Trauma TV: How TV Is Designed to Damage Your Kids

This is an actual quote from Oberlin College’s guide to professors issuing “trigger warnings:” 

Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is a triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read. However, it may trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more.

What it’s saying is that a book that they think “everyone in the world should read” (review: Don’t Bother) is possibly harmful, triggering literal Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in students who have experienced, among other things, colonialism. If you’re left scratching your head as to how anyone gets actual PTSD from “colonialism” (a) join the club–but (b) you’re (and everyone else) is looking in the wrong place.

The Big Lie About ‘Trigger Warnings’

The common narrative is that “Trigger Warnings” started off in the Women’s Blogosphere where lady-bloggers were sometimes writing about rape or sexual abuse and realized that for people who had been legitimately raped, there could be PTSD associated with the experience. As such, before getting graphic, they’d issue a ‘heads up’ about the content.

Then, as PTSD, for, like veterans and survivors of real trauma, is an actual thing, the concept spread and all our precious little snowflakes (we’re not sure why these kids are always called ‘snowflakes’–but it seems to fit) decided they could get “triggered” or re-traumatized by anything. Once the term “micro-aggression” was coined for “anything I encounter in real life that I don’t like” everything had to be padded and wrapped with verbal “baby bumpers” so that the new generation of cream-puffs wouldn’t hit their precious little egos on anything.

For anyone who knows kids today, there is an element of truth in all that–but there’s an even bigger slice of lie.

The Big TRUTH: Children Were Systematically Traumatized Intentionally

The truth is far more disturbing than the lie (which is usually the case). We spoke with professor Alison Nadia Fields at the Chicago University Division of the Humanities in the Department of Cinema and Media studies. She has been investigating the history of children’s TV and its encoded messages.

RealTrueNews: Good morning professor Alison. Can you explain your thesis on traumatic television aimed at children?

Professor Alison Nadia Fields: In the late 80′s and early 90′s there was a lot of research being done on how children learn. Some of this was funded and run by the Department of Defense since we were afraid of losing a strategic resource to countries like China in terms of educated young people. There were some ideas about “video learning” and whether that could work. Things like that.

RTN: What did they discover?

ANF: Mostly–mostly what you’d think. Traditional Sesame Street seemed to be okay for reinforcing normal lessons. They discovered that kid’s attention spans were naturally short but could be trained to be longer by doing things like homework. Overall it was something of a let-down. Educationally video resources could make a difference but not much of one. Reading, for example, was much less ‘mentally passive’ than viewing. Things like reflected light, like off a movie screen, were less hypnotic than projected light, as from a TV–but most people couldn’t set up a projector in their home. Stuff like that.

RTN: Okay–so TV isn’t all that educational. Then what?

ANF: Well, one of the things they did learn was that developing children were highly susceptible to symbols. Things that were implied symbolically could be absorbed very quickly and the in troubling ways. This research was sort of accidental in the late 80′s–but by the 90′s, people with specific interests had gotten their hands on it. After that we started seeing this media coming out that was loaded with symbols–and not good ones either. Really, really bad ones, in fact.

RTN: Wait–hold up a second. What people got their hands on the research? What “interests.”

ANF: Well, people like the gay-rights lobby. Disney, which has an entire social-engineering department. The people who were less interested in educating children and more interesting in shaping them. I think one of them’s running for president this year.

RTN: Can you explain more about “shaping” children?

ANF: Well, you can’t program children but you can influence them. The gay rights lobby realized that the best way to get more social acceptance was for people to see the right kinds of homosexual characters on adult TV because for grown-ups their executive function could override their amygdala response.For children, though, the way to influence them is . . .

RTN: What?

ANF: Trauma. We started looking at the symbol-load of children’s television in the 90′s and it was sophisticated and horrifying. There were sexual images everywhere. In the widely watched TV show Blue’s Clues you have a young girl cast as a cartoon dog living with a college-aged boy and they “play.” This is a pedophilia model complete with the ever-present camera and lack of adult intervention.

Yo Gabba Gabba was worse. While Clues was encoded, Gabba-Gabba was basically un-cut. It was the straight traumatic symbol-load shot directly into the child’s brain. One of the characters was an abusive sexual toy. Others were cannibalism, slavery, things like that.

The so-called ‘Teletubbies’ was disturbing to a lot of grown-ups. It was very viscerally homosexual in 

influence even though most adults couldn’t put their finger on why. It was also coded for worship–specifically of TV. It was laying the foundation for a generation of kids to become slaves to the media. It was so powerful that it hurt itself some: if mom watched any of it, she usually found other things for her kids to sit in front of.

On the other hand there were a lot of families where the kids were sat in front of it for hours a day absorbing the symbol-load in mega-doses.

RTN: That’s–wow, that’s scary. How does that relate to Trigger Warnings?

ANF: Well, the programming isn’t like “education.” It doesn’t get processed through the intelligence and consciousness functions of the brain. It directly goes much, much deeper. This basically codes as trauma. The kid is terrified and doesn’t know why. It’s because their natural state of mind is under attack. They are in the process of being broken down with all this horrific sexual-subtext they can’t process. This leaves them with very literal PTSD for all kinds of experiences.

A person who grew up exposed to mega-doses of 90′s and 2000 TV may as well have been through a major war as far as their mind-state is concerned. When they get out into the world, those early wounds are still there. They are essentially broken people who have been shattered to meet the gay and government agendas. 

For the most part we didn’t even know it was happening.

Trigger Warnings are often a response to that. Educators see the trauma but don’t know why. Social Justice co-opts it in order to advance it’s narrative. Thus the whole edifice gets more powerful.

RTN: That’s really scary. Is there anything a parent can do?

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