Readers familiar with the Dr. Seuss classic “The Cat in the Hat” will remember the twin chaos agents Thing 1 and Thing 2. “‘These Things are good Things,’” the Cat reassures the children, whose mother has inexplicably left them under the supervision of a fish. “‘They are tame. Oh, so tame! / They have come here to play.’”

The Things briefly feign innocence, then quickly reveal themselves to be marauding imps, knocking over nightstands and ruining the linens. “I do not like the way that they play!” says the son of the house.

Now here comes Woke 1 and Woke 2. “Woke 1 was crazy,” said U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, quoting an unnamed city councilman in a viral interview for ABC. The congresswoman sheepishly acknowledged that Americans did not like the way Woke 1 played out, while also implicitly announcing that there will soon be, or already is, a Woke 2. And it will be tame. Oh, so tame!

For purposes of advertisement, Woke 2 will try to keep its trans members less conspicuous than Woke 1 did, for at least as long as it takes to re-establish national power.

There is, in fact, a new version of wokeness in the making. But just as Thing 2 was fundamentally identical to Thing 1, Woke 2 will not be any different in essence from Woke 1. They are both here to upend the furniture.

Wokeness in all its forms is grievance politics. Its central idea is that an injustice lies at the heart of America and must be corrected to atone for the historical misery inflicted on groups of innocents.

What is changing in Woke 2 is the account of who those innocents are and how they have been wronged. Woke 1 was founded on the notion that black women are the most oppressed, and therefore most righteous, of all people. “I’m thinking,” said Kamala Harris in her vice presidential victory speech, “about her and the generations of women — black women.” She mentioned many other kinds of women, of course, but the list began and ended with “the black women — who are too often overlooked, but so often prove that they are the backbone of our democracy.”

This approach had rhetorical power, up to a point. It traded on the successes of second-wave feminism and the reality of black slavery in America’s past. But it ran into some problems. Third-wave feminism, as worked out by theorists like Judith Butler, made it basically impossible not to affix the prefix “trans-” wherever the word “woman” appeared. So the flag of Woke 1 became the complicated and confusing progress Pride flag — a gay rainbow with black and trans colors intruding from the left.

RELATED: How Kamala Harris accidentally sold the SAVE America Act

Christian Bruna/Getty Images

To make matters worse, the legacy of slavery did not actually touch all the racial minorities that Democrats wanted to bring into their fold. Most Nigerians, for example, had not experienced segregation in the United States. Nor had the millions of unvetted South and Central Americans streaming across the border.

They were certainly “people of color.” But so were Chinese, Japanese, and Indian Americans, whose typically enviable life outcomes fit awkwardly into the narrative that the country was built on a ruthless caste system.

The contradictions heightened as Woke 1 faced a series of embarrassments such as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the 2023 Supreme Court case in which Asian students complained that admissions officers were discriminating against them in favor of black applicants. Then there were the notorious Trump ’24 ads that pinned Harris to her previous support of taxpayer-funded gender surgeries for federal prison inmates.

Placing black women at the center of the moral universe created an unexpected and electorally unworkable set of obligations to illegal immigrants and queer felons.

Clearly, the coalition needed shuffling. And so rearranging the order of priorities in the grievance hierarchy is what the reinvention of woke has actually been about. In place of the black trans woman who defined Woke 1, Woke 2 has chosen as its ideal victim the dispossessed Palestinian liberationist, fighting with Hamas against Israel. This has a number of interesting strategic advantages.

First, the racial argument has been neatly streamlined. Rather than implausibly analogizing every racial group in America to the victims of Jim Crow, Woke 2 presents the black American story as just one instance of a global fight for justice carried out by minorities everywhere and epitomized in the intifada.

RELATED: Socialism’s favorite bait-and-switch

Scott Olson/Getty Images

In 2023, on a panel for the Democratic Socialists of America, future New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani claimed that “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF.”

He was outlining the blueprint for Woke 2, which takes its cues not from Judith Butler but from post-colonialist Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” (1961). “Between colonial violence and the insidious violence in which the modern world is steeped,” wrote Fanon, “there is a kind of complicit correlation, a homogeneity.” Therefore, “The colonized, underdeveloped man is today a political creature in the most global sense of the term.”

Recently, in an intriguing interview with the New Yorker’s David Remnick, Democrat Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed put forward an argument that connects Fanon’s global struggle to America’s domestic economy. He claimed that pro-Israel politicians are allowing “the money that should be spent taking care of our kids to be sent to a military that has done a genocide.”

In other words, Woke 2’s new order of priorities allows its proponents to suggest that white or white-coded (read: Jewish) oppressors are funneling money away from America’s working poor to fund a worldwide campaign of mass slaughter.

Distant as this account is from reality, it is much more ruthlessly focused as a line of woke reasoning. It emphasizes foreign policy and the economy, where the public’s real anger lies, and deftly mutes the discredited claims of LGBTQ extremists.

In practice, any woke administration of any variety will end up imposing pretty much the same bizarre sexual priorities on the country once elected. But for purposes of advertisement, Woke 2 will try to keep its trans members less conspicuous than Woke 1 did, for at least as long as it takes to re-establish national power.

Replacing the progress Pride flag with the Palestinian flag will distract from the ravages of queer excess while infusing socialist revolution with the moral self-righteousness of anti-white resentment.

Whether this tactic succeeds with voters is another matter. If it does, though, Americans will discover that both Woke 1 and Woke 2, like Thing 1 and Thing 2, only play nice until they can start turning over tables. If we want to avoid a rerun of the early 2020s, then — to paraphrase Seuss — we will have to get rid of Woke 1 and Woke 2.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

​Black women, Democratic socialists of america, Dr seuss, Foreign policy, Illegal immigrants, Woke 1, Woke 2, Zohran mamdani, Economy, Lgbtq agenda, Alexandria ocasio-cortez, Abdul el-sayed, Opinion & analysis 

Ariana Grande’s new music video for her song “Petal” opens with a “parental advisory and viewer warning.”

Before a single verse is sung, a voiceover cautions: “The following video contains explicit content and depicts graphic violence, which may be offensive to some viewers. Viewer discretion is advised.”

It’s an honest warning. The nearly seven-minute video that follows includes one of the most graphically violent sequences in a mainstream Hollywood pop music video in recent history.

In the video, a skeletal-looking Grande plays the role of Pepper, an aspiring actress who repeatedly auditions at the fictional Fame Inc. and faces harsh rejection from male executives over her looks and talent. Eventually, Pepper snaps and murders the panel with a chainsaw.

The sequence cuts between stark red silhouette shots of Pepper wildly swinging the chainsaw and closer live-action frames that show the blood spraying as limbs and fingers are severed. She keeps going until the executives are a mangled, bloody heap, then walks out of the room still covered in gore, as the room full of her fellow female auditionees erupts into applause and cheers.

The scene is so horrifically violent, Allie Beth Stuckey refuses to play it on her show. But she does expose what’s going on beneath Grande’s sudden dark turn.

Allie highlights a disturbing pattern among female pop stars.

“They become darker and edgier and more violent and more disturbed in their artistry as time goes on,” she says, pointing to Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, and Chappell Roan as examples. “That seems to also be true of someone like Ariana Grande.”

Between the gory violence in the “Petal” music video and Grande’s “skin-and-bones” frame, Allie is nearly certain the “Wicked” star is under the influence of demonic powers.

“When you have this skeletal figure covered in blood, you see the wedding of these two things [and] she’s glorifying them … I do think that there is something very dark going on mentally and spiritually here,” she says, noting that Grande has not admitted to any weight-related illness or struggle and has insisted she’s “so much healthier now than she used to be.”

“I don’t know what goes on behind the scenes in Hollywood. I think some very scary exchanges probably happen,” Allie continues, “but again, we don’t even need to know all of that to know that this is just the nature of sin: It takes you from one thing to the other.”

She argues that between Grande’s sickly weight, her new dark image, and her dating Ethan Slater, her “Wicked” co-star who was married and had a child, Grande should be “a very controversial figure.”

“But instead her posts still get millions of likes. People still praise her as being beautiful and wonderful,” says Allie. “I’m like, ‘No, this girl is on the brink of death, fantasizing and glorifying murder — the last thing our culture needs right now. And she’s a home-wrecker.”’

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Allie beth stuckey, Ariana grande, Hollywood, Spiritual warfare, Blazetv show 

Why are so many young Americans struggling to find lasting relationships? According to BlazeTV host Nick Freitas, the answer has a lot to do with the way modern dating has not only been influenced by feminism — but has been reshaped by the apps.

These apps, Freitas says, have created a “fake environment” where men get far less attention than women do.

“On Tinder, men’s average match rate is 5.26%. Women’s is 44.4%. So that’s an eight times difference, roughly. On Hinge, men swipe right on 61% of profiles. Women swipe right on 5% of profiles,” he explains.

“This part blew my mind. There’s a huge gender skew, like on Tinder, 67%-76% of the people on there are male. For Hinge it’s 60%-40%; for Bumble it’s 54%-46%,” he continues.

“On all these platforms where, again, we’re being told to go find people … it’s even worse, because one of the things that women typically need to truly be attracted to a man is they actually need to be able to be in proximity toward them,” he adds.

And an Institute for Family Studies study found that couples who meet in real life are much happier than ones who met online — and there’s good reason for it.

“Modern dating is already set up for failure, which is to say that you’re essentially putting on a performance for another human being. But your ability to perform outside of who you really are is far more limited in person than it is online, especially when we have all kinds of enhancements and filters and everything else that are going on,” Freitas explains.

However, as men and women begin to point the finger at each other for the growing issue of modern dating, Freitas points out that there’s something they both need to realize.

“As we go into this final phase talking about what should you be doing is men, you have every right to be pissed at the system that was set up for you,” he says.

“What I want you to understand is that it’s harder sometimes to understand how the women were also lied to because the women were lied to in a very, very different direction. You were put down by the system; they were built up by it,” he explains.

“But you were both lied to,” he adds.

Making the Argument with Nick Freitas” is available on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.

Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK40 for $40 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

​Dating apps, Modern dating, Nick freitas, Online dating, Feminism, Data, Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, Blazetv show 

DiJonai Carrington may have committed the most educational flagrant foul in the history of basketball.

I was discussing the episode with a friend who asked, “Do you remember roller derby?” I confessed I did not. “It was a sport where people enjoyed watching women beat each other up,” he said. I saw the connection immediately.

‘White privilege’ did not appear spontaneously in professional sports. It has an intellectual pedigree.

It reminded me of undergraduate classes in which feminists argued that women should run the world because they are more level-headed, calm, and compassionate than men. I had also watched some of those same people treat conservative colleagues with remarkable contempt. The theory and the behavior did not always match.

The WNBA has lately offered a rather vivid reminder that women, being human, are perfectly capable of aggression, rivalry, resentment, and the occasional refusal to accept responsibility.

During Saturday’s game between the Chicago Sky and Indiana Fever, Sophie Cunningham broke toward the basket for a layup. Carrington pursued her from behind and struck Cunningham across the head and neck. Officials reviewed the play, upgraded it to a flagrant 2, and ejected Carrington.

This was WNBA drama. Then higher education entered the game.

After her ejection, Carrington posted on Threads: “WHITE PRIVILEGE @indianafever.”

One has to admire the efficiency. Universities can spend an entire semester teaching students to interpret ordinary human interactions through racial categories. Carrington managed it before the game was over.

Predictably, people asked the obvious question: What precisely did Cunningham’s whiteness have to do with Carrington hitting her in the face?

Former NFL player Emmanuel Acho was among those who challenged Carrington’s invocation of white privilege. Carrington later said people had misunderstood her: She was not claiming the ejection itself was caused by white privilege, but pointing to what she regarded as a larger pattern of white players receiving different treatment. She defended her understanding of the subject by citing her education, including Stanford.

And there, buried beneath the WNBA drama, was the genuinely interesting story.

Carrington herself appealed to her education as authority for the framework she was using. That does not prove some Stanford professor taught her how to explain this particular foul. It does show how natural it has become for educated Americans to reach for concepts such as “white privilege” when interpreting conflict and punishment.

RELATED: Magical thinking just made the WNBA Draft

Melissa Tamez/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

America’s universities have spent decades teaching students to interpret institutions and human behavior through racial categories. “White privilege” did not appear spontaneously in professional sports. It has an intellectual pedigree. Students encounter frameworks in which racial identity becomes a morally significant category through which achievements, punishments, disagreements, and disparities are interpreted.

Carrington apparently regards her education as establishing her authority on the subject. Fine. Then taxpayers and parents should pay attention to what that education teaches people to see.

Stanford is private, of course, but like many American universities, it receives substantial federal funding. Universities receiving federal money are subject to federal antidiscrimination law. That does not mean professors cannot discuss controversial theories of race. They obviously can. The serious question comes when theories move from subjects to be examined into institutional doctrines that classify people morally by race.

Imagine reversing the language. Imagine a university program teaching students to interpret the behavior of black classmates through a theory of “black privilege,” complete with generalizations about what black people characteristically possess, how they characteristically think, and what judgments should attach to them because of their racial identity.

Would anyone seriously maintain that race had nothing to do with it?

The Carrington episode also illustrates something universities rarely advertise about these theories: They can be wonderfully useful for avoiding personal responsibility.

In the classical university, education aimed at forming a good soul: one capable of wisdom, ordered toward what is good, and disciplined against vices such as hatred, envy, and bitterness. This did not mean the good person escaped persecution or injustice. It meant that injustice did not excuse becoming unjust in return. A good soul fears God, not men — or women.

Today’s university is different. It teaches students to locate wrongdoing in systems, structures, identities, and power. Once in a while those explanations are relevant. But they can also become a vocabulary for explaining away one’s own choices. For the philosophy students reading this, the contrast is Socrates versus Thrasymachus: seek the good, or reduce everything to power.

The old-fashioned response to committing a flagrant foul was fairly straightforward: “I went too far.”

The new response requires considerably more vocabulary.

One can discuss systems, privilege, disparities, power structures, historical patterns, and institutional inequities until the original question — “Why did you hit her in the face?” — disappears beneath a small graduate seminar.

That is one of the most corrosive temptations of identity ideology. It can supply an external explanation for almost every unfavorable consequence. If I succeed, I overcame oppression. If you succeed, you benefited from privilege. If I am punished, we investigate the system. If you are punished, justice has finally arrived.

Personal responsibility becomes strangely difficult to locate.

Carrington has also defended her aggressive play on the grounds that she will do everything she can to prevent an opponent from making a layup. Fair enough — except that this rather misses the point of organized sports.

Basketball is not defined as “do everything you can to stop the other person.” It has rules.

That’s what distinguishes basketball from rugby or a parking-lot fight.

RELATED: ‘She didn’t wait until it was easy’: Victim of brutal injury from male athlete praises Sophie Cunningham

Michael Reaves/Getty Images

You may contest the shot. You may block the ball. You may position yourself defensively. You may even commit an ordinary foul to force free throws. What you may not do is simply employ whatever technique seems most likely to prevent the basket.

Otherwise, why stop with a cross-face? Tackle her. Bite her. Kick her. Put her in a rear-naked choke.

Although, given recent WNBA highlights, perhaps I should stop giving anyone ideas.

The rules are not an obstacle to the game. The rules constitute the game. And that is precisely the moral lesson obscured by the ideology Carrington invoked.

Civil society works the same way. We do not get to suspend ordinary standards of conduct because we believe ourselves to be fighting injustice. We do not get to judge people by their skin color because an elaborate theory tells us doing so is enlightened. Anti-racism becomes corrupting when it licenses hatred, envy, or racial blame in the name of correcting hatred, envy, and racial injustice.

Carrington’s foul lasted only a moment.

Her explanation deserves more attention because it inadvertently reminded Americans that when racial ideology shows up on the basketball court, it did not necessarily begin there.

Someone taught the framework. Quite possibly at a university. And taxpayers help support the institutions where it flourishes.

​Chicago sky, Dijonai carrington, Indiana fever, Sophie cunningham, White privilege, Higher education, Diversity equity inclusion, Identity politics, Racism, Stanford university, Wnba, Opinion & analysis 

Until now, Google Gemini has been an optional part of Android. Most of its features are locked behind the dedicated Gemini app, or you can choose to rely on Google Assistant as your on-device companion for fielding questions and completing tasks. That is all about to change, though, as Google officially prepares to retire its old assistant for an AI future, and it is coming sooner than you think.

Google brought Gemini to Android in early 2024. Since then, the company has progressively injected its AI into every corner of its operating system. The latest iteration, Gemini Intelligence, aims to take its chatbot a step farther by giving it agentic capabilities. At launch, the only way to set Gemini as your default personal assistant instead of Google Assistant was to manually make the switch in your settings. Many newer phones, however, default to Gemini straight out of the box.

You aren’t allowed to delete it from your phone. You can, however, take away its functionality.

Needless to say, if you have avoided Gemini like the plague thus far, your efforts are commendable, but your luck is about to run out.

Starting on September 4, Google will start rolling out Gemini support as the default personal assistant in all applicable Android models — devices with 2 GB of RAM or more that run on Android 9 or later. The process will take several weeks to reach everybody, so you may not lose access to Google Assistant immediately. However, once it is complete, Gemini will take over as the default assistant on your handset, whether you like it or not.

It’s not just your phone, either. The switch is coming to all devices in Google’s product ecosystem, including tablets running Android, car infotainment systems with Android Auto, smartwatches running on Wear OS, and TVs with Google TV or Android TV. In other words, you can’t escape it … but you might be able to turn it off, if you know where to look.

How to remove Google Gemini as the digital assistant on Android

To disable Gemini on a Samsung Galaxy device, open the Settings app, select “Apps” near the bottom of the page, and tap “Choose default apps” at the top. From there, tap “Digital assistant app,” and choose either an alternative to Google or select “None” from the options. Now, when you invoke the digital assistant on your phone, absolutely nothing will happen. Your digital assistant is effectively gone.

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/One UI 9.0 on Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8

For Google Pixel phone owners, open up the Settings app and choose “Apps” near the top of the page. Next, select “Default apps,” followed by “Digital assistant app,” and finally, choose “None” or an alternative option to Google, if applicable. Congrats, now your phone no longer has an AI-powered digital assistant!

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Android 17 on Google Pixel 10 Pro XL

If you use an “other” branded Android phone, such as a Motorola, OnePlus, Nothing, etc., the process should be similar to the steps above. The main goal is to find the default apps section in your settings and change the digital assistant to anything other than Google. Once you do that, you’re free from Gemini! Well, sort of. There’s more …

How to remove Gemini from your Android apps

Google has also baked Gemini into many of your favorite apps, including Gmail, Maps, and Drive, but this should only work if you have Personal Intelligence enabled. To check, open the Gemini app on your phone, select “Personal Intelligence,” and then “Connected Apps.” From here, uncheck every app and service that’s enabled. There are a lot of integrations on this page, so make sure you scroll all the way to the bottom and get every single one.

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Android 17 on Google Pixel 10 Pro XL

How to disable the Gemini app on Android

Now that we’ve fired Gemini from its digital assistant role and banished it from Google apps, there’s one last thing to do, and this one comes with an unavoidable caveat.

Some new phones these days, especially from Samsung and Google, come with the Gemini app installed by default, and you aren’t allowed to delete it from your phone. You can, however, take away its functionality.

RELATED: Google forced age restrictions onto Android. Are they right for you?

yourstockbank/Getty Images

To disable Gemini on Android, simply swipe into your app drawer and locate Gemini in the app list. Hold your finger on the app for several seconds to bring up the secondary menu, and choose the “i” icon that indicates “App info.” Next, tap on the “Disable” switch. You’ll get a warning message to try to convince you to change your mind. Ignore that, disable the app anyway, and you’re all set. You will no longer see Gemini in your app drawer, and it will cease to work.

Screenshots by Zach Laidlaw/Android 17 on Google Pixel 10 Pro XL

Reclaim your privacy from Gemini

As expected, it’s not easy to pry Gemini’s grubby claws out of an Android device. The service is ubiquitous, and as Google triples down on its AI strategy, it will only become more prevalent throughout its operating systems. However, if Gemini is not something you want anywhere near your phone and your data, these steps will help you reclaim some of your privacy and peace of mind.

​Artificial intelligence, Tech 

Since the 1980s, Cliffe Knechtle has been evangelizing on college campuses as part of his “Give Me an Answer” ministry. His son Stuart joined him in 2015, and together the father-son duo continue to conduct their open-air Q&A sessions on campuses around the nation, addressing students’ questions and doubts with the explicit goal of sharing the gospel.

In the nearly five decades “Give Me an Answer” has been operating, Cliffe has had a front-row seat to observe college students devolve in many disheartening ways.

On this episode of “Relatable” with Allie Beth Stuckey, Cliffe and Stuart explain the three biggest factors that have changed since the dawn of the ministry — and which one has been the most disturbing.

The emotional fragility of students is something Cliffe didn’t have to consider back when the ministry began — but today, it is something he is forced to adjust to everywhere he goes.

“My dad grew up in Switzerland, and when he was 18, he sat up in the Alps with a gun, watching Hitler’s Panzer divisions roll toward Switzerland. My grandpa, my dad’s dad, was in the front lines with his gun,” he reflects. “Today, when Donald Trump wins the election, university students go to a crying room to get counseling.”

This hypersensitivity has been a challenging factor to adapt to, he admits.

“I’m so grateful for Stuart and for my wife, Sharon, because they’ve helped me understand that and helped me not be quite as harsh and quite as direct as I have often unfortunately been,” Cliffe shares.

The second shift he has seen is the growing belief in moral relativism — the idea that right and wrong are subjective.

“Moral relativism and sexual immorality has become so commonplace that if you stand against that, you are really, really weird,” says Cliffe.

The third shift he has seen is the rising conviction that science is the ultimate truth.

“Unfortunately, what has become too firmly entrenched is unless you can prove it scientifically, it’s not true,” says Cliffe.

“It’s fascinating to watch — one group is totally into relativism, and the other group is into unless you can scientifically prove it, it’s not true,” he continues, “and so to be able to address both of those camps is a challenge.”

It is difficult, he explains, because the gospel, with a few minor exceptions, is largely opposed to moral relativism, and while the gospel of Jesus Christ is “based on evidence,” it is not based on “scientific proof.”

But of all three shifts, Stuart finds the second — the rising belief in moral relativism — to be the most shocking.

He shares a story from one of his college campus visits where a large group of students followed him around, pressing the issue of euthanasia.

“When I started 11 years ago with [my dad], I did not see — for the first few years, at least — any type of devaluing of human life — the relativizing of human value like I do today,” he says.

“[At one campus], this group follows me — very, very progressive group — to a corner where I was eating a sandwich. And they corner me and they say, ‘Hey, how dare you say that you are going to try and save the life of a suicidal 16-year-old woman? That’s devaluing her freedom and autonomy. If anything, you should aid her in her decision to kill herself,”’ Stuart shares.

Their certainty, he says, left him “shell-shocked.”

“They wouldn’t say get a noose or, you know, push her off a cliff. They were more so saying, though, a type of euthanization like the elderly get, you know, whether it’s a pill or something along those lines,” he says, “and so they pressed me for a good hour in a very angry way.”

“Personal autonomy and freedom is considered really the top idea and thing to pursue, even more so than the value of human life.”

To hear more about the Knechtles’ ministry, watch the episode above.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Allie beth stuckey, College campus, Indoctrination in schools, Evangelists, Blazetv show 

I was lucky to grow up during the adolescence of the tech age. Sleepovers meant Super Smash Bros. with friends. The 2000s meant building free personal websites and poking around whatever new technology had just appeared. A lot of my formative experiences came from discovering what these tools could do.

Now I’m a young father, and I want my kids to have the same chance to enjoy technology’s creativity and connectivity.

The KIDS Act risks placing more sensitive information in more places while flattening the very different ways children use technology.

Of course, security was always part of the bargain. As technology has evolved, so have the vulnerabilities. But the KIDS Act approaches those risks with a sledgehammer — and may make children less safe in the process.

A basic cybersecurity principle is that services should collect as little data as possible — certainly no more than they can reasonably protect. The KIDS Act pushes in the opposite direction.

If gaming services and social media platforms must make legally consequential decisions based on a user’s age, more of them will need some way to verify it. That means more companies asking children and parents for sensitive information — and more databases that can be breached.

The risk is not merely that more data could leak. The data itself could become more sensitive. Liability concerns may be enough to incentivize some services to demand government-issued IDs, biometric information, or similarly intrusive identifiers.

We have already seen the danger of age-verification systems creating new troves of information. In the United Kingdom, a similar law helped drive broader age-checking requirements, and a later Discord data breach exposed identity documents held by a third-party verification provider. The point is not that every age check will produce a breach. It is that collecting information that was never needed before creates something new to steal.

The KIDS Act also sweeps very different online experiences into a one-size-fits-all framework. App-based games, console games, PC games, and social platforms do not expose children to the same kinds of interactions or risks.

Parents should be vigilant about how their children use all of them. But parents are better positioned than Congress to decide which spaces are appropriate for a particular child. When we hand that judgment to a clumsy legal framework, kids may either lose access to genuine social interaction or start bypassing the safeguards altogether — often ending up in less safe corners of the internet.

That matters because online connection is not fake connection.

RELATED: British Invasion: Inside the UK’s Orwellian plan to control YouTube

Anna Barclay/Getty Images

The lockdowns made this obvious. When governments shut down schools, workplaces, churches, and ordinary social life in 2020, millions of people turned to the internet because they had nowhere else to go. Friends used Zoom to play Dungeons and Dragons. Families bonded over Animal Crossing. For many, online spaces were not a replacement for real life so much as the only part of real life still available.

The lockdowns are over, but the lesson remains. Online communities can be frivolous, toxic, educational, creative, supportive, or all of those things at once — just like offline communities.

The harms of youth overexposure to social media are real. So are the benefits lawmakers risk sweeping away. People have used online communities to find life-changing information about rare medical conditions and to build what amounts to one of the largest educational ecosystems in the world.

The problem with the KIDS Act is not that Congress wants to protect children. Parents want that too. The problem is that the law treats more data collection and centralized rules as if they were synonymous with safety.

They are not.

As a parent who grew up online, I want my kids to have access to creativity, connection, and fun without turning their identities over to every service they use. My wife and I do not even post photos of our children online. Privacy is not an abstraction in our house.

Parents already have tools. Nintendo offers parental controls, and services such as Bark and Aura can help families manage devices and online activity without requiring the government to redesign the internet around age verification.

The KIDS Act pushes in the wrong direction. It risks placing more sensitive information in more places while flattening the very different ways children use technology.

Those of us fortunate enough to grow up with the opportunities the internet created should be careful about raising the digital ladder behind us — especially when the safety measure at the top may make the fall worse.

​Age verification, Cybersecurity, Data collection, Data privacy, Opinion & analysis, Social media, Technology, Parental controls, Video games, Congress, Kids act, Safety