The Cure For Teen Depression Is Giving Your Kids Siblings
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When Nick Freitas engages with young men, they often have the same complaint: The culture made them the scapegoat for its ills — and now they feel lost and don’t know what to do about it.
While he doesn’t deny young men’s predicament or blame them for it, Freitas does put the responsibility to do something about it on their shoulders.
The truth, he says, is that the institutions that shape the culture deliberately broke young men’s spirits by convincing society that masculinity was “bad, evil, toxic, horrible, and [needs] to be repressed” and then turned around and sold the young men they villainized toxic escapes, like social media, gaming, and pornography.
The path to a fulfilling life is still there, though — but it’s theirs to find and take.
On this episode of “Rufo & Lomez,” Freitas and fellow BlazeTV hosts Chris Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman talk through why so many young men have checked out — and why reclaiming faith, family, and responsibility is the way back.
It’s both “confusing and horrific” for young men, he adds, to try to make it in a world where they’re “emasculated” in order to be more acceptable to a culture that will reject them regardless.
The message so many young men receive today, says Freitas, is: “By the way, even after you've been emasculated, nobody's going to want to sleep with you … corporations don't want to hire you either.”
“So once you understand that they have legitimate grievances that are truly unique to their experience, well, now we can start to talk about, OK, how do we deal with this?” he continues.
Dealing with it, however, begins with rejecting the “escapes” offered by the same institutions that villainized men in the first place. Doomscrolling social media, pornography, and video gaming, for example, may offer temporary relief, but they ultimately prevent men from finding the fulfilling path they desire.
“One of the big things that I tell men is that look, I get my identity first and foremost through my Christianity. Why? Because it's eternal. … I always have identity, meaning, and purpose. I never lose it, and it cannot be taken away from me,” says Freitas.
When the culture inevitably condemns a Christ-centered identity, it’s men’s job to say “screw the culture” and continue to “pursue” what is godly, he continues.
“Ultimately, if young men choose to do that en masse, the culture will follow,” Freitas says. “The reason why there's been such a push not just to diminish men but to elevate women is because it’s the only way you can’t get self-correction.”
Choosing the righteous path, however, is no easy thing.
“There's pain involved in doing that,” Freitas acknowledges.
“You will be punished in society for doing that, but the more people who do it and the more critical mass you reach, the more things shift.”
Already, the tides have begun to turn.
Freitas cites an NBC News Decision Desk Poll of 18- to 29-year-olds that compared Trump and Harris voters on what they consider a successful life.
“The number-one thing for young men that voted for Trump was having a family; it was number six for women,” says Freitas.
Male Harris voters, however, placed family in 10th place, while female Harris voters put it in second-to-last place.
“That really gives me encouragement,” says Freitas.
To hear more, watch the episode above.
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Parents Who Wanted to Abort Their Children Should Not Have Custody Of Them
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Mark exited his family group chat after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election and, shortly after, stopped speaking to his family entirely. He knew his mom and siblings were conservative and pro-life, and though they didn’t really talk politics, his suspicions about their votes were confirmed when he pressed them. They had made a choice, and now he would too.
Mark had taken to social media the day after the election to rant about half the country, but there was little he could do with anger at that scale. His family offered something more manageable: a localized target for a generalized grievance. He couldn’t control how millions of Americans voted, but he could control whether the few he knew who voted for Trump remained in his life.
For anyone seeking a controlled, frictionless existence, cutting people off offers a deceptively clean solution: eliminate the point of contact.
His mother, recently widowed, is heartbroken by her son’s decision to go no contact. She tries to focus her attention on the rich relationships she still has. Mark’s siblings vacillate between annoyance and deep hurt, bewildered that something so distant from the ordinary life of their family — national politics — could enter their intimacy and overwhelm it.
The no-contact phenomenon is one manifestation of a deeper spiritual jaundice. We’re estranged from ourselves in a way that makes the risk and friction of other people difficult to bear. Politics gives that interior unease somewhere to go. It can be particularly potent as a repository for discontent because it supplies both a diagnosis and a culprit. Diffuse dissatisfaction is difficult to metabolize.
Ideology offers a simplistic answer for why you feel bad and who did it to you. And once the culprit is someone you know, you can do something about it.
Obvious forces are contributing to the rise of this phenomenon, a topic I explore in my new book, “No Contact.” Social media is an accelerant driving estrangement in a couple of ways. We habituate ourselves to a curated “community” and proceed to block, unfollow, and mute voices that introduce friction into the seamless zombie scroll. Social media also spawns what I call TikTok psychologists, whose endless short-form videos invite you to examine your workplace, family, or childhood for the hidden toxicity, narcissism, or trauma.
For a fee, you can sign up for courses that will help you “break the cycle.”
The promise is seductive: Excavate your past, locate the wound, identify its author, and your present unhappiness begins to make sense. Pundits and politics offer the same explanatory relief in the present tense, supplying villains and catastrophes with enough regularity to keep us perpetually activated. Past or present, the gaze remains trained outward. We will go surprisingly far down rabbit holes to discover what someone else did to us or is doing to us while avoiding the much more frightening journey down the rabbit hole of our souls.
The accelerants, however, presuppose something already combustible. Social media can supply the siloes, pundits the villains, and therapists the permission, but none fully explains the strange zeal with which we have embraced the promise that amputating even our most primordial relationships can make us well. And we’ve been amputating them at a rapid pace. According to recent polling, 38% of Americans are estranged from a family member, with political and ideological disagreement accounting for a significant share of these ruptures.
While it can be entirely healthy and prudent to distance oneself, even permanently, from an abusive or dangerous friend or relative, the hundreds of estranged parents I’ve encountered across the country — and those I interviewed for the book — testify to a different phenomenon: a diminishing willingness — particularly among young people — to endure the risks and friction that durable relationships require.
And nowhere are the risks higher, the friction more unavoidable, or the returns less certain than in family life.
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Weighing the costs
By our current calculus, family is a fool’s bet. It’s a long-term investment in other human beings, with few variables or outcomes under our control. We choose a spouse without knowing who they will become in 30 years. We have children knowing they will suffer and make us suffer, without knowing what kind of people they will become, what they will believe, what they will make of their lives, or ultimately what they will make of us.
Besides the risk, there is relentless friction along the way: competing needs, irritating habits, misunderstandings, disappointments, heated political disagreements, and obligations that arrive at the most inconvenient times. Family continually frustrates our preferences and interferes with our plans. The people closest to us are those with the greatest opportunity to disturb our peace. The friction is certain, but the return on investment is not, as the no-contact phenomenon makes painfully clear.
For anyone seeking a controlled, frictionless existence, cutting people off offers a deceptively clean solution: eliminate the point of contact. And there is good reason to think its justifying logic metastasizes easily. Colleges that implemented no-contact orders to protect students from predation now report demands for such orders because a roommate ate their bagel or someone looked askance at them in the cafeteria. Avoidance pays an immediate dividend.
But the costs of avoidance compound. First, avoidance makes us more brittle. The more accustomed we become to eliminating friction rather than navigating it, the less friction we become capable of bearing. Avoidance trains us in avoidance. What begins as relief from a difficult encounter can become an increasing dependence on controlling the conditions of encounter.
Second, avoidance keeps us stuck. Friction is a form of contact with reality. Once contact ends, we lose one of the most powerful correctives to our grievances: the encounter with the actual person. In memory, the mother who wounded us can remain frozen in our minds at the moment of injury. In person, she is harder to reduce so neatly. She is irritating and funny, selfish and generous, capable of the same old failure and suddenly vulnerable in some way we hadn’t expected. The living person keeps interfering with the story we tell about her.
There is a third cost: Avoidance can become a means of avoiding ourselves. Rehearsing the reasons for a cutoff can be a vital reminder to stay away when estrangement is necessary. Persons escaping abuse may need to remember clearly what happened, particularly when guilt or loneliness threatens to draw them back imprudently.
But when the relationship was merely difficult but not dangerous, that same rehearsal can work against us. Avoidance invites us to recount our grievances continually, quieting the dissonance that might otherwise invite us to question our narrative. It’s far easier to rehearse our righteousness than it is to wrestle and reckon honestly with a more complicated account that might in part implicate ourselves.
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Strangers to all?
A culture organized around minimizing risk and friction will eventually find family difficult to justify, because family is a long-term wager on goods that cannot be secured in advance and a daily encounter with people we can’t control.
Before deciding to go no contact, consider that you may be losing far more than you gain by cutting ties. Risk and friction are prerequisites of life and love. Family is indeed a bad bet if we prize control and an untroubled life, but it might be our best bet if we want a more human one.
Mark can eliminate the friction his family creates. He cannot make them cease to be his family. Nor can he know what might have happened had he stayed in contact long enough for all of them to become again something more than the worst thing he believed about them.
There is a terrible risk of remaining. But there is a risk in leaving too: that in protecting ourselves from the people who disturb our peace, we slowly become people incapable of loving and knowing anyone — and will secure one terrible result: remaining a stranger to all and to ourselves.
Editor's note: This article is adapted from Noelle Mering’s new book, "No Contact: How a Seductive Ideology Broke Families and Friendships and How We Can Repair Them" (Forum Books), and appeared originally at the American Mind.
Victim 0001: A chaplain's last walk into the fire
In the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, Jesus remarks that a good shepherd will leave 99 sheep to go looking for one that is lost. FDNY chaplain Father Mychal Judge spent most of his life living out some version of that — with alcoholics, AIDS patients, and firefighters on their worst nights.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, at 68 years old, Fr. Mychal did it one last time. He left his friary and walked straight toward the fire that everyone else in the city was running from.
'I'm not finished here.'
Inside the North Tower lobby, Fr. Mychal stayed close to the men he had come for. He moved through falling debris and the bodies of people who had jumped, stopping again and again to kneel, to anoint, to bless, and to pray for whoever was in front of him — the dying and the already dead, treated with the same unhurried attention.
Someone offered him a way out, a seat with the officials heading somewhere safer. He said no. "I'm not finished here."
Witnesses remembered his lips moving without stopping, the same prayer said over and over into the noise: "Jesus, please end this. God, please end this."
He was reportedly still on his knees, mid-rite, when the South Tower gave way at 9:59 a.m. The collapse sent a wave of debris through the North Tower lobby, killing him where he knelt before the building he was standing in had even begun to fall.
A cop, two firefighters, an emergency worker, and a Wall Street employee who had wandered over to help found Fr. Mychal first, feeling through a smoke-choked lobby until someone tripped over his body in the dark.
A photographer caught the moment he was recovered — ash-covered men cradling a priest between them, his body carried like something too precious to be dropped.
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It didn't take long for people to name what they were looking at in that image. They started calling it "the American Pietà" — the same posture as the Virgin Mother cradling her Son.
Because his was the first body to reach the medical examiner that day, the paperwork simply read: Victim 0001. Of the nearly 3,000 people who died that morning, his name went down first — the shepherd, oddly, arriving ahead of the flock.
One firefighter later said as much himself. It felt fitting that Fr. Mychal would go first, as if he had simply done what he always did — walked ahead, so that whoever came next wouldn't be walking into the dark alone.
Fr. Mychal was carried the rest of the way to St. Peter's Church and laid before the altar.
The street where his friary still stands now carries his name. And every September, firefighters and family retrace his final walk — from the church where he served, to the firehouse nearest where he fell — covering once a year on foot the same distance he covered without once looking back.
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If You Think Ending Discrimination Against Stay-At-Home Moms Is ‘Welfare,’ You’re Not Conservative
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The text from my friend contained one of the stranger questions I have ever received from a family planning a funeral: “Do you know ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah’?”
I stared at my phone, a bit wild-eyed. My first instinct was to reply, “Why do you ask?” Instead, I simply wrote, “Yes.”
In that sanctuary, the music served something greater than itself.
His mother had died after a long battle with Parkinson’s. The song was one of her favorites, and the family had sung it with her for years. They hoped I could play it during a slideshow at her memorial service.
I have been a pianist longer than I have been a caregiver, which is saying something. Over the years, families have invited me to play at hundreds of funerals, and I never take that invitation lightly.
As a preacher’s kid, I began as cheap labor for my father’s church: Sunday services, weddings, funerals. I did it all. I no longer play weddings unless enormous amounts of money or extraordinary affection are involved. There is simply too much drama. Funerals are different. If possible, I still play them.
A grieving family does not need entertainment or musical pomp. They need someone willing to serve the moment. Music should give grief room to breathe while gently lifting people’s eyes, even if only an inch.
That assignment becomes considerably more demanding when the requested song is “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”
I could have treated it as a novelty, played the familiar tune, collected a few smiles, and moved on. But this family was not asking for a joke. They were asking me to honor their mother.
A funeral is one of the few remaining places in American life where we must confront the difference between entertainment and reverence. Our culture can turn nearly anything into content, spectacle, or argument. A family’s grief deserves better.
My father had died not long before this service. He was a pastor who understood ceremony. He did not confuse reverence with stiffness or ceremony with showmanship. He knew some moments deserve the very best we can bring to them. His lessons sat close as I worked on the arrangement.
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Before moving to Montana, I lived and played in Nashville. Nashville taught me polish. Montana reminded me of intimacy. In a small rural sanctuary, every note sits close to the people who need it.
I did not try to make “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” sacred. The song was not sacred. The moment was.
A family’s love was sacred. A life well lived was sacred. So was the faith that endured years of Parkinson’s and the long goodbye that accompanied it.
I arranged the piece more slowly than usual, but not sorrowfully; tenderly, but not timidly. I added a few chords no one expects to hear in “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” My wife calls them my “non-sanctified chords.”
When I played it for her at home, she wiped her eyes. “You played it so respectfully,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
I called one of the daughters and asked for the exact length of the slideshow. Then I shaped the arrangement to fit it.
At the service, the pastor introduced the slideshow: “It is set to one of her favorite songs, ‘Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,’ played by Peter Rosenberger.”
After decades at the piano, I had never received an introduction quite like that. Chuckles rolled through the sanctuary. I understood. Then the pictures began.
Childhood. Marriage. Ranch life. Children. Grandchildren.
As her life unfolded across the screen, the novelty disappeared. The room settled into stillness. A playful song associated with happy memories in her home began carrying the weight of a family’s love and loss.
I timed the final chord to the last photograph of her face. For a moment, no one moved. The chuckles had given way to misty eyes. That familiar little tune had slipped past everyone’s defenses and carried something deeper than anyone expected.
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Christians do not pretend that Parkinson’s is beautiful or that death is merely another happy chapter. Scripture calls death the last enemy. But it also declares that Christ has defeated it. For those in Christ, suffering does not receive the final word. Neither does Parkinson’s. Neither does the grave.
The song was not the gospel, and I did not pretend it was. But it carried the memory of a woman who had sung it through years of suffering. In that sanctuary, the music served something greater than itself.
My father’s death still weighed heavily on me as I played. Perhaps that helped me understand the assignment. Even amid our own grief, we can offer the best of what we have to someone walking through theirs.
Sometimes grief calls for a great hymn. Sometimes it calls for silence. And every now and then, it calls for “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”
Because for those who belong to Christ, everything really is … satisfactual.
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