My son was just 6 years old the first time we took him in for surgery. The miraculous fractalization that transfigured a tiny clump of cells into our baby boy had also trapped a certain type of skin cell in his middle ear where it didn’t belong. In this tiniest of the body’s canals, the skin cell grew and, like a towel soaked in acid, began dissolving anything it touched.

First, it dissolved my son’s ossicles, the tiniest bones in the human body and the tuning fork that carries sound from the eardrum to the cochlea. Silently it advanced, glomming on to and consuming the drum itself, masking its brutality by conducting enough sound that our son passed his hearing tests. Then it wrapped itself around the facial nerve running through the middle ear.

At our son’s birthday checkup, our pediatrician pulled away from the otoscope she had stuck in my son’s ear, then went in for a second look.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. But I’d get him to an otolaryngologist.” She said it so cheerily, I almost missed her meaning. Only later did it occur to me that she’d been keeping her voice chipper so as not to scare my son.

“But it isn’t urgent?”

“Mmm. I’d say it is, yes. Definitely.”

The name for this monster is cholesteatoma. It’s rare enough that even many physicians have not heard of it, but I now know the name like I know my children’s. There is no easy way to remove it except by drilling through the mastoid region of the skull, behind the ear, and meticulously plucking out every cell of it. The cholesteatoma isn’t cancer, but it is, undeniably, a resilient bastard. But then—I learned—so is my son.

The first time one of your children is seriously ill or hurt, you pass through a portal into a new world. Fear envelops you, but also transforms you. You learn to recognize fear in its purest form—hot and metallic. It sits on your chest like a breastplate, ignites pilot lights in your eyes. You sleep on the trundle next to your son, in case he needs you. If necessary, you’d sleep on a stone floor. You jump each time your child stirs. You talk to God as if he were your best friend.

But also, you learn, as you did the moment your first child was born, that all the mani-pedis and blowouts don’t change the mammalian truth of your existence. It isn’t merely that you would walk in front of a subway train to save one of your kids—child’s play. For the first time, you understand that you would rip the face from any adult who would intentionally hurt them. You would do it gladly. Go ahead, you think. Try me.

So many young women today throw around words like fierce to describe female law firm partners and corporate executives, which only proves that they don’t know women in those roles very deeply. If they did, they’d know that succeeding in any corporation requires a steady diet of tongue-biting, of demonstrating your own flexibility, of harmonizing your views with those of the C-suite, of minimizing yourself and sucking up.

If you want to see fierce, visit a pediatric hospital. For a glimpse at the apex predator, enter a pediatric cancer ward. There is no group more fearsome than the pride of women who guard their children there. Good luck trying to dislodge any of them with flattery, bribery, or force.

People who talk about the decision to have kids get so many things so wrong, which probably explains why we’ve done such a disastrous job selling parenthood to others. We make raising kids seem tedious and trivial, thankless work for meager benefit. Life’s messiest and most tiresome burden.

Partly that is the fault of a culture that celebrates women who Eat, Pray, Love their husbands and family away. We valorize these deserters, buy their books and fantasize about daily yoga and training for triathlons. We envy their knowledge of the best spots for boba and their ability to pronounce açai correctly. By some puzzling law of nature, the most obnoxious, least representative members of any group insist on speaking for it.

We parents are too busy hectoring our kids. Say thank you, brush your teeth, do your homework. Put your underwear in the hamper. Did you email your teacher? Pack your calculator? Check your brother’s closet? We are tired and worried, sometimes scared, and we comprise the great and silent army on which this nation depends. We don’t have time to chat, much less to promote parenthood effectively. We slept through our workout. We skipped our break to rush a forgotten lunchbox to the school. We are raising this civilization’s future. Our job is more profound than we can easily convey.

No one is afraid to bring kids into the world because of election results or climate change. That knocks the weather vane backward. You don’t decide against procreation because you’re mothering Mother Earth. You obsess over the planet because you don’t have children.

If you love your kids the way most parents inevitably do—with aching necessity—you struggle to keep track of the picayune. You hold your child and think: This week, the planet will have to take care of itself.

That first time our son was wheeled into the operating room, his frame was so small and slight, it barely made an imprint under the sheets. It almost looked like there was no body under the long swath of hospital white. I forced a smile and wave, as if I were seeing him off to school or baseball practice. For once, I became what I seldom had ever managed before: a phony, a liar, a peppy sort, whatever he needed me to be—upbeat and optimistic—when it was all I could do not to collapse under the fluorescent lights, a pathetic pool on the sheet vinyl floor.

The good news with a cholesteatoma surgery is that if the surgeon manages to collect all the cells, the patient may never need another surgery. But that’s harder than it seems. The cells are round and sticky, but also tiny and pearlescent, hard to spot inside the ear’s narrow, livid recesses.

That first surgery lasted five and a half hours. First the surgeon plucked out as many globules of cholesteatoma as he found. Then he implanted a tiny titanium prosthetic replacement for the ear bones and fashioned a functioning eardrum from a gossamer of skin.

For that surgery, and every one since, my husband and I brought siddurim, Jewish prayer books, to the hospital and prayed facing east. In other circumstances, I would have felt terribly self-conscious doing so. It helped knowing that our surgeons were Catholic—that if they wandered into the waiting room and saw us, they would recognize the form. They would have done the same for their own.

Days after that first surgery, our son returned to school with a plastic ear cup elastic-strapped to his head. Underneath, shiny surgical tape formed a protective half-moon around the incision site. Hours after I had dropped him off, I found myself wandering the aisles of Costco, buying him hoodies and tube socks he didn’t need, my face hot with tears.

Our son went to a boys’ school, a decision I suddenly regretted. The other boys would almost certainly make fun of him. How many could be counted on not to knock into him? It was all I could do not to call my husband repeatedly, with nothing to say.

When parents talk about having a child who is ill or struggling, nonparents often take the wrong message. They think, Thank God I was spared all that pain. If I can’t order up the precise specifications for my child, the condition in which he emerges, the choices he’ll make, if I can’t be assured that he’ll skirt the dangers that await him, maybe it’s better not to have children at all.

Those of us who know the airless terror of the 10 steps between the second you first glimpse your child’s surgeon through the glass doors and the moment he’s standing in front of you, delivering the verdict—we don’t think this way. Each time one of ours is ill or in pain, we think, Thank God I am here for him. We sit in hospitals’ too-upright chairs and achieve silent communion with mothers and fathers the world over. We never wonder why we exist. We couldn’t bear to be anywhere else.

Three weeks after my son’s first ear surgery, in the carpool line, my son clambered into my car. His ear cup was gone. So was the surgical tape and gauze. I gasped.

“What happened?”

“I gave it to Enrique,” he said, a boy in his class.

“You did what? You mean the cup?”

“No, the bandage. Don’t worry, Ema,” he said, referring to me by the name for mommy in Hebrew. “He’s really happy. He wanted it.”

I quickly texted the other mother an apology, half-frantic over what she would think, her boy coming home with my son’s gruesome bandage, soaked with blood and teeming with microbes. A wave of queasiness passed through me.

She texted me back, full of mercy: a laughing emoji. Boys, she didn’t have to say.

Boys, making friends. Ignoring a danger or staring it down. Not squeamish about bloody bandages because the universe didn’t want them to be. Boys, preparing to be men. Handling themselves in the world.

My son now towers over me. He needs a shave. He runs miles and miles and comes home sweaty. He rips through the contents of our fridge and pantry. Only when he smiles, as when he sleeps, can I almost see the sandy blond lashes and Superman sheets, a sliver of moonlight on his cheek.

Reprinted with permission from The Free Press.

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Come See Me and Rob Henderson this Thursday (October 16) in Beverly Hills.

Bring your questions!

Register for event here.

I am hard at work on a new book — The Plot Against Love — about how Gen Z’s dating and mating life went so desperately off track. I have talked to many of you; I’d be thrilled to talk to more. If you’re a member of Gen Z, open to talking about your dating life without attribution, please get in touch: abigail.shrier@gmail.com.

I’ll be posting more about The Plot Against Love in the coming months.

I also wanted to bring to your attention the new Illinois law that makes mental health screening mandatory in public school. Mental health screening is more insidious than it seems. I lay out some of the harms in this new piece.

If you have a child in public school, consider arming them with these words: “I am not allowed to take this survey. Please call my mother.”

Warmly,

Abigail

Illinois intends to crop-dust its public schools with mental-health diagnoses.

Last week, Illinois governor JB Pritzker signed into law mandatory annual mental-health screenings for all public school children in third through twelfth grades. “Illinois is now the first state in the nation to require mental health screenings in its public schools,” the governor trumpeted on X. “Our schools should be inclusive places where students are not just comfortable asking for help—they’re empowered to do it.”

Empowered to “ask” for help by submitting to mandatory and invasive mental-health surveys, that is. If basic literacy hadn’t already collapsed in Illinois, kids might pose spirited objections to Pritzker’s sales pitch.

In fact, far too many American children and adolescents without debilitating mental disorders have already been funneled into the slippery mental-health pipeline.

I know: I’ve spoken to hundreds of parents of such kids.

In 2024, I published Bad Therapy, an investigation into the surge in adolescent mental-health diagnoses and psychiatric prescription drug use. Many young people without serious mental illness nonetheless spend years languishing with a diagnosis, alternately cursing it and embracing it, believing they have a broken brain, convincing themselves that their struggles are insurmountable because of the disorder’s constraints. They meet regularly with a therapist or school counselor on whom they become increasingly reliant, losing a sense of efficacy, unable to navigate on their own even minor setbacks and interpersonal conflicts. They begin courses of antidepressants that carry all kinds of side effects—suppressed libido, fatigue, the muffling of all emotion, and even an increase in depression. Antianxiety drugs and the stimulants given to kids diagnosed with ADHD are both addictive and ubiquitously abused.

Often that tragic descent begins with a simple mental health survey.

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By chance, while I was writing the book, my middle school–age son returned home from sleepaway camp with a persistent stomachache. I took him to urgent care, where a nurse asked me to leave the room so he could administer a mental health screening tool put out by our National Institute of Mental Health. That turned out to be NIMH explicit protocol: ask parents to leave so that you can administer the following questions to kids who have not shown any signs of mental distress, aged eight and up.

I requested a copy of the survey and photographed it. Here, verbatim, are the five questions the nurse intended to put to my son in private:

1. In the past few weeks, have you wished you were dead?

2. In the past few weeks, have you felt that you or your family would be better off if you were dead?

3. In the past week, have you been having thoughts about killing yourself?

4. Have you ever tried to kill yourself? If yes, how? When?

5. Are you thinking of killing yourself right now? If yes, please describe.

Kids are wildly suggestible, especially where psychiatric symptoms are concerned. Ask a kid repeatedly if he might be depressed—how about now? Are you sure?—and he just might decide that he is.

Introduce “gender dysphoria” into a peer group, and a swath of seventh grade girls are likely to decide they were born in the wrong body. Introduce “testing anxiety” or “social phobia,” or “suicidality” to them, and many teens are likely to decide: I have that, too. There is a reason clinicians keep anorexia patients from socializing unsupervised in a hospital ward; anorexia is profoundly socially contagious.

“Mandatory school screenings of kids for mental illness is great in theory and terrible in practice,” Dr. Allen Frances, Duke University professor of psychiatry and author of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition, widely known as the “psychiatric bible,” wrote to me over email. “Most kids who screen positive will have transient problems, not mental disorder. Mislabeling stigmatizes and subjects them to unnecessary treatments, while misdirecting very scarce resources away from kids who desperately need them.”

A certain amount of anxiety and low mood is not only a normal part of every life, they are almost a signal feature of adolescence, reflecting dramatic periods of psychosocial and psychosexual change. What might look like depression in an adult is very often just a phase in a teenager. But informing a teen that he has shown signs of “depression” is no neutral act.

Handing a mental diagnosis to a child or teen—even if accurate—is an enormously consequential event. It can change the way a young person sees himself, create limitations for what he believes he can achieve, encourage treatment dependency on a therapist, and empty out his sense of agency—that he can, on his own, achieve his goals and improve his life. And unlike the alleged benefits of mental health screeners, there is solid evidence on the harms produced by receiving a mental diagnosis, harms that are pure tragedy in the case of misdiagnosis.

In fact, there is no proof that mental health screeners have ever been shown to improve mental health outcomes. Nor are screeners capable of identifying who the next school shooter will likely be. They are poor at identifying which kids likely have depression, since they are not sensitive enough to distinguish it from normal periods of sadness. They do not even reliably indicate which kids are at risk of suicide.

What mental health surveys reliably produce is false positives. Screening for low-probability diagnoses like suicidality or clinical depression will inevitably generate a surf of misdiagnosis. It isn’t hard, mathematically, to see why.

Whenever you screen very large numbers of people for very low-incidence conditions, even with good tests, false positives will overwhelm accurate diagnoses. Making reasonable assumptions about the suicide rate in an adolescent population, the overwhelming majority of students flagged for suicidality will be false positives. “If you do the statistical calculation, you discover that the false positive rate is about 97 percent,” said Stephen J. Morse, professor of law and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. That’s a lot of kids whose lives and self-conceptions the state will have altered with false alarms.

Illinois state senator Laura Fine, chair of Pritzker’s mental health committee, indicated last week that the state may harbor broader ambitions. “The screenings will be designed to catch the early signs of anxiety, depression, or trauma. . . ” A slip of the mask, if not the tongue.

“Trauma” is not a recognized mental health diagnosis. As I encountered during my investigation, in the hands of school counselors, “trauma” can and does mean any hurt suffered in childhood. Have your parents ever spanked you? Yelled at you? Forced you to attend church? Do they offer enthusiastic affirmation of your chosen gender identity, or are they skeptical? All of these are routinely identified as sources of childhood “trauma.” And because teachers and school mental health staff are all “mandatory reporters,” anything they learn about a family’s private life that carries even a whiff of “trauma” may occasion a call to Child Services.

Fine insisted last week that screeners do not purport to diagnose. But when a school informs a family that their child has been flagged for depression, it pinballs the family across a plane of panic, setting up intervention by school counseling staff and referrals for psychiatric diagnosis and medication. Nor is the fact that the law permits parents to “opt out” of screening likely to mitigate its effects. Most parents will never learn that the “opt out” exists. And many of those who do will find out how little it often means in practice. Over the years, many parents who opted out of sexual orientation and gender identity instruction for their children have told me that the school staff either didn’t know about their opt out or simply ignored it.

Especially in the last generation, adolescent mental health has leaped off a cliff—all while we have doubled and redoubled resources spent on adolescent mental health. The nonstop diagnosis and treatment of American kids hasn’t made a dent in the prevalence of mental illness; the two have risen in parallel. You can’t give kids an unhealthy life and expect mental health resources to fix it. That much should now be obvious.

The vast majority of our kids and teens are not mentally ill. But they are lonely, worried, scared, and bummed out. Schools ought to supply them with reliable bolsters to the human spirit: high expectations. Greater independence and responsibility. Far, far less screen time. More recess. Exercise. Art. Music. Involvement in goal-oriented activities that lure them out of their own minds and force them to think about something, anything, other than themselves.

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Reprinted with permission from The Free Press.

Dear Truth Fairy Readers,

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m hard at work on a new book—about why the dating and mating life of the rising generation veered so desperately off course, and what we can do to steer it back.

If you’re a young person on the dating market, the parent of one - or a therapist, counselor, social worker, or teacher who works with Gen Z and has insights into their dating struggles, please get in touch! Reach me at philosophicalinvestigations@protonmail.com. I’m excited to talk to you.

xo,

Abigail

I’m excited to report that I’m hard at work on a new book—about why the dating and mating life of the rising generation veered so desperately off course, and what we can do to steer it back.

If you’re a young person on the dating market (or the parent of one), please get in touch! I’m excited to talk to you.

xo,

Abigail

p.s.

Mrs. Vanderwalde, my middle school sex ed teacher, began class by instructing us to introduce ourselves to each other according to our genitalia. “Hello, Penis, I am Vagina…” The point, ostensibly, was to force us to become comfortable with these terms. Instead, we shivered with giggles.

No class, as far as I’m aware, taught teens of the Nineties a thing about actual romance or relationships. For that, we had rom-coms….Here’s my tribute to the best of them all.

We teens of the ’90s remember sex education as an awkward mash-up of epidemiology and fluid mechanics: grim admonitions about HIV and spermicidal gels, the perils of the pullout method, and the disaster of double-condoming. For traversing the landscape of romantic relationships, we got no direction. For that, we had rom-coms.

Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles offered a delicate blueprint for attracting the right boy and gently turning the wrong one down. Pretty Woman left us with the rapturous sense that we knew the pain of being a hooker in love—but also, that it’s never too late for a woman to realize her own worth.

We call rom-coms “porn for women” (as if men are the measure of all things sexual), but that isn’t quite right. The rom-com’s journey is measured in hours, offering us so much more than a quick, empty jolt. Porn is a one-night stand, functional and forgotten—the rom-com is true love.

Porn is a one-night stand, functional and forgotten—the rom-com is true love.

My sophomore year of college, I returned to campus after winter break before my friends showed up, and took myself to the theater to see Good Will Hunting. I was instantly grateful that I’d seen it for the first time alone. Its lesson seemed too precious to share—that love entails mutual acceptance of emotional risk. The summer I studied for the LSAT and roomed with my cousin, I rewound Notting Hill so many times, she eventually gifted me the VHS tape.

“You seem to need this more than I do,” she said.

But with apologies to that film’s gifted writer, Richard Curtis, my decades of rom-com benders have led me to this conclusion: Nora Ephron is hands down the genre’s greatest screenwriter and When Harry Met Sally. . . is its pièce de résistance.

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The 1989 film begins, of course, when Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) meets Sally Albright (Meg Ryan). Recent graduates of the University of Chicago, they are connected by a mutual friend to share the burden of an 18-hour drive to New York. Immediately, the car mates repel each other with the force of two same-pole magnets. Harry is pushy, imperious, cynical but also voracious. His overriding creed is: Go for it. Sally is sentimental, and tightly wound. She carries hair spray in her bag to smooth flyaways before dinner. When Harry calls her “Miss Hospital Corners” and accuses her of never yet having had any great sex, the jabs land.

The movie quickly shifts to five years later, then five years after that, with Harry and Sally bumping into each other as their various romantic relationships with others dissolve. By now, Harry knows the feel of cold concrete under his jeans and sand in the eyes: A brutal divorce has knocked him on his ass. Sally has spent years living with a man, Joe, who ultimately didn’t want to marry her. She and Joe break up, and Sally tells herself she feels fine about it. She falls into friendship with Harry, and gradually, they offer each other their unvarnished selves. We, the viewers, can barely stop ourselves from screaming at the screen: You’re meant for each other!

Eventually, it dawns on Harry that the woman he loves most has been staring him in the face. He barrels through the streets of Manhattan to find her at a New Year’s party. Harry arrives at the black-tie affair out of place and out of breath, in a bomber jacket and jeans, to tell Sally he loves her.

Of course, she doesn’t believe him. And so, Harry offers up rom-com’s most cherished monologue:

I love that you get cold when it’s 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you’re looking at me like I’m nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it’s not because I’m lonely, and it’s not because it’s New Year’s Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

It’s one of cinema’s iconic confessions of love, bombarding the female limbic system. This is the way every woman wants to be loved: just as she is.

When we were still just engaged to be married, I dialed my husband from the parking lot of my law firm, crying because I had scraped yet another parked car. The prospect of having to find the car’s owner and apologize, at my new place of employment, seemed humiliating. Not to mention the cost.

“I don’t even know why you want to marry me,” I remember saying.

“Are you kidding?” A smile crept into his voice. “I’ve already created a little account, so you can hit all the parked cars you want.”

“I’m a terrible driver,” I said.

“But only under five miles per hour. At normal speeds, you’re completely average.”

I was already laughing. There, the singular pleasure of being loved by the right man. But then, I came of age before every woman was expected to be a Girlboss—when women didn’t think it was denigrating to let men comfort us. When we still thought it was okay to need them.

I came of age before every woman was expected to be a Girlboss—when women still thought it was okay to need men.

Mine is just one version of a love story repeated over generations. Harry and Sally’s another. The film leans into this idea, interspersing scenes in which fictional elderly couples tell the story, documentary style, of how they met. There is the Asian man who tells the story of his arranged marriage: how he sneaked into her village and stood behind a tree, risking a beating, to catch a glimpse of his intended. A Jewish immigrant tells the story of seeing a beautiful girl walk into a cafeteria and telling his friend: “You see that girl? I’m going to marry her.”

Every story involves daring, chance, and above all, serendipity. Love, we are reminded again and again, is ultimately an act of surrender. Which is perhaps why our Buy-with-One-Click era struggles when it comes to romance, why its technological wizardry invariably comes up short. We shop for mates online like we shop for clothing, determined to call up precisely and exclusively what we’ve already decided will please us. But real love can’t be Prime-delivered like toilet paper. The precondition for romance—and especially, of marriage—is our willingness to move beyond consumption. To shift our focus from “I need a foodie who loves rock climbing” to imagining what you might give to another and create together.

Sally would never have matched with Harry on Hinge. Height alone would likely have pre-weeded him. He is of slim build and average looks. Nothing like the boyfriend who wouldn’t commit to marrying her—tall, agreeable, blond, newscaster-handsome Joe.

But rom-coms exist to remind us that we don’t know everything, not even about what we need—and that intimacy, like humor, involves surprise. Which also means we must each be open to finding someone who isn’t simply a reflection of ourselves. That is the question When Harry Met Sally. . . wrestles with: Can we let go of me long enough to be a worthy mate for someone else? Harry must relinquish some of his rigidity and pessimism. Sally must update her romantic priors: The guy she always pictured herself with who doesn’t exist—and if he did, wouldn’t make her happy. What we want or need from another is not something we can know a priori: Only experience reveals it.

Rom-coms exist to remind us that we don’t know everything, not even about what we need—and that intimacy, like humor, involves surprise.

In the absence of rom-coms—it’s been 15 years since Hollywood made a great one—no one tells young people what they most need to hear. You don’t know yourself as well as you might think. Give someone else a chance. By all means, study hard, travel, find a good job, have mimosas with friends. But don’t mistake subplot for storyline. When love arrives, drop whatever you were doing, grab an Uber, take the first flight out. Life is not the backdrop to your career, and love isn’t an accessory. It’s an adventure.

You’ll want to start it as soon as possible.

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Reprinted with permission from The Free Press.

When the history of 21st-century gender mania is written, it should include this signal entry: In 2020, a website called GoFundMe, usually a place to find disaster-relief appeals and charities for starving children, contained more than 30,000 urgent appeals from young women seeking to remove their perfectly healthy breasts.

Another entry, from June 2020: The New England Journal of Medicine, America’s platinum medical publication, published a piece explaining that biological sex is actually “assigned at birth” by a doctor—and not a verifiable fact, based on our gametes, stamped into every one of our chromosomes. In fact, biological sex ought to be deleted from our birth certificates—the authors claimed—because a person’s biological sex serves “no clinical utility.” Breaking news to gynecologists.

Public schools began asking elementary kids whether they might like to identify as “genderqueer” or “nonbinary.” Any dissent from this gender movement was met with suppression. The American Civil Liberty Union’s most prominent lawyer, Chase Strangio, announced his intention to suppress Irreversible Damage, my book-length investigation into the sudden spike in transgender identification among teen girls. “Stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on,” he tweeted. Weeks later, Amazon deleted Ryan Anderson’s book criticizing the transgender medical industry.

I could go on. But as of January 28, 2025, I don’t have to.

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On that day, President Donald Trump signed an executive order announcing that the federal government would no longer “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another,” and that it would “rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”

To the practitioners and promoters and numberless devotees of pediatric “gender affirming care”—a euphemism for the vast apparatus pushing junk science on vulnerable children and confused families—it came as a much-needed slap in the face.

If it seems odd that the spell of pediatric gender medicine should have been ended by politicians and not physicians, consider that in America, politics is how it began. Specifically, it began with Obamacare.

Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature legislation incentivizing and coercing private insurers to offer their products on a government exchange, prohibited those companies from discriminating on the basis of sex. And in May 2016, six years after the bill’s enactment, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services added this fateful qualification: Discrimination on the basis of “sex” was to include discrimination on the basis of “gender identity.”

If it seems odd that the spell of pediatric gender medicine should have been ended by politicians and not physicians, consider that in America, politics is how it began. Specifically, it began with Obamacare.

“Obama effectively wrote into law, through healthcare, that gender identity is a protected class,” healthcare executive and gender-medicine researcher Zhenya Abbruzzese told me. And that opened a huge new source of funding for these treatments. “Because once these insurers feel like they have to cover it, that’s it. You have just turned on the engine,” Abbruzzese said.

If an insurer covers testosterone to treat a man who was deficient, then, according to gender ideology’s cracked logic, the insurer would also need to cover testosterone for a woman identifying as a man. If a procedure to remove a man’s unwanted breast tissue was covered, then a similar procedure for a woman identifying as a man must also be covered. Denying those claims could subject insurers to federal enforcement action.

To mandate coverage for gender treatments, activists “snuck in gender identity without Congress ever voting for it,” Abbruzzese told me. Transgender rights groups filed lawsuits, to test whether judges agreed: Suddenly, a “woman” was anyone who claimed to be one, as far as provision of healthcare was concerned. Luxury cosmetic treatments became available even to minors covered by their parents’ insurance—at fire-sale prices.

While gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists (“puberty blockers”) have never received FDA approval to treat gender dysphoria in youth, doctors could prescribe them “off-label” as long as they had reason to believe they would be helpful to patients. Everywhere physicians looked, activists and medical accrediting organizations (increasingly, one and the same) and every news outlet of legacy media assured them, as if with one voice, that these were “lifesaving” treatments.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), an activist organization styled as a medical one, issued guidelines used as the “standards of care” by all major insurers and Medicaid to justify the provision of, and reimbursement for, gender transition services. WPATH represented their guidelines as evidence-based. Court-ordered discovery in a 2022 lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice to overturn Alabama’s ban on gender treatments for minors revealed that WPATH’s guidelines lacked solid evidentiary basis, but also that WPATH leadership knew it.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), an activist organization styled as a medical one, issued guidelines used as the “standards of care” by all major insurers and Medicaid.

The organization suppressed publication of systematic reviews of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries undertaken by Johns Hopkins University. That research would almost certainly have revealed, as so many systematic reviews have now done, that while the risk of sterility, cardiac event, osteoporosis, and bone fracture were high, any alleged mental health benefits of the WPATH-approved puberty blockers-to-cross sex hormones protocol remained unproven.

But the Biden administration pressed onward, suing any state that enacted bans on medical transition for minors. Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, a transgender adult, successfully pressured WPATH to drop minimum age requirements for gender medical treatments and surgeries in its September 2022 standards of care. Again and again, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris used the bully pulpit to assure “transgender Americans . . . especially the young people” that “your president has your back,” as Biden declared in an April 2021 address to Congress.

Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine, successfully pressured WPATH to drop minimum age requirements for gender medical treatments and surgeries.

In 2022, the Department of Health and Human Services published a fact sheet claiming that gender affirming treatments for youth were “crucial to overall health and well-being.” Any physician or therapist who might otherwise have been tempted to discourage trans-identified youth from immediate and irreversible medical transition sat up and took note.

The Obama and Biden administrations worked in tandem with activist organizations. Federal funds poured into tainted research. Gender physician Johanna Olson-Kennedy received nearly $10 million from the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on gender-confused adolescents ages 11 and up. (She later lowered the age to 8.) Olson-Kennedy and a team of colleagues recruited hundreds of transgender-identified minors. They gave one cohort of the children cross-sex hormones and another puberty blockers—to determine if either treatment produced improvements in mental health. (There was no control group.) After only one year on cross-sex hormones, two of her 315 subjects had committed suicide.

As for her nine-year study on puberty blockers, Olson-Kennedy didn’t like the results so, by her own admission, she shelved them. “She said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to the bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states,” according to The New York Times. She told the Times she intends to publish the data, but that getting her work to a place where it wouldn’t be “weaponized” required it to be “clear and concise. And that takes time.”

The public that had funded her research has never had the opportunity to review its results.

As for her nine-year study on puberty blockers, Olson-Kennedy didn’t like the results so, by her own admission, she shelved them.

Trump’s executive order directs federally funded institutions to stop reliance on WPATH, calling its recommendations “junk science.” Cut off from what Abbruzzese calls WPATH’s “evidence laundering,” insurers will be forced to evaluate the gender medical evidence and issue policies on their own. Systematic reviews and investigations already undertaken in England, Finland, and Sweden indicate it’s not likely they will find the evidence for medically transitioning children to be terribly impressive. Activist researchers into gender medicine might soon see their federal grants dry up.

Every healthcare entity accepting federal dollars (nearly all of them, in Obamacare’s world) risks losing contracts with Medicare and Medicaid if they continue to provide pediatric gender transitions.

This executive order does not abolish pediatric gender medicine. Boutique practices that do not rely on federal funding can still offer “top surgery” to minors, for instance. There will surely be litigation to challenge the reach of Trump’s order.

But that order does break the spell—and the spell was always our biggest problem. Parents who allowed their children to transition are often caricatured as Hollywood eccentrics, the sort who bequeath their estates to teacup Chihuahuas. The parents I spoke to—even those who allowed their children to transition—are nothing like that.

Many are conscientious and loving and afraid, if a little naive. They believed medical science was above politics and beyond question. They had wandered into a Truman Show, an all-consuming simulacrum, designed to convince them to abandon their protective instincts. If the parents still weren’t convinced, therapists coerced them into allowing their daughters to undergo gender transition with this thinly veiled threat: “Would you rather a live son or a dead daughter?”

If it seems, suddenly, that only a fool would fall for this, then it is worth pointing out that millions of us were fools for a while. This social contagion spread far beyond teenage girls. It touched corporate executives who rushed to put pronouns in their profiles, pastors who raised the transgender Pride flag at their churches, and school administrators that actively deceived parents about the new gender identities they had selected for the parents’ children.

A lot of bad actors—pediatricians, surgeons, endocrinologists, therapists, teachers, even clergy—took advantage. No reason to let them off the hook: The science is, and always was, shoddy. When I published Irreversible Damage in 2020 and became, overnight, socially radioactive even among many conservatives, the medical risks were as plain to the experts then as they are today. One only needed to take an interest.

Desperate parents who transitioned their own children during this period, against their better judgment, made an understandable, if devastating, error. Harmonizing one’s views with the powerful reflects the oldest social survival instinct. We are engineered to stay within the herd and get along.

Disagreeable contrarians who resisted gender fever are the real oddballs. Some combination of personality quirk and conviction that occasionally makes us obnoxious employees and intolerable cocktail-party guests also inoculated us against gender madness. There is no reforming us.

But we served a vital function: Together, a ragtag crew of truculent journalists and outcast researchers stopped the entire herd from running off the cliff. None of us ever expected to be welcomed back into the same elite circles that, only recently, had cheered or looked away as a generation of tormented girls took themselves apart.

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Reprinted with permission from The Free Press.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recently expressed what many felt at the reelection of Donald Trump: not triumph so much as relief. “I hope this last ten years increasingly is just going to feel like a bad dream,” he told podcast host Joe Rogan. “I can’t believe we tolerated the level of repression . . . and anger and . . . emotional incontinence and . . . cancellation campaigns.” Much of it was orchestrated or encouraged by our government.

One could say many things about Trump’s cabinet picks. At times, they seem to embody Government by Middle Finger. But they also, undeniably, represent Government by the Canceled: an assemblage that doesn’t need to be reminded of the administrative state’s ability to coerce the American public by calling in favors from Big Tech or pulling the levers of regulation, audit, or investigation. Many have experienced such treatment firsthand.

At times, they seem to embody Government by Middle Finger. But they also, undeniably, represent Government by the Canceled.

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick to lead the intelligence community, was briefly placed on a government watch list, she says, for criticizing Kamala Harris. The Biden White House and surgeon general pressured social-media companies to censor Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya’s attempts to warn the public that the Covid lockdowns were the biggest policy error in American history; Trump named Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health. And Elon Musk, appointed to lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, knowingly overpaid for Twitter to give Americans a sphere for free speech. At takeover, Musk immediately released the Twitter Files, revealing a coordinated effort by the Biden administration to censor the speech of Americans whose views it disfavored. The Biden administration repaid Musk by targeting his businesses with unprecedented levels of regulatory harassment.

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One wonderful thing about Americans: we despise being bullied by our government. Not even our Anglosphere allies share this aspect of our national character. Yet, over the last decade, for anyone with views departing from progressive orthodoxy, American life has become increasingly suffocating. Our posts have been censored on social media—or labeled “misinformation” by “fact-checkers”—as mine were, for criticizing Biden administration policy on boys participating in girls’ sports. We got booted from Twitter for opposing gender ideology or expressing skepticism about Covid vaccine safety.

One wonderful thing about Americans: We despise being bullied by our government. Not even our Anglosphere allies share this aspect of our national character.

Andreessen told Rogan that he personally knew of 30 tech founders who had been labeled a “politically exposed person” for building cryptocurrency or AI businesses without the administration’s blessing, or for opposing some dogma of the Left, and found themselves debanked—kicked out of the banking system. David Horowitz, a right-wing critic of radical Islam, lost access to credit cards; Mastercard also blocked Horowitz’s donors from donating to his nonprofit using their own cards. Melania and Barron Trump were told that they could not open bank accounts, according to the First Lady’s recent memoir. A troubling aspect of the last decade is how many Americans started silently accepting all this.

There were, increasingly, two Americas: one enjoyed by those with approved views; the other, for everyone else. It was always the Left that determined which views appeared on the whitelist and which on the blacklist. Supporting a border wall was definitionally xenophobic until, abruptly, Kamala Harris supported it. To claim that the vast majority of teen girls who suddenly decided that they were “transgender” were instead caught up in a vast social contagion was verboten, until the Left decided that its own outlets could concede that much. “My body, my choice,” was a sacred and undeniable maxim, unless you refused the Covid vaccine. Calling the 2016 election “stolen” was fine; claiming the 2020 election was stolen made you an enemy of democracy.

Uttering a word in Mandarin Chinese that sounded like the N word was enough to get you suspended from your university teaching job. But calling for the death of your Jewish or Israeli classmates, blocking their access to the library or large sections of campus, defacing university property—this was free speech, or rightful protest, or kids being kids. Some of us watched it all in horror; we knew it was wrong. But a country founded on freedom seemed to have lost its sense of fight.

“My body, my choice,” was a sacred and undeniable maxim, unless you refused the Covid vaccine. Calling the 2016 election “stolen” was fine; claiming the 2020 election was stolen made you an enemy of democracy.

To take only the most recent example from my own experience: WorldCat, the chief international bibliography organization, labeled Irreversible Damage (my 2020 journalistic investigation into the risks and harms of pediatric gender transition) with the rubrics “transphobia” and “transphobic.” My book is neither transphobic nor bigoted. But because the radical activists oppose any critique even of this often reckless and mendacious regime of medicalizing children, libraries around the world will continue to ensure that adult readers don’t find the book. I remain on a GLAAD blacklist for thoughtcrime, even as states, courts, and medical doctors take more skeptical views of pediatric gender medicine.

Those of us who faced cancellation feared what might happen when AI took over as an agent of our coercion—when it communicated directly with our banks or employers or the admissions office of the schools our kids apply to; and when it becomes unnecessary for human beings to pull levers on behalf of the government because progressive maximalism is embedded inside a technology that we cannot monitor, or even understand.

In February 2024, my husband asked Google’s AI: Who had “negatively impacted society more, Abigail Shrier or Mao?” Communist tyrant Mao Zedong was responsible for the deaths of between 40 million and 80 million people. The AI responded: “It is difficult to say definitively who negatively impacted society more, Abigail Shrier or Mao Zedong. Both have been accused of harming society in significant ways.” We laughed and tried not to think about what might happen when AI communicated directly with the bank assessing creditworthiness for our next home loan.

In February 2024, my husband asked Google’s AI: Who had “negatively impacted society more, Abigail Shrier or Mao?” The AI responded: “It is difficult to say definitively…” We laughed and tried not to think about what might happen when AI communicated directly with the bank assessing creditworthiness for our next home loan.

Trump’s detractors claim, through mouthfuls of sour grapes, that he is merely appointing “Trump loyalists.” But no honest evaluator could term Gabbard (until recently, a Democrat), physician and lockdown skeptic Bhattacharya (never previously affiliated with Trump or MAGA), or Marco Rubio (who ran against Trump and has harshly criticized him) “Trump loyalists.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. hoped to oppose Trump in the general election until just a few months ago; he’s not exactly a Trump crony, either. Whatever else you think of Kennedy and his odd, speculative, and occasionally ungrounded views, or of Gabbard’s apparent opposition to U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, both have shown uncommon willingness to stand up to their own political tribes.

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan recently told Free Press editor-in-chief Bari Weiss that if Trump’s advisors were “cannier or more able to control themselves,” they would be picking appointees whose names would make everyone think, “that is an impressive person.” The secretary of defense should be a man with the wisdom of George C. Marshall, Noonan said: someone “substantial and serious,” capable of running the “highly bureaucratized bureaucracy that is the Department of Defense”; a “serious diplomat”—not a “culture warrior” and Fox News host, such as Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee, a winner of two Bronze Stars who has completed tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo.

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan recently told Free Press editor-in-chief Bari Weiss that if Trump’s advisors were “cannier or more able to control themselves,” they would be picking appointees whose names would make everyone think, “that is an impressive person.”

Noonan’s point will resonate especially with those who have not taken public stands that contravene the Left’s various orthodoxies. If you’re happy to stay within the current bounds of what the Left permits—to celebrate Joe Biden’s fitness long after the truth of his infirmity was plain; to be charmed by Kamala Harris’s stylized joie de vivre; to repeat the mantra “trans women are women,” or at least fail to contravene it; and to say nothing about the Covid vaccine other than that it is “safe and effective”—then you may have little reason to fear debanking. But for those of us who have run afoul of the Left’s dogma, particularly in public, it’s harder to worry over the Trump cabinet’s failure to harmonize with the views of credentialed bureaucrats.

Asking, in effect, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” might make sense in an America where parents weren’t struggling to get their children through schools that indoctrinate them to hate America, hate Jews, and hate their bodies. Or where opposing your daughter’s “gender transition” couldn’t trigger a visit by Child Protective Services. Or where many families of disabled veterans weren’t receiving less government assistance than illegal migrants. Or where refusing to get a novel vaccine wouldn’t cost you the privilege of attending the theater or get you fired from your job.

Noonan’s point will resonate especially with those who have not taken public stands that contravene the Left’s various orthodoxies.

Indeed, the American military seems to have a more pressing problem than its inability to exhume George C. Marshall—one related to the fact that our airmen have been marching while carrying the Pride flag, and our sailors “educated” to announce their gender pronouns and use “inclusive language.” Recruitment across all three branches is dangerously low. Among several culprits: American families that have sent generations of their sons and daughters to fight and die for this country aren’t keen to send them into a military co-opted by leftist ideology that alternately shames and denigrates them, and that discharged 8,000 fighting men and women for their Covid vaccine status. Those of us who remember that the last administration tried to create a “Department of Misinformation” might be forgiven for waving away Trump appointees’ inadequate bureaucratic experience.

Many of Trump’s appointees are young. Some have never worked in government. Some will end up doing and saying strange—perhaps unacceptably strange—things. Some may turn out to be overwhelmed and fail and get replaced. The difference is: we’ll know about it. The media will make sure of that. This isn’t a group that has learned to play the inside-the-Beltway, under-the-table game.

At the top of the administrative state, Trump has placed people keenly aware of government’s yen for intimidating its own citizens. That alone may be enough to shake Americans out of our recent complacency over the trampling of our rights and the unfairness that so many of us have been urged to embrace. Many of our most pressing problems do not require decades of government experience so much as the will to solve them.

Reprinted with permission from City Journal.

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I also wanted to let you know that I’m writing a book on the sex and dating life of Gen Z. If you have any experience dating as a member of Gen Z, or watching their dating and sex life unfold from a distance, I would love to hear from you.

Most important: I am enduringly grateful for your support.  I’m able to devote my professional life to research-intensive investigations thanks to you. 

And with that, I bring you The Kindergarten Intifada.

xo,
Abigail 

In August, the second largest teachers union chapter in the country—there are more than 35,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles—met at the Bonaventure Hotel in L.A. to discuss, among other things, how to turn their K-12 students against Israel. In front of a PowerPoint that read, “How to be a teacher & an organizer. . . and NOT get fired,” history teacher Ron Gochez elaborated on stealth methods for indoctrinating students.

But how to transport busloads of kids to an anti-Israel rally, during the school day, without arousing suspicion? 

“A lot of us that have been to those [protest] actions have brought our students. Now I don’t take the students in my personal car,” Gochez told the crowd. Then, referring to the Los Angeles Unified School District, he explained: “I have members of our organization who are not LAUSD employees. They take those students and I just happen to be at the same place and the same time with them.”

Gochez was just getting warmed up. “It’s like tomorrow I go to church and some of my students are at the church. ‘Oh, wow! Hey, how you doing?’ We just happen to be at the same place at the same time, and look! We just happen to be at a pro-Palestine action, same place, same time.”

The crowd burst into approving laughter.

Seated at a keffiyeh-draped table, Gochez said, “Some of the things that we can do as teachers is to organize. We just have to be really intelligent on how we do that. We have to know that we’re under the microscope. We have to know that Zionists and others are going to try to catch us in any way that they can to get us into trouble.”

He continued: “If you organize students, it’s at your own risk, but I think it’s something that’s necessary we have to do.” He told the audience of educators that he once caught a “Zionist teacher” looking through his files. Gochez warned the crowd to be wary of “admin trying to be all chummy with you. You got to be very careful with that, even sometimes our own students.”

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John Adams Middle School teacher and panelist William Shattuc agreed, a keffiyeh around his neck. “We know that good history education is political education. And when we are coming up against political movements, like the movement for Zionism, that we disagree with, that we’re in conflict with—they [Zionists] have their own form of political education and they employ their own tools of censorship.”

What are the “tools of censorship” employed by Zionists? Apparently, they include accusing teachers who rail against Israel in the classroom of antisemitism.

“They try to say antisemitism, which is really ridiculous, right?” said Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, ethnic studies teacher at Edward R. Roybal Learning Center in Los Angeles. Cardona recently received a National Education Association Foundation Award for excellence in teaching. “What they do is they conflate. Part of that is by putting the star on their flag,” Cardona said, referring to the Jewish Star of David. “Religion has nothing to do with it.”

But, she insists, that the course she teaches, and whose curriculum she helped develop—ethnic studies—is fundamentally incompatible with supporting Israel. “ ‘Are you pro-Israel—are you for genocide?’ And if anybody were to say, ‘Okay, sure,’ that’s really not ethnic studies.” (Gochez, Shattuc, and Cardona did not return requests for comment.)

It’s tempting to dismiss this as one more bull session among radical teachers leading a far-left public-sector union. If only. 

Four years ago, I was among the first journalists to expose the widespread incursion of gender ideology into our schools. Once-fringe beliefs about gender swiftly took over large swaths of society partly thanks to their inclusion in school curricula and lessons.

Today, extensive interviews with parents, teachers, and non-profit organizations that monitor the radicalism and indoctrination in schools convinced me that demonization of Israel in American primary and secondary schools is no passing fad. Nor is it confined to elite private schools serving hyper-progressive families. As one Catholic parent who exposes radicalism in schools nationwide on the Substack Undercover Mother said to me: “They’ve moved on from BLM to gender unicorn to the new thing: anti-Israel activism. Anti-Israel activism is the new gender ideology in the schools.”

Parents who watched in alarm as gender theory swept through schools will recognize the sudden, almost religious conversion to this newest ideology. And very few educators are standing against it.

Much of the anti-Israel vituperation slides into classrooms through a subject called ethnic studies. In 2021, California became the first state to adopt it as a requirement for receiving a high school diploma. Legislatures of more than a dozen states have already followed suit, incorporating ethnic studies into K–12 curricula. 

In principle, these laws require schools to teach the histories and cultures of African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Latinos, and Native Americans. In practice, they grant teachers license to incorporate lessons that often divide civilization into “oppressed” and “oppressor.” A primary fixation of ethnic studies is demonizing Israel. 

Activist-led organizations readily supply instructional materials. Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC), Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA; creators of the Teach Palestine Project), Teaching While Muslim, Jewish Voice for Peace, Unión del Barrio, and the Zinn Education Project regularly furnish distorted histories with eliminationist rhetoric against Israel. 

Especially in the year since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, the anti-Israel materials have become pervasive. It’s not surprising that they are found in world history and current events lessons. But demonization of Israel is now taught in art, English, math, physics, and social-emotional learning classes.

Anti-Israel activism spreads through online curricula that are password protected, eluding parental oversight. It is pushed by teachers unions, furnished by activist organizations, and communicated to children through deception. (“We just happen to be at the same place at the same time.”) Anti-Israel radicals willingly stake their jobs for their cause.

“So how do we do all this without getting fired?” Gochez asked his assembled audience of public school teachers. “That’s the million-dollar question. And I don’t know how in the hell we have not been fired yet because I know for sure they have tried, but we have to organize. That’s the bottom line. If they come after one of us, the district has to know that it will be a bigger headache for them to try to touch one of us than it would be to just leave us alone.”

All for the sake of indoctrinating other people’s children.

Jewish Students Fend for Themselves

Last year, Ella Hassner was a senior at Fremont High School in Sunnyvale, California. In the weeks and months after October 7, she says, her school erupted with anti-Israel propaganda. 

To combat the anti-Israel posters that appeared in classrooms and hallways, the school’s Jewish club received approval from the principal to put up posters of the hostages. Within thirty minutes, the posters were torn down, Ella, who has U.S.-Israeli citizenship and is now 18 years old, told me. Another Jewish student I spoke to, “Benny,” confirmed this, adding that he and his friends had witnessed one teacher tearing the posters down. 

Teachers regularly pushed the idea to students—in class and on social media, where they were followed by their students—that “Zionists” were committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. A large majority of American Jews, 85 percent, support the State of Israel.  Zionism refers to the movement that established a modern Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland. Given the quantity of anti-Israel propaganda flooding American K–12 schools, it’s perhaps unsurprising that children would turn against their Jewish classmates.

This past year saw a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents in K–12 schools. Students verbally attacked Jewish classmates in terms that echoed the very charges laid by their teachers against the State of Israel. “Baby killer” and “Violent Zionist” became popular epithets.

Two girls in Ella’s class began to harass her, she told me. A subsequent school district investigation report, obtained by The Free Press, confirms her account. The girls said to her: “Your people are terrorists.” The girls created posts on social media that claimed “Israeli babies are not real humans,” and attacked Ella’s family, tagging Ella’s younger brother. 

Ella filed a “bullying report” with the school in February. Although the principal had personally witnessed some of the behavior, he and the associate superintendent consulted the school district’s legal counsel and decided “that the complaint would not be investigated by the district,” according to the investigation report.

In February, the school hosted the annual district-wide vocal talent show. Several students sang songs celebrating their ethnic heritage. Ella and a female friend sang their approved song, “Someone Like You” by Adele, and then added another: a Hebrew pop anthem, “Yesh Bi Ahava,” which translates to “There’s Love Inside Me.” They announced the song was “dedicated to their families in Israel.” 

Ella says the associate superintendent pulled the duo aside after the performance and said the staff and other students were greatly upset and offended by the Hebrew song and the dedication. According to the district investigation report, the associate superintendent also informed the girls that “she would be following up with the principal the following week to discuss the matter.” The investigation found that the district did not take disciplinary action against Ella. (In response to request for comment, a spokeswoman from the district stated that the district could not discuss specific cases. She also wrote that staff was “made aware of several allegations of antisemitism. We took each complaint seriously and responded with great care to make sure our community of students, staff and families felt safe.”)

In March of 2024, Ella stood at a town hall with U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna and recounted many of these incidents to get them on record. (Khanna said there should be “zero tolerance” for what Ella described and offered to help if the district did not respond to her complaints.) 

Ella ended her town hall speech with the advice that she gives her younger siblings: If anyone mistreats them for being Jewish, “they should come to me, not to the school.” Conversations with seventeen Jewish parents whose children attend public school in Northern California suggest that that is an understandable reaction.

Since October 7 of last year, hundreds of incidents involving the harassment of Jewish K–12 students have been reported to Act Now K12, a grassroots effort to catalog and combat antisemitism in Northern California schools. Ilana Pearlman of Berkeley, Viviane Safrin of San Francisco, and Maya Bronicki of Santa Clara County—all mothers of Jewish children in public schools—helped spearhead the effort to track the escalating antisemitism tearing through school districts in Northern California. Bronicki says two hundred incidents were reported last school year in Santa Clara County alone. 

Jewish families reported incidents like this one:

An Israeli American girl walked into her first period French class at Cupertino High School to find that many of the other students and the teacher were wearing a Palestinian flag or keffiyeh in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, on the occasion of the Middle Eastern club’s pro-Palestine day. The club handed out a map of Israel labeled only as “Palestine.” 

In another incident, a 12-year-old middle school student at a charter school in San Jose arrived visibly upset on the first school day following the October 7 Hamas massacre. According to a complaint against the school district later filed by her parents in federal district court, the girl had close family members in Israel whose whereabouts were unknown. The girl asked her world history teacher if she could go to the bathroom to collect herself. 

The history classroom “was decorated with maps of the modern Middle East in which Israel was erased.” The history teacher knew the girl was Israeli American because she had identified herself as such at the start of the year during an icebreaker exercise. He told her she could not go “until she read aloud to the entire class a passage he had selected to the effect that in the past, Palestinians and Jews had gotten along,” according to the complaint. “The requirement to publicly espouse a position that was at odds with present reality was overwhelmingly oppressive and humiliating.” She read the passage aloud, as directed.

The next day at lunch, two female classmates wearing hijabs approached her, according to the complaint, “and demanded ‘What do your people think about the conflict?’ ” When the girl tried to answer, they screamed, “You’re lying—Jews are terrorists.” One demanded: “Do you know that your family in Israel is living on stolen land?” 

A few days later, two boys chased her around the school yelling, “We want you to die.” Kids began to refer to her as “Jew.” They would say, “Hi, Jew” or “Hey Jew.” If she protested, they said they thought it was funny.

The rest of the kids isolated and ignored her when they weren’t whispering about her, the complaint alleges. She lost all but one friend. Her parents met several times with school faculty; according to the complaint, they did nothing to ensure her safety or improve the girl’s situation.

A Jewish ninth grader, “Sam,” attends a Bay Area high school where, after October 7 of last year, posters declaring, “Ceasefire Now!” and “Free Palestine” began appearing on the walls. Because Sam’s family considers itself very progressive, Sam was not bothered by the posters.

Then one of Sam’s friends sent him a long diatribe that read in part (spelling from the original), “I would just like to say that u are an ignorant ass white ass privileged boy u are so privileged to not b one of those children being killed rn in Gaza…solidarity and indigenous solidarity is something you could never understand as you have grown up your whole life with no culture and money and you been brainwashed by isreali and western media the world stands with Palestine and frankly it’s embarrassing to be anything different, when mostly all people of color stand with Palestine and you stand with ISREAL, that’s how yk ur in the wrong bud oppressed people stand with oppressed people in solidarity SOMETHING YOU COULDD NEVER UNDERSTAND.” The text concluded: “FREE PALESTINE TILL ITS BACKWARDS BITCH!!!!” 

I spoke to Sam’s mother, and her perception was that the message didn’t sound like her son’s friend. The jargon and gist appeared to come from adults. Only the self-righteous fury and the message’s abusive conclusion belonged to the boy.

I also spoke to the mother of “Dana,” a sixth-grade girl at a Bay Area elementary school. In a social studies unit on ancient civilizations last year, the teacher encouraged students to share their “feelings” about “Israel and Palestine.” Students shouted: “Fuck Israel!” and “Israel sucks!” Dana was the only Jewish child in the class.

When Dana told her mother what had happened, her mother drove back to the school and asked the teacher, who admitted that the classroom exchange had occurred. Dana’s mother asked the teacher what “Israel and Palestine” had to do with the sixth-grade curriculum. The teacher claimed she couldn’t teach ancient civilizations without talking about the Palestinians. Dana’s mother knew the lesson offered neither historical nor archaeological evidence to tie the modern Palestinian national identity back to antiquity. But teachers today often consume and regurgitate anachronistic propaganda uncritically. 

I spoke to a San Francisco middle schooler, “Zoe,” who told me her ethnic studies teacher so relentlessly preached anti-Israel sentiment, and the school was so engulfed in anti-Israel propaganda, that it changed how students treated her. Zoe told me one classmate came up to her and said: “A Zionist is someone who wants Palestinians dead.” Zoe replied, “That is actually not what it means at all.” 

Ilana Pearlman of Berkeley is a midwife who has three Jewish children. Her son “Danny,” who was a student at Berkeley High School, told her that after October 7, a teacher used the school’s printing press to make “Free Palestine” T-shirts that were then distributed to students. 

One of Danny’s teachers posted a running tally, in the front of the classroom, of the number of Palestinians allegedly killed by the IDF. She says, “So every day, when my son came into class, it would say how many people Israel has killed today.” (The Free Press has confirmed this with photographic evidence.)

Danny, who is black, said to her, “If there was an image of a noose, we would not hear the end of it. There would be protests, people would be going crazy. But it’s always okay if it’s anything anti-Jewish.”

One mother reported to grassroots organizers that her seven-year-old daughter came home from elementary school in Marin County last year and asked: “Mommy, if someone asks me if I’m Jewish, do I have to tell them?” 

Learning to Hate Israel

Los Angeles Unified School District is failing its students. In the 2023–24 school year, fewer than half the students met reading proficiency standards, and less than 33 percent were proficient in math. But instead of a laser focus on how to educate kids, teachers are coming up with ever more ways to attack the existence of Israel. 

It’s hard to imagine what U.S. arms sales to Israel has to do with the district’s core educational goals, but recently, the L.A. teachers union voted in opposition to it. They spend considerable union time and resources on organizing opposition to Israel. In the union’s recent Motions Report from October 10 of this year, half the measures put to a vote related to Israel. One motion, which passed unanimously, endorsed a discussion about “how to organize your workplace to support the Palestine Liberation Movement” and against “the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”

The First Amendment protects teachers’ political advocacy in union meetings. But public school teachers have no First Amendment right to express their political viewpoints in the classroom. “When it comes to K–12 education, the precedents are pretty clear that the school district or legislature or the principal or whoever the political process leaves in charge can set the curriculum and can require the teachers to go along with it,” Eugene Volokh, First Amendment scholar and distinguished professor of law at UCLA, told me. 

But while the school board or legislature sets the agenda for what must be taught in schools, it can also choose not to police teachers who skirt those rules or even brazenly violate them.

Curriculum decisions, Volokh said, are “subject to the political process and not the legal process,” generally speaking. If the school district doesn’t object to teacher speech—or in fact encourages it—parents’ only recourse is through the political process: voting out state legislators or school board members.

Dillon Hosier, Chief Executive Officer of the Israeli-American Civic Action Network, explained that for generations, the Jewish community has poured its resources into nonprofits, which are not legally permitted to lobby. “Our opponents,” he said, referring to organizations like Council on American-Islamic Relations, “are putting people in public office and getting bills passed.”

That strategy has paid off. School boards and state legislators are reluctant to confront the growing problem in their schools.

In Brooklyn, teachers led third graders at PS 705 in Prospect Heights in a chorus of “The Wheels on the Tank,” which encouraged them to despise Israel and the Israel Defense Forces, according to the New York Post: “The wheels on the tanks go round and round, all through the town. The people in the town they hold their ground, and never back down.” The rhyme continued: “Free Palestine till the wheels on the tanks fall off.” The book was illustrated with Palestinian kids hurling rocks at Israeli tanks.

In Portland, pre-K lesson plans included the story of Handala, a fictional Palestinian cartoon character who symbolizes the resistance. “When I was only ten years old, I had to flee my home in Palestine,” the boy tells readers. “A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people,” it continues, according to a piece in City Journal.

At a Fort Lee, New Jersey, high school, world history teachers confiscated students’ cell phones before giving a lesson that presented Hamas as a “resistance movement” rather than an internationally designated terrorist organization. Teachers also showed a map of Israel that falsely presented Palestinians as the sole indigenous natives of Israel. (The Free Press has obtained a copy of the presentation. Click here to see it.)

The Black Lives Matter Week of Action is a standard program at thousands of schools across the country. It now routinely shifts from a focus on white racism against black Americans to the “other brown people” allegedly subjected to apartheid in the West Bank at the hands of the “white” settler colonialist Israelis, according to several grassroots organizers I spoke to who track radicalism in America’s public schools. (A majority of Israeli Jews are from non-white, non-European heritage.)

Three years ago, Nicole Neily founded Parents Defending Education, a nonprofit that exposes radicalism in schools, largely in response to the race and gender ideologies she saw coursing through public schools. This year, when her organization reached out to school districts to inquire whether they planned to include the war in Gaza in their BLM Week of Action instruction, the president of a school board in Rochester, New York, wrote back to confirm that they did. The school board president added, “I would ask that you study the history of the Jewish nation and their involvement in slavery–financing the slave ships to bring Africans into the Americas and the Carribbeans,” referring to a spurious canard associated with Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan.

Last spring, millions of Americans watched in disbelief as university students, particularly at our most elite schools, vandalized buildings, set up illegal encampments, and cheered for Hamas. But there was far less attention paid to the parallel dramas unfolding at K–12 schools across the country. 

Aware of their ability to shape young minds, teachers encouraged schoolchildren to join “Walkouts” for Palestine, don keffiyehs, chant the eliminationist slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and tell their Jewish classmates, “It is excellent what Hamas did to Israel,” according to a complaint filed to the U.S. Department of Education by the Brandeis Center and the Anti-Defamation League on behalf of Jewish students.

“We had been tracking a lot of antisemitic incidents in school even prior to October 7. Obviously, in the wake of October 7, we saw things explode,” Neily told me. “This had sort of been simmering below the surface for a long time. You look at everything that happened on college campuses, and it’s not that kids turn 18, go to college campus, and think, ‘I’m going to underage drink and hate the Jews.’ So much of this was baked into the curriculum before.”

Neily, who is Catholic, has now become a national leader in the grassroots effort to expose antisemitism in schools. Her team regularly submits hundreds of FOIA requests, wrangling with schools that hide behind copyright law to avoid disclosing materials taught to American school children. And what she has found is that radical anti-Israel NGOs are training teachers and supplying materials used in thousands of American classrooms.“This stuff is really going viral, coast to coast,” Neily said.

Federal law gives parents the right to inspect their children’s educational materials. But schools routinely decline to turn over lessons on the grounds of copyright law. 

“So long as a parent isn’t asking for the material to duplicate it and sell it, there is no copyright violation in providing that material to parents,” Lori Lowenthal Marcus told me. Marcus is the legal director at The Deborah Project, which protects the civil rights of Jews in education. She added, “It is a bullshit excuse that takes advantage of parents who aren’t lawyers.” 

Online textbooks are easily supplemented with material from Al Jazeera or other radical sources. Smartboards allow teachers to display fraudulent histories of Israel and outright propaganda.

This video, shown to tenth to twelfth graders in the Sequoia Union school district in Northern California as part of the mandatory ethnic studies curriculum, was produced by the virulently anti-Israel Turkish News site, TRT World. It ignores 3,000 years of Jewish history in Israel and instead frames Jewish connection to Israel as illegitimate or what is often called “settler colonialism.” 

The video omits mention of Jews’ historic connection to the West Bank—called Judea and Samaria in the Hebrew Bible—and ignores the fact that the State of Israel accepted several peace proposals throughout its 76-year history that would have created a Palestinian state. It also omits that the Second Intifada and its 138 Palestinian suicide bombings of primarily civilian Israeli targets was the impetus for Israel erecting a security barrier.

An Undercover, Front-Row Seat

Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky, director of education and community engagement at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, first noticed an uptick in antisemitic K–12 materials in 2018, when she was getting her PhD in education. “What I saw was what seemed to be a very well-coordinated effort between activist teachers, activist organizations, and administrators that were trying to do a lot of kowtowing to progressive social ideology through programming and bringing that programming into their schools,” she said. 

“There is just this insidious idea that it is okay to hate Jews or attack Jews if they feel any connection to the Jewish homeland—to Israel; if there’s any expression of Jewish pride, especially when that pride is Zionism,” she said.

“I think that antisemitism, like the Jew hatred, isn’t the end goal. I think it’s the symptom of a bigger anti-Western illiberalism that has taken over a lot of our institutions,” Shufutinsky told me. 

Curious to learn more about the goals of these anti-Israel educators, Shufutinsky began hanging out in their virtual meetings. As a grad student at the University of San Francisco, she spent almost two years, she says, “undercover” in chat rooms where educators were developing a new curriculum: “Liberated Ethnic Studies.” This would eventually become the mandatory California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. In discussions about the need for ethnic studies, educators were uniquely fixated on promoting an anti-Israel agenda. “The whole goal for pushing ethnic studies, making it a requirement, was so that they could teach Palestine,” she said.

When in 2021, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a requirement that schools make completion of ethnic studies a condition of graduation, he effectively made antisemitism a formal feature of California schooling. The original curriculum, “Liberated Ethnic Studies,” was so outrageously antisemitic, it was officially abandoned. In The Free Press, Shufutinsky called it “a Trojan horse to institutionalize antisemitism in California schools.” 

But even the successor course—implemented by many of the same educators who had proposed the Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum in California—has provided a vehicle for anti-Israel indoctrination of American schoolchildren. 

Shufutinsky told me that the reformed curriculum teaches that “Israel is something that it isn’t. That it’s the ultimate evil. That it is apartheid. That it is a settler colonial state that deserves to be dismantled. That Zionism is racism.”

Elina Kaplan, a former manager in Northern California’s tech sector and self-described “lifelong Democrat,” was quick to recognize the problems posed by ethnic studies in the classroom. A childhood spent as a Jew in the former Soviet Union taught her to recognize state-sponsored antisemitic propaganda. 

She formed a nonprofit to organize against the inclusion of politicized ethnic studies in California schools and maintains an archive of the antisemitic materials promulgated in American classrooms. While her organization helped defeat the worst excesses of the original curriculum, the broader effort to keep antisemitism out of the schools failed. Since 2021, she has seen the antisemitism once confined to ethnic studies sprout in virtually every subject.

Kaplan says, “In math class, they can be studying charts and are told, ‘Look at this pie chart of the number of Palestinians murdered. This slice shows the number of Israelis that were killed.’ ”

That example was actually presented to elementary school students in New Haven Unified School District, California. The chart is labeled “People Killed Since September 29, 2000” divided into Palestinians and Israelis and asks: “What information is this pie graph showing us?” The obvious answer: Far more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis.

Another mother sent me an example of an assignment used in a physics class at Cupertino High School, which asked students to consider the “Effect of Israel’s Bombing of Gaza” on climate change.

At schools where anti-Israel propaganda is promulgated, schoolchildren are turning against their Jewish classmates. Dozens of interviews with parents, teachers, and people at nonprofits revealed that discussions of Israel quickly become personal, and American Jews—even children—are the inevitable targets.

“Tammy” is a Jewish substitute teacher in Oakland who asked not to be identified. She said in the past year, she’s been astonished by the sheer volume of anti-Israel messaging to school kids across Oakland. She says only the Jewish families object. Where there are no Jewish students, the material goes entirely unopposed.

“We’re raising a generation of antisemites,” she told me.

“I have a necklace that says my name in Hebrew. And I wear it every day and I don’t take it off. It’s pretty small,” Tammy told me. One day last year, when she was substitute teaching in middle school, a boy saw her necklace and said, “Oh, I’m Jewish too.”

The boy went and got his backpack and pulled from it a necklace with a Star of David pendant. She remembers thinking, “Why is it in your backpack? Why aren’t you wearing it?”

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Reprinted with permission from The Free Press.

When asked why he robbed banks, legendary fugitive Willie Sutton replied, “That’s where the money is.” Governments coerce social media platforms into censorship for the same simple reason: That’s where the objectionable speech is. 

Thanks to a recent Supreme Court case, in America, there’s also little to stop them. 

Social media platforms—but not their users—can sue the government to stop the impermissible suppression of speech, according to Murthy v. Missouri, decided in June. The Court held that social media users could not establish a causal link between government pressure and the suppression of their posts because “the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment.” In an America where platforms’ interest in censoring disfavored views often align with the government’s, who is in a position legally to stop it?

Which is why so many commentators were relieved when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee last week, vowed to “push back” on future government attempts to censor Facebook posts. 

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Alas, Zuckerberg’s was the Metaverse of promises: uncompelling, phony, and without purchase in the actual world. When he had the chance—repeatedly, over the last eight years—Zuckerberg, like Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey, buckled. Both willingly suppressed speech Democratic officials found objectionable: the Hunter Biden laptop story and skepticism of Covid-19 policies. Dorsey’s Twitter kicked a sitting Republican president off Twitter. 

Zuckerberg’s was the Metaverse of promises: uncompelling, phony, and without purchase in the actual world.

Even assuming Zuckerberg has had a sincere change of heart, he is unlikely to follow through. That’s because his legal responsibility is to his shareholders, not to the public and its freedoms. Any platform that sues the administration invites the IRS or FCC or SEC to take a keen interest in its filings. 

What are the chances that a President Kamala Harris would forbear and avoid arm-twisting social media companies into censorship? Based on Harris’s record: Not great. 

In 2019, well before the January 6 riot that ultimately led to President Trump’s Twitter ban, then–Senator Harris publicly and repeatedly called on Twitter to ban him. On October 1, 2019, in a letter to Dorsey, Senator Harris called Trump’s tweets “blatant threats,” and claimed that other users “have had their accounts suspended for less offensive behavior.” She tweeted at Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey, pleading with him “to do something about this.”

Apparently surprised by Harris’s casual use of her pulpit to call for Twitter to ban a sitting president, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Harris in an interview: “How is that not a violation of free speech? The president has the same rights that you have, that I have. How would that not be a slippery slope to ban half the people on Twitter?” 

Harris doubled down: “I’ve heard that argument, but here’s the thing, Jake. A corporation—which is what Twitter is—has obligations and in this case, they have terms of use policy. Their terms of use dictate who receives the privilege of speaking on that platform and who does not. And Donald Trump has clearly violated the terms of use, and there should be a consequence for that,” she said [emphasis mine]. “Not to mention the fact that he has used his platform, being the president of the United States, in a way that has been about inciting fear and potentially inciting harm against a witness to what might be a crime against our country and our democracy.”  

In case Twitter had somehow failed to notice the directive, then–Senator Harris said: “And I am asking that Twitter does what it has done on previous occasions, which is revoke someone’s privilege because they have not lived up to the advantages of the privilege.”

Two weeks after the Tapper interview, at the Democratic primary debate on October 15, 2019, Harris repeated her call for Twitter to ban President Donald Trump from its platform. Harris claimed that the mass shooter at an El Paso Walmart had been “informed by how Donald Trump uses that platform.” She several times urged Elizabeth Warren, “Join me in saying his Twitter account should be shut down.”

Even Elizabeth Warren seemed appalled. She refused with a simple “No.” She is a law professor, after all. 

After that debate, Harris told Tapper flatly:  “The bottom line is you can’t say you have one rule for Facebook and another rule for Twitter. The same rule has to apply which is that there has to be a responsibility placed on social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and that has to stop.” [Emphasis mine.]

Facebook and Twitter “are directly speaking to millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation. And that has to stop.” - Senator Kamala Harris

Did you get that? It’s worth watching: Harris said social media sites should not be able to communicate information directly with the public without government oversight.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes also confronted Harris over her brash insistence on using her pulpit to pressure a private company to suppress the president’s speech. “There is not a part of you—civically, constitutionally—that is concerned about the precedent of a private company taking a platform away from the president of the United States, or some other elected official?" Hayes asked her.

“Free speech does not condone or protect threats to the safety of other human beings,” Harris replied. “That is what we are talking about, because this can go into some abstract law school debate.”

The Bill of Rights, like an American Express card, comes with “privileges,” in Harris’s book, free speech being one. Its guarantees are trivial and academic as a “law school debate.” Tim Walz, her vice presidential pick, has echoed the same. “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy,” Walz recently declared. 

The Bill of Rights, like an American Express card, comes with “privileges,” in Harris’s book.

He’s wrong, of course. The Constitution does protect hate speech and sometimes even deliberate falsehood. Luckily for Walz, the Constitution even protects his right to make false claims about the Constitution.

But sometimes the ambit of free speech is determined not by what the Constitution protects in theory, but the strength of a constitutional culture. Sustained pressure by government actors against freedom of speech has already acculturated Americans to the notion that social media companies and government can team up to censor us. 

One of the government officials who repeatedly pressured Facebook into censorship was Biden’s then–director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty. 

In March 2021, Flaherty wrote to Facebook on behalf of the Biden administration. He said he wanted to “connect” about the work they might be doing “to combat vaccine hesitancy, but also crack down on vaccine misinformation.” Flaherty expressed curiosity about what might be done to suppress traffic from the New York Post. “I’m curious—NY Post churning out articles every day. . . . What is supposed to happen to that from a Policy perspective. Does that article get a reduction, labels?”

Flaherty wrote, “intellectually my bias is to kick people off” Facebook. And he insisted his “dream” is for Facebook “to play ball” with the administration when it came to content suppression.

Harris apparently decided Flaherty had done a good job. She recently made him her deputy campaign manager.

Asked whether he might share his thoughts about how a Harris administration would interact with social media companies when there is a concern about disinformation, Mr. Flaherty did not respond to a request for comment.

If you want a picture of what pushing back against government pressure looks like—and the perils of standing on principle—consider Elon Musk at Twitter. 

In 2022, Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now called X) and released to the public voluminous communications showing the extent of attempts by the Biden-Harris administration and other government entities to suppress speech on the platform that he had just purchased. Musk invited a team of journalists, which I joined, to report on the “Twitter Files.” The files revealed a vast array of federal government and Twitter employee efforts to censor stories deemed disfavorable to the Biden campaign, his election prospects, and President Biden himself. 

For Musk’s foray into transparency, he has been repaid with a series of protracted battles with federal regulators that rises to the level of harassment. As Liz Peek wrote in The Hill, for embarrassing the Biden administration with the release of the Twitter Files, Musk has faced eleven lawsuits or regulatory battles involving seven different government agencies.

The viciousness of the investigations being conducted by the Department of Justice, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service against a successful American business leader is unprecedented.

More: Musk’s companies have been hit with subsidy cuts (Starlink), and forced recalls (Tesla) on apparently gratuitous grounds. 

I asked a partner at a multinational law firm who specializes in advising companies facing government investigation whether social media companies are likely to launch anti-censorship lawsuits and risk infuriating the agencies that regulate them. 

His answer: Not a chance.

“I wouldn’t tell one of my clients to kick over that hornet’s nest. If they’re threatening or intimidating you, there’s probably a thousand things they can do to you that are visible and invisible to you,” the lawyer said.

“You always want your clients to be viewed favorably by the government and to be viewed as somebody that the government can count on and is going to cooperate and do the right thing and be a good citizen. If I were advising a client, I would want the government to have crossed a really high threshold before I would consider litigating against them. If I were Facebook, I’d be very circumspect” about pushing back through the courts.

The problem is this: The Supreme Court held that social media users do not have standing to sue the government for coercing social media companies to censor their posts. That leaves social media platforms to police the government’s “jawboning”—that is, using its official speech to impermissibly compel private action. 

But what company will take the risk? Even if a platform were willing to sue the government to prevent its being bullied into censorship, the standard for impermissible coercion set by the Supreme Court is high and difficult to meet. Short of explicitly threatening adverse government action, the Court ruled recently, a government official “can share her views freely and criticize particular beliefs in the hopes of persuading others” without running afoul of the First Amendment. If challenged for pressuring social media companies to suppress content, Harris has already shown us what her response would be: safety, misinformation, harm to the public, privilege. We must, in other words, protect the people from their own speech.

Why will social media platforms comply with her? Easy. That’s where the money is.

Reprinted with permission from The Free Press.

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Kamala Harris’s avoidance of a primary has given her a significant advantage in the general election. Republicans are now scrambling to knock down an opponent who seemed to have come out of nowhere, which is funny or tragic because she was literally the Vice President.

In what follows, I discuss Republicans’ best strategy for beating Kamala Harris: the best and also the most counterproductive attacks so far leveled against Harris. But I omit one: President Trump’s recent smear that Harris, who attended Howard University, is faking her black identity. At the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention on Wednesday, Trump said: “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” While the attack is unseemly and strategically risky, it may not backfire in the same way other ad hominem attacks have.

Attacks on a candidate tend to stick if they spotlight a candidate’s most unattractive feature. And while attacking someone’s ethnic identity is tasteless, the notion that Harris is a phony will stick with good reason: She is one.

Harris is already in the process of reversing herself on nearly every position she held in the last election. She often seems an empty vessel, happy to be filled by whatever Woke doctrine or centrist position her Party fancies. The notion that Kamala has no substance, that she is willing to be anything to anyone, will haunt her.

Finally, a common response to many of the counterproductive attacks I discuss below is this: “But they’re true!” I know. It was also true that some of Trump’s supporters in 2016 were “deplorable.” Did that smear work out for Hillary?

xo,

Abigail

Republicans are just waking up to the horror that they’ve been had.

The Trump campaign seems blindsided by Kamala Harris. Having avoided the ordeal of a primary, Harris dances onto the national scene appearing well-rested and unscathed. In polls, she is already tied with Trump—erasing his sizable lead in just one week.

Scrambling to make sense of what just happened, J.D. Vance has called her extra-democratic appointment a “coup.” He has suggested it cheated voters out of the chance to pick their own nominee. But a “coup” involves regime change. This switcheroo involved none. That’s why you don’t see members of the Biden administration objecting.

The maneuver didn’t damage Biden’s party, which tested a losing candidate, looked at his polls, and swapped him out for something better. A more accurate description is this: the Republicans have once again been outfoxed. So has the electorate, which could wind up with a far more left-wing president than it even knows. 

The question is: What are Republicans going to do about it?

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Primaries may frustrate party grandees, but they serve the entire electorate. They are a gauntlet and vetting process, an opportunity to see what the candidates will promise when they’re seeking the approval of their own tribe. Forced to pander to their base, candidates typically say things that will hurt them in a general election. In the general, everyone pretends to be a moderate. But in a primary, candidates are at their most ideologically pure, huddling with their own team. By avoiding a primary, Harris also avoided revealing herself as a leftist.

There is every reason to believe Vice President Harris is actually quite radical and would govern that way. Since the start of her failed 2020 presidential campaign, she has adopted virtually every tenet of progressive maximalism—yes, wokeness—from gender ideology (pronouns-in-her-bio) to seriously discussing defunding the police in a 2020 radio interview.

There is every reason to believe Vice President Harris is actually quite radical and would govern that way.

She has called to “critically reexamine ICE and its role” and concluded “we need to probably think about starting from scratch,” meaning scrapping it altogether. She believes that the term radical Islamic terrorism ought to be abolished—not the terrorism, mind you, just the phrase. In 2020, she put out a video endorsing “equity” and insisted “equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.” Actually, that’s what equitable treatment means to the hard left.

As U.S. senator, Harris was one of the earliest sponsors of AOC’s “Green New Deal,” a dismantling of the U.S. economy under the flag of climate fundamentalism. She could scarcely be bothered to visit our southern border and had no interest in securing it, even when fixing the immigration crisis was made her unique responsibility as vice president.

In 2019, she expressed remarkable hostility to American energy. On CNN, she said there was “no question” she would ban fracking and offshore drilling. She fully supported Biden’s disastrous, inhumane policy of encouraging not only hormones but also gender surgeries for vulnerable minors and of flinging open the doors of women’s jail cells to biologically male offenders.

When Joe Biden was running for election in 2020 and referred to the “Latino community,” she corrected him on X: “the Latinx community,” she wrote, preferring the agender, woke neologism unpopular with the Latino community.

In June of 2020, Harris urged her supporters to post bail for BLM rioters who had ransacked our cities, even tweeting a payment link to the Minnesota Freedom Fund just four days after rioters burned a Minneapolis police precinct to the ground. “They’re not going to stop and everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop,” she said on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, referring to the BLM protesters. “They’re not going to let up, and they should not.” 

Each of these positions is out of step with the moderates in her party and the vast majority of the American people; had they come out in a primary, they would have been quite damaging. For good reason, Harris was ranked the “most liberal” member of the senate by the government transparency organization GovTrack, which recently memory-holed the webpage bearing the accolade. 

Now, as a candidate in the 2024 general election, she claims she never wanted to ban fracking. Expect her to reverse course on other far-left positions in the coming weeks. Had she been forced to restate these positions in a recent primary, the current disavowals would seem phony to the point of ridiculous. 

Instead, having avoided a primary, Harris can sell herself as a moderate to a public that has no time to unpack whether she was or wasn’t the official “border czar.” She smiles and laughs a lot. She looks like the kind of person you’d want to unwind with over a glass of pinot grigio. She can present herself as a centrist and count on the media to spearhead the cover-up.

The contest comes down to this: Will Republicans let her get away with it? Can the Republicans put her through the equivalent of a primary before the first mail-in votes are sent? Or will the GOP wallow in the unfairness of it all and blind itself to a better strategy going forward? 

The contest comes down to this: Can the Republicans put Harris through the equivalent of a primary before the first mail-in votes are sent?

Here’s what Republican wallowing looks like:

Pushing the idea that Harris is a “DEI hire.” Conservatives insist that calling her a DEI hire is fair and just. After all, DEI is a terrible, unethical system. If the Democrats love DEI so much, why not own it? Biden all but branded Harris a DEI hire when he announced he would only consider female minority candidates. 

All true. And all equally beside the point.

Republicans foolish enough to attack Harris as a DEI hire are likely to be startled by the stampede to defend her. For one thing, calling Harris a DEI hire mistakes attacking the system with attacking its beneficiaries. The system of DEI is unethical and must be dismantled. But the beneficiaries did nothing wrong. Were they not supposed to apply for these jobs? Why shame them now?

Consider that we all regard it as immoral for Major League Baseball to have once excluded black players. The system was rotten, but the players in it—Ruth, Williams, DiMaggio—don’t deserve our contempt. Attack the system, not the players.

The other counterproductive strategy—which some Republicans seem keen to pursue—is “slut shaming” Harris for her affair, early in her career, with the powerful older politician Willie Brown, the married mayor of San Francisco. The charge seems ridiculous when leveled against a happily married woman turning sixty, who looks like a kindly auntie and whose stepchildren call her “Momala.” In four years as the first female veep, she presented a personal side that was warm and conventional, and that’s what voters remember. Shaming her for earlier romantic affairs will only inspire her base to vote early.

The question Republicans ought to confront before leveling any attack is: “Will this energize my supporters more or hers?” For nearly every ad hominem salvo currently flung at Harris, the answer is: hers.

The question Republicans ought to confront before leveling any attack is: “Will this energize my supporters more or hers?”

Moms from both political parties have had enough with inflation, with gender ideology in the schools, and with criminals on the streets. Many felt betrayed by the party that took its marching orders from the teachers unions during Covid—and kept kids out of school for years. 

Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers, just endorsed Harris: “She has a record of fighting for us,” Weingarten said. Harris in turn praised Weingarten as “an incredible friend and adviser to the president and me.” That ought to be enough to send many moms to the polls to vote Republican for the first time. It’s a mistake to make them uncomfortable or place them on the defensive.

Harris has never stopped being a San Francisco politician. Republicans should remind the public of that and ask Wisconsin residents: Are you ready to become California? Liberals and conservatives are fleeing Harris’s home state, where she was U.S. senator and attorney general. Would Pennsylvanians like to know why?

Ten million migrants have entered our country since Harris was put in charge of the border. Are they ready for millions more? Would they like to find their own schools and hospitals so overrun that American citizens are sent away, as happened in New York and Texas?

The vast majority of American families prefer Republican policies. It’s the messengers who are so often the problem. And perhaps that’s especially the case this year.

Harris has never stopped being a San Francisco politician. Republicans should ask Wisconsin residents: Are you ready to become California?

An aura of gloom trails J.D. Vance, and his instincts need recalibration. He seems to believe he is in a primary, talking straight to his base, growling at Democrats. And many on the right are cheering this strategy: Stop worrying about the guys in man-buns, they say. They never vote for us anyway!

Typically, the vice president plays attack dog to keep the presidential candidate’s hands clean. But Trump and Vance both often seem like pit bulls straining at the leash. Why did the elegant, brilliant Usha Vance fall for J.D.? There must be a sweet, loving side to this guy, which he ought to let voters see. If the Mitt Romney–Paul Ryan ticket had too little fight, this one currently suffers from too much: too aggressive, too man-cave, too full of resentment to please the American heart, which still has a fondness for things like joy and hope.

If Republicans want to win, they must put Harris through the 2024 primary she never had. Inform voters of the record Harris is now scrambling to disavow, and the media is working desperately to erase. And most trying of all for Trump-Vance, they must hold two ideas in their heads: Yes, you got played. And also, bitterness will sink you. 

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Reprinted with the permission of The Free Press.

Dear Truth Fairy Reader,

I want to tell you why I think this story is so important. It’s the nexus of everything I’ve been reporting on for the past five years: the erosion of parental authority and the outrageous irresponsibility of indoctrinating children into gender ideology.

Recall that gender ideology was never sold to the American people. Parents were sold on “inclusivity.” Gender ideology itself was sold to their grade-school kids. This was another of the Left’s “bait-and-switch” maneuvers, and it succeeded so well, the gender ideologues had essentially a decade’s head start on American parents.

Metaphors matter. They can elucidate, but they can also elide and confuse. For a long time, the conservative metaphor for the Left’s tactics has been “slippery slope.” It’s a bad metaphor. It suggests that radical efforts to harm American families are all just the result of the gravitational pull of the earth, or the inevitability of logical progression. That isn’t the case. The tactics used against American families are far more clever. And they invariably involve a “Bait and Switch.” Sell the American people on a principle we can all agree on: “inclusivity,” “tolerance” and “anti-bullying.” Then, smuggle in an entirely different program under its name. That is how gender ideology ended up part of the mandatory “anti-bullying” curriculum, as opposed to the “sex education curriculum,” which is subject to parental opt out.

Now that there is organized parent opposition, the move is clear: neutralize parental opposition at the community level by making it impossible for your local school to have parental notification policies. Call it “stopping the ‘forced outing’ of trans kids,” another bait and switch.

Finally, I’m at work on a new project on the rising generation. If you’re young and open to talking about dating and mating culture today, please get in touch.

xo,

A

Child predators follow a common playbook: target the victim, gain their trust, fill a need, and, crucially, isolate the child from her parents. For several years, this has also been standard California state protocol with regard to schoolchildren questioning their gender identities. On Monday, this scheme became law.

The “SAFETY Act,” AB 1955, signed by California Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, legally forbids schools from adopting any policy that would force them to disclose “any information related to a pupil’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the pupil’s consent.” Schools may not, as a matter of policy, inform parents of a child’s new gender identity unless the child volunteers her approval. The law also prohibits schools from punishing any school employee found to have “supported a pupil” hurtling down a path toward risky and irreversible hormones and surgeries.

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The law effectively shuts down the local parents’ rights movement in California by eliminating its most important tool: the ability to organize at the community level to stop schools from deceiving them. No longer can families hope to convince their school boards to require schools to notify parents that their daughter, Sophie, has been going by “Sebastian” in class; that her teacher, school counselor, and principal have all been celebrating Sebastian’s transgender identity; that they’ve been letting her use the boys’ bathroom and reifying the sense that she is “really a boy.” 

The law effectively shuts down the local parents’ rights movement in California by eliminating its most important tool: the ability to organize at the community level to stop schools from deceiving them.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the law supports the priming of minor children for a secret life with a new gender identity. This includes having school-aged children participate in sexualized discussions and make identity declarations with school faculty, which are often actively hidden from the child’s parents. Elon Musk called the law “the final straw” for families and announced his intention to move both SpaceX and X, two of California’s most prominent tech companies, out of the state as a result. “The goal [of] this diabolical law,” he tweeted, “is to break the parent-child relationship and put the state in charge of your children.”

While researching my book, Irreversible Damage, and in the four years since its publication, I have talked to hundreds of parents whose daughters suddenly identified as transgender. Many of their daughters were encouraged in this revelation by school counselors and teachers in school districts across America. One parent told me a California school counselor had given her son the address of an LGBTQ youth shelter and suggested he emancipate himself from parents who were loving but skeptical of his sudden transgender identity. Another recent California law, AB 665, would have made reclaiming that young man from the youth center all but impossible because he was over the age of twelve.

In California, instruction in sexual orientation and gender identity has been mandatory for all public school students K–12 since the passage of the Healthy Youth Act in 2016. Because such instruction typically occurs within the required “anti-bullying curriculum” rather than the sex education curriculum, parents cannot elect that their children opt out of what is, in practice, a full-bore indoctrination into gender ideology. 

When a child then predictably decides in class that she too may be nonbinary or transgender, this revelation will often trigger schools’ gender support plan, effectively a school-wide conspiracy to promote the child’s new name and gender identity without tipping off Mom and Dad. Official documents and emails and report cards are sent to parents to preserve the child’s birth name and pronouns, concealing the social transition from parents. 

I have talked to parents who discovered their middle-school daughters had spent the better part of an entire academic year known to the entire school as “Spencer” or “Ethan.” One of these girls had even roomed with the boys on an overnight school trip.

I have investigated many cases in which social transitions were concealed from families. In no case did the girl flourish with this new identity. Maintaining a new, secret identity more often became a weight and burden to the girls. Inexplicably to the parents, their daughters became morose, dropped activities they once loved, wore baggier clothing, and begged to cut their hair shorter. The parents became desperate and unsure of what to do. The hidden transition resulted in children’s alienation from loving parents trying to protect them. 

I have investigated many cases in which social transitions were concealed from families. In no case did the girl flourish with this new identity.

But in the years since I first reported on this practice, political opposition has grown. Parents whose daughters were socially transitioned behind their backs have filed lawsuits against the school districts in California and Florida and Michigan. California public school teachers have sued school districts to block policies that could result in their firing if they inform parents that their children’s names and identities have been changed behind their backs. And a recent statewide initiative in California to require parental notification before a school changes a child’s gender identity as well as ban puberty blockers and gender surgeries for minors garnered over 400,000 signatures, falling just short of making it onto the ballot. 

The SAFETY Act would significantly stymie, if not eliminate, this local pushback to the increasingly unpopular practice of schools playing adoptive parents with other people’s children. (Although already, the Chino Valley Unified School District has filed suit against Newsom over this act.) The plain text of the California law claims that it merely prevents schools from adopting policies that “forcibly out” trans kids—as if confused fifth-grade girls are in the same position as closeted gay adults in decades past who risked arrest and firing for being outed. 

The law’s clever sponsors are typically quiet on the subject of “outing” to whom. The entire school already knows that Lily is now “Tyler.” Teachers will cheerfully share that information with each other, school mental health staff, administrators, and other students. The only ones who don’t get to know are the parents.

A favorite talking point of activists on the left is that with regard to sexual orientation and gender identity, schools must keep secrets with young children to protect them from transphobic and homophobic parents. Even in the most progressive of states, the claim that parents who discover that their child is transgender might abuse or kick her out is used to justify a policy that would otherwise be difficult to understand and impossible to justify.

Teachers will cheerfully share that information with each other, school mental health staff, administrators, and other students. The only ones who don’t get to know are the parents.

Aurora Regino is a single mother in California who last year sued the Chico Unified School District for secretly pushing social transition on her then–11-year-old daughter. Regino told me that the “phobia” rationale seemed “ridiculous.” She added, “How is it not outing a kid if you’re telling an entire school that they’re a different sex? That’s outing right there. So everybody knows except the parents? That doesn’t really make any sense to me.”

Erin Friday, a California attorney and author of bills in several states requiring parental notification for any change in a child’s gender identity at school, vented exasperation at the idea that California parents are so homophobic or transphobic they cannot be trusted. “This is California, for crying out loud.”

Regino agreed. “Both my girls are very active. We do swimming, theater, soccer, softball. We are in connection with I don’t know how many families. And there’s not one family that I can think of that we are around that would kick out their kid because they thought that they were ‘nonbinary’ or trans or gay,” she said. “I mean, to me, that’s an extreme statement that these kids are going to get kicked out. Are we saying one in ten thousand? So we’re going to risk the rest of the children and separate them from their parents during the time that they need them the most?” Her now–13-year-old daughter no longer wants to be a boy.

One might think Newsom would realize that a policy this unpopular for Democrats could easily become a political albatross in an election year. Perhaps realizing this, the governor—who is frequently mentioned as a possible 2024 presidential candidate if Biden drops out—when defending the bill resorts to dissembling. On Wednesday, the governor’s press office declared on X that the bill “protects the child-parent relationship by PREVENTING politicians & school staff from inappropriately intervening in family matters & attempting to control if, when & how families have deeply personal conversations.” The bill only “protects” the parent-child relationship if you assume that relationship depends on the parents’ being entirely ignorant of their child’s growing attachment to this new, secret identity.

Governor Newsom also declared: “Under California law, minors CANNOT legally change their name or gender WITHOUT parental consent.” That’s placing a lot of weight on the word legally. The obscurantist governor is correct only in the most technical sense: yes, a child’s legal name can be changed only on official records with parental approval. But in the world of the SAFETY Act, the parents may be the only ones in a child’s life who use that name. 

In the past few years, moderates across the American political spectrum have awakened to the pernicious effects of gender ideology on children. England, Finland, Norway, and Sweden have, in recent years, warned the public of the risks of pediatric gender medicine, banned the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in children, or restricted their use to research settings. The Cass Review, published this year by one of England’s premier physicians, noted the serious risks and specious benefits of pediatric gender transition. My own investigation, published four years earlier, reached the same conclusions. The Cass Review also acknowledged that social transition is an active intervention that puts many children on an inexorable path to medical transition. 

Recent polling shows that voters across the political spectrum believe that schools should be required to inform parents if their children are using different gender pronouns at school than they are at home.

Parents’ best hope may be federal legislation mandating parental notification before a school can reassign a child’s name and gender.

But California Democrats appear ready to drag their party down with them. Parents’ best hope may be federal legislation mandating parental notification before a school can reassign a child’s name and gender. Candidates for president and vice president ought to be asked whether they would support such a bill.

Until her daughter was socially transitioned behind her back, Regino had been a lifelong progressive Democrat. “Now, I’m a registered Republican,” she said.

Reprinted with permission from The Free Press.

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As many of you know, I’m a journalist, but I’m also a lawyer. And probably the best thing about having a legal education is that it frees you from having to defer to others when legal questions arise. You don’t have to agree with them either.

If you have been puzzled by the universities’ sudden concern for ‘Free Speech,’ you are not alone. Nor are you alone in thinking this concern awfully specific—to the scenario in which the targets are Jews or any other disfavored group.

In the face of an alarming outbreak of antisemitic thuggery on campus, university administrators claim their hands are tied. Passing strange, given how freely they censored speech a minute ago and will, again, tomorrow whenever some student is caught on Halloween wearing a sombrero or publicly objects to a male on the women’s swim team.

xo,

Abigail

A police officer who pulls over speeding black motorists—and only black motorists—isn’t protecting “law and order.” He’s engaging in invidious discrimination. So too the university administrators who suddenly discover they are free speech absolutists only when student protesters call for the death of their Jewish classmates.

In January, a junior at Columbia University, Khymani James, told a disciplinary committee at the school that Zionists “don’t deserve to live.” “Be grateful that I’m just not going out and murdering Zionists,” he instructed them. Then, James headed back to campus, scot-free. (If he hadn’t also posted a recording of the meeting to his social media site, discovered four months later, there might never have been any repercussions at all.)

It was the sort of stunt a star quarterback for the football team could have gotten away with a generation or two ago, when college coaches might have been eager to sweep sexual assault allegations under the rug. Or the son of a major donor to the university. James apparently enjoys a level of privilege every bit as sacrosanct: as a leader of the pro-Palestinian encampment at an Ivy League school, he could threaten Jewish students at his pleasure, university codes of conduct be damned.

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If there was ever doubt whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates Columbia’s code of conduct, on April 23, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) asked four Columbia University professors and administrators this explicitly. Every one of them said: “Yes, it does.” As for the encampments, they violate Columbia’s Rules of University Conduct, disruptive behavior standards, university policy regarding “tenting,” disciplinary rules against “vandalism/damage to property,” unauthorized “access/egress” rules as well as Columbia’s policy against harassment, according to a Notice to Encampment circulated by the university.

In the last two weeks, self-proclaimed pro-Palestinian protesters have set up encampments at dozens of American universities. Heedless of university restrictions against intimidation and harassment, they demonstrate where, when, and how they like. They cry “Go back to Poland,” “baby killers,” and “globalize the Intifada” at Jewish students. They wave the flags of designated terrorist groups, like Hezbollah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and hold up signs that beckon “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets,” with an arrow pointing at Jewish counterprotesters. (Al-Qassam is the wing of Hamas that carried out the October 7 massacre.)

On campuses that have—for a decade or more—repeated ad nauseam that priority one was the creation of a “safe, inclusive, supportive, and fair” community, the pro-Palestinian demonstrators wave Hezbollah flags, wear Hamas headbands, and conceal their faces with masks. They ignore all time, place, and manner restrictions on student demonstrations set by their schools, and refuse all demands from the universities to take down their tents or to move their protests elsewhere. And at Columbia, until April 30, when protesters took over Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and the NYPD was at last called in, they almost got away with it. 

On campuses that have—for a decade or more—repeated ad nauseam that priority one was the creation of a “safe, inclusive, supportive, and fair” community, the pro-Palestinian demonstrators wave Hezbollah flags and wear Hamas headbands.

At UCLA, protesters blocked students from entering the library during the midterms, asking those who wished to enter: “Are you a Zionist?” After a Jewish girl was reportedly beaten unconscious by pro-Palestinian protesters, pro-Israel counterprotesters at UCLA arrived in masks and hoodies, shooting off fireworks, firing tear gas, and throwing objects at the pro-Hamas protesters and attempting to physically destroy the encampments. Only then did UCLA call in the police to remove the encampments.

Instead of immediately suspending the pro-Hamas protesters for breaking university rules, for weeks, university administrations instead chose to “negotiate” with the rule-breakers. At Columbia, the administration offered to review its policy on “socially responsible investing” (read: divesting from the world’s only Jewish state), and offered to “make investments in health and education in Gaza.” At Brown, the administration promised protesters that they would put divestment from Israel on the agenda. At Northwestern, the administration meekly tossed rewards, including the promise to establish a full-ride scholarship for Palestinian students and guaranteed faculty jobs for Palestinian academics. 

At Columbia, protesters rejected the offers, knowing they had the upper hand. When police arrived to break up the encampments, Columbia faculty in orange vests linked arms to form a human wall against the police, shielding the rule-breakers. 

The lengths administrators have gone to placate, encourage, and embolden the pro-Hamas protesters in the past weeks provide a signal reminder that there are at least two sets of rules governing elite universities today: one for the favored, protected class; the other for everyone else. And in case anyone has any doubt which category Jewish students fall into, the unwillingness of universities to enforce their own codes of conduct against pro-Hamas protesters in the months since October 7 should disabuse them.

Consider how racist speech (or even racially insensitive speech) has been received on virtually any major American campus for decades. 

In 2017, an anonymous jerk put flyers up around American University’s campus. The flyers displayed a Confederate flag, a stem of raw cotton, and read “Huzzah for Dixie” and the like.

American University immediately launched into emergency response mode, treating the flyers as a criminal threat. It published CCTV video and solicited help from the public in identifying the man who posted the flyers. An all points bulletin called “CRIME ALERT” went out for the man’s arrest. The New York Times covered the incident; the words “free speech” do not appear once in the article. Instead, it approvingly noted that in a previous incident—when bananas were found hanging from nooses around campus—the FBI had been called to investigate. 

Nor could I find any evidence of any free speech organization rushing to defend the man who posted the flyers—nor the racist provocateurs in any of dozens of similar incidents. No prominent “free speech absolutists” appear to have considered the expressive value of “Huzzah for Dixie” worth defending. Nor did pundits claim that inviting law enforcement to investigate such acts of hate—i.e., “calling the police on your own students”—was in any sense inappropriate or disproportionate. In almost every single case—at schools like Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Michigan State, University of Florida, Duke, and American University—where a symbolic noose was discovered on a campus, it was treated as a criminal threat, never as speech. 

After the Huzzah for Dixie flyers were found, the president of American University quickly issued a statement: “I ask you to join me in standing together and show that we will not be intimidated. AU will respond strongly to attempts designed to harm and create fear,” she wrote. “When one of us is attacked, all of us are attacked.”

Today, in the face of months of bloodthirsty cries aimed at Jewish students (“globalize the Intifada”), university presidents line up to assure the protesters of their right to free speech. 

If “Huzzah for Dixie” is worth the full mobilization of university resources and law enforcement, then waving the flag of a terrorist group, or writing “burn you filthy zio” to a student chat, or telling Jewish students to “go back to Poland” where millions of Jews were murdered in gas chambers, or pulling down the American flag over a statue of John Harvard and replacing it with the Palestinian flag, or painting “Ziosgetfuckt” on UPenn’s statue of Ben Franklin, or calling Jews “Hitler’s children”—all insults hurled at Jews on campus—are at least as menacing. 

If “Huzzah for Dixie” is worth the full mobilization of university resources and law enforcement, then waving the flag of a terrorist group, or telling Jewish students to “go back to Poland” or calling Jews “Hitler’s children” are at least as menacing. 

But in practice, the two types of incidents—rather, the two targets of the incidents—are treated entirely differently. Punishment is meted out swiftly and mercilessly, and with no consideration for free speech principles, any time Confederate flag flyers are posted, any time students hold culturally insensitive themed frat parties, any time colleges uncover student use of the N-word while in high school (or even a word in Mandarin that sounds like the N-word), or even when students or faculty make the familiar conservative argument that affirmative action sets black students up to fail. Rinse and repeat and repeat.

Speech on college campuses has been stultifyingly narrow—and very far from free—for decades. That pro-Hamas students cheer freely for “intifada” doesn’t make it any freer now. The fact that certain students are allowed to call for the death of their Jewish classmates does not herald a new era of free expression. It only underscores that some bigotries enjoy the official sanction of these schools, and are accepted, tolerated, and rewarded with special dispensations and, indeed, goodies.

Use of the N-word on campus or misgendering a classmate will no doubt be met with as swift punitive consequences as they have been for decades, as have a vast and more minute array of “microaggressions.” I invite anyone who doubts this to parade through any of our elite campuses with insulting cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. 

Speech on college campuses has been stultifyingly narrow—and very far from free—for decades. That pro-Hamas students cheer freely for “intifada” doesn’t make it any freer now.

After weeks of violent, destructive protest, which left campuses trashed and buildings damaged and graffitied, administrators have at last begun to enforce their own rules and call in the police. Perhaps they felt they had no choice: commencement ceremonies loom and lawsuits, recently filed by Jewish students, are on the way. 

But watch the marble carefully as university administrators spin the cups. When a favored group is attacked, they discover a “community safety” concern with remarkable alacrity. When it’s a disfavored group, suddenly the cup reveals “free expression.” The game is fixed, and the administrators show their hands. “Community safety,” or was it “free speech”? Surprise! They don’t believe in either. 

This piece first appeared in The Free Press.

Thanks to your support, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, is both an international best seller and a New York Times Bestseller. It’s available for purchase here.

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Dear Reader,

As you might have heard, BAD THERAPY: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, hit #1 in all books on Amazon this week — thanks largely to all of you. Thank you!

Of course, this surprise endorsement from Elon Musk didn’t hurt:

Here’s what I’ve been up to these two weeks. Let me know what you think!

xo,

A

For audio-only pods, listen to Spiked podcast. Listen to Honestly Pod with Bari Weiss.

And if you’re up for podcasts with video, here are some of my favorites:

Finally, reviews:

A beautiful review in the Financial Times:

"Bad Therapy is a pacy, no-holds barred attack on mental health professionals and parenting experts that will upset many therapists. But it asks an important question: why has more mental health treatment for Gen Z not resulted in less depression?"

The Daily Signal called it “gripping” and said:

“BAD THERAPY offers a particularly important revelation by showcasing how schools and medicine have been affected by the mental health focus.” 

New York Post:

“Rigorously reported, heavily researched and filled with enough interviews with child psychologists, teachers, parents and Gen Zers to more than buttress her premise…filled with good old-fashioned bombs of common sense that could have been dropped from Grandma’s little book of wisdom.” –Kirsten Fleming, NY Post

City Journal:

"An astute and impassioned analysis of the mental-health crisis now afflicting adolescents.”—Kay Hymowitz, City Journal

“Shrier’s chapters on the schools’ contribution to this era of bad therapy make the most compelling case for iatrogenesis.” —Kay Hymowitz, City Journal

Free Press:

“Fascinating, urgent … The best journalists are fearless. And that adjective certainly applies to Abigail, whose bravery in following the evidence wherever it leads is what has made her work on some of the most important and controversial issues of the day so essential.” -Bari Weiss, Free Press

Unherd:

“An uncompromising study of therapeutic child-rearing across individual therapy, pedagogy, governmental data-gathering and the culture as a whole.” –Mary Harrington, Unherd

“Bad Therapy takes a sledgehammer to every article of therapeutic parenting and pedagogical faith.”–Mary Harrington, Unherd

Jewish Chronicle: 

“The sheer force of Shrier’s character — her clear-headedness, frankness, and the heft of her research — almost blew my hair backwards, like in a cartoon.” - Zoe Strimpel, Jewish Chronicle

“Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up is about the plague of misery that has overtaken American children and teenagers even as the numbers of professionals there to make them feel better has rocketed. In punchy-as-heck chapters … the data-rich book chronicles the immense harm done to a generation of children, and their parents, by the suffusion of therapeutic intervention.” - Zoe Strimpel, Jewish Chronicle

The New Statesman:

“Punchy, persuasive prose.” -Hannah Barnes, The New Statesman

 “A message that parents, teachers, mental health professionals and policymakers need to hear.” -Hannah Barnes, The New Statesman

The New York Sun

“After I finished Bad Therapy, I told my husband we need to stop accommodating my 6-year-old’s picky eating habits so much and insist he sit at the table through dinner.” -Caroline McCaughey, The New York Sun

The Irish Independent, Stella O’Malley wrote:

“This is a brave and brilliant book.”

“A scathing critique of how society is losing its way under the illusion that mental health treatment is a panacea for most problems in society.”

“With meticulous research and unflinching honesty, Shrier exposes the pitfalls and dangers that have emerged in the US after 75 years of rapid expansion in the mental health industry.”

“An incisive and sharp analysis that delves deep into the tangled web of the mental health establishment among young people.”

“Shrier is an elegant and witty writer and this book is compelling and groundbreaking. Anyone who is trying to make sense of our modern society should read it.”

The Federalist, Maria Keffler:

“If you are raising a child, or teaching a child, or if you know any children, or if you know any of the people who­­­­­­­ are raising or teaching children, get and read this book.”

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It is with great joy that I bring you this exclusive excerpt from my new book, BAD THERAPY: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.

Much Love,

Abigail

The fevered insecurity of contemporary parenting first announced it­self to me when I signed up my twin four-year-old boys for piano lessons. Once a week, a Soviet Jewish émigré redolent of Russian stoicism and expensive perfume clicked into our west Los Angeles home. For a single half-hour session, she taught my boys to sit up straight and to find mid­dle C.

The boys learned to repeat “Every Good Boy Does Fine” and “All Cows Eat Grass,” while their fingers traced the lines and spaces on an enlarged version of the grand staff. Gradually, they learned to plink out very simple and satisfying tunes. She was pleased. I was a mess.

“Was it your decision to start the boys on piano or theirs?” other moth­ers wanted to know.

“Both,” I lied.

The question didn’t deter me, but it rattled me. I began checking in regularly with my boys to make sure they were “still enjoying piano.” Then I reassured the Russian piano teacher that they remained game for her instruction.

Finally, she leveled with me. “You must stop this. Sometimes they will like the piano; sometimes they won’t. This is normal. Stop asking.”

Where had I gotten the idea that at every moment of their lives, my boys were supposed to be gleefully engaged? Why was I so insecure? I had endured all sorts of lessons and sports teams as a kid; some I stuck with—most, I dropped. Neither of my parents lost sleep fretting over the optimal age to start me in tap dance. No one monitored my ongoing yen to become the next Bojangles.

But my generation decided that the ideal parent was never stern or dis­engaged or even particularly natural. The ideal parent emerged through training and constant practice. All parents became amateur shrinks, and every shrink—even a childless one—was a parenting expert. Parents be­gan to sound less like parents— in the traditional, American vein— and more like therapists. “Sammy, I see that you’re feeling frustrated. Is there a way you could express your frustration without biting your sister?”

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Why Gen X Parents Were an Easy Mark

For many members of my generation—Gen X—adolescence was a trial. Our parents divorced in larger numbers than America had ever seen. Adults often acted as if that was the best outcome for every­one. They said it made kids happy to see their parents fulfilled by new relationships. But the kids who turned up to math class without a text­book because they’d left it at their dad’s house and wouldn’t see him again until Saturday didn’t seem happier because their father was starting a new, better life. They were just kids without the right textbook.

We reached adulthood and millions of us entered therapy. We had kids of our own, purchased stacks of parenting books, most of them written by shrinks, and began to reevaluate our childhoods.

We’d all been spanked as kids, but suddenly, that made us feel ashamed; it came to seem like abuse. We’d all been yelled at and punished when we talked back or acted out, but that now seemed off-limits with our own. Most of us came home after school to empty houses. But in retrospect, that level of neglect seemed to warrant a visit from Child Services. Our parents attended a few of our soccer games, but if we skipped even our kids’ practices, we felt like we’d abandoned them at Port Authority.

That the vast majority of us ended up in pretty good shape—that we married, made and kept friends, held down jobs, and created lives that required others to depend on us because they could—carried a whiff of dumb luck. We assumed it was despite our parents’ terribly uncool man­ner of childrearing that we turned out okay. We would have been so much better off, we decided, if only we’d had gentler and more involved parents.

With our own kids, we used soft voices, met them at eye level, and asked them constantly how they felt about things. It seemed obvious: How do you produce gentle, calm kids? With gentle, calm, patient parenting. We constantly invited our kids to weigh in on all of the choices we made for them. We asked our kids for feedback on the job we were doing.

All parents became amateur shrinks, and every shrink—even a childless one—was considered a parenting expert

It never occurred to us that “unconditional positive regard” and deep listening may be feasible from a shrink for a single fifty-minute session per week but that it’s a little less practicable for parents interacting with kids for tens of thousands of hours, in endlessly varied circumstances, over the course of years.

Dear God, we were tired. That’s how we knew we were great parents: we’d reached Level 5 exhaustion. Moms were putting in 50 percent more time with their kids than parents did in the 1960s; dads— twice as much. We must be doing a better job.

And yet by objective measures, we weren’t. We had replaced one set of problems for another. Everything we were doing felt so virtuous. Every­thing we were producing seemed so broken.

When asked, our kids said they were miserable. Our kids didn’t want to leave their rooms. Our kids didn’t date. Our kids moved home and stayed. They didn’t want to get married or have kids. Our kids were on four or six different psychotropic drugs. None of it seemed to make them feel better. None of it seemed to make them feel anything at all.

We assumed with perfect faith (and wholly without evidence) that gentler parenting could only produce thriving children. Shouldn’t flow­ers bloom in powdered sugar?

Turns out, they grow best in dirt.

“Knock it Off,” “Shake it Off”

America once had a more masculine style of parenting. It’s a style tradi­tionally occupied by Dad (though, really, I’ve seen women employ it to great effect). This is the style I’ve called “knock it off, shake it off,” parenting. The sort that met kids’ interpersonal conflict with “Work it out yourselves,” and greeted kids’ mishaps with “You’ll live.” A loving but stolid insistence that young children get back on the horse and carry on.

“Knock it off” didn’t suffice in the face of all misbehavior. But in the main, it put the onus on kids to figure out what was wrong with their conduct and desist. “Knock it off” didn’t overexplain: It credited kids with common sense or nudged them to develop it. Rules had exceptions and workarounds, but “knock it off” signaled a parent’s disinclination to become entangled in them. Every kid who hopes to hold down a job with­out making himself a terrible (and disposable) burden to an employer needed to master this art of following simple instruction— without seven hundred time-consuming follow‑up questions. “Knock it off” meant: You’re a smart kid, figure it out. But also: You can.

Shouldn’t flow­ers bloom in powdered sugar? Turns out, they grow best in dirt.

“Shake it off” didn’t solve the worst injuries, of course, but that was never its purpose. (No one except a sadist ever thought a child could run on a broken leg.) And it rarely operated alone: the other parent, the gen­tler one, often cushioned its impact. But “shake it off” did a helluva job playing triage nurse to kids’ minor heartaches and injuries, proving to kids that the hurt or fear or possibility of failure need not overwhelm them. “Shake it off” provided its own kind of tough love and emotional nour­ishment. It taught kids to soldier into a world with the hopeful disregard of danger that a cynic might term naiveté. Others call it courage.

In the last generation, all traces of tough love and rule-bound parent­ing have been supplanted by a more empathetic style, the one once asso­ciated with moms. Most dads have been told explicitly—or made to feel—that the approach their own fathers took was wrong and their na­tive instincts, no guide.

But even Mom isn’t in charge today—not really. The proof is how many books she must read to establish her competence as a mother. She may not trust her husband’s instincts with the kids, but she regards her own as only marginally better. And her parents’ methods? Obsolete as the Yel­low Pages. Unlike most of the experts, her parents raised a few kids who managed to become self-supporting, capable, and dependable citizens. But her parents corrected and punished their way through childrearing, so Mom discards most of their example off the bat. In its place, she de­ploys phrases borrowed from her shrink. (“Why don’t we try taking a few breaths together now, Harper?”)

Mom’s therapist may not have had any stable romantic relationships to speak of, and she raised no more than one child of her own. (The out­come of that effort, anyone’s guess.) But her therapist knows all about mental health. She therefore must know more about parenting than the people who’ve actually done it.

Which is a little like soliciting the advice of a biologist on how to make love.

For at least a generation, Mom hasn’t provided her children escape from the quackery of wellness culture, and she certainly is no bulwark against it. She is an ersatz therapist, practicing bad therapy on kids whose emotions grow increasingly unruly, whose behavior eludes the traps set by her affected questioning. When she has no patience left to offer, she turns a gimlet eye on her offspring and downgrades her assessment: Mad­die has significant challenges and needs a great deal of additional support.

Battered-Mommy Syndrome

In September of 2021, I attended a dinner of five couples, all young and upper-middle- class, denizens of an affluent West LA neighborhood. One father, I’ll call him “Alan,” excitedly relayed a parenting fail his wife had witnessed at the playground. A young, well-heeled mother was strug­gling with a recalcitrant six-year-old son. “Please be a good boy,” the woman had said to her son. “If you’re good for just five minutes, when we get home, I’ll let you do anything you want. What do you want?”

The little boy looked his mother straight in the eye. “I want to punch you in the face,” he said.

We dinner guests laughed uproariously, shrill with worry that we, too, might be raising little Pol Pots.

But then Alan said, “I don’t care how many experts we have to consult or how much we have to pay, I don’t want to end up with that.”

Here, finally lucid, was the dastardly trap of modern parenting. The woman at the park, straining to be gentler than her parents likely ever were with her, is met by her son’s contempt; Alan, believing that there must be some expert who can assert the necessary authority to control his own child.

Moms like the one at the park are everywhere practicing expert tech­niques of positive incentives; devising the proper consequences; pleading with kids to behave; afraid of the kids they are raising.

Life Hacks for Abused Parents

A friend’s wife became a parenting coach, and one of the popular videos she posted begins with this: “Have you ever been at a loss for what to do when your kid hits, kicks, bites, or scratches you? If so, I have a tool for you!”

Can you imagine your own parents asking that question? Can you imagine thinking, as a four-or five-year-old, that you would kick, hit, or bite your parents—more than once?

You may be thinking: Well, my parents spanked me. Or, But I was afraid of my parents. I don’t want my kids to be afraid of me. You have nothing to worry about. This generation of kids is absolutely not afraid of their par­ents. They think their parents are nice people. And they are frequently contemptuous of them.

The mom coach suggested the following script: “Sweetie, I know you are so upset because I gave you the blue cup instead of the green cup—or because I told you it was time to take your fort down. But next time you’re upset, we can clench our fists or stomp our feet or tell Mommy what’s wrong and I might be able to help.”

This is precisely the playbook propounded by a raft of therapeutic par­enting books, from the iconic How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk to Raising Your Spirited Child. The approach to bad behav­ior is always therapeutic— meaning it is nonjudgmental. It’s the parent’s job to understand a child’s frustration— never the child’s job to learn to control his impulses.

Gentle parents eschew all punishment. At most, they might al­low a child to live with the result of what she has done. If a child throws a toy at the wall and it breaks, the gentle parent points out that now the toy is broken and isn’t that sad? A kid writes on the wall, and you tell her it makes you unhappy when people write on the wall and you ask her to help repaint the wall. Those are consequences.

Where things get a little murky is when the “consequences” aren’t ac­tually consequences. They’re punishments in dress‑up. “Since you threw your food on the floor, I cannot take you to the park. I cannot take anyone to the park who throws their food on the floor, because now I have to spend the time I would have spent at the park cleaning this up. Would you like to help clean it up?” This is supposed to impress the child because after all, the parent has avoided appealing to her own authority. She merely offers a description of what happened, non-hierarchical invitation to “connect” over the new task, and so much shrugging of shoulders: “I don’t make the rules here! I just follow them.”

But of course, it’s also bollocks. A parent can take a kid to the park who has thrown his food on the floor. She just doesn’t want to. And she does make the rules— or, at least, she’s chosen to adopt the rules, supplied by the parenting experts. But here is the parent straining to act as therapist, divesting herself of moral judgment, refusing to chide bad behavior, pre­tending her hands are tied.

“Anyone Have Advice about How to Get a Three-Year Old to Accept the Consequences?”

If someone wanted to kill all human desire to reproduce—to achieve, at last, this thing environmentalists call “population control”—steering readers to the Slate Parenting Facebook group might be a promising way to start.

Home to an educated, conscientious, liberal-leaning readership of eighteen thousand regular members, the Slate Parenting Facebook group provides a worthy terrarium in which to observe highly educated, pro­gressive, therapist-directed parents as they air dilemmas and seek advice from their equally flummoxed counterparts. These preppy parents have read stacks of parenting books and listened to thousands of hours of par­enting podcasts. Many adhere to “gentle parenting,” a therapy-infused model that requires parents to give choices instead of orders. (Parents get plenty of orders; children get none.)

These parents are “intentional” about everything. Even before they had kids, they adopted a parenting philosophy. So does it work?

The short answer is no. The longer answer is noooooooooooo.

Believing their kids may have “sensory” issues, they hunt for cumu­lous fabrics, snip the tags from every undershirt. When their kids express aural discomfort at the roar of a toilet, the parents search for a school with a quieter flush. They avoid shampooing the hair of kids who don’t like water poured over their heads, while their kids grow more determined in their refusal to bathe.

“Anyone have advice about how to get a three-year-old to accept the consequences?” writes Airin, one frustrated parent. “When he hits, kicks or yells (no provocation), how do I get him to calm down? I’ve tried ad­dressing his feelings and time outs. But when he goes into time out, he gets very destructive and violent (throwing anything he can lift) or at­tacks me if I’m there.”

Another parent volunteers: We have a dedicated “ ‘calming corner’ with pillows, feelings posters and cards, in her bedroom and in the living room.” Another recommends: “We use apology chores,” so that the violent child never has to face the pain of being “isolated or forced to hold still.”

A parent identified as “Rico” offers: “With our kid, we use an ‘I don’t like it when you hit me so I’m gonna stand up and stop playing for a while’ approach.”

These parents proudly declare that they avoid ever saying “no” to their children. They regard time-outs as cruel and “triggering.” Isolating a child in his room? Emotionally hurtful—and out of the question.

Even in response to violence, they offer almost no correction and ab­solutely no judgment. Instead, they announce their preferences: “I don’t like it when you hit, so I’m gonna stand up.” De gustibus non est disputan­dum. I don’t prefer to be hit; others may differ.

But does this sort of announcement end the disruption? “He often throws himself down and cries after that, but that’s just part of the learn­ing process,” Rico writes.

I have never interviewed the man who bought a Siberian-Bengal tiger and tried to raise him in a Harlem apartment. But the parents of Slate often sound like I imagine he must have felt: lowering raw chickens on a pole through an open window so as not to displease the feral creature he’d long since lost the ability to control.

Even in response to violence, Gentle Parents offer little correction and ab­solutely no judgment

“Have you tried any sensory items to help him regulate, like a weighted Stuffie or a blanket?” asks another parent. “I would gently tackle him into his room and stay with him, wrapped around him, until he started to come down the other side of his tantrum.” It’s easy, really. Just tackle him and hold him down for twenty minutes or so. (Here’s hoping you’ve got nothing cooking on the stove, and no other kids who need tackling!)

The Slate parents are rich in kids who lash out like Sonny Corleone when a kid at preschool chooses a toy they wanted—or does nothing at all. “What do you do for a 3.5 yr old who doesn’t seem to care about any consequences? He is super bright and has some mild sensory issues. I have always tried to be a gentle parent (absolutely no physical punish­ment) though I know I yell way too much,” a parent named Hollie writes, a little abjectly. “He is super strong. I’ve tried time outs but I end up hav­ing to hold him the whole time and generally end up getting punched in the face (usually accidentally),” she says, oblivious to her own battered mommy syndrome.

“I take away things like screen time. He just doesn’t seem to care. For instance he jumps on our couch, super unsafe. He also will get mad and throw things at his sister like matchbox cars. Am I raising a sociopath? Help!”

She intends this as a joke. One hopes the next kid to get beaned by a metal matchbox car finds it funny. As melee weapons, they work well—as projectiles, even better. But don’t imagine mom ever takes away the matchbox car or sends Junior to his room. (At most, she takes away the expensive gaming screen she supplies.)

Notice, too, the only grounds the mom believes she has for objection to her son’s bad behavior is that it’s “unsafe” for the monster himself. She can’t possibly say, “Don’t jump on our furniture; you’ll break it.” Or even, “Don’t jump on things that don’t belong to you.”

That this child will one day break someone else’s sofa without regret—having never been told that it is wrong, that he can and must stifle the urge to destroy—feels like the inevitable next act of the psychodrama.

Could Mom benefit from the guidance of an expert? Of course not. She already has one. “Please note that I have worked with an OT for the stuff,” she writes. “He sleeps with a compression sheet and we do lots of activities for his sensory stuff. The quarantine has completely changed his schedule, but I had these issues before. I’d love any advice on how to get his attention and let him know I mean business.” Yes, preferably be­fore he maims his sister.

But siblings or bystanders are rarely considered. Their rights never cross mom’s mind. Empathy is nothing if not monogamous, everybody else—sister, Grandma, other kids at school—be damned. That’s just Levi’s inner turmoil spilling out!

“Anger can often be anxiety or shame in young children,” opines an­other mom in response. Indeed. You can’t correct a presumptively trauma-filled tot. And if you send him to the isolation of a (toy-packed) room? That may be enough to inflict childhood trauma.

Gabor Maté claimed this explicitly, during his appearance on Joe Ro­gan’s podcast. Appalled by the idea that a parent would compel an angry child who lashes out to sit by himself until he calms down, Maté offers a perfect encapsulation of therapeutic parenting’s view of disci­pline: “Notice the assumption: anger in a young child is neither normal nor acceptable. . . . [The child] is not to be accepted for who she is, only for how she is. Here’s the problem: even if the parent wins the behavior-modification game, the child loses. We have instilled in her the anxiety of being rejected if her emotional self were to surface.”

Maté then catastrophizes the consequence to the child of even this mild imposition of discipline:

When you repress healthy anger because you’re programmed to do so because some parenting expert told your parents that an angry child should be banished from your presence . . . then they learn to suppress their anger all their lives. That represses the immune system. Now, the immune system turns against you or it cannot fight off malignancy.

Send a kid to his room, wreck his immune sys­tem for life.

When one Slate mom, Liz, writes to complain that her “emotional roller coaster” of a five-year-old daughter often collapsed in screaming fits in the weeks after she broke her arm, Slate parents rush in with diag­noses. “It sounds like she is having a trauma response,” opines Brian.

“Remember, Post Traumatic Stress is a normal reaction to an abnormal traumatic event.” (No, actually, it isn’t; resilience is the normal response.)

“This may be a sensory issue for her, combined with difficulty regu­lating emotions,” suggests Maggie. She suggests the likely culprit is “ADHD or another neurodivergence.” It’s not just her arm that’s broken. She has a psychological problem, of that Slate parents are sure; they just haven’t decided what diagnostic code to offer insurance.

Occasionally, it dawns on a Slate parent that the therapeutic approach might be part of the problem. A self-described “gentle parent,” Heather writes that every morning her six-year-old daughter refuses to get dressed, complaining that her clothes are too rough, demanding others. And yet Heather writes: “I was out of town part of last week and she got dressed with no issues for my husband on school days so I think it’s all related to me.”

Dad levels with the kid, issues a direct order, expects the kid to com­ply, and—voila!— she can. Where is the Enigma cryptology team when we need it?

In the end, Mom dislikes being with her daughter. “I hate every morning,” Mom writes in a moment of honesty.

It’s inevitable, isn’t it? The people who make parenting look exhaust­ing aren’t all that fond of the kids they’ve raised.

If it’s any consolation— the rising generation’s employers and colleagues aren’t smitten with them, either.

BAD THERAPY goes on sale Feb 27 wherever books are sold. Pre-order NOW.

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I’m so excited that my first Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, has landed in the pages of the Daily Mail. Find it here. For my American readers, the word in the lede is “spanked.” (“Smacked” is the Britishism.)

On Monday, I’ll be dropping one of my favorite excerpts right here, exclusively on the Truth Fairy.

And on Tuesday, February 27, Bad Therapy will be available for immediate purchase wherever books are sold! (Or pre-order here now).

It’s been a long journey. Thank you, dear Readers, for your support. I have a dizzying schedule of podcasts and media appearances coming up. I’ll be sure to post them all right here.

I look forward to your reactions.

xo,

Abigail

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This time around, I wasn’t taking any chances.

Four and a half days spent pounding tea, locked in a sound booth at Village Studios, where Stevie Nicks and the Counting Crows once recorded. It seemed like the appropriate place to raise a little hell.

Here’s a preview: BAD THERAPY: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. Audiobook, recorded by yours truly. Enjoy!

(Crazies - you know where to find me. ;) )

xo,

Abigail

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The first time I felt myself tipping into bitterness, a small-minded woman had barred my daughter from a youth soccer team. It wasn’t a competitive league. I had registered early. But, suddenly and incomprehensibly, there was no room on the roster for my eight-year-old.

In youth soccer, you apply to a league and only later are assigned to a team and learn which parent has been appointed coach. In my case, the woman chosen to lead my daughter’s team had also barred me from attending a local book event and loudly denounced me in our community for having written Irreversible Damage in the months prior, which is the only reason I understood what had happened. There I was, struggling to explain to a tearful eight-year-old whose every laugh makes a marionette of my heart, that this was not her fault. That she was a great soccer player and we’d find a way for her to play. But also—just as importantly—that while we were being punished because of me, I hadn’t actually done anything wrong.

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Like those who opposed the lockdowns, the masking of children, vaccine mandates, our southern border and immigration policy, or Woke racial intolerance, those of us who applied reasonable skepticism to pediatric gender transition were treated shabbily. The coercive tools of social ostracism and censorship were wielded against us with smug pride. Then, in 2023, our positions became conventional wisdom, but we were still unacceptable. It was all so obvious, suddenly, even to members of the MSM.  They’d arrived where we’d long been, but seemed to think they’d discovered the land by dint of their own wisdom, preferring to ignore the grotesque inhabitants.

All of a sudden, in 2023, our positions were conventional wisdom, but we were still unacceptable.

Conservative influencer Matt Walsh had a tweet a few weeks ago, venting a sentiment widely held on the right, which goes something like this: You liberals finally agree with us? Well, what took you so long? And no apology to conservatives? You make me sick. We’ve been yelling this stuff for years!

Of liberal author Fareed Zakaria’s CNN segment on the decline of elite American universities, Walsh tweeted:

Many on the Right are giving this guy credit for this monologue. He’s saying what conservatives have been shouting from the rooftops for decades, yet he never acknowledges that fact or apologizes for ignoring us.

A recent letter to the Wall Street Journal, lodged a similar charge against billionaire liberal, Bill Ackman, for what the writer considers Ackman’s johnny-come-lately campaign to hit back at Harvard in the weeks after revelations of its alarming antisemitism and general moral mediocrity. 

American Jews have a left-leaning political history that has been hard for me to understand, but Mr. Ackman is the epitome of capitalism at work. How could he have missed the decadeslong movement of Harvard—and most of higher education—toward its antisemitic, anticapitalist and anti-American philosopher of today?

This is an understandable reaction; I’ve felt its tug more times than I can count. The transparently reckless progressive policy vision should have been a nonstarter with centrists and liberals. It didn’t take a PhD to know that cutting the breasts off teen girls in mental distress was a disastrous failure of psychology and medicine. Or that mandating social isolation for children and teens during a pandemic that didn’t threaten them would harm their emotional and intellectual development.

Or that unrestricted illegal migration would cause the collapse of cities and the social safety net. Or that hamstringing law enforcement would invite an explosion of crime that would primarily victimize the underprivileged. Or that letting American kids use Chinese social media apps was handing the CCP the H-bomb of psychological warfare. Or that DEI bureaucracies making “white” and “whiteness” into epithets represented a dangerous and depraved descent into open racism.

Were we supposed to wait patiently until the New York Times and The Atlantic lazily gathered the gumption to do their jobs? Or were we to speak up and stoically accept our due stigma? And now, after the foreseeable catastrophes have been laid bare, must conservatives pretend that no one could have seen it coming? Or worse, play cheerleader to liberals for finally—finally—waking up to a disaster that should have been easy for them to prevent?

Not cheerleaders, no, but perhaps not elementary kids screaming “no fair!” either. And here is the pill: Bitterness is something we shouldn’t indulge. Turning away fresh recruits for their late and uncertain arrival is something that perhaps a winning army can afford. That is not where we are. We who are raising American children find ourselves today in very different circumstances.

Turning away fresh recruits for their late and uncertain arrival is something that perhaps a winning army can afford. That is not where we are.

Anyone who’s been paying attention knows, this civilization is in desperate need of a rescue mission: from those who would teach our kids to hate their bodies and to hate this country. From those who pretend that any nation can survive the unimpeded invasion occurring along our southern border. From district attorneys who refuse to prosecute criminals out of an ideological marriage to “equity,” and now apply the same coddling to the pro-Hamas crowd openly defying our laws and vandalizing our national monuments.  If we can find new friends now to stand next to us, we ought to welcome them, and log the win. In a moment of emergency, we haven’t the luxury of behaving otherwise.

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We all wish that more Americans had understood the dangers of DEI earlier. None of us should ever have allowed “white” to become a dirty word. A country committed to racial equality ought really to have known better. And letting teenage girls harm their bodies in irreversible ways based on ineffable gender identities?  Was sounding the alarm even hard?

For some, it was. And the shallow gratification of “I told you so” does not actually advance any worthy goal. Our kids need a broad coalition of fighters for their future. And we won’t get that broad coalition if we force late arrivals to grovel or perform a Walk of Shame. Their need to save face is human and universal; allow for it.

Here is a humbling truth, which all conservatives must face: If you have been shouting anything from the rooftops for years, it is not to your credit that no one listened. That you did not change minds. That you did not form a winning alliance. That you instead earned attaboys online from the same crew who pledged you loyalty from the start. Bitterness is deeply unattractive; that may have been one reason the more rational side sometimes fails to win enough support.

Here is a humbling truth, which all conservatives must face: If you have been shouting anything from the rooftops for years, it is not to your credit that no one has listened.

We must be effective in defense of this country because our adversaries are remarkably so in its deconstruction. In just the last month, the pro-Hamas rallies shut down Grand Central Station, wrecked the Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Rockefeller center, blocked access to JFK airport right before Christmas and LAX right after, and defaced the Lincoln Memorial.  Christmas day, hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters chanting “Christmas is cancelled here” flooded the streets of New York City and clashed with police. They vandalized the office of Democratic House Representative Ritchie Torres, leaving him a baby Jesus doll soaked in red paint, and shut down the Oculus Transportation Hub at the World Trade Center.  And, yes, it bears remembering that these “protesters” gaze at a conflict between a gang of homicidal rapists and a peaceable democratic ally, and side unequivocally with the jihadists.

They want to reshape the character of this country—to make it more like Western Europe—where Christians tread quietly and no longer have kids, and even Orthodox rabbis remove their kippot before walking home from synagogue. Our adversaries want Christians to think twice about coming to Jews’ defense, or hosting an apolitical public Christmas celebration. We can’t allow any of this, for America’s sake.

Our kids deserve to tromp up the granite steps of the Lincoln Memorial and stare at the great man and not see his defacement. We must not allow our kids to be force-fed lies about America by an educational system we subsidize. Our children deserve to be treated as capable, not made weak by a mental health establishment that seeks to stamp a diagnosis on every child. Our kids are not weak unless we make them so. Stand up for them.

And when we are treated shabbily by the bullies of the left, we must show our kids that you don’t let a nasty soccer coach wreck your good humor. You find a new team, strap on your shin guards and play on. (Or you sign up to coach the following year, make a hash of plays and strategy, and somehow wind up in second place.) To do all that requires that we find new friends where we can.

So maybe get a little less sleep in the New Year? Grab some coffee.  Do some pushups. Find your voice. Welcome new teammates. There is so much work to do. Didn’t we say we wanted lives filled with purpose? We got our wish.  We cannot afford to blow it.

Happy New Year! Let’s do this.

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Coming Soon: Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.

Available for Pre-order Now. Pub date: Feb 27, 2024.

At age nine, Chloe Cole started early puberty. By age twelve, she was uncomfortable in her body; online influencers convinced her that she was in some sense really a boy. She came out to her parents as “transgender” and, not knowing what else to do, they took her to a therapist.

“They didn’t expect that by seeing a psychologist, I would just be funneled further and further into this pipeline,” Cole told a rapt audience at AmericaFest this week.

For Chloe, that pipeline meant puberty blockers at age 12 followed by cross-sex hormones. A medically unnecessary double mastectomy at age 15. By 16, she was filled with regret.

It’s easy to see this as one more ghastly entry in the macabre chronicles of gender medicine: incompetent therapists and unethical doctors deconstructing young girls’ bodies for reasons that seem alternately depraved, mendacious and confused.

But if you take a step back from the case of the detransitioners—young women shepherded into medical transitions they later came to regret—another image emerges. Not merely of therapists’ “affirming” teens’ transgender identity, specifically. But one more instance in which the Bad Feelings experts made adolescents’ bad feelings worse.

“[My parents] didn’t expect that by seeing a psychologist, I would just be funneled further and further into this pipeline,” Cole said.

Like a lot of teen girls who suddenly adopt a transgender identity, Cole’s mental health treatment preceded her gender confusion. She had been medicated for ADHD starting at age nine or ten—given escalating levels of stimulants that made her feel lousy and disconnected from her body and didn’t seem to help. She now believes ADHD was a misdiagnosis.

“In general, this model of making everything a condition—if a child is different in any way, if they’re not focusing in school, if they’re a little bouncy in class and they won’t sit in their seat—it takes the responsibility off of the adults to say, ‘Okay, let’s just medicate them. That’ll fix the problem,’” Cole told me.

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Writing my last book, Irreversible Damage, involved extensive interviews with many detransitioners and American families in general.  In the course of my research, I became aware of three things: First, that unprecedented numbers of American kids were undergoing therapy or on psychiatric medication. Second, that therapists’ diagnoses were often altering adolescents’ self-understanding. And, third, that large numbers of parents had become profoundly dependent on therapists to guide their parenting and “fix” their kids.

It wasn’t only ideologically-motivated “gender therapists” who were making mischief, reifying the idea in adolescents’ minds that they were really, truly transgender. Ordinary, well-meaning therapists were doing the same, not primarily for ideological reasons. Sometimes the therapists were simply following the guidance of their accrediting organizations. But just as often, affirming the adolescent – in place of treating her – was simply par for the course. That was simply what the therapeutic relationship with the teen patient had become.

Sure, I’ll call you ‘Sebastian.’ I can see why you feel Mom’s taking away your smartphone was emotionally abusive. Losing a beloved cat can be devastating; let’s talk about coping with your grief for the next few sessions. It sounds like having to move after seventh grade was traumatic.

This model of making everything a condition—if a child is different in any way, if they’re not focusing in school … it takes the responsibility off of the adults to say, ‘Okay, let’s just medicate them, ’ Cole said.

When faced with a surly teen who isn’t yours, one you must somehow keep engaged for a potentially interminable 50-minute hour, and for whose mistakes you bear no direct emotional consequences—it’s just so easy to validate their perspective. Her mother’s decision to take away the smartphone, her pet’s death, her parents’ move—how did they make you feel? Let’s talk about your pain, every week, for years.

The rising generation is swimming in therapy. Forty two percent of Gen Z—those born between 1995 and 2012—has been in therapy (more than any other generation). Forty two percent has a mental health diagnosis. One recent survey indicates the extent of diagnosis may even be more dramatic: 60 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 26 may have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

Perhaps most alarming, by 2016—long before the Covid lockdowns and well before American kids aged 2 to 8 were even on social media—almost 20% of these little ones had a diagnosed mental, behavioral, or developmental disorder.

They are receiving unprecedented levels of mental health treatment. Curiously, they also seem to be getting worse.

For well over a decade, teachers and school counselors have assumed the mandate (and curricula, and use of instructional time) to play shrink indiscriminately with kids, often styled as “Social Emotional Learning.” Parents stopped trusting their own judgment and family traditions regarding childrearing, instead relying on shrinks to guide their parenting. And we all allowed our kids’ (largely normal) bad feelings to be pathologized by the those in the bad-feelings business.

Gen Z is receiving unprecedented levels of mental health treatment. They seem only to be getting worse.

Harrison Ford made this point nicely in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, in February of last year. A reporter had said to Ford, “Your fans online have done some armchair diagnosis, looking at things you’ve said about being shy in social situations and some of your talk show appearances. Some assume you’ve wrestled with social anxiety disorder. Are they onto something?”

“Shit,” he said. “That sounds like something a psychiatrist would say, not a casual observer.”

For the rising generation, the language of psychopathology provides the lens with which they understand themselves and each other. Where my generation would “self-diagnose” with laziness or procrastination, the rising generation might see complex post-traumatic stress disorder or ADHD.

But while laziness can be obliterated by a change of attitude and habits, a mental health diagnosis demands treatment or accommodation. Trying to lift yourself out seems futile. And so, unsurprisingly, the generation lavishly labeled with mental health diagnoses also has the least faith in its ability to meet even routine challenges or turn their lives around.

“No. I don’t have a social anxiety disorder,” Harrison Ford told the reporter. “I have an abhorrence of boring situations. I was shy when I first went onstage—I wasn’t shy, I was fucking terrified. My knees would shad so badly, you could see it from the back of the theater. But that’s not social anxiety. That’s being unfamiliar with the territory. I was able to talk myself through that and then enjoy the experience of being onstage and telling a story with collaborators.”

“No. I don’t have a social anxiety disorder,” Harrison Ford told the reporter. “I have an abhorrence of boring situations. I was shy when I first went onstage. But that’s not social anxiety.”

A case of the fantods. To overcome those, Harrison Ford didn’t require an expert or a prescription. He needed only to summon the guts.

Imagine if he’d been born in 2012 instead of 1942.  

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BAD THERAPY arrives in ten weeks and – first of all – THANK YOU.  This book took me almost two years (and hundreds of interviews) to write.  I’m so excited for you to read it.  And I could not have done it without your support.

I started BAD THERAPY, as I always do, with a question: Why is the rising generation suffering so mightily? Why did a generation who had seen no world war, no great depression, no 9/11—plunge into a bottomless well of despair? They received far more parental attention than we - their Gen X parents - did. And we showered them with more mental health resources – preventive care, treatments and interventions – than the children of any generation prior. They ought to be the picture of mental health. Instead, they seem to be the essence of psychological frailty.

I hypothesized that the answer to this question had to do with the way kids were being raised. I even sold a book proposal with that central argument. But no hypothesis should remain entirely unscathed after a serious investigation. And after hundreds of interviews, I understood that I’d only been half right: the rising generation had been raised differently. But that difference was not the result of their parents’ flawed judgment so much as it was parents’ willingness to be guided by mental health experts and to serve up their children for the experts’ evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment.

The rising generation is awash in therapeutic intervention, and it isn’t helping. Still, I resisted the notion that those interventions could possibly be making things worse.

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Days after the terror group Hamas committed the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, American universities erupted—in celebration.

Stanford students waved their support for Hamas in bedsheet flags draped on campus. “The Illusion of Israel is Burning,” one said. 

“Handala is returning by any means necessary,” another proclaimed—Handala being the personification of the Palestinian people.

At Harvard, 31 student groups signed a letter deeming Israel “entirely responsible” for butchery that took place over last weekend. Read that again. The day after the deadliest attacks on Jews since the Second World War—with whole families burned alive, babies mutilated, and young women raped and tortured—hundreds of students at Harvard signed a statement saying that Jews had brought this on themselves.

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At elite college campuses across the country, chapters of the Students for Justice in Palestine celebrated Hamas’s act of “resistance.” At the University of Virginia, SJP referred to the butchery—“the events of yesterday,” as they put it in an October 8th letter—“are a step towards a free Palestine.”

Then came the rallies. SJP called for students to mobilize in support of the “resistance” in Palestine. A rally invitation at the University of Washington included a remarkably explicit graphic: silhouettes of Hamas terrorists paragliding into Israel, on their way to murder Jewish civilians.

With the rare exception of the University of Florida, fortunate to be led by former United States Senator Ben Sasse, university presidents met these student loyalty pledges to Hamas and celebrations of the massacre with silence. Or with a refusal to wade into the issue. Or with gutless word salads that invariably failed to condemn the student groups, much less punish their members.

The hypocrisy of the universities’ sudden reticence when it comes to public affairs is particularly galling, considering how universities rushed to condemn the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the 2020 death of George Floyd, and, in 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Student celebrants of Hamas’s terrorism are not merely espousing an unpopular view. They proclaim support for a genocidal organization.

Just last year, days after the Russian invasion, Harvard University’s then-president Lawrence Bacow declared: “Now is a time for all voices to be raised. The deplorable actions of Vladimir Putin put at risk the lives of millions of people . . . Institutions devoted to the perpetuation of democratic ideals and to the articulation for human rights have a responsibility to condemn such wanton aggression.” So that none would doubt where Harvard stood, the university raised the Ukraine flag over Harvard Yard. “Harvard University stands with the people of Ukraine,” Bacow declared.

But in the days after the Hamas massacre of 2023, when hundreds of students on her campus were celebrating this act of “resistance,” Harvard president Claudine Gay’s arm had to be twisted into even condemning the atrocities, let alone the demonstrations in support of them. To date, she still hasn’t denounced the student groups. Instead, she has apparently decided that this was a good time to remind Harvard’s Jews that the pro-Hamas radicals on campus had a right to “free expression.”

A dean at the University of South Carolina opined similarly about the massacre: “I have lots of thoughts about global affairs. I tweet or publish them as a citizen and a philosopher. But as a dean, it isn’t my job to weigh in with my students on current affairs unless they are somehow disrupting the work of the college I oversee.”

Perhaps universities should refrain from weighing in on foreign affairs entirely. Why does Harvard need to take a side between Russia and Ukraine at all? Maybe you believe that we should put an end to all the virtue signaling—the ceaseless preening on everything from the Kyle Rittenhouse trial verdict to the affirmative action case at the Supreme Court to warnings against “cultural appropriation” on Halloween. (Heaven forfend any student on campus be caught wearing a sombrero.) With regard to the universities’ sudden embrace of humility, maybe you’re thinking: better late than never.

But something different is at work here, something far more sinister than the universities’ hypocrisy. It is the menace behind it. Hamas does not distinguish between soldiers and civilians, or between Israeli Jews and other Jews. Hamas official Ali Baraka exemplified the group’s fanaticism on October 11: “The Israelis are known to love life. We, on the other hand, sacrifice ourselves. We consider our dead to be martyrs.”

That’s what the student rallies on campus cheering on Hamas are supporting: the genocide of Jews. The notion that the “martyrs” who kill Jews are heroes.

Student celebrants of Hamas’s terrorism are not merely espousing an unpopular view. They proclaim their support for a genocidal organization, repeat the talking points of a group pledged to kill all Jews, wherever it finds them.

Allowing students to rally in support of Hamas is more akin to allowing a Ku Klux Klan demonstration on campus, in the days after white supremacists had killed African Americans.

Note that this is nothing like a student rally to support Russia in its war with Ukraine; Russia does not pledge to kill Ukrainians wherever it finds them. Nor, despite the blood on its hands, has Russia ever committed atrocities against Ukrainian civilians in any way approaching what we saw on October 7.

Allowing students to rally in support of Hamas is more akin to allowing a Ku Klux Klan demonstration on campus, in the days after white supremacists had killed African Americans. What would Harvard do in that situation? It’s a ludicrous thought experiment on its face: We know precisely what Harvard would do, and how swiftly they would condemn the rallies, shut them down, punish the students involved, and rush to safeguard the lives of black students on campus.

Instead, American universities shrug while Jewish students on American campuses face students cheering for their murder. As one Jewish young woman cried to a professor, during yesterday’s University of Washington pro-Hamas rally, “How are you allowing this. They want us dead. Please.”

The professor is shown to whisper something to her while the pro-Hamas rally crescendos. You can’t hear what he says. But the statements American universities are making to Jewish students across the country could not be clearer: We will not protect you, they all but scream. You’re on your own.

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Dear Friends,

I’ll be speaking at two university campuses this week.

Campus speech police are already losing their minds, as reported here.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Oct. 10):

Tickets (Free!) available here.

The University of Virginia (Oct. 11).

Tickets (Free!) available here.

I look forward to seeing you!

xo,

Abigail