Weaponizing Our Children

that our young people are dealing with. Not only have we created an environment where it is now the norm for children in schools to do active shooter drills as opposed to just the fire drills that most of us grew up with. Not only is it the norm for as a part of putting together back to school supplies, for parents to be googling bulletproof backpacks. Now we have young people who are living in Red States who are having books banned, books that represent them, their lives, their families.

The message that is being sent purposefully to those young people who are queer, who are black and brown, who come from queer families is that we do not see you. Not only do we not see you, we don't want to see you. Your existence, your experience. Your life doesn't matter, and not only should it not matter, it should be banned, It should be illegal for you to exist. We are

in this country weaponizing our children. Jonathan and I will get into a discussion on what the future looks like when we are not tending to the needs of young people but instead using them as a political football. Now, you know, when I say we, I mean all of America, but it is really the Republican regime that does not give a damn about your kids and your children's well being, because if they did, they wouldn't be continuing on their

march to defunding public education. They wouldn't be offering up policies that have people with zero experience quote unquote teaching your young people. If we cared about kids, we would care about teachers, and we would pay them a wage that is worth the work that they are doing to shape the minds of future leaders, innovators, and workers in

this country. We don't. Every time there is a shooting, we send in mental health professionals for what a month, two months, and then we assume what that Kids shrug this off and just continue about their days. What Jonathan will talk about is the fact that what these young people are dealing with is not something that can be fixed with a pill. This isn't about a lack of serotonin level or a mental health disorder. It is about

society structural injustice. And so, what does America look like ten years, twenty years, thirty years, fifty years down the road. If this is what we are doing to our young people now, does it look like Putin's Russia? This man wants to be a world power, wants to be the force of yesteryear, but he doesn't have the workforce, the innovation, the creativity, or anything to actually bring that country forward, because how does that work when you have an oppressive regime.

Jonathan will talk about what we know to be true through research with regard to diverse work environments with people from varied cultural, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. In those environments, you're able to work with and deal with and create and design creative systems to deal with the issues of today because you're coming with so many different vantage points. America isn't just a backsliding democracy. It will have a

backsliding economy. It will cease to be a world leader because you can't do that with the restrictions and oppression that Republicans are putting in place. So what does the future of America look like? It's sure as hell doesn't look bright. Coming up next, my conversation with our friend

and our in house doctor, doctor Jonathan Metzel. The Damage Report with John Idarola is one of the most popular shows on the TYT network that serves as your daily breakdown of the genuine threats and challenges facing our country and world. These days, we're confronted with an overwhelming sea

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be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Hey, there, I want to tell you about another podcast I think you'll love. The Brown Girl's Guide to Politics, hosted by a Shanty Gooehler, the president of Emerge. BGG, is the one stop shop for women of color who want to

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I am always thrilled. And Jonathan, you know this month, September is back to school, you know, for the nation's children, and I have, you know, as a former educator. My sister is currently teaching in an independent school in New York and we've been having conversations about the emotional and mental health and well being of young people and I can't imagine honestly what it is like to go back to school in the climate that we are in, and just the fact that over the last. I don't even

know how many years it's been since Columbine. I guess it's been over twenty. That school shootings are the norm, and preparing for that is part of preparing your kids to go back to school. I wanted to get your thoughts on what many have been talking about as like this kind of you know, impending emotional national emotional breakdown of our children and it and it doesn't necessarily these feelings don't necessarily vary with age. The intensity just varies.

So I wanted to get your your initial thoughts on the mental and emotional well being of our nation's children. Well, I mean, our our response is going to go. Our response is going to reverberate. Our shitty response honestly, is going to reverberate for generations. I really have been worried about this for some time. I mean, think about the perfect storm of what happened. We had fault lines already in education, we'd under invested in education before the pandemic.

For all this, there were dramatic inequities in the education system, and then and also in the mental health system, right and then the pandemic hits and all of these things play out. People are either at home or there. No matter where they were getting schooling, they were missing socialization. But also there was just an overwhelming sense that no matter what side of the political divide you were on the world as we knew it was kind of collapsing.

The grown ups could not get along. And so all these things were happening at one time, and it led to as we saw a dramatic, just overall mental health crisis in young in young people at the same time that the mental health system was falling apart. There wasn't enough treatment, and just to be honest, mental health treatment didn't have a response to what was happening. Right. Mental health treatment like talked to a psychiatrist on zoom or take some Zoloft was not a right answer. The answer

was fixed the structure. And so in general there was a crisis of the education system and the mental health system for young people at the same time. And then in response to that, what we've done is we politicized school. So in the face of all of this crisis, the best answer would have been, we are taking care of you, young people. We want to just make sure we're all getting along, even if we can't agree as grown ups.

We can get along and figure out what to do so that you guys can lead us to the future. And instead, what we did is we had all these fights about critical race theory and sexuality studies and banning books in libraries and what viewpoint and all these kind of things, and so in a way, we basically brought the culture wars that we're leading to mental health crisis in the first place into the lives of young people.

And so I just can't imagine. And I know because I teach college kids and I hear about this every day, but I just can't imagine what that must feel like, because what young people now we're looking for is a kind of certainty that everything's going to be okay, And instead, what they're getting is that the ship show, honestly that

education and mental health art right now. You know. One of the things that my sister and I had been talking about was the fact that parents, being out of their depth right at this time, are turning to their pediatricians, right their general pediatricians to seek advice, counsel, medication for their children, and that what is coming up is that the pediatricians themselves are saying that they are not equipped for this they're not mental health professionals. They deal with

right the body and not the mind. So can you speak to you know, for parents or caregivers who are looking to seek aid, their first line of defense is to go to their pediatrition, but that their pediatrician may in fact not be you know, not have the right tools in their own toolbox to be able to provide your child with the type of care that they need. But not every parent has a therapist on speed dial. And also, so many of these problems aren't medical or

psychiatric problems. There are social problems. They're structural problems. And so in a way, I don't think that many mental health professionals or health professionals have a toolkit for you know, imagine being a trans kid right now and having books about you banned from your own school library. Like it's not like there's a prescription that's going to cure that in a way. And so I just feel like that what we're seeing as kind of the mental help the facts.

I mean, there is real months of illness, and I do think we need a national move to just take care of people. But instead what we're seeing is I just feel like kids are being weaponized right now, education is being weaponized and it's kind of like, how much can we instill our own agenda by brainwashing kids so that thirty years from now they'll be the foot soldiers.

So that that's part of it. And then the other part is we talked about last week and the week before, is also it's not just about and I don't mean to get away from your britietrition, Quesian, but I'm saying like, when you're having like very untrained, unqualified soldiers and their spouses teaching kids who have no qualification whatsoever to teach, then the other the message you're telling people is also your education as a kind of critical thinker who's going

to contribute to society and have you know, successful life is less important than our own agenda, which is going to undertrain you so that you only become like a menial labor or something like that. So in a way, just all these messages are being heaped onto kids right now, and it's just it's honestly horrific. And so partially I agree mental health. I mean, even trained psychiatrists don't have an answer for this. What do they have? They can

do zoom therapy, they can do individual therapy. They can do medications, but they can't fix these bigger structural problems, which is like, man, it's a moment for some social capital, some social cohesion, Like let's kind of get together and take care of kids and not use them as ponds, which is what's happening right now. You know, It's what

I find. So, you know, troubling about what you're saying is that it isn't as if this is a psychiatric issue, right that we're we're talking about your serotonin levels, or we're talking about you know, any type of disorder, right,

mental disorder. We are talking about the fact that if you are a queer child, right, or the child of queer parents, and you're living in any red state in this country right now, which is you know, a majority of them, your life right is being banned, is being shunned, is being told that it is not even just a sin, but it is not worthy of discussion of you know, of of of of of literature, of anything that you you should not By banning these books that allow children

to be able to understand themselves more and the world around them, we are essentially blacking them out right, And I just I want to talk about this for a moment, because it isn't This isn't a pill solution, right, Like, because we can't say like, oh, well, they're depressed because they are suffering from depression. They are depressed or are being weighed down with anxiety because the fears that they have are real, and so how do we manage this?

Because it isn't enough, like, and this is the thing that is troubling me is that, Jonathan, in the early two thousands, if you remember, which I'm sure you do,

there was a rash of suicides of LGBTQ children. Was like the it was like Obama had I think it was like that election time, maybe he had been entering the White House, and it was like one headline after the other were elementary school and middle school children that were committing suicide because of bullying that they were experiencing because they were the perception was that they were queer,

they were different, they were other. The Trevor Project and other LGBTQ organizations got together and created the it Gets Better campaign to try and have older LGBTQ people express in video form that you will get to the other side. But Jonathan, this is the other side, right, And it's a mixed bag. We have a gay Secretary of Transportation,

a transgender cabinet member in the Biden administration. Right, we have more representation of queer people and difference in Hollywood, you know, in Disney, on the small screen, on the big screen, and yet we have this And so I guess, how do we formulate to these kids that it gets better, but that it's a eventually, life is a mixed bag. I mean again, I think, let me just be clear. I think anybody who needs help should seek help. So I'm not at all saying that we shouldn't enlist mental

health support when we can. And I mean, there are life saving interventions for therapy and medication and all those factors. So I'm not making an argument against treatment. But I would say that countries that use their kids to prove ideological points really suffer for decades and centuries. And that's

what we're seeing now. And so I mean, I understand because I read a lot of conservative media, you know, all this critique of like woke indoctrination and all that kind of stuff, and I just feel like there's just so many kids caught in the middle of all this stuff and so on one hand, I agree if you're a gay or fans kid and you're just seeing it's not just the books being banned in the library, but it's of course tied to a bigger political agenda and

ideology that is banning actual medical treatment and it's banning there's a bill that is not being supported to support gay marriage and all these things, and so it's tied to a bigger ideology. But I would say on the other side, just because I'm in Tennessee, I do often wonder and it's kind of countertuitive point, like what we just assume that conservative kids have the same ideology as

their parents. But how many conservative kids who could go on to be like creative geniuses or mathematicians or world leaders or something like that, are being like homeschooled, are, you know? Or they're not being exposed to complex problems or diverse things. And so in a way we're kind of screwing over conservative kids also because we just kind of automatically assume, well, they're the ones who just have

the same ideology as their parents. And I think all the data on education shows that people who are exposed early on to like the greatest array of different kinds of people and complex problems and different ways of approaching things. They're the ones who go on to be like the leaders of tomorrow. And so I think that in a way, we're also screwing. We're screwing over all kinds of kids

in different ways right now. And I think that that's kind of the issue that kind of gets lost sometimes, is like defunding education across the board screws over many different kinds of kids because we just assume, you know, right wing kids are at home spouting off election propaganda or something, and that's not the case, you know, And so let's talk about those ripple effects, right because again, what I find about and I don't even like to refer to it as conservatism at this point, because it

is just authoritarian, fascist propaganda, right that we are seeing at at at every turn, at every level, at every level of government and society. I want to talk about the ripple effects of this because I believe that the Republican regime is one that is incredibly shortsighted, one that is very much even though they have had plans for the last forty years to overturn rob Wait that they have plans you know, for fifty years since the Civil

Rights Act to suppress the black and brown votes. That they have these long term plans of oppression, but the immediacy of what they're doing. They are not looking at the long term effects of how defunding education, how putting a soldier in their spouse in front of the classroom is going to inhibit the United States in being a global power, in being competitive. So can you speak to this this how white supremacy right, how white supremacy, how this how this mindset is really like it's going to

be counterproductive. I don't know what else to say. Counterproductive. How it's going like how the how they are not seeing the forest through the trees of what it is that they're doing. Well, I mean, they're creating the world that they want, but it's the world. It's a kind of Vladimir Putin and his all the all the advisors that he hasn't killed, um telling him, oh, the war is going great like that, and we're in control. Like

in a way, that's kind of the model. So it's not like they're you know, and the reason I think about this, right, So I was at University of Michigan when the when the affirmative action cases we're going before the courts, and that's coming down the pipe too. All

that is going to get overturned. But all the data on affirmative action, for example, from employers, industry, the military on down made the point that being in a diverse education setting, actually it just builds your brain in a much more complex and nuanced way that lets you much better, makes you much better at addressing real world problems because you know how to work with different people and you respect that different people can bring different skill sets to

complex problems, and that has been shown. It's not just some woke critical race theory point like I read quite often the McKenzie Black Economic Forum, a data for example that makes this great point about diverse workplaces and how diverse workplaces are far better if more people have the idea that basically they're going to be able to succeed within the structure, if they come from different backgrounds, they're going to be much better at answering the kind of

complex problem that for example, consultants are are are faced with, and so anyway, it increases predictivity. And then if you think about it from a city level, for example, like the more people who are educated, who are have good jobs, who are better, who are taxpayers who feel like they're

part of what's happening. You're going to increase your tax base, You're going to have more infrastructure funds, You're going to have more vibrancy in terms of everything from economic entertainment, education, roads, bridges, bike lanes, all that kind of stuff. And so in a way, that world and that maybe sounds a bit come by out, but I mean, there's so much data

on this point. And conversely, if you just have kind of the same people with the same ideology around around the table and you're squelching other ideologies, you're really you get into the kind of blood and recruitent model right now is a great example of like, you just hear one viewpoint, it's the one that doesn't make you uncomfortable, and then you it's just it's not a good way to solve problems, right It turns out like there are other perspectives and you end up just hearing what you

want to hear it and it leads to disaster or under productivity. And so the data is pretty overwhelming, and yet we're doing exactly the wrong thing right now. So Jonathan, what happens, what happens to what give us the real stark picture of America ten years from now if there is no significant disruption in this ideology taking hold in

every facet of our society and government. I don't. I mean it's funny because like we've done it before, right, I mean we in the sixties, we did it in the I mean it's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not like we don't know how

to do this. We've done it in our But you bring up the sixties, and the sixties was a violent time, right, Like wet we don't look back at the sixties and say this is a you know, we know that black and brown people and white allies were practicing non violence in the face of abhorrent violence by white people in order to reflect to the world how horrendous Jim Crow into segregation all of these things were. And so if you say that we've done that in the sixties, is

that what you see as one of the avenues? Because to me, and this is something that I've said I've been saying on WOKF since I started this show during the Trump years, which was that things were going to get bloody are before they got better? Is that unavoidable? Do you think? Well? I mean the issue for the sixties is not to like idealize what was happening. I mean it certainly. I think you're exactly right. Was a profoundly a profoundly violent time with a lot of people.

But the legislation that came out of it, the infrastructure that we built, the community, mental health movement, voting rights, educational factors, things like that, investment in higher education and education. I don't think that it was perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I do think that it was kind of a move in the right direction in a way.

That was because it was basically like building structures. We also of course had them, you know, Gun Control Act of nineteen sixty eight, and so like the kind of things that people would basically there was a center that

could come together and agree. And of course the answer to that was like fifty years of resentment leading to where we are right now, so that that was not going to be allowed to And but I would say that this idea of kind of a very broad and honestly, when you need legislation paths like that, it was like a broad centrist coalition that built structures that again we're in no way, in no way perfect, but at least it was a framework that led to things like affirmative action,

for example, which led to betterment for a good number of people. And so in a way, it's it's kind of like, I just feel like, among other things, we've evacuated the center right now, and so just the idea of that kind of cooperation is just conceptually impossible, and and so I don't know. And I guess my other concern right now having kind of to do with this is I'm, of course worried about the midterms and what happens. You know, this stuff's going to potentially get worse before

it gets better. And I feel like a lot of Democrats are feeling complacent about a bunch of random opinion polls it came out two months ago, rather than really mobilizing people to really, really really see about how much of this can be saved. Right now. Yeah, I mean, I think that if I'm looking at the next ten years in America, I think are going to make the

nineteen sixties seem like a innocent time. I think that America, by virtue of the point that you made about the center being evacuated, about gun laws just being overturned, and the temperature in this country just at a height because of white people being not being held accountable, right, and

so it just continues to build and old up. I don't think that the next ten years in America are going to be good, and I become increasingly concerned, even with what we have seen the Biden administration be able to do this past summer, the legislation that they've been able to push, I think that everything is just going to come to a head, and that the beginning of

that head is midterms. It'll go into the president's the presidential election in twenty twenty four, and then the next you know, several years following that are going to be really something. I mean, it's such shit, right, because like there is such potential and creative energy. I mean, just yep, there's so much potential, and it's just infuriating that we are indoctrinating our way out of our potential. That's really

what it is. So just tying it back to the question of youth, like I don't know, we should be we should be encouraging that potential, not weaponizing it. Weaponizing education in ways that screws over our kids' futures. As always, doctor Jonathan Metzel, appreciate this conversation. It's one that I would like us to, you know, continue, because I think that we neglect where the mental and emotional well being

of our young people are to our detriment. And if they are in fact our future, and we're not paying attention and being responsible for the caregiving of our children and instead weaponizing them, then our future doesn't look bright at all. As a matter of fact, it looks quite dismal and terrifying. Yeah, no, I agree completely, So yeah, let's please keep talking. I mean, I think it's a cause I think we should all be fighting for. Appreciate you, Jonathan.

That is it for me today, Dear friends on woke f as always, Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.