I also wanted to let you know that I’m writing a book on the sex and dating life of Gen Z. If you have any experience dating as a member of Gen Z, or watching their dating and sex life unfold from a distance, I would love to hear from you.

Most important: I am enduringly grateful for your support.  I’m able to devote my professional life to research-intensive investigations thanks to you. 

And with that, I bring you The Kindergarten Intifada.

xo,
Abigail 

In August, the second largest teachers union chapter in the country—there are more than 35,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles—met at the Bonaventure Hotel in L.A. to discuss, among other things, how to turn their K-12 students against Israel. In front of a PowerPoint that read, “How to be a teacher & an organizer. . . and NOT get fired,” history teacher Ron Gochez elaborated on stealth methods for indoctrinating students.

But how to transport busloads of kids to an anti-Israel rally, during the school day, without arousing suspicion? 

“A lot of us that have been to those [protest] actions have brought our students. Now I don’t take the students in my personal car,” Gochez told the crowd. Then, referring to the Los Angeles Unified School District, he explained: “I have members of our organization who are not LAUSD employees. They take those students and I just happen to be at the same place and the same time with them.”

Gochez was just getting warmed up. “It’s like tomorrow I go to church and some of my students are at the church. ‘Oh, wow! Hey, how you doing?’ We just happen to be at the same place at the same time, and look! We just happen to be at a pro-Palestine action, same place, same time.”

The crowd burst into approving laughter.

Seated at a keffiyeh-draped table, Gochez said, “Some of the things that we can do as teachers is to organize. We just have to be really intelligent on how we do that. We have to know that we’re under the microscope. We have to know that Zionists and others are going to try to catch us in any way that they can to get us into trouble.”

He continued: “If you organize students, it’s at your own risk, but I think it’s something that’s necessary we have to do.” He told the audience of educators that he once caught a “Zionist teacher” looking through his files. Gochez warned the crowd to be wary of “admin trying to be all chummy with you. You got to be very careful with that, even sometimes our own students.”

Share

John Adams Middle School teacher and panelist William Shattuc agreed, a keffiyeh around his neck. “We know that good history education is political education. And when we are coming up against political movements, like the movement for Zionism, that we disagree with, that we’re in conflict with—they [Zionists] have their own form of political education and they employ their own tools of censorship.”

What are the “tools of censorship” employed by Zionists? Apparently, they include accusing teachers who rail against Israel in the classroom of antisemitism.

“They try to say antisemitism, which is really ridiculous, right?” said Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, ethnic studies teacher at Edward R. Roybal Learning Center in Los Angeles. Cardona recently received a National Education Association Foundation Award for excellence in teaching. “What they do is they conflate. Part of that is by putting the star on their flag,” Cardona said, referring to the Jewish Star of David. “Religion has nothing to do with it.”

But, she insists, that the course she teaches, and whose curriculum she helped develop—ethnic studies—is fundamentally incompatible with supporting Israel. “ ‘Are you pro-Israel—are you for genocide?’ And if anybody were to say, ‘Okay, sure,’ that’s really not ethnic studies.” (Gochez, Shattuc, and Cardona did not return requests for comment.)

It’s tempting to dismiss this as one more bull session among radical teachers leading a far-left public-sector union. If only. 

Four years ago, I was among the first journalists to expose the widespread incursion of gender ideology into our schools. Once-fringe beliefs about gender swiftly took over large swaths of society partly thanks to their inclusion in school curricula and lessons.

Today, extensive interviews with parents, teachers, and non-profit organizations that monitor the radicalism and indoctrination in schools convinced me that demonization of Israel in American primary and secondary schools is no passing fad. Nor is it confined to elite private schools serving hyper-progressive families. As one Catholic parent who exposes radicalism in schools nationwide on the Substack Undercover Mother said to me: “They’ve moved on from BLM to gender unicorn to the new thing: anti-Israel activism. Anti-Israel activism is the new gender ideology in the schools.”

Parents who watched in alarm as gender theory swept through schools will recognize the sudden, almost religious conversion to this newest ideology. And very few educators are standing against it.

Much of the anti-Israel vituperation slides into classrooms through a subject called ethnic studies. In 2021, California became the first state to adopt it as a requirement for receiving a high school diploma. Legislatures of more than a dozen states have already followed suit, incorporating ethnic studies into K–12 curricula. 

In principle, these laws require schools to teach the histories and cultures of African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Latinos, and Native Americans. In practice, they grant teachers license to incorporate lessons that often divide civilization into “oppressed” and “oppressor.” A primary fixation of ethnic studies is demonizing Israel. 

Activist-led organizations readily supply instructional materials. Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC), Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA; creators of the Teach Palestine Project), Teaching While Muslim, Jewish Voice for Peace, Unión del Barrio, and the Zinn Education Project regularly furnish distorted histories with eliminationist rhetoric against Israel. 

Especially in the year since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, the anti-Israel materials have become pervasive. It’s not surprising that they are found in world history and current events lessons. But demonization of Israel is now taught in art, English, math, physics, and social-emotional learning classes.

Anti-Israel activism spreads through online curricula that are password protected, eluding parental oversight. It is pushed by teachers unions, furnished by activist organizations, and communicated to children through deception. (“We just happen to be at the same place at the same time.”) Anti-Israel radicals willingly stake their jobs for their cause.

“So how do we do all this without getting fired?” Gochez asked his assembled audience of public school teachers. “That’s the million-dollar question. And I don’t know how in the hell we have not been fired yet because I know for sure they have tried, but we have to organize. That’s the bottom line. If they come after one of us, the district has to know that it will be a bigger headache for them to try to touch one of us than it would be to just leave us alone.”

All for the sake of indoctrinating other people’s children.

Jewish Students Fend for Themselves

Last year, Ella Hassner was a senior at Fremont High School in Sunnyvale, California. In the weeks and months after October 7, she says, her school erupted with anti-Israel propaganda. 

To combat the anti-Israel posters that appeared in classrooms and hallways, the school’s Jewish club received approval from the principal to put up posters of the hostages. Within thirty minutes, the posters were torn down, Ella, who has U.S.-Israeli citizenship and is now 18 years old, told me. Another Jewish student I spoke to, “Benny,” confirmed this, adding that he and his friends had witnessed one teacher tearing the posters down. 

Teachers regularly pushed the idea to students—in class and on social media, where they were followed by their students—that “Zionists” were committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. A large majority of American Jews, 85 percent, support the State of Israel.  Zionism refers to the movement that established a modern Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland. Given the quantity of anti-Israel propaganda flooding American K–12 schools, it’s perhaps unsurprising that children would turn against their Jewish classmates.

This past year saw a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents in K–12 schools. Students verbally attacked Jewish classmates in terms that echoed the very charges laid by their teachers against the State of Israel. “Baby killer” and “Violent Zionist” became popular epithets.

Two girls in Ella’s class began to harass her, she told me. A subsequent school district investigation report, obtained by The Free Press, confirms her account. The girls said to her: “Your people are terrorists.” The girls created posts on social media that claimed “Israeli babies are not real humans,” and attacked Ella’s family, tagging Ella’s younger brother. 

Ella filed a “bullying report” with the school in February. Although the principal had personally witnessed some of the behavior, he and the associate superintendent consulted the school district’s legal counsel and decided “that the complaint would not be investigated by the district,” according to the investigation report.

In February, the school hosted the annual district-wide vocal talent show. Several students sang songs celebrating their ethnic heritage. Ella and a female friend sang their approved song, “Someone Like You” by Adele, and then added another: a Hebrew pop anthem, “Yesh Bi Ahava,” which translates to “There’s Love Inside Me.” They announced the song was “dedicated to their families in Israel.” 

Ella says the associate superintendent pulled the duo aside after the performance and said the staff and other students were greatly upset and offended by the Hebrew song and the dedication. According to the district investigation report, the associate superintendent also informed the girls that “she would be following up with the principal the following week to discuss the matter.” The investigation found that the district did not take disciplinary action against Ella. (In response to request for comment, a spokeswoman from the district stated that the district could not discuss specific cases. She also wrote that staff was “made aware of several allegations of antisemitism. We took each complaint seriously and responded with great care to make sure our community of students, staff and families felt safe.”)

In March of 2024, Ella stood at a town hall with U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna and recounted many of these incidents to get them on record. (Khanna said there should be “zero tolerance” for what Ella described and offered to help if the district did not respond to her complaints.) 

Ella ended her town hall speech with the advice that she gives her younger siblings: If anyone mistreats them for being Jewish, “they should come to me, not to the school.” Conversations with seventeen Jewish parents whose children attend public school in Northern California suggest that that is an understandable reaction.

Since October 7 of last year, hundreds of incidents involving the harassment of Jewish K–12 students have been reported to Act Now K12, a grassroots effort to catalog and combat antisemitism in Northern California schools. Ilana Pearlman of Berkeley, Viviane Safrin of San Francisco, and Maya Bronicki of Santa Clara County—all mothers of Jewish children in public schools—helped spearhead the effort to track the escalating antisemitism tearing through school districts in Northern California. Bronicki says two hundred incidents were reported last school year in Santa Clara County alone. 

Jewish families reported incidents like this one:

An Israeli American girl walked into her first period French class at Cupertino High School to find that many of the other students and the teacher were wearing a Palestinian flag or keffiyeh in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, on the occasion of the Middle Eastern club’s pro-Palestine day. The club handed out a map of Israel labeled only as “Palestine.” 

In another incident, a 12-year-old middle school student at a charter school in San Jose arrived visibly upset on the first school day following the October 7 Hamas massacre. According to a complaint against the school district later filed by her parents in federal district court, the girl had close family members in Israel whose whereabouts were unknown. The girl asked her world history teacher if she could go to the bathroom to collect herself. 

The history classroom “was decorated with maps of the modern Middle East in which Israel was erased.” The history teacher knew the girl was Israeli American because she had identified herself as such at the start of the year during an icebreaker exercise. He told her she could not go “until she read aloud to the entire class a passage he had selected to the effect that in the past, Palestinians and Jews had gotten along,” according to the complaint. “The requirement to publicly espouse a position that was at odds with present reality was overwhelmingly oppressive and humiliating.” She read the passage aloud, as directed.

The next day at lunch, two female classmates wearing hijabs approached her, according to the complaint, “and demanded ‘What do your people think about the conflict?’ ” When the girl tried to answer, they screamed, “You’re lying—Jews are terrorists.” One demanded: “Do you know that your family in Israel is living on stolen land?” 

A few days later, two boys chased her around the school yelling, “We want you to die.” Kids began to refer to her as “Jew.” They would say, “Hi, Jew” or “Hey Jew.” If she protested, they said they thought it was funny.

The rest of the kids isolated and ignored her when they weren’t whispering about her, the complaint alleges. She lost all but one friend. Her parents met several times with school faculty; according to the complaint, they did nothing to ensure her safety or improve the girl’s situation.

A Jewish ninth grader, “Sam,” attends a Bay Area high school where, after October 7 of last year, posters declaring, “Ceasefire Now!” and “Free Palestine” began appearing on the walls. Because Sam’s family considers itself very progressive, Sam was not bothered by the posters.

Then one of Sam’s friends sent him a long diatribe that read in part (spelling from the original), “I would just like to say that u are an ignorant ass white ass privileged boy u are so privileged to not b one of those children being killed rn in Gaza…solidarity and indigenous solidarity is something you could never understand as you have grown up your whole life with no culture and money and you been brainwashed by isreali and western media the world stands with Palestine and frankly it’s embarrassing to be anything different, when mostly all people of color stand with Palestine and you stand with ISREAL, that’s how yk ur in the wrong bud oppressed people stand with oppressed people in solidarity SOMETHING YOU COULDD NEVER UNDERSTAND.” The text concluded: “FREE PALESTINE TILL ITS BACKWARDS BITCH!!!!” 

I spoke to Sam’s mother, and her perception was that the message didn’t sound like her son’s friend. The jargon and gist appeared to come from adults. Only the self-righteous fury and the message’s abusive conclusion belonged to the boy.

I also spoke to the mother of “Dana,” a sixth-grade girl at a Bay Area elementary school. In a social studies unit on ancient civilizations last year, the teacher encouraged students to share their “feelings” about “Israel and Palestine.” Students shouted: “Fuck Israel!” and “Israel sucks!” Dana was the only Jewish child in the class.

When Dana told her mother what had happened, her mother drove back to the school and asked the teacher, who admitted that the classroom exchange had occurred. Dana’s mother asked the teacher what “Israel and Palestine” had to do with the sixth-grade curriculum. The teacher claimed she couldn’t teach ancient civilizations without talking about the Palestinians. Dana’s mother knew the lesson offered neither historical nor archaeological evidence to tie the modern Palestinian national identity back to antiquity. But teachers today often consume and regurgitate anachronistic propaganda uncritically. 

I spoke to a San Francisco middle schooler, “Zoe,” who told me her ethnic studies teacher so relentlessly preached anti-Israel sentiment, and the school was so engulfed in anti-Israel propaganda, that it changed how students treated her. Zoe told me one classmate came up to her and said: “A Zionist is someone who wants Palestinians dead.” Zoe replied, “That is actually not what it means at all.” 

Ilana Pearlman of Berkeley is a midwife who has three Jewish children. Her son “Danny,” who was a student at Berkeley High School, told her that after October 7, a teacher used the school’s printing press to make “Free Palestine” T-shirts that were then distributed to students. 

One of Danny’s teachers posted a running tally, in the front of the classroom, of the number of Palestinians allegedly killed by the IDF. She says, “So every day, when my son came into class, it would say how many people Israel has killed today.” (The Free Press has confirmed this with photographic evidence.)

Danny, who is black, said to her, “If there was an image of a noose, we would not hear the end of it. There would be protests, people would be going crazy. But it’s always okay if it’s anything anti-Jewish.”

One mother reported to grassroots organizers that her seven-year-old daughter came home from elementary school in Marin County last year and asked: “Mommy, if someone asks me if I’m Jewish, do I have to tell them?” 

Learning to Hate Israel

Los Angeles Unified School District is failing its students. In the 2023–24 school year, fewer than half the students met reading proficiency standards, and less than 33 percent were proficient in math. But instead of a laser focus on how to educate kids, teachers are coming up with ever more ways to attack the existence of Israel. 

It’s hard to imagine what U.S. arms sales to Israel has to do with the district’s core educational goals, but recently, the L.A. teachers union voted in opposition to it. They spend considerable union time and resources on organizing opposition to Israel. In the union’s recent Motions Report from October 10 of this year, half the measures put to a vote related to Israel. One motion, which passed unanimously, endorsed a discussion about “how to organize your workplace to support the Palestine Liberation Movement” and against “the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”

The First Amendment protects teachers’ political advocacy in union meetings. But public school teachers have no First Amendment right to express their political viewpoints in the classroom. “When it comes to K–12 education, the precedents are pretty clear that the school district or legislature or the principal or whoever the political process leaves in charge can set the curriculum and can require the teachers to go along with it,” Eugene Volokh, First Amendment scholar and distinguished professor of law at UCLA, told me. 

But while the school board or legislature sets the agenda for what must be taught in schools, it can also choose not to police teachers who skirt those rules or even brazenly violate them.

Curriculum decisions, Volokh said, are “subject to the political process and not the legal process,” generally speaking. If the school district doesn’t object to teacher speech—or in fact encourages it—parents’ only recourse is through the political process: voting out state legislators or school board members.

Dillon Hosier, Chief Executive Officer of the Israeli-American Civic Action Network, explained that for generations, the Jewish community has poured its resources into nonprofits, which are not legally permitted to lobby. “Our opponents,” he said, referring to organizations like Council on American-Islamic Relations, “are putting people in public office and getting bills passed.”

That strategy has paid off. School boards and state legislators are reluctant to confront the growing problem in their schools.

In Brooklyn, teachers led third graders at PS 705 in Prospect Heights in a chorus of “The Wheels on the Tank,” which encouraged them to despise Israel and the Israel Defense Forces, according to the New York Post: “The wheels on the tanks go round and round, all through the town. The people in the town they hold their ground, and never back down.” The rhyme continued: “Free Palestine till the wheels on the tanks fall off.” The book was illustrated with Palestinian kids hurling rocks at Israeli tanks.

In Portland, pre-K lesson plans included the story of Handala, a fictional Palestinian cartoon character who symbolizes the resistance. “When I was only ten years old, I had to flee my home in Palestine,” the boy tells readers. “A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people,” it continues, according to a piece in City Journal.

At a Fort Lee, New Jersey, high school, world history teachers confiscated students’ cell phones before giving a lesson that presented Hamas as a “resistance movement” rather than an internationally designated terrorist organization. Teachers also showed a map of Israel that falsely presented Palestinians as the sole indigenous natives of Israel. (The Free Press has obtained a copy of the presentation. Click here to see it.)

The Black Lives Matter Week of Action is a standard program at thousands of schools across the country. It now routinely shifts from a focus on white racism against black Americans to the “other brown people” allegedly subjected to apartheid in the West Bank at the hands of the “white” settler colonialist Israelis, according to several grassroots organizers I spoke to who track radicalism in America’s public schools. (A majority of Israeli Jews are from non-white, non-European heritage.)

Three years ago, Nicole Neily founded Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit that exposes radicalism in schools, largely in response to the race and gender ideologies she saw coursing through public schools. This year, when her organization reached out to school districts to inquire whether they planned to include the war in Gaza in their BLM Week of Action instruction, the president of a school board in Rochester, New York, wrote back to confirm that they did. The school board president added, “I would ask that you study the history of the Jewish nation and their involvement in slavery–financing the slave ships to bring Africans into the Americas and the Carribbeans,” referring to a spurious canard associated with Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan.

Last spring, millions of Americans watched in disbelief as university students, particularly at our most elite schools, vandalized buildings, set up illegal encampments, and cheered for Hamas. But there was far less attention paid to the parallel dramas unfolding at K–12 schools across the country. 

Aware of their ability to shape young minds, teachers encouraged schoolchildren to join “Walkouts” for Palestine, don keffiyehs, chant the eliminationist slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and tell their Jewish classmates, “It is excellent what Hamas did to Israel,” according to a complaint filed to the U.S. Department of Education by the Brandeis Center and the Anti-Defamation League on behalf of Jewish students.

“We had been tracking a lot of antisemitic incidents in school even prior to October 7. Obviously, in the wake of October 7, we saw things explode,” Neily told me. “This had sort of been simmering below the surface for a long time. You look at everything that happened on college campuses, and it’s not that kids turn 18, go to college campus, and think, ‘I’m going to underage drink and hate the Jews.’ So much of this was baked into the curriculum before.”

Neily, who is Catholic, has now become a national leader in the grassroots effort to expose antisemitism in schools. Her team regularly submits hundreds of FOIA requests, wrangling with schools that hide behind copyright law to avoid disclosing materials taught to American school children. And what she has found is that radical anti-Israel NGOs are training teachers and supplying materials used in thousands of American classrooms.“This stuff is really going viral, coast to coast,” Neily said.

Federal law gives parents the right to inspect their children’s educational materials. But schools routinely decline to turn over lessons on the grounds of copyright law. 

“So long as a parent isn’t asking for the material to duplicate it and sell it, there is no copyright violation in providing that material to parents,” Lori Lowenthal Marcus told me. Marcus is the legal director at The Deborah Project, which protects the civil rights of Jews in education. She added, “It is a bullshit excuse that takes advantage of parents who aren’t lawyers.” 

Online textbooks are easily supplemented with material from Al Jazeera or other radical sources. Smartboards allow teachers to display fraudulent histories of Israel and outright propaganda.

This video, shown to tenth to twelfth graders in the Sequoia Union school district in Northern California as part of the mandatory ethnic studies curriculum, was produced by the virulently anti-Israel Turkish News site, TRT World. It ignores 3,000 years of Jewish history in Israel and instead frames Jewish connection to Israel as illegitimate or what is often called “settler colonialism.” 

The video omits mention of Jews’ historic connection to the West Bank—called Judea and Samaria in the Hebrew Bible—and ignores the fact that the State of Israel accepted several peace proposals throughout its 76-year history that would have created a Palestinian state. It also omits that the Second Intifada and its 138 Palestinian suicide bombings of primarily civilian Israeli targets was the impetus for Israel erecting a security barrier.

An Undercover, Front-Row Seat

Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky, director of education and community engagement at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, first noticed an uptick in antisemitic K–12 materials in 2018, when she was getting her PhD in education. “What I saw was what seemed to be a very well-coordinated effort between activist teachers, activist organizations, and administrators that were trying to do a lot of kowtowing to progressive social ideology through programming and bringing that programming into their schools,” she said. 

“There is just this insidious idea that it is okay to hate Jews or attack Jews if they feel any connection to the Jewish homeland—to Israel; if there’s any expression of Jewish pride, especially when that pride is Zionism,” she said.

“I think that antisemitism, like the Jew hatred, isn’t the end goal. I think it’s the symptom of a bigger anti-Western illiberalism that has taken over a lot of our institutions,” Shufutinsky told me. 

Curious to learn more about the goals of these anti-Israel educators, Shufutinsky began hanging out in their virtual meetings. As a grad student at the University of San Francisco, she spent almost two years, she says, “undercover” in chat rooms where educators were developing a new curriculum: “Liberated Ethnic Studies.” This would eventually become the mandatory California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. In discussions about the need for ethnic studies, educators were uniquely fixated on promoting an anti-Israel agenda. “The whole goal for pushing ethnic studies, making it a requirement, was so that they could teach Palestine,” she said.

When in 2021, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a requirement that schools make completion of ethnic studies a condition of graduation, he effectively made antisemitism a formal feature of California schooling. The original curriculum, “Liberated Ethnic Studies,” was so outrageously antisemitic, it was officially abandoned. In The Free Press, Shufutinsky called it “a Trojan horse to institutionalize antisemitism in California schools.” 

But even the successor course—implemented by many of the same educators who had proposed the Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum in California—has provided a vehicle for anti-Israel indoctrination of American schoolchildren. 

Shufutinsky told me that the reformed curriculum teaches that “Israel is something that it isn’t. That it’s the ultimate evil. That it is apartheid. That it is a settler colonial state that deserves to be dismantled. That Zionism is racism.”

Elina Kaplan, a former manager in Northern California’s tech sector and self-described “lifelong Democrat,” was quick to recognize the problems posed by ethnic studies in the classroom. A childhood spent as a Jew in the former Soviet Union taught her to recognize state-sponsored antisemitic propaganda. 

She formed a nonprofit to organize against the inclusion of politicized ethnic studies in California schools and maintains an archive of the antisemitic materials promulgated in American classrooms. While her organization helped defeat the worst excesses of the original curriculum, the broader effort to keep antisemitism out of the schools failed. Since 2021, she has seen the antisemitism once confined to ethnic studies sprout in virtually every subject.

Kaplan says, “In math class, they can be studying charts and are told, ‘Look at this pie chart of the number of Palestinians murdered. This slice shows the number of Israelis that were killed.’ ”

That example was actually presented to elementary school students in New Haven Unified School District, California. The chart is labeled “People Killed Since September 29, 2000” divided into Palestinians and Israelis and asks: “What information is this pie graph showing us?” The obvious answer: Far more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis.

Another mother sent me an example of an assignment used in a physics class at Cupertino High School, which asked students to consider the “Effect of Israel’s Bombing of Gaza” on climate change.

At schools where anti-Israel propaganda is promulgated, schoolchildren are turning against their Jewish classmates. Dozens of interviews with parents, teachers, and people at nonprofits revealed that discussions of Israel quickly become personal, and American Jews—even children—are the inevitable targets.

“Tammy” is a Jewish substitute teacher in Oakland who asked not to be identified. She said in the past year, she’s been astonished by the sheer volume of anti-Israel messaging to school kids across Oakland. She says only the Jewish families object. Where there are no Jewish students, the material goes entirely unopposed.

“We’re raising a generation of antisemites,” she told me.

“I have a necklace that says my name in Hebrew. And I wear it every day and I don’t take it off. It’s pretty small,” Tammy told me. One day last year, when she was substitute teaching in middle school, a boy saw her necklace and said, “Oh, I’m Jewish too.”

The boy went and got his backpack and pulled from it a necklace with a Star of David pendant. She remembers thinking, “Why is it in your backpack? Why aren’t you wearing it?”

Share

Subscribe now

Reprinted with permission from The Free Press.

When asked why he robbed banks, legendary fugitive Willie Sutton replied, “That’s where the money is.” Governments coerce social media platforms into censorship for the same simple reason: That’s where the objectionable speech is. 

Thanks to a recent Supreme Court case, in America, there’s also little to stop them. 

Social media platforms—but not their users—can sue the government to stop the impermissible suppression of speech, according to Murthy v. Missouri, decided in June. The Court held that social media users could not establish a causal link between government pressure and the suppression of their posts because “the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment.” In an America where platforms’ interest in censoring disfavored views often align with the government’s, who is in a position legally to stop it?

Which is why so many commentators were relieved when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee last week, vowed to “push back” on future government attempts to censor Facebook posts. 

Share

Alas, Zuckerberg’s was the Metaverse of promises: uncompelling, phony, and without purchase in the actual world. When he had the chance—repeatedly, over the last eight years—Zuckerberg, like Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey, buckled. Both willingly suppressed speech Democratic officials found objectionable: the Hunter Biden laptop story and skepticism of Covid-19 policies. Dorsey’s Twitter kicked a sitting Republican president off Twitter. 

Zuckerberg’s was the Metaverse of promises: uncompelling, phony, and without purchase in the actual world.

Even assuming Zuckerberg has had a sincere change of heart, he is unlikely to follow through. That’s because his legal responsibility is to his shareholders, not to the public and its freedoms. Any platform that sues the administration invites the IRS or FCC or SEC to take a keen interest in its filings. 

What are the chances that a President Kamala Harris would forbear and avoid arm-twisting social media companies into censorship? Based on Harris’s record: Not great. 

In 2019, well before the January 6 riot that ultimately led to President Trump’s Twitter ban, then–Senator Harris publicly and repeatedly called on Twitter to ban him. On October 1, 2019, in a letter to Dorsey, Senator Harris called Trump’s tweets “blatant threats,” and claimed that other users “have had their accounts suspended for less offensive behavior.” She tweeted at Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey, pleading with him “to do something about this.”

Apparently surprised by Harris’s casual use of her pulpit to call for Twitter to ban a sitting president, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Harris in an interview: “How is that not a violation of free speech? The president has the same rights that you have, that I have. How would that not be a slippery slope to ban half the people on Twitter?” 

Harris doubled down: “I’ve heard that argument, but here’s the thing, Jake. A corporation—which is what Twitter is—has obligations and in this case, they have terms of use policy. Their terms of use dictate who receives the privilege of speaking on that platform and who does not. And Donald Trump has clearly violated the terms of use, and there should be a consequence for that,” she said [emphasis mine]. “Not to mention the fact that he has used his platform, being the president of the United States, in a way that has been about inciting fear and potentially inciting harm against a witness to what might be a crime against our country and our democracy.”  

In case Twitter had somehow failed to notice the directive, then–Senator Harris said: “And I am asking that Twitter does what it has done on previous occasions, which is revoke someone’s privilege because they have not lived up to the advantages of the privilege.”

Two weeks after the Tapper interview, at the Democratic primary debate on October 15, 2019, Harris repeated her call for Twitter to ban President Donald Trump from its platform. Harris claimed that the mass shooter at an El Paso Walmart had been “informed by how Donald Trump uses that platform.” She several times urged Elizabeth Warren, “Join me in saying his Twitter account should be shut down.”

Even Elizabeth Warren seemed appalled. She refused with a simple “No.” She is a law professor, after all. 

After that debate, Harris told Tapper flatly:  “The bottom line is you can’t say you have one rule for Facebook and another rule for Twitter. The same rule has to apply which is that there has to be a responsibility placed on social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and that has to stop.” [Emphasis mine.]

Facebook and Twitter “are directly speaking to millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation. And that has to stop.” - Senator Kamala Harris

Did you get that? It’s worth watching: Harris said social media sites should not be able to communicate information directly with the public without government oversight.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes also confronted Harris over her brash insistence on using her pulpit to pressure a private company to suppress the president’s speech. “There is not a part of you—civically, constitutionally—that is concerned about the precedent of a private company taking a platform away from the president of the United States, or some other elected official?" Hayes asked her.

“Free speech does not condone or protect threats to the safety of other human beings,” Harris replied. “That is what we are talking about, because this can go into some abstract law school debate.”

The Bill of Rights, like an American Express card, comes with “privileges,” in Harris’s book, free speech being one. Its guarantees are trivial and academic as a “law school debate.” Tim Walz, her vice presidential pick, has echoed the same. “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy,” Walz recently declared. 

The Bill of Rights, like an American Express card, comes with “privileges,” in Harris’s book.

He’s wrong, of course. The Constitution does protect hate speech and sometimes even deliberate falsehood. Luckily for Walz, the Constitution even protects his right to make false claims about the Constitution.

But sometimes the ambit of free speech is determined not by what the Constitution protects in theory, but the strength of a constitutional culture. Sustained pressure by government actors against freedom of speech has already acculturated Americans to the notion that social media companies and government can team up to censor us. 

One of the government officials who repeatedly pressured Facebook into censorship was Biden’s then–director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty. 

In March 2021, Flaherty wrote to Facebook on behalf of the Biden administration. He said he wanted to “connect” about the work they might be doing “to combat vaccine hesitancy, but also crack down on vaccine misinformation.” Flaherty expressed curiosity about what might be done to suppress traffic from the New York Post. “I’m curious—NY Post churning out articles every day. . . . What is supposed to happen to that from a Policy perspective. Does that article get a reduction, labels?”

Flaherty wrote, “intellectually my bias is to kick people off” Facebook. And he insisted his “dream” is for Facebook “to play ball” with the administration when it came to content suppression.

Harris apparently decided Flaherty had done a good job. She recently made him her deputy campaign manager.

Asked whether he might share his thoughts about how a Harris administration would interact with social media companies when there is a concern about disinformation, Mr. Flaherty did not respond to a request for comment.

If you want a picture of what pushing back against government pressure looks like—and the perils of standing on principle—consider Elon Musk at Twitter. 

In 2022, Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now called X) and released to the public voluminous communications showing the extent of attempts by the Biden-Harris administration and other government entities to suppress speech on the platform that he had just purchased. Musk invited a team of journalists, which I joined, to report on the “Twitter Files.” The files revealed a vast array of federal government and Twitter employee efforts to censor stories deemed disfavorable to the Biden campaign, his election prospects, and President Biden himself. 

For Musk’s foray into transparency, he has been repaid with a series of protracted battles with federal regulators that rises to the level of harassment. As Liz Peek wrote in The Hill, for embarrassing the Biden administration with the release of the Twitter Files, Musk has faced eleven lawsuits or regulatory battles involving seven different government agencies.

The viciousness of the investigations being conducted by the Department of Justice, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service against a successful American business leader is unprecedented.

More: Musk’s companies have been hit with subsidy cuts (Starlink), and forced recalls (Tesla) on apparently gratuitous grounds. 

I asked a partner at a multinational law firm who specializes in advising companies facing government investigation whether social media companies are likely to launch anti-censorship lawsuits and risk infuriating the agencies that regulate them. 

His answer: Not a chance.

“I wouldn’t tell one of my clients to kick over that hornet’s nest. If they’re threatening or intimidating you, there’s probably a thousand things they can do to you that are visible and invisible to you,” the lawyer said.

“You always want your clients to be viewed favorably by the government and to be viewed as somebody that the government can count on and is going to cooperate and do the right thing and be a good citizen. If I were advising a client, I would want the government to have crossed a really high threshold before I would consider litigating against them. If I were Facebook, I’d be very circumspect” about pushing back through the courts.

The problem is this: The Supreme Court held that social media users do not have standing to sue the government for coercing social media companies to censor their posts. That leaves social media platforms to police the government’s “jawboning”—that is, using its official speech to impermissibly compel private action. 

But what company will take the risk? Even if a platform were willing to sue the government to prevent its being bullied into censorship, the standard for impermissible coercion set by the Supreme Court is high and difficult to meet. Short of explicitly threatening adverse government action, the Court ruled recently, a government official “can share her views freely and criticize particular beliefs in the hopes of persuading others” without running afoul of the First Amendment. If challenged for pressuring social media companies to suppress content, Harris has already shown us what her response would be: safety, misinformation, harm to the public, privilege. We must, in other words, protect the people from their own speech.

Why will social media platforms comply with her? Easy. That’s where the money is.

Reprinted with permission from The Free Press.

Share

Subscribe now

Kamala Harris’s avoidance of a primary has given her a significant advantage in the general election. Republicans are now scrambling to knock down an opponent who seemed to have come out of nowhere, which is funny or tragic because she was literally the Vice President.

In what follows, I discuss Republicans’ best strategy for beating Kamala Harris: the best and also the most counterproductive attacks so far leveled against Harris. But I omit one: President Trump’s recent smear that Harris, who attended Howard University, is faking her black identity. At the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention on Wednesday, Trump said: “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” While the attack is unseemly and strategically risky, it may not backfire in the same way other ad hominem attacks have.

Attacks on a candidate tend to stick if they spotlight a candidate’s most unattractive feature. And while attacking someone’s ethnic identity is tasteless, the notion that Harris is a phony will stick with good reason: She is one.

Harris is already in the process of reversing herself on nearly every position she held in the last election. She often seems an empty vessel, happy to be filled by whatever Woke doctrine or centrist position her Party fancies. The notion that Kamala has no substance, that she is willing to be anything to anyone, will haunt her.

Finally, a common response to many of the counterproductive attacks I discuss below is this: “But they’re true!” I know. It was also true that some of Trump’s supporters in 2016 were “deplorable.” Did that smear work out for Hillary?

xo,

Abigail

Republicans are just waking up to the horror that they’ve been had.

The Trump campaign seems blindsided by Kamala Harris. Having avoided the ordeal of a primary, Harris dances onto the national scene appearing well-rested and unscathed. In polls, she is already tied with Trump—erasing his sizable lead in just one week.

Scrambling to make sense of what just happened, J.D. Vance has called her extra-democratic appointment a “coup.” He has suggested it cheated voters out of the chance to pick their own nominee. But a “coup” involves regime change. This switcheroo involved none. That’s why you don’t see members of the Biden administration objecting.

The maneuver didn’t damage Biden’s party, which tested a losing candidate, looked at his polls, and swapped him out for something better. A more accurate description is this: the Republicans have once again been outfoxed. So has the electorate, which could wind up with a far more left-wing president than it even knows. 

The question is: What are Republicans going to do about it?

Share

Subscribe now

Primaries may frustrate party grandees, but they serve the entire electorate. They are a gauntlet and vetting process, an opportunity to see what the candidates will promise when they’re seeking the approval of their own tribe. Forced to pander to their base, candidates typically say things that will hurt them in a general election. In the general, everyone pretends to be a moderate. But in a primary, candidates are at their most ideologically pure, huddling with their own team. By avoiding a primary, Harris also avoided revealing herself as a leftist.

There is every reason to believe Vice President Harris is actually quite radical and would govern that way. Since the start of her failed 2020 presidential campaign, she has adopted virtually every tenet of progressive maximalism—yes, wokeness—from gender ideology (pronouns-in-her-bio) to seriously discussing defunding the police in a 2020 radio interview.

There is every reason to believe Vice President Harris is actually quite radical and would govern that way.

She has called to “critically reexamine ICE and its role” and concluded “we need to probably think about starting from scratch,” meaning scrapping it altogether. She believes that the term radical Islamic terrorism ought to be abolished—not the terrorism, mind you, just the phrase. In 2020, she put out a video endorsing “equity” and insisted “equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.” Actually, that’s what equitable treatment means to the hard left.

As U.S. senator, Harris was one of the earliest sponsors of AOC’s “Green New Deal,” a dismantling of the U.S. economy under the flag of climate fundamentalism. She could scarcely be bothered to visit our southern border and had no interest in securing it, even when fixing the immigration crisis was made her unique responsibility as vice president.

In 2019, she expressed remarkable hostility to American energy. On CNN, she said there was “no question” she would ban fracking and offshore drilling. She fully supported Biden’s disastrous, inhumane policy of encouraging not only hormones but also gender surgeries for vulnerable minors and of flinging open the doors of women’s jail cells to biologically male offenders.

When Joe Biden was running for election in 2020 and referred to the “Latino community,” she corrected him on X: “the Latinx community,” she wrote, preferring the agender, woke neologism unpopular with the Latino community.

In June of 2020, Harris urged her supporters to post bail for BLM rioters who had ransacked our cities, even tweeting a payment link to the Minnesota Freedom Fund just four days after rioters burned a Minneapolis police precinct to the ground. “They’re not going to stop and everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop,” she said on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, referring to the BLM protesters. “They’re not going to let up, and they should not.” 

Each of these positions is out of step with the moderates in her party and the vast majority of the American people; had they come out in a primary, they would have been quite damaging. For good reason, Harris was ranked the “most liberal” member of the senate by the government transparency organization GovTrack, which recently memory-holed the webpage bearing the accolade. 

Now, as a candidate in the 2024 general election, she claims she never wanted to ban fracking. Expect her to reverse course on other far-left positions in the coming weeks. Had she been forced to restate these positions in a recent primary, the current disavowals would seem phony to the point of ridiculous. 

Instead, having avoided a primary, Harris can sell herself as a moderate to a public that has no time to unpack whether she was or wasn’t the official “border czar.” She smiles and laughs a lot. She looks like the kind of person you’d want to unwind with over a glass of pinot grigio. She can present herself as a centrist and count on the media to spearhead the cover-up.

The contest comes down to this: Will Republicans let her get away with it? Can the Republicans put her through the equivalent of a primary before the first mail-in votes are sent? Or will the GOP wallow in the unfairness of it all and blind itself to a better strategy going forward? 

The contest comes down to this: Can the Republicans put Harris through the equivalent of a primary before the first mail-in votes are sent?

Here’s what Republican wallowing looks like:

Pushing the idea that Harris is a “DEI hire.” Conservatives insist that calling her a DEI hire is fair and just. After all, DEI is a terrible, unethical system. If the Democrats love DEI so much, why not own it? Biden all but branded Harris a DEI hire when he announced he would only consider female minority candidates. 

All true. And all equally beside the point.

Republicans foolish enough to attack Harris as a DEI hire are likely to be startled by the stampede to defend her. For one thing, calling Harris a DEI hire mistakes attacking the system with attacking its beneficiaries. The system of DEI is unethical and must be dismantled. But the beneficiaries did nothing wrong. Were they not supposed to apply for these jobs? Why shame them now?

Consider that we all regard it as immoral for Major League Baseball to have once excluded black players. The system was rotten, but the players in it—Ruth, Williams, DiMaggio—don’t deserve our contempt. Attack the system, not the players.

The other counterproductive strategy—which some Republicans seem keen to pursue—is “slut shaming” Harris for her affair, early in her career, with the powerful older politician Willie Brown, the married mayor of San Francisco. The charge seems ridiculous when leveled against a happily married woman turning sixty, who looks like a kindly auntie and whose stepchildren call her “Momala.” In four years as the first female veep, she presented a personal side that was warm and conventional, and that’s what voters remember. Shaming her for earlier romantic affairs will only inspire her base to vote early.

The question Republicans ought to confront before leveling any attack is: “Will this energize my supporters more or hers?” For nearly every ad hominem salvo currently flung at Harris, the answer is: hers.

The question Republicans ought to confront before leveling any attack is: “Will this energize my supporters more or hers?”

Moms from both political parties have had enough with inflation, with gender ideology in the schools, and with criminals on the streets. Many felt betrayed by the party that took its marching orders from the teachers unions during Covid—and kept kids out of school for years. 

Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers, just endorsed Harris: “She has a record of fighting for us,” Weingarten said. Harris in turn praised Weingarten as “an incredible friend and adviser to the president and me.” That ought to be enough to send many moms to the polls to vote Republican for the first time. It’s a mistake to make them uncomfortable or place them on the defensive.

Harris has never stopped being a San Francisco politician. Republicans should remind the public of that and ask Wisconsin residents: Are you ready to become California? Liberals and conservatives are fleeing Harris’s home state, where she was U.S. senator and attorney general. Would Pennsylvanians like to know why?

Ten million migrants have entered our country since Harris was put in charge of the border. Are they ready for millions more? Would they like to find their own schools and hospitals so overrun that American citizens are sent away, as happened in New York and Texas?

The vast majority of American families prefer Republican policies. It’s the messengers who are so often the problem. And perhaps that’s especially the case this year.

Harris has never stopped being a San Francisco politician. Republicans should ask Wisconsin residents: Are you ready to become California?

An aura of gloom trails J.D. Vance, and his instincts need recalibration. He seems to believe he is in a primary, talking straight to his base, growling at Democrats. And many on the right are cheering this strategy: Stop worrying about the guys in man-buns, they say. They never vote for us anyway!

Typically, the vice president plays attack dog to keep the presidential candidate’s hands clean. But Trump and Vance both often seem like pit bulls straining at the leash. Why did the elegant, brilliant Usha Vance fall for J.D.? There must be a sweet, loving side to this guy, which he ought to let voters see. If the Mitt Romney–Paul Ryan ticket had too little fight, this one currently suffers from too much: too aggressive, too man-cave, too full of resentment to please the American heart, which still has a fondness for things like joy and hope.

If Republicans want to win, they must put Harris through the 2024 primary she never had. Inform voters of the record Harris is now scrambling to disavow, and the media is working desperately to erase. And most trying of all for Trump-Vance, they must hold two ideas in their heads: Yes, you got played. And also, bitterness will sink you. 

Subscribe now

Share

Reprinted with the permission of The Free Press.

Dear Truth Fairy Reader,

I want to tell you why I think this story is so important. It’s the nexus of everything I’ve been reporting on for the past five years: the erosion of parental authority and the outrageous irresponsibility of indoctrinating children into gender ideology.

Recall that gender ideology was never sold to the American people. Parents were sold on “inclusivity.” Gender ideology itself was sold to their grade-school kids. This was another of the Left’s “bait-and-switch” maneuvers, and it succeeded so well, the gender ideologues had essentially a decade’s head start on American parents.

Metaphors matter. They can elucidate, but they can also elide and confuse. For a long time, the conservative metaphor for the Left’s tactics has been “slippery slope.” It’s a bad metaphor. It suggests that radical efforts to harm American families are all just the result of the gravitational pull of the earth, or the inevitability of logical progression. That isn’t the case. The tactics used against American families are far more clever. And they invariably involve a “Bait and Switch.” Sell the American people on a principle we can all agree on: “inclusivity,” “tolerance” and “anti-bullying.” Then, smuggle in an entirely different program under its name. That is how gender ideology ended up part of the mandatory “anti-bullying” curriculum, as opposed to the “sex education curriculum,” which is subject to parental opt out.

Now that there is organized parent opposition, the move is clear: neutralize parental opposition at the community level by making it impossible for your local school to have parental notification policies. Call it “stopping the ‘forced outing’ of trans kids,” another bait and switch.

Finally, I’m at work on a new project on the rising generation. If you’re young and open to talking about dating and mating culture today, please get in touch.

xo,

A

Child predators follow a common playbook: target the victim, gain their trust, fill a need, and, crucially, isolate the child from her parents. For several years, this has also been standard California state protocol with regard to schoolchildren questioning their gender identities. On Monday, this scheme became law.

The “SAFETY Act,” AB 1955, signed by California Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, legally forbids schools from adopting any policy that would force them to disclose “any information related to a pupil’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the pupil’s consent.” Schools may not, as a matter of policy, inform parents of a child’s new gender identity unless the child volunteers her approval. The law also prohibits schools from punishing any school employee found to have “supported a pupil” hurtling down a path toward risky and irreversible hormones and surgeries.

Subscribe now

Share

The law effectively shuts down the local parents’ rights movement in California by eliminating its most important tool: the ability to organize at the community level to stop schools from deceiving them. No longer can families hope to convince their school boards to require schools to notify parents that their daughter, Sophie, has been going by “Sebastian” in class; that her teacher, school counselor, and principal have all been celebrating Sebastian’s transgender identity; that they’ve been letting her use the boys’ bathroom and reifying the sense that she is “really a boy.” 

The law effectively shuts down the local parents’ rights movement in California by eliminating its most important tool: the ability to organize at the community level to stop schools from deceiving them.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the law supports the priming of minor children for a secret life with a new gender identity. This includes having school-aged children participate in sexualized discussions and make identity declarations with school faculty, which are often actively hidden from the child’s parents. Elon Musk called the law “the final straw” for families and announced his intention to move both SpaceX and X, two of California’s most prominent tech companies, out of the state as a result. “The goal [of] this diabolical law,” he tweeted, “is to break the parent-child relationship and put the state in charge of your children.”

While researching my book, Irreversible Damage, and in the four years since its publication, I have talked to hundreds of parents whose daughters suddenly identified as transgender. Many of their daughters were encouraged in this revelation by school counselors and teachers in school districts across America. One parent told me a California school counselor had given her son the address of an LGBTQ youth shelter and suggested he emancipate himself from parents who were loving but skeptical of his sudden transgender identity. Another recent California law, AB 665, would have made reclaiming that young man from the youth center all but impossible because he was over the age of twelve.

In California, instruction in sexual orientation and gender identity has been mandatory for all public school students K–12 since the passage of the Healthy Youth Act in 2016. Because such instruction typically occurs within the required “anti-bullying curriculum” rather than the sex education curriculum, parents cannot elect that their children opt out of what is, in practice, a full-bore indoctrination into gender ideology. 

When a child then predictably decides in class that she too may be nonbinary or transgender, this revelation will often trigger schools’ gender support plan, effectively a school-wide conspiracy to promote the child’s new name and gender identity without tipping off Mom and Dad. Official documents and emails and report cards are sent to parents to preserve the child’s birth name and pronouns, concealing the social transition from parents. 

I have talked to parents who discovered their middle-school daughters had spent the better part of an entire academic year known to the entire school as “Spencer” or “Ethan.” One of these girls had even roomed with the boys on an overnight school trip.

I have investigated many cases in which social transitions were concealed from families. In no case did the girl flourish with this new identity. Maintaining a new, secret identity more often became a weight and burden to the girls. Inexplicably to the parents, their daughters became morose, dropped activities they once loved, wore baggier clothing, and begged to cut their hair shorter. The parents became desperate and unsure of what to do. The hidden transition resulted in children’s alienation from loving parents trying to protect them. 

I have investigated many cases in which social transitions were concealed from families. In no case did the girl flourish with this new identity.

But in the years since I first reported on this practice, political opposition has grown. Parents whose daughters were socially transitioned behind their backs have filed lawsuits against the school districts in California and Florida and Michigan. California public school teachers have sued school districts to block policies that could result in their firing if they inform parents that their children’s names and identities have been changed behind their backs. And a recent statewide initiative in California to require parental notification before a school changes a child’s gender identity as well as ban puberty blockers and gender surgeries for minors garnered over 400,000 signatures, falling just short of making it onto the ballot. 

The SAFETY Act would significantly stymie, if not eliminate, this local pushback to the increasingly unpopular practice of schools playing adoptive parents with other people’s children. (Although already, the Chino Valley Unified School District has filed suit against Newsom over this act.) The plain text of the California law claims that it merely prevents schools from adopting policies that “forcibly out” trans kids—as if confused fifth-grade girls are in the same position as closeted gay adults in decades past who risked arrest and firing for being outed. 

The law’s clever sponsors are typically quiet on the subject of “outing” to whom. The entire school already knows that Lily is now “Tyler.” Teachers will cheerfully share that information with each other, school mental health staff, administrators, and other students. The only ones who don’t get to know are the parents.

A favorite talking point of activists on the left is that with regard to sexual orientation and gender identity, schools must keep secrets with young children to protect them from transphobic and homophobic parents. Even in the most progressive of states, the claim that parents who discover that their child is transgender might abuse or kick her out is used to justify a policy that would otherwise be difficult to understand and impossible to justify.

Teachers will cheerfully share that information with each other, school mental health staff, administrators, and other students. The only ones who don’t get to know are the parents.

Aurora Regino is a single mother in California who last year sued the Chico Unified School District for secretly pushing social transition on her then–11-year-old daughter. Regino told me that the “phobia” rationale seemed “ridiculous.” She added, “How is it not outing a kid if you’re telling an entire school that they’re a different sex? That’s outing right there. So everybody knows except the parents? That doesn’t really make any sense to me.”

Erin Friday, a California attorney and author of bills in several states requiring parental notification for any change in a child’s gender identity at school, vented exasperation at the idea that California parents are so homophobic or transphobic they cannot be trusted. “This is California, for crying out loud.”

Regino agreed. “Both my girls are very active. We do swimming, theater, soccer, softball. We are in connection with I don’t know how many families. And there’s not one family that I can think of that we are around that would kick out their kid because they thought that they were ‘nonbinary’ or trans or gay,” she said. “I mean, to me, that’s an extreme statement that these kids are going to get kicked out. Are we saying one in ten thousand? So we’re going to risk the rest of the children and separate them from their parents during the time that they need them the most?” Her now–13-year-old daughter no longer wants to be a boy.

One might think Newsom would realize that a policy this unpopular for Democrats could easily become a political albatross in an election year. Perhaps realizing this, the governor—who is frequently mentioned as a possible 2024 presidential candidate if Biden drops out—when defending the bill resorts to dissembling. On Wednesday, the governor’s press office declared on X that the bill “protects the child-parent relationship by PREVENTING politicians & school staff from inappropriately intervening in family matters & attempting to control if, when & how families have deeply personal conversations.” The bill only “protects” the parent-child relationship if you assume that relationship depends on the parents’ being entirely ignorant of their child’s growing attachment to this new, secret identity.

Governor Newsom also declared: “Under California law, minors CANNOT legally change their name or gender WITHOUT parental consent.” That’s placing a lot of weight on the word legally. The obscurantist governor is correct only in the most technical sense: yes, a child’s legal name can be changed only on official records with parental approval. But in the world of the SAFETY Act, the parents may be the only ones in a child’s life who use that name. 

In the past few years, moderates across the American political spectrum have awakened to the pernicious effects of gender ideology on children. England, Finland, Norway, and Sweden have, in recent years, warned the public of the risks of pediatric gender medicine, banned the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in children, or restricted their use to research settings. The Cass Review, published this year by one of England’s premier physicians, noted the serious risks and specious benefits of pediatric gender transition. My own investigation, published four years earlier, reached the same conclusions. The Cass Review also acknowledged that social transition is an active intervention that puts many children on an inexorable path to medical transition. 

Recent polling shows that voters across the political spectrum believe that schools should be required to inform parents if their children are using different gender pronouns at school than they are at home.

Parents’ best hope may be federal legislation mandating parental notification before a school can reassign a child’s name and gender.

But California Democrats appear ready to drag their party down with them. Parents’ best hope may be federal legislation mandating parental notification before a school can reassign a child’s name and gender. Candidates for president and vice president ought to be asked whether they would support such a bill.

Until her daughter was socially transitioned behind her back, Regino had been a lifelong progressive Democrat. “Now, I’m a registered Republican,” she said.

Reprinted with permission from The Free Press.

Share

Subscribe now

As many of you know, I’m a journalist, but I’m also a lawyer. And probably the best thing about having a legal education is that it frees you from having to defer to others when legal questions arise. You don’t have to agree with them either.

If you have been puzzled by the universities’ sudden concern for ‘Free Speech,’ you are not alone. Nor are you alone in thinking this concern awfully specific—to the scenario in which the targets are Jews or any other disfavored group.

In the face of an alarming outbreak of antisemitic thuggery on campus, university administrators claim their hands are tied. Passing strange, given how freely they censored speech a minute ago and will, again, tomorrow whenever some student is caught on Halloween wearing a sombrero or publicly objects to a male on the women’s swim team.

xo,

Abigail

A police officer who pulls over speeding black motorists—and only black motorists—isn’t protecting “law and order.” He’s engaging in invidious discrimination. So too the university administrators who suddenly discover they are free speech absolutists only when student protesters call for the death of their Jewish classmates.

In January, a junior at Columbia University, Khymani James, told a disciplinary committee at the school that Zionists “don’t deserve to live.” “Be grateful that I’m just not going out and murdering Zionists,” he instructed them. Then, James headed back to campus, scot-free. (If he hadn’t also posted a recording of the meeting to his social media site, discovered four months later, there might never have been any repercussions at all.)

It was the sort of stunt a star quarterback for the football team could have gotten away with a generation or two ago, when college coaches might have been eager to sweep sexual assault allegations under the rug. Or the son of a major donor to the university. James apparently enjoys a level of privilege every bit as sacrosanct: as a leader of the pro-Palestinian encampment at an Ivy League school, he could threaten Jewish students at his pleasure, university codes of conduct be damned.

Share

If there was ever doubt whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates Columbia’s code of conduct, on April 23, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) asked four Columbia University professors and administrators this explicitly. Every one of them said: “Yes, it does.” As for the encampments, they violate Columbia’s Rules of University Conduct, disruptive behavior standards, university policy regarding “tenting,” disciplinary rules against “vandalism/damage to property,” unauthorized “access/egress” rules as well as Columbia’s policy against harassment, according to a Notice to Encampment circulated by the university.

In the last two weeks, self-proclaimed pro-Palestinian protesters have set up encampments at dozens of American universities. Heedless of university restrictions against intimidation and harassment, they demonstrate where, when, and how they like. They cry “Go back to Poland,” “baby killers,” and “globalize the Intifada” at Jewish students. They wave the flags of designated terrorist groups, like Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and hold up signs that beckon “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets,” with an arrow pointing at Jewish counterprotesters. (Al-Qassam is the wing of Hamas that carried out the October 7 massacre.)

On campuses that have—for a decade or more—repeated ad nauseam that priority one was the creation of a “safe, inclusive, supportive, and fair” community, the pro-Palestinian demonstrators wave Hezbollah flags, wear Hamas headbands, and conceal their faces with masks. They ignore all time, place, and manner restrictions on student demonstrations set by their schools, and refuse all demands from the universities to take down their tents or to move their protests elsewhere. And at Columbia, until April 30, when protesters took over Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and the NYPD was at last called in, they almost got away with it. 

On campuses that have—for a decade or more—repeated ad nauseam that priority one was the creation of a “safe, inclusive, supportive, and fair” community, the pro-Palestinian demonstrators wave Hezbollah flags and wear Hamas headbands.

At UCLA, protesters blocked students from entering the library during the midterms, asking those who wished to enter: “Are you a Zionist?” After a Jewish girl was reportedly beaten unconscious by pro-Palestinian protesters, pro-Israel counterprotesters at UCLA arrived in masks and hoodies, shooting off fireworks, firing tear gas, and throwing objects at the pro-Hamas protesters and attempting to physically destroy the encampments. Only then did UCLA call in the police to remove the encampments.

Instead of immediately suspending the pro-Hamas protesters for breaking university rules, for weeks, university administrations instead chose to “negotiate” with the rule-breakers. At Columbia, the administration offered to review its policy on “socially responsible investing” (read: divesting from the world’s only Jewish state), and offered to “make investments in health and education in Gaza.” At Brown, the administration promised protesters that they would put divestment from Israel on the agenda. At Northwestern, the administration meekly tossed rewards, including the promise to establish a full-ride scholarship for Palestinian students and guaranteed faculty jobs for Palestinian academics. 

At Columbia, protesters rejected the offers, knowing they had the upper hand. When police arrived to break up the encampments, Columbia faculty in orange vests linked arms to form a human wall against the police, shielding the rule-breakers. 

The lengths administrators have gone to placate, encourage, and embolden the pro-Hamas protesters in the past weeks provide a signal reminder that there are at least two sets of rules governing elite universities today: one for the favored, protected class; the other for everyone else. And in case anyone has any doubt which category Jewish students fall into, the unwillingness of universities to enforce their own codes of conduct against pro-Hamas protesters in the months since October 7 should disabuse them.

Consider how racist speech (or even racially insensitive speech) has been received on virtually any major American campus for decades. 

In 2017, an anonymous jerk put flyers up around American University’s campus. The flyers displayed a Confederate flag, a stem of raw cotton, and read “Huzzah for Dixie” and the like.

American University immediately launched into emergency response mode, treating the flyers as a criminal threat. It published CCTV video and solicited help from the public in identifying the man who posted the flyers. An all points bulletin called “CRIME ALERT” went out for the man’s arrest. The New York Times covered the incident; the words “free speech” do not appear once in the article. Instead, it approvingly noted that in a previous incident—when bananas were found hanging from nooses around campus—the FBI had been called to investigate. 

Nor could I find any evidence of any free speech organization rushing to defend the man who posted the flyers—nor the racist provocateurs in any of dozens of similar incidents. No prominent “free speech absolutists” appear to have considered the expressive value of “Huzzah for Dixie” worth defending. Nor did pundits claim that inviting law enforcement to investigate such acts of hate—i.e., “calling the police on your own students”—was in any sense inappropriate or disproportionate. In almost every single case—at schools like Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Michigan State, University of Florida, Duke, and American University—where a symbolic noose was discovered on a campus, it was treated as a criminal threat, never as speech. 

After the Huzzah for Dixie flyers were found, the president of American University quickly issued a statement: “I ask you to join me in standing together and show that we will not be intimidated. AU will respond strongly to attempts designed to harm and create fear,” she wrote. “When one of us is attacked, all of us are attacked.”

Today, in the face of months of bloodthirsty cries aimed at Jewish students (“globalize the Intifada”), university presidents line up to assure the protesters of their right to free speech. 

If “Huzzah for Dixie” is worth the full mobilization of university resources and law enforcement, then waving the flag of a terrorist group, or writing “burn you filthy zio” to a student chat, or telling Jewish students to “go back to Poland” where millions of Jews were murdered in gas chambers, or pulling down the American flag over a statue of John Harvard and replacing it with the Palestinian flag, or painting “Ziosgetfuckt” on UPenn’s statue of Ben Franklin, or calling Jews “Hitler’s children”—all insults hurled at Jews on campus—are at least as menacing. 

If “Huzzah for Dixie” is worth the full mobilization of university resources and law enforcement, then waving the flag of a terrorist group, or telling Jewish students to “go back to Poland” or calling Jews “Hitler’s children” are at least as menacing. 

But in practice, the two types of incidents—rather, the two targets of the incidents—are treated entirely differently. Punishment is meted out swiftly and mercilessly, and with no consideration for free speech principles, any time Confederate flag flyers are posted, any time students hold culturally insensitive themed frat parties, any time colleges uncover student use of the N-word while in high school (or even a word in Mandarin that sounds like the N-word), or even when students or faculty make the familiar conservative argument that affirmative action sets black students up to fail. Rinse and repeat and repeat.

Speech on college campuses has been stultifyingly narrow—and very far from free—for decades. That pro-Hamas students cheer freely for “intifada” doesn’t make it any freer now. The fact that certain students are allowed to call for the death of their Jewish classmates does not herald a new era of free expression. It only underscores that some bigotries enjoy the official sanction of these schools, and are accepted, tolerated, and rewarded with special dispensations and, indeed, goodies.

Use of the N-word on campus or misgendering a classmate will no doubt be met with as swift punitive consequences as they have been for decades, as have a vast and more minute array of “microaggressions.” I invite anyone who doubts this to parade through any of our elite campuses with insulting cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. 

Speech on college campuses has been stultifyingly narrow—and very far from free—for decades. That pro-Hamas students cheer freely for “intifada” doesn’t make it any freer now.

After weeks of violent, destructive protest, which left campuses trashed and buildings damaged and graffitied, administrators have at last begun to enforce their own rules and call in the police. Perhaps they felt they had no choice: commencement ceremonies loom and lawsuits, recently filed by Jewish students, are on the way. 

But watch the marble carefully as university administrators spin the cups. When a favored group is attacked, they discover a “community safety” concern with remarkable alacrity. When it’s a disfavored group, suddenly the cup reveals “free expression.” The game is fixed, and the administrators show their hands. “Community safety,” or was it “free speech”? Surprise! They don’t believe in either. 

This piece first appeared in The Free Press.

Thanks to your support, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, is both an international best seller and a New York Times Bestseller. It’s available for purchase here.

Share

Subscribe now

Dear Reader,

As you might have heard, BAD THERAPY: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, hit #1 in all books on Amazon this week — thanks largely to all of you. Thank you!

Of course, this surprise endorsement from Elon Musk didn’t hurt:

Here’s what I’ve been up to these two weeks. Let me know what you think!

xo,

A

For audio-only pods, listen to Spiked podcast. Listen to Honestly Pod with Bari Weiss.

And if you’re up for podcasts with video, here are some of my favorites:

Finally, reviews:

A beautiful review in the Financial Times:

"Bad Therapy is a pacy, no-holds barred attack on mental health professionals and parenting experts that will upset many therapists. But it asks an important question: why has more mental health treatment for Gen Z not resulted in less depression?"

The Daily Signal called it “gripping” and said:

“BAD THERAPY offers a particularly important revelation by showcasing how schools and medicine have been affected by the mental health focus.” 

New York Post:

“Rigorously reported, heavily researched and filled with enough interviews with child psychologists, teachers, parents and Gen Zers to more than buttress her premise…filled with good old-fashioned bombs of common sense that could have been dropped from Grandma’s little book of wisdom.” –Kirsten Fleming, NY Post

City Journal:

"An astute and impassioned analysis of the mental-health crisis now afflicting adolescents.”—Kay Hymowitz, City Journal

“Shrier’s chapters on the schools’ contribution to this era of bad therapy make the most compelling case for iatrogenesis.” —Kay Hymowitz, City Journal

Free Press:

“Fascinating, urgent … The best journalists are fearless. And that adjective certainly applies to Abigail, whose bravery in following the evidence wherever it leads is what has made her work on some of the most important and controversial issues of the day so essential.” -Bari Weiss, Free Press

Unherd:

“An uncompromising study of therapeutic child-rearing across individual therapy, pedagogy, governmental data-gathering and the culture as a whole.” –Mary Harrington, Unherd

“Bad Therapy takes a sledgehammer to every article of therapeutic parenting and pedagogical faith.”–Mary Harrington, Unherd

Jewish Chronicle: 

“The sheer force of Shrier’s character — her clear-headedness, frankness, and the heft of her research — almost blew my hair backwards, like in a cartoon.” - Zoe Strimpel, Jewish Chronicle

“Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up is about the plague of misery that has overtaken American children and teenagers even as the numbers of professionals there to make them feel better has rocketed. In punchy-as-heck chapters … the data-rich book chronicles the immense harm done to a generation of children, and their parents, by the suffusion of therapeutic intervention.” - Zoe Strimpel, Jewish Chronicle

The New Statesman:

“Punchy, persuasive prose.” -Hannah Barnes, The New Statesman

 “A message that parents, teachers, mental health professionals and policymakers need to hear.” -Hannah Barnes, The New Statesman

The New York Sun

“After I finished Bad Therapy, I told my husband we need to stop accommodating my 6-year-old’s picky eating habits so much and insist he sit at the table through dinner.” -Caroline McCaughey, The New York Sun

The Irish Independent, Stella O’Malley wrote:

“This is a brave and brilliant book.”

“A scathing critique of how society is losing its way under the illusion that mental health treatment is a panacea for most problems in society.”

“With meticulous research and unflinching honesty, Shrier exposes the pitfalls and dangers that have emerged in the US after 75 years of rapid expansion in the mental health industry.”

“An incisive and sharp analysis that delves deep into the tangled web of the mental health establishment among young people.”

“Shrier is an elegant and witty writer and this book is compelling and groundbreaking. Anyone who is trying to make sense of our modern society should read it.”

The Federalist, Maria Keffler:

“If you are raising a child, or teaching a child, or if you know any children, or if you know any of the people who­­­­­­­ are raising or teaching children, get and read this book.”

Share

Subscribe now

It is with great joy that I bring you this exclusive excerpt from my new book, BAD THERAPY: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.

Much Love,

Abigail

The fevered insecurity of contemporary parenting first announced it­self to me when I signed up my twin four-year-old boys for piano lessons. Once a week, a Soviet Jewish émigré redolent of Russian stoicism and expensive perfume clicked into our west Los Angeles home. For a single half-hour session, she taught my boys to sit up straight and to find mid­dle C.

The boys learned to repeat “Every Good Boy Does Fine” and “All Cows Eat Grass,” while their fingers traced the lines and spaces on an enlarged version of the grand staff. Gradually, they learned to plink out very simple and satisfying tunes. She was pleased. I was a mess.

“Was it your decision to start the boys on piano or theirs?” other moth­ers wanted to know.

“Both,” I lied.

The question didn’t deter me, but it rattled me. I began checking in regularly with my boys to make sure they were “still enjoying piano.” Then I reassured the Russian piano teacher that they remained game for her instruction.

Finally, she leveled with me. “You must stop this. Sometimes they will like the piano; sometimes they won’t. This is normal. Stop asking.”

Where had I gotten the idea that at every moment of their lives, my boys were supposed to be gleefully engaged? Why was I so insecure? I had endured all sorts of lessons and sports teams as a kid; some I stuck with—most, I dropped. Neither of my parents lost sleep fretting over the optimal age to start me in tap dance. No one monitored my ongoing yen to become the next Bojangles.

But my generation decided that the ideal parent was never stern or dis­engaged or even particularly natural. The ideal parent emerged through training and constant practice. All parents became amateur shrinks, and every shrink—even a childless one—was a parenting expert. Parents be­gan to sound less like parents— in the traditional, American vein— and more like therapists. “Sammy, I see that you’re feeling frustrated. Is there a way you could express your frustration without biting your sister?”

Share

Why Gen X Parents Were an Easy Mark

For many members of my generation—Gen X—adolescence was a trial. Our parents divorced in larger numbers than America had ever seen. Adults often acted as if that was the best outcome for every­one. They said it made kids happy to see their parents fulfilled by new relationships. But the kids who turned up to math class without a text­book because they’d left it at their dad’s house and wouldn’t see him again until Saturday didn’t seem happier because their father was starting a new, better life. They were just kids without the right textbook.

We reached adulthood and millions of us entered therapy. We had kids of our own, purchased stacks of parenting books, most of them written by shrinks, and began to reevaluate our childhoods.

We’d all been spanked as kids, but suddenly, that made us feel ashamed; it came to seem like abuse. We’d all been yelled at and punished when we talked back or acted out, but that now seemed off-limits with our own. Most of us came home after school to empty houses. But in retrospect, that level of neglect seemed to warrant a visit from Child Services. Our parents attended a few of our soccer games, but if we skipped even our kids’ practices, we felt like we’d abandoned them at Port Authority.

That the vast majority of us ended up in pretty good shape—that we married, made and kept friends, held down jobs, and created lives that required others to depend on us because they could—carried a whiff of dumb luck. We assumed it was despite our parents’ terribly uncool man­ner of childrearing that we turned out okay. We would have been so much better off, we decided, if only we’d had gentler and more involved parents.

With our own kids, we used soft voices, met them at eye level, and asked them constantly how they felt about things. It seemed obvious: How do you produce gentle, calm kids? With gentle, calm, patient parenting. We constantly invited our kids to weigh in on all of the choices we made for them. We asked our kids for feedback on the job we were doing.

All parents became amateur shrinks, and every shrink—even a childless one—was considered a parenting expert

It never occurred to us that “unconditional positive regard” and deep listening may be feasible from a shrink for a single fifty-minute session per week but that it’s a little less practicable for parents interacting with kids for tens of thousands of hours, in endlessly varied circumstances, over the course of years.

Dear God, we were tired. That’s how we knew we were great parents: we’d reached Level 5 exhaustion. Moms were putting in 50 percent more time with their kids than parents did in the 1960s; dads— twice as much. We must be doing a better job.

And yet by objective measures, we weren’t. We had replaced one set of problems for another. Everything we were doing felt so virtuous. Every­thing we were producing seemed so broken.

When asked, our kids said they were miserable. Our kids didn’t want to leave their rooms. Our kids didn’t date. Our kids moved home and stayed. They didn’t want to get married or have kids. Our kids were on four or six different psychotropic drugs. None of it seemed to make them feel better. None of it seemed to make them feel anything at all.

We assumed with perfect faith (and wholly without evidence) that gentler parenting could only produce thriving children. Shouldn’t flow­ers bloom in powdered sugar?

Turns out, they grow best in dirt.

“Knock it Off,” “Shake it Off”

America once had a more masculine style of parenting. It’s a style tradi­tionally occupied by Dad (though, really, I’ve seen women employ it to great effect). This is the style I’ve called “knock it off, shake it off,” parenting. The sort that met kids’ interpersonal conflict with “Work it out yourselves,” and greeted kids’ mishaps with “You’ll live.” A loving but stolid insistence that young children get back on the horse and carry on.

“Knock it off” didn’t suffice in the face of all misbehavior. But in the main, it put the onus on kids to figure out what was wrong with their conduct and desist. “Knock it off” didn’t overexplain: It credited kids with common sense or nudged them to develop it. Rules had exceptions and workarounds, but “knock it off” signaled a parent’s disinclination to become entangled in them. Every kid who hopes to hold down a job with­out making himself a terrible (and disposable) burden to an employer needed to master this art of following simple instruction— without seven hundred time-consuming follow‑up questions. “Knock it off” meant: You’re a smart kid, figure it out. But also: You can.

Shouldn’t flow­ers bloom in powdered sugar? Turns out, they grow best in dirt.

“Shake it off” didn’t solve the worst injuries, of course, but that was never its purpose. (No one except a sadist ever thought a child could run on a broken leg.) And it rarely operated alone: the other parent, the gen­tler one, often cushioned its impact. But “shake it off” did a helluva job playing triage nurse to kids’ minor heartaches and injuries, proving to kids that the hurt or fear or possibility of failure need not overwhelm them. “Shake it off” provided its own kind of tough love and emotional nour­ishment. It taught kids to soldier into a world with the hopeful disregard of danger that a cynic might term naiveté. Others call it courage.

In the last generation, all traces of tough love and rule-bound parent­ing have been supplanted by a more empathetic style, the one once asso­ciated with moms. Most dads have been told explicitly—or made to feel—that the approach their own fathers took was wrong and their na­tive instincts, no guide.

But even Mom isn’t in charge today—not really. The proof is how many books she must read to establish her competence as a mother. She may not trust her husband’s instincts with the kids, but she regards her own as only marginally better. And her parents’ methods? Obsolete as the Yel­low Pages. Unlike most of the experts, her parents raised a few kids who managed to become self-supporting, capable, and dependable citizens. But her parents corrected and punished their way through childrearing, so Mom discards most of their example off the bat. In its place, she de­ploys phrases borrowed from her shrink. (“Why don’t we try taking a few breaths together now, Harper?”)

Mom’s therapist may not have had any stable romantic relationships to speak of, and she raised no more than one child of her own. (The out­come of that effort, anyone’s guess.) But her therapist knows all about mental health. She therefore must know more about parenting than the people who’ve actually done it.

Which is a little like soliciting the advice of a biologist on how to make love.

For at least a generation, Mom hasn’t provided her children escape from the quackery of wellness culture, and she certainly is no bulwark against it. She is an ersatz therapist, practicing bad therapy on kids whose emotions grow increasingly unruly, whose behavior eludes the traps set by her affected questioning. When she has no patience left to offer, she turns a gimlet eye on her offspring and downgrades her assessment: Mad­die has significant challenges and needs a great deal of additional support.

Battered-Mommy Syndrome

In September of 2021, I attended a dinner of five couples, all young and upper-middle- class, denizens of an affluent West LA neighborhood. One father, I’ll call him “Alan,” excitedly relayed a parenting fail his wife had witnessed at the playground. A young, well-heeled mother was strug­gling with a recalcitrant six-year-old son. “Please be a good boy,” the woman had said to her son. “If you’re good for just five minutes, when we get home, I’ll let you do anything you want. What do you want?”

The little boy looked his mother straight in the eye. “I want to punch you in the face,” he said.

We dinner guests laughed uproariously, shrill with worry that we, too, might be raising little Pol Pots.

But then Alan said, “I don’t care how many experts we have to consult or how much we have to pay, I don’t want to end up with that.”

Here, finally lucid, was the dastardly trap of modern parenting. The woman at the park, straining to be gentler than her parents likely ever were with her, is met by her son’s contempt; Alan, believing that there must be some expert who can assert the necessary authority to control his own child.

Moms like the one at the park are everywhere practicing expert tech­niques of positive incentives; devising the proper consequences; pleading with kids to behave; afraid of the kids they are raising.

Life Hacks for Abused Parents

A friend’s wife became a parenting coach, and one of the popular videos she posted begins with this: “Have you ever been at a loss for what to do when your kid hits, kicks, bites, or scratches you? If so, I have a tool for you!”

Can you imagine your own parents asking that question? Can you imagine thinking, as a four-or five-year-old, that you would kick, hit, or bite your parents—more than once?

You may be thinking: Well, my parents spanked me. Or, But I was afraid of my parents. I don’t want my kids to be afraid of me. You have nothing to worry about. This generation of kids is absolutely not afraid of their par­ents. They think their parents are nice people. And they are frequently contemptuous of them.

The mom coach suggested the following script: “Sweetie, I know you are so upset because I gave you the blue cup instead of the green cup—or because I told you it was time to take your fort down. But next time you’re upset, we can clench our fists or stomp our feet or tell Mommy what’s wrong and I might be able to help.”

This is precisely the playbook propounded by a raft of therapeutic par­enting books, from the iconic How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk to Raising Your Spirited Child. The approach to bad behav­ior is always therapeutic— meaning it is nonjudgmental. It’s the parent’s job to understand a child’s frustration— never the child’s job to learn to control his impulses.

Gentle parents eschew all punishment. At most, they might al­low a child to live with the result of what she has done. If a child throws a toy at the wall and it breaks, the gentle parent points out that now the toy is broken and isn’t that sad? A kid writes on the wall, and you tell her it makes you unhappy when people write on the wall and you ask her to help repaint the wall. Those are consequences.

Where things get a little murky is when the “consequences” aren’t ac­tually consequences. They’re punishments in dress‑up. “Since you threw your food on the floor, I cannot take you to the park. I cannot take anyone to the park who throws their food on the floor, because now I have to spend the time I would have spent at the park cleaning this up. Would you like to help clean it up?” This is supposed to impress the child because after all, the parent has avoided appealing to her own authority. She merely offers a description of what happened, non-hierarchical invitation to “connect” over the new task, and so much shrugging of shoulders: “I don’t make the rules here! I just follow them.”

But of course, it’s also bollocks. A parent can take a kid to the park who has thrown his food on the floor. She just doesn’t want to. And she does make the rules— or, at least, she’s chosen to adopt the rules, supplied by the parenting experts. But here is the parent straining to act as therapist, divesting herself of moral judgment, refusing to chide bad behavior, pre­tending her hands are tied.

“Anyone Have Advice about How to Get a Three-Year Old to Accept the Consequences?”

If someone wanted to kill all human desire to reproduce—to achieve, at last, this thing environmentalists call “population control”—steering readers to the Slate Parenting Facebook group might be a promising way to start.

Home to an educated, conscientious, liberal-leaning readership of eighteen thousand regular members, the Slate Parenting Facebook group provides a worthy terrarium in which to observe highly educated, pro­gressive, therapist-directed parents as they air dilemmas and seek advice from their equally flummoxed counterparts. These preppy parents have read stacks of parenting books and listened to thousands of hours of par­enting podcasts. Many adhere to “gentle parenting,” a therapy-infused model that requires parents to give choices instead of orders. (Parents get plenty of orders; children get none.)

These parents are “intentional” about everything. Even before they had kids, they adopted a parenting philosophy. So does it work?

The short answer is no. The longer answer is noooooooooooo.

Believing their kids may have “sensory” issues, they hunt for cumu­lous fabrics, snip the tags from every undershirt. When their kids express aural discomfort at the roar of a toilet, the parents search for a school with a quieter flush. They avoid shampooing the hair of kids who don’t like water poured over their heads, while their kids grow more determined in their refusal to bathe.

“Anyone have advice about how to get a three-year-old to accept the consequences?” writes Airin, one frustrated parent. “When he hits, kicks or yells (no provocation), how do I get him to calm down? I’ve tried ad­dressing his feelings and time outs. But when he goes into time out, he gets very destructive and violent (throwing anything he can lift) or at­tacks me if I’m there.”

Another parent volunteers: We have a dedicated “ ‘calming corner’ with pillows, feelings posters and cards, in her bedroom and in the living room.” Another recommends: “We use apology chores,” so that the violent child never has to face the pain of being “isolated or forced to hold still.”

A parent identified as “Rico” offers: “With our kid, we use an ‘I don’t like it when you hit me so I’m gonna stand up and stop playing for a while’ approach.”

These parents proudly declare that they avoid ever saying “no” to their children. They regard time-outs as cruel and “triggering.” Isolating a child in his room? Emotionally hurtful—and out of the question.

Even in response to violence, they offer almost no correction and ab­solutely no judgment. Instead, they announce their preferences: “I don’t like it when you hit, so I’m gonna stand up.” De gustibus non est disputan­dum. I don’t prefer to be hit; others may differ.

But does this sort of announcement end the disruption? “He often throws himself down and cries after that, but that’s just part of the learn­ing process,” Rico writes.

I have never interviewed the man who bought a Siberian-Bengal tiger and tried to raise him in a Harlem apartment. But the parents of Slate often sound like I imagine he must have felt: lowering raw chickens on a pole through an open window so as not to displease the feral creature he’d long since lost the ability to control.

Even in response to violence, Gentle Parents offer little correction and ab­solutely no judgment

“Have you tried any sensory items to help him regulate, like a weighted Stuffie or a blanket?” asks another parent. “I would gently tackle him into his room and stay with him, wrapped around him, until he started to come down the other side of his tantrum.” It’s easy, really. Just tackle him and hold him down for twenty minutes or so. (Here’s hoping you’ve got nothing cooking on the stove, and no other kids who need tackling!)

The Slate parents are rich in kids who lash out like Sonny Corleone when a kid at preschool chooses a toy they wanted—or does nothing at all. “What do you do for a 3.5 yr old who doesn’t seem to care about any consequences? He is super bright and has some mild sensory issues. I have always tried to be a gentle parent (absolutely no physical punish­ment) though I know I yell way too much,” a parent named Hollie writes, a little abjectly. “He is super strong. I’ve tried time outs but I end up hav­ing to hold him the whole time and generally end up getting punched in the face (usually accidentally),” she says, oblivious to her own battered mommy syndrome.

“I take away things like screen time. He just doesn’t seem to care. For instance he jumps on our couch, super unsafe. He also will get mad and throw things at his sister like matchbox cars. Am I raising a sociopath? Help!”

She intends this as a joke. One hopes the next kid to get beaned by a metal matchbox car finds it funny. As melee weapons, they work well—as projectiles, even better. But don’t imagine mom ever takes away the matchbox car or sends Junior to his room. (At most, she takes away the expensive gaming screen she supplies.)

Notice, too, the only grounds the mom believes she has for objection to her son’s bad behavior is that it’s “unsafe” for the monster himself. She can’t possibly say, “Don’t jump on our furniture; you’ll break it.” Or even, “Don’t jump on things that don’t belong to you.”

That this child will one day break someone else’s sofa without regret—having never been told that it is wrong, that he can and must stifle the urge to destroy—feels like the inevitable next act of the psychodrama.

Could Mom benefit from the guidance of an expert? Of course not. She already has one. “Please note that I have worked with an OT for the stuff,” she writes. “He sleeps with a compression sheet and we do lots of activities for his sensory stuff. The quarantine has completely changed his schedule, but I had these issues before. I’d love any advice on how to get his attention and let him know I mean business.” Yes, preferably be­fore he maims his sister.

But siblings or bystanders are rarely considered. Their rights never cross mom’s mind. Empathy is nothing if not monogamous, everybody else—sister, Grandma, other kids at school—be damned. That’s just Levi’s inner turmoil spilling out!

“Anger can often be anxiety or shame in young children,” opines an­other mom in response. Indeed. You can’t correct a presumptively trauma-filled tot. And if you send him to the isolation of a (toy-packed) room? That may be enough to inflict childhood trauma.

Gabor Maté claimed this explicitly, during his appearance on Joe Ro­gan’s podcast. Appalled by the idea that a parent would compel an angry child who lashes out to sit by himself until he calms down, Maté offers a perfect encapsulation of therapeutic parenting’s view of disci­pline: “Notice the assumption: anger in a young child is neither normal nor acceptable. . . . [The child] is not to be accepted for who she is, only for how she is. Here’s the problem: even if the parent wins the behavior-modification game, the child loses. We have instilled in her the anxiety of being rejected if her emotional self were to surface.”

Maté then catastrophizes the consequence to the child of even this mild imposition of discipline:

When you repress healthy anger because you’re programmed to do so because some parenting expert told your parents that an angry child should be banished from your presence . . . then they learn to suppress their anger all their lives. That represses the immune system. Now, the immune system turns against you or it cannot fight off malignancy.

Send a kid to his room, wreck his immune sys­tem for life.

When one Slate mom, Liz, writes to complain that her “emotional roller coaster” of a five-year-old daughter often collapsed in screaming fits in the weeks after she broke her arm, Slate parents rush in with diag­noses. “It sounds like she is having a trauma response,” opines Brian.

“Remember, Post Traumatic Stress is a normal reaction to an abnormal traumatic event.” (No, actually, it isn’t; resilience is the normal response.)

“This may be a sensory issue for her, combined with difficulty regu­lating emotions,” suggests Maggie. She suggests the likely culprit is “ADHD or another neurodivergence.” It’s not just her arm that’s broken. She has a psychological problem, of that Slate parents are sure; they just haven’t decided what diagnostic code to offer insurance.

Occasionally, it dawns on a Slate parent that the therapeutic approach might be part of the problem. A self-described “gentle parent,” Heather writes that every morning her six-year-old daughter refuses to get dressed, complaining that her clothes are too rough, demanding others. And yet Heather writes: “I was out of town part of last week and she got dressed with no issues for my husband on school days so I think it’s all related to me.”

Dad levels with the kid, issues a direct order, expects the kid to com­ply, and—voila!— she can. Where is the Enigma cryptology team when we need it?

In the end, Mom dislikes being with her daughter. “I hate every morning,” Mom writes in a moment of honesty.

It’s inevitable, isn’t it? The people who make parenting look exhaust­ing aren’t all that fond of the kids they’ve raised.

If it’s any consolation— the rising generation’s employers and colleagues aren’t smitten with them, either.

BAD THERAPY goes on sale Feb 27 wherever books are sold. Pre-order NOW.

Subscribe now

Share

I’m so excited that my first Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, has landed in the pages of the Daily Mail. Find it here. For my American readers, the word in the lede is “spanked.” (“Smacked” is the Britishism.)

On Monday, I’ll be dropping one of my favorite excerpts right here, exclusively on the Truth Fairy.

And on Tuesday, February 27, Bad Therapy will be available for immediate purchase wherever books are sold! (Or pre-order here now).

It’s been a long journey. Thank you, dear Readers, for your support. I have a dizzying schedule of podcasts and media appearances coming up. I’ll be sure to post them all right here.

I look forward to your reactions.

xo,

Abigail

Share The Truth Fairy

This time around, I wasn’t taking any chances.

Four and a half days spent pounding tea, locked in a sound booth at Village Studios, where Stevie Nicks and the Counting Crows once recorded. It seemed like the appropriate place to raise a little hell.

Here’s a preview: BAD THERAPY: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. Audiobook, recorded by yours truly. Enjoy!

(Crazies - you know where to find me. ;) )

xo,

Abigail

Pre-order BAD THERAPY here.

Subscribe now

Share

The first time I felt myself tipping into bitterness, a small-minded woman had barred my daughter from a youth soccer team. It wasn’t a competitive league. I had registered early. But, suddenly and incomprehensibly, there was no room on the roster for my eight-year-old.

In youth soccer, you apply to a league and only later are assigned to a team and learn which parent has been appointed coach. In my case, the woman chosen to lead my daughter’s team had also barred me from attending a local book event and loudly denounced me in our community for having written Irreversible Damage in the months prior, which is the only reason I understood what had happened. There I was, struggling to explain to a tearful eight-year-old whose every laugh makes a marionette of my heart, that this was not her fault. That she was a great soccer player and we’d find a way for her to play. But also—just as importantly—that while we were being punished because of me, I hadn’t actually done anything wrong.

Share

Like those who opposed the lockdowns, the masking of children, vaccine mandates, our southern border and immigration policy, or Woke racial intolerance, those of us who applied reasonable skepticism to pediatric gender transition were treated shabbily. The coercive tools of social ostracism and censorship were wielded against us with smug pride. Then, in 2023, our positions became conventional wisdom, but we were still unacceptable. It was all so obvious, suddenly, even to members of the MSM.  They’d arrived where we’d long been, but seemed to think they’d discovered the land by dint of their own wisdom, preferring to ignore the grotesque inhabitants.

All of a sudden, in 2023, our positions were conventional wisdom, but we were still unacceptable.

Conservative influencer Matt Walsh had a tweet a few weeks ago, venting a sentiment widely held on the right, which goes something like this: You liberals finally agree with us? Well, what took you so long? And no apology to conservatives? You make me sick. We’ve been yelling this stuff for years!

Of liberal author Fareed Zakaria’s CNN segment on the decline of elite American universities, Walsh tweeted:

Many on the Right are giving this guy credit for this monologue. He’s saying what conservatives have been shouting from the rooftops for decades, yet he never acknowledges that fact or apologizes for ignoring us.

A recent letter to the Wall Street Journal, lodged a similar charge against billionaire liberal, Bill Ackman, for what the writer considers Ackman’s johnny-come-lately campaign to hit back at Harvard in the weeks after revelations of its alarming antisemitism and general moral mediocrity. 

American Jews have a left-leaning political history that has been hard for me to understand, but Mr. Ackman is the epitome of capitalism at work. How could he have missed the decadeslong movement of Harvard—and most of higher education—toward its antisemitic, anticapitalist and anti-American philosopher of today?

This is an understandable reaction; I’ve felt its tug more times than I can count. The transparently reckless progressive policy vision should have been a nonstarter with centrists and liberals. It didn’t take a PhD to know that cutting the breasts off teen girls in mental distress was a disastrous failure of psychology and medicine. Or that mandating social isolation for children and teens during a pandemic that didn’t threaten them would harm their emotional and intellectual development.

Or that unrestricted illegal migration would cause the collapse of cities and the social safety net. Or that hamstringing law enforcement would invite an explosion of crime that would primarily victimize the underprivileged. Or that letting American kids use Chinese social media apps was handing the CCP the H-bomb of psychological warfare. Or that DEI bureaucracies making “white” and “whiteness” into epithets represented a dangerous and depraved descent into open racism.

Were we supposed to wait patiently until the New York Times and The Atlantic lazily gathered the gumption to do their jobs? Or were we to speak up and stoically accept our due stigma? And now, after the foreseeable catastrophes have been laid bare, must conservatives pretend that no one could have seen it coming? Or worse, play cheerleader to liberals for finally—finally—waking up to a disaster that should have been easy for them to prevent?

Not cheerleaders, no, but perhaps not elementary kids screaming “no fair!” either. And here is the pill: Bitterness is something we shouldn’t indulge. Turning away fresh recruits for their late and uncertain arrival is something that perhaps a winning army can afford. That is not where we are. We who are raising American children find ourselves today in very different circumstances.

Turning away fresh recruits for their late and uncertain arrival is something that perhaps a winning army can afford. That is not where we are.

Anyone who’s been paying attention knows, this civilization is in desperate need of a rescue mission: from those who would teach our kids to hate their bodies and to hate this country. From those who pretend that any nation can survive the unimpeded invasion occurring along our southern border. From district attorneys who refuse to prosecute criminals out of an ideological marriage to “equity,” and now apply the same coddling to the pro-Hamas crowd openly defying our laws and vandalizing our national monuments.  If we can find new friends now to stand next to us, we ought to welcome them, and log the win. In a moment of emergency, we haven’t the luxury of behaving otherwise.

Share

We all wish that more Americans had understood the dangers of DEI earlier. None of us should ever have allowed “white” to become a dirty word. A country committed to racial equality ought really to have known better. And letting teenage girls harm their bodies in irreversible ways based on ineffable gender identities?  Was sounding the alarm even hard?

For some, it was. And the shallow gratification of “I told you so” does not actually advance any worthy goal. Our kids need a broad coalition of fighters for their future. And we won’t get that broad coalition if we force late arrivals to grovel or perform a Walk of Shame. Their need to save face is human and universal; allow for it.

Here is a humbling truth, which all conservatives must face: If you have been shouting anything from the rooftops for years, it is not to your credit that no one listened. That you did not change minds. That you did not form a winning alliance. That you instead earned attaboys online from the same crew who pledged you loyalty from the start. Bitterness is deeply unattractive; that may have been one reason the more rational side sometimes fails to win enough support.

Here is a humbling truth, which all conservatives must face: If you have been shouting anything from the rooftops for years, it is not to your credit that no one has listened.

We must be effective in defense of this country because our adversaries are remarkably so in its deconstruction. In just the last month, the pro-Hamas rallies shut down Grand Central Station, wrecked the Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Rockefeller center, blocked access to JFK airport right before Christmas and LAX right after, and defaced the Lincoln Memorial.  Christmas day, hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters chanting “Christmas is cancelled here” flooded the streets of New York City and clashed with police. They vandalized the office of Democratic House Representative Ritchie Torres, leaving him a baby Jesus doll soaked in red paint, and shut down the Oculus Transportation Hub at the World Trade Center.  And, yes, it bears remembering that these “protesters” gaze at a conflict between a gang of homicidal rapists and a peaceable democratic ally, and side unequivocally with the jihadists.

They want to reshape the character of this country—to make it more like Western Europe—where Christians tread quietly and no longer have kids, and even Orthodox rabbis remove their kippot before walking home from synagogue. Our adversaries want Christians to think twice about coming to Jews’ defense, or hosting an apolitical public Christmas celebration. We can’t allow any of this, for America’s sake.

Our kids deserve to tromp up the granite steps of the Lincoln Memorial and stare at the great man and not see his defacement. We must not allow our kids to be force-fed lies about America by an educational system we subsidize. Our children deserve to be treated as capable, not made weak by a mental health establishment that seeks to stamp a diagnosis on every child. Our kids are not weak unless we make them so. Stand up for them.

And when we are treated shabbily by the bullies of the left, we must show our kids that you don’t let a nasty soccer coach wreck your good humor. You find a new team, strap on your shin guards and play on. (Or you sign up to coach the following year, make a hash of plays and strategy, and somehow wind up in second place.) To do all that requires that we find new friends where we can.

So maybe get a little less sleep in the New Year? Grab some coffee.  Do some pushups. Find your voice. Welcome new teammates. There is so much work to do. Didn’t we say we wanted lives filled with purpose? We got our wish.  We cannot afford to blow it.

Happy New Year! Let’s do this.

Share

Subscribe now

Coming Soon: Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.

Available for Pre-order Now. Pub date: Feb 27, 2024.

At age nine, Chloe Cole started early puberty. By age twelve, she was uncomfortable in her body; online influencers convinced her that she was in some sense really a boy. She came out to her parents as “transgender” and, not knowing what else to do, they took her to a therapist.

“They didn’t expect that by seeing a psychologist, I would just be funneled further and further into this pipeline,” Cole told a rapt audience at AmericaFest this week.

For Chloe, that pipeline meant puberty blockers at age 12 followed by cross-sex hormones. A medically unnecessary double mastectomy at age 15. By 16, she was filled with regret.

It’s easy to see this as one more ghastly entry in the macabre chronicles of gender medicine: incompetent therapists and unethical doctors deconstructing young girls’ bodies for reasons that seem alternately depraved, mendacious and confused.

But if you take a step back from the case of the detransitioners—young women shepherded into medical transitions they later came to regret—another image emerges. Not merely of therapists’ “affirming” teens’ transgender identity, specifically. But one more instance in which the Bad Feelings experts made adolescents’ bad feelings worse.

“[My parents] didn’t expect that by seeing a psychologist, I would just be funneled further and further into this pipeline,” Cole said.

Like a lot of teen girls who suddenly adopt a transgender identity, Cole’s mental health treatment preceded her gender confusion. She had been medicated for ADHD starting at age nine or ten—given escalating levels of stimulants that made her feel lousy and disconnected from her body and didn’t seem to help. She now believes ADHD was a misdiagnosis.

“In general, this model of making everything a condition—if a child is different in any way, if they’re not focusing in school, if they’re a little bouncy in class and they won’t sit in their seat—it takes the responsibility off of the adults to say, ‘Okay, let’s just medicate them. That’ll fix the problem,’” Cole told me.

Share

Writing my last book, Irreversible Damage, involved extensive interviews with many detransitioners and American families in general.  In the course of my research, I became aware of three things: First, that unprecedented numbers of American kids were undergoing therapy or on psychiatric medication. Second, that therapists’ diagnoses were often altering adolescents’ self-understanding. And, third, that large numbers of parents had become profoundly dependent on therapists to guide their parenting and “fix” their kids.

It wasn’t only ideologically-motivated “gender therapists” who were making mischief, reifying the idea in adolescents’ minds that they were really, truly transgender. Ordinary, well-meaning therapists were doing the same, not primarily for ideological reasons. Sometimes the therapists were simply following the guidance of their accrediting organizations. But just as often, affirming the adolescent – in place of treating her – was simply par for the course. That was simply what the therapeutic relationship with the teen patient had become.

Sure, I’ll call you ‘Sebastian.’ I can see why you feel Mom’s taking away your smartphone was emotionally abusive. Losing a beloved cat can be devastating; let’s talk about coping with your grief for the next few sessions. It sounds like having to move after seventh grade was traumatic.

This model of making everything a condition—if a child is different in any way, if they’re not focusing in school … it takes the responsibility off of the adults to say, ‘Okay, let’s just medicate them, ’ Cole said.

When faced with a surly teen who isn’t yours, one you must somehow keep engaged for a potentially interminable 50-minute hour, and for whose mistakes you bear no direct emotional consequences—it’s just so easy to validate their perspective. Her mother’s decision to take away the smartphone, her pet’s death, her parents’ move—how did they make you feel? Let’s talk about your pain, every week, for years.

The rising generation is swimming in therapy. Forty two percent of Gen Z—those born between 1995 and 2012—has been in therapy (more than any other generation). Forty two percent has a mental health diagnosis. One recent survey indicates the extent of diagnosis may even be more dramatic: 60 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 26 may have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

Perhaps most alarming, by 2016—long before the Covid lockdowns and well before American kids aged 2 to 8 were even on social media—almost 20% of these little ones had a diagnosed mental, behavioral, or developmental disorder.

They are receiving unprecedented levels of mental health treatment. Curiously, they also seem to be getting worse.

For well over a decade, teachers and school counselors have assumed the mandate (and curricula, and use of instructional time) to play shrink indiscriminately with kids, often styled as “Social Emotional Learning.” Parents stopped trusting their own judgment and family traditions regarding childrearing, instead relying on shrinks to guide their parenting. And we all allowed our kids’ (largely normal) bad feelings to be pathologized by the those in the bad-feelings business.

Gen Z is receiving unprecedented levels of mental health treatment. They seem only to be getting worse.

Harrison Ford made this point nicely in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, in February of last year. A reporter had said to Ford, “Your fans online have done some armchair diagnosis, looking at things you’ve said about being shy in social situations and some of your talk show appearances. Some assume you’ve wrestled with social anxiety disorder. Are they onto something?”

“Shit,” he said. “That sounds like something a psychiatrist would say, not a casual observer.”

For the rising generation, the language of psychopathology provides the lens with which they understand themselves and each other. Where my generation would “self-diagnose” with laziness or procrastination, the rising generation might see complex post-traumatic stress disorder or ADHD.

But while laziness can be obliterated by a change of attitude and habits, a mental health diagnosis demands treatment or accommodation. Trying to lift yourself out seems futile. And so, unsurprisingly, the generation lavishly labeled with mental health diagnoses also has the least faith in its ability to meet even routine challenges or turn their lives around.

“No. I don’t have a social anxiety disorder,” Harrison Ford told the reporter. “I have an abhorrence of boring situations. I was shy when I first went onstage—I wasn’t shy, I was fucking terrified. My knees would shad so badly, you could see it from the back of the theater. But that’s not social anxiety. That’s being unfamiliar with the territory. I was able to talk myself through that and then enjoy the experience of being onstage and telling a story with collaborators.”

“No. I don’t have a social anxiety disorder,” Harrison Ford told the reporter. “I have an abhorrence of boring situations. I was shy when I first went onstage. But that’s not social anxiety.”

A case of the fantods. To overcome those, Harrison Ford didn’t require an expert or a prescription. He needed only to summon the guts.

Imagine if he’d been born in 2012 instead of 1942.  

Pre-Order my new book, BAD THERAPY: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.

Share

Subscribe now

BAD THERAPY arrives in ten weeks and – first of all – THANK YOU.  This book took me almost two years (and hundreds of interviews) to write.  I’m so excited for you to read it.  And I could not have done it without your support.

I started BAD THERAPY, as I always do, with a question: Why is the rising generation suffering so mightily? Why did a generation who had seen no world war, no great depression, no 9/11—plunge into a bottomless well of despair? They received far more parental attention than we - their Gen X parents - did. And we showered them with more mental health resources – preventive care, treatments and interventions – than the children of any generation prior. They ought to be the picture of mental health. Instead, they seem to be the essence of psychological frailty.

I hypothesized that the answer to this question had to do with the way kids were being raised. I even sold a book proposal with that central argument. But no hypothesis should remain entirely unscathed after a serious investigation. And after hundreds of interviews, I understood that I’d only been half right: the rising generation had been raised differently. But that difference was not the result of their parents’ flawed judgment so much as it was parents’ willingness to be guided by mental health experts and to serve up their children for the experts’ evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment.

The rising generation is awash in therapeutic intervention, and it isn’t helping. Still, I resisted the notion that those interventions could possibly be making things worse.

Read more

Days after the terror group Hamas committed the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, American universities erupted—in celebration.

Stanford students waved their support for Hamas in bedsheet flags draped on campus. “The Illusion of Israel is Burning,” one said. 

“Handala is returning by any means necessary,” another proclaimed—Handala being the personification of the Palestinian people.

At Harvard, 31 student groups signed a letter deeming Israel “entirely responsible” for butchery that took place over last weekend. Read that again. The day after the deadliest attacks on Jews since the Second World War—with whole families burned alive, babies mutilated, and young women raped and tortured—hundreds of students at Harvard signed a statement saying that Jews had brought this on themselves.

Share

At elite college campuses across the country, chapters of the Students for Justice in Palestine celebrated Hamas’s act of “resistance.” At the University of Virginia, SJP referred to the butchery—“the events of yesterday,” as they put it in an October 8th letter—“are a step towards a free Palestine.”

Then came the rallies. SJP called for students to mobilize in support of the “resistance” in Palestine. A rally invitation at the University of Washington included a remarkably explicit graphic: silhouettes of Hamas terrorists paragliding into Israel, on their way to murder Jewish civilians.

With the rare exception of the University of Florida, fortunate to be led by former United States Senator Ben Sasse, university presidents met these student loyalty pledges to Hamas and celebrations of the massacre with silence. Or with a refusal to wade into the issue. Or with gutless word salads that invariably failed to condemn the student groups, much less punish their members.

The hypocrisy of the universities’ sudden reticence when it comes to public affairs is particularly galling, considering how universities rushed to condemn the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the 2020 death of George Floyd, and, in 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Student celebrants of Hamas’s terrorism are not merely espousing an unpopular view. They proclaim support for a genocidal organization.

Just last year, days after the Russian invasion, Harvard University’s then-president Lawrence Bacow declared: “Now is a time for all voices to be raised. The deplorable actions of Vladimir Putin put at risk the lives of millions of people . . . Institutions devoted to the perpetuation of democratic ideals and to the articulation for human rights have a responsibility to condemn such wanton aggression.” So that none would doubt where Harvard stood, the university raised the Ukraine flag over Harvard Yard. “Harvard University stands with the people of Ukraine,” Bacow declared.

But in the days after the Hamas massacre of 2023, when hundreds of students on her campus were celebrating this act of “resistance,” Harvard president Claudine Gay’s arm had to be twisted into even condemning the atrocities, let alone the demonstrations in support of them. To date, she still hasn’t denounced the student groups. Instead, she has apparently decided that this was a good time to remind Harvard’s Jews that the pro-Hamas radicals on campus had a right to “free expression.”

A dean at the University of South Carolina opined similarly about the massacre: “I have lots of thoughts about global affairs. I tweet or publish them as a citizen and a philosopher. But as a dean, it isn’t my job to weigh in with my students on current affairs unless they are somehow disrupting the work of the college I oversee.”

Perhaps universities should refrain from weighing in on foreign affairs entirely. Why does Harvard need to take a side between Russia and Ukraine at all? Maybe you believe that we should put an end to all the virtue signaling—the ceaseless preening on everything from the Kyle Rittenhouse trial verdict to the affirmative action case at the Supreme Court to warnings against “cultural appropriation” on Halloween. (Heaven forfend any student on campus be caught wearing a sombrero.) With regard to the universities’ sudden embrace of humility, maybe you’re thinking: better late than never.

But something different is at work here, something far more sinister than the universities’ hypocrisy. It is the menace behind it. Hamas does not distinguish between soldiers and civilians, or between Israeli Jews and other Jews. Hamas official Ali Baraka exemplified the group’s fanaticism on October 11: “The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves. We consider our dead to be martyrs.”

That’s what the student rallies on campus cheering on Hamas are supporting: the genocide of Jews. The notion that the “martyrs” who kill Jews are heroes.

Student celebrants of Hamas’s terrorism are not merely espousing an unpopular view. They proclaim their support for a genocidal organization, repeat the talking points of a group pledged to kill all Jews, wherever it finds them.

Allowing students to rally in support of Hamas is more akin to allowing a Ku Klux Klan demonstration on campus, in the days after white supremacists had killed African Americans.

Note that this is nothing like a student rally to support Russia in its war with Ukraine; Russia does not pledge to kill Ukrainians wherever it finds them. Nor, despite the blood on its hands, has Russia ever committed atrocities against Ukrainian civilians in any way approaching what we saw on October 7.

Allowing students to rally in support of Hamas is more akin to allowing a Ku Klux Klan demonstration on campus, in the days after white supremacists had killed African Americans. What would Harvard do in that situation? It’s a ludicrous thought experiment on its face: We know precisely what Harvard would do, and how swiftly they would condemn the rallies, shut them down, punish the students involved, and rush to safeguard the lives of black students on campus.

Instead, American universities shrug while Jewish students on American campuses face students cheering for their murder. As one Jewish young woman cried to a professor, during yesterday’s University of Washington pro-Hamas rally, “How are you allowing this. They want us dead. Please.”

The professor is shown to whisper something to her while the pro-Hamas rally crescendos. You can’t hear what he says. But the statements American universities are making to Jewish students across the country could not be clearer: We will not protect you, they all but scream. You’re on your own.

Share

Subscribe now

Dear Friends,

I’ll be speaking at two university campuses this week.

Campus speech police are already losing their minds, as reported here.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Oct. 10):

Tickets (Free!) available here.

The University of Virginia (Oct. 11).

Tickets (Free!) available here.

I look forward to seeing you!

xo,

Abigail

I wanted you to be the first to see the cover of my new book, BAD THERAPY: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up (out February 27, 2024).

A single question motivates BAD THERAPY: Why does the generation that received the most therapy, the most mental health diagnoses, the most psychiatric medication also seem to have the worst mental health? How did a generation raised so gently come to believe it had experienced debilitating trauma? And when faced with tasks teenagers a generation ago handled with ease, why are so many of today’s young people falling apart? Why are they not able to do for themselves? Why are they not growing up?

BAD THERAPY is the product of hundreds of interviews with parents, teenagers, child psychiatrists, academic psychologists, sociologists, parenting coaches, teachers and school counselors. And what I learned is this: The experts are a big part of the problem. For more than a generation, our mental health experts have been treating healthy young people, making them sick, feeding the well into an unending mental health pipeline.

But we parents can fix this. We can act on the knowledge gained from tens of thousands of hours with our kids, family traditions, and our own judgment and reclaim our kids from the experts whose advice has made young people’s mental health so much worse.

I look forward to continuing this discussion with you, here on Substack!

And I will be speaking on campus, mid-October, at the University of North Carolina followed by the University of Virginia.  Details to follow.

Much Love,

Abigail

p.s.

BAD THERAPY is available for pre-order on Amazon as of today.

Photo by Yossi Aloni, for Makor Rishon.

I began my talk in a suburb of Tel Aviv last week, as I always do, by scanning the audience for trouble. In the second row, a tall woman sporting a flat-top and a decidedly non-binary aspect, stared fixedly at some middle distance, something apparently on her mind. A few questions in, she rushed the stage, backpack slung over one shoulder, arm extended like a jousting lance: “Mrs. Shrier! I was wondering if you would shake my hand.”

I thought I held still, but videos don’t lie: I hopped back in my seat, while I waited for security to wrestle her to the ground. “I am a person! I am not a disease!” she cried again and again, in an accent I know as well as my own: American.

Share

Does Israel have a Gender Ideology problem? From the many concerned parents of daughters who have contacted me over the last year, I gather it does. Gender Ideology is undoubtedly an American export, though that’s of little consolation to the frightened parents in Ra'anana and Tel Aviv—or for that matter, so many cities in Spain and France and elsewhere across the West where young people watch “Euphoria” and march for George Floyd.

So why poke the bear? Why travel to Tel Aviv, one of the world’s most left-leaning cities, where hundreds marched against the publication of my book, Irreversible Damage, in Hebrew, blaring horns and pounding bass drums? Why speak out in leftist hotspots like Tel Aviv—so many people asked me—when there are perfectly rational cities like Jerusalem, where I could meet fans and make common cause? The questioners often imply the reaction is my fault—that I am deliberately causing trouble.

A mistake lies at the heart of this question, a false conceit borne of metaphors like tides, and pendulums and fashion fossils like bellbottoms: That if we all stay quiet, the trans extremism will swing back or die down, like feathered bangs and breakdancing.

Gender Ideology is not a pendulum, and it will not swing back with a little help from inertia. Gender Ideology is a fundamentalist religion—intolerant, demanding strict adherence to doctrine, hell-bent on gathering proselytes. I do not here use the term “religion” metaphorically or lightly.

Gender Ideology is a fundamentalist religion—intolerant, demanding strict adherence to doctrine, hell-bent on gathering proselytes.

Induction into this religion begins with a baptism: the selection of pronouns and often a new name, greeted with all the celebration (and more) of a conversion. It evangelizes aggressively: through social media influencers, who claim to know a teen’s truest self better than her parents and to love that teen so much more than they ever could. Therapists, teachers, and school counselors play evangelist to numberless kids at American school.

There’s no physical evidence that any of us possesses an ethereal gender identity, of course. It may actually be disprovable; there is a good deal of evidence against it. No matter. The adherents take it on faith. The notion that each of us is born with a gender identity, utterly separable from our physiology, known only to us, imagines gender identity as the secular version of the ‘soul.’

Gender ideology is policed by blasphemy laws. Gender identity is the secular version of the ‘soul.’

Gender Ideology is policed by blasphemy laws – like those passed in California and New York, which assign criminal and civil penalties to healthcare workers who intentionally misgender patients and landlords who intentionally misgender tenants. And outside of statutory law, most social media services will quickly exile you if you’re caught blaspheming (ie. misgendering, deadnaming et al.). College campuses enforce these blasphemy laws with such smug severity, they are rarely violated. Much as the instances of public blasphemy in Mecca round down to zero.

Adherents to the gender orthodoxy reserve their greatest ire for apostates, “detransitioners,” those who once identified as ‘transgender’ before reversing course and resume identification with their biological sex. The level of ostracism and hatred detransitioners face in America today would be familiar to anyone who has tried to leave a close-knit orthodox faith community.

And, finally, Gender Ideology is full of holidays—one or two in every calendar month, except August. (No need for a celebration - it seems - when there is no school.) These are regarded with all the sanctity of religious festivals. As in, “I can’t believe Abigail would schedule her talk just before Pride Month.” All major institutions are expected – or is it compelled? – to celebrate Pride by changing their logos to incorporate the look of the Pride flag. They don’t do that for any other holiday – not even Christmas.

All of which is to say, Gender Ideology is not a tide, and it will not turn with the gravitational pull of the moon.

Its adherents were willing to threaten every venue in Tel Aviv that dared host a talk by me and demand that Israel’s few dominant book chains refuse to carry my book. (Amazon commands a negligible slice of the book market there.) Much like the Amazon and Spotify employees in America who quit over the companies’ refusal to delete my book or interviews, it is insufficient for adherents to criticize me or decline to read my book themselves: they demand a world in which no one can hear my sacrilege, read my writings, or obtain my book.

All of which is to say, Gender Ideology is not bellbottoms or feathered bangs. It is no pendulum, and it will not swing back with a little help from inertia. It is not a tide, and it will not turn with the gravitational pull of the moon.

That isn’t bellbottoms. It’s not even similar to other raucous debates in America, like those over abortion or gun control.  When Gender Ideology remakes American institutions in its image and polices their language, it represents the establishment of Shariah Law. Societies policed by religious law don’t abandon it on their own.

So why do so many Americans believe this ‘tide’ will turn? Because the adherents excel at deceit.

Consider, in the last year, the moments in which Liberal and Left publications like New York Times appeared to have broken ranks, finally allowing publication of important pieces that defended J.K. Rowling three years after she was pilloried across the globe for daring to reject gender orthodoxy. Or the recent pieces admitting the risks of gender medicine, two and half years after my book pointed out those same risks, and more than a year after England, Finland, France and Sweden all halted or curtailed pediatric gender treatments because of them. These pieces do not represent the start of genuine debate at publications that all but refused it, and they ought not to be misinterpreted as such.

They are a pawn sacrifice, offered with an eye toward winning a larger war. Conservatives like Tucker Carlson, who one once hosted the highest-rated cable news show among both Republicans and Democrats, placed pressure on establishment media in the form of millions of viewers. When enough heat gathers in the kitchen, even the New York Times must crack open a window.

So why do so many Americans believe this ‘tide’ will turn? Because the adherents excel at deceit.

But Tucker is gone, banished from cable news, and the true believers who were never interested in debate will insist their publications turn away from it once more. They tie off a limb when they must, cut loose from their more embarrassing losses, air token dissent, and return to fight another day. Consolidate their wins. Concede the absolute minimum, and only after it is so obvious that they are propounding a lie, that it would be ruinous to stay the course. This is a tactical pivot, not retreat, and it does not signify a new era of real debate on these issues in mainstream media or elite institutions.

When I published Irreversible Damage three years ago, I predicted that medical malpractice lawsuits would end the social contagion and irresponsible disaster of pediatric gender medicine. I’m no longer so sure. As of now, too few doctors are willing to testify in trials. Always the same handful of names—the courageous and honorable few—against a growing legion of ideologue “experts,” newly-minted and prepared to die on the sword of ideas so fanciful, only the True Believer could hold them.

Subscribe now

If Gender Ideology (or Wokeism -- that constellation of extreme, academically-birthed progressive orthodoxies -- more generally) were a pendulum , DEI administrators hired in staggering numbers, would be let go. Conservative faculty would be recruited by academic departments, and conservative students, wooed to campus with new programs. States like California would repeal laws that allow male felons to self-identify into women’s prisons. Girls would again be permitted to flourish on the field and in the Olympic pool, and made safe in their changing rooms once more.

We aren’t likely to see those reversals. Not until concessions are compelled by those with equal conviction in counterpoise.

They are the stakes. I speak to audiences to the tune of a ticking clock: so many gender evangelists graduating medical school and law school, attaining degrees in social work, and ascending to the bench.

So no, I don’t love the sensation of young people screaming in my face. But there is something I fear more than the furor of hundreds of zealots, blaring horns and banging bass drums: the world they aim to create, where truth finds no foothold and fairness, no purchase.

Subscribe now

Share

If you live in a more sensible state, don’t feel complacent. These ideas are being exported nationally and California’s politicians are explicitly inviting young people—minors—to to flee their home states for California if they can’t get the gender transitions they crave at home.

All of this is done in the name of “LGBTQ,” but kids affiliating with LGBTQ will be among the worst victims.

Thank you, again, for all of your support—and for making this type of work possible. Please share this broadly—it’s free. It’s important that this story is told nationwide.

Much Love,

Abigail

On a Saturday night in South Los Angeles, cars pull up and idle along the side streets of Figueroa, high beams ablaze, so that the drivers can get a good look at “the girls.” The women stand three astride in the middle of the street, in pasties and G-string bikinis under fishnet dresses. Draped over their shoulders are unzipped coats; even in temperate L.A., the night’s January chill is biting. In seven-inch Lucite heels, they teeter toward the driver of each car the way you might walk barefoot across gravel. Less than a block away, their pimps keep company on a sidewalk corner, in hoodies and loose jeans, watching their quarry, awaiting the payout. Absent is the one thing that might typically break up the party: a police car.

In early January, I joined Erin Wilson and Stephany Powell on a tour of “the track” on Figueroa, one of California’s busiest prostitution areas. For decades, Wilson, who volunteers for the anti-trafficking organization Journey Out, and her mother, Powell, have worked to combat human trafficking in Los Angeles and to help women and child victims escape this brutal world.

Subscribe now

In our postfeminist era, prostitution is so often idealized—“sex work is work”—that it’s easy to overlook the gruesome reality of what it means to have a pimp, an arrangement closer to slavery than to any legitimate job. “The horror stories I could tell you about [prostitutes] being beaten and being choked and being burned and being gang raped,” said Vanessa Russell of Love Never Fails, an anti-trafficking nonprofit based near Oakland. “And the PTSD and all the mental health, the trauma bonding, the psychotic breaks. Maybe you’re somebody who likes to have sex more than once a day. But nine to 21 times with different guys, some that are like 90 years old that smell?”

“Nine to 21 times over what period?” I ask.

“One day,” she said. “That’s healthy living? I don’t think so. The body is not even made for that. Like the pelvic inflammatory disease that you see.” She ticks off the ways a woman’s body is subjected to microbial assault: the STDs, yeast infections, and UTIs that are frequent among the women she sees. Their hospital records prove, she says, that the human body is “not meant to have that much activity going on. And then the girls that are out there—where they’re being sold—they don’t even get to take showers in between.”

While the last few decades have seen an increase in human trafficking, women at all three of the anti-trafficking groups I spoke with across California agreed: nothing compares with the stunning rise in trafficking they’ve witnessed in recent months. Powell, formerly a sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Vice Division, knows the city’s streets intimately. Over the last six months, the number of prostitutes has doubled, she says. “On Figueroa, between 68th and 75th, in an hour, you might see about 30 girls out there. Now, you can see 60 to 65 girls in an hour.”

Over the last six months, the number of prostitutes has doubled, Powell says. “On Figueroa, between 68th and 75th, in an hour, you might see about 30 girls out there. Now, you can see 60 to 65 girls in an hour.”

What shifted? The answer, the anti-trafficking advocates told me, is Senate Bill 357. Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in July, the measure decriminalized loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution. The bill did not officially take effect until January 1 of this year; but, from the moment it became law back in July, these women say, the on-the-ground reality changed. “The minute the governor signed it, you started seeing an uptick on the streets,” Powell said. “And on social media, the pimps were saying: ‘You better get out there and work because the streets are ours.’”

The pimps were right: police stopped making arrests for crimes that would no longer be charged. The anti-loitering statute had provided the grounds for officers to question women and children whom they suspected might be trapped in a prostitution ring. “As a police officer, you need probable cause to stop and investigate,” Powell explained. “So if I have a law that says you can’t loiter in this area, with pasties and a G-string, flagging down cars, I could stop you for that because you’re loitering. But if I just say I’m stopping you because you look kind of young, that’s a little weak. So, it takes away a tool.” Without the statute, police hands were suddenly tied. Henceforth, questioning the girls—and potentially provoking a violent confrontation with pimps—came to seem a Pyrrhic gamble, one that California’s police officers would now avoid.

Prostitution remains illegal in California. But police have lost significant ground in the effort to contain it, women at anti-trafficking nonprofits in the Bay Area, San Diego, and Los Angeles all emphasized. “The only time they have the right to engage and investigate is if they hear the transaction going on between the buyer and the exploited person,” said Russell, who works closely with the Oakland Police Department. “Which means it would have to be a sting operation where there’s an undercover officer posing as an exploitive person who can actually hear the transaction. Any other scenarios would not be grounds for the police to get involved.”

Sergeant Marcos Campos of the Oakland Police Department told me that his force rescued 24 underage girls from the streets in 2021. But in 2022, that number dropped to 14—most from before the law was signed. “Since, I believe, July, when we were officially told it passed, we have been directed by the district attorney’s office to not arrest for [statute] 653.22, which is loitering,” he said.

You might wonder, at this point, who actually benefits from SB 357. Sergeant Campos wonders, too. Not the communities, he said, for whom a rise in trafficking brings more gun violence, which often attends prostitution. Not the sex workers, many of whom rely on police officers for help in escaping their pimps. “I think if anything, it probably helped the sex traffickers the most,” Campos said.

“I think if anything, it probably helped the sex traffickers the most,” said Sergeant Campos of the Oakland PD.

Why would anyone propose such a law? Why would the California State Legislature pass it? I asked the bill’s author, San Francisco–based state senator Scott Wiener. The answer he gave is the one that he supplies for so many of the bills he authors: it was necessary to advance the rights of LGBTQ people. “If you are standing on the sidewalk with high heels, and you wear your hair a certain way, and you wear tight clothing, an officer can say, ‘I think you’re loitering with the intent to commit prostitution’ and arrest you,” Wiener said. “That is not how we should be doing things in the United States of America—arresting people for how they look,” he continued. “And when you do that, not surprisingly, it’s only certain kinds of people who actually get arrested: it’s trans women. It’s black women. . . . It’s an inherently profiling law,” he said. “Randomly arresting a bunch of black trans women for how they look is not protecting potential victims of human trafficking.”

But were the police indeed “randomly arresting a bunch of black trans women”? The anti-trafficking advocates I spoke with dispute this. For starters, Wilson, Powell, and Russell (all of whom are African-American) say that biological women and girls—not transgender individuals—constitute the vast majority of those trafficked. Nearly every report on human trafficking by global human rights organizations confirms this observation.

Subscribe now

Share

And if the women I saw on Figueroa are any indication, discerning which are involved in prostitution does not require sophisticated sartorial judgments but only two eyes and a brain. If a woman is wearing a G-string bikini in the middle of the street and if she’s flagging down cars—while men in dark clothes stand watch, as if holding an invisible leash—she is very likely to be a modern-day sex slave.

Russell, who has worked in tech for 20 years, became interested in combating human trafficking while teaching inner-city kids to dance. Twelve years ago, one of her students, aged 15, was raped in Hayward and then trafficked throughout California for about a year. The girl had no mother or father in her life. “She was being raised by family members. And someone did a strategy that’s called ‘Romeo pimping’ to get her to believe that they were her boyfriend. And then they introduced violence into the relationship,” Russell said. “And she ended up being sold by multiple exploiters throughout the Bay Area, in Vallejo, Southern California, and Oakland, and so on.”

Russell started Love Never Fails as part of a rescue mission for girls like her former student. “Twelve years ago, people didn’t even know what [human trafficking] was. There were all these myths about it being something that’s only happening to people from other countries. There were myths about, ‘slavery has ended here.’ And so I think we did a good job of demonstrating that no, it’s alive and well, and it’s happening here in the U.S. Eighty-three percent of all cases [within the U.S.] are of U.S.-born people.”

On my ride-along with Powell and Wilson in Los Angeles, just after 10 p.m.—before “the track” really gets going—I saw several lines of vehicles stretching around the block, each manned by a prospective client, waiting for his chance with one of the girls. At least 35 females worked the lines, most of them white or Latina. Many looked very young—under 18. I identified only one prostitute as transgender, though Powell noted that there were likely others at a second location on Western Avenue. Powell and Wilson told me that the traffic starts to pick up at 11 and peaks at midnight. As the hour neared 11, more and more women indeed appeared along Figueroa. But Powell and Wilson made certain that we left before midnight. After 11:30, the chance of gun violence erupting around the pimps escalates. We wouldn’t be safe.

In Oakland and in the San Diego area, Russell and Marisa Ugarte, a woman who runs an anti-trafficking group out of San Diego County, reiterated that the vast majority of the trafficked are female—African-American women and girls in Oakland, Russell was careful to specify. But there’s another population Russell has seen rise in the last few years among the ranks of the victims: “those that identify as LGBTQIA+.”

But there’s another population Russell has seen rise in the last few years among the ranks of the victims: “those that identify as LGBTQIA+.”

Scott Wiener’s social media antics might invite comparisons with those of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar. On Twitter, he has posted pictures of himself posing bare-chested at San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair, arms slung around men in bondage gear. During the monkeypox outbreak last summer, he approvingly tweeted an article encouraging gay men to cover up their bumps with Band-Aids and party on. And he threatened to make “Drag Queen 101” a mandatory part of K–12 education. (He later said that the threat was “tongue in cheek.”) Like other media-adroit, attention-seeking politicians, Wiener seems to delight in trolling his detractors.

Yet in a political era defined by legislative gridlock in Washington, Wiener stands out as one of the nation’s most effective lawmakers. In the six years since the Harvard Law grad took office, he has managed to author, and get passed, a series of radical gender- and sex-related bills. The measures have allowed biological male felons to self-ID their way into women’s prisons; assigned criminal penalties to health-care workers who fail to provide gender-affirming care; made California a “sanctuary state” for LGBTQ youth; expanded access to “gender-affirming care” for LGBTQ-identified youth, with and without parental approval; proposed jail time for health-care workers who “willfully and repeatedly” misgender a patient (i.e., refer to them in a way at odds with their gender identity); decriminalized the intentional exposure of a sexual partner to HIV; and reduced criminal penalties for sex offenders.

In a political era defined by legislative gridlock in Washington, Sen. Scott Wiener stands out as one of the nation’s most effective lawmakers.

Another Wiener bill, introduced in 2021, sought to decriminalize psilocybin and ketamine, but it failed to pass, partly because of the vocal opposition of former state senate Republican Melissa Melendez, who railed against easing restrictions on ketamine, a drug notorious for facilitating date rape. “I’m like, ‘Do you guys not see the agenda here?’ I mean, honestly, in the legislature, I think people came to just sort of accept those types of bills from him because he’s from San Francisco,” she told me in a telephone conversation. Undeterred, Wiener in December reintroduced a modified version of the bill.

In thoroughly blue California, where Democratic lawmakers have, since 2018, enjoyed a veto-proof supermajority in both chambers, Republican legislators are all but irrelevant and Governor Newsom is a legislative show poodle. It’s Wiener who calls the shots. Republicans and centrist Democrats are often frustrated in trying to oppose bills coming from the left.

As both a former senate aide and a California Republican Party strategist told me, Wiener, one of the country’s most prominent and outspoken defenders of LGBTQ rights, is uniquely difficult to oppose. “The moment you speak out against one of his bills, just like he does with me . . . he turns around and says: ‘You’re homophobic or transphobic. You’re this or you’re that,’” Melendez said. “I don’t care. You can call me whatever name you want. That doesn’t change the fact of what your bill does.”

Share

Wiener indeed typically argues that his politically charged gender- and sex-related bills are needed to fight invidious discrimination against LGBTQ people. “When Greg Abbott announced that the State of Texas was going to investigate and prosecute parents who had allowed their trans kids to get gender-affirming care, we knew that we needed to do something,” he said. “And then we saw it started to spread to other states and so we sprang into action and put together [the ‘sanctuary state’ bill] to make clear that if kids did not feel safe in Texas or other states, they could come to California, and we would do our best to protect them.”

But if some of Wiener’s bills seek to protect LGBTQ youth, they also represent a golden opportunity for a different group: adults who would take advantage of them. Wiener “is an extremely dangerous person, [so] extremely dangerous that I cannot believe that people cannot read in between the lines,” said Marisa Ugarte, who runs the anti-trafficking nonprofit, Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition, based in National City, just south of San Diego. Wiener is turning California, she warned, into “a sex-trafficking paradise.”

Wiener is turning California, Ugarte warned, into “a sex-trafficking paradise.”

Whatever the intent behind many of his bills, this does seem to be their effect: to make life better for sexual predators. Consider the Wiener-authored SB 145, a 2020 measure that amended the sex-offender registration laws in California, so that an adult having anal or oral sex with a minor could avoid getting placed on the sex-offender registry, as long as the child was at least 14 and the adult was no more than a decade older.

Defenders of the law have noted that there has long been judicial latitude in California in whether to place perpetrators of statutory rape on the sex-offender registry, if the crime involved was vaginal intercourse with a minor, the minor was at least 14, and the offender was within ten years of her age. Wiener’s bill extends such potential leniency in sentencing to statutory rape involving anal or oral sex. He has many times defended the bill as required to “end blatant discrimination against LGBT young people regarding California’s sex offender registry,” as his website declares.

“The only thing SB 145 did was to treat LGBTQ young people exactly the same way that straight young people have always been treated on the sex-offender registry, which is, if you’re within a certain age range, and there’s statutory rape that happened, then . . . judges have always had the discretion to decide whether someone should go on the sex-offender registry,” he told me.

Wiener is correct on the history: California law did treat 25-year-old statutory rapists differently, depending on the manner of intercourse that they had with their victim. That discrepancy called out for remediation: the same treatment should apply to anal sex with a minor.

But if the problem is inequality, why not place both sets of offenders on the registry? Why not amend the registry so that a 24-year-old who has sex with a 14-year-old will land on the sex registry, irrespective of whether that statutory rape is anal or vaginal? “My job is to get equality for my community so that these queer kids’ lives aren’t being ruined because of this discrimination,” he replied. “We’re just ending the discrimination. And if someone else wants to go in and try to change a law for everyone, they’re entitled to introduce that bill. No one has done that. All we’re asking for is equal treatment, and that is fundamental fairness. And it is not the gay kids’ responsibility to come in and change the registry for everyone in order to get equality.”

But if some of Wiener’s bills seek to protect LGBTQ youth, they also represent a golden opportunity for a different group: adults who would take advantage of them.

But who exactly are these “queer kids” and “gay kids” he’s talking about? He can’t be referring to the young gay teens who are the victims of felony statutory rape; those minors weren’t being discriminated against by the law—they were being protected by its bright-line insistence that they were sexually off-limits to predatory adults. When he refers to discrimination against “queer kids,” Wiener seems actually to be concerned with the law’s unfairness to the perpetrators of felony statutory rape. That is, he worries about a twentysomething adult—a “kid,” in his turn of phrase—who has sex with a minor.

Many of us would reasonably oppose the prosecution of, say, an 18-year-old high school senior arrested for a consensual sexual encounter with his 16-year-old boyfriend or girlfriend. But in California, that scenario doesn’t describe a felony, and does not require anyone to register as a sex offender. Wiener’s bill deals with older offenders who have sexual relations with 14- or 15-year-old kids. I asked him why those young teens shouldn’t deserve the protection of the law. “Then why aren’t you asking this of any other legislator?” he replied. “I mean, honestly, what you’re doing is you’re saying to the gay people who are just asking to be treated equally: Why don’t you change everything for everyone? And no one’s asking that of any straight legislator.”

The equality argument is Wiener’s classic sleight of hand, and he’s practiced it many times. When he authored the bill to eliminate the felony penalty enhancement for knowingly exposing a sexual partner to HIV, for example, he claimed the mantle of fighting the “discrimination” against those living with the disease. But, as a consequence of the bill, there is now no justice for a gay man infected with HIV by a sex partner who lied about it. The violation of his consent and bodily integrity now go unvindicated. Similarly, the violent reality of today’s pimp-dominated sex trade seems to have escaped Wiener’s legislative pen. As we have seen, the repeal of the anti-loitering statute is a boon to human traffickers, not their victims. “Has Wiener ever been down on Fig?” Powell said, referring to the sex trade on Figueroa. “Has he seen it? I really wonder.”

Subscribe now

Nowhere is the disconnect between Wiener’s talk of LGBTQ civil rights and the on-the-ground effects of his bills more obvious than with his “sanctuary state” legislation, SB 107. Enacted in January 2023, the law purported to turn California into a “state of refuge for trans kids and their families,” as Wiener declared on Twitter.

To understand the impact of this law, one should begin with the bill that it amends: California’s Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act (UCCJEA), which deters interstate forum shopping and parental kidnapping by making the jurisdiction in custody disputes the exclusive province of the home-state courts. Forty-nine of 50 states, including California, adopted this rule, voluntarily limiting the jurisdiction of their courts. For example, a father under investigation by Wisconsin Child Protective Services cannot simply flee with his kid to Michigan to have his custody determination adjudicated in a jurisdiction that he considers more favorable.

But Wiener’s sanctuary state bill now amends California’s UCCJEA, to allow California courts to exercise jurisdiction where the parents would otherwise be prosecuted in their home states for having medically transitioned their minor children. A reaction to the laws in various states that have criminalized gender medical treatments on minors, the bill halts the extradition of such parents for these home-state offenses and refuses to cooperate with out-of-state law enforcement for this purpose.

This provision may simply be unconstitutional: California courts’ refusal to cooperate with out-of-state subpoenas and extradition orders in this context may violate the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the U.S. Constitution, under which states are bound to enforce other states’ court orders. But there is another, arguably more mischievous, provision of the sanctuary state bill. It states: “A court of this state has temporary emergency jurisdiction if the child is present in this state and the child has been abandoned or it is necessary in an emergency to protect the child because the child, or a sibling or a parent of the child, is subjected to, or threatened with, mistreatment or abuse, or because the child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care” [emphasis added].

Read that carefully: a court may obtain temporary emergency jurisdiction over the care of a child if she has been “unable to obtain” gender-affirming medical care in her home state. The law seems to equate child abuse and neglect with failing to provide gender-affirming medical transitioning procedures to a child. At the very least, the law treats them as equivalent for the purposes of letting the court take jurisdiction over the care of the minor.

Does this bill promise what it plainly seems to—invite runaways to California from across the country to undergo gender medical transition? Does it permit California minors to liberate themselves from their families by coming before a judge, declaring that they have been blocked from obtaining “gender-affirming care” by unsupportive parents, and so escape their parents’ authority? I asked a criminal-law expert with experience working on federal-state joint criminal investigations to interpret the provision for me. “That means the kid is going to come to California and go to some nonprofit, which will bring the kid before the family court. And the court would say: ‘We find you’ve been abandoned, or you’ve been unable to get necessary health care. And so, we’re going to assume custody over you and let you do that,’” she said.

It’s a heckuva carrot to dangle in front of a teenager already fighting with a parent desperate to set limits: come to California, where we have the power to liberate you from possibly the only adults in your life devoted to your best interest—the only reliable source of guardrails, of the unfashionable but sometimes necessary-to-protect-them “no.”

“That means the kid is going to come to California and go to some nonprofit, which will bring the kid before the family court. And the court would say: ‘We find you’ve been abandoned, or you’ve been unable to get necessary health care. And so, we’re going to assume custody over you and let you do that,’” she said.

LGBTQ youth who arrive in California as a result of the bill and join the ranks of the homeless would be vulnerable to traffickers. If you build a “sanctuary state,” those seeking refuge will likely come, even if the refuge they seek is only from their parents’ rules. Homeless youth have long flocked to California. Wiener has helped make the state a magnet for many more.

In 2019, Wiener cosponsored the “LGBTQ Foster Youth Bill of Rights,” another law with disturbing implications. The bill granted LGBTQ-identified foster kids the rights, among other things, to abortions, contraception, and medical treatment for sexual assault, “without the knowledge or consent of any adult.” Included in this bill of new “rights” was this one: “the right to ‘access to computer technology and the internet.’” Suddenly, foster parents found it impossible to police the Internet activity of their foster kids.

The bill’s supporters claim that Internet access allows LGBTQ foster youth to obtain the peer support they need. Such support is necessary, they say, since so many of these kids are extremely vulnerable, lacking intact family. But that same vulnerability should make us extraordinarily wary of government handing numberless adults what amounts to a right of Internet access to these children. After all, so much harm comes to adolescents via fiber-optic cables. Why prevent foster parents—adults the state has at least vetted—from regulating foster kids’ communication with unvetted adults?

As a result of this law, adult sexual predators of all orientations in California gained greater access to child victims. The Internet has become a major tool of traffickers—particularly of boys, Ugarte told me. “Sextortion is the new trend, where there’s an avatar girl, and they befriend a boy, then send them to a chat room. And say: ‘Hey, you know, I like you. Why don’t you let me see your body? I want to see what you look like because you’re so handsome.’ He gets naked. And then once they do that, they go and tell him: ‘If you do not give us $5,000, we’re going to expose you in all the Internet. Meaning, in every single social media.’”

Wiener’s detractors often assign to him malign intentions, but guessing at intent is unproductive. The truth is: his intent doesn’t really matter. The effects of naïveté, ambition, or wrongheaded zeal for social transformation can be just as devastating as anything proceeding from darker motives. “I mean, he’s a smart guy,” a Republican former senate staffer said. On other issues—those that aren’t the hot-button social issues—“he likes to hear opposing opinions and likes to try and address concerns that people may have.” He’s even earned the reputation in San Francisco for being a moderate, supportive of real-estate developers (who have donated handsomely to his campaigns), for instance, and opposing far-leftists on the environment. Wiener is often “statesmanlike” and “easy to get along with,” the GOP staffer told me. And he would present a formidable candidate to replace Nancy Pelosi in the 11th District as her congressional career draws to a close.

But in terms of legislative influence, that would almost certainly be a step down. From his perch in America’s most left-leaning district, Wiener is already legislating for the country, establishing a model for ambitious progressive officeholders to follow, and inviting America’s misunderstood children to flock to the Golden State.

“The sex industry has historically capitalized on people who feel lost, people who feel unloved, people who feel unseen,” Russell observed. “And, you know, they do a great job, especially when they’re in the throes of it, of making that person believe that they’re having a good time. And then later, when they’re more stabilized, they’ll come back and go, ‘Oh my gosh, that was so horrible, it was one of the worst times in my life.’”

Subscribe now

Share

This story will appear in City Journal’s upcoming special issue on California, which will be published in March. Reprinted here with permission from City Journal.

Dear Reader,

I’ve been hard at work on a major investigative piece, which I will post here very soon. It is the product of a dozen interviews of legal experts, California police officers and politicians—including California Democratic state senator Scott Wiener—and a ride-along with a former LAPD (Vice Division) Sergeant.

And I’m almost finished with my book on the Gen Z mental health crisis — writing the final chapter now. It’s chock-full of original research and lots of surprise.

The Story of Gen Z is very different from what you’ve been told.

All good things, I’m excited to share with you. Thank you, dearly, for your support.

Warmly,

Abigail

Subscribe now

Share

“What’s the worst thing the activists ever did to you?” The question I’ve been asked most often is also the one I never answer. Because isn’t it obvious? It’s the times they managed to reach my children.

Yesterday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk suspended nearly a dozen journalists from his site, allegedly for publicly posting the real-time coordinates of his jet. The suspensions came one day after Musk says a car transporting his two-year-old son, X, was trailed by a man who blocked the car and then jumped on the hood.

Booting journalists from Twitter, even temporarily, is a dicey move, since the job they typically do lies at the heart of our most precious freedoms—those enshrined in our First Amendment. And of course, over the previous two weeks, Musk had declared himself a “free-speech absolutist” and offered a team of journalists that included me, led by Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi, to examine the “Twitter Files”: internal company messages from the past decade. A toddler in pajamas, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Elon, careened around the Twitter HQ unencumbered, alternatively enjoying cartoons on his iPad and watching the journalists with intense curiosity.

Share

We discovered evidence of a secret committee that systemically suppressed the visibility of disfavored speech: Feminists who dared define women as “adult human female,” like Megan Murphy and Kellie-Jay Keen, were kicked off Twitter. But critics of Covid lockdown policy like Physician and Professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, Jay Bhattacharya; and also gay women who pushed back on what they saw as the excesses of LGBTQ activism, like Jaimee Michell, were secretly suppressed. Entire user accounts were blocked from participating on the “trends” homepage or from ever being included in the feeds of those users who did not already follow the accounts. (This was the “Do Not Amplify” marker.)

The Twitter Files remain a vital revelation—evidence of a systemic attempt by Twitter executives to shape public debate and even political outcomes. (Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, among those whose account had been marked with a “Do Not Amplify” marker, was campaigning for re-election during the period her account was suppressed.)

Michell’s organization, ‘Gays Against Groomers’ was placed on a “Trends Blacklist,” curtailing the visibility of her tweets.

For political conservatives, Covid vaccine skeptics, and critics of gender medicine, the revelations came as proof that their voices had been suppressed sub rosa. Proof that Big Tech has been pulling hidden strings to manipulate the political outcomes of an evenly-divided country. Proof that millions of Americans who believed their perspectives were being unfairly disregarded weren’t in the grips of a paranoid fantasy.

Numberless pundits jumped to criticize Musk’s suspensions as no better than the previous regime’s. Novelist Gary Shteyngart quipped on Twitter: “I haven’t seen this much freedom of speech since the Soviet Union.”

For political conservatives, Covid vaccine skeptics, and critics of gender medicine, the revelations came as proof that their voices had been suppressed sub rosa. Proof that millions of Americans who believed their perspectives were being unfairly disregarded weren’t in the grips of a paranoid fantasy.

Journalist Julia Ioffe wrote on Twitter: “Banning speech critical of you under the veil of pseudolegality, all based on the rules you invented yourself to protect yourself from critical speech—well, there’s a reason the owner of this website so enjoyed speaking to Vladimir Putin.”

Musk claims the suspensions accord with Twitter’s new rules, freshly fashioned, to bar people from posting real-time locations of other people. His critics claim this is a pretext for silencing detractors of Musk himself.

Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chided Musk on Twitter: “You’re a public figure. An extremely controversial and powerful one. I get feeling unsafe, but descending into abuse of power + erratically banning journalists only increases the intensity around you. Take a beat and lay off the proto-fascism. Maybe try putting down your phone.”

Daily Mail columnist, Meghan McCain, wrote: “Elon is playing by his own set of rules and banning his critics like the last CEO. But I look forward to the next round of dramatic ‘twitter files’ showing how it’s only leftists who [censor] their critics & Elon is some kind of ‘free speech warrior.’”

Whether Musk is in fact a free-speech warrior or simply a self-interested CEO with incomprehensible power to shape public debate remains to be seen. But those of us who published pieces about the Twitter Files never claimed nor implied he was a “free speech warrior.” Musk himself did.

“What’s the worst thing the activists ever did to you?” The question I’ve been asked most often is also the one I never answer. Because isn’t it obvious? It’s the times they managed to reach my children.

The systemic suppression of anti-Woke speech on a social media platform that sets the news agenda for our largest media companies and hundreds of millions of users remains a critical revelation. When Nikita Khrushchev took power in the Soviet Union and in 1956, began revealing Stalin’s purges of his political enemies and ethnic cleansing, Krushchev did history a service whether or not his regime turned out to be more liberal and freedom-affording than the one it replaced. (Of course, it did; anybody’s would have.)

Musk is a strange man. A consummate jokester and an undeniable genius. He bought a company for which, by his own estimation, he paid three times what it was worth. “At least,” he said, when I and Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss asked him about this.

Subscribe now

“I thought this was important to the future of civilization,” he said. “I told investors that too…. And I thought this was important to the future of civilization to have a digital Town Square that people thought was fair and a level playing field and that, I don’t know, pro civilization essentially.” He told us he bought Twitter to protect the “expansion of consciousness.”

I pressed him on this. Were President Donald Trump’s tweets really necessary for the “expansion of consciousness?”

Musk is a strange man. A consummate jokester and an undeniable genius. He bought a company for which, by his own estimation, he paid three times what it was worth.

I expected Musk to back off of this claim. He didn’t. “If we are to understand more about, I don't know, the world, then we do have to have like freedom of expression and freedom of speech. If we constrain it, then we are limiting our understanding of the universe or of reality,” he said.

So is suspending the journalists, as Musk did in the last twenty-four hours, the first indication that the new regime is as bad as the old? Doubtful. That Musk is no “free speech warrior” after all? Maybe.

And perhaps Musk will ultimately resort to suppression of opinion he dislikes. In that event, he will face a flood of opprobrium, including from me. But Twitter’s new rule against posting real-time coordinates of famous people is a good one.

“Justice Sotomayor spotted at Koronet’s on Broadway dining alone!” Or, “Plane carrying AOC landing at La Guardia, Terminal B, in 15 minutes!” Does anyone imagine that that wouldn’t compromise their safety? Does anyone doubt that that might encourage some crazy to harm them? Does this kind of real-time doxxing help anyone except stalkers?

Subscribe now

Does anyone think our democracy could handle the result of that sort of open season on our public figures? We are unimaginably fortunate that Nancy Pelosi and Bret Kavanaugh weren’t murdered in recent attempts by unhinged men to invade their homes. As Americans, we are already deeply, painfully divided. Something resembling Civil War could easily erupt in this country over the assassination of a Justice or even a figure like Musk.

And no, this has nothing to do with “free speech,” that much misdescribed and battered freedom, best appreciated after it is already lost. The Twitter Files have already shown that ordinary Americans cannot possibly keep pace with technologists’ ability to quash and narrow public dialogue. But there is no “free speech” interest in the real-time trailing of anyone’s precise location.

When the crazies come for your children, you experience something captured by the phrase “she saw red.”

Maybe Elon Musk has ushered in a regime that will ultimately be as bad as the one before. Maybe it will be less bad but still subject to whims of the powerful. But for the first time, we know where to take our grievances: to one man, at last, an identifiable repository of responsibility. No more the hidden committee passing secret judgment. One man, explaining his decision to a critical public. And maybe that man will prove a grave disappointment. But this new policy doesn’t yet indicate that.

Because when the crazies come for your children, you experience something captured by the phrase “she saw red.” And you aren’t a rational thinker any longer, nor really a person. You’re just a mammal, red in tooth and claw. And you will do anything—anything—to protect your young.

Share

Subscribe now

As kids headed back to school this week, I noticed a peculiar trend: friends and acquaintances have started sending their kids to Japanese, French, and Spanish immersion schools—parents, that is, who do not speak those languages. I know a lovely family of American-born parents who is sending its children to mainland China to be educated, and another who selected a school offering a “Classical education,” where, in the mom’s words, “the kids are learning Latin and Greek by third grade.” (Mom never studied either language.)

Over the last two decades, matriculation at dual-language curricula in both public and private schools has skyrocketed. In 2000, there were roughly 260 dual-language programs in the U.S. By 2011, Harvard Graduate School of education estimated the number at 2,000.

The American Councils Research Center estimates that in 2010, there were about 1,000 dual-language programs in public-schools in the U.S. A decade later, there were more than three times that many. American parents are signing up their kids for instruction in languages they can’t speak and immersion in cultures to which they have no native connection.

Subscribe now

“We just thought it was good for our kids to have another language,” one Jewish woman who signed her kids up for a Japanese-immersion program, told me.

So what’s with all the sudden interest in making American kids bilingual? It’s better for their brains, parents tell me. We live in an increasingly international world, they say. Or maybe it just seems a way for educated parents to signal higher status. The American-born parents who are educating their kids in China are hoping—wait for it—the children might actually learn something; their elementary school kids just didn’t seem to be reaching their potential here in America.

American parents are signing up their kids for instruction in languages they can’t speak and immersion in cultures to which they have no native connection.

And here is the peculiar part: it isn’t exactly love for, or attachment to, a specific foreign culture that often seems to motivate parents’ desire to seal their kids inside it for 8 hours a day. They may send their kids to a full-day of Japanese, but the parents I’ve talked to aren’t learning Japanese themselves. They’ve never been to Japan. They aren’t serving Tonkatsu at home.

They don’t actually seem to want to raise Japanese kids. They may claim deep admiration for “Japanese aesthetics” or “Chinese discipline.” But most of the parents I’ve met could no more raise a culturally Japanese child than they could order conger eel stew off a menu in Kyoto. What they actually seem to be hoping for is to raise kids who are—dare I say—less American?

While the U.S. government does not officially track emigration out of America, it’s clear that more Americans these days are leaving the country. A 2016 estimate put the number at nine million—double the number it was in the previous decade. The most popular destination countries were in South America, but the trends for emigration out are up all over.

What they actually seem to be hoping for is to raise kids who are—dare I say—less American?

“For at least the past decade, North American Aliyah”—moving to Israel—"has remained at a rate of roughly 3,200 per year,” according to Israel’s Absorption Minister Pnina Tamano-Shata. “But after barely dipping in 2020,” when Israel issued severe COVID-based restrictions on immigration, “numbers spiked to more than 4,200 last year, an increase of nearly 33% over pre-pandemic numbers.”

At first, I assumed these trends were unrelated: More people were interested in foreign-language immersion programs, perhaps, because of the educational benefits of dual-curricula. As American education plummets in rigor, as educators talk incessantly about “social emotional learning,” but rarely what they are teaching in math or science, parents are searching for ways to inject gravitas into their children’s education. Adding Mandarin to a child’s list of courses gets that job done and quick.

Share

But then, I was at a back-to-school function where I ran into a friend just returned from Israel where she and her husband had taken their three kids for much of the summer. “Everything there is opening up, it’s exciting,” she said of her recent trip. “I hate to say it, because I love America, but everything here feels like it’s getting worse.”

Parents are often afraid to tell other parents why they’re making specific choices for their children—particularly if they’re afraid it will make you feel worse about yours. And some of those who are signing their kids up for foreign language and cultural immersion may simply be after the educational benefits of a second language or simply long-time admirers of French or Japanese culture based on novels, movies, or the trace seminar in college. But I suspect they don’t want their kids to be Japanese; they just want them to be a whole lot less American.

Share

I dislike parenting books as a rule and distrust most who hold themselves out as “parenting experts.” But I’m a sucker for excellence. And when a string of parents insisted to me that the smartest things they’d ever read about parenting were from MIT-educated physician and best-selling parenting book author, Leonard Sax—I got in touch.

Dr. Sax lectures internationally about raising kids, which he frankly thinks America, as a society, is doing poorly. American parents are not authorities in their own households and they don’t enforce even basic behavioral standards with their children, he says. “Fifty years ago, boys wanted to be men. But today, many American men want to be boys. And that there are many American men who want nothing more than to sit with their twelve-year-old son and play Call of Duty and games like that—they have no clue of the role of the father. They just want to give their kids a good time.”

Sure, American parents are lax. So what? It’s far deeper than a little lassitude, he explained. The culture we’re surrounding our children in—by so many metrics (mental health, physical fitness, drive)—it’s making them worse. “We now have very good research comparing American kids who speak English at home to immigrant kids who don't speak English at home,” he said. “American kids who speak English at home are much more likely to be anxious, depressed, disengaged, and experienced non-suicidal self-injury compared to kids who don't speak English at home, using speaking English at home as a proxy for engagement with American culture.” When he advises immigrant families in the United States, he tells them not to speak English at home.

When Dr. Sax advises immigrant families in the United States, he tells them not to speak English at home.

For decades, kids of American-born parents generally outperformed those of recent immigrants in school and had lower crime and better mental health related outcomes. But in recent decades, evidence began to emerge that length of time spent in the United States was associated with declining outcomes. This is the “immigrant paradox,” so named because it shocked the researchers at the time: the more time immigrants spent in this country, the worse their kids fared by all sorts of metrics.

“Being American-born and raised to American parents is now a major risk factor for bad outcomes,” Dr. Sax said. “Being American-born and raised to American parents is a major risk factor for anxiety, depression, disengagement from school non-suicidal self-injury and many other bad outcomes, being children of immigrants and not speaking English at home now predicts good outcomes.”

“Being American-born and raised to American parents is now a major risk factor for bad outcomes,” Dr. Sax said. “Being children of immigrants and not speaking English at home now predicts good outcomes.”

Surely there are reasons other than language that allow immigrant families in this country to thrive over American-born. Why would not speaking English in the home curtail any of the serious problems we’re seeing among kids today—anxiety, depression, obesity and the like? Foreign languages would seem incidental to whatever else the wiser immigrant parents are doing.

Wrong, Dr. Sax told me. America has become a “culture of disrespect” and English, a primary vector. Every cultural medium—your kid’s favorite webisodes on YouTube or Disney Plus—promotes to children the notion that parents are foolish and inept and that it’s admirable, cool, or smart for kids to dismiss, deride or countermand them.

This, he believes, lies at the heart of the mental health crisis among the rising generation. Parents can’t guide you or make you feel safe if you doubt their authority. Yes, there are any number of things that may threaten an adolescent’s wellbeing, and this is true in every culture; the difference is, an American kid in a culture that disparages parental authority, doubts her parents can do anything to stop or contain the harm. (And if her parents can’t, how can she?)

Whether or not you agree, it’s a fascinating hypothesis—one you don’t often hear. And Dr. Sax came to this idea not from talking to Americans, but from talking to those whose children were flourishing: immigrant parents.

Share

At the end of a talk Dr. Sax gave at an Islamic center in Detroit years ago, a Syrian-born father approached him. The man and his wife had come to the United States twenty years earlier and had four children. “They normally speak Arabic at home, but they told me that when their teenage son wants to be defiant and disrespectful, he switches to English,” Dr. Sax said. “And Dad told me that his son’s whole body language changes. His eyes narrow, he gets a smirk on his face.”

Some parents who sign their children up for foreign language instruction in a language they do not speak may simply hope to produce kids more orderly and respectful than the typical American adolescents. But they may also have a humbler ambition: raising kids who are less lethargic and sad, less screen-obsessed, less anti-social—less adrift than American kids seem to be.

Parenting experts disagree wildly on what’s ailing kids these days. Since I believe most of these authorities are far from “expert,” and so few of them seem open to making their own results (ie. their kids) available for inspection—I rarely take their advice seriously. But I liked what Dr. Sax had to say, in part because he seems to wrestle with his own conclusions. He clearly dislikes telling Americans our culture is “toxic” for families; the very idea seems to pain him. The problem is, he believes it is true.

Leonard Sax clearly dislikes telling Americans our culture is “toxic” for families; the very idea seems to pain him. The problem is, he believes it’s true.

From my years of research into the stunning spike in transgender identification among teen girls, this may be the most important take-away: social media, schools, doctors, therapists, even teachers now actively work to undermine parents’ authority and pry kids away from the values and protection of their families. Puzzling over why activists of every profession would do such a thing seems to ensnare many good people, who expend far too much energy wrestling a spider’s web of malign motives, bad faith, and empty piety.

I doubt very much that there is a single, coordinated motive among the activists of every profession who threaten American kids. Why do vandals deface a beautiful new storefront? Can you discern a compelling motive? Because they feel uncontrollable envy and rage? Because they have a status incentive to do so? Sometimes. Maybe.

Whatever their motive, what is clear is that they are bent on damaging something precious that doesn’t belong to them. The activists attempt the same with our children: to damage their innocence, wreck their connection to family, attenuate their connection to the sources of familial love and strength that would otherwise fortify them against an increasingly chaotic world.

Which, in the end, might be why so many American parents are now doing whatever they can to insulate their kids from American influence. If they are religious, they place their kids in the first parochial school they can find. If they are not, they hunt for any other culture to stuff like fiberglass batt insulation between their kids and American influence. The point isn’t what’s in the fluffy pink stuff. The point is to keep their kids safe, dry, and a few inches further from the gathering storm.

Subscribe now

Share

Dear Reader,

I know I’ve been away for a while. I’m at work on a book under contract about the rising generation’s mental health crisis—what caused it, and how to fix it. The answers to both will surprise you. (They have certainly surprised me.)

I’m so grateful for your support, which has allowed me to take time for some very hot investigative reporting. I look forward to sharing it with you.

Warmly,

Abigail