How a Perfect Storm of Covid Lockdowns and Woke Schools Stole a Generation’s Youth
Bethany Mandel is grateful she’s not growing up in 2023.
The cultural commentator and mother of six is fairly sure that her tomboy, teenage self would have fallen prey to the gender madness being promoted in schools and online.
“If I were growing up now, between the school closures and gender ideology stuff, I would have cocooned myself in my room, gotten on Tumblr or TikTok, and come out as God only knows what,” she said.
Mandel’s new book, Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation is enough to make any adult reader grateful they grew up before the education system was entirely captured by progressive gender and racial ideology.
Mandel and her co-author, New York Post columnist and mother Karol Markowicz, relay the stories of confused kids who have emerged from the isolation of Covid and the ideological pressure cooker of modern public education as people their parents don’t recognize.
Mandel spoke to one mother whose daughter spiraled into a mental-health crisis during Covid lockdowns. The girl was suicidal and self-harming, so her parents sought psychological help. They enrolled her in the only facility they could find that would accept new patients during the pandemic. No visitation was allowed, so the parents only saw their child (masked) on Zoom.
When the girl reunited with her parents, they noticed the clinician was prodding her to say something. Finally, the girl confessed to her parents that she was non-binary. After bringing her to the clinic for medical help for severe anxiety and depression, the parents were shocked and dismayed to find their child was now confused about her gender as well. A significant number of kids came out of the program claiming to be a different gender, according to the book.
Desperate for support, the parents asked their daughter’s school to keep her off screens because they believed social media precipitated her depressive episode. Instead of respecting their plea, the school changed the child’s name without her parent’s knowledge or permission, Mandel said.
“These parents looked to experts to help their daughter and at every turn, they were worked against,” she said.
Schools are enabling the descent to gender insanity for many adolescents, and for those hours when kids are out of school, social media is there to pick up the slack. Throughout the pandemic, teenagers marinated in dark corners online, spending hours on TikTok and watching pornography. Children were denied social interaction and academic stability by the education system, and then they were left to their own devices . . . literally.
“This generation of girls, when they’re lost, they latch onto an ideology that says the discomfort that you’re feeling physically is a manifestation of your gender identity,” she said. It directs these girls to be maimed “permanently, whether hormonally or surgically.”
“And it’s spreading like wildfire,” she said.
Ordinarily, girls would figure out these uncomfortable feelings with time, alongside guardians who would explain that body disorientation is a natural, normal part of puberty — but no longer.
Parents who were exposed to their children’s curricula during Covid remote schooling and began to question the wisdom of introducing complex themes around sexuality and gender were met with resistance. But the genie won’t go back in the bottle.
“They can’t unsee what they saw,” Markowicz added.
“We’ve traced a lot of wokeness to activism in schools and cutting out the parent. They must do it through secrecy because it’s unpopular,” she continued. “If parents wanted it, this wouldn’t be a big deal. They cut the parents out of the child’s life, and this is all by design, so they can implement their new religion to your children.”
Desensitizing kids to sexuality in their early years will have far-reaching consequences that we can’t yet comprehend, the pair warn, turning to another anecdote from the book about a young girl who was too scared to speak out about how uncomfortable she felt having a male counselor in her cabin at summer camp.
“She learned and internalized the lesson that talking about sexuality and asking questions and being nervous are punishable and make you a bad person,” Mandel said. “That little voice inside of you while you’re growing up as a woman is so important. We’re teaching a generation of girls to ignore that voice. We’re going to see safety implications for an entire lifetime.”
