“With this Executive Order, the war on women’s sports is over.” - Donald Trump, 45th and 47th President of the United States.
What must it have felt like for all of those feminists on the Left who have spent the better part of a decade insisting Trump was an enemy to women - a rapist, a sexual harasser, an assaulter — to see so many young girls encircling him as he helped protect their future with the swipe of his pen?
What they should be asking themselves is how it ever came to this. How did we raise a generation to believe such falsehoods about themselves or to feel the need to be something other than who they are? Or to lie about the biological differences between men and women or to teach them never to speak up when they know something is wrong.
How did it arrive with so many millions of people too afraid to stand up for them? How did we get to 2024 with the Left handing over the cornerstone of their movement to Trump?
Look no further than The Coddling of the American Mind as written in the book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, which has now been turned into a movie:
Most people on the Left recognize there is a problem, but they won’t agree with so many of us that Trump and his tough love are the way out of it, probably not even Lukianoff and Haidt.
But the time for niceties is over. We can’t worry about whose feelings might be hurt or who might be offended. No. This is the time to save America and its young from a dominant contagion that has overtaken nearly every corner of American life.
It isn’t just the denial of science and reality. It’s that so many have become so afraid of just words that we can do nothing except blow past them and try to salvage whatever is left.
We’ve arrived all the way on the opposite end of where the Greatest Generation was when they were sent to war to save the world from Hitler. How did we get from Patton and MacArthur and Eisenhower to a generation who believe that words have the power to destroy them? Just words? Imagine George Patton arriving in modern-day America. What would he make of the nation’s young people?
Or MacArthur. The guy who said, “It is fatal to enter a war without the will to win it.” And “You are remembered for the rules you break.” And “You don't win wars by dying for your country. You win wars by making the other son of a bitch die for his.”
How did we get from that to this?
I don’t know what makes Donald Trump so tough and resilient. But I do know that whatever he has, we could use a lot more of it to help us un-coddle the American mind not a moment too soon.
How to Destroy a Whole Generation
My daughter came home from high school one day just before Trump won and said, “I’m worried I don’t have anything wrong with me.” What did she mean, I wondered. It wasn’t long before I found out. Her classmates had all been diagnosed with something - ADHD, bipolar disorder, ADD, and depression. I told her there was nothing wrong with her because I raised her to be happy and healthy, so why would she need therapy or drugs? Because her friends all had therapy, and drugs.
To make matters worse, my daughter, whose best friend was Black and whose president was Black, was now being taught that she was part of systems of oppression that caused harm to other races. She was told she had to stand outside of the circle because what she said didn’t matter. That was when the depression started. I refused to medicate her then, but once she turned 18, there was nothing I could do about it, so she, like all of her classmates, got a prescription. It became like a fashionable water bottle, or a tattoo - a cultural identifier that she was somehow broken and therefore deserved protection online.
By the time my daughter graduated, only one of her friends had announced she was a boy and wanted what my daughter casually called “top surgery.” I’d never heard the expression before. These words tumbled out of my daughter’s mouth like it was all perfectly normal: “top surgery” and “puberty blockers.” Suddenly, her friend now had a boy’s name.
By the time she graduated college and moved into an apartment, two of her roommates were now presenting as the opposite sex and were a couple. A boy she’d had a crush on had fully transitioned and was now a female. Somehow, she escaped the madness, and I know I dodged a bullet. Maybe some of my parenting paid off in the end because, at the very least, I didn’t have to have that conversation with her that she might really be a boy.
It would turn out that my generation of helicopter moms, who overprotected our kids and boosted their self-esteem, never seemed able to back off and allow them to suffer the slings and arrows of what it means to become a resilient adult.
To escape us, they disappeared online, building a whole new societal structure, Lord of the Flies style, that would ultimately take our social justice lessons and turn them into a strident new fundamentalism that ranked and categorized people by most-victim. If you had mental health issues, your status was boosted. If you were not white or not heterosexual, your status was boosted. The highest status, or the most-victim, were trans people.
Most of us didn’t realize what we’d done until much too late to turn things around. It wasn’t only the fault of the coddled generation. Everything on the Left reflected those ideas—institutions, the Democrats, Hollywood, doctors, journalism, Big Tech.
Everyone was expected to keep the plates spinning, to ensure real life never happened to all of our children now becoming adults.
When you look at it like that, it’s easier to understand the reaction to Trump’s win in 2016. The mass hysteria that ensued showed the fruits of our labor. It was like the baby alien that burst out of John Hurt’s stomach in the movie Alien, slithered into the shadows, and emerged as a monster no one was prepared for and had no way of dealing with.
Evergreen College is a great example of a generation of minds destroyed and how a feckless administration would further coddle them, pander to them, and teach them nothing.
By 2020, the Evergreen generation had come of age and now were pouring into the streets like the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, tearing down statues, demanding people raise their fists, and ordering all cult members to post black squares on their Instagrams.
And what did the government do? The same thing as the Evergreen administrators - they pandered, they coddled, they taught them nothing.
Trump charged forward through all of it, somehow being the one person with the right set of skills to state plainly the harsh realities no one on the Left wanted to hear. These were existential crimes to them. He was breaking our carefully curated rules of language, our thought policing, our politically correct house of cards.
Trump’s “bull in a China shop” behavior might have been traumatizing in 2016. But by now, it seems as necessary as Ripley taking the wheel to drive the tank and rescue the crew in Aliens because enough was enough.
Who else but Trump would arrive at the Superbowl with this ad directed by Michael Bay?
The Great Un-Coddling Begins
Last Summer, I had a decision to make. It was a pivotal election year. Sooner or later, someone would find my Substack, see I had announced I was voting for Trump, and would expose me on the pages of a high-profile site. I could wait it out, stay quiet in public, and confine my ideas to a place almost no one in my world even knew about. Or I could come clean. I could tell the truth. I could use whatever voice I had to help destroy and dismantle a destructive movement I helped build.
I watched other fearless women like Megyn Kelly, Abigail Shrier, and JK Rowling speak out loudly, and I felt like a moral coward. So, I decided to start speaking truthfully and without fear. I had to un-coddle my own mind and learn how to survive it all—the mean comments, the doxxing, the threats.
And yes, I lost almost everything they could take from me—most of my income, freelance gigs, and whatever was left of my reputation. What I gained was more valuable than any job or money. It’s that thing inside us that guides us toward doing the right thing. When you betray that impulse, it feels bad. You know you sold yourself out and worse, you have to live with it.
I wanted to show my daughter that life isn’t easy. It is as hard as showing up in Butler, Pennsylvania and having a bullet just miss killing you on live television. It is about having an entire administrative apparatus that includes a massive alignment of power sabotaging your presidency and calling you an existential threat to the country. It’s showing up at the Capitol while exercising your First Amendment right and being called an “insurrectionist.”
And yes, it’s having the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences not invite you to the Governors Awards. It’s having Academy members not find your “white dudes for Harris” joke funny. It’s having an embarrassing hit piece written about you as an implicit threat, Invasion of the Body Snatchers style.
Living through that awful experience has taught me a lot about human nature, about the fake friends we make online, and the fragile safety net we imagine is there. But it isn’t. Its protection depends on your willingness to comply, to bend, to conform. I also learned that I’m stronger than any of them. I never caved. I never apologized. And guess what? I survived.
In Salem, a cantankerous wife-beater named Giles Corey refused to confess to witchcraft. They piled stones on his chest until his tongue stuck out and his heart stopped. If he can do that, I can handle the cold indifference of the phonies in Hollywood.
That is what I want my daughter to spend the rest of her life knowing. It isn’t just that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And it isn’t just all we have to fear is fear itself. It’s also that living in a protective cocoon makes you afraid of everything. And that fear will ultimately destroy you and every great thing you might do with your precious life.
What does Giles Corey say to them? MORE WEIGHT.
So let’s have it. Let the Great Un-Coddling begin.
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