Do Whatever You Want, Final Edition [3 ed.]

Citation preview

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.

*When you read any of my works, you will need to have read both The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith and The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene 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 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 compulsory schooling, and organize and protest safely and effectively. *Why not remix, reproduce, and redistribute this zine? Add drawings and images, highlight and bold sections that you like, and generally make it more inviting to read! I give you my permission; just make sure to include that it was originally by Liberationist111 and the words “the copyright license for this work is Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.”

Keeping Your Youth Liberationist Works Online As youth liberationists, you might want to back up your youth liberationist writings, art, and entertainment media as many times as possible. Online free-to-upload libraries can often become subject to lawsuits and get taken off the internet, causing the precious information they hold to be lost forever. Rain and fall damage will damage computers beyond repair. Physical paper can have food and beverages spilled on it and ruined. It’s very important that if you’re writing, drawing, or producing youth liberationist works, you back them up again and again and again. What’s even more important is that you spread them to the maximum possible number of youth. Send them to your fellow youth liberationists and get them to download them. Especially share them with your fellow youth at your elementary, middle, and high schools. The more copies of your work that are out there, the smaller the setback you’ll face when one or more of them go missing. This practice also has the added benefit of making it harder to silence you. You’ll also get better at distribution as you keep spreading your work. As youth liberationists, we must accept the fact that parent-slavers, teachers, ageist media, and other anti-youth people will try to silence us. There are all sorts of methods that they use, from claiming that they own our work because we are minors and they are our guardians/custodians/conservators to abusing copyright laws to get rid of our work, filing a lawsuit, filing criminal charges, or a hundred other methods. You need to make sure your work can outrun your parent-slavers and anyone else who wants to silence you. That means giving it the fastest wings possible by uploading it to as many online archives as possible, distributing it around your school to as many kids as possible, and making sure you have backups for your backups and for your backups’ backups.

The Story of Joey *This story is purely for demonstrative purposes and is totally fiction. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. We tell this story to help fellow youth liberationists understand how the abuse of parent slavers can destroy the life of a youth and how the tendency of parent-slavers to weave narratives to disguise their abuse can cause the life story of a kid to be very different than what is documented in legal, medical, and school records. There once was an 8-year-old kid named Joey. Joey is heavily abused by his parents, who use their supposed desire for him to get an education to justify their abuse. They say that if he doesn’t get perfect grades, then he doesn’t deserve to live under their roof or eat their food. They use this narrative to fill his time with studying and yell at him whenever he is not studying at home. They forbid him from making friends and refuse to let him relax at home, to the point where he is always afraid at home. Joey eventually starts making mistakes in his schoolwork due to this abuse, which then gets communicated to his parents. Joey doesn’t speak to adults about the abuse, and it wouldn’t matter anyway because CPS in the US works for parents instead of against them. It gets worse. Joey is now 9 years old. Joey’s grades slip from perfect A’s to Bs, and his parents take action to abuse Joey even more, starving him by giving him less than the amount of food that he needs to survive and taking away his bed. They steal and sell all but three pairs of his clothes and load up his backpack with textbooks so that his back hurts whenever he walks through the school hallways. They claim that they’re “motivating” him to study, but Joey feels less motivated than ever. Joey suffers under the abuse, and his grades drop even more because he can’t concentrate due to the hunger. Joey doesn’t offer any complaints because he has been told since birth that it is his duty to reflect well on his parents. Joey feels grateful, even though he is being heavily abused. As the abuse intensifies, Joey more and more comes to believe that his parents are loving and kind, and everything they do to him is what he deserves. It gets worse. Joey begs and pleads with his parents on his knees for food, and they allow him to work for food around the house. Joey is forced to do all the housework before going to school every day, and when he complains to his parents that he’s going to get in trouble for missing school, his parents threaten to turn him in for being truant. Meanwhile, they’re pretending to plead with the school for leniency on his behalf, saying that he’s just not interested in school anymore and has been experiencing mental health issues. They lie to the school that he has been getting into smoking cigarettes and stealing things. Joey has to go to Juvy as punishment for skipping school, but he eventually gets out. It gets worse.

One day Joey is cooking breakfast for his parents because they are forcing him to, and while he is normally an expert cook, the overwork and lack of food have gotten to him. His hand slips, and the hot pan slides off the stove, burning him when it lands on his foot. Joey is taken to the emergency room by his parents, who tell him during the car ride over that they will kill him if he says that the pan burning his foot was their fault or anything about his home life. They then give him a cover story, saying that he was cooking for himself and on his own and was very irresponsible because his parents told him, "Don't cook because we will do all the cooking for you." It gets worse. After he gets treated, he comes home, and his parents stop ordering him to do all the housework and start feeding him regular meals again so it doesn’t look suspicious. Joey gets enrolled in physical therapy after he gets treated, which his parents pay for. However, his parents refuse to drive him to physical therapy when it’s in the next town over, 20 miles away. Joey gets there on his own when he can and skips when he can’t. Joey’s parents use his lackluster attendance in physical therapy to claim that he isn’t trying hard enough, that he is lazy, and that he doesn’t even care about his own health. They commiserate with other parents who remark at how much time Joey has been out of school, how lazy the boy is for not attending his own physical therapy, how little he cares for his health, and how he shows no gratitude for them paying for his therapy. Joey’s parents pretend to defend him to these parents, cementing their image of very caring parents who are unlucky to have a very troubled, disobedient, and ungrateful boy. It gets worse. They use this as an excuse to start forcing him to do housework again, saying that he needs to earn his keep if he’s going to keep rejecting their generosity and disobeying so willfully. This time, they tell the other parents that Joey has “turned over a new leaf” and started voluntarily cleaning up around the property to thank his parents. They also start threatening him any time he eats more than they think is “enough for a boy his age” and sometimes prevent him from eating by locking up all the food. However, he is better fed than before, so Joey sees this as a plus. Joey eventually goes back to school full time, being 13 years old now. One day, Joey’s parents are forcing him to clean the gutters while refusing to stand and support the ladder. It’s rainy. The ladder slips, and Joey falls to the ground, injuring his spine and paralyzing himself from the waist down. Joey’s parents now tell the story to anyone who will listen that Joey was cleaning the gutters of his own free will and repeatedly refused their requests that he forget about it or at least get some safety equipment and follow safety protocols. His parents naturally say that they were away when he decided to clean the gutters, pinning all the blame on him. The one neighbor who doesn’t believe his parents keeps her mouth shut because she doesn’t want to care for a crippled boy and doesn’t want to testify against Joey’s parents either. Joey gets to the hospital, and he again receives medical treatment. It gets worse. Joey is now 14 years old. His parents start saying that they can’t afford all the medical bills and time that come with treating a disabled kid. They say that he needs to leave and find a job for the good of the family. They remind him how much they’ve done for him and that he needs to pay them back. By this time, Joey understands that he’s been screwed over, but they’ve already woven a rock-solid narrative that has been included in medical documents and school records.

When it comes to the “evidence,” everything supports the narrative that Joey’s parents have woven. They try to get him placed in a youth home, but there are no places that will take him. Joey has lived a horrible life, and he has to listen to them degrading him and cursing him for being a leech, ungrateful, and useless. They often amuse themselves by kicking him out and then bringing him back, against his will, before they get into legal trouble. They’ve sold all his stuff as “compensation” for living there. Every time Joey’s parents walk into his room, he feels like he is seeing a monster from a horror movie. Every time they talk, it’s as if ominous music is playing in his stomach. Everything feels wrong. He can’t understand how his parents are really his enemies and what crazy evil world he has woken up in. His parents write books on good parenting and disability rights, pretending to the rest of the world that they are loving and caring parents. The books sell very well, and no one believes him when he tells them what his parents did to him. They just label him ungrateful and call him manipulative, abusive, and a traitor, reciting how his parents have been very kind to him and have done so much for him. This is Joey’s life now for four more years, but the paralysis is irreversible, as is the fact that they turned 18 years of his life into a living nightmare. While paralysis in the service of parents is rare, Joey’s parents’ behavior is common. There is no limit to the lengths that parents will go to cover up their own abuse, and most of their coverups inevitably involve punishing the kid for being abused, ensuring that “it gets worse.” This is because the quickest way to cover up the abuse of a victim is to make sure the victim is never believed, and that involves hurting the victim more in an attempt to diminish their credibility. Joey’s parents’ deliberate manipulation of the narrative in order to avoid punishment for abuse meant that the official documented record was completely different from the actual story. Joey had his reputation, his autonomy, and his body ruined by his parents. His mindless devotion to obeying his parents kept him from speaking the truth, not that it would have mattered, as Joey’s parents were careful in making sure that nothing ever blew back on them. Joey’s parents tortured him for five years, and then off and on for the rest of his childhood. This story is an illustration of how easily parents can abuse kids and then weave a narrative to punish their kids and escape blame. Joey’s parents frauded their way through his medical, school, and legal records. Juvy and the courts believed that Joey was skipping school in order to steal and smoke. The school believed that Joey didn’t try hard enough and couldn’t care less about his classes (although, to be fair, school stinks and compulsory schooling should be abolished, so that’s not really that much of an insult on the school’s part). The hospital believes that Joey kept having accidents because of his failure to listen to his parents. Finally, the people who read his parents’ books believed that Joey’s parents love him and just want the best for him. Joey’s parents repeatedly wrote their fake version of his life into official records, creating a fake history for him and ensuring that no one ever believes the truth of his life. Narrative weaving is a common and possibly ubiquitous part of parent-slaver behavior. This false qualitative data ends up in every kind of official record, poisoning studies about kid behavior, intelligence, K–12 education, and parenting strategies. These false narratives about kids affect court judgments and federal legislation and create culturally accepted news stories. In other words, narrative weaving by parent-slavers creates a common narrative that constantly

repeats and strengthens itself, oppressing kids worldwide. Kids all over the world are affected, no matter how little abuse they face from their parents. Kids should have the ability to determine their own life story.

Using the Method In DWYW Issue 3, we shared “The Method,” a way to create and keep the habits that you want. In that context, we talked about using it for youth liberationist writing, but it can be used for any habit that doesn’t cause a great deal of pain. We want to reiterate that the key to using The Method is putting in as little effort as possible. In fact, the idea behind the method when it was created was to be able to create and keep habits with as little effort as possible, or even zero effort. The method can be used for writing, running, swimming, dancing, singing, protesting, eating more, and eating less (although you might want to wait until you stop growing before trying dieting). The method can be used to create a daily habit out of any activity that can be broken down into infinitely small pieces. If you’ve broken your habit into bite-sized pieces and are still not cementing it, then odds are those bite-sized pieces need to be smaller. Baby steps are really important when using The Method, even if it feels ridiculous how small your baby steps are. For example, when jogging/walking, I started off walking less than 1 minute a day for my first 42-day cycle, then only 2 minutes a day for my second cycle, then five minutes a day for my third cycle, then ten minutes a day for my fourth cycle, then twenty minutes a day for my fifth cycle, then thirty minutes a day for my sixth cycle, then forty minutes a day for my seventh cycle, then fifty minutes a day for my eighth cycle, then an hour a day for my ninth cycle, then back down to forty minutes a day where I feel comfortable. It may seem embarrassing and stupid how small you have to start, but it’s worth it in the end. Another important thing that helps when using The Method is understanding that you can slice an activity into different types of pieces, and the key to starting and keeping the habit is slicing it the right way. For example, weight loss. Say that you need to lose weight. You could try slicing your food up by calories and going from eating ten calories less a day for 42 days to moving up to eating 200 calories less a day after six 42-day cycles. However, that’s too hyper-focused on calories and might give you a hangup about calories. You could also try slicing by macronutrients and eating a certain number of carbs, fats, and proteins, but that’s also not very good, and you’ll probably develop a hangup about macronutrients. The best way to do it is to restrict your “not-eating” to a single hour of the day (like from 5pm to 6pm) and slowly increase it until about eight and a half months later, or six 42-day cycles, you stop eating at 5pm and resume eating at 5am. Sometimes you have to experiment a little bit to find the right way to slice your habit; this trial and error may take several months. If you’re not slicing it the right way, you’ll end up dropping the habit, so keep experimenting; however, sometimes the takeaway might be that you just don’t want to do the habit as much as you thought. In this case, you’ve found out that you just don’t want the habit, and that’s cool too. One third important thing to know about The Method is that it only works for activities that do not cause significant physical pain. For example, the method works great for daily exercise, but if you have a chronic pain condition that is exacerbated by exercise, then the method won’t work

at all. Part of the idea behind the method is to change one’s habits by finding that sweet spot between the pleasure of doing what you want to do and the effort you have to go through to get it. You can actually put in quite a lot of effort and still easily make your habit every day,such as swimming for an hour daily or running for an hour daily. Since exercise makes people feel good and the pain is minimal, the method works flawlessly for all types of exercise that you can do daily. However, if the habit that you’re trying to do causes significant pain or exacerbates pain from a preexisting physical injury or health condition, then the method won’t work. A fourth important thing to know about The Method is that it even works well for activities that cause emotional pain. As long as you follow the steps of The Method, you’ll be able to cement your habit, no matter how much emotional pain it causes you. For example, if you are very afraid of protesting in the street, using The Method will allow you to accomplish it. The Method won’t take away your emotional pain, although it will make you better and better at pushing through it to do whatever you want. A fifth important thing to know about The Method is that “caring less makes it easier.” While seemingly contradictory, caring less about achieving the habit and simply going through the steps without a care makes it easier to accomplish your habit. Don’t obsess over whether you’re doing it right or over the number of days you’ve been doing it. Especially with emotionally stressful habits, reducing emotional distress is important. As strange as it sounds, not giving a fudge about keeping your habit is actually an important step in keeping your habit. If you miss a few days here and there, it doesn’t really matter as long as you keep at it. What matters is that you get back on it; you’re not being graded, so there’s no need to try for a perfect score. Just turn your brain off, follow the steps, and tell yourself, “Who gives a fudge if it doesn’t work out? I don’t give a fudge.”

*When you read any of 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.

Drug Dependency One thing that parents do to abuse their children is get them hooked on addictive drugs so that they cannot leave. While this is less common in the developed world than property slavery and labor slavery (compulsory schooling), it is definitely worth talking about. Youth liberation is an international movement, and all kids from all countries matter. When a parent gets a kid hooked on a drug and then acts as their only dealer, it creates a dependency that cannot be overcome even through the most thorough education on youth liberation. This is because drugs are a physical dependency, not a psychological one. Once you become their drug dependent, you can be easily coerced into doing things you don’t want to do. The only way to regain your agency will be to break free of the drug, which is very hard to do. Drug dependents can and often are forced to commit crimes, hurt others, and perform sexual acts that they do not want to do. We do not offer methods for rehab, but simply warn those who have not yet been hooked on a recreational drug to turn down any attempts by your parents to get you to try one. Whether your parent introduces you to alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, crack, meth, marijuana, or prescription pills, once they become your dealer, you are under their control. You were already their slave, as legally codified human property, but now you are also physically dependent upon them in a way that is hard to break even when you become an adult. Never accept off-label and/or recreational drugs from your parents.

Trustwashing One of the ways parent-slavers get youth to participate in their own oppression is through trustwashing. There are several definitions of trustwashing, and we will discuss the first one in this issue of the zine. Trustwashing is “the deliberate rewriting of narratives to make people with power seem trustworthy and to trick a kid into inaction.” We provide three examples of trustwashing below. In the first case, a kid is very hungry for dinner. It is only early afternoon, but there is plenty of food in the house. The parents refuse to let the kid eat until dinner. The parents say, “You can’t eat right now; you would spoil your dinner. Trust me; would I ever let you starve?” This is trustwashing, because the kid is clearly very hungry, and the parents are acting cruelly by making their kid go hungry when there is plenty of food. The correct action for the kid would be to sneak the food from the pantry anyway, as nutrition is far more important than whatever power trip the parents are currently on. In the second case, a kid comes to their homeroom teacher about someone bullying them. The bullying goes on in homeroom, in clear view of the teacher. The teacher says to the student, “Trust me, I will handle this. Don’t try to pick a fight with them, or I’ll have to write you both up for fighting. I won’t let them hurt you; you just have to trust the process.” The teacher obviously has not done anything so far, even though they know the bullying is going on. The teacher has obviously let the bully hurt the kid and is now threatening to punish the kid if she righteously stands up for herself. The teacher is not trustworthy, as their past actions have told more than their words could ever say. The correct action would either be to confront the bully personally, find a group of bullying victims and confront the bully using superior numbers, or find somewhere else to be while homeroom is going on. In the third case, a mother beats the daylights out of her kid, and the dad says, “It was for your own good; she’s your mother! She’d never do anything to hurt you; just behave and don’t talk back to her. She’s trying to teach you a lesson; you should pay attention and learn from your mistakes.” The dad trustwashes the kid by reframing the narrative to make the kid untrustworthy and the mother trustworthy. The act of beating the child is reframed as an action that shows how trustworthy and devoted the mother is. In this way, the mother, a person with legal power over the kid who should never be trusted, is reframed as being very trustworthy. The correct action would be to wear multiple sets of clothes when in the house to reduce the damage done by the beatings, to avoid the mother at all costs and never initiate conversation, to wait until everyone has gone to sleep and then go sleep in a different place in the house every night so that she doesn’t find you and beat you awake, and to spend as much time out of the house as possible.

Trustwashing is extremely dangerous for youth because it has the potential to turn powerful, malicious adults into trustworthy, harmless individuals at the exact moment when suspicion and fear are most needed. Trustwashing works primarily because people don’t like to be afraid and don’t like to be suspicious; acting in a way that disregards the words of a powerful person can be uncomfortable. This means that as long as they are presented with a narrative that tells them they don’t need to be afraid and that authority is on their side and will handle everything, people can easily be trustwashed into believing complete lies. Trustwashed people are unlikely to act because they believe that authority figures will solve all their problems. Methods for breaking free of trustwashing are the same as the methods used to break free of obedience training, a practice that is discussed in the next section.

Obedience Training One of the lesser-known facts about modern parent-slavers is that forcing their kids to obey forces their kids to trust them. The fact is that obedience generates trust, maybe even on a biological level. The more any person is forced to obey, the more they trust the person coercing them. We call this forced obedience “obedience training.” Months and years of obedience training can create trust so strong that even hinting that the coercer is untrustworthy provokes a hostile response. When combined with trustwashing, even the smallest acts of obedience can create undeserved trust in a youth. This is why parent-slavers repeatedly nag, force, or trick their kids to obey; the more they obey, the more they’ll trust their parents, no matter how trustworthy their parents actually are. This is especially true of forced schooling. As the child is forced to obey, over the months and years they begin to trust the school teachers more and more, even though they are the overseers of their slave labor. In this way, youth are often brainwashed into thinking that their oppressors are the most trustworthy figures in their lives. There are two ways to break obedience training. The first is to read The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, which is mentioned at the start of all my works. The book goes into great detail about the motives for the horrible things that people with power do and provides the best foundation for a healthy distrust of powerful people. This is important for youth liberation because youth have many powerful people in their lives that they cannot afford to trust. Parent-slavers, teachers, school principals, the police officers who bring back runaways, and the court officials (guardian ad litems, court visitors, and judges) who trade children like playing cards from person to person all have a reputation for being trustworthy (because of trustwashing) but are all completely untrustworthy and many times dangerous. The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene is good for breaking obedience training too, but it should be taken with a mountain-sized grain

of salt so that it doesn’t go to your head. It’s important for youth to know that if they choose to read either or both of these two books as their method of breaking obedience training, they will need to reread them when they get to the end, and again, and so on. These books are important and provide all the facts that youth need to know about people in power, but the effects of obedience training are not so simply broken. If you don’t engage in disobedience or don’t reread the books, obedience training will reassert itself over a couple of years (assuming that you’re still a youth and forced to obey your parents and teachers; otherwise, this doesn’t apply). The other way to break obedience training is to actively engage in disobedience. This is tricky because getting caught disobeying brings punishment, whether it’s from the overseers we call teachers, the slavers we call parents, or the career criminals we call court officials. Skipping school, only a few times at first but then more and more, can free you from the mindless trust for school staff. Disobeying parents in small ways, such as chewing with your mouth open, sneaking out after dark, or hanging out with friends in the park when your parents only said that “you couldn’t invite them over,” can break you out of the mindless belief that parents are all-good, all-powerful, and all-seeing. Other ideas for disobedience are cursing in a foreign language, going to school in the morning and then silently ditching after lunch, meeting with your friends after school to play games and eat snacks for “homework club,” walking to the next town over (or anywhere else you’re not supposed to go) without a chaperone, altering your clothes to better suit your style, getting a crazy haircut from your barber, being absent from the room whenever your parents want you to do something, gaming on your computer after you told your parents you were going to do homework, and pulling an all-nighter. The more you disobey, the more you’ll learn about what you believe in and the more you’ll figure out who you want to be. You’ll also learn a great deal about your parents and who they really are. One of the first things that disobedient kids learn is that parents can be vicious if they catch disobedience, but they are far from all knowing. An enterprising kid who knows her parents well can get away with a ton of disobedience while appearing to be a “wellbehaved” kid. Slavery is tough. You might not want to be too harsh on the teacher’s pet, the nerd, or the kid who always follows the rules; chances are they have been so thoroughly trustwashed that the only thing they’ve ever known is obedience. If you introduce them to either of the two books mentioned above, it might open their eyes and earn you a lifelong friend.

*When you read any of 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. *The word parent-slaver means “parent who legally owns their kid as property.” This means that all parents who have kids under the age of majority are parentslavers. *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.

Torture Roulette: Why Some Kids Are More Obedient Than Others Youth should be aware of the techniques used by their parent-slavers to coerce them into obeying. Parent-slavers use a particularly brutal technique called "torture roulette" to instill obedience in youth by exploiting their fear of unpredictability. Because torture roulette is a psychological torture technique that works well at regulating kids’ conduct, most of today’s parents utilize it with their kids. "Varying the type, frequency, severity, and time of punishment without warning the kid beforehand" is the definition of torture roulette. Torture roulette gives the impression that punishments are random, which makes youth afraid and uncertain. This fear and uncertainty make them cling desperately to obedience in order to avoid being abused. In this section, we use the term "randomized" as a shortcut for the full definition of torture roulette, knowing that we really mean the full definition. Parent-slavers use torture roulette to control their kids’ behavior by robbing them of knowledge about the consequences of disobedience. The parent-slaver creates an environment where the kid is continuously scared of what the parent might do in reaction to disobedience by randomly changing the type of punishment, frequency of punishment, severity of punishment, and time at which the punishment is inflicted. This environment really hurts a youth’s ability to fight their own enslavement. Without the ability to judge for themselves how their parents will react to their disobedience, kids are left with the terrifying choice to either obey or face

unexpected, unexplained, catastrophic harm. Torture roulette is so effective that today there are very many hyper-obedient youth who bend over backwards to please their parents. There are very few youth today that are rebellious to the degree that youth were fifty, seventy, and ninety years ago, and that is partly because of torture roulette.

Youth can beat torture roulette because it’s just a more vicious type of obedience training. The tactics against obedience training outlined in DWYW Issue 8 can be used to completely defeat torture roulette. Kids who are faced with torture roulette might find it helpful to read The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith and The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. Kids can also practice deliberate disobedience, which works well against the demotivating effects of torture roulette, using “The Method” from DWYW Issue 3. Finally, you can avoid torture roulette by tricking your parents into thinking you are obeying their orders when you really aren't. You'll have achieved a small win and fooled them if they believe you're complying without double-checking. We'll talk about that tactic in the upcoming DWYW Issue 10. Today’s parents pretend that they are more “lenient” than yesterday’s parents, and so they don’t have strict rules. In reality, this just means that they hurt their kids without warning whenever they want, and this has given rise to torture roulette. By removing rules, they enforce their unpredictable tendencies to hurt their kids while removing the element that the kid can control. Even more importantly, removing written rules also means removing the easier-to-use tools for abused youth to take control of their situation. Without specific rules to focus on, abused and isolated youth find it harder to speak out about their parents’ abuse. Punishments are evil, and rules that youth have to obey under threat of punishment are evil, but torture roulette is real torture and is far more despicable than rule-based parenting. Youth liberationists should watch out for these “lenient” parents and “lenient” stances towards parenting, which look like progress but in reality are psychological torture and are dozens of steps backward. This type of parenting is oppression in disguise. Youth liberationists should not aim for lighter punishments or “leniency,” but for a world where parents have no authority over youth.

Changing the Type of Punishment Changing the type of punishment is one way that today’s parent-slavers are far more vicious than those of the past. Examples of different common punishment types include grounding imprisonment, beatings, forced labor, public shaming, destroying social networks, apologies, boarding school, framing (framing a kid for a crime and getting them sent to prison on false charges), physical torture, and the troubled teen industry (getting kidnapped and sent to a concentration camp). Switching between these punishments while keeping the kid in the dark will always

be terrifying. Such an evil method of treating one’s kid is typical of modern parents and their sick obsession with enforcing obedience. Youth liberationists must understand that as time goes on, oppression evolves and becomes more targeted and effective. Parent-slavers have found that changing the kind of punishment for disobedience without giving kids any notice or explanation is a very powerful tool for forcing youth to obey. The parent’s refusal to tell the kid what is coming next or even explain why they are doing what they do is the lynchpin of this method. Kids don't know what's going to happen next and are kept in terror of what their parents will do; they know it's going to be terrible, but they don't have the knowledge to ease their fears. Youth grow up with the messages, "You can trust me; I am here for you," "I will always love you," and "I would never do anything to hurt you," but they are also kept in the dark about everything and are therefore unable to predict the behavior of their parent-slavers, which is one of the reasons torture roulette works so well. Combined with torture roulette, this creates contradictory information where what the parent repeatedly tells them (I love you and would never do anything to hurt you, trust me) clashes with the parents’ real behavior and creates an environment of fear without cause.

Changing the Frequency of Punishment Parent-slavers sometimes decrease the frequency of punishment in order to trick their kids into obeying out of gratitude. Although this might appear to be a step forward, their relationship's legal framework remains the same. Regardless of what the parent may say, the kid is still considered a slave by law. Here, the kid is either encouraged to disobey more, which is a good thing, or he or she is suspicious of the parent's lack of discipline, which is also a good thing. By changing up the frequency of punishment, the parent tricks the kid into thinking that they are "lenient" instead of mostly cruel. It is cruel for a parent to harm their kids for refusing to follow their orders like good little slaves. It isn't the moral duty of kids to obey their parents; in fact, every kid would be better off never ever obeying. If parents want their kids to do something, they should persuade them without using force or coercion. The slavery that kids suffer under is a perversion of the natural order of things. A parent who uses less "punishment" does not become any less cruel because, in reality, they are still abusing their kid by committing crimes against them on a regular basis to get what they want. Reducing the overall number of crimes they commit against their kid does not cause the remaining crimes to disappear or cease. Kids’ human rights are violated by all "punishments," and kids should never have to obey their parents.

Kids have no moral duty to obey their parents; laws that mandate otherwise serve to enforce slavery.

Changing the Severity of Punishment Changing the severity of punishment is another way in which parent-slavers force their kids to obey. The possibility of getting a broken leg instead of a slap for eating dinner early serves to reinforce the obedience training that parent-slavers are already forcing their kids to go through. Many kids are terrified enough of the prospect of an unpredictable and extremely severe punishment to obey without question. It is common for parent-slavers today to pretend to “restrain their temper” (as if their monstrous and violent tendencies toward their kids are somehow their kid's fault) and give light “punishments” for repeated acts of disobedience before suddenly “snapping.” In these cases, parents can go from slapping a disobedient kid to breaking their leg in three places, permanently crippling them for life. In these cases, a kid can call a parent a bad word, and the parent will go from having never hit them before to brutally murdering them. In these cases, the parent-slaver actively seeks a cruel and inventive way to cause permanent physical damage to their kid as “retribution” for having “tested their patience for so long.” Other code phrases that parent-slavers use that can indicate this sort of torture roulette include “being patient,” “taking a deep breath,” and “finding my inner peace. In general, youth should keep a lookout for any and all short phrases that imply that a parent-slaver is patient but full of frustration and trying not to take it out on their kid. Kids who hear these phrases from their parents (or relatives) might want to get out immediately and should know that their parents are not to be trusted. It is not possible to guarantee safety in these houses because this specific type of torture roulette is so unpredictable. Young people who live in homes where parentslavers randomly change the severity of punishment need to get out of there as soon as possible because these parents are dangerous and frequently cause crippling or life-changing injuries.

Changing the Time of Punishment One very evil way that parent-slavers use torture roulette to force kids to obey is by changing the time of punishment without warning or explanation. In this case, the kid is always punished for disobedience, but they are never told when. This means that a kid could go unpunished for a year for a previous act of disobedience, only to find themselves with a beating on the first day of the second year, with no explanation or warning. This is terrifying, cruel, and inhumane, and yet this strategy is the most common of all the aspects of torture roulette listed.

Parents will stop at nothing in their cruel quest to subjugate their human property, and so this cruel aspect of torture roulette is at the forefront of today’s parenting.

The Struggle of Rich Kids One overlooked struggle is that of rich kids. It would be more accurate to rephrase the term "rich kids'' as "kids born to rich parents." There are no rich kids because no rich parent-slaver would ever provide their kid with the financial means to challenge them. Kids born to wealthy parents are poorer and less financially stable than adults making the minimum wage; their parents only give them little financial favors like dog treats. In this section, when we say "rich kids'' we really mean "kids born to rich parents." One of the special challenges that rich kids face is that their parents use them as slave labor to further their own personal brands. Rich parent-slavers frequently make their kids perform "prestigious" tasks in order to enhance their own status. Rich kids are forced to do painting, music, chess, robotics, science, medicine, the piano, the violin, and so forth. The kid receives no immediate or long-term benefit from these activities, but the wealthy parent's reputation is greatly enhanced. Rich parent-slavers put their kids through an unending hell of orders where their sole purpose is to obey. Rich kids live lives that are entirely devoted to obedience, from dawn to dusk. Rich parent-slavers dictate to their kids what to wear, how to act, what their interests are, how to speak, who their friends are (if they’re even allowed to have friends), and how to think. They abuse their unique access to money and free time to control their kids. Because their entire lives have been built around the goal of appeasing their parent-slavers against their will, rich kids frequently view themselves as "failures." Rich kids are made to dance to a horrible tune like puppets on strings. By creating a fake standard of what makes for a good childhood, rich-parent slavers judge their kids to be smart or dumb, hardworking or lazy, kind or mean, and more. They invent a fake reality in which disobedience is viewed as wicked and obedience as virtue. Rich parent-slavers gain from this misleading metric as well, since it gives the impression to other parent-slavers that they are "giving their kid opportunities" or "setting them up for success," when in fact they are just controlling their unhappy slave. Middle-class and relatively poorer parent-slavers typically only abuse their kids where no one can see, while rich parent-slavers have no such restrictions. Due to their money and power, rich parent-slavers are able to abuse their kids in the most heinous ways when witnesses are present without ever facing consequences. Rape, torture, beatings, slavery, and human trafficking can all be done to rich kids with many witnesses around, and as long as a parent-slaver is rich enough to pay, there

won’t be charges or convictions. Would-be witnesses can be paid off or intimidated with lawsuits and threats of prosecution or financial pressure; witnesses lying about what happened can be paid for and summoned to exonerate the rich parent-slaver; judges can be bribed; clerks can “forget” to enter paperwork into the system; court proceedings can be stalled; court records can be lost; court officials can falsify statements; lawyers both defending and prosecuting can be bought; police can falsify police statements as they write them down; and much more. This is uniformly true even in court systems that are structured to reduce real corruption (both reported and unreported), because even in the best countries, court officials are not accountable to youth in any way. In this way, rich-parent slavers weaponize their power and wealth to hurt their kids. Rich kids are often blamed for their parents’ sins, but the crime of the father (or mother) is not the crime of the son (or daughter). Kids should never be punished for the crimes of their parents. Since the law explicitly states that kids cannot leave their parents and become freedpeople, kids who are ensnared in criminal activity by them should likewise not face punishment. For kids of rich parent-slavers, who frequently become witnesses to the crimes their parents commit, this is especially important. Rich kids also face the evils of the troubled teen industry. Rich parents can literally pay for their kids to be kidnapped and dragged off to a concentration camp in the middle of nowhere. These concentration camps, which go by various names like "residential treatment centers," "therapeutic boarding schools," "juvenile boot camps," "behavior modification programs," and "wilderness programs," abuse and torture young people in the name of mental health therapy. Rich kids are brainwashed, forced to take drugs, raped, beaten, made to perform labor, and have all kinds of human rights violations done to them in these hellholes. Most people never question whether a rich kid actually has any real money or income at all; they just notice how much the kid's jacket is worth. Rich kids spend 16-hour days completing unpaid tasks against their will, decided for them by their parent slavers, and that goes unnoticed by the public. The majority of people never think about how rich parents can oppress their own kids with all of their money and power. Rich kids are not rich; rather, they are impoverished and the victims of rich and powerful slavers. These slavers subjugate their kids without end, abusing their wealth and influence. Rich parent-slavers use their wealth and influence as weapons against their kids in an endless number of ways. Like all other youth, rich kids deserve to be freedpeople (people who are not slaves). They have the human right to choose how they spend their time, the right to not be kidnapped and tortured, and the right to be free from their parents using their money and power to oppress them. All kids, regardless of privilege, ought to be born free.

Abolish the Voting Age All at Once One of the ideas being floated around the youth liberationist movement right now is the idea of slowly lowering the voting age. First to sixteen, then to fourteen, then “maybe further.” What this really means is a bunch of oppressors putting an end to youth liberationist organizing by satisfying the anger of older youth liberationists and spitting on the efforts of younger ones. Slowly lowering the voting age divides the youth vote and creates artificial divisions and rivalries among youth, and by doing this, these malicious adults will change the definitions of adulthood and kill the youth liberationist movement in the cradle. For example, the voting age in the United States was previously 21 before it was lowered in 1971. The age of majority followed, and now American 18- to 21-year-olds consider themselves to be adults. Despite having spent the majority of their lives as youth and easily meeting the definition of youth, they now regard themselves as adults. Even though those over 18 are now freedpeople, those under 18 face much greater oppression than they did prior to 1971. In truth, slowly lowering the voting age changed the meanings of both youth and adulthood, leading to youth under the age of 18 facing far more oppression. We are about to see another big wave of slowly lowering the voting age, maybe for military reasons or some other sinister political agenda disguised in the rhetoric of youth liberation. We cannot let this happen. The key to youth liberation and universal voting rights for young people is the complete abolition of the voting age. The ability to vote is also a human right. It is what we are owed, and it has been ours from the moment of our birth. We demand our birthright of voting rights, not because we are greedy but because it is ours. Slowly lowering the voting age is a ploy to deny youth their human right to vote. Even the term “slowly” doesn’t mean anything; it’s just a way to trick youth liberationists into standing still. The last time the voting age was lowered was in 1971, and it’s been over fifty years since then. The voting age has not been lowered again. Any delays in lowering the voting age are human rights violations; we want our vote, and we want it now. “Slowly lowering the voting age” is code for oppression by eliminating political support for youth liberation. Such laws move an imaginary line to turn youth into adults and then say that the remaining youth deserve greater oppression. Indeed, this is what has happened. Compared to today's youth, those born before 1971 were far more free—though they were still slaves. Slowly lowering the voting age is nothing more than a tool that parent-slavers use to justify the new controls over youth that they have created over the last 50 years. If the voting age is lowered to 16, the next round of oppressive regulations will cause youth under 16 to cry themselves to sleep while daydreaming of the world before the lowering. Youth over 16 will be set free, while those under 16 will see a significant worsening of their enslavement. It can always get worse, and if this slow lowering of the voting age happens a second time, it will get worse. This time, it will get unimaginably worse.

As youth liberationists, we must fight off this co-option before we become complicit in our oppression. The oppression of people under 16 is the same as the oppression of people ages 16–18. Youth at birth deserve freedom just as much as youth at age four; youth at age four deserve freedom just as much as youth at age ten; and youth at age ten deserve freedom just as much as youth at age seventeen. Youth liberation will only happen through the complete emancipation of youth from slavery and the granting of the right to vote from birth. The only way to win is together, so we must achieve the abolition of the voting age all at once. We must abolish the voting age all at once and grant every youth the right to vote from birth. No co-option, no oppression, no promises about the future. We are entitled to the right to vote from birth; we want it now, and we will not take no for an answer.

*When you read any of 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. *The word parent-slaver means “parent who legally owns their kid as property.” This means that all parents who have kids under the age of majority are parentslavers.

Spotting Parent Propaganda One skill that youth liberationists need to train is the ability to spot parent propaganda. We detail one helpful tip for spotting parent propaganda here. A reminder from DWYW Issue 3 that the definition of parent propaganda is: “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 the legal ownership of or control over youth. Even propaganda that argues for legal ownership of or control over youth that does not explicitly mention parents is parent propaganda.” One way to spot parent propaganda is to remember that it is not “path-dependent.” This means that parent propaganda can and will often sound different when coming from people with different values. What matters is that it results in parents owning or controlling youth, not the intent or moral value of the message. Slavery enforced by sweet words is no different from slavery enforced by bitter insults. Here we list three examples of parent propaganda coming from three different political parties. A first political party might spew parent propaganda, and it might sound like “kids are helpless; they can’t do anything on their own; they’re worthless without parents guiding them.” This political party might prevent the repeal of laws that allow parents access to their kids' information and give them the power to control their kids' legal decisions. This political party’s ideology is very clearly anti-youth and pro-slavery, but parent propaganda isn’t just restricted to comical villains who are easy to identify.

A second political party might spew parent propaganda, and it might sound like “kids are very important and should be protected; we have put rules in place to protect kids from people who hurt them; these laws will prevent adults from abusing or controlling kids.” This political party might disenfranchise most kids by forcing kids younger than 16 through a hundred impossible “security checks” just to vote. In this way, the party officials can disenfranchise youth while saying that they’re “preventing kids from getting their vote stolen by their parents” and “protecting the youth vote.” This party is nominally youth liberationist but is actually not only stalling for time in order to diffuse the movement’s momentum but also oppressing youth by actively disenfranchising them and claiming that their oppression is a proyouth policy. A third political party might spew parent propaganda, and it might sound like “these religious nutjobs are trying to brainwash my kids with garbage, and they’re filling their minds with lies.” This party might ban kids from participating in religious gatherings of any kind and from forming their own religious gatherings and organizations. This party is secular, and while this is a departure from the “obey your mother and father” of Christianity, they have taken away kids’ right to religious freedom and are thus oppressing youth. Not only that, but they’ve also reduced the right of youth to organize. So here we have three different ideologies, only one of which appears to be antiyouth, and yet each political party uses propaganda to advance and justify their oppression of youth. Youth liberationists should be aware that the parent propaganda of tomorrow will probably not look like the parent propaganda of today or yesterday. Parent propaganda constantly mutates and evolves, so it’s important that youth liberationists be on guard. Any beliefs spewed by politicians can be parent propaganda if they result in or perpetuate the control and legal ownership of youth.

Crippling There are some families that are more like “crime syndicates with family characteristics” than anything that resembles a true family. Events within the family (and extended family) are censored by a single parent or council of parents, and then a fake history is constantly presented to the outside world, complete with paper trails and false testimonies (given by other elders of the family). As such, no one ever knows what is going on behind closed doors except members of the family. Slavery, torture, human trafficking, murder, imprisonment, and more are successfully concealed in families (and extended families) that operate under this system of governance. Four examples of this type of censorship are:

1) A kid is being abused by their parents and is getting really emotional because she is suffering, and the fake story is that she has a genetic mental illness. 2) An aunt and uncle kidnap and launder one of their sister’s kids, and the fake story is that the single mom abandoned them and the benevolent and selfless aunt and uncle took them in. 3) A kid is kicked out of the house by her own parents, and the fake story is that the kid “broke her parents’ hearts” by running away from home. 4) Parents beat their kid so badly they put her in the hospital, and the fake story is that the kid attacked first and has always been violent and unstable. Crippling is a practice that occurs in these types of families due to the ability of the leaders of the family to effectively censor and rewrite family events and history. Crippling is the practice whereby parents cripple kids who aim to upset the family censorship policy or expose the criminal activities of their parents. One thing that no one ever considers is the immediate reaction of kids who find out that their parents are criminals. These kids are often taught democratic values and told to report to the police, so naturally they report to the police. When the kids report to the police, or even if they just find out what their parents have been doing, the parents face going to prison if they don’t shut the kid up or make them seem less credible. Due to the rule of law in democratic countries, criminal parents cripple their kids instead of killing them, using social and cultural values to weave a story that justifies their behavior towards their kids. One hypothetical example is parents renting their daughter out as a prostitute. When she finds out that what is happening is illegal, the parents act to shut her up. The parents drug her morning coffee with a poison that doesn’t kill her but effectively paralyzes her and/or prevents her from being able to support herself. Her parents claim she got her “health condition” from this or that origin to keep people from guessing that they did it. They use the increased bills they have to pay, both to support her and to treat her “condition,” to generate resentment. They weave a story of a needy, ungrateful brat who doesn’t even show gratitude for all the sacrifices they have made for her. All the parents in the community resent the daughter for being ungrateful and a burden on her parents and look the other way when the parents kick the daughter out at 15. Whether or not she survives until the age of 18, her parents have effectively branded her as untrustworthy for life. Due to prejudice against disabled people and her parents destroying her reputation, nothing she says will ever be taken seriously, especially in court. Even coming to the authorities about the fact that her parents crippled her wouldn’t be taken seriously. In this way, the parents cripple the daughter and then create an excuse to remove the food, water, and shelter she needs to survive. If she survives anyway, it doesn’t matter because she’s disabled and authorities won’t ever look past their prejudice in order to listen to her cries of child abuse.

Kids in these criminal families should use whatever means possible to escape instead of biding their time or trying to wait it out. Whatever actions they take in order to free themselves from their family, up to exceeding actions that destroy their families’ reputation, are morally justified. We do not offer advice for kids in criminal families other than to escape immediately. Future youth liberationists might pool their experiences and come up with better recommendations for kids in these situations.

Practicing an Escape Route One strategy that might be helpful to kids in abusive families is practicing an escape route. Having a plan of escape is only as good as one’s ability to use it, and people who are in fight or flight mode will have difficulty leaving familiar situations. The best way to make sure that you have an escape route to get away from your abusive parents is to practice using it every week. Otherwise, when the time comes to leave, you won’t be able to leave because you’re either too scared or not prepared. In places where there is a bus network that connects the surrounding area, a good practice is to ride the buses as far as they go. Riding the bus network around your county is the best way to get familiar with the area. Actively being in places that are not your home opens you up to feeling familiar with them. In times of crisis, you need to feel comfortable riding the bus to someplace else, which means it’s better to explore the bus network as often as possible beforehand. Walking from one city or town to another is also a great way to increase your familiarity with the surrounding area. When you escape, you’ll basically be walking until you either reach your friends’ house, a shelter, a place to camp, or some other place to spend the night. Doing practice runs of that long walk to find shelter for the night is very important. One way to practice an escape route is to actively stay over at relatives’ houses, homeless shelters, camping grounds, and friends’ houses. Not only are you more likely to show up at their doorstep on the day that you escape, but you’ll be less likely to freak out and go running back home. Walking over to grandpa and grandma’s house every weekend and spending the weekend there is a great way to get used to escaping from your house. The same can be said of spending all your weekends at a friend’s house, camping in a tent one or two days of the week, and even going down to the local shelter and spending one night a week. The point is to practice getting away, and that means the whole experience, from packing a small backpack and escaping without drawing attention, to the long walk to shelter, to spending the night away from home and trying not to freak out.

When the moment comes when you need to escape and your parents are screaming at you, blackmailing you, or beating the crap out of you, you’ll need to be familiar with your escape route. If you’re not familiar with it, you’ll second-guess yourself and stay at home with your dangerous parents rather than rise to the occasion. Youth in dangerous situations might want to practice their escape routes to make sure that they’re ready to go when their parents go nuclear.

*When you read any of my works, you will need to have read both The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith and The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene 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 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. *The word parent-slaver means “parent who legally owns their kid as property.” This means that all parents who have kids under the age of majority are parentslavers.

You Don’t Need Money to Hang Out One of the things that parent-slavers are always telling us is that we need money to hang out. We always need to “DO” something, like eat at a restaurant, buy movie tickets, or test out our new airsoft guns. Parents tell us we need money, or at least cool stuff; otherwise, it isn’t fun. These are just lies, and they’re always subtly aimed at keeping youth from spending their time together. You don’t need to have money or stuff to hang out. There is plenty of fun to be had just by meeting up and chilling. You just meet up and hang out. If there’s stuff you want to talk about, you talk about it. Otherwise, you just hang out, and it's cool. Being in the same space while keeping to yourselves is a fun way to hang out. Youth have been enjoying themselves without money since the dawn of humanity. They just messed around and had a good time, doing whatever they wanted with whatever was available to them. A few ideas for having fun are: talking about your favorite TV shows; exploring the forest and drawing a map of where you went; creating an underground newspaper; exploring and mapping out the town; defacing your old textbooks; and practicing a specific dance move. The point is to do whatever you want, no matter how stupid, boring, or rude it seems. One mistake youth make is to hang out in their houses, their backyards, or anywhere on their parents’ property. Just go somewhere else, man. You can do the same stuff somewhere around town and have more fun because you can be louder and make dumb jokes and not filter yourself for your parent-slavers. Also, grab some food from the pantry and stuff it in your bag because you’ll probably get hungry.

A second mistake youth make is to hang out at school. Nobody wants to hang out at school; it’s not fun, and there are always staff there just itching to report to your parents. Not to mention that some kids are always thinking about grades and having a good school record to keep their parents from abusing them. Go somewhere else, like really, school is not cool. Lastly, there’s this stupid idea going around that you actually need stuff in common to hang out. That’s BS. Most people don’t even stick to their hobbies anyway (btw, check out “The Method” in DWYW Issue 3 to guarantee that you stick to your hobbies), so having stuff in common is just an illusion most of the time. The vast majority of kids like hanging out and talking, and having stuff in common is usually just a conversation starter. If you really need something in common to talk about, talk about something you saw on social media or something. Like, a ton of youth watch the same shows and videos, so it’s not like you have super unique tastes anyway.

Conversation for Dummies Some kids have trouble talking to friends and are always making it awkward. There’s no shame in not knowing how to make friendship work. Here’s a guide to make things easier for you. How to get your friend to meet up: Ask, “Want to hang out next Tuesday?” If they say yes, then ask, “Does 1pm work?” If they say yes, then it’s on. If they say no to Tuesday or 1pm, ask, “How about Friday?” and “How about 10am?” Always make sure that you lock down the day, the time, and the place when you first ask them to hang out. How to form a friend group: Ask, “Want to form a friend group?” when you’re standing or sitting around with a bunch of other kids. Then go around individually and ask, “What’s your phone number for the group chat?” How to apologize: Say, “Hey, I’m really sorry for ghosting you yesterday. Can you forgive me?” If they say yes, then you’re all good. If they say no, either ask, “What can I do to make it up to you?” or just move on. Sometimes relationships are not meant to be. How to ask for an apology: “Hey, I felt really hurt by this. Can I have an apology?” Yeah, it sounds dumb and kinda stupid and bratty and entitled, but sometimes you just gotta ask. First, it lets them know that they hurt you. Second, it gives them an easy way to solve the problem.

How to keep a friend group together: You don’t always have to have everyone hang out at the same time. Hanging out in twos and threes is totally okay; just get the whole group together when you can. Say, “Want to hang out next Tuesday?” If some people say yes, you’ll be hanging out with those people next Tuesday. If some people say no, that’s okay. You’ll see them some other time. Or if you want to hang out with that person or people, just find a different time when you and them can hang out. You don’t have to hang out with everybody at the same time. Just keep finding times to meet up, and you’ll be golden. Also, keep reaching out to someone if it seems like they’re slowly fading out of the group. How to keep a conversation fun: Don’t hang out at home. Parents kill all the fun. Keep at least a mile between you and anyone’s parents. Also, keep a mile between you and babysitters and adults in general. How to ask to hang out again: Say, “That was fun. Want to hang out again next Tuesday?” Or if you’ve been doing this for awhile, say, “That was fun. Does next Tuesday work? If they say yes, ask, “Same time, same place?” How to reschedule: If something comes up, say, “I can’t make it on Tuesday. Want to reschedule?” If they say yes, ask, “How about Wednesday?” Don’t offer an apology; you have a good reason for not being able to make it. Just reschedule until you find a time that works. Again, always make sure to lock down the meetup place as well. When people ask how you’ve been: Say, “I’ve been great!” And then talk about something that you found cool recently or that’s been on your mind. “Btw, have you seen Ji-soo’s music video?” You don’t have to tell them your life story; just say you’ve been great and transition into whatever topic. How to leave a hangout early when you have to go do something: “Hey, I got to go. This was fun.” If they want you to stay, just say, “Yeah, I really gotta go. But this was fun.” Keep it simple. You don’t have to say why you have to leave, and they’re not entitled to know. Make sure to reschedule before you leave; this is very important as it shows that you want to hang out again and aren’t just done with the friendship. How to keep from having lulls in the conversation: Ask “What do you mean?” when somebody says something that you’re not clear about or you just want to hear what they have to say. It’s okay to use this line again and again; nobody will mind. It gives people an opportunity to talk. When you're bored: Say, "I've got to go. It was fun talking to you," and leave. No need to feel guilty.

How to encourage the other person to speak up: Don’t interrupt. And every time you do, immediately stop what you’re saying and apologize, then be quiet so that the other person can speak. Don’t be afraid of silence. Sometimes you need a minute, two minutes, or more of silence; just be comfortable with it. Silence isn’t going to hurt you. It encourages the other person to speak up because they’ll see silence as prime real estate for talking about something they want to talk about. How to take a group selfie: Ask, “Wanna take a selfie?” Or just take one yourself and ask if they wanna join in. If you keep hanging out, you take a group selfie every time you meet. Kind of like a scrapbook. It also gives you something to talk about later and allows you to customize your clothes for your next selfie. When you want to change the subject: “Hey, subject change, what do you think about this?” When you’re uncomfortable talking about something: Say, “Do you skateboard?” or one of your hobbies. Or just change the subject. When the conversation is dead in the water: Ask them questions about themselves. It doesn’t have to be an interrogation. Just ask them one thing about themselves and then follow it up with the old “What do you mean?” Eventually, you’ll find something to talk about. When you feel uncomfortable with eye contact: Just look down while you talk and only meet their eyes once in a while. Or not at all. Don’t feel pressured; you’re not weird, and they won’t care if you keep your eyes on the ground. If they insult you and you need to leave: Just turn around and walk away. Don’t even make eye contact; don’t say anything; just go. You don’t have to put up with this. When people say something you don’t agree with: Either agree with them and change the subject or ask, “What do you mean?” Then, once they’ve talked themselves out, change the subject. You’re not in a philosophy class; you don’t need to have an intellectual seminar. Just let them talk and move on. When you have an idea of something you want to do right now: “Hey, want to play BS (the card game)?” or whatever it is that you want to do. If you can’t stop speaking with big words (like a nerd): Use slang. It’s okay if you sound dumb and rude; just stop speaking like you’re in English class. You’re not being graded, and no one will hit you if you don’t sound like your parents’ model daughter and future CEO. It’s okay if you mix and match slang and it doesn't make sense. No one is grading you, and literally no one cares.

When you want to say something but they’re talking: Wait. For the love of god, wait. The urge to interrupt will pass, and if what you wanted to say is important, you’ll remember it later. If not, no sweat. Just never interrupt (and if you do, apologize and then stay quiet). If someone is roasting you: Roast them back. Don’t make the roasts super personal; just find an insult that sounds good. If they respond back in kind, that’s great. If they look hurt or try to start a fight, maybe remind them that “If you didn’t want to get roasted back, you shouldn’t have started in the first place.” Some friendships are built on friendly roasting; some aren’t. Find out which kind this one is.

How to Form a Youth Liberationist Group Find another kid who knows about Youth Liberation. Say, “Want to form a group and do stuff about it?” If you don’t know anybody who knows about Youth Liberation, just ask someone, “Have you heard about Youth Liberation?” If they say no, just send them a link to the youth rights subreddit or one of the many other youth rights social media groups. You can also send them a link to the zine Youth Liberation Now, DWYW Issue 1, or to any number of youth liberationist articles online. Meet up outside of both school and home. It’s important that the setting is good for youth liberationist thinking. School and home are the main places where youth get oppressed, so you don’t want to meet up there. Bring a youth liberationist article or two to share at the club. That way, you’ll all have something to talk about. Just have everyone go around in the circle and share their thoughts on the article. Articles by Peter Grey, Carol Black, and Emma Goldman are pretty good, as are any of Mike Males’s books. Issues of this zine ( Do Whatever You Want by Liberationist111) are also very good material. Form a group chat. You’ll need one to schedule meetings with the rest of the club. One thing that is important to notice is that you don’t need to meet up with everyone at once. If some people can’t make it, that’s okay. Just meet with them another time or let them come to the next meeting. People will meet together on their own in twos and threes, and not everyone can always come. The important part is that you keep meeting up and talking about Youth Liberation. If you’re going to stage a protest, say so and make sure everyone knows the day and time. Take a selfie at the protest and share it with the rest of the group. Invite

everyone to come and bring some snacks that everyone (or at least most people in the group) likes. Keep expanding the group: youth are going to come and go, as they have to do things to keep their parents from hurting them. For some, it's studying; for others, it's manual labor; and many are just being imprisoned by their parents and so can't get to the meeting. Just make sure that you keep inviting people. You can invite people by saying, “Hey, want to come to our club meeting? I think you’ll like it.” This invitation is low-pressure, so they don’t have to commit to joining the club, just to coming to a club meeting and seeing what it’s about. Sense the vibe. If other kids want to talk about Youth Liberation and be super serious, that’s okay because at least you’re talking about Youth Liberation regularly. If other kids want to stage a protest right now, draft new laws to liberate youth from slavery, and put up posters at school, that’s okay too. Some groups are more serious than others. Write your own paragraphs on Youth Liberation and bring them to share with the group. Remember, kids are the leaders, the decision-makers, and the organizers of the movement. There is no greater expert than yourself, and so what you say has the highest importance. Be confident when you write about Youth Liberation. If you claim to be second in understanding the oppression of youth, no adult could be first. When making big decisions that require the group to take action, take a vote. If you decide to write an essay or doctrine that has the name of the group on it, vote on it when it’s done to see that the group majority supports the completed product. Make sure that the vote is anonymous (you can use an anonymous online voting form; just look one up) and use an absolute majority to decide whether to take action. Keep a detailed record of group activities over the long term so that you can track your political activity. This helps if you’re looking to increase youth liberationist activity and get to staging regular protests, publishing regular essays, or emailing legislators with fully written-out policy proposals. Never let adults and/or parents in. Parents are the political enemies of youth, the slave owners who own youth, and the people who carry out the most youth oppression. Adults also often support youth oppression, so you should be very careful around them too. Don’t let either of them in. Don’t let them find out what you are discussing in meetings, where and when you are meeting, or who is in the group. Both the majority of adults and all parents want to shut down youth liberationist organizing. Don’t fall prey to them. Don’t talk over younger kids like they’re stupid. Four-year-olds can have good ideas about Youth Liberation, and creating fake divides in the movement based on age is

stupid. Three-year-olds are youth; so are babies; and so are 17-year-olds. Take three-year-olds, five-year-olds, and everyone under ten seriously, because their political demands matter. Getting rid of the oppression of younger kids, toddlers, and babies is just as important as getting rid of the oppression of teenagers. All youth should have autonomy and be free from parental authority, and that means everyone ages 0–17. Don’t start using parent propaganda on them just because they’re not within two years of your age. Look at other political groups and see what methods they use to increase their membership. Talk with your group members about what you can do to promote your group and spread the idea that youth are people too. Don’t give up. It’ll be awkward at first, and there will be challenges in scheduling and getting used to getting along with each other. This is just in the short term; eventually, the group will be running like a well-oiled machine.

*When you read any of my works, you will need to have read both The Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith and The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene 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 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. *Why not remix, reproduce, and redistribute this zine? Add drawings and images, highlight and bold sections that you like, and generally make it more inviting to read! I give you my permission; just make sure to include that it was originally by Liberationist111 and the words “the copyright license for this work is Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.”

Co-Option and the Power of Youth Youth slavery has been a part of civilization since farming was invented 12,000 years ago. The first recorded civilizations enslaved their youth, and all throughout history, youth have been enslaved as the property of their parents. While many other forms of slavery have been abolished, such as serfdom, concubines, and eunuchs, youth slavery is a global practice, and adults and parents are even growing in their convictions about how good it is. Youth are the chattel of their parents, their legally defined personal property, and are slaves not only as property but also as forced laborers in schools (and many other places). Yet only a few lone adults care to highlight this issue; the vast majority instead lie and say that slavery has been abolished, even though the 2.1 billion kids around the world are still chattel. Every year, new restrictions (like child labor laws that ban kids under a certain age from working, limit the number of hours older kids can work, and allow employers to pay them less than the amount that adults get paid) are passed into law to make youth more obedient. Because of these restrictions and youth slave runaway laws, there is no underground railroad (yet) for youth, and the only release available is the struggle for freedom. Nowadays, those who think that youth have the right not to be slaves (aka the right to be freedpeople) are few and far between among adults and nonexistent among parent-slavers. There is only one group who will fight for the rights of youth everywhere, and that's youth. Youth make up 2.1 billion of the world's population, and that huge number could be an incredibly large force dedicated to a single cause: freedom. Many youth liberationists are worried that without adults on their side, they can't win. However, youth are so numerous that they don't need adults to win political battles, not now or ever. Youth are also politically important as they are not easily replaced and will be the new backbone of society and the economy, and so political parties cannot afford to carry out the large-scale genocide and crippling necessary to stop a united

youth liberationist movement. This means that youth have leverage and have a certain amount of leeway in pursuing their freedom that other political groups can’t get. When used strategically, this leverage can be used to force anti-youth governments to pass effective pro-youth laws. The political power youth can exert is large, and this political power will grow every time we repeal slave laws, age restrictions, and other anti-youth laws. Every time youth protest and secure the repeal of an anti-youth law, they grow stronger. In time, youth voters could decide elections and be powerful players in determining the culture, laws, and structure of society. Parents fear youth because of this power, because youth have a common set of interests and have the potential to overturn their bigoted and slave-owning ways. The idea of a parent-child relationship where the parent does not exploit their kid is terrifying to them. They reserve the human right to autonomy exclusively for themselves, so the idea of a world where kids do whatever they want is terrifying to them. Youth liberationists cannot rely on adult participation in youth liberation, nor can they afford to grant adults important positions in the movement. This is because even though adults can be awesome people, their political interests are often against youth. Parent participation in the movement can never exist and can only be seen as an attempt at co-option, since, as their slave owners, parents are the political enemies of youth. Youth liberationists should remember that the youth liberation movement is a movement of youth, not adults, and might want to completely refuse political "support" offered by any and all political parties that do not allow all youth ages 0–17 to vote. Political parties will aim to co-opt the movement and will use their superior political experience to beat youth if they are let into the movement. No political party today is a friend of youth liberation because there is no country on earth (yet) that allows all youth ages 0–17 to vote. If they want the support of the youth liberationist movement, then they should act first and give all youth ages 0–17 the right to vote. Only then can they be considered friends of youth liberation.

It’s Okay to be Angry One thing that a lot of youth struggle with is their anger. More specifically, the ability to feel angry in response to abuse and to come to terms with the fact that it’s okay to be angry. Parents often tell us to suppress our anger because it’s “unhealthy” or “never to act out of anger.” At least part of the motivation behind that is good, because acting out of anger can be bad when it hurts other people. In that sense, we shouldn’t act out of anger in order to hurt other people. However, anger is important, and the idea that we shouldn’t act out of anger or that it is unhealthy is just plain wrong. Anger helps us stand up against injustice, and there is a reason that we are wired so that anger affects our actions. Anger helps us tell our parents that it’s not okay to order us around; it helps us stand up for ourselves and say that it’s our life and what we want comes first. If that means that we have to shout, curse, or hurl insults, so be it. One thing that is true of oppressors that isn’t true of the oppressed is that oppressors commonly don’t feel anger when they oppress others. Instead, they feel little because they are too busy reaping their feeling of power over others. For

example, if all parents went around red-faced and spitting mad all day, everyone would notice. Some oppressors may have personal reasons for keeping others down, and so they may act out of anger, but most are just doing evil things, and there isn’t any psychology behind it. Demonizing anger as the culprit behind oppression ignores the fact that anger has almost nothing to do with the actions of parent-slavers. It’s direct power over others that motivates their actions. For youth, on the other hand, anger is very important because it is the soul of resistance. Getting angry about being denied human rights leads to protests and organizing. Being indignant and frustrated leads to calling out and documenting the horrific ways in which parents hurt their kids. Anger is the motivation and fuel of political organizing, protests, and writing. So you’re feeling angry. That’s wonderful. You don’t need to hide away your anger as if it’s some dark part of you; anger is healthy and, just like all of your other emotions, is part of who you are.

How to be a Youth Liberationist Friend One important part of being a youth liberationist friend is making sure that your friend knows that they are not alone. A lot of youth don’t realize that what is happening to them isn’t only happening to them. Parents abuse kids everywhere, and not a single kid can fully escape from that. The idea that they’re alone prevents them from writing about it, organizing with other kids to do something about it, and individually taking steps to avoid the abuse. No matter how unique or specific the abuse is, there is always another youth who is experiencing the same thing. A second important part of being a youth liberationist friend is to make sure that your friend knows that their emotions are justified. It’s okay to feel angry that your parents treat you badly. It’s okay to feel scared of what your parents will do to you next. It’s okay to feel miserable when your parents are forcing you to do things you don’t want to do. All these emotions are justified and valid, and it’s important to let your friend know that “you’re absolutely justified in feeling that” and that “you’re totally in the right.” A third important part of being a youth liberationist friend is to make sure that your friend knows you believe them. Adults almost never believe kids when they say their parents are hurting them. Parents will kick their little girl out of the house, and the parents will call the police and say that she ran away and that she broke their hearts by leaving, ensuring that she neither gets let back into the house nor can get into a youth shelter. She may even get arrested for running away. When she reports them for doing this, people will call her a liar and label her emotionally abusive towards her parents. Parents will repeatedly rape their little boy while spreading the idea that he is mentally ill and has strange fantasies. When he reports his parents and tries to get help, all the churchgoers will call him a liar, demonic, and mentally ill. Parents will force their daughter to work long hours of manual labor rearranging furniture in the middle of the night so that there is no footage, and when she reports them to the police, all the people in the neighborhood will claim that she’s lying and that they “need to hear both sides of the story” (so that they can find a reason to decide that it’s not their problem). The way parents oppress kids is

always strange, unique, and limited only by their imaginations. What seems unbelievable to one person is reality for another, so don’t discriminate against kids just because their parents are cruel and have overactive imaginations. When another kid tells you that their parents are doing something unbelievable to them, letting them know that you believe them is very important. Nine times out of ten, their parents really did do that unbelievable thing to them. Believe all kids!