Maia Szalavitz

speaker

249 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 30 Jul

Maia Szalavitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Infamous · Paris Hilton’s Troubled Teen School Shut Down by the State of Utah · 30 Jul 2026 podcast

And this translated into troubled teens very well because everybody wants to think that they deserve a kick in the butt as well.

So what happens is, as the war on drugs escalates, synanon spreads.

In Florida, there's an organization that was known as The Seed.

And The Seed was...

Directly based on Synanon, it was humiliation and public attacks and break people.

But it was aimed at teens.

There was an enormous amount of anxiety in the late 70s and early 80s about runaway teens and everybody's doing drugs and we got to stop this.

So the seed actually gets investigated by Congress in 1974.

And it got compared to North Korean brainwashing.

Wow.

OK.

By Congress.

So they decided, OK, not we should stop doing this.

Let's just change our name.

So the seed becomes straight incorporated and it continues doing the same things and continues to get government funding.

And soon in the 80s, it attracts the attention of Nancy Reagan.

who is looking for a cause so that she doesn't seem frivolous.

She was friends with the guy who founded Straight, and he was a big Republican campaign donor.

And for a long time, he chaired the Finance Committee of the Republican Party on the national level.

so he introduces nancy to straight and soon straight is nancy's favorite treatment program and she's listening to these stories that these kids are telling of being forced into sex work and having sex with dogs and all these terrible things that they were doing to get drugs

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