Latest / The Lila Rose Show / E228: The ‘No Contact’ Epidemic That Is Tearing Families Apart w/Noelle Mering | Lila Rose Show

Transcript

E228: The ‘No Contact’ Epidemic That Is Tearing Families Apart w/Noelle Mering | Lila Rose Show · The Lila Rose Show

• 0:00
  The growing phenomenon of young adults going no contact with
• 0:03
  their parents over ideology. But it's a new rising phenomenon
• 0:06
  being written about more and more often all over TikTok, what
• 0:09
  I call TikTok psychologists. You chose to have me.
• 0:12
  I did not choose to be born. So you owe me everything.
• 0:15
  I don't owe you anything. Once you elevate the identity of
• 0:19
  woundedness, you start looking at your history for a culprit
• 0:21
  for that. And parents are kind of a
• 0:22
  natural place to put that. What has been the most tragic
• 0:26
  story that has caught your eye? So I've been interviewing a ton
• 0:28
  of families and once story sticks out in my mind, this dear
• 0:32
  father and mother and their daughter.
• 0:35
  She had already. Hi everyone, Welcome back to the
• 0:37
  Lila Rose Show. Today I'm sitting down with my
• 0:39
  friend Noel Mehring, who is a founder over at Theology of
• 0:42
  Home, and she's also a fellow at EPPC, the Ethics and Public
• 0:46
  Policy Center. She is writing a new book and
• 0:49
  doing research on this very, I guess it's a dark trend, but
• 0:52
  it's also very important to understand.
• 0:54
  It's very interesting where family members are increasingly
• 0:57
  freezing each other out, especially children freezing out
• 1:00
  or going no contact with their parents.
• 1:02
  Now you might know somebody who's actually experienced this
• 1:05
  or you have family members in the last five years because of
• 1:07
  one of the many big things that have happened in the last five
• 1:10
  years has decided to build big walls between themselves and a
• 1:14
  family member. This can be really painful and
• 1:16
  tragic, but I hope this interview with Noelle will bring
• 1:19
  some hope and understanding. She provides some background
• 1:22
  about why this is happening, as well as her research showing how
• 1:25
  we can make meaningful steps towards building unity and
• 1:28
  harmony again based on the truth in our families with the ones
• 1:32
  that we love. Also, don't forget to subscribe.
• 1:34
  If you're hearing YouTube, make sure you're subscribed.
• 1:35
  If you're listening on podcast app, make sure you're
• 1:37
  subscribed. And if you're on podcast app,
• 1:39
  please leave us five stars. Give us a review.
• 1:41
  I read all of them and I I appreciate it and it also helps
• 1:44
  the podcast reach more people. Noel Marrying, welcome to the
• 1:46
  podcast. Thanks.
• 1:47
  For having me, great to be with you.
• 1:48
  I'm so glad you're here. I'm so excited to talk to you.
• 1:50
  Here we have some mutual connects, one very wonderful
• 1:54
  spiritual guide, Father Paul Donlon.
• 1:57
  I know we've both, I've been very blessed by over the years
• 2:00
  we have. So I do feel like you're a bit
• 2:02
  of a spiritual sister, even though I haven't gotten to talk
• 2:04
  to you very much. I get to know you, except now
• 2:06
  I'm getting that opportunity here, so.
• 2:07
  That's right, he always talks to us about each other.
• 2:09
  So his spiritual daughters, he likes to connect.
• 2:12
  Yes, he's always saying you got to talk to Noel, you got to talk
• 2:15
  to Noel. So here we are.
• 2:16
  We're talking your work. I've noticed it over the years.
• 2:19
  Theology of home is beautiful. So there might be some ladies
• 2:23
  listening who are fans. I want to hear about that.
• 2:25
  You also have the book Awake Not Woke, which I think you kind of
• 2:28
  coined the idea of being awake not woke.
• 2:31
  My understanding is CPAC at one point even picked up the
• 2:34
  phraseology from. Your book.
• 2:36
  He reached out to my publisher, actually, to make sure it was
• 2:38
  OK. And so, and then I went out and
• 2:39
  did a book signing. So it was great.
• 2:41
  You know, it's a simple, nice, strong title which I like.
• 2:43
  Amazing. And then you've got this new
• 2:46
  work, your research you're doing on the growing phenomenon of
• 2:50
  young adults going no contact with their parents over
• 2:53
  ideology. Right.
• 2:54
  Yep, tentatively called no contact.
• 2:56
  So, yeah, it's a new, new rising phenomenon.
• 2:59
  It's been written about in the New York Times, I think three
• 3:02
  Times Now, maybe 4. I mean, it's being written about
• 3:05
  more and more often. New Yorkers covered it, The
• 3:07
  Guardian, Time magazine, NPR. I mean, it's exploded
• 3:12
  everywhere. And the storylines tend to be,
• 3:14
  you know, why is Gen. Z cutting off their parents and
• 3:17
  often over ideology. And it's a lot of kind of head
• 3:21
  scratching and what's happening covering this phenomenon.
• 3:23
  Not sure exactly what to do with it.
• 3:25
  So I had already decided to write the book before I started
• 3:27
  seeing all these articles. So it's interesting to see them
• 3:29
  all come out as I'm writing it. I'm trying to write it faster,
• 3:31
  faster. Vox 2.
• 3:33
  Vox has written about it several times.
• 3:34
  But umm, So yeah, there's a certain urgency.
• 3:36
  And I think, you know, the election 2024 kind of probably
• 3:39
  led to a lot of articles emerging because of this.
• 3:41
  But I actually want to write about it because I've just been
• 3:44
  seeing it on the ground anecdotally.
• 3:46
  You know, I've been going around the country for, I guess four
• 3:48
  years now talking about woke, the woke movement and how it
• 3:52
  affects families in particular. That's kind of the intersection
• 3:55
  of my interest is how does ideology affect the family?
• 3:59
  And I noticed that at Q and AI had one question or comment
• 4:03
  every single time and it would be somebody would stand up and
• 4:06
  say my adult children or my adult grandchildren are they
• 4:11
  know they've left the faith. They barely talk to me.
• 4:14
  They, you know, kind of don't value any of the things that
• 4:17
  I've tried to pass along to them.
• 4:19
  And sometimes we're completely estranged, you know, so that it
• 4:22
  was a spectrum of our relationship is very strange.
• 4:24
  I have to tiptoe around my kids or or they they've cut me off
• 4:28
  all together. So I just thought, you know,
• 4:29
  gosh, what is happening? I'm seeing this anecdotally and
• 4:32
  then so connected with agent editor and got the book set up.
• 4:37
  But yeah, meanwhile all these articles have exploded.
• 4:40
  So it just seems like this is an urgent, maybe new crisis the
• 4:44
  families facing that I think is only going to play out in more
• 4:48
  escalating ways as time goes on. I think what you're the project
• 4:51
  that you're undertaking is incredibly important and I think
• 4:54
  it affects everyone because we're whether we are in that
• 4:57
  family system where this estrangement or ideological
• 5:00
  tension is happening or we know people.
• 5:02
  I think pretty much everyone now knows someone who somebody
• 5:05
  wouldn't talk to somebody or somebody didn't have someone
• 5:07
  over for dinner or something. Something happened to breakdown
• 5:10
  otherwise typical bonds because of ideology.
• 5:13
  So I'm very excited to dive in. For those that, though, aren't
• 5:17
  familiar yet with your work, give us more about Noel, your
• 5:20
  background. I thought you interested in all
• 5:22
  of this. Yeah.
• 5:23
  Whatever else you want to share. I've been married for 26 years.
• 5:27
  We have six children, our first grandchild, our daughter,
• 5:30
  grandchild Evangeline, who's the cutest and our so we've got 3
• 5:35
  still at home that's. Crazy.
• 5:36
  You have grandkids, Noel, What's that?
• 5:37
  That's crazy. You have a grandchild.
• 5:39
  That's crazy. Awesome.
• 5:40
  It is awesome. Everyone says it's great and it
• 5:42
  truly is. So I was a stay at home mom for
• 5:45
  most of that time and then started dipping my toe into
• 5:49
  various projects and started writing around 20/17/2018 and
• 5:53
  then that turned into I connected with an old friend
• 5:55
  Carrie Gress from I Went to Franciscan with.
• 5:58
  We've had her on the show, folks.
• 5:59
  She's been on the show now, yeah.
• 6:01
  So we started the theology of home, the book series, which is
• 6:05
  now a four books and a website, a shop, original content.
• 6:10
  So that's been great. That's and we found an
• 6:13
  institutional home, EPPC ethics and public policy Center where
• 6:16
  we Co direct the theology of home project and but they're
• 6:19
  very supportive of all of our extra work too.
• 6:21
  I mean the ideology, the no contact book.
• 6:24
  So all of that is housed with EPPC, which is great.
• 6:27
  We have amazing colleagues. So yeah.
• 6:31
  So it's just that's slowly taken more and more of my time
• 6:34
  writing, speaking, working on TOH and talking to great people
• 6:39
  like you. So it's been a great blessing.
• 6:41
  I mean, I think I've been always been passionate about how our
• 6:44
  beliefs affect the way we live and how it affects, you know,
• 6:47
  culture war issues, which I think that term gets kind of
• 6:50
  denigrated, but it's actually they're really important issues.
• 6:52
  And the denigration is maybe part of kind of undermining
• 6:55
  their value. But they affect us deeply and
• 6:58
  people are interested in them for good reasons because they
• 7:00
  tend to work out in very personal ways in our lives and
• 7:03
  unfold in various ways. So.
• 7:06
  So yeah, that's kind of been the heart of my work.
• 7:07
  And sometimes people say, oh, you wrote write about the woke
• 7:10
  movement, but then you write about home.
• 7:11
  And I think those are two sides of one coin in a way, right.
• 7:14
  You know, I mean, we have to both critique what is attacking
• 7:17
  the family, but also, you know, uplift and and value and kind of
• 7:21
  maybe give a vision for what ought to be.
• 7:24
  Yeah. And you're out here in
• 7:25
  California? Ventura.
• 7:27
  OK, you're in Ventura. So, you know, from what I
• 7:28
  understand of your world, which is kind of adjacent to my world,
• 7:31
  this whole space of Southern California, you have like this
• 7:35
  deep faith and people that are Building Schools and
• 7:37
  institutions and businesses and certainly families, parishes who
• 7:41
  are just on fire for values and faith and timeless truth.
• 7:45
  And then you're surrounded by, you know, the, you know,
• 7:49
  attitudes of the age and also like California and you've got
• 7:52
  like, Hollywood over there. And then up north of Silicon
• 7:54
  Valley and big tech. And there are these ideologies
• 7:57
  that are particularly, I would say, vicious that can originate
• 8:02
  or at least find special life and power.
• 8:05
  So I think about Gavin Newsom when he was the mayor of San
• 8:07
  Francisco, CA via ballot votes to make marriage clear as one
• 8:14
  man and one woman. So gay marriage, you know,
• 8:16
  marriage is naturally a one man and one woman.
• 8:18
  Any other union is not a marriage.
• 8:20
  You can have other unions, but those are not marriages.
• 8:22
  They don't get the special rights of marriages, privileges
• 8:24
  and responsibilities of marriage.
• 8:25
  Anyways, Gavin Newsom, who's now our governor, was the mayor of
• 8:28
  San Francisco and he actually violated that order and was
• 8:31
  giving out marriage licenses to same sex couples.
• 8:34
  Like this was like his big event that he staged.
• 8:36
  So anyways, I say all that to say, do you think your
• 8:39
  experience of being in California, how do you think
• 8:41
  that's affected the way that you view between your faith, your
• 8:44
  values and then this kind of state that we're in where like
• 8:47
  the culture war is very much here.
• 8:49
  How has that shaped you, how you see things?
• 8:52
  And also you're interested in even getting involved as a stay
• 8:55
  at home mom? You're very involved.
• 8:56
  You've writing books, you're on the speaking circuit.
• 8:58
  Like you're out there. Right, right.
• 9:00
  Yeah, I'm sure it's affected me in ways that I'm unaware.
• 9:02
  I mean, when I go to talk to friends in more red states,
• 9:05
  they'll say, you know, we tend to be a little bit more
• 9:07
  complacent and our California friends tend to be pretty
• 9:09
  galvanized. And I think that's probably a
• 9:11
  product of your, as you're saying, just being here.
• 9:14
  And another nice thing that I like about being in California
• 9:16
  is I've always had lifelong dear friendships with people who are
• 9:19
  very progressive and outside the faith and, you know, think very
• 9:22
  differently than I do. And I, and I think that that's
• 9:24
  always been something that has made this sort of writing,
• 9:27
  particularly in a mission of mine, is that it's, you know, I
• 9:31
  see the, the viciousness of the ideology and I also see the dear
• 9:36
  hearts of some of the people who are consumed by it.
• 9:37
  And it may be brought into it. And so that kind of makes me
• 9:42
  want to write about it with strength, but also with a lot of
• 9:45
  love because of the people that I'm thinking of.
• 9:47
  You know, there's not an abstraction.
• 9:49
  Those relationships have always been very important to me.
• 9:51
  And I think I've always kind of prided myself on being able to
• 9:54
  maintain them. And it changed a little bit in
• 9:55
  2020, I'm sure this. And so this is one of the
• 9:58
  reasons why I think the no contact book is interesting is
• 10:00
  because it's not just, you know, it's I'm primarily writing about
• 10:03
  kids and their parents, but we've all had friendships that
• 10:06
  have gotten really strained, right, over the last five years.
• 10:09
  And so that's been a real test of how, you know, how are we
• 10:12
  going to maintain kind of unity amongst difference and you know,
• 10:15
  not just in a microcosm of one particular friendship or
• 10:18
  community, but as a country, you know, can we, I mean, how can we
• 10:21
  move forward in the home, in the community and in the country?
• 10:24
  And seems like those are all connected to in my mind.
• 10:27
  It's 4th of July, you guys, happy 4th of July and now is the
• 10:30
  time to celebrate those American companies that we love and get
• 10:34
  the best sales. And that's why I'm so excited
• 10:36
  that Nimi Skin Care, the brand that I use, the brand that I
• 10:38
  love that has the best products like the brightening day
• 10:40
  protection sunscreen here that I use every morning and like the
• 10:44
  Age Defying Antioxidant moisturizer that I use every
• 10:46
  night. These products are 15% off
• 10:49
  today. You can go to nimiskincare.com
• 10:51
  and patronize this amazing company that supports our
• 10:54
  values. That's an American based
• 10:55
  company, all products made in the USA and you get a full 15%
• 10:59
  off your order today using the code yes Freedom.
• 11:02
  I love Nimi because their approach is refreshingly simple
• 11:05
  and honest. You're getting clinically proven
• 11:07
  ingredients that actually work for your skin.
• 11:09
  I also love the fact that the Nimi skin care lines are simple.
• 11:12
  I'm a simple gal. I don't like a million products
• 11:14
  and having to like sift through all of these different packages
• 11:18
  With Nimi Skin Care, it's a very.
• 11:19
  Simple line, you get a few products per line and you can
• 11:21
  pick the one that works best with your skin type and you can
• 11:24
  order any product on the Nimi website using the code freedom
• 11:28
  and get a full 15% off your order.
• 11:31
  Do you think that the phenomenon of people going no contact is a
• 11:35
  consequence of the pandemic and like the whole vaccine mandate
• 11:40
  stuff, some people choosing to vax and not vax and all the
• 11:42
  judgement that happened? Yeah.
• 11:45
  I mean, I think that certainly escalated a lot of things.
• 11:47
  For one thing, people are much more able to be controlled when
• 11:51
  they are isolated. Isolation and anxiety makes
• 11:56
  people yearn for some sort of powerful figure to come come
• 12:00
  down and on the the enemies that that they see are a threat to
• 12:04
  them. So whether that be the end
• 12:05
  vaccinated out there or you know, whatever, there are people
• 12:08
  who don't believe the right things.
• 12:10
  Certainly the COVID times made left a lot of people very
• 12:12
  isolated and alone and anxious and scared.
• 12:15
  And you know, I think we have left people without sort of a
• 12:19
  way of foundation for contextualizing suffering.
• 12:21
  I mean, that was the biggest thing that was alarming to me is
• 12:24
  that, you know, I could not. My father passed away in 2022
• 12:28
  and I remember the whole time in his bedside thinking if I were
• 12:31
  doing this over FaceTime, which a lot of people did in 20/20/22
• 12:35
  on, I mean I would want to stage a revolution at that point.
• 12:39
  You mean it's so inhuman? And what's so inhuman about it,
• 12:42
  too, is they're dying. And the risk to of COVID is to
• 12:47
  whom, you know, it's like, like, are they gonna die a lot?
• 12:49
  Like, yeah, how's this? Who who is this actually
• 12:52
  helping? Right.
• 12:52
  Serving. It's not the worst.
• 12:55
  It's not the most inhuman thing. I mean, there's far we are needs
• 12:58
  to balance, you know, the medical necessities with real
• 13:02
  human needs, which are to be with each other and to be with
• 13:05
  our loved ones to console them. And meanwhile, you're thinking,
• 13:08
  you know, OK, so I guess this is a virus that I can catch at the
• 13:12
  playground and at my child's therapy, you know, physical
• 13:16
  therapy appointment or but I can't catch it in, you know, a
• 13:19
  bar or in a strip club or in a BLM protest.
• 13:22
  You know, there are all these arbitrary places you could go
• 13:25
  and places you couldn't go. You know, you can't go to
• 13:27
  church, but you can go here. You know, it's just say.
• 13:29
  Abortion clinics are. Right, exactly.
• 13:31
  That just blew my mind. Yeah, the churches were closed
• 13:34
  and the abortion clinics. Yeah, yeah.
• 13:36
  So I mean, the absolute of it combined with the censorship, I
• 13:40
  mean, there just was a time. And so I think, you know, it
• 13:42
  sorted people, you know, it's sorted people or people really
• 13:45
  scared and isolated and really ready to be angry at someone.
• 13:48
  And then a lot of people were like, Oh my gosh, this is
• 13:51
  massive overreach of power. You know, how can we be
• 13:55
  succumbing to this? So, you know, it made people.
• 13:57
  I think it created a lot of division.
• 13:59
  What has been the most tragic story that has caught your eye
• 14:04
  with regard to Gen. Zers?
• 14:06
  Younger people going no contact over ideology with their their
• 14:10
  own loved ones, especially their parents.
• 14:11
  Yeah, there's one story. So I've been interviewing a ton
• 14:14
  of families and one story sticks out in my mind of this dear
• 14:19
  father and mother and their daughter.
• 14:21
  She had already had always had some, maybe some comorbidity,
• 14:24
  some anxiety, some mental health stuff.
• 14:26
  And she got captured by kind of a really alternative group and
• 14:30
  was online a lot. And, you know, they like online,
• 14:34
  Yeah. And then, you know, parents have
• 14:35
  all sorts of regrets, of course, but.
• 14:37
  How old was she? Sorry.
• 14:38
  She was about 16 when it started.
• 14:40
  Yeah. And then she came out as gay,
• 14:42
  and then she came out as transgender.
• 14:45
  But she was just in, you know, having fits of rage even before
• 14:50
  starting. Testosterone can put you into
• 14:52
  fits of rage, but she was already sort of in that place,
• 14:55
  very highly emotionally reactive, real black and white
• 14:58
  thinking, entitled, you know, there's three signs of, you
• 15:01
  know, kind of mental pathologies.
• 15:04
  And she, you know, her father, her parents really tried to
• 15:07
  accompany her at one point. She the last time we talked to
• 15:10
  her, she looked at him and basically gave him ultimatum
• 15:13
  said, you know, your, your, your Catholic faith or me.
• 15:16
  I can't believe you'd choose your your religion over me, your
• 15:19
  daughter or your son, you know, at that point and and you know,
• 15:23
  he said something effective. I love you and I, but I also am
• 15:26
  not going to leave our Lord. And he realized that, you know,
• 15:29
  he she was asking him. It was a moment of apostasy.
• 15:33
  You know, that he used to be presented with a moment of
• 15:34
  apostasy. And I think, you know, we always
• 15:36
  think that that would come, you know, at the end of a long a
• 15:38
  gun, you know, in some sort of war or some, you know, political
• 15:43
  prisoner. To have it be coming from the
• 15:45
  person to whom you're most, you know, beholden to protect and
• 15:50
  the person you most care about in the world presenting you with
• 15:53
  that choice is wild and rather diabolical.
• 15:56
  And, you know, one things I realized is that the parents,
• 15:59
  these parents are really particularly with the gender,
• 16:02
  the parents are really an existential threat to their
• 16:05
  identity. First of all, they have an
• 16:06
  unstable identity. Gender fluidity is by definition
• 16:09
  unstable identity. But as parents, you have a
• 16:13
  Canon, a memory for your child that they don't have for
• 16:16
  themselves. You know, I remember when my
• 16:17
  children were one or when they were newborn.
• 16:20
  They don't remember that. And so they're, you know, my
• 16:25
  memory, our memory for our kids is more comprehensive than their
• 16:28
  own. And so we can pretend like we're
• 16:31
  going along with a change in identity, but they know that we
• 16:34
  are a reminder of an identity that just won't die.
• 16:37
  And so I think parents will always be a threat, particularly
• 16:40
  for these poor kids who are gender confused.
• 16:43
  Where do you make the distinction between there are
• 16:47
  abusive parents that exist, there are narcissistic parents
• 16:49
  that exist, there are, you know, boundaries that are healthy that
• 16:55
  some children should have with their, especially adult
• 16:57
  children, I should say, should have with their parents, right?
• 17:00
  And so how do you discern, and I know you're exploring this in
• 17:03
  the book, but how do you discern between a healthy boundary and
• 17:07
  then an ideological called no contact or let's call it a
• 17:12
  healthy boundary versus an ideological boundary?
• 17:14
  Actually, maybe use that framework to keep it simple.
• 17:17
  How do you How do you make the? How do you discern?
• 17:19
  That it's such an important question.
• 17:21
  And so, yeah, the so I'm making a big point of the book to say,
• 17:24
  you know, if your parents are abusive, if you, you know, there
• 17:27
  are situations where going no contact is the right and healthy
• 17:30
  choice. And it's it.
• 17:31
  Would be those situations by the way.
• 17:33
  Well, the historical reasons are abuse.
• 17:36
  A divorce oftentimes leads to no contact for sometimes just and
• 17:39
  sometimes less just reasons, mental illness, severe
• 17:42
  addictions. This is historically why in
• 17:45
  modern West, people have gone into contact with parents.
• 17:48
  You know, if you go back further in the history, which I do,
• 17:51
  there's always been some sort of version of kind of family
• 17:54
  estrangement, banishing a relative.
• 17:56
  And often, you know, the thing that changed is that
• 17:58
  historically it was always for the sake of preserving some sort
• 18:01
  of societal cohesion. So maybe somebody is, you know,
• 18:05
  a live wire, he's a vicious person or he's dangerous or he's
• 18:08
  a threat to the community. He might, you know, be put in
• 18:10
  prison or banished in, you know, older times for good or for
• 18:13
  I'll, or commits treason or something.
• 18:17
  Or if, you know, someone is severely addicted to something
• 18:19
  and they're, you know, they're too, it's too threatening.
• 18:21
  They're dangerous. Yeah.
• 18:23
  But something switched, particularly in the 20th century
• 18:26
  when, you know, the rise of ideologies, the type of family
• 18:30
  estrangement. And they weren't even calling it
• 18:32
  that, but that's what it was, became ideological, meaning it
• 18:36
  changed in two particular ways. One, it was directed from the
• 18:39
  younger towards the older. And secondly, the big change was
• 18:42
  that it was not for the sake of preserving unity, but for the
• 18:46
  sake of the interruption of that relationship.
• 18:49
  It was for the sake of changing the culture in a revolutionary,
• 18:51
  utopian way. So like in Mao and Chairman Mao
• 18:54
  would say, you know, we have to get rid of the four olds, old,
• 18:58
  old religion, old ideas, old culture, old, old habits or
• 19:01
  whatever. But old people were part of
• 19:03
  that. And so they had all of these,
• 19:06
  you know. Yeah, the Chinese youth movement
• 19:09
  that were part of the Communist Party.
• 19:11
  They had them, you know, denounce their parents on stage
• 19:14
  in front of a bunch of, you know, in front of a bunch of
• 19:16
  people. That's so crazy.
• 19:17
  And that was, you know, for replacing the loyal familial
• 19:22
  piety with piety to the state, you know, to, to a, to a
• 19:26
  Chairman Mao. He became both the spiritual
• 19:28
  leader and the father, father leader.
• 19:31
  And I think we're seeing something similar to that now.
• 19:33
  You know, it's not in that dramatic way.
• 19:35
  It's more coming. It's viral, I would say now.
• 19:38
  So it's coming from the individual himself.
• 19:40
  It's not like someone's coming to a kid and saying, hey, you
• 19:42
  should cut off your parents. But it is all over TikTok.
• 19:46
  You know, there's what I call TikTok psychologists and like
• 19:49
  the hashtags, toxic parents, narcissistic parents, and these
• 19:53
  are all over with tons of views. And I think, you know, there's
• 19:56
  something really appealing to once you elevate kind of the
• 20:02
  identity of woundedness as being something that kind of gives you
• 20:05
  a platform and an importance and explains away maybe some
• 20:08
  sufferings that you have in your life or some ways you haven't
• 20:11
  been able to thrive. You start looking your history
• 20:14
  for a culprit for that and parents are kind of a natural
• 20:16
  place to put that. And so if you've got all of
• 20:19
  these viral kind of influencers talking to you to, you know,
• 20:22
  this really freed me. I walked away from my family and
• 20:25
  it's amazing. I feel fantastic now and then
• 20:28
  they have like quizzes, you know, where your parents not
• 20:30
  there for you, an important moment.
• 20:32
  Did your parents ever kind of withhold affection from you?
• 20:36
  This is called the Barnum effect.
• 20:37
  It's this phenomenon where generalized statements you can
• 20:40
  think applies to you personally. It's like fortune cookies or
• 20:42
  like horoscopes or you know, and so they will conflate sort of
• 20:46
  like abuse with very simple kind of normal, maybe parenting
• 20:49
  failures. You know, I mean, we're all
• 20:51
  going to fail our kids at some point or another, hopefully not
• 20:54
  in ground horrible traumatic ways.
• 20:55
  But, you know, I might be busy one day and not realize this kid
• 20:58
  is about his feelings hurt and I'm not giving them proper
• 21:00
  attention. And I, I can find, once I find
• 21:03
  out, I can apologize for that, But you know, for them to, for
• 21:05
  they, but for kids, they can easily look back in their
• 21:07
  history, find those moments and then kind of explode them in
• 21:10
  their memory to be, you know, a source of something wrong their
• 21:14
  life now. And I think that's a human
• 21:16
  temptation. We heartnutrition.com is a
• 21:19
  vitamin and supplement company that provides the highest
• 21:22
  quality researched back ingredients, customized and
• 21:26
  optimized to help you be healthy.
• 21:29
  What I also love about We Heart Nutrition is that this is a
• 21:31
  family owned company and they donate a full 10% back of all of
• 21:35
  their revenue to pregnancy resource centers to help moms
• 21:38
  and babies in need. So whether you are premenopausal
• 21:41
  or postmenopausal, whether you're looking to conceive, how
• 21:44
  improve your fertility, whether you're pregnant and this is a
• 21:46
  great prenatal vitamin or your post Natal plus, I'm very
• 21:50
  excited to share this with my husband.
• 21:52
  Now we Heart Nutrition has come out with their first line of
• 21:54
  men's vitamins. And if you ordered today at
• 21:57
  weheartnutrition.com, get your vitamins.
• 21:59
  You can get 20% off using the code Lila.
• 22:02
  And if you spend at least $50, you will get a free signature
• 22:05
  bamboo capsule vitamin box. So go to weheartnutrition.com
• 22:08
  today. Use the code Lila at checkout to
• 22:10
  get 20% off your purchase. That's weheartnutrition.com.
• 22:15
  There's so many questions I want to have based on what you said.
• 22:17
  It's very fascinating stuff. Because on the one hand, you're
• 22:20
  talking about the fact that if I'm understanding you correctly,
• 22:23
  based on your research, this idea of the youth rejecting the
• 22:28
  elderly as opposed to revering the elderly and caring for the
• 22:32
  elderly and, and seeing them as wise sages to guide the future,
• 22:36
  right? And the youth are rebellious and
• 22:37
  all over the place, but are not even rebellious.
• 22:39
  The youth are just needing the guidance, right?
• 22:41
  That something fairly unique to the 20th century is that you had
• 22:46
  this switch where instead of the elderly being revered and wisdom
• 22:51
  being revered, it's now this really cult of youth.
• 22:55
  And I think there has always been a cult of youth to some
• 22:58
  degree, like admiration for youth and its beauty and
• 23:00
  everything else. But it now became about sort of
• 23:02
  the leadership power of youth. And you mentioned the Cultural
• 23:08
  Revolution in China and, and, and Mao and this whole rejection
• 23:13
  of old, old, old. We want the new, new, new.
• 23:16
  We had Doctor Ming Wang on the show who grew up in Communist
• 23:19
  China and he was talking about how he experienced this first
• 23:22
  hand where they literally took rounded up all the people who
• 23:25
  are college educated and sent them off to the rural parts of
• 23:31
  China and refused to let them do any meaningful intelligent work
• 23:36
  or even build fan. I mean, they had to.
• 23:38
  Basically, they lost a whole generation of intelligent, of
• 23:42
  people with skills, special intelligence, good education.
• 23:47
  They just destroyed that because they were, I think, too liberal
• 23:50
  in terms of, you know, not communist.
• 23:53
  You know, they weren't propagandized to be in the
• 23:55
  communist mold. And they needed to do that very
• 23:57
  intentionally. And they hadn't done that with
• 23:58
  that cohort. So they just shipped them off to
• 24:00
  the countryside anyways. Very fascinating stuff, like how
• 24:02
  you engineer populations, but is that your sense of it, that this
• 24:07
  idea of the youth being the wiser ones, the youth rejecting
• 24:10
  the older ones, the old ones throwing them away?
• 24:12
  That's a very modern thing. Like you don't really see much
• 24:15
  of that throughout human history.
• 24:16
  Yeah, I love the way you described it.
• 24:17
  I mean, it's very ideological and very modern, right?
• 24:20
  So I think that that's exactly right.
• 24:21
  I mean, it's reengineering. Society takes kind of a culture
• 24:24
  of forgetting, you know, that you want to interrupt and then
• 24:27
  you want to forget. You don't want a unity with
• 24:29
  what's come before you either in the reign at the, the path of
• 24:33
  history. You want to be on the next
• 24:35
  thing, right. If you want to be at the right
• 24:36
  side of history, you want to be at the very end, the first to
• 24:39
  revolutionize the most. It creates this sort of
• 24:42
  hastening of the future and it hastening to transgress.
• 24:46
  I mean, a big part of this is, you know, of inversion of the
• 24:49
  4th commandment. You honor thy father and thy
• 24:52
  mother, which is the only commandment that has a promise
• 24:54
  so that they you can live long and flourish in the land our
• 24:57
  Lord has given you. So I think in other words, you
• 25:00
  know that there are some civic kind of implication to
• 25:03
  disregarding that commandment. And the interesting thing is
• 25:06
  that not only are we disregarding it, it really is an
• 25:09
  inversion. So there's a lot of common
• 25:11
  scripts amongst the no contact community.
• 25:14
  And one of the things that they will say is that, you know, you
• 25:18
  chose to have me. I did not choose to be born.
• 25:22
  And so you owe me everything. I don't owe you anything.
• 25:26
  And, you know, you hear in this language, they'll say, you know,
• 25:28
  I didn't consent to my life. I didn't consent to being born.
• 25:31
  And one therapist I heard actually said this phrase, which
• 25:33
  totally jolted me. But he said, it's true.
• 25:36
  You know, if you inflict life on unsuspecting flesh, you owe it a
• 25:41
  lot. And I was like, gosh, that
• 25:43
  sounds like sexual assault, doesn't it?
• 25:45
  You know, you imagine, like the gift of life.
• 25:48
  You're giving somebody their life.
• 25:50
  And I'm not going to be grateful for it.
• 25:51
  I'm going to see that as a burden, right?
• 25:54
  It's not a blessing. It's a burden.
• 25:55
  And you did this to me. You inflicted life on
• 25:59
  unsuspecting flesh. And so you know, it's a
• 26:01
  recasting of what the role of parent is.
• 26:04
  And the point of life. And the point of life.
• 26:06
  Life is inherently it's nihilistic.
• 26:08
  It's nihilism. That's right.
• 26:09
  That's right, is inherently not good.
• 26:11
  That's right. And one of the consequences is
• 26:12
  that those grown, those young adults then who are who bought
• 26:15
  into this philosophy, you know, that's language of consent,
• 26:18
  which is basically meaning, I mean, consent is there's a lot
• 26:20
  to that. It's a reflection of an
• 26:23
  autonomous understanding of the human person that has no moral
• 26:27
  language for any action except for is it consent?
• 26:29
  Did I consent to it? Anything goes if I consented,
• 26:33
  which actually prohibits any ability to contextualize when
• 26:36
  we've made bad choices and we suffer from them.
• 26:38
  You know, if I consented and then I'm suffering from it, I
• 26:40
  can't look. I consented, so it must have
• 26:42
  been fine. So who is to blame here?
• 26:43
  And it makes you look outside again.
• 26:45
  But anyway, my point was going to be the young adults who
• 26:48
  adopted this language, I did not choose to be born.
• 26:51
  They are not moving into parenthood.
• 26:54
  And it makes perfect sense because if parenthood by their
• 26:56
  own definition and framework is something that's not honorable,
• 27:00
  it's not noble. It's just a lot of work and you
• 27:04
  might end up isolated and rejected at the end of it by
• 27:07
  your. Child and you're like look at
• 27:08
  all the mistakes they made anyways.
• 27:10
  Why would you want to move into that category?
• 27:12
  And so I think it really explains a lot about why these
• 27:15
  young adults are not moving into the category of parenthood.
• 27:17
  I just listened to this interview of this beautiful
• 27:19
  Israeli director. She's a documentarian and she
• 27:22
  was talking about why she's not had children to another, an
• 27:25
  older woman who's was her friend's mom.
• 27:28
  And the woman said, you know, when you have children, you
• 27:32
  know, it, it makes you less spontaneous.
• 27:34
  You have to look at someone else's priorities and put them
• 27:37
  above your own. And she was saying these things
• 27:38
  that are about generosity. And the woman that kind of
• 27:41
  laughed and the young woman laughed and she said, you're
• 27:43
  making a case for why I don't want to be a mom.
• 27:45
  And then the older woman said, you know, don't you think that's
• 27:48
  a little bit there's a tish of selfishness to that?
• 27:51
  And she immediately became went on to kind of like almost like a
• 27:55
  sanctimonious moment. Like she said, well, you know,
• 27:58
  we think that it's actually selfish to have children because
• 28:00
  this world is really horrible and there's a lot of suffering.
• 28:03
  And you know, I did, I tell my parents all the time, I did not
• 28:06
  ask to come into this world. So, you know, so you can see how
• 28:09
  not only does it make parenthood unappealing, it also makes gives
• 28:12
  a moral cover for it. You know, for for rejecting it
• 28:15
  also. Dark.
• 28:17
  It really is. It really is.
• 28:19
  It's so dark. And it's the abortion ideology
• 28:20
  too. Like it's better to not be born.
• 28:22
  It's better to not exist. That's right.
• 28:24
  Existence itself is a. Curse.
• 28:26
  That's right. And even the people that, like
• 28:29
  the parents, happily chose for them to be born are now
• 28:33
  regretting it or they're thinking, I got to make the most
• 28:36
  of this, but I'm not going to bring children into the world
• 28:38
  now for any number of reasons. This is a an article exactly
• 28:42
  with what you're describing. This is CNBC.
• 28:44
  But neither of us feel interested.
• 28:46
  More Americans don't want kids, and it's not just because of
• 28:50
  money. And this is a review of these
• 28:54
  different perspectives saying this one young woman was looking
• 28:59
  at other single people in their 30s and 40s.
• 29:01
  And it's like, oh, that looks like fun.
• 29:02
  Why would I have a child? And it remarks about the US
• 29:06
  fertility rate, which I know you've, you know, speak spoken
• 29:09
  about and talked about the US fertility rate is 1.6 births per
• 29:13
  woman, which is cataclysmic in terms of future repercussions
• 29:19
  economically and socially because you need 2.1 children
• 29:22
  minimum per, that's right, woman to reproduce, to continue the
• 29:26
  population. The only reason we're not
• 29:28
  totally destroying ourselves is because of immigration.
• 29:31
  That's right. Yeah.
• 29:33
  No, it's, I mean, a lot of it is built around this framework of
• 29:36
  choice. My colleague in DC actually just
• 29:38
  sent me a sign outside of a fast fashion department store and
• 29:42
  it's the sign said chosen Families, Infinite Love, which I
• 29:45
  thought I've never heard of something that could be both so
• 29:47
  banal and deranged. But chosen families is another
• 29:50
  big part of this, so that that's another common thing they'll
• 29:52
  talk about. It What is a chosen family?
• 29:54
  Chosen Families has its history in LGBTQ culture.
• 29:57
  So, you know, young men would run away and live in these homes
• 30:01
  in, you know, San Francisco or something.
• 30:02
  They would have, they would create their family with a mom
• 30:04
  and a dad and a cousin and siblings.
• 30:06
  And, you know, it's all it's all met chosen families can be
• 30:10
  benign and even good. You know, if you think about,
• 30:12
  you know, everyone has the experience where good
• 30:14
  friendships become like family. You know, that, you know, we
• 30:16
  were so close that you're actually my family.
• 30:18
  That can be a sweet thing. And it can also be a vital thing
• 30:20
  when somebody has a family crisis and needs to create new
• 30:23
  community. But it also is an ideological
• 30:27
  thing. So it's really kind of exploding
• 30:29
  now where a lot of the no contact kids are talking about,
• 30:32
  you know, thank goodness I have my chosen family.
• 30:34
  The father I mentioned earlier, the first thing he saw his
• 30:37
  daughter posted on social media, you know, that she was coming
• 30:40
  out and that she has a chosen family.
• 30:42
  And it's this, you know, even if we are not going to extremes
• 30:46
  with it, it's still an ideology that affects us all.
• 30:48
  For example, I mean, I think about family life, family is a
• 30:52
  given, right? You know, I, I don't choose who
• 30:54
  I'm born to. I don't choose my siblings.
• 30:56
  You know, my kids are kind of stuck with their siblings.
• 30:58
  You know, even though we choose our spouse, there can be given
• 31:01
  us that enters into marriage where, you know, it's a given
• 31:03
  that you're near me, you know, next to me or whatever.
• 31:06
  But the magic family life is choosing what is given.
• 31:09
  You know, I'm going to choose you again every day.
• 31:12
  You know, even though I've that choice was years ago, I choose
• 31:15
  you again. And then even for my kids, I
• 31:17
  think, you know, when they have a friend come over, it's
• 31:19
  tempting to be like, Oh, I've got my friend, you know, get
• 31:21
  away siblings, you know, you don't play with us, but you
• 31:24
  know, encourage them, you know, choose to include your sibling.
• 31:27
  That is the loving thing to do. And when that starts to happen,
• 31:30
  we have stability. We have, you know, love, we have
• 31:33
  bonding. If our relationships are all
• 31:36
  built on choice, they're unstable.
• 31:37
  And if they're all built on givenness, they're impersonal,
• 31:40
  right? And so we need to really reunify
• 31:42
  that those ideas. And one of the fascinating
• 31:44
  things that's happened is that I was this man who he had a chosen
• 31:47
  family. He rejected his parents, chose
• 31:50
  his family. And this was 20 years ago.
• 31:52
  He was ahead of the curve in a lot of ways.
• 31:54
  And he said, you know, he wrote honestly about it and he said,
• 31:56
  you know, chosen family is great when you're young and good
• 31:59
  looking and capable. I'm getting old now.
• 32:03
  People are kind of walking away from me.
• 32:05
  I need more, you know, I'm vulnerable, my body's breaking
• 32:07
  down. I'm not good looking anymore.
• 32:09
  You know, I've gained whatever. And he realized, you know, you
• 32:12
  need people who are obligated to you.
• 32:14
  You need real family. You don't, you know, chosen
• 32:16
  family can't really sustain us. And so these re engineering
• 32:19
  utopian ideologies that think that we can rework all of
• 32:22
  ourselves out of this old, the construct of family life, it's
• 32:26
  not successful. It always ends up in the same
• 32:28
  way with total tragedy and disaster.
• 32:30
  And we're just repeating that again.
• 32:32
  We just had Beckett Cook on the show and he is sort of well, I
• 32:37
  think he I think I don't know if he uses this exact language, but
• 32:40
  it's certainly connected to his book and everything in his life.
• 32:43
  Ex gay. So he lived the gay life and he
• 32:46
  was this, you know, from a Catholic family, youngest of
• 32:49
  eight kids kind of left, went to LA, did his own thing, live this
• 32:53
  other life. And then he had a big
• 32:55
  conversion. And part of the impetus for that
• 32:58
  big conversion is he was getting older and he looked around at
• 33:01
  his life, which was was fun. He hung out with all these big
• 33:05
  famous people in Hollywood and creative and interesting and
• 33:08
  artistic and like the depth he was hungry for like something
• 33:12
  deeper, more than like they're cool, fun pursuits, like family.
• 33:16
  It was another part of that. And then also he felt the sense
• 33:20
  of what's my future going to hold because, you know, he made
• 33:24
  this joke when we were talking about the, you know, gay men of
• 33:26
  LA, when they get older, they're put out to pastor in Palm
• 33:29
  Springs. It was the language that he used
• 33:30
  was like very funny. But he was, it's a real
• 33:33
  phenomenon of like, well, who's going to care for me?
• 33:35
  Who's going to be there for me? By nature, it's a naturally
• 33:38
  sterile relationship unless you adopt or, you know, use some
• 33:41
  reproductive technologies. But like, you're not fruitful.
• 33:44
  You're not building families. There's not a mother and a
• 33:46
  father. And I think because of all the
• 33:49
  woundedness people experience from broken families, divorce
• 33:52
  culture of the 70s, sixties, 70s and 80s and beyond, sexual
• 33:56
  revolution, people can come up with enough reasons to say, I
• 34:00
  reject that. Like, I reject my parents way of
• 34:03
  doing things. I reject the way they hurt me.
• 34:04
  I reject, I reject and reject. But it's like, OK, well, what
• 34:08
  are you going to build now? Yeah.
• 34:09
  What's, what's your superior plan to all the old ways?
• 34:14
  Oh, yeah. And there's just total chaos
• 34:16
  right now. Yeah.
• 34:17
  Yeah. Seven Weeks Coffee is America's
• 34:19
  pro-life coffee company on a mission to fund the pro-life
• 34:22
  movement and help moms and babies in need.
• 34:24
  My favorite is the Ethiopia medium roast.
• 34:27
  Its notes are smooth, chocolate and floral.
• 34:29
  It is absolutely delicious. You have all kinds of blends
• 34:32
  available on thesevenweeks.com website.
• 34:34
  What I love about this coffee is it is from the top one or 2% of
• 34:37
  beans in the world and it's also mold free, pesticide free, ultra
• 34:40
  low acid and organically farmed. And this is where you and I come
• 34:44
  in. Not only can we subscribe to
• 34:45
  Seven Weeks Coffee and get the most delicious coffee delivered
• 34:47
  right to our door, we know that with every single purchase we
• 34:50
  make at Seven Weeks Coffee, they are donating a full 10% to
• 34:54
  pregnancy resource centers in need and they have donated
• 34:57
  almost $1 million. You can actually help them get
• 35:00
  over the $1 million mark by ordering your coffee from 7
• 35:04
  weeks today. Go to sevenweekscoffee.com
• 35:07
  today, subscribe and save a full 15% off your order.
• 35:10
  And when you use the code Lila, you get an additional 10% off
• 35:14
  your first order. That's a full 25% off your your
• 35:17
  first order at sevenweekscoffee.com and you'll
• 35:19
  also get a free gift. Order today and help fuel the
• 35:22
  pro-life movement. No, absolutely.
• 35:25
  I mean, I just, this is kind of on a different note, but I
• 35:27
  similar, I just didn't let Coletta pilgrimage to Poland
• 35:30
  with Father Dave Pavanca and we went to Auschwitz.
• 35:33
  I'd never been there. Wow, how was that?
• 35:34
  Oh my gosh. I mean, seeing Maximilian
• 35:36
  Colby's cell was so striking to me.
• 35:39
  I mean, first of all the stories.
• 35:40
  And so I didn't know the full extent of how he how he died,
• 35:43
  but I was struck by, you know, they've got a candle in there
• 35:46
  too, from J when JB 2 visited in a plaque.
• 35:49
  And I was, you know, praying in front of it.
• 35:51
  And I thought every utopian ideology promises heaven and
• 35:55
  they turn this world into hell. And our Lord takes undeniable
• 36:01
  hell and injects heaven right into it through love, right
• 36:05
  through this St. through the grace that is on offer.
• 36:07
  But wow, it was such a juxtaposition.
• 36:10
  I mean, seeing like this is a site of absolute help.
• 36:12
  A St. was made here. You know, people are converted
• 36:15
  from that love witness of that St. that martyr.
• 36:18
  This is. I mean, no one remembers the
• 36:19
  name of the commandant who put him to death, but everyone
• 36:21
  remembers St. Maximan and Colby.
• 36:23
  How many people have converted because of him that we don't
• 36:25
  even know about? You know, like.
• 36:26
  Tell a story. I mean, for folks listening, a
• 36:28
  lot of people might know. But can you?
• 36:29
  Yeah. So what?
• 36:30
  And what did you learn that was new that you didn't realize?
• 36:32
  Because you, I'm sure, had heard of him before.
• 36:34
  Oh, yeah. Yeah.
• 36:35
  From World War 2. What did you learn that was new?
• 36:37
  By going to Auschwitz and seeing the place where he was killed.
• 36:39
  Yeah. Well, so he was, he was a
• 36:42
  Franciscan Friar priest. He was really amazing.
• 36:44
  And he had a radio show. He had a huge reach.
• 36:47
  He was very influential. He was, you know, a priestly
• 36:50
  influencer of the time. I didn't know that.
• 36:52
  That was once things that surprised me.
• 36:54
  So he was putting Auschwitz arrested.
• 36:55
  Put Auschwitz, and for what? A political dissident?
• 36:59
  I guess I could be wrong. He was a Christian.
• 37:01
  He wasn't Jewish, right? He wasn't Jewish, but he sided.
• 37:04
  Too much with the Jews basically and criticized the.
• 37:06
  He was an influential person and of course, Christianity is
• 37:10
  always an enemy to utopian ideology.
• 37:13
  So he's arrested a prisoner, attempts an escape and so the
• 37:17
  commandant decides to to make an example out of him by then just
• 37:23
  picking 10 prisoners to to die in starvation in a starvation
• 37:27
  cell. So he picks 10.
• 37:29
  One of them, one of the the 10 starts crying out for his wife
• 37:33
  and children, saying I'm a father, I'm a husband.
• 37:36
  So Maximilian Colby steps in front.
• 37:37
  He said, let me take his place. And he said, the commandant
• 37:40
  said, who are you? And he said I'm a Catholic
• 37:41
  priest, which I kind of love that.
• 37:42
  He didn't say his name or, you know, he just said, I and this
• 37:45
  is who I am. It's my identity.
• 37:47
  And so by the grace of God, he's allowed to take the place.
• 37:50
  I mean, the commandant could have said no and they're put in
• 37:52
  a starvation cell and about day 16 starving.
• 37:56
  Could have also killed them both.
• 37:57
  That's true. Like they ate such a risk.
• 37:59
  Right. The fact that he let this moment
• 38:01
  of love and saying, I mean, it's amazing.
• 38:02
  But it's such a risk that Maximilian Colby offered
• 38:04
  himself. Yeah, because he might not have
• 38:06
  even have been able to save that guy's life.
• 38:08
  That's right. That's.
• 38:08
  Right. And just like he was throwing
• 38:09
  his life to the wind. But there was a chance of saving
• 38:11
  the guy's life, and he took the chance.
• 38:13
  That's right. It's.
• 38:13
  Yeah. Gives me chills.
• 38:15
  So on day 16, I think 6 of the prisoners had died of
• 38:18
  starvation. There are 4 left.
• 38:19
  I could be wrong, but something like that.
• 38:21
  And they're, you know, in this hellish environment and the
• 38:25
  guards are sick of hearing St. Maximilian Colby sing his love
• 38:28
  of God. He was singing the.
• 38:30
  Letergy of the hours. He's singling literature of our
• 38:32
  Psalm. Yeah, beautiful.
• 38:34
  So they came in and they injected him.
• 38:37
  And this is the part I didn't know.
• 38:38
  His heart with chemicals that and he lifted his arms to make
• 38:42
  it easier on them. And I I made it just
• 38:46
  disintegrated his body. But so there's nothing left of
• 38:48
  him. But he had had a Barber who had
• 38:50
  a strange sense that that this was a very holy man and he saved
• 38:54
  some of his hair. So there is a relic of him which
• 38:57
  is wild. But yeah.
• 38:58
  So anyway, I know it took us on a totally different tangent, but
• 39:01
  you know, I've just been, it's been part of my prayer life ever
• 39:03
  since to seeing that was so striking.
• 39:04
  And the juxtaposition of, you know, social re engineering,
• 39:08
  what they promise, what they deliver, what Christ promises
• 39:12
  and also delivers, you know, could not be more opposite the
• 39:15
  inversion. And then, you know, I mean, the
• 39:17
  whole situation was a lie that St.
• 39:18
  Maximilian Colby was in, and he took that inversion and with
• 39:21
  Christ, he righted it, you know, and by injecting love into it,
• 39:25
  it's beautiful. Why is it so important to honor
• 39:28
  thy father and thy mother? Why?
• 39:29
  Why is why does that commandment exist?
• 39:33
  Good question. You and your future generations
• 39:35
  should prosper. Is is the rest of the.
• 39:38
  Well, that's a part of it. I think there's also a lot of
• 39:39
  natural reasons. So we are practicing being
• 39:43
  obedient to authority and imperfect authority, right?
• 39:46
  And that's an important skill to learn.
• 39:47
  I mean, on a practical level that we might have to obey
• 39:51
  things that we don't necessarily agree with or don't quite
• 39:53
  understand. And God rightly gives us from
• 39:56
  our the time we're small, someone to kind of direct that
• 39:59
  obedience towards. But also someone who loves us
• 40:03
  personally, right. So I mean the value of the, you
• 40:05
  know, the, the power of the families that I it's benevolent
• 40:09
  authority in, in, in a well ordered family.
• 40:12
  We have this false dichotomy in society where we think of all
• 40:15
  authority is collapsed into authoritarianism.
• 40:17
  So if you think about there being authority or hierarchy or
• 40:20
  anything, we think immediately, oh, oppression, it's not true.
• 40:25
  Proper authority is benevolent, right?
• 40:26
  It's for the sake of the good. It's for it's Commission from
• 40:29
  above. So a real leader, real parents
• 40:32
  ought to be reverent to God himself and to be beholden for
• 40:36
  what they are creating in their home.
• 40:39
  So I think kids, you know, are given that as a instruction into
• 40:42
  the realm of authority and also, as you know, a microcosm of
• 40:47
  being a relationship with, with a good and loving Father, God
• 40:50
  himself. That, that that is, you know,
• 40:52
  how we are introduced to that sort of fatherly love, motherly
• 40:55
  love, which are, you know, 2 expressions of who, of God's
• 40:58
  nature. And so learning to serve and
• 41:01
  obey and is an introduction into reference into, into wonder.
• 41:07
  It's an introduction into there's something that there's
• 41:10
  some things in this life that are veiled that I don't totally
• 41:12
  understand, but I'm going to honor them.
• 41:15
  And I don't have full control. And I don't have full control.
• 41:17
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 41:19
  So it's incredibly important. And I think there's a lot of
• 41:21
  chaos. You know, I often times think
• 41:23
  we'll say, you know, cultural revolutions turn every member of
• 41:25
  the family into its opposite. So men tend to become weak, you
• 41:29
  know, and a sexual revolution makes men very weak.
• 41:32
  Saint Thomas Cuena says that effeminacy is the inability to
• 41:35
  endure what is arduous for the sake of what is good.
• 41:38
  So the good, the strong man is the virtuous man, the holy man.
• 41:41
  It tends to make women hardened, right?
• 41:43
  Because we are have a nature that is too valuable and
• 41:46
  vulnerable to endure the traumas of the sexual revolution.
• 41:49
  And so like a callus, we kind of contend to create a hard shell
• 41:52
  around ourselves when we're wounded, unprotected, all these
• 41:54
  things used whatever. And I think this is another type
• 41:57
  of inversion where children become the authoritarians over
• 42:01
  their parents. The parents become like the
• 42:02
  child. I just watched this one video of
• 42:04
  this granddaughter and she's interviewing her grandfather and
• 42:07
  she's, you know, asked him his name, asked him who he votes
• 42:09
  for, voted for he voted wrong. And she just begins excoriating
• 42:13
  him like she's a dictator, authoritarian father, yes,
• 42:17
  authoritarian father. Like she just starts saying, I
• 42:20
  have talked to you for so long about this.
• 42:22
  I have tried to educate you. I cannot I mean, it's it's it's
• 42:26
  wild. It's wild.
• 42:27
  I've. Seen those TikTok videos though.
• 42:28
  Oh. Yeah.
• 42:29
  Oh, yeah. And, you know, we can say that
• 42:30
  they're extreme, but they speak into a logic that's real, You
• 42:33
  know, that there's really is an authoritarianism that's risen on
• 42:36
  the left. In fact, I've been.
• 42:38
  I mean sorry I'll just quick introduct.
• 42:40
  I noticed this theme of I need to educate you or worse even you
• 42:46
  need to educate yourself. It's not my job to educate you.
• 42:49
  I'm superior in my ideology. Your ideology is bigoted, wrong,
• 42:53
  hateful, whatever title they want to put on it.
• 42:56
  I'm not even going to engage you because you're below me.
• 42:59
  Like, so go figure it out. It's not my responsibility to
• 43:03
  educate you as if A, you are actually right and they're
• 43:05
  wrong. B, they need to be educated.
• 43:07
  C they need to. I mean, like there's so many
• 43:10
  implications there. It's it's horribly
• 43:12
  condescending. Yeah, yeah.
• 43:14
  Do the work. Yeah, do the work.
• 43:16
  Yeah. So some of the stuff I've been
• 43:18
  researching lately, it's fascinating that, you know,
• 43:21
  oftentimes this is coming from the left far more than it's
• 43:25
  coming from the right. And there's some good reasons
• 43:29
  for that. So one of them being that the
• 43:33
  leftist for a long time had built into their ideology a real
• 43:35
  blind spot to their own possibility of their ability to
• 43:38
  be authoritarians. So some social psychologists
• 43:43
  call this the Loch Ness Monster theory, where they say, you
• 43:46
  know, people talk about left wing authoritarianism,
• 43:48
  authoritarianism, but there's no evidence for it.
• 43:52
  We don't really see it. It's just a figment of our
• 43:54
  imagination. It's really a right wing
• 43:56
  phenomenon. And this has a long history.
• 43:58
  I mean, Herbert Marcusa Theodorodorno, they wrote, you
• 44:01
  know, Theodorodorno wrote the F scale, the fascist scale.
• 44:04
  How do we know if someone's a fascist?
• 44:06
  And some of the traits were respect for authority.
• 44:09
  I want to preserve certain hierarchies or respect for
• 44:12
  fatherhood, I think was what, you know, just pathologize sort
• 44:15
  of things that are tend to be more conservative beliefs.
• 44:19
  So but then, you know, the 90s, these social psychologists said,
• 44:22
  you know that that is there's it really is a phenomenon purely of
• 44:24
  the right. There have been some ground
• 44:27
  breaking studies in the last some 10 years ish 1 coming out
• 44:31
  of Emory University, one from a social psychologist Luke Conway
• 44:35
  and he was in Montana. Now he thinks he's at Grove
• 44:36
  City, but they really exposed to Loch Ness theory as being a
• 44:40
  itself a fiction. So, but it's the fascinating
• 44:43
  thing is that where right wing authoritarianism tends to follow
• 44:46
  those kind of traits I mentioned, respect for
• 44:48
  hierarchy, left wing authoritarianism tends to want
• 44:51
  to break down all any hierarchy. It tends to want top down
• 44:55
  censorship, however, which is in its own way, type type
• 44:58
  hierarchy, an authoritarian 1 and it tends to, whereas the
• 45:02
  right wing wants to kind of is resistant to change.
• 45:05
  The left wing authoritarianism manifests itself in a
• 45:08
  celebration of transgression, transgressive behavior.
• 45:11
  So but because the ideals of the left believe that they are anti
• 45:16
  fascist, they're anti fascism, anti authoritarianism, they that
• 45:20
  sort of baptizes all of their behaviour in the in the social
• 45:24
  psychology from as being justifiable.
• 45:26
  And so it's a real blind, blind spot, so.
• 45:29
  They're saying they're being authoritarian in the name of
• 45:31
  fighting authoritarians. Yeah, but they don't even think
• 45:34
  that behaviour is authoritarian. So they're much more prone to
• 45:36
  political violence, for one thing.
• 45:38
  This, this is what the studies say.
• 45:41
  And much, much, much less able to identify like right wing
• 45:45
  people who are involved in the study were pretty, they were
• 45:48
  able to say, you know, I think I have a tendency maybe towards
• 45:50
  authoritarianism. The left, the more authoritarian
• 45:53
  they were, the less likely they were to say that they were.
• 45:56
  So you're saying the left they lack self-awareness?
• 45:58
  Yes, about their own issues. They tend to according to the
• 46:01
  studies. But now one good news that one
• 46:03
  of the Luke Conway points out is that he says, you know that the
• 46:06
  there is a seed of hope in here, which is because they are by
• 46:09
  sort of in principle anti authority, authoritarianism,
• 46:12
  anti authoritarianism. Once they sort of see it, they
• 46:17
  become very motivated to resolve it on their own side.
• 46:20
  And I think we're seeing a lot of that very wise.
• 46:23
  You know, there's been Bill Maher.
• 46:25
  You know, there's a lot of people who have been very
• 46:27
  progressive who are starting to say, you know, we what are we
• 46:30
  doing? So you're saying honest
• 46:31
  progressives? Yeah, actually have a great
• 46:34
  appetite for self correction? Exactly.
• 46:36
  Provided it's clear to them that they know what to correct and
• 46:39
  then they'll go to town. Yeah, they have to sort of see
• 46:41
  it. And once they see it, they tend
• 46:42
  to be really a good and and and motivated to correct it.
• 46:46
  And for all the follies of me too, right?
• 46:48
  And by the follies, I mean, you know, going too far the other
• 46:51
  direction, the, let's say, excesses.
• 46:53
  Me too. Yeah.
• 46:54
  Is a better term. Like believe all women, all
• 46:56
  women versus, well, let's generally speaking, like pay
• 46:59
  attention to, you know, these concerns and like reform, you
• 47:03
  know, sexual abuses, you know, whatever, right.
• 47:06
  But Harvey Weinstein, he was a a leftist dream boy.
• 47:10
  I mean, he was like patriotizing all the leftist causes.
• 47:13
  He was friends with all the left, just politicians.
• 47:16
  He wasn't like some raging conservative that they're like,
• 47:18
  finally we have a reason to get rid of.
• 47:19
  Him right, Right. So I think that now we can get
• 47:23
  into the argument of did you know he was clearly involved in
• 47:27
  very sleazy behavior. Is even the dynamics of the
• 47:31
  legal battle against him fully fair?
• 47:33
  Meaning, you know what was consented to versus not.
• 47:36
  We could have all those discussions, but the point still
• 47:38
  stands to your point that they outed him happily because he
• 47:43
  they were doing a self correction with there being
• 47:46
  sexual abuse and, you know, bad sexual behaviours and everything
• 47:51
  in Hollywood. Now, what's ironic about that is
• 47:54
  there's still horrible sexual behaviours in Hollywood, but
• 47:57
  they just have the vineyard of consent.
• 47:58
  Like, oh, we're all consenting to this.
• 48:01
  I'm the intimacy coordinator for the shoot.
• 48:03
  So we're going to do pornographic stuff that's super
• 48:05
  abusive, but we're all enjoying ourselves, right?
• 48:07
  It's just disgusting, right? So I don't know that we've
• 48:10
  necessarily reformed Hollywood after Me too.
• 48:11
  We I don't think we have. Well, they don't have the right
• 48:15
  moral. I mean, there's not a framework
• 48:16
  to really do the deep reform. They, it needs to be some sort
• 48:19
  of conversion or something, I think oftentimes or either
• 48:22
  intellectual conversion or spiritual conversion, because
• 48:24
  the language of consent simply is just not, it's too reductive.
• 48:27
  It can't. It can't make comprehensive
• 48:30
  sense out of the whole scope of moral wounds and hurts and abuse
• 48:33
  that can happen amongst people. Right.
• 48:37
  So what would be in your research so far, you, you're
• 48:40
  seeing this trend, you're seeing it sort of blind side parents.
• 48:45
  It sounds like a lot of parents like I don't know what to do
• 48:47
  with this. What are some of the other
• 48:49
  stories you're hearing about the experiences of parents right now
• 48:52
  and, and and that and and it increasing in the last few
• 48:55
  years? Yeah, well, so we've talked a
• 48:57
  lot of about the gender stuff that.
• 48:59
  So the three main things I'm seeing is gender voting and
• 49:03
  COVID stuff. So several stories of couples
• 49:06
  who wouldn't allow their families to come to their
• 49:08
  wedding if they didn't get, you know, the the shot One was
• 49:12
  featured in The New Yorker. New Yorker, I believe.
• 49:14
  Yeah. Featured for not allowing their
• 49:17
  family to come to their wedding. Yeah, yeah.
• 49:18
  And you know, sometimes these families are trying to do
• 49:21
  whatever they can. You know, they're saying we'll
• 49:22
  we'll self isolate. You know, they're trying
• 49:25
  everything. It just.
• 49:26
  It's it's over the backs. It's it's so ideological at that
• 49:29
  point, it's not really, it doesn't make sense.
• 49:32
  But the other is voting. So, yeah, I just spoke with this
• 49:36
  lovely woman and she, her son was, she knew he was on the
• 49:40
  progressive side. And so they, she they really
• 49:42
  didn't talk about it much. And amongst the siblings and
• 49:46
  they tried to, they weren't, it was not a point of contention,
• 49:49
  but he just became irate after the last election and, you know,
• 49:53
  put it on social media. I believe that my family voted
• 49:56
  for this person. I'm, I'm thinking about calling
• 49:58
  them and screaming and, and sure enough, she got a phone call and
• 50:03
  he was irate and, you know, and, and she said, you know, I voted
• 50:06
  for someone I thought was the more pro-life would have more
• 50:08
  pro-life policies. That's all.
• 50:09
  That was the point of my vote. And he said, well, you shouldn't
• 50:12
  have, shouldn't, should not have voted at all.
• 50:16
  And, you know, she realized at one point this wasn't going
• 50:18
  anywhere. And she said, you know, I love
• 50:19
  you. And he said, I love you too.
• 50:20
  And then they haven't, he won't speak to her anymore or nor his
• 50:24
  siblings. But so, you know, that's a big
• 50:28
  thing that's happening now. And that's been written about a
• 50:30
  lot of and, you know, this has been really normalized.
• 50:32
  I think back, look back, looking back on like the Obama
• 50:34
  administration. Do you remember Pyjama Boy?
• 50:37
  It was this campaign that the Obama administration put out as
• 50:41
  leading into the holidays. And they had this hipster young
• 50:43
  man in pyjamas and he was saying this Christmas, wear PJS, drink
• 50:47
  hot chocolate and talk about healthcare policy.
• 50:51
  And then in the Biden administration, they had
• 50:52
  something else where the Biden put out administration put out
• 50:54
  talking points about, you know, how to talk to your your uncle,
• 50:58
  your conservative uncle about abortion.
• 51:00
  And how did you know pass, pass the potatoes.
• 51:02
  You know, let's talk about how we need abortion in our state.
• 51:05
  I mean, it's nuts. But the the strange thing was
• 51:08
  that, you know, I don't remember any administration before kind
• 51:13
  of putting it right in the heart of the family like that before.
• 51:16
  Like you're going to go at your family dinner table and you're
• 51:18
  going to make this an issue away.
• 51:20
  Your political talking. Point, yeah.
• 51:22
  And and sort of leveraging the young to talk to the older
• 51:25
  people who are ignorant, you know.
• 51:27
  So in some ways, you know, we're seeing the fruits of those sorts
• 51:30
  of this has been a long time. And at some point, in some ways,
• 51:33
  you know, those campaigns were a little bit mocked and derided,
• 51:36
  but they were onto something that they knew was coming.
• 51:38
  And you would be a way to kind of that the young would be their
• 51:42
  next constituency that would really kind of either correct
• 51:45
  the olders or or just become more militant.
• 51:48
  Part of your book and research is looking at how people can
• 51:52
  respond. Yeah, on a more practical level
• 51:54
  to this growing phenomenon. And I think there's a take away
• 51:58
  for the apparent like if the parents listening, quite
• 52:00
  frankly, or grandparents. But there's also, I think just a
• 52:04
  disposition that anybody needs to have to this because it's
• 52:07
  it's happening to friends. Yes, it's less extreme when it
• 52:10
  happens. Like they unfriended me,
• 52:11
  literally, they unfriended me. I'm used to being unfriended
• 52:15
  back in the day because I, you know, my pro-life work turned a
• 52:18
  lot of people off just because they're like, so passionately
• 52:20
  for abortion. But it's much more painful when
• 52:24
  it's like a child and a parent than just like your friend.
• 52:27
  It's all it can be, all painful. Yeah.
• 52:29
  So what? What?
• 52:30
  Yeah. What is the practical takeaways
• 52:32
  that you would recommend for people who are facing being iced
• 52:34
  out over their beliefs? Well, I mean in friendship thing
• 52:37
  can be very painful too. I think, you know, a lot of
• 52:39
  people have talked to me about that.
• 52:41
  Well, you know, the one of the hard things is that particularly
• 52:44
  for moms, this can be eviscerating of their identity,
• 52:47
  right? And there's a lot of shame and
• 52:49
  secrecy around this topic because a lot of parents think,
• 52:51
  you know, who am I if I have been rejected by my own child,
• 52:54
  you know, and just feel this deep sense of embarrassment or
• 52:57
  shame, you know, and there's some murkiness there because,
• 53:00
  you know, there are, as you said earlier, there really are some
• 53:03
  toxic parents. I believe, truly believe a lot
• 53:05
  of these parents, they did what they could and they did it well
• 53:08
  and that they didn't anticipate the strength of the ideology.
• 53:12
  One parent I talked to said, you know, I think if it we, if we,
• 53:15
  if it had been 10 years earlier or 10 years later, I would been
• 53:17
  OK. 10 years earlier, all of this ideology would not have
• 53:20
  been so forceful on my kid. 10 years later, I would have been
• 53:23
  more aware. I just was at the sort of Nexus
• 53:25
  where I didn't realize what was happening.
• 53:27
  And it was really strong. So and you know, I do think that
• 53:30
  this there's a lot of good parents who are feeling shamed
• 53:32
  that ought not, you know, and I think what one things that that
• 53:35
  I will tell people is, you know, it's confusing when you're in
• 53:39
  this much pain. One mom, she went to bed for a
• 53:41
  year and a half and finally her husband said, we have to.
• 53:44
  I need you to. We need to move on with our
• 53:47
  life. You.
• 53:47
  Went to bed meaning. I mean, she's just, she stayed
• 53:49
  in bed. She stayed in bed basically
• 53:51
  could barely get out of bed for a year and 1/2.
• 53:53
  She was so distraught. And grandchildren are in the mix
• 53:56
  too. So she's not seeing
• 53:57
  grandchildren. Frozen out from her her
• 53:58
  grandkids. Yeah, and this is, I can't
• 54:00
  imagine that's not gender, that's it's politics more.
• 54:04
  So like because of how she voted she's being rejected by her kids
• 54:08
  and then she's not allowed to see her grandkids?
• 54:10
  Yeah. And there's some other dynamics
• 54:12
  there. I think that politics were maybe
• 54:13
  more of a battle and some maybe some other personality dynamics
• 54:15
  in the mix. But I mean, things that are
• 54:17
  should have been surmountable. And that's The thing is that,
• 54:19
  you know, part of the solution is I think there's collective
• 54:22
  solutions. You know, we need to be talking
• 54:24
  as a society about how we avoid this, you know, and be
• 54:26
  preventative about it. You know, how we build up
• 54:29
  families so that this does not become a thing and to expose and
• 54:33
  defeat this ideology. And then there's personal
• 54:35
  remedies too. So one thing so I'll talk to
• 54:38
  parents about is that, you know, you're going to, it's going to
• 54:39
  feel confusing. You're going to be questioning
• 54:41
  yourself. You need some objective person
• 54:44
  you're about, you're talking to to help you gain peace.
• 54:47
  You know, they need peace. Sometimes parents will become
• 54:50
  desperate and they'll, you know, make promises.
• 54:53
  You know, I've talked to this one mom who she, she was very
• 54:55
  progressive and she always celebrated the transgender
• 54:58
  movement until it was her child. And then she got really freaked
• 55:00
  out because of all the medical, you know, harm that could come.
• 55:03
  And her hesitancy was immediately sniffed out.
• 55:07
  And so she just said, just start affirming, affirming, affirming.
• 55:09
  And she said, you know, I won't pay for any of these surgeries.
• 55:11
  And then the kid kind of threatened estrangement, so she
• 55:14
  started paying for them, you know, and I think, you know, we
• 55:17
  have to figure out what lines we don't want to cross now instead
• 55:20
  of just kind of chasing a line and then crossing lines we wish
• 55:23
  we never had crossed with, you know, Christian parents often
• 55:28
  say, you know, you have to, you know, we, we need to speak truth
• 55:31
  and we need to speak it in great love, in the context of great
• 55:33
  love. I mean, a lot of times these
• 55:36
  kids are in a lot of pain. They're in a lot of confusion.
• 55:37
  They're maybe have been abused or there's, you know, some ways
• 55:40
  in which they're wounded and they're searching for clinging
• 55:42
  to this identity in a way that is desperate.
• 55:46
  And, you know, one of the first things a parent can do is not
• 55:49
  panic, but just maybe ask questions.
• 55:52
  Say, you know, how long have you been carrying this?
• 55:54
  You know, and, and be curious, you know, how can I, how can I
• 55:57
  help you in your suffering? How can I accompany you?
• 55:58
  I want to understand where you're coming from, not just be
• 56:01
  revolted or freaked out or, you know, panicking, but also, you
• 56:05
  know, never compromising the truth, you know?
• 56:08
  Should do you think family members should use another
• 56:12
  person's pronouns if that's what they're insisting, in order to
• 56:15
  maintain contact? I think you should never use
• 56:17
  pronouns or the OR the. Or the new name.
• 56:20
  I think that's a little bit more Gray of a Gray area because it's
• 56:23
  not as clear to me that that's necessarily a lie.
• 56:26
  I I would have. Like they can have a preferred
• 56:28
  nickname. Yeah, yeah.
• 56:30
  But I would never use pronouns. I mean, I just don't think we
• 56:32
  can never participate in a lie. Because if you have like a child
• 56:34
  is like I, I love you, but if you don't use my pronouns, I
• 56:39
  can't talk to you anymore because you're making me
• 56:40
  suicidal or whatever. The narrative is right.
• 56:43
  And the parents like oh shoot how bad is this?
• 56:46
  Just use a pronoun just so I can maintain contact.
• 56:49
  I totally understand that instinct and I would guard
• 56:51
  against it. I mean, I think that.
• 56:52
  I mean, I agree with you. I don't think you should tell a
• 56:54
  lie because it's not going to help them in the end, it is
• 56:56
  going to hurt. Them, right, I think that we
• 56:57
  have to be for them in a way that is even beyond what they
• 57:01
  might be presently, how they might be presently for
• 57:03
  themselves. We might be more for them than
• 57:05
  they are for themselves, but we can't turn and reduce that into
• 57:08
  being for their destruction, right.
• 57:10
  And so, so, you know, some parents, they make their highest
• 57:12
  priority maintaining contact. And I understand why they're
• 57:15
  doing that, but I don't think that be the highest priority.
• 57:17
  I think that we have to love them to the point of being
• 57:20
  willing to even sacrifice that relationship, maybe temporarily
• 57:24
  for the sake of loving them. You know, more truly, more
• 57:27
  deeply, more honestly. There's all sorts of prudent and
• 57:31
  Holy Spirit driven ways I think we should be letting you know,
• 57:34
  guiding our conversations and our interactions.
• 57:37
  You know, oftentimes I'll tell parents, don't you?
• 57:39
  Don't they know what you think? We don't always have to be
• 57:41
  telling what we think. Sometimes parents are constantly
• 57:43
  like, I'll e-mail them this article that will change your
• 57:45
  mind or I'll e-mail them the story.
• 57:47
  And I get that I would probably have that same instinct too, but
• 57:51
  sometimes that just makes them more defensive.
• 57:53
  You know, we then if we they know what we think, we don't
• 57:56
  have to keep presenting it. We need to instead maybe shift
• 57:59
  the conversation and the relationship to, I want to
• 58:01
  affirm the deeper identity that I see in you, which is not
• 58:04
  reduced to this sin or this disorder or this whatever,
• 58:08
  whatever you think it is or your political beliefs is something
• 58:10
  far deeper because these kids have unstable identities.
• 58:13
  I mean, we all can have unstable identities, you know, do we
• 58:16
  understand that we are identified by the love of God?
• 58:19
  I don't know, sometimes maybe I think I'm identified by my sin
• 58:22
  or by whether or not I'm achieving something.
• 58:25
  You know, we can make create false identities for ourselves
• 58:27
  all the time, but this generation in particular, I
• 58:29
  think has an unstable identity in in two particular ways.
• 58:32
  One, they've been told that they have immense amount of power,
• 58:35
  God like power. They can discern what the
• 58:37
  meaning of sex is, what the meaning of their body is, what
• 58:39
  the meaning of the world is, what the meaning of family is.
• 58:42
  At the same time, they're told they have no power at all, that
• 58:45
  they are total victims of systemic forces that are outside
• 58:47
  of themselves. And so this is a really strange
• 58:51
  cognitive dissonance for a kid to grow up when you.
• 58:53
  Frame it like that. That's a very good framing and
• 58:55
  clear framing. Yes, it's.
• 58:57
  Yeah, it's. I have all power and no power.
• 58:59
  I have power. I have control over things I
• 59:01
  don't have any control of. And and then at the same time,
• 59:03
  I'm saying I have no control over things that are right in my
• 59:05
  wheelhouse, right? I can actually change the, you
• 59:08
  know, I can change, make my life better.
• 59:09
  I can choose to do something different tomorrow.
• 59:11
  I can choose to, you know, have a new struggle, have a new
• 59:13
  habit, have a new work on a new virtue.
• 59:16
  But they're saying, you know, the systemic forces have led to
• 59:19
  my life and being what it is. And then, yeah.
• 59:23
  So it's this I I think that's created a lot of cognitive
• 59:26
  distance in young people and also made them very prone to
• 59:29
  anxiety. They don't know who they are.
• 59:31
  And so I think that the parent has a particular opportunity to
• 59:34
  reaffirm the deeper identity that they ought to have.
• 59:38
  What some practical ways that a parent can do that?
• 59:40
  Yeah, in. Your view?
• 59:41
  Well, I think making the relationship about something
• 59:44
  greater and bigger, so affirming the good that we see in them.
• 59:48
  There's always good that we can see and identify another person.
• 59:51
  How about we we have lunch and talk about that, You know, how
• 59:54
  about I asked you how you're doing with your friendships?
• 59:56
  What how's work going? What if I make the conversation
• 59:58
  about everything else in your life and not about this thing
• 1:00:01
  that we are locking heads about? I think those sorts of practical
• 1:00:06
  things. I think also maintaining a piece
• 1:00:08
  where. The parent needs to assume the
• 1:00:11
  dignity and nobility of the parenting role.
• 1:00:13
  Where I'm not desperate, I'm not needy, I'm not panicking.
• 1:00:17
  I've got peace. I love you.
• 1:00:19
  I'm here for you. You know, like the image of the
• 1:00:22
  prodigal father. You know, who is there ready to
• 1:00:25
  run out and welcome you at any time that you want to come back.
• 1:00:28
  This therapist I talked to, Rachel Hack, she's great.
• 1:00:30
  She said she tells parents set the table.
• 1:00:32
  Meaning just be prepared, they might go off the reservation,
• 1:00:35
  but they know where it is and they know what a kind of a
• 1:00:37
  welcome awaits them when they come back.
• 1:00:39
  So how can we be that whether we're estranged or not, even if
• 1:00:42
  we just have a strained relationship, how can I let you
• 1:00:44
  know? I'm always here for you.
• 1:00:45
  I will never abandon you. I love you.
• 1:00:47
  I love you too much to kind of support you in your sin.
• 1:00:50
  And we don't have to say those explicit words, but that's the
• 1:00:52
  disposition, right? I deeply love you and I want to
• 1:00:56
  carry your burdens with you. And I'm here for you as you want
• 1:00:58
  me to be. I'm not going to handle, I'm not
• 1:01:00
  going to tolerate, you know, abusive actions.
• 1:01:03
  A lot of these parents of their kids cannot be very abusive
• 1:01:05
  towards them. You know, that's sort of dignity
• 1:01:09
  and nobility that has peace, has their lines, but also has great
• 1:01:12
  love on offer. What is your recommendation when
• 1:01:15
  it comes to some of the more complex family dynamics
• 1:01:17
  involving children? And I'm thinking actually in
• 1:01:20
  particular about families where there are young children and
• 1:01:25
  there's a desire to protect those young children like they,
• 1:01:27
  they belong to the, the family, the, the couple that has values.
• 1:01:31
  They're trying to raise their family with faith, let's say,
• 1:01:33
  right. And then there's close family
• 1:01:35
  members who are acting very dramatically out of line with
• 1:01:41
  the moral order and they're promoting their behaviors.
• 1:01:45
  It's not like we're just doing in the privacy of our home, like
• 1:01:46
  they're promoting this sexual disorder or chaos or whatever it
• 1:01:50
  is. Do you have recommendations
• 1:01:51
  because that that's that's the kind of the opposite side of
• 1:01:54
  Fraser. I was like, well, we need to
• 1:01:55
  have our family needs boundaries with these relatives because
• 1:01:58
  they're so you know, and to swing your culture, what you
• 1:02:01
  know, whatever it is, and they're open about it and like
• 1:02:02
  we want to protect the innocence of our children.
• 1:02:04
  Have you come across that side of the equation and thoughts
• 1:02:08
  about how to deal with that in a way that's ultimately loving,
• 1:02:11
  peaceful? Yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:13
  No, I interviewed one woman who is a little bit different
• 1:02:15
  situation, but her sister is sort of a raging alcoholic.
• 1:02:19
  And they used to go on vacations together and for a time.
• 1:02:21
  And she has young kids. And for a time she thought, you
• 1:02:24
  know, I'm just going to pull back on this.
• 1:02:26
  And she know, she was prayerful about it.
• 1:02:28
  She realized, you know what, I'm going to say, let's keep doing
• 1:02:30
  our vacations. But I'm also going to say, you
• 1:02:32
  know, these are the things, you know, that we need to not do.
• 1:02:36
  And, you know, she said, you know, it's I have to grip my
• 1:02:38
  teeth a bit. And there's, you know, some
• 1:02:39
  awkwardness. She's, you know, still drinking
• 1:02:42
  a ton and, you know, kind of can be swearing sometimes and she
• 1:02:45
  catches herself and tries to stop.
• 1:02:46
  But, you know, this woman has just said, you know, you can't,
• 1:02:50
  I don't know, bring men home or, you know, whatever it is.
• 1:02:52
  You know, she gave her concrete things that were kind of
• 1:02:54
  boundaries, but she's still maintaining the relationship.
• 1:02:57
  And I think, you know, we obviously can't allow harm to
• 1:03:00
  come to our kids or it's our prior obligation.
• 1:03:03
  I think that probably kids can handle more knowledge than we
• 1:03:06
  often times think, You know, that I was surprised my kids do
• 1:03:09
  what, you know, gay was before I realized that they knew it.
• 1:03:11
  And you know, they even though they're I think in some ways in
• 1:03:14
  very Catholic community, but the world is just the world.
• 1:03:18
  And so that's OK. We can have frank discussions
• 1:03:21
  with them about that. I think they can handle it.
• 1:03:22
  So I think letting them know things that are they can handle,
• 1:03:26
  but also trying to figure out what's age appropriate and what
• 1:03:29
  behaviors are going to be too kind of scary, alarming,
• 1:03:32
  disturbing that they should be really protected from And that,
• 1:03:35
  you know, there's that takes a lot of prudence and probably
• 1:03:38
  maybe some spiritual direction because it's, it's just a real
• 1:03:40
  chasm of behaviors. You know, it's, there's a real
• 1:03:43
  spectrum there of what is tolerable, what's not, and where
• 1:03:46
  that exact line is. I'm not quite sure.
• 1:03:47
  I think people need particular advisement.
• 1:03:50
  You have a chapter about therapy and that you're working on.
• 1:03:54
  I know it's all being developed now, but you mentioned it a
• 1:03:57
  couple times and I'd love to hear more thoughts from you
• 1:03:59
  about it. This idea of lack of resilience,
• 1:04:02
  people are using this therapy speak to coming up with these
• 1:04:07
  terms to reflect reality for themselves, but it's not
• 1:04:11
  reality. They're the constant victim in
• 1:04:13
  these sort of in this framework. And everybody's out to get them
• 1:04:17
  and they have no responsibility and everybody has
• 1:04:18
  responsibility. Speak more to how and I think
• 1:04:21
  today, I don't know the numbers I should have try to pull this
• 1:04:24
  up, but let's look it up really quick.
• 1:04:25
  How many people are going to therapy today?
• 1:04:28
  Oh, I think it's. Like I think, I know that, I
• 1:04:30
  think it's about 24%. 60 million adults in the United States are
• 1:04:34
  have received treatment, treatment or counseling for
• 1:04:37
  mental health in the past year. Yeah, there's about one in four,
• 1:04:40
  I think. Well.
• 1:04:41
  Half of Jen's ears go to therapy.
• 1:04:43
  OK. Oh, interesting.
• 1:04:44
  And it's interesting because I'm not against therapy.
• 1:04:46
  On the show, we talk about therapy.
• 1:04:47
  It actually can be amazing. Totally.
• 1:04:48
  You can have really bad therapy, though.
• 1:04:50
  That can hurt you. Yeah.
• 1:04:51
  And hurt other people. And then you can also rely on
• 1:04:54
  therapy for things that you actually need.
• 1:04:55
  Friends went for. And like a faith, so it's those
• 1:05:00
  are important distinctions, but what's your take?
• 1:05:02
  That's right. Well, I think that it's
• 1:05:04
  something that statistics have jumped to the point of 22,000
• 1:05:08
  and two, I think 7% of Americans were in therapy, 2022 is 24% I
• 1:05:13
  believe it's, I mean that, but that's a pretty intense leap.
• 1:05:16
  And the more we're talking about mental health, the less mentally
• 1:05:19
  resilient we are. And I'm there's not a
• 1:05:21
  necessarily a direct causation there.
• 1:05:23
  It can just be a correlation, but I do think the correlation
• 1:05:25
  is significant. And, you know, there's a whole
• 1:05:28
  whole all sorts of parts to this.
• 1:05:30
  I mean, I've talked to a lot of therapists about there's a lot
• 1:05:32
  of gatekeeping in the accreditation of the therapy
• 1:05:35
  industry where, you know, some therapists are saying, you know,
• 1:05:38
  I just when I'm counseling kids who are have gender dysphoria, I
• 1:05:41
  just try to get them to be non binary because then they won't
• 1:05:44
  feel like they have to have surgery and they don't feel like
• 1:05:46
  they can tell them, you know, this isn't good for you.
• 1:05:48
  So they just say, you know, you might not be a boy, you might
• 1:05:50
  just be a non binary and then you don't need, you know, I
• 1:05:53
  mean, but that's how, you know, kind of a silence they are.
• 1:05:56
  So there is something there. But there are, as you said, it
• 1:05:59
  can be immensely helpful. And they're amazing therapists
• 1:06:01
  out there too. So I wouldn't want to make a
• 1:06:04
  blanket statement either. But part of this is, you know,
• 1:06:07
  once you incentivize victim identities, you create, it's an
• 1:06:14
  insatiable desire to then identify yourself as one, right?
• 1:06:17
  Because we're all tempted to that it's hard to look at
• 1:06:20
  ourselves honestly. It's really easy to deflect.
• 1:06:23
  And something's gone wrong. And I want to say, well, who,
• 1:06:25
  who made this happen? Who's who's, whose fault is
• 1:06:27
  this? I mean, that's a human
• 1:06:28
  temptation. And This is why the church is so
• 1:06:31
  beautiful. And why is because the church is
• 1:06:32
  saying, well, why don't you every day examine your
• 1:06:34
  conscience and why don't you, once we go to confession and why
• 1:06:38
  don't you do a mea culpa, the Mass, you know, in other words,
• 1:06:40
  like the church knows we're tempted by this.
• 1:06:42
  And so it's constantly redirecting us to look at
• 1:06:44
  ourselves and which makes paradoxically a more merciful
• 1:06:48
  society because once we're aware of the pollution in our own
• 1:06:50
  soul, we look with more merciful eyes upon the pollution in
• 1:06:53
  someone else's soul or the apparent pollution.
• 1:06:56
  But so once we remove sort of that scaffolding and and then
• 1:07:00
  inject an incentive to become a victim, it's really tantalizing.
• 1:07:03
  And so, you know, then you create the social media scroll,
• 1:07:06
  all these kids who have unstable identities, who are, you know,
• 1:07:08
  oftentimes making bad decisions or like, experiencing abuse
• 1:07:11
  because all of the, you know, moral guard wheels are off the
• 1:07:15
  rails. And so there's, you know, going
• 1:07:17
  through wounds and they don't have any moral grammar to
• 1:07:20
  identify why they're feeling this bad and this suffering.
• 1:07:23
  And then here come these TikTok psychologists that are saying,
• 1:07:26
  you know, well, it might be your parents, It might, you know, and
• 1:07:31
  if you're 20 years old, I mean, you don't probably have that
• 1:07:33
  many places to look other than the way you were brought up,
• 1:07:36
  right? That's kind of the most obvious
• 1:07:37
  place. So yeah, I think that's a big
• 1:07:40
  part of it. Another part that I go into in
• 1:07:41
  the book is just, you know, expressive individualism that we
• 1:07:44
  have really sort of identified our value as being how we can
• 1:07:48
  kind of live out our true self or in an authentic way into the
• 1:07:52
  world. And one way actually that I, I'd
• 1:07:55
  like to think about this because I think it's a tidy way of
• 1:07:57
  seeing the change, is that, you know, maybe 2 generations ago,
• 1:08:01
  say a woman is in love, married to a man and in love with
• 1:08:04
  another man. Two generations ago we would
• 1:08:07
  have said, well, you're living a lie.
• 1:08:10
  That lie is your fantasy with that man and you need to live
• 1:08:13
  honestly and commit to your husband.
• 1:08:15
  Now a woman who's married, in love with another man, you can
• 1:08:18
  very easily imagine her reframing that as like, my
• 1:08:20
  marriage is a lie. To live my true self, I have to
• 1:08:23
  be with this person I'm in love with.
• 1:08:24
  I mean, Bridges of Madison County and we think of how many
• 1:08:27
  movies have been built around that theme.
• 1:08:29
  So that sort of authenticity, you know, I think it's the kids
• 1:08:32
  are really deeply have absorbed. And so that creates a lot of
• 1:08:37
  moral chaos. It creates a lot of wounds and
• 1:08:39
  it creates a lot of sourcing for a culprit.
• 1:08:42
  You know, if you want to maintain a victim identity, you
• 1:08:45
  have to find in a perpetual perpetrator, you have to be an
• 1:08:49
  accuser. There's no perpetual victim
• 1:08:51
  without a person who's a perpetual accuser.
• 1:08:53
  And the accuser is the nature of the devil, right?
• 1:08:55
  So it's no wonder we're a society that's royally conflict
• 1:08:59
  accusation division. I mean, I think that's where
• 1:09:02
  we're finding ourselves now. What do you hope that this book
• 1:09:05
  and your research can lead to in terms of maybe solving some of
• 1:09:12
  this very sad trends that we're seeing?
• 1:09:14
  Yeah. Well, the nice thing about
• 1:09:17
  ideology is that it can't really withstand much scrutiny.
• 1:09:20
  You know, I mean, that's a beautiful thing about the truth.
• 1:09:22
  The truth can withstand any scrutiny.
• 1:09:24
  And that's why people who really are, you know, they have the
• 1:09:26
  preeminent value of the truth, are open to debate, you know,
• 1:09:29
  open to, you know, you want to invite objections, you want to
• 1:09:32
  course correct. Ideology is very fragious.
• 1:09:36
  What's that? Fragile.
• 1:09:37
  Fragile. It's fragile.
• 1:09:38
  It's got a hollow core. That's right.
• 1:09:40
  Yeah. It's censorious because it
• 1:09:42
  cannot thrive under scrutiny. It has to be coercive.
• 1:09:45
  It has to be silencing. And so oftentimes, ideology is
• 1:09:49
  greatly defeated by just shining light on it.
• 1:09:51
  I mean, that's what I tried to do with Awake, not woke.
• 1:09:53
  That's what I'm trying to do with this book.
• 1:09:55
  But also, I think, you know, I was listening to an expert kind
• 1:09:58
  of on in this movement the other day and I really admire him, but
• 1:10:01
  he said something that I I take issue with.
• 1:10:03
  He said, you know, we used to raise children differently.
• 1:10:06
  We used to raise them to, you know, sort of respect our values
• 1:10:10
  and, you know, I don't know, grow in the faith or conform,
• 1:10:12
  conform to good things, you know, live a solid moral life.
• 1:10:16
  And now we just they're it's all individualism.
• 1:10:18
  We're telling them be who you are in defiance of anyone who
• 1:10:22
  tells you not to be who you are. Just that's the most important
• 1:10:24
  thing to be your, yourself. And you know, which can't be a a
• 1:10:27
  fine message, but taken to an extreme, it's can be really
• 1:10:30
  deranged. And he said, you know, that ship
• 1:10:33
  has sailed. You know, we just don't, we
• 1:10:34
  don't parent like that anymore. So we need to deal with how
• 1:10:36
  we're parenting now. And I and I disagree with that.
• 1:10:38
  You know, I really think that. And when I'm one small thing I'm
• 1:10:41
  trying to do or big thing I'm trying to do with my small book
• 1:10:44
  is to say, you know, as a culture, we can change.
• 1:10:48
  You know, we really can't change how we look at how we ought to
• 1:10:51
  raise children, how we ought to relate to one another, what we
• 1:10:54
  think it it means to be human. We can change the narrative.
• 1:10:57
  And I think we're seeing that, you know, all these young adults
• 1:11:00
  coming to the church. It's a great sign of hope to me.
• 1:11:03
  And I one of the things I think is that, you know, this
• 1:11:05
  generation Gen. Z is really sorted.
• 1:11:07
  You know, there's I see this group that is kind of diving
• 1:11:10
  deeply into the city ology. And then I see this other group.
• 1:11:12
  It's like, Oh my gosh, we want God.
• 1:11:15
  And they're going to need to be deepened and directed.
• 1:11:18
  And so, you know, one rule I see for parents, particularly ones
• 1:11:21
  who are estranged, is to say, you know, why don't you mentor
• 1:11:24
  people? You know, you've got wisdom to
• 1:11:26
  share, things that you wish you'd done differently, things
• 1:11:28
  that you did well. Find other people, even if it's
• 1:11:31
  not your own children, but in your school community, maybe
• 1:11:34
  grandchildren, maybe nieces and nephews, maybe in your church.
• 1:11:37
  People need mentors because a lot of our guidance has been
• 1:11:40
  exposed to be folly. And so that person to person
• 1:11:42
  witness is going to be really important moving forward and how
• 1:11:45
  we shape, you know, the next generation.
• 1:11:47
  I love that it's very helpful. Yeah.
• 1:11:49
  Because anybody can do that. That's person to person witness.
• 1:11:52
  That's right. Pick up where you're at,
• 1:11:53
  wherever you are. Make a friend, you know, love
• 1:11:56
  someone in your family, you know, do some, if you're
• 1:11:58
  married, do some project with your spouse and the parish.
• 1:12:01
  Like just get in the fight. Like just one person at a time.
• 1:12:04
  Absolutely loving one person at a time.
• 1:12:05
  Hearts and minds, I believe, do change.
• 1:12:07
  Yeah. But it's often through, yes,
• 1:12:09
  truth and not compromising the truth and then the willingness
• 1:12:11
  to share that in a loving way. Yeah.
• 1:12:13
  It's. Beautiful.
• 1:12:14
  There it is, and people are hungry for it.
• 1:12:15
  Let's give it to him. Yes.
• 1:12:17
  How can people follow you, Noel? And be ready to get this book
• 1:12:21
  when it's ready, and just follow your writing and all of your
• 1:12:23
  work. Yeah, well, if you can find me
• 1:12:25
  at theologyofhome.com, at eppc.org, I'm on Instagram under
• 1:12:31
  my name, Noel Maring. I'm easy to find.
• 1:12:34
  Amazing. Love it.
• 1:12:35
  Thank you so much, Noel. This has been a lot of.
• 1:12:37
  Fun. This is great.
• 1:12:37
  Thank you. Thanks so much for listening to
• 1:12:39
  this episode of the Lila Rose Show with Noel Maring.
• 1:12:42
  I hope you enjoyed it. Check out Noel's stuff, it's
• 1:12:44
  over at the link in the description.
• 1:12:46
  You can go find all of her work. It's really fascinating.
• 1:12:48
  Make sure you're following her. I think she's such an important
• 1:12:50
  thinker and writer today. Also, don't forget subscribe.
• 1:12:53
  If you're listening here on YouTube, make sure you're
• 1:12:55
  subscribed. Also, if you're on podcast app,
• 1:12:57
  make sure you're subscribed. Give us five stars, Leave us a
• 1:13:00
  review. Helps the show reach more
• 1:13:01
  people. Thanks so much everybody.
• 1:13:03
  We'll see you next time. And a huge thank you to EWTN
• 1:13:06
  Eternal Word Television Network, which is the largest broadcaster
• 1:13:09
  in the world. You can get access to Lila Rose
• 1:13:12
  Show episodes 24 hours in advance at ewtn.com.
• 1:13:17
  Slash on demand. And a big thank you to EWTN and
• 1:13:19
  their incredible mission to bring souls to Jesus.