u/Glass-Enclosure

I was watching a 2003 BBC documentary by Louis Theroux, "Louis and the Nazis," and was so disgusted and sad to see a duo of 11-year-old girls who'd been groomed by their mother to front a neo-Nazi pop band, singing overtly white supremacist lyrics. This is clearly an absolutely disgusting case of grooming and child abuse. In the documentary, Louis Theroux even asked the mom if the girls understood the lyrics they were singing, and she said they did. She then asked the girls directly, and, of course, they had no idea how to answer and it was abundantly clear they didn't actually know what they were singing about. It was deeply disturbing. I had a strong suspicion they were homeschooled, and sure enough, later in the documentary Louis asks the girls where they go to school, and they say "homeschool." Yeah... of course they do.

After I finished the documentary, I looked up where Lamb and Lynx are today, hoping they'd been able to break away from their mother and live life on their own terms. I can't imagine how difficult that would be... Not only did they have to deal with the standard trauma of overcoming an abusive homeschooled childhood, with all the gaps in education and socialization that come with it, but they also had to overcome being publicly known as children in a Nazi band. I have no idea how anyone could be asked to overcome all of that.

It turns out that the story does have a happier ending though: Lamb and Lynx eventually went to public school and broke away from the racist indoctrination they suffered as children homeschooled by Nazis. From a 2011 ABC News article:

"I'm grown up now. I was a little kid back then and said a lot of things I don't believe in now," Lynx told ABC News. The girls credit moving to Montana — and attending public school there — for opening their eyes and giving them new perspectives on life.

'My sister and I were home-schooled. We were these country bumpkins... It makes me proud of humanity every day that we have so many different places and people.'

...The twins say they are new people, and that time, experience, and love have changed them for the better. 'We just want to come from a place of love and light… I think we're meant to do something more — we're healers. We just want to exert the most love and positivity we can,"' Lamb told the Daily Mail."

I think the Lamb and Lynx case is a perfect, albeit tragic, example of why there needs to be much stricter regulation in homeschooling. With no oversight of what children are or aren't being taught, parents are free to raise their kids into literal Nazi bands, indoctrinated with hateful ideology from a young age. Instilling any ideology in children before they can comprehend it is abusive (let alone one this hateful) and it saddles them with a lifetime of trauma to unravel. It is abusive, it is not fair, and it is morally reprehensible. Every child deserves an environment where they're able to grow into well-adjusted individuals capable of freely living according to their own dreams and desires. What Lamb and Lynx went through severely impacted their lives, and I can only imagine that they've carried that trauma well into adulthood, and likely forever, long after their parents are gone. If they'd been allowed to go to school sooner, or if there had been stricter regulations on homeschool curricula, they might have been spared some of that harm and had the chance at a freer, more fulfilling life.