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FOUNDED IN 2017 —but only became famous in 2022— Budding Rose breaks out as the progressive summer camp for Portland kids to learn to hate the police, despise border security, and become proper radical revolutionary kids.
No, it’s no joke. There is a summer camp in Portland dedicated to indoctrinating kids as young as third grade to become social justice activists.
According to Budding Rose’s website, children attending the camp follow a program that teaches them how to protest and protect themselves from tear gas and introduces them to revolutionary leftist slogans (in English and Spanish). They learn to create their anti-establishment chants and expose them to anti-American propaganda in the best style of the Antifa or Black Lives Matter movements.
How did Budding Roses become national news?
Budding Rose, which had gone virtually unnoticed for four years, gained national recognition when anarchist collectives began to publicize it on social networks asking for donations to carry out the camp on-site this 2022 after two years of the pandemic.
“Help Budding Roses host a fun, free social justice camp for Portland-area youth!” reads the GoFundMe launched by the progressive summer camp. “Budding Roses launched in 2017 as a free, radical social justice summer camp in East Portland for youth in 3rd-9th grade. For four summers, we have provided two-week summer camps including workshops on social justice issues, art projects, outdoor recreation, and free meals and school supplies.”
However, on the GoFundMe — which has already raised nearly $2500 — Budding Roses does not specify the content of its “curriculum” that appears on its website.
Delicately radical content
For example, at Budding Roses, participants learn about the book “As Black As Resistance by Zoe Samudzi and William C . Anderson in a zine-style adaptation for kids.”
“Learn about colonialism, anti-blackness, intersectionality, self-defense, and more!” reads the content description.
Other content provided at the camp is “designed to support teachers, students, parents and families in their conversations about race and the core values of the Black Lives Matter movement.” Here, children can draw BLM movement propaganda.
Additionally, the children’s summer camp provides materials on the proposals of Critical Resistance (CR), “a national grassroots organization working to abolish the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe.” In other words, they teach children that prisons should be abolished.
Reaching the more activist part of the content —where kids are taught to be revolutionaries— Budding Roses shows Portland’s “history of radical organizing,” they teach “What is Police Abolition,” ask participants to imagine “scenarios without police,” and show material “about tear gas and its use by PPB [Portland Police Bureau] during the Summer 2020 protests.”
“Learn about what tear gas is, how it was used in Portland, and ways to keep yourself safe if you get tear gassed,” the camp curriculum reads.
Budding Roses also gives the children an 11-page PDF containing nine revolutionary songs and famous chants from around the world, including the Black National Anthem, the chants of Black Lives Matter, or the favorite song “Violador en Tu Camino” written by feminists in Chile.
The camp also features a series of children’s videos that “will explain some terms like ‘white supremacy,’ ‘intersectionality,’ ‘privilege,’ and ‘systemic racism.'”
Although the camp was not well known nationally until a few hours ago, in its hometown, it had already had some accolades, winning the 2018 “Spirit of Portland Award” for the nonprofit initiative of the year.
Portland was one of the cities in the U.S. that bore the brunt of the riots in the summer of 2020, following the death of George Floyd and the start of the nightly riots supported by Antifa and BLM.
Some right-wing alternative media, such as PJ Media, labeled Budding Roses as an Antifa indoctrination center, accusing them of training young people to support radical causes in the future.
Emmanuel Alejandro Rondón is a journalist at El American specializing in the areas of American politics and media analysis // Emmanuel Alejandro Rondón es periodista de El American especializado en las áreas de política americana y análisis de medios de comunicación.
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