Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
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CATEGORY: GOVERNMENT PROJECTS  Valkyrae, live streamer and YouTuber Source: Office of the California Surgeon General Read time: 1.9 minutes This Happened On May 31, 2024, the California government’s ACEs Aware program released a three-minute promotional video featuring celebrity gamer Valkyrae for its new Live Beyond campaign. Who Did This? ACEs Aware is a more than $106 million program paid for by California taxpayers and run by the Office of the California Surgeon General. It promotes the narrative that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) cause an extraordinary array of mental and physical problems in adulthood. Valkyrae, real name Rachell Marie Hofstetter, is a 32-year-old live-streamer who makes her living by filming herself playing video games and sharing her single social life. She is YouTube’s most-watched female streamer since 2020. Her channel currently has 4.09 million subscribers. The Premise The California ACE campaign began in 2019 as the first incentive-based program to pay pediatricians to administer ACE screens to children in their practices. The rationale was that ACEs were harmful psychological toxins that families needed to be aware of. Since 2024, the campaign has shifted the emphasis to focusing on resilience strategies with the Live Beyond campaign to complement its message about alleged harms. The promotional video shows Valkyrae talking for three minutes about how she discovered the concept of ACEs through the ACEs Aware program and this changed her outlook on life. Her ACE was that she grew up with an alcoholic father. The short video below shows excerpts where she blames her father’s behavior for causing severe asthma, hives, and an anxiety disorder that led her to seek counseling: Analysis The ACE narrative is unproven as a scientific concept because it is based one hundred percent on weak cross-sectional studies that have zero power to determine causality. Valkyrae’s story is a perfect example: There was no mention of whether her asthma started before or after her father was an alcoholic; no mention of whether anxiety runs in her family and maybe anxiety could be genetically based. Instead, nearly everything that defines her is blamed on childhood stress. Further, the proposed physiological mechanisms of how stress damages the brain and body are based on flawed, inconsistent, and non-replicable studies. One of the co-authors of the original ACE studies, pediatrician Robert Anda [1], and others [2], have criticized misguided programs like the ACEs Aware screenings. Her suggestions for coping with stress—therapy, meditation, exercise—are not bad, but they teach viewers the wrong lesson that other people are the cause of all their problems. Why Is This Happening? While the ACE narrative is pitched as a scientific discovery, it has always been primarily an ideology about the nature of human beings that was searching for some validation from research. The ideology is that life experiences, not genetics, molds human traits and determines which groups become advantaged or disadvantaged in society. This belief requires that human nature is highly malleable. This set of beliefs has been the foundation of nearly all progressive leftist projects for the past three hundred years. The creations of the ACE and toxic stress narratives were the long sought-after melding of modern science with liberal activism. As a public health program, ACEs Aware was doomed from the beginning: It cannot improve the health of children it intends to help because it misunderstands the source of their problems. But as a cultural propaganda program to instill a belief framework in children, it was cunning. REFERENCES [1] Robert F. Anda, Laura E. Porter, David W. Brown Inside the Adverse Childhood Experience Score: Strengths, Limitations, and Misapplications. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 2020;59(2):293−295; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2020.01.009 [2] John D. McLennan, Andrea Gonzalez, Harriet L. MacMillan, Tracie O. Afifi, Routine screening for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) still doesn't make sense, Child Abuse & Neglect, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2024.106708 Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe here to our weekly email notice of new posts. Comments are closed.
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