In March 2020, I was a New York City mom with two kids in public school. I spent the next year fighting to reopen schools, and I sued Mayor Bill de Blasio to get them open. Then I spent more than three years interviewing nearly 60 people about who closed our schools and why. The result is 15 DAYS: The Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures. This page gathers the reviews, interviews, articles and screenings in one place, and I will keep adding to it.

This page covers the documentary on Covid school closures, directed by Natalya Murakhver. It is not the unrelated film also titled 15 Days.

Watch the film

• Stream 15 DAYS on the Restore Childhood Substack, with permanent access for paid subscribers

• Amazon Prime Video

• Apple TV

• Google Play

• Kinema for virtual and in-person group screenings

• DVD and 4K digital copy from the Restore Childhood store

• Host a screening with a licensed screening kit

• Watch the official trailer

Film listings

• 15 DAYS on IMDb

• Natalya Murakhver on IMDb

• 15 DAYS on TMDB

• 15 DAYS on JustWatch

• 15 DAYS on Wikidata

• Official film site

The film features NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Scott Atlas, Dr. Monica Gandhi, Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, Martin Gurri, Anya Kamenetz, Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice, coach Ron Naclerio, high school football player Garrett “Bam” Morgan and, in archival footage, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten. It premiered free on X in September 2025, passed one million views there, and launched on streaming platforms in March 2026.

Reviews

• The Christian Post, review by Brandon Showalter

• Jewish Journal: The Biggest Scandal in U.S. Public Policy History, Revisited, by editor David Suissa

• Film Threat, review by Alan Ng

• Hollywood in Toto: 15 Days Will Make You Furious at Teachers Unions

• UK Film Review, review by Jason Knight

• Emily Burns: 15 Days, a film review and a warning about teachers’ unions

• Penny Marie: The film that exposes what Covid did to our children

• Radio Free Oxford on 15 DAYS

Articles and news coverage

• City Journal: Who Was to Blame for Pandemic School Closures?

• Breitbart: Documentary 15 Days exposes how “slow the spread” led to years of school closures

• Hoover Institution: New documentary 15 DAYS examines America’s school closure crisis

• AP News release: New documentary 15 DAYS examines America’s school closure crisis

• Connecticut Centinal on the film

• Bucks Independence: Broad and Liberty hosts a screening of 15 DAYS

• Eli Steele: Friday Night Movie, 15 Days

• Eli Steele: FAIR Screening, 15 Days

• FAIR: What We Owe the Children We Locked Out of School

Praise on X

• James Lindsay on 15 DAYS, after the Dallas screening: he wrote that the film made him angrier than he expected.

Interviews and podcasts

• EpochTV, American Thought Leaders with Jan Jekielek: How School Closures Irrevocably Harmed a Generation

• City Journal, 10 Blocks podcast with John Tierney: Fighting Covid School Closures

• Freedom to Learn with Ginny Gentles, also on Apple Podcasts and YouTube

• Journal of Free Black Thought, Ep. 163: Schools, Masks, and Power

• Noggin Notes: School closures, childhood resilience and the untold story of 15 DAYS

• WITHIN with Dr. Azadeh Khatibi, Ep. 6: What did pandemic school closures really do to children?

• Solid Ground #179: The Public School Corruption Covid Revealed

• Struggle Sessions: How to Restore Childhood with 15 Days

• The One Way Ticket Show: back to 1980s Brooklyn

• Independent Women’s Forum, The Bespoke Parenting Podcast with Julie Gunlock

• The Armstrong Williams Show, my segment starts at 25:13

• In conversation with Steven Shalowitz

My writing on the film and the closures

• New York Post: With no accountability for school lockdowns, freedom’s foes soldier on, a new doc reveals

• The Daily Signal: Faith Restored, Moms Across America Are United and Ready to Fight Back

• Townhall: The Teachers’ Union Betrayal, How Randi Weingarten Sacrificed America’s Children for Power

• DC Journal: U.S. Needs to Learn Lesson of School Lockdown Mistake

• New York Post: We’re raising kids who can’t do the math, making them easy to manipulate

• New York Post: Unions want full control of schools and our kids

• All my New York Post columns

• My articles at The Blaze

• My articles at Brownstone Institute

• My articles in The Epoch Times

• Full list of my published articles on Muck Rack

From the Restore Childhood Substack

• 15 DAYS: Why Powerful Unions Are Terrified of a Documentary Made by Moms

• 15 DAYS: One Year Later Livestream, with Stephanie Edmonds and Garrett “Bam” Morgan Jr.

• We Didn’t Wait for Permission

• Standing Room Only

• Free Speech Is Not a Spectator Sport

• Five Years Ago Today, Schools Closed

• We Were Right to Fight for Open Schools

• What They Never Knew

Screenings

15 DAYS has screened more than a dozen states. We premiered it at the Moms for Liberty national summit in October 2025. The Manhattan Institute hosted our New York premiere in November 2025. We screened in Paso Robles, California, and Bucks County, Pennsylvania. The Freedom Foundation filled a room at its Dallas Teachers Summit in July 2026. FAIR closed its Eli Steele film series with 15 DAYS in August 2026. Vermont Stands Up took the film on a statewide tour and closed the United We Stand Media Fest with it in October 2026.

On December 8, 2026, we will screen the film at the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, with a keynote by NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and a conversation with Sen. Ron Johnson, moderated by Jan Jekielek.

To host a screening at your school, church or community group, start here or write to natalya@restorechildhood.com.

For press

Download the 15 DAYS electronic press kit, with the poster and stills of our interview subjects. For interviews, contact Natalya Murakhver at natalya@restorechildhood.com.

Restore Childhood is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to protecting children’s education, health, and parental rights. Support our work at restorechildhood.com/donate.

Before 2020, my daughters’ public elementary school in Manhattan had wonderful traditions that nobody thought twice about. The third graders went to Ellis Island for American history, and the fourth graders took the bus to Philadelphia to stand in Independence Hall. Every fall, Jewish parents came into the classrooms to teach the children about Rosh Hashanah and the other holidays.

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These things were quotidian, and we took them for granted. The knowledge of them lived in us, parents, whether we had a younger child or an older one. Each class expected Ellis Island in third grade because the class ahead of it had gone, and the parents ahead of us had told us what was coming.

Then the pandemic closed the schools, and the chain broke. We talk a great deal about what the children of those years lost in reading and math. We talk far less about what they never received at all.

When the buildings reopened, safety mattered more than anything else. The children sat apart in masks, and they ate lunch facing one direction so they would not infect each other with a virus that posed very little danger to them.

They stripped away the Ellis Island trip. They stripped away the Philadelphia trip. Then they stripped away the holiday visits. Suddenly we could not come in for Rosh Hashanah, because the holidays were Jewish. The school called it separation of church and state, although for years before Covid nobody had seen a conflict.

Our school was not alone. In a 2023 survey, 40 percent of museum directors said school visits still had not recovered to pre-pandemic levels, and the researcher behind it said field trips went “off a cliff” even after schools reopened.

I was born in Odessa and came to Brooklyn in 1977, when I was six. What happened at our school felt familiar to me. Suddenly it was like the Soviet Union, where the school welcomed only the approved values that invoked compassion. God, faith and real tradition that the kids knew had no place in the room anymore.

To be fair, our school stayed fairly laid back about woke ideology. Many of our teachers were older, and they were not prepared to learn the new language it demanded, so change came slowly. The school never added rainbows or Pride programming. Mostly, we just lost things.

I imagine the school is different now. Many of those older teachers have retired, and the new teachers have come up through the education schools, which have become palaces of indoctrination.

This is how cultural subversion works inside a single school. The new parents never knew the good things, so they never asked for them. The old parents left because the good things left, and the school’s memory left with them. Nobody had to cancel anything. The school only had to pause long enough for one generation of families to move on.

I saw the same pattern when I wrote They Quietly Let the Best Children’s History Books Go Out of Print. Random House never banned the Landmark Books. It simply stopped printing them, and a generation of children grew up without them.

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A Soviet defector warned us about this long ago. Yuri Bezmenov worked for the KGB before he defected to Canada in 1970. In a 1984 interview, he described a slow and open process he called ideological subversion, and he said it made up most of the KGB’s work, far more than spying. Its first stage, demoralization, takes 15 to 20 years, about the length of one generation’s schooling. At the end of it, Bezmenov warned, “exposure to true information does not matter anymore.”

Nobody needs a foreign agency to do this today. A school closure long enough to break the chain of memory will do the job.

Yesterday I walked through Central Park past the roller skate circle just north of Sheep Meadow. Skaters have gathered on that road since about 1978, and for decades the DJs played disco while the dancers on skates sang every word.

Yesterday the DJ played Middle Eastern music instead. That music is beautiful, and I love it. But suddenly the young crowd knew all the words.

It reminded me of the many NYC landmarks where I see organized protests, rallies, with previously unseen flags from far-flung terror organizations (Hamas, Hezbollah). Most people there have no idea what those symbols mean, yet young people have adopted them as their own.

We should have anticipated this moment, as a culture never stays empty for long. When nothing is left to preserve, something new moves in.

We have watched American symbols and monuments come down. In January 2022, the American Museum of Natural History removed its Theodore Roosevelt statue from the front steps on Central Park West, right across from the park where I walk.

Remember when San Francisco tried to rename its schools during Covid, even as they stood closed? In January 2021, the school board voted to rename 44 schools, including schools named for George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The board rescinded the vote that April only after a lawsuit and a judge’s ruling. The names survived, but the children still learned that Washington and Lincoln were up for removal.

This subversion accelerated during Covid. I spent more than three years interviewing the people behind the school closures for my film, 15 DAYS: The Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures. The decisions they made are still shaping these children, and now we will have to deal with the consequences.

Last week marked three years since October 7. My rabbi tells me that his high school students do not know about 9/11 or 10/7, not really. Our schools are not teaching those things either.

A 2016 NPR report found that only about 20 states covered 9/11 in any depth in high school social studies.

A 2018 survey of more than 1,000 teachers found that about 130 history and social studies teachers had never taught 9/11 at all.

Surely it is worse now, in 2026.

The polls show what fills that gap. In a December 2023 Harvard-Harris poll, 60 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 said Palestinian grievances could justify the October 7 massacre, and 27 percent said it was not a terrorist attack.

This will be very difficult to undo. We have, before us, a blank slate generation, and someone else is writing on it.

How can we remind young people of things they never knew in the first place?

The work falls to us, parents.

If you can, take your children to Ellis Island yourself. Walk them through the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. Tell them at your own table what happened on September 11 and October 7.

Then go back to your school and ask, by name, for the traditions it quietly dropped.

If we do not do everything we can to protect and conserve our history, it will be erased.

What did your school quietly drop after Covid? Tell me in the comments. I want to build a list, the way we built our list of out-of-print history books.

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Restore Childhood is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to protecting children’s education, health, and parental rights. Watch our film 15 DAYS, share this piece, and consider supporting our work at restorechildhood.com/donate.

I met Eli Steele in 2022. When I first announced on X that I planned to make a film about the pandemic school closures, Eli Steele agreed to mentor me and, then for three long years of production and post-production, continued to take my calls, patiently answering questions, helping to shape the film and finally coming onboard as a producer for 15 DAYS. We are also working together again on a new project. I can’t say more just yet, but I will soon, so please stay tuned.

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I have followed White Guilt’s making film from the start. While Eli was still shooting, he and his father Shelby stepped away from their rental SUV on Lombard Street in San Francisco for ten minutes. In that time, thieves broke in and stole more than $40,000 of camera gear. Many of you read about it here, and many donated to keep the production going.

White Guilt is the film many of you helped save, and it is finally out.

The film was released on October 6th and was made in collaboration with Eli’s dad Shelby Steele— it brings Shelby’s 2006 book of the same name into the present. The film asks how the country that won the civil rights fight ended up teaching kids to sort themselves into oppressors and victims.

People are watching. Within three days, the film broke into Amazon’s Top 10 new documentary releases and climbed to No. 34 among the platform’s best-selling documentaries.

Eli and I recorded this podcast on launch eve, two days before the third anniversary of October 7, the day in 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel, killed 1,200 people and took 251 hostages in the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

This conversation is a personal one for me. My family left Odessa for Brooklyn in 1977, when I was six. The Soviet Union manufactured much of the antizionist propaganda that now fills American campuses (read this and subscribe to if you want to learn more). My parents talked about it at home, but it always felt like something that happened over there. For fifty years in America, nobody treated us as the other. October 7 changed that, and Eli’s film shows how we got here.

Here’s our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Your father’s book is 20 years old. Why make this film now?

Eli: White guilt is not just a book. It is a real force, and most people do not see it. You cannot have a collision between 300 years of white supremacy and the civil rights movement without some fallout. King and the movement’s foot soldiers, including my grandparents and my father, told white America that using race that way was immoral. White America lost its moral authority, and it has tried to buy back its innocence ever since. That current drives much of what has happened to this country.

Then October 7 happened. I woke up, checked my email, and the first image I saw was a young woman’s body in the back of a pickup truck. America did not condemn that evil the way it would have in the 1990s. So what was different? What gave people license to call that horror resistance?

For me, that’s white guilt. Liberation ideologies like Marxism and the PLO have been here all along. They need grease to get into the system, and white guilt is the grease. They tell you that you need their ideology to be a good person, and that you are a racist if you question it. People want to keep their jobs, so they go along.

“The car does not run without oil.”

Your father stood up early. Why, and what did it cost him?

Eli: My father wanted to be an American more than anything. Immigrants look at America and want to live by its principles. My father was born here and was denied those principles, but he wanted them just the same.

He came of age in the 1960s with a lot of anger, and he joined the Black Power movement. In the film we show his trip to Algiers to meet the Black Panthers. I grew up with African statues in the house from that trip. On that trip he realized that America’s principles never failed him. The people failed to live up to them. Those principles hang on the wall in DC, in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. He decided to live up to them.

Then he saw the transaction. White people buy innocence. Black people sell victimization. Neither side can get out of that deal, and it drags the whole country down. The Palestinian leadership runs the same play. Arafat walked away from a deal that gave him almost everything he wanted, because victimhood was his power. Notice how Israel gets every Western evil superimposed on it. That’s white guilt.

You said Israel “acted that way” before October 7. What did you mean?

Eli: I mean concessions. I spent eight years at a human rights organization reading United Nations documents. Israel is the most indicted nation at the UN, and it knows it carries a higher burden than anyone else. After the Arabs lost in 1967, Palestinian leaders realized they could not beat Israel on the battlefield. So they took the fight inside people’s minds. If you can convince the world that Israel is evil and you are the victim, you hold enormous power.

Gaza is the big example. In 2005, Ariel Sharon pulled every Israeli out of Gaza and handed over the territory. An Israeli friend of mine said at the time that we would pay for it, and that they would come across that border one day. About ten years before October 7, she was already screaming about it. She had no white guilt. She saw the enemy with very clear eyes.

Why do Jewish organizations keep getting antisemitism wrong?

Natalya: I run a nonprofit, so I know that crisis is the easiest time to raise money. When the crisis ends, the money dries up. American Jewish organizations seem to thrive in crisis. They spun into a frenzy after October 7, but they haven’t solved anything.

Eli: I have a controversial take. I filmed a documentary at Coronado High School, and the ADL was involved. The ADL buys into the oppressor and oppressed model. It buys the idea that Jews are white, which is absurd. I’m Jewish myself. My mother is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Watch an Israeli soccer game. You can’t even tell who is white.

Jewish organizations betrayed the value of the individual to go along with the idea that we all belong to a race and owe a debt for the past. So if you’re a white Jew, you land on the same side as the white supremacist. Why would you allow yourself to be called white? Why would you give the racial order that power over you?

I would argue that Jews are not the canary in the coal mine. They are just the latest target. White guilt went after black people first, then white people, then Asians. After October 7, the story that Hamas fighters were the resistance won out. Once you excuse an evil like that, you have to explain it. The Jews must have done something. That is how antisemitism comes forward.

What do you hope this film does?

Eli: There is power in seeing things. I tried to pack this film with evidence, maybe too much. It’s a heavy film, and I don’t deny that. One of the more inflammatory lines says we have been cowards. We can keep being cowards and complain about the decline of the country. France drank its wine while the Nazis marched in. That’s our choice. The film is a warning, and Americans are in the same boat as the Israelis.

When What Killed Michael Brown? came out in the summer of George Floyd, people told us it gave them the language and the courage to argue back. I hope White Guilt does the same. This country is worth fighting for. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

What are young people saying after they see it?

Eli: The letter from those Chicago students was devastating. Their classes covered only how racist and oppressive America was. Nobody taught them that George Washington stepped down from power at a time when kings ruled the world. That choice kept the democracy alive, and it paved the way for my own family’s freedom a century later.

At Arizona State, a student came up to me after a screening. He said the film made a powerful case for a merit-based society, and that it made him want to be more human. He was tired of the oppressor and oppressed lens. He wanted to meet a person and ask where they’re from without worrying that the question is offensive. If people walk away with that, I’m happy.

Our kids absorb this framework in the classroom long before they can question it. White Guilt gives parents the history and the language to push back. We plan to bring a premiere to New York City, and would love your help to fill the room.

Where to watch White Guilt

• Stream it on Amazon Prime Video. Every purchase there helps the film climb the charts.

• Watch on Apple TV or Google Play and YouTube.

• Buy it directly from the filmmakers, so more of your money goes to the people who made it.

• Host a screening at your school or church through Gathr, or reach Eli through whiteguiltfilm.com.

Read Eli

Subscribe to Eli’s Substack, Man of Steele. Start with “They’re Milking White Guilt,” where a childhood memory of overpriced candy bars in San Jose shows him how guilt turns into a transaction. Then read “What October 7 Revealed: The Hatred White Guilt Made Innocent.”

White Guilt in the press

• Fox News: Eli’s op-ed on how the terror of being called racist is crushing free speech

• Hollywood in Toto: The 20-year journey behind the film

• The Daily Wire: How fear forged a new racial order centered on white guilt

• Political.org: The documentary argues fear of the racism charge is silencing American speech

• Cornell Law School: the April campus screening

Thank you, Eli, for this conversation and for everything you and your father have built. It changed the way I speak and the way I think. If this conversation moved you, share it with one parent who needs to hear it. And remember, 15 DAYS, the film Eli co-produced, is available right here for paid subscribers:

Yesterday, I had my hair and makeup done and a seat in the Fox News green room when Marco Rubio took my slot.

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Fox invited me on The Faulkner Focus after the New York Post quoted me in its story on Jewish families who pull their children out of public schools as antisemitism grows. The producers told me that a speech by the Secretary of State could bump my segment. It did, and I could not ask for a better reason. I watched from the green room as Rubio stood before the Acropolis in Athens and told the West to stop apologizing for itself.

Rubio delivered his speech on the third anniversary of October 7. On that day in 2023, Hamas terrorists murdered 1,200 people and dragged about 250 more into Gaza as hostages. Hamas attacked Israel and Jews everywhere, and three years later it is clear that it was an attack on Western civilization itself.

Now that this horrible anniversary is behind us and as we approach Columbus Day (now known as Indigenous People’s Day), parents face a practical question: what story do we tell our kids? They now regularly hear that America’s founding is a crime and our legacy is a reason for shame.

Rubio tells our story very differently — all Americans deserve to hear his version.

Rubio reminds us that our very words for democracy and politics come from Greek, and that our idea of a self-governing republic took shape in the Greek city-states. Even the name Philadelphia, the city where the founders wrote our Constitution, comes from Greek and means “brotherly love.” None of this gives us a reason for guilt.

It gives us a reason for pride and a reason to defend what we inherited.

The speech opens with a story every child ought to know by heart. In 480 BC, the Persian king Xerxes marched on Athens and burned it. A handful of Athenians refused to leave and barricaded themselves on the Acropolis. They rolled boulders down the cliffs and held off the largest empire on earth for days, until the Persians overran them and torched the temples. The Athenians came back to the ashes, gathered the broken statues, and buried them in the hill.

About thirty years later, under Pericles, they raised the Parthenon on that same rock. It still stands 25 centuries later. They buried their dead and built something even greater on the same ground.

What Rubio said to the West

He names the problem in our education system:

“Too often, these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure that no one will lose.”

“In too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit.”

He draws a hard line between Western heroes and the Iranian regime, which hails child suicide bombers as national heroes:

“Our heroes may be willing to die for their cause, but our heroes do not worship death.”

And he reminds us where it all began:

“The Greeks did not just shape history. The Greeks gave us history itself.”

“The history of Greece shows us an image of ourselves. It shows us that ours is the inheritance of great heroes, and that we should be proud.”

Watch it together

Please watch the full speech with your kids. It runs about 25 minutes and asks for sustained attention, which our children rarely get to practice. Sit beside them and pause when they have questions. Rubio calls the story of our civilization “the greatest story ever known to man.” Our kids deserve to hear someone say that out loud and really mean it.

The people who celebrate murder will never win while leaders like Marco Rubio are among us!

Natalya

The speech

Remarks by Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Acropolis, Athens, October 7, 2026. Lightly edited for clarity. Brackets mark words added for clarity. [...] marks passages cut for length.

The last stand on the Acropolis

There are great ruins all across the world. In many cases, they are places where history seems to have exhausted itself, remnants of distant cultures that have long passed beyond living memory.

But the Acropolis is different. For thousands of years, the civilization that built what stands behind me has captivated the imagination of the Western world.

Generations of our statesmen, artists, and philosophers have looked to it, and looked to it with wonder, and looked to it with awe. Now, time has a tendency to dull the senses. Great victories and catastrophic defeats seem to shrink to becoming like a footnote in a textbook. Another fact for our schoolchildren to memorize and forget. But the Greeks of antiquity seem to have an almost mystical hold on our memory.

They call us back to them again and again. 480 years before Christ, the armies of Xerxes arrived in this city, and they put its sanctuaries to the torch. Most Athenians had by then evacuated by ship to a nearby island, but there was a handful of them that refused to leave their home. So instead, they barricaded themselves in the rocky fortress of the Acropolis to fight an extraordinary last stand, heaving massive stones down the cliffs onto the Persian invaders, and holding the greatest empire of that age at bay for days. They were eventually overwhelmed. The Persians plundered the temples, they burned the shrines, they razed the Acropolis to the ground.

When the Athenians returned, they gathered the broken remains of the old Acropolis and buried them in the hill where it had stood. Decades later, under Pericles, they raised the Parthenon. For 25 centuries since, the Parthenon has stood. Empires have risen and fallen beneath its shadow, and the progeny of the men who built it, the sons of Athens and Rome, have carried their civilization with them to the ends of the earth.

Two and a half centuries after the founding of the American Republic, halfway across the world from where I stand now, I stand here today as the Secretary of State of that republic, and as the great-grandson of settlers who arrived in the New World from Spain. I stand here to testify to a debt that no lapse of time, no distance of space, can ever extinguish.

What America owes to Greece

The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity. Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government, in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city. The city where our Constitution was born, Philadelphia, is itself a Greek name.

The men who founded my country were fascinated by the heritage we inherited from yours. They were exceptionally well read in history. They were vividly aware of their unique place in it, but no other age of the past held their attention or their imagination quite like that of antiquity. Many, many people are surprised to learn that the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was not an Enlightenment philosopher or a political theorist. The most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was Plutarch, the Greek biographer of Greece and Rome’s great men.

Now, much has been written and said about the influence of ancient Greece on the ideas of the American founders, and for that matter, on all of the Western philosophers and statesmen that preceded them. Most of us are familiar with the basic history. Athens gave us democracy. Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy. Our ideas of law, of virtue, citizenship, and republican government were shaped in the Greek city-states. Even much of our political vocabulary, words like democracy, tyranny, the word politics itself, found its origins here.

All of that is true, but the things we owe to this place as Americans and as Westerners actually [go] far [beyond] these institutions and ideas. These institutions and ideas were the outward expression of more fundamental qualities we see in the ancient Greeks, qualities that can’t be reduced to any particular political system.

Here in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition, daring exploration and invention, a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory, an insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos, an impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries, at all limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.

These were not just the formulas or precepts of a particular school of philosophy. They were the characteristics of a people, expressed in their traditions, their stories, their imagination, in the qualities that they demanded of their citizens, and the things they lived and fought and died for. To know them is to know ourselves. What blossomed here, in this place, was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man. The Greeks did not just shape history. The Greeks gave us history itself.

Much of what we know about many ancient civilizations comes almost entirely from the records of Greek explorers and historians, explorers and historians who didn’t just chronicle the histories of their own people, but ventured outward to observe and record the sagas of foreign peoples and cultures all across the world. Where others looked inward, the Greeks were the first to direct their focus outward, to chase the thrill and glory of seeing all that was strange and new. It was this trait that would push the West to create and build what others could not, marking us out from so many other cultures and civilizations, where stability and subsistence were the highest ends of life.

But it is not just the ambition to explore the unknown that we inherit from the Greeks. It is the conviction that the unknown can be known, the confidence that the world can be charted and measured and mapped and understood, and that there is a rational order to the cosmos governed by certain fundamental laws, laws that men can observe and the mind can come to understand. This was the foundation of the Western mind: our math, our science, our medicine, our philosophy, ethics, and religion. It paved the way for the gospel of Jesus Christ to find fertile soil in Europe and flourish into the empire of Christendom. It was the foundation of the riches of Christian theology, of Augustine and Aquinas, and the whole tradition of natural law.

It gave birth to a civilization marked not just by a common culture; it was marked by a common anthropology, a common view of man and of his place in the universe. Its descendants would share not just the idea of a natural order, but a distinctive understanding of virtue, of destiny, of fate, of truth, goodness, and beauty, of a code that dictates how men ought to live, of objective standards and ideals to strive towards.

“We build downwards”

For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man’s existence. They organized all of civic life around contest and ambition and competition: in philosophy and poetry and sculpture and drama, in athletics and art, in war and statecraft. The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle, to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection.

Now I know that to modern ears, what I just described, this way of life, may sound odd. It may even sound cruel. The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly, become a world of perfect safety, a world devoid of risk or failure, where neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat [exists]. Too often, these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure that no one will lose. We preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best. We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.

The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards. They held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the best in all things. The ancient Greek city-states were filled with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict. But from that constant struggle for distinction came the great flowering of art, philosophy, and political and intellectual energy that would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world.

The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it, the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride, is the heart of great civilization. And without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive.

Today, too much of the West has forgotten this quality. Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional. We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world. Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness. The word nationalism became a dirty word, and so we tore down our monuments. We condemned our own history, and in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit.

[...]

Heroes who do not worship death

Now it’s become fashionable today to believe that enlightened foreign policy means prioritizing the global community over one’s own people, and I think here too we have much to learn from the men of ancient Greece, because they knew that there was nothing selfish or wrong about loyalty to your nation, nor anything selfish or wrong about fighting to defend its interests. Above all else, they believed fiercely in the ideal of the great man, the exceptional individual who obtains immortality through his own deeds. But they believed that glory and fame, those things were won through striving, sacrificing, and achieving greatly for something larger than yourself.

The recurring hero of the ancient Greek world was the man who was willing to pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty. We see this in Socrates, who refused to abandon the inquiry into truth, even at the cost of his own life. We see it in the legendary stand of 300 Spartans, surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by the vast armies of Persia, who refused a chance to save themselves, choosing to fight to the last man rather than abandon their post or abandon their duty. And we see it in the epic myth of Achilles, who is offered the choice to return home and live a long and peaceful life, but chooses instead to remain at Troy and perish in pursuit of eternal glory.

These are the qualities that would shape the Western moral imagination, from the Christian martyr who refused to betray his faith to the patriot who gave his life for his country, from Saint Thomas More to the Battle of the Alamo, running through the immortal closing words of the Declaration of Independence of the United States, which says we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

It is from the Greeks that the West inherited its sense of duty, an unbreakable loyalty to one’s code, one’s cause, one’s country. Our heroes, the heroes of the West, are those who choose to remain faithful to their duty precisely when it is most difficult and painful to do so: the man who is bound by his word, the soldier who will not abandon his post, the proverbial captain who goes down with the ship.

This is wholly different from what we see even now, for example, from fanatics like the radical mullahs of Iran, whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes and portrays martyrdom as an end in itself. Our heroes, our heroes may be willing to die for their cause, but our heroes do not worship death. It is precisely because we value life that we come to recognize the heroism in those who would sooner sacrifice it than to betray their principles.

Now we take the Western conception of these things, heroism, honor, duty, we take these things for granted. We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places. They are not. They are the product of a distinct character, a distinct character which arose here and shaped the whole story of the civilization that came after. The civilization that we must fight to defend today with the same passion as our forefathers did.

From Athens to Apollo 11

The men who built the Parthenon were succeeded by the architects of European Christendom, who raised the cathedrals of Milan, Cologne, and Florence. The quest to perfect the human form that moved the ancient Greek sculptors found a new expression in Michelangelo. The Greek philosophers’ search for the structure of the universe was inherited by Copernicus, then Galileo, and Kepler, and Newton. The hunger for new knowledge, that’s what gave birth to Magellan’s first expedition around the world, to Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, and ultimately to Apollo 11’s journey to the moon. And the qualities that led Alexander to conquer the entire known world reappeared in Caesar, and Charlemagne, and Cortés.

And in America, that same tradition rediscovered itself anew. An open and wild land became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition. The Greek aspiration for new horizons became the American frontier spirit. The civilization of Athens and Rome transformed an infant seaboard republic into a continental empire.

The greatest Americans of every generation have carried the unmistakable features of their forefathers. Born in Athens, formed by Rome, baptized in Christendom, hardened in the furnace of medieval Europe, endowed with the English genius for liberty, and then carried across the Atlantic to be reborn on the shores of a new world.

Together, we must now rediscover that spirit. We are at an inflection point, an inflection point not only in the history of my nation, but an inflection point in the whole of our civilization. The threats we face today are every bit as real as they were on the dramatic stage of antiquity. National interests did not vanish in the face of international institutions. War did not disappear simply because we preferred peace.

Other states continued to arm, to seek influence, to compete for territory and technology and resources and markets and energy and power. And now there is war again. There is new competition between great powers again. There is vulnerability, aggression, terrorism, a whole universe of new threats and attacks again.

[...]

An image of ourselves

You know, our friendship dates back to the earliest years of my nation. When Greece rose in 1821 to recover its independence after centuries of Ottoman rule, Americans recognized something familiar in that struggle. Three years later, the great American statesman Daniel Webster delivered a famous address to Congress, helping bring the cause of the Greek Revolution before the representatives of the young American Republic. And he began by calling their attention to everything around them. This is what he said in his speech:

Those words are as true today as they were when he said them. And all of us, not just Americans, but Europeans and our friends across the West, must relearn the lessons our forefathers took from this place and from its history.

The history of Greece does not just offer us a glimpse of institutions in their earliest forms. The history of Greece shows us an image of ourselves. It shows us that ours is the inheritance of great heroes, and that we should be proud, that we should be intensely proud of where we come from. We should marvel at what our forefathers carved out of this countryside. The story of the civilization is the greatest story ever known to man, and it began here with the first men and women of the West. From them, we can rediscover the virtues, the courage, and the strength to confront the dangers that we face in our time.

Thank you.

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This week New York Magazine put Ellen Page (now known as Elliot), 39, on one of the covers of its first Men’s Style Issue. Two days earlier, the Human Rights Campaign had held its own celebration in Washington, where Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, 55, delivered the keynote at the group’s 2026 National Dinner, while Marcia Gay Harden, 67, accepted the Ally for Equality award.

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Yesterday we showed you the new New York Magazine cover. Today we look at the group that platformed Page at 26 and has continued to incentivize and reward celebrity transitions.

HRC’s recap calls Whitmer a proud mother of an LGBTQ+ child, and a roundup of celebrity parents says Harden has three queer and trans children.

The Oscar nominee

At 20, Ellen Page earned an Oscar nomination for Juno. In February 2014, at 26, she walked onto the stage at the HRC Foundation’s Time to Thrive conference in Las Vegas and came out as gay, then told the crowd, “Thank you for inspiring me. Thank you for giving me hope,” in a room full of professionals who work with LGBTQ teenagers.

Then, on December 1, 2020, at 33, Page announced a transition and wrote that it felt remarkable “to finally love who I am enough to pursue my authentic self,” in her own statement.

You can see for yourself just how influential and contagious this all is.

HRC platformed Ellen at 26 and praised her transition at 33, and the public tagged along, ingesting the vocabulary— self-love, authenticity, courage. The same words we hear from transgender activists today.

The reward for telling the story

When Cher and Sonny Bono’s daughter Chastity Bono (Chaz Bono) announced a transition in June 2009 at 40, HRC issued a statement calling the move “nothing short of courageous.”

In 2012, HRC gave Larry Wachowski, then 47, its Visibility Award. Bruce Jenner (Caitlyn Jenner), 76, also belongs on the list of celebrity transitions.

HRC treats celebrity parents the same way, and it recognized Charlize Theron as an ally in 2012, and Theron later told the press her eldest child is transgender. Other stars, including Robert De Niro, Cher, Naomi Watts, and Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union, have spoken about a trans-identified child. Amber Briggle, a Texas mother, helped found HRC’s Parents for Transgender Equality National Council and later became its national co-chair.

HRC’s own guide, Supporting & Caring for Transgender Children, opens with a reality-TV star Jazz Jennings, who was transitioned as a child, tells parents they have “little control” over a child’s gender identity, and advises them to work with providers to plan the transition.

Together these moves form an incentive structure, since a famous person who joins HRC’s story gets a stage, a public statement, an award, or a keynote, and a famous parent gets the same.

On and on it goes.

Who is listening

The audience is young, and it has grown fast. In 2017, the Williams Institute at UCLA, a research group that supports trans equality, estimated that 0.7 percent of U.S. teenagers, about 150,000, identified as transgender, using 2014 and 2015 data. By 2022 the estimate had reached 300,000, or 1.4 percent, and in 2025 it reached 724,000, or 3.3 percent, while 2.7 percent of adults aged 18 to 24 now identify as transgender, compared with 0.42 percent of adults aged 35 to 64. That is nearly a fivefold rise between the 2017 and 2025 reports. The institute attributes part of the early jump to better survey methods, and the numbers come from self-reported surveys, but the same institute says younger generations are more likely to identify as trans and expects the trend to continue.

Medical records point in the same direction, since Komodo Health data that Reuters analyzed showed gender dysphoria diagnoses among children aged 6 to 17 jumped 70 percent from 2020 to 2021, and puberty blocker and hormone treatment more than doubled between 2017 and 2021. Reuters wrote that the cause is not clear. This all accelerated when schools closed and children spent long days online, and parents tell us the influencers filled those hours, though no study has proven or disproven that link. Chloe Cole says she first met the ideas online at 11.

A Harvard-led study offers a smaller number, and its framing deserves a close read. The researchers used private insurance claims from 2018 to 2022 and found fewer than 1,000 adolescents on blockers and fewer than 2,000 on hormones, which they present as less than 0.1 percent of teens and as evidence against claims that such care is “too freely given.” That percentage divides by every teenager with private insurance, including the great majority who never sought care, and the study takes a five-year snapshot without measuring growth.

It also leaves out Medicaid patients and families who pay cash.

The cost, and the reckoning

Chloe Cole started blockers and testosterone at 13, had a double mastectomy at 15, and at 18 sued Kaiser and her doctors for malpractice. Clementine Breen took blockers at 12, testosterone at 13, and had a double mastectomy at 14, then detransitioned and at 20 sued Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Last January, a jury awarded Fox Varian $2 million over a mastectomy at 16.

Thankfully, gender clinics have begun to close, and the clinic Olson-Kennedy led shut its doors on July 22, 2025. Stanford, Kaiser Permanente, Children’s National, NYU Langone, and others stopped or changed youth programs. The hospitals cite federal pressure— that pressure grows out of the lawsuits, the whistleblowers, and the evidence reviews.

One of those reviews came from HHS, whose November 2025 report, Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices, calls the harms of blockers, hormones, and surgery in minors “significant, long term, and too often ignored or inadequately tracked.” Nine researchers wrote it, including psychiatrist , who co-authored our Gender Toolkit. It came as no surprise that HRC dismissed the report as a “sham report.”

HRC grades the hospitals

HRC’s Foundation also grades hospitals through its Healthcare Equality Index, which rewards top scorers with a “Leader” title. Do No Harm, an advocacy group for evidence based medicine, counted 41 children’s hospitals in the 2024 survey. HRC’s site lists Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston as a “Past Participant” and gives no years or reason. The 2024 index says its health team gets a grant from Pfizer, and Pfizer says it earned top marks from HRC. Pfizer’s annual report breaks out no testosterone sales, so I found no evidence that it profits much from this care, but a drug company funds part of the system that grades children’s hospitals.

Texas Children’s is also where surgical resident Eithan Haim blew the whistle to City Journal revealing that the hospital kept transitioning minors after it said it would stop. President Biden’s Justice Department indicted Haim in June 2024, the House Judiciary Committee said DOJ removed the lead prosecutor over undisclosed ties to the hospital, and the court dismissed the case. Earlier this year, Texas Children’s agreed to pay $10 million and open a detransition clinic.

What to teach your kids about celebrities

Kids see a movie star and assume this larger than life figure is someone to follow, a role model, the light. Talk to your kids and tell them that acting is a job and it often attracts talented, vulernable people who may become trapped in these terrible situations and goaded into decisions that may not be their own or in their own best interest.

Still, fame goes a long way. When Ellen Page announced her transition, HRC answered the same day, and fans who never read an HRC guide were suddenly inducted into the cause. Chloe Cole says she was introduced to these ideas online at 11, too young to understand the ramifications of her decisions.

That’s why (and I know I say this all the time) it is up to us parents to prepare our kids so when they encounter the ideas Chloe did, they will be prepared and ready.

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Look at the girl on the left. Her name is Ellen Page. She is smiling. She looks happy and at ease.

Now look at the person on the right. She goes by Elliot. She is on the cover of New York Magazine’s first Men’s Style issue. She has had her breast removed and is on cross-sex hormones. She looks unhappy and morose to me.

The magazine holds her up as a role model for masculinity. It tells every reader to ignore their own eyes and intuition.

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But this person is not a man.

She never will be.

How Ellen got here

Ellen came out as a lesbian in 2014 at a Human Rights Campaign conference. In 2015, HRC gave her its Vanguard Award. She became an activist for nearly every cause on the left, from abortion rights to the Palestine boycott pledge.

Last week, Elliot Page joined a Jewish Voice for Peace sit-in outside the UN and blocked the road. More than 100 people were arrested.

HRC is at the center of the fight over transitioning children. It applauds government actions that support affirming children who say they are trans. HRC groomed her.

Then the politicians joined in.

In June 2023, at a White House press conference, President Biden said that when it comes to these children, they are all our kids.

But this is untrue.

Your child is yours.

The erasure

Search for Ellen Page. You land on a Wikipedia page titled Elliot Page. Ellen becomes a former name.

The girl in the left photo has disappeared.

We all become complicit if we go along with these lies. Our children become complicit too, if we do not tell them the truth.

What I ask of you

Show your children these two photos. Show them the smiling girl and the person on the NY Magazine cover. Even if your child is young, show them, talk about it in age appropriate ways, now.

Ask what they see. Tell them what you see.

Tell them that a girl cannot become a boy and a woman cannot become a man. Tell them a boy cannot become a girl and a man cannot become a woman.

Do not leave this to the activists.

Their story will not be the one you want your child to hear. I guarantee it.

Where to start

If your child asks a question you cannot answer, start with our original Gender Toolkit. We are updating it and will release the new version soon.

No one is coming to save our kids but us.

Natalya

Restore Childhood does this work for free because we are a nonprofit. If this post moved you, please upgrade to a paid subscription and help us keep going.

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Ann paid dearly for that post. In our conversation, she tells me what speaking out cost her. She lost friends. She lost work. She lost her place in the city where she and her husband built their lives. But she didn’t back down. In the end, she and her husband left Minneapolis for Kentucky.

Ann was a writer long before that fight. She has published three novels and a memoir. Her essays have run in Salon, Tablet and The Free Press. Her latest essay there is a tribute to L. Frank Baum, the man who wrote The Wizard of Oz. She writes about hard things in plain language, and that’s rare.

Together with her husband, Ann recently co-founded Storyalīz, a reading app. It serves classic books in short installments of about 900 words. You can read one in a few minutes, the way readers once followed Dickens, chapter by chapter.

Ann has written about falling reading scores and how many adults no longer read books at all. Kids who were out of school while learning to read are still paying for it.

In our conversation, we talk about:

• What the school closures looked like in Minnesota

• What speaking out cost her, and why she did it anyway

• Why she left Minneapolis

• Her writing, and why reading matters for kids and families

Listen to our conversation above.

Try Storyalīz with your kids.

Watch 15 DAYS, our film about America’s pandemic school closures, here on Substack.

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What is your child reading right now?

Tell me in the comments.

Read Reviews & Press for 15 DAYS

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with and ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

WATCH: 15 DAYS

Yesterday New York Times journalist and author of the 1619 Project Nikole Hannah-Jones published a new essay in the New York Times Magazine, titled “Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?“

Her daughter Najya is 16 now. In the essay, Najya tells her mother, “I never really got the education I wanted.”

Hannah-Jones and her husband enrolled Najya at P.S. 307, a high-poverty Brooklyn school, in 2015, then at a middle school called Urban Assembly Unison. She writes that the family “had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do.” She picked the low-income school on purpose, believing that families like hers moving in would improve it for everyone.

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Najya struggled. A tutor later found gaps in her long division and fractions. She earned A’s in a class she barely understood, because her teacher never checked her homework. In eighth grade, Najya asked to choose her own high school for the first time, and she picked a screened, mostly white and Asian school, the kind her mother had spent a career arguing against.

Hannah-Jones writes about the phone call where Najya asked why her mother hadn’t thought about her instead of other kids. Hannah-Jones answered, “I feel like you got cheated. And I’m sorry for that.”

She goes on: “This girl, my only child, looked to me to protect her, to give her what she needed to thrive. And I had not chosen her.”

Jones had picked her cause over her daughter.

But she doesn’t end there. Her closing line asks every parent who has moved a child out of a failing school to share her guilt: “there is no absolution here. Not for me. Not for you. Not for any of us.” Even now, watching what it cost her own daughter, she cannot admit that the right thing to do was always, always to choose her child.

How can you not help noticing a pattern here?

A vocal minority shame parents wanting good schools, destroy those schools, and they build nothing in their place. ran into this exact ideology in 2020, when Hannah-Jones interviewed her, then piled on her online for a line pulled out of context. My film Uncancellable looks at the costs of standing up to this bullying, the silencing of parents, shaming us into staying quiet, with no improvement to the students or their schools.

Who does that benefit? Not Najya. Not Maud’s kids. Not one child sitting in a New York City classroom right now.

New York City is putting a record $43 billion into public schools this budget, which works out to roughly $44,000 per student, more than any other large school district in the country.

There is no honest excuse for a teacher who never grades a fourth grader’s homework, or a school that cannot staff a lunchroom.

And this month, the state made it worse. New York is phasing out the Regents exam requirement for graduation, starting with the class of 2028. Najya’s whole story turned on a hard number: a reading assessment, a failed algebra exam, a test score she couldn’t hide from. Remove the test, and no one will learn she was never taught long division until a private tutor catches it in high school (!).

Not only are we not fixing what happened to Najya, we are making sure the next child in her old classroom never even gets the data to know it happened to her.

How does this help anyone, Nikole?

It is not selfish for a mother to choose her own child first - it is right, it is nature!

It is the way a child gets strong enough to help anyone else.

Every person is a world, and you build your own before you can lift another one. Hannah-Jones had that order backwards (at best) for a decade, at her daughter’s expense, and she still doesn’t seem to be capable of a self reckoning.

Advocacy starts at home. If you cannot fight for your own child, what exactly are you fighting for? Your kids only have you, not a movement or an ideology.

When you decide not to do right by them, when you had the power to choose better and chose worse instead, that is not complicated and it is not noble. It is a choice. It is a failure.

It teaches your child that she is a sacrifice. That she comes second to a cause her mother picked before she was even born. Najya said it plainly: she wished her mother had thought about her instead of other kids.

This is the most powerful lesson in the entire essay, sadly not the one Hannah-Jones meant to teach. It is a lesson in what not to do as a parent. Love your own child best and first. Not in place of the world but because you love the world. A child who knows she comes first learns she is worth fighting for, and that is what gives her the strength to go out and fight for someone else.

Hannah-Jones took that from her daughter for a decade.

Do not take it from yours.

Before this work, Ken served in the U.S. Army as a Russia specialist. His first tour put him on the border between East and West Germany in 1986. He saw the fence with his own eyes.

Ken has been a friend and a great supporter of Restore Childhood for several years. I heard him speak at the Teachers Freedom Alliance conference in Dallas this summer, and I recorded this conversation the day after I watched White Nights in 70mm at the Paris Theater. As you know, my own immigration background makes this conversation personal, and it’s part of why I wanted to bring Ken’s story to you directly.

Here’s a short video clip I took of Isabella Rosselini on on her experience in the 1980s of filming director Taylor Hackford’s White Nights “Misha (Mikhail Baryshnikov) couldn’t go back to Russia, so we filmed it in Helsinki…”

Ken explains why socialism appeals to a 19-year-old. He also gives parents steps they can take at the dinner table and at the school board.

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The transcript below is edited for readability only. I removed filler words and false starts. All links are mine.

“They got to put a fence around people”

NATALYA: Hi, thank you so much for joining us. This is Natalya with Restore Childhood, and I am so honored to have my friend Ken Pope with us today. I just saw him a month ago. Well, I guess it’s probably closer to two months at this point, at the Teachers Freedom Alliance in Dallas, where he gave an absolutely riveting presentation on socialism, communism, and why it should never happen here.

And myself, as I would say, a victim of communism. I think many people who are watching this know my history because I feel like I beat the drum nonstop. I came here as a 6-year-old from the Soviet Union. My parents experienced many of the things that Ken will tell you about firsthand and talked to me about it. It’s kind of like the mythology of my beginning. And so when he talks about these things, they really ring true to me, and I think it’s for all of you to listen to him as well. I’ve known Ken for several years. We’ve attended several conferences together. He’s been an incredible supporter of 15 DAYS and of Restore Childhood.

He is a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Foundation and also director of Coalition for Empowered Education. Did I get that right? Is it Coalition for Empowered Education?

KEN: You got it right.

NATALYA: Okay, great. So I’m gonna let Ken talk a little bit about himself and his very unusual and interesting history. And then I’ll ask a couple of questions and we’ll go from there.

KEN: Okay, thanks. Well, it’s just a great privilege to be with you and talk about this. We both share this passion about getting the word out about socialism and communism because we’ve both, at some level, experienced it. So my background, I’ll just start with how I kind of became involved in it. My career has been kind of bookended by tours in academia. As a young college student during the Cold War, I had this fascination with Russia, the Soviet Union at the time, and communism. I just didn’t know much about it, but I wanted to learn more. So I ended up majoring in sociology of the Soviet Union, of all things.

And so I get this degree. All my professors are telling me the same thing, actually the same garbage we’re hearing today, right? That socialism is not that bad. We’ve just not done it right. Soviet Union during the Cold War, professors were actually saying, they’re trying to get it right. Just give them time. They’re going to figure this stuff out. They get all this free stuff. And as a young, dumb college kid, I probably believed some of that. But I was also a newly commissioned lieutenant in the Army. My first tour, as fate would have it, was on the East-West German border. So I go there in 1986.

So now let’s fast forward a little bit. Now I am teaching at the university level, probably the second weekend of my very first semester. And we get on the topic of the Cold War. And I’m looking at these kids and I’m getting blank stares back. They have no idea what I’m talking about. And I’m going like, you gotta be kidding me. So then I started peeling it back a little bit. I said, well, tell me, have you at least heard of the Iron Curtain? And everybody raised their hand, said, yeah, we have. And then we kind of talked about that a little bit. I asked, well, tell me, is this a real physical barrier or was it just a metaphor? And about every time I asked that question, every single class, probably 99% got it wrong every single time. They thought it was just a metaphor.

But really what it was was this fence that divided East and West Europe, from Finland all the way up in the Barents Sea, all the way down to the Black Sea, to keep at the time about 400 million people captive behind a fence, to include your family back in the ‘80s before you guys came over. So that’s what it looked like. So when I get there in ‘86 and I see this fence, I’m going like, this is so good that they got to put a fence around people to keep them in the system. That’s not at all adding up to what these college professors were talking about.

So that is kind of a nutshell of what this whole thing is really all about. It’s this system that’s always brought about by and maintained by force and by violence. Because once you start down that path, the people really quickly will figure out that this stuff doesn’t work. It’s not good. It’s repressive. It’s violent. It only leads to really three things: repression, violence, and death. Every single time. And so that’s what I saw firsthand being there.

“It only leads to really three things: repression, violence, and death. Every single time.”

So I had roughly a 25-year career in the military. Then worked in the consulting world, focused on defense stuff. Then went into academia, and then ended up running VOC as a CEO for a bit, and then stepped down to be a senior fellow so we could work on creating this organization called Coalition for Empowered Education. So we’re all working together doing the same thing, which is educating people about communism, about socialism, mainly socialism today.

And we can get into theory if you want a bit later, but my contention is the world has never really seen communism, because Marx, the great theorist as everybody calls him, said that you have socialism, then you have communism. In order to reach communism, you got to have two things. You got to have the government disappear, which no Soviet or communist or socialist government has ever disappeared, and everything’s got to be shared equally, and that’s never happened anywhere. So you never really get that. What you do get is totalitarian socialism, every single time. That’s kind of where we are now. So yeah, I think that’s probably a good intro. We can talk about your questions now and see where we want to go.

NATALYA: It is, and I’ve never heard the term totalitarian socialism. I think that’s really good, because even as somebody who came from there and has spoken about it with my family, mostly in Russian though, I don’t know that I have a good grasp on what each of these very big words mean. I remember hearing that communism was the perfection of socialism or something like that. I didn’t even really understand what that meant.

White Nights

NATALYA: But it’s interesting that we’re talking about this today, because last night I went to the 40th anniversary premiere of White Nights.

KEN: I remember, yeah.

NATALYA: Yes, it was released in 1985, so I guess it’s about 41 years, but they’re calling it 40. Fine. They screened it at the Paris Theater in Midtown, right across the street from the Plaza Hotel, a very beautiful old theater, in 70mm, with Isabella Rossellini present and answering questions afterwards. She’s 74 years old. She was early 30s when she filmed it. First of all, she was like, I haven’t seen this film in 40 years. I was kind of scared to watch it, because when it was released, it really kind of got mixed reviews. And the film is fun to watch, but it’s a little weird, especially with the Gregory Hines character. But she watched it and she was like, it’s riveting, it’s great, I love it, I can’t believe it’s so good.

She and Mikhail Baryshnikov became very close friends. They’re still very, very close to this day. She talked about him nonstop. And she calls him Misha, which is the casual version of Mikhail. She says Misha, while we were filming this, over and over again kept saying, it’s not my story. This is not how it happened. It’s not how it happened. He was happy acting it, but this is not how it happened.

But just watching it, I have to say, it gave me a visceral response. I had tears in my eyes, because it’s the story of a Russian dancer who’s defected to France and the United States. And he’s heading to some incredible performance that he’s supposed to give in Japan, and his flight crashes in Siberia. And we know where that goes. He becomes a prisoner once again. And just the lengths to which this dancer, who was enjoying the fruits of freedom for 8 years in the United States, is now suddenly imprisoned in Siberia and has become a puppet of the government.

One of the most striking moments in that film, and it really kind of crystallized everything to me, is Helen Mirren plays the lover that he left behind. And she’s a manager of a Bolshoi dance theater, a beautiful theater in St. Petersburg, Leningrad back then. And he comes to her and he says, there are all these pieces that you’ve wanted to perform. She said, one day we’ll perform them, like Balanchine or whatever. She’s like, why did you leave me? Like, all these pieces that you dream of performing, I’ve performed them.

And it’s like, I’ve tasted freedom. I will do anything. I will die. I will not stay here. I will not become an instrument of this oppression ever again. And it was just like, oh. And I’m not sure the audience got it, to be honest with you. I think they think that it’s Trump. So anyway, I went to see this just because I happen to love film, and I saw this in the theaters when I was 15 years old. I’m 55 now. And it was like, wow, this is so searing, and I feel like it’s closer to me than it was back then.

Behind the Wall

NATALYA: So you’ve given some pretty amazing historical perspectives on what’s been happening in the United States and what you saw back there. When you were in East Germany, the Soviet Union, can you talk about what you saw through your eyes as an American that really surprised you, or that you think we should be aware of?

KEN: Yeah. So I think it’s really interesting to tell the story of the very first time I went to East Berlin. I was selected by the U.S. Army to go be an observer at the May Day parade in East Germany in May of ‘87. And we had to take the Berlin troop train over there. So remember, East Germany is divided. You have a line that runs down basically the center line of the country, from World War II, where the Allies took the western half, the Soviets kept the eastern half. And then Berlin looked much like the divide among the country itself. So Berlin was also subdivided. So you had the American sector, British sector, French sector, and then you had the Soviet sector on the other side. And the city, remember, was walled in.

So in order to get there, we had to cross the East German border, and at that point you have to pull all your shades down on the train. You could not look out the window. Everything was closed on the train, and you went through a number of checkpoints. And then you get to the point where you’re entering into West Berlin again. You got to pass through another East German and Soviet checkpoint. We did not acknowledge East Germany. So we did not have to pay attention to anything the East Germans said. So we didn’t. We only answered to the Russians, or the Soviets. So they were the ones who would come in and check our documents. And you had to have paperwork, trust me, to get in there. So they checked everybody’s paperwork. And if anything was wrong, you would not be allowed to proceed. So we go into East Berlin, and I’m sorry, you went to West Berlin.

NATALYA: West Berlin.

KEN: And it’s like West Germany. It’s like a great island in this sea of communism surrounding you. So it’s like a wall around West Berlin. So you’re in this little island. And then for the May Day parade, as Americans, military in uniform, we could cross into East Germany. And all we had to do is present that same paperwork that got us into West Berlin. So we go over there.

The stark contrast was immediate. We couldn’t see much out of the train. It was overnight. So you couldn’t see anything, even if you really opened the windows. So you get into East Berlin. We went in through Checkpoint Charlie, the famous one you see in all the old movies and everything else. So you go in there and you’re kind of dumped on the main drag. So the main drag is kind of like the showplace of communism, right? So everything looks neat. Got some bright, clean stores, not a ton of stuff in them. But then if you start venturing out where they didn’t want you to go, you go off the main drag a couple blocks and it’s still bombed out from World War II.

Meanwhile, West Berlin, completely a modern city, beautiful, beautiful place, a ton of fun to be in. But you go across and the stark contrast. There’s nothing there. The exchange rate is just ludicrous. Now, if you went through the official exchange rate, it would be about dollar for dollar for the East German mark or whatever they used at the time. But if you went, like everybody did, on the black market to get the real exchange rate, you literally could live like a king over there. But then just going and seeing the scarcity.

And I guess the biggest shock to me was the people. They were cowed. They wouldn’t look you in the eye. They definitely would not talk to an American officer in uniform. So unlike West Berlin, where you’re walking around talking to anybody and everybody if you had any language skill whatsoever, or just talking in English, that was not the case on the east side. And you’re always being watched. Somebody was always following you.

And you gotta remember, East Germany was the most surveilled people group in the Soviet Empire. For every 180 people in East Germany, there was one full-time security officer. That’s even more paranoid than the Soviet Union, where the ratio was 1 to 580. So just complete surveillance state. Watched, cowed people, nothing really in the stores off the main drag at all. So that’s what it looked like. It’s just like you imagine.

And you remember the video I showed about the grocery store in Moscow? Anybody can look that up. Look up Rick Suddeth Moscow grocery store 1989 video. It’s on YouTube, and it’ll show you what a typical Moscow grocery store looked like in 1989. Nothing on the shelves, and what’s there, you probably didn’t want to eat anyway.

NATALYA: Yeah. My parents talk about how hard it was to even get some milk or some cheese or any sort of fresh fruits or vegetables. They talk about scoring an orange in winter for me when I was a child. I mean, it’s incomprehensible.

KEN: Yeah, exactly. One friend of mine told me that when she got to the West, she didn’t even know what a banana was.

NATALYA: Yes, that’s right.

KEN: Did not know what it was. She said, people offered me a banana. I think they escaped into Italy. And yes, never seen it before.

NATALYA: My parents talk about the fact that there were Navy ships or sailors who’d come in, and they would have treats like bananas that they would sell, or gum. Chewing gum, that was like a big thing.

But when we also went through Italy, it’s interesting, because I was 5 turning 6 in Italy, and maybe this is just revisionist history, but I feel like my life in the Soviet Union in Odessa was in black and white, and when we crossed over to Italy, I suddenly started to see things in color. The food, the candy. I remember these little hard candies that were citrus-flavored and wrapped in citrus-colored wrappers, like orange for orange, yellow for lemon. They’re seared in my head. Or the colors of gelato, the green of pistachio and the red of strawberry. I feel like I didn’t see anything like that in the Soviet Union. It really feels very monochromatic. I’m sure it was colorful. But not in the same way.

KEN: Yeah, so that was what struck me too, was the people. The clothing too. Everybody’s wearing the same kind of... I mean, there were variations, obviously, but it was basically the same kind of set color scheme and set cut. And there was not a lot of wide variety like you’d see in the rest of Europe, traveling around.

NATALYA: And I think you see it these days in some of these hipsters. They look like they’re working on a communist farm. It’s these burlap pants, and these... well, people here call them babushka, but babushka is grandmother. So I don’t know how that got... it’s kosynka. The word is kosynka. Right?

KEN: It shows you how little people know about this history. Really, truly how little they know about it, that they can romanticize it in even the slightest manner.

“It promises everything and it requires nothing of you”

NATALYA: It’s insane. So on that note, I guess, why does socialism sound so seductive to a 19-year-old? I live in New York City. Mamdani ran a very beautiful campaign that targeted the young and actually the old. There are plenty of old people. I’m going to curse, and I normally do not curse on this, but I walked past an old lady who was probably around 75 yesterday, maybe 80, in Central Park, and she was wearing giant pink earrings, and they said fuck ICE on them. I was astonished, I have to say. So it’s not just the young, it’s the old too. I’ve never seen an old person wearing something like that.

So why does socialism sound so seductive to the young, and I guess the old?

KEN: Well, I think it sounds seductive because it promises everything and it requires nothing of you. Right? The government’s going to give you everything. Doesn’t require you to work. You just show up and the government’s going to take care of all your needs. And that sounds very appealing to a generation now who has kind of bought into the idea, well, I can never buy a house. I can never do these things. My life is going to be much worse than my parents’, blah, blah, blah. It’s this doom and gloom, and it’s all part of the education system. That’s what they’ve been fed throughout their K-12 space. Then go to university. You’re just flat out going to get a Marxist education, whether you want it or not, no matter what the class is. It really doesn’t matter.

“It promises everything and it requires nothing of you.”

So I think that’s part of it. It sounds good. It sounds appealing. When things look tough, it’s nice to know that Uncle Mamdani is going to give you everything you could possibly want and you don’t have to do anything for it. Just like Lenin promised exactly the same thing.

And if you lay out Lenin’s promises in 1917 beside the DSA’s and Mamdani’s today, there is no difference. I think I showed that at the event. So what did Lenin promise? He promised peace, land, and bread. Liberty, peace, land, and bread. Actually, they left that part out, because it didn’t really pan out too well for them. Then they promised they’re going to do several things that you hear today. We’re going to abolish the police, abolish the bureaucracy, abolish the army. Where have we heard that just recently? DSA, that’s their new platform. They’re going to abolish all these things. Lenin said, we’re always with the oppressed and we’re always fighting against the high cost of living. All that they said in 1917, you could do a side-by-side.

And then what are Lenin’s results? The people who voted for him, or not voted for him, he took over by coup, but the people who supported him initially... when he was in power less than a year, he destroyed the economy. And then the murder and the death started right away. So Lenin was in power 5 years, murders 7 million people through famine, through executions, through the gulag system, through just gross incompetence of the Russian, then the Soviet, system that he created.

NATALYA: Who were they executing?

KEN: Anybody who stood against them.

NATALYA: Was it the aristocracy, or...

KEN: It was the aristocracy. Orders the murder of the czar’s family. It’s anybody who was against them. Then, when the Civil War started, it was the Whites that were executing them. And then it was the people they supposedly liberated, to welcome them into the warmth of collectivism. It was anybody who wasn’t pleased with the progress, if you complained. When he started taking food from the farmers, who probably were originally with them because they didn’t want to work under the czar, he killed them, murdered them.

Same thing for the church, when he went in to steal the money out of the Orthodox Church, all the gold and the silver, because he had, like I said, bankrupted the economy in a year. So in the early 1920s, the last thing he hasn’t robbed was the Orthodox Church. So he goes in and steals 900-some pounds of gold, probably 500 tons of silver, to fund his government. Of course, some of the priests and the parishioners resist that. And he kills 22,000 people to get that money to fund his government. So how long do you think that funded his government? One month. So he kills 22,000 people for one month.

“He kills 22,000 people for one month.”

And people say, well, that’s not what the DSA is doing. I would beg to differ. If you look at some of their rhetoric today, they’ve created a security council. You got a guy in there, literally on a podcast. His name was Christopher Winston. Promised another DSA guy that he had a little bit of a spat with on air: after the revolution, you’re going to face the people’s court and we’re going to execute you. Said that seriously on a podcast.

And you hear, listen to what Hasan Piker and all these other guys are saying. Exactly the same thing. Blood in the streets. [Inaudible.] They don’t care. So people think, well, this is just going to be a give-me. What they do is they promise you what they’re going to destroy. They always talk about, we’re going to get rid of XYZ. We’re going to prosecute, go after, punish these people. They always talk about what they’re going to destroy. Very little about what they’re going to build.

“They always talk about what they’re going to destroy. Very little about what they’re going to build.”

So they don’t really tell you. They don’t explain how young people are not going to have to worry about anything and they’re going to get everything free. Trust us. That’s been the common line for socialist failed experiments since it began. I mean, it always fails.

How it got into the schools

NATALYA: So when I went to public school in the ‘80s, I don’t feel like I was being groomed to accept socialist totalitarian ideology. I felt like there were more heterodox thinking conversations. I went to NYU undergrad and grad as well. And I think there, things got a little bit more lefty. But I think in public school, it was kind of okay. When did things change? How did things change? And how do parents combat this in the home? Because our kids... it’s everything. To me, it seems like this is the lens through which everything is being taught.

KEN: Yeah, I think frankly it started a long time ago. It started with Lenin’s Comintern, where he was trying to export this brand of socialism around the world. It started with the Frankfurt School, those band of socialists in Germany who wanted to come into the various institutions around the world, targeting really the U.S., probably as early as the late ‘20s, ‘30s. And it’s always continued, especially in American academia. It was a joke, but I think it was probably Lenin or Stalin, I can’t remember which one, but they would joke around saying the only true committed communists are in American academia. And I think that’s probably a pretty valid statement, because even after a while, those guys didn’t get it. Only here in our hallowed halls of academia do you really get people who really seem to believe this.

So I think where it started was kind of that march through the institutions. That was a term coined by Rudi Dutschke, a West German student activist, in the ‘60s. But I think we probably lost K-12. If you look at the colleges of education now, the ones who produce our teachers, if you look at the most cited work, it’s usually number one. I think last time I looked, it was still number one, or between one and three. The most cited required reading in the colleges of education is Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and The Politics of Education.

NATALYA: I knew you were going to say that.

KEN: So if you look at Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the cover is a pencil shaped into the shape of a rifle. So that kind of tells you what he was after, this Brazilian Marxist who claimed to be a Brazilian Marxist, and is still listed that way in a lot of places you do research on this guy. So that’s what his pedagogy was: we’re going to teach these kids to read a little bit, but really what we’re after is teaching them to be politically active. Active for what we want. Active against the society that we disagree with, violently, like all socialist Marxists do in the education space today. We’re going to use these kids to become little mini-me socialists. And guess what they’re going to do when they turn 18? They’re going to vote what they’ve been taught.

And if you think, well, that’s an exaggeration, well, think about what we’re seeing now. Between 18 to 29-year-olds, 62% of them view socialism favorably. And what are they voting for? You got Mamdani, right, in New York. You got all these little groups of DSA folks who have won at least a Democratic primary. Just pray to God they don’t win an actual seat in the Senate or other places in the House. But you got a rise of this ideology, because that’s what these kids have been taught to like.

And even I’ve got people who are very conservative, and I’ve had friends call me. He goes, I need your help. Give me something I can talk to my college student about, because these kids think they’re socialists after I raised them this way.

So the indoctrination used to start in college. Now it’s starting... if you really want to know, this book here, Little Rosa Luxemburg Starts a Big Revolution. And on the front: for little Bolsheviks aged 3 to 6. So in pre-K, they’re starting this. And if you look at what it says on the back, this is what they’re really after, from Paulo Freire to this book. And this is what it says: full of cute Soviet retro drawings and with plenty of inside jokes for revolutionary parents. Get this. Again, this is what they’re after. This book will have your kid organizing strikes and boycotts in no time. Oh my God.

Okay, don’t buy that book, please. I bought it so you guys wouldn’t have to. But that’s what it is. It starts that young. There’s a pipeline of this, frankly, garbage and romanticized view of this woman who was killed and tossed in a canal in Germany. So not a good end for Rosa, who some of these people want their kids to aspire to. But what they’re trying to create are political activists.

And if you think that’s again an exaggeration, every time I go to a city to give a talk, be it Dallas, when you saw it, I will look up the city schools from where I’m talking. Do they allow their kids to leave school to go protest? And if the answer is yes, then the next thing I do is look up what’s their proficiency in reading and math. I have never found a school district that allows students to protest during the school day that is at or above proficient greater than 30%. So your kids can’t read, they can’t do basic math, but they have plenty of time to go out and protest.

“Your kids can’t read, they can’t do basic math, but they have plenty of time to go out and protest.”

NATALYA: Well, sorry to interrupt, but do you remember during the pandemic, Cecily Myart-Cruz in Los Angeles? This is one of my favorite horrible quotes. She was quoted by Los Angeles Magazine. She’s the head of the UTLA, the second-largest or third-largest teachers union in the country. She said, and this was a quote in LA Magazine, it’s okay if our babies haven’t learned their times tables. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.

KEN: Yeah. Again, that’s the purpose now of what so many of these young teachers have been taught, and what sadly they’re relaying to their students. And it’s incumbent upon parents to get involved in these schools if you want to change it.

“Make them defend their position”

NATALYA: So what do you say to the parent who says, I have this 19-year-old, and I taught them in this house, and now they’re being indoctrinated in college? What do you say?

KEN: Well, I will say you have a challenge, because you’re going to be swimming uphill really for this, because it’s just so ingrained now that you’re going to have a hard time reaching them. How I would approach it, and I’ve approached it with one of my kids who leans a little farther that direction than I could ever have imagined, is just have conversations with them. Don’t condemn them. Talk about the reality of what it is.

And just like I do with teachers who come up to me afterwards and say, well, why do you say socialism is so bad? Look at our country. It’s authoritarian. I go, well, tell me how it’s authoritarian. Just ask them questions. Make them give you answers. And don’t allow the standard gimmick, which is, well, I just don’t want to talk about it. Well, no, you brought it up. So I want you to tell me about it. Make them defend their position. And hopefully over time, they’re going to come to the conclusion that my position is kind of stupid. Not a lot of facts there. It’s a lot of feelings.

And I think part of it too is we don’t teach kids to really examine sources of information. You got to look at stuff besides what your tribe is producing. You got to look at the other side, see which arguments have the best merit, not just, well, this makes me feel good because my side says it. And that’s where most of the arguments stop: I’m going to go grab information from my side and I’m going to throw it in your face. And if you disagree with me, then you’re a racist, or you’re a phobe of some flavor. I go, not either one of those. I just disagree with you, and I think your ideas are weak. So convince me.

NATALYA: What are the best resources that parents have? The Victims of Communism Foundation, talk about what you guys have produced and where else they can look.

KEN: I think the best antidote for this is let them hear people talk who have lived the socialist dream. We have a series of witness videos on the VOC website. If you name the country that’s enjoyed socialism as you would like to think about it, I would suggest pick that country. You always get this example as well: well, Venezuela was not that bad. Well, let me show you. David Smolansky or Danny Di Martino or some other folks who actually enjoyed what you said was so great, and they tell you what the reality was. Or the Cambodian Killing Fields, or the Soviet Union, or China, or North Korea, or all these other socialist paradises that people think, well, we got to try that here.

And they’ll say, well, that’s not really what it was. It was more the Nordic countries. Well, that just shows me you really have no idea what you’re talking about. Nordic countries, as all the leadership in those nations will tell you, are market economies. They are democracies. They just have very generous welfare states that you, if you’re living there, are going to pay. If you make about $80,000 a year, about 61% of your check’s going to go to the government. So if you want to live there, then you ought to go try it.

And I tell kids who say, well, I have it so bad here, and they ask me, well, where can I learn more? I said, well, I would invest in some perspective. Go travel. Go to these places you aspire to live and give it a whirl. And then come back and let me know what you think. Most people never travel. I’ve had the blessing, I think, to live, work, and fight in probably 65 different countries around the world. And whether a lot of these little socialist kids want to believe it or not, there is nothing else like it out there.

NATALYA: Yeah, I agree.

KEN: Your dream country, or the worst despot pothole you can think of. Nothing like it, not even those Nordic countries. Let me tell you, go there. It’s not like what you think.

NATALYA: Certainly not anymore.

KEN: No, not at all. It even wasn’t back in what you might have considered the glory days, right?

Nothing belongs to you

NATALYA: It really wasn’t. It’s interesting, after White Nights, they were asking Isabella Rossellini about where they filmed it, because it was 1986, and it looks like it’s filmed in Russia, but it couldn’t be, because they wouldn’t have been allowed.

KEN: Wouldn’t have been allowed, yeah.

NATALYA: And so she said, if you look at the end, it says Finland and Portugal and whatever. And so she was like, oh yes, we were staying in Finland, and the camera crew went off to Russia and took some B-roll. And then while we’re running across a bridge in Finland, it looks like you cut to a scene in St. Petersburg, but actually we were in Finland. Then you cut back and we’re still in Finland. It was so interesting. It was still so, so oppressive when they made this film.

And it just reminded me: when I was 5 and a half, we left. It was very, very difficult, but my parents made the decision. My grandmother and my aunt had moved their family to Israel a couple of years before. And then we finally had the opportunity to leave. And it was trains, planes, and automobiles. We had to take a train. I think we ended up going from Odessa to Austria, where we spent several days. But I do remember, as a 5-year-old, my parents were lugging suitcases with pots. They weren’t allowed to take very much, but some sheets, some pots, enameled cups and things like that. My father’s dragging... by the way, these suitcases did not have wheels. It would have been very nice if you could have wheeled your suitcase. And I remember it falling on his foot, and he was injured, and it was so traumatic and it was so scary.

And I remember we had to cross some border, border control, and we could bring nothing. No gold, no anything. And I had a pair of earrings with these rubies in them. And my mother gave them to me and said, put them in your pocket. You’re gonna walk across the border with them. She’s like, they’re your earrings. Just put them in and don’t touch anything. Don’t say anything. Just go. And I kept those earrings, and they were one of the only things we were able to bring.

And I’m sure the story is slightly different. And actually, my mother is going to speak on a panel with us in Vermont in a couple of weeks. So maybe she can remember this story better than me. But I do remember that feeling of extreme terror, but also a desire to break free of it and take a piece of contraband with me that belonged to my family. That’s the thing. Nothing belongs to you.

“That’s the thing. Nothing belongs to you.”

KEN: Yeah, well, I think that’s a good point. So many families that I’ve spoken to relate the same thing. When they came out, they were basically robbed at the checkpoint. They could not take anything of any value. The guards took everything from them. I’m sure they’re saying it was confiscated by the state, but no, the guys were just robbing you. The state already got everything in your house before you left that they could find. And the final shakedown was at the border, every single time. And again, this is this great socialist system where everybody takes care of everybody else, and it’s just such a sweet place, and they do all these great things for people, but yet they rob their people when they go anywhere.

NATALYA: And that’s happening here in New York City. We’re paying... California, you’re paying in different ways. You’re being robbed, right? There are the fraud rings, for one thing, that are sanctioned by our state governments. But also, we’re paying insane amounts in taxes and gas and energy prices. And where is that money really going to? It doesn’t make our lives better. In fact, I’ve lived in my apartment in New York City for 29 years now. And every year in the past decade, my life has gotten more difficult. It’s gotten dirtier. There’s been more of a mental health crisis. The quality of life has gone down precipitously. And our prices have gone up.

KEN: Well, think about too, I’ve heard both California and New York, and I think New Jersey too. When people like you have had enough and they’re going to leave the state, they’re trying to pass laws where they’re going to take some of your money before you’re allowed to leave. Or take an exorbitant amount of taxes, just so they... they don’t want you to... it’s almost like an electronic barrier now, like the fence was during East-West Germany, where they’re gonna rob you like they did your family before you can leave their states, if they pass these laws.

“It’s almost like an electronic barrier now, like the fence was during East-West Germany.”

Same principle and the same mindset that’s driving what the Soviets and the East Germans and all the socialist countries did. It was exactly that model. You’re going to leave, but you’re going to leave with nothing, because all of it’s the state’s.

Something positive

NATALYA: So dire. So before we end this, give me something positive. An activist or an organization or a book or something positive that we can look to, to model where we need to be going.

KEN: Yeah, so I think what we need to be doing are some of the things like Florida and Texas are doing. They’re now requiring educating K through 12 on this topic, and I think that’s very positive. I think you got to be really careful, even in states like that that are conservative, or at least want to really teach history the right way. You can’t just go tell the teachers, go teach this, because without any type of training or resources, some of them have nefarious intentions. So some of them will use that as an excuse. Well, you told me to teach about communism. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to teach these kids how to be a communist. And I saw a blatant example of that. We don’t have time for that, but maybe in a next podcast. That’s exactly what teachers did. And I saw it full on from what I was getting from these students. So I think you have to be really careful there.

So Jen and I, we’ve created a children’s book for kids ages 6 to 10. We’ve seen a lot of these books, just like this little Rosa book, another one that’s P is for Palestine, that I is for Intifada, and talks about that at a kid level. So we decided to create this book called A is for Authoritarian, and we’re going to talk about the ABCs of socialism. We’re using a story based on some things I experienced when I lived in Estonia. It was also a former Soviet republic, and we have that story. So that’s going to come out now. We’re talking to publishers now, hopefully out in a couple months.

NATALYA: Oh, great.

KEN: And then we’re going to create a series of historic fiction adventure books where these two kids travel back in time trying to stop socialism from ever happening. And we’re going to go visit Marx, Lenin, Stalin, all the famous despots, and kind of get an idea what that was all about, trying to solve it, and then see what happens. So that’s part of it.

I think also, as parents, be like Natalya. Get involved. Go to your schools. Hold people accountable. But also, when you go to school and you see something going well, then by all means, sing the praises of that great teacher as far and wide as you can. Also be involved in the school boards. Hold these people accountable. I don’t know what the laws are in New York or other states, but I know a lot of states, you can go in the classroom anytime you want to as a parent. You ought to exercise that right, to figure out what’s really going on. You got a glimpse of what it looked like during COVID. You might want to go get another glimpse when you get a chance. But again, not to look for bad or other things going on, but to go find good teachers and kind of help elevate them.

NATALYA: And talk to your kids at home all the time. They have to have dinner with you. Dinner is non-negotiable, right?

KEN: Yeah, I think that’s the key point. That’s why we got involved in certain things, because we found out what our daughter was reading one time, and it just infuriated me and terrified me. So you really got to explore that. You got to get them to talk. And they’ll say, what? I don’t want to talk about that. Well, then you really ought to be worried at that point.

NATALYA: One thing that a friend of mine did, whose son goes to public middle or high school in New York City, which I thought was really interesting: her husband is a Soviet immigrant, and they found out that their son was reading Ibram Kendi, and that’s all they talked about in whatever class. And they knew that they couldn’t get them to stop reading the book, right? So what they demanded was that if they’re reading a book like that, they read a partner book from an opposing viewpoint, and at least force a conversation. And I think that’s a fair thing. It’s hard to argue against, right? If a teacher’s so confident in her or his views, why not present both viewpoints?

KEN: Right. I think that’s fair. I think that’s a great way to do it. But I would also say, if you find a book like what prompted us, that is just so sexualizing your kids, that’s got to go. And we just decided our kid will not read that book, period. We’ll find one that they can read. And that’s another story. But I think parents getting involved, just really working in this system, trying to make it as viable as possible. But talking to your kids is crucial. I mean, crucial.

NATALYA: Absolutely. And talk to other parents too. Don’t assume parents know anything they don’t. So just find the Soviet immigrants and the immigrants of totalitarianism in your yard. That was a saving grace for me during COVID. I suddenly wasn’t hanging out with the American-born moms. I was hanging out with the Venezuelan. And I’m really seriously telling you, this is exactly who I started hanging out with, just by accident, because we all had the same views. It was the Venezuelan, the Hungarian, the Romanian, the Polish, the South Korean. And we all suddenly were standing together, and we’re like, wait a second, we’re the only ones who are opposing these mandates in the schools. What’s going on? I don’t even know you. So those are the people who really understand and will actually take the risk of speaking up, because they know what they don’t want to go back to.

KEN: Exactly. That’s exactly right. So again, if you want to hear more stories like that, go to VOC’s website and go to the Witness Project, and you’ll have a long list of videos you can watch of these folks telling their stories. And they’re truly heroes, some of them. So I think you’d find that interesting.

NATALYA: Yeah. And as a bonus, Hawk Jensen, who worked on 15 DAYS with me, directed several of these Victims of Communism films, and they were amazing. I saw them before we brought him in for 15 DAYS, and that was really what sold us. So he’s amazing. Ken and I and James Lindsay and a bunch of amazing people are gonna be in Vermont October 2nd and 3rd, in Middlebury and in Burlington. I’m gonna post all the information here, but you can come and hear us speak and watch 15 DAYS and see some of the VOC films and keep the conversation alive. So thank you so much, Ken, for your time.

KEN: Thank you.

NATALYA: I love talking to you. Could do this all day.

KEN: Me too. I know, I know. It just needs more time. So we’ll do that. We’ll do it again.

NATALYA: Definitely. Okay. Thanks so much. Have a great day.

KEN: You too. Bye-bye.

Come hear us in person. Ken, James Lindsay, and I are screening 15 DAYS and speaking together in Vermont in two weeks!

• Friday, October 2 — a private dinner and screening in Middlebury, with Ken, James Lindsay, Jennifer Richmond, and me. Tickets here.

• Saturday, October 3 — the United We Stand Media Fest in Burlington, 1:00 to 6:30 p.m., ending with a screening of 15 DAYS and a panel. Tickets here.

Did you grow up around anyone who lived under communism, or who got out? Would love to hear your story in comments!

I was two weeks shy of thirty.

I lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

In between jobs, I had gone out the night before and stayed out late, so I slept late.

My mother called me around nine in the morning and told me a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

I did not believe her.

I walked into my living room and turned on CNN and saw it myself. I still cannot tell you what went through my head. It was the most shocking thing that had ever happened. I could not understand it. By the time the second plane hit, it was beyond understanding. What could possibly have happened?

The towers marked New York City. That is what they were to me. I had been to the top once or twice. I do not like heights, so I did not go back. They were not personal to me. They were the thing you looked for to know where you were.

And the towers had already been a target.

In February 1993, a truck bomb went off in the garage beneath the North Tower and killed six people. The blind sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman, was later convicted of conspiring with the men who did it, and of plotting a wider campaign against New York landmarks, bridges and tunnels. Someone had tried to bring those buildings down once already. We knew that. But of course, life went on.

My mother was sixty. She worked for a nonprofit in Chelsea, on 14th Street and Seventh Avenue. She and my father lived in Brooklyn but no trains were running to Brooklyn. So she walked 60 blocks, the whole way uptown as buses were sparse and trains were not running.

I stayed home and watched the news without stopping (I remember it was all CNN). Emails came into my old AOL account, because that is how people reached each other then. A friend in California wrote to ask if I was alright.

I went around the corner to a coffee shop and tried to lock eyes with people. Everyone looked like a caricature. Everyone looked like the man in Munch’s The Scream.

When my mother finally got to me, we stopped at the Red Cross to see if we could give blood or do anything at all. Then we walked to the river, to the pier at West 69th Street, and stood there with everyone else. We looked south at the smoking towers. Nobody could believe what they were looking at.

I do not remember what we said to each other. Our phones were not cameras. I have no photographs of that day.

I have no pictures of 9/11.

Every picture I have seen of it belongs to someone else.

The pictures I own are in my head, and they are permanently seared there.

The soot on my windowsill. The smell, or my memory of the smell. The sunshine. It was a beautiful September day, and September is one of the most beautiful months in New York. The walks with friends. The flip-flopping in my mind, hour after hour. How could it be.

How could people do this to each other? It was incomprehensible.

25 years later, it is still incomprehensible.

Going down to Ground Zero with friends to help. I cannot even remember what the volunteering was. We put up flyers with the faces of missing people on them. I cannot imagine we believed anyone would be found alive.

It felt like it never ended. We were inside one long nightmare. Then the anthrax letters started.

That is when it turned apocalyptic. We were still trying to pick up the pieces and understand what had happened to us, and suddenly we were not safe in our own homes either. Every piece of mail was suspect. We were told to wear gloves, or to wash our hands after opening anything. The images of contaminated letters were on the news constantly. That was terrifying in a different way.

I could not sleep for six months.

I was afraid to fall asleep and wake up to another horror. The insomnia was severe. I needed medication to fall asleep at all.

My normal sleep never came back.

For those same six months, I could not talk about anything else. There was no other subject. It was everything, everywhere I went. The news did not contradict my private life, because every channel was reporting on some angle of it every hour of every day.

I read a piece in the New York Times Magazine that I still think about. brilliantly laid out the historical and religious roots of what had happened to us. He argued that this was a religious war. It was, he wrote, “a war of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds” that had made their peace with freedom and modernity. He also said we were not near the end of the conflict but at the start of it. He was right. The full text is free to read here.

For the first six months after that day, f I traveled somewhere, 9/11 is what we talked about. If I went out locally, that is what we talked about. When I was not talking about it, I was thinking about it. Turning it over and over.

Then, at about six months, something changed.

Every time somebody asked me about 9/11 after that, it felt like they were opening a new wound. The scar had started to close, barely. My sleep had not come back, but I could function.

And I did not want to talk about it anymore.

That is how I learned something I now repeat often.

After the height of the pandemic lockdowns, the school closures, and the mandates, we had about six months. Six months to collect the stories before the people who lived them put the rawest part of themselves away and stopped being able to talk about it, or stopped wanting to. I assumed I was not unusual. I assumed many people were like me.

That is why we made 15 DAYS when we did, and why we made it so fast, while we were still living through the experience of it all.

For new subscribers, or if you missed it, I am including the 15 DAYS trailer.

On September 23, it will be one year since 15 DAYS premiered on X.

A year on, I keep hearing the same thing I heard in 2001. Incomprehension. People still cannot comprehend what was done to children, to families, to the sick and the dying and the people who were kept from them. The picture is still not clear to most people. They know pieces but not how they fit or who decided what, or why.

The level of human incomprehension in both events is nearly unparalleled in my lifetime.

And I have started to think they sit on one continuum. From September 11 to now. The same questions. How could it be. How could people do this to each other. Who decided. How/when/will it happen again.

I will tell you something I have not admitted in print. I misspeak. Sometimes I will be talking about one and say the other. I will say 9/11 when I mean Covid, or Covid when I mean 9/11. Whatever part of me sorts experience into categories put those two things together.

Both were collective trauma. Both arrived as a rupture in our ordinary lives. Both were followed by months (almost years) where there was no other subject. Both wounds were scabbing over before we finished understanding them.

That is why we filmed when we did (mainly 2022-2023). The people in 15 DAYS spoke when they still felt the need to, while the stories were raw, painful and immediate.

You can watch 15 DAYS on Substack, Amazon Prime, or on Apple TV.

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If this meant something to you, send it to one person. And if you can, subscribe, please do!

From 2003 through 2007 I was a graduate student in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at NYU. Marion Nestle founded that department in 1996. When I got there it was seven years old and the first of its kind in the country. She was a big reason I applied.

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On Tuesday night I stood in a crowded room at NYU’s Bobst Library while probably over a hundred people sang “Happy Birthday.” Marion, who has written 18 books, is now 90 years old and the Food Studies department is celebrating its 30th birthday this year.

Wow!

Marion has been one of the most influential people in my life.

She taught me to look at marketing claims and at who benefits from us believing these claims. My mother taught me much the same, and between the two of them I have never been able to read a package, a school newsletter, or a doctor’s handout the same way again.

Marion’s new book (co-written with Lisa Sutherland) Sugar Coated, which was published yesterday, is all about the fronts of cereal boxes. But, of course, it is not just about cereal. It’s about the difference between what the front of a package promises and what is actually inside.

It also got me thinking just how much of what we buy for our children (and ourselves) we buy after falling for the front images and promises, without verifying if the ingredients are supportive or contradictory.

The two boxes behind her

Three years ago I interviewed Marion about childhood obesity. If you watch our conversation, you will notice, as I just did that there are two cereal boxes sitting on the shelf behind her head.

I didn’t think to ask about those boxes at the time. I thought they were props, or a joke.

Turns out, they were research. She has collected cereal boxes since the Reagan administration, and she was already deep into the book that came out this week.

Sugar Coated

Sugar Coated: Unboxing the Hidden Forces Shaping America’s Favorite Breakfast Food was written with Lisa Sutherland, who is a former nutrition vice president at the Kellogg company. Lisa now serves as interim president of Jacksonville University.

The pairing is certainly unusual. Marion is one of the most persistent critics of the food industry in the world. Turns out the two met years ago. In 2010 Marion talked her way into Kellogg’s headquarters in Battle Creek, Michigan, to see the archives.

The lawyers said no. The nutrition staff felt sorry for her and handed her something better: full color copies of three cereals, every box design, from the year each one launched to the day she walked in.

All-Bran from 1919.

Rice Krispies from 1928.

Froot Loops from 1963.

They spread them on a table. Someone said, this is the year the FDA passed that rule, this is the year we got sued. And they looked at each other and understood they were holding a history of American food policy printed on the sides of boxes.

A billboard you carry home

Marion’s co-author Lisa Sutherland calls the cereal box a “billboard,” — that may be the most useful way of looking at marketing, or front-of-box-claims, for everything.

Cereal companies redesign these boxes constantly, sometimes as often as a dozen times a year. Nothing else in the grocery store is that big, that bold, or that responsive. When the science changes, the front of the box changes. When a company loses a lawsuit, the front of the box changes. When Washington moves, the front of the box moves with it, usually in the same week.

Here is a great illustration of this…

From 1986 to 1988 Nestle served as senior nutrition policy advisor at the Department of Health and Human Services and managing editor of the 1988 Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health. The advice was not radical. Less saturated fat, less salt, less sugar, more fiber, more fruits and vegetables.

Within months of publication, General Mills put out a box announcing that the cereal inside met all seven of the Surgeon General’s recommendations.

That box became the first in Marion’s cereal collection.

General Mills turned a government health report meant to help families eat better into ad copy for a boxed grain product, in under a year.

Once you see it you see the way health and wellness claims are used to sell stuff, you see it everywhere.

It was never only cereal

Nearly every product sold to children has a “front of the box”.

A curriculum comes with a glossy cover and a promise of rigor and outcomes. Somebody gets paid to write it, lobbies to keep it adopted, and the district that buys it rarely reads past the front. A social and emotional learning program comes with a research-backed sticker on it. Ask who did the research and who sells the training. A school markets itself with a photo of children on a lawn. A pediatrician hands you a printed guideline manufactured by a pharmaceutical company.

Marion said something in our 2023 interview I have not been able to shake. We were talking about the American Academy of Pediatrics guidance on childhood obesity, which opened the door to surgery and to drugs a child would take for life. She called it a downstream solution. Downstream is where you treat the sick child in front of you, one at a time, after the damage is done. Upstream is where you go to find out why so many children keep getting sick in the first place.

We run an enormous, expensive, well-meaning operation downstream.

Almost nobody works upstream, because there is no product to sell there.

Maybe the drug companies would like millions of children on a lifetime prescription. No one else wants this.

The institution that sell to us have a budgets, lobbyists, growth targets, and, most importantly, stories. They print the story large and the ingredients small, on the side. In light, fine print.

Trix Cereal, Then & Now

In April 2025, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the FDA announced a plan to strip the petroleum-based synthetic dyes out of the American food supply, targeting Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1, Blue 2 and Green 3. Industry had spent decades explaining why this was impossible, even though these colorings were banned in the same products in Europe.

It took about sixteen months, but by late August, General Mills confirmed it had removed artificial colors from its entire U.S. cereal lineup, Trix and Lucky Charms included, after finishing its K-12 school foods in March. WK Kellogg, which makes Froot Loops and Apple Jacks, pulled its own deadline forward to the end of this year, roughly a year ahead of schedule.

American cereal ingredient lists now look much closer to the European versions our companies have quietly produced all along. European children never ate those dyes. American children ate them for decades, and science was never the reason.

Marion went to three supermarkets last week hunting for one last box of Trix made with the old dyes and found only one. At her own book party it was set beside the new vegetable-colored box, with poured bowls of each, letting a room full of food studies and nutrition people see and taste the difference.

What I want you to do with this

Turn that box around.

Turn that curriculum around.

Turn that therapy program around.

Turn the school brochure and the clinical guidelines around.

Read the small, gray print on the side, find out who profits if you believe the front, and then decide.

This is an important lesson in critical thinking- and best of all, you can give it to your own children this week, in a grocery aisle, for free.

You can buy Sugar Coated here.

Happy birthday, Marion!

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For years now, I’ve felt that a key driver of our youth’s dismay and decay is the absence of intergenerational relationships. Our kids are numerators in search of denominators- I even touched on this in this piece:

Saying this felt like screaming into the void, because there were no echoes of my call to rejoin the generations, to give renewed purpose and life to the elderly and a rooting in time, history and context to our youth. It seemed to me, and still does, that without rejoining the youth to their elders, they will be forever floundering, lost.

So you can imagine how pleased I was to read this X post from writer Elisabeth Stone the other day, complete with a photo of her with her own great grandmother.

I loved it so much, I asked if she would expand on it for Restore Childhood and she obliged.

Would love to get your reactions to this piece.

- Natalya

We used to have grandmas, but now we have Youtube.

The other day my daughter ripped her shirt, and the day before a button fell out of my husband’s nice shirt. The other time I wanted to make someone a nice blanket, and a few years ago I decided I would love to crochet. My grandma knows how to do all of these things, but, unfortunately, I do not. I go to Youtube. Grandma goes to the memories she has growing up around family, sisters, her mother and aunts, an entire village of people teaching her how to do these things.

My grandmother is not to blame for this.

She had a desire, and a heart to pass this knowledge on. The fault is mine. Mostly because of the home I grew up in, and with the type of mother I had, well, I was entirely convinced that these things were stupid. I was certain that it was a waste of my time to ever learn these traditions, because I would never become a homemaker, I was a modern woman, I was going to make money, be on my own and pay someone else to do it all.

Either that or I’d Youtube it like any decent modern woman would.

In my mind this intergenerational knowledge was like old relics, things of the past. I, on the other hand, was a modern woman. I was progressive, and much the same way I did not want my grandmother’s China, I also did not want her endless source of wisdom and know-how.

What a shame.

There is a huge gap now. The older generation of my grandparents still have this village-like desire in their hearts. I mostly grew up in my grandmother’s house, or at least, that is where I spent most of my time. My grandmother lived on the same street as her mother, my great grandmother. A little down the street lived my great-aunt, my grandmother’s sister, and further down on the other street lived my other great-aunt. Not many streets over lived my great-uncle. My cousins and my uncle were not far away.

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I had the immense privilege of growing around a true family village. The tables were always big so that everyone could sit, and eat together. My grandmother had two kitchens to cook all this food, there was always warm bread and fresh fish, and there were always people who loved you around. If someone did not know how to do something, well, not far away there was someone who knew.

Life was done together, lived together, and life had joy together.

My mother and father’s generation, well I find that this one has become very different, and as many of them age and become grandparents, many do not want to build a village. They are opting out, and many grandparents are, indeed, clocking out.

Somewhere, somehow we have adopted this belief that our obligations and duties to our families have an expiration date. How many times are we told that as soon as your son or daughter turns eighteen they are out of the house. That is how my parents felt. Once you become an adult, well, their job and work is finished. They are finally off the hook, able to enjoy a life of freedom.

So now we have an entire generation of people who had a village, tremendous support, loving parents who helped raise their children, all saying, no thanks, I will pass. They enjoyed the fruits of a labor they are unwilling to continue. I have a word for this— it’s called being a brat.

This is not how villages work.

Villages exist because people are willing to be inconvenienced and honestly love exists for the exact same reason too. If your desire is to never be inconvenienced, then you’ll never have a meaningful friendship, a meaningful marriage, or any meaningful relationship with anyone.

To love someone is to inconvenience them. To be loved is to be inconvenienced.

The village used to function as a cycle, much like a retirement system: when you are young you pay in so that you might have funds to take out when older. Grandma watched the baby to help mom, twenty years later mom brings grandma groceries because grandma cannot drive, an aunt teaches you how to make bread, an uncle teaches your brother how to fix his bike, a cousin watches everyone’s little so that you might help cook.

Someone always knew how to fix a shirt, cook and clean the fish, help the baby stop crying, fix the sink and the dishwasher, cut hair, or to simply give you comfort of shared experiences and that no, you are not crazy for feeling overwhelmed because little children are indeed a ton of work.

This was the village, not a service we could provide mothers— it was an entire way of understanding what it meant to be family.

We often talk about how villages have altogether disappeared and it’s been partially our own doing, but this means we can also be part of what changes the tide.

Villages do not simply appear because we want them to, villages are built over generations of people who accept that not only do they belong to one another, they owe one another something. Being part of village is going to cause inconveniences, it is going to require duty, it requires you doing things you do not particularly feel like just because someone who you love needs you. This is the cost of a village, but is also the cost of meaning, the cost of love, the cost of having a life worth something outside of ourselves.

We have spent decades now teaching people very differently. The religion many of us now follow is one I like to call — the religion of autonomy — we follow the self, we worship the self and we venerate the self. Life is about our own personal wants, and needs. The purpose of life under this religion is to find happiness, to find ourselves, all of it about essentially and solely about the — me.

If you were anything like me then when you were young you were taught that young people are to leave.

Go away for college, move across the country— maybe even across the continent to find work, never let your family hold you back. The goal was to become independent as soon as possible, need nobody, owe nobody. The purpose was to find ourselves, to live for the self. But reality comes for all of us, and truth has a way of being very rude. One day when I became a mother, alone at home, I did not very much care about my own personal autonomy, my own religion of autonomy, instead I soon found out that life alone was terrible idea.

I needed others, I was made for others, not just myself.

This is where I find that grandparents matter, they matter a lot, they matter in a way that most of us have completely forgotten. Grandparents are the bridge between one generation and the next, they are the ones who remember all of those who came before us, they know the stories, how to pray, the tragedies, the love stories, they know the names of those who are long dead, the traditions that have existed long before you or I. They carry an entire world inside them, and if they do their job right, well little pieces of their world can be handed on down to us and carried far longer, to other people they will never meet.

Grandparents give children something nobody else can. They give them closeness to another time.

My grandmother did not learn how to sew, how to cook, how to care for a baby, a home, how to crochet, how to do anything because she sat down and opened an app one afternoon.

Knowledge was not this thing we had to sit down to learn about as if we were in school, it was just all around us. Like ripe fruit waiting to be picked off the tree of knowledge, available to all of those around. When we went to grandma’s house, we were not just there to be watched after, we were there learning, realizing that even our own parents existed long before us, we were learning that there will never be food out there quite like what grandma makes, we were learning that life did not just begin to exist the moment we were born. And all of this is so important, exactly because the world in which we now raise our children, is a world terribly obsessed with whatever is new.

We love new technology, new values, new religious beliefs, new ways to identify ourselves, new ways of doing everything on earth. In our new world everything that is old, everything that is old-fashioned, or traditional is treated with much suspicion. This is why the gap to the past that only grandparents are able to bridge is so important. You cannot tell children that tradition, that family matters when the people who actually carry all of that tradition are not willing to be around.

It is sad that we are here trying to recreate traditions our own grandparents right there who live in another state still remember, we are googling recipes grandma has made thousands of times, we are watching strangers teach us homemaking while the women who could still teach us are all alive and well, we are buying books telling us about how families used to live all while in our families there are people who still remember it all.

This is why any grandparent who says “I already raised my children” enrages me. Yes, in fact you did, nobody is asking you to raise them again, nobody is saying grandma should become the primary parent while her adult children go out to party and live the child-free lifestyle, but my goodness, have we no ability to find something in between all of this?

Surely there is some in between raising your grandchildren yourself and acting as if they are just some strangers who happen to share some of your DNA. Surely there is still such a thing as being a grandma and not someone who just simply has grandchildren.

And mind you this is not just about what grandparents can give to grandchildren, I think we forget in these conversations just how much grandchildren give back. They are a wonderful source of love, and one you can outpour your love into as well, your memories, your stories, your wisdom.

Grandchildren give us reason to keep telling these same old stories, to keep making the same old recipes you otherwise would not have an excuse to do, to keep teaching the things you know so well. Grandchildren give grandparents a place in a future they will likely never live to see.

Children and grandchildren are how we live forever— in our traditions, our beliefs, our history, our blood. I come from a long, very long line of Catholics. This is not just some random occurrence, it because all the people before me believed and held onto their faith. My great-grandmother prayed many silent rosaries for my sake, as did my grandmother, and even despite me spending years living as an atheist who hated God, I made my way back, and I owe it to them, I owe it to all the people who came before me who made a plea to God for my sake.

It is not just the recipes, the pictures, or the memories that get passed down, I truly believe it is also the grace of God, the love for God, the caring about truth, the care for all that is good, for mercy, and for tradition. All of it can be a wonderful gift you leave to your grandchildren, and the many more that will come after.

@itsme_lisapReply to @savabshire the lack of a “village” is the biggest hinders center to happiness in motherhood #wheresthevillage #motherhood #mothersoftiktok

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This is why all of this makes me sad. Sad that we are now convinced that being needed is a burden, when turns out, being needed is actually one of the greatest privileges of being alive. Think about it, how is it a burden to be the one person needed by someone you deeply love? How is it anything other than a blessing that someone calls you, out of everyone else in the entire world, because they need you. How is it anything other than wonderful to have a child calling your name and running to you, running into your house, into your arms? How is it anything but a wonderful gift not only to be needed but also to be wanted?

The unfortunate truth is that we have spent years convincing people that needing another is some sort of moral failure, that the ultimate goal in life is to become independent, never to need another, never to bother another person with our needs. So here we all are, all of us free, independent people, all of us having to use the internet for information, for love, for wisdom, all the things that we used to have just down the street, in the warm home that always smelled like bread, filled with voices of all the people you knew, and those that knew you.

We all very much still need one another.

So yes it is true that in many ways and in many families, lots of grandmas have clocked out, and Youtube has had to fill the void. It is true that many grandparents are not willing to build the village together, but it does not have to be this way. You and me, all of us can decide right now that family is not something we can ever age out of, it is not something we can ever stop being a part of. You and me, we can decide that being needed is not some burden, we can decide that needing others is not something awful either.

So go and call your grandmother, ask your mom for help, become the village you wish you had. Let your children get to know their family history, family members, forgive their flaws, forgive their annoying habits or the politics you might disagree with. Let your children know the people from where they come from, and allow yourself the same privilege. Let your children see you needing others, being kind and loving to those that need you.

Someday soon it will be your turn to be the old grandparents sitting at the table, watching all the people we love in the world eat the food we made them, and for goodness sake, let us not clock out.

Last week we published Under the Skin: Why Are So Many Young Women Getting Tattoos? It generated much-needed conversation. But it’s the bigger question underscoring it all that keeps nagging at me.

Why are young women doing this to themselves?

Tattoos are just one part of a larger pattern. It is also linked to fashion.

I see two types of clothing on young women now, in Manhattan and at the airport in Denver and all around the country. The first one shows a great deal: slip dresses, bralettes worn as shirts, sheer panels over the ribcage, clothing that used to go underneath other clothing and now goes on top of it.

The second shows almost nothing. Loose layers and hoods and fabric that hides the shape of a body completely.

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I’ve seen both looks at the same time on the same block and it is dizzying, schizophrenic, even.

And it’s not just the oversized, amorphous clothing. Face piercings. Hair in unnatural colors, ink from wrist to shoulder and even on the face.

What does beauty mean today, is it to be aspired to or avoided at all costs?

The white glove

Edith Wharton published The Age of Innocence in 1920, and it won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, making her the first woman to take the prize. In 1993, Martin Scorsese (my favorite director of all time) released the film version starting Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer.

The most talked-about scene in that film contains almost no skin.

Newland Archer, played by Day-Lewis, sits in a carriage with Countess Ellen Olenska, played by Pfeiffer. He removes his own glove, unbuttons hers slowly, and kisses the inside of her wrist. Nora Ephron called the scene better than sex. One critic described it as demure and profane at the same time.

That glove carried information, which is why the scene works. Someone chose it, knew how to fasten it and when to wear it, and everyone in that carriage understood what its removal announced. Gabrielle Pescucchi, the costume designer for the film won the Academy Award that year, and the glove scene was certainly a driver of this!

Women used to pass that knowledge down.

What do you wear to a funeral?

What do you wear to meet his parents?

What does a hemline say about you, and what you hold back, and why?

These are the things we stopped teaching. Girls are now left to figure this out on their own, but it is clear they need support…

What exposure actually communicates

In 2011, Kurt Gray published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showing viewers pictures of the same people, some revealing and some not. When viewers looked at a body, they credited that person with less agency and less self-control, they credited her with more raw feeling instead, and they judged her as less morally responsible.

Showing more of your body changes what strangers assume about your mind. They assume there’s less of one.

A sixteen-year-old posting in a bralette wants to look confident but her audience may read it as less smart.

Young women already sense this, honestly, because they’ve started defending themselves against it.

New Yorkers came up with the subway shirt. A girl carries an oversized layer and pulls it on over whatever she wanted to wear, so she can cross town without the stares and the comments, and the hashtag has millions of views. The behavior predates the name. A French transport survey in 2016 found that 48 percent of women changed their clothing to move around the city, trading a skirt for pants or covering themselves with a scarf.

So she dresses to be seen in the morning and packs a shirt to stop being seen on the way there.

Forty years ago we were reaching up

I always come back to my childhood in the 1980s, when we all seemed to be reaching towards something, musically, fashion, cinematically, it was so good to want things, both aesthetic and material.

Beauty was aspirational. The women in my college class and on the Manhattan-bound D train to NYU, put effort into how they looked, and I could see it— it was contagious.

But things have taken a darker turn.

Fashion writers call the current mood ugly dressing. They describe it as deliberately unflattering, a rebellion against filtered perfection. It also sells. Ludovica Cesareo at Lehigh looked at more than 10,000 Amazon products and found an ugly luxury premium. From an ordinary brand, shoppers pick the prettier thing. From a luxury brand, they pick the ugly one just as often. It only works when the ugliness looks like a choice.

Ugly on purpose says you know something the rest of us don’t.

I still see aspiration in plenty of young women. Both things are happening at once in one generation.

Which will win? I don’t know.

The boys are doing a version of this

For a decade now, young men have heard that the old male virtues are dangerous. Physical strength. Providing for someone. Taking responsibility for people who depend on you. We called much of that toxic masculinity, and a lot of young men gave it up.

So boys apologize for wanting to be strong, and girls apologize for wanting to be beautiful.

What is missing

In 2022, Catherine Gimbrone and her colleagues at Columbia looked at 86,138 twelfth graders in SSM Mental Health. Depression rose for everyone after 2010. It rose fastest for liberal girls, and the widest gap was on self-esteem. Put that next to the tattoo numbers. Pew asked 8,480 adults in 2023. Among women 18 to 29, 56 percent have a tattoo.

Pew found 41 percent of adults with no religion have a tattoo, as opposed to 29 percent of adults who are faithful. Jerome Koch and Kevin Dougherty found that the denomination hardly matters but the commitment does.

Ying Chen and Tyler VanderWeele at Harvard tracked more than 5,000 young people for eight to fourteen years. The children who went to religious services every week were about 18 percent more likely to call themselves very happy in their twenties, and they reported a stronger sense of mission and purpose.

Mission and purpose. A girl who has those already knows who she is, and she can leave her skin alone.

Parents need to step in, though it is not easy.

I talk to my children about everything including norms, and what is and is not acceptable clothing. They know what I find beautiful, because I tell them (though we often disagree and that is great, too). They know I would like to be a grandmother. I wrote in May about telling children we hope they will have children. My own parents told me constantly, on the drive to school and over dinner and again at the door. I resented it for years. They were overbearing and they were right.

I have spoken to so many parents who keep quiet so their daughters won’t call them old-fashioned or overbearing.

Our daughters are paying for that quiet.

A girl learns norms of what beauty is from the adults around her, from what they wear, do and say. From stories of their own youth.

If we don’t say these things, have these conversations, TikTok fills that void.

I hope I can convince you that we can and should begin to be more confident about our voices and our experience and embrace authoritative (not authoritarian!) parenting again.

For the sake of our daughters (and sons, too).

If posts like this one matter to you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Restore Childhood. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and we work hard to keep most of our content free.

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Last week ran a report by Suzy Weiss on the fight over face tattoos. It follows a First Amendment lawsuit against South Carolina, which bans ink above the shoulders.

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For several years now, I have also noted the dramatic rise in extreme tatooing among young people. Why is this spreading so fast, and why fastest among young women?

The best-known face tattoo in America may hold the answer, at least part of it.

In 2011, rapper Gucci Mane got an ice cream cone on his cheek. For years his team sold it as branding.

But in his 2025 memoir, Episodes, he told a different story. He got the tattoo days after a court-ordered stay in a psychiatric hospital, in the middle of a mental health and addiction crisis. He calls it “an act of rebellion, but it was also a cry for help,” and writes that he wanted the world to see he was in distress.

That face tattoo was distress made visible.

Just yesterday, Nancy Mace, a Republican Congresswoman from South Carolina, the state noted in Weiss's story, revealed she has gotten nine tattoos while in office. They give her "the pain I need to feel," she told Politico, and a way to reclaim her body.

One of the tattoos is the opening line of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Mace describes herself as broken, and living with PTSD.

What the data says

Fifty-six percent of American women ages 18 to 29 now have at least one tattoo. A decade ago, about one in five adults did. The steepest line in the data belongs to young women.

At the same time, according to the CDC, the share of teen girls reporting persistent sadness or hopelessness rose from 35 percent in 2011 to 57 percent in 2021. Nearly a third had seriously considered suicide. Emergency-room visits for self-harm among girls 10 to 14 are roughly five times higher than in 2009. Boys stayed flat.

The most common form of self-injury among adolescent girls is cutting.

Set that beside a generation of young women marking their own skin with needles. One type of cutting is rightfully considered a crisis.

The other type- tatooing- is a burgeoning industry that calls itself self-expression.

A search for belonging

One might guess that this rise in tatooing is due to activism, but it is not that simple.

Tattoos split almost evenly across left and right. The sharper divide is religion, with the unaffiliated far more inked than the faithful.

What the research keeps finding instead is belonging.

The tattoo now works as membership in a self-assembled tribe, a private badge of who you are.

That badge often marks a wound.

Among adults who report childhood abuse, 48 percent have a tattoo or piercing, while 35 percent of those who do not, and the rate climbs as the abuse gets worse.

So why now?

Start with what these girls learn about themselves.

During the pandemic, childhood was expendable. Schools closed and stayed closed while the rest of life reopened. Schools have taught them to treat the body as something to be modified and that femininity, like masculinity is toxic and should be rejected.

One common lesson makes the point. A graphic called the Gender Unicorn, used in classrooms from kindergarten up, teaches children that the sex on their birth certificate is only “assigned,” separate from the gender they feel inside, with sliders they can move to pick their own. The lesson tells a child that her body is raw material and the real self is something she selects, then makes the body match.

It teaches children that their shape is fluid, they can mark their skin, change, transform.

A tattoo gives a fixed shape to girls, while they are being taught that everything is maleable.

A tattoo is easy to regret and hard to remove. A quarter of tattooed adults regret at least one, and women make up about two-thirds of removal patients. Removal takes many laser sessions, real pain, hundreds or thousands of dollars, and skin that rarely comes back clean. It is a hard mistake to undo…

Medical gender procedures on a child cannot be undone. Puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery can leave a girl sterile for life, remove healthy breasts and organs that never grow back, and deepen her voice for good. A tattoo costs money and pain. Gender surgeries can cost children their future fertility and destroy their healthy bodies.

Smartphones and social media facilitate all of this. Apps feed accounts registered to 13-year-olds self-harm and body-image videos within minutes, the same pipeline that pushes gender content at them. And the faces they study belong to influencers. Cardi B wears her son’s name across her jawline and holds more than 37 million followers on X.

Many of these stars were in real distress when they marked themselves.

We hand the young to the most followed and least steady people in the culture.

The question

A young woman (18+) has the right to a tattoo.

The question is why so many want one (or many more than one, even in the most visible and impossible to hide parts of their bodies).

Why does a generation of girls long to cover or carve their own skin instead of living in it? What are they trying to show, and what are they trying to hide?

Is it grief, or trauma, or the loss of a faith and a belonging that once held them? Is it the guilt we taught this generation, about its history and even its own bodies, until covering the skin they were born in starts to feel like relief?

These are the questions to ask, and to put to our own children, plainly, before they mark themselves.

Also this week, newly released text messages surfaced from Anthony Fauci’s government phone.

On January 25, 2021, Fauci wrote to then-CDC director Rochelle Walensky and Dr. Vivek Murthy that the fever and “cytokines storm” many people had after the second COVID vaccine dose “theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”

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Walensky called it “a good point.” Nine days later, Fauci told the public there were “no red flags” for pregnant women. Drug companies had not enrolled pregnant women in the original vaccine trials. Pregnant women were told to trust the public message.

Ater all this horrifying news, I only have one question:

What is a child worth in this country?

Set the Massachusetts law next to Europe, the region Americans are constantly told has the more humane abortion laws.

France allows abortion on request only through 14 weeks. Past that point, two physicians must certify a specific medical reason: danger to the mother’s life or health, or a severe, incurable fetal condition.

Sweden’s limit is 18 weeks.

The Netherlands, one of the most permissive countries in Europe, caps elective abortion at 24 weeks with medical review after.

Massachusetts just removed every one of those guardrails. Massachusetts now has one of the most permissive abortion laws anywhere in the world, more permissive than the European countries routinely held up as the model.

During COVID, children themselves were reframed as a public health risk. In January 2021, Andy Slavitt, a former top health official under two Democratic presidents, wrote on Twitter that children should circulate less or they would become vectors, comparing them to mosquitoes carrying tropical disease. Toddlers were pulled off planes for a mask slipping below the nose. Kids sat through school lunch being told to keep their masks on between bites.

Then schools reopened, and parents were not let back in the building. Parents who stood up at school board meetings to ask questions got filmed, mocked, and labeled domestic terrorists by their own school districts. We documented that fight in detail in 15 DAYS, our film on the years of school closures and tyranical restrictions, now streaming free to paid subscribers.

The same coercive logic showed up again in pediatric gender medicine. Parents raising concerns about a child’s rapid gender transition got handed the same ultimatum: “Do you want a live son or a dead daughter?” parents are still asked.

That exact phrase was used by a mother describing her own reasoning on WNYC’s Only Human in 2016, and documented gender therapists posing the same ultimatum directly to parents in Irreversible Damage. It left no room for a parent’s own judgment, and it used a parent’s love as the pressure point.

Dr. Kristopher Kaliebe, our Gender Toolkit co-author, has written about how major medical organizations built policy on that same ultimatum with little supporting evidence, and five countries have since walked their guidance back.

Doctors at Children’s Hospital Colorado have quietly refused to keep prescribing under a court order. Maia Poet’s own account of transitioning at 12 and coming back from it is one of the clearest firsthand records of what that ultimatum actually costs a child.

A state just removed every limit on ending a child’s life before birth. Public health officials lied to America about pregnancy risks when they forced the Covid-19 vaccine. A generation of kids were reduced to vectors and had years of their lives stolen. And parents have been told that children belong to the state not to their families (see President Biden clip at 1:40 below).

I want to know when this country stopped putting children first, and what a child is actually worth in America today.

In the womb.

At the school door.

In the exam room.

I am struggling with this question and I imagine you will too. Still we must have a reckoning if we are to survive as a nation.

Watch: 15 DAYS is now available in full to paid subscribers.

Join us: I’ll be joining Eli Steele and FAIR’s Monica Harris for a live discussion of the film on Wednesday August 12 at 7 PM EST Register here.

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I know y’all are probably suffering through Fauci fatigue right now, so I’m sharing something different today.

It’s an essay I wrote a few weeks ago for America’s 250th birthday. Take some time and listen to these songs, they will lift you up — I included Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger” official video below and listened to it as I wrote this post!

And if you haven’t yet, now’s a good moment to upgrade your subscription. Upgrading is the most direct way to help us keep telling stories like 15 DAYS. And as a thank-you, paid subscribers get to watch 15 DAYS right here, right now.

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It’s Good to Want Things

I came to New York from Odessa in 1977, a Soviet Jewish kid of six who spoke no English. What I owned fit in a suitcase. What I gained was a country entering its most unapologetically aspirational decade, and its music became my foundation. The anthems paved the way forward.

By nine, I had Irene Cara singing “Fame” on my radio. “I’m gonna live forever. I’m gonna learn how to fly.” Nobody sang those lines with a wink. The film followed New York kids who wanted to be great and said so out loud. In the country I left, ambition outside the approved channels marked you. Here, they set it to a beat and danced.

Cara did it again in 1983 with “Flashdance... What a Feeling,” which won the Oscar for Best Original Song. “Take your passion and make it happen.” A welder wants to dance. No credentials, no permission, just want. America turned it into a phenomenon.

Survivor wrote “Eye of the Tiger” for Rocky III. A fighter rises and refuses to stay down. Journey gave us “Don’t Stop Believin’,” where a small-town girl boards the midnight train toward a bigger life. And in 1985, John Parr wrote “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)” for Rick Hansen, a Canadian athlete paralyzed at fifteen who wheeled 40,000 kilometers around the world for spinal cord research. I can climb the highest mountain. The man in the song could not walk. He crossed the earth anyway.

I never expected to reach those stars, and I did not need to. These songs made the striving itself the honor. The reaching was the point. That reframed everything for an immigrant kid with the wrong accent and the wrong clothes. My circumstances were not a verdict but a starting line.

The movies married that music to something I wanted even more than success, which was belonging. Footloose put a boy against a town that banned dancing and let him win by refusing to sit still. The Brat Pack films did the rest. The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo’s Fire, Pretty in Pink. Kids who felt like outsiders found each other, backed each other, and reached for adult lives together. Their soundtracks, blasting from boomboxes all around me, fused their dreams to my own. Watching them, I learned what I thought America was. A place where the misfits form their own crew and go get the future.

That belief runs straight through one small film at the edge of the decade. In 1990, Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael featured Winona Ryder as a misfit girl in an Ohio town. A boy tells her he wants to kiss her. She answers in five words that could be the epigraph for the whole era, and the country, too.

“It’s good to want things.”

It is. Wanting is not greed or vanity. Wanting is the engine. A nation founded 250 years ago on the pursuit of happiness, never its guarantee, understood that the pursuit is the gift. You get the striving and the open road.

What you make of it is yours.

Children now grow up in a culture that often calls ambition gauche and achievement unfair. They deserve what I absorbed from the music and film all around me at nine – to hear that their reach should exceed their grasp, that adversity is the setup and not the sentence, and that in this country a welder becomes a dancer, a paralyzed kid circles the earth, and a girl from Odessa grows up to make films, raise children, and write these words as a free American.

Happy 250th birthday to the country that told me it’s good to want things.

It still is.

This piece was originally published by PJ Media.

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“An institutional autopsy with a pulse.” Film Threat

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There was a lavender backpack hanging on a hook by our door.

It hung there for months.

My younger daughter, the one whose backpack was hanging on the hook was in kindergarten at the time. My older daughter was in third grade. Neither of them was going anywhere. They should have been with their friends. Instead they were inside a nine-hundred-square-foot apartment in Manhattan, staring at the walls, asking me what had happened to their world.

My daughters wanted to know who closed the schools and why. At the time, I couldn’t really answer.

Last Saturday things became clearer.

Sen. Rand Paul released 1,141 pages of Anthony Fauci’s diary on his committee’s document archive, The Reading Room. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said publicly that it took his department about eight months to find the entries, which were sitting on eleven different servers. Fauci testifies before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday morning at 8:30, under subpoena.

In an entry dated March 15, 2020, Fauci writes that he called the mayor of New York City and convinced him to close the schools. Six days before that, he writes that the governor of New York asked him whether to close schools in Westchester, and that he said yes.

In 2022, on ABC’s This Week, Anthony Fauci said this: They always come back and say, Fauci was responsible for closing schools. I had nothing to do. I mean, let’s get down to the facts. The clip has been set against the diary entries since Saturday.

I have spent years chasing that contradiction. Here is what the diary says.

One note on sourcing before we start. I have not been able to review all 1,141 pages myself, and neither has anyone else who has published on them since Saturday. The diary passages below come from outlets that have worked through the release, and every one of them is linked. The full PDF is on Rand Paul’s Reading Room if you want to go to the original. Where the source is something other than the diary, I name it and link it where it appears.

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We finished 15 DAYS thinking we already knew most of this. Years of work, dozens of interviews. The closures did not come from a thousand local officials all reaching the same call on their own. They came from a small number of people. They stayed in place because a powerful group had a direct line to the agencies writing the rules. The kids who paid for it were never in the room.

We could show all of that. What we could not do was show it in the handwriting of the man who made the call.

Now we have the handwriting.

There is a full timeline further down, with dates and sources, so you can follow the sequence yourself and check anything you want to check.

“I tell him yes.”

March 9, 2020. Six days before the backpack came off the hook for the last time. This entry was transcribed by The Post Millennial and by the Gateway Pundit.

Gov. Cuomo calls me up and asks my advice on whether to close schools in the orthodox Jewish section of Westchester where they have 90 cases.

Fauci’s answer, in the next sentence: I tell him yes.

Cuomo asked about the subways on the same call. On the subways, Fauci wrote, I tell him not yet, but let us stay tuned.

One adviser. One phone call. Two questions, both brand new, no data behind them. On the trains that packed adults together, wait.

On the buildings that held children, close.

Six days later. This entry has been transcribed identically by the Daily Signal, Blaze Media, Townhall, the Federalist, and CNSNews:

I spoke with Bill de Blasio (Mayor – NYC) and convinced him... to close the NYC schools.

Convinced him. That is Fauci’s own word, about the biggest school district in the country. About my daughters’ school.

The same entry admits the mayor had already decided based on what I was saying on TV. Then Fauci goes past what he was asked: I went on to tell him he should close the bars and restaurants in NYC. De Blasio, he writes, said that he would base this on my recommendation.

Then a second call that night, to California:

I had a similar call with Ann O’Leary, the COS of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.

Her answer, as Fauci wrote it down: based on my TV appearances today and yesterday, the Governor has decided to close the schools in California.

Two of the biggest school systems in America. One evening. One phone.

Here is how Fauci ends the March 15 entry. He leaves the White House and crosses Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street:

several cars honked their horns and shouted “thank you” out the window.

That is the last thing Fauci wrote on the day he closed two states’ schools.

15 DAYS to slow the spread

I named the film 15 DAYS because that is what they told us - fifteen days to slow the spread.

Here is what Fauci wrote in his diary on March 16, 2020, as transcribed by Townhall:

Came out with the guidelines that reflected my pushing for a more aggressive mitigation 15 day strategy... if a community has spread, CLOSE the bars, restaurants and places of congregation, close schools where there is community spread.

The same entry ends with this: Press conference after was highly attended. Stock market dropped by 3000 points, the biggest percentage drop in history.

He is not describing something that happened to him. He is describing something he pushed for and got. Six years later, the title of our film turns out to be his phrase.

Within weeks of that entry, almost every district in America went dark.

The information was already there

The standard defense of March 2020 is the fog of war. Nobody knew anything, everyone was guessing, and the people making the calls did the best they could. I heard some version of that from nearly everyone I interviewed who had a hand in it. I do not accept it.

The picture on children was already forming before the schools closed. Writing in the Journal of Korean Medical Science in mid-March 2020, researchers reviewing the case for closing schools noted that the data available at that point suggested children were less susceptible to this virus and less ill when infected. That was not a summer discovery.

The evidence for closing schools was thin, and the federal government knew it was thin. In February 2020, weeks before the closures, the CDC’s own journal Emerging Infectious Diseases published a systematic review of social distancing measures for pandemic flu. It found the evidence for school closures came largely from observational studies and simulation models, and it concluded that the more drastic measures might be reserved for severe pandemics. The CDC and HHS pre-pandemic planning guidance, first issued in 2007 and updated in 2017, treated school closures the same way, as a measure tied to a severity index rather than a default.

Then there is the March 9 call. Fauci told Cuomo to close the schools and to keep the subways running, in the same conversation, minutes apart. Uncertainty does not produce that answer. Uncertainty produces caution in both directions or in neither.

What came after was worse, and the diary shows it.

July 2020: Clearly Trump is pushing to open the schools no matter what.

Fauci describes a meeting in the Oval Office that he calls dangerous. Against the idea that Schools can open and should open everywhere, he writes that he countered that this would cause a new round of community spread and eventually lead to new hospitalizations and deaths. He writes that he plans to work the states directly, to limit school reopenings where there is uncontrolled community spread.

The president wants schools open. Fauci moves to keep them closed. Fauci clearly sees Trump as an oponent.

Then Florida. Fauci went after Gov. Ron DeSantis from the White House podium. The diary records what happened next:

That afternoon DeSantis called my cell and explained that he was evaluating the situation on a week by week basis.

DeSantis told him he was only looking at districts with very few infections. Fauci wrote that down, and then went on to the next day.

Eight days later, on Mehmet Oz and Sean Hannity saying kids belonged in classrooms:

As if some bizarre form of national swagger was worth making schoolchildren canaries in a coal mine.

The kids in the coal mine were the ones at home.

The people who said so at the time

Dr. Scott Atlas came to the White House in August 2020 from Stanford. He was clear the risk to kids was very low, closing schools was doing serious damage, and schools should open.

His main point is now the mainstream view.

He did not get a fair hearing. In an August 2020 email obtained through public records requests and reported at the time, Deborah Birx, who ran the White House virus response, told Fauci and other officials she was more convinced than ever that Atlas’s views were “dangerous.” Atlas has said in his own published account that Vice President Pence and the political staff were afraid of Fauci and Birx because both polled so well, and that this fear let the two of them write the guidance.

Two months later came the email that shows the debate was not going to happen.

On October 4, 2020, three epidemiologists from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford published the Great Barrington Declaration. Their argument was simple: protect the people at real risk, mostly the elderly and the sick, and let everyone else go back to normal life.

Four days later, the head of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, emailed Fauci. The email came out through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Institute for Economic Research, was also released by a House subcommittee in December 2021, and Collins has confirmed writing it in a television interview since. He called the authors three fringe epidemiologists. Then he wrote:

There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises.

Fauci’s reply was to paste in an article from Wired attacking the declaration. He followed it with a piece from The Nation doing the same. Neither was a study.

That was October 2020, the month districts were deciding what to do about the spring semester. The two most senior scientists in the federal government answered a competing idea from three major universities with a press campaign rather than a study.

One of those three fringe epidemiologists was Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. We interviewed him at Stanford in December 2022 for 15 DAYS.

He now runs the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

How the schools stayed closed

Everything above explains March 2020. It does not explain 2021.

By that spring the federal government had backed off, teachers were getting vaccinated, and most of the developed world had kids back at desks. American buildings stayed closed anyway. To understand that you need the part of the story 15 DAYS spends most of its time on, and it is not about Anthony Fauci.

Watch Randi Weingarten talk to teachers and parents. She is warm and reasonable. She talks about ventilation and testing. She talks about teachers who are scared, about the classroom aide whose husband has a weak immune system. She says, correctly, that kids learn best in person. She makes the union sound like the last thing standing between frightened staff and a government willing to use them up.

Then look at what she said to her own members that summer. The quotes below are from her July 2020 convention address, published by the AFT on its own website, where they remain. The full speech is here.

The AFT held its convention in July 2020, with the fall semester coming. Weingarten backed what the union called safety strikes if districts reopened without meeting union conditions. In the same speech she laid out how the union would spend the fall:

Activism changes the narrative, elections change policy, and, together, they change lives.

She asked members for 100,000 actions a month to elect Joe Biden, running right through Election Day. She brought up Michigan, which Democrats lost by about 10,000 votes in 2016, and the members who had not voted. Changing outcomes like that, she said, is within our grasp.

She closed the speech this way:

Together, we have the power to defeat Donald Trump and elect Joe Biden.

Read the two versions next to each other. To teachers and parents, the question was whether a building was safe. To her own convention, the answer to the crisis was an election.

Three months after that convention, on an October 2020 video call with supporters, the actress Jane Fonda said it without any hedging at all. The video is public and Snopes checked it and found it authentic. It is featured in our film:

I just think COVID is God’s gift to the left.

She laughed, then caught herself. That’s a terrible thing to say, she added, before going on about what a great opportunity the moment was and how lucky they were to have it.

Fonda held no office and set no policy. That is why the clip matters. She had nothing to lose by saying it out loud.

Then February 2021.

The following comes from emails and text messages released under public records requests and from a House Oversight Committee interim report.

The CDC gave the AFT an early copy of its school reopening guidance, which broke the agency’s own rule about keeping drafts private. AFT staff asked CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to add a trigger, meaning a rule that would shut schools automatically once local case rates hit a certain number. Walensky wrote that the union’s suggestions were going in with just a few small tweaks.

On February 11, the day before the guidance came out, Weingarten texted Walensky to complain about a New York Times story previewing it. The reporting was at odds with what they had discussed, she wrote. Her problem with it: They are running with a full speed ahead angle.

The draft had said that at any level of spread, all schools can provide in-person instruction. The published version said all schools have options to provide in-person instruction.

The first sentence opens schools. The second one lets a district stay closed and still say it is following the CDC.

Over that same stretch, parents got one thirty-minute meeting with the CDC director. The unions had her on the phone.

Asked about it under oath in 2023, Weingarten said she did not submit line-by-line edits, and that the union offered suggestions, two of which were used. Walensky, testifying separately, confirmed the union wanted the automatic closure trigger.

School Closures were a gift to/grift for the unions

Put the two records side by side and you can see how it worked.

Fauci gave it authority. When a mayor or governor closed a school system in March 2020, he was not acting on a study he had read. He was acting on a phone call, or a TV appearance, from the most trusted man in the country. Fauci knew that at the time and wrote it down.

The unions made it neverending. Authority alone would have worn off by the fall of 2020 as the data came in. What kept buildings closed through 2021, and in some districts into 2022, was a powerful group with a direct line to the agency writing the rules and a federal government handpicked by Randi, herself.

Kids cannot strike. They cannot pull an endorsement or run 100,000 actions a month or call a cell phone at the White House. In March 2020 they lost the one adult institution whose job was to pay attention to them, and then they were told to wait while the people who closed it argued about when to open it.

We have gone through everything published about these 1,141 pages looking for the entry where a six-year-old shows up the way the Washington Post profile shows up, or the honking cars, or the Barbra Streisand phone call he wrote down as a great call.

We haven’t found it. Neither has any reporter who has published since Saturday.

What did turn up right away was a man following his own press while the country’s classrooms sat empty. April 7, 2020: Press still hot and heavy about me. May 21, with his typos left in: The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable.

By August 2021, on the oversight letters coming in from Congress: This is an amazing and unbelievable waste of our time.

The bill

The numbers are in.

The Nation’s Report Card, the national test run by the federal National Center for Education Statistics, shows reading scores for fourth and eighth graders falling again, on top of the drop between 2019 and 2022. The share of eighth graders reading below the test’s basic level is the worst in the history of the assessment.

Peggy Carr, who runs the federal office behind that test, said the obvious thing out loud: If students aren’t in school, they can’t learn, and that is what these data underscore.

The Education Recovery Scorecard, a joint project of researchers at Harvard and Stanford, found that as of spring 2024 the average American student was close to half a grade level behind pre-pandemic achievement, and further behind in reading than in 2022. Stanford’s Sean Reardon said who paid for it: scores declined far more in America’s middle- and low-income communities than in its wealthy ones.

About 28 percent of students are now chronically absent, meaning they miss at least ten percent of the school year. That is well above 2019. A generation of families learned that showing up was optional, because for a year or more the government told them it was.

Roughly $190 billion in federal emergency money went to school districts. The deadline to spend it passed in January 2025.

None of that is in a diary entry. All of it came out of phone calls that are.

THE TIMELINE

Tomorrow—Wednesday

Fauci goes before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. He has not answered press questions about the diary. President Biden gave him a full and unconditional pardon covering January 2014 through January 2025, which means he cannot be charged for anything in that window no matter what he says. The statute of limitations on the separate perjury question ran out in May.

Senators will spend the morning on the lab leak question, on virus research funding, on deleted records.

I am watching for one thing. I want a senator to hand him the March 15 entry, ask him to read it out loud, and then ask what he meant in 2022 by “nothing to do.”

He has answers ready. He was writing down conversations, not giving orders. Private notes scribbled at the end of a long day are not a policy record. Neither answer survives the word he picked, which was convinced. Neither one survives March 9, when a governor asked a question and got an answer.

I tell him yes.

We made 15 DAYS because the people who closed the schools were already writing the first draft of their own history, and children were not in it. Three years. Nearly sixty interviews. Parents, teachers, pediatricians, superintendents, and kids who lost years nobody is giving back.

Next week the entire film goes up here on Substack, and every paid subscriber gets it permanently. Not a rental or a 48-hour window. The film will stay in your library for as long as you subscribe, alongside everything else we publish.

Restore Childhood is a 501(c)(3). We take no advertising and no money from the industries we cover. This post is free and will stay free, like almost everything we publish. A paid subscription does not buy you access. It funds the interviews, the archive work, and the next film.

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No one is coming to save our kids but us.

I owe you an update, and an apology for going quiet, because I have spent most of the last month out on the road and I kept waiting until I got home to sit down and tell you everything I saw.

We premiered Uncancellable in Washington, DC

On July 1, Palladium Pictures premiered Uncancellable and three other incredible incubator films in Washington, DC, and it was one of the proudest nights I have had in a very long time. The film follows Maud Maron through her run for Manhattan District Attorney, and what makes her worth an entire documentary is that she said the things everyone else was too afraid to say, out loud and on the record, with her own name attached to every word of it.

Palladium Pictures runs an incubator that Michael and Thomas Pack launched only a couple of years ago, and I was lucky enough to be one of four fellows in the second round, alongside four more filmmakers who came through the year before us. Every film that comes out of this program was made by someone who decided that staying quiet simply was not an option, and I would encourage you to watch all of them when you get the chance: Palladium Pictures.

Then I hit the road

From DC I just kept going, and over the course of a single month through America’s 250th birthday I traveled through ten states: Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, Maryland, Texas, and Louisiana.

I wanted to take the temperature on the ground for myself, and what I came away with is that this country is far more post-partisan than the headlines would ever have you believe. Every time I sat down and talked with someone directly, as one person to another instead of as two political labels, I found that I could actually reach them, and you can do the very same thing as long as you are willing to meet people where they are and look for the things you already share. That common ground has not gone anywhere, but the moment you steer a conversation into politics it sinks like a stone, so my honest advice is to stay off the politics and stay on everything else you have in common.

And then there were the flags. I saw American flags flying on lawns in every single state I drove through, and to me that says people still have real confidence in this country even now, which is about as good a sign as I could have hoped to find.

A conversation in New Orleans

This past weekend I took a tour of the Pharmacy Museum in New Orleans, which I would recommend to just about anyone, because the guide was genuinely gifted and knew the history of medicine, surgery, and pharmacy in that city cold.

The trouble was that he told the entire story through an anti-American lens, and it was impossible to miss. He spoke about the Native Americans, the French, the Spanish, and the Haitians with warmth, or at the very least with a neutral hand, but the moment he arrived at the Americans, the Protestants who had come over from England, they suddenly became guilty and somehow beyond saving. While he mentioned in passing that they had brought real values with them, things like punctuality and precision, and he still could not bring himself to give them a shred of credit for any of it.

So I waited until the tour was over and I went and talked to him. I told him that I had come to this country as an immigrant from a totalitarian communist regime, and that I live here now right alongside him, and that while this place is far from perfect it is still one of the very best places on the whole Earth to live. I have seen the alternative with my own eyes and heard about it my entire life in my parents’ stories, and I told him plainly that America is his friend, and that she deserves quite a bit more love than he had been giving her all afternoon.

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I said every bit of this gently, because if I had come at him hot he would have shut the door on me and that would have been the end of it. Instead he reached out and took my hand in both of his and told me, “Thank you for bringing another perspective to the conversation.”

That single exchange is the whole reason I keep making these films, and it is the reason I am asking you to speak up too, because free speech is not some passive thing that takes care of itself while you go about your day.

You cannot take it for granted and you cannot leave it to somebody else, you have to actually get out there and practice it.

Maud Maron exemplifies it in Uncancellable, and our doctors, parents, kids, teachers, all exemplify it in 15 DAYS, too- so many chose to use their voices at the exact moment when keeping silent would have been the far easier road.

15 DAYS packed the room in Dallas

On Wednesday July 15th, the Freedom Foundation’s Dallas Teachers Summit screened 15 DAYS —there was not a seat left anywhere in the house. People stood shoulder to shoulder along the back wall, and no one left before the film was over.

What really stayed with me was what happened afterward, when teacher after teacher came up to tell me that they had known all along that the closures were wrong and had felt completely powerless to do anything to stop them. That is exactly why I keep saying what I say, and it confirmed something I have believed for a long time now, which is that the unions do not speak for teachers and should be abolished.

You can watch or screen 15 DAYS here: 15daysfilm.com.

James Lindsay/ joined us for the screening and had this to say:

Required reading: Brandon Showalter’s article

Brandon Showalter of the Christian Post has spent ten years covering the gender beat, and his latest piece names the whole pattern so precisely, from the flat denial that anything is happening at all, to the quiet admission that it is only happening to a few people, all the way to the accusation that you are the strange one for caring about it in the first place.

It is a hard thing to read, which means you should read it anyway.

Those of us who’ve been doing the hard work exposing the madness against an impenetrable mainstream media blockade can all tell you what it’s like to learn about all the horrors, only to be gaslit with flat denials like “that’s not happening.” Then you show concrete proof, and it becomes “well, it’s only a few people,” and then maybe “why are you so obsessed with this small, strange issue?” The whole world is under a reality-denying spell, shrouded in pink and blue flags, and people are programmed with dismissive talking points if anyone suggests that something’s wrong.

You can read the full piece here: “What I Learned After 10 Years of Covering the Trans Madness”.

Assorted interviews you may have missed…

I have been doing a lot of media- this was a highlight! I joined Armstrong Williams on his show, and if you want to skip straight to my segment it begins at 25:13: watch the interview.

And I sat down for a longer conversation with the inimitable interview genius Steven Shalowitz, which you can watch in full here: watch the interview.

Support the work

Stephanie’s book is up for preorder right now, and I hope you will grab yourself a copy, because I Was a Girl Who Wanted to Be a Boy by Stephanie Edmonds is exactly the kind of honest and brave book that parents need sitting on their shelves: restorechildhood.com/preorder.

Our t-shirts sold out completely in Dallas, so we went ahead and restocked them, and every single purchase you make supports Restore Childhood and supports free speech, which has been our core mission from the very beginning: restorechildhood.com/store.

So that is where I have been and what I have been up to all this time, and I want to thank you for reading this far and, even more than that, for using your own voice out there in the world.

No one is coming to save our kids but us.

Natalya

If any of this moved you, please share it, and send it along to just one parent, one teacher, or one friend who you think needs to hear it today.

Keep this work going

Restore Childhood runs on reader support, and none of what you just read, the films, the reporting, the miles on the road, happens without it. If this work matters to you, please upgrade to a paid subscription and help me keep it going: restorechildhood.substack.com/upgrade.

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