merican mothers have a history of political activism. This is hardly a golden age of maternal activism, mainly visible in the relentless television-commercial-monitoring of One Million Moms, or in Portland’s “Wall of Moms,” which enjoyed a brief spotlight moment before crumbling under allegations of “anti-blackness.” Earlier eras have seen mothers rallying to weightier causes, such as supporting the American Revolution, attaining women’s suffrage, or launching the temperance movement. As vessels of life and defenders of children, matrons can command their own kind of moral authority. The world has been needing that influence of late, as kids are deluged by successive waves of lunacy: nonsensical Covid policy, transgender activism, and ideology-drenched school curricula.
Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz are ready to seize the moment. Their new book, Stolen Youth, urges American parents to band together against a youth culture saturated in toxic ideology. They are enraged by the way that our kids’ welfare has been sacrificed repeatedly to the gods of politics. Even organizations explicitly created to protect our children’s interests, such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, showed their true colors during the Covid pandemic when they willingly took kids’ needs right off the table in deference to frightened seniors. Culture wars ebb and flow, but lately it feels like the kids are constantly losing, and these moms have had it.
Mandel and Markowicz are both opinion writers with connections to Fox News, the New York Post, and other major right-wing outlets. Their book is every bit as polemical as one would expect, and perhaps less humorous than their Twitter followers might have hoped. As I will shortly explain, I think they have somewhat misdiagnosed the deeper causes of the problems they decry. Nevertheless, I felt deep sympathy as I moved through the chapters of Stolen Youth.
This really isn’t my kind of book, as a writer, I try not to trade too heavily in partisan anger. In a way though, that’s why I read it. I have a strong aversion to activism, generally advising my fellow Americans to spend more time tilling fertile soil and less “draining swamps.” My impulse is to view insane ideologues like tantrum-throwing toddlers, and I favor the same strategy for both: just let them exhaust themselves, and they’ll sleep like logs. But I know that this philosophy strikes many of my contemporaries as naïve do-nothingism, and I’m prepared to entertain alternative perspectives. I recognize that Mandel and Markowicz are quite different from those feckless, pie-in-sky drifters who use hysterical causes as a substitute for meaningful life pursuits. They’re matron-activists. They’re mama bears. And unfortunately, they don’t really exaggerate the problem by all that much. Americans are failing our kids in some catastrophic ways.
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