Propaganda and Your Kids ｜ Karol Markowicz ｜ EP 355 (u1QOvu6d5AM)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=u1QOvu6d5AM

I would say that the conversation about what to teach kids and at what age is larger than just sex either. I don’t know why we’re teaching climate change fear to small children. Age appropriateness is such a big part of all of this and the left really wants to remove the boundaries of age appropriateness. And you could see this with the drag queen shows. It started with drag queen story hour where a drag queen would read a book to kids. Where’s the last time we saw a book in any of these events? Now it’s twerking and dancing. This really inappropriate behavior becomes something that you must not only accept, you must also support. And a lot of what we go through in the book as well is how the spectacle of leftism is such a big part of it. It’s not just that you need to believe certain things. You need to demonstrate that you believe them. You can’t just think Black Lives Matter. You need to put the sign in your window. And so all of this is very again Soviet, totalitarian, authoritarian. And it’s coming here and it’s aimed at our kids. Hello everyone. Today I’m speaking with Carol Markowitz, writer of the new book Stolen Youth and a columnist at the New York Post. We discussed the ideological capture not just of our school systems but of our children. From the pornographic books being peddled into libraries to the authoritarian doctrines letting bad teachers preach, keeping good teachers silent. This interview is vital for parents worried about the state of the K-12 public school system. So Carol, you have a book Stolen Youth and that’s being published by Daily Wire, by the Daily Wire crew. And so is that out? And if not, when is it out? And then even more importantly, what is it about? It is out. It came out March 15th. And it’s about the way the woke are targeting our children for indoctrination and what parents can do about it. All right. So let me ask you a specific question about that. I’ve been trying to think this through watching the American public school system implode. So I want to walk a hypothesis by you and maybe then you can tell me what you think of it in light of what you’ve been researching. So our whole society decided a couple of decades ago to include gay relationships under the broader umbrella of socially acceptable and or desirable relationships. That was the gay marriage issue. And that started out as a progressive movement, but eventually the classic liberals and the conservatives came on board. And we made a societal decision to expand the definition of conjugal union, let’s say, if not on the religious front, at least on the state front and often on the religious front. Now that produces a thorny problem, you might say, because what you’ve done then as a society is to sacralize same-sex sexual activity. Now that brings up the next problem, which is, well, once you’ve decided that there’s no moral or qualitative distinction between homosexual sex and heterosexual sex, and you’ve already decided that you’re also going to educate your children on the sex front, then you have to solve the problem of exactly what you teach children about sex. And you might say the default would be, well, you spend half the time teaching them about heterosexual processes, let’s say, and you spend half the time teaching them about homosexual practices, because since there’s no distinction in value, there’s no reason to draw a boundary. And then that makes the problem even worse after that, because if the default rule of thumb now is every proclivity has an equal opportunity to be put forward on the educational front, you have to face the problem of, well, what if all the books that your children are reading feature only heterosexual couples? Do you now have to transform the entire canon of children’s literature so that all other forms of sexual encounter get equal airtime? The content I’ve created over the past year represents some of my best to date, as I’ve undertaken additional extensive exploration in today’s most challenging topics and experienced a nice increment in production quality, courtesy of DailyWire+. We all want you to benefit from the knowledge gained throughout this adventurous journey. I’m pleased to let you know that for a limited time, you’re invited to access all my content with a seven-day free trial at DailyWire+. This will provide you with full access to my new in-depth series on marriage, as well as guidance for creating a life vision, and my series exploring the Book of Exodus. You’ll also find there the complete library of all my podcasts and lectures. I have a plethora of new content in development that will be coming soon exclusively on DailyWire+. Plus, voices of reason and resistance are few and far between these strange days. Click on the link below if you want to learn more, and thank you for watching and listening. And it seems to me, number one, that the answer to that is we don’t know how to do that. Number two, we’re trying to give every proclivity equal airtime. And number three, that’s destroying the public education system. So what do you think of that? What’s your take on the situation? Why are we in this peculiar position? So it’s interesting because one of the things that we cover in the book is how children’s books have gotten so inappropriate in so many different ways. And I think a lot of the time these books are allowed into the classroom or into the children’s libraries because they’re specifically LGBT. A lot of the pornographic books, for example, that Ron DeSantis in Florida, my governor, is trying to pull out of elementary school libraries are pornography books, but they’re specifically gay pornography. And they use that as cover to say, if you don’t like these pornographic books in your elementary school library, then perhaps you’re anti-gay, perhaps you’re homophobic. And so they use this all as an excuse to kind of get these things in front of children. It’s a wider issue of much younger sexualization and just pitching ideas to kids that are completely inappropriate. They wouldn’t allow this kind of thing to go on if it were straight sex. They wouldn’t let a pornographic book with straight couples into libraries. They wouldn’t let, let’s say, a stripper grind and dance in front of children, but drag queens are okay. And if you challenge that, then you’re the problem. So two things come out of that. Like, who do you think is the they in question? Exactly. It’s a why they. We try to answer this question in the book because this is a really good question. It’s not some vague they. And in fact, a lot of it is I don’t like the idea of saying it’s an ideology that targets children. No, it’s people that target children with their ideology. A lot of it does come at the top. So you have like teachers, unions, teachers, accreditation societies. All of that is has been captured by the ideologically woke. And so this is being spread throughout the U.S. and I’m sure elsewhere, really from the top. And there are if you look at like library associations, I know that that sounds crazy. Before we started researching this book, I would have thought, oh, this is a conspiracy theory. Why would the libraries want to push this kind of thing? But they do. And they have like these annual meetings where they decide what kind of books are going to be in our libraries. And they specifically say things like, it’s okay to not tell the parents what the kids are taking out of the library. That’s crazy. Parents should be the last line of defense for their kids, but they can’t be if they don’t know what’s going on. So your sense is that there are, well, targeted groups of activists fundamentally who are pushing this agenda. That brings up two additional questions, I suppose. One is why would they do that? And the second is what exactly constitutes pornographic content? And I know that’s a particularly thorny question. Let’s talk about why, first of all. Like my sense of this, looking at it historically, because there have been pushes for, let’s say, liberalization of childhood sexual behavior that have been mounted for decades now. There was a famous petition signed back in the early 70s by a whole coterie of French intellectuals aiming at radically lowering the age of consent, making the claim that children were perfectly capable of consenting to, essentially, to sexual relationships. Now, you might ask why adults would be interested in doing that. And I suppose the positive side is that they’re trying to free children from unnecessary constraints by tyrannical adults. But the darker end of that is something more like the entire movement to promote sexual freedom is grounded in a very narrow hedonism. And I would say it’s narrow because narrow means willing to sacrifice everything to the pleasures of the moment. Now, you know, there is a psychological literature on the personality attributes of people who engage in short-term mating strategies. So that would be casual sex mating strategies. And the tilt towards casual mating strategies rather than long-term relationships, let’s say committed relationships, is associated with what’s been called the dark tetrad group of personality traits. And that’s narcissistic, manipulative or Machiavellian, psychopathic, that’s parasitic and predatory, and, because that wasn’t enough, sadistic. And so what you have is a group of people, and arguably there is a small minority of people, who are extremely oriented towards maximizing short-term pleasure, their own short-term pleasure, and perfectly willing to sacrifice everything to that, and also perfectly capable to demonize and destroy reputations in that pursuit. And they attempt, I think what’s happening is that they’re attempting in every desperate way possible to ensure that their hedonism moves forward in an untrammeled manner, but also that they can make a moral claim that any objection to their hedonistic behavior is nothing but prejudice, right, which is the radical leftists are extremely good at maneuvering and manipulating on that front. So that seems to be associated with the why. In your investigations, you talk about the they that are pushing this agenda, for example, in library groups and among teacher groups and so forth. What’s your sense of the underlying motivation? I think it’s a cultural revolution, and I think we’ve seen it before in so many countries. We opened the book with a history chapter. I was born in the Soviet Union. I came to the US as a small child, and these so many things that I heard throughout my life, I feel like are happening right now in our country. And I don’t know that, you know, I ever felt like this before. Throughout my life, people have said, oh, doesn’t this feel Soviet to you, like the 1990s, the early 2000s, like isn’t this Soviet feeling? And I would always say no. But now I see it. I see that we’re moving in the direction of an authoritarian system where neighbors inform on each other and people are afraid to speak. And so much of this, to me, began under COVID, but has really accelerated. They’ve managed to force this cultural revolution on all of us. And they’re starting with the kids just like all the revolutions before them. And the only difference is that in places like the US, you know it’s happening. My Soviet ancestors could probably say that they didn’t know it was happening. They didn’t have the internet. They didn’t have much news. And in other countries too, in China and Cambodia, these places could say that we didn’t know. We didn’t know what the leaders were doing. We didn’t know what people in charge were doing. I don’t think people in America can say that. And for us, part of the reason of writing this book is to make sure that they can say that. So the overt sexualization of children, let me add another wrinkle to this just to make things further complicated. A long while back, five years ago, I interviewed Milo Yiannopoulos. And Milo was quite an interesting person. Extraordinarily extroverted, dramatic, charismatic. He made quite a splash on university campuses for a couple of years as a right-wing provocateur, you might say, but coming from the LGBT side of the community spectrum. And I talked to him a little bit about his early sexual experiences. He was inducted, you might say, into homosexual activity when he was about 14, something like that, at the hands, as it turned out, of someone who was a member of religious community who was about 29 or so. And he said that that was consensual and that it was welcome on his part. And also that he was capable of making that decision even though he was 14. That was his retrospective memory. But I had my doubts about that when I talked to him, listening as a clinician, first of all, because I don’t care how smart you are when you’re 14, you’re still only 14. And just because you thought you were competent at that point to make decisions like that doesn’t mean that that was an accurate memory to carry forward, let’s say, into your adult years. And Milo didn’t seem to harbor any malice or resentment towards the person who he had been involved with. But later on, his star plummeted, let’s say, and things got pretty twisted and bent for Milo. He ended up converting to a rather radical form of Christian evangelism and eschewing his homosexual lifestyle. And I’m not saying that he saw the light or anything like that. I’m saying that all of that was evidence of an extraordinarily deep-seated existential confusion. But one of the things Milo did say, and this is a very thorny issue, was that that practice of having young gay men inducted into active homosexual activity by older men is an extremely common part of the subculture. Now, nobody talks about that outside of the subculture, let’s say. And part of the reason for that is that if you even bring it up, I understand that this is also common in organizations like, well, there isn’t any evidence that I know of that shows that the rate of child abuse among Roman Catholic clergy is any higher than it is among other groups of people that have access to children, let’s say. But I have heard through the grapevine and as a consequence of my investigations that this practice of older men inducting younger men into active homosexual practice is, what would you say, it’s a subcultural given. And so that complicates the situation very much, as well. You know, there’s a proclivity among the gay male community to be attracted to youth. Now, it’s not different, really different than heterosexual male attraction to heterosexual female, because there’s a proclivity for men to like younger women. And this is an extension of that, but it certainly makes the discussion of all of this much more complicated, especially when you’re also talking about the motives. I think part of the question we’re dealing with is, you know, is it possible to develop a society that manifests tolerance of or even appreciation for committed homosexual relationships that doesn’t run a ground on the problem of what to teach children about sex? So I would say that, first of all, everything that Milo says should be taken with a grain of salt. I think that when he said that, it’s one of the many controversial splashy things that he says to get into our news, which I’ve met him. He is very personable. He’s very magnetic. I get it. But, you know, I think that there was a level of disgust when he said that, and also a pushback from a lot of gay people, and not just on the left, the idea that they’re predators. And obviously, I think that that’s something that they argued very strongly against. So Milo isn’t the best to me example, but your question is right. How do we protect children in any case, from anyone? And I think that a lot of what we address in the book is that you have to have sort of open conversations with your kids about what happens out in the world, and how to protect them is to lay a foundation at home and to make sure that there is this open line of communication. I think a lot of the work that you do, for example, is to help adults be resilient. Well, what if we didn’t mess up kids in the first place? What if we didn’t have to have unresilient adults that needed fixing or help? What if we treated childhood as a time to teach them how to be in the world, instead of to indoctrinate them with far left ideas in their schools and libraries and doctor’s office and media companies and every other avenue? President Trump recently issued a warning from his Mar-a-Lago home, quote, our currency is crashing and will soon no longer be the world standard, which will be our greatest defeat, frankly, in 200 years. There are three reasons why the central banks are dumping the US dollar, inflation, deficit spending, and our insurmountable national debt. The fact is there is one asset that has withstood famine, wars, and political and economic upheaval dating back to biblical times, gold. 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I think there was a famous Supreme Court decision at one point where the justice involved in deciding whether a particular, I believe it was a magazine transgressed against community standards. He said something approximating. I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it. And that’s not a completely unreasonable answer because there are lots of things we know when we see that we can’t define or make explicit. But when push comes to shove, which is what’s happening in the schools right now, it’s no easy matter to clearly define the line between what constitutes pornography and what constitutes open and frank discussion about sexuality. And of course, what’s happening in Florida is that the more radical types, the more progressive types, and also, by the way, some people who are concerned with censorship is that the attempt to regulate what’s being shown to children is, can easily degenerate into a form of heavy-handed state censorship. And so for you personally, you’ve been researching this book for a long time, thinking about these matters. I mean, do you regard yourself like, are you a conservative on the sexual morality front? Is that embedded in your own, what would you say, your own concerns about purity and propriety? And how do you think that we can draw a line between what constitutes appropriate sexually informative material and what constitutes pornography? These books that you’ve been objecting to, that DeSantis has been objecting to, what line is it that they’re crossing as far as you’re concerned? Yeah. So DeSantis has been asked this, and he held a press conference, and he said, I’m going to show you the books. And the news agencies had to pull away from his press conference because they couldn’t show what was in the books on the news. I think that’s a fairly good standard. If you can’t show it on the news to adults, then you can’t show it to my kindergartener. And that’s not a crazy thing to say. I’m generally very permissive about written material, not to kids. I don’t think it should be immediately because something’s okay to be published, means that it should be acceptable for children. It’s not. Not everything is made for kids. And I don’t just mean books. A lot of things in the world are not appropriate for children. And so in these books, it’s not simply sex acts. There’s things like sexting in the books. Again, this is in the library for elementary school, so until fifth grade, which in the US is like 11, 12 years old, 11. And so these books are accessible to really small children, and it’s drawing, so it looks almost cartoony. And librarians suggest it to kids. There’s graphic sex acts. There’s, I don’t know how much I’m allowed to say here, but there’s oral sex, renal sex. Say exactly what you have to say. There’s language like blowjobs, butt plugs, etc. in these books that are available to small children. Now, should they be available to high school children, to teenagers? Even that, if beyond, why should it be available in their school library? But to smaller children, I don’t even think it’s a question. I don’t understand why having this debate, because it’s so clear that if we can’t read it on the news, we shouldn’t have it in their library. Right, so that’s a practical demonstration of the violation of community standards. Well, okay, this brings up another issue. So you might say that there’s a certain minimum degree of sex education that should be provided as part of the public education system, and that children who are properly educated in sexual matters, for example, might be less likely to end up pregnant as teenagers. Now, I would say the empirical evidence for the utility of sexual education in public schools as a preventative measure for teenage pregnancy is damn dismal. There’s no real evidence that providing just the facts, ma’am, so to speak, to kids had any effect whatsoever on the remediation of childhood teenage pregnancy, let’s say. And I would also say that kids can get so much information about sex on the net. Now, not that that’s a particularly good way of going about it, but it’s certainly available that the additional value of having teachers teach sexual education seems debatable at best. But then you could perhaps say that there’s a place in the schools for discussion of the biology of reproduction, maybe in a biology class, because obviously reproduction is a major element of biology. But then that brings up another thorny issue, which is, is it possible or desirable to offer value-free sex education, you know, or is that a contradiction in terms? Because if you describe the process merely in terms of its mechanics, you’re making the case implicitly that, what would you say, that sex can be viewed purely through the lens of objectivity. And it isn’t obvious at all that that’s the case. Like it seems to me, and this is my socially conservative prejudice, you might say, that it’s actually unethical to teach kids about sex outside the context of simultaneously teaching them about the necessity of long-term committed, loving, mutually reciprocal relationships, right? Marriages for all intents and purposes. And that if you divorce one from the other, you’re already halfway down the slippery slope to the kind of perdition that we’re facing now. Well, and then you might say, well, the simplest solution on that front would just be to pull the schools out of the sex education business altogether. So what do you think about that? And you’ve been talking to political figures, you’re somewhat involved with the DeSantis people. Like what’s the solution from the conservative side to this conundrum? Well, there I think is a range of solutions. So one thing I would say is a number of years ago, there was this show called Teen Mom on MTV. And there was a study that showed that this show actually did more to reduce teen pregnancies than all of these sex education classes, because they saw what it was like for a teenager to be a mother and they thought, God, I don’t want this. And so for all the conversations in the sex education class about how not to get pregnant or why not to get pregnant, the image of it really did solidify for kids. I don’t want this. The other thing I would say is that the biology classes are running into a different problem at this point, because we can’t be honest about a lot of biology. We have a chapter in the book on transgenderism. How do they address transgenderism in biology or sex education classes? They don’t address it with any facts. It’s all very feelings based and what people think and feel as opposed to what things actually are. So I would love to see a straight discussion in biology class about the way the human body works, but we’re moving further and further away from that. And it’s being filled in with a bunch of woke nonsense that our kids aren’t going to be able to process at the age that they’re at and carry forward into being these resilient, capable adults. I would say that the conversation about what to teach kids and at what age is larger than just sex either. I don’t know why we’re teaching climate change fear to small children. There’s a lot of evidence that anxiety among teenagers and young people is very high because of stuff like this. And why? What are these kids going to do to fight climate change? What are they going to do other than lay in their bed at night and be afraid that the world is going to end? So for us, and what we say a lot in stolen news is that age appropriateness is such a big part of all of this. And the left really wants to remove the boundaries of age appropriateness. And you could see this with the drag queen shows. It started with drag queen story hour where a drag queen would read a book to kids. Where’s the last time we saw a book in any of these events? Now it’s twerking and dancing and they would never stand for it if it were a straight woman stripping and doing the same thing. But because it’s again, they use the LGBT shield, this really inappropriate behavior becomes something that you must not only accept. You must also support. And a lot of what we go through in the book as well is how the spectacle of leftism is such a big part of it. It’s not just that you need to believe certain things. You need to demonstrate that you believe them. You can’t just think Black Lives Matter, which is a, you know, idea as controversial as the earth is round. You need to put the sign in your window. And so all of this is very, again, Soviet, totalitarian, authoritarian, and it’s coming here and it’s aimed at our kids. 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And so those are measurable and they’re pretty good predictors of long-term outcome. And while I was investigating all of that on for purely practical reasons, by the way, I was trying to figure out how to help people select better employees and how to select better students, those who had a better chance of succeeding, let’s say. I started investigating alternative theories of human ability, and that led me into research that was being conducted primarily at education schools. Howard Gardner, Robert Sternberg, those were big names in those days. Gardner invented the theory of multiple intelligences and Sternberg, the proposition that there was a kind of practical intelligence that was different and could be, what would you call, promoted independent of general cognitive ability. And I looked into that research in great detail and concluded along with my colleagues that it was absolute 100% nonsense and rubbish. That all that Gardner had done with his theory of multiple intelligences was repackage the idea of talent and call it intelligence and that all Sternberg had done was hand wave about a form of cognitive ability that he couldn’t measure nor demonstrate. But it was politically, what would you say, welcome because it challenged the idea that general cognitive ability is a unitary phenomena, which it is, by the way. And that led me to take a look at what education schools were doing in more detail and what I learned, and I certainly have learned more of this as the years have progressed, that there isn’t any worse research done on the social science front than the research that’s done in faculties of education. They’re responsible for more pathological educational fads than any other single academic source, which is really saying something because they have to compete with departments of English and say fields of like faculties of social work and all the, what do they call those, grievance study disciplines. So you have to work pretty hard to be the worst of that bunch, but the faculties of education have truly managed it. Now, and they’re the people who are training our teachers, but it’s worse than that because the students that enroll in faculties of education are not exactly the cream of the crop, generally speaking. They’re all the same. They’re often kids who haven’t figured out who go into education as a kind of default because they don’t know what else to do. They’re not stringently selected for their academic prowess, and they’re often people who are interested in a rather permanent career with a pretty decent shot of holidays. And so we’re not getting the cream of the crop as students, and we certainly don’t have the cream of the crop as researchers in the faculties of education. However, the faculties of education have a hammerlock on teacher certification, and that means that the woke enterprise enters the general population because of the faculties of education hammerlock control of teacher certification. And so my question is, why in the world are the Republicans daft enough and have been for like 50 years to not only allow this insane monopoly to exist, but to continue especially given also that in many states in the US there’s actually a teacher shortage, and given also that there’s no evidence whatsoever that faculties of education have ever produced to show that their attempts to train teachers actually make teachers better. So you know, we could complain about the radical leftists pushing their idiot agenda, and there’s no shortage of useful complaining to do on that front, but I would say, well, if the bloody conservatives are going to roll over like dimwits and allow the monopoly of the leftists to continue on the teacher certification front, they get exactly, we get exactly what we deserve. So we’re talking about ideology here, and we’re talking about the sway of these ideas and even the sway of these radical individuals, but the fundamental problem technically is that there’s a monopoly on teacher certification that’s been granted to the faculties of education and their woke nightmares. So like, how in the world can the Republicans and the conservatives in general be so blind? If I had a dollar for every time I wondered how could Republicans be so daft, I would be a gazillionaire. You’re absolutely right. They’re not doing anything. I think in places like Florida, I have a lot of faith in Governor Ron DeSantis, but obviously there’s only so much he can do. Our family moved from New York to Florida about a year ago because we saw saner policies, but you’re right. And so much of what you’re saying is right. It’s not even just political stuff. Like a discussion happening right now in America is about the way that we’ve been teaching children to read. Now I have three kids, 13, 10, and seven. About a year and a half ago, I realized that my youngest kid does not know how to read despite everybody around him thinking that he does. And the thing was he had managed, cause he’s a smart kid, he had managed to memorize enough words to make it seem like he knows how to read. So I would have these conversations with his teachers and they would say, Oh no, you’re wrong. He knows how to read. He’s really smart. And I’d say, I know he’s really smart. He’s managed to convince you he knows how to read. And he does it because the way that we’ve taught reading in America for the last decade plus has been memorize these words. And somehow that works. It’s whole word reading. Yeah, it’s not reading. It’s no sounding out. So my older two managed to still read the right way, but my younger one took the lesson, memorized all these words, a lot of words, and went through life pretending to read. Now we’re having the conversation of like, wow, that was a really dumb thing to do for a while in our schools, but why did it happen in the first place? Why are we throwing random, I can tell you, I can tell you why. I can tell you how that happened. I looked into that because that’s one of the preposterously stupid theories put forward by faculties of education. So here’s how it happened. So if you analyze, imagine that you might start by thinking that if you wanted to teach children how to do something, you’d look at how experts do it and teach them the way the experts do it. Okay, well, that’s not a bad theory. It’s not necessarily true because experts and beginners might use different strategies, but as far as theories go, it could be stupider. So let’s start with that. Okay, so now let’s analyze the behavior of expert readers. Well, expert readers read words at a glance. They don’t sound them out. And not only that, expert readers, if they’re really expert, can probably read a whole phrase at a glance with one eye movement. And so the theory was, well, experts read at the whole word level, so perhaps we should teach children to do that. Now, there’s other evidence supporting that idea. So for example, if I showed you a paragraph made up of English words where each word had the first letter and the last letter in the right place, but all the intermediary letters were scrambled, you could still read that and almost as fast. And so by the time you’re an expert reader, you do recognize whole words as units. And so the theory was, well, why don’t we just teach children to recognize whole words? Now, the problem with that is, well, just because that’s how experts do it doesn’t mean that’s how they learn to do it. So that’s one problem. And the second problem is that basically converts English into a form of Chinese. Now, Chinese words exactly is that each character becomes something like an image instead of a sequence of letters. The whole point of the bloody alphabet is to have an alphabetic language. And the whole point of that is to allow for phonetic learning to break down the sounds into their units, to allow children to piece together the units, and then to memorize the words. Now, so what happens when you learn phonetically is that you first of all master the 40 sounds or so that are associated with the alphabet. Then you learn how to chunk them into say two letter or three letter combinations. Then you learn how to put them together in words. And as you do that, you build up the neural circuitry that enables you to identify the words at a glance. But you do it from the bottom up. Well, the idiot researchers. It just seems like we’re teaching kids, you know, using a philosophy that we haven’t thought through. I don’t know very much about education. I haven’t thought it through at all. But I know that that was crazy. It was research that was shoddy in the utter extreme. And this isn’t new. The whole word reading dispute goes back at least 40 years. And it’s absolutely 100% self-evident in the literature that if you take a school system, this happened in California, that used a phonetic approach to reading, and you transform that into a school system that uses a whole word approach to reading, that you decimate the ability of the education system to teach children how to read. And we’ve known that for 40 years. And the faculties of education are still debating whether or not this is true. And that’s only one of the many unbelievably foolish things they managed to do. And here’s some more. They’re the originators of the self-esteem movement. And because of their cockeyed version of what constituted self-esteem, they ended up teaching children to be narcissistic instead of to be confident. And narcissists pretend to be confident. That’s how they, and mimic it. And when you do explicit self-esteem training, you train narcissism, not confidence. We have social-emotional learning. We have learning styles. We have all these idiot educational fads. And there’s not an iota of good research data suggesting that they do anything but harm. And that’s all, that can all be put at the foot of the faculties of education. But they’re entirely enabled by idiot Republicans, for example, who aren’t smart enough to notice that they’re losing the cultural war because they’ve handed over the entire educational enterprise to social justice warriors. And it doesn’t take that much thinking to figure that out. Yeah. I mean, one of the other discoveries that we made in researching stolen youth. And again, this is something that I would have thought was a conspiracy theory before we started writing this book. But in teachers’ colleges, they use Marxist books to teach the teachers. So the teachers themselves get indoctrinated. And then they spread out throughout the country and they indoctrinate the kids. They don’t even know what’s happening. They don’t know that they’ve learned critical theory and that they’re passing it along to children. They think that they’ve learned something good. So I think a lot of this, I don’t know why Republicans don’t spend all their time talking about it. I think the reason I would have thought it was a conspiracy theory is because how can it be in America that the teachers’ colleges are using Marxist books and they’re coming up with concepts like two plus two is not always four. And it’s not front page news every day. It’s not the main thing that all of our politicians talk about all the time. How could that be? And that’s really, again, part of the reason that we needed this book to be published is because we felt like for a long time you could say, I didn’t know, I don’t know. These politicians can say, I don’t know. Well, again, read our book and there’s no way to say, I didn’t know. Yeah, well, you know, I see this happening in Canada. There’s a conservative government in Ontario and there’s a conservative minister of education in Ontario. And nonetheless, the school system there is as woke as hell. And what happens consistently is that these bloody Marxist doctrines are put forward under the rubric of anti-racism, let’s say, and idiot politicians who don’t do their homework or who are afraid of being pilloried see the word anti-racist and they think because the leftists are very sneaky in this regard, they think, oh, well, if it’s anti-racist, we have to be for it. And they don’t look at all to see what is being transmitted, what ideas are being transmitted in the guise of this so-called anti-racism. And they are a strange hybrid of postmodernism. You know, the postmodernists dispute the existence of any uniting narratives whatsoever. And the Marxists, well, I suppose they trump that by claiming that there’s nothing else but power. And the conservatives are so damn blind that this goes up on under their noses constantly. And they often facilitate its movement forward. And it’s because they’re either ignorant, that’s part of the problem, or they’re afraid on the moral front. And neither of those are excusable, especially when hypothetically they’re concerned about losing the cultural war, which they are definitely losing. Well, look at the abuse and pushback that Governor DeSantis gets, even from other Republicans, you know, people that are in the public eye, the Chris Christie’s of the world and such, they say things like he, DeSantis sparks cultural wars. Well, cultural wars are really important because a war for the culture matters, culture matters. So yes, we should be fighting these wars. I think so much of what we talk about is dismissed by the left and we let them dismiss it. We let them say, oh, this doesn’t matter, but it does matter. And we should be talking about it all the time. I think that the schools and the fight for our schools is so important. So another thing that Republicans are doing right now, look, I love the idea of school choice, which is, you know, supplying vouchers to parents so that they could pull their kids out of failing public schools and go to parochial schools or private schools. But that’s nowhere near enough. Most people still send their kids to the local public school. So the idea that Republicans have like, oh, I passed a school voucher bill, I’m done, is ridiculous. We have to fight for the schools, we have to fight for the curriculums, we have to fight for the kids who go to those schools. We can’t just give up on them and say like, oh, we’ll hand out vouchers. That’s just simply not Well, if all your voucher choice is between one woke school or another, it’s not helpful in the least. And well, that’s part of the reason too, why I think it’s necessary to go to the source of the problem and the faculties of education, which I think should just be abolished. There certainly their monopoly on teacher certification should be revoked like tomorrow and permanently, because there’s no excuse for it whatsoever. The other thing that’s so bloody idiotic about this, that it’s almost a kind of miracle of stupidity is that if you look at the teachers unions, for example, and you look at where they donate all of their monetary support, I think it’s 99% Democrat. So what you have is this strange spectacle where not only do the Republicans hand over children and the future to the woke mob via the vehicle of the faculties of education, but they actually facilitate the development of these immense organizations, the teachers unions and so forth that do nothing but fundraise for their opponents 100% of the time. I mean, it’s no bloody wonder that the conservatives are being rolled over, you know, and it’s not even that the leftists are, what would you say, pushing the conservatives or circumventing the conservatives. The conservatives are so blind that they help the leftists do this, know by, and I see this very, very clearly in Canada, for example. Right. I think I saw this very clearly during the pandemic, where places like Maryland that had Republican governor, nevertheless had schools closed one of the longest in the country, because the Republican governor was so cowered by the teachers unions. He didn’t want to be criticized as wanting teachers to die, which is again, you know, what Ron DeSantis was getting what the governor of Texas was getting. He didn’t want to have parade of caskets outside of his office, like what’s happening in places that were trying to open schools. And so you have these weak Republicans who don’t stand up to their political enemies. Like nobody’s even saying, you know, fight the people on your own side, which is a lot of times necessary, at least fight the people that hate you. It’s such an easy kind of decision to make, but even they can’t even do that. We’ll be right back. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan’s new documentary, Logos in Literacy. I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump started the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm. The pastor’s home was the first school, and every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion. Probably 80% of scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing. Here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the press of Johann Gutenberg. Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is available to everyone. From Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself. It is the most influential book in all of history, and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that. So there’s another issue here that’s interesting too. So I’ve been playing with this notion, which I think is true in a very deep level, which is that any civic responsibility that you abdicate will be taken up by tyrants and used against you. And so what we see in Canada, the local school boards have a fair bit of sway over how the schools conduct themselves. And many of the positions on the school boards are elected. And those are low level positions and they’re not well paid and they require a fair bit of work. And so we could say, let’s say they don’t necessarily attract the best candidates. Or we could even say they often attract people who, for whom that avenue to some power is the only avenue they have. And who have the same kind of pathology that idiot radicals in universities who take over the students unions have, because they’re the same sort of people. And resentful and power mad and devious and neurotic and narcissistic. And so they end up on the school boards. But, and we could say, well that’s a terrible thing that the school boards have been taken over by the woke radicals. But by the same token, the same people, so let’s say the centrist, conservative and liberal types, they’re not putting their names forward to occupy these low level political positions. It’s the same within political parties. You know, the woke mob can’t take over the political landscape unless normal sane people abdicate their responsibility. And that certainly happens. So in your book, for example, you talk about what parents can and should do. And one of the things they can and should do is get involved with their child’s education in some manner. Well, so what sort of things do you see as low hanging fruit on the parental front? Well, in the US in the last three years, what you’re describing has been changing. For a long time, it was only people on the left running for school boards. And so the majority of the school boards throughout the country were run by committed leftists. And what happened in the last three years, and COVID sparked so much of this, it was COVID plus the George Floyd riots, those two things combined to open a lot of eyes. And so what parents saw was, wow, my school board does not represent my values at all, and isn’t fighting for my kids at all, isn’t trying to get my schools open, isn’t trying to get the masks off the kids while 80 year olds were, you know, living freely. The curriculum is ridiculous, they saw it over their kid’s shoulder while the kids were studying from home, they suddenly realized that math is racist and reading isn’t taught correctly at all. And so much is filled in with this woke nonsense, a lot of critical race theory, gender theory at a very young age. So there has been a parental revolution across the US where more moderate or right of center parents have been running for school board. But again, the left has like a 20 year head start on this. It’s not going to be an overnight thing. And it’d be great if Republican politicians, instead of talking about the presidential election, would talk about run for your school board, push people to do it, say, this is how we fight back, this is how we win the culture. And if you don’t step up and do it, the left will. And so many leftists who run for school boards, don’t even have kids, they’re just there to influence the culture. And the right doesn’t seem to have the same verb to do the same. Now you’re, you’re, you have a extensive background as a journalist, you’ve worked for the New York Post, for Fox, and so forth. And yet you wrote this book. What was your pathway into this issue? And why did it start to, well, obsess you sufficiently so that, you know, you wrote a book, which is non-trivial, takes a non-trivial devotion and to manage on the time and resource front. What pulled you into this? It really was the COVID era. We were living in Brooklyn. We were lifelong New Yorkers. My husband and I both grew up in New York. We were going to raise our children in New York. We had just finished our dream home, moved in March 2020. And what I saw around me shook me so hard that I needed to talk about it. And so I would talk about it all the time. I would say before 2020, I wrote about all kinds of things. I wrote about sex. I wrote about marriage. I wrote about immigration, but 2020 hits. And I see kids as being uniquely targeted. So my co-author, Bethany Mandel and I would talk a lot about what was going on with children in the country. I have three kids. They were all in public school in New York City. She had six, she has six kids now, all homeschooled. So very different paths she and I take. But what I saw happening in New York and across the country where kids were so disregarded, the COVID pandemic really just exposed how kids are put last. In New York, for example, when the reopening plans were announced by Governor Cuomo, kids were like, it was like concerts, Broadway shows, schools. It was the last thing that he thought of. Like, oh, right, kids need to go back to schools. And things like I lived in a super left neighborhood and my neighbors all marched for equity and they all put the BLM signs and the defund police signs in their window. And then when schools didn’t open, they sent their kids to private schools, which obviously were open because that’s safe. Or they formed pods for their own kids, or they moved to their beach house and sent their kids to school there. And they didn’t say a word for any of the kids around the city who didn’t have the same opportunities as their children. I grew up poor in Brooklyn. I was an immigrant. I lived in an immigrant enclave where things were tough. And so the people that I grew up with were not enjoying the pandemic and baking banana bread and ordering Uber Eats. They were struggling. And I saw that nobody cared about them. And particularly nobody cared about their children. So we have a COVID chapter in the book, which I don’t, you know, I admit it doesn’t exactly fit because a lot of the book is about fighting and moving forward and what you need to do to get your kids out of this crazy system. But the COVID chapter was so important because I think that that’s where a lot of the eye opening began for me and for so many other parents, where I realized that something really bad was happening to the children. Maybe it had been happening for a while, but that was the moment where I realized we had to do something. Yeah. Well, one of the things that struck me, I live in a pretty leftist neighborhood too in Toronto. In fact, I think I’m probably more unpopular in my own neighborhood than I am anywhere else in the world, which is rather annoying consequence of everything that’s transpired around me in the last six years. But one of the things I was quite struck by in Toronto in particular was the two things. One was the willingness of the left to sacrifice the poor to their purity concerns. That was really quite interesting. And also to align themselves with the pharmaceutical companies, because that was kind of a miraculous reversal that was virtually incomprehensible. I mean, for decades, the only enemy the left had that was as significant, let’s say as big energy companies was big pharma. And for the left to align themselves with the pharmaceutical companies struck me as a, what would you say, a philosophical reversal of miraculous proportions. I still haven’t wrapped my head around that entirely. And I was also shocked, and I would really say shocked by the absolute pleasure that people seem to take in the side effect of the COVID lockdowns, which was the opportunity to spy and inform on your neighbors. And my sense was that in Toronto, first of all, 70% of people would have worn those goddamn masks happily for the rest of their lives. And half of that group would have done it happily merely because it gave them an opportunity to spy on and inform on their neighbors. And you know, I knew that in places like East Germany under the Soviets that one third of citizens were government informers, which is a pretty damn dismal statistic. But I, and I knew that that proclivity was embedded deep in the heart of the human soul, let’s say, if a soul can have a heart, you get my point. But it was still a shock to me to see how rapidly that desire made itself manifest when the social and political conditions made it possible. And morally necessary. And so, yeah, I was, I think it was also very interesting. Please go ahead. No, I was gonna say I think I was naive. I did not think that Americans or Canadians or free people in general had that inside them. I knew that people who had been under totalitarian rule, who didn’t know anything else. Yes, they could be made to inform on their neighbors. But free people who didn’t have anything to lose were telling on people for having too many friends in their backyard. And that was happening frequently in my neighborhood. Another interesting moment was, so I lived in this neighborhood Park Slope in Brooklyn, and there was like a board on Facebook. And a woman wrote in and she said, I’m Asian, I was bicycling without my mask. And an older white couple yelled racial epithets at me. This is at the height of the pandemic, you know, spring 2020. And in normal times, obviously, everybody would be supportive of her and oh, how dare this white couple say racist things to you. But the majority of the comments were like, well, you should have been wearing your mask. And that’s where they got to where they threw away their own previous ideas in order for this new mask God. And it was really wild to watch that. I don’t I didn’t expect that. Look, I’m a lifelong conservative. My husband is a conservative and we were going to live in this liberal area. And that would have been fine until the pandemic hit. And we saw what was really going on. We couldn’t unsee it. So Carol, you were locked down in in New York with your progressive neighbors and you started to become aware that children were being placed pretty damn low on the hierarchy of importance. I mean, we certainly saw that in two ways, right? We saw that with the 100% insane insistence that children should wear masks, which was appalling, given the absolute paucity of evidence that children were at any risk whatsoever for mortality in relationship to covid. And the notion that the children were presenting a danger, therefore, to the teachers. I mean, the first thing I would say is, well, there’s an occupational hazard for you and you can walk along with it the same way the bloody nurses do and the doctors. But but but having said that, I would also say that the evidence that teachers were at particular risk because of the, you know, the the the infectious nature of the children was also lacking. But it didn’t make any difference. We put the damn masks on the kids and and wreaked havoc on their psycholinguistic and emotional development for two years. And then we locked them at home where they didn’t learn a goddamn thing. And and and the poor kids in particular are going to pay for that perhaps for the rest of their life. And we’re going to pay a walloping economic price as well because we failed to educate a very large number of people. And so they won’t be as productive as they might have otherwise been. So that’s quite the bloody catastrophe. But then we also you also dug further into that and realized that children’s interests weren’t being served on a broader front. And that’s how you moved more into the into the, let’s say that what the gender dispute, the culture war domain that started to occupy your attention before that, how concerned had you been with the broader issues of the culture war? Somewhat concerned, but nowhere near what ended up happening. So I would say that I should have begun speaking up earlier when my middle son was in first grade, he switched schools after the school year had begun and his new school had a climate march in their courtyard. And I didn’t want him to be the weird kid who just got to the school and didn’t participate and sat it out. So I let him march around when he was seven years old with his Earth dies, we die sign. And obviously, in retrospect, I would never allow that ever again. But that’s the kind of thing that I think parents don’t even really see until it’s too late that they’re using your children as little activists. And this is happening so much in Brooklyn, kids marched, obviously against climate change. They marched for gun control. They marched vaguely against hate after the 2016 election. And so they have this idea that they could turn the kids into child soldiers, and then their ideas will be unassailable. How are you going to argue about climate change with a first grader? You’re not. And how are you going to argue about gun control with a teenager? I think a lot of politicians tried to do that after the Storm and Douglas shooting in Florida a few years ago. And they ended up looking ridiculous on TV because you can’t argue with kids. It just doesn’t work out that way. And so that’s why the left is using them. Greta Thunberg, it’s not an accident. There’s another reason too, I think, which is even more perverse, if possible. I mean, it’s pretty damn perverse to turn children into activists. But it’s more perverse to do this. And this is what’s been happening, particularly with young men. And I’ve seen thousands of examples of this. In fact, I had a friend who eventually committed suicide. He was an early victim of exactly this sort of thinking, I would say. He committed suicide about, it’s got to be 15 years ago after living a pretty damn dismal life. And he was wracked with existential guilt as a consequence of his intolerable masculinity. And so that didn’t work out very well for him as a, let’s call it a life plan. And so here’s what I see happening in the schools with young men in particular. And I think it’s worth concentrating on them because boys are not doing well in school. Teenage boys are not doing well in junior high. Men are not going to university. And if they do, they don’t graduate. An increasing number of men aren’t picking up, let’s say, gainful employment or mature relationships when they had adulthood. And more and more men are bailing entirely out of the entire sexual dynamic process as well. Not only not having relationships with women, but not having sex at all, not even with themselves. And that’s becoming more and more widespread. It’s part of the broad-scale demoralization of men and boys. And so how does that start? Well, it starts in school. And the reason it starts in school is because the more boisterous boys, extraverted and less agreeable, so actually more hard to discipline and control. They don’t want to sit still for six hours a day and shut up and not say anything. They want to run around and play, and they want to do it competitively. And that is like verboten in school. If you’re the sort of boy who wants that, you’re nothing but trouble. And so right at the beginning, the boys are taught that their deepest intrinsic desire for, let’s say, active exploration and engagement, certain degree of competitive dominance, that’s bad. That’s morally bad. And so that’s brutal, especially when it’s medicated out of them, which is exactly what happens on the attention deficit disorder front, let’s say. Because Ritalin suppresses play. That’s what it does pharmacologically. It doesn’t calm kids down. That’s complete bloody rubbish. And it certainly doesn’t calm hyperactive kids down differentially. None of that’s the least bit true, but those medications are widely used. And so boys are demoralized right at the beginning in school because their natural proclivity for boisterous activity is deemed inappropriate. And then there is explicit training. That happens next. And the explicit training is the bloody leftist claim that, you know, history is to be read as nothing but a patriarchal nightmare. The inference being that all of the competitive striving that characterizes masculinity is nothing but the force that manifests itself as patriarchal domination and tyranny. And so any boy that has any degree of compassion, let’s say, and who might feel guilty for his toxic masculinity is going to be demoralized by the suggestion that his ambition is nothing but the manifestation of implicit tyrannical force. And if he escapes that, well, then the leftists are there to mop up whatever, you know, bit of courage might be left by accusing him of being part of the force that’s eternally raping the planet. And so you see, and I’ve seen thousands of cases of this, it’s been devastating to me to see how widespread this is. The degree of demoralization that characterizes young men is almost incomprehensible. It’s incomprehensibly deep and it’s hurting people in a very deep way. And it’s not just hurting boys and men, obviously, because if women are then faced with an entire cohort of demoralized men, it’s like, well, what the hell are they going to do for a partner? You know, there’s lots of universities now where it’s two to one women to men. Well, that’s no damn good for the women. How are they going to find a partner? Right. And the idea, you know, women say there are no good men. Well, yeah, this is what happened. They destroyed boys, they destroyed men. And then obviously women are unable to find somebody because the pool has gotten like this. I have a daughter and two sons. I absolutely think that there’s a difference between the two sexes. They’re born different. It’s not just something that they grow into. They’re day one, they were different. And the idea that they’re the same and that we should treat them the same and that we should give preference to girls, I think that that’s a real problem. I don’t know that we’ve gotten to a point where we can treat them equally. That would be, you know, obviously the goal. But, you know, in the meantime, I think we need to do more for boys. I think we’re really raising a lost generation of boys. And it’s scary to me that it’s so easily dismissed because, oh, who cares about boys? They’ve done well enough in history that we don’t need to worry about this group of boys now. I definitely worry about my sons more than I worry about my daughters. Well, there’s also, there’s a lurking danger there too. So the rising attractiveness of figures like Andrew Tate speaks to the danger of demoralizing young men. Because if you demoralize young men, you make, what would you say, charismatic bad men become much more attractive because they’re the men who say, well, to hell with all of this idiot constraint and pathetic morality, I’m just going to go and do whatever the hell I want. This is kind of a narcissistic route to self aggrandizement and attainment, right? But if the alternative to that is to lay half comatose in your basement being depressed about the impending apocalypse, a little bit of attractive criminality beckons as quite the compelling alternative. And that can easily be, make itself manifest on the political front. If you raise a generation of demoralized men and then you wave a leader in front of them who says, some forthright, self aggrandizing semi-criminal behavior would be in your best interest, the probability that they’re going to find that attractive, that kind of, well, that’s a good route to a kind of fascist populism, let’s say. The probability that people are going to find that attractive is extremely high. I mean, I think that part of the reason that Trump was attractive, and I am not going to grind away negatively and simple-mindedly on Trump because he’s a complicated character, but part of the reason that Trump was attractive was because he had that up yours attitude, that giant middle finger attitude towards the woke mob that was a hell of a lot more attractive than the half-baked cowardly kowtowing that the typical conservatives do when faced with a woke onslaught. And Trump at least had the gall to tell people to go to hell when it was necessary. And maybe he did that more often than he should have. I mean, he’s not the world’s, he’s definitely a bull in a China shop, but maybe it’s better to have a bloody bull in the China shop than a castrated gelding. You’ve covered Trump, you know, and you have your ambivalent, what would you say, feelings about him. I mean, how do you read Trump’s popularity in light of the culture wars that we’ve been describing? And what do you think is going to happen on the Republican front? You know, you’ve been involved with the DeSantis enterprise, and DeSantis looks like the prime challenger to Trump, but at the moment, Trump seems to be trumping him in terms of overall popularity. And I think the bloody Democrats are pretty happy about that. So how do you see this playing out? You’re right that he has stood up to the woke mob, etc. And he’s been himself the whole time. I think a lot of what his campaign is doing now, though, I wrote about it recently, where I really don’t like that he’s trashing Florida’s policies. I understand that political campaigns get very dirty. I expect if Ron DeSantis gets into the race that the primary is going to be a really dirty one. But attacking conservative policies that are actually working in the model Republican state really makes no sense to me. And I hope that his campaign takes what I wrote to heart and doesn’t just dismiss it. Because whoever ends up the candidate, I want to see them be strong and be able to defend ideas and not just be a cult of personality. I’m obviously a big fan of Governor DeSantis. I moved to Florida in large part because of his policies. But obviously, I moved my whole family. It’s not just because of a politician. We saw a sanity in Florida that had been missing and I had never really experienced in New York. So it definitely was Governor DeSantis leading the way, I think, a lot of what he’s doing, especially on things like woke. My sons are in a public school in Florida and I don’t worry about them learning gender ideology in school. I don’t worry about them learning critical race theory in school. I just worry a lot less. I mean, I’m still worried about things like reading, but I just have a lot less to be concerned with in Florida. And the idea of the Trump campaign attack. Right. So now you’re worried about what he’s not being taught instead of what he is. Well, I would say that I have found Florida school to be incredible. I feel like a lot of what I talk about when I talk about Florida, it sounds like I drank the Kool-Aid and I have because it’s really a magnificent place. It’s such a great place to raise a family. I didn’t know what I was missing for so long. And we have a lot of discussion with some of our mutual friends about getting Jordan Peterson to make the move someday. I think you’d really enjoy it. But it’s a great place. We have an enterprise. We have an enterprise. We have an enterprise in Miami and my daughter spent some time there. And so I’ve enjoyed being in Florida. Let’s talk about that personally for a minute. Now you were a dyed in the wool New Yorker and you lived in a liberal neighborhood. And I mean, New York has its attractions. It’s an incredibly exciting. It’s an incredibly exciting city. And so, and it tends to evoke a substantial amount of what patriotic identification among its inhabitants. You know, there’s no place in the world like New York and that’s particularly what New Yorkers think. And they have some reason for that. But you moved to Florida, which was a major move. And you said that you’ve experienced being in Florida as a relief. And so like exactly why is that? You’re not worried. You said you’re not worried about your kids in school now, but what else did you see that changed for you when you got out of that liberal hot house atmosphere of New York? And how do you think that was affecting you now when you look at it in retrospect? I was a New York supremacist. I thought New York was not just the best, but the only place to live. I couldn’t even imagine a life outside of it. And getting to Florida and every time I fly back to Florida and landing in Florida, I just feel this sense of freedom that I’ve never felt before. Freedom to say what you want, to raise your kids how you want, to say things that people know to be true, but have to pretend that are not true in New York. I don’t have to do that in Florida. We don’t have to pretend. Everybody that I’ve met, even people who are politically on the left, can be themselves and don’t have to worry about their neighbors coming for them, which actually was happening in New York City. And I think that the New York of my childhood and the New York of my dreams really got crushed during COVID. We had been through so many tough times before, the post-9-11 period, the blackout of 2003, various hurricanes in New York that did a lot of damage. But we always came out a bit stronger. And this was the first time that I really felt like New York came out of it weaker. The pandemic exposed that the New Yorkers that I had always loved, the independent, strong, unique New Yorkers, were going to be sheep going forward and that they felt the pressure to conform. And they became this conformist blob that I could no longer defend and appreciate. Florida is just a beacon of freedom. And it’s been for the last three years, I think it’s really become something unique where if you want to be free, if you want to be bold, if you want to say what you want to say, Florida is the place to do it. Yeah. Well, you know, there’s an interesting parallel between your parents leaving the Soviet Union and you leaving New York. And I don’t want to make a lot of that, but here’s the parallel. And I spent quite a lot of time working with Democrats over the last decade. And one of the things that I found very difficult was that I was trying to help the people that I was consulting with, let’s say, pull the party to the center away from the grip of the woke radicals. And I wouldn’t say I had a lot of success on that front. I had some success for better or for worse, but I got very tired of having to watch every bloody thing I said, you know, because I would rather be around people where I can just say what I think. And sometimes that’s a joke and sometimes it’s harsh and sometimes it’s real harsh. And but I can do it and they can do it. And that’s just fine. And this sense of walking on eggs constantly gets extraordinarily wearing. But there’s something deep and horrible about that, because you know, people think that when you’re in a totalitarian state, the reason that the state is totalitarian, because everyone is the victim of top down pressure from tyrants. And that’s completely that’s not how it works at all. A state becomes totalitarian when every single person is lying about absolutely everything all the time. And you said that you started to experience that in New York, because you had to pretend all the time, you had to watch your language, you had to couch what you say and you did, because you were afraid of how other people would react. And that is the totalitarian ethos. And when that’s distributed across the population in general, you still have tyrants who are in control, but they’re just mouthpieces of that more generalized lie. And, you know, I’ve traveled a lot in the last three or four years, and I’ve been in places that were very woke, especially on the lockdown front. And I would say Toronto was first and foremost among them, worse than New York, worse than San Francisco, worse than LA, worse than Washington. A sense of real oppression descended on me arriving say back in Toronto airports, and a sense of real freedom emerged going to places like, well, Tennessee, Texas, Florida, where I could say what the hell I wanted and everyone wasn’t half insane with mask frenzy and the associated COVID authoritarianism. You know, and I’m more and more convinced that there was no damn pandemic at all. I’m convinced on that front, not least in part because there’s not a lot of data showing excess mortality in Sweden, for example, during the pandemic years. What we had instead, and conservatives should probably stop talking about the pandemic as such, what we had was an outbreak of two years of totalitarian governance. And that was the bloody pandemic. It was a lot worse than the virus by any stretch of the imagination. And there were some places that managed to stay relatively free of that. You know, Tennessee is a good example, but so is Florida. You can go there and there is a sense of lightness that I think it’s palpable on landing. And maybe it’s because the airports aren’t quite as authoritarian as they are in the more, you know, in the more lockdown oriented states and provinces. It’s true. I remember landing in New York on, you know, various trips during that time, and there would be National Guard there, you know, asking you where you’re going. The idea that that would be happening in America is wild. And you’re right. It is. I mean, look, I don’t want to discount. When I say it’s similar to my parents leaving the Soviet Union, it’s similar because I’m moving towards freedom just like they were. And maybe we didn’t come from the same terrible totalitarian system, but we both felt the social pressure to conform. And I didn’t want to conform anymore. I wanted to be free. I cannot tell you how many well-known famous people were in my direct messages during that time saying, I agree with you, but I can’t say anything. How many news people in the media who are like, yeah, I think schools should be open, but I’m afraid to say anything. Well, like in the beginning, I felt sorry for them. And I was like, I would respond like, I get it. You know, I understand you can’t speak out. But after a while, I came to really hate them and think like, you can’t speak out about really basic things that you know are affecting your children and other children. And you can’t speak out because what? You’re going to get a nasty comment on Facebook. It’s just, I came to lose so much respect for people who were conforming even when they didn’t have to. Yeah. Well, I felt the same thing with regard to the professoriate and the influx of the woke administrators. It’s like, look, you guys, you have tenure. You are the most protected people in the world. Right. Be brave. You have this privileged position. Well, it’s your, uphold your bloody ethical responsibility. The price you pay for your tenured privilege is the requirement that you speak your mind at whatever risk that poses to you. Now, the culture has done everything it possibly could to ameliorate that risk for you. Everything it can. And yet you don’t have enough courage to oppose, you know, the HR person who’s pushing forward a diversity, inclusivity and equity proposal. It’s like, well, we can’t say anything about that. We have to go along with what the administration wants. You know, what happened in the universities, it’s so interesting to watch. And I watched this over a 30 year period. The first thing that happened was the administration took over the universities and that’s well documented. All you have to do is look at the statistics that show how much the administration increased in terms of sheer numbers compared to how much the professoriate or the student body increased. And you see a massive increase in administrators and no, a slight increase in students and almost no increase whatsoever in faculty. And the reason that happened was because the administrators pushed and they could see a good thing when they had one and they figured out how to pick the future pockets of their students in a parasitical manner. But, and so that’s on the administrators, but the faculty allowed it to happen just like the bloody Republicans have allowed the woke mob to take over the education system. Exactly the same thing. So it’s on the faculty as far as I’m concerned. Cowards, cowards, thousand micro retreats or 10,000 micro retreats. But then what happened, and this was so bloody interesting, is that once the administrators had taken over the university, the woke mob used the same tactics to take over the administration. And it probably took 30 years for the administrators to take over the university. It took like four years for the woke mob to take over the administration. And that’s where we are now. And that’s, for me, that’s a hundred percent on the faculty because it was their job to not allow this to happen. And so, and these people that you’re talking about, I can understand why people are afraid of being singled out and mobbed, you know, but if you’re a journalist or an academic or a politician, you know, you’re somewhat on the front lines of the culture war, it’s your bloody ethical responsibility to put yourself at some risk to say what you believe to be the truth. And so, you know, I might get mobbed. Well, that’s a reason, but it’s not an excuse. Yeah. I just, I, my thinking on them was what is the point of you? What is the point of you doing this job? What is the point of any of this if you’re not able to speak really basic truths? And it’s going to get harder. It’s like, it wasn’t that hard to say schools should be open. I think it gets a lot harder when they have to say, look, there are actually only two sexes. There are only two genders and there is no such thing as gender non-binary. All of this becomes really difficult to say when you’ve already laid the foundation where you don’t say anything controversial at all. It’s just the lack of bravery. It was scary to me. It was scary to me, not only among like famous journalists, et cetera, but among parents, the fact that they weren’t fighting for their own kids and they were expecting somebody else to do it, I think is a really bad path to go down. And if you’re expecting the culture or the school or somebody else to teach your kids values, you’re going to find that they’re going to learn values that are not aligned with yours. And that is what happens all the time. Well, it’s so interesting to think, you were talking about the fact now that it’s risky to make the case for a sexual binary. It’s like, it’s so interesting because people backtracked as a consequence of the onslaught of the reputation-savaging woke mob. And they made little compromises along the way, so to speak, little compromises, which weren’t little at all, but appeared that way. And within a period of a very short number of years, it’s probably the last six years, we’ve got to the point where stating the most, what you could argue is the most self-evident fact is enough to put your reputation on the line. I think, cognitively speaking, it isn’t obvious to me at all that there is a distinction that is more real than the distinction between male and female, because organisms that can’t make that distinction don’t propagate, right? And sex is extremely old, it’s hundreds of millions of years old. It’s older than nervous systems, by a large margin. It’s way older than trees. I think it’s probably older than the distinction between up and down. I don’t think there is any piece of differentiated perception that’s more fundamental to the integrity of our psyches and to the integrity of our social systems than agreement on the distinction between male and female. And the fact that we’ve gone from cowardly, you know, what would you say, cowardly adherence to the woke mob routine, to the point where we can’t even claim that there’s a difference between men and women, just shows you exactly how dangerous the totalitarian slippery slope precisely is. So, I mean, Matt Walsh is getting pilloried like, Matt, did they just throw him off YouTube? He dares to do such a thing as stand up to Dylan Mulvaney, who’s like the most preposterous human being that’s ever existed, narcissistic right to the bloody core, as is obvious to anyone who has the eyes to see, playing this idiot game that’s de-menting the culture for no other purpose than his own self-aggrandizement. And the consequence of that is that someone who points out the completely obvious, well, God, it’s, I mean, when I first saw Dylan Mulvaney, I actually thought he was pretty damn funny. His little routines running through the forest where he’s pretending to be female, that’s high comedy, man, unless you’re taking it seriously, in which case it’s just an absolutely dismal parody. And I can never make up my mind with Mulvaney, whether or not he’s a comedic troll, and who’s just playing this for the laughs, or whether he’s tied up in his own pathology and believes it’s a serious endeavor. I think it’s half and half. And I think that contradiction will eventually tear him apart, because there’s no way someone can sustain that sort of thing over any reasonable amount of time. But the notion that he’s some kind of cultural hero, that he was welcomed to the White House, that Kamala Harris sent him a note of commendation, it’s like you just can’t make, and that Matt Walsh is being canceled for objecting to this absolutely absurd, narcissistic parody. You can’t make this up. And it’s so interesting to see that that silence, you know, that all the right thinkers who were afraid of being mobbed allied themselves with has led us to a place where we’re confusing children regularly about whether or not they’re boys or girls. And that’s moral, you know, God, it’s something to behold, man. Yeah, I was just gonna say the cancellation factor is affecting not just, you know, moderate or left culture. We had a hard time getting this book published. Daily Wire took a chance on us. We are two fairly well-known writers in the conservative space of, you know, fairly large followings. Publishers were very interested in our books. We had meetings with all the conservative publishers. They openly said to us, we want this, but A, can you tone down the fighting a little bit? And then other publishers said to us, the transgender chapter, we’re afraid Amazon’s not going to sell this. You know, it was during the time when Abigail Shrier’s book was in danger of being pulled down off Amazon. Ryan Anderson’s book had been pulled down. They were afraid. So when Daily Wire offered us this deal, it really was taking a chance. And they knew that they were taking a chance on us. And that should be scary to everybody. Where do we live that even the conservative publishers are afraid to publish books? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So now your book is available on Amazon. It is. Yes. For now. Is that the case? Okay, so that’s good. So we can be happy about that. And so if people want to pick up your book, is that the best place to do it? Where else can they find it? Are all the bookstores are so far distributing it? All the bookstores. Yeah, all the bookstores distributing it. And Daily Wire books selling it. Amazon. And how’s it doing? It’s a bestseller. Well, congratulations on that front. So it shows. Well, so that’s optimistic, because you did write this book, you did get it published. It isn’t being canceled. And I think there has been a shift in the tide in recent months, especially after the closing of the Tavistock Clinic in the UK, which was a major blow to the woke gender transition mob. And that hasn’t fully unfolded yet on the cultural front, but will over the next few years. I suspect that, I think in 10 years, you won’t be able to find a person who will admit to having ever supported the idea that children should be medically transitioned. That’ll be as taboo as lobotomies. It’ll be as taboo as eugenics. Right. Or the fact that everybody now says they didn’t support lockdowns, right? And there was nobody who supported lockdowns. Justin Trudeau didn’t push anybody to get vaccinated. Right, right. Exactly, exactly. We’re going to see a spate of historical revisionism, the likes of which we’ve never seen. So with any luck, your book, along with Shrier’s book, there’s a number of them that have come out recently that have been decimating the arguments made on the gender transition front, especially for minors. There’s not a bloody shred of evidence that that so-called gender-affirming care does one iota of good. And it’s preposterous to assume that it does, but there’s certainly no evidence that it does. And so it’s very nice to see that there is some well-documented journalistic work, like Shrier’s, for example, and yours, that is making a strong case for the elimination of this particular brand of unforgivable and malevolent stupidity, virtue signaling stupidity. The fact that we’re willing to sacrifice children in the name of this perverse, woke propaganda is, I think, it’s beyond criminal. And it’s funny because The Telegraph really supported me. I wrote one vicious article about childhood surgery, the most vicious article I could produce. I was actually afraid of it, you know, calling the counselors who enabled this and the surgeons, liars and the surgeons who perform the process as butchers, which I think they are, and calling outright for their imprisonment and criminal prosecution, which is exactly what I think should happen. And The Telegraph published both of those articles, which was extremely brave of them. And it was so weird to launch them into the public sphere because 99% of the comments were positive. So it’s not like people think this is a good idea, but a very loud minority of very nasty creatures think it’s a good idea, and they’re perfectly willing to do everything they can to ruin your life if you dare to object. Their teeth are being pulled, though. They’re a very loud minority. They implement what they want through force, and they try to force conformity, and that’s how they get it done. But yeah, they’re a tiny minority. They’re going to grow. Right now, I would say 7% of the US refers to themselves as very liberal, and I bet that number for woke is even lower. But they certainly will grow if we let them. Yeah. Well, you know, what that really highlights, I would say, and maybe we can close with this before we move over to the daily wire plus side of things. You know, if you look at the course of revolutions throughout human history, especially the more pathological revolutions like the Russian Revolution, it was a tiny minority of people who fomented the revolution. It doesn’t take that many people. This is the thing that everyone has to realize. You might think, well, it’s a tiny minority of people who are pushing this. It’s like, yeah, well, it’s always a tiny minority of people that upset the Alpacaart. And the thing is, they can, especially when they get organized. I mean, Andy Ngo told me Andy studied Antifa probably more than anyone else in the world. And I had a bunch of Democrats at one point tell me that Antifa didn’t exist. And these were smart people. And I thought, what the hell do you mean? And they said, well, you know, they have no formal organization. There’s no hierarchy. They’re not a charitable institution. No, they don’t. They’re not a recognized organization. And I thought, well, fair enough. That’s a point. And so I asked Andy about Antifa. And I asked him how many cells he thought there were. And he thought about something approximating 40. And I said, well, how many full-time employee equivalents do these cells have? And he figured 20 per cell. And that’s 800 people. And there’s 320 million people in the U.S. So that’s one person in 400,000. And so that’s kind of statistically indistinguishable from zero people, right? In a city of a million, you’d have two people. But the terrifying aspect of that is that’s actually enough. Like 800 well-organized people, especially given electronic resources, they can wreak an awful lot of havoc. And so minority or not, we’re still in a position of how can this be regulated so that, you know, they don’t bring the whole bloody thing crashing to a halt, which is certainly, certainly their aim. So, all right. Well, I would recommend to everyone who’s listening that you check out, you check out Carol’s book, Stolen Youth. Apparently, you can get it where books are sold online and otherwise. And so that’s good. You haven’t been canceled. And in fact, your book is a best seller. So, you know, kudos to Daily Wire and also to you. Have there been any critical reviews? There have. There have been. I think in Slate or Salon, one of those where they call us names like, you know, genderphobes or I don’t know, I don’t even know what they’re saying at this point. But nothing that, oh, it was at Daily Beast. Yeah, it didn’t make any sense. Oh, yeah. Well, that, yeah. Well, that Daily Beast specializes in things that don’t make sense. So, but any, any thoughtful critical reviews? No, I, you know, I would love to do adversarial interviews about the book. But we, you know, I haven’t been offered any. And I would love to argue with somebody about the concepts that we talk about in the book. I would love for CNN, MSNBC to invite me on and have a reasoned debate, even if it’s a, you know, the five minute cable news clip where they mostly yell at me, let’s do it. Like, let’s get the conversation going. But they’ll never do it because you’re not allowed to even platform. Have you reached out to, you know, people? Well, of course not. Of course not. Evil people like you. That’s right. Yeah. Have you reached out to Anna Kasparian and the young Turks? Maybe they would have you on. Anna seems to have decided that maybe everything the bloody woke left thinks isn’t. She sure is. And so is, I remember how to say his name, Ugyr. How do you say? Chink? Chink. Yeah. Chink. Yeah. Yeah. Well, both of them, both of them seem to be, well, it’s so interesting watching them because they’re claiming that, you know, the woke mob is just a tiny proportion of progressives. You know, it’s like, yeah, like Kamala Harris, for example, who pushes equity nonstop. So they’re hand waving about how this is just a right-wing fantasy, this progressive nightmare. But it is interesting to see both of them, you know, take stock again and realize that indeed the left can and has gone too far. So it’d be fun to see you on the young Turks, but you know, that probability, that strikes me as pretty much zero. Anyways, everyone who’s watching and listening, you can pick up this book, Stolen Youth. And, you know, especially if you’re a parent or maybe an interested teenager, it might be a book you want to pick up. And thanks, Carol, very much for agreeing to talk to me today. And good luck with the promotion of your book and your further work. And thank you to the Daily Wire Plus for making this conversation possible, facilitating this studio here in Portugal. I’m in Porto, Portugal today, which is a beautiful old town. And to everybody watching and listening, thank you for your time and attention. And also I’m going to talk to Carol for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform. We’ll do a more autobiographical interview talking about the manner in which her career path made itself obvious and accessible to her. And so if you’re interested in that, please consider subscribing to the Daily Wire Plus. They could use your support anyways, because they’re one of the few organizations brave enough, for example, to publicize Matt Walsh’s documentary, What is a Woman? and to publish your book. And so, you know, that kind of courage arguably could use some support if we want to facilitate and reward its existence. Anyways, Carol, thanks a lot for talking to me today. Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guests on dailywireplus.com.