The Grooming of the American Youth

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekKMBNpXnO0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekKMBNpXnO0)

This is a very interesting video, from a few months ago, that touches on something that gets overlooked quite frequently in the Us vs. Them conversations. The Republicans, more accurately, the billionaires, are using the standard tactics of the religious fringe to groom the young people in the US. Charlie Kirk and Nic Fuentes and the rest of the MAGA podcasters are not great people. But, in the end, they are just tools for the people in charge. Trump isn't in charge, he's another tool. SCOTUS isn't in charge, they are just another tool.

The people in charge are the ones that just gained over a trillion dollars in wealth this year. They are the ones funding Trump and SCOTUS and the podcasters in a coordinated effort to disrupt and distract. The podcasters are the recruitment arm of that effort, and Charlie Kirk was an extremely successful tool.

The frustrating is that this is a very basic and obvious technique that has been used by religious groups forever. They send Kirk and the other recruiters to events that attract disenfranchised young people. While the churches would usually go after children to indoctrinate them from a very early age, these groups are going after young adults, typically 15-20 year old white men, who are lost in the world. Then they make their targets feel seen, loved, important, and empowered with lies and false hopes.

The movie American History X is a great portrayal of this type of recruitment and indoctrination. The goal is to get these young people to believe that they're loved, and then to mutate that love into a driver to create blindly loyal extremists.

These fanatics have made their choices, and they deserve the blame for any of their wrongdoings. However, we cannot begin to heal the country if we only blame the followers and don't aggressively go after the leaders.