Karol Markowicz is a columnist for the New York Post.
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Damaged children are easier to control, said author and New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz in a speech on campus Tuesday.

Markowicz is the author of “Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation,” which was the main subject of her talk. Her book, co-authored with Deseret News columnist Bethany Mandel, covers the reported realities of how “woke” ideas are infiltrating schools and influencing children. Markowicz, who is on campus as the Eugene C. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism, said she defines “woke” as “leftism meets forced conformity.”

The book and her talk drew comparisons between what’s happening in America today to what has happened in totalitarian societies throughout history. Markowicz was born in the Soviet Union and, though she moved to America as a child, said she has heard stories from her family about the horrors of the Soviet regime. She said COVID lockdowns, which she experienced while living in New York City, made her realize the similarities between America today and the Soviet Union then.

“COVID exposed the totalitarian streak, the way the left was willing to say or do anything for the cause,” she said. 

She moved her family to Florida in 2020.

“What I saw happen to New York during the pandemic response and the way New Yorkers just accepted it drove us out,” she said. “You couldn’t see your family. Your kids couldn’t go to school. But the medical field joined together to endorse the George Floyd riots. That’s very specifically what happens in totalitarian societies: rules can and are bent for friends of the regime. The hypocrisy is not an accident.”

She said New York’s reaction to COVID showed that her children were not free to be children.

“We refer to our move to Florida as a move toward freedom, and it was for us all,” she said. “But the main point was to save our children, preserve their childhoods, and give them the life that we used to imagine could be had anywhere in America but found it could not.”

Markowicz said using children is an important part of a totalitarian system.

“I often say the left wants to tear us apart, and I get asked, ‘why would they want to do that?’” she said. “Because damaged children are easier to control. Cutting the parent out is important and it has been done in many totalitarian societies that we cover in the book.”

She discussed specific examples of what schoolchildren experience today.

“They’ve made protesting part of the experience of schooling,” she said. “When we lived in Brooklyn, the public schools had the kids march against climate change, against guns, against, vaguely, ‘hate,’” she said. “They’re turning kids into child soldiers for the cause. And parents are letting it happen because they’re too afraid to say no.”

People can’t argue with children, Markowicz said, so they are the perfect instrument for leftists to put their ideas forth without any personal responsibility. 

“Leftist activists realized they could dodge the basic responsibility in any debate of providing reasoned and well articulated disagreement if they could simply defer to a child as a substitute,” she said. “That way, disagreement with their position equals hating children and the media supported them in this effort entirely.”

Markowicz said you can’t let them use your children and offered a solution: to make the abuses against them clear to all, especially parents.

“The people who lived through those times in the Soviet Union and Cambodia and China can maybe say they did not know. We wrote the book so that in 20 years no one in America can say they didn’t know,” she said. “We know what is being done to children. We have cataloged it and proved it and we have to stop it.”

The issue is that it’s hard to put forth ideas that are against the mainstream, Markowicz said. She discussed the difficulty she and her co-author had even getting “Stolen Youth” published. The fear of speaking out combined with the difficulty of convincing people that these things are actually happening is the main barrier to effecting change, she said.

“When I talk to regular liberals, not activists, they know this is crazy. They acknowledge that kids being asked to keep secrets from their parents is insane,” she said. “They’re afraid to act or speak up because they’re afraid of being targeted. But this is exactly how forced conformity wins.”

She said the gulags only existed in Soviet Russia for 30 of the regime’s 69 year lifespan. But their consequences — the stifling of speech, the fear of constantly-changing laws, the censorship — have persisted to the present day.

The solution to the forced conformity of wokeness in America is to fight in any way possible, Markowicz said. 

Beth Dobrozsi, a longtime educator, said Markowicz’s ideas spoke to her even though she doesn’t have school-aged children.

“My four children are grown, the youngest is here, but there are takeaways, I think, regardless of your age. I can identify with a lot of what she said,” she said.

Her husband Doug Dobrozsi, laboratory director at Hillsdale College, attended the talk too.

“Her talk reinforced things I already thought or had hunches about,” he said. “It illuminated what I would call deeper, more detailed aspects of what I was aware of and, in a sense, was encouraging because just the fact that she’s telling her story and she’s fighting on the good side is encouraging.”