The Truth About Woke Indoctrination in Schools - Karol Markowicz
Episode Stats
Words per minute
193.79971
Harmful content
Misogyny
15
sentences flagged
Toxicity
41
sentences flagged
Hate speech
39
sentences flagged
Summary
Carol Markers is the co-author of the book, Stolen Youth, and the author of How Radicals Are Raising Children. In this episode, she talks to us about what it means to be a leftist in the 21st century, and why we should all be worried about what's happening in our schools.
Transcript
00:00:11.020
We have, in the U.S., we have these gifted and talented schools,
00:00:14.080
and they're trying to limit how many Asian kids get to go because there's just too many.
00:00:19.180
So what is the state of education at the moment?
00:00:25.640
The woke have marched through our institutions,
0.97
00:00:29.200
and they have taken over schools at pretty much every level.
00:00:32.940
You see this also with pornography in school libraries.
00:00:39.700
What do you mean pornography in school libraries?
00:00:40.740
Pornography in school libraries has become a giant thing in the U.S. because...
00:00:45.580
This breaks every single safeguarding guideline that I have ever heard.
00:00:54.660
Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry, on the road from the U.S.A.
00:01:08.900
And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:01:14.260
Our brilliant guest today is the co-author of this book, Stolen Youth, Carol Markers.
00:01:20.800
It is great to have you here, and by the way, thank you to our locals for lending us the studio in Miami so we could do this.
00:01:29.300
Listen, the same question as we always ask all our guests is, who are you?
00:01:34.800
How do you find yourself sitting here talking to us?
00:01:37.360
I'm a columnist at the New York Post for over a decade, and I also write for a lot of other places.
00:01:43.080
And I moved to Florida, which is where we are, about a year ago, very publicly, because I had been a lifelong New York supremacist and really always defended New York City against all slights, you know, real and perceived.
00:01:59.000
And about a year and a year and a bit ago, our family decided that we had had enough, the schools had been closed, the masks had been on kids for too long, the wokeness had overrun everything, reality had ceased to exist for a lot of our neighbors, and we had to get out.
00:02:17.000
So that is how we're sitting here in Florida today, and the book is an outgrowth of that as well.
00:02:24.780
And before that, your family moved here from the Soviet Union.
00:02:28.820
We were thinking about doing this interview in Russian, but, you know, I thought that might be not cool right now.
00:02:32.580
My Russian wasn't going to be good enough.
0.73
00:02:43.900
This is a moment every trigonometry viewer and listener is going to drink because I'm a former teacher, and I was reading about what's happening in education in the United States.
00:02:54.160
So what is the state of education at the moment in public schools in the U.S.?
00:03:02.400
The woke have marched through our institutions, and they have taken over schools at pretty much every level.
0.85
00:03:09.160
It begins in teachers' colleges where the teachers themselves are indoctrinated into leftist philosophy.
00:03:19.520
A lot of times the teachers don't even know that they're being indoctrinated, and then these teachers disperse throughout the country and end up arguing things like math is racist.
00:03:28.340
And this is reality that's happening in schools across the country.
00:03:31.720
And I do note that it is public and private because I think one of the main solutions to all of this in America has been school choice, where you get the portion of the funding that would have gone to educate your child in a public school.
00:03:45.540
You could take that funding and go to private or parochial, et cetera.
00:03:49.120
The issue with that is that it's very hard to find private and parochial schools that are also not woke.
00:03:55.320
It's a minority of schools across the country that haven't been ideologically captured.
00:03:59.940
Carol, if I'm listening to this, I'm not someone who is clued up on all this, I don't even know what woke means.
00:04:09.860
You know, the woke people have taken over the institutions.
00:04:17.420
You know, the subtitle to the book is How Radicals Are Raising Innocence and Indoctrinating Children.
1.00
00:04:22.820
What's actually, if I'm a parent, I don't care about the stuff.
00:04:28.620
What's going on in the school that I should care about?
00:04:32.540
You know, I think before writing this book, I would have said that a lot of this stuff sounds like a conspiracy theory.
00:04:38.420
And I don't know that I thought that I was going to find what we found while writing this.
00:04:48.040
And come on, you know, obviously they're not teaching Marxism at teachers' colleges.
00:04:52.960
So, you know, it ends up being something that's very hard to convince people.
00:04:58.160
And I would have been one of those people had I not seen what I saw in writing this book.
00:05:02.700
So what I say to parents is, you know something questionable is going on.
00:05:10.880
Woke is, to me, when leftism meets a forced conformity.
00:05:17.860
So the old leftism might, sure, they might indoctrinate your kids or try to.
00:05:23.780
They might try to put in information that is really one-sided into curriculums, yes.
00:05:29.440
But the new wokeism does that and also does not allow stepping outside of the lines whatsoever.
00:05:36.360
They do not allow other influences or considerations.
00:05:38.740
So while the old leftist teacher might, you know, paint a picture, let's say, of America as being this, like, terrible place where we just, you know, slaughtered the Native Americans and stole all their land and we have nothing positive about us at all, they'll sometimes, they would often present the opposite opinion as well.
00:06:01.080
And what I say often also is that liberals are hardest hit by this.
00:06:09.640
But for liberals, they've gotten to where they're very scared to speak and their liberal teachers are very scared to speak.
00:06:18.220
They don't want to be ostracized by their tribe.
00:06:22.120
And so you have this conformist thinking that you know has taken over everything.
00:06:27.800
And I think parents recognize it and they might not be able to label it or name it, but they know it's happening.
00:06:33.160
And the reason I ask this is because I think there are quite a few people now who feel this way.
00:06:39.380
Like Dave Rubin had me on his show on this very set yesterday.
00:06:43.120
We recorded it and we're talking about will we ever move to America and why and why not, et cetera.
00:06:48.280
And one of the things I was saying is, you know, the one thing is children's education that is terrifying because you know this as a mother.
00:06:55.940
Like you give birth to this little thing and you raise it, you nurture it.
00:06:59.800
And then, you know, they're not that old when you send them off to be, you know, brainwashed by people.
00:07:07.440
And it is quite scary, I think, for a lot of parents.
00:07:09.560
But I suppose the question is on a practical level, what can you tell us about what children in this country are being taught at school that should concern people?
00:07:19.740
I started telling you guys this before the show started, but I lived in Scotland.
00:07:23.580
And the first time I lived in Scotland, I really loved it.
00:07:27.340
And I moved there because I had just fallen in love with the country.
00:07:31.340
But I moved the first time to study on a commune in Scotland, in the north of Scotland.
00:07:39.180
All my, you know, flatmates knew who I was and what I believed.
00:07:48.560
You cannot have flatmates who have different political beliefs than you do currently in the US.
00:07:53.220
It just isn't, like, when you have ads for roommates in newspapers, it'll say, you know, no conservatives or no, you know, Trumpers or no, just no, not anybody who doesn't believe what we believe.
00:08:05.380
So all of that is scary to me, that kind of conformity.
00:08:09.960
I don't know if you guys have gotten to there yet in the UK.
00:08:12.420
I don't know that you worry about what your kids are learning in school.
00:08:16.000
But for me, I have now seen something that I can't unsee and I have to battle it at home.
00:08:21.580
I was telling you that my kids watched your Oxford Union speech because to me, I wanted to explain to them why the rest of the world is not, let's say, focusing on climate change the same way that our 18-year-olds are.
00:08:35.740
So at home, we try to really lay the foundation so that when they go out into the world, I'm not as worried about them being ripe for indoctrination.
00:08:44.360
And Carol, what specific things are happening in the classroom that you would say is wrong and teachers shouldn't be teaching?
00:08:51.740
Well, we have so many examples in the book of things that teachers absolutely shouldn't be teaching.
00:08:56.740
I kind of joke about the whole math is racist, but that's happening.
00:09:01.940
That is actually happening, where if you believe that 2 plus 2 will always equal 4, that is a racist construct.
00:09:14.780
Because I see idiots saying it on Twitter.
1.00
00:09:16.840
But when people assert that it's happening in a school, I'm like, is it?
1.00
00:09:24.360
They're learning the idea that 2 plus 2 does not always equal 4.
00:09:28.560
And if you're adamant that it does, that is a racist construct, a white supremacist construct that you believe.
00:09:35.920
So many other things that go beyond that kind of nonsense.
00:09:40.940
But we keep hearing stories in the U.S. of kids being transitioned in the classroom behind their parents' backs, where they don't tell the parents that the little girl has decided she's a little boy.
00:09:51.180
And they give them a new name, and they let the kid bring in other clothes to wear.
00:09:54.780
And we're talking, you know, when you picture this, you might be picturing like a 16-year-old.
00:09:58.520
But one of the recent cases was a fourth grader, which in the U.S. is around 9, 10 years old.
00:10:08.160
And the idea that the teacher can have a secret with your child is scary.
00:10:14.820
And parents should be afraid, because maybe your child doesn't have gender dysphoria and thinks that they might be a different gender.
00:10:22.180
But they could have other problems that the teacher's going to keep from you and decide that you're not worth bringing into the conversation.
00:10:30.740
And Carol, look, as someone, again, who used to work in that sector, it's surely got to be a minority, hasn't it?
00:10:37.900
Because just from my experiences of teachers in a career that spanned 12 to 13 years, I can't imagine that many of them behaving in this fashion, if I'm honest.
00:10:50.320
You know, if we had 50-plus percent of the teachers across the country deciding that your kid, you know, might be of a different gender and not telling you about it,
00:11:04.120
And so, again, it's like it could be one thing.
00:11:08.260
At my kid's school in Brooklyn, getting the kids to march for different causes has become standard.
00:11:20.040
They have marched, obviously, for climate change, you know, policies to be altered.
00:11:26.280
And I tell a story in the book where I let my first grader, my middle son, march in this climate march because we had just switched schools after the school year had started.
00:11:40.960
And I would never, you know, it still bothers me that I didn't say anything because my little seven-year-old marched around with an Earth Dies, We Die sign.
00:11:47.540
And then he came up with, like, ideas on helicopters and caves and what he can do to, like, fight climate change.
00:11:53.980
And you wanted my first grader on it, and now he's on it.
00:11:56.760
And, you know, you could see where this grows into anxiety for kids.
00:12:02.480
So many kids have issues because they are told that the Earth is ending and you are tasked with stopping it, little seven-year-old, you know.
00:12:11.680
And what I find baffling is I look at what – sorry, I look at these things that are happening in classrooms in the United States,
00:12:20.940
and it might be more understandable if your outcomes educationally in this country weren't appalling.
00:12:28.880
Every minute you spend on woke nonsense is a minute you're not spending on math and science and, you know, history.
00:12:36.860
And, you know, being born in the Soviet Union, I think I have a very – like, my kids must be very into academics.
00:12:50.140
I love the, you know, tiger mom, Amy Chow, but I'm not as good at it as she is.
00:12:56.440
But, yes, I absolutely think academics is so important, and I want my kids to be challenged.
00:13:04.820
I don't want them just skating by, which my kids love to do.
00:13:10.320
And even that is an idea that you're not allowed to have anymore.
00:13:14.360
So, in places like San Francisco, they're dumbing down their curriculums because it's not fair to have, let's say, an algebra class where the majority is white.
0.84
00:13:26.480
And so, because it's not fair, they're getting rid of, like, algebra for seventh graders altogether.
00:13:34.180
And the lack, so this, I call it, like, the war on merit, really goes hand in hand with this wokeness because it's all one thing.
00:13:42.160
It's all, like, we do it like this, and this is how we are going to push equity, and this is how it works.
00:13:47.900
And your assertion is that this comes from the teacher training.
00:13:54.580
But it has gripped so many different facets of our society.
00:13:58.900
Schools is just one chapter of the book because so many other ways that wokeness has woven itself into our world.
00:14:07.500
Again, I don't know that things are as bad in the U.K. yet.
00:14:10.100
When I listen to you, you know, I think that your universities, for sure, are also captured.
00:14:15.280
But I don't know that the rest of your society has been taken over quite as much as ours has.
00:14:19.820
And so another example, and the one that I find just absolutely scariest in the book, like, I think schools, kids, you can, you know, education,
00:14:27.980
you could sort of still reverse, you can do stuff at home, you can build a block.
00:14:32.700
But the scariest chapter for me is the medical chapter where our medical system has been entirely captured by this woke virus.
0.73
00:14:41.760
And so, for example, every year there's like a conference where the best doctors who deal with premature birth babies get together and they talk about it.
00:14:53.320
And they have like the four absolute best who tell you what happened in the last year because things are always changing and improving in the field.
00:15:00.480
And so they recently had this conference about a year and a half ago maybe.
00:15:06.620
And they realized that the four best doctors in this field are white men and you can't have that.
0.97
00:15:13.560
So now they're going to introduce women and make sure that the ethnicity spread is wider on the stage.
0.95
00:15:21.980
But so now you no longer have the best doctors.
00:15:23.960
You have good doctors maybe, but you're looking for other things other than best.
00:15:30.540
And then in order to get into medical schools, you need to write an essay on how you're going to promote diversity and the rest in your practice.
00:15:42.760
To me, that really takes away the ability of a doctor to say what they want to say, investigate what they need to investigate,
00:15:51.840
and really not feel like they have to conform to some ideas.
00:15:56.900
It's such a good point because with a doctor, you don't want them thinking about any of this nonsense.
00:16:06.360
And the gender thing comes up in the medical thing too, where the doctor has to pretend that they don't know what gender you are for real.
00:16:13.520
And they have to give you tests that don't apply to you because you say that you're this gender and your birth sex is something different.
00:16:24.540
And so just every minute that is spent on this, people are going to die.
00:16:35.300
And of course, because a woman having a heart attack is very different to a male having a heart attack.
00:16:42.160
And the dosage that you have to give and all the rest of it.
00:16:45.320
And I mean, a heart attack is a perfect example because someone's having a heart attack, you don't have a lot of time to then go,
0.99
00:16:50.800
oh, I wonder what this person with a vagina identifies as.
1.00
00:16:58.180
So my co-author is the homeschooling mom of six.
00:17:09.100
She doesn't let them watch any modern television or YouTube or anything.
00:17:14.520
And for me, we kind of lay down the foundation at home.
00:17:18.220
We really talk about a lot of different things that we wish we didn't have to be talking about on a lot of different levels.
00:17:24.320
But she'll say that no matter how much she opts out of culture, she can't opt out of her pediatrician's office.
00:17:30.260
And so this, no matter how much you want to pull your kids from this insanity, you have to go to the doctor sometimes.
00:17:37.800
And so you might not be interested in woke, you know, but woke is interested in you.
00:17:42.360
And how does this play out against what I think is a very good system?
00:17:46.500
Again, Dave and I talked about this, the federal system where you can do what you've done,
00:17:51.200
which is if you don't like what's happening in the jurisdiction that you live in, you can move somewhere else.
00:17:55.900
Like, are you able in this country as an American to go, well, I don't like this.
00:18:04.260
And there I can vote for my school district or whatever to be the way that I want.
00:18:08.520
Is that still possible or is this like you can't escape it?
00:18:13.920
But the medical thing, for example, that's a national accreditation society.
00:18:21.800
You might, you just might find more doctors who don't subscribe to this kind of thing and who will do things, you know, in a normal way,
00:18:30.500
even though they've been taught to do it in an abnormal way.
00:18:32.980
You might find more of them in places like Florida.
00:18:36.100
But they have been accredited by the same licensing groups that push this.
00:18:41.840
So, and it's happening on such a wide level that it's tough to find rational, sane doctors.
00:18:50.640
And, you know, even in Florida, we sort of have like a whisper network.
00:18:55.980
Like, and that's the, that's how you find your MD even here.
00:18:59.760
And I know you left the Soviet Union at a fairly young age, younger.
00:19:07.700
But I imagine you still know, you're familiar with the idea of living in a society as we would have done it, as I certainly did,
00:19:16.260
where your parents had to fight the, the authorities to prevent you from being indoctrinated into an ideology that they thought was wrong or evil, frankly.
00:19:30.920
Do you feel that, look, whenever you make any comparison with anything, people are like, no.
00:19:37.080
Do you think we're sort of operating in a similar environment now where if you don't agree with these ideas,
00:19:42.980
you have to work so hard at home as a parent just to prevent the children from being basically ruined by the school that they end up going to?
00:19:51.820
So we open with a history chapter in Stolen Youth because there are a lot of parallels to what's happening right now.
00:19:58.720
And I don't know about you, but my whole life people have said like, oh, doesn't this feel like the Soviet Union?
00:20:07.360
But the last three years, the COVID years, have really felt Soviet.
0.53
00:20:11.040
And in a lot of ways, you know, neighbors informing on each other.
00:20:20.680
The spectacle of it, like the Black Lives Matter and like the defund police in the U.S.,
00:20:31.880
And so the difference is that my parents would have worried about getting into real trouble if they had tried to tell me the truth.
00:20:47.860
And he was the, he had told, we don't know which part of the story is true is what I was going to say about Pavlik.
00:20:55.060
My mom does not know which part of that story is true.
00:20:58.220
It doesn't matter which part of the story is true.
00:20:59.840
What matters is this was a story that was held up.
00:21:05.180
He had informed on his parents for hoarding grain.
00:21:11.620
So let's just get the background to the story for people who don't know.
00:21:14.680
How old was the kid and when was this, et cetera, et cetera?
00:21:21.240
He is, he tells, and again, did he tell on his parents or was he randomly murdered?
00:21:26.700
We have no idea because everything there is a lie.
00:21:29.220
But the story goes he informed on his parents who had been hoarding grain.
00:21:36.140
And then in retribution, the state killed his entire family, his mother, his father, his
00:21:53.760
And this is a story that they use to indoctrinate other children.
00:22:09.220
And you could be a hero or you could be dead in a ditch.
00:22:13.760
And so, yeah, I think that a lot of the, you know, I'm not saying, again, that we're at
00:22:19.460
the same place in the Western world that the Soviet Union was, but we are in danger of
0.53
00:22:25.180
And I think that a lot of the main thing to me is that in the Soviet Union, in China, in
00:22:30.260
Cambodia, and a lot of places that we write about in the history chapter.
00:22:43.380
We don't want people to say, oh, I had no idea.
00:22:48.220
And Carol, one of the things that I find extraordinarily troubling about the moment that we're in is, I'm
00:22:55.680
not saying we ever got to the goal, because we didn't.
00:22:59.480
But the aspiration for my generation, and probably, you know, people older than me as
00:23:04.980
well, was we were in the West, we're trying to get to a society where your race didn't
0.93
00:23:13.060
There were still racist assholes around when I was growing up and still are.
0.99
00:23:21.900
And it was universally embraced as the way that a multi-ethnic society like the ones that
00:23:28.420
And now, I think it's fair to say that the woke ideology has the opposite view.
00:23:38.220
So what do you, how do you talk to your kids about that?
00:23:43.020
Like, if all they see from the outside is race, race, race, race really matters, how do
00:23:52.140
We try to have really honest conversations with them.
00:23:55.560
Parents are so awkward and they're so afraid of saying the wrong thing to their own kids.
00:24:03.060
I think we talk to our kids about how much character matters and how the color of somebody's
00:24:11.540
And so many different ways that we try to bring home the idea that you're not going to be colorblind.
00:24:20.420
Of course, you see race, but you treat everybody the same and you don't, you know, treat anybody
00:24:25.880
differently because of their race in a positive or a negative way.
00:24:30.060
And I think it's crazy that we've moved away from that.
00:24:32.420
That used to be, you know, it was, it was the gold standard of it.
00:24:37.260
I'm not saying that we lived in some like racism-free society.
0.98
00:24:40.820
But we were heading towards something better and now we're heading towards something far
0.95
00:24:48.520
We're heading towards race being the absolute number one most important thing about you.
00:24:53.140
And, you know, what's interesting about that is it's happening to white people too.
00:24:57.960
So it is leading to an increase in like white supremacist groups, et cetera.
00:25:03.480
If you tell people your race is the most important thing about you, people are going to believe
1.00
00:25:07.560
And so, you know, I, I, I like to say to my kids, you know, we're Jewish.
00:25:14.000
Like, who knows that this, you know, today we might be, yesterday we weren't.
00:25:22.000
And I know as cheesy as that sounds, like that's the message we should be delivering to
00:25:28.260
And also as well, the discrimination against Asian people, particularly when it comes to
00:25:39.060
So the thing is that there are so many books about, um, the way the colleges have been
00:25:43.380
this, had this ideology, ideologically captured.
00:25:46.280
Um, but it's happening everywhere now we have in the, in the U S we have these like gifted
00:25:50.380
and talented schools and they're trying to limit how many Asian kids get to go because
00:25:55.520
there's just too many, too many, you know, like the tiger moms are doing just too good
1.00
00:25:59.800
Um, and it's interesting, like, you know, that they used to limit how many Jews could
00:26:10.960
Um, but now you won't even see Jewish kids at these G and T schools because priorities have
00:26:16.060
And, but you will see Russian Jews and they're, you know, they're pushing the same thing that
0.99
00:26:20.640
the Asian parents are that, that, you know, academics matters a lot and we expect high
00:26:27.320
Um, and some, taking this away from people because they have the wrong skin color, because
00:26:31.980
you didn't get the right mix of skin color is just absurd.
00:26:36.020
How have we got to this place where even something, I mean, that to me is nuts.
00:26:41.540
The fact that you, you literally say to someone, you pass every, every one of our standards,
00:26:54.060
Um, so there was a giant scandal in the U S, um, a few months ago, like three or four
00:26:58.680
months ago where there's a school, um, in Virginia called the Thomas Jefferson.
00:27:03.860
And it was like the premier gifted and talented school, um, and high Asian population.
00:27:10.100
The principal of several schools didn't tell kids that they had qualified for a national
00:27:15.980
merit scholarship because they were embarrassed that the majority of the kids who had qualified
00:27:20.500
were all Asian and there just wasn't a good racial mix.
00:27:23.580
So they didn't tell these kids that they were going to get money for college.
00:27:26.720
It's like, to me, that should be the huge story.
00:27:32.700
Like they took away something from kids because they were the wrong race.
00:27:38.440
The governor, um, passed some rule, Republican governor passed a rule that now you must tell
00:27:44.020
them what, if they qualified for a national merit scholarship, like, okay, that's, I guess
00:27:48.720
that's something, but it's not really making the kind of changes that we should be making.
00:27:53.340
Well, it's because it's reflecting a much deeper thing that's going on in society, which
00:27:59.400
And that, that's where we come back to your point about the war on merit.
00:28:28.560
I will be shocked if they end up anywhere near the same, uh, with, you know, outputs.
00:28:33.920
And they're going to have, I'm sure they're all going to do great, but they're going
00:28:38.420
And if I tried to apply the equity standard to them, like you three must all come out
0.98
00:28:43.140
virtually the same, it would be a tough, tough haul.
00:28:46.180
Well, Thomas Sowell makes this point a lot, which is how can you possibly expect equity
00:28:49.800
in society when you can't expect equity within people who share the same genetic base.
00:28:55.680
Um, but this, this is also another thing that reminds me of the Soviet Union.
00:29:00.760
I mean, one of the reasons the Soviet Union collapsed was the, the fall of the terrible
00:29:04.820
productivity that is produced by a system in which you're not rewarded.
00:29:10.320
And the impact of that sort of mindset on a society, I mean, you've talked about doctors
00:29:15.720
and that's, that's an obvious kind of cold face scenario, but everywhere, if, if you run
00:29:21.500
a business by, I mean, we saw it and we saw it in the UK, you know, with the comedy industry,
00:29:25.780
um, mock the week, which was a huge TV program, comedy program in the UK, the mass report,
00:29:32.360
which I, I worked on for a bit, uh, a, a bunch of them, uh, I basically have died and a big
00:29:38.920
part of the reason is they, they went Uber into sort of left-wing politics instead of
00:29:44.020
Uh, but also it's, I think it's objective, objectively a fact that they picked people
00:29:50.580
to work on the show based on their demographic characteristics and not on their talent.
00:29:58.120
And I wouldn't want to be picked because I'm a woman.
00:30:00.780
I like that was just, I would just find that so insulting.
00:30:03.040
I would want to be the best at whatever it is I'm doing.
00:30:06.360
I don't want to be, you know, oh, we gave the woman a job.
1.00
00:30:09.940
Um, I find that really, you know, um, insulting.
00:30:16.040
I'm teaching them that they all better work and that they have to, you know, produce and
00:30:22.260
be at their very best and not just expect doors to open for them.
00:30:28.320
They're nobody's opening doors, but my daughter, I'm like, you know, I'm not waiting for somebody
00:30:31.900
to offer her opportunities just because she's a girl.
00:30:34.840
And actually she turned down an opportunity where, um, there was a, she's on a robotics
00:30:41.620
And then she was invited to join another robotics team because they needed a girl.
0.61
00:30:46.340
Like, I don't want to be the girl on your team.
1.00
00:30:48.840
What does this do to kids when you effectively say to them, it doesn't matter how hard you work,
00:30:53.200
you're either going to achieve because you come from a certain ethnic background or you're
00:30:58.800
I really think it messes them up and, and not just, you know, not just about the merit
00:31:03.360
thing, but just in every way, if you're told that your accident of birth is all that matters
00:31:09.700
about you and things that you had absolutely no control over is, is what's important.
00:31:14.640
Um, I think, you know, one of the things that I believe why so many teenagers are non-binary
1.00
00:31:21.400
now or, you know, switching their gender, I think it's because they don't have any, you
1.00
00:31:25.700
know, points in the, in the oppression meter and they want some.
00:31:29.620
So non-binary is a really easy way to get some.
1.00
00:31:34.240
You just have everybody call you some new pronouns and now you're oppressed.
00:31:40.740
And I always say that if this was happening when I was a teenager, no doubt in my mind,
00:31:46.340
you guys would have to be calling me some pronoun you've never heard of before.
00:31:51.800
I would have my teachers, I can control my, well, my teachers call me every day, every
00:32:00.740
And you also think as well, what's going to happen to this generation when they go into
0.99
00:32:05.720
Well, we used to think that, and then they went into the world of work and the world of work
00:32:12.640
It's more like, what is the world of work going to, what's going to happen to them when
00:32:16.220
this new generation who have pronouns that literally we have not heard of yet goes to
00:32:22.580
So that's the problem is that this capture has happened on so many different levels that
00:32:30.160
I think that these people are running the place.
00:32:33.460
What's interesting is, and we point this out a lot in the book, and really I know I'm a
00:32:37.300
huge bummer usually, but this is like my real optimistic point, is that they're still a real
00:32:42.940
They're just really loud and they're able to assert their dominance and they're able to
00:32:49.320
push the kind of conformity that they require in order for this to work.
00:32:54.020
If people in mass said no, if the Bill Mares and, you know, the other liberals who know that
00:33:02.280
this is crazy would be more vocal in pushing back, this could end tomorrow.
00:33:10.540
They don't want to be ostracized or shunned or called names.
00:33:14.360
And, you know, I think that's going to be step one.
00:33:17.620
Well, one of the elements of the book is the idea of erasing innocence.
00:33:22.640
And the thing that I see that makes me want to get the flamethrower out, frankly, is...
00:33:32.900
When I see a drag queen in a G-string twerking in front of kids, I want to get the flamethrower
1.00
00:33:38.660
Yeah, I get that because, you know, this conversation started with drag queen's story hour at your
00:33:46.380
And, you know, it's interesting because I think that a lot of parents at the time were
00:33:54.960
And then it spiraled into this G-string thing where when's the last time you saw them read
00:34:00.460
Like, this drag queen story hour has turned into drag queen twerking hour, and we're supposed
0.98
00:34:06.520
And there's so many examples like that where the slippery slope is just... does not allow
00:34:14.360
I think that, you know, in the past, I would have said, like, oh, I'll call people whatever
00:34:21.080
But then it went to they, and that's already iffy.
00:34:23.540
And then they went to, like, zher, and I don't even know what that is.
0.98
00:34:26.100
And now, like, there are literally just so many others.
00:34:32.500
And it sucks because, like, I don't think I cared when drag queen story hour first hit.
0.88
00:34:40.240
If parents want to take their kids to this, whatever.
00:34:42.560
But now when I see that, you know, the G-string twerking, I'm like, no, make that illegal
00:34:55.380
Why do children need to be exposed to obviously sexualized behavior?
00:35:10.780
They get you or they get other people to say that this is OK through using LGBT, you know,
00:35:19.480
Right, because if you've got Stormy Daniels to turn up in a G-string, nobody would be
00:35:23.920
Right, nobody thinks it's OK for a woman to, you know, dance around in six-inch heels
1.00
00:35:33.860
You see this also with pornography in school libraries.
00:35:40.760
What do you mean pornography in school libraries?
00:35:41.660
Pornography in school libraries has become a giant thing in the U.S.
00:35:46.520
Parents keep finding pornography in their kids' school library.
00:36:00.120
It's just, it's books that literally talk about, show pictures of sex acts, but the sex.
00:36:07.820
Hold on, but look, when I was a kid, my parents, when I was a teenager, gave me a book which
00:36:13.500
Did it have somebody on their knees and giving oral sex?
1.00
00:36:20.880
Um, and did it have, like, sexting in it where two boys sext each other dirty pictures
00:36:26.740
or ask for really graphic things to be sent to them?
00:36:31.720
And you would be, again, you would be shocked, and it's happening at elementary schools.
00:36:37.240
So, in the U.S., again, that's till fifth grade, that's 11, 12 years old is where elementary
00:36:43.920
In Florida, Governor DeSantis has made, you know, made them go through all the libraries,
00:36:49.320
and for this he's called a book banner, and remove a certain, uh, these books that they
00:36:55.880
So, he sent out, um, so he had a press conference where he was talking about what books they were
00:37:00.980
getting rid of, and he started reading from these books, and news channels had to pull
00:37:04.620
away from his press conference because they can't show that on TV.
00:37:10.580
But you can't show that to 10-year-olds, and the quirk here is it's always, always a gay
1.00
00:37:16.420
story because, you know, you can't show straight sex at that age to kids, but somehow it becomes
00:37:24.180
okay when it's a gay story, and this is how they are able to protect themselves from a
0.89
00:37:30.300
lot of criticism because, you know, we're just showing LGBT youth, um, you know, stories
00:37:35.560
about them, and this, if you have a problem with this, you're a bigot.
00:37:41.480
I'll, I'll send you, I will, you can, you're, I don't know if you're going to be able to
00:37:44.760
post the pictures, but you will be, look up pornography elementary schools, Florida.
00:37:51.100
I mean, I don't want that in my Google history, but.
00:37:54.180
Anton's our producer, mate, we're going to do that on your phone.
00:38:00.080
But we use the word they, and I think this is really important to specify.
00:38:06.280
Um, I know, I know that they, it seems like, um, I'm just, I'm calling out some group that
00:38:12.860
doesn't, some shadowy group that doesn't exist.
00:38:14.800
But there's, it comes from a lot of different places.
00:38:16.680
Um, so one of the examples, again, with one of these pornographic books, um, they're a,
00:38:23.540
a, a 11-year-old boy, I think, around that age, got up at a school board meeting, started
00:38:28.820
Again, they're all shocked, like, please stop speaking.
0.77
00:38:31.640
And they're like, he's like, I got this in my elementary school library.
00:38:37.220
The librarian offered him this book and then said, if you like it, I have others like it.
00:38:42.260
Um, yeah, this is, again, happening where it's at every level.
00:38:46.920
We have a chapter on libraries and book publishing where, again, super woke, completely ideologically
00:38:56.520
This, and I'll look, I'm looking at it through a UK teacher's lens and I go back to my training.
00:39:04.320
This breaks every single safeguarding guideline that I have ever heard, that I've ever heard.
00:39:11.060
Because if someone told me that a boy in my class or a girl, it doesn't matter, was getting
00:39:16.080
content or books which have sexual connotations and pornographic, that to me is grooming.
00:39:26.520
And if I didn't report it, I would get in trouble, quite rightly so.
00:39:32.100
And it's grooming them to not have a perspective on what safety is.
00:39:37.560
Not being able to say, this doesn't feel right to me, because you're supposed to be okay
00:39:42.660
You must see these books, because the fact that you haven't seen these, I don't know if,
00:39:47.020
again, I would love to hear if this is happening in UK schools once you see the book titles,
00:39:55.040
It's like dozens and dozens of schools founded just in Florida and in other states.
00:40:05.840
We, as far as, I mean, I didn't know you had this here.
00:40:11.000
We did have some kind of, a show that was marketed to families with children.
00:40:19.100
It was called, I think, the Family Sex Show.
0.97
00:40:22.860
In which the actors were encouraged at one point to remove items of clothing up to and
0.66
00:40:33.120
And I still remember when we talked about it on the show, the lines were, I have a penis
1.00
00:40:43.640
And where is this, where is this, why, where, why is this happening?
00:40:55.340
In my day, if somebody wanted to sexualize children, we knew what that was, right?
00:40:59.160
We had a name for those people and we tried to arrest them and put them in prison, right?
00:41:05.340
So, again, why it's happening is to, it is to end up with these kids being messed up.
00:41:18.060
But look, in all these totalitarian societies, that was the goal, to unbalance the family,
00:41:22.360
to make the kids all messed up and make them easier to control.
00:41:26.100
So, even though that sounds like something that is crazy, like who would want to harm kids,
00:41:30.460
this is something that has happened throughout history in so many other places.
00:41:33.920
It's just unique that it's happening here and now.
00:41:37.340
And then the idea of removing the kids' barriers and making them more awake, woke to everything
00:41:54.180
It's all to remove, like, the barrier of this is not for kids.
00:42:01.540
And once you move that barrier and kids become your little activists who can be, any agenda
00:42:06.700
could be pushed, they're really hard to argue with.
00:42:09.040
Look at the climate, you know, Greta, it's impossible to argue with her.
1.00
00:42:13.700
But who's going to argue with her when she was, like, a, you know, adorable little crazy
1.00
00:42:19.020
And it's, we have that with gun control in the U.S. too.
00:42:22.300
Like, the teenagers who speak out on guns, they're impossible to challenge because they're
00:42:27.580
kids and you don't want to argue with children.
00:42:31.860
Carol, do you think as well, maybe we're projecting a bit too much.
00:42:35.220
I'm not talking about the pornographic stuff because that's vile.
00:42:40.960
Is it just that these people see that they are, to quote what they always say, on the
00:42:47.600
And that being the case, it's only right that we teach kids about what it means to be on
00:42:53.360
Then the whole kind of indoctrination and mind control.
00:42:58.220
I'm going to be honest with you, I don't think they do.
00:43:00.320
I think the reason this ideology is so powerful is it makes you feel good.
00:43:05.560
It makes you feel you're doing the right thing.
00:43:07.020
And if you feel you're doing the right thing and you feel good, then you're going to spread
00:43:13.100
Like, you're saying the drag queens or gender ideology?
00:43:22.100
If you genuinely believe that we're in a climate emergency, then why wouldn't you teach kids?
00:43:28.340
Why would you teach kids that the earth might end soon?
00:43:30.720
Like, what are they going to do about it other than not sleep at night?
00:43:38.940
And when Britain can, you know, I love referring to your speech, but when it sinks into the
00:43:42.680
sea and nobody cares, like that, it's still not going to make a dent in climate change.
00:43:47.040
So there's no real purpose of teaching kids about adult issues unless you want them to
00:43:53.260
stress and worry about it because they can't do anything.
00:43:56.480
Again, I can send you my son's, you know, plan from when he was seven years old and how
00:44:04.580
They're not like the smartest, these seven-year-olds.
00:44:10.720
When I was growing up, we were also told, you know, we're about to run out of oil, we're
00:44:17.260
I don't remember this level of, like, intensity, anxiety, you know, that wasn't happening.
00:44:27.080
So, again, had we been having this conversation three years ago, I probably would be with you.
00:44:35.740
But so much has changed in the last three years where I do think so much of it is willful
00:44:42.660
And so many of the people in charge or, like, Randy Weingarten basically runs schools throughout
00:44:51.400
Very powerful, you know, at the Biden White House.
00:44:54.020
Got to write COVID policy for whether schools opened or not.
00:44:59.440
Just got to write policy about whether kids get to go to school.
00:45:06.120
And yet she gets to control so much of what happens to children.
00:45:15.320
I think a lot of the, you know, you were saying about the grooming and whatever.
00:45:20.920
There's other ways, not just sexual grooming, but to groom them to accept different ideas
00:45:25.820
and to be able to immediately convince them of things is another kind of grooming.
00:45:33.640
But that's what's happening also, making them believe that this set of ideas is the only
00:45:43.900
Plus, as well, you know, one of the great tragedies about education is that education
00:45:49.240
rapidly becomes political because adults are political.
00:45:52.180
And unless they have a real discipline, they bring politics into the classroom.
00:45:56.060
And the problem is with doing that is kids, they don't yet have the capacity to take on
00:46:03.420
an idea, to break it down, to analyze strengths and weaknesses, unless you teach them that.
00:46:09.360
And that's another part of the problem is that we don't teach critical thinking in schools.
00:46:14.880
Why would we allow critical thinking in schools when we need them to believe certain things
00:46:20.940
We do a lot of critical thinking stuff at home.
00:46:23.660
For us, it's really important that my kids can identify when somebody is trying to convince
00:46:30.220
And so my older two, you know, my youngest is seven.
00:46:33.680
But my older two are really, they're woke police.
00:46:45.100
But they're very careful about what gets told to them.
00:46:49.040
And I let, you know, again, my co-author protects our kids from all media.
00:46:55.480
And what I end up discovering is that like they, because I let them watch whatever they
00:46:59.260
want, they end up watching the world's most wholesome stuff.
00:47:05.500
Like, oh, this Mormon comedy skit with no cursing at all or, you know, bad themes is what my kids
00:47:11.600
And Carol, if people want more on that, I really recommend they read the book, Stolen Youth.
00:47:16.700
But before we wrap up, I wanted to spend a few minutes.
00:47:20.540
I mean, the COVID policies managed to achieve something that's very difficult, which is to
00:47:30.880
Well, for us, it was really what around schools, that the schools were closed, only the public
00:47:38.860
schools, which is the public schools in Britain, I know, mean private schools.
00:47:45.120
But if you paid 50 to $70,000 to go to private school in New York City, your schools were open
00:47:52.600
And the thing was that our neighbors had spent that summer of 2020.
00:47:56.420
We lived in a very left neighborhood, which never mattered.
00:48:05.680
But it never mattered until then, where we watched them march for equity and then not
00:48:11.300
say one word when the poorest kids in the city couldn't get help, couldn't go to school,
00:48:16.660
didn't get to, you know, my neighbors hired for their own kids tutors, or they formed pods,
00:48:21.960
or they moved to their beach house and sent the kids to school there.
00:48:25.060
And they didn't speak up at all for the kids all around the city.
00:48:28.700
I grew up really poor in Brooklyn, you know, the immigrant story.
1.00
00:48:32.540
And so all of my kids from, all of my friends from childhood were, are blue collar workers
00:48:38.540
who didn't get to like sit at home and order Uber Eats during the pandemic and treat it
00:48:48.360
And the New York that I had always loved was one that when bad things happened to us,
00:48:52.420
we joined together and we, you know, 9-11 happens, we become the world's most patriotic
00:49:02.020
Old ladies, you know, would just, people would bring them food or we really do step up.
1.00
00:49:08.800
We had a major hurricane and power was out throughout most of the city and people really
00:49:14.000
And this was the first moment that I was like, these assholes, like, didn't want to help
0.99
00:49:19.360
anybody, didn't do anything at all, took care of their own kids, all while marching for
1.00
00:49:28.800
And that was the, what really pushed us out the door.
00:49:31.160
It was a lot of things were going right in Florida.
00:49:33.600
Governor DeSantis, I think did an amazing job on COVID, but on so much more.
00:49:37.240
And we liked the way the direction Florida was going and we wanted to be somewhere sane
00:49:43.980
And one of the things about New York, Francis and I were there last year, we'll be back
00:49:49.740
And it's not just New York, because the same thing is the case in Nashville, the same thing
00:50:00.620
I mean, for people who haven't been to New York lately, I'm not exaggerating when I say
00:50:05.120
you walk out of the door and in quite a lot of parts of New York, I mean, it is literally
00:50:13.140
In terms of like homeless people with no clothes on the street.
00:50:16.040
We were driving, we went to pick a parcel up in DC and we had to go out of like the main
00:50:21.840
pretty bit in the center and we were in a cab somewhere and we were stopped at a traffic
00:50:27.080
light and there was a guy lying there with no shirt on.
00:50:31.560
And I said to a producer, I said, do you think he's all right?
00:50:37.940
But you literally have in the most powerful, wealthiest country in the world, hundreds
00:50:43.920
of people in major cities lying around in the street because they're addicted to drugs
00:50:53.680
So I would tie this all back to wokeness because, again, I grew up in 1980s Brooklyn.
00:51:04.760
And the difference that I always like to point out is that nobody in 1980s Brooklyn was saying
00:51:14.640
Like we are doing so much better than we were doing 10 years ago.
00:51:17.620
But now it's like a giant ask to get people to admit that crime is bad, that crime is bad,
00:51:24.460
that crime is happening, that homelessness is bad, that homelessness is happening.
00:51:34.320
Then we had the, you know, years and years of New York being the most amazing place to be.
00:51:41.100
I was so into New York and I was so defensive of New York because it was great.
00:51:47.620
It was a great place for us to have our kids in my 30s.
00:51:50.520
And then now it's like you can't admit that there's a problem.
00:51:57.200
And you can't admit there's a problem because wokeness says that you're not supposed to notice
00:52:04.520
And that it's only happening really primarily in blue areas.
00:52:10.860
Dallas, you know, Houston, all cities have problems.
00:52:14.400
But at least they, like, admit these are problems worth fighting or challenging or doing something about.
00:52:20.720
In New York, they can't get to that first step of, like, this is a problem.
00:52:25.040
Do you think we spend far too much time talking about other things
00:52:27.960
and not enough time talking about these things?
00:52:30.480
I mean, I feel like we talk about a lot about crime in the U.S.
00:52:36.560
and the homeless issue because places that are doing crazy things like legalizing drug use out in the open
00:52:43.700
are seeing, obviously, an increase in both drug use and homelessness and also crime.
00:52:49.500
And in the U.S., we do talk about, like, look, your policies are leading to bad outcomes.
00:52:54.040
And it's like, no, but these policies are equitable.
00:53:01.220
It's not like this isn't a topic that gets covered a lot.
00:53:03.980
It gets dismissed as right-wing, you know, paranoia.
00:53:07.080
And if you notice that things are bad and things are –
00:53:10.200
and I watched this happen to liberals in my very leftist neighborhood in Brooklyn
00:53:13.700
where if they said they were worried about crime, they would get it on Facebook in a group or whatever.
00:53:18.740
They'd get hundreds of comments like, what crime?
00:53:26.060
Just walking around New York, you are literally confronted with human misery.
00:53:32.960
It's not that you go, oh, these people are smelly.
00:53:36.580
You're going, like, these people are in distress.
00:53:46.380
It was eight years of Rudy Giuliani followed by 12 years of Michael Bloomberg and even the first term of –
00:53:56.060
We were coasting because even though he's like a super leftist and his ideas are really stupid,
0.99
00:54:00.000
things were so good for so long that New York was just, like, free-rolling, basically.
0.99
00:54:07.780
And it's going to take a long time and a lot of work to get back to that place.
00:54:14.120
I think that they keep voting for policies that don't do that.
00:54:24.860
You can't have, you know, policies like, oh, if somebody steals something, as long as it's not –
00:54:30.380
I'm not sure if New York has $999.99, then it's not a crime.
00:54:42.300
This, like, major retailer, REI, just left Portland.
00:54:47.160
Basically, everybody in Portland wears REI from head to toe.
00:54:51.320
And that giant business has left Portland because they're just getting robbed all the time.
00:55:00.960
And just the migration levels in the U.S., like, the fact that people are moving to places like Florida and Texas at such a high rate.
00:55:08.060
Last year, in 2022, the year that we moved, we were two of 36,000 just New Yorkers who moved from New York to Florida.
00:55:17.900
And that number is way higher than, you know, just New Yorkers.
00:55:26.220
I do see the pendulum swinging because it absolutely has to.
00:55:32.620
It wasn't like they didn't know it wasn't working.
00:55:35.100
But it still managed to keep on keeping on for decades.
00:55:42.880
I hope my kids don't grow up in the insanity that we are living in right now.
00:55:46.400
I'm kind of, I feel lucky that they're young.
1.00
00:55:48.880
And I still have a few years of, you know, getting them ready to be in college and be around the woke idiots and, you know, et cetera.
0.99
00:55:58.560
This may or may not end in the next few decades.
00:56:01.900
Carol Marcus, recommend Stolen Youth to everybody.
00:56:04.420
Where can people find you online and follow your work?
00:56:10.460
My pinned tweet has a newsletter where I send out everything I'm up to.
00:56:16.840
Well, we're going to ask you a few questions from our local supporters that they will only get to see on our locals page.
00:56:27.860
You've written that parents should tell their children that marriage is as important, if not more important, than money and a career.
00:56:35.260
Why do you think parents are giving the opposite message to their children?
00:56:38.560
Is there anything social or government policy can or should do to encourage and support the formation and continuation of stable families?