Hey everybody.
So we're gonna get back to our larger documentary projects
because that's really where our hearts lie.
And this whole situation that is unfolding is...
We have a secret language now, okay?
And she's leaving us Easter eggs in our secret language.
It's like a train wreck.
It is very hard to look away from it,
but I think I'm gonna have to
because it's like staring into the abyss for real.
But this is one more thing.
I have to, I can't help it.
We have to have this discussion because this is happening.
Ivy League students, this is a headline
and it's not a parody.
This isn't the onion.
This is an actual headline.
Ivy League students offered crayons,
Legos and cookies with milk
to cope with Trump's election win.
Harvard and Penn State are giving students the day off.
There are professors at Princeton
who are postponing exams.
There are students at various schools
who are allowing their grades to be changed later
for the stress they have now gone through
during this election.
They're getting out of homework.
They're getting out of class.
And Georgetown University built a self care suite.
This is the level that things are at
in Ivy League colleges.
I don't even know anymore
how much is being charged to these kids
and their families for going to these
very, very expensive schools
that we're supposed to in our society revere
as the most elite educational facilities we have.
And this is the way that they are treating
their adult students.
You had professors at Columbia University
and at sister school Barnard sending emails
for people to take school off
and take care of themselves.
The classes are being canceled
and we just need to breathe.
We all just need to breathe because it's so heavy
but they'll remain, they'll keep the classroom open
for people to come if they want a space to reflect.
An adjunct professor of international
and public affairs at Columbia
who apparently served on the Obama administration
White House Council on Women and Girls
canceled class and said,
although I planned a tentative lecture
on modern polling methods in their blind spots,
it feels a bit tone deaf to deliver that today.
You mean the day after an election?
That is the perfect time to deliver a class
on misleading polling methods.
That's exactly the time you wanna deliver that class.
Why would that be tone deaf?
Organizers at Dartmouth encourage students
to be off the grid the day after election
or come back to attend a decompression dinner,
bring a book or a craft to a listening circle
for the supportive environment,
about the reflections, about the,
they're treating these people like their children.
Look at this headline,
LEGO's cocoa and coloring books for Georgetown students.
At the McCourt School of Public Policy,
officials are offering mindfulness options.
Now look at this agenda,
which comes from the school's director
of student engagement.
T-Coco self-care, a LEGO station,
coloring and mindfulness exercises,
milk and cookies and LEGOs,
snacks and self-guided meditation to recover from this.
There are more educational activities
taking place in preschools than this.
I just wanna point that out, look at this.
In recognition of these stressful times,
be good to yourselves, check in on your friends,
they're acting like 9-11 happened and it was an election.
You know, I was in college in the 2000s,
I was driving to campus on the day 9-11 happened,
listening to NPR, wondering if the country was at war
cause we had no idea what was going on
and we all went to school
and did they offer us milk and cookies and LEGOs on 9-11?
No they didn't, no they didn't.
They did let people go home though
because everyone was very upset
and we did not know what was going to happen
and thousands of people were dead.
So it actually was a stressful event.
An election is something that happens every four years.
Every four years, this is gonna happen in four more years.
This is just reality in this country,
that's how our election process works.
And by the way, the McCourt,
the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy,
these are people that are going to affect diplomacy
in the future with these degrees.
They offer undergraduate and master's degrees
in public policy.
It says right here on their website
that their foundational skill set
is based around things like critical thinking
and engaging with bias.
It actually says that here,
that engaging with bias is having the ability
to relate to and learn from people
with different backgrounds and perspectives
and being open to evidence
that may challenge your prior conception.
But they obviously don't think their students can do so.
They don't even think their students can handle
of the basics of an election
that they didn't get the person they wanted elected
in the election.
They're giving them milk and cookies and coloring books.
And they did this at other schools too.
There's many, many schools like Missouri State University
had a self-care no phone zone space
with coloring pages, calm jars.
I don't know what a calm jar is.
Calm jars, coloring pages and sensory fidgets.
Northwestern University offered students
a post-election wellness space with puzzles, crafts,
games, snacks and brain break activities.
And Princeton offered art build processing space.
Harvard Divinity School had a whole community care day
which included office hours with sunshine, the puppet.
I just, office hours with a puppet.
Okay, okay, okay.
Because the election was so devastating for these people
that it says many of us are feeling frustrated,
scared and uncertain, a whole mishmash
of mostly not good emotions.
I mean, you could pull that sentence off of here
and you could put it in the mouth of one of those people
that has puppets, like a puppet show, like Sesame Street.
That's the way they used to talk to us
when we used to watch Sesame Street
when I was like five years old.
And that's how they're talking to adults.
Professors at Columbia are making classes optional
and giving students passes on exam work
and they're giving people participation points
in biology classes now, even if they don't show up
and they're allowing students to replace
their midterm exam grades with their final grades
if they do poorly in recognition of the increased quote,
stress some of you might be feeling
because of the election results.
At Emory School of Medicine,
which presumably is a school that teaches doctors
how to be doctors,
deans and administrators are sending emails
to residents and fellows to check in post-election
to ask if they have any feelings of anxiety
about the future and reiterate that they are there for them
during these challenging moments.
They are treating these people like babies.
They're treating them like little tiny babies.
I went over to Yale,
tried to see what was going on over there
and I came across this article
and this is where I actually just stopped and went,
okay, I obviously just am so in another reality
that I didn't realize this is the level
that we're at in this country.
Like I obviously just don't.
I obviously just don't know where we even are anymore
as an adult living in America in 2024
because this is a headline.
Yale bleeds champion's menstrual equity
and social justice on campus and beyond.
What?
Through workshops, art and community partnerships,
Yale's menstrual equity organization
tackles period poverty challenges stigma
and confronts institutional barriers to access.
I had to go look some of this up.
Apparently it actually just has to do with
some people can't afford tampons
and so they're gonna get it to where people
can have those in the bathrooms on campus.
Well, that makes total sense.
They used to have them in the bathrooms on campus anyway.
So I don't know what's happening now
that we have to act like it's not equal anymore
that half of the population has a period
but then you go down in here
and it's talking about how they're having
abstractionist painting workshops
using the colors associated with period blood textures
and smells at the sentence
to facilitate engagement to focus on your identity
as a menstruator.
And that's in quotes, menstruator.
And that they're gonna do it the day after election day
because it's really important to provide a space
for students to process their feelings
about the incoming administration and reproductive health.
And tomorrow they're gonna have
a uterus cookie making workshop.
This is a thing.
I'm just, look, this is on their website.
This is reality.
This is not an SNL sketch.
This is real life.
They're gonna paint pictures with the textures
and smells of period blood
and then make uterus cookies at Yale.
That's what they're doing.
That's what they're doing, okay?
As menstruators, which by the way,
as a woman feels incredibly dehumanizing
to, we're not gonna call ourselves women anymore.
We're gonna call ourselves our bodily functions now.
It's incompletely dehumanizing.
I feel like it's completely dehumanizing and gross.
I actually think it's gross personally
but, hey, you wanna call yourself a menstruator?
Fine.
But I feel like it's incredibly dehumanized.
I mean, are people who take dumps
gonna start calling themselves?
You see what I'm saying?
Like, we could do this all day.
That's just a thing your body does.
How is that an identity now?
I just don't understand this.
I actually don't comprehend it.
And so I'm gonna use a word that I've been using all year
which Erin says is now a drinking game in our house
because of how many times I brought it up
but it's called infantilizing.
Infantilization, that's absolutely correct.
Infantilization.
I'm sorry, you're really lucky
I didn't bust out laughing earlier.
It's a real word.
And this is what these schools are doing to these people.
These are supposed to be people,
they are supposed to be adults.
These are supposed to be adults.
This is our future in this country
at these Ivy League schools.
And they're treating them like they're five years old
or even in just preschool.
So infantilization is a verb and it means
to treat or condescend to as if still a young child
to reduce to an infantile state or condition,
to reduce a person to the state or status of an infant,
to keep someone infantile, to treat them like a baby.
That's infantilize.
This is infantilization.
It is institutional infantilization
by just telling these kids that
you should come have milk and cookies
and play with Legos.
You're actually giving them the message
that that's how they should respond.
That these meltdowns, that these complete breakdowns,
these inabilities to handle reality are normal.
You're normalizing this behavior.
This is what you're doing.
As a school, as an institutional practice,
you're normalizing the infantilization of adults.
Practically ensuring that next election
they're gonna act worse
and be able to handle it even less.
That is what is being done to this.
This is actually a disservice.
This is actually harmful.
I think this is harmful.
And you have charts being put out like this one, this map.
If the election, if having a degree was a requirement
to vote in this election,
this is what it would have looked like.
Because far and away,
the vast majority of our universities and colleges
are left-leaning institutions.
You've had studies put out on this.
Back in 2020, Democratic professors
outnumber Republican ones nine to one.
There was a whole thing that came out
of the National Association of Scholars
and they talked about this,
how this divide has grown rapidly.
And it says the concern is grounded in research
on confirmation bias, group polarization,
motivated reasoning and the tendency
for these phenomena to be even more pronounced
among the highly educated.
Consistent findings from this work
is that although the ratio of faculty who identify
and are registered as Democratic versus Republican
varies across departments,
it almost always favors the Democratic party.
Secondly, Democratic to Republican registration ratio
is typically higher among disciplines
in the humanities and social sciences
as compared to the natural sciences and engineering.
Third, Democratic to Republican registration ratio
has increased over time.
It was 4.5 to one in 1999.
Now it's 10 to one today
among elite liberal arts colleges
and social science departments.
And that the partisan slant is the most extreme
in the most highly rated institutions.
So I don't know why it's being put out here
that it's a measure of intelligence
to say that if you send a bunch of 18 year olds
to extremely left leaning institutions
they are going to emerge also left leaning
when almost all of their professors are left leaning.
Why is that a surprise to anyone?
That that is how it would go down.
You're sending people there in their very formative years
where they're very first becoming adults from children
and they're surrounded with extremely left leaning
partisan people.
You think that's not coming across in their classes?
Some of that was coming across in my classes
even back in the day.
But it wasn't as pronounced as it is now.
So they're overwhelmingly liberal
and then of course the people who graduate from there
become liberal, that makes sense.
I don't know why, like that's not a measure of,
well that just means that all Democrats
are more intelligent.
It means that the majority of our higher learning
institutions are Democrat
and they're shaping the foundational views
of emerging adults who are also Democrat
after they leave there.
Ashley St. Clair shared this map actually
and she said, what do you call an institution
in which everybody who enters it
leaves with a uniform political ideology?
I mean that's what's going on.
So now we're infantilizing people
and it's not just the people who go to these colleges
it's not just the leaders of tomorrow
who are going to these Ivy League institutions
who are coming out this way.
You have MSNBC having a Yale University
child psychology fellow going on the air.
So they're doing kind of an appeal to authority,
trust the experts type of deal
by having a Yale child psychology fellow
come on the air and talk to everyone.
Telling people to cut their friends and family out
who didn't vote the way they,
who voted for Trump for the holidays.
I think just a societal norm
that if somebody is your family
that they are entitled to your time.
And I think the answer is absolutely not.
So if you are going to a situation
where you have family members,
where you have close friends
who you know have voted in ways that are against you
like what you said against your livelihood
and it's completely fine to not be around those people
and to tell them why.
You know, to say I have a problem
with the way that you voted
because it went against my very livelihood
and I'm not going to be around you this holiday.
I need to take some space for me.
And acting like that's an expert opinion
that it's normal to do that.
That it's normal to cut out your family
if they don't agree with you politically.
Which by the way is exactly what cults do.
Cults isolate people from people
who could challenge their views,
who could challenge the views of the cults.
That is exactly, that's straight out of the cult playbook
of cult programming to isolate people
so that they're only around other people
who share the cult's views.
That's completely what that is.
And they're parading it on the news as if it's news,
this is a thing that's happening to our country.
This is happening.
You know, I don't know what the answer is.
But the other day I watched a video
and I'm not a huge, you guys know on this channel
Ted Talks are not my favorite thing in the world
because a lot of times they're formulaic
and they do the Ted Talk hands
and it makes it very hard to just listen to the person
who's presenting sometimes, feels very contrived.
But I did watch this, Dr. Susan David,
she was talking about emotional intelligence
and she brought up a really good point
that I think needs to be considered.
I like being happy.
I'm a pretty happy person.
But when we push aside normal emotions
to embrace false positivity,
we lose our capacity to develop skills
to deal with the world as it is,
not as we wish it to be.
I think some of that is what is going on.
I saw a person make a video the other day
and they were saying, you know,
I don't know why so many of you on our side,
meaning the Democrat side,
I don't know why so many of you thought
that people were gonna vote based on their identity politics.
When the average person who votes
is voting based on basic things like,
can I afford the cost of living in society?
Well, they thought that because they're coming out
of a very progressive university
that's treating them like their children
who can throw a temper tantrum
when they don't get their way
if I could make a two to three hour documentary right now
with no commentary whatsoever,
just putting videos up of grown adults
behaving like children after this election
and turning on cameras and screaming and crying
and throwing fits and making threats
and melting down in ways that I would have given my child
a time out for when he was little,
if he had behaved that way
and they're behaving that way and they're older than me.
And it goes back to this,
when we push and embrace false positivity,
people are losing their capacity
to develop skills to deal with reality as it is
and not the illusion they have in their minds.
This whole love and light crowd
where it's always good feelings and good vibes all the time
and there's no such thing as a negative emotion.
There's no such thing as anger, frustration and depression.
Can't even have those.
So when you do, it's so alien and all-encompassing
you can't handle how to deal with your,
you have no emotional intelligence
to deal with your negative feelings
which by the way serve a purpose.
And this society has spent way too much time
making people think that if you have a bad feeling
at all, you need to immediately go get a pill for that
because you're not supposed to even have that
and it's not right to have those
but they're there for a reason.
That is how you learn about yourself.
You actually learn what's wrong
and what's actually making you upset
and then you learn how to process those emotions
and deal with them.
And the society is like, live, laugh, love.
Okay, well, that's great.
And being happy is great too
but it's not normal to just be happy all the time.
And whenever they tried to normalize that idea,
I think that's when a lot of this mental illness
became a serious issue.
You can't reject the negative emotions
and pretend they don't exist
and not feel them and not experience what that is.
No amount of milk and cookies is gonna fix that.
And so now you have huge portions of society
who are projecting the negative things
they refuse to face in themselves,
their fears, their anger, their disappointment,
their frustration.
They're projecting it on the rest of society
like their own personal Plato's Cave
because the illusion doesn't match the reality.
And when that happens, breakdown is inevitable.
If you can't face yourself
and your own emotions and truths within yourself,
you're not gonna be able to face it in reality either
but these universities are not helping
by literally coddling and infantilizing these students.
These are supposed to be adults.
I can't believe these are headlines and not parody.
Generations like mine, we were,
I've seen articles now that claim
that if you were born in the 80s,
like you're lucky you aren't dead
because we were just out on our bikes
riding around for hours.
Our parents didn't know where we were.
I would say by the time I was 10 years old,
I was past the milk and cookies phase
for my bad feelings about things that were going on.
So if that tells you anything,
but this is not how we handled anything,
even not that long ago,
I do not know what has happened in this country
that we've gotten to this point,
but this is very, very dangerous
to the future of society actually.
And I wish I had more answers,
but we could at least start with the idea
that emotional intelligence means a full picture,
not just one side.
And I'm just, I guess I'm just ranting again,
but I don't know,
these kind of conversations need to be had somewhere
because this is insane.
And it feels like it's just getting more insane.
I just, as much as people want to pretend
like this isn't what's happening
and be like, well, they just need to grow up.
Well, they're not, they're not growing up.
They're not, clearly they're not growing up.
They're going backwards, they're regressing,
they're Benjamin Button, okay?
And not even back into like a cute little kid,
but into like a bratty spoiled kid
who has no idea how to handle reality.
And this society for years and years now
has really promoted the idea that if you're sad, that's bad.
And you need to go take a pill for that or erase it
instead of facing it and trying to figure out
what is actually bothering you
so that you can actually overcome that.
We're not overcoming things anymore.
We're just prescribing things
and trying to ignore reality all the time.
And that ignoring of reality
may be what has gotten us here.
You know what?
As a society, we have to stop lying to ourselves.
Reality is not a safe space.
It will never be a safe space.
I don't wanna try because I don't wanna feel disappointed
or I just want this feeling to go away.
I understand, I said to them,
but you have dead people's goals.
Only dead people never get unwanted
or inconvenienced by their feelings.
Only dead people never get stressed,
never get broken hearts,
never experience the disappointment
that comes with failure.
Tough emotions are part of our contract with life.
You don't get to have a meaningful career
or raise a family or leave the world a better place
without stress and discomfort.
Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.