Parenting & Family Quote by Joseph Jackson

Raw possessiveness is doing a lot of work here. Joseph Jackson isn’t speaking like a guardian weighing what’s best for children; he’s talking like a man drawing a perimeter around property. The double negative and the blunt repetition of “those kids” creates a verbal barricade: not a nuanced argument, a lockdown. It’s an instinctive, street-level rhetoric of control, built less on legal reasoning than on dominance and lineage.

The intent is clear: preempt the custody fight by framing any outside intervention as illegitimate from the start. “They Michael’s kids” is doing two jobs at once. On the surface, it’s a claim about biological and familial bonds. Underneath, it’s a claim about authority within a dynasty - the idea that the Jackson family, and by implication Joseph as patriarch, should remain the gravitational center even after Michael’s death. There’s no mention of the children’s preferences, stability, or safety; the emotional priority is ownership and legacy management.

Context matters because the Jackson brand was never just a family - it was an industry, with money, image, and narrative control at stake. In that light, “They have no right” reads as less a moral statement than a power play against courts, ex-spouses, advisers, and the media swarm that circles celebrity estates. The kicker - “It’s going to be a big mess over that” - isn’t a warning so much as a threat dressed up as inevitability: comply, or brace for chaos.