If it were possible to force people to take off their ideological blinders and actually view what the left in this country is attempting to do to our kids, the madness would soon end. We saw a bit of that happen in the Virginia gubernatorial victory by Glenn Youngkin in 2021, with parents who would otherwise vote Democratic clinching a win for Youngkin over Terry McAuliffe specifically because of the creeping wokeness infecting the curriculum in schools. And we saw a little bit of it nationwide during the midterm elections, especially in local school board races all over the country. But sadly, the fight over what our kids are being taught, and by whom they are taught, are largely being conducted on partisan lines.
United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is not a bystander in this controversy. The man most known for never seeing a piehole in public he didn’t want to mandate slapping a mask on, even if fully vaccinated, took to Twitter, among other places, to comment on the growing divide over how to handle gender dysphoric youth and the appropriateness of providing life-altering reassignment surgery or puberty blockers. Texas Governor Greg Abbott in early 2022 used a legal opinion by Attorney General Ken Paxton that certain medical procedures and treatments, including puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgeries, constituted child abuse under several instances of Texas state law. Abbott issued an order to state agencies to investigate thoroughly to see if abuse to children was indeed occurring. Murthy entered into the discussion via social media, tweeting a thread coming down on the side of supporting the decisions of young kids to permanently alter their bodies.
But the apparent ability for children to have the mental acuity to decide their own fate, fully weighing the pros and cons in a deliberative fashion, has limits, according to General Murthy. Here he is on CNN this week.
13 is too young for social media, you say? Here’s the catch. I agree with him wholeheartedly. 13-year olds have no business having being on social media. How many examples have we seen in recent years where a college athlete gets cancel cultured because of some tweet or post he/she offered up when they were 12? Kids just do not possess the capacity to think of ramifications of their actions like adults do. Their brains aren’t wired at that age to that kind of critical thinking, yet. And for that matter, even adults in all too many cases do not consider the future when considering the undertaking of their actions in the present moment.
But unlike the good doctor, I suspect I take limitations on what a 13-year old should not be able to consent to a bit further. They also have no business having a smart phone, smoking, drinking, consuming marijuana or any other recreational pharmaceuticals in any form, having sex, voting, driving, signing or entering into contracts, buying guns, playing first-person shooter video games, riding on anything without a helmet or in anything without a seat belt, swearing, consuming porn, blocking the onset of puberty, or having radical cosmetic surgery to change the outward perception of their gender.
The problem with Murthy isn’t the message about his desire to keep kids off a platform they’re honestly not mature enough to handle. The problem is he, and this administration, are not credible messengers. Here’s his boss, Joe Biden.
It’s just insanity to believe a 13-year old doesn’t have the mental wherewithal to handle content and conversation on social media, and think of the future impacts of posts they make now, and simultaneously hold to the damnable lie that the same kids can know perhaps as early as pre-school what their gender should have been, and abet that child’s decision outside of the knowledge of their parents in order to make sure that child gets to have whatever procedure done they deem to be necessary. There’s just no science out there that a 13-year old child can think through an entire life’s worth of consequences on that big of a decision at that age.
Even if you didn’t ignore the glaring double standard in Murthy’s position, let’s analyze just the social media guideline he’s trying to offer. What maturity growth happens in the average American youth’s brain between the age of 13 and 14 in which anything they would see, hear, or on what subjects they would engage, would change significantly? There’s no scientific study to support that mythical age line. So why 13? Why not 16 or 18? Is it a PG-13 movie academy guideline he’s trying to transpose to social media, or a TV-14 level of guidance?
The problem with the loss of credibility among all of the scientists in this government’s agencies is that they’ve forgotten how to be scientists. They’re ideologues first and foremost, and then they apply the science only when it fits their ideology. In the 80s and 90s, we used to hear the term outcome-based education. It wasn’t what or whether a student learned, it was only important that everyone got there at the end, even if we have to lower the standards to get to the conclusion we want as a society.
Whether it’s the science you only hear about when it supports the dire consequences of climate change and not the science that shows the Earth has actually cooled a smidge over the last eight years even as carbon emissions have risen, or whether it’s the science that’s overlooked or smothered showing prenatal viability earlier than we ever thought possible in order to keep the abortion on demand narrative alive, science isn’t really science anymore when it’s a political weapon instead of research and data.
The next Republican president, whoever it might be, better put a high priority on flushing out all the alphabet health agencies, and I mean all of them. Half the country doesn’t trust them, and the other half seems only to want to use these agencies to punish the half that doesn’t trust them. That’s just not sustainable. The Band-Aid has to be ripped off, and the agencies like the CDC, FDA, NIH, HHS have to be pared down to their core missions and have someone go through their employee base with a scythe.
Remember that Murthy comes at this as the masks now and forever guy, regardless of vax status. And yet, science just came out this week with another peer-reviewed study that shows that masks really don’t work much against either the influenza or the COVID-19 virus. Why? The virus is a lot smaller than the holes in the fabric of the masks. And not only have we known that for years, the doctors have known that as well.
And yet even after the scientists conclude that their data shows something other than what they want the outcome to show, they conclude that their data isn’t conclusive enough, and that there should be more studies done. It’s like a Magic 8 ball. If you don’t like the answer that science offers, shake it up again until you get the answer you want. That’s no longer science.
Dr. Murthy, even with a message I support as a conservative and as a parent, should probably sit this one out, or at a bare minimum show up with someone that the other half of the country might respect in a joint appearance to have some credibility on that point.
But to his credit, he’s at least a doctor serving in the role of Surgeon General. Can you imagine if Gov. Self-Medicate were installed in that role?
God help us.
