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April 12, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show

54:13

Who’s Really Killing The Kids? | Ep. 1472

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	Teen depression and suicidal ideation are up and there are a bunch of reasons why.
	The White House warns of catastrophic inflationate numbers and Kamala Harris didn't wear a mask at a public event because feelings.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
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	We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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	Well, you've heard the argument quite recently that it is conservatives who are killing the kids.
	This is an argument that has been most clearly articulated by Pete Buttigieg, who literally went on The View two days ago and suggested that Republicans and conservatives are killing kids.
	And the way that they are killing kids is by not teaching small children about gender ideology and sexual orientation.
	And if you don't teach them these things about gender identity and sexual orientation, you are murdering the kids because kids have all sorts of questions about their identity.
	And if you don't answer them, In the most progressive possible way, you are endangering the kids.
	You've also heard, over the course of the last couple years, that conservatives are murdering the children by not masking them up full-time at schools.
	You are putting your own children in danger.
	You don't even care about your own kids.
	Well, one thing is very clear, and the thing that is clear is that teen suicidality, suicidal ideation, depression, all of these things are up.
	And the reason that these things are up, there are a bunch of competing reasons as to why these things are up, but the biggest reason of all is the social incentive structure that has been created via social media, via the media, and via progressive thinking on a wide variety of issues that really damages kids in pretty significant ways.
	There are two big articles from The Atlantic out today specifically about this topic.
	is from Jonathan Haidt over at New York University, and the other is from Derek Thompson, who's a columnist over at The Atlantic.
	So let's begin with a piece from Jonathan Haidt, because this is really important stuff.
	If we're talking about what and who are damaging the kids, then you have to begin with the actual data.
	So here's what Jonathan Haidt writes today, quote, What would it have been like to live in Babylon the days after its destruction?
	In the book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah built a great city in the land of Shinar.
	They built a tower with its top in the heavens to make a name for themselves.
	God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said, look, they're one people.
	They all have one language.
	This is only the beginning of what they will do.
	Nothing they propose to do will now be impossible for them.
	Come, let us go down, confuse their language there, so they will not understand one another's speech.
	The text does not say God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let's hold that dramatic image in our minds.
	People wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.
	The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit.
	Something went terribly wrong very suddenly.
	We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth.
	We are cut off from one another and from the past.
	It has been clear for quite a while now that Red America and Blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history.
	But Babel is not a story about tribalism.
	It's a story about the fragmentation of everything.
	It's about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community.
	It's a metaphor for what is happening not only between Red and Blue, but within the Left and within the Right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.
	Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country's future and to us as a people.
	How did it happen and what does it pretend for American life?
	Says Jonathan Haidt, there is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales.
	We see this trend in biological evolution, in the series of major transitions through which multicellular organisms first appeared and then developed new symbiotic relationships.
	We see it in cultural evolution too.
	As Robert Wright explained in his 1999 book, Non-Zero, The Logic of Human Destiny, Wright showed that history involves a series of transitions driven by rising population density plus new technology, writing, roads, the printing press, that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning.
	Zero-sum conflicts, like wars of religion, were better thought of as temporary setbacks and sometimes even integral to the process.
	The early Internet of the 1990s, with its chat rooms, message boards, and email, exemplified the non-zero thesis, as did the first wave of social media platforms, which launched around 2003.
	By 2008, Facebook had emerged as the dominant platform, with more than 100 million monthly users on its way to roughly 3 billion today.
	In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy.
	What dictator could impose his will on an interconnected citizenry?
	What regime could build a wall to keep out the Internet?
	The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement.
	That's also when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel.
	We were closer than we had ever been to being one people, and we had effectively overcome the curse of division by language.
	In February 2012, as he prepared to take Facebook public, Mark Zuckerberg reflected on those extraordinary times and set forth his plans.
	Quote, today our society has reached another tipping point, he wrote.
	Facebook hopes to rewire the way people spread and consume information by giving them the power to share.
	It would help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.
	So here's where things begin to go wrong, according to Jonathan Haidt.
	Historically, civilizations have relied on shared blood, gods, and enemies to counteract the tendency to split apart as they grow.
	But what is it that holds together a large and diverse secular democracy, like the United States, or India, or for that matter, Britain or France?
	Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind successful democracies.
	First, social capital, extensive social networks with high levels of trust, strong institutions, and shared stories.
	Social media has weakened all three.
	To see how, we have to understand how social media changed over time, especially in the several years following 2009.
	And I want to reiterate what those three factors are according to Jonathan Haidt.
	He's a really good social scientist.
	One, social capital.
	Two, strong institutions.
	And three, shared stories.
	Says Haidt, in their early incarnations, platforms like MySpace and Facebook were relatively harmless.
	They allowed users to create pages on which to post photos, family updates, and links to the most static pages of their friends and favorite bands.
	In this way, early social media can be seen as just another step in the long progression of technological improvement, from the postal service, to telephone, to email, and texting.
	But gradually, social media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations.
	As I wrote in a 2019 Atlantic article with Tobias Rose Stockwell, they became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand, activities that might impress others but don't deepen friendships in the way a private phone conversation will.
	Once social media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation which began in 2009, the intensification of viral dynamics.
	Before 2009, Facebook had given users a simple timeline, a never-ending stream of content generated by friends and connections, with the newest posts at the top and the oldest ones at the bottom.
	This was often overwhelming in volume, but it was an accurate reflection of what others were posting.
	That began to change in 2009, when Facebook offered users a way to publicly like posts with the click of a button.
	That same year, Twitter introduced something even more powerful, the retweet button, which allowed users to publicly endorse a post while also sharing it with all of their followers.
	Facebook soon copied that innovation with its own share button, which became available in 2012.
	Like and share became quickly standard features of most other platforms.
	Shortly after its like button began to produce data about what best engaged users, Facebook started to develop algorithms to bring each user the content most likely to generate a like.
	Later research showed that posts that trigger emotions, especially angered outgroups, are the most likely to be shared.
	By 2013, social media had become a new game with dynamics unlike those in 2008.
	If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would go viral and make you internet famous for a few days.
	If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts, roads of fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game. This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics.
	As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality and politics, I saw this happening.
	The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out the most moralistic and least reflective selves.
	The volume of outrage was shocking.
	And so this undermined all of the factors that you need in order to ensure, for example, that social capital is built.
	And also to uphold institutions.
	And also to shared stories.
	Because people can create competing versions of the same story and the story you like the best is the one that you share.
	Okay, so according to Jonathan, it really is social media and the viralization of politics and content that has allowed for all of this to happen.
	The predictable impact of the rise of social media is the nationalization of institutions.
	When you nationalize all institutions, when you nationalize all ideas, what you end up with is people who are more divided in their actual opinions.
	You agree very strongly with the people you live near.
	Ideological sorting is a thing.
	So take my community, for example.
	I'm an Orthodox Jew.
	Because I'm an Orthodox Jew, this means, according to Jewish law, I have to live within walking distance of a temple so that I can walk to my synagogue on Saturday.
	This means that my community is largely demographically Orthodox Jewish.
	So I share a lot of values with the people among whom I live.
	And this is true across the country.
	People live in pockets of people with whom they generally tend to share values.
	And this is becoming exacerbated because as politics infuse everybody's lives in a lot of ways, people are beginning to ideologically sort.
	So red states are now getting redder and blue states are getting bluer and purple states are hitting a tipping point and then getting either red or blue.
	And what this means is that the values that you share are more tenuous than they used to be unless you happen to live in a place where people really strongly agree with you.
	When you nationalize all issues, when every local issue becomes a national issue, what that ends up doing is undermining the social trust that you have in communities, where the stuff you used to share was apolitical stuff, like going bowling, as Robert Putnam of Harvard used to say.
	Where the stuff you used to share was Little League with your kids.
	And you didn't know what the other parents of the Little League thought about politics.
	You really didn't talk about that.
	You just knew that your kids were on the same team, and you could be nice to each other, and you could hang out together, and you could be friends.
	And then every issue not only became nationalized, but also it was basically downloaded directly into your brain via social media and your smartphone, which you were constantly scrolling for the little endorphin rush that you got every time you refreshed your Twitter page.
	Yeah, all of this is really, really dangerous.
	When you add on top of this, particularly for teens, The need for social approval and an incentive structure that creates social approval for the most bizarre and confused behavior, you end up with higher rates of teen suicidality, with higher rates of teen depression.
	None of this should be a shock.
	We've incentivized the most vulnerable people among us, minors, to engage in activities that get the most clicks and likes.
	And clicks and likes are going to be defined by level of societal celebration and acceptance of particular behavior.
	And society today does not celebrate and accept behavior that is driven by duty or morality in the traditional sense.
	You're gonna get a lot more clicks and likes, for example, on TikTok, if you suggest that you are a transgender person, then you will, if you put up a TikTok video of yourself handing out food at a homeless shelter with your church.
	Viral content is driven by stuff that people want to see, and people are naturally driven to see and look at things that are out of the ordinary, that are considered strange or new.
	We're driven by the need to see the new.
	That's something the human brain is driven by.
	And you cannot disconnect the rise of social media from the rise of progressive politics.
	Social media, without the rise of a progressive, mainlined attitude toward extraordinarily radical issues, would not be nearly as damaging as it has now become.
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	Which brings us to this other piece by Derek Thompson today over at The Atlantic.
	It's called, Why American Teens Are So Sad.
	It's about four forces that are propelling the rising rates of depression among young people.
	He points out the United States is experiencing an extreme teenage mental health crisis.
	From 2009 to 2011, 2021, the share of American high school students who say they feel persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness rose from 26% a quarter to 44%, according to a new CDC study.
	This is the highest level of teenage sadness ever recorded.
	Now, theoretically, we should have the highest levels of teenage happiness ever recorded, should we not?
	Because after all, teens are freer to do now what they want to do than ever before.
	Their parents celebrate them doing whatever they want to do, whatever floats their boat, however they identify, whatever sexual behavior they wish to engage in.
	Whatever they do is met with societal approval because self-esteem is the key.
	As we become a more progressive society in terms of how we raise our teenagers and in terms of how social media treats teenagers, teenagers are not becoming happier, they're becoming a lot sadder.
	Because it turns out that human liberty and human freedom requires boundaries.
	It requires duties.
	It requires institutions.
	It requires roles.
	The truth is that human happiness is reliant on you playing a series of roles.
	And we used to understand this in civilization.
	All sorts of civilizations understood this.
	And in fact, if you go to the cemeteries, I've mentioned before, if you go to the cemetery, you can see this.
	When you go to the cemetery and you look at the epitaphs on the graves, what you will see on the headstones is a description of roles.
	Father and husband.
	Mother and daughter.
	Mother and sister.
	Friend.
	Right?
	These are all roles.
	These are things that have rules attached to them.
	You can't be a good mother unless you perform a series of rituals with your kids.
	Unless you fulfill a series of duties with your kids.
	The same thing is true of being a good son, or being a good daughter, or being a good husband, or being a good wife.
	All of these roles are what give your life definition.
	And then, in the 20th century, Western civilization decided that the truth about human happiness lay in blowing up those rules.
	That if you blew up the rules, and you experienced unfettered liberty, meaning libertinism, if you were just able to get rid of the rules, all of the rules, and discovered the inner authenticity, the inner you, this is where happiness truly lay.
	And for a long time, And that sort of ideology had been basically stymied by the realities of life.
	Because the thing is that if you acted like a libertine, there were actual consequences to it.
	And then in the 1960s, we alleviated a lot of those consequences through the creation of new technologies.
	For good and for bad, right?
	Birth control pill.
	Very good in many ways because it allowed people to plan how they wanted to live their lives in terms of having kids.
	Very bad in the sense that it completely disconnected sex from obligation.
	Which is actually has some pretty dire side effects as it turns out societally.
	Well, once you blew up the rules, and then once you as a society created a social media contagion that celebrated, the more authentic you were, and the more authentic, you know how we can tell you're truly authentic?
	The more rules that you defy, the more rules that you blow up, that's the more authentic you are.
	In fact, we can adjudicate your level of authenticity by how many rules you destroy, by how many people you refuse to go along with the social institutions.
	You are a hero.
	This means you are the most authentic you.
	The most authentic you is not the person who lives in accordance with duty and with roles and with society building and building social capital and helping to reshore up those institutions and helping to share stories with one another, all the factors that build civilizations.
	The thing that makes you the most authentic is bucking all those things.
	If you break the social capital, this means that you are just being the most you that you could possibly be.
	If you destroy institutions that create roles and rules, this means you are the most you that you could possibly be.
	And so we celebrate you.
	If you have your own story, forget about history, herstory.
	We need your story, your truth, your refusal to share a story with others.
	But instead, everybody else to accept your story?
	This means that you're the most authentic you that you can be.
	The cult of authenticity that has arisen basically from the 1960s on had been tried beginning in the early 1800s by the Romantics, but then it actually took real hold in Western civilization in the 60s, and now it has been wildly exacerbated by the rise of social media, which allows you to like and make viral a bunch of content that demonstrates authenticity.
	This sort of stuff has dire ramifications for the most vulnerable among us.
	Because guess what it is to raise a child?
	What it is to raise a child in any sort of normal civilization is to civilize the child.
	I have three kids.
	They're eight, five, and two.
	And they are uncivilized.
	Because kids are uncivilized.
	They have no prefrontal cortex to speak of.
	They are all amygdala.
	All they are in terms of brain development is an emotional center and not a lot of forethought.
	Your forethought happens here and your emotional center happens in the amygdala.
	Your prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until you hit your mid-twenties.
	So, what this means is that teenagers have the greatest imbalance between amygdala response and prefrontal cortex.
	Their prefrontal cortexes are really underdeveloped.
	Their amygdalas are really overdeveloped because the hormones are now flowing.
	And what this means is that they are really unstable.
	So it requires stronger institutions to hem in kids.
	Stronger rules.
	And kids like the rules.
	They desire the rules.
	They require the rules.
	And if you don't give them the rules, they destroy themselves.
	And this is what we are watching right now.
	All this nonsense about how parents need to just give kids the freedom to be kids.
	Okay, that's true to the extent that you need to give kids the freedom to make mistakes.
	It is not true to the extent that you allow kids to make up their own rules and to buck institutions and destroy those institutions or suggest that the institutions of which you are a part are actually guilty of killing kids by existing.
	What kills kids is destroying all of the boundaries.
	That is the same thing as allowing your three-year-old to walk alone on the freeway.
	You would never do that.
	But societally speaking, this is precisely what we have done, not only with small kids, but also with teenagers.
	So here's what Derek Thompson writes today.
	And again, his message is not exactly mine.
	I'm just gonna read you what he says, and then I'm gonna explain where we differ.
	He says, the government survey of almost 8,000 high school students, which was conducted in the first months of 2021, found a great deal of variation in mental health among different groups.
	More than one in four girls reported they had seriously contemplated attempting suicide during the pandemic, which was twice the rate of boys.
	Now, this happens to be fairly consistent.
	Teenage girls tend to be more suicidal than teenage boys.
	Nearly half of LGBTQ teens said they had contemplated suicide during the pandemic, compared with 14% of their heterosexual peers.
	Sadness among white teens seems to be rising faster than among other groups.
	But overall, there's a general rise.
	The differentials, by the way, are very, very consistent.
	So LGBT teens are significantly more suicidal and more depressed than teens who are not LGBT.
	And males are significantly less depressed and less suicidal than females are.
	According to Derek Thompson, the big picture is the same across all categories.
	Almost every measure of mental health is getting worse.
	For every teenage demographic, it's happening all over the country.
	Since 2009, statilists and hopelessness have increased for every race, for straight teens and gay teens, for teens who say they've never had sex, and for those who say they've had sex with males and or females, for students in each year of high school, for teens in all 50 states.
	Why is this happening?
	So he says the first fallacy is we can chalk all this up to teens behaving badly.
	In fact, a lot of self-reported teen behaviors are moving in a positive direction.
	Drinking and driving is down 50% from the 90s.
	School fights are down 50%.
	Sex is down more than 70% before the age of 13.
	And LGBTQ acceptance is up.
	So the idea here is that It's not bullying, right?
	Which that's true.
	It is not bullying.
	But again, as we will see when he speaks of bad behavior, he is speaking of behavior that you would call a victim driven behavior, right?
	Bullying or drunk driving.
	But he's not talking about bad behavior in the sense of breaking institutions and roles and indoctrinating kids in the idea that the destruction of roles and rules is good for them, which is the long term trend in destroying the mental health of minors.
	The second fallacy is the teens have always been moody and sadness looks like it is rising because more people are willing to talk about it.
	Objective measures of anxiety and depression like eating disorders, self-harming behaviors, teen suicides are up sharply over the past decade.
	The third fallacy is today's mental health crisis was principally caused by the pandemic and an overreaction to COVID.
	It wasn't principally caused by those things.
	So instead, Derek Thompson suggests that there are four factors that are propelling the increase in depression and suicidality.
	And underscoring all of this, as I'm going to argue in just a moment, underscoring all of these factors, is the rising tide of a progressive social ethos that believes that the destruction of social fabric, social institutions, and shared stories is actually a net good for society.
	Again, a man alone on a desert island is not truly free.
	That is the only person, by the way, who has no rules and rules attached to him.
	But that person is not free.
	That's what we've created.
	We've isolated teens by not having them engage in the process of civilization.
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	Okay, so here's what Derek Thompson writes in The Atlantic about the four factors that are militating in favor of the increase in teen depression and suicidality.
	One, social media use.
	As we've discussed from Jonathan Haidt, not a shock.
	As teens look for approval from others, and they look for the likes, and they try to craft their public images, and they feel the blowback when their public image does not meet with approval, this has increased teen depression.
	He says, one explanation is that teenagers, and teenage girls in particular, are uniquely sensitive to the judgment of friends, teachers, and the digital crowd.
	As I've written, social media seems to hijack this keen peer sensitivity and drive obsessive thinking about body image and popularity.
	The problem isn't just that social media fuels anxiety, but also that it makes it harder for today's young people to cope with the pressures of growing up.
	Two, sociality is down.
	According to a couple of social scientists, one is named Jean Twenge, a psychologist, And the other is named Steinberg.
	According to these two social scientists, they stress the biggest problem with social media might not be social media itself, but rather the activities it replaces.
	Steinberg says, I tell parents all the time, if Instagram is merely displacing TV, I'm not concerned about it.
	But today's teens spend more time than ever on social media, five hours daily on social media.
	And that habit seems to be displacing a lot of beneficial activity.
	The share of high school students who got eight or more hours of sleep declined 30% between 2007 and 2019.
	Today's teens are less likely to go out with friends, get their driver's licenses, or play youth sports.
	Three, the world is stressful and there's more news about the world's stressors.
	Lisa D'Amour, clinical psychologist and author, said no single factor can account for the rise of teen sadness.
	She believes a part of the answer is that the world has become more stressful, or at least teenagers' perceptions of the world seem to be causing them more stress.
	In the last decade, teenagers have become increasingly stressed by concerns about gun violence, climate change, and the political environment, she wrote in an email.
	Hey, who does that sound like?
	Who's militating in favor of a panic-emergency-driven state?
	Gun violence, climate change, the political environment?
	Would that be progressivism rearing its ugly head?
	I mean, by the way, you tell teens that the world is going to end during their lifetime, and you try out Greta Thunberg to explain how disappointed she is in all of you?
	That's not gonna have a great mental impact.
	So sociality is down.
	Socializing, by the way, happens in the context of institutions.
	Happens in school, happens in church, happens in sports leagues, happens in all the places you need to build social capital.
	All the places that have been deemed not particularly necessary or appropriate, and more likely to cram down conservative social values than is necessary.
	And finally, Derek Thompson says, modern parenting strategies.
	He says in the past 40 years, American parents, especially those with a college degree, have nearly doubled the amount of time they spend coaching, chauffeuring, tutoring, and otherwise helping their teenage children.
	The economist Valerie Ramey has labeled this the rug rat race.
	High-income parents in particular are spending much more time preparing their kids for competitive college admissions process.
	He says the rug rat race is an upper-class phenomenon that can't explain a generalized increase in teen sadness, but it could well explain part of what is going on.
	So, um, This is the part that I disagree with.
	The idea that the parents are now more demanding than ever because kids are basically over-parented.
	No, there's one other problem that has been happening that no one is going to talk about.
	And so we'll talk about it now.
	And that is, again, the destruction of all of the traditional demands upon teens to socialize and to engage in proper behavior and to form their identity in conjunction with the institutions that help them live a happier life.
	I'm gonna come back to, as church attendance has declined, sadness and depression have gone up.
	As synagogue attendance has declined, sadness and depression have gone up.
	As sexual freedom, and not even just how much sex teens are having, because that's gone down, the idea that your identity is wrapped up in your sexual identity, as that has gone up, teen sadness and depression have also gone up.
	There is a wide differential, by the way, between, with regard to teens, Suicidality, depression rates between, for example, lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth and heterosexual youths.
	And that is not due to societal discrimination.
	It is very consistent across place.
	It is very consistent across time.
	Because there's no question that LGBT acceptance by the media and by society generally has led to a tremendous increase in the number of people who now identify this way.
	And celebration has led to an enormous increase in the number of people who identify this way.
	And so, just two factors we're gonna have to take into account when we look at the rising rates in total of teens who are experiencing depression, suicidal ideation.
	Okay, one, people who identify as Non-cis heterosexual people who identify this way are much more likely to suffer from depression and suicidality.
	And two, the number of people who identify this way has spiked dramatically among teenagers.
	Those are just two facts.
	Take from that what you will, but those are the statistical facts.
	And so is it possible that a society that actually cheers, celebrates, deems as the height of human happiness and authenticity, the finding that you are not in conjunction with society's rules is actually incentivizing teens to be more depressed?
	Is actually confusing teens and making them less happy?
	The rates is according to the CDC.
	Percentage of US high school students who felt sad or hopeless 2019 Lesbian, gay, and bisexual, 66.3% in 2019.
	Heterosexual, 32.2%.
	So more than double the rate for LGB youth.
	This doesn't include T. We'll get to T in just one second because T is rising dramatically.
	Seriously considered suicide.
	LGB, 47% in 2019.
	Heterosexual, 14.5%.
	Made a suicide plan.
	Okay, so that's pretty serious.
	Lesbian, gay, and bisexual, 40.2%.
	Heterosexual, 12.1%.
	Attempted suicide.
	Actual suicide attempt.
	Lesbian, gay, bisexual, 23.4%.
	Heterosexual, 6.4%.
	40.2% heterosexual 12.1% attempted suicide actual suicide attempt lesbian gay bisexual 23.4% heterosexual 6.4% about four times the rate if you are lgb now this does not mean that we shouldn't have sympathy for people who are suicidal no matter why they are suicidal
	But, if you are driving an increasing number of young people to identify as members of the LGBTQ+, IA-, etc., and it turns out that the suicidality and depression rates among this group of people is very, very high, you should not be surprised when there's additional suicidality in the cohort in general.
	Obviously.
	I mean, again, there are wild disparities in these statistics.
	And pretending they don't exist isn't going to make them go away.
	This does not include, by the way, the transgender adolescent suicide rate is extraordinary.
	According to an article, this is from PubMed, the authors are Russell Toomey, Amy Sivertson, and Morris Schramko.
	This is from the Journal of Pediatrics, October of 2018.
	Nearly 14% of adolescents reported a suicide attempt.
	Disparities by gender identity in suicide attempts were found.
	Female to male adolescents, Right?
	This is the most fast-growing group of people who now identify as transgender or female-to-male.
	So it used to be a vast majority of people who identified as transgender were male-to-female.
	Now it has reversed because of rapid onset gender dysphoria, social contagion, and social media.
	The suicide rate, attempted suicide rate, okay?
	This isn't even like suicidal ideation, like thought about suicide.
	This is attempted suicide rate.
	Female-to-male adolescents, 50.8%, more than half, Followed by adolescents who identified as not exclusively male or female, 41.8%.
	Male to female adolescents, 29.9%.
	Questioning adolescents, 27.9%.
	Female adolescents generally, 17.6%.
	And male adolescents, 9.8%.
	Identifying as non-heterosexual exacerbated the risk for all adolescents, except for those who did not exclusively identify as male or female.
	If you're non-binary, it didn't really exacerbate it.
	It was just sort of wrapped into the package.
	For transgender adolescents, no other sociodemographic characteristic was associated with suicide attempts.
	So the idea that it's just, you know, class, or that it's race, no.
	Across all boundaries, these are the stats.
	What that suggests is, again, if you have a population that has gone from, and I'm looking at the Gallup polls right now, the LGBT identification in the United States has spiked unbelievably dramatically.
	In 2012, the number of Americans who self-identified as LGBTQIA+, etc.
	was 3.5%.
	In 2013, it was 3.6%.
	In 2014, it was 3.7%.
	By 2021, it was 7.1%, more than doubling from 2012.
	In 2013, it was 3.6%.
	In 2014, it was 3.7%.
	By 2021, it was 7.1%, more than doubling from 2012.
	And it is very, very striated by age.
	Here are the responses by age.
	If you were born before 1946, 0.8% of people born before 1946 identified as LGBTQ.
	If you were born from 1997 to 2003, 20.8% identify as LGBTQ.
	as LGBTQ. If you were born from 1997 to 2003, 20.8% identify as LGBTQ.
	Okay, by the way, that is people who are aged 19 to 25. 19 to 25.
	For people who are currently aged 12 to 19, I guarantee you it's way higher than 20.8%.
	How do I know?
	Because for each successive generation, it is increasing dramatically.
	And it's increasing dramatically specifically because of social contagion and social incentivization and all of this sort of stuff.
	Okay, add on top of that, By the way, all of the insanity about locking people in their homes during COVID and masking them up so that they don't even have social contact.
	And is it any shock whatsoever that you have this massive increase in suicidal ideation and depression?
	Why is this a shock at all?
	Again, remove all boundaries for people who have no capacity to create their own.
	And what you end up with is not freedom.
	You end up with suffering.
	A great example of this.
	Today, there's an article, it's a heartbreaking article in the Washington Post, by a person named Corinna Cohn.
	It's called, What I Wish I'd Known When I Was 19 and Had Sex Reassignment Surgery.
	Because we've not been able to talk about any of this stuff.
	You're not supposed to.
	If you mention the costs of sex reassignment surgery, or if you mention the fact that transition does not actually prevent suicide, according to best available data, Longitudinal study from Sweden, for example, that covered a 30-year time span found adults who underwent surgical transition were 19 times more likely than age-matched peers to die by suicide overall.
	Female-to-male participants was 40 times the expected rate, according to one 2011 study, for example.
	If you mention this stuff, you're considered very bad.
	You're breaking the rules, the new rules.
	Okay, so according to this columnist in the Washington Post, this person talks openly about the cost of this sort of stuff that you're not supposed to talk about.
	Is it any shock that when you have a society that lies to you, About the evils of traditional male and female roles, for example.
	Not suggesting that females belong in the kitchen and that males are out killing tigers in front of the cave, but suggests that females Are different than males in very strong and important ways, including the ability to bear and rear children differently than males do.
	And when you destroy all of that and you don't prepare people for motherhood and fatherhood, when you don't prepare people for becoming responsible members of a religious or social community, that they don't do that, that instead they become free-floating, atomistic agents who are a danger to themselves.
	Is that a shock?
	It shouldn't be.
	We'll get into this amazing piece in the Washington Post in a moment.
	First, we're a little over a year into Joe Biden's presidency, and honest to God, I didn't think that it was possible for a doddering old fool to set so many things on fire this quickly.
	From gas prices to the war in Ukraine, it's safe to say the leader of the free world, he is just stumbling around and banging his head against hard objects.
	Not only that, massive corporations like Disney are showing us what they really have in mind for our future generations, complete left-wing indoctrination on social issues.
	Which is why you should tune in to catch an all-new episode of all of your favorites discussing what's happening and how we are actively fighting it on Backstage tomorrow.
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	So there's a heartbreaking article from a person named Corinna Cohn, a software developer in Indianapolis.
	who is an officer in the Gender Care Consumer Advocacy Network and is titled, What I Wish I'd Known When I Was 19 and Had Sex Reassignment Surgery.
	Quote, When I was 19, I had surgery for sex reassignment, or what is now called gender affirmation surgery.
	A callow young man who was obsessed with transitioning to womanhood could not have imagined reaching middle age.
	But now I'm closer to 50, keeping a watchful eye on my 401k and dieting and exercising the hope I'll have a healthy retirement.
	In terms of my priorities and interests today, that younger incarnation of myself might as well have been a different person.
	Yet that was the person who committed me to a lifetime set apart from my peers.
	There's much debate today about transgender treatment, especially for young people.
	Others might feel differently about their choices, but I know now I wasn't old enough to make that decision.
	Given the strong cultural forces today casting a benign light on these matters, I thought it might be helpful for young people and their parents to hear what I wish I had known.
	I once believed I would be more successful finding love as a woman than as a man.
	But in truth, few straight men are interested in having a physical relationship with a person who was born the same sex as they were.
	In high school, when I experienced crushes on my male classmates, I believed the only way those feelings could be requited was if I altered my body.
	It turned out several of my crushes were gay.
	If I had confessed my interest, what might have happened?
	As a teenager, I was repelled by the thought of having biological children.
	But in my vision of the adult future, I imagined marrying a man and adopting a child.
	It was easy to sacrifice my ability to reproduce in pursuit of fulfilling my dream.
	Years later, I was surprised by the pangs I felt as my friends and younger sister started families of their own.
	The sacrifices I made seemed irrelevant to the teenager I was.
	Someone with gender dysphoria, yes, but also anxiety and depression.
	The most severe cause of dread came from my own body.
	I was not prepared for puberty, nor for the strong sexual drive typical for my age and sex.
	Surgery unshackled me from my body's urges, but the destruction of my gonads introduced a different type of bondage.
	From the day of my surgery, I became a medical patient, and will remain one for the rest of my life.
	I must choose between the risks of taking exogenous estrogen, which include venous thromboembolism and stroke, or the risks of taking nothing, which includes degeneration of bone health.
	In either case, my risk of dementia is higher, a side effect of eschewing testosterone.
	What was I seeking for my sacrifice?
	A feeling of wholeness and perfection.
	I was still a virgin when I went in for surgery.
	I mistakenly believed this made my choice more serious and authentic.
	I chose an irreversible change before I'd even begun to understand my sexuality.
	The surgeon deemed my operation a good outcome, but intercourse never became pleasurable.
	When I tell friends they're saddened by the loss, but to abstract me, I cannot grieve the absence of a thing I've never had.
	Weren't my parents in all this?
	They were aware of what I was doing, but by that point, I had pushed them out of my life.
	I didn't need parents questioning me or establishing realistic expectations, especially when I found all I needed online.
	Is this sound?
	Like, maybe this is what we're talking about here?
	I shudder to think of how distorting today's social media is for confused teenagers.
	I'm also alarmed by how readily authority figures facilitate transition.
	I had to persuade two therapists, an endocrinologist, and a surgeon to give me what I wanted.
	None of them were under the crushing professional pressure as they would now be to quote-unquote affirm my choice.
	I may well have transitioned after waiting a few years.
	If I hadn't transitioned, I likely would have suffered from the world in other ways.
	In other words, I'm still working out how much regret to feel, but I'm comfortable with the ambiguity.
	What advice would I pass on to young people?
	Learning to fit in your body is a common struggle.
	Fad diets, body shape and clothing, cosmetic surgery are all signs that countless millions of people, at some point, have a hard time accepting their own reflection.
	The prospect of sex can be intimidating, but sex is essential in healthy relationships.
	Give it a chance before permanently altering your body.
	Most of all, slow down.
	Or maybe, perhaps, we should think about the roles that have been developed over the course of centuries because they are important.
	Maybe it turns out that the source of all wisdom is not your bizarre new notions of how society ought to work and how biology ought not count.
	Perhaps, in the end, there are really only three sources of human knowledge.
	One is the actual facts on the ground, biological reality.
	Two is the accepted wisdom of the ages, which is, in fact, a tested and tried hypothesis.
	And you need to actually debunk that hypothesis before simply tossing it out the window, especially when it's been tried over the course of centuries.
	The basic rule when it comes to destroying roles and rules in society, you have to explain why those roles and rules have failed and why things will be better if you uproot them.
	You can't just destroy them willy-nilly.
	Because they are far more tested and tried than whatever nonsense you came up with at your head this very moment.
	And finally, human reason.
	But it has to be connected.
	Reason can't be free-floating.
	Rationalism is not a solution here.
	Because people come up with all sorts of dumb ideas out of their own heads.
	It has to be connected with realities, factual, biological realities.
	It has to be connected with the realities of tradition.
	And then you can make incremental changes if you are engaged in that ongoing dialectic process, that conversation between reason and biology and accepted tradition and wisdom.
	If you just jettison two of the three, or as we now do, all three, you shouldn't be surprised when people find themselves to be completely disconnected from reality, from logic, and from happiness.
	None of that should be a shock.
	And of course, all of this is exacerbated again by a social media climate that celebrates you the more that you violate the rules, which is how you end up with videos like this one.
	There's an Oklahoma teacher who's literally explaining to kids that if your parents disagree with you, I will be your new parent.
	And when social media is your parent, you don't have parents who are an orphan.
	If your parents don't love and accept you for who you are this Christmas, f*** them.
	I'm your parents now.
	I'm proud of you.
	Drink some water.
	I love you.
	Bye.
	You don't.
	He doesn't know you.
	He doesn't know anything about you.
	This doesn't seem like a particularly happy person either.
	But again, destroying rules, destroying rules.
	This is what the progressive left lives for.
	And as they win, and as that message is spread via social media, and as control is taken out of the hands of parents who actually care about their kids a lot more than these morons on social media, kids are going to become less and less happy.
	So who's really killing the kids?
	An ideology that suggests that the most vulnerable people in our society should be making life-altering decisions forever based on the celebration of a bunch of idiots on social media who spend all day clicking like buttons.
	That's a great way to destroy your society and we are definitely doing that right now.
	Okay, meanwhile...
	The new inflation stats are out and they are absolutely horrifying.
	The new inflation stats show that we are now at 8.5%.
	8.5% is the highest since the late 70s, early 1980s.
	This is massive inflation.
	Now, the White House was warning yesterday this is exactly what was going to be announced.
	There was Jen Psaki yesterday announcing this.
	Because of the actions we've taken to address the Putin price hike, we are in a better place than we were last month.
	But we expect March CPI headline inflation to be extraordinarily elevated due to Putin's price hike.
	And we expect a large difference between core and headline inflation reflecting the global disruptions in energy and food markets.
	The numbers are astonishing.
	The food index increased 8.8%.
	That is the largest 12-month increase since the period ending May of 1981 when we were in the middle of Jimmy Carter's stagflation.
	That was the tail end of it before Paul Volcker ratcheted up the interest rates to like 18-20%.
	President Biden, by the way, is fighting back the oil prices.
	How's he doing so?
	He's going to announce that his administration will temporarily allow E15 gasoline, which is gasoline that uses a 15% ethanol blend, typically banned for sale from June to September to be sold this summer.
	Wow, that's gonna fix the problem.
	Is ethanol.
	Ethanol is gonna fix the problem.
	Sure.
	It is a 1.2% increase in the inflation rate since last month's report.
	That is still the highest single increase since 2005.
	Hourly earnings are down 2.7%.
	Weekly earnings are down 6%.
	That renders essentially all wage gains absolutely meaningless.
	So just a disaster area of inflation under the Biden administration.
	None of that is particularly shocking.
	Well, the good news is we have Kamala Harris out there to explain how they are really interested in lowering Americans' monthly bills.
	The president and I know that one of the biggest challenges facing working families today is the rising cost of living.
	Helping Americans lower their monthly bills is one of our administration's top priorities.
	And that is why we are here today.
	Yeah, and you've been so good at it that you've ratcheted up America's living bills beyond the measure of the rational.
	Speaking of which, the people who are getting hurt the worst are the people who are on fixed incomes, of course.
	If you're on a fixed income, the new inflation stats are just wrecking you.
	Because, after all, the amount of money that you're getting every month is exactly the same, and now everything costs a lot more.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, signs are mounting that high inflation is helping propel more people, including retirees, back into the labor force, according to economists.
	That could be good for the economy overall, as a growing workforce boosts the economy's growth prospects.
	It could ease staffing shortages that have pushed up wages and added to price pressures.
	But for many people, including those who rely on pensions or limited savings, rising prices are an unwelcome development, forcing them back onto the job market.
	Inflation is a tax on a couple of types of people.
	One, people with savings, and two, people of low income.
	That is where inflation really hurts people.
	According to Joseph Broussoulis, the chief economist at RSMUS, quote, We're beginning to see the migration of the older cohort who expected to live on fixed income and a low interest rate and low inflation environment that has not materialized.
	Therefore, they have to come back to the labor force to create the conditions so they can retire.
	He said, really, what you're dealing with is an inflationary shock that has elicited a change in this behavior.
	The share of people aged over 55 either working or looking for a job rose to 39% in March from 38% in October.
	More than 480,000 people in that age group entered the labor force during the past six months.
	Now, this makes sense.
	Inflation is basically driving people back into the workforce.
	So all of the talk about how people were going to be quitting long-term from the economy, that was only true so long as Joe Biden could subsidize them.
	But he can't subsidize them, not to the tune of the inflation that he has now created.
	Roughly 2.6 million Americans retired earlier than expected between February 2020 and October 2021.
	Now many are returning to work at rates not seen since March 2020.
	Again, people still need to pay their bills.
	And this is deeply connected with the stupidity of the Biden administration, which continues to pour money on raging gas fires of inflation.
	It's pretty incredible.
	I mean, Joe Biden's solution to this, by the way, is still to push the bill back better.
	Meanwhile, one of the things that is exacerbating the ramp up, the lack of production, which is necessary in order to cut down on inflation, is continued talk about COVID mandates and COVID restrictions.
	This administration just can't let go.
	So Joe Biden's new COVID advisor, Ashish Jha, said yesterday, maybe we'll extend the airline mask mandates.
	On what basis?
	The airline mask mandates have never been useful, ever.
	Those HIPAA filters in the planes are incredibly good.
	Planes were never a vector of transmission.
	And yet, here is the Biden administration saying they want to mask up forever on planes.
	Again, it's this sort of stuff.
	This stuff does have an impact on how the economy works.
	Does that mean that extending the mask mandate in public transportation is a live option?
	It's on the table?
	Yeah, look, this is a CDC decision, and I think it is absolutely on the table, and Dr. Walensky is going to make her decision based on the framework that the CDC scientists create, and we'll make a decision collectively based on that.
	Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
	No, I think you'll make a decision based on what you think is politically valuable at the time.
	The good news about this White House is that even as they push things like masks for all of you peasants on the planes, people like Kamala Harris don't need to wear masks.
	This time, Kamala Harris was not wearing a mask indoors during an event for Keitanji Brown-Jackson, who was just confirmed for her slot to the Supreme Court.
	Jen Psaki was asked about why it is that Kamala Harris doesn't have to mask up like the little people, and here was her answer.
	You said on Friday that the Vice President was masked indoors all day, but the White House tweeted a video showing her standing over the President without a mask on.
	Can you explain what happened there?
	Well, I would say that the Vice President and the President and all of us abide by what the CDC protocols are.
	It was an emotional day.
	It was a historic day.
	And there were moments when she was not wearing a mask inside, including in a photo, but she was wearing it 99.9% of the time.
	For those of you who are not peasants, if you have an emotional day, like, say, you have a parent dying in the hospital, or an emotional day, like, say, a wedding, an emotional day, a historic day, something that matters to you, it doesn't matter.
	You need to mask up forever.
	I mean, you're indoors, obviously.
	But Kamala Harris was having an emotional day.
	She's having a moment.
	She's having an emotional, feelings-driven moment.
	So she doesn't have to wear a mask.
	This is like London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, who's unmasked inside in a club, but the spirit moved her, so that was okay.
	It's amazing how when feelings move, Democrats, they're allowed to take off the mask.
	And frankly, I think this should be all of our excuses.
	Every time we get on a plane from now on, we should all just say, listen, I'm having a historic day.
	It's an emotional day for me here on this plane.
	This is the first time I've ever been on this particular plane.
	It's very historic and emotional for me.
	I don't need to wear a mask anymore because after all, I learned from the vice president of the United States that if I'm having a moment, here's my emotional support animal.
	My emotional support cheetah, I brought it with me.
	Here's my proof.
	I don't need to wear a mask.
	It's an emotional moment for all of us.
	And this means I no longer have to wear a mask.
	It's all just an issue of control for these folks.
	And those issues of control have serious bleed over effect for how the state is run.
	And that has bleed over effects for your kids going to school, has bleed over effects for the economy, has bleed over effects even in terms of simple decisions about how you're going to live your life.
	So you've got the Biden administration, which is out there exacerbating COVID talk, COVID lockdown talk again, and more sorts of restrictions as we enter the summer.
	And meanwhile, the inflation stats are just out of control, completely out of control.
	And once again, I bring you Kamala Harris, who does not know what a Pell Grant is, explaining why we need to now have the government essentially waive student debt, which by the way, increases inflation.
	Have you increased Pell Grants? We have definitely extended the, and it's something that I think we need to keep doing, the awareness about what we have to do on Pell Grants. And I can follow up with you on specifically what we've been doing, but I can tell you that when I was in the Senate, I was definitely working on the Pell Grant issue because it can't be what it was when I was Howard.
	Okay, so very edifying stuff there from the Vice President of the United States.
	Meanwhile, Philadelphia is announcing a new indoor mask mandate April 18th.
	It said, quote, The Philadelphia Department of Public Health established a benchmark system in February that uses case counts, hospitalizations, and the increase in case rates to determine which safety strategies are needed.
	This is according to Philadelphia Enquirer.
	The seven-day daily average of cases, 142 as of April 8th, and a 60% increase in case counts over the past 10 days met the standards to reintroduce the indoor mask mandate.
	The paper cited health commissioner, Cheryl Bedigal, saying the number of cases have prompted the move.
	Quote, if we fail to act now, knowing every previous wave of infections has been followed by a wave of hospitalizations and a wave of deaths, it'll be too late for many of our residents.
	They are reintroducing the indoor mask mandate in Philadelphia.
	Just genius stuff here happening from the Democrats.
	By the way, it is worth noting at this point that according to a new paper from Phil Kirpin, Stephen Moore, and Casey Mulligan, available at the National Bureau of Economic Research, it's a report card on states' response to COVID-19.
	And what they find is essentially the blue states completely blew it.
	So they measured which states did best, and they measured it using three categories, the economy, education, and mortality.
	So they looked at unemployment and GDP by state, and then they looked at the Burbio cumulative in-person instruction percentage for the 2020-2020 school year, right?
	So this is who kept their schools open.
	And then they looked at COVID-associated deaths reported to the CDC, and all cause excess mortality.
	And here is what they found.
	They found that the states that did the best were nearly all red states, and the states that did the worst were nearly all blue states.
	They said, That on the basis of economics, the states that ended up doing the best in mortality rate, excess mortality, the states that did the best were states like Utah.
	Vermont did really well.
	Florida did really well.
	States like California did incredibly poorly.
	What they find is that there's no relationship between reduced economic activity during the pandemic and composite mortality measure.
	So lockdown economies did not actually have better health.
	There's no actual correlation.
	They also find that there is only moderate correlation between school closures and the mortality measure, but they don't believe that that relationship is causal.
	They did find a strong relationship between states that had poor economic performance and closed down schools.
	So here's what they concluded.
	Quote, three states that stand out as having combined scores well above the others, Utah, Nebraska, and Vermont.
	They're substantially above average in all three categories.
	Six more states followed, including Montana and South Dakota, almost two standard deviations above the average in terms of economy, but 0.8 to 1.0 below in terms of mortality, i.e. higher death rates.
	New Hampshire and Maine were about 1.5 standard deviations above average on mortality, while also somewhat above average economically.
	Although sometimes criticized as having policies that were quote, too open, Florida proved to have average mortality while maintaining a high level of economic activity and 96% open schools.
	When we combined these three categories using z-scores, future research could consider weights reflecting revealed preference.
	Meaning, like, which things do people think matter the most?
	But they say that the four states with the most negative per capita rates of net migration from July 2020 to July 2021 were D.C., New York, Illinois, and California, and all were in the bottom six in terms of composite score in terms of economy, open schools, and all-cause mortality.
	So again, well done to the lockdown crew for, once again, breaking things beyond recognition.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here a little bit later today for another hour of content.
	In the meantime, go check out one of our newest podcasts, Morning Wire.
	On today's episode, they report on the controversial abortion bill.
	Colorado's governor has now signed into law.
	That episode is available right now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
	Make sure to tune in.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
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	On today's episode, Biden announces new gun control measures, Elon Musk turns down Twitter's offer to join its board of directors, and Colorado's governor signs a controversial abortion bill into law.

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