Carol Markowitz and Bethany Mandel’s Stolen Youth exposes how "wokeness" infiltrates schools, libraries, and even medical fields, enforcing rigid leftist conformity through intimidation. Markowitz notes private NYC schools push it harder than Florida’s public ones, while both authors—one homeschooling, the other countering exposure at home—admit no strategy fully blocks indoctrination, including in medicine where dissent risks careers. Publishers allegedly censored their book to avoid backlash, revealing conservative publishing’s fragility, as they warn parents must fight systemic grooming rhetoric and ideological control across institutions. [Automatically generated summary]
One of the most important reasons you have to know what you believe is raising kids, is taking care of kids, especially in a world where people are coming after your kids to indoctrinate them.
There's a new book out that is just climbing up the Amazon ranks very high.
I thought the last I saw was like 20 or something on the Amazon ranks.
It's by two women that I respect and like very much.
It's called Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.
It's by Carol Markowitz and Bethany Mandel.
A couple of days ago, Bethany was on some podcast or something and got caught out.
She was asked to define woke and she blanked and it looked silly.
And so, of course, the left made a big deal out of that.
Bethany handled it like absolute men.
She just took the hit.
And I did help sell some books.
But we're going to talk about woke and what it is doing to children and how people can react with Carol Markowitz.
Carol, it is great to see you again.
How are you doing?
Hi, Andrew.
So nice to see you.
Congratulations on the book.
It looks like it's really doing great.
So I'll let you start.
Define woke.
What is woke when you talk about that?
Wokeness is a leftism coupled with a forced conformity.
And we go through this a lot in the book where the old leftism was also a problem.
Let us not joke with that.
Leftism was enforced onto children in college.
They were indoctrinated into the views of their professors.
This was all going on for a while.
But the difference with wokeness is that there's a really narrow way that you're allowed to speak about any subject.
And even, and especially people on the left get caught up in the woke dragnet because they didn't say the right words.
They didn't use the right language.
So when we say woke, it necessarily includes a conformity of thought.
And it's not just leftism for the sake of leftism, which again, I'm not a fan of, but it's a rigid way of thinking that does not allow any outside influence or possibility.
It's only one way of thinking about any one subject.
You know, it's really interesting.
There's a great article about how gay marriage became law in First Things.
It talks about basically the intimidation, the gangster-like intimidation, the exposure of anybody who didn't support it, the firing of people that didn't support it.
It really is a system of intimidation, a system of just bullying people into believing what you want them to believe.
And now it has reached our schools, which is an amazing, amazing thing.
So let's talk about this.
I mean, you talk about the fact that most moms are not paying attention to politics because of being moms.
Now, you and Bethany, I think between you, you have 157 children, right?
She has most of them.
You guys have a lot of kids.
So it's hard to pay attention to this stuff.
What do you see?
What are you seeing happen in schools?
Schools is one chapter of our book because we trace how this is happening throughout society.
But the schools chapter is obviously very important.
I wrote the schools chapter.
Bethany is a homeschooling mom of six.
I have three children, two in public school, one in private.
And what we see happening in schools was happening in colleges, you know, 15 years ago, 20 years ago.
There's so many books on indoctrination of college students and the way that this like woke virus has taken hold in so many places.
But it has come to the K through 12 space and it's really widespread.
When you watch like libs of TikTok videos, what I like to say to people is like parents look at those videos and say, well, not my, that's not my teacher, you know, my kid's teacher.
That's some teacher somewhere else.
And they believe that this is only happening in like San Francisco and New York City.
And a lot of people in red states or red areas think that they're safe from this.
But just because your teacher is not openly talking about being a Marxist indoctrinator on limbs of TikTok doesn't mean they're not doing it.
And, you know, most teachers aren't on limbs of TikTok.
So what we say to parents is that this is coming everywhere.
There's no escaping this.
There's only going to be putting up a fight.
It's also not like on the conservative side, it's become very popular to say, get your kids out of government schools.
Well, in a lot of places, public schools are safer than private schools for this kind of thing.
In New York City, private schools are lost under this woke, you know, just problem that they're experiencing.
They cannot function.
They no longer are teaching kids any of the basic subjects.
And they're just fully wrapped up in pleasing the woke gods.
And public schools, you have more of a chance of having actual academic subjects taught.
And in places like Florida, for example, the governor has made it so hard to get that woke nonsense into the public schools.
And he's so careful about what gets taught there that it's safer to be in a public school.
It's safer to be in a government school than it is to be in a private school.
Just go ahead and keep bragging about the fact that you went to Florida and making the rest of us feel better.
Andrew, you have an open invitation.
Not everybody has a red carpet out there.
I'm scared of alligators.
What can I tell you?
I have yet to see an alligator.
I think it's even more alligators in New York.
That's the problem with those alley.
You only have to see them once.
The book is Stolen Youth.
The authors are Carol Markowitz, Bethany Mandel.
You know, I noticed that you wrote the book in alternating, not alternating chapters, but you each took different chapters.
You didn't actually collaborate on it.
And you mentioned that Bethany has her kids, is homeschooling her kids and you're not.
Now, do you think one of those is a better idea?
Does it just have to do with your personal situation?
It has to do with our personal situation.
But also, we like the idea.
And the reason we wrote the book together is that we can provide two different paths to families to look at as a model for their own lives.
So for me, I let my kids watch modern movies.
I let them read what they want.
I send them, obviously, again, to public and private schools.
I let them kind of immerse in the culture.
And at home, we provide the foundation and the building blocks and the defense against anything that I think would be a problem.
Bethany pulls her kids from culture.
She, you know, she'll say her kids' favorite actor is Robin Williams.
They watch old movies only.
She pre-reads everything that they read.
Look, there are two different paths and some people are taking one and some people are taking the other.
And it's important that families understand that there's not just one way.
Also, what Bethany will say about it is even though she homeschools, even though she pre-reads the books, even though she doesn't allow media into her home for the kids, she still needs to take her kids to the pediatrician.
And that's why we have a medical chapter in the book about how wokeness has captured the medical field.
And obviously we saw that up close during COVID where any alternate opinion was considered not allowed.
And you could lose your medical license if you questioned the vaccines or really had any opinion that wasn't specifically on the line.
And so Bethany will say, like, even though she does all of this, even though she pulls her kids from culture, she still needs to take her kids to the pediatrician.
So no matter how much you pull your kids out, you're still going to face this, what we can, you know, continue to call a virus, this woke virus that has really just saturated so many different aspects of our society.
You know, one of the things that is shocking to me, I pride myself, I'm not sure this is true, but I pride myself on being the guy who invented the joke, okay, groomer.
I'm not sure, but I think I was the first person.
I say that I invented a free state of Florida.
And I invented the internet, but that was a long time ago.
But the fact is, the fact is, there is an element of sexual grooming in the way these people are treating our children.
I don't understand how that, why is that at the center of this?
Why is there so much of this without people saying what is, you know, when I was a kid, cops came in and told you how to avoid these people who are now the people who are teaching our children?
How did that happen?
It's a number of things.
So we opened the book with a history chapter on totalitarian societies and the way that they would always separate the family first.
And they do that because it's much easier to indoctrinate children when they don't have the influence of the parents.
And also the kids bring home the concepts to the parents.
And what we're seeing right now is a really common thread with that, where they're discombobulating the kids.
They're literally messing them up so that they can rebuild them with the concepts that they want them to have.
Bethany wrote the sexuality chapter and she uses the word groomer.
She wrote that before the okay groomer discourse, but literally she uses the word grooming to mean if you introduce sexual concepts to kids early, you're setting them up to be groomed, even if you're not, even the person introducing the concept is not the one that's going to end up grooming them, that this is a risk.
Why Porn in Elementary Libraries?00:02:10
And it, you know, we used to kind of know that porn in school libraries was something that we didn't want.
And what I would say about that also is that great majority of parents still don't want that.
They still don't want porn in their elementary school libraries.
It's the insane minority of the country that's very loud, very aggressive, very totalitarian, that they push this kind of thing and pretend that it's okay.
And parents need to fight back.
That is the message throughout the book is it's going to take a fight.
It's not going to be easy.
It's not going to be somebody else doing it.
It's going to have to be us.
You know, when you talk about the medical profession and you have a chapter called No Subject is Safe, you're talking about such a widespread poison, such a toxic thing that these guys, and when your governor, your terrific governor, bans literal porn from literal elementary schools.
The New York Times says he's banning books.
There used to be a time when you would horse whip people for doing this stuff.
And he has done, again, he could be your governor too.
I know, I know.
Could he just ban the alligator?
No.
He, you know, what he does so brilliantly is really show, he kind of bypasses the media that hates him.
You know, they all hate him.
And he bypasses them and goes straight to the people.
And he says, look, these are, this is what's in the libraries.
He started reading it on TV and they had to cut off his feed because we couldn't show them the thing that he was reading on TV.
And he also, his team, because I wrote about this in my New York Post column last week, but his team sent me a list of the schools where they found it.
So it's not like, oh, it's one or two schools.
Here's the list.
And there are elementary schools and their middle schools.
And here are the books that we found in this school.
And here are the books we found in this school.
And the idea that this is happening on a small level just is not true.
And they end up proving it.
But here's the other thing.
Let's say it's only five schools, five schools in all of Florida who happen to have porn in their elementary school libraries.
Why are the left opposed to removing it?
Doctors Speak Out00:02:57
So what?
So it's only five.
Okay, let's take it out of those five.
but you can't even get them to the point where they're like agreeing to that, right?
It's like there's just no conversation.
They're trying to minimize what's happening, but even if you minimize it, let's still not let those kids have access to porn in their school libraries.
So when you're talking, I've only got a few minutes left, but when you're talking about your doctor is indoctrinated and you're a mom, like you got to take your kids to the doctor.
What do you do?
How do you fight back against this?
It's really, that's the toughest chapter in the book.
I think we provide strong solutions for everything, except it's really hard to fight back on the medical profession.
That is going to have to be a societal change because right now, doctors are so afraid to speak the truth.
And that is going to cause us damage.
Another way that wokeness seeps into the medical field is, you know, if you have a panel of four experts, and Bethany talks about this in that chapter who are experts on prenatal care and they happen to be four white guys, they replace them with, you know, a more diverse group who are not necessarily the top of the field.
People are going to die because of that.
So I would say do your best to tell the doctor what your values are and what you expect and that you don't want.
And if your doctor says, like, we want you to step out of the room so we could talk to your 12-year-old, like, no, no, I'm not.
And that's it.
Yeah, no, I think that's ferocious.
Where else do you think the danger lies besides you got schools, you got the medical profession, but there are a lot of other things that kids do and that moms do.
Where else do you think the danger is?
So we talk about publishing companies, we talk about libraries.
Every librarian might not be woke, but the libraries are ordering books according to a really narrow set of values.
And so the publishers are publishing books according to those same set of values.
We talked about, Bethany and I co-wrote a piece in the New York Post a few weeks ago about the book, and we talked about how we had a hard time publishing this book.
It was publishers told us we want it.
Can you tone down the fighting?
And that's scary.
This is conservative publishers.
If it weren't for Daily Wire, I don't know that this book makes it to print.
And that should terrify people.
We're already in like the conservative publishing ghetto.
And if those publishing companies are afraid to publish a book that says parents should fight for their kids, like what are we doing here?
Yeah, no, I've got stories like this too.
It's terrible.
Carol Markowitz with Bethany Mandel.
The book is Stolen Youth, How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.
Carol, it's great to see you.
And I envy you being in paradise.
But when you visit, when you visit hell, I hope you'll come and see me.