Stolen Youth offers a simple answer to wokeness: No
Peter Tonguette
In America today, the great philosophical debate is not between Republicans and Democrats or Never Trumpers and Only Trumpers, but between what we might call the joiners and the rebels.
The joiners are those willing to conform to the prevailing spirit in the culture: those who embrace, or at least tolerate, the introduction of woke dogmas into schools, businesses, civic life, and the media. The rebels are those who decline to go along with the masses: those who say “thanks, but no thanks” to critical race theory, gender ideology, masking each time a respiratory virus breaks out (or forest fire smolders), and all the rest.
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The rebels practice a form of “Just Say No” that entails withdrawing from institutions in society that many take for granted — and in this, I speak from some experience. When I was about to enter the third grade, my parents, frustrated with the educational dullness of the private school I had been attending and willing to encourage my interest in writing and the arts, allowed me to start taking correspondence courses from home. Growing up, my brother and I were the only home-schooled children in our entire extended family, and the subject of thinly veiled derision for it. Once the Rubicon was crossed, however, it was remarkably easy to stay there. I loved spending half of my day pursuing interests that fell outside of any traditional curriculum. I read great novels and watched classic movies — both of which did pay off in my eventual profession — and I did not miss, not even for one second, my occasionally idiotic classmates and unimaginative teachers. It was liberating.
As Martin Luther once taught us, hugely powerful institutions only stay that way if you play along. And when you stop playing along, you can see them for all their corruption and atrophy. In Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation, writers Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz have given us a book that is to our woke age what Luther’s Ninety-five Theses was to the church in the 16th century.
Wokeism is an ideology that works because of the natural human instinct to play ball. “Conformity is easier to achieve than it may seem,” writes Markowicz (who signs her own chapters, as does Mandel). “We all hope we’d stand up for what’s right but, generally, people want to be accepted by their peers and will cover up their real opinions to ensure they are.” Wokeness exploits this tendency by demanding assent to ludicrous premises, such as the assertion that men can be turned into women, math is racist, and the United States should date its founding to 1619 rather than 1776. “The more outlandish the accusation, and the more normal people you can get to agree with it, the better,” Markowicz writes.
The authors point to the countless brands that posted black squares on their social media accounts and pledged to “do better” in their diversity efforts following the killing of George Floyd. But these brands were engaging in needless, performative self-criticism. “‘Black lives matter’ is an idea as uncontroversial as ‘the Earth is round,’” Markowicz writes. “But because everyone already agreed with it, it couldn’t simply be believed. You had to put a sign in your window to signal support for an idea that everyone already favored.” Groupthink extended to far more questionable ideas, such as protecting the public from the dangers of accidentally stumbling upon a statue of a figure from history; a minimum of 33 such statues of Christopher Columbus have been packed away, including, in a particularly self-contradicting example, one such statue in a city that took its name from the explorer, Columbus, Ohio.
Whole swaths of society have been bullied or nudged into agreement with the underlying, preposterous ideas, but Mandel and Markowicz are most immediately concerned with the woke capture of those institutions most responsible for the shaping of young minds: education, medicine, and the media.
The authors are both mothers attempting to navigate a world in which sending their children to school or taking their children to a doctor is more fraught than anyone could have imagined a generation ago. They understand the vulnerability of children to something far more noxious than peer pressure — what we might call authority figure pressure: Teachers who blanket every subject in the jargon of critical race theory, medical professionals trained to substitute “mother” or “father” with “parent” and “breastfeeding” with “chestfeeding,” media companies which all too eagerly introduce a “nonbinary” character on Muppet Babies and feature an animated drag queen on Blue’s Clues. Children, Markowicz writes, “want to please, and they will repeat the lessons being pushed on them from every direction.” The authors are aware of the irony of the fact that the leading exponents of wokeness are progressives with declining birthrates, leading to this tragicomic state of affairs: “Their aim is ideological capture of a generation, but it’s not their kids they’re working to brainwash — it’s ours.”
In fact, the question of whether children belong to their parents at all is implicit in so many facets of wokeness — and was made explicit by Joe Biden when he said, last spring, “They’re all our children. They’re not somebody else’s children. They’re like yours [the teacher’s] when they’re in the classroom.” This thinking gives a kind of moral legitimacy to the efforts to introduce critical race theory in class and drag queens at the library. Teachers and librarians are simply doing their duty in co-parenting your children, the thinking goes. But Mandel and Markowicz push back firmly, bravely, and relentlessly. “Parents have to treat wokeism being forced on their children similarly to how they might treat a religion being dictated to them,” Markowicz writes.
This book is satisfying in its completeness; there is scarcely a front in the woke wars to which Mandel or Markowicz are not attuned. They home in on the hypocrisies and doublespeak of wokeness. At one point, Mandel quotes former Biden spokeswoman Jen Psaki in referring to so-called gender-affirming care as “best practice and potentially lifesaving,” a typically vague formulation that seems to refer to the allegedly high risk of suicide among transgender youth without interventions, relative to those who do receive the currently fashionable interventions. Mandel quotes a physician who debunks the premise of Psaki’s confident statement: “There’s no proof that puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones or surgeries reduce suicide rates in this population.”
So much of wokeness is similar: morally strident claims based on factually flimsy ideas that their woke advocates feel too sure they’re on the right side of history to deign to check.
The book is peppered with useful workarounds to the problems the authors describe. Mandel suggests scrutinizing the forms given by a prospective pediatrician or mental health professional: “Do they ask parents to list their children’s pronouns? Do they ask if there’s a gun in the home?” (Neither question is disqualifying, she adds, but should be taken into consideration.) She advises holding on to physical media so that Dumbo and Dr. Seuss can continue to be part of your child’s life. She practically insists that you prohibit your preteen or young teenager from possessing a phone.
In the end, the authors must grapple with a more basic question: In an age like this, what to do about that centerpiece of ordinary American childhood, brick-and-mortar schooling? They reach different conclusions, or rather, solutions. During the pandemic, Markowicz pulled up stakes from Brooklyn to Florida in search of maskless, woke-free in-person learning for her children, while Mandel home-schools her children. Given the picture the book paints of wokeness running amok in society at large, Mandel’s choice comes across as meeting the moment more thoroughly. “I am convinced the only way to protect our children is to disconnect them almost completely from those conduits,” she writes. Speaking from experience, the nourishing, enriching, and morally rigorous home schooling experience described by Mandel is entirely achievable.
Parents who cling to the habit of packing their kids onto a school bus every morning are living in a fantasyland — a sort of simulacrum of an earlier pre-woke era that is, as this clarion call of a book illustrates, lost. “Even moderate parents don’t want their kids’ moral instruction happening at the hands of woke twenty-five-year-olds, but that’s what’s happening when they choose to send them to school,” Mandel writes. Perhaps the most terrifying passage in the book is this librarian’s introduction on TikTok: “My vaccine is Moderna. My birth control is Mirena. My antidepressant is Zoloft and my anti-anxiety is trazodone and I accessorize occasionally with ibuprofen for migraines.”
Is this who you want helping raise your children? Oh, how very good it can feel to “Just Say No.”
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Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.