TRIGGERnometry - The Truth About Woke Indoctrination in Schools - Karol Markowicz

Episode Date: June 11, 2023

Born in the Soviet Union and raised in Brooklyn, Karol Markowicz is a columnist for the New York Post and Fox News, as well as Contributing Editor at the Spectator. She is the author of ‘Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation’, a deep dive into the current ideological assault being directed at American families through politics, education, medicine, mental health, entertainment, culture and more. SPONSORED BY: EasyDNS - domain name registrar provider and web host. Use special code: TRIGGERED for 50% off when you visit https://easydns.com/triggered/ Karol’s book: https://www.amazon.com//dp/1956007083/  Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why would anyone want to wage a war on merit? Right. Because it's not fair. Merit is not fair. So what is fair? Fair is everybody having the same outcome. We have in the US, we have these gifted and talented schools, and they're trying to limit how many Asian kids get to go, because there's just too many.

So what is the state of education at the moment? In public and private, it is pretty dire. The woke have marched through our institutions, and they have taken over schools at pretty much every level. You see this also with pornography in school libraries. That's become a huge thing. What? What do you mean pornography?

Pornography in school libraries has become a giant thing in the US because... What do you mean? This breaks every single safeguarding guideline that I have ever heard. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry on the road from the USA. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a co-author of this book, Stolen Youth, Carol Markowitz.

Welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks, guys. Nice to be here. It is great to have you here. And by the way, thank you to locals for lending us the studio in Miami so we could do this. This is great. Listen, the same question as we always ask all our guests. Who are you? What's been your journey through life?

How do you find yourself sitting here talking to us? I'm a columnist at the New York Post for over a decade, and I also write for a lot of other places. And I moved to Florida, which is where we are, about a year ago, very publicly, because I had been a lifelong New York supremacist. And really always defended New York City against all slights, you know, real and perceived. And about a year and a bit ago, our family decided that we had to be. It had enough. The schools had been closed, the masks had been on kids for too long, the wokeness had overrun everything. Reality had ceased to exist for a lot of our neighbors, and we had to get out. So that is how we're sitting here in Florida today, and the book

is an outgrowth of that as well. Yeah. And before that, your family moved here from the Soviet Union. That's right. We were thinking about doing this interview in Russian, but, you know, thought that might be not cool right now. My Russian wasn't going to be good enough. Francis was fine. I was going to struggle. Yeah, it's also iffy time to be Russian. Yes, that's right. That's right. So I've been reading the book. I find it very interesting.

This is the moment every trigonometry viewer and listener is going to drink because I'm a former teacher. And I was reading about what's happening in education in the United States. It sounds terrifying to put it mildly. So what is the state of education at the moment in public schools in the U.S.? In public and private, it is pretty dire. The woke have marched through our institutions and they have taken over schools at pretty much every level. It begins in teachers' colleges

where the teachers themselves are indoctrinated into leftist philosophy. They use Marxist books to teach the teachers. A lot of times the teachers don't even know that they're being indoctrinated and then these teachers disperse throughout the country and end up arguing things like math is racist. And this is reality that's happening

in schools across the country. country. And I do note that it is public and private because I think one of the main solutions to all of this in America has been school choice where you get the portion of the funding that would have gone to educate your child in a public school. You could take that funding and go to private or parochial or etc. The issue with that is that it's very hard to find private and parochial schools that are also not woke. It's a minority of schools across the country that haven't been ideologically captured. Carol, if I'm listening to this, I'm not someone who is clued up on all this, what I don't even know what woke means. It almost sounds like a bit of a

parody, you know, the woke people have taken over the institutions, they've brainwashed the teachers. Like, what does that mean? You know, the subtitle to the book is how radicals are raising innocence and indoctrinating children. What's actually, if I'm a parent, I don't care about the stuff. I've got a job. What's going on in the school that I should care about? So that used to be me. I think before writing this book, I would have said that a lot of this stuff sounds like a conspiracy theory. And I don't know that I thought that I was going to find what we found while writing this. I am a very optimistic. Everybody kind of wants the best for everyone. And come on, you know, obviously they're not teaching Marxism at teachers, colleges. That's

crazy, Constantin. So, you know, it ends up being something that's very hard to convince people. And I would have been one of those people had I not seen what I saw in writing this book. So what I say to parents is you know something questionable is going on. You might not have a label for it. You might not call it woke. Woke is to me when leftism meets a forced conformity. That's how I describe wokeism. So the old leftism might, sure, they might indoctrinate your kids or try to. They might try to put in, in information that is really one-sided into curriculums, yes. But the new wokeism does that and also does not allow stepping outside of the lines whatsoever.

They do not allow other opinions. They do not allow other influences or considerations. So while the old leftist teacher might paint a picture, let's say, of America as being this like terrible place where we just slaughtered the Native Americans and stole all their land and we have nothing positive about us at all, they'll sometimes, they would often present the opposite opinion as well. Now it's like this is what we believe. We believe this now. And what I say often also is that liberals are hardest hit by this. It's not really conservatives like me. I don't really care what they say. And I could brush it off and that's it. But for liberals,

they've gotten to where they're very scared to speak and their liberal teachers are very scared to speak. They don't want to say the wrong thing. They don't want to be ostracized by their tribe. And so you have this conformist thinking that you know has taken over everything. And I think parents recognize it and they might not be able to label it or name it, but they know what's happening. And the reason I ask this is because I think there are quite a few people now who feel this way. Like Dave Rubin had me on his show on this very set. Yesterday we're recorded it.

And we're talking about will we ever move to America and why and why not, et cetera. And one of the things I was saying is, you know, the one thing is, children's education that is terrifying because you know this as a mother like you give birth to this little thing and you raise it you nurture it and then you know they're not that old when you send them off to be you know brainwashed by people and it is quite scary I think for a lot of parents but I suppose the question is on a practical level what can you tell us about what children in this country are being taught at school that should concern people so it's interesting I lived in the I started telling you guys this before the show started, but I lived in Scotland.

And the first time I lived in Scotland... Our apologies. I really loved it. And I loved, and I moved there because I had just fallen in love with the country. But I moved the first time to study on a commune in Scotland, in the north of Scotland. Open conservative, lived on a commune. All my flatmates knew who I was and what I believed. And maybe that could still happen in Scotland, I don't know.

That cannot happen in America. Not only, forget about the commune. And you cannot have flatmates who have different political beliefs than you do currently in the U.S. It just isn't like when you have ads for roommates and newspapers, it'll say, you know, no, no conservatives or no, you know, Trumpers or no, just no, not anybody who doesn't believe what we believe. So all of that is scary to me, that kind of conformity. I don't know if you guys have gotten to there yet in the U.K. I don't know that you worry about what your kids are learning in school. But for me, I have now seen something that I can't unsee and I have to battle it at home.

I was telling you that my kids watched your Oxford Union speech because to me, I wanted to explain to them why the rest of the world is not, let's say, focusing on climate change the same way that our 18-year-olds are and why that matters. So at home, we try to really lay the foundation so that when they go out into the world, I'm not as worried about them being ripe for indoctrination. And Carol, what specific things are happening in the classroom that you would say is wrong and teachers shouldn't be teaching? Well, we have so many examples in the book of things that teachers absolutely shouldn't be teaching. I kind of joke about the whole math is racist, but that's happening. That is actually happening where if you, you know, if you believe that 2 plus 2 will always equal 4, that is a racist construct. And that is that is really happening. That is really happening.

That happens in the school. How insane is that? Because I see idiots saying it on Twitter, but when people assert that it's happening in a school, I'm like, is it? Yes. We trace it to two teachers' colleges. Again, they're learning this. They're learning the idea that 2 plus 2 does not always equal 4.

And if you're adamant that it does, that is a racist construct, a white supremacist construct that you believe. So many other things that go beyond, you know, that kind of nonsense, but we keep hearing stories in the U.S. of kids being transitioned in the classroom behind their parents' backs, where they don't tell the parents that the little girl has decided that she's a little boy, and they give them a new name, and they'll let the kid bring in other clothes to wear. And we're talking, you know, when you picture this, you might be picturing like a 16-year-old, but one of the recent cases was a fourth grader, which in the U.S. is around

nine, ten years old. Keeps happening. It's not like one story. It's like dozens at this point. And the idea that the teacher can have a secret with your child is scary. And parents should be afraid because maybe your child doesn't have gender dysphoria and thinks that they might be a different gender. But they could have other problems that the teacher is going to keep from you and decide that you're not worth bringing into the conversation. And that should really scare people. And Carol, look, as someone, again, who used to work in that sector,

it's surely got to be a minority, hasn't it? Just from my experiences of teachers in a career that span 12 to 13 years, I can't imagine that many of them behaving in this fashion, if I'm honest. Of course it's a minority. If we had 50 plus percent of the teachers across the country deciding that your kid might be a different gender and not telling you about it, I think that would really be a bigger problem. But it's happening.

And so again, it's like it could be one thing, it could be another thing. at my kids' school in Brooklyn, getting the kids to march for different causes has become standard. They have marched against guns. They have marched against hate, vague hate. They have marched, obviously, for climate change, you know, policies to be altered. And I tell a story in the book where I let my first grader, my middle son, march in this climate march because we had just switched schools after the school year had started. He was already new and different.

And I didn't want to speak up. And I would never, you know, it still bothers me that I didn't say anything because my little seven-year-old marched around with an earth-dies-we-die sign. And then he came up with, like, ideas on helicopters and caves and what he can do to, like, fight climate change. And you wanted my first grader on it, and now he's on it. And, you know, you could see where this grows into anxiety for kids. And that is a giant problem.

So many kids have issues because they are told that, the earth is ending and you are tasked with stopping it little seven-year-old, you know. And what I find baffling is I look at what the, sorry, I look at these things that are happening in classrooms in the United States. And it might be more understandable if your outcomes educationally in this country weren't appalling. Well, that's the whole thing, right? Every minute you spend on woke nonsense is a minute you're not spending on math and science and, you know, history. That's a big issue to me. And, you know, being born in the Soviet Union, I think I have a very, like, my kids must be very into academics.

Like, I do not play. You know, you got a B-minus. You're like a Chinese mom. Right. Well, yeah. I love the, you know, Tiger Mom, Amy Chau, but I don't, I'm not as good at it as she is. Like, I, you know. But, yes, I absolutely think academics is so important.

And I want my kids to be challenged. I want things to be hard for them. I don't want them just skating by, which my kids love to do. I want them to work. And even that is an idea that you're not allowed to have anymore. So in places like San Francisco, they're dumbing down their curriculums because it's not fair to have, let's say, an algebra class where the majority is white. And so because it's not fair, they're getting rid of, like, algebra for seventh graders altogether. And this is insanity.

This is crazy. And the lack, so this, I call it like the war on merit really goes hand in hand with this wokeness because it's all one thing. It's all like, we do it like this, and this is how we are going to push equity, and this is how it works. And your assertion is that this comes from the teacher training. Well, this part of it, yes. But it has gripped so many different facets of our society. Schools is just one chapter of the book because so many other ways.

that wokeness has woven itself into our world. Again, I don't know that things are as bad in the UK yet. When I listen to you, I think that your universities, for sure, are also captured. But I don't know that the rest of your society has been taken over quite as much as ours has. And so another example, and the one that I find just absolutely scariest in the book. Like, I think schools, kids, you can, you know, education, you could sort of still reverse. You can do stuff at home. You can build a block.

But the scariest chapter for me is the medical chapter where our medical system has been entirely captured by this woke virus. And so, for example, every year there's like a conference where the best doctors who deal with premature birth babies get together and they talk about it and they have like the four absolute best who tell you what happened in the last year because things are always changing and improving in the field. And so they recently had this conference, or about a year and a half ago maybe, and they realized that the four best doctors in this field are white men. And you can't have that.

So now they're going to introduce women and make sure that the ethnicity spread is wider on the stage. But so now you no longer have the best doctors. You have good doctors, maybe, but you're looking for other things other than best. and that is so scary. And then in order to get into medical schools, you need to write an essay on how you're going to promote diversity and the rest in your practice.

And it's terrifying. To me, that really takes away the ability of a doctor to say what they want to say, investigate what they need to investigate and really not feel like they are, you know, have to conform to some ideas. This is Euphoria,

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And so it's just every minute that is spent on this, people are going to die. This is going to lead to death. We might not know it. We might not see it, but it is going to happen. And of course, because a woman having a heart attack is very different to a male having a heart attack. Absolutely. And the dosage that you have to give and all the rest of it. And I mean, a heart attack is a perfect example because someone's having a heart attack.

You don't have a lot of time to then go, oh, I wonder what this person with vagina identifies as. That's exactly it. And that kind of thing is really terrifying. So my co-author is the homeschooling mom of six. I have three kids. I have two in public, one in private school. And she homeschools her children. She pre-reads the books.

She doesn't let them watch any modern television or YouTube or anything. I'm much more permissive. And for me, we kind of lay down the foundation at home. We really talk about a lot of different things that we wish we didn't have to be talking about. on a lot of different levels. But she'll say that no matter how much she opt out of culture, she can't opt out of her pediatrician's office. And so no matter how much you want to pull your kids from this insanity,

you have to go to the doctor sometimes. And so you might not be interested in woke, you know, but woke is interested in you. And how does this play out against what I think is a very good system? Again, Dave and I talked about this, the federal system, where you can do what you've done, which is if you don't like what's happening in the jurisdiction that you live in, you can move somewhere else. Like, are you able in this country as an American to go, well, I don't like this.

I am going to move to wherever, and there I can vote for my school district or whatever to be the way that I want. Is that still possible? Or is this like you can't escape it? Yes, that is still possible in some ways. But the medical thing, for example, that's a national accreditation society. So it's not a local thing. You can't move to Florida. You just might find more doctors who don't subscribe to this kind of thing

and who will do things in a normal way, even though they've been taught to do it in an abnormal way. You might find more of them in places like Florida, but they have been accredited by the same licensing groups that push this. And it's happening on such a wide level that it's tough to find rational, sane doctors. And, you know, even in Florida, we sort of have like a whisper network. Like, is your doctor normal? Can I have him? Like, and that's the, that's how you find your MD even here.

And I know you left the Soviet Union at a fairly young age, younger. I think you said you were two. I was about 11 or 12. But I imagine you still know, you're familiar with the idea of living in a society, as we would have done it, as I certainly did, where your parents had to fight the, the authorities to prevent you from being indoctrinated into an ideology that they thought was wrong or evil, frankly.

Right. Do you feel that, look, whenever you make any comparison with anything, people are like, no, you know. But you know what I mean? Do you think we're sort of operating in a similar environment now where if you don't agree with these ideas, you have to work so hard at home as a parent just to prevent the children from being basically ruined by the school that they end up going to. So we opened with a history chapter in stolen youth because there are a lot of parallels to what's

happening right now. And I don't know about you, my whole life, people have said like, oh, doesn't this feel like the Soviet Union? And I would be like, no, not at all. That's not even comparable. Like, what are you talking about? But the last three years, the COVID years, have really felt Soviet. And in a lot of ways, you know, neighbors informing on each other. You're not allowed to say certain things. You must word. things in a certain way, the spectacle of it, like the Black Lives Matter and the defund police in the U.S., like it wasn't enough to say it. You had to put the sign in the window. You had to really say it. So I see a lot of parallels. And so the difference is that my parents would have worried

about getting into real trouble if they had tried to tell me the truth. I tell the story of Pavlik in the book. And, you know, my mom still does... Pavlik Morozov. Yes. And he was the... He had told, we don't know which part of the story's true, is what I was going to say about public. My mom does not know which part of that story is true. We don't really know. It doesn't matter which part of the story. What matters is this was a story that was held up. This guy was a hero. Right. That's what matters. So he was a hero. He had informed on his parents for hoarding grain and his family had killed him. So how, so let's just get the background to the story for people

who don't know. How old was a kid? And when was this, et cetera. So this is in the Stalin years. He's around 10. He is, he tells, and again, did he tell on his parents, or was he randomly murdered? We have no idea because everything there is a lie. But the story goes, he informed on his parents who had been hoarding grain, and then his family killed him. And then in retribution, the state killed his entire family, his mother, his father, his cousins, his like, everybody, everybody gets killed in the story.

The grandparents, I mean, everybody. It's a very Russian story. Yeah, everybody dies. And then you call it a comedy, like. check off at the beginning. So he becomes pioneer number one. And this is a story that they use to indoctrinate other children. Look, you can be like public.

You can be a boy hero. Who told on his family. Yeah, who told on his family. Family matters far less than the state does. So here's the perfect example. And you could be a hero or you could be dead in a ditch. Like which one do you want to be? And so, yeah, I think that a lot of the, you know,

I'm not saying again that where, at the same place in the Western world that the Soviet Union was, but we are in danger of it. And I think that a lot of, the main thing to me is that in the Soviet Union, in China, in Cambodia, and a lot of places that we write about in the history chapter, they could say we didn't know. And a lot of it is true. They really didn't know.

They didn't know what was true. They didn't know what was real. But we can't say that. And part of that is why we wrote the book. We don't want people to say, oh, I had no idea. Well, here's what's happening. You have the idea now. And Carol, one of the things that I find extraordinarily troubling about the moment that we're in is, I'm not saying we ever got to the goal because we didn't.

But the aspiration for my generation, and probably, you know, people older than me as well, was we were in the West, we're trying to get to a society where your race didn't matter. Yeah. I'm not saying we got there. There was still racist assholes around when I was growing up and still are. But that was the dream. That was the goal. That was the vision. We got that from Martin Luther King onwards.

And it was universally embraced as the way that a multi-ethnic society, like the ones that we live in, should move forward. And now, I think it's fair to say that the woke ideology has the opposite view. Race matters a lot to people. So how do you talk to your kids about that? Like, if all they see from the outside is race, race, race, race really matters, how do you teach them about it? How do you talk to them about it? We try to have really honest conversations with them. And that's the thing.

Parents are so awkward and they're so afraid of saying the wrong thing to their own kids. I'm not afraid of that. And neither's my husband. I think we talk to our kids about how much character matters and how the color of somebody's skin is, you know, irrelevant. and so many different ways that we try to bring home the idea that you're not going to be colorblind. It doesn't mean that you don't see race. Of course you see race, but you treat everybody the same, and you don't treat anybody differently because of their race in a positive or a negative way.

And I think it's crazy that we've moved away from that. That used to be, you know, it was, it was the gold standard of it. Again, you're right, we didn't get there. I'm not saying that we lived in some, like, racism-free society. It's ridiculous. But we were heading towards something better, and now we're heading towards something far worse. What are we heading towards, Carol? We're heading towards race being the absolute number one most important thing about you.

And, you know, what's interesting about that is it's happening to white people too. So it is leading to an increase in, like, white supremacist groups, et cetera. If you tell people your race is the most important thing about you, people are going to believe you. And so, you know, I like to say to my kids, you know, we're Jewish, so I'm like, I don't know, are we white? Like, who knows that this, you know, today we might be yesterday, we weren't. And so race really doesn't matter. It's who you are. And I know it's cheesy as that sounds, like that's the message we should be delivering to children. It absolutely should be.

And also as well, the discrimination against Asian people, particularly when it comes to colleges. Terrible. It's mind-boggling. You can't do this. Right. And it's spiraling past colleges. So the thing is that there are so many books about the way the colleges have been, had this ideologically captured.

But it's happening everywhere now. We have in the U.S., we have these gifted and talented schools. And they're trying to limit how many Asian kids get to go because there's just too many, too many, you know? Like the tiger moms are doing just too good a job. And it's interesting. Like, you know, they used to limit how many Jews could go to different colleges for the similar reasons.

They still do, but to a lesser extent. But now you won't even see Jewish kids at these G&T schools because priorities have changed. But you will see Russian Jews, and they're pushing the same thing that the Asian parents are. Academics matters a lot, and we expect high things from you, and we want you to work hard.

And taking this away from people because they have the wrong skin color, because you didn't get the right mix of skin color, is just absurd. have we got to this place where even something, I mean, that to me is nuts. The fact that you literally say to someone, you pass every one of our standards, but you can't come in because you're Asian. Right.

Well, they don't end up saying it to them. So there was a giant scandal in the U.S. a few months ago, like three or four months ago, where there's a school in Virginia called Thomas Jefferson, and it was like the premier gifted in talented school and high Asian population. The principal of several schools didn't tell kids that they had qualified for a national merit scholarship because they were embarrassed that the majority of the kids who had qualified were all Asian and there just wasn't a good racial mix. So they didn't tell these kids that they were going to get money for college.

To me, that should be the huge story even today. It should just be every day. They took away something from kids because they were the wrong race. And it was a story for a few days. The governor passed some rule, Republican governor passed a rule that now you must tell them if they qualified for a national merit scholarship. Like, okay, I guess, that's something.

But it's not really making the kind of changes that we should be making. Well, it's because it's reflecting a much deeper thing that's going on in this society, which is the re-racialization of society. And that's where we come back to your point about the war on merit. why would anyone want to wage a war on merit?

Right, because it's not fair. Merit isn't fair. Merit is not fair. So what is fair? Fair is everybody having the same outcome. That's fair. Well, that's the word that they use. They use equity, right?

It's not equality. Equity is a standardization of outcomes. It's not about how much work you put in. It's everybody comes out the same. I have three kids. They could not be more different. I will be shocked if they end up anywhere near the same, with, you know, outputs.

They're going to have, I'm sure they're all going to do great, but they're going to do great in completely different ways. And if I try to apply the equity standard to them, like, you three must all come out virtually the same, it would be a tough, tough haul. Well, Thomas Sol makes this point a lot, which is how can you possibly expect equity in society when you can't expect equity within people who share the same genetic base?

Right. But this is also another thing that reminds me of the Soviet. I mean, one of the reasons the Soviet Union collapsed was the full, the terrible productivity that is produced by a system in which you're not rewarded for merit. Yeah. And the impact of that sort of mindset on a society, I mean, you've talked about doctors, and that's an obvious kind of cold-faced scenario. But everywhere, if you run a business by them.

I mean, we saw it in the UK, you know, with the comedy industry. mock the week, which was a huge TV program, comedy program in the UK, the Mass Report, which I worked on for a bit. A bunch of them basically have died, and a big part of the reason is they went Uber into sort of left-wing politics instead of doing jokes. Right. But also, I think it's objectively a fact that they picked people to work on the show based on their demographic characteristics and not on their talent.

And those shows don't exist anymore. Yeah. And I wouldn't want to be picked because I'm a woman. No. Like that was just, I would just find that so insulting. I would want to be the best at whatever it is I'm doing. I don't want to be, you know, oh, we gave the woman a job. I find that really, you know, insulting.

And so again, I have a daughter and two sons. I'm teaching them that they all better work and that they have to, you know, produce and be at their very best and not just expect. doors to open for them. You know, the sons, forget it. Nobody's opening your doors. But my daughter, I'm not waiting for somebody to offer her opportunities just because she's a girl. And actually, she turned down an opportunity where there was a, she's on a robotics team. They didn't make it to states. And then she was invited to join another robotics team because they needed a girl. And she was like, no, thanks. Like, I don't want to be the girl on your team.

What does this do to kids when you effectively say to me, it doesn't matter how hard you work, you're either going to achieve because you come from a certain ethnic background or you're not going to achieve. I really think it messes them up and not just about the merit thing, but just in every way if you're told that your accident of birth is all that matters about you. And things that you had absolutely no control over is what's important. I think one of the things that I believe why so many teenagers are non-binary now or switching their gender, I think it's because they don't have any, you know, points in the oppression meter and they want some. So nine binary is a really easy way to get some.

You don't even need to change anything. You just have everybody call you some new pronouns and now you're oppressed. Now you get to be part of the club. And I always say that if this was happening when I was a teenager, no doubt in my mind, you guys would have to be calling me some pronoun you've never heard of before. I would make it up every day. I would have my teachers. I can control what my teachers call me every day.

Every day I can come in and say I'm something else. Sure, I would do it. A lot of power. And you also think, as well, what's going to happen to this generation when they go into the world of work? Well, we used to think that, and then they went into the world of work, and the world of work conformed to all this nonsense.

So I don't know. It's more like what is the world of work going to, what's going to happen to them when this new generation who have pronouns that literally we have not heard of yet goes. to work. So that's the problem is that this capture has happened so on so many different levels that I think that these people are running the place. What's interesting is, and we point this out a lot in the book, and really I know I'm a huge bummer usually, but this is like, oh, my real

optimistic point is that they're still a real minority. They're just really loud, and they're able to assert their dominance, and they're able to push the kind of conformity that they require in order for this to work. If people in mass said no, if the Bill Mars and the other liberals who know that this is crazy would be more vocal in pushing back, this could end tomorrow.

But people are not brave, they're afraid, they don't want to be called out, they don't want to be ostracized or shunned or called names, and so they don't. And, you know, I think that's going to be step one. Well, one of the elements of the book is the idea of raising innocence. And the thing that I see

that makes me want to get the flamethrower out, frankly, is... That's a metaphor, by the way. No, it's fucking literal. I want to get the flames... When I see a drag queen in a G-string twerking in front of kids, I want to get the flamethrower out. Yeah, I get that because, you know,

this conversation started with drag queens' story hour at your local library. And, you know, it's interesting because I think that a lot of parents at the time, we're like, oh, what's the big deal? It's like a clown reading to your kids. Like, who cares? And then it spiraled into this G-string thing

where when's the last time you saw them read a book to kids? Like, this drag queen story hour has turned into drag queen twerking hour, and we're supposed to just accept it. And there's so many examples like that where the slippery slope is just, does not allow for any kind of middle ground. I think that, you know, in the past, I would have said, like, oh, I'll call people whatever pronoun they ask me. But then it went to they, and that's already iffy.

And then they went to, like, jure, and I don't even know what that is. And now, like, there are literally just so many others. You can't keep playing this game. You have to say no early now. And it's, it sucks because, like, I don't think I cared when Drag Queen's Dori Hour first hit. I think I thought, you know, who cares? If parents want to take their kids to this, whatever. But now when I see that, you know, the G-string twerking, I'm like, no, make that illegal right now.

And where is that coming from? Because I don't understand. I don't, I don't, I don't, I'm getting old, I don't understand. Why? Why do children need to be exposed to obviously sexualized behavior? I don't care if it's a drag queen. I don't care if it's a stripper. I don't care if it's, it's the metal work teacher.

It's never going to be a stripper. That's the whole thing. They get you or they get other people to say that this is okay through using LGBT community, basically. Right, because if you've got stormy Daniels to turn up in a G string, nobody would be like, oh, yeah, this is important. Nobody thinks it's okay for a woman to, you know, dance around in six-inch heels and a G-string for kids.

But a man dressed as a woman becomes okay. You see this also with pornography in school libraries. That's become a huge thing. What? Yeah, no, no. What do you mean pornography in school libraries? Pornography and school libraries has become a giant thing in the U.S. because what do you mean parents keep finding pornography in their kids school library what

what do you mean by pornography i mean you it would shock you not like not like you know I mean you haven't seen this phone but just the joke it's just it's books that literally talk about show pictures of sex acts but the set on yeah look when I was a kid my parents when I was a teenager gave me a book which was educational about sex did it have somebody on and giving oral sex? No. No, right. So no.

And did it have, like, sexting in it where two boys sexed each other dirty pictures or ask for really graphic things to be sent to them? It didn't. And you would be, again, you would be shocked, and it's happening at elementary schools. So in the U.S., again, that's till fifth grade, that's 11, 12 years old, is where elementary school ends. In Florida, Governor DeSantis has made them go through all the libraries. For this, he's called a book banner, and remove these books that they know that exist, right?

So he sent out, so he had a press conference where he was talking about what books they were getting rid of. And he started reading from these books, and news channels had to pull away from his press conference because they can't show that on TV. They can't have that language on TV. But you can't show that to 10-year-olds. But you can show that to 10-year-olds. And the quirk here is it's always, always a gay story. Because you know you can't show straight sex at that age to kids.

But somehow it becomes okay when it's a gay story. And this is how they are able to protect themselves from a lot of criticism. Because, you know, we're just showing LGBT youth, you know, stories about them. And this, if you have a problem with this, you're a bigot. Carol, you're not making this up, are you? Swear. I'll send you. I don't know if you're going to be able to post the pictures,

but you will be... Look up pornography, elementary schools, Florida. I don't want that in my Google History. Anton's our producer, mate. We're going to do that on your phone. You have a look, mate. All right, yeah. I hear you.

But we use the word they, and I think this is really important to specify, who are they? There's a lot of days. I know. I know that they, it seems like, I'm just calling out some group that doesn't, some shadowy group that doesn't exist. But it comes from a lot of different places.

So one of the examples, again, with one of these pornographic books, they're, an 11-year-old boy, I think, around that age, got up at a school board meeting, started reading from this book. Again, they're all shocked, but please stop speaking. That's really disgusting. And he's like, I got this in my elementary school library. He got it from the librarian. The librarian offered him this book.

and then said, if you like it, I have others like it. Yeah, this is, again, happening where it's at every level. We have a chapter on libraries and book publishing, where, again, super woke, completely ideologically captured, and pushing a very specific agenda. This, and now look, I'm looking at it through a UK teacher's lens, and I go back to my training. This breaks every single safeguarding guideline that I have ever.

heard that I've ever heard because if someone told me that a boy in my class or a girl, it doesn't matter, was getting content or books which have sexual connotations and pornographic, that to me is grooming and I would have to report it. And if I didn't report it, I would get in problem. I would get in trouble, quite rightly so. It's absolutely grooming. And it's grooming them to not have a perspective on what safety is, not being able to say this doesn't feel right to me because you're supposed to be okay with all of it. You must see these books

because the fact that you haven't seen these, I don't know if, again, I would love to hear if this is happening in UK schools once you see the book titles because they're really common here. It's not like two schools found it. It's like dozens and dozens of schools founded just in Florida and in other states

and it's everywhere. Sorry, Francis. Just to follow up on that, we, as far as far as, I mean, I didn't know you had this here, I don't know if we have in the UK, we did have some kind of, a show that was marketed to families with children. It was called, I think, the family sex show. Sex show, yeah.

Family sex show, in which the actors were encouraged at one point to remove items of clothing up to and including full frontal nudity. And I still remember when we talked about it on the show, the first of the first, the lines were, I have a penis in my pants, touch it, touch it, touch it. Yeah. And where is this, where is this, why, where, why is this happening? Right, why is it happening? Who wants to, who is it?

Look, I'm sorry, in my day, if somebody wanted to sexualize children, we knew what that was, right? We had a name for those people and we tried to arrest them and put them in prison, right? Why is this happening now in our society? So again, why it's happening is to end up with these kids being messed up. I know that that sounds, I know how it sounds. I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory. Who would want to mess up kids?

But look, in all these satelitarian societies, that was the goal, to unbalance the family, to make the kids all messed up and make them easier to control. So even though that sounds like something that is crazy, like who would want to harm kids, this is something that has happened throughout history in so many other places. It's just unique that it's happening here and now. And then the idea of removing the kids' barriers and making them more awake, woke to everything that's going on is absolutely part of it.

Why have kids protest? Why have kids do any of this? Why have kids learn about grown-up topics? It's all to remove the barrier of this is not for kids. This is not okay to do to children. And once you remove that barrier, and kids become your little activists who can be, any agenda could be pushed.

They're really hard to argue with. Look at the climate, you know, Greta, it's impossible to argue with her. It's getting easier as she gets older. But who's going to argue with her when she was like a, you know, adorable little crazy teenager? And we have that with gun control in the U.S. too.

Like the teenagers who speak out on guns, they're impossible to challenge because they're kids and you don't want to argue with children. And this is the thing that ends up happening. Carol, do you think as well, maybe we're projecting a bit too much. I'm not talking about the pornographic stuff because that's vile.

But I'm talking about the other things. Is it just that these people see that they are, to quote what they always say, on the right side of history? And that being the case, it's only right that we teach kids about what it means to be on the right side of history, then the whole kind of indoctrination and mind control.

Do people really think that deep? I'm going to be honest you, I don't think they do. I think the reason is this, ideology is so powerful, is it makes you feel good. It makes you feel you're doing the right thing. And if you feel you're doing the right thing and you feel good, then you're going to spread it, aren't you? Right. But so which part? Like you're saying the drag queens or gender ideologies? I don't know. Right. I'm willing to believe you. And again, I'm so, I'm, I'm, I'm, but for instance, like with the climate, if you genuinely believe that we were in a climate emergency,

then why wouldn't you teach kids? Do you see what I mean? Why? Why would you teach kids that the earth might end soon? Like, what are they going to do about it other than not sleep at? night. Like, I don't know. No, no, they're going to stop using plastic straws, and everything's going to be fine. Right, right. And when Britain can, you know, I love referring to your speech, but when it sinks into the sea and nobody cares, like, that it's still not going to make a dent in climate change. So there's no real purpose of teaching kids about adult issues unless you want them to stress and worry about it because they can't do anything. Again, I can send you my son's, you know,

plan from when he was seven years old and how we're all going to live in caves. And you that's what they end up with. They're not like the smartest, these seven-year-olds. Well, right. And, you know, on this, I mean, you are right. When I was growing up, we were also told, you know, we're about to run out of oil, we're about to run out of coal, all of these things.

I don't remember this level of, like... Intensity. Intensity, anxiety, you know, oh, that wasn't happening. Right. So, again, had we been having this conversation three years ago, I probably would be with you. Nobody thinks about this, this deeply. This is crazy.

But so much has changed in the last three years where I do think so much of it is willful and it is meant to mess the kids up. And so many people in charge, or like Randy Wine Garden basically runs schools throughout the United States. He's head of the Teachers Union. Very powerful, you know, at the Biden White House,

got to write COVID policy for whether schools open or not. Not a scientist, obviously, not a doctor. Just got to write policy. about whether kids get to go to school. Doesn't have kids, doesn't have any kind of care about kids, and yet she gets to control so much of what happens to children. So do I think it's by design?

I do at this point. There's too many coincidences here. I think a lot of the, you were saying about the grooming and whatever, there's other ways, not just sexual grooming, but to groom them to accept different ideas and to be able to immediately convince them of things. This is another kind of grooming. It's intellectual grooming.

But that's what's happening also, making them believe that this set of ideas is the only set of ideas allowed, and this is what we're going to push to you. Yeah, and I think that's a problem. Plus, as well, you know, one of the great tragedies about education is that education rapidly becomes political,

because adults are political. And unless they have a real discipline, they bring politics into the classroom. And the problem is with doing that is kids, they don't yet have the capacity to take on an idea, to break it down, to analyze strengths and weaknesses, unless you teach them that. And that's another part of the problem, is that we don't teach critical thinking in schools. Absolutely, because you're not allowed to. Why would we allow critical thinking in schools when we need them to believe certain things that we're telling

them? We do a lot of critical thinking stuff at home. For us, it's really important that my kids can identify when somebody's trying to convince them of something. And so my older two, you know, my youngest is seven. He doesn't count yet. But my older two are really they're woke police. They are like, wait, I heard something. Is this something? And often they're right.

Sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're like, no, it's fine. Don't worry about that. But they're very careful about what gets told to them. And I let, you know, again, my co-author protects her kids from all media. My kids are on YouTube. They're watching stuff. And what I end up discovering is that, like, they, because I let them watch whatever they want,

they end up watching the world's most wholesome stuff. They are just like the Mormon channel. Like, oh, this Mormon comedy skit with no cursing at all or, you know, bad themes is what my kids watch. And Carol, if people want more on that, I really recommend they read the book, Stolen Youth. But before we wrap up, I wanted to spend a few minutes. I mean, the COVID policies managed to achieve something that's very difficult, which is to get some New York Jews to move out. That used to be pretty hard.

What happened? Well, for us, it was really around schools, that the schools were closed, only the public schools, which is public schools in Britain, I know, mean private schools. But here, like, our local schools were closed. But if you paid $50,000 to go to private school in New York City, your schools were open because they were COVID-safe. And the thing was that our neighbors had spent that summer of 2020.

We lived in a very left neighborhood, which never mattered. It was fine. We didn't care at all. It was like, yeah, we were open conservatives. We had friends, which we still do. But it never mattered until then where we watched them march for equity and then not say one word when the poorest kids in the city couldn't get help, couldn't go to school, didn't get to, you know, my neighbors hired for their own kids,

tutors, or they formed pop. or they moved to their beach house and sent the kids to school there. And they didn't speak up at all for the kids all around the city. I grew up really poor in Brooklyn, you know, the immigrant story. And so all of my kids, all of my friends from childhood were, are blue-collar workers who didn't get to like sit at home and order Uber Eats during the pandemic and treat it like a little vacation. And I saw that nobody cared about them at all.

And the New York that I had always loved was one that when bad day, that when bad things happen to us, we joined together, and 9-11 happens, we become the world's most patriotic city, or we had a blackout in 2003. We ended up, you know, helping each other. Old ladies, you know, people would bring them food. We really do step up. Superstorm Sandy was another one.

We had a major hurricane, and power was out throughout most of the city, and people really helped each other. And this was the first moment that I was like, these fucking assholes. Like, didn't want to help anybody, didn't do anything at all, took care of their own kids, all while marching for equity in the streets, like liars.

And I could never unsee that. And that was what really pushed us out the door. It was a lot of things were going right in Florida. Governor DeSantis, I think, did an amazing job on COVID, but on so much more. And we liked the way the direction Florida was going, and we wanted to be somewhere sane for the first time in our lives. When you fly with Hawaiian Airlines,

It's hard to tell where your flight ends and family vacation begins. From the moment you bored, feel the Aloha spirit. Hear the sounds of Hawaii and relax with local entertainment at your seat. Let us welcome your family to our island home. Hawaii starts here. And one of the things by New York, Francis and I were there last year, we'll be back there very soon again. And it's not just New York because the same thing is the case in Nashville,

the same thing to even larger extent is the case in L.A., and this is what we've seen with our own eyes, and I know San Francisco is even worse. I mean, for people who haven't been to New York lately, I'm not exaggerating when I say you walk out of the door, and in quite a lot of parts of New York, I mean, it is literally a human zoo now. Right.

In terms of, like, homeless people with no clothes on the street. We were driving, we went to pick a parcel up in D.C., and we had to go out of, like, the main pretty bit in the center, and we were in a cab somewhere. And we were stopped at a traffic light. And there was a guy lying there with no shirt on. And I said to a producer, I said, do you think he's all right? And Anton went, I would go with no.

But you literally have, in the most powerful, wealthiest country in the world, hundreds of people in major cities lying around in the street because they're addicted to drugs or whatever. Like, how is that happening in? in this country. So I would tie this all back to wokeness because again I grew up in 1980s Brooklyn. Things were really bad. Crime was worse

than it is now but it had been bad for a long time and the difference that I always like to point out is that nobody in 1980s Brooklyn was saying like oh this isn't that bad. Look at the numbers from the 1970s like we are doing so much better than we were doing 10 years ago but now it's like

a giant ask to get people to admit that crime is bad, that crime is bad, that crime is happening, that homelessness is bad, that homelessness is happening. It's very like, what are you talking about? Look at the 1980s. It was so much worse back then. But who cares? Who cares that it was worse back then? Then we had, you know, years and years of New York being the most amazing place to be. And that's the thing. I was so into New York and I was so defensive of New York because it was great. It was a great place to be in my 20s. It was a great place for us to have our kids in my 30s. And then now it's like,

you can't admit that there's a problem. And that, again, is step one. And you can't admit there's a problem because wokeness says that you're not supposed to notice that these policies have led to this outcome and that it's only happening really primarily in blue areas. Like, Miami has problems. I'm not saying it's not Dallas, you know, Houston.

All cities have problems. But at least they, like, admit these are problems worth fighting or challenging or doing something about. In New York, they can't get to that first. step of like, this is a problem, let's do something about it. Do you think we spend far too much time talking about other things and not enough time talking about these things? I mean, I feel like we talk about a lot about crime in the U.S. and the homeless issue, because places that are doing crazy things, like legalizing drug use out in the open, are seeing, obviously, an increase

in both drug use and homelessness and also crime. And in the U.S., we do talk about, like, look, your policies are leading to bad outcomes. And it's like, no, but these policies are equitable. So this is what we're going to be doing now. So we do talk about it a lot. It's not like this isn't a topic that gets covered a lot. It gets dismissed as right-wing paranoia. And if you notice that things are bad and things are...

And I watch this happen to liberals in my very leftist neighborhood in Brooklyn where if they said they were worried about crime, they would get it on Facebook in a group or whatever. They'd get hundreds of comments, like, what crime? What are you talking about? What are you, like, put away your MAGA hat.

You don't have to be ideological. Just walking around New York, you are literally confronted with human misery. It's not that you go, oh, these people are smelly, get the plebs away from me. You're going, like, these people are in distress. And 10 years ago, this wasn't the case. Absolutely. Which is really what the point is. Like, it wasn't like this.

It wasn't like this for a long time. It was eight years of Rudy Giuliani, followed by 12 years of Michael Bloomberg, and even the first term of... Eric Adams. No, no. DeBlasio. Mayor of Bill de Blasio, we were coasting because even though he's like a super leftist

and his ideas are really stupid, things were so good for so long that New York was just like free rolling, basically. And then that ended. And it's going to take a long time and a lot of work to get back to that place. And I don't know that New Yorkers want it. I think that they keep voting for policies

that don't do that. They don't solve it. any of these issues. When is a pendulum going to swing back? Because the reality is it has to. It has to. You can't have policies like, oh, if somebody steals something, as long as it's not the, I'm not sure of New York.

$900. $99 and 99, then it's not a crime. You go, this can't carry on. This is literally unsustainable. Right. And these businesses keep leaving these areas. This like major retailer, REI just left Portland. REI is like hiking gear.

Basically, everybody in Portland wears REI from. from head to toe and that giant business has left Portland because they're just getting robbed all the time and it's become an issue you know they don't really like that um so yeah it has to stop and just the migration levels in the u.s like the fact that people are moving to places like florida and texas at such a high rate um last year in 2022 the year that we moved we were two of 36 000 just new yorkers who moved from new york to florida and that number is way higher than you know just New Yorkers. So it's happening. People are making changes and I don't know. I do see the pendulum swinging because it absolutely has to. But you know, you never know. Communism lasted a

long time. It wasn't like they didn't know it wasn't working. They did. But it still managed to keep on keeping on for decades. So I hope it changes in my lifetime. I hope my kids don't grow up in the insanity that we are living in right now. I'm kind of, I feel lucky that they're young and I still have a few years of, you know, getting them ready to be in college and be around the woke idiots and, you know, et cetera. All right. Well, there's a note of optimism. This may or may not end in the next few decades.

There you go. Cow Markowitz recommends stolen news to everybody. Where can people find you online and follow your work? On Twitter, I'm just at K-A-R-O-L. My PIN tweet has a newsletter where I send out everything I'm up to and that's really it. Perfect. Well, we're going to ask you a few questions from our local. supporters that they will only get to see on our locals page. So follow us over there.

Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. And we'll see you on locals very shortly. You've written that parents should tell their children that marriage is as important, if not more important than money in the career. Why do you think parents are giving the opposite message to their children? Is there anything social or government policy can or should do to encourage and support the formation and continuation of stable families?