Racist Kids

I think this is your best video

Videos like this are why im a patreon tbh. I think their is potential to edit this with a fine tooth comb and make it more concise, but I do like whats presented. The only thing I might be wanting of personally is more insight into the children themselves, a bit more insight into the episode itself

The zoom on the dog in the portrait *chef's kiss*

The fact that Michael Hobbes saw that Little Joel video is hilarious 😂

I've watched this video a couple of times now and I really think it's great.

This was a fantastic video, with a lot of insight. I would read an entire book on this subject tbh. Personally, I hope very much that it eventually makes it to youtube.

I love you Henry this is a wonderful video

I wouldn't begin to second guess your judgement about your own videos, or about the management of a Big(joel) YouTube channel - so this is definitely not "advice" - but I just wanted to say that I think this video is fantastic and I really, really hope it makes it to the main channel. I can see why you, as the person who wrote it, would feel like it's poorly constructed because it jumps about between topics a lot, etc. But I honestly think the links you're drawing between the topics & ideas do flow pretty well, and all are clear and well argued throughout. I think it's wonderful, and (as a trans person) I think it would be a real shame if at least the parts about 'Irreversible Damage' never ended up making it to a wider audience. Having said that, whatever your particular reasons in this case, the fact you decided not to post it on BigJ despite having put loads of work into it, is part of what makes you one of my favourite YouTube essayists. I can believe that you really care about what you say publicly on a weighty topic. So I do trust that you know best! 😋 In a nutshell; well done, I loved it, thank you for making it, and I really hope more people will be able to see it soon 🤞🤞

This is actually one of my favorites. I'm not sure why you're so down on it. I highly encourage you to release it broadly.

I think it's extremely pertinent that you highlighted the racism against Jews, particularly Jewish children. I found it very interesting that you went from Jennifer calling Jews "the children of the antichrist" to talking about the film The Omen. I was hoping you would say more on the topic. Although I know anti Jewish hatred is not a popular topic in video essays so perhaps an uncommercial decision with your audience. But thanks for what you included, it's a great piece.

the feelings and relationship conservatives have to kids is so weird that even if you don't publish this video specifically I'd be interested to see your take on something related

American tv is wild what do you mean legit KKK members were invited to the studio to talk about what's up with them

An hour of Joel! This is why I pay the big bucks. I really like the ideas you’re exploring in this one, it’s clear a lot of work went into it. I love hearing your thoughts on these topics that are omnipresent but never explicitly stated and explored

Hello Big Joel, my partner and I really enjoyed the video. It's been a hard time for us recently. My partner is trans and estranged from her family, and we live in the UK, where there is a lot of scary rhetoric at the moment (she says hi, by the way). We found the video moving and thought-provoking. I think all the parts build together (I don't agree necessarily with other comments about excluding the Pinochio section - that was actually my favourite). Anyway.... bye :)

It's a good video but I had to stop watching bc it was too heavy for me. 😮‍💨

Extremely thought provoking video. I get where you're coming from about it lacking a bit of focus, but this is so enriched with a pointed yet empathetic criticism of our culture- I think it's absolutely worth sharing.

good video 👍

There's a lot to like here. I agree with other commenters that the Irreversible Damage section feels a bit out-of-place in the video, so here's maybe a suggestion on how to connect them. It feels like one subtext of the video is cultural anxieties of nature vs nurture — if there's something wrong with our children, is it scarier to imagine that we put it there (racist kids) or that we didn't (the antichrist)? Is it scarier to have no control over who children become or too much? This subtext is at play in Irreversible Damage, too. These kids have something inside of them that no adult put there. That's too scary for their parents to deal with, so they and Abigail Shrier imagine a social contagion, a group of doctors and media personalities and slightly older kids who did put it there. Focusing the trans panic on kids is, first and foremost IMO, a useful pretext for taking rights away from trans adults, but I imagine that there is also a hopeful logic — if we could stop kids from being trans, if we could get them to adulthood without anyone putting that idea in their head, then trans adults would just disappear.

I actually really liked this video. Honestly one of my favorites I’ve seen. If I would change anything, it would maybe be to make its thesis (about children being imaginary) show up a bit earlier. I feel like the Pinocchio bit atm is interesting in its idea but not as connected to the other bits. But this video is one of my favorites of yours honestly. Really good!

I thought this was good! It felt a bit unfocused, but there are still a lot of great ideas being shared.

Is this video up on nebula

I thought the section on trans children, while being a very good response to Schrirer, doesn't really fit. I understand the link being made but it's too much of a stretch to my mind. Otherwise I found it more coherent than I expected from your intro.

I loved this video. It was super emotionally resonant and made sense to me all the way through. Only critique is that there were several unintentional micro aggressions in the trans section (which unlike others I really think you should keep in, it meant a lot to me and when you talked about “imaginary children being weaponized politically” I was like “trans” but then you went Q anon. I think it’s hugely thematic and helps the rest of the points make sense). First issue was sometimes you would use wrong pronouns outside of quoting the book, literally just a mistake. Second was the line about kids like to be referred to as the gender “they think they are” - should just be “the gender they are.” Only nitpicking because as a trans person these things lightly sting and future trans viewers will feel it too Otherwise, I loved this video. Made me think about a lot differently. Joel being too hard on Joelself

I'll no doubt have more substantial critique later but can I just say that having that painting take up the majority of the frame in the last section is pure genius? It's been in the background of many videos of yours but only now, when it's thematically relevant, is it so up close. This brings back so many subjects from prior videos of yours (Red Pill, Unplanned, Leo+Layla) that it almost feels like a series finale of sorts.

There’s really some gold in this one. Your central ideas about children, society, and morality were revelatory to me. I hope you can eventually clean it up & release it to a wider audience. My suggestion would be to cut out the section on Irreversible Damage and find pithier way to make your points.

There’s not much on television tonight so I’m glad to have this.

BTW I hadn't seen a picture of Michael Hobbes before this thanks for ruining the magic for me

I think it's all tied up into our anxiety about our own legacies, and the acknowledgement that some day the world will move on without us. It's up to future generations to preserve us and our values. Bill Maher needs us to be charitable to Thomas Jefferson, because if the history books can scrutinize the character of an important president, what will they say about people like Maher? Children are the only people whose feelings and values we can freely scrutinize and influence. Once they're adults, they gain access to autonomy and the power to advocate for themselves. For wannabe fascists especially, this is difficult to contend with. Bigoted parents of trans adults are fighting, not only for prolonged control over their children's autonomy, but also to avoid being cemented in history as "my abusive transphobic mother and father." Some people are so concerned about killing the antichrist, but refuse to acknowledge that the society they're defending was not built by perfect Christlike children. Ultimately, we'll all have to watch helplessly as the world we leave behind writes the history books without our input.

Cultural ideas surrounding children to me - like those surrounding the intellectually disabled and fetuses - are sites of anxiety surrounding the human and the non-human. Specifically the difficulty of drawing a hard binary between those two things. Human being defined as fundamentally agentic and thus subject to the law. The law premises the knowledge and capability to choose one's actions in its subjects. But what is the moment when somebody becomes truly agentic and fully human? The deeper roots of this may be anxieties surrounding the possibilities of our own agency on an existential level. In our Christian culture there exists a paradox that in that judgment and redemption in the Christian faith is based on choice and will, but that the best way to maintain the Christian population is through the reduction of choice. So there is a reproduction crisis and anxiety surrounding that centered on how to raise children. But these anxieties might go further and deeper into a more universal experience of instability concerning the boundaries of the body the mind and identity within human experience. Where and when do we become what we are? In witnessing children we see our own past of being incomplete and shaped by others. When did we leave that behind? Did we? That's why the flip between "innocent monstrous" and "culpably monstrous" Jen is so shocking. The artifice of something between 14 and 16 years old as constituting that line. These are some of the concepts that your video is hovering around imo.

It’s nice seeing something incomplete, like Kafka’s works. there are hints of a real greatness in this video essay but it does not complete or tied up into a nice overarching theory is really fascinating.

This is like a Rosetta Stone for Size Joel videos. The Bill Maher clip, the anti-trans book, the Michael Hobbes stuff. This discarded video sits in the background of everything we've seen. It's like Kant's "noumena."

I've always loved the way you talk about kids and teenagers like actual people. It's weirdly not the way a lot of people like to talk about children, and this video is really indicative of that, I think. I'd love to see how this video evolves if you ever decide to come back to it, but I'm already connecting to it pretty deeply as is.

I like your sweater in this one! Très sharp.

This one hit me hard. This isn't a trauma dump don't worry, but I've been no-contact with my mother for 3 years now after she got radicalised online during lockdown and became a rabid transphobe. It happened gradually - a few ignorant comments and loaded questions here and there, eventually becoming an obsession that took over her life. She saw trans people in everything - the unrelated memes I sent her, the TV shows she watched, the stories on the news. It didn't matter that they weren't about trans people, she always found a way to tie it back to "gender ideology". Me and my brother tried very hard to pull her out of the pipeline every step of the way too. We'd bring data and stats, show her reports and scientific findings, we tried to appeal to her heart and emotions with real stories of people hurt by her movement and our own personal experiences and relationships with trans people, we tried to "agree to disagree" and not bring it up around each other... But nothing we did could de-radicalise her as fast as she was being radicalised online. She read the book you talked about in this video and from the way she relayed things to me, it's clear she also saw them as literal children and not adults. This is a very deliberate move not just on the part of the author, but the movement as a whole. Within the trans community, there are a higher % of people with autism than the general population. The same is true for the wider LGBTQ community - no one really knows why, but neurodivergence appears to have some connection to emergent identities. The anti-trans movement takes research showing that people with autism are more vulnerable to abuse, more susceptible to grooming, less able to spot a lie, more likely to be excluded from social groups etc and it posits that because of this, autistic people are being brainwashed and groomed by predators into believing they are trans. They seek out gender affirming treatments and surgery to please their groomers and "fit in". They are kept on puberty blockers to remain "eternal children" for the sexual pleasure of these groomers and then they *become* the freaks and groomers themselves. This conspiratorial hypothesis is used as a means of both spreading fear of trans people, and a desire to "protect" trans people. They are innocent children left to the whims of evil abusers, and they are also the evil abusers who want to harm children. But, in the vast majority of cases, children aren't actually receiving any permanent gender affirming care or treatments. So the anti-trans movement simply weaponises autism and neurodivergence in general to infantilise transitioning adults and remove their ability to consent. There's a case I read in the news a few years ago of a father who was so against his adult son's transition, that he took him to court and made this very argument - his son may be in his 20s, but he has autism so he cannot make informed decisions and give consent. The way this case was framed in discussions online and in the British press was one of a desperate father who was fighting to save his child - an act of love and self sacrifice and defiance against the evil extremists trying to capture his child. For me, someone with autism, it felt terrifying. That my body - the only physical thing of value that I "own" and can do what I like with - could be handed over to my parents by order of a court should I choose to do something too extreme, too disagreeable for them. And it was around that time I realised how often and how easily gen x (boomers too, but gen x seemingly moreso) have been manipulated by this "save the children" rhetoric. From stranger danger and satanic panic in the 80s and 90s, through to Qanon, muslim grooming gangs, "gender ideology", and critical race theory. They may seem like radically different causes on the surface, but scratch a little deeper and it's clear they're all the same - "Our children are in danger and if we don't save them, they will become the danger". Innocent, helpless, powerful, terrifying - all at the same time. The last time I spoke to my mother was on the phone - she screamed at me that I was in a cult. That I had been brainwashed. That I was supporting and enabling rapists and child abusers. That I was so naive not to see how I'd been manipulated and one day I'd see I was wrong and apologise to her. I'm not trans btw. But I am neurodivergent, so even my support for trans rights can be written off as the whims of a vulnerable, brainwashed child, incapable of knowing her own mind. That conversation is something I spend a lot of time thinking about. Not least in part because I was vulnerable to grooming and abuse as a child, and it was enabled by my mother who didn't believe me when I told her what was happening. The same mother who's entire identity now revolves around "save the children". I wish I had something to end this with, some conclusion to make or a hypothesis to put forward, I don't though. There's just something wrong with the way gen X feels about children, especially their own. Sorry this got so long. Thank you for the thoughtful video, it was very validating to watch 💕

Loved this video! I did think some aspects were a bit stinky, but I would be so happy to see a polished version down the road. Here are some notes based on my initial, knee-jerk reaction. Don't take them too seriously! 5:04 I like the pivot to Jennifer and Amy's father, but it was kind of out of the blue. It might have worked better for me as something to return to later, like after Pinocchio 8:15 good bit, I agree Home Alone is a horror movie 8:55 I didn't really understand the point of this chapter until later in the video when you referred to it at 51:51. It's weird that the kid didn't really do anything, but could use some foreshadowing about what this means 12:53 great two chapters! Loved the contrast of LoTF and Pinocchio. But I had a hard time connecting them to the rest of the video. I enjoyed the point at 19:07 though, and think that was one of the high points of the video for me 21:13 I have to think more about this section. I think the contrast between the way Jerry Springer treats adults and children is a cool point, but it could have been explained by the KKK mom's question without bringing up Erv Reuben at all 27:39 I don't have much to add to this. The point that this book is really about trans kids' parents was insightful, and I think pivots the narrative of the video overall from centering children to centering parents, but I also found it a bit meandering 53:58 I would have liked to see this discussion fleshed out a bit. You summarize the main point, but what did you love about the article? 58:30 if you got to this a little faster I think it would be good. I didn't need to hear your response to Bill Maher's argument, because it's kind of obvious. I'm just here for the deconstruction 1:00:49 I didn't understand this point at all. How does this viewpoint allow us to cast children as the font of all evil? I mean, LoTF does this, but isn't Maher, and Springer for that matter, saying it's society at large, the way we are socialized, that leads to evil? 1:01:20 beautiful discussion, and I love your out there reading. That said, I want to see bad drawings of this story very much (or good ones by Mothcub, if it gets to that point) 1:04:40 "She got to grow up" is such a good line. Would work great as the hard stop of the video

Feeling really spoiled recently with the new video, the Q&A, and now this!

This is a great video about adults and three good videos about kids

Lots of interesting thoughts to chew on here, thanks for posting it even with your doubts about its completeness! I like how your final words left Jerry Springer speechless clutching his head hehe

every time i hear that i have no strings song i think of the creepy slowed version from age of ultron

Just finished this. I think it's a great exploration of the paradoxical nature of children as both sacred and profane, innocent but not treated as such. It gets a little long in the section about Irreversible Damage, but I may only think that because I've seen Sarcasmatron's vid on the topic.

I know it's been said by others, but the kids that The Lord of the Flies was based on were indigenous and did just fine until they were rescued. William Golding worked at a boarding school, so the book was more about how kids behaved in that environment

Are you telling me I can have 65 minutes of bonus joel FOR FREE? Wait I'm paying for this?? ...POG I'M PAYING MY FAVORITE CREATOR

holy shit this is a blessing

Joel proving his namesake with a big video

getting a notification that just says “Racist Kids” was an emotionally intense experience for me. super looking forward to watching this

An hour?? I'm well fed!

No way!!!! So excited for this long awaited glory

wow (?) thanks

a HOUR

Is this a bonus vid for May or April