March 12, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
40:19
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 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? | ||
| ♪♪ I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today | ||
| are the authors of the new book, Stolen Youth, How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence | ||
| and Indoctrinating a Generation, Carol Markowitz and Bethany Mandel. | ||
| Carol, Bethany, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Hard to not fix my hair and look at myself, you know? | ||
| And Bethany, we've never met before. | ||
| No. | ||
| But you're in the mix of these mothers who are fighting this lunacy. | ||
| Yeah, I just tag along with Carol, basically. | ||
| How did you guys decide to write a book together? | ||
| I'll go to the new person first. | ||
| I'm going to have to blend this so I don't want to cause a catfight here, right? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, let me maybe do a little bio part first before we get fully to that, just so that people have a frame of reference here. | ||
| Why don't you both say how many kids you have, ages, things like that, that kind of frame this in a personal way. | ||
| So, Bethany Mandel, I am a columnist for Deseret News and Fox News, and I write things, places. | ||
| You're on Twitter. | ||
| Yeah, I do the tweets. | ||
| And I'm an editor of a children's book series that is like super patriotic and wonderful called Heroes of Liberty. | ||
| And I have six kids, age nine and under. | ||
| Six, nine and under. | ||
| I just met the two month old. | ||
| God, you're really going for it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Carol? | |
| I'm Carol Markowitz. | ||
| I'm a columnist at the New York Post and Fox News, and I have only three kids, which seems like a lot until you meet Bethany. | ||
| As someone with two, three does seem like a lot. | ||
| You gotta catch up. | ||
| 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? | ||
| No, no, it's actually the opposite of Parent 101. | ||
|
unidentified
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Parent 101 was supposed to be... Not what Parent 101 should be, I mean, the way it functions. | |
| 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. | ||
| Last summer, summer of 22, right? | ||
| That was 22? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's going faster and faster. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So Carol, you were, I know this factually, you were dealing with this nonsense in Brooklyn and crazy things they were putting your kids through. | ||
| What was the snap point for you? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And we all pick our battles. | |
| We all pick our battles. | ||
| Like, did I mask my kids at moments that I did not feel comfortable with? | ||
| Absolutely, I did. | ||
| But that summer of 2022 really killed me. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was a combination. | ||
| In Brooklyn, I had people who were just like, well, the CDC says. | ||
| And if the CDC says, then I do it. | ||
| And the doctors say. | ||
| And I would be like, no, the doctors don't really say. | ||
| But then there were people who would tell me, like, I agree with you, but I can't speak up. | ||
| And that was really terrifying to me. | ||
| We opened with a chapter on the history of totalitarian societies and how this has happened before. | ||
| You know, forced conformity has happened before and it's happening here now and it's really scary to watch. | ||
| I know you mentioned this in your book, Don't Burn This Country, which I read, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great book, great book. | |
| Yeah, really good book. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Again, no excuse, but I was canceled over COVID, so I really have nothing. | |
| What were you canceled for? | ||
| Oh, you were a grandma killer? | ||
| You're always fighting with people on Twitter. | ||
| What were you canceled over? | ||
| 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. | ||
| My kids will never see some family members again. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Just add them to the list. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| What about the professional class related to all of this? | ||
| So talking about like the teacher class and the administrators, whether it's at a school or at a hospital, like were any of them trying to fight too? | ||
| 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. | ||
| She wrote the chapter on it in our book. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Which basically means kill more white people. | ||
| people, right? Like at some level, right? Like if you want equity in health, like... | ||
| Yeah, I mean, what we saw with the COVID vaccinations, the first priority in, | ||
| what state was it? | ||
| I think it was, I think, well, I think, I think Oregon did it too, or maybe the city of Portland. | ||
| Yes, yes. So you didn't get it first if you were a white male. Tough luck. Gotta wait. | ||
| Well, in actuality, it was probably pretty good, but that wasn't, that wasn't the intention. | ||
| What about the psychological level for your kids? | ||
| Because I remember at the height of COVID craziness, I hadn't seen my family in like six months. | ||
| I was like, forget this. | ||
| I'm going back to New York just to see my parents and see my nieces and nephew. | ||
| And I go into my nephew's room, and I think he was in sixth grade at the time, maybe fifth grade, and he's got a computer and he's in school. | ||
| But he was also playing on his Switch and doing his thing, and I was like, Ian, what's the deal with this? | ||
| And he's like, it's so stupid. | ||
| Everybody knows it's stupid. | ||
| Nobody's paying attention. | ||
| In the most pure, innocent possible way. | ||
| But the way they destroyed Kids! | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| The anxiety rates are off the charts. | ||
| The suicide rates are higher than ever. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, well that's why I do believe it's intentional now. | ||
| I used to try my best and I still do to some degree to not go after everybody's motives. | ||
| But after, I mean, you I think moved here a day before I did to Florida, right? | ||
| Or the day after me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're so smart. | |
| We're right there, right? | ||
| We like landed like probably within 24 hours of each other. | ||
| Upend our lives. | ||
| Come here. | ||
| Now you're here. | ||
| Your kids are going to school. | ||
| There's no chance they're going to be masked or forced. | ||
| That changes literally everything, right? | ||
| And again, it's not just the masking, right? | ||
| Because apparently we're past COVID, Joe Biden says. | ||
|
unidentified
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Not for that emergency order, still got that so many. | |
| Right, it's still going. | ||
| We've got COVID-25. | ||
| Right, it's coming. | ||
| But you know, the whole Ron DeSantis not allowing woke nonsense in schools, which means that | ||
| my kids who are in public school, I feel safer with them at those schools. | ||
| And I don't worry about them as much. | ||
| They don't have like 12 trans friends each because it just hasn't hit here in the same way that it hit New York. | ||
| But the thing that we always say is that you shouldn't feel safe and confident if you live in a red area. | ||
| It's coming to you too. | ||
| The teachers go to the teachers' colleges where they learn Marxism, which they pass along to your children. | ||
| This is happening everywhere. | ||
| We heard from people in small towns and rural areas and deep red states and they were all saying, my kids are getting it too. | ||
| What do you say is the ultimate answer to this at the school level? | ||
| Is it pure school choice and funding students instead of systems and doing the homeschooling? | ||
| Is it basically obliterating education as we know it? | ||
| We have different paths, but you talk about yours first. | ||
| So we homeschool, and I have no intention of doing otherwise. | ||
| I mean, I don't live in a red state. | ||
| I live in the most liberal county in a quite liberal state. | ||
| I live in Montgomery County, Maryland. | ||
| Why has Montgomery County gone so bananas? | ||
| Every time I see something out of Montgomery, it's like beyond woke. | ||
| Part of it is because a lot of us journalist folks live there. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Because it's Maryland, it shouldn't be that crazy. | ||
| So the stories that we are getting published on Fox News, and I have a hand in a lot of them. | ||
| A lot of the stuff that gets published, I'm feeding to people because it's not my zone, | ||
| but I want it out there. | ||
| And it's because I have the privilege of having the email address of a Fox News reporter. | ||
| There's people in Indiana and in Oklahoma who don't have that privilege. | ||
| Doesn't mean it's not happening there. | ||
| And so, you know, for us, like we homeschool and we are very choosy about the friends that | ||
| our kids have. | ||
| But my DMs on Twitter are a repository of all of the crazy MCPS stories. | ||
| But what's really sort of crazy is that they are so open about it. | ||
| They're so proud about it. | ||
| And so a lot of the stuff that I end up passing on to Fox News reporters is stuff that they've posted publicly on their own Twitter feed. | ||
| Well, it's sort of like libs of TikTok, right? | ||
| People are like, oh, she's attacking these people, but literally she's reposting their own videos. | ||
| So how do you differ in terms of that? | ||
| I mean, you're not. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I mean, not just tell them, but also live it. | ||
| 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 do not want to get on your bad side. | ||
| We're not going to home school tomorrow. | ||
| They sort of avoided me for the next four hours. | ||
| But they saw that I was screaming about them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Your famous tagline. | ||
| Every minute spent on wokeness is not spent on math or reading or science. | ||
| It's a time suck from those subjects. | ||
| Isn't that the extraordinary part of this? | ||
| Whenever I give a speech about this stuff, I always say to people, it's like, picture your third grade teacher. | ||
| Now picture that woman, it's most likely a woman, at least if you're of a certain age, picture that woman talking about sex with you. | ||
| It's so insane. | ||
| When I picture Mrs. Kachanow, who I thought was 120, she was maybe 55, but I just thought she was like the oldest thing ever. | ||
| And like she read a secret garden. | ||
| The idea that she would have secretly like in a small room been like talking to me, maybe your penis is a vagina. | ||
| Like it's so bananas. | ||
| And yet I'm not that old. | ||
| Like that's, you know, you know, 30 something years ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, the secrecy is a big part of it. | ||
| Another thing that I like to say is that leftism is very unpopular. | ||
| Only 7% of the country considers themselves very liberal. | ||
| So that means that 93% don't. | ||
| And that 93% is the majority, obviously, but they also don't feel like the majority because that 7% is so loud and they do what they do through force. | ||
| They kind of push their way into our society. | ||
| And that 93% has to realize that they can stand up and fight them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, people would ask me, you know, how can we get the masks off in the schools? | ||
| How can I, how can I switch? | ||
| And my answer is switch daycares. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, and they were just, well, it's really convenient. | ||
| It's close to my office. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| And that's your bed and you've decided to lie in it. | ||
| Or fight, but you can't, emailing me doesn't do anything. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I actually don't run your daycare, so. | ||
| I would take off the masks if I did, but you have to stand up and you have to fight. | ||
| Parenting is not easy, as you might know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you know how many times they pee? | |
| They pee a lot. | ||
| Forget the peeing thing. | ||
| It's just a lot. | ||
| Yeah, they do pee a lot. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It happens all the time. | ||
| And it's, you know, all of this work of getting peed on for 18 years goes out the window. | ||
| What's easier? | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, well Dave and I are obviously in like Florida la-la land where everything really is so much saner. | ||
| Do you know we live in Florida? | ||
| I don't know, I've heard. | ||
| It's a really great place. | ||
| We're here right now, you don't have to go home today. | ||
| There's one or two hundred pieces about it. | ||
| But I am so happy about that. | ||
| And I feel so much more comfortable with the kids because I don't worry about them as much. | ||
| In the book, I write a lot about the Florida move, obviously. | ||
| And in acknowledgment, I thank the governor and the first lady for giving us this place of normalcy. | ||
| And what I say in my chapter about what to do about this wokeness is you might have to move. | ||
| You might have to switch states. | ||
| You might have to switch communities. | ||
| Maybe it's as easy as switching schools, but you have to do this for your kids. | ||
| The last word in the book is fight, and we really mean it. | ||
| You have to fight for your children. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, do I have hope? | ||
| I have hope for our kids. | ||
| Like, our kids. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| I mean, I've never met them. | ||
| Presumably they're a married couple. | ||
| They seem alright so far. | ||
| They're starting to babble a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, my 9-year-old is going to marry her 10-year-old, so we're really in it for the long haul. | ||
| You've got to line them up. | ||
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Yeah, that's good. | |
| 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. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| and you can't assume anymore. | ||
| Where do you think the media plays into this? | ||
| Because even with what's going on now with DeSantis going after the AP African American Studies | ||
| course because it was teaching gender queer theory | ||
| and did you know that Harriet Tubman was running an underground lesbian bar? | ||
| Like it's all so stupid, but the way they frame everything is so profoundly dishonest | ||
| that parents watch The View and they hear them say, okay, they're not going to teach slavery in Florida. | ||
| And then they, it's like this systemic, everyone uses the word systemic, but it's like this systemic stupidening. | ||
|
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Stupidening? | |
| Stupidening, I like it. | ||
| Of everyone, basically. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But DeSantis manages to get past that. | ||
| He manages to out-talk The View, right? | ||
| I think that that's the case. | ||
| When given the opportunity. | ||
| So I think DeSantis handles it very well. | ||
| And MSNBC asked his office for a comment and they said, we will not be commenting. | ||
| Yeah, that was after the Andrea Mitchell absolute lie, why does Ron DeSantis not want to teach slavery? | ||
| The reason I'm asking that question, though, is because, you know, there was this, the book that was taken out so far, the only book, what was it? | ||
| It was the gender, what was it, woke gender theory? | ||
| I don't remember, I don't know what it was called, but yeah. | ||
| But they were literally teaching kids how to give handjobs. | ||
| Why would you want that in a school? | ||
| Did you guys ever talk to these people? | ||
| Were you able to, like, whittle it down to that with any of the people that you're fighting with? | ||
| Like, they have the grand woke idea, but did you ever, like, get it to them at that note? | ||
| We have a chapter on sexuality. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, that's Communism 101, right? | ||
| Yeah, but the thing is that they're also not having children. | ||
| They want to indoctrinate our children. | ||
| They're not having any. | ||
| They're all antinatalists. | ||
| Yeah, their fertility rates are really low. | ||
| So it ends up happening that they don't have kids and they want your kids to have this | ||
| information. | ||
| And the thing is the secrecy is such a big part of it. | ||
| They don't run on, you know, let's get porn into schools. | ||
| They run on, you know, oh, we're going to have great books in our library, but then | ||
| they end up having stuff like that. | ||
| What is going on with whether these teachers are actually dealt with or not? | ||
| So like when Libs of TikTok puts up these videos of these teachers and they clearly are, they're saying exactly what you said. | ||
| They say it themselves, these are our kids. | ||
| And they view themselves as the savior of these children. | ||
| Are they being fired? | ||
| Like I know in Florida a couple of them have. | ||
| I'm guessing in Montgomery County it's probably not happening. | ||
| So in that regard, it's still strengthening in some respects. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Genderqueer, by the way, is the name of the book. | ||
| That's the main one that has been taken out of the Florida schools. | ||
| So while the media is running around saying 1.5 million books have been taken out of Florida schools, it's all complete nonsense. | ||
| What about at the race level? | ||
| Because we've talked about it sort of at the COVID level and a bit at the gender and sexuality level. | ||
| What's going on at the race level? | ||
| Your kids are white supremacists. | ||
| They are, obviously. | ||
| Well, they're Jews, so that's not... No, that's double white supremacists. | ||
| I don't know if they're white right now or not. | ||
| It depends on the week. | ||
| Yeah, it really does depend on the week. | ||
| The funny thing is that CRT was somewhat beat back. | ||
| It was, uh, that really hit when everybody was paying attention. | ||
| And when CRT, uh, the concept of it was introduced to parents, they saw how noxious it was. | ||
| Um, and I think that, that, that it provides kind of a roadmap of what to do and it, and the parents should emulate that in the gender fight. | ||
| It's a very similar, I mean, I think a lot of parents of color also were horrified by CRT. | ||
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Exactly. | |
| And that was a really powerful voice because they said, do not teach my children that they are victims. | ||
| Do not teach my children that we have to lower standards so that they can succeed. | ||
| My child can succeed against anyone in your school, and please stop telling them otherwise. | ||
| Because that's what's really, you know, we want to talk about racism. | ||
| The racism of low expectations is really what's harming those kids. | ||
| And so those voices of black parents We're really, really powerful in the fight against CRT. | ||
| But I think also with the gender stuff, it's a lot harder to speak up because it's all sort of lumped together and you're just a generalized bigot. | ||
| That could be the title of my next book. | ||
| Generalized bigot. | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| There was something about the way you said bigot that seemed particularly strong there. | ||
| To some extent, okay, it's growing. | ||
| People are fighting back. | ||
| Does this just leave us in what we've come to the conclusion of that it's just the state and the local community and lower and lower and lower? | ||
| Like, is there any hope at the federal level that any of this will change? | ||
| 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. | ||
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Even the delayed speech thing, which is huge now. | |
| It seems like almost every kid now, obviously that's a bit of an exaggeration, but has some level of speech deficiency. | ||
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unidentified
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That simply was not the way it was back in the day. | |
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I have six kids. | ||
| I'm probably safe. | ||
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unidentified
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Probably. | |
| My odds are really in my favor. | ||
| I'll take decent care of you the other five years. | ||
| The odds are really in my favor. | ||
| You're gonna be fine. | ||
| What else are you guys hitting in here that, that, you know, beyond, okay, so we've got gender, | ||
| we've got COVID, we've got race stuff, the sort of move to where you're supposed to be | ||
| kind of thing. | ||
| Yeah, the medical chapter. | ||
| The medical chapter. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Did this change how you guys do family structure things as well? | ||
| Because they're obviously trying to infiltrate the family. | ||
| Did it shift anything in terms of how you deal with just your internal, literally your home? | ||
| So when I was writing the chapter on entertainment and media, I spent a lot of time on literature because I think that folks... | ||
| are now pretty understanding of the fact that, you know, when they turn on the TV, | ||
| Disney, everything is woke. But the insidiousness of it in the children's literature space, I think, | ||
| is very shocking. And I was talking to two mothers one week, and both of them mentioned the same book, | ||
| a graphic novel for middle grade kids. So like, seven to 12 or so. | ||
| And it's for girls and it's about girls soccer players. | ||
| And both of them told me there's a sex scene in it between two girls at a sleepover. | ||
| And I was like, I don't want my daughter thinking she can have a sexual encounter at a sleepover. | ||
| That seems like a road that I don't want to open. | ||
| And the second time the mother described it in more detail, I thought, girl soccer player graphic novel. | ||
| library last week. I feel like that sounds familiar. And I hung up the phone, got my iPhone | ||
| flashlight out, opened my trunk, went into the bag with the library books, and there it was. And I | ||
| said, oh, well, I could quote this extensively because my daughter picked it out at the library | ||
| this week. And I hadn't brought the book in. And I said, that's it for us at the library. I'm done. | ||
| And it was ironic because I spent all of COVID fighting with my local library to reopen. | ||
| I don't remember the last time I've been there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, that they just, everywhere. | ||
| That's really what it was. | ||
| It was the war on normalcy, I think. | ||
| That's what drove us out of New York. | ||
| It was that we didn't see normalcy returning for a while, and childhood very short, so we didn't want our kids to be growing up in that. | ||
| I think that's the real thing parents need to give their kids, that stability and normalcy so that they grow up and they're resilient. | ||
| That's the goal, raising resilient children. | ||
| Well, Bethany, you walked in here with a two-month-old, who then you handed to my assistant. | ||
| We haven't heard anything in the last 40 minutes, so I feel like it's probably going okay out there. | ||
| I mean, before she's taken him, in which case I have five spares. | ||
| So, good luck to her. | ||
| Any final thoughts, ladies? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Greta Thunberg's at the top. | ||
| Well, that's the thing. | ||
| That's the thing that, you know, really people should understand is that this has permeated everything. | ||
| You think that something is normal or fair or standard, and it's not. | ||
| And New York Times bestseller list is a great example of that, where it doesn't matter how many books you sell. | ||
| The Greta Thunberg example, she was on the bestseller list last week with 4,000 books. | ||
| I'm sure that you sold more. | ||
| We sold way more. | ||
| Way more. | ||
| And you weren't on it, right? | ||
| I should have been number 2, possibly number 1 for my last book. | ||
| They didn't even put me on it. | ||
| And on my first book they put me at 11 when I should have been 4. | ||
| That's really what we're fighting. | ||
| And I sold 10 times more than number 4. | ||
| That's what we're fighting here. | ||
| It's that this abnormal behavior and this push of just one viewpoint is permeating everything, and you have to keep your kids from it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the final thought for me is the resilience chapter. | ||
| That was the last chapter that I wrote and told a very personal story of my mom passing away in the circumstances of that when I was 16 years old. | ||
| I was the one that pulled the plug. | ||
| Spoiler alert. | ||
| And I was raised resilient. | ||
| And I went to a therapist who gave me some tough love and said, do not define yourself as a victim. | ||
| If it's not who you want to be, do not define yourself as such. | ||
| What are the chances of a 16-year-old Bethany today having a therapist who would say that to her? | ||
| Now victimhood is the goal. | ||
| It's not something that you want to avoid. | ||
| And it's creating a generation of children who are not just not resilient, but who are basket cases. | ||
| And that's the goal. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Am I with my one suitcase and my two month old? | ||
| There is no flight back and your child has been taken by my assistant. | ||
| It's been a pleasure, ladies. | ||
| It was really nice. | ||
| The book is Stolen Youth. | ||
| The link is right down below. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of mindless dribble, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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