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Is childhood being replaced by something much more sinister, or are we just witnessing the tragic results for one lost generation? We'll be discussing this and more today on the Truth Perspective.
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Here's the transcript of the show:
Corey: Hello everyone and welcome back to The Truth Perspective. Today is Saturday, the 13th of October. I'm Corey Schink and joining me today are Elan Martin,
Elan: Hi everyone.
Corey: And Adam Daniels.
Adam: Hello everybody.
Corey: Today we're going to be discussing the state of childhood in America. We're going to examine the state of the family, the education system and we're going to take a look at their mental health. So brace yourselves because it isn't looking pretty.
I think all of our listeners have been paying attention to the news lately and they're aware of some of the madness that's been going on in the public school system, and I'm referring specifically to Satanists invited to speak to elementary school children in order to increase their awareness of the diversity of religious thought. Now, that is pretty crazy I think, but it's actually just the tip of the iceberg of what we're going to be discussing today.
Before we get to that, I'd like to go over some of the interesting developmental psychology that we've come across so that we have a baseline for viewing the strange institutions we're going to be examining. I think everybody who has ever taken an intro to psychology course is aware of Erik Erikson and his developmental stages of childhood. He discusses the different milestones that children need to meet in order to become responsible adults.
He talks about the trust milestone which is met in the first year of life when the child learns to trust their parents in order that they will meet their basic needs, feed them and take care of them, regulate their emotions. Then he discusses the need for autonomy versus feelings of shame and doubt which toddlers go through around ages 1-3 when they experience their world, learn that they can control their actions and learn how to play with others. Jordan Peterson discusses this extensively in his books and his talks about the ages of 3 and then moving on into 4 that children need to learn how to play with one another in order to understand how to socialize with other kids and you learn how, as you go through life, how you play the game, whatever game that is, whether it's school, college, the job, how you get along with others and then can give and take.
So then Erikson talks about the next stage of initiative versus guilt where children initiate activities and achieve goals while interacting with others and then move on to industry versus inferiority which is more of the elementary school stage of ages of 6 through 12 where children face the tasks of learning how to become industrious and do their homework and work a basic job and earn an allowance and feel like they're contributing to the small society that surrounds them.
Eventually when they're adolescents they have to go through...
Adam: Identity versus role confusion.
Corey: Yes. Of creating or thwarting their personal identity. Now if any of these stages aren't met then we come across the basic compromised core capacities. With that in mind, we're going to be looking at how all these needs are not being met in the modern world, specifically ever since the sexual revolution that was initiated back in the 1960s and 1970s that has drastically changed the structure of the family.
The generation that we're going to be discussing is the generation born around 1995 through 2005. This generation was 50% likely to experience living without a father and children from single parent homes without a father are more than twice as likely to be arrested for juvenile crimes, twice as likely to be treated for emotional and behavioural problems and twice as likely to be suspended or expelled from school and a third more likely to drop out before completing high school.
Now this really came about precisely because of feminist lawyers, specifically the National Association of Women's Lawyers which claimed credit for pioneering no-fault divorce laws which made it extremely easy for anyone to initiate divorce proceedings because you didn't have to have adultery, betrayal, any sort of abuse. All you had to do was say, "Well I just don't like this person anymore so we're going to go ahead and get a divorce and I'm going to move on with my life because we're growing apart", or something like that.
At that point, once divorce started occurring at more rapid rates then you've got more children growing up without fathers and you reach this point in the 1990s where there's a 50/50 chance that these children are going to be born into a house without a father and you're not going to experience some of those important milestones that fathers provide to a child.
Adam: One thing that I know that Jordan Peterson has brought up in regards to that point, about the importance of having a father and to child development, in one of the Q&A session videos that he gave, he was talking specifically about fathers and the need for them to rough house with the children and simply the father being there and wrestling with the child with rough play, gives the child an ability to feel out their own physical boundaries and boundaries with others as well and that's one important reason why having a father in the family is important.
Elan: Also, just on a very basic level you had the father being the traditional breadwinner which has changed quite a lot in the past few decades, having someone in the house who fulfilled a consistent, responsible role in providing for the family, a role model, a person in a position of authority who did something that was everyday, that was in support of the family in just making ends meet.
Adam: You can take that with a job, with being a handyman around the house, you take the initiative because you have to. No one else is going to do it for you, if the sink's broken or the toilet's clogged or whatever it is. It's dirty work but it has to be done because you need that sink in order to wash the dishes so you've got to do it and that is a really good role model behaviour to have in an environment.
Corey: It turns out that the share of US children living with an unmarried parent has actually doubled since the 1960s and I think that coincides with a cultural shift in the idea of what a family should look like, which is reflected in current polls where 44% of millennials said that marriage as an institution was obsolete. A lot of this is because of different kinds of welfare that will pick up the slack for a woman if she chooses not to have a husband or a man in the house. Actually the welfare itself makes it more difficult for her to get that same amount of money if she were to be married.
So the culture itself says, "Women should be independent and you shouldn't have to worry about being a wife or having to raise children." You put all this pressure on women to succeed and to be the best self that they can be. Are they then going to choose to just live in the shadows of a breadwinner and to raise children? It damages their self-respect I think in some way.
Adam: I think it co-opts it in an odd way where, traditionally I would say, you had the male breadwinner and then you had the woman who was taking care of the household and helping to raise the children and that's the very traditional view. The feminists have taken that and said that it's wrong and evil and it's patriarchal and oppressive, I think is the biggest word that they like to use. So it takes that traditional motherly role, the traditional role within a family where women had a sense of purpose which mirrored their biological drive to nurture and to raise children, to love children. It takes that and spits in the face of it.
Corey: Well I think that was part of the plan all along too. When you look at the original feminists and what they wrote, like Shulamith Firestone who wrote in The Dialectics of Sex (and I'm quoting here), "Unless revolution uproots the basic social organization, the biological family, the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be smuggled, the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated."
This was their plan for whatever strange conspiratorial reasons they had, but was to "liberate" women from the family in order to destroy the family, destroy what they called the tapeworm of power which nowadays manifests in claims to oppression and patriarchy where everything becomes coloured in this strange power dynamic when it's not whatsoever that simple. There's power involved, correct, but we know much more about things like the dominance hierarchy now in terms of competence and in terms of being successful and rising and working your way through "the dominance hierarchy", that it has very little to do with this nasty, malevolent force, at least in many ways.
You look at a father who is protecting his family. He goes out and he works. Let's say he works a dangerous job and he sees it as a way of protecting his wife from the harshness of the world to go out there and do that and take that on his own shoulders and then to come back. Then she takes on her own shoulders the raising and the tending to the psychology of the children and the family and keeping everything nice and making everyone as happy as she possibly can. It's a massive sacrifice really for her.
If you look at the bottom dregs of society throughout time, in some cases possibly it's pathological abuse, but that's not the core of it. The core is survival and these people doing everything they can, and people who are damaged in obviously ways and that doesn't function the way that we want it to. But to say that this family is the vinculum through which the psychology of power can always be smuggled is at the heart of this feminist plan, this feminist drive to destroy fatherhood, to destroy men in general.
It started with the sexual revolution and the liberation of women from traditional sex roles but then it lead to, as we see, the drastic collapse of fatherhood in general. I think the author of The New Politics of Sex discusses the fact that marriage isn't about procreation, it's about creating fatherhood because a mother can have a child that's his or her mother but the father, how do you get the father to get skin in the game? You really need the father to have skin in the game in order to contribute these very important things in order to keep society stable, as we discussed, all those different building blocks, developmental stages for the development of a child's healthy psychology. It's necessary to have two parents involved. You need to have the rough and tumble play of the father. You need to have someone who's able to impose the discipline necessary and then you also need someone to attend to those connection and loving and nurturing type activities that will strengthen the child's inner sense of who they are and that, no matter what they go through, that they will still be loved in whatever sense.
By the 1990s it was pretty rough in terms of marriage. Now recently the percentage of babies born to unmarried women has reached up to 40%. This is unplanned, "Oh, had a baby!" While the shotgun marriages, people who are going immediately after having a child, get married, has dropped catastrophically. You look at these charts and it just plunges. It doesn't really happen anymore because we've discussed cultural factors related to the liberation of people from these familial responsibilities.
Adam: Yeah, there's no longer the moral imperative to save the family honour, I guess you could put it in one sense, by getting married and having that child within a married couple and then, like you said, the sexual liberation movement which tried to free society from these oppressive regimes actually undermined that and, like you said, there's an unbelievable number of children being born outside of wedlock. Like you said earlier with the statistics of children being twice as likely or however many times more likely to have behavioural problems or getting kicked out of school or truancy and criminal behaviour, which Adrian Raine talked a little bit about in his book Anatomy of Violence.
Some of those statistics that he talked about were that when you're raised without a father you're much more likely to have violent tendencies and criminal behaviour and you want to take men away from the house?! Are you insane?!
Corey: Well how much easier than to criminalize men, when you've turned them into criminals! {laughter}
Elan: Well looking at all of this as a kind of backdrop, a historical context or bedrock, for lack of a better term, all of these things that we're going to discuss today concerning the cultural, societal influences on children and people growing up in the past 20 years, or as some people call it the I-gen or the I-generation, that's one of the biggest, if not the biggest foundational losses that has affected this group that we're looking at today.
There are a number of other influences that we're seeing today that have been, whether spontaneously manifested in our society or by design in some sense, have just been chipping away at the psychological, emotional foundation of young people in our country.
So I think we might talk a little bit, getting back to the Strange Contagion themes of a couple of weeks ago, we were covering the rash of suicides in California and elsewhere which have been largely attributed to in some cases use of the internet or misuse of the internet or iPhones, tools that have been touted as ways to communicate, ways to be connected when in fact they are these narcissistic indulgences that at the end of the day just give young people a dopamine hit, an instant of gratification and have done nothing for them in the growth of their being, their personalities and their character.
It's not news they're getting. It's not information they're getting. It's entertainment. That's what it comes down to.
So if you know anybody who has grown up in this generation, if you've observed anybody, it's quite a shocking thing to see them wake up in the morning to check their Instagram account and look at all of the photos of their friends. All of this is, by now, quite obvious to many people who have been observing this. But I don't think that we've really examined how detrimental. I don't think it has come into our consciousness how this phenomena has poisoned the minds and the souls of young people in the west, especially.
This has been one huge influence that had eroded the very integrity of young people. I don't see a way out at this point because it's an addiction. It's a co-dependence. It's something that they're so connected to. We could go through the stats of the numbers of hours that young people spend on their phones, on their tablets, on their computers, looking at meaningless information when in fact they're not reading anything. Corey, I think there were some stats. What is it? One-third out of all teenagers of this I-generation haven't read a book in a year.
Corey: Yeah, something like that.
Elan: Something really crazy. It got me thinking about when I was growing up, spending so much time outdoors, spending so much time with friends in a state of play when my parents were working, engaging in imagination, going to parties, occasionally getting into a bit of trouble, just having normal experiences of interacting with the world in a real way that wasn't mediated by social media, that wasn't captured by YouTube videos. I feel like, to read some of these stats which are quite shocking, I feel like there's a whole generation of people now who are disconnected with reality in such an intrinsic way so that they've largely lost the role model of a father in many cases. This has been replaced. They used to say the TV was the babysitter. Well now it's your iPhone.
Corey: Right. Like you're saying, they're disconnected from reality in so many different ways. Some of the statistics are alarming. Close to half of them don't work, don't have jobs during the summer, don't work during the school year. They don't get that experience of earning a paycheque, buying your own stuff. When you analyze the data, they're also not getting allowances. Their parents don't have them do things around the house in order to earn money in order to simulate getting a job, to prepare them for that. In many cases when they want money they just ask for it. That's the general state of affairs for this generation. They're not working. They're not earning allowances so they don't get that kind of experience.
You discussed the fact that online they're not reading in-depth material or engaging material necessarily. We're talking about the general public in statistics, not the individuals because I think we all know individual children who buck the trend. But they are also not engaging in really engaging material but they're also being bullied. When they're on Facebook or Twitter they can't get away from these bullies. When I was growing up, if I was bullied by somebody I had a chance to regroup. When I went home I had a chance to say to my dad, 'Hey, I got bullied" and he would tell me how to take care of it. Well nowadays they go home but they bully follows them. It's all over the social media.
Close to 60% of them claim to be bullied on social media and it's extremely rough for young girls because since the iPhone was introduced in 2007, the rates of girls that are aged 10-14 who are going to emergency rooms for self-harm, for cutting themselves or for inflicting serious injuries to themselves, keeps rising by close to 20% every year since 2009, just a couple of years after the iPhone.
Adam: Yeah, it was 19% every year, year over year.
Corey: Yeah. And the amount of teenagers who have major depressive episodes has just been skyrocketing as well. I think a lot of that can be attributed to bullying but also a lot of it can be attributed to just not gaining the tools. You're really lucky if you didn't get bullied. You were probably the bully if you weren't getting bullied! {laughter} But you get those experiences, you have a chance to regroup and then you build something, some part of you evolves and adapts. You learn how not to take it on, how not to take it personally, how to face the harshness of reality. But like we said, the statistics are showing time and time again that the kids aren't going out and taking these challenges. The number of teens who are learning how to drive has plummeted as well.
Elan: Right. So you have that statistic. You have the statistic of kids who are only going to the mall with their parents. They don't spend any time, as I was mentioning earlier, with friends in proximity, in contact. They're not reading. They're not thinking. I was thinking, "Gosh, this really kind of sucked the meaning out of a lot of people's lives because if you're not having meaningful social interaction in proximity to someone, if you're not sharing things, if you're not empathizing and showing compassion to your friend's problem by having a real, honest conversation, for instance, what else is there but a narcissistic bubble of avatars and...
Adam: Emoji's.
Elan: And emoji's and selfies that prop oneself up in the eyes of others which is, I think what a lot of people attempt to do. So you have that whole phenomenon going on. There is also the incredible decay in the quality of education in the western world. We have some stories here today. What can I say? You read these stories of the types of individuals who are now responsible for putting ideas into the minds of young people in western schools who have this incredible responsibility who I wouldn't even want in the same room with my child, let alone spending six or seven hours a day five days a week for nine or 10 months out of the year!
We can talk about some of those stories. I think they're pretty shocking and indicative of how this spectrum of radical liberal thinking, feminism, cultural Marxism and postmodernism - all topics we've been bringing out in the show these past few months - have become incredible centers of gravity and thought and ideology and thinking for young people in the west. You read about some of these professors and what they're filling the minds of these young people with and coupled with everything else we've been talking about it's the perfect storm for a lost generation of young people that we're looking at today.
Adam: Just as one example of a by-product I think of the feminist postmodern influence within education, I was watching a video this morning about a young black woman from Cape Town, South Africa and she was speaking at the University of Cape Town in a group that was a safe space for discussing the decolonization of science. This young woman was ranting and raving about how Newtonian physics was the colonization of your mind and so the only thing that they could do was get rid of everything because science is based on the western mindset and western influence and that somehow makes everything that science has uncovered, wrong. I don't know how she made that leap, but it was just absolutely shocking to hear her say it, in trying to remember exactly what it was that she said.
Elan: It just makes me think that, in some of these stories that we'll get to, so much of what we're witnessing is an appeal to the emotions.
Adam: Yes, that was my point. You get to the point where you can't think critically because what she was saying was that they needed to decolonize their minds from western scientific thought because science is based on western ideas. What struck me was that she had absolutely no knowledge of scientific or mathematics history to realize that the basis of mathematics comes from Babylonia, the Middle East and some of it came from the far east in China, and some of it came from the Egyptians, which is from Africa.
So that whole thing about her decolonizing your mind from western science, it's like, "You moron! This is based in things that come from many cultures. It has nothing to do with western oppression and patriarchy."
Corey: Was this a public school?
Adam: It was the University of Cape Town.
Corey: Oh yeah, a university. Okay, so I do have a good example from the public schools of Edina, Minnesota. This all started in 2013 so the cohort that we're talking about would have been about eight at the time and in the public schools of Edina they all decided to ditch the standards which were gold standards among the state school districts and go from being an upscale public school system to a social justice public school system. It all began in 2013. I'll just read from the article.
"The shift began in 2013 when Edina school leaders adopted the all for all strategic plan, a sweeping initiative that reordered the district's mission from academic excellence for all students to racial equity. Equity in this context does not mean equality or fairness. It means racial identity politics.
So the school district's all for all plan mandated that henceforth all teaching and learning experiences would be viewed through the lens of racial equity and that only racially conscious teachers and administrators should be hired. District leaders assured parents this would reduce Edina's racial achievement gap which they attributed to barriers rooted in racial constructs and cultural misunderstandings. As a result the school system's obsession with 'white privilege' now begins in kindergarten where kids are supposed to trace their hands, colour them to reflect their skin tone and then place the cut-outs on a poster reading, 'stop thinking your skin colour is better than any one else's. Everyone is special.'"
Etc., etc., etc.
Adam: What kind of a mind job is that? Don't think that your skin colour means anything but you need to know what your skin colour is because that means something. What kind of nonsense is that?!
Corey: That's the kind of education that these kindergartners are receiving. It's absolutely crazy. It reminds me of those academics who recently came out who gave all those bogus papers to all these institutions and they published in major journals and one of the papers that they got published was on having white students sit in chains in the classroom and get publicly humiliated in order for them to own their own white privilege and if they said that this was a bad thing, then that was just evidence that their white privilege had made them frail and fragile. This is the kind of thinking that goes on in these institutions of 'higher learning', this kind of complete and utter racism is what's being taught in public schools to these kids who, as we've discussed already, are not equipped for this kind of nonsense. But these kids are even more crippled emotionally...
Elan: Right.
Corey: They're being set up. This whole generation, so many of them set up.
Elan: They are being told to take a political position on something that they are many years away from even beginning to assess. It's being foisted upon them, like any of the worst totalitarian regimes that we've read about in history where you have a certain idea - in Israel it's 'all Arabs are evil, you're going to join the IDF when you're 18'. The very worst elements of the Soviet Union were much the same way when Stalin was in power. Stalin was basically your father. The state was all important. It's basically the same thing.
Adam: Your critical thinking gets destroyed and your ability to self-regulate your emotions also gets destroyed so that you are an adult-sized little person basically. That's not good for society as a whole but if you have political ambitions and a fascist tendency, that is just ripe pickings right there.
Corey: Yeah. The public schools are a nightmare when you read through some of the statistics and you look at what the students go through. I think we're all aware of the school shooting drills that go on and not all of them are active drills but they do exist where SWAT members will dress up in riot gear with their fake guns, blasting through the school pretending like it's an actual live shooter and all these kids are traumatized. It's proven that it doesn't work or it's not going to prepare these students for an actual drill. What it does is teach them about the totalitarian, authoritarian powers of the government, that they're allowed to just come in with guns and simulate 'for your own good'. "This is for our own good. They're here to protect us." But it's just such a police state mentality.
Elan: Yes. How many of those schools have been put into motion without even a warning to the students?
Adam: That was something that definitely happened in my high school when I was there. We had active shooter drills and, if I remember right, the fire alarms went off or something like that. Everybody had to go stand in a corner so that way you weren't visible from the doorway and somebody would come around and then they'd jiggle the lock to make sure the door was locked and then they'd go on to the next one. I was 17, 18 at the time so it was fine I guess for me because I could handle it. But if you're talking about middle school or elementary school children and you're doing this kind of thing, that's just traumatizing. There's no way for them to be able to handle that.
Corey: Well the percentage of public schools running them, according to 2016 statistics, was nearly 95% of schools have these kinds of drills. But this includes just low-key lock downs. That's no big deal but there's still this atmosphere of fear, this atmosphere that's played up on by the media every time there is some kind of a school shooting or even when they hype up statistics, like they were caught doing recently where they were lying about the number of school shootings. They spread this social contagion of fear and paranoia and then political actors will use that to mobilize protests in order to take away gun rights. Once again, you see all these students' emotions being manipulated in order to advance what appears to be this authoritarian agenda. They call it progressive authoritarianism or liberal authoritarianism, but it just looks authoritarian to me. No need to try and put any sort of lipstick on that pig, as they say. {laughter}
So there's this police state-type vibe where 95% of schools run these kinds of drills and then somewhere near 60% have armed guards that carry weapons on campus and who routinely are being called in to engage students on even minor issues.
Adam: Yeah, minor infractions.
Corey: Yeah, minor infractions. This was a big thing. I remember a few years back it seemed like every week on SOTT we were seeing another story about a student being beaten by a resource officer, being hurt or just being engaged or put in handcuffs by a school resource officer for things that really make no sense, like bringing scissors to school or something like that. And then when they're actually needed, like during that shooting not to long ago, they just stand outside and wait until the shooter leaves!! Just absolutely bizarre.
But that's not the worst thing about public schools. Adam, I think you have a really shocking statistic handy about sexual abuse.
Adam: So in their 2002 survey the AAUW (American Association of University Women) reported that of students who had been harassed, 38% were harassed by teachers or other school employees. One survey that was conducted with psychology students report that 10% had sexual interactions with their educators. In term, 13% of educators reported sexual interactions with their students. Holy god!!
Corey: Well, yeah. I think I read a 2004 study that reported that a student was 100 times more likely to be sexually assaulted by their teacher than by priests and this was at a time when all that uproar and that still goes on about molestation in the catholic church. But in the meantime, in schools you don't hear a peep about what students are going through in schools. One part of the problem is, like we said, since 2007, these predators have constant access to these kids through their phones. A survey found that 26% of teenagers have participated in these kinds of activities on their phone and 11% said they've shared naked pictures via text messages and these predators have constant access and it's unmonitored. Up to 80% of parents don't know what their kids are up to online.
Adam: Yeah, and the same American Association of University Women found that 290,000 students experienced some sort of physical/sexual abuse by a public school employee between 1991 and 2000. I went and I looked and the worst numbers that I could find as far as priests allegations of sexual abuse or misconduct was of the 100,000 priests that were active for a 40 year period or something like that, there was a 5.8% of them had been accused and it was a justifiable accusation and the number of victims was just shy of 20,000 if I remember correctly. I got that from priesthoodaccountability.org.
So when you think about those numbers, just shy of 20,000 for decades worth versus nine years and 290,000?!? It just boggles my mind. It's basically a trope at this point in our society to make fun of priests for being sexual abusers but you don't hear a peep about it when it comes to educators!
Elan: I was just thinking the same thing. If all those numbers are correct, this is something that 10 years from now, if we're all still here, will be the new scandal. But it also says so much about how this information must be suppressed, that we don't know about it.
Adam: Oh yeah!
Elan: I did want to get back to a couple of the more political ideological ways in which students are being abused right now, particularly in US schools. This is an article called Indoctrination of Young Minds-School Teachers Belonging to Antifa Spin-off Group are Using Students to Further Their Radical Agendas. Now granted this is probably a pretty extreme example, but the fact that this is happening at all is telling of some of the most extreme ways in which kids are being indoctrinated into a radical liberal point of view.
"Public school teachers are behind a leading far left militant group that is part of the Antifa network and federal officials say it's committing 'domestic terrorist violence' by any means necessary (that's the name of the group) which has played a key role in riots in Berkeley, Sacramento and elsewhere has dozens of public school teachers among its members including among its most prominent leaders. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security began paying closer attention to Antifa groups in general after BAMN (by any means necessary) and other extremists started a riot and attacked marchers at a white nationalist rally in Sacramento last July. The Sacramento violence left at least 10 people hospitalized, several of whom had knife wounds.
One of BAMN's most prominent organizers is Yvette Felarca, a Berkeley middle school teacher and pro-violence militant. Felarca currently faces charges of inciting a riot for her role in the Sacramento violence. After BAMN and other Antifa groups staged violent protests in Berkeley to keep right-wing author Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking. Felarca defended her group's acts of violence. BAMN was able to cancel another event, this time an April speech by pro-Trump author Ann Coulter by promising a repeat performance of the Milo riots.
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security say Antifa groups like BAMN are engaging in domestic terrorist violence. Just last weekend (this was a few weeks ago) Felarca helped organize BAMN's mass demonstrations that shut down a free speech rally in Berkeley. As with BAMN's other organized actions, left-wing actors at the demonstrations violently attacked peaceful protestor."
It also goes on to say that "BAMN organizer and teacher Nicole Conaway organized a "sick out" at her school in 2015 leading other teachers and calling in sick to protest the policies of republican governor Rick Snyder. The sick-out forced six Detroit area schools to cancel classes, affecting nearly 4,000 students. One month later Conaway led students in a school walkout protesting poor building conditions." That's not such a bad thing I suppose. "She was one of the BAMN organizers arrested in connection with the protest."
What we're talking about here, especially in organizing students or other teachers to protest the policies of a governor, even if they policies are pretty horrible, this has a knock-on effect for students who are not in a position to be political, who are relying on a modicum of education every day, who are just getting their bearings with life, with the things that their learning, with whatever it is that they're being engaged with in their lives.
So at the very least, these teachers are highly responsible. At the very worst, I think that there's a level of criminal negligence involved in doing these types of things.
Corey: Yeah, that criminal negligence really seems to spread across the public school system, discussing the sexual abuse statistics, but then there's the problem with their sex education programs.
Adam: Oh god!
Corey: Which they think are normal but are graphic. Some of these manuals are borderline pornography and it's led thousands of parents from Australia to Canada to America - because this is a western phenomenon - to protest and to demand that they stop trying to teach these deviant activities to children.
Adam: Kindergartners, man! Kindergartners!
Corey: Kindergartners! I've got a quote and it's written by somebody who radically disagrees with this but I think that it really sums up the attitude that we should have about sexualizing children in this way. So he writes,
"Try to imagine explaining to the old farmers of Prince Edward Island the need to teach small children how to insert, safely of course, antiseptically of course, their fingers or tongues or other protuberances into the orifice of another kid of ambiguous sex including the anus. It is not that they would disagree with you. It is not that they would have an alternative opinion about behaviour that makes old fashioned sodomy look like a peck on the cheek. It is that they would think you had lost your mind. They would believe that you were suffering a terrifying moral and psychological illness, nigh unto demonic possession, perhaps well past it. Would they let you speak to their children? They would not want you to speak to their parents or friends or anybody, not because they would be afraid that you might persuade or entice one of them, but merely to spare their loved ones the experience of something so gross, so wicked, so repulsive, so sad they themselves in future years would let the memory of it drop into the darkness and the silence. You do not make scrap books of slime and you do not expose children to that. That is not why we have an educational system."
Adam: An educational system should be to help you think critically and logically and to give you a basic understanding of history, science, mathematics, economics, a basic understanding to where you can walk out into the world and be able to deal with the subtle nuances that come with a very complex society, not to know how to put a condom on a wooden prophylactic, whatever.
Corey: Yeah, and they're not teaching that because according to the statistics only up to 65% of students could not read at a proficient level or do basic math. 60-65%! They're not teaching anymore. They're indoctrinating. This is what these kids are going through. So then we wonder why in 2016, when the oldest of this cohort that we're talking about, goes to college, the colleges start to go absolutely insane. Now we have a problem of mass hysteria on colleges where everything is about white privilege, everything is about being oppressed. They're mocking, probably rightfully so, adults at this point, but being mocked for being snowflakes, but look at what conditioned them! This is society's child.
Adam: Yup.
Corey: This is what western society, increasingly, has given birth to. This is the next generation and it doesn't look good. It's not looking good at all.
Elan: Corey, you mentioned before the show a story about inviting Satanists to speak at a classroom.
Corey: Yeah.
Elan: I thought that was interesting. I didn't read that article. The gist of it was a Satanist was actually brought into a school to do what?
Corey: To read to students I think it was.
Adam: I know when they did it with the trannie who was dressed in his/her full-on garb, her drag ensemble, it was just story time with a drag queen. I remember you saying that at one point she asked the students, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And a little boy stands up and says, "I want to be an astronaut" and the trannie's just, "Yeah, you could be a trannie astronaut." And then another person says, "Yeah, I want to be a hairdresser" and the trannie's like, "Yeah, you can be a trannie hairdresser."
Elan: Being a trannie being the ideal kind of version of adulthood.
Corey: Yeah! It just makes you wonder - I can't imagine the parents know that that's going on! I couldn't imagine letting the child go back to that classroom after somebody in some administrative capacity, whether it was the teacher or somebody else, decided that this would be a good idea because of "diversity" or whatever crazy reason they have, to sexualize children in the case of transsexuals and to expose them to absolute pathology! You don't get much more pathological than being a Satanist! That's pretty much as bad as it gets.
But it's funny because Satanism is to Christianity what postmodernism is to our secular, liberal order and now it's being shown to kids. This is how the kids are being raised, what they're being exposed to on the internet. I know from personal experiences, several nieces and nephews who were raised in that generation and who turned out fantastically well, responsible adults, but they had parents who cared about them, parents who had them work. I'm not saying that every child that's going through this general is like this and no doubt a lot of them are struggling for a sense of identity and sanity in watching all of their peers go nuts, like they are. It seems like a crisis on the horizon because if this problem isn't solved, if this doesn't make it into general awareness, all of these problems and nothing is done about it, things can only get worse.
As we've seen, the statistics for children not engaging in responsible activities keep on skyrocketing and for watching pornography, that's how they learn about relationships and it's impacting their psychology and their choices to even date one another. We've seen statistics that teens dating has gone way down. Just through interviews with teens, one teenager said that there wasn't anything special about it. He'd seen it all on whatever pornography website. He said there wasn't anything magical about it. This is the kind of cynicism that really needs to be nipped in the bud and it's not looking like there's anybody who's going to be able to do that any time soon.
Elan: I have a question that I don't think there's an answer for but I want to ask it nonetheless. So every generation of young people is going to have their set of issues, given what their contemporary culture is doing and what the zeitgeist is and the trends are and the state of the economy. All of these things play and influence. There are challenges for every generation. However, you take a step back - well I'll speak for myself - it's like I woke up one day reading all of these stories and it's like "What the hell happened?!" I don't mean to say it's like, by the way, that's a common...
Corey: "It is what it is?"
Elan: It's like this, like, like. No, it's not like anything. This is exactly what's occurring. It's as though we have a whole generation of people who are being attacked in some sense from every angle who are at every disadvantage for being functional human beings in the world. It's all happening at once and it's all simultaneous. The social contagion is virulent and it's knocking these kids out like flies. I know one or two I-gen people who have suffered severe depression who are addicted to their phones, who have had lousy teacher, who are subject to several of the things that we've mentioned on today's show.
So this isn't a foreign abstract idea to me at all! I've seen it! What's incredible to me is how pervasive it is and the implications for the future, as you were saying a few minutes ago Corey, where is this generation of kids going to take society? All of these influences have been taking form right now. What are the choices that these kids are going to make in the near future when they get into political office or become business leaders? Will they even be capable of such things? Would they rather take to the streets in reaction to the next offense than take any responsibility for something more constructive in a more constructive way?
This is a crisis and I think it's far-reaching. We'll only really begin to see what the effects of it are in coming years. But I think the outlines of it are becoming very clear.
Adam: There's a video I watched called What Is the Internet Doing to Our Brains? It was a talk given by Nicholas Carr. He did a really good job of outlining what it is exactly that the internet has done to our brains. He makes a couple of good points and one of the things that he was talking about was the difference between short-term memory and long-term memory and why this is important. The way that you get to deep critical thought is to be able to sit with some information or some idea and just sit with it, give it your attention. Whereas with the internet, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, this has conditioned people's minds to jump from one page to the next. He said the statistic is that by and large, the general population spends no longer than 10 seconds on any particular web page. Ten seconds!
Your working memory can only hold a very few number of things at a time so there's no possible way for you to really put together anything into a logical, coherent, deeply well thought out idea if, in the span of five minutes you've looked at 50 different articles and you haven't really read them, you just skimmed it for the gist and then on to the next one and on to the next one.
One thing he said to sum up his point was that we're sacrificing our ability to determine ourselves what our minds focus on and how long we think about these things. We're ceding our responsibility for critical thinking to the internet and to people and Facebook, Google, etc. I think you can apply that into pretty much everything. With the political sphere we're sacrificing our ability to think logically and critically about economic or social policies to people that just simply appeal to the emotions and make us feel good. That is not a good avenue to take.
Corey: Nope. And the generation we're talking about, is their primary audience it seems. That's their big audience for now. Well, on that note guys, do you have anything else that you'd like to discuss about this generation?
Adam: No, I'm good. I'm done.
Corey: Yeah, I feel like it's...
Adam: I'm terrified enough. {laughter}
Elan: And it has exhausted us.
Corey: Yes, emotionally exhausted us, maybe a little bit depressed. But that does it for today. Until next week, we hope you have a wonderful week. Thank you for listening. Take care.
Adam: Bye everybody.
Elan: Bye.
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