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Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation
American children are facing a crisis unlike any in human their very extinction. Every day, thousands of American kids are being robbed of their youth as they are converted into foot soldiers for an aggressive agenda of woke politics while parents watch in horror or resigned indifference. The insidiousness of wokeism is a phenomenon most American parents never fully realize, yet these ideas pervade children’s minds because of the woke narrative ever-present in society. In this book, Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz present data about the impact of wokeism on childhood and give parents tools to identify how wokeism has encroached in their lives—and limit its influence.
304 pages, Hardcover
Published March 7, 2023
158 people are currently reading
1080 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 86 reviews
March 9, 2023
My father gave me this book. He is one of those “patriots” who thinks there is a political movement out there to destroy America. This book was frustrating to read -constant fear mongering, ideas and quotes taken out of context, gossip-y stories, and insulting language. This book is not intended to teach you anything or open you eyes to other ideas. This book is meant to fan the flames of fear and hate inside of people that already believe the USA is headed for doom. This book is nothing but far-right wing propaganda.
March 15, 2023
She can’t define ‘woke’ in interviews
March 13, 2023
I read this in a day! It is a captivating and important book for anyone with children or who cares about children and understanding the woke societal forces that inundate our lives. Highly recommend this book!
March 16, 2023
Lunatic biased, ranting propaganda. If someone can't even define a word they are constantly using as an insult, they shouldn't be writing a book.
Right-wing propaganda trying to indoctrinate us with racist beliefs
Right-wing propaganda trying to indoctrinate us with racist beliefs
March 15, 2023
Let's hear you [try] to explain "woke" one more time. That's entertainment.
April 11, 2023
Trolls who didn’t actually read the book will give it one star. I would encourage all parents to read it!
March 16, 2023
Stupid shit-ass book written by a MAGA grifter who makes shit up for profit. Don’t waste your time or money on this crap.
March 15, 2023
Hot garbage
March 28, 2023
You’ve seen it, read about it, or heard about it, but nowhere except in these pages is the assault on children outlined in detail and in total. No matter how bad you think it is, it’s worse. These authors show great restraint in not injecting personal outrage into the anecdotes and statistics they cite. The lay out provable facts of what once would have been criminal conduct toward children.
I fear a generation may already be lost. Let’s hope it’s not more.
I have 12 grandchildren. I pray for them, daily. Thankfully, my children see what’s ahead. I don’t envy the hard choices they face.
Read this book. Nothing is more important than children.
I fear a generation may already be lost. Let’s hope it’s not more.
I have 12 grandchildren. I pray for them, daily. Thankfully, my children see what’s ahead. I don’t envy the hard choices they face.
Read this book. Nothing is more important than children.
April 5, 2023
Excellent, excellent, excellent. A must read imo!
July 28, 2023
3.5 stars
The book is about how extreme leftists are using wokeness to indoctrinate and harm kids, ultimately harming their mental health and leaving them unprepared for adulthood. This has spread into the medical field and education professions, where young professionals are taught inclusiveness training instead of actual medicine or teaching techniques.
The two co-writers take turns writing the chapters. The text flows well and quickly. The book cites many other books, and I’ve read quite a few of those, so there’s not a lot of new information here if you have read similar books or paid attention to the news. I still highlighted a lot, though.
Language: Mild
Sexual Content: discussions on pedophilia, pornography; not graphic
Violence/Gore: None
Harm to Animals:
Harm to Children:
Other (Triggers):
===================================
[parent Charlie Jacobs] These kids are exposed to all of this very liberal schooling, which I was clueless about. … seventh-grade health class … gave these kids highly sexualized labels. It was nonsense: polyamorous, bi-gender, etc., a whole list of made-up words. And the eleven- and twelve-year-old girls picked a label; it became cool. Nobody wanted to be the cis-basic kid; that’s boring. And not only is it boring. For a white and affluent kid who wants for nothing, they don’t want to be the oppressor, which is what they’re being taught in school. They have to pick something that marginalizes them.
The term “woke” was once used by the black community to describe someone who stays alert to racism in society. But once it spread to larger use, woke thought became more than just social awareness or just espousing leftist doctrine or even just having the “right” beliefs. Wokeness became the enforcement of a narrow set of values and a policing of language. It is now a method to shut down any alternate opinions, even those within the same general range. It’s a system characterized by intolerance and showing one’s own superiority by denouncing those who step out of line. And though woke ideology centers a very different set of people than the USSR did, the methods are eerily similar.
The conformity of totalitarian regimes, whether fascist or communist, always had to begin with children. Children were the great hope of the realized utopian future. They belonged to all of society—not just to the family in which they were born. If they could lead the children to righteous thought, they could become the idealized society. If children could be convinced into the ideas that totalitarians wanted, their parents would follow. And if not, the disobedient parent could easily be removed from the equation.
[parent] The effort to sow gender and racial confusion among little kids, and to impose on little kids a bunch of theories and ways of looking at the world that are totally unnatural and at odds with what little kids understand around them, should be situated I think as part of the leftist mission to destroy the nuclear family. The Left hates normalcy because normalcy is happy and bourgeois and resists change and revolution, and the great enforcer of normalcy in a society is the family. It takes men off the streets and domesticates them in homes, caring for wives and children. It creates sacred bonds and loyalties between people that come before politics, the state, or anyone’s ideology. … And the Left hates this. Passionately. So, their new attack on the normalcy of the family is to convince six-year-olds not to believe what they see. You have a penis, but really, you’re a girl. You see mommy and daddy, but really there’s no such categories and instead there’s a gender spectrum. … Kids are left confused and damaged by this. And that’s what the Left wants. … Promoting alienation and grievance has always been a central part of the groundwork for leftist revolution.
Wokeness is black and white, right and wrong—exactly the kind of thing that appeals to children and why they are so susceptible to being brainwashed in the name of wokeness. What does raising children to be woke do to their value system and inherent sense of curiosity? Childhood anxiety and mental health challenges are all at-time highs. Is it any wonder, when we’re teaching children to be anxious?
American librarians are talking out of two sides of their mouths: they are decrying the “censorship” of books that are wholly inappropriate for children while at the same time engaging in actual censorship against classic writers like Jane Austen, Dr. Seuss, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Daniel Buck: They’ll tell you this is about diversifying curriculum. It’s not. It’s about getting rid of any commitment to excellence, aesthetic beauty, or canons. … The irony. The list of books they want to remove would make a brilliant high school curriculum.
[Josh, author] “If you’re a young author, agents are telling them, ‘If only you had a gay or trans character in this book, maybe we could sell this.’ They’re messing with the art in order to shoe-horn these characters in.” I spoke to a number of previously published and aspiring authors, and all of them related a similar tale: They were finding themselves increasingly shut out of the industry unless they were willing to conform to the woke narrative and include its themes in their work.
Abe Greenwald said it best: “Being told that you are destined to be only your race, never an individual, cuts against the American creed.” This is exactly what we’re doing when we publish children’s literature obsessed with race to the exclusion of everything else. We strip black children of the ability to see themselves as anything but their race, and we strip children of other races of seeing their black friends as individuals. Today, thanks to the woke censors, black characters can only be portrayed in one way, victims, and their race must be the focus of the story.
Children’s media is now agenda-driven, with the intention of sending moral messages to readers and viewers. Those moral messages always existed in children’s entertainment; but the creators’ sense of morals has shifted significantly. No longer is the moral of the story just about sharing or being kind; now it is moral to practice radical acceptance of every racial and sexual theory of the day. Whereas the moral once as that were color-blind with our friendships, now children are taught to be hyperconscious of race. Whereas the idea of introducing sex and sexuality to a young child was unthinkable, it’s now commonplace to see Pride Month programming and other content related to sexuality throughout the year.
Regarding the dangers of messaging surrounding “fatphobia” seeping into medicine, [pediatrician] Fred explained, “We’re seeing an increase in diabetes and obesity. We want to tell them that they need to fix that. But we’re also telling them ‘you’re OK this way,’ and pediatricians are saying that too.” This kind of messaging from medical professionals terrified of being offensive to patients doesn’t just impact healthcare outcomes in the short term but also changes how children and teenagers optimize their behavior for their own health. Instead of trying to make healthy choices through diet and exercise, Fred explained, “They will try to find everything external to blame for a person’s or group’s bad health outcome, while conspicuously avoiding internal causes: choices, culture, personality traits and so on.”
When your child suffers from a condition requiring the expertise of a surgeon, the knowledge that the person holding the knife if the operating room was trained in this kind of environment is terrifying. Instead of spending their energy perfecting their training and skills, that surgeon is working to make sure he or she appears adequately woke for his or her peers and professors, lest he or she commits a microaggression. The infestation of this ideology into the inner workings—and priorities—of medical professional organizations isn’t the exception. It’s the norm.
They aren’t even subtle about it. It’s right out in the open: the goal of medical school isn’t to produce the best clinicians and diagnosticians and researchers, it’s to introduce woke ideology into the medical field. These doctors are expected to be not just healthcare providers but activists.
The highly politicized nature of medical schools and the outsized amount of time spent on politics instead of medicine doesn’t bode well for the competency of future doctors, let alone for the ideological diversity of the field. Would you rather have a doctor who spent three hours a week on politics, or three hours a week on actual medicine?
We are conducting an unprecedented sociological experiment on our children. Never before have we raised children and told them to ignore very basic biology. We’ve never told kids, “There is no such thing as a man or a woman,” as their brains are forming. Learning how to categorize is a crucial early-learning tool, and the first way young children have learned to separate human beings is into two camps: man and women. What does that to do the human brain when we tell children as their brains are developing that their inherent drive to categorize in this manner is wrong and incorrect? We’re about to find out.
The irony is that not so long ago we were celebrating the notion that girls can like trucks and dinosaurs and boys can like dolls, but those days are over, apparently. Now we’ve regressed fifty years and liking dancing and painting one’s face with makeup is now indicative of a medical condition in need of treatment.
The concept of “gender-affirmative” care is a euphemism given for a whole host of interventions, hormones, or surgeries, which come with lifelong side effects. Giving care that is “gender-affirmative” results in children self-diagnosing themselves with gender dysphoria, and then being treated by physicians and surgeons to change their bodies physically and hormonally. SEGM [The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine] explains, “The ‘gender affirmative’ model commits young people to lifelong medical treatment with minimal attention to … the psycho-social factors contributing to gender dysphoria. This model dismisses the question of whether psychological therapy might help to relieve or resolve gender dysphoria and provides interventions without an adequate examination.” … “Before we ‘affirm’ the feelings they’ve had, sometimes only for a short duration, we need to sit down and discuss with them—and amongst ourselves as clinicians—the risks and the benefits of providing hormones and surgical options.” Seems reasonable, but not to the woke police.
These children are being consigned to a life of health problems, including higher risk for heart attacks and strokes, as well as impaired bone health and sterility, before they’re even old enough to vote.
[Helen Joyce] The lack of decent research and misrepresentation of findings mean gender affirmation cannot even be described as a risky experiment on children, since “experiment” implies someone, somewhere, is tracking outcomes and comparing them with other options. Doctors are usually cautious when treating children, especially when interrupting normal physical development. But very surprisingly, puberty blockers have never been put through clinical trials for use in gender medicine and are not licensed by their manufacturers for this purpose.
References to cults were made again and again by those familiar with transgender activism. Dr. Jeffrey told me, “When you expose young and stressed children to ideas like this, and then you flood them with positive reinforcement when they claim to be transgender and there’s a lot of fanfare … destransitioners who share their stories online are often explicit about this ‘lovebombing’ drove them into this identity. There’s huge parallels to the cult world. It’s a very similar experience that many of them describe.”
[Helen Joyce] “The stereotypes they promote teach children ideas about what is proper for boys and girls that feminists had thought consigned to the dustbin of history. This is just one of the ways in which gender-ideology harms all children, not merely those who end up identifying out of their sex. As queer theory conquered campuses, and the simplistic ‘wrong body’ version conquered popular culture, writing about transkids proliferated. … All express the same contradiction. Gender identity is an innate, ineffable sense, unrelated to body types, behavior and presentation. But that inner truth is manifested by stereotypes.” It’s ironic that a movement all about ending oppression would simultaneously promote limiting stereotypes.
[James] Lindsay compares the sexual innocence of childhood to racial innocence (where children don’t see race) that woke ideologues find “suspect” and “problematic” and believe must be “intervened upon.” He explains, “CRT insists that racial innocence is, because of the operation of whiteness, only available for white (passing) people, though others will covet it and act white or take up white adjacency. That is, CRT argues that racial innocence (in young children) is a privilege afforded only to white (passing) people, and therefore, rather than aiming to expand it (which it deems impossible), it seeks to obliterate it to put everyone on equitable footing. By this logic, innocence is a sign of privilege and, therefore, something to be ashamed about—and something to be destroyed as soon as possible. As Lindsay summarizes, “Children can’t be innocent; they must be activists.”
[Dana Loesch] I believe Parkland was the first time, on a national level, that leftist activists realized they could dodge the basic responsibility in any debate, providing reasoned and well-articulated disagreement, if they could simply defer to a child as a substitute. That way, disagreement with their position equals hating children and the media supported them in this effort entirely.
In the 1980s, kids were deeply afraid of “acid rain.” But even the New York Times had to admit by 1990, “Worst Fears on Acid Rain Unrealized.” … Adults are meant to protect kids and make it so they don’t worry about things out of their control. Using kids to play activist and echo adult talking points is wrong, and we shouldn’t let our kids be used in that way. This activism also takes the place of actual knowledge—in this case, scientific knowledge. Emotional responses become far more prevalent than intellectual ones.
From social media trends and influences to celebrities to mental-health professionals, the message is clear: everything wrong in the world is the fault of racism or some other strain of bigotry. As a result, children are being taught to externalize responsibility for anything negative that happens to them. And their internal struggles are elevated to the level of mental illness, absolving them of the need for self-reflection. Some go even further and embrace their newly clinicalized identity as the golden ticket into a protected class. Not only are they faultless but any objection to their actions is beyond the pale. There is nothing they can, or should, do to improve their situation.
Josh, a clinical psychiatrist, predicted that this mindset will increasingly produce “kids who are brittle, kids who think that everything needs to be catered to them. That that’s the natural state of being. Anything that’s adverse or a challenge will be misperceived and misconceived and will be turned into an -ism, as we’ve seen increasingly. I think you’re going to see kids who are more depressed, who don’t know how to relate to one another, and don’t know how to express disagreements effectively. Increasingly, you’ll see kids whose only answer to conflict isn’t to deal with it but to go to an authority figure.
[Robert] Pondiscio “Fair-minded people can see that gratitude for what works and outrage at what’s not working are equally important in a well-functioning civil society. But when only the latter is emphasized, it creates in the minds of students that impression that their country is reflexively antagonistic to their interests: what we have, what we have been given, and what some may wish to preserve is wrong, unjust, and must be dismantled, root and branch.
The growth in popularity of “gentle parenting” and an aversion to discipline and authority in millions of American homes is a clear problem for anyone familiar with the goings-on across college campuses. Again, the inmates are running the asylum. And they demand to be kept safe from unpleasant ideas and feelings to the degree that professors have to tiptoe around any possible “triggers” that might offend their students, rather than teaching the subjects in which they are recognized experts. … A population-wide shift in parenting away from discipline and clear consequences and toward making sure children only experience positive emotions has created a proliferation of young adults incapable of taking on not just the hard aspects of adulthood but any aspect of “adulting.” This is a societal catastrophe.
Boyce asked Chawla, “What are the outcomes you see for clients who are given the woke model of therapy?” Chawla responded, “They don’t cope very well because one of the rhetorics that I hate is that they are now problematizing resilience. They’re saying you shouldn’t have to be resilient because the world is oppressive … The oppression should be removed and then you can be as you are. What kind of stupid bollocks is this to tell people?”
The book is about how extreme leftists are using wokeness to indoctrinate and harm kids, ultimately harming their mental health and leaving them unprepared for adulthood. This has spread into the medical field and education professions, where young professionals are taught inclusiveness training instead of actual medicine or teaching techniques.
The two co-writers take turns writing the chapters. The text flows well and quickly. The book cites many other books, and I’ve read quite a few of those, so there’s not a lot of new information here if you have read similar books or paid attention to the news. I still highlighted a lot, though.
Language: Mild
Sexual Content: discussions on pedophilia, pornography; not graphic
Violence/Gore: None
Harm to Animals:
Harm to Children:
Other (Triggers):
===================================
[parent Charlie Jacobs] These kids are exposed to all of this very liberal schooling, which I was clueless about. … seventh-grade health class … gave these kids highly sexualized labels. It was nonsense: polyamorous, bi-gender, etc., a whole list of made-up words. And the eleven- and twelve-year-old girls picked a label; it became cool. Nobody wanted to be the cis-basic kid; that’s boring. And not only is it boring. For a white and affluent kid who wants for nothing, they don’t want to be the oppressor, which is what they’re being taught in school. They have to pick something that marginalizes them.
The term “woke” was once used by the black community to describe someone who stays alert to racism in society. But once it spread to larger use, woke thought became more than just social awareness or just espousing leftist doctrine or even just having the “right” beliefs. Wokeness became the enforcement of a narrow set of values and a policing of language. It is now a method to shut down any alternate opinions, even those within the same general range. It’s a system characterized by intolerance and showing one’s own superiority by denouncing those who step out of line. And though woke ideology centers a very different set of people than the USSR did, the methods are eerily similar.
The conformity of totalitarian regimes, whether fascist or communist, always had to begin with children. Children were the great hope of the realized utopian future. They belonged to all of society—not just to the family in which they were born. If they could lead the children to righteous thought, they could become the idealized society. If children could be convinced into the ideas that totalitarians wanted, their parents would follow. And if not, the disobedient parent could easily be removed from the equation.
[parent] The effort to sow gender and racial confusion among little kids, and to impose on little kids a bunch of theories and ways of looking at the world that are totally unnatural and at odds with what little kids understand around them, should be situated I think as part of the leftist mission to destroy the nuclear family. The Left hates normalcy because normalcy is happy and bourgeois and resists change and revolution, and the great enforcer of normalcy in a society is the family. It takes men off the streets and domesticates them in homes, caring for wives and children. It creates sacred bonds and loyalties between people that come before politics, the state, or anyone’s ideology. … And the Left hates this. Passionately. So, their new attack on the normalcy of the family is to convince six-year-olds not to believe what they see. You have a penis, but really, you’re a girl. You see mommy and daddy, but really there’s no such categories and instead there’s a gender spectrum. … Kids are left confused and damaged by this. And that’s what the Left wants. … Promoting alienation and grievance has always been a central part of the groundwork for leftist revolution.
Wokeness is black and white, right and wrong—exactly the kind of thing that appeals to children and why they are so susceptible to being brainwashed in the name of wokeness. What does raising children to be woke do to their value system and inherent sense of curiosity? Childhood anxiety and mental health challenges are all at-time highs. Is it any wonder, when we’re teaching children to be anxious?
American librarians are talking out of two sides of their mouths: they are decrying the “censorship” of books that are wholly inappropriate for children while at the same time engaging in actual censorship against classic writers like Jane Austen, Dr. Seuss, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Daniel Buck: They’ll tell you this is about diversifying curriculum. It’s not. It’s about getting rid of any commitment to excellence, aesthetic beauty, or canons. … The irony. The list of books they want to remove would make a brilliant high school curriculum.
[Josh, author] “If you’re a young author, agents are telling them, ‘If only you had a gay or trans character in this book, maybe we could sell this.’ They’re messing with the art in order to shoe-horn these characters in.” I spoke to a number of previously published and aspiring authors, and all of them related a similar tale: They were finding themselves increasingly shut out of the industry unless they were willing to conform to the woke narrative and include its themes in their work.
Abe Greenwald said it best: “Being told that you are destined to be only your race, never an individual, cuts against the American creed.” This is exactly what we’re doing when we publish children’s literature obsessed with race to the exclusion of everything else. We strip black children of the ability to see themselves as anything but their race, and we strip children of other races of seeing their black friends as individuals. Today, thanks to the woke censors, black characters can only be portrayed in one way, victims, and their race must be the focus of the story.
Children’s media is now agenda-driven, with the intention of sending moral messages to readers and viewers. Those moral messages always existed in children’s entertainment; but the creators’ sense of morals has shifted significantly. No longer is the moral of the story just about sharing or being kind; now it is moral to practice radical acceptance of every racial and sexual theory of the day. Whereas the moral once as that were color-blind with our friendships, now children are taught to be hyperconscious of race. Whereas the idea of introducing sex and sexuality to a young child was unthinkable, it’s now commonplace to see Pride Month programming and other content related to sexuality throughout the year.
Regarding the dangers of messaging surrounding “fatphobia” seeping into medicine, [pediatrician] Fred explained, “We’re seeing an increase in diabetes and obesity. We want to tell them that they need to fix that. But we’re also telling them ‘you’re OK this way,’ and pediatricians are saying that too.” This kind of messaging from medical professionals terrified of being offensive to patients doesn’t just impact healthcare outcomes in the short term but also changes how children and teenagers optimize their behavior for their own health. Instead of trying to make healthy choices through diet and exercise, Fred explained, “They will try to find everything external to blame for a person’s or group’s bad health outcome, while conspicuously avoiding internal causes: choices, culture, personality traits and so on.”
When your child suffers from a condition requiring the expertise of a surgeon, the knowledge that the person holding the knife if the operating room was trained in this kind of environment is terrifying. Instead of spending their energy perfecting their training and skills, that surgeon is working to make sure he or she appears adequately woke for his or her peers and professors, lest he or she commits a microaggression. The infestation of this ideology into the inner workings—and priorities—of medical professional organizations isn’t the exception. It’s the norm.
They aren’t even subtle about it. It’s right out in the open: the goal of medical school isn’t to produce the best clinicians and diagnosticians and researchers, it’s to introduce woke ideology into the medical field. These doctors are expected to be not just healthcare providers but activists.
The highly politicized nature of medical schools and the outsized amount of time spent on politics instead of medicine doesn’t bode well for the competency of future doctors, let alone for the ideological diversity of the field. Would you rather have a doctor who spent three hours a week on politics, or three hours a week on actual medicine?
We are conducting an unprecedented sociological experiment on our children. Never before have we raised children and told them to ignore very basic biology. We’ve never told kids, “There is no such thing as a man or a woman,” as their brains are forming. Learning how to categorize is a crucial early-learning tool, and the first way young children have learned to separate human beings is into two camps: man and women. What does that to do the human brain when we tell children as their brains are developing that their inherent drive to categorize in this manner is wrong and incorrect? We’re about to find out.
The irony is that not so long ago we were celebrating the notion that girls can like trucks and dinosaurs and boys can like dolls, but those days are over, apparently. Now we’ve regressed fifty years and liking dancing and painting one’s face with makeup is now indicative of a medical condition in need of treatment.
The concept of “gender-affirmative” care is a euphemism given for a whole host of interventions, hormones, or surgeries, which come with lifelong side effects. Giving care that is “gender-affirmative” results in children self-diagnosing themselves with gender dysphoria, and then being treated by physicians and surgeons to change their bodies physically and hormonally. SEGM [The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine] explains, “The ‘gender affirmative’ model commits young people to lifelong medical treatment with minimal attention to … the psycho-social factors contributing to gender dysphoria. This model dismisses the question of whether psychological therapy might help to relieve or resolve gender dysphoria and provides interventions without an adequate examination.” … “Before we ‘affirm’ the feelings they’ve had, sometimes only for a short duration, we need to sit down and discuss with them—and amongst ourselves as clinicians—the risks and the benefits of providing hormones and surgical options.” Seems reasonable, but not to the woke police.
These children are being consigned to a life of health problems, including higher risk for heart attacks and strokes, as well as impaired bone health and sterility, before they’re even old enough to vote.
[Helen Joyce] The lack of decent research and misrepresentation of findings mean gender affirmation cannot even be described as a risky experiment on children, since “experiment” implies someone, somewhere, is tracking outcomes and comparing them with other options. Doctors are usually cautious when treating children, especially when interrupting normal physical development. But very surprisingly, puberty blockers have never been put through clinical trials for use in gender medicine and are not licensed by their manufacturers for this purpose.
References to cults were made again and again by those familiar with transgender activism. Dr. Jeffrey told me, “When you expose young and stressed children to ideas like this, and then you flood them with positive reinforcement when they claim to be transgender and there’s a lot of fanfare … destransitioners who share their stories online are often explicit about this ‘lovebombing’ drove them into this identity. There’s huge parallels to the cult world. It’s a very similar experience that many of them describe.”
[Helen Joyce] “The stereotypes they promote teach children ideas about what is proper for boys and girls that feminists had thought consigned to the dustbin of history. This is just one of the ways in which gender-ideology harms all children, not merely those who end up identifying out of their sex. As queer theory conquered campuses, and the simplistic ‘wrong body’ version conquered popular culture, writing about transkids proliferated. … All express the same contradiction. Gender identity is an innate, ineffable sense, unrelated to body types, behavior and presentation. But that inner truth is manifested by stereotypes.” It’s ironic that a movement all about ending oppression would simultaneously promote limiting stereotypes.
[James] Lindsay compares the sexual innocence of childhood to racial innocence (where children don’t see race) that woke ideologues find “suspect” and “problematic” and believe must be “intervened upon.” He explains, “CRT insists that racial innocence is, because of the operation of whiteness, only available for white (passing) people, though others will covet it and act white or take up white adjacency. That is, CRT argues that racial innocence (in young children) is a privilege afforded only to white (passing) people, and therefore, rather than aiming to expand it (which it deems impossible), it seeks to obliterate it to put everyone on equitable footing. By this logic, innocence is a sign of privilege and, therefore, something to be ashamed about—and something to be destroyed as soon as possible. As Lindsay summarizes, “Children can’t be innocent; they must be activists.”
[Dana Loesch] I believe Parkland was the first time, on a national level, that leftist activists realized they could dodge the basic responsibility in any debate, providing reasoned and well-articulated disagreement, if they could simply defer to a child as a substitute. That way, disagreement with their position equals hating children and the media supported them in this effort entirely.
In the 1980s, kids were deeply afraid of “acid rain.” But even the New York Times had to admit by 1990, “Worst Fears on Acid Rain Unrealized.” … Adults are meant to protect kids and make it so they don’t worry about things out of their control. Using kids to play activist and echo adult talking points is wrong, and we shouldn’t let our kids be used in that way. This activism also takes the place of actual knowledge—in this case, scientific knowledge. Emotional responses become far more prevalent than intellectual ones.
From social media trends and influences to celebrities to mental-health professionals, the message is clear: everything wrong in the world is the fault of racism or some other strain of bigotry. As a result, children are being taught to externalize responsibility for anything negative that happens to them. And their internal struggles are elevated to the level of mental illness, absolving them of the need for self-reflection. Some go even further and embrace their newly clinicalized identity as the golden ticket into a protected class. Not only are they faultless but any objection to their actions is beyond the pale. There is nothing they can, or should, do to improve their situation.
Josh, a clinical psychiatrist, predicted that this mindset will increasingly produce “kids who are brittle, kids who think that everything needs to be catered to them. That that’s the natural state of being. Anything that’s adverse or a challenge will be misperceived and misconceived and will be turned into an -ism, as we’ve seen increasingly. I think you’re going to see kids who are more depressed, who don’t know how to relate to one another, and don’t know how to express disagreements effectively. Increasingly, you’ll see kids whose only answer to conflict isn’t to deal with it but to go to an authority figure.
[Robert] Pondiscio “Fair-minded people can see that gratitude for what works and outrage at what’s not working are equally important in a well-functioning civil society. But when only the latter is emphasized, it creates in the minds of students that impression that their country is reflexively antagonistic to their interests: what we have, what we have been given, and what some may wish to preserve is wrong, unjust, and must be dismantled, root and branch.
The growth in popularity of “gentle parenting” and an aversion to discipline and authority in millions of American homes is a clear problem for anyone familiar with the goings-on across college campuses. Again, the inmates are running the asylum. And they demand to be kept safe from unpleasant ideas and feelings to the degree that professors have to tiptoe around any possible “triggers” that might offend their students, rather than teaching the subjects in which they are recognized experts. … A population-wide shift in parenting away from discipline and clear consequences and toward making sure children only experience positive emotions has created a proliferation of young adults incapable of taking on not just the hard aspects of adulthood but any aspect of “adulting.” This is a societal catastrophe.
Boyce asked Chawla, “What are the outcomes you see for clients who are given the woke model of therapy?” Chawla responded, “They don’t cope very well because one of the rhetorics that I hate is that they are now problematizing resilience. They’re saying you shouldn’t have to be resilient because the world is oppressive … The oppression should be removed and then you can be as you are. What kind of stupid bollocks is this to tell people?”
March 15, 2023
https://twitter.com/vanguard_pod/stat...
Unsure why anyone would think she has anything to add to any discussion.
Unsure why anyone would think she has anything to add to any discussion.
May 7, 2023
After reading this book, every parent will say, “This woke crap has got to stop, and it's up to me to do something about it.”
The third word in the above quote was much more vulgar in the first version of this review, but I changed it because this is a book review and not a rap or trap song filled with obscenities and vulgarisms.
The problem of my editing the first sentence of this review, however, obtains: parents will be angered to the point of uttering vulgarities or obscenities when they learn to what degree that woke ideology has penetrated social institutions which were once safe for everybody, especially their children, including Disney (105ff), the American Library Association (108ff), and the American Academy of Pediatrics (136ff).
Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz do a stellar job of defining “woke”, demonstrating how that leftist philosophy has permeated the culture. Best of all, the authors punctuate their several chapters with suggestions on how parents can fight back against the woke indoctrination occurring in their children’s schools and entertainment venues. They state their purpose in writing the book clearly:
“In this book, we set forth with a few objectives: expose how the woke are infiltrating American childhood, provide parents with the tools to fight back, and tell the cautionary tales of parents who didn't realize what was happening until it was too late.” (17-8)
Numerous paragraphs could be included in any review to highlight facts and opinions which clarify the perversity of the woke movement. For example, the quotes culled from the book preparatory for this review take nine pages, single-spaced. The task of determining which quotes are worth mentioning brings me perilously close to the limit suggested for quotes.
But the fear of trespassing copyright law must not stop me from highlighting several trenchant facts and opinions which the authors include in their research.
For example, some facts are simply shocking; I can see how they would easily contribute to parents’ anger against woke teachers.
“A 2018 study by San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge and University of Georgia psychology professor W. Keith Campbell published in Preventative Medicine Reports found that ‘even after only one hour of screen time daily, children and teens may begin to have less curiosity, lower self-control, less emotional stability and a greater inability to finish tasks.” (53)
Tell me again why public school teachers’ unions pushed so hard for online instead of in-classroom learning.
“By June 2020, the management company McKinsey & Company had ‘created statistical models to estimate the potential impact of school closures on learning.’ The company found that its models predicted the worst impact on the very students the equity-warriors pretend to care most about: ‘The average loss in our middle epidemiological scenario is seven months. But black students may fall behind by 10.3 months, Hispanic students by 9.2 months, and low-income students by more than a year. We estimate that this would exacerbate existing achievement gaps by 15 to 20 percent.’” (69-70)
Tell me again how woke teachers are supposed to be fighting for students because of “equity”, a concept that was once sound and justifiable, but which leftists took over as a tool to use against “white privilege” and other canards.
“The Biden administration was in on the crackdown of parents from the start. In an internal memo, the NSBA [National School Board Association] revealed that they had had discussions with the Biden White House before sending the letter. In an October 5 email, NSBA Secretary-Treasurer Kristi Swett wrote that it was President Biden's Education Secretary Miguel Cardona who had solicited the letter from the group.” (74)
Tell me again, National School Board Association and your state affiliates, why you hate parents so much.
“In 2015, Verdant Labs released an extensive study on the political affiliations of professions. They used political contribution data to figure out which jobs lean Republican and which lean Democrat. What they found was that teachers were overwhelmingly Democrats. Elementary school teachers were Democrats by an eighty-five to fifteen margin. There were eighty-seven Democrats teaching high school for every thirteen Republicans. School health educators were even more ideologically slanted at ninety-nine to one.” (76)
Tell me again how such partisan teachers can be fair in the classroom.
“[Ibram X.] Kendi is just one of the people banking on schools paying up to make sure everyone knows they're not racist. It's a system ripe for con artists. […] It seems like a scam because it is. In April of 2021, the New York Times broke a story about BLM’s co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors ‘snagging four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the US alone’.” (84)
Tell me again— No, better not; don’t raise my blood pressure by talking about the racist and pro-abortion agitprop Black Lives Matter.
“American librarians are talking out of two sides of their mouths: they are decrying the ‘censorship’ of books that are wholly inappropriate for children while at the same time engaging in the actual censorship against classic writers like Jane Austen, Dr. Seuss, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.” (114)
Tell me again why a masterly British literary icon (a woman, too), rhyming children’s books, and a series of books about prairie life in the nineteenth century must be not only banned, but replaced with drag queens grooming children by encouraging them to twerk their little butts in public libraries.
The English professor in me recoils at the recommended verbosity and faulty causation of the following example of woke nonsense, this time promoted by the American Medical Association:
“In late 2021, the American Medical Association (AMA) released ‘Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts’ as part of a multi-year project called the ‘Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity.’ […] The document calls for doctors to change their language to insert progressive politics into everything, even statements of fact. For instance, instead of saying, ‘Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States,’ members are encouraged to say, ‘People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States.’ Everything must be modified to fit woke orthodoxy.” (149)
Tell me again why it’s not only improper but also wrong (in the moral sense) to tell an African American or another minority person that he or she is obese and should stop eating so much damned McDonald’s.
Quoting Dr. William Malone, “the vast majority of childhood-onset gender dysphoria resolves naturally, ‘with 61-98% of children re-identifying with their biological sex during puberty.’ While there are no studies yet to provide comparable data for adolescent-onset gender dysphoria, one can imagine it would not be far different.” (172)
Instead of my own “Tell me again” repetition as a response to the authors’ presentation of facts, their own commentary a page earlier is a perfect conclusion to the ad hominem attacks which transgender activists use against parents who affirm that there are two genders:
“The battle for gay rights was always about acceptance—mainly, the right to marry. For ‘trans rights’ it's a different ballgame completely, especially when it comes to minors. ‘Acceptance’ of a transgender child comes with body-altering modifications that can cause lasting damage. That fact is ignored and denied by its proponents. And if you bring up that pesky little fact, you're told you're a bigoted transphobe who wants eight-year-old trans kids to kill themselves.” (171)
Quoting Brian Willoughby, a professor at Brigham Young University: “‘More and more young people,’ he says, ‘are seeing sexual content before puberty—not because they're seeking it out, but because it's been delivered to the smartphones their parents are buying them. In the current generation of young people, their first orgasms are tied not to real-life experiences, but to pornography. We know from brain research how influential first experiences are for mapping the brain, which could explain how year after year, we're seeing fewer and fewer young people interested in sex, dating, and committed relationships.’” (199)
Tell me again why students whose ages are single digits must have sex education which does not merely show, but recommends (in alphabetical order) anal sex, exposure to “Minor Attracted People” (MAPs or pedophiles; page 201), gender bending, homosexuality, masturbation, multiple sex partners, oral sex, or other sexual practices which my innocent mind cannot understand.
Not all is doom and gloom, though. The authors are vibrantly optimistic that parents can effect change in their children’s schools and thus eradicate the woke nonsense which pervades the culture. They pepper their volume constantly with affirmations of how parents are the force of change. The following are the more concise expressions of what parents can do to achieve this change:
“Parents have to start drawing a sharp line when it comes to their kids. Our children belong to us. The home is where we teach our children to stand up for themselves and learn they don't have to hide their true beliefs. There are a lot of jokes about ‘safe spaces’, a term that hit the popular lexicon when colleges began providing rooms with Play-Doh and crayons where students, the majority young adults, could hide from controversial opinions.” (44-5)
“The home is the last line of defense. In totalitarian societies, parents have to pretend to believe the lies that kids are taught at school, lest they make themselves or their children a target. In a free country, you don't have to do that. You can and should explain to children that life isn't black and white and that America's history is complicated, just like any other country’s history. You can and should reassert the morals that matter in your family. You can and should teach your child to be himself or herself and not be coerced into other people's opinions.” (46)
“No amount of nonsense equity education can take the place of actual academic instruction, and no amount of rejiggering the standards will help.” (87)
“Many activists like [Quisha] King [spokesperson for Moms for Liberty] recommend that parents start with involvement at the school board level. Attend the meetings, support candidates, and take seriously the local elections, as they have the biggest effect on what happens inside your child's school. Support candidates who want school choice. Push for curriculum transparency. That one should be easy, and you can assume that a school district with nothing to hide will not have a problem with telling you what they teach.” (100)
“What can parents and concerned residents do about the woke takeover of the publishing industry and library system? Given that a great deal of the shift in kids’ literature is driven by publicly funded institutions like schools and libraries, one librarian suggested, ‘Patrons need to use the online purchase suggestion forms that most libraries have and start asking for titles! I had already been trying to figure [out] a way to get your books into our libraries before today, but it is difficult to justify ordering from lists of different companies without a specific patron request or without surrounding libraries doing the same.’ Moderates and conservatives should also vote with their wallets and support smaller publishers in a David and Goliath fight against the massive power that Scholastic (with its in-school book fairs) and other large publishers wield.” (126; brackets in original)
“Just like with books, paying attention to one-star reviews online and looking up potential shows and movies on Common Sense Media are important steps for parents wishing to keep tabs on what their children are watching. The assumption with any new show has to be that there will be objectionable content; and even shows we grew up on like The Muppet Show and Blue’s Clues can't necessarily be trusted.” (131)
“We cannot afford the luxury of shutting out the outside world; we have to stay engaged, stay in the fight, and work to send wokeness to the dustbin of history. We should do it not just for the mental and physical health of our own children, but also that of children around the country for whom there is no voice.” (164)
The volume has some flaws. One intellectual problem is that the authors may have misunderstood that Catholic social justice is not equivalent with its distortion by woke zealots (156). The volume itself is flawed because there are no section breaks within the chapters; thus, for example, the reader must try to follow the explication of twenty-four pages on transgenderism in schools without subdivisional headings which would help the categorization of the ideas presented.
Worst of all, the book has no index. Faculty, parents, and students who want to quickly ascertain, for example, how the abortion business Planned Parenthood is involved in gender reassignment surgery and hormone blockers in children (pages 177 and 185) must plow through whatever chapter the reader thinks may concern that anti-life entity. Not even the twenty-four pages of small print endnotes, giving URLs for internet access to sources (pages 271 through 295), can assist the faculty, parent, or student researcher as well as a detailed index. One hopes this mission will be corrected in subsequent printings.
Despite these minor flaws, Mandel and Markowicz’ book is a mellifluous, yet aggravating read of the penetration of woke nonsense in American life. It will definitely inspire parents to get involved in the fight to make education great again for their children.
Since Amazon collaborates with cancel culture zealots and bans conservative and pro-life material, purchase this book from DW Books directly: https://store.dailywire.com/products/....
The third word in the above quote was much more vulgar in the first version of this review, but I changed it because this is a book review and not a rap or trap song filled with obscenities and vulgarisms.
The problem of my editing the first sentence of this review, however, obtains: parents will be angered to the point of uttering vulgarities or obscenities when they learn to what degree that woke ideology has penetrated social institutions which were once safe for everybody, especially their children, including Disney (105ff), the American Library Association (108ff), and the American Academy of Pediatrics (136ff).
Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz do a stellar job of defining “woke”, demonstrating how that leftist philosophy has permeated the culture. Best of all, the authors punctuate their several chapters with suggestions on how parents can fight back against the woke indoctrination occurring in their children’s schools and entertainment venues. They state their purpose in writing the book clearly:
“In this book, we set forth with a few objectives: expose how the woke are infiltrating American childhood, provide parents with the tools to fight back, and tell the cautionary tales of parents who didn't realize what was happening until it was too late.” (17-8)
Numerous paragraphs could be included in any review to highlight facts and opinions which clarify the perversity of the woke movement. For example, the quotes culled from the book preparatory for this review take nine pages, single-spaced. The task of determining which quotes are worth mentioning brings me perilously close to the limit suggested for quotes.
But the fear of trespassing copyright law must not stop me from highlighting several trenchant facts and opinions which the authors include in their research.
For example, some facts are simply shocking; I can see how they would easily contribute to parents’ anger against woke teachers.
“A 2018 study by San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge and University of Georgia psychology professor W. Keith Campbell published in Preventative Medicine Reports found that ‘even after only one hour of screen time daily, children and teens may begin to have less curiosity, lower self-control, less emotional stability and a greater inability to finish tasks.” (53)
Tell me again why public school teachers’ unions pushed so hard for online instead of in-classroom learning.
“By June 2020, the management company McKinsey & Company had ‘created statistical models to estimate the potential impact of school closures on learning.’ The company found that its models predicted the worst impact on the very students the equity-warriors pretend to care most about: ‘The average loss in our middle epidemiological scenario is seven months. But black students may fall behind by 10.3 months, Hispanic students by 9.2 months, and low-income students by more than a year. We estimate that this would exacerbate existing achievement gaps by 15 to 20 percent.’” (69-70)
Tell me again how woke teachers are supposed to be fighting for students because of “equity”, a concept that was once sound and justifiable, but which leftists took over as a tool to use against “white privilege” and other canards.
“The Biden administration was in on the crackdown of parents from the start. In an internal memo, the NSBA [National School Board Association] revealed that they had had discussions with the Biden White House before sending the letter. In an October 5 email, NSBA Secretary-Treasurer Kristi Swett wrote that it was President Biden's Education Secretary Miguel Cardona who had solicited the letter from the group.” (74)
Tell me again, National School Board Association and your state affiliates, why you hate parents so much.
“In 2015, Verdant Labs released an extensive study on the political affiliations of professions. They used political contribution data to figure out which jobs lean Republican and which lean Democrat. What they found was that teachers were overwhelmingly Democrats. Elementary school teachers were Democrats by an eighty-five to fifteen margin. There were eighty-seven Democrats teaching high school for every thirteen Republicans. School health educators were even more ideologically slanted at ninety-nine to one.” (76)
Tell me again how such partisan teachers can be fair in the classroom.
“[Ibram X.] Kendi is just one of the people banking on schools paying up to make sure everyone knows they're not racist. It's a system ripe for con artists. […] It seems like a scam because it is. In April of 2021, the New York Times broke a story about BLM’s co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors ‘snagging four high-end homes for $3.2 million in the US alone’.” (84)
Tell me again— No, better not; don’t raise my blood pressure by talking about the racist and pro-abortion agitprop Black Lives Matter.
“American librarians are talking out of two sides of their mouths: they are decrying the ‘censorship’ of books that are wholly inappropriate for children while at the same time engaging in the actual censorship against classic writers like Jane Austen, Dr. Seuss, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.” (114)
Tell me again why a masterly British literary icon (a woman, too), rhyming children’s books, and a series of books about prairie life in the nineteenth century must be not only banned, but replaced with drag queens grooming children by encouraging them to twerk their little butts in public libraries.
The English professor in me recoils at the recommended verbosity and faulty causation of the following example of woke nonsense, this time promoted by the American Medical Association:
“In late 2021, the American Medical Association (AMA) released ‘Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts’ as part of a multi-year project called the ‘Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity.’ […] The document calls for doctors to change their language to insert progressive politics into everything, even statements of fact. For instance, instead of saying, ‘Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States,’ members are encouraged to say, ‘People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States.’ Everything must be modified to fit woke orthodoxy.” (149)
Tell me again why it’s not only improper but also wrong (in the moral sense) to tell an African American or another minority person that he or she is obese and should stop eating so much damned McDonald’s.
Quoting Dr. William Malone, “the vast majority of childhood-onset gender dysphoria resolves naturally, ‘with 61-98% of children re-identifying with their biological sex during puberty.’ While there are no studies yet to provide comparable data for adolescent-onset gender dysphoria, one can imagine it would not be far different.” (172)
Instead of my own “Tell me again” repetition as a response to the authors’ presentation of facts, their own commentary a page earlier is a perfect conclusion to the ad hominem attacks which transgender activists use against parents who affirm that there are two genders:
“The battle for gay rights was always about acceptance—mainly, the right to marry. For ‘trans rights’ it's a different ballgame completely, especially when it comes to minors. ‘Acceptance’ of a transgender child comes with body-altering modifications that can cause lasting damage. That fact is ignored and denied by its proponents. And if you bring up that pesky little fact, you're told you're a bigoted transphobe who wants eight-year-old trans kids to kill themselves.” (171)
Quoting Brian Willoughby, a professor at Brigham Young University: “‘More and more young people,’ he says, ‘are seeing sexual content before puberty—not because they're seeking it out, but because it's been delivered to the smartphones their parents are buying them. In the current generation of young people, their first orgasms are tied not to real-life experiences, but to pornography. We know from brain research how influential first experiences are for mapping the brain, which could explain how year after year, we're seeing fewer and fewer young people interested in sex, dating, and committed relationships.’” (199)
Tell me again why students whose ages are single digits must have sex education which does not merely show, but recommends (in alphabetical order) anal sex, exposure to “Minor Attracted People” (MAPs or pedophiles; page 201), gender bending, homosexuality, masturbation, multiple sex partners, oral sex, or other sexual practices which my innocent mind cannot understand.
Not all is doom and gloom, though. The authors are vibrantly optimistic that parents can effect change in their children’s schools and thus eradicate the woke nonsense which pervades the culture. They pepper their volume constantly with affirmations of how parents are the force of change. The following are the more concise expressions of what parents can do to achieve this change:
“Parents have to start drawing a sharp line when it comes to their kids. Our children belong to us. The home is where we teach our children to stand up for themselves and learn they don't have to hide their true beliefs. There are a lot of jokes about ‘safe spaces’, a term that hit the popular lexicon when colleges began providing rooms with Play-Doh and crayons where students, the majority young adults, could hide from controversial opinions.” (44-5)
“The home is the last line of defense. In totalitarian societies, parents have to pretend to believe the lies that kids are taught at school, lest they make themselves or their children a target. In a free country, you don't have to do that. You can and should explain to children that life isn't black and white and that America's history is complicated, just like any other country’s history. You can and should reassert the morals that matter in your family. You can and should teach your child to be himself or herself and not be coerced into other people's opinions.” (46)
“No amount of nonsense equity education can take the place of actual academic instruction, and no amount of rejiggering the standards will help.” (87)
“Many activists like [Quisha] King [spokesperson for Moms for Liberty] recommend that parents start with involvement at the school board level. Attend the meetings, support candidates, and take seriously the local elections, as they have the biggest effect on what happens inside your child's school. Support candidates who want school choice. Push for curriculum transparency. That one should be easy, and you can assume that a school district with nothing to hide will not have a problem with telling you what they teach.” (100)
“What can parents and concerned residents do about the woke takeover of the publishing industry and library system? Given that a great deal of the shift in kids’ literature is driven by publicly funded institutions like schools and libraries, one librarian suggested, ‘Patrons need to use the online purchase suggestion forms that most libraries have and start asking for titles! I had already been trying to figure [out] a way to get your books into our libraries before today, but it is difficult to justify ordering from lists of different companies without a specific patron request or without surrounding libraries doing the same.’ Moderates and conservatives should also vote with their wallets and support smaller publishers in a David and Goliath fight against the massive power that Scholastic (with its in-school book fairs) and other large publishers wield.” (126; brackets in original)
“Just like with books, paying attention to one-star reviews online and looking up potential shows and movies on Common Sense Media are important steps for parents wishing to keep tabs on what their children are watching. The assumption with any new show has to be that there will be objectionable content; and even shows we grew up on like The Muppet Show and Blue’s Clues can't necessarily be trusted.” (131)
“We cannot afford the luxury of shutting out the outside world; we have to stay engaged, stay in the fight, and work to send wokeness to the dustbin of history. We should do it not just for the mental and physical health of our own children, but also that of children around the country for whom there is no voice.” (164)
The volume has some flaws. One intellectual problem is that the authors may have misunderstood that Catholic social justice is not equivalent with its distortion by woke zealots (156). The volume itself is flawed because there are no section breaks within the chapters; thus, for example, the reader must try to follow the explication of twenty-four pages on transgenderism in schools without subdivisional headings which would help the categorization of the ideas presented.
Worst of all, the book has no index. Faculty, parents, and students who want to quickly ascertain, for example, how the abortion business Planned Parenthood is involved in gender reassignment surgery and hormone blockers in children (pages 177 and 185) must plow through whatever chapter the reader thinks may concern that anti-life entity. Not even the twenty-four pages of small print endnotes, giving URLs for internet access to sources (pages 271 through 295), can assist the faculty, parent, or student researcher as well as a detailed index. One hopes this mission will be corrected in subsequent printings.
Despite these minor flaws, Mandel and Markowicz’ book is a mellifluous, yet aggravating read of the penetration of woke nonsense in American life. It will definitely inspire parents to get involved in the fight to make education great again for their children.
Since Amazon collaborates with cancel culture zealots and bans conservative and pro-life material, purchase this book from DW Books directly: https://store.dailywire.com/products/....
March 17, 2023
There is a new trend of books attacking a boogeyman or two. They are typically poorly researched, poorly written, and filled with illogical arguments. This is no exception. It jumps around, but it’s clearly an anti trans book. However, you’ll see the author go off script to complain about things like schools not saying the pledge of allegiance anymore. The sourcing is not very good. I tried to follow the logic but it just wasn’t there. It’s undergrad level work for a topic the student isn’t interested in. Save your time and read a well researched book instead.
July 1, 2023
Though I was not the intended audience, I read this book mainly to learn two parents' perspectives on the trendy sexual and racial content in children's entertainment/literature. The other reason I read it is due to my profession. Living in a blue state and working in a public school, I often feel like I'm the only one scratching my head at the obsessive push for filling children's minds with sex and race - two concepts children are emotionally and academically unprepared to understand in the context it is currently being presented to them. All that said, the book was depressing, but at the same time, an enlightening read and an encourging reminder that there are people who still care and will fight for children.
Below is a lengthy review. If you'd rather not read it, I'll stress my main point in this paragraph: Parents, please read this book. I don't have children, but as a library teacher, I witness the negative consequences of children being raised in a morally decaying society. If you aren't already, please get involved at your child's school, extracurriculars, and be cognizant of the social media and entertainment they digest. You are the ones who can change the institutions that have transformed into self-serving, illogical, destructive enemies against the very ones they ought to serve - your children.
Part One: Education
The chapter on the history of China & the Soviet Union's totalitarian methods and drawing similarities to what's happening in today's America is quite interesting. As the author noted, "It's not a new concept to separate children from parents for the purpose of indoctrination. It was just shocking that it was being attempted so openly in America." (p. 31).
The other two chapters of this section focus on parents' revelation of the public schools' indocrination, mainly through the COVID shutdown and curriculum exposure (did you know math was racist?). Reading those chapters drudged up old frustrations I experience as a teacher: students w/speech delays and/or special needs wearing a mask and not being able to see lip formations; the students struggling academically and behaviorally upon returning "part time" to school; the general decline of academics, because the curriculum is bloated with gender/race ideologies and America bashing instead of actual academic skills. Also, the obsession of equality: It reminds me of the frustrations Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams expressed in their biographies concerning meritocracy in grades. Teachers cannot give low grades to poor students' work because that would upset the equality cart - unless they are white, go ahead and give the "F." But blacks and other minorities dare not receive the grade they earned; thus, setting them up for failure if we give struggling students an "A" instead of a lower grade coupled with remedial assistance they need in order to eventually improve their academic performance.
Part Two: Institutions in Trouble
I very well know libraries, schools, and publishing companies are the major contributors of exposing inappropriate content to children. When an author I follow declared a LGBTQ+ character may be in a future book, I emailed the author and asked if that was the author's decision or the publisher's (author is with Scholastic). I expressed my concern of publishing companies pushing authors to add "LGBTQ+" content for the sake of it; thus, stunting creativity. The response was cordial but noncommittal. After reading Stolen Youth, I learned publishing companies are indeed focused on LGBTQ+, race, et. al: "I spoke with an editor of a large publishing house, Susan, who works exclusively on their children's books, about how the obsession over equality, diversity and other woke buzzwords impacts her work...She explained, 'We have biweekly meetings to discuss the initiatives we're going to take to make our publishing programs more woke and activist oriented.' " (p. 116). And: " 'There was always an interest in publishing a diversity of voices and perspectives. [But] ten years ago, that meant something wholly different. I think there was always a desire to be inclusive and help backgrounds to see themselves in books they have access to. [But], whereas once the real impetus was to find great books, meaningful books, and not really put the author's color of skin at the fore, now the question of race and sexual orientation and gender and all those woke buzzwords feels like it's more important than finding great literature.' " (p.116-117)
The chapter on medicine and the issues physicians face, especially pediatricians, are very enlightening. I had no idea.
An example: "The session was scheduled to focus on caring for babies born severely prematurely, on discussing best practices in the delivery room, and on managing cardiac care and caring for immature lungs. But an activist doctor, Dr. Erica Kaye, noticed that the panel was lacking any female voices and lamented this on Twitter...She went on to question why there was also 'not a single Black physician to speak on a topic that disproportionately affects Black women.' So what did the [Pediatric Academic Societies, my brackets] do? They groveled at the feet of the social media mob, telling Dr. Kaye...'This session has been canceled. It does not align with our values and our commitments to no manels [a panel comprised of just men] and to a diverse and inclusive program.' " (p. 145)
Another example: "[Dr. Richard, my brackets] Bosshardt says that 'many lectures and articles coming out of the [American College of Surgeons, my brackets]' have promoted 'progressive ideology' and 'focused on issues of diversity, equity, and social justice...All our laudable goals, but they have become poisoned with ideological meaning and taken primacy over other considerations, such as excellence, professionalism, competence, and compassion, which should be overarching priorities in something like surgical practice." (p. 147)
Part III: Kids as Guinea Pigs
This whole section is disturbing. I read the chapters pretty much in one day, because I didn't want to linger on such atrocities. A few passages that jumped out at me:
"Children have always been exposed to inappropriate content for their age; sexualized content and frightening world events. This moment is unique: while we always understood that the innocence of children should be guarded at all costs, we have now decided as a society that children aren't just unavoidably going to be exposed to sex and fear-inducing news, but that this is a good thing." (p. 165).
"There have always been troubled children and adolescents struggling through puberty, and there have always been adults willing to take advantage of their emotional distress...In previous generations, troubled youth would dabble in substance abuse, cutting, eating disorders - all dangerous and potentially deadly, but also universally recognized as harmful. Now, troubled youth are expressing their distress through gender identity, and unlike other toxic coping mechanisms in the past, adults in position of power in schools, medical and psychiatric settings, and the media are throwing kindling in the fire. It's like handing a knife to a girl who is cutting and telling her it's a healthy way to express her feelings, or telling a girl struggling with an eating disorder that she does, indeed, look fat in those jeans and should purge to try to lose a few pounds." (p. 167)
Part IV: Where Do We Go From Here?
The authors offer advice to fellow parents concerned how their children are being affected by these ideologies. They made it clear there is no best solution since each family situation is different. I won't go into their advice here.* I'd rather every concerned parent read the book.
Conclusion: If you've lasted this long through my ramblings, I recommend this book to parents but also anyone else who is surrounded by children, including but not limited to grandparents, teachers, and librarians. I cannot emphasize enough how parents need to get out there and see what is being taught to their children. Reading this book is a step towards that direction.
*I had to laugh when the homeschooling author mentioned how many times she got the "how do your kids socialize?" question. As a former homeschooler, that was a question I heard frequently. Yes, those rumors of homeschoolers being socially awkward, sheltered people who learn in their PJs do circulate! Mary Pride is the homeschool resource my mom referred to back in the 90s. Not sure if she or her work are still around, but my mom tells me how helpful Mary Pride's book was when she started homeschooling my siblings and me.
Below is a lengthy review. If you'd rather not read it, I'll stress my main point in this paragraph: Parents, please read this book. I don't have children, but as a library teacher, I witness the negative consequences of children being raised in a morally decaying society. If you aren't already, please get involved at your child's school, extracurriculars, and be cognizant of the social media and entertainment they digest. You are the ones who can change the institutions that have transformed into self-serving, illogical, destructive enemies against the very ones they ought to serve - your children.
Part One: Education
The chapter on the history of China & the Soviet Union's totalitarian methods and drawing similarities to what's happening in today's America is quite interesting. As the author noted, "It's not a new concept to separate children from parents for the purpose of indoctrination. It was just shocking that it was being attempted so openly in America." (p. 31).
The other two chapters of this section focus on parents' revelation of the public schools' indocrination, mainly through the COVID shutdown and curriculum exposure (did you know math was racist?). Reading those chapters drudged up old frustrations I experience as a teacher: students w/speech delays and/or special needs wearing a mask and not being able to see lip formations; the students struggling academically and behaviorally upon returning "part time" to school; the general decline of academics, because the curriculum is bloated with gender/race ideologies and America bashing instead of actual academic skills. Also, the obsession of equality: It reminds me of the frustrations Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams expressed in their biographies concerning meritocracy in grades. Teachers cannot give low grades to poor students' work because that would upset the equality cart - unless they are white, go ahead and give the "F." But blacks and other minorities dare not receive the grade they earned; thus, setting them up for failure if we give struggling students an "A" instead of a lower grade coupled with remedial assistance they need in order to eventually improve their academic performance.
Part Two: Institutions in Trouble
I very well know libraries, schools, and publishing companies are the major contributors of exposing inappropriate content to children. When an author I follow declared a LGBTQ+ character may be in a future book, I emailed the author and asked if that was the author's decision or the publisher's (author is with Scholastic). I expressed my concern of publishing companies pushing authors to add "LGBTQ+" content for the sake of it; thus, stunting creativity. The response was cordial but noncommittal. After reading Stolen Youth, I learned publishing companies are indeed focused on LGBTQ+, race, et. al: "I spoke with an editor of a large publishing house, Susan, who works exclusively on their children's books, about how the obsession over equality, diversity and other woke buzzwords impacts her work...She explained, 'We have biweekly meetings to discuss the initiatives we're going to take to make our publishing programs more woke and activist oriented.' " (p. 116). And: " 'There was always an interest in publishing a diversity of voices and perspectives. [But] ten years ago, that meant something wholly different. I think there was always a desire to be inclusive and help backgrounds to see themselves in books they have access to. [But], whereas once the real impetus was to find great books, meaningful books, and not really put the author's color of skin at the fore, now the question of race and sexual orientation and gender and all those woke buzzwords feels like it's more important than finding great literature.' " (p.116-117)
The chapter on medicine and the issues physicians face, especially pediatricians, are very enlightening. I had no idea.
An example: "The session was scheduled to focus on caring for babies born severely prematurely, on discussing best practices in the delivery room, and on managing cardiac care and caring for immature lungs. But an activist doctor, Dr. Erica Kaye, noticed that the panel was lacking any female voices and lamented this on Twitter...She went on to question why there was also 'not a single Black physician to speak on a topic that disproportionately affects Black women.' So what did the [Pediatric Academic Societies, my brackets] do? They groveled at the feet of the social media mob, telling Dr. Kaye...'This session has been canceled. It does not align with our values and our commitments to no manels [a panel comprised of just men] and to a diverse and inclusive program.' " (p. 145)
Another example: "[Dr. Richard, my brackets] Bosshardt says that 'many lectures and articles coming out of the [American College of Surgeons, my brackets]' have promoted 'progressive ideology' and 'focused on issues of diversity, equity, and social justice...All our laudable goals, but they have become poisoned with ideological meaning and taken primacy over other considerations, such as excellence, professionalism, competence, and compassion, which should be overarching priorities in something like surgical practice." (p. 147)
Part III: Kids as Guinea Pigs
This whole section is disturbing. I read the chapters pretty much in one day, because I didn't want to linger on such atrocities. A few passages that jumped out at me:
"Children have always been exposed to inappropriate content for their age; sexualized content and frightening world events. This moment is unique: while we always understood that the innocence of children should be guarded at all costs, we have now decided as a society that children aren't just unavoidably going to be exposed to sex and fear-inducing news, but that this is a good thing." (p. 165).
"There have always been troubled children and adolescents struggling through puberty, and there have always been adults willing to take advantage of their emotional distress...In previous generations, troubled youth would dabble in substance abuse, cutting, eating disorders - all dangerous and potentially deadly, but also universally recognized as harmful. Now, troubled youth are expressing their distress through gender identity, and unlike other toxic coping mechanisms in the past, adults in position of power in schools, medical and psychiatric settings, and the media are throwing kindling in the fire. It's like handing a knife to a girl who is cutting and telling her it's a healthy way to express her feelings, or telling a girl struggling with an eating disorder that she does, indeed, look fat in those jeans and should purge to try to lose a few pounds." (p. 167)
Part IV: Where Do We Go From Here?
The authors offer advice to fellow parents concerned how their children are being affected by these ideologies. They made it clear there is no best solution since each family situation is different. I won't go into their advice here.* I'd rather every concerned parent read the book.
Conclusion: If you've lasted this long through my ramblings, I recommend this book to parents but also anyone else who is surrounded by children, including but not limited to grandparents, teachers, and librarians. I cannot emphasize enough how parents need to get out there and see what is being taught to their children. Reading this book is a step towards that direction.
*I had to laugh when the homeschooling author mentioned how many times she got the "how do your kids socialize?" question. As a former homeschooler, that was a question I heard frequently. Yes, those rumors of homeschoolers being socially awkward, sheltered people who learn in their PJs do circulate! Mary Pride is the homeschool resource my mom referred to back in the 90s. Not sure if she or her work are still around, but my mom tells me how helpful Mary Pride's book was when she started homeschooling my siblings and me.
May 1, 2023
This book proves anyone can get published
This book is full of logical fallies. Essentially it boils down to a series of unsubstantiated claims and unrelated anecdotes to poorly attempt to prove its point.
In summary what it basically claims is that the youth of America (and while not mentioned, implied white youth) are overly stressed out and misled by a supposed indoctrination of progressives who the authors suggest are forcing consideration not only of present injustices but of ones that occurred in history. The authors are basically suggesting that it would be far better to limit information to children about anyone or anytime where others not like them were mistreated. All the authors really want is to condone the perpetuation of bias. However in their twisted logic they believe that any school or product or service in the US that asks anyone to stop and consider is creating group think and indoctrination. The comparisons to the Soviet Union are pathetic. The Soviet Union was a nationalistic oligarchy- not all that different from the Russian Federation or NAZI Germany or Facist Spain or any other dictatorship in Africa, Central America or Asia.
Its really sad that this supposed journalist believes that trying to understand the world from multiple perspectives is somehow brainwashing.
There isn’t a single redeeming, non circular or functionally truthful bit of logic or journalism in this entire book.
No wonder the author couldn’t define “woke” because it basically comes down to anyone who forces me to take responsibility for the way I and my ancestors have treated others in the name of whatever personal being I have and a complete lack of honesty that whites in this country have treated others badly for hundreds of years.
This book is full of logical fallies. Essentially it boils down to a series of unsubstantiated claims and unrelated anecdotes to poorly attempt to prove its point.
In summary what it basically claims is that the youth of America (and while not mentioned, implied white youth) are overly stressed out and misled by a supposed indoctrination of progressives who the authors suggest are forcing consideration not only of present injustices but of ones that occurred in history. The authors are basically suggesting that it would be far better to limit information to children about anyone or anytime where others not like them were mistreated. All the authors really want is to condone the perpetuation of bias. However in their twisted logic they believe that any school or product or service in the US that asks anyone to stop and consider is creating group think and indoctrination. The comparisons to the Soviet Union are pathetic. The Soviet Union was a nationalistic oligarchy- not all that different from the Russian Federation or NAZI Germany or Facist Spain or any other dictatorship in Africa, Central America or Asia.
Its really sad that this supposed journalist believes that trying to understand the world from multiple perspectives is somehow brainwashing.
There isn’t a single redeeming, non circular or functionally truthful bit of logic or journalism in this entire book.
No wonder the author couldn’t define “woke” because it basically comes down to anyone who forces me to take responsibility for the way I and my ancestors have treated others in the name of whatever personal being I have and a complete lack of honesty that whites in this country have treated others badly for hundreds of years.
March 19, 2023
Complete right wing garbage. She is being ridiculed for her stammering and stumbling promotion appearances then had the nerve to write an Op Ed soliciting sympathy for having some kind of breakdown as a result. Not likely that it will result in any self awareness on her part.
May 18, 2023
I heard an interview with the author of this book where she talked about the “book banning“ controversy in Florida. So I decided to get her book and listen to it.
My conclusion as to the value of this book can be summarized in the following incident.
Early in the book, the author mentions that the Florida governor held a press conference to debunk the whole “book banning” thing as a hoax, by showing that the books being removed from the elementary school shelves had actual pornography in them. And during his press conference the news channels all had to cut away when he showed actual pictures from these children’s books, because they were too pornographic to be shown on their newsfeed.
I thought, “Oh, come on. Surely that’s an exaggeration. They couldn’t actually be pornographic — especially not too pornographic for a news feed! No elementary school would allow books on their shelves with drawings of actual sexual acts in them. That’s just silly.”
So I went looking for this video of the press conference. It’s nearly impossible to find. I had it for a while - and it was eye-popping — but it seems to have disappeared. It’s impossible to find on YouTube. And I had a news article with it in it for a while, but it’s been post-publication edited down to nothing now. I can’t decide if this is because it was too graphic for those platforms, or because those platforms didn’t like this information being revealed. Either option is disturbing, considering these books are sitting on shelves for any five year old pick up in their elementary school.
I finally found a link on the Internet that shows pictures directly from one of the books. I would include that here, except I’m not sure we’re allowed to link to pornographic images in a Goodreads review. So I won’t. But, if you’d like to see for yourself, just trot down to your local bookstore and ask for a copy of “Gender Queer,” then turn the page 367 (I think it was). Pictures of children giving oral sex to each other is just really not appropriate for an elementary school.
So, the answer was yes. Yes the elementary school librarians had indeed actually chosen books with pornographic images in them to put on the library shelves for Elementary kids.
And the really disturbing thing is that all the news media outlets I can find (other than the reporters at Fox News, who in most other ways are nut cases) don’t seem to want us to know this. You would think that pornographic pictures in a children’s book would be a relevant fact to add to your news story. But every single story I hear on the subject portrays this issue as though there are just crazy right wing parents in Florida who want to be mean to gay people. None of them point out that there are perfectly sane parents in Florida who don’t want their kids reading pornography in their elementary schools.
And it’s not like the reporters don’t know that this particular book I researched exists. It’s their favorite poster-child book for talking about this. It’s the one they usually show. They show its cover. They show someone flipping through the pages — with Post-it notes on certain pages covering certain images. Why are there Post-it notes on their pages? What are they covering up?
Well, now I know.
So that was the incident.
I have to highly recommend this book. It does an excellent job of laying out the extent to which inappropriate sexualization of children is going on in the schools, and also the way in which the media is trying to hide this from us. My conclusion is that we are all being gaslighted on this subject by our favorite news sources, because they are all following ideologies that tell them this is a good and right thing to do.
My conclusion as to the value of this book can be summarized in the following incident.
Early in the book, the author mentions that the Florida governor held a press conference to debunk the whole “book banning” thing as a hoax, by showing that the books being removed from the elementary school shelves had actual pornography in them. And during his press conference the news channels all had to cut away when he showed actual pictures from these children’s books, because they were too pornographic to be shown on their newsfeed.
I thought, “Oh, come on. Surely that’s an exaggeration. They couldn’t actually be pornographic — especially not too pornographic for a news feed! No elementary school would allow books on their shelves with drawings of actual sexual acts in them. That’s just silly.”
So I went looking for this video of the press conference. It’s nearly impossible to find. I had it for a while - and it was eye-popping — but it seems to have disappeared. It’s impossible to find on YouTube. And I had a news article with it in it for a while, but it’s been post-publication edited down to nothing now. I can’t decide if this is because it was too graphic for those platforms, or because those platforms didn’t like this information being revealed. Either option is disturbing, considering these books are sitting on shelves for any five year old pick up in their elementary school.
I finally found a link on the Internet that shows pictures directly from one of the books. I would include that here, except I’m not sure we’re allowed to link to pornographic images in a Goodreads review. So I won’t. But, if you’d like to see for yourself, just trot down to your local bookstore and ask for a copy of “Gender Queer,” then turn the page 367 (I think it was). Pictures of children giving oral sex to each other is just really not appropriate for an elementary school.
So, the answer was yes. Yes the elementary school librarians had indeed actually chosen books with pornographic images in them to put on the library shelves for Elementary kids.
And the really disturbing thing is that all the news media outlets I can find (other than the reporters at Fox News, who in most other ways are nut cases) don’t seem to want us to know this. You would think that pornographic pictures in a children’s book would be a relevant fact to add to your news story. But every single story I hear on the subject portrays this issue as though there are just crazy right wing parents in Florida who want to be mean to gay people. None of them point out that there are perfectly sane parents in Florida who don’t want their kids reading pornography in their elementary schools.
And it’s not like the reporters don’t know that this particular book I researched exists. It’s their favorite poster-child book for talking about this. It’s the one they usually show. They show its cover. They show someone flipping through the pages — with Post-it notes on certain pages covering certain images. Why are there Post-it notes on their pages? What are they covering up?
Well, now I know.
So that was the incident.
I have to highly recommend this book. It does an excellent job of laying out the extent to which inappropriate sexualization of children is going on in the schools, and also the way in which the media is trying to hide this from us. My conclusion is that we are all being gaslighted on this subject by our favorite news sources, because they are all following ideologies that tell them this is a good and right thing to do.
May 1, 2024
This is an ongoing problem within our society. Progressive, neo-Marxists are taking over our school boards and our teachers unions in order to drive an agenda that specifically is intended to indoctrinate them into a belligerent little army for drastic change to our society and it is all for the worse! Do not misunderstand me, I believe there are good teachers out there and some good board members, but they are outgunned and outnumbered by those who seem to wield the power. Parents are really just starting to wake up an sniff the coffee, so to say. Unfortunately, it takes much more to get involved. If we do not fight for our kids, we will in essence lose this nation, because the youth are the future of this nation. If it is to remain great, we must take back the education for those children who are being miseducated!
March 24, 2023
must read for parents
This book is a must read for parents trying to understand wokeness and how it is affecting children in all aspects of their lives. It also gives practical advice for parents and (to my surprise and delight) calls out parents to their DUTY to our young. I particularly enjoyed the co-authorship because it gives more than one point of view to the same issues, which is great.
If you are a parent or want to be a parent someday, you MUST read this book!
This book is a must read for parents trying to understand wokeness and how it is affecting children in all aspects of their lives. It also gives practical advice for parents and (to my surprise and delight) calls out parents to their DUTY to our young. I particularly enjoyed the co-authorship because it gives more than one point of view to the same issues, which is great.
If you are a parent or want to be a parent someday, you MUST read this book!
April 6, 2023
This book initially was going to be a DNF. As a young female, who looks in both directions in order to make an educated opinion, I had a difficult time with this book only being represented from the farthest right opinions. Some points were interesting to think about, other points were spoken about in a jarring manor. I’m not sure what the right answers are to a lot of new cultural things occurring but near-to-hate is not the way.
April 25, 2023
Anti-vax, racist right-wing nonsense. Manages to mention nonsense outrage points like Al Gore’s home electrical use and manages to call Greta Thunberg mentally ill for being concerned about climate change.
I like to look at issues from “both sides” but good lord this is just nonsensical trash.
Oh and they advocate homeschooling and keeping your kids off the internet for as long as possible. Gee I wonder why
I like to look at issues from “both sides” but good lord this is just nonsensical trash.
Oh and they advocate homeschooling and keeping your kids off the internet for as long as possible. Gee I wonder why
April 1, 2023
Every parent should read this book
April 13, 2023
A must read for any parent concerned about what their child is learning from school, tv, movies, or the internet.
October 21, 2023
What can you expect from an author that thinks we need to befriend neo nazis and thinks Palestinians are animals who should be nuked if the cloud didn't come to her.
April 18, 2023
if you are raising children or even if you are a grandparent and you're are trying to understand what is happening in the American Culture today, this is a must read. This well researched, fact based book will make you realize we can no longer trust other adults to have that natural instinct of protection towards children. We can not allow "Compassion" to be disguised as complacency. We are losing a generation in the American Experiment and it is of our own doing if we are allowing the culture to instill values and morals in our children.
May 24, 2023
A must read for every parent! The terms are clearly defined, the urgency of what has happened and is happening is clearly conveyed, the amount of research and quotes from sources is tremendously helpful. There is an all out war happening right under our noses, in our very own families- through those who have access to our children. Parents are the first and last line of defense for children- it’s time to take back our rightful place in our children’s lives and protect them from the evil ideologies this culture is shamelessly indoctrinating them in.
August 4, 2023
“We named this book ‘Stolen Youth,’ but we could have just as easily called it Woke War on Families because the assault on childhood is an all-out battle against the American family. The radical progressive Left—the woke—are trying to completely remake society and start a revolution. They know they can’t accomplish that without ideologically capturing America’s youth. After all, you can’t start a revolution among happy and contented citizens. Their goal, thus, is to make our kids miserable, make them question every fundamental building block of society (“What is a woman?” “What is a man?”), and make them rebuild their entire sense of reality, concept of right and wrong, and vision for the future.”
– Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz
Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation by Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz details how the radical left is trying to turn good young children and teenagers into leftist revolutionaries, and how parents need to fight back. Mandel, a political commentator, children’s book editor, and stay-at-home mother, and Markowicz, a New York Post columnist who was born in the Soviet Union, dedicate much of Stolen Youth to discussing how divisive race ideology—which they call “critical race theory” or “wokeism”—crept into public education and government responses to the coronavirus pandemic. They detail the alarming shifts toward ideological indoctrination in concisely argued points documented with nearly 25 pages of references (endnotes).
Mandel and Markowicz contend that woke ideology is potentially devastating to the health of our nation and the mental health of individual children. The stated objectives of the authors are to “expose how the woke are infiltrating American childhood, provide parents with the tools to fight back, and tell the cautionary tales of parents who didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late.”
The authors maintain that woke ideology has penetrated social institutions which were once safe for both children and adults, including Disney, which has decided to go all in on radical gender ideology; the American Federation of Teachers along with local and state-wide teacher unions; the National School Board Association along with local school boards; the American Library Association along with local libraries; and the American Academy of Pediatrics along with local pediatricians and other healthcare professionals.
In addition, Mandel and Markowicz argue that the danger is this: “While every librarian may not consider himself or herself to be woke, woke ideology sets the narrative currently sold by children’s publishing houses. While every pediatrician isn’t woke, wokeness sets the narrative in medical schools and professional medical organizations. While there are many well-meaning teachers and mental health counselors, the woke narrative is uniformly dominant in their graduate programs and professional organizations across the country.” Further, wokeism does not allow for any deviation from its radical ideological movement. Professionals (teachers, librarians, physicians, etc.) in once-trusted institutions who support long held traditional morals and values are now afraid of public disagreement with wokeism for fear of losing their jobs.
Stolen Youth is a disturbing read. This well-documented exposé of the attacks by left-wing radicals on our children is shocking. The combined impact of these attacks is clear: There is a large, organized, well-funded movement drawing together media, professional organizations, teacher unions, corporations, libraries, universities, and government officials, who is committed to destroying and indoctrinating our children. Its methods are brutal and clear: It promotes psychological instability and fragility. It teaches children to ignore their emerging common sense, their parents, and timeless ethics in favor of “expert” pronouncements and “trendy” social concepts. Chapter 7, titled “Sexualized Childhood,” is particularly alarming and leaves a disgusted feeling in the stomach with its examination of the radical left’s efforts to destigmatize sexual attraction to minors and to encourage homosexual and transgender sexual behavior by minors.
We have all heard and seen things that make us concerned about the future of our children and grandchildren. This book lays out the very systematic and wide-sweeping way that a very left ideology is being instituted into every aspect of their lives. It is a wakeup call to everyone to know what is being taught in their schools, displayed in our libraries, who and what their children are being exposed to, and to take every step to get involved and make your voices heard while there is still an option. Don't think someone else is going to it. It is up to each of us to protect our children. Wokeism will not die out naturally.
– Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz
Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation by Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz details how the radical left is trying to turn good young children and teenagers into leftist revolutionaries, and how parents need to fight back. Mandel, a political commentator, children’s book editor, and stay-at-home mother, and Markowicz, a New York Post columnist who was born in the Soviet Union, dedicate much of Stolen Youth to discussing how divisive race ideology—which they call “critical race theory” or “wokeism”—crept into public education and government responses to the coronavirus pandemic. They detail the alarming shifts toward ideological indoctrination in concisely argued points documented with nearly 25 pages of references (endnotes).
Mandel and Markowicz contend that woke ideology is potentially devastating to the health of our nation and the mental health of individual children. The stated objectives of the authors are to “expose how the woke are infiltrating American childhood, provide parents with the tools to fight back, and tell the cautionary tales of parents who didn’t realize what was happening until it was too late.”
The authors maintain that woke ideology has penetrated social institutions which were once safe for both children and adults, including Disney, which has decided to go all in on radical gender ideology; the American Federation of Teachers along with local and state-wide teacher unions; the National School Board Association along with local school boards; the American Library Association along with local libraries; and the American Academy of Pediatrics along with local pediatricians and other healthcare professionals.
In addition, Mandel and Markowicz argue that the danger is this: “While every librarian may not consider himself or herself to be woke, woke ideology sets the narrative currently sold by children’s publishing houses. While every pediatrician isn’t woke, wokeness sets the narrative in medical schools and professional medical organizations. While there are many well-meaning teachers and mental health counselors, the woke narrative is uniformly dominant in their graduate programs and professional organizations across the country.” Further, wokeism does not allow for any deviation from its radical ideological movement. Professionals (teachers, librarians, physicians, etc.) in once-trusted institutions who support long held traditional morals and values are now afraid of public disagreement with wokeism for fear of losing their jobs.
Stolen Youth is a disturbing read. This well-documented exposé of the attacks by left-wing radicals on our children is shocking. The combined impact of these attacks is clear: There is a large, organized, well-funded movement drawing together media, professional organizations, teacher unions, corporations, libraries, universities, and government officials, who is committed to destroying and indoctrinating our children. Its methods are brutal and clear: It promotes psychological instability and fragility. It teaches children to ignore their emerging common sense, their parents, and timeless ethics in favor of “expert” pronouncements and “trendy” social concepts. Chapter 7, titled “Sexualized Childhood,” is particularly alarming and leaves a disgusted feeling in the stomach with its examination of the radical left’s efforts to destigmatize sexual attraction to minors and to encourage homosexual and transgender sexual behavior by minors.
We have all heard and seen things that make us concerned about the future of our children and grandchildren. This book lays out the very systematic and wide-sweeping way that a very left ideology is being instituted into every aspect of their lives. It is a wakeup call to everyone to know what is being taught in their schools, displayed in our libraries, who and what their children are being exposed to, and to take every step to get involved and make your voices heard while there is still an option. Don't think someone else is going to it. It is up to each of us to protect our children. Wokeism will not die out naturally.
August 6, 2023
Woke situations; options for families
Changes in American society became more observable during lockdown, primarily because parents received first hand views of school curricula when students stayed home. As concerned parents and thinking adults, Mandel and Markowicz researched and organized data to highlight frightening changes. Thoughtful analyses include complete references and citations.
Changes in American society became more observable during lockdown, primarily because parents received first hand views of school curricula when students stayed home. As concerned parents and thinking adults, Mandel and Markowicz researched and organized data to highlight frightening changes. Thoughtful analyses include complete references and citations.
August 8, 2023
informative and eye opening
A must read for every parent concerned about the future of their children. Packed with facts, stories, stats and ends with suggestions on what do with all the information.
A must read for every parent concerned about the future of their children. Packed with facts, stories, stats and ends with suggestions on what do with all the information.
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