Source: Journal of Teaching in Social Work
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
In March 2025, the Journal of Teaching in Social Work published a special issue devoted to critiquing the woke hegemony in the training of new social workers.

Who Did This?
Vicki Lens is the editor-in-chief of the journal, and is Professor in the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, New York. Her work has focused on critiquing welfare reforms and analyzing court decisions related to welfare.
Naomi Farber and Maryah Fram joined Lens as guest editors to put together this issue. Both are professors in schools of social work.
​
The Premise
The catalyst for the special issue was the very public reactions to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, which included a disproportionate number of social work students and faculty signing petitions and joining protests that refused to condemn terrorism and viewed Hamas’ actions as ‘valorized violence in the name of antiracist practice.’ This raised a concern that the social work profession was degraded in ‘a coalescing of what we have been observing for some time, that perhaps from impatience and frustration with the stickiness of entrenched social problems, our profession has gradually been letting go of the necessary burdens of the humbling search for professional and scientific knowledge.’ [1]
A contributory factor was that in 2022 the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) decreed that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) must be taught throughout all social work curricula. 

Authors described consequences such as student self-censorship. Indeed, two of the papers were anonymously-authored for fear of reprisals, reminiscent of eighteenth-century European autocracies where dissidents often published under pseudonyms to avoid imprisonment or exile.
Other essays explored the politicization of language, the pitfalls of DEI rhetoric, and the displacement of scientific inquiry by postmodern frameworks. At stake, contributors argued, is the profession’s ability to balance values of justice with commitments to evidence and client well-being.
Collectively, the issue called for humility, pluralism, and a recommitment to rigorous, open, and diverse scholarship that resists ideological capture and safeguards social work’s mission to enhance human well-being.
 
Analysis
Exactly for these reason, clinical work and research on trauma has been another direct victim of this ideological capture of social work. The concerns raised in this special issue help explain how certain trauma-related concepts gained extraordinary influence despite weak empirical grounding. Within a professional culture that privileges moral certainty over methodological skepticism, ideas such as “the body keeps the score,” toxic stress, adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), complex PTSD, and epigenetic intergenerational transmission of trauma flourished as predetermined narratives despite the lack of evidence. Each offered an intuitive, emotionally resonant story: that trauma operates as an insidious oppressive force that indelibly imprints on the body, poisons development, or echoes through generations.
Social workers constitute approximately 60% of the psychotherapist workforce. Their voices dominate the narratives in clinics, workshops, influencer videos, and online comments about the impact of trauma and how to treat it.
When critical perspectives are silenced, clinicians and educators may adopt concepts that align with prevailing activist or moral frameworks, rewarding dramatic language over cautious science. Students trained in such environments are less likely to challenge weak evidence, while practitioners may apply these ideas unquestioningly, shaping interventions and policies around them. Thus, the professional drift toward rigid ideological mandates not only undermines academic freedom, but also creates fertile ground for the proliferation of trauma “hype concepts” that captivate the imagination while evading empirical accountability.
 
​
References
[1] Lens V, Farber N, Fram M (2025). Editorial. Journal of Teaching in Social Work 45(2):179-197. DOI
10.1080/08841233.2025.2472491.

Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
Redefining traditional concepts of American culture has been a staple of the progressive agenda. What do attempts to redefine American’s Constitution and attempts to redefine the meaning of psychological trauma have in common? More than one might think. As has often been the case in psychology, intellectual frameworks are not formed in a vacuum.
 
Book Summary
American politics can operate on two levels. In normal politics, there is consensus on national goals, with disagreement only on the means of achieving them. In regime politics, the author Charles Kesler explains that the stakes are considerably higher; the conflict is over the ends themselves—over which vision of the country should prevail. The United States is edging toward regime politics, split between two constitutional visions: the original Constitution and the “living” Constitution. Proponents of the latter, often on the progressive Left, argue that the original framework is tainted by systemic racism and must be replaced. Kesler likens this to a “cold civil war.”
In Crisis of the Two Constitutions (2021), the book begins by defending the Founders’ Constitution, then traces the rise of the progressive “living” Constitution, and finally examines conservative efforts to restore the Founders’ principles. The purpose of American constitutionalism itself is at the center of this struggle. The Founders assumed that all citizens were capable of broadly shared moral values such as fairness, security, and truth, which converged on at least the major objective of a strong nation. Progressives, by contrast, over time, rejected that assumption, contending that modern circumstances require reinterpreting the Constitution to produce a different kind of nation.
One of the most compelling sections outlines this reinterpretation as the “Three Waves of Liberalism.” The first, Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom, targeted political reform. The second, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, launched the welfare state. The third, in the 1960s, rejected many traditional American values outright. Despite their differences, all three waves sought to “transform the country into something altogether freer, fairer, and more fulfilling.” By this account, the 20th century was the century of liberalism. Conservatism, emerging in force only in the 1950s, reached its peak influence in 1980.
 
The New Left of the 1960s, influenced by Herbert Marcuse and thinkers like Freud, Marx, and Rousseau, found its home in universities, where it championed radical individualism. The subsequent “New New Left” combined critical legal studies and radical feminism into a politics of identity, characterized by emotional fragility and heightened sensitivity to perceived slights. This shift marks not just a change in political priorities, but an evolution in the very conception of the citizen—and the role government should play in shaping that identity.

What Does This Have to Do With Trauma?
This historical outline helps explain why, by the 1990s, leftist-based hype around psychological trauma flourished. With the third wave of liberalism in the 1960s, the focus shifted from political structures to reshaping personal identity, often in opposition to traditional norms. The “New New Left” that emerged by the 1980s–1990s was steeped in radical identity politics. This created fertile ground for softer, emotionally resonant narratives—like those centered on trauma—to serve as moral justification for social change.
Universities, already crucibles for New Left activism, became hubs for importing psychological concepts into political discourse. Trauma frameworks—especially those stressing hidden wounds, systemic harm, and vulnerability—offered a unifying language that fit neatly with critical legal studies’ focus on structural oppression and radical feminism’s focus on lived experience. By framing political grievances as psychological injuries (“the body keeps the score,” “toxic stress,” “complex PTSD”), activists could claim scientific authority while advancing a moral revolution. Thus, trauma rhetoric became a strategic tool in regime politics, serving to redefine both the citizen and the political ends of the republic.

Source: James Cooke Substack
Read time: 2.0 minutes plus video
 
This Happened
In May 2025, Judith Herman appeared on James Cooke’s Substack podcast in a post titled Tyranny & Trauma vs. Justice & Healing.
 
Who Did This?
Herman, a clinical psychologist, is the famed inventor of complex PTSD based on a 1992 paper. Now 83, she is promoting a new book on restorative justice. Cooke, a neuroscientist, launched his Substack in 2024 to explore consciousness.
 
The Premise
In recent decades, claims about trauma have grown increasingly dramatic—describing it as the greatest public health crisis or promoting treatments that are the singular path to personal and societal salvation. These narratives almost always frame trauma as a form of oppression that leaves deep, lasting damage to the mind, body, and self.
Yet, closer examination repeatedly finds little evidence in support and substantial evidence against such claims (see here on complex PTSD, here on The Body Keeps the Score, here on toxic stress, here on ACEs, here on trauma-informed care, here on epigenetics, and here on intergenerational transmission).
 
Shared Traits of Trauma Entrepreneurs

​A similar admission appeared in an interview 25 years earlier, where she acknowledged applying a social justice ideology across multiple issues, perceiving that “oppression takes many forms.” The interviewer summed it up more concisely that this worldview (social justice to right the wrongs of perceived oppressions) seemed to provide the spark of creativity for her psychological work. While complex PTSD was not directly discussed, the connection is clear: her activism preceded and may have inspired the disorder’s creation without supporting empirical evidence.

This pattern of fashioning oppression-based worldviews absent heavy lifting of supporting evidence is typical of the progressive personality. It is evident from the very beginning, in the eighteenth century, with Rousseau, who himself admitted he is exhausted by reasoning power and takes more “pleasure in meditating, in searching, in inventing.”
 
Why Is This Happening?
In my critique of The Body Keeps the Score, I argued that such expansive errors require attention: “the vastness and completeness of van der Kolk’s wrongness demands an explanation. If it’s not ideology, a better explanation has not presented itself. It can’t be that he just doesn’t understand cross-sectional studies. He can’t be that naive.” [1]. For Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, and others, ideology appears to be that explanation: a moral framework where empathy for the disadvantaged outweighs all other  moral concerns. Within this worldview, human fragility becomes an assumed truth, forming the psychological foundation of progressive and neo-Marxist thought.

​
References
[1] Scheeringa MS (2024). The Body Does Not Keep the Score: How Popular Beliefs About Trauma Are Wrong. Columbia, SC: Kindle Direct Publishing. ISBN 979-8344969244.

Source: SAMHSA
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
In 2014, the federal agency responsible for improving treatment quality in mental health published a report on trauma-informed care (TIC) that has become the central touchstone for the movement.

Who Did This?
The report’s lead author, Larke Huang, is a Yale-trained clinical psychologist and currently serves as Director of the Office of Behavioral Health Equity at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). The report included six secondary authors. None of the authors have published on trauma in peer-reviewed journals.
Huang has long been celebrated as a social justice advocate. The American Psychological Association described her as someone who has “worked tirelessly her entire career as an advocate for social justice and a champion for diverse and underserved populations.” In 2024, leveraging her government platform once again, Huang published Guide to Equity Terminology: Promoting Behavioral Health Equity through the Words We Use—a document aiming to reshape discourse through prescriptive language.
​
The Premise
As discussed in earlier posts (see here and here), the TIC model was introduced in 2001 by Harris and Fallot. Despite no widespread demand for such a framework and no empirical evidence supporting it, within just four years, remarkably, SAMHSA established the National Center for Trauma-Informed Care based on little more than aspirational theory.
True to the nature of federal institutions, SAMHSA then began organizing conferences, funding academic and nonprofit initiatives, and publishing a stream of reports. Consistently concluding that trauma-informed care was essential to resolving a national crisis in service delivery, these efforts culminated in the infamous 2014 report, SAMHSA’s Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach. It introduced six “key principles” of trauma-informed care:

1. Safety
2. Trustworthiness and Transparency
3. Peer Support
4. Collaboration and Mutuality
5. Empowerment, Voice, and Choice
6. Cultural, Historical, and Gender Issues

They then assembled a panel of “national experts,” including trauma survivors, clinicians, researchers, and policymakers. From this gathering, SAMHSA produced a draft document and posted it for public comment, drawing over 2,000 responses.

Do these principles align with Harris and Fallot’s original concept?
Harris and Fallot emphasized several key ideas, most of which were faithfully reproduced in the SAMHSA report: services should accommodate vulnerable survivors; environments should be inviting rather than threatening; staff should be empathic and trustworthy; and empowerment and autonomy were essential.
Both documents share the qualities of ambiguity and loose definitions. For example, the principle of Collaboration and Mutuality is described in the report to include “leveling power differences, including clerical and housekeeping staff... One does not have to be a therapist to be therapeutic.” These elaborations are vague and riddled with jargon, giving the illusion of depth while having zero evidence and offering little actionable guidance.

Why Did This Happen?
The TIC movement grew in tandem with the rising critical race theory (CRT) movement. Rooted in postmodernism, CRT claimed the moral high ground by championing the voices of the oppressed. Its adherents fashioned a political framework that fused identity-based grievance with institutional critique—often lacking empirical grounding but rich in rhetorical power.
Critics of both movements warned of the frameworks’ theoretical instabilities and manipulative tendencies. Yet, proponents of both skillfully outmaneuvered opposition and embedded their ideology within influential sectors of government, academia, and healthcare. They have reshaped some sectors of society to the extent that the social contract—the agreement between individuals and its government that defines and limits the rights of each—has been significantly influenced to reevaluate how rights are understood in relation to race and identity. Specifically, while CRT and identity movements claim to address systemic inequalities, their implementations often led to societal harm by fostering division, misunderstanding, and backlash against efforts for racial justice. The brilliance of both CRT and TIC lay not in intellectual coherence, but in strategic execution. And, if fully executed, will lead to nothing good.

Source: Molecular Psychiatry
Read time: 2.4 minutes
 
This Happened
The academic world’s long-standing romance with the idea that trauma leaves ghostly fingerprints on our very DNA has taken yet another turn—this time via the sperm cells of Finnish men. A new study in this genre found some associations with two types of epigenetic variables.
 
Who Did This?
Jetro Tuulari is an Associate Professor in the Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Turku, Finland. He has published two prior studies on trauma and eighteen prior studies on non-trauma stress. Much of his work is aimed at finding how stress during pregnancy impacts children’s brain development.
 
The Claim
There has been growing interest in the prospect that life experience—in particular, exposure to trauma and stress—can be passed on to subsequent generations through heritable epigenetic modifications, firmly planted in the lush, speculative landscape called “intergenerational transmission of trauma.” The possibility remains highly controversial, even according to some whose careers are invested in the prospect [1]. A first step in proving this claim is that epigenetic changes attributed to trauma and stress exist in sperm.
Tuulari and colleagues measured the amount of trauma exposure for each man with a self-report questionnaire. They measured epigenetic changes in sperm on two variables: (1) The number of small non-coding RNAs (sncRNA). The abundance of five broad classes of sncRNAs did not differ between high-trauma and low-trauma groups. On analyses at a narrower level, however, 29 miRNAs, 15 tsRNAs, and 3 piRNA clusters were lower, and 18 miRNAs, 6 tsRNAs, and 1 piRNA cluster were higher in high-trauma group sperm compared to low-trauma group.
(2) The amount of DNA methylation. Those with high-trauma exposure showed relatively less methylation on three regions compared to those with low trauma. That’s right—three.
 
Analysis
An online supplement reveals (if one hand-counts all their tests) that they tested 509 miRNAs, 266 tsRNAs, 509 piRNA clusters, and 541 DNA methylation sites. Out of 1,825 total tests, seventy-five tests, or 4%, were significant. One must question the random chance nature of these findings.
More importantly, did their findings replicate findings from three previous sperm studies? Overall, the researchers demurely concluded, “We found an interesting overlap with previous reports for miRNAs, particularly miR-34c-5p, although most of our results were distinct from prior reports.”

The Skeptical View: There is no there there. All the findings may be spurious, caused by chance findings in small samples. The sample size of the three prior sperm studies were 28, 34, and 58 men. Tuulari et al.’s sample sizes were 30 for RNAs and 55 for DNA.
 
Why Did This Happen?
Now we come to the heart of the matter.
For decades now, a faction of ideologically-inclined scientists—let’s call them The Trauma Creators—have labored to recast virtually every social ill as the aftershock of some primordial wound. With the discovery of epigenetics, this extraordinary project expanded to an even more extraordinary newer claim that such damage is passed to generations. Their bet is that neuroscience, epigenetics, and a cascade of shimmering brain scans would someday validate their suspicion that trauma not only warps the soul but etches its sorrow into our double helix.
Scientists are allowed their wild speculations. For the time being, however, Lamarckian inheritance of trauma and stress through epigenetics remains a scientific fan fiction—highly readable, emotionally charged, and scientifically unproven.
 
 
References
[1] Nestler EJ. Transgenerational Epigenetic Contributions to Stress Responses: Fact or Fiction? PLoS Biol. 2016 Mar 25;14(3):e1002426. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002426. Erratum in: PLoS Biol. 2016 Jun 7;14(6):e1002486. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002486.
[2] Scheeringa MS (2025). False positives for Criterion A trauma events and PTSD symptoms with questionnaires are common in children and adolescents and could not be eliminated with enhanced instructions. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, DOI: 10.1089/cap.2024.0126.

Source: Essex News Daily
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
On June 2, 2025, teachers at Carteret Elementary School in Bloomfield, NJ attended a workshop to be trained in “trauma-informed teaching.”
 
Who Did This?
The workshop was led by Guidance Counselor Marissa Acosta and special education teacher Beth Armstrong. Funding for the workshop and subsequent implementation of the skills is provided by a state grant.
 
The Premise
The premise of the training is that emotional trauma experienced outside the classroom may affect a child’s performance in the classroom.
Teachers must be taught to:

1. Understand that today’s children live in fear.
   
2. Be comfortable talking about fear in the classroom.
   
3. Recognize the symptoms of trauma.
   
4. Know what activities may trigger a trauma reaction.
   
5. Recognize that teachers themselves may be affected vicariously.
   
6. Academic performance and emotion development of students depend on teachers forming positive relationships.
   
7. Prioritize empathy in the classroom without losing control of classroom management.
   
8. Teachers of today must therapize students and understand what is bothering disruptive students.
   
9. Achieve a “mind shift” that classrooms of today “are not easy places to be.”
   
10. Teachers are in a “different era” where much revolves around emotions and trauma.

 
Analysis
The concepts taught were true to the trauma-informed ideology which posits that individuals who have experienced trauma can be distressed when re-triggered by insensitive behaviors when they try to obtain routine services in society. Their distress is so disabling that it prevents them from getting education, medical care, mental health care, and every other service that involves the interaction of a consumer with a live human [1,2].
 
These types of trainings in education settings raise at least two concerns. First, there is no evidence that therapized teachers projecting more empathy than they already naturally show can have a substantial impact on trauma child victims.
 
Second, this training promotes a model of educator-student relationships that risks overstepping traditional professional boundaries by encouraging teachers to assume roles more appropriately held by parents. Critics have raised similar concerns in the context of transgender-affirming and DEI programming, where educators are seen as inappropriately displacing parental influence. Worse, these ideological shifts occur without meaningful parental knowledge or consent.
 
These types of workshops train teachers to foster in children an identity that they are highly fragile, and instill an identity in teachers that they are savior-replacements for incompetent parents in the emotional lives of children and serve as essential barriers to protect children from an imagined, haunting specter of oppression in society.
 
Why Is This Happening?
The motivations of the trauma-informed movement have puzzled many people since the movement was launched out of nowhere in 2001 (see here and here). It was devoid of any empirical basis and had no constituency calling for it. 

​Being a movement rather than an evidence-based public health issue, trauma-informed trainings have become a way to group diverse domains under a common term to the end of shaping political objectives. Trauma-informed approaches are meant for any type of social agency, medical practice, and perhaps any business that must interact with consumers. These trainings are the new version of ‘party cells’ for organizing at the grassroots level that were common in the Communist Party in the early twentieth century.
The aim is to reframe the social contract between humans and community structures based on the premise that humans can be made dysfunctional through oppression. The revolutionary remedy is widespread reforms of therapized empathy in consumer interactions to guide them back to a utopian path of perfectibility.
Nothing good has ever come from a societal praxis of this sort of vision. This falsely divides the world into oppressed and oppressor. Victims are coached to be endlessly fragile. Non-victims have their freedoms intruded upon to cater to the victim’s special rights. It enables dependency of a subset of free riders who are more than willing to take advantage of others’ compassion and reduces their incentive to flourish through their own initiatives.
 
​
References
[1] Harris M and Fallot RD (2001). Envisioning a trauma-informed service system: A vital paradigm shift. New Directions for Mental Health Services, 2001: 3-22. https://doi.org/10.1002/yd.23320018903
[2] SAMHSA, (2014). SAMHSA’s concept of trauma and guidance for a trauma-informed approach. HHS Publication No. (SMA) 14-4884. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Source: Journal of Psychiatric Research
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
This Happened
A meta-analysis was published examining the possibility of a causal relationship between posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and cardiovascular disease (CVD).
 
Who Did This?
Arum Lim is a PhD student in the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. This is her first publication as first-author and her only one on trauma.
 
The Premise
Many cross-sectional studies have found a statistically-significant association between PTSD and CVD. Nearly all of them inferred that PTSD caused CVD, thus purposefully creating a sense of crisis in the public. But the causal relationship has always been inferred and is factually unclear.

The result was that authors found the usual cross-sectional association between PTSD and CVD, but, when more specifically analyzing for causation the authors concluded woefully “Evidence of a causal relationship between the two diseases was insufficient.”
 
Analysis
It cannot be overstated that the striking anomaly of this review is the authors’ attempt to find a causal relationship, as opposed to the enormity of studies that found cross-sectional associations, assumed it was causal, and called it a day. For those wishing to perpetuate the sense of crisis, this study might be an example of the old maxim for researchers who want to keep getting their shaky propositions funded: Don’t test things for which you don’t want to know the answers.
 
While this was a noteworthy effort, it was not, however, the best type of evidence that could test causality because the studies encompassed in this literature review were all cross-sectional. Their statistical technique inferred causality based on software modeling.
The best type of evidence to prove causality comes from pretrauma prospective studies in which PTSD and the biological variables are assessed prior to trauma exposure and a second time following trauma exposure. There is only one known pretrauma prospective study involving a cardiac factor [1]. That study (conducted in my lab) failed to find a causal relation between development of PTSD and heart rate variability in young children.
 
So, if there is an association but not a causal relationship, why is there an association? The authors dodged this question, instead doubling down in science-speak and suggesting that “complex networks are involved” and implying that the association still must be causal.
There are two alternative possible explanations. One is that the association finding is spurious (and tiny). A meta-analysis is only as good as the original studies. If the original studies were poor quality samples of convenience, a meta-analysis cannot improve upon that. Garbage in, garbage out. Another is that various profiles of genetic susceptibility to develop PTSD also lead to unhealthy lifestyles that sometimes lead to CVD.
 
Why Is This Happening?
For several decades, PTSD researchers have claimed that psychological trauma causes permanent damage to brains and bodily organs. Many researchers working in this area are deeply committed to the trauma-to-illness hypothesis, both intellectually and emotionally. They are the ‘trauma creators,’ fabricating a false worldview that trauma is the source of nearly all suffering. This commitment may shape how evidence is interpreted and which questions are prioritized. Institutional incentives, including funding priorities and publication trends, may reinforce a narrower focus and limit theoretical diversity. As a result, literature reviews that outright question the trauma-to-illness link are rare. 


References
[1] Mikolajewski AJ, Scheeringa MS (2018). Examining the prospective relationship between pre-disaster respiratory sinus arrhythmia and post-disaster posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms in children. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Vol 46(7), Oct, 2018 pp. 1535-1545, DOI: 10.1007/s10802-017-0396-0.

Source: Arkansas State Legislature
Read time: 2.5 minutes plus 2-minute video
 
This Happened
On April 15, 2025, The Arkansas state legislature passed Senate Bill 458 which will require judges to consider whether juvenile criminals experienced adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) or trauma.
 
Who Did This?
Greg Leding (D) was lead sponsor. He is the Senate minority leader.
 
The Premise
Judges must consider certain factors when sentencing juveniles or transferring juveniles to adult courts. These include the severity of violence and previous history of crime, among other things. A new law will add to that list whether juveniles experienced “exposure to adverse childhood experiences, childhood trauma, involvement in the child welfare or foster care systems, status as a victim of human trafficking, sexual abuse, or rape” [1].
The law does not define adverse childhood experiences but in testimony for the bill, a supporter explained that one could measure them with the well-known ten experiences popularized by Dr. Vincent Felitti’s research (see here). 

Analysis
There are at least three concerns about the passing of this bill. First, there is no good evidence that childhood experiences make people commit crimes they would not otherwise commit. There are two correlational studies that show higher ACE scores associated with criminal activity [2,3]. But, like one-hundred percent of all the other hundreds of ACEs studies that are correlational, they have zero power to prove causation. It is probably more likely that criminal behavior has a biological basis (i.e., genetic), dysfunctional parenting that places children in adverse experiences has a biological basis, and these genetic profiles greatly overlap. ACEs and crime are associated because of shared genetic vulnerabilities and neither causes the other. Taking ACEs into account to reduce sentences is more likely to increase recidivism than to decrease it.
 
Second, embedding the ACEs theory into law will undoubtedly expand from juvenile judges' standard practice. Seven of the ten ACEs are not traumas, including emotional abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, divorce, parental substance abuse, parental mental illness, and a parent in prison. It seems inconceivable that, say, parental divorce contributes to criminal psychopathy, but that has now been quietly codified into Arkansas law.
 
Third, Republicans did this. Republicans hold 29 of the 35 Senate seats and it passed 35-0. Republicans hold 81 of the 100 House seats, and the bill passed 82-2 (9 voting Present). It seems this was possible because Republicans didn’t understand they were voting to codify a radical neo-Marxist view of human nature that society is the oppressor that drives fragile minds to hold dysfunctional moral codes.
​
The testimonies of the sponsors were condensed into a misleading message that “it’s what we’re already doing.” The adjacent 2-minute video shows four clips: (1) In Sen. Leding’s testimony before a Senate committee, he misleads the panel by saying that a child who steals a loaf of bread because he is hungry is what this bill is addressing. He omits the bedrock of the radical ACEs theory that earlier experiences have long-lasting neurobiological effects long after the stress has passed. (2) In the same hearing, a judge is asked if we really need this bill, and the judge minimizes any change by saying, “We’re already doing this.” (3) In Sen. Leding’s testimony before a House committee, he repeats this minimization by claiming that this is already standard practice in juvenile courts. (4) He repeats this claim before the full Senate.

Why Did This Happen?
Judges have always been allowed to consider mitigating factors at their discretion. So, of all the mitigating factors that could be added to a binding law, why ACEs and trauma? It’s the same tragedy of misguided compassion for the 1960’s Great Society bills where it was believed that federal government welfare could lift people out of poverty, or, at least, it was worth a try. The unintended consequences of that were tragic in helping to destroy the two-parent family. It seems inevitable many states will repeat this type of doomed experiment with the trauma and ACEs belief system that gentleness can reform unempathic criminals.
 
References
[1] SB458. State of Arkansas 95th General Assembly.
[2] Lansing AE, Park J, Beck AN (2023). Cumulative trauma, adversity, and loss among juvenile justice-involved girls: Implications for health disparities. Journal of Traumatic Stress. 36(6):1015-1030, 2023 Dec.
 [3] Levenson, JS, Socia KM (2015). Adverse Childhood Experiences and Arrest Patterns in a Sample of Sexual Offenders. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 31(10), 1883-1911. 

Read time: 2.0 minutes
 
This Happened
The trauma-informed concept has spread like a virus through academia. Having been invented as a term since only 2001, the number of papers with "trauma-informed” in the title or abstract is over 130,000.
 
Who Did This?
A subset of scholars in academia, numbering in the thousands, made this happen, most of them sporting a range of Leftist progressive and neo-Marxist beliefs. An illustrative example is one of the most frequent writers on the topic: Jill Levenson is a social work professor at Barry University who conducts workshops all over the world as a “SAMHSA-certified” trauma-informed care instructor. She has published at least nine papers on trauma-informed care since 2014, explaining how it can be incorporated into work with sex offenders, family members of sex offenders, correctional systems, LGBTQ+ clients, and general social work practice. She also promotes the extraordinary idea that Adverse Childhood Experiences can cause individuals to become sex offenders, and gently refers to pedophilic sex offenders as “minor-attracted persons.”
 
The Premise
In 2001, the concept of trauma-informed services sprang into being absent an empirical base or pedagogical lineage (see here on its birthing and here on its moral basis). The call was for all social service agencies to revolutionize their practices so that trauma victims would not feel frightened to use their services. All staff must upgrade their consciousness towards the permanent Leftist agenda of transforming humans through sensitivity training. All consumers must be considered potential trauma victims who are a unique class of emotionally disabled individuals and who require special treatment no matter how such treatment violates common sense or other people’s rights.

Why Did This Happen?

“Cultures fight wars with one another.
They must do so because values can only be
asserted or posited by overcoming others,
​not by reasoning with them.”
​(Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind)

What is really new about the trauma-informed movement is that being a consumer deserving of trauma-informed care represents a value judgement in creating a new identity that never appeared in American culture before 2001. It joins a lengthy list of other aggrieved factions that relatively recently posited new identities based on sex, race, ethnicity, and other oppressed status claims.
Being a bone-fide trauma-informed scholar or trainer is yet another new identity.
These are part of identity politics, which gains its currency by identifying oppressed groups that demand redress from society. The process usually goes by woke, critical race theory, or anti-racism. While driven mostly by the radical Left, these have become the dominant positions of the Democratic party.
The rise of identity politics is one of the main factors cited by many critics as the source of destroying American civility, if not American democracy. With new identities, comes new rights and new powers. It is a new kind of power, different in kind from most traditional politics in that there is no common ground.
 
References
[1] Lewis NV, Bierce A, Feder GS, Macleod J, Turner KM, Zammit S, Dawson S (2023). Trauma-Informed Approaches in Primary Healthcare and Community Mental Healthcare: A Mixed Methods Systematic Review of Organisational Change Interventions. Health and Social Care in the Community, Volume 2023, Article ID 4475114, 18 pages. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1155/2023/4475114
[2] Chin B, Amin Q, Hernandez N, Wright DD, Awan MU, Plumley D, Zito T, Elkbuli A (2024). Evaluating the Effectiveness of Trauma-Informed Care Frameworks in Provider Education and the Care of Traumatized Patients. J Surg Res. 2024 Apr;296:621-635.  doi: 10.1016/j.jss.2024.01.042.
[3] Mahon, D (2025). A Systematic Review of Trauma Informed Care in Substance Use Settings. Community Ment Health J 61, 734–753. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10597-024-01395-z

Source: New Jersey Education Association
Read time: 1.9 minutes
 
This Happened
The New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) held a four-day summer workshop in 2024 on Culturally Responsive Teaching with a Trauma-Informed Lens for kindergarten through fifth grade teachers in Atlantic County. The workshop was funded by local nonprofit the Atlantic County Collaborative for Educational Equity.
 
Who Did This?
NJEA is a public school employee union.
The leader of the workshop, Tamar Lesure-Owens, is a teacher and is involved in NJ-Heart, an activist teacher group that is “Helping educate anti-racist teachers.” Lesure-Owen holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Criminal Justice with a certificate in African American Studies.
 
The Premise
Day 1 began with an introduction to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) as the backbone of the workshop’s intellectual framework—stressful experiences are permanently damaging children’s brain and bodies. This included how perceived racism is transmitted through generations as “historical trauma” in minority communities. 

On Day 2, they explored Jewish studies, the Holocaust, and how to integrate cultural celebrations such as Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa into lesson plans.

​Analysis
Lesure-Owens’ teachings are consistent with the Leftist progressive ideology of human fragility, i.e., the world is divided into oppressors and oppressed. Since life experiences can allegedly damage and permanently mold human psyches, then any perceived cultural oppression is a public health crisis.

​Overall, the workshop was euphemistically described as, “In a time when teaching is becoming increasingly multifaceted, educators are searching for innovative ways to connect with and uplift their students.” In reality, the workshop goal was to transform teachers into therapeutic presenters of new interpretations of history and culture, not simply to add a tool to their academic skill sets.

​Why Did This Happen?
Workshop trainings on ACEs are common across the country, but they are usually public awareness campaigns (see here) and stand-alone workshops (see here and here) that focus only on the public health danger of ACEs. The most noteworthy aspect of this training, however, was how ACEs were tied into the progressive cultural narratives of diversity, equity, and inclusion. If there was any doubt about the underlying motivations behind ACEs, this helps make it clear that ACEs is part and parcel of the radical, neo-Marxist agenda to install a public consciousness. It is anything but a public health campaign based in science. This is cultural transformation, not public academic education.