The dysfunction is coming from inside the house.
When tragedy strikes a family—violence, collapse, a child acting out in ways the culture can’t comprehend—America reaches for its favorite bedtime story: the myth of the “bad seed.”
A tale that comforts adults, absolves parents, and erases the emotional physics inside the home.
In this episode, we dig into the ancient reflex that makes people blame the child before they ever ask what happened behind closed doors.
From the 1954 novel The Bad Seed to Lolita, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, and today’s true-crime industrial complex, America has built an entire entertainment empire around the fantasy of the inherently evil child.
But the story is older than Hollywood. Much older.
Scripture is filled with children punished for their parents’ failures—Cain, Ham, Ishmael, Esau, Absalom—the original “bad seeds” in a culture terrified to look at the adults in the room.
And nothing shows this pattern more clearly than the Menendez brothers, whose story Netflix has now sensationalized twice: once as a documentary, and once as a Ryan Murphy dramatization.
Two formats, same scapegoat. Shock over context. Spectacle over truth.
So what happens when we flip the lens?
What if no child is born evil? What if violence is the final symptom of a home collapsing long before the headline?
What if the real monster isn’t the child at all—but the myth that keeps us from asking the right questions?
This is an episode about trauma, generational denial, and the stories we tell to avoid looking in the mirror. Because once you understand what the “bad seed” myth is really protecting, the entire narrative begins to unravel.
The dysfunction was coming from inside the house. It always is.
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