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Proud Groomer Teachers

Fearless exploiters of children brag on TikTok about corrupting their minds, fearing no consequences
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Call it confidence, or call it arrogance, but there are some young schoolteachers who brag on TikTok about telling the little kids in their class all about transgenderism and gender theory. For example:

And this:

And this:

These people aren’t hiding it. They are openly bragging about propagandizing children without parental consent. Putting their faces to it and everything for plaudits from their online tribes.

Why don’t these people ever seem to be outed, and parents demand that they be professionally disciplined, and (preferably) fired? This is exploitative and disgusting. Are parents afraid to take a stand and to say publicly that there is something wrong with presenting this material to children? Do they fear the accusation of bigotry more than they care for their kids?

Yes, I think they are — and that’s why these lunatics keep posting these things. They know that most parents in this country would rather sacrifice their children to these monsters than stand up and say HELL NO, for fear of personal and professional repercussions.

I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all. I’m a bear when it comes to defending my children. If one of these pushy freaks forced their personal choices onto my children in a classroom setting, where they have authority, I would bring down Armageddon on their heads, and on the heads of the school officials who continue to employ their creepy groomer selves.

A friend of mine says this is why he thinks that the transgender cult is going to continue going from strength to strength: because there’s no real fight left in this country, even from the Right.

Get this, from the UK:

Campaigners have accused TikTok of helping children to be ‘brainwashed’ by hosting viral social-media videos that promote changing sex as ‘cool’.

Material posted by transgender influencers on the social networking service – in which they provide advice on transitioning and accessing hormone therapies – has been seen by millions of young viewers.

Some parents are concerned the involvement of TikTok, which became the UK’s most downloaded app last year, is fuelling a ‘social contagion’ of pressure on impressionable youngsters and the rise in teenagers who are identifying as trans.

More than a quarter of British TikTok users are aged between 15 and 25, and children aged between four and 15 who sign up spend an average of 69 minutes on the app each day, according to TikTok’s own data.

Analysis by The Mail on Sunday shows that videos with the hashtag #Trans have been seen more than 26 billion times.

… One popular transgender TikTok influencer, Bella Fitzpatrick, raised £20,000 from followers in less than three months to fund private gender-reassignment surgery.

The 19-year-old has 700,000 followers and explains the process of transitioning, including her experience of bypassing NHS waiting lists.

Another is Alex Consani, 18, who has more than 680,000 followers. She went viral five years ago when, aged 12, Cosmopolitan magazine featured her life as a trans model.

Here’s the bomb:

TikTok signed a partnership earlier this year with Stonewall, the controversial lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights charity, to promote this material.

TikTok is owned indirectly by the Chinese government, which this year began restricting LGBT social media material for its own people. Make of this what you will.

UPDATE: In related news, Matt Taibbi today, in a dispatch for his subscribers only, said that the Democrats are going to take a shellacking in 2022 because of the party’s inability to recognize what progressivism is doing to education. He talks about how Chuck Todd had Nikole Hannah-Jones on Meet The Press to talk about how all the nasty white people object to schools teaching her phony 1619 Project. NHJ said that parents shouldn’t have anything to say about what kids are taught, because parents aren’t experts. More:

However, much like the Hillary Clinton quote about “deplorables,” conventional wisdom after the “gaffe” soon hardened around the idea that what McAuliffe said wasn’t wrong at all. In fact, people like Hannah-Jones are now doubling down and applying to education the same formula that Democrats brought with disastrous results to a whole range of other issues in the Trump years, telling voters that they should get over themselves and learn to defer to “experts” and “expertise.”

This was a bad enough error in 2016 when neither Democrats nor traditional Republicans realized how furious the public was with “experts” on Wall Street who designed horrifically unequal bailouts, or “experts” on trade who promised technical retraining that never arrived to make up for NAFTA job josses, or Pentagon “experts” who promised we’d find WMDs in Iraq and be greeted as liberators there, and so on, and so on. Ignoring that drumbeat, and advising Hillary Clinton to run on her 25 years of “experience” as the ultimate Washington insider, won the Democratic Party leaders four years of Donald Trump.

It was at least understandable how national pols could once believe the public valued their “professional” governance on foreign policy, trade, the economy, etc. Many of these matters probably shouldn’t be left to amateurs (although as has been revealed over and over of late, the lofty reputations of experts often turn out to be based mainly upon their fluidity with gibberish occupational jargon), and disaster probably would ensue if your average neophyte was suddenly asked to revamp, say, the laws governing securities clearing.

But parenting? For good reason, there’s no parent anywhere who believes that any “expert” knows what’s better for their kids than they do. Parents of course will rush to seek out a medical expert when a child is sick, or has a learning disability, or is depressed, or mired in a hundred other dilemmas. Even through these inevitable terrifying crises of child rearing, however, all parents are alike in being animated by the absolute certainty — and they’re virtually always right in this — that no one loves their children more than they do, or worries about them more, or agonizes even a fraction as much over how best to shepherd them to adulthood happy and in one piece.

Implying the opposite is a political error of almost mathematically inexpressible enormity.

More:

Historically, both parties have cranked out unsuccessful education reforms, from George Bush’s No Child Left Behind to Barack Obama’s $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” (which EdWeek just quietly noted showed “no positive impact”). Only the current iteration of Democrats, however, is dumb enough to campaign on the idea that parents should step aside and let the same “experts” who’ve spent the last fifty years turning the American education system into a global punchline take full charge of their kids’ upbringing.

The arrogance of this position is breathtaking. There is a debate to be had over whether public education, as New York put it after McAuliffe’s loss, is “a public good in which the citizenry at large is the essential stakeholder, or a publicly provided private benefit for children and their parents.” But the strategy of the educational establishment has been to put off the debate by denouncing as conspiracy theory the very idea that a discussion is even needed.

Worse, the rhetorical stall usually involves this argument that parents lack the moral and intellectual standing to be part of the conversation.

You have to subscribe to read the whole thing, and I think you should. Taibbi is killing it.

There are several “live not by lies” problems here, as I see it.

First, the media are high on their own supply. Far too many of them simply can’t imagine that progressive dogmas are wrong. If we had a press that worked like it is supposed to, there would be investigations going on by local newspapers and TV stations all across the country. Remember how back in 2002, in the wake of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigation, local media started looking into whether their own Catholic dioceses had behaved like the Archdiocese of Boston regarding concealing clerical sex abuse? It turned out that it was indeed happening everywhere. Well, how likely do you think it is that some version of the garbage in Loudoun County is happening at the local level elsewhere in the country? I’d say fairly likely — but this is not a story that validates the media’s prior beliefs, so they won’t be looking into it.

Second, with reference to educational reform that doesn’t work being pushed by both parties, there is an inability of middle class people to imagine the lives of people not like themselves. I’ve told the story in this space before about sitting in on an editorial board meeting at The Dallas Morning News during election season. We interviewed Lew Blackburn, an incumbent school board member who had a reputation of being something of a deadhead. He’s a black man who represents a black and Hispanic district. My colleagues asked him perfectly valid questions about the subpar state of Dallas public school kids’ test scores. At some point, Blackburn said that you could only expect so much of these kids, most of whom were poor, and had either only one parent in the home, or two parents with both working long hours. When Blackburn said that, something clicked with me. I recalled my sister, a public school teacher, explaining to me back in 1993 how hard it was to work with students who had zero support at home. She opened my eyes to the fact that this is one effect of the breakdown of the family. Lew Blackburn may or may not have been a deadhead, but he was talking about a sociological reality that no school program devised by experts can fix. But most of us on the editorial board left that meeting angry at him, believing Blackburn was making excuses. I realized that educated middle class people have a weakness for believing that all social problems can be fixed by programs.

Third, and closely related, is a false anthropology: the idea that children are blank slates who can be properly programmed by expertise. Education then becomes a matter of devising the best system to input into the minds of the kids. In fact, education is far more an organic process. Children are living beings, not machines. Education is a matter of cultivating a garden — and that requires recognition that there is natural variation among individual kids. The same strategy doesn’t work equally well with all of them.

Fourth is the lie of racialized egalitarianism: that the only reason for disparities in educational outcomes is racial discrimination. If children require cultivation to be educated, they require a culture. A culture that disparages education, or is at best indifferent to it, will produce kids who do not achieve. My sister and I were both smart kids, but I was a lazy student. If our working-class parents hadn’t imposed high expectations for educational achievement on us, I would not have done as well as I did. Teachers can’t take kids whose parents don’t care, and whose social milieu doesn’t care, and make scholars out of them. This is true no matter what one’s race and income level is. We have become the sort of country that would rather believe the egalitarian lie, and abolish grades and gifted programs for the sake of leveling, than face hard truths about human difference and the effect of culture on capability.

This hit me square in the face when I was in 11th grade, and in my first year at a public boarding school for gifted kids. I had always made As in all my classes, even math. Now I was in a school with kids who were really gifted in math. I could not keep up with them — mostly, I think, because I was lazy, and didn’t like math, but also in part because I didn’t have the natural intelligence to do math at their level. I shut down entirely, and quit going to class. Naturally, I failed, and had to take trigonometry in summer school, with a tutor. I handled that badly — boy, were my parents angry at me! — but I learned that aside from my own laziness, it really is true that even among gifted kids, not everybody is equally gifted. Courses that rewarded verbal skill came easy to me; math and science were not subjects in which I naturally excelled. It would have been unjust to the kids who were gifted in math and science to compel them to slow down and work to the level of a mediocre student like me. I wasn’t actually bad at math, but I needed to be in a slower class in order to flourish.

And you know what? This is fine! “Physics For Poets” is a good idea for a class — as is “Poetry for Physics Students,” in which poetics are taught at a level that math/science geeks can understand. My late father had an engineer’s mind, and often complained about how the class he hated the most in college was poetry. None of it made sense to him. I think he was slightly on the spectrum, and didn’t really get how metaphorical and allusive language works. I have no way of knowing to what extent he was at a cognitive deficit, and to what extent he was, like his son, a horse’s ass when it came to doing work that he didn’t like doing. The point is, though, that he did very well in his STEM classes, but was not capable of keeping up with the better poetry students. This did not make him a lesser human being any more than my own weakness in STEM subjects makes me a lesser human being. But in America, we have a very hard time facing the reality of natural hierarchies of ability. We will destroy good things, like gifted programs, and tell ourselves all kinds of lies, to avoid having to face difficult truths.

I know what’s coming next: somebody is going to start talking about IQ and race, and accuse me of being too sensitive on the subject. I am sensitive on the subject, because I hate the way some people are, acting as if people having lower IQ scores makes them somehow a lesser person. And, more to the point, it could justify racism in the minds of racists. Nevertheless, people who criticize me for discouraging IQ discussions here aren’t wrong to say that I am afraid of those conversations — again, because I fear what racists will do with them, and I also fear that we will surrender to biological determinism, and downplay or even ignore the role of culture in learning. And you know, thinking back to my two years in that gifted school, one of the biggest things that made learning possible there was a classroom culture of silence and attentiveness. Teachers didn’t have to fuss at the class constantly to keep us quiet and paying attention. That made a huge difference.

Anyway, this ties in to the original post about LGBT activist teachers abusing their authority because it shows again what progressive capture of schooling in America is doing to the education. Taibbi might be right, and parental revolt at the ballot box could bring Trump back. But would that change anything?

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