“In junior high they’d come home saying they wouldn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance anymore,” one mother related. “They told me boy and girl bathrooms were wrong and they should all be gender neutral. That’s how it started.” How it ended was with estrangement from her own children.
Another mother told a similar story, with her daughter once refusing to attend Thanksgiving dinner because it celebrated “Columbus’ genocide.” That all started after the young lady had “an awakening” in her sophomore year of college.
Welcome to the world of kids who trade their parental relationships for cult-like ideology.
Last November, The New American reported on Annabella Rockwell, whose brainwashing in academia turned her into an unhappy, anti-male social-justice warrior bent on “reforming” her mother and fighting the “patriarchy,” all while wallowing in victimhood and battling a campus-acquired alcohol problem. Her mom finally had to pay a deprogrammer $300 a day to restore her sanity.
Now, after reading about Rockwell’s story in the New York Post, other parents have come forward to reveal they also have lost children to this cultural revolution — and that they seek deprogramming for them, too.
One of them, Beth Pensky, a 54-year-old single mom from New Jersey now residing in Florida, is so embarrassed by her estrangement from her kids that she won’t even tell people about it. She fears it’s too late for a remedy, however, as both children have graduated from college and neither will even speak to her, reported the Post in a new story.
Another example is a Manhattan mother of five daughters, who “told The Post she saw their indoctrination into gender and race ideologies start at Dalton, one of New York City’s poshest private academies — and worsen when her girls went to colleges,” the paper writes. “Most of them went to Ivy League schools.”
(Note, with Dalton tuition now almost $24,000 yearly and the Ivy League being pricey, the hapless woman might’ve paid a million dollars or more to have her kids seduced away from her.)
“‘The emotional stress is unbelievable,’ said the mother, who did not want to be publicly identified,” the Post continued. “‘I consider myself a Democrat and a liberal but it doesn’t matter. I’ve had fights with some of my girls just because I wouldn’t get myself a Rainbow pride Starbucks cup. The cup itself became this huge battleground. Apparently it matters what cup you hold.’”
This is an old story, too: As the USSR’s “old Bolsheviks” learned the hard way (death), you can never be radical enough for the next-wave revolutionaries.
The Post quotes a reformed ex-sexual devolutionary, who now works as a deprogrammer, as saying that these parents are “bewildered.” First the child starts behaving differently; then he adopts opposite-sex pronouns. It’s like a cult; only, it’s more insidious than an old-fashioned one that spirits the child off somewhere. This brainwashing occurs “through schools” and the kids’ electronic “devices,” says the deprogrammer.
The Post also cites “Tennessee-born Ted Patrick, now 92 … well-known and often controversial in the 1970s and 1980s as the ‘father of deprogramming.” Patrick once called brainwashed young people “the college-educated ignorant” and said that “deprogramming work is more in demand than ever” and that the situation is “worse now than it was then,” in the ’70s. “But parents are more scared and weak than they were then,” he adds.
The Post in addition related the story of a mother named Dorothy, “who did not want her last name used,” but “recognized her struggles with and near-estrangement from her 27-year-old daughter when she read The Post story about Rockwell,” the paper wrote. “The two had long been close but when her daughter went to a prestigious college out West and began taking gender studies and women’s studies, everything changed.”
Dorothy’s daughter is the aforementioned anti-Thanksgiving gal. “We were not allowed to visit her on campus,” stated Dorothy. “She went on a mission to convert her brother against us. She told him that he should be against us because we’re conservatives and that we all should be against men.”
Returning to Pensky, she says that her kids “began to be conditioned into a new hard-left way of thinking when they were just teenagers in Monmouth County, NJ.” They were the ones who bemoaned the Pledge and sex-specific bathrooms in junior high.
Moreover, “Both Beth Pensky and Dorothy’s daughters came out as lesbians in college but neither mother said they had a problem with that,” the Post also tells us.
To be blunt, the problem is that too many parents are morally confused themselves. It’s obviously a red flag when a child comes home from junior high espousing hard-left propaganda, and that kid should never return to that school. Pull him out immediately. Embracing lesbianism is also a warning: The young ladies didn’t just naturally “come out” — they were converted to lesbianism, at least partially via inculcation with anti-male hatred.
There’s more to the Post’s story, which you can read here. But what’s more significant is how kids’ minds are snatched — and how it can be prevented.
As the Twig Is Bent….
Why do some kids but not others fall victim to full-bore school brainwashing? While some children may be innately more susceptible (just as certain people are more likely to become drunkards), the groundwork is laid for these problems early. Greek philosopher Plato emphasized that we must develop in young children an emotional attachment to virtue, so that when they reach the age of reason they’ll be more apt to accept its dictates.
Yet kids can also develop an emotional attachment to vice — and far more easily. I discussed Saturday how this is common now, as we feed children “into a popular-culture morality meat grinder that fills them with evil and stokes the fires of their passions.” The emotionally corrupted young are then more likely to accept unreasonable dictates, such are far-left ideological prescriptions.
The lesson: Insulate children from popular culture and preserve their innocence (“innocence,” meaning, “absence of sin”). Also, learn what the virtues are and seek to cultivate them in yourself and your kids. Virtue, or “good moral habits,” inoculates us against vice.
Man’s Nature Abhors a Mind Vacuum
The above stories are, in a way, reminiscent of the plight of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh. How did this youth, raised in liberal Marin County, California, end up fighting with Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan? Perhaps it was because, to echo another Saturday point, he was raised a mostly empty spiritual vessel, “lacking in virtue and rooted to nothing permanent.”
But man craves meaning; he needs it. Lindh found it in Sunni Islam, which he converted to at 16. The college-created social-justice warriors may find it in leftist radicalism. Either way, the result can be hatred-born passion — and sometimes violence.
The lesson: When kids aren’t given Truth, they very well may embrace a lie. And lies kill souls.
Beware Environmental Toxins
Even if a child sees virtue modeled and encouraged at home and is insulated from corruptive entertainment there, this may be undermined by bad intra-school influence from teachers and peers. Many people may think, “It’s the values taught at home that really matter.” But this is a bit as with diet and health: Feeding a child ideal food at home may be for naught if he’s allowed to ingest poisons outside. Exposure to moral and spiritual toxins in school and elsewhere can, likewise, destroy otherwise well-nurtured souls.
The lesson: “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it,” as the Bible instructs. A prerequisite for this is insulating children from bad influences until their “moral and spiritual immune system” is fully developed.
At the end of the day, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” and whence God is banished, the Devil slithers in. Don’t be a parent who learns this only too late.
