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Feb. 15, 2024 - Epoch Times
51:50
[FREE EPISODE] Karol Markowicz: 'Ultimate Revolutionaries’—How the Woke Regime Indoctrinates Kids
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This happened in a red enclave, in a red hamlet, in a red town, in a red county.
And it's like, I need these people to understand that this could happen anywhere.
New York Post columnist Carol Markowitz was a self-described New York supremacist, having spent all of her life in the Big Apple.
But she uprooted her family to Florida after the coronavirus pandemic opened her eyes to what she saw were Soviet patterns across American culture.
I saw very clearly for the first time that even free people can act like authoritarians and turn on their neighbors at a moment's notice.
She's the co-author with Bethany Mandel of Stolen Youth, How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.
The woke are a very small This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kelly.
Carol Markowitz, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you so much for having me.
I've been really enjoying reading your book, as I've done a lot of interviews related to woke ideology, to gender-affirming care, as it's called, around COVID, just disastrous COVID policy.
I've been thinking a lot about how I'm seeing similar themes.
Yeah.
And you put it all together in a book for me, which I really appreciate.
So, well, tell me a little bit about how you saw first how all these things are related.
It was definitely COVID that opened my eyes to a lot of what was going on, and I started to see patterns across our culture that I thought were part of a larger cultural revolution that I think is happening in the United States.
Things like, during COVID, you weren't allowed to speak and say what you really thought, and you had to conceal your actual opinion lest you be shunned by your community or your neighbors, or worse, you could be fired from your job, etc.
And it reminded me very much of the stories I had heard from my family.
I was born in the Soviet Union and the stories that I had heard from my parents, from my grandmother, suddenly resonated in a way that they never had before.
And I recognized things that were going on in American culture that I felt were very similar to those Soviet stories.
And while I had always sort of dismissed the idea that any part of American culture could be Soviet, I saw very clearly for the first time that even free people can act like authoritarians and turn on their neighbors at a moment's notice.
So my co-author, Bethany Mandel, and I started throwing around stories that we were hearing.
We didn't have An overarching theme necessarily other than bad things are being done to children and we need to say something about it.
Original title of our book was Keep Your Village Off Our Children.
That was like what we, when we were writing it, what we were thinking.
And we just saw that COVID had exposed so many different ways that kids were being targeted for indoctrination and were just treated so poorly in our society that we felt like we had to say something.
On the one hand, there's this whole idea that children are little adults, that they should be taught about all sorts of what typically would be thought of as very adult things as early as possible.
Basically, all boundaries Right.
Right.
And the greatest boundaries, I mean, there's—and I subscribe to this idea from Scott Atlas that they were—that adults use children as shields for themselves, right?
And what a horrific idea, right?
So how do we square these two things, right?
Well, that's the problem here, is that adults use children for their own purposes.
I don't know that they use them for shields, right?
I mean, did the adults think that the kids were particularly dangerous?
I'm not sure that they did.
It's just that the kids were easier to control.
And that's the whole problem with this ideological push at children, is that Kids are much easier to persuade than a full-grown adult who has their own ideas and concepts and thoughts.
If you start the indoctrination early, you can ideologically capture most children.
You can feed them ideas throughout their schooling and make them believe what you want them to believe.
You know, what Americans might not realize is that this has been done many times in the past.
It's not a unique thing that's happening right now.
The only unique part is that it's happening in a free country where you get to hear about it as it's happening.
I think in a lot of the places where these revolutions have taken place and where kids were targeted for this kind of indoctrination, I think people can say, oh, I didn't know.
And here, and the reason we wrote Stolen Youth Is that you won't be able to say you didn't know.
We're telling you this is happening.
We're telling you this is going on in your kid's school and at the library and at their pediatrician's office and everywhere else.
And so you can't look away.
You have to fight back.
Well, you know, one of the examples you bring up a number of times in the book is, you know, one of these things that you're not supposed to talk about, what happened in Nazi Germany and how children's perceptions on Jews changed specifically through this kind of indoctrination.
Tell me a little bit.
Well, so there's so much evidence that what the kids pick up in society as it's being pushed on them really does resonate.
That if you believe that, oh, I can just at home fight back against this indoctrination.
I mean, in free places, you might be able to do that to a larger extent.
But in places like Nazi Germany, it was uncontrollable.
They were picking up the idea of anti-Semitism in their schools and in their culture as a specifically targeted system.
And so you had that generation of children, when they grew up to be adults, be far more antisemitic than previous or post-generations.
So the fact that they were pushing these ideas on them was extremely important and it resonated.
And I talk a lot in the book also about the Soviet Union where Kids were seen as the ultimate revolutionaries.
They were the ones who were going to carry the bright future forward.
And the targeting of children was not accidental.
And the breaking up of families was not accidental.
They tried to separate kids from their parents for indoctrination.
And even somewhere like the Soviet Union, they had to kind of be sly about it.
They couldn't say, like, these are our children now.
You know, these children belong to all of us.
Which Joe Biden recently said.
He said, these are not your kids, these are our kids.
There's no such thing as someone else's child.
No such thing as someone else's child.
Our nation's children are all our children.
And I think even in places like the Soviet Union, that idea would have gotten pushback.
So they couldn't do that.
They had to kind of say that we're all in this together and we're going to help you raise your children.
And it's not about separating you.
It's about growing you together.
At one point, parents were kind of instilling values onto children.
And that changed to being friends with children, being kind of equal with children.
It's kind of a very different mentality of upbringing.
Yeah, it seems like we're raising kids based on some book that we haven't finished reading.
It's like we just keep throwing theories and philosophies of parenting that we can see isn't going to work out.
There was a story recently where a doctor said that a child had come to his office with the mom and had a sore throat, and the doctor said, okay, I'm going to check your throat open wide.
And the child refused to do so, and the mom said, well, it's his body, his choice.
And the doctor was like, what?
I need to check the kid's throat.
But this is the natural progression of this kind of thing where the kid's in charge and they get to tell you what they believe and what they think.
You're the parent.
Kids need parenting.
It's something that I think parents take for granted, how much kids need them.
They need them to show them the way.
They need them to teach them.
And parents are really abdicating that duty, and it's going to have bad repercussions.
There isn't kind of a one-size-fits-all solution.
That's what strikes me.
Like, some kids are just incredibly responsible from a very early age, and it almost makes sense to have that kind of a relationship with them.
Of course, with some boundaries, but they're already developing their own boundaries.
And there's other kids who have none of it, like zero, right?
And you need to be extremely...
Yeah, look, I have three kids.
They could not be more different.
They literally seem like they have, you know, two different parents, all of them.
They were born the way that they were born, that's true, but we have helped shape their responses, if not their personalities.
Sure, they, you know, they might have the personalities they arrived with, but we've...
The goal is to raise resilient children who can go out into the world and not feel a level of anxiety that debilitates them or have them be extremely worried about climate change in college where they feel a level of worry that prohibits them from living their full lives.
So when we treat kids like little adults, we Instill all of our problems and issues on them, and that really does mess them up going forward.
But it seems like the parents are just as ideologically captured in some of these stories, like this mom, where they have stopped thinking reasonably, and it should be concerning to all of us.
I think the people who believe in this ideology would say, We all do indoctrination, actually.
Carol, you're indoctrinating kids with your ideology.
I have a better ideology.
I want them indoctrinated with mine.
That's just a fact, right?
So are you not indoctrinating your kids?
Well, I'm sure I'm influencing them.
Listen, I would love to indoctrinate my kids.
It just isn't reasonable that kids will follow everything that a parent tells them.
But when you have every force in society pushing them in one direction, that's very powerful.
But also the idea that you should be able to indoctrinate my children is one that I find abhorrent.
No, you can't.
You're not their guide.
You're their teacher.
You're their doctor.
You don't get to implant ideas into their head that I then need to cancel out at home.
And I have to say that my kids do move through the world because of, you know, my indoctrination or whatever you want to call it, my teaching.
They do move through the world very aware when somebody's trying to convince them of something.
My older two come home from school and they'll say, like, oh, I heard this in class today.
Like, is this something I need to think about or are you worried about?
I jokingly call them the woke police because they're very aware when A concept is being pushed on them or when they're getting somebody's opinion and not fact.
And that's good.
I want them to be aware.
You know, Bethany and I, my co-author, have very different paths that we take.
I have three kids.
Until recently, they were all in public school.
One's now in private.
She has six kids and she homeschools them.
She pre-watches their movies.
She pre-reads the books.
I don't do any of that.
I kind of give them a longer rope and I say, I trust you.
I want to hear what you're learning out there.
But I also provide the foundation at home and we both do that.
But what she would say is, no matter how much she protects her children, she can't Protect them from this woke mind virus in every way.
At the pediatrician's office, she says, I homeschool them and we do everything outside of the culture, but I still need to take them to the doctor.
And if you have a pediatrician who has been ideologically captured, which many of them have been, you're going to run into some issues.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I liked how you put it, that, you know, you want to, you know, inoculate them with some level of this wokeism, right, so they can actually see.
You made a very, very interesting distinction, right, when the whole kind of perception of what you're supposed to believe, right, this sort of the perceived consensus, which I keep thinking about in our society, is pushing in a certain direction, and you're being taught that this is exactly how it's supposed to be, as opposed to Hey, I'm going to give you the skills to evaluate these things.
It just sounds like what you're doing is very different.
Trying, yes.
Well, that's definitely the goal, is to give them the tools to evaluate what they hear out in the world.
But I also say that this new wokeism, as opposed to liberalism or old leftism, Walk such a narrow line that you have to parrot the words in the exact right way.
And you need to have the ideas be very specifically outlined to you that you have to only speak about them in a really certain way.
Like, you can't say I'm not racist.
You have to say I'm anti-racist, right?
So I don't have that rigidity with my kids.
I want them to explore their ideas and have their own thoughts and have their own concepts.
And that used to be the goal.
We wanted our kids to have...
A wide range of opinions presented to them where they could pick their own and learn on their own.
And now we don't have that because everybody has to think the exact same way under this woke regime.
So just explain to me You know, where you've come from and maybe some of these ideas that your parents taught you that you thought, hey, this looks familiar.
I was born in the Soviet Union and I came to the US as a small child.
I wasn't quite two yet.
I grew up in Brooklyn and I lived in New York most of my life with some little gaps here and there.
I was a lifelong New Yorker.
We were going to raise our children in New York.
And then a little over a year ago, we made the decision to move to Florida, which was a sort of startling decision.
We had just built our dream home in Brooklyn.
We really did have a plan to spend our lives there.
But we felt like New York had lost its grip on reality, particularly under COVID. But also, you know, in lots of issues around COVID, it wasn't just COVID, but that did play a large role.
We felt like Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida was doing some really sane, normal policymaking that we appreciated.
And so we made the move, which was very public because I'm a New York Post columnist and again, a New York supremacist.
So the idea that I was leaving New York was It was big and people wanted to hear the story.
So it's been amazing.
It's been just really freeing and our family Really found a way to be free.
Your reporting, especially during COVID, that's when I started reading you a bit more because I thought you were a bit ahead of the curve than a lot of people.
That was very thoughtful.
But I want to get at, what is it that your parents told you that made you more aware of what was happening?
Because I'm sure there was some moment where you were...
Looking at what's happening and the people around you were like, what are you talking about?
Right.
There were quite a few moments, but I would say things like on Facebook groups, my very liberal neighborhood suddenly was no longer interested in providing education to the poorest members of society.
They didn't care at all that kids in poorer neighborhoods all over New York City did not get to go to school.
And in fact, it became Part of their philosophy to keep them out of school.
Meanwhile, for their own kids, they sent them to private school, which were open, obviously.
Public schools were very dangerous, but private schools were allowed.
Or they got them a tutor, or they moved to their beach house and sent them to the school there.
But they didn't say a word for the poor kids all over the city.
And I felt like that was a very Soviet moment for me.
It was like you said one thing, but you believed something else entirely.
Also, the telling on your neighbors, people would call the police and say, oh, there's too many people in this backyard.
They seemed to enjoy it so much.
It was really full of zeal.
Other things were those shutting down of conversation when somebody would say, I think schools should open.
I don't understand why liberal Europe has schools open, but it's become an idea only Donald Trump supporters believe in America.
And they basically would say, oh, you're a right-winger.
They would...
I'm a lifelong liberal.
I believe everything you believe.
I just don't understand why we can't open the schools.
And they would get harassed really seriously.
Some people got fired for these beliefs.
It was a really serious time.
But then crime started to really spike.
And New York had been Doing so well for so long that we all expected that to just continue.
And then when it didn't, it was like they refused to accept it.
They refused to admit that crime was going up.
So you would have posts like, I'm just afraid to walk around by myself after dark or my teenager's cell phone got stolen at the local subway station.
Or stuff like that.
And they would get comments like, no, you know, don't believe the right-wing media about crime.
And I'd be like, the stats are the stats.
And they would say things like, but look, you know, in the 1990s, the crime was higher.
Well, yeah, but that was during an extremely bad time in New York City history.
You're talking about, we've now had like, at that point, what, 20 plus years of relatively crime-free, not crime-free, but low crime time for New York City.
And You're just going to give that up over ideology.
You're going to say that this doesn't exist because you're on the side that wants to pretend that this doesn't exist.
I just saw the conformity that I had heard about my whole life where you had to believe and you had to make a spectacle of it, which I address in the book.
I talk about in Stolen Youth a lot where the spectacle is survival.
It's part of what makes these totalitarian societies So, for example, when the George Floyd killing happened and there were these riots and everybody put BLM signs, Black Lives Matter, in their window, and I just thought to myself, and I say this in the book, you know, Black Lives Matter is a really uncontroversial idea.
So when you're putting the sign in the window, who are you talking to in your ideologically Homogeneous neighborhood.
Who are you trying to convince with your sign?
And of course, they're not trying to convince anybody.
They're trying to say, I'm on the team.
I'm part of this.
And don't come for me, please, because look, I have the sign in my window.
That felt very Soviet to me.
My great-grandmother's father, my great-grandfather, was killed in Stalin's gulag.
But my grandmother and her sister, when Stalin died, made a scrapbook of his glorious life, because that's what you do when the spectacle is what matters.
And I saw it in so many different ways, and then I couldn't unsee it.
Did you ever have this situation in your family where it was kind of treason to talk about things inside the family, outside of the household?
Did you grow up with that?
I didn't have that.
I think my parents were not afraid of what I would say outside the home.
But recently, my kids are 13, 10, and 7.
I don't remember what it was.
My 7-year-old, we made some sort of gender joke.
He's like, oh, my nails painted like my sister.
He's joking.
I'm joking.
Everybody's joking.
But I said, oh no, in this family we follow really strict gender roles and I wouldn't let you do that.
And we're just playing around.
And my daughter says to him, make sure not to say that outside the house.
Don't tell anybody that mom said that.
And it's funny because I don't worry about that.
Why is she worrying about that?
Why is she worrying that somebody might take our jokey family behavior and do something bad with it?
So something that you mentioned earlier was this zeal with which some people were doing that so-called tattletaling on others.
It kind of empowers these obsessive people that typically don't have a lot of power, but suddenly they can become the people who are the enforcers.
That's right.
In every communist society, those people are the people that rise in the communist ranks.
When I saw these people doing the tattletaling with zeal, what is that?
Why with zeal?
They've been waiting for their moment to tell on their neighbors.
I mean, isn't that so troubling?
It is.
It is because I think that before COVID, I wouldn't have thought that I would see that in American society.
And it is troubling.
It's troubling how quickly and how easily so many people fell into that and did tell on their neighbors and tried to get people fired for the wrong opinion and, you know, called people's jobs, etc.
Yeah, it's unbelievable that that happened and it is happening in America and that people are standing by it, standing for it.
It's like the woke are a very small segment of the population, and yet they're able to control so much.
And they do that through this forced conformity.
You know, this idea that freedom is only ever one generation away.
I always felt so lucky to be here, and I obviously still do, but I feel like there's a really troubling trend happening in American society, and you're right.
It isn't something that we should just dismiss or not worry about.
This could all end tomorrow.
This is already one of the, if not the longest-running experiment in democracy and freedom In world history.
I think it is the longest, right?
I don't think anybody's beat us.
And it could end tomorrow.
And we can't let that happen.
And it can happen with elections.
And it has happened all around us.
You look at Venezuela.
This really kind of thriving free society voted itself into totalitarian dictatorship.
Right.
Well, there's that joke.
You can vote yourself into it, but you're going to have to shoot your way out.
You have this kind of comprehensive picture between you and Bethany of wokeism.
So what is it?
And you reference all sorts of people who have done excellent work, of course.
So wokeism is the combination of leftist ideology with this forced conformity.
So where old leftism definitely tried to push its agenda and did so successfully, say at the college level, the new wokeism wouldn't allow any room in that conversation.
It's like leftists would not be able to argue with leftists about different perspectives.
Wokeism walks a very narrow path.
So it's like the old leftism, the joke I kind of use for it is you might get a woman's studies degree, but the new wokeness is you get a woman's studies degree and you can't define woman.
And that's important.
It's something that like, you know, the old leftists would be shocked that wokeness now says they're not sure what woman is.
They're not sure what it means to be a woman.
They cannot define it.
And You know, the feminists of the 70s, for example, 60s and 70s, would find that shocking.
So that's really the difference to me between old leftist ideology and this new wokeism.
Also, the discussion of equality versus equity is another great example of that.
I think that the old left used to be for equality, whereas equity is the buzzword of the woke.
It's not about...
Equal opportunities.
It's about equal outcomes.
And anybody who's ever lived in a communist country can tell you equal outcomes is not a thing.
It does not happen.
It is impossible.
Some people will have different outcomes than others, and that's just how it goes.
You know, I noted down some kind of themes that occurred in my mind as I was reading.
So one of them has to do with preposterous medical prescriptions for children.
Yeah, what we're doing to kids medically is a gigantic problem, specifically for boys.
I think that we're way over-medicating them, and we're taking away the very natural way that boys behave.
Again, I have a girl and two boys.
They are different.
They're not the same.
My girl can sit for hours and read, and my boys will destroy half the house if they had to sit for hours and read.
And they come from the same parents.
So I think the over-medication of boys is just...
A large, large problem.
You're seeing this use of medication on kids in the gender ideology debates, too.
What is acceptable to do to children, whether it's okay to stop their puberty from arriving, or hormone treatments.
It's wild because it's only recently that we've really begun to say this is not okay.
I think hormone treatments for kids had been sort of prevalent for any kid presenting as gender dysphoric for a long time.
And now it's finally being challenged and challenged fairly well.
It's amazing to me that we've let it get this far.
In Europe, both again on the sort of gender medicine side of things and COVID medicine side of things, there were much more science-based Policies created, but for some reason we didn't know about them over here.
Well, we knew about them.
We just chose to full-on ignore them.
It's crazy to me to give Europe credit for something, but they did so much better than us on COVID. I just was watching astounded that so many countries in Europe never mask children at all.
And then when the vaccines arrived, they were like, no, kids don't need this, which is what I was saying.
And it was considered a really far-out thing.
I was pro-vaccine.
I just thought kids didn't need it.
I don't know that I'd be pro-vaccine, you know, if I had to do it over again, but I was.
It was so obvious to me that kids, their risk already of a poor COVID outcome was zero.
So you can't reduce it any lower.
It's not like you can make zero less.
And yet Europe figured this out fairly quickly.
And they've also really inoculated themselves from a lot of the wokeness.
They are a very liberal continent.
Most of the countries there are fairly liberal countries.
But that's the whole thing.
They're liberal.
They're not woke.
They're not in the grips of a mania, this ideology that is really manic.
And they're not having the same kinds of issues that we are.
Their gender dysphoria numbers are nowhere near the numbers of ours, which just shows that it's a social contagion.
And it's not something that's happening naturally.
Europe is very accepting, for example, of transgender kids in general.
And yet they're having a far lower instance of transgenderism in their children than we are.
And really, people on the left in America should wonder why they used to follow Europe on everything, but now they don't.
But nobody's allowed to ask any questions.
Well, and also the shift, you know, now accelerating away from this whole gender-affirming care idea, where it's like if you think anything different than the norm, affirm, affirm, affirm, right?
Right.
And Europe's moving away from that.
And Britain, for sure, is moving away from it.
Because it didn't work.
Because it caused huge problems.
I mean, they saw that, right?
Right.
Yeah.
It's causing huge problems here, and we're not doing anything about it.
The third theme that I noticed is just this general idea, again, on the gender side, on the COVID side, and frankly beyond, is this just this idea that parents should be excluded from their children, from decisions about their children, so that's actually an okay thing somehow.
Yeah, that should scare parents.
You know, we used to understand that if somebody's asking a child to keep a secret from their parents, that person's doing something bad to them.
But we've gotten to where that's become acceptable, where parents don't need to know what the child is doing in school.
If the child has decided to become a different gender in school, to go by different pronouns and dress up as the opposite gender, that should motivate parents to understand that there's a wider issue at play here.
The separation of the family Is what happens in these kinds of revolutions.
And if parents see this kind of thing going on where somebody's asking their kid to keep a secret from them, I think they should imagine for themselves what else is happening.
If this is happening, what else is out there?
Is this a cultural revolution?
I mean, it doesn't feel like it really.
We've seen them in the Soviet Union.
We've seen them in communist China.
And yes, it was the young people.
I don't know if I said this earlier, but yes, the Red Guard, Mao's Red Guard, were young people basically putting the older generation who were not according to the rules through the ringer, right?
Right.
It is a cultural revolution happening here.
And I think it's very similar to those revolutions.
And the only real difference is that we know it's happening here.
We are aware of it.
And so stopping it should be easier than it was elsewhere.
I think that...
We draw these historical parallels in the book because I think that they're instructive.
They're trying to alter our culture towards their vision.
And if we allow it, it's not like we're going to be able to stop it once they succeed.
It has to be stopped now.
When you see it happening in different facets of our society, it should be stopped as soon as possible.
And people should take it seriously.
I feel like I... Before I wrote this book, I don't think I would have agreed there was a cultural revolution happening, but now I see it clearly.
I see that it's taken over everything, and it's not a conspiracy theory.
It's happening.
And the other thing is, we talk about things like...
That the left uses children to be their activists.
And, you know, we get so many comments or letters or whatever saying, like, that's ridiculous.
You know, it's ridiculous to imagine that that's really what's happening, conspiracy theories.
And then Bernie Sanders puts out his book recently and says, yes, we should make children into activists.
Absolutely.
That's the goal.
And it's like, is it a conspiracy theory, or did one of the top leaders of the left just admit that that's what's going on?
You're not going to get admission on everything, so you're going to have to think it through, you know, parents will have to think it through for themselves, but this is what's happening.
Well, you have a really excellent chapter, I think, looking at things in a way that I haven't seen anywhere else, called Child Soldiers.
And this is, of course, what you just discussed.
I didn't fully grasp the significance of the Parkland shooting and how that catalyzed the idea of using the child as the kind of activist that can't be argued against.
How can you argue with the child?
Tell me about that.
Well, it was the first time that it was teenagers that could speak out and say what they believe on guns.
And the media immediately fell in love with them.
They were articulate and they were bright and they had just survived something very traumatic.
When CNN proposed a town hall, these teenagers got to confront various politicians on a stage in front of everybody.
And they also confronted Dana Lash, who was NRA spokesperson at the time, National Rifle Association.
There was also the sheriff on the stage who had failed to go into the building for hours.
His team did let this go on for a really long time.
And yet he was spared their criticism.
It was like they really tore into the politicians on the stage, like Senator Marco Rubio.
And what's interesting is they were clearly traumatized.
And look, some of them went on to become activists, but at least one of them really regrets that appearance and regrets that whole episode because he feels like he was pressured into it.
And so...
When you see the case of Greta Thunberg talking about climate change...
Who was inspired by what she saw here, right?
Inspired by Parkland.
Yes, I didn't know that either until we started looking into this.
It was a direct line.
It was a grown-up in her life who knew that she was passionate about climate change, saw the Parkland kids, was an activist, and saw the Parkland kids and the reaction that they were getting and said, I have someone who can do the same thing.
And so she became an activist On climate change, and how are you going to argue with this pigtailed little girl who is afraid that the world's going to end?
And so they've set up a situation where their opinions are impossible to confront, impossible to argue with when they're delivered by small children.
As you're talking right now, I'm thinking back again to Scott Atlas' assertion that we use children as shields for adults.
Isn't that exactly what's happening here?
Yes, that is exactly what's happening here.
I think that that is a classic example of how we're using children in this way.
And I think we're seeing it with gender ideology.
They definitely have kids who proclaim themselves trans in the public eye and talking about these trans issues because what are you going to say to this child who says, no, I was born in the wrong body?
It's something you can argue with an adult about, but you're going to argue with a child that's not yours?
You're not.
Shuts down the conversation.
You talk in the book about groupthink.
And then there's, of course, again, people who are believers, capital B, in this wokeism or critical social justice, which I think is what it calls itself.
Is it the same thing or is it different?
Well, in that woke world, You cannot say things that aren't specifically already pre-approved for you to say.
You cannot draw a new parallel or use language not already used.
But somehow they're ever-changing, isn't it?
Well, it has to be changing, yes.
So we talk about this in the book as well, but the jargon has to change so that you know who's in the in-group.
It's an idea that my friend Michael Malice wrote about, and I think it's so right on, where...
It's very easy to change your language, right?
It's easy to change the word, one word, two words.
And that's why they have to keep changing the jargon so that they know who belongs and who doesn't.
One of the predictions that I've made is that I think the word trans will be out of favor very soon.
Right now, it's like you have to call them a trans woman or a trans man.
Very soon, the fact that you're even qualifying that they're not actually a man or not actually a woman will be unacceptable.
And I could see that heading in that direction, just like the way, you know, vagrant became homeless, became unhoused, became, you know, etc.
What is it that's appropriate to teach children at a young age?
Math.
Science.
I think things that we always knew would be appropriate.
Reading.
I've gotten to the point where I don't think we should be teaching climate change to small children anymore.
And, you know, the argument for teaching them is like, oh, they need to know what's going on with the world.
Well, do they?
Why?
Why do they need to know that?
We don't tell them about, like, car crash statistics, like, before they get in a car.
Like, hey, by the way, a lot of people die in these things.
Like, no, we don't do any of that.
And so the idea that we need to terrify them and make them think that the world is ending, which is what they think, it doesn't make any sense to me.
It's something that they've had so many studies where teenagers have high anxiety rates because they've been told their whole lives that climate change is happening and it's going to destroy everything.
Well, maybe we save that conversation for when their cognitive abilities can accept it.
Well, except that there's no evidence that there's 12 years left or whatever it was.
That just isn't supported.
Right.
Every 12 years, it's like 12 years left.
Meanwhile, we're barely teaching any history at all.
I would love to see any kind of approximation of historical education in our schools, which really doesn't happen.
You know, one thing I've also been thinking about is what are considered guidelines, right, whether it's from the CDC or from the American Association of Pediatricians, which is one of the groups that you cite that you believe has been captured heavily.
The guidelines somehow become policy, and it just dawned on me that this forced conformity is the tool for that, right?
In order to get into medical school, you need to address how you're going to support diversity and inclusion in your medical practice.
It produces immediately a control of what you're allowed to think.
Is anybody going to write like, oh, I don't think diversity is that important in my practice?
No, of course not.
They're all going to parrot the same thing.
Because I actually want to focus on, like, Cutting well as a surgeon.
I'm going to read a quote from Dr.
Jeffrey talking about this topic of gender dysphoric youth or somehow he's involved in it.
And he says, Interesting.
It's the same sort of deal.
You've got a group with a vested interest, you've got weak data, you've got ideological capture, you've got mass psychosis.
Legions of unthinking clinicians doing what their medical societies are telling them to do.
Right?
That's the real problem with this kind of woke capture is that you're not allowed to step outside the line.
So if you know something crazy, something bad is being done, you're not allowed to say anything.
You have to tell the line.
So what happens is you end up having a whisper network of where the normal sane doctors are because you can't tell based on their practice anymore.
It should scare people.
It really should.
It should scare people that we're putting ridiculous ideas like this ahead of actual hard science and actual medicine.
And the fact that your doctor can't say what they really think should really scare people.
You know, one of the reactions to this often, and from talking to people in the heartland, right, is just like, wow, those people on the coast are pretty nuts.
Yeah.
You know, we don't really have to worry about that.
Oh, this is like the trial of my life.
I find it much easier to get people in blue areas to believe what I'm saying than I do people in red areas.
And It's so wild to me because the people in red areas, they intrinsically agree with me, but they just don't think it's happening there.
And so I'm constantly pulling out examples.
Like a few months ago, there was a little girl who was...
She transitioned behind her parents back at school.
She's in fourth grade, nine years old or ten years old.
And they start calling her a boy name.
She starts wearing boy clothes.
And the parents are only brought into the conversation when she draws a picture of a little girl who wants to kill herself.
And the parents finally get called and brought in.
And this happened in a red enclave, in a red hamlet, in a red town, in a red county.
And it's like, I need these people to understand that this could happen anywhere.
These teachers get ideologically captured themselves at their teachers' colleges.
They're themselves being indoctrinated.
And then they're taking these ideas and going throughout the country.
And it's just...
The idea that this is only happening on the coasts is just untrue.
It's probably happening more on the coasts.
I would say your child is more likely to have a cluster of kids in their class who declared themselves transgender in San Francisco or in New York City, but it's still happening places.
We have examples in the book where in small-town Girl Scout troop, a bunch of girls declared themselves trans at the same time.
It absolutely happens.
How does that happen?
It's like an epidemic of that.
It's the mind virus?
It's a social contagion, for sure.
It's really one person says it and then a bunch of other people fall into it.
One of the influential girls, for example, in the group.
Preteens are feeling uncomfortable in their bodies, you know, tail as old as time.
We used to have cutting as an epidemic when I was a teenager in my twenties.
And this is sort of a similar thing where they're being caught up in something and What they're being caught up in in this case can have real lifelong implications if they take the next steps.
And when you have a medical system that does nothing but affirm them, there's no other option.
If you come to a doctor with your child and the child says, I feel like I'm in the wrong body, the doctor does not have any other options.
And that's, again, the problem with woke medicine is that the doctor can't say, like, You know, she'll grow out of it.
No, the doctor has to affirm what's going on and provide suggestions on next steps.
There's these unbelievably pornographic books that end up in children's libraries and not just one, like kind of all over the place.
And you wonder, you really think to yourself, did someone look at this book and was like, yes, this is a great idea for my, you know, eight-year-old or whatever.
I just can't imagine it.
But you actually explain how this happens.
Well, it happens because these books end up winning awards, and it's an award-winning book, so obviously we have to have this pornography in our school library.
A main thing that Bethany and I talk a lot about is that they use the fact that these books are LGBT as a shield They would never allow a book that showed pornographic images of straight sex in a library meant for, you know, 11 and under, which is, these are found in elementary school libraries.
But because it's gay sex, it becomes okay because, oh, you know, what are you, homophobic?
You don't want this porn in your kid's library?
And they use that as a shield.
So I think the question for us...
As we move forward, it's not so much even how the books get there, although that is interesting why these books are chosen, but why do they stay in after we see what's happening in them?
Why did they become the model of what we should have in our school library?
And if you don't want that, then you're banning books, which is ridiculous.
And just somehow managing to conflate age-appropriateness with banning books.
Exactly.
Yeah, we don't let kids watch rated-R movies.
Why are we letting them see books that are deeply inappropriate?
It's not a free speech issue.
It's for sure not.
Right.
And it's not really a banning book issue.
Just because your book is not available in a children's library doesn't mean your book is banned.
I'm sure my book is not in an elementary school library.
Does that mean my book is banned?
No, of course not.
It's not for kids.
Not everything is for kids.
Right.
Well, it's just that these narratives are so powerful.
You get caught up in them.
How does media fit into this whole ecosystem?
Yeah, media drives a lot of it.
The media is obviously in the woke camp, and if you question any part of the agenda, they will come for you.
I think J.K. Rowling, who wrote Harry Potter, is a great example of that.
I challenge anybody to find anything that she said that is really actually controversial.
Just the fact that she says things like women need their own female-only spaces, it's not a controversial idea at all.
It's an idea that most of the world believes in.
But the media portrays her as this, like, firebrand and who says really crazy things.
She really doesn't.
And the media is responsible for so much of this.
They push this conversation along and they push it leftward and then they don't feel responsible for the repercussions of it.
And they are.
Because it comes out of the academy.
It's in the school.
It's taught in the universities.
The teachers that come out of teachers' colleges disproportionately believe it or at least believe that this is what they should be teaching.
Then it's amplified dramatically by this media.
I've mentioned this in a lot of interviews.
But there's this kind of mechanism of manufacturing perceived consensus in society.
I call it the megaphone.
It's a very powerful thing in our society.
And some portion of us are susceptible to it.
They're very dramatically susceptible.
That's something that COVID taught me.
Yeah, absolutely.
In the book, we go through a lot of the conformity experiments where people are asked to give an answer of something, and they give the correct answer, but then they see everybody else in the experiment, which is staged, giving the wrong answer, and they'll often adjust their answer to fit in with the group.
We're very social creatures.
We want to belong.
We want to believe what our peers and neighbors and community believe.
And it's hard to be the one who has a different answer.
And that's something important that I teach my own children is that it's okay if you're the only one with this answer.
It's okay to stand alone and believe what you believe.
There's this very interesting chapter where Bethany talks about her own struggle and how she developed her resilience, some of the most challenging moments in her life, and struggle with her mother's passing in very difficult circumstances.
I'm just very curious.
Obviously, you discussed this together, and you chose to include this.
Why?
We thought it was important because that was the overall message of our book.
We want to raise resilient children.
We don't want to raise necessarily conservatives.
I mean, that would be great.
I would love for my kids to be conservative, but I would mostly like them to be resilient.
At our book party in New York, we had protesters who threw drinks and threw books at us.
I would be heartbroken if those were my children.
I would think that, like, wow, I did not prepare them for a world in which other people have other ideas.
So for us, the resiliency chapter was really important because you want to raise children who are resilient, who will grow up into resilient adults, who are able to live their lives to their full capacity and not be hindered by bad ideas.
You know, what are your prescriptions at this point?
Bethany and I have different prescriptions.
Again, she pulls her kids from the culture where I leave mine in but provide a foundation at home.
We give parents a lot of different ideas on what they could be doing, but if You find yourself in a place where you're unable to speak freely and you're unable to challenge the bad ideas that your kids are being subjected to.
One of the prescriptions is absolutely moving and it might not be moving to another state like my family did.
It might be moving to the next town over or a different neighborhood, but a family who is free is the goal and that's what you're looking for.
You're looking for a situation where Your family can be themselves and you can raise your children according to your own philosophies.
What's your pithy message to parents?
This is going to take a fight no matter where you are.
If you're in a red area, blue area, this is going to be a fight not only for our children but for the culture and for the future.
So don't imagine somebody else is going to mount this fight for you.
It's going to have to be you.
It's going to have to be for your own kids.
And I think that once you wrap your mind around the idea that I think you'll find that other people will join with you, but you have to be brave, and that's when people will gravitate to what you're saying.
When they see that you're brave and not afraid of the slings and arrows, I think you'll find a community of people willing to do the same.
Well, Carol Markowitz, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you all for joining Carol Markowicz and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
I'm your host, Janja Kellek.
Coming up this week on the American Thought Leaders Sunday Watch Party, 7.30pm Eastern.
All the information that they don't want you to know is hidden in the footnotes.
Today, I sit down with Brownstone Institute fellow Debbie Lerman to discuss her research into U.S. government documents and the origin of America's pandemic and mass vaccination policies.
All of a sudden, there was a new square on the org chart that said, And it said National Security Council.
And underneath that, very interestingly, it said WMD, Weapons of Mass Destruction.
According to Lerman's research, in a sharp break from official pandemic preparedness plans, the National Security Council was put in charge of the pandemic response in 2020 instead of Health and Human Services.
Trump derangement syndrome segued perfectly into what I call COVID derangement syndrome.
Moderna and BioNTech now have dozens of mRNA vaccine trials going on, which I think is just astonishing.
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