The pandemic shutdowns may have given parents an unexpected blessing, author Bethany Mandel tells me in the latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast. “It was a real red-pill moment,” Bethany says. Forcing children into “distance learning” opened up the classroom to parents in a way that hadn’t taken place in decades — and parents got shocked by the indoctrination and lack of education taking place.

In Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation, Bethany and co-author Karol Markowicz detail the long application of cultural Marxism and radical gender and identity theories in primary education. This creates an enormous amount of psychological damage as well as opportunity costs for proper education, Bethany and Karol argue, and use their own experiences as parents to offer strategies for parents to counter the Cultural Revolution taking place — and prevent educators from drafting their children into it.

Just how radical has this become? Bethany spoke to one pro-choice mother who ended up voting for Glenn Youngkin, one of many Democrats who crossed party lines when the parental-rights movement caught fire in 2021. It wasn’t so much the content of the classroom material that convinced her, Bethany relates, “but her kid could couldn’t read and she was in 2nd grade.”

That kind of bottom-line outcome has become so common as to shake people out of their ideological complacency, Bethany argues. “I don’t know how much the Woke sort of curriculum animates parents,” she tells me, “but when it comes at the expense of really basic reading and writing skills that their kids are lacking, that’s when it really sort of lit the fire under folks.”

What kind of response did parents get when they first objected to what they saw? “Parents who were watching all of this take place on Zoom were gaslit about everything,” Bethany recounts. They were gaslit about the necessity for school shutdowns, they were gaslit about the need to put masks on their children’s faces, and especially about the impact of all this on children.

The book opens, Bethany tells us, with an introduction focusing on “a woman whose teenage daughter spiraled emotionally and psychologically during COVID, when they were sort of locked on the screens and she spent so much time on Youtube and TikTok that she sort of became suicidal and she was never stable. And it really just sort of set her over the edge,” Bethany relates.

“And they sent her to an inpatient facility that didn’t allow visitation, that would only allow masks. And in this very small inpatient program, eight of the kids came out of it identifying as non-binary,” Bethany says. “Instead of treating their daughter’s mental health, they add it to her mental health diagnoses, throwing in some gender dysphoria. So I mean this, these are the stories that, you know, I heard countless times over the course of the pandemic, and parents are fed up.”

Speaking of gender dysphoria, Bethany insists that it’s no coincidence that rates are exponentially expanding. Schools are pushing it onto children and encouraging it in the curricula.

“This is the gaslighting,” Bethany says. When schools insist that ” we’re just teaching them social and emotional skills,” parents discover that they’re “reading kindergartners books called Swish, Swish, Swish Go The Drag Queen’s Hips. It’s literally a book. It literally was read to a kindergarten class,” Bethany recounts.

“I talked to parents in [Austin], Texas, whose kid came home from kindergarten one day singing Swish, swish, swish, go the drag queen’s hips. And they were like, I’m sorry, what, what are you singing? Where is this coming from?” The children explained that “it’s like this cool new lyric to Wheels on the Bus. And the parents did not think it was cool.” That kicked off “months of fighting with the school district,” Bethany says.

Bethany and I discuss a lot more about the book and about the state of children in today’s world:

• Bethany plays Stump the Host — and wins — regarding the heroine of a children’s book called How Mommas Love Their Babies
• How Bethany and Karol took very different strategies in protecting their children from radical indoctrination
• The power of positive reinforcement and honest communication for values at the earliest ages — and all ages afterward
• The message to parents in Stolen Youth, and the need to understand that this a long war rather than a single battle

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