Combating the Rise of Extremism

Today In the Den, we’re tackling a topic that’s both unsettling and urgent: the rise of extremism, and how it’s targeting our young people across the spectrum of identity. We’ll also talk about solutions; exploring how we can recognize the signs of radicalization along with tools and strategies we can use to counteract these harmful messages and foster empathy, critical thinking, and inclusivity in the next generation.

Special Guest: Lydia Bates 

Lydia Bates (she/her) is the Senior Program Manager of Partnerships at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Her work focuses primarily on equipping communities with the tools and information they need to help young people build resilience against supremacist ideologies. Prior to moving into this role, Ms. Bates was a Senior Research Analyst at SPLC, monitoring several hate groups and ideologies. She has a M.A. in Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs from American University. 

Special Guest: Cynthia Miller-Idriss

Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a Professor in the School of Public Affairs and in the School of Education at the American University in Washington, DC, where she is also the founding director and chief vision officer in the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL). Dr. Miller-Idriss regularly testifies before the U.S. Congress and briefs policy, security, education and intelligence agencies in the U.S., the United Nations, and other countries on trends in domestic violent extremism and strategies for prevention and disengagement. She is the author, co-author, or co-editor of seven books, including her most recent book, Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism (Princeton University Press, 2025) and Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (Princeton University Press, 2022).

Links from the Show:

• Link to “Not Just a Joke” report: https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/peril-understanding-preventing-gender-sexuality-bigotry/ 
• Report from the Trevor Project: https://www.thetrevorproject.org/resources/guide/how-to-signal-you-are-an-ally-in-hostile-environment/ 
• Find SIECUS here: https://siecus.org/contraceptive-coercion-access-and-sex-education/ 
• Find Safe Bae here: https://safebae.org/ 
• Join Mama Dragons here: www.mamadragons.org 

In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you. Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at www.mamadragons.org.

Transcript

SARA: Hi everyone. Welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons. A podcast and community to support, educate, and empower parents on the journey of raising happy and healthy LGBTQ+ humans. I’m your host, Sara Lawall. I’m a Mama Dragon myself and an advocate for our queer community. And I’m so glad to be part of this wild and wonderful parenting journey with all of you. Thanks for joining us. We’re so glad you’re here.

Hello, Mama Dragons. Today we’re tackling a really tough topic. One that’s both urgent and a little unsettling. We’re talking about the rise of extremism and how it’s targeting our young people across the spectrum of identity. We’re diving into a report published by the Southern Poverty Law Center titled: Not Just a Joke: Understanding & Preventing Gender- & Sexuality-Based Bigotry. This report exposes how extremism is infiltrating mainstream spaces and how it’s often disguised as humor or satire, and some of the very real dangers it poses particularly to our LGBTQ+ beloveds and other marginalized communities. Today’s guests will walk us through this report, some of the concerning findings like the dangerous ideologies of the so-called Manosphere and the alarming trend of online youth radicalization. But, I promise, it’s not going to be all doom and gloom. We’re also going to talk some solutions. We’re going to talk about how we can recognize the signs of radicalization along with some tools and strategies we can use to counteract those harmful messages.

So, to help us unpack all of this, we’re joined by two incredible experts in this field. First up, we have Lydia Bates, Senior Program Manager for Partnerships with the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Lydia’s work focuses on tracking and combating hate groups and extremist ideologies.

And joining Lydia is Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor at American University, where she holds joint appointments in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education. Cynthia, along with the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a founding partner with the Polarization & Extremism Research and Innovation Lab. 

So they are here to help us, guide us, and figure all of this stuff out so we don’t freak out too much. Let’s dive into this big topic together.  Lydia & Cynthia, welcome to In The Den! It’s so good to have you. 

CYNTHIA: Thanks so much.

LYDIA: Good to be here.

SARA: Lydia. I want to start with you a little bit to set the stage for us. And for those that might not know the Southern Poverty Law Center and the work, can you give us a little primer? And then I’ll invite you to dive in and share a little overview of the report and why that report was commissioned and some of the key findings.

LYDIA: Yeah. For sure. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which from now on I’ll just call SPLC, seeks to be a catalyst for racial justice in The South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, to strengthen intersectional movements, and to advance the human rights of all people. And a little bit more specifically, I’m in a department called the Intelligence Project where we research and monitor far-right ideologies and work to prevent and build resilience against manipulation by those ideologies.

SARA: Well, that’s incredible work. I imagine you have your work cut out for you these days.

LYDIA: We do. We do. There’s a lot to keep up with right now in terms of research and monitoring. And probably even more to keep up with in terms of prevention and preparing people with the tools that they need.

SARA: So tell us a little bit about this particular report, the Not Just a Joke report.

LYDIA: Yeah. Absolutely. So Not Just a Joke: Understanding and Preventing Gender and Sexuality-based Bigotry is the third full-length guide in a growing suite of resources that SPLC has developed in partnership with the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, which now I’m just going to call PERIL – that’s their acronym. And so these guides and the other supplemental materials we’ve developed are rooted in a whole of community strategies to secure young people’s overall well-being, to build social engagement, and really work to counter harmful disinformation and stereotypes. So these resources engage in this community strengthening work by providing all adults who care for, who educate, and who interact with young people in any capacity with the tools to help those young people build resilience against manipulation by extremist disinformation. And then these resources also provide guidance on how to intervene if you think that a young person has become susceptible to manipulation, as well as ways to support those who have been targeted or harmed by biased behavior.

SARA: It’s a beautifully comprehensive report and I just wanted to let our listeners know that, while we’ll dive into some details, we’ll also put a link to the full report in our show notes so folks can download it, print it if you need to because it really is a great tool and guide for parents and caregivers and educators.

LYDIA: Yeah, absolutely. Whereas our first two guides focus more on the audiences that we’re providing resources to, so parents and caregivers for our first guide which was published in June 2020, and then expanding resources out to the broader network of caregivers in our Building Networks guide which was published in November 2022. Not Just a Joke is our first guide that really focuses on a specific issue. So providing resources and tools to parents, caregivers, all adults who interact with young people, providing them the information that they need to understand male supremacy and anti-LGBTQ+ hate, how to recognize warning signs, how to intervene if they suspect a young person has become vulnerable to those ideologies, and ways to build resilience amongst young people.

SARA: Great. Before we get into some of those specifics, Cynthia, I’m curious to hear from you. What led you down this road and how did you come to be a founding partner in this Polarization and Extremism Research Lab?

CYNTHIA: Well, I spent the first 15 years of my career as a comparative education professor studying school-based responses to resurgent hate and antisemitism in Germany, actually. So I was looking at post-unification and post-EU integration surgers in Neonazism and how schools were dealing with that at a moment when the German government started investing massive amounts of resources. And so, today, they fund with about 3 billion Euros, over 2400 prevention programs of which PERIL would be one, right. So when you think about our lab with 27 employees that produces tools like this in an integrative basis all year round, there’d be like over 2,000 examples of that in a country that is one quarter of the size of the US. So they just put billions of Euros into the prevention of extremism, prevention of radicalization, the prevention of racism, of antisemitism, of other kinds of harmful ideologies because of their history with the Holocaust and because of the surge that started to happen after unification. And so when I got asked, after I had written a couple of books on the German approach and then when Charlottesville happened, the Right Rally in the US, I started getting asked to explain Global Far Right Youth Culture here to policy makers in the US and someone from the SPLC at that time asked me what it would take to create a nationally scalable intervention to prevent young people from being persuaded by white supremacist propaganda. And so we held a couple of meetings, what we called Blue Sky Meetings to sort of try to dream up interventions that were not security-based, not law enforcement, that brought together experts on immigration and race and social justice and social work and education. And to dream up ideas for what to do. And then that led to the creation of the lab. I founded the lab to go after resources and to bring in other faculty and students and experts to help do it. So the SPLC is our founding partner. But we’ve had a couple of dozen other partners and funders since then and are expanding rapidly to try to get these types of resources out into the hands of communities across the country. But first, to design them, to test them, and make sure that they’re effective as well.

SARA: That’s great. Thank you. That is a fascinating story and so many interesting and challenging and unfortunate correlations to what we’re experiencing right now here in the US. So let’s dive into some of the findings and topics that were brought up in this report. The report focuses pretty heavily on the ideology of male supremacy and something called the Manosphere. This term in particular was new learning for me. Can one of you unpack that for us? What is the Manosphere and the ideology of male supremacy?

LYDIA: Male supremacy is the belief that cisgender men are naturally, biologically, and genetically superior to women, to transgender men, and to nonbinary people. And people who adhere to the male supremacist ideology justify and rationalize the social, political, economic, and legal domination of women and pretty much anyone else that doesn’t adhere to a very strict gender binary. And at the core of the male supremacist ideology is what we call the Manosphere. So that’s a collection of blogs, forums, various online spaces where adherence to male supremacy are really exchanging their vitriol about women, about feminism, and really organizing around anti-feminist conspiracy theories. There’s a few core groups in the Manosphere. One of note are men’s rights activists. That’s probably the oldest segment of the male supremacist ideology. And they’re really organizing around this anti-feminist conspiracy that feminism is privileging women over men and that they are championing the rights of boys and men. But actually they’re just packaging misogyny to blame women for real, and some perceived, issues that men and boys are experiencing. Then there is Men Going Their Own Way which is a separatist movement made up of men that have decided to remove themselves from the perceived toxicity of women. There’s also Pick Up Artists which are groups of men who share predatory and coercive tactics to manipulate women into having sex with them. Probably the most well-known segment of the Manosphere are misogynist Incels, incels stands for Involuntarily Celibate. And we always put misogynist in front of those and have to give credit to an organization called the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism. They’re a fantastic group and it’s important to put the misogynist part in front of there because the term Incel wasn’t originally developed as part of the Manosphere. And so that group has probably gained a lot of notoriety because they are responsible for the deaths of at least 44 people in the US since 2014. And I think a lot of people are probably interested in that segment of the Manosphere because they have a very niche language that they organize around and use to create an in-group dynamic. And they believe that they’re entitled to sex with undatable women whom they call, “Stacys,” and that feminism and evil women are preventing them from accessing that right. Another group is called the AlphaMales, which unfortunately AlphaMales are gaining a lot of traction in very heavily trafficked online spaces right now because they’re repackaging toxic masculinity as “Self Help Advice” about making money, about getting fit, about having successful relationships, and probably the most famous person in the AlphaMale space is Andrew Tate who I think a lot of people have heard of, especially since he recently returned from Romania to the United States. And finally, there’s the Black Manosphere where Black men are essentially trying to lift each other up, but by disparaging Black women. It’s a little bit counter-intuitive but it’s kind of the same aim as male supremacy and white supremacy to really keep a concentration of power amongst a small group of people. So that’s a quick overview of the core groups within the Manosphere.

SARA: Wow. That kind of just blew my mind a little bit. I have sort of heard bits and pieces over the years. And it has always felt a little fringy. And listening to you talk, I’m really beginning to understand how much it’s infiltrated society and culture. And I’m curious, how do these ideologies that feel so extreme find their way into regular lives and regular homes of regular kids and people?

CYNTHIA: I’ll add a couple of things. Everything that Lydia said, plus I would say on the nature of it being fringe versus mainstream, I think one of the things that has happened is that we have overlooked – in our field even of preventing violent extremism – the way that a lot of ideologies, maybe even all ideologies within in the extremist spectrum are often in addition to being white supremacist or Christian supremacist or Western supremacist like the Proud Boys that like to declare themselves to be Western Supremacist, but are male only. A lot of these different movements are also misogynistic. And so when you have something like the Great Replacement Conspiracy theory that motivates terrorist actors in Christchurch, New Zealand, in El Paso, Texas, in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, and in Buffalo, New York, just to name a few recent awful tragedies, mass shootings. We have often talked about the way that that conspiracy theory is antisemitic and also anti-immigrant, it’s obviously targeting Black Americans in Buffalo, Jewish Americans in Pittsburg, Latinos in El Paso for example. But it’s also very anti-feminist and it’s obsessed with white birthrights and with reproductive control over women and with demographic change. And we tend to overlook that. And so I think a lot of the ways that the Manosphere ideas or male supremacist ideas seep into these spaces is as other ideas start to become a little bit more mainstream, like the idea of replacement which started out as a really fringe conspiracy theory but starts ending up in some mainstream, sometimes conservative spaces, by talking about this conspiracy that Democrats are going to replace white American voters with immigrants. Let’s say this implication. So it becomes a little mainstream and it ends up on mainstream, cable news. Language about replacement which echoes this conspiracy theory which ultimately still is about birthright and control over women – particularly over white women’s reproductive power. So one way it gets in is by attaching itself to other conspiracy theories and propaganda that emerges and to other kinds of hateful ideas. Another way is the more typical expansion of boys' lives. And if anybody out there has watch the Adolescence series on Netflix or heard the chatter about it recently, this is exactly the kind of thing we’re talking about with what boys are confronted with on social media which is a constant barrage of persuasive tactics that tell them they are being disadvantaged, that feminism has gone too far, and that, in the name of fairness, outdated or out-moded DEI policies are causing them to be oppressed. And so there is a language of victimization that kind of comes at it. And so you have someone like Andrew Tate who starts every video with “Boys and Men are suffering” or “Men are suffering and I’m the only one that will talk about it.” And there’s some truth to that. There is a crisis of men and boys. And so it’s meeting men and boys where they are in a loneliness epidemic, in a crisis of connection, in a world where 50% of men say their online lives are more rewarding than their offline lives where they have 75% of depths of despair which is suicides, overdose, and deaths by alcohol. Where 25% of men under the age of 30 say they don’t have a single friend. And a higher percentage of men 18 to 23 say they agree with the statement that, “No one really knows me.” So you have this real isolation, this real loneliness crisis, a crisis of connection and fewer than half of college graduates now being men. You have a world in which their outcomes are not looking so great. And they are in real crisis. But in online spaces, that real crisis of men and boys gets converted into a crisis of misogyny. And that’s because they’re given a narrative about scapegoating that tells them “This is who’s to blame for your problems.” And that kind of further polarizes. And then that creates openings to go further down rabbit holes, which not everyone does. But you end up, some young men and boys, then start saying things like “Repeal the 19th“ or women shouldn’t have the right to vote. Or a middle schooler near me whose mom told me her daughter was told by a boy in the hallway to go put on your Handmaid's dress. Or the daughter of a college student whose mom told me she had her butt grabbed out in public one day by a man who, when she turned around to look at him said, “We can do that now.” These are all episodes from the last few months that girls and young women are experiencing that are behavioral indicators that something is happening in online spaces that is empowering a different kind of entitlement and ownership over women and girls and their bodies. And the idea that men and boys are entitled to the service, domestic labor service or sexual service, of women. And that narrative is out there online.

SARA: Wow. That’s deeply troubling. And thank you for painting that picture for us of what is the reality of what is really happening and how it’s being twisted and turned and exploited. I think that’s really important for us to hold in all of this, even as the behaviors are atrocious. I mean, I’m just astonished at those examples. Can you talk a little bit about particularly how the Manosphere uses humor? A little bit more about that, tease that out. Satire is reeling in our young male teenagers and exploiting societal pressures around masculinity and passing things off as jokes because that’s the title of the report and that’s really interesting. It isn’t just the serious come and listen to me rant.

CYNTHIA: I can start, Lydia, but also I know you have a lot of these examples in your head. Just to say the classic meme is “Make me a sandwich” right. There’s a lot of memes that circulate that are laden with the plausible deniability of just being a joke. And so boys will share this or men will share this, send somebody that they’re in an argument with, “Go make me a sandwich.” But it’s always directed at a woman. And so we’ve heard from teachers that they’ve been told that by boys like, “I don’t have to take that test. Go make me a sandwich.” That the joke itself kind of seeps into some of these behavioral indicators in real life too. But it’s the dismissal of sexual assault as not real. It’s the use of memes to make fun of women’s appearance or to prioritize a “Trad” wife, a traditional wife, with this sort of demure appearance against a lefty, unkempt woman who is tattooed and unattractive and has dyed hair. There’s a lot of images that are juxtaposing the sort of supposed virtuous traditional spouse against an appearance of someone that is unattractive but also often the text is laden with really racist language about who this supposed cartoon character woman has slept with or other types of things. But because they’re in the form of memes that get shared, or little jokes or asides, there’s this plausible deniability like, “Oh, it’s just a joke. You’re just a triggered snowflake who can’t take the joke.” And we see that with Holocaust memes. We’ve seen that with racist memes that compare people of color to animals. And then you see it with all kinds of anti-feminist memes and jokes. And that’s just one example of the memes. I’m sure Lydia has other examples to add as well.

LYDIA: Yeah. I think the “Make me a sandwich” one is just such a good example because it really works to desensitize people and soften them to more extreme misogyny to more extreme supremacist ideas and talking points. And just to kind of illustrate Cynthia’s point about how widespread “Jokes like that” are, Elon Musk tweeted a few years ago about a hypothetical university that the acronym for which is TITS, which is clearly meant to undermine women in STEM fields. Young people are encountering this humor everywhere. It’s not a matter of if they will encounter it. It’s a matter of if they’re prepared to encounter it and remain resilient to ideas like that. And I think there’s this one quote from Andrew Angline who is the founder of a Neonazi website called the Daily Stormer. And he wrote a 17-page style guide for people posting on the Daily Stormer. And in it, he emphasized “We should be using as many memes, jokes, and humor as possible because we’re trying to attract kids. It’s the same as adding cherry flavor to medicine.” And I think that also just really illustrates how these supremacist ideologies overlap because so much of that style guide – in addition to being antisemitic – focuses on feminism and women. So the humor is really a way to desensitize, dehumanize, to really normalize these types of ideas.

CYNTHIA: And I would just add, especially for parents of LGBTQ kids as well, I think this is a lot of what we’re talking about is the anti-feminism part of this and the idea that women should be subservient to men in some sort of natural or biological way. But that, what we call gender policing, is also happening against any people who aren’t deemed to fit this kind of mold of traditional masculinity or machismo. And so we’ll see that type of policing happen. We’ve seen examples where LGBTQ folks are violently attacked, not explicitly because they’re gay, but because they flaunt it. That was the word the attackers used. “They flaunted their identity.” So it’s this performance part of it that is if you fit into this gendered expectation, that’s one type of thing. But the norm is being promoted that this is the only acceptable way to act like a man or a woman. And you have to fit into that category. So you’ll have Andrew Anglin, for example, also giving guidance about a proper weight for neo-Nazis. You have to go to the gym and commit to working out. “Fat people can’t join.” That’s a quote, right? And so this idea that there’s an aesthetic appearance that shows discipline and discipline in keeping with the gendered norms of the nation which are also racialized, right? And that relates to the bullying and the policing of behaviors for anyone who doesn’t fit that set of expectations of patriarchal norms and expectations around what it is to be a man according to this male-supremacist vision.

SARA: I’m both reflecting because I am the parent of a 16-year-old male child. And I’m thinking a lot about the humor. And even as I was spending some time reading through the report, I was thinking of the recent Kanye wearing a swastika on a t-shirt, promoting the swastika t-shirt. And I was listening to my child and friends talk about it. And the concern that I had is the “Oh, it’s just become a joke.” And because Kanye is doing it, even if they think Kanye’s dumb, it’s losing any kind of impact and weight and seriousness because it’s being expressed in this way. And all that you’re saying really fits with that thinking.

LYDIA: Yeah, I think it resonates. I’ve heard parents tell me they’ve heard their child putting a frozen pizza in the oven and saying something about the holocaust that I won’t repeat, a teenager. And when they were asked about that, their son said, “It’s a meme, Dad. Everybody says it.” And it’s that desensitization that the minimization of harm that comes from, in this case, in just losing a sense of what the horror is to begin with from the Holocaust or what is wrong with saying that there’s a kind of superior way of being, if you will, right? And so I think you can lose that in some of these jokes whether that’s a swastika on Kanye West’s new cover and in his casting call also he said, “You have to be comfortable wearing swastikas,” when he issued the casting call, which was also for men only and had strict skin tone guidelines as well. So it’s many layers of offense. And it’s true. Kids will say, “You can separate the art from the artist.” Or “It was just a joke,” and I think you have to be wary of the desensitization that can happen.

SARA: Cynthia, I want to go back for a minute because earlier you were talking about the theory, the Great Replacement Theory. And then all of the different intersections that that has and how it connects to this kind of male supremacy, misogyny, this ideology and radicalization. But can you talk us through a little bit more about what is the Great Replacement Theory?

CYNTHIA: Yeah. So the Great Replacement Theory is a conspiracy theory that kind of brings together two much older conspiracy theories that have existed for decades in the US. One was called “White Genocide.” In Europe, it was called “Eurabia.” Both of them had this idea that there is an orchestrated effort by a group of puppet masters to replace white civilizations with more multicultural ones. And the “White Genocide” version which was in the US, the conspiracy was that it was Jews – and sometimes Jews and feminists – who were conspiring to promote abortion, to increase immigration, to bring in refugees to replace white Americans with multicultural civilizations. In Europe, it was Muslims – and sometimes Muslims and feminists – who were conspiring to do that. So in Oslo, Norway that led to a terrible terrorist attack in 2011 that was one of the worst ever. Seventy seven, mostly children, were killed in that attack by a man who believed that feminists were conspiring to produce multicultural societies at the expense of native white Norwegians and others. And then, in Christchurch, New Zealand, 51 people – I think eventually 53 people – were killed, Muslims mostly, at the hands of someone who believed in the Great Replacement Conspiracy theory. And then, in the US we saw similar terrorist attacks targeting Latinos in El Paso, Jews in Pittsburgh, and Black Americans in Buffalo in a grocery store. So even though the conspirers, if you were, in the conspiracy theory, the so-called puppet masters are usually feminists and Jews together, the targets are often people of color. So it’s a wide ranging set of harms that happen. And it’s one of the reasons why it became such a powerful – if you will, I hate to use that word – but powerful conspiracy theory is because it is such a big umbrella. They could target so many different kinds of people for being the problem, if you will, in the situation where there wasn’t enough, demographically enough, white births happening, meaning white women weren’t having enough white births. And so abortion also becomes a problem especially for white women. And a version of that then got promoted that said Democrats were trying to replace American voters with immigrants. And so that language of replacement started showing up on mainstream cable news and from elected officials. And that helped echo this set of conspiracy theories and strengthen it, although it was a slightly different version of it.

SARA: So is this current thread of attack and rhetoric we’re seeing against trans folks, trans kids, queer people, it feels like that’s a thread of connection there, that although their numbers are really low, the rhetoric is about “They’re taking over and they’re turning your children!” and they’re stirring up this fear that sounds kind of similar to all of this.

LYDIA: So kind of like Cynthia was saying, the Great Replacement Conspiracy Theory, it really reinforces this rigid gender hierarchy that positions, particularly white men, as protectors and aggressors, and white women as passive, child-bearers and nurturers. And so it’s enforcing this really rigid gender hierarchy that is similarly applied to trans individuals. So male supremacy and the anti-LGBTQ movement really overlap in that way because both are really aiming to enforce these regressive gender roles in a way that gives, again, cisgender white men the most social, political, and economic power. But while male supremacy is seeking to really oppress, control, extract resources, essentially, from women, the anti-LGBTQ+ movement uses these conspiracies to position children – and we’ve seen more recently – women being positioned as the victims in an effort to really undermine the realities of LGBTQ people and to oppress and oppose their rights, any progress that they’re making, any freedoms that they have. We’re really seeing, we’re living this backlash against progress right now with just so many of the executive orders that the Trump Administration has signed.

CYNTHIA: I would just add, all of that, and I think so two big components to what’s happening in the attack on LGBTQ people and particularly in trans folks are, one, the political use of persuasion about anything related to people’s safety which we know is one of the things that makes propaganda most effective and salient. And so any time you’re trying to promote – in general – someone trying to promote anti-vacs propaganda, vaccine propaganda, or firearms propaganda – like you have to keep yourself safe from the government – the things that are most persuasive often to populations are safety. And so that’s the same with the conspiracies about groomers, about the idea that kids are somehow being groomed to become gay. And when you hear teachers at board meetings say things like, “I’m busy teaching math. I don’t have time to make your kids gay.” And then having to resign, right? The quotes from teachers and librarians on this stuff is amazing. And also, they’ve been threatened with death threats. And all of that is rooted in conspiracy about some sort of predator threat that might affect children. And we saw that with QAnon and other types of conspiracies, especially during the pandemic, taking a lot of effectiveness. The second thing is real erasure, I think. This idea that we’re not just pointing at these people as predators or as a risk to the safety, but we’re going to erase the gains, we’re going to erase the identity. We’re going to try to make people invisible. And so removing rights, removing people from the websites, removing data from surveys and databases, not allowing that data to be seen on suicide rates, that’s a real erasure. Taking the books off the shelves, literally, taking the curriculum out of the classroom. And so it’s not enough to paint a threat. It’s also trying to roll back visibility. And that gets back to that whole idea of flaunting that I think is really important to understand. It’s not just that someone exists, it’s that there’s within this supremacist mindset, there’s a desire to make people invisible. And I will say, I have a new book coming out in the fall, in which Lydia knows because you read this part. I analyze a portion of my own hate mail in it because I realized, at some point, that almost all the hate mail I get from men has movement in it. They don’t want me to be, “Front and Center.” I have to go back under the rock I came out from. “Go back to the shithole. Go back to Russia, you Commi,” or whatever. Once you move the sexualized threats out of it, it’s always kinetic. And a lot of that is about, “Get back in the closet. Lock her up. Send them back.” Right? “Get women and LGBTQ folks out of public view. Stop flaunting yourself.” And that, I think, is something that the desire to erase the visibility of trans folks is a lot of what’s happening here in ways that I’m not even sure that people who are doing it would articulate. But it’s always there.

SARA: Right. We’re feeling that here. I live in a very conservative red state where we’re seeing that in our own legislature every single day. And it’s disheartening and distressing but also bizarre. It’s also very puzzling.

LYDIA: I think the attacks on gender-affirming care in particular really embody the connection between erasure and also this fear mongering about safety. And that’s really taken off in the past couple of years. Several of my SPLC colleagues in our research department have done an amazing job documenting the groups that are organizing around spreading pseudo-scientific, disinformation about the alleged dangers of gender-affirming care. And the threat to young people in particular, to their safety. And then rolling back people’s access to gender-affirming health care then contributes to the erasure of people in the LGBTQ community. And we know that that only has a negative impact on people’s health and their mental wellbeing.

CYNTHIA: Yeah. The data out of Florida, for example, over the last several years of legislation, the literal removal of families with LGBTQ kids or the LGBTQ families leaving the state. Erasure of allies from the classroom, of allies from public librarian positions, and of curriculum, but also of families who just leave these states if they can. And not everyone can. And so then you have erasure, but presence from people who don’t feel comfortable being visible. And so that’s its own type of harm too.

SARA: So those are some real significant, long-term impacts of these ideologies. Are there others that you’re seeing, and observing, that are some long-term societal impacts from male supremacy and the overarching white supremacy ideologies besides erasure?

CYNTHIA: I mean, there’s physical, right. So as Lydia mentioned there’s nearly 50 deaths at the hands of misogynists alone. And people may remember the attacks that ‘s just in the US, but in North America a little more than that if there was an attack on a sorority in California several years ago. The yoga studio shooting, the Atlanta spa shootings, there was a Toronto vehicle ramming attack. People will remember these and be like, “Right. Right. Right.” And then we often have school shooters who, they may not identify exactly as an incel or a misogynist insult. But they have been consuming some of that or participating in those chats and say some of the same kinds of things. And so you can see some of that language. The last two terrorist attacks in Germany, for example, one of them was playing a famous insult anthem song during his attempt to live-stream the attack. The other one had a bunch of Incel references in the manifesto. And, again, those didn’t get identified as male-supremacist attacks because one was an attack on a synagogue and the other was an attack on restaurants populated by mostly Muslim communities. So the targets of those points of rage, the elementary school shooting in Uvaldi, Texas, where the target was children, but the shooter was imbedded in a bunch of online spaces where he was espousing rape and kidnapping and death threats against teenage girls. So there was a lot of misogynist incubation happening in his life. But then the target of rage was different. And so I think a lot of the time you can’t draw an exact through-line which means the data won’t be there. But it’s incubating and cultivating violent rage and hatred that sometimes comes out with other targets that are none-the-less tragic and maybe could’ve been seen as early warning signs. Just like domestic and intimate partner violence is almost always in the histories of violent shooters and mass shooters. Over half of mass shooters already are targeting an intimate partner as part of their rampage. So we have these other types of histories of violence against women. And when we see that kind of thing incubating and getting cultivated online, that type of anger, those are the types of things that I worry about is that, as we see violence go up, mass shootings go up across the board across the US, school shootings continuing to be a problem, terrorist attacks continuing to be a problem, that we kind of miss the ways that these through-lines are sometimes cultivated in everyday settings that constantly confront our boys with these ideas.

SARA: So let’s stick with that for a moment. What are some more specific warning signs? You touched on it just a little bit that we parents, educators, those who work with kids might be aware of that would indicate our kids might be at risk of radicalization. And what do we do about when we start to observe those warning signs?

LYDIA: I think a big one that’s both a warning sign that someone has become susceptible to manipulation by extremist ideologies, and is also a vulnerability to being manipulated, is isolation. So if you notice a younger person starting to self-isolate by disengaging from activities that they once really loved or that they’re separating from the friend groups that they’ve liked to engage with, they’re cutting themselves off from family and caregivers, it might be a time to start asking some questions about why they feel like they need to start self-isolating from those groups, from those activities, because it is a moment where they might be more susceptible to the manipulation of extremist rhetoric and narratives. There’s also in Not Just a Joke, we talk about a bunch of different kinds of linguistic and behavioral indicators that parents and caregivers and educators and everyone can keep an eye out for. And I think the Manosphere in particular is pretty well-known for coming up with its own kind-of language. So they’ll use terms like, “Chad” and “Stacey” to refer to, Chads are attractive men, Staceys are attractive women. Alpha Males, Beta Males, MMAS is an acronym for “Make me a sandwich” which we’ve talked about, one of Andrew Tate’s famous taglines. They might mention things that we’re hearing a lot of in more mainstream spaces like “Woke ideology,” “Gender ideology,” “Cancel Culture.” Things like that, talking about a “God-given order of things.” Saying things like, “There are no good women left.” and “Feminism is cancer.” So changes in a young person’s language that should raise a red flag and let the trusted adult who hears that language know that we need to start asking questions from a place of curiosity, not questions from a place of punishment. But instead, asking “Where did you hear that?” Trying to figure out the source of that language, the source of that idea so that you can really start discussing that content with them and developing a response and prevention that isn’t punitive. Because, oftentimes, that’ll push people farther down the rabbit hole towards holding more harmful ideas. But coming at it from a place of curiosity.

CYNTHIA: I will add, we’re in the middle of testing for this guide updated in about two weeks from the time that we’re talking now. But we test each of the guides with 1,500 parents or so in a pre- and post- way and then often longitudinally to see “What do they do with that, what do they learn, how do they use it?” So we’ve learned a couple of things. One is that the number one place where parents engage with kids after they read our tools, is in the car. And so the car, the carpool in particular, and often the kids they engage with are not their own kids. But a neighbor's kid or somebody else that they’re driving to soccer. And so this is a place where you can often overhear that kind of language being used and then get into a conversation, out of curiosity, about what it is. I will say, I’ve talked to a lot of high school groups and when you get it right – which I don’t always get right – but when I get the climate right, the people who come up to me afterward are always boys and boy moms, depending on who’s in the audience. It’s really interesting. That’s the people because they know what they’re seeing and they know what their boys are seeing or they’re worried about it. So girls also want to talk, but boys really hear and recognize that they’re being confronted with this stuff and there’s almost never been a space in their lives to talk to anyone about it. And so that goes for violent pornography and it also goes for some of this anti-feminist, and racist, and anti-LGBTQ stuff that crosses their feeds. And they want to talk about it and how it makes them feel and how it’s shaping the way they think. They can tell. And they are worried about it. They’re worried about why it shows up in their feeds. Did they do something wrong? Is there something wrong with their algorithm? Have they watched something? They start to feel a little bit guilty and ashamed too. But we know from the data that sock-puppet accounts for 16-year-old boys – meaning researchers who set up new fake accounts – it’s minutes before Manosphere content comes across. The latest data I saw was four minutes. And a year ago, it was nine. Just by searching for gendered content on YouTube shorts or TikTok, about gym or fitness or video games, the Manosphere finds them. You don’t look for it. It comes to the boys. And so one of the things we try to help parents and boys understand, “This isn’t your fault. It’s not because you searched for something. You don’t have to be ashamed of it. But you do have to be aware of it and understand how it subtly influences some of the ways you think.” Same with girls and pro-anorexia content or trad-wife content or other kinds of stuff that might present a different type of idea to them. But what we’re finding is that parents are worried across the spectrum, Republican parents, Democrat parents coming to our trainings are just as worried as each other. And kids know what’s up and they want to talk about it.

SARA: That’s heartening. And this is a very nuanced question. But, Lydia, as you were talking about isolation, I was thinking about maybe differences in different communities' progressive versus conservative, like states in particular, and curious to think about when kids are steeped in a place where this kind of thinking is more mainstream and more prevalent just generally speaking. The political leaders are espousing it. Now our federal political leaders are espousing it. So it feels more normalized, and then in communities where kids are surrounded by high, conservative religion – even if it’s not their own – where this kind of language might not be as extreme, but it’s just more acceptable. And I’m just kind of thinking through, how do we broach a conversation about that with our kids when it maybe isn’t as obvious that it is extremism?

LYDIA: I feel like that is one of those million-dollar questions. And it also just reminds me of this really great resource that the Trevor Project has. And I think it’s called, “Being an Ally in a Hostile Environment,” And how important it is for particularly young LGBTQ+ people to have at least just one person who is willing to engage with them in these difficult conversations, who’s there to be their supportive outlet even if they are surrounded by a community that might not always be the most welcoming of who they are. So I think it’s imperative that all adults who are willing are then also able and have the tools and the capacity and the capability to engage in these conversations. One thing that Cynthia touched on when she was talking a minute ago is that boy moms come up to her so often. And in our first impact study of the parents and caregivers guide, we found that moms came into the study knowing more about extremism. They spent more time reading the guide and so they left the study feeling more confident to intervene on behalf of young people who might be susceptible to manipulation. And that’s great. And we also really need dads and male figures in young people’s lives to step into these difficult spaces and to have these difficult conversations and to access tools that exist so that they can be engaging in these conversations with young people.

SARA: Thank you for bringing that up. I’m also thinking particularly, and selfishly, as one of those boy moms who thinks about, my kid’s a pretty social kid. He’s got a lot of friends. But I live in a community where it’s very likely he could be at a friend’s house and hear a lot of this stuff just low-level from the dads and the parents and the community that he’s friends with. And I think, “What do I do about that?”

CYNTHIA: I think there’s two things we often find. One is that it really helps to point out to kids, in particular, teenagers, how manipulation works. It’s one of the reasons why Lydia’s been using the word manipulation and not just propaganda, right? So it’s not the ideas themselves that we necessarily can come straight at, especially if they’re hearing them used in other parts of their life in an ordinary way. But reminding them, talking to them in a preventative way about how manipulation works. Who’s profiting from trying to get them to believe in particular kinds of ideas? I think it’s a really easy conversation to have. I mean, not easy, but an easy example is sex-tortion where parents are already really worried about that happening and boys are being targeted. And so you can talk about manipulation and what if someone is not who they say they are online and asks you to send them a picture. Look at the 36, or whatever, suicides we’ve had in the last year or so of teenage boys to whom this has happened. And let’s make sure we’re on the same page about it. And then that can kind of open the door of, “Who’s charging $19.95 for a subscription to Pimping Ho’s University, Pimping Ho’s Degree PhD?”. That’s a real subscription. I think it’s actually more expensive than $19.95 a month. And the people who are subscribing to that are mostly teenagers who are being sold a package of something that is to profit somebody else, a character that someone else is playing sometimes in an online substack or a channel. And that’s true of politicians sometimes too. So it’s not to say that people can’t have their own ideas and a range of ideas. But if someone’s trying to use you to profit, whether that’s the fast food company or an influencer online, it helps to be skeptical of that. And we find that teenage boys in particular do not like to find out that they’re being manipulated. And so that is a really helpful kind of approach to talk to them about what manipulation looks like and how tricky it can be. And the other thing that I’ll add about that is that, in the first study that Lydia talked about with parents, when we studied that first group of parents, we also found that every group of parents improved their ability to do some of this work, like recognizing online misinformation, there were some more specific metrics there, except for one group of parents, and that was the most highly educated group of parents did not get better at it. And that’s because they came in so much more confident than everyone else that they could already do it. Then they got worse. And so we saw that as a good outcome, like we’re correcting the unwarranted overconfidence of highly-educated parents. And I count myself in that group. But we also realized, those parents might not reach out for help because they don’t think they need it. They think that they’re already on top of this and on top of the worlds that their kids inhabit. And one of the things we’re trying to do is help parents understand, this is more complicated than you think and it’s trickier than you think and it’s more manipulative than you’re aware of and more insidious. And so it can help to have these conversations early and often with kids. And that’s one of the reasons I love having these conversations with high school kids because they will just start to tell you stuff about what they’re seeing online because nobody really asks them.

SARA: Yeah. As I’m listening to you with some of your examples, Cynthia, and I also randomly just started watching Adolescence which felt like the universe talking as reading this report. And I’m hearing words that are in this report that I’ve never heard before. I’m thinking I know so very little. And I thought I knew so much.

CYNTHIA: I think that’s the right place to start. And I studied the stuff and I still feel that way. I need a team around me of really young people to constantly be showing me. And still, it’s no guarantee with your own kids or with any other kid. So I think being curious, listening to kids, and making sure that all the spaces that kids are in have a reporting place, have a place to talk to a trusted adult if they’re seeing something. I’ll just give you one other example from a high school I was in recently. And the kids started saying, “Oh, like that time on February 26th “– I think I told you this, Lydia. It was awful – “when our feeds were full of awful content.” And so it turns out their Instagram feeds were full with, on February 26th, a bunch of high school students with really gory live-streamed content, deaths, murders, suicides, a bunch of different awful stuff that Meta apologized for, issued an apology for an error in the algorithm, essentially, that caused some users’ feeds to have this type of content. And there were teachers in the room when the kids started telling me this. And they all knew what each other were talking about and none of the adults had heard about it. So one of the teachers said something like, “You’re telling me that over lunch you saw a murder and then you had to go take a math test? I think we need a mechanism for who you can talk to!” And in some cases the kids were like, “Well. I’m not supposed to have my phone out.” And then I asked my own students. And one of the students is like, “Yeah. I saw that stuff, but I thought there must be something wrong with my feed. And I was embarrassed. What if someone saw what just showed up on my phone.” And so you’re so used to your feed being so personalized that you think this must be something that I did that got me to get this video sent to me. And so that can inhibit some of the reporting mechanisms. And I think that if adults in mental health roles, in sports teams, faith leaders, youth groups, in teachers, extracurricular activities, in particular – not just parents because that can be harder – but carpool leaders, whatever it is, can have some sort of mechanism to create spaces where kids feel really safe saying, “This is what I saw. And I know it wasn’t normal.” And for kids to know that’s not normal and it’s not okay. So it’s not just the manosphere content. It’s also other types of violent content and other pornography that shows up on their phones unsolicited, un-asked for, that they don’t know what to do with or they feel bad that it showed up. So I think we don’t really have mechanisms in a lot of places to create room for kids to share or to know how to process that.

SARA: I really appreciate you sharing that. That’s really striking. And also striking because it just highlights how injured maybe we’ve become to social media that to stop and think, not just why are they getting the content but also what impact is it having on the rest of their day and how that’s really shaping them. It’s really scary.

CYNTHIA: Or that they just get numb to it or they think like, “Oh, that was weird but it’s gone now.” But still, nobody should have to look at that, right? And for it to show up right on your phone. And again, I understand if a kid’s like, they’re sneaking their phone out at lunch, they know they’re not supposed to have it, then they feel like “Maybe I can’t report this,” right? So what are the ways that we can create – I heard about one school that created an app that allows a check in the middle of the day. So if it’s happening to everyone in the school, all the kids know but the adults don’t, right? There’s not an example of this in previous generations in the same way of the outside world being able to come into your kids' lives and sometimes in a way that might disrupt their whole day, a test they have to take or something else they have to do.

SARA: So say more about this app. A school developed an app where kids can check in?

CYNTHIA: This is a student created project. I heard that a group of college students created it, that was, basically, an app for high schools to be able to touch base about the climate of the kids so that they could push something to the phone in the morning that says a really quick, “Scale of 1 to 5, how is everybody doing today?” And so it would check in, not so much about, “What are you seeing on social media?” but you could also have a version that did that. But this would allow the kids to, if everybody was stressed about something that the adults didn’t know, they could get a sense of the pulse. And they figured out a way to actually get people to use it because then they responded to it, right? And they’d say, “Hey. We know something’s going on. Let’s pause and address why is everybody at a 2 today? Maybe we need to address it.” And so it did actually get used and the kids seemed to really appreciate it. So I don’t know if that’s the solution for every school. But I think finding some way to have a connection and understand that it is also the responsibility of schools to think about the climate that kids spend time in, and that includes their online lives. And I think a lot of universities at least often say, “Well that’s their private lives. It’s not our responsibility.” But they’re using Instagram to promote and recruit and kids are out there bullying each other or cancelling each other on social media. And then they expect them to be able to live together in the dorms and in the classrooms peaceably. And I think we have to figure out ways to equip kids with tools to both be better citizens online with each other, but also know how to talk to an adult or where to go when you’re seeing awful stuff.

SARA: Yes. I love that app idea. That sounds like it has a lot of uses, too, for more than just this. This can be some really great mental health red flags as well.

CYNTHIA: Yeah. You don’t know what it is, but at least it gives you a chance to catch the pulse of the teenagers.

SARA: And I’m thinking, like it or not, no matter how hard we try to keep the internet world and the phone world out of the classroom, this is the learning environment we are in in this 21st century culture.

CYNTHIA: It is. And I know a giant large public high school in D.C. where they often have WIFI problems because it’s overcrowded and it’s not strong enough. And they will have the kids pull out their phones to join a hotspot so that they can get access to the platform that they’re using. And then their phones are right in front of them. And of course they’re doing other stuff. So there’s also resource constraints that sometimes mean big schools might not have the kind of strength of a WIFI connection or they don’t have functioning technology for everybody and then kids pull out their phones to get access to an app. I have to approve, two factor authentication on my phone. Everyone in my university does. And then you’ve got your phone right in front of you in the classroom just to get into your platform. So there’s a lot of ways that our phones show up in front of us, even when we’re trying not to be distracted by them.

SARA: There’s one question that’s been lingering for me that had to do with some of the examples you shared earlier, Cynthia. Some of the girls in particular who were experiencing some harassment and some really awful stuff as a result of this kind of normalization of the male supremacy ideology. So the question is, in particular, what can women and girls do when we experience that? What are some tools we can have to address it, resist it?

CYNTHIA: Yeah. I think, one, reporting it. And so those examples that I gave you, we only know about because those girls told – in every case, it was a mom who came to me. I had four or five people after I was on PBS NewsHour talking about our new guide. Moms reached out to me and said this is what. It’s interesting. Boy-moms come up to me after talks. But the emails and messages that I get are often from the moms of girls and young women who have been experiencing stuff too. And so I think, one, we often urge in our guides adults to take it seriously, to not dismiss it as just a joke or “boys will be boys.” You do hear that and I’ve had people say that to me when I give them those examples. And to make girls and young women feel seen and heard about the fact that they – in one case a 10-year-old girl heard a boy come up to her at the playground and say, “Your body, my choice,” which was something that was being said after the – does he even know what he means by that, but he's heard it somewhere. He knows that it’s an insult. So somebody said, “Isn’t that the same thing as saying girls are stinky, to a 10-year-old. They’re just being playground bullies.” And I said, “I think if you’re expressing something that’s about ownership over someone else’s bodies, that is an additional layer of harm that you have to address.” And so I do think taking it seriously and having conversations as adults, making sure that there’s a safe place to report and making sure that girls and young women know to report it. And this is one of the things that happened with the Uvaldi, Texas, shooter. The teenage girls who he was threatening and harassing online were asked why they didn’t report it. And one of them said, “Because it’s just how online is.”

SARA: Wow.

CYNTHIA: And so that, to me, is one of the saddest parts of that whole story is like, “It’s just how online is.” And another teenage girl said she’s just become numb to the stuff that she sees online, one of the girls in the classroom a couple of weeks ago. I think we have to break through that too and make sure that kids know this isn’t normal. And if you are threatened and harassed, you can report it. You don’t have to accept it as just “the way that this is.”

LYDIA: I would say, to that point, helping girls and young women really assess that network of care-givers around them from their home to their school to their sports and extracurriculars and identifying the individuals that they feel comfortable confiding in ahead of any incident actually happening. And also making sure that there are various ways to report an incident. So going into a principal’s office might draw more attention to somebody who’s reporting an incident. But having before-school hours, meeting time with a school counselor, or having an online app where somebody can report something, even if it’s just slipping a note under a trusted teacher’s door. Just having different ways to report those issues, but then having consistent channels of recording those issues so you can identify if there’s a pattern emerging. And it’s also really important to listen to the person who experienced the harm, to not define their experience for them, and to follow the steps that they need to feel safe again in that environment. So in a school, that might mean removing a perpetrator from their class or extracurricular. It might mean allowing some absences without threatening detention or something like that. Or allowing them to engage in a hybrid online learning until they really feel safe coming back into the school environment. So allowing them to really dictate what the response looks like so they can regain a sense of agency and safety.

SARA: Thank you for that. That’s really helpful because I also imagine that means parents can also be helpful advocates for their young people when these moments arise to get some of those accommodations.

CYNTHIA: Also, one thing I often tell parents and high school kids, when I was growing up it was like a phenomenon that kids stole stop signs and street signs and hung them in their basement. It was just a dumb thing to do. And then I remember a group of teenagers in another state stole a stop sign, and there was a car accident at that intersection and a girl from their school died. And they were charged with vehicular homicide and went to prison for 20 years. This was pre-internet. And it made the rumors of somebody’s cousin’s high school. And I remember it was just a shock, like, “Oh my god. That could happen?” I’d never stolen a stop sign, but I knew people who had. And it just was something that teenagers didn’t think about. And I think now about the kinds of harms that we see happening, in some cases online, when boys are using AI generated nude, undressing apps to make nudes photos of all their classmates. We’re working with a couple of schools where that’s happened. And they are doing things that they think are funny or a game as 13-year-olds before they realize, one, in many states, that’s criminal behavior now prosecutable as child pornography. Then they get listed on the sex-offender registry. And there’s real harms happening to the victims who then don’t want anything to do with them for the rest of their high school career. So sometimes that education can help kids and parents realize that there are also consequences to some of this stuff that is not just a joke. And in those cases, we also go in and work with the younger students, so not just the 8th grade boys, but the 7th and 6th grade boys and girls in the same school, so that they’re aware. They’ve heard about it, but also know that these apps show up in your feed, recommending themselves as a free, funny thing to do. And it’s not funny. It’s not just a joke.

SARA: Thank you for that reminder. Lydia, the report talks about some prevention tips, some real critical prevention tips. And I wonder if you’ll talk about one or two of those with us?

LYDIA: Absolutely. Several of the prevention tips that we give in the guide would be most effective if they were implemented across schools in the country. But we all know, and your audience knows, that that’s not going to happen for a lot of these programs. But any caregiver in a young person’s life can work on digital media literacy with them to help young people discern fact from fiction, to help them explore trustworthy news sites, and to help them understand when they’re being manipulated and who might be profiting off of that manipulation. Parents and caregivers, people outside of the school environment, coaches, religious leaders, etcetera, can also engage in conversations around comprehensive sexual health education that includes talking about gender-affirming care. It includes talking about the experiences of trans individuals. It includes talking about consent and reproductive healthcare, including abortion. It includes talking about just healthy relationships. So anyone can bolster that conversation. It doesn’t have to only be implemented in a school environment.

SARA: I’m going to interrupt you real quick because I’m really curious. Just knowing in particular how many schools are refusing to do that kind of education and really shying away from it, access to comprehensive sexuality education is actually shrinking. Do you have some good sites that you recommend or providers that you recommend online where parents and families could go to access more resources?

LYDIA: Yeah. There are a ton listed and linked in the guide. Some that come to mind right now, SIECUS, and I forget exactly what that acronym stands for. But they have really great resources for comprehensive sexuality health education. And also to help parents and caregivers to help advocate on behalf of young people. So it’s a fantastic website. They also have score cards to help you understand what comprehensive sexual health education looks like in your state. I’m in Georgia. It’s not great. There’s also SafeBAE which is an organization that’s working to help young people understand healthy consensual relationships. So they have some really great resources as well. But there’s a bunch more linked throughout the guide, particularly in our prevention sections.

SARA: Thank you for that. I really appreciate that. I know that’s a growing question and concern among many in our community.

LYDIA: Oh, absolutely.

SARA: This has been an extraordinary conversation. My eyes are open. I think I’m leaving it with a little more hopefulness, maybe, than I had when we started because it feels a lot. It feels really heavy. So I wonder if each of you will just sort of give us some parting words of what we can do next. Like, what would be one or two things that we could just begin immediately or think about to really address this instead of just swirling in the overwhelm.

CYNTHIA: I find in our research with parents that we find that 12 percent of the parents that we study – which is about 155, 160 parents – over the course of the year either join or create a group of other parents to talk about the online harms that their kids are exposed to and experiencing. And that that’s a really empowering thing for parents. And so that’s my first thing. To know you’re not alone, that there are resources and tools out there, that it’s not that hard to stay informed. On average, parents improved their pre and post test scores in our study significantly in just seven minutes of reading. So we often say, “Hey, you can do this while you have your morning coffee.” You don’t have to do a whole workshop. There are also workshops if you want more training but you don’t have to. And so I think that it’s a common concern of parents across the country, across demographics, across politics and religion. Everybody’s worried about it. And so I hope that parents know that there are resources. There are people who are trying to get those resources to you. And there’s evidence that they are effective in helping parents feel more confident, more willing to intervene, and be better informed about it, and know where to get more help.

SARA: Excellent, Thank you.

LYDIA: I’d say in addition to accessing and sharing resources, get engaged and involved with your community and help the young people in your life do the same thing. I think right now in particular, the climate in the United States is really disorienting. And I know, for myself personally, I’ve been kind of a little bit like Eeyore recently. And it’s been hard to shake that. And I find that when I’m engaged with organizations in my community, talking to my neighbors, going to various community events and just engaging with people, and being reminded of that kind of community resilience is really helpful in moments like this. And it keeps me connected and grounded when it feels like a lot of stuff is fighting that.

SARA: Great reminder. Thank you. I think we all needed to hear that. I really appreciate it. Thank you both for coming on the podcast, for your expertise and wisdom. This was just a very deep and powerful conversation. And we are very grateful for both of you and the work that you are doing in the world.

LYDIA: Thank you.

CYNTHIA: Thank you for having us.

SARA: Thanks so much for joining us here In the Den. Did you know that Mama Dragons offers an eLearning program called Parachute? This is an interactive learning platform where you can learn more about how to affirm, support, and celebrate the LGBTQ+ people in your life. Learn more at mamadragons.org/parachute. Or find the link in the episode show notes under links.

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