LET THEM EAT THERAPY: How Liberals Weaponize Psychology Against Americans, From 1950s Market Research to 2020s SEL

For most of the last decade, the national government—along with the corporations, universities, and schools it underwrites—has advanced policies that explicitly shape the way people think about major parts of their identity: race, gender, sexuality, trauma, anxiety. How effective these policies are isn’t clear, but to those concerned by the shift, they seem endless and self-reinforcing. Projects that started with addressing the emotional toll of racism now extend to climate anxiety; trans acceptance has given rise to a medical industry providing sex changes to minors; scholars’ concerns over isolation have become a government program to “solve” loneliness. And the justifications for these shifts don’t come from a single ideological place: Some of them insist on equality; others invoke self-expression; still others are promoted in the name of suicide prevention. Each issue has its individual causes and controversies—but cumulatively, they have had a similar function: to give first corporations, then schools, and most recently, the national government more authority over our minds, and to put aside questions of who has power in favor of how people feel.

Read more at Compact.