember what you were thinking in the beginning. This is why keeping a journal is so important. By understanding where you started, you’ll understand where you’re going. Keeping a journal is a powerful tool for understanding yourself and having more agency in your life.

What Happens at Home Doesn’t Stay at Home It’s important for youth, and not just youth liberationists but youth as a group, to share knowledge about their home lives. All parents are abusive, some more than others. Some abuse their kids differently than others or use a very specific brand of cruelty on them. Some are physically abusive, some are emotionally abusive, and some use blackmail and crime and turn the law against their kids. Often, there is a mixture of all three behaviors. It’s important for youth to swap stories about how their parents treat them and how they avoid being treated badly. Knowing how parents react in a situation means fewer youth get hurt, and those that do get hurt less. It is best for youth to share stories about their home lives so that fewer kids will be hurt by their parents and everyone will know what to do in bad situations. There’s also the fact that no one kid has the full puzzle, but united, they can piece it together. Some kids like to talk back to their parents or openly disobey them, and this helps them understand their parents in ways that obedient kids do not. Obedient kids, on the other hand, have found a way to maximize favor and minimize pain (though what that looks like is still largely dependent on their parents’ whims). That’s good for a kid who has found themselves with an angry parent and can’t escape from home. Youth need to keep sharing so that they can work together and help each other. Parents are not unique. Many parents would have their kids believe that their home is different and special, but the opposite is true when it comes to how parents treat

kids. The absolute power that parents have—the power of the slaveowner over the slave—makes their actions dangerous but very predictable. This is the truth of absolute power: people with it are more dangerous but also more predictable. This is because they are choosing to answer to the incentives of staying in power (in control of their kids) and exploiting their kids as much as possible.* Parents’ methods of abuse may vary from place to place, but common threads run through all of their behaviors towards their kids. Youth all over need to understand that they are not alone and that all they need is the knowledge to outwit their parents. If kids know these common threads about how parents treat them, they can find ways to avoid getting hurt and do more of what they want to do. It’s also important for youth to know that while they may be keeping silent about their home lives, their parents are definitely not. Go online and see the hordes of parents talking about their opinions on what their kids think, do, and feel. There is nothing that parents hold sacred about their relationships with their kids; otherwise, they wouldn’t go blabbing about those relationships to the first person they meet. Mom groups, drinking buddies, coworkers, parent-teacher associations, even complete strangers. There are few places where parents won’t spout about how much they have done for their kids, take credit for their kids’ accomplishments, and crow about their moral superiority over their ungrateful kids while nodding parents agree in the background. Rest assured that every detail of your life has been talked about, dissected, and put back together by people who are complete strangers to you, but to whom your parents have no problem spilling the beans. Your behavior at home has already been propagandized to make your parents look better, and you look ungrateful, frustrating, and helpless. If you are rebellious in any way, be assured that many adults already hold a grudge against you because of the way your parents pettily slant, alter, or omit the facts to make it seem like you are the devil incarnate. If parents don’t even respect their kids enough to keep their relationships private, then kids have no obligation to either. You, the kid, are the only one who doesn’t talk about your home life with your peers. In summary, it’s important for youth to share information about their home lives. Parents say “friends are temporary, but family is forever.” If family is forever, then it’s important to find ways to avoid letting them hurt you. Friendships may often be temporary, but sharing about our home lives will improve all our lives. Many kids hate their parents, and for good reason; they legally own us, use that power to control us, and then have the nerve to act as if they “have done so much for us.” They have the nerve to demand gratitude when they sabotage us constantly. We can help each other by opening the flow of information and choosing honesty over secrecy. Instead of saying that your home life is “great,” dare to share. You might find that what you learn is more valuable than you could have ever imagined.

*Like all my works, you will need to have read The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, to understand the messages that follow. Also, a reminder that the definition of youth used here is people under the age of majority. In the US, that’s people ages 0–17. *You might also want to read The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene; Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion , by Robert Cialdini; Our Masters’ Voices: The Language and Body-language of Politics , by Max Atkinson; and Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t, by Jeffrey Pfeffer. These books will help you gain a deeper understanding of youth liberation and how parents oppress their kids. These books will also be instrumental in helping you come up with strategies to avoid getting hurt by your parents, band together against the school system, and organize and protest safely and effectively.

Specific Protest Methods for Specific Policies For abolishing compulsory schooling, the best method of protest is the school strike. This is where students simply refuse to go to school. Schools require students to attend to receive funding from the state. If students don’t go, schools run out of money and have to shut down. Long-term (more than one year) school strikes are very effective; gather a large number of students and simply decide not to go. If you want, go out into the streets and protest with signs, but it is more effective to simply scatter in groups of twos and threes. If you protest in a large group, truancy officers will simply arrest you because you are easy to find. Tracking down and apprehending each protestor individually costs more money than arresting some protestors in a big group to get the rest to go back to school. In the long term, the costs of tracking down hundreds or thousands of individual students every day for each school are too much for the state to maintain good PR, and that will lead to voter pressure to abolish compulsory schooling. When you scatter, go down to a coffee shop or a fast food place, or go eat somewhere quiet and deserted. You might simply walk the town and enjoy your free time since you’ll have seven or eight hours to wait. Since you are going to be away from school for the whole school day, pack lunch and water, as well as an extra meal or two. If you can, bring extra snacks for other students to maintain the energy level of the protest. Of course, this “bleeding out” strike method, where you bleed the school dry of funds by refusing to attend, only works in states where attendance is linked to funding. In other states and countries, funding is linked to enrollment. In this case, the traditional mass take-to-the-streets protest and a mass refusal to go to school will be effective in bringing down schools in the long term (more than one year). For the right to vote from birth, the best method of protesting is the traditional taketo-the-streets protest. It’s best to group up to make sure that you’re visible, and make large signs that are easily readable from a distance. If you can, try to find a tshirt or merchandise sponsor for the event that is willing to foot the bill for t-shirts

with slogans. Otherwise, pooling money for t-shirts may be a good idea. If you are short on cash, pick a particular color for your protest and have everyone wear the same color. This way, you are easily identifiable, and protestors and watchers alike have a way to visually link the color to your aim of the right to vote from birth. Again, this protest movement will have to go on for more than one year; plan to switch up the cities and schools so that you protest at different times. This way, each school can have protests a couple times a month, but large-scale protests occur every day. If students are up to it, they should be welcomed to join protests more often than they are regularly scheduled. For the right to eat at restaurants that have an age limit, sit-ins at restaurants are the most effective. This protest will hinder revenue until youth are allowed to order from the restaurant, while bringing the promise of higher revenue when the policies are changed to include patrons of all ages. Not only does it put pressure on restaurant owners to change their policies to remove age limits, but it is also a subtle reminder of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. Organizers should train youth protestors in nonviolence to avoid getting into fights with restaurant bouncers or police who come to arrest them or escort them off restaurant premises. This method is designed to work in the short term but can also work in the long term. Restaurants will lose a lot of money in the short term, and many may go under if they refuse to heed the demands of protestors. In the absence of a specific protest method, protesting in the street is the best method. Sometimes, the specific protest methods that people come up with may not be the best; protesting in the street is a tried and true method that is guaranteed to work. When in doubt, taking to the streets to protest is guaranteed to be effective. Protesting in the streets is designed to be a long-term strategy in which youth must protest for more than one year for change to occur. Sometimes, it may take seven to ten years of protesting, such as during the civil rights movement.

Parent Stalking Programs One type of program that should be outlawed is what we call a “parent stalking program,” a program designed to tell a parent where a kid is, lock their phone, prevent them from accessing certain programs, or censor their internet. These programs give parents the power of the panopticon over their children, taking away their fundamental right to privacy. Of course, this behavior by parents is to be expected, and that is exactly why it should be stamped out. Parents are slavers, the property owners of children. To repeat, they own their kids as human property, and that absolute power makes them both extremely paranoid and extremely controlling. These programs will continue to grow in both scope and thoroughness until there is nowhere on the internet where a youth can go without their parents’ knowledge.

Massive fines should be charged to tech company CEOs and members of the board of directors who have apps that allow parents to surveil and control youths’ digital lives. By charging hefty fines to CEOs, directors on company boards, and senior management, these leaders will quickly remove these apps from their app stores and programs from the web. This policy will turn the self-interest of corporate leaders into a force that drives parent stalking programs off the market. App features that control content based on age and maturity level must also be banned so that kids may have access to the entirety of human knowledge. This ban must include app features that use proxies for age and maturity level, like “NSFW” and “Content Warning.”

You Don’t Have to be Anything When You Grow Up One of the ways that parents control kids is through the use of the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” This seemingly innocent question is used to trap kids in tiny boxes where they have to be this or that person. If a kid says they want to be a doctor, suddenly they have to be this or that type of person in order to become a doctor. Parents use that to control the kid, holding their “future” over their head like a whip to beat them back within a narrow box. If a kid wants to be a marine, then they have to enroll in all sorts of extracurricular sports and do some manual labor provided by the parents, or the parents will say the kid is a failure and mistreat them. If the kid wants to be a lawyer, then they are constantly pressured to get good grades and do something that won’t “bring shame to the family.” These little career boxes, along with that seemingly innocent question, are used to destroy both independent thought and the desire for freedom and autonomy. The truth is that the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” isn’t asking you what you want. It’s an information-gathering probe—a form of social warfare disguised as an innocent question. The question encourages kids to share personal details about themselves so that parents can use them against them. If a kid disobeys, the parent says, “How are you going to get through medical school if you can’t even listen to your parent?” The parent says, “How are you going to be a marine when you can’t even do a little manual labor?” The parent says, “How are you going to be a lawyer when you can’t even get good grades? They’ll never admit you to law school.” The truth is that parents who ask this question don’t care about their kids’ wants; they just need a grain of truth to use as a weapon against them. You don’t have to be anything when you grow up. You can be nothing; you can be an average workaday schmuck who works forty hours a week and shares an apartment with four roomates. There are plenty of people like that who are happy. You don’t have to choose to please your parents; you can wait it out and go with the flow. If becoming a doctor or a lawyer seems like a good career when you’re in college, go for it. Wait until you have more information before making a decision.

Wait until you’ve done many things for yourself, until you’ve questioned authority, and until you have had years of practice being who you want to be (not as a worker, but as a person). You don’t even have to choose a lifelong career; you can switch between careers if you get bored. The most important things about us are not the boxes that other people make for us, no matter how highly recommended they are. What matters is not your job, but how you spend your time outside of it. What matters is that you do what you want, and what matters is that you have fun. The truth that we should do what we want with our lives is something that kids instinctively know; that truth is also brainwashed out of us through compulsory schooling and years of obedience. By the time a kid graduates high school, their original intention to do whatever they want has been forgotten. But kids don’t have to forget; they don’t have to answer the question; they don’t have to succumb to the pressure to fit inside a box. Be wild, be obnoxious, be loud, be lazy, be hardworking, be impatient, be stupid, be polite, and be whoever you want to be at whatever time you want. You have a human right to bodily autonomy; your future is your own, and no one is entitled to know your plans or lack thereof.