Book Review
Stolen Youth
5/5 stars
"Workarounds for parents who want to save their kids from being damaged by woke institutional capture."
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Of the book:

-9 chapters plus a conclusion in two parts.
-261 pps prose
-26.1 pps/chapter
-610 point citations. 61/chapter. 2.3/page (=very well sourced)
-Need not be read in order
-No index
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This book does not start out trying to trace the causes of a crumbling society, and that is fine because there are other books for that. 

It is more of a practical guide to describe the extent of the problem and offer practical suggestions of how to sit it out and to keep your own kids out of it.

The entire book reads as lightly as a broadside, but I will skip to the conclusion and tell the reader that there are two options presented (we have two different authors, and two different conclusions):

∆∆∆1. Benedict option (enclavism/ retreat from society into a tight-knit community):

a. Learn how to homeschool, working in tandem with other like-minded parents; 

b. Send your kids to private schools;

c. Minimize the television and internet footprint in your home (no video games, TV once a week, and older cartoons).

∆∆∆2. Selective flight option (take children from woke spaces while still participating in overall culture and engaging more in local politics)

a. Be present in school and volunteer where possible

b. Use freedom of information act requests to uncover withheld information.

c. Link up with other like-minded parents

d. Join groups like Moms For Liberty, et al

e. Reinforce your values at home and don't assume the school system is doing it for you.

Whom might this book NOT be for?

If you know of names such as: Matt Walsh, Abigail Shrier, Ben Shapiro, Haidt-Lukianoff, Ryan T. Anderson, etc ..... then this book may not be for you.  You already know how bad the situation is. You can update with more specific examples, but this book is just so much stamp collecting at that point. (Maybe you could learn a few things about keeping your kids shielded.)

Whom IS it for?

-Parents who are wondering why and how schools have gotten so......creepy....without their noticing. 

-Parents who want a good defensive/offensive strategy so that they don't have to get involved in the banality of a decaying society.
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Bethany Mandel is my kind of mother/person: 

-Married.
-Six children (all one father--her husband)
-Orthodox Jewish (convert)
-A case study in resilience (her mother died when she was 16 years old and she had to make the end of life decisions)


Familiar topics (backbone of each chapter):

1. Children are the target of leftists because a lot of them don't have their own.

2. The covid Hysteria / pandemic was about control more than anything, and the same "social distancing" standards were not applied during the corresponding summer riots.

3. Nut balls from teachers' colleges go on to teach in high schools, and that is a mechanism of transfer of the infestation.

4. Even libraries and books are not safe because the professional societies that guide them have been through the woke meatgrinder at university. Of course they are happy to censor books from people like JK Rowling because she is a "trans exclusionary radical feminist."

5. Focus on politics is corrosive to the overall mission of an organization, medicine specifically in this case. (If people can't give conferences because they are not racially balanced, then no medicine is actually discussed.)

6. Transgenderism is the topic of the hour. Lots of recapitulation of Abigail Shrier. ("Live son, dead daughter" game.) Loudoun County Virginia: one student pretends to be trans and rapes not one but two different girls and two different schools.

7. Drag queen story hours and extremely precocious sex education are gigantic grooming exercises.

8. People like to hide messages behind "the children." 

9. A very notable chapter that describes Bethany's mother's death at 16 and father's suicide 3 years later, and her learning to become an adult as a result.
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Second Order Thoughts:

1. It sure does seem like when you have Strange White People involved in some morass with each other, EVERYBODY ELSE has to be part of that problem. 

-WWI/WWII was them fighting each other, and somehow EVERYBODY ELSE had to be involved. 

-The Woke/Critical Race Theory Hysteria, much like Communism /Marxism is some of them fighting each other (for primacy of ideas), but it seems like black people have to get involved in this as weapons/chips/mascots/guinea pigs.

2. The author aptly points out that one thing the left wing nut jobs do not do is have children, and so they must indoctrinate / destroy other people's children.(p.9--"If you look at birth rates by ideological persuasion, you will see that it's not progressive having kids; they're entrenched in anti-natalist propaganda.")


3. "Why?" questions.

a. Will this burn itself out? (I think that when we were going through the 60s nobody thought that that time would eventually pass, but it did.)

b. All civilizations and institutions rot; Different pathways lead to the same destination. (The Great leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in China were Western imports to a historically unbiddably closed country.)  

Can the rot be arrested, and if you are able to stop your own children from getting involved, what does it mean if s/he is the only sane person for miles?. What happens to the next generation?

c. A lot of these professional organizations have overreached really badly with things like COVID. Could they lose their credibility? (p.163)

4. Mandel likes to imagine that using children to push some radical left-wing political agenda is new, when it is not. Cultural Revolution in China, and the Red Guards (average age, 14)/ Hitler Youth in Germany are textbook historical examples.

5. It seems like people who do jobs that have a very heavy empirical component tend to be conservative. Mandel notes that "67% of general surgeons and 65% of anesthesiologists are Republican, while 32% of pediatricians and 24% of psychiatrists are." And of course we know that academics are usually about 1% conservative - - but when you work a job where you don't have to live under the threat of going out of business/ have no consequences for getting anything wrong/ everything is a floating abstraction... What else do you expect?

6. Professional organizations (ideological and institutional capture) show up again and again.  American Academy of Pediatrics.  American Library Association. National Education Association. 

7. If it wasn't this silliness, would it just be any other? (This is a conclusion reached by Richard Dawkins and Helen Joyce; during an interview, Dawkins conceded that his vendetta against the church had been a life wasted because if people weren't being religious in "that" way, then they would just be religious transgender activists.)

8. (Unity of opposites; once you generate one thing, you generate its exact opposite at that moment.) Yascha Mounk has suggested that all of this excessive woke indoctrination will actually create MORE white supremacists.  I think that prioritizing mediocre non-white people for things that require technical competence, such as surgery, will actually intensify the association between "whiteness" and competence.

9. I wonder if it's by design, but: black people end up taking the most damage from these policies that are meant to help them. People can't police areas because it's politically incorrect, and more black people end up getting killed. CPS cannot talk to black families, so more black kids end up getting beaten to death in a home. Everybody wants unlimited abortion access, but black people kill their own babies at a rate four times what white people do. (Thank God they take the lead experimenting on each other with all the damages that come from "transitioning.")

10. Bethany Mandel is one more in a lot of people that have suffered from some extreme trauma and converted to Orthodox Judaism desiring its structure. (It seems like all of us that convert / try to convert are working through some type of genuine trauma.) She's also an example of how children that are shaken up badly earlier in life succeed a lot more often than you would think, the same way children who have had every advantage die of trauma if somebody makes a mean face at them.

Quotes:

1. [Gender Identity] also isn't consistent: the race you're born into decides everything, but your gender can change at anytime.

2. For those of you keeping score at home: "Peter Pan,"/ "Dumbo,"/ and "Lady and the Tramp" are out. Gender-bending Muppets are in.

3. .... a state sponsored pedophile cabal carried out in Germany called "The Kentler experiment"... named after psychologist Helmut Kentler, whose idea it was to hand over homeless teenagers to foster parents who happened to be known pedophiles.

4. Another organization in Indiana was recently exposed for hosting a camp for children as young as eight that featured an instructor who encourages children to explore gender identity, kink, and condom demonstrations.

5. We know from brain research how influential first experiences are for mapping the brain, which should explain how year after year, we're seeing fewer and fewer young people interested in sex, dating, and committed relationships.

6. There is no easy option to avoid the avalanche of indoctrination being aimed at children.

7. They do not want kids under any circumstances to be strong, happy, independent, able to think for themselves and look after themselves. You will never have a revolution, or at least a manipulable citizenry that seeks paternalistic government, with people like that.

8. It becomes a cool status symbol to self identify with any number of mental illnesses.

9. We might define weakness as a trauma inflation regime.

Verdict: Recommended

New Vocabulary:

Duper's delight
Guilty grin
Arielle Scarcella