Authors Carol Markowitz and Bethany Mandel argue in their new book, Stolen Youth, that "woke" ideology erases childhood innocence through schools, libraries, and media, a trend accelerated by pandemic-era mask mandates and DEI litmus tests for medical school applicants. They detail how licensing risks silence professionals who oppose these enforced norms, creating a culture where parents fear cancellation if they challenge policies promoting Critical Race Theory or gender theory. Ultimately, the authors advocate for homeschooling and relocation to states like Florida to escape what they describe as totalitarian conformity, warning that this indoctrination is producing a generation of speech-delayed "basket cases" rather than resilient citizens. [Automatically generated summary]
One of the scariest parts that sort of came out of COVID was that if you were accused of spreading misinformation, and misinformation was narrowly defined as COVID misinformation, but now it's defined more broadly into any misinformation.
Reproductive health, in the wake of Roe vs. Wade falling, if you're spreading misinformation about reproductive health, your license is at risk.
And so I wrote a piece for The Spectator about the fall of Roe vs. Wade and all these things, and no one would talk to me on the record because they said, I can lose my license.
And who defines misinformation and who makes these decisions, all of it is secret.
And so I can just get a letter one day that says I've had my license revoked.
And so all of this is permeating through licensing for psychiatry, for medical, to get into med school you have to answer questions that, you know, it's a litmus test.
How will you implement DEI in your professional life as a medical professional of any kind?
Carol, this must be freaking you out because we usually do this over Skype or in person when we're drunk, but here we are sober in the middle of the day talking about stuff.
So Carol and I have been friends for a really long time.
It's hard to do, but we're friends.
And we have very similar worldviews, and she writes the columns that I always meant to write but didn't get around to emailing the editor, and then I'd read it and I'm like, dang, she did that better than I would have.
And so we've been talking about it for years, and we had another iteration of the book proposal, Get Your Village Off My Children, and then COVID hit.
And we kind of, everything froze and we sort of said, let's see where the dust settles.
And then the dust settled and we realized like, well, get your village off my children
is legit.
We really need to get them away from our children.
And so we said like, you know, there is this woke stuff happening younger and younger.
And but do we have enough for a book?
Like, is there enough material here?
And so we started Google Doc, and we just started dumping stuff in.
And we realized after a week, we have too much stuff.
The problem isn't, is there a book?
It's like, how can we only write one book about this?
And how do we narrow this down?
And so we just started Plugin.
And, you know, we had a lot of interest.
I mean, I don't know how much you want to say, but do you want to take over this part of the story?
So you guys, okay, so you get this google.com and you're dumping stuff in there.
Trust me, I wish I could wake up on any given day and have no woke thing to go crazy over so I can see how this thing would be expanding and expanding.
And then how did you decide to frame it like sort of purely around education?
And was that just from being moms?
And you were like, this is clearly the thing that matters most.
So we have two different paths that we have taken.
I have kids in public and private schools.
I have two sons in public and a daughter in private and Bethany homeschools.
And so what we were seeing was during COVID, kids were just the last priority.
They just completely weren't considered.
They would post reopening plans and not even put children in them.
They had to live under restrictions far longer than anybody else.
And we saw that It was really getting to be a problem where kids were just not considered in society at all.
And so our book focuses on that, but also on how schools are targeting them, and publishing companies, and libraries, and doctor's offices, all of it targeting for woke indoctrination.
Are you shocked at the amount of parents that just go along with whatever crazy thing happens next?
I mean, I can tell you as a father of a six-month-old and a four-month-old, the idea that, you know, is it the CDC or the NIH now, you know, they want to put in the schedule?
The COVID vaccination for six-month-olds?
There's no chance in hell that I would, like, literally over my dead body.
But they do things, and then people just go along with it.
Was that shocking to see, or is that just kind of Parent 101?
What you're supposed to do is lay your life on the line and do anything possible to save your children, to help your children in any way, shape, or form.
And what we saw over COVID, I'm sorry, but was a lot of parents saying, well, I don't want to be the loud mouth.
I don't want to be the troublemaker.
And so they went along with it.
One of the craziest things that happened over COVID, and our book isn't just about COVID, there's so, so much more to it, but this sort of drove it home for me.
I sent my kids to a violin summer camp and signed them up.
First day of summer camp, I dropped them off, and every single kid was wearing a mask.
And I thought, gosh, that's awfully weird.
Didn't think of anything of it.
I got a call from the camp, we're requiring masks.
I was completely shocked.
There's no mask mandate in the county, no mask mandate in the park that they're in.
We're past masks.
Why are you requiring masks only for the summer camp at this park?
And they said, well, it's to protect the children, as if my biggest imperative isn't to protect my children.
And I came in guns blazing, furious.
And I pulled my kids out and they said, sorry, no refund.
And I said, oh, you do not know who you're dealing with, do you?
And I said, I want the name of your board of directors.
I want all of their contact information.
And let's have a conversation about how this bait and switch situation happened and about how you have no concern about the future of children and the well-being of children.
And I mean, why was I the only parent that was horrified?
Every other parent dropped their kid off dutifully in a mask for a music camp in the middle of summer in a literal swamp.
We call D.C.
the swamp for a reason.
It is a swamp.
And every single parent would just say, you know, this is... And I had a lot of work to do that week.
I had piled all the rest of my work that summer, including for this book, into that week.
And I pulled my kids out and I said, OK, looks like I'm not sleeping this week.
And I did mommy camp with them the whole week.
And from 7 p.m.
until 2 a.m.
I worked.
And I don't understand why more parents didn't take that perspective.
Well, the snap point was I saw that nothing was getting better.
But just for a slight defense of parents, I would say that COVID ran into cancel culture in such a way that parents were afraid of having their lives destroyed if they spoke out and if they spoke up.
And while that doesn't excuse anybody, they should still be pulling their kids out of camps and doing stuff like that.
It does explain why parents didn't fight harder at the time.
People did get fired for saying the school should open.
Right, a little bit past the point where any of this made sense.
And I think many people would argue it never made sense.
That's a whole other thing.
So when you would talk to other parents, when you do this at the violin camp or now you're talking to parents at your kids' schools, was it really just fear or is it just that people actually had no freaking clue?
In some ways they're not adults, something like that.
That's what we have, a Gen X generation of people that never fully became adults.
But, you know, the conformity thing and people feel like they have to say exactly the right thing in the exact right way really scared people off from doing the right thing for their kids.
So in May of 2020, I said, what's the end point here?
What's the end game?
What are we doing?
I'm not willing to have every single aspect of our society sacrificed when the pediatric wing of our hospital, I mean, this was so representative of everything, the pediatric wing of our local hospital was converted into a COVID ward and sat empty for a year.
And so if you had a kid who needed to go to the ER, you had to go farther away.
Tough luck.
We got to keep it open just in case there's enough COVID patients to fill it.
And I did that and I trended on Twitter for a full day.
And, you know, there are family members that still won't see us to this day.
And that, you know, we were talking before the show about how all of this stuff impacts our kids.
Yeah, well being on this show is not going to help that department because now you're going to have members of my family that won't talk to you either.
So part of the problem is that the people who give them their licensing, for doctors for example, or teachers colleges, are very leftist and they teach them how to be indoctrinators.
I think Bethany could speak more to the licensing.
Yeah, so one of the scariest parts that sort of came out of COVID was that if you were accused of spreading misinformation, and misinformation was narrowly defined as COVID misinformation, but now it's defined more broadly into any misinformation.
And so, you know, Reproductive health.
In the wake of Roe v. Wade falling, if you're spreading misinformation about reproductive health, your license is at risk.
And so I wrote a piece for The Spectator about the fall of Roe v. Wade and all these things, and no one would talk to me on the record because they said, I can lose my license.
And who defines misinformation and who makes these decisions?
All of it is secret.
And so I can just get a letter one day that says I've had my license revoked.
And so all of this is permeating through licensing for psychiatry, for medical, to get into med school you have to answer questions that, you know, it's a litmus test.
How will you implement DEI in your professional life as a medical professional of any kind?
So many things that they did that we just will never have any kind of recourse for.
But yeah, what you described was a really damaging era in the lives of children that they'll never get back.
That's it.
That childhood moment is gone.
I think part of it is that, and going back to that forced conformity, it's a way of dividing us.
It's like, what's a woman?
What's, you know, we don't even know what this means.
These are words that have no meaning.
It's a way of making sure that we stay divided and don't unite over anything so that they can keep us in control and that they can keep the kids indoctrinated.
And again, like this goes way past just COVID, but COVID was a great accelerator for all this stuff.
And you know, you can't revolutionize an entire society when everyone is happy and content.
And so the misery and the anxiety and the depression of all of these kids is the goal, because that's how you further change, because they see that stuff is messed up and they need to fix it.
And so You know, who cares if they lose a couple and the ends justify the means.
So my kids are at public and private and we really lay the line down at home that this is what we believe.
And these are the values that we want you to carry out into the world.
And so a lot of it requires being really honest with our children about our beliefs, because parents say that, oh, we don't, we don't really talk about with our kids about that.
Well, we don't talk about necessarily politics.
We don't talk to them about which political candidates we like or anything like that.
But we do talk to them about values.
And that's important.
You want to get the message to your kids and you want to lay the foundation for them.
Because a lot of the time, you will have to let them go eventually.
They will get to college and they'll face this wokeness no matter how much you've protected them.
And it's important that they know where they came from.
I mean, they watched me scream at Montgomery County.
The county council on Zoom meetings, and I would sit there for an hour and 45 minutes, and they never tell you your time slot for speaking for two minutes on Zoom.
So you have to sit there.
And so there's one video of me holding one of my babies, and they turn on the camera, and I was the first one testifying for this portion of the county council bill.
And so I just let loose and started screaming at them.
And my kids at the end of it were like, first of all, you're terrifying.
I was yelling at them about how kids were being treated, about how my son was yelled at in a supermarket because he wasn't wearing a mask.
Just because I'll play along to go into the supermarket doesn't mean I'm going to make my kids do it.
And so my kid got yelled at in the supermarket.
And I said, this is your fault, Montgomery County Public, like the County Council.
And they saw I was fighting for them.
And that is really powerful.
And they got it.
And I mean, they saw that we were, you know, the front lawn sign for the school board candidate that we were supporting.
That was not just for my kids who are not in the public school, but it's for literally our neighbors' kids.
Right.
Because the woke infestation isn't just impacting sort of all of this ideological indoctrination, but it's also impacting the quality of education that's happening in these schools.
At the elementary school around the corner, my daughter would be in fourth grade in that school.
Less than 5% of kids are performing on level in math and I think 7% in English.
When you have moments like that, like the Zoom thing or something goes viral and blah blah blah, I assume you're going to get a ton of hate and every now and again you repost some of the hate and they say rather unpleasant things about you.
But I'm sure your inbox also blows up with a lot of parents that are like, thank you.
Do they want to get involved or do they just want to encourage you to keep fighting for
them?
Because I used to get a lot of that when I was leaving the left.
It was like people didn't want to do it but they wanted to encourage me to keep taking
the bullets which at some point starts getting annoying and then you start resenting those
people in a weird way because it's like you're not Superman or Superwoman.
But the thing is that you're going to have to stand up for your children, and if you don't stand up for them, they're going to be influenced outside of your sphere, and you will lose them.
I'm like, listen, if you're going to pee on me, at least you're going to take some of my ideas with me into life, I would hope.
That's the goal.
Where are you at now?
Like, in terms of, do you think that, you know, the 7% versus the 93%?
Are things changing?
You know, I know we have our very microcosm version of it in Florida, which feels very disconnected, as I said in the thing we did the other day to the governor.
It's like my show, I do all of the craziness for a half hour and then I finish up with 15 minutes of Florida sanity.
So I have this huge at odds view of the world at the moment.
I am encouraged that a lot of parents were horrified over COVID, not just over COVID, obviously, but also, you know, they got a peek at what their kids were learning, and they were not happy about it.
And I think that, you know, test scores hitting the news is good, and I think that people are recoiling more and more in horror at those things.
But, you know, we cover a lot of things in the book that people don't really know about.
The medical chapter to me was one of the most terrifying to write.
There are so many instances in big ways and small ways that this woke infestation through, I mean, we talked about a little bit with the licensing, with med school applications, at a conference for, you know, neonatal doctors, they canceled a panel that was supposed to sort of teach doctors about the latest technology for Premature.
Premature, thank you.
Premature babies and they canceled the panel because there weren't enough women and people of color on the panel.
So given the choice between educating doctors in the latest technology or being woke, they decided to be woke.
And so all of these things have an impact on medical innovation.
And it doesn't end in a good place.
And so that's the stuff that scares me.
And also in the children's literature space, it is so crazy now and getting crazier and crazier.
And it's because, I mean, I talked, this was one of the things I talk about in the book.
I talked to librarians and editors at big publishing houses and they said the incentive is to go woke because the libraries buy us in bulk and individual families only buy us single books.
So, you know, this is the situation that we have and people assume that, you know, when they're in a doctor's office they're safe or if they're reading they're safe.
I mean, at the end of the day, all parents are bigots and not woke enough, and it is their job, it is their sacred duty to save our children from their parents.
Yeah, no, I mean, it is part of the job description to be woke.
The number of teachers that I have heard from who say, I am not comfortable and I don't know what to do, that's to me some of the most discouraging stuff because What can they do?
I don't want them to quit.
I don't want everyone to be insane in these schools, but they have to sort of abide by the superintendent, the principal, the curriculum developers, and so they're really stuck between a rock and a hard place, and they feel this obligation to students, but they know that it's a David and Goliath fight.
Well, I don't know that there's hope for the government to do anything, but I do think the pendulum is swinging and that parents, even in blue areas, kind of had enough of all this.
And it's partly because their test scores are plummeting Yeah, and I see that their kids are not learning anything.
No, I mean, I've spoken to speech-language pathologists.
My older two kids were speech-delayed, my nine and my seven-year-old, and so I knew immediately when we started putting masks, both on kids, but also on their childcare providers, that this was going to end badly.
And it's not just that, but it's also the reading.
I have a kindergartner who I'm teaching how to read, and I was teaching him something recently, and, oh, it was the word black, which, funny enough, since I'm a racist also.
And so he could not figure it out, and I said, watch my lips.
And then he, as soon as my lips went between my teeth, he said, L. How were they teaching reading for two years?
And so I think that, you know, being lied to and told that the sky isn't blue so many times really sort of woke a lot of parents up.
But the level of delays, I think we're only just starting to realize.
And I've seen data from speech-language pathologists that, like, We're in for a rough road, and if there's any of your viewers out there who are in college thinking about their future life plans, child psychologists, speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, very safe jobs.
How worried are you that, I don't know that you cover this in the book, but that this generation of kids is going to grow up and really do horrible things to their parents in some ways?
I really mean it.
Like literally when they're checking them into the home being like no no you're going to the cheaper home and like that at some point they'll realize you know they because they were also drugged probably prescription drugs and not going to school and masks on the face and you even see it now at the airport you'll see parents without masks they've still got the kids in the masks like I actually think there is going to be a real generational thing there.
I mean, that's if, you know, if it doesn't take, if it's not like those kids are doing the same thing to their kids, which would be one of the better case scenarios, I think.
Not that I'm saying anybody should be throwing anybody in a home or anything like that.
The history chapter that we open with, I think will be eyeopening for people.
I don't think they think about it as something that has happened in history before.
It's not new.
This indoctrination thing, they do this to kids in totalitarian societies.
And we happen to be going through a very similar period.
I would say that throughout my life, people have said to me,
because I was born in the Soviet Union, do you feel like this is very Soviet?
And I would always say, no, no, nothing.
You know, the Clinton years, no, they don't feel very Soviet to me.
But this does, and the way that people told on each other during COVID, papers calling the police on each other, the way that they socially pressured each other to only have a very narrow set of opinions, you know, if you think schools should open, that means you want teachers to die, and that sort of thing, it was very reminiscent of the stories of my youth, like the things that my grandmother would tell me about, like, your friends churning on you because you weren't politically correct, and it's scary.
Isn't it weird how it ultimately became a war on normalcy?
Like, remember when Megyn Kelly finally had her, like, final straw with all this after they were doing all of this stuff at her kid's school on the Upper West Side?
And then she took a picture, I think, of a bookstore that I used to live a block away from on Amsterdam and 83rd, and it was just like, it was literally like woke superheroes or something in the bookstore window.
And then she was like, okay, I gotta leave this city.
We will link to the book down below and we'll do our best to get you on the New York Times bestseller list, but of course you know that's completely made up because they're woke and they are not big fans.
All right, well, to end this, why don't we do, we can reveal our plan now.
You guys went through this whole process of writing this whole book, coming here, et cetera, et cetera, but it was really, should we hold your hand while we say, it was to move to Florida.