This is not exactly news, so we apologize for that. But only now have we learned about "CoComelon", an online video channel for kids, which is apparently enormously popular (your correspondent's kids are older, so all we had to worry about was Peppa Pig and Bluey).

The shows are specifically designed to get kids to enter a trance-like state and, frankly, clorox their brains.

A NYT story from 2022 (again: not news, we know) describes how the company specifically designs the shows to hypnotize children, using a device called "the Distractatron," and here is what it is: "It’s a small TV screen, placed a few feet from the larger one, that plays a continuous loop of banal, real-world scenes — a guy pouring a cup of coffee, someone getting a haircut — each lasting about 20 seconds. Whenever a youngster looks away from the Moonbug show to glimpse the Distractatron, a note is jotted down." This is just comically evil.

Look, we get it. Every parent puts their kid in front of the iPad to get some much-needed peace once in a while and it probably doesn't hurt them. But there's no way that a show designed with this doesn't melt kids' brains if they watch it more than once in a blue moon, and they're designed to ensure they watch them more than once in a blue moon.

Because the only criterion is whether they hypnotize kids, they also teach them "life lessons" that are destructive, because subversion is of course more entertaining than uplift. To take examples from online testimonies: "There's a song about being afraid of bugs, now she's afraid of bugs. There's another where they cry when they get a boo-boo until they get a band aid." Another song teaches kids to lie to their parents about stealing candy (!!!!).

We do recommend that you watch a minute or two of this biohazard. Note the quick camera cuts and permanent camera movements, the focus on facial expressions—everything designed to poke the brain. There is no main character or story or arc to follow. Just pure brainless…entertainment isn't even the right word. …Hypnotic drugging?

Imagine what happens—potentially for life—to a very young, very malleable brain that watches this for hours per day or weeks, as countless surely do. CoComelon has many hours-long videos, which it wouldn't produce if its stats didn't show kids watch them for hours. There's certainly plenty of anecdotal evidence that these videos act like a drug.

Now imagine what will happen when it's not just human designers coming up with better ways to put kids in a drug-like trance, but AI.

The reason we write about this years-old Times story now is because it brought to mind KOSA, which is currently hanging in lame-duck limbo. The main criticism of KOSA from libertarian groups is that it creates an allegedly vague "duty of care" for online platforms to protect children. But shows like CoComelon show why such "vague" provisions are needed. No legislator could or could be expected to draft a provision saying "Don't run an R&D lab where you expose children to a Distractatron and use that data to create addictive mindless slop." Congress cannot, nor should it be expected to, know or anticipate every R&D scheme companies are using or might use in the future to create addictive mindless slop aimed at kids. The job of the legislator is to create "abstract and general rules," as Montesquieu, one of the inspirators of the Founding Fathers, put it, which it is then up to the executive and judiciary to apply to specific cases.

Nor are we convinced by libertarian arguments that the important thing here is to exercise and encourage parental responsibility: in no other context do we see a libertarian defense of companies pushing drugs on children. On this score, we might ask our highly select readership of Washington insiders and businessmen to, to coin a phrase, check their privilege. One of the lessons of the past 50 years of social policy in the United States, very broadly speaking, has been that if you remove a bunch of social and legal rules that are intended to encourage people to adopt pro-social behavior, people who have high socioeconomic status, high ability and high conscientiousness will be able to continue to navigate life mostly-unharmed, but that for people who lack these endowments, the results are very different. (This is the story of marriage and illegitimacy, for example, where the overclass still generally holds to a kind of "neo-trad" life script where serial monogamy precedes marriage which precedes children, and behaviors such as serial divorce or divorce while children are very young or having several children from several different unmarried partners is still, at least, frowned upon.) The point here, of course, is not to relitigate the past 50 years of social change in America. The point instead is to make the following observation: many people who were born and live in the contemporary Western overclass have very little idea of how people in the underclass actually live. You, dear reader, may put your kid in front of CoComelon just a few minutes at a time to have some quiet time, and it's fine, because you're a responsible parent. You and your children would win every Marshmallow Test. We would submit, however, that a great many Americans don't do great on the Marshmallow Test, and they are still fellow citizens. Whatever libertarian arguments hold in theory about parental responsibility, in practice, what is actually happening and will keep happening is that countless millions of low-SES families will be pushed by the pressures of life and the lack of cultural background about education, to put their kids in front of this slop for hours per day because they simply don't know better, and will therefore further handicap kids who are already not getting the best start in life.

It is not the policy of PolicySphere to endorse any particular piece of legislation or even any particular policy as such, beyond the rejection of far-left insanity. We invite any opponents of KOSA to reach out and we will put forward their perspective.

Policy News You Need To Know

#Woke #CivilRights — Rep. Dan Bishop has a great op-ed over at The Federalist on the best tool in the Federal government's arsenal for fighting wokeness: the DOJ's Civil Rights Division. Many people have adopted the line "wokeness is civil rights law," to mean that doctrines in civil rights law (particularly the doctrine of disparate impact) have meant that institutions, and thence the culture at large, have been led to adopt identity politics grievance as a key part of their worldview. We believe there's a lot of truth to this. However, while wokeness may "be" civil rights law, it's also very much illegal under civil rights law. This is also a good reason to support a nominee like Matt Gaetz as Attorney-General. How many people would dare to use the DOJ's Civil Rights Division to go after diversity initiatives at big corporations? (And fire employees at that division who would be reluctant to do it?) Not many. But someone like Gaetz would.

#TaxFight — ATR's war on American Compass continues, with a piece in Fox News Digital full of notes on American Compass's left-wing donors (who comprise a minority of its donor base to be clear) and quotes from ATR to the effect that Oren Cass is a crypto-communist. Of course, this is all a prelude to the big fight over the tax bill next year. We have previously reported that groups around Grover Norquist see their job in 2025 as to "stop Oren Cass." Cass pointed out to us the irony of ATR spending so much energy going around talking to anyone who will listen about how irrelevant Cass is. American Compass has done a lot with very little, in terms of its influence in the conservative movement and MAGA-world, and we've heard that a number of American Compass-linked people are set to get jobs in the Administration. At the same time, it's notable that, apart from the very important, but narrow, issue of trade, Trump ran as a straightforward Republican on economic issues, promising a raft of tax cuts, unspecified spending cuts, pro-business deregulation, and little in the way of the "postliberal" ideas that a lot of people on the new right believe is key to building the Republican Party's multiracial working class coalition. (One noteworthy exception is JD Vance's proposal for a $6,000 universal child tax credit, which Trump endorsed.) Key Trump allies such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are very much in the libertarian camp. So the tax fight will also be a big proxy fight between two economic visions for the future of the Republican Party.

#Tax — Now here's a good place where technobro optimism and conservative populism and state capacity intersect: WaPo's Jeff Stein reports that Elon Musk's DOGE is contemplating creating a free app for Americans to file their taxes on. You probably already know this, but this is an issue that enrages wonks: the US government, it seems, makes it deliberately complicated to file taxes, essentially as a way to protect the gargantuan tax preparation industry, which spends a lot of energy lobbying to keep it that way. Stein notes that historically a lot of that lobbying has been successful in the GOP. Stein also notes drily: "President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act included a pilot program for free online filing that seems to have gone off very well, with +100K taxpayers successfully using it. Would be I think somewhat exasperating to Dems if Trump can build on that success and turn it into a thing people use nationwide." Quite.

#AI — The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission's annual report came out yesterday, and the big banger is its headline recommendation: for DoD to launch a Manhattan Project-like program to race China to artificial general intelligence. Yowza. Watch this space.

#PreferenceCascade — One of the striking things about the Trump victory seems to be its cultural repercussions. There have been athletes doing the "Trump dance." There have been the reports of (especially in blue cities) more Trump signs being put up after the election than before. And now this report in The Cut on how social media influencers are "going full MAGA." Says reporter EJ Dickson: "According to one prominent wellness influencer I spoke to, RFK endorsing Trump was a huge factor in her 'coming out' as MAGA. 'If this had been 2020, I would never have done it,' she says. 'But the political landscape has changed. People are fed up.'" Adds Dickson: "It's hard to overemphasize how much of a shift this is. Lifestyle influencers have always avoided political content, for fear of being canceled or losing brand deals. That's no longer a concern: 'It's impossible to be canceled now,' one PR consultant said." As we saw with BLM, or with X freeing speech, culture can influence policy. When was the last time the Right had the cultural winds in its sails?

#FreeSpeech — Mark Warner, read the room! The Virginia Senator has a bizarre press release out "pressing" Valve, the owner of Steam, the incredibly popular video gaming platform, to "crack down" on "the rampant proliferation of hate-based content." Yes, teenagers playing video games say lots of obscene things. That is the nature of teenage boys. Sorry Senator, but we're Making America Great Again, free speech is legal again, and 13 year olds calling each other bad words while playing Call of Duty is not worthy of the time of a member of the United States Congress. De minimis non curat praetor.

#MAHA — Over at The Free Press, UCSF Professor Vinay Prasad (that's Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH for the peons out there) has a very good piece showing how many of RFK, Jr.'s conspiracy theories are actually fairly mainstream.

#Immigration — "U.S. sets record with 1.1 million foreign students," reports the Washington Examiner. There's a very good case for allowing the world's smartest students to come to the US to study and do research. But there's no way that those over 1 million are all future Elon Musks. Indeed, many of them are the children of third world oligarchs invited to do fake degrees in the US because they pay full-freight. CIS's Mark Krikorian adds that nearly 25% of those "are not students at all, but foreign workers masquerading as students (so called 'Optional Practical Training' or OPT)."

#AI — Very funny anecdote from Frank Bednarz at the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, a pro-free market public-interest litigation law firm: "Minnesota offered an expert declaration on AI and “misinformation” to oppose our motion to enjoin their unconstitutional law. His declaration included fake citations hallucinated by AI!" Friends don't let ChatGPT do their homework!

#Media — Eye-opening revelation from this New York Magazine article on Jeff Bezos's plans for the Washington Post: the paper lost $77 million last year, and that is before the wave of subscription cancellations that followed the paper's decision not to endorse in 2024. Democracy, it seems, dies in plain sight.

#DC — Very "DC" news but your correspondent still hasn't digested the Redskins' name and logo change, and it looks like the Senate wants to pressure the team to at least "honor" the old logo.