The Intercept published a stunning confession by a young man about his “grooming” by an elementary school teacher.
Jon Schwarz writes:
Anyone following the news knows the U.S. right is now obsessively accusing public school teachers, especially ones who are LGBTQ+, of being “groomers” — i.e., pedophiles. It’s both astonishingly vile and horrifyingly cynical.
This kind of propaganda — that some minority group is plotting to harm our children — has always been the specialty of history’s most vicious political movements. Today’s version is just one step away from the Taliban’s violent loathing of education, and two steps from declaring that teachers are using the blood of children to make their unleavened bread. Ignorant audiences have always been vulnerable to these fairy tales, which is why the abuse of children is a popular theme of literal fairy tales.
At the same time, the right-wing figures who spew out this sewage are absolutely indifferent to the actual sexual abuse of children. For instance, one of the most hateful proponents of the groomer narrative is Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at a conservative think tank called the Manhattan Institute. Rufo recently proclaimed on Twitter: “The public school system has a child sex abuse problem.”
That’s all you need to know about Rufo. He has no interest in the sexual abuse of children in private or charter schools. Nor did he mention churches. For that matter, he has nothing to say about the Republican Party: Its longest-serving speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, was a child molester, and the next GOP Speaker of the House may be Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who has been accused by eight former studentsof helping cover up the sexual abuse of wrestlers at Ohio State University.
That’s because, for Rufo and his compatriots — such as the playwright David Mamet; Christina Pushaw, the press secretary for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; andDonald Trump Jr. — the victims of genuine sexual abuse don’t matter at all. They and the lifelong pain many experience are simply useful tools in the right’s centurylong attack on public education. Rufo and company understand that democracy is impossible without public education and so are willing to do anything to destroy it.
We know where this path leads, and we must step off it immediately. The people doing this are cruel and sadistic, but they’re also mewling cowards — and with pushback now, they will slink back into the holes from which they emerged.
At the same time, we should be telling the full truth about public school teachers. The one good thing I can say about this awful current phenomenon is that it’s made me remember all the beautiful teachers I’ve had, and how much better they made my life. Here’s my story of how my elementary school teacher.
Please read his memories of teachers who taught him to love learning.
He says:
From encouraging me to read and write, to nudging me to think for myself, their pernicious influence burdens me to this day.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thanks for this post. Our insane preoccupation with gender orientation has a very minor role in most classrooms. The whole grooming supposition is another tool to undermine public educators and schools. It is a propaganda tool. The only ‘grooming’ in most classrooms is teaching students to respect each other, think for themselves and encourage young people to be life long readers.
sadly, courtesy is a type of social “grooming” which seems to be less and less normal in so many venues
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Christopher Rufo doesn’t care about children or what parents think of their local public schools. He only cares about himself, his hate, and the dangerous lies he spews to support that hate.
Christopher Rufo “has no interest in the sexual abuse of children in private or charter schools. Nor does he mention churches. For that matter, he has nothing to say about the Republican Party: Its longest-serving speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, was a child molester, and the next GOP Speaker of the House may be Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who has been accused by eight former students of helping cover up the sexual abuse of wrestlers at Ohio State University.”
But Christopher Rufo, another extremist on the far-right catering to the hateful, dangerous, MAGA mindless mob, says OUR public-school teachers are grooming children to be abused sexually by pedophiles. I was a public teacher for thirty years.
Should the more than THREE-MILLION public school teachers across the United States take Rufo to court and sue him for slander and libel?
Now, lets learn what most parents think. Do they agree with Christopher Rufo and the other hateful liars like him?
“How satisfied are you with the quality of education your oldest child is receiving? Would you say you are completely satisfied, somewhat satisfied, somewhat dissatisfied or completely dissatisfied?”
In 2021, 73 percent were satisfied with the quality of education their oldest child was receiving.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1612/education.asp
Bravo, Jon Schwarz! Clearly, those teachers were quite successful in teaching you to gratify your dark desires to write well and make people laugh and think!
Mr. Schimezzi, Mr. Long, Mr. Luginbill, Dr. Pettijohn, Dr. Donald Gray, Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, Dr. James Miller, Dr. Kenton Machina, Dr. Michael Flanagan, and many others–I’m looking at you! Yes, I am naming names!
Thank you.
The right is afraid elementary school teachers might groom the students to be nice to each other rather than to fear and to loathe one another. Can’t have that. It might short circuit their ability to get people to vote against their economic self-interest. If people are groomed to tolerate, they might not hate.
to get people to vote against their economic self-interest
The Greying Old Party has been good at that for a long time.
Who knew that David Mamet, of all people, was a far right wing Trump supporter spouting vile conspiracy theories about school teachers. His mother was a school teacher.
Here’s Mamet on the Mark Levin show (far right wing fascist): Quote – “What we have is kids not only being indoctrinated but groomed, in a very real sense, by people who are, whether they know it or not, sexual predators,” Mamet said Sunday during a FOX News interview. “Are they abusing the kids physically? No, I don’t think so. But they are abusing them mentally and using sex to do so. This has always been the problem with education. Teachers are inclined, particularly men because men are predators, to pedophilia.”
Mamet, who has been hitting the airwaves to promote his new book, “Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch,” did not cite any source to back up his claims nor was his assertion challenged by host Mark Levin. END Quote
Making outrageous claims without any evidence……how Trumpian. Mamet wasn’t challenged on his lies because he was on the Mark Levin show. Rush Limbaugh is clapping and cheering from the deepest depths of hell.
The above quote cited was from nbc news, 4-11-22. “Mamet’s remarks are “a repulsive demonization of the very people who have been the lifeline to our kids,” teachers’ union president Randi Weingarten said.
As if teachers don’t get slimed and demonized enough on any given day, now we have people like Mamet throwing the kitchen sink at a whole class of people, teachers, without any concern for truth, decency and reality.
Why aren’t Republicans upset about a convicted pedophile—Jeffrey Epstein—and his close friendship with Trump and Gates?
This is breathtakingly horrifying to learn. Mamet is a Trumpanzee!!!! Yikes. And here I thought Glengarry Glen Ross was about a whole lotta stuff that is wrong with capitalism. Come to think of it, Glengarry Glen Ross IS about a whole lotta stuff that is wrong with capitalism. Here’s the thing about authentic literary work: it tends to tell the truth even if the writer of it is otherwise a bonehead.
And yes, you can be a bonehead and produce authentic literary work. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies in the garden. D. H. Lawrence thought it was a great idea to whip one’s servants “to establish blood reciprocity.” Wallace Stevens was a racist, so much so that I was utterly horrified when I learned of this, for I had long been a huge fan of his work. Kipling, a racist imperialist. W. B. Yeats and William Blake both looney as jaybirds. Yeats produced some of the greatest poetry in the history of our language but never met a really profoundly stupid spiritualist idea that he didn’t swallow hook, line, and crystal ball. Geoffrey Chaucer denounced his life’s writing for being sinful. Gerard Manly Hopkins wanted his poetry burned for the same reason. Loonytoons. I know it’s fashionable to say that Blake wasn’t totally cuckoo, just deep, but he was as cuckoo as the clock (his later works bear all the characteristics found in the ramblings of profoundly schizophrenic persons; this isn’t a popular idea among Blake scholars, but they are wrong). And, of course, Blake was a genius of the first order. Method and madness.
This line from an interview with Mamet is really funny:
“All you need to know about communism is that Marx was a sponger. He lived off Engels’ family who had a furniture factory.”
But Mamet got his factoid wrong. The Engels family businesses were in textiles. And, of course, that’s not ALL you need to know about Marxism. For example, I highly recommend reading Marx on wolrker alienation from The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1944 (if you can stomach Marx’s turgid prose)–brilliant, profound, tragic, true.
And then there is the most spectacular example of this genetic fallacy–judging the creation on the character of the creator–Martin Heidegger. He was a terrible writer–simply godawfully bad at it–and he WAS A NAZI, an ACTUAL NAZI. But he had some truly interesting and useful insights about philosophical matters and is worth reading despite this stuff.
Oh, and then there’s Jean-Paul Sartre, who stole his best ideas from Simone de Beauvoir and was a freaking apologist for Stalin. But again, some great ideas.
cx: Marx on worker alienation
Wasn’t Ezra Pound sympathetic to fascism?
Yes. He gave commentaries on the radio from Italy during the war. Afterward, he was arrested and was to be tried for treason and was committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in New York. Pound claimed not to be a fascist. The folks at the hospital judged him mentally unfit. Here’s a good story: At one point, T. S. Eliot visited him in the hospital. On the way out, a reporter stopped him and said, “Mr. Eliot! Mr. Eliot! Is he crazy?” to which Eliot replied, “His erudition is frightening.”
Thanks for the Pound story. You are truly full of these gems. Back in 78 I got a job working in the sewer. There was a guy I worked with who used to tell me I was a G#$%^ book of knowledge. If he had known you, he would have increased the G()&)(&&(^^.
Haaaa!!!
Pound was as crazy as Marjorie Taylor Greene on acid, IMHO. An anti-Semite with idiotic economic ideas, a literally tone-deaf fellow who wrote an opera, and an autodidact full of interesting, weird, peculiar knowledge, having not had the benefit of graduate school teachers. Flashes of brilliance in his critical writing and poetry. He tried to invent a poetic form into which he could pour everything in his teeming brain. The result, his Cantos. There’s a weird and wonderful picture of him as an aged man in Portofino, Italy, on a bench on the street with Alan Ginsburg. There’s a wonderful facsimile edition, available as a large-format paperback, of Pound’s brilliant edits on Eliot’s The Waste Land. What a gift those were! I own a copy, and it’s fascinating.
I guess that I’m being immoderate today, as I have responses in moderation. But nothing new there. This from Mamet is shocking.
From a twitter feed, “Planned Parenthood ins’t killing children. You’re thinking of the NRA.”
Amen
Gorbachev mused that Reagan would have a difficult time getting elected without the Soviet Union to complain about. Little did he know. Without the powerful quasi-communists (we now know that the Soviet Union was just fascism dressed so that you could not tell the pigs from the men) the distant right has searched for haunts until they seem everywhere.
lol. And now they have CRT and Jewish Space Lasers and Socialists
The Repugnican Party can always find the next Goldstein to whip the Trumpanzee mob up about.
The author of this wonderful piece, Jon Schwarz, is asking readers to submit their own “grooming” stories to him at The Intercept. This is the perfect forum for deluging him with stories. We can support him in responding to this vile, Republican, lie machine with the truth.
Here is his request
It’s Teacher Appreciation Week, and The Intercept is collecting stories about how elementary school teachers positively impact people’s lives. If you had experiences similar to mine, please send them to me. jon.schwarz@theintercept.com
By the way, I loved this piece. I had a lot of grooming as a youngster as well. Ms. Nell groomed me to accept high heels. How she taught all day in those spikes is way beyond my ken? My feet would have been so tired. Maybe that had something to do with her life when her husband died. A dapper middle aged fellow in a bright yellow convertible started coming around town. Next thing you know she was retired and moved away. Lived to be 93.
I think I first read about David Mamet’s new political views (then read something in the WSJ) on Fred Klonsky’s Blog.
The man has lost his mind. Mamet…not Fred.
yup
“For instance, one of the most hateful proponents of the groomer narrative is Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at a conservative think tank called the Manhattan Institute.”
Rufo is a shady figure, however wellgroomed he looks. John Oliver credits him with starting the CRT-in-schools madness.
This John Oliver video is about CRT and the part about Rufo starts at about 6 min.
Of course Rufo did.
I didn’t know.
Mate,
I posted the last minute of the Derby for you.
Thanks, Diane, I looked at it. He did have some luck that the inside line was left open by the other riders, but he might have pulled it off anyways even if this didn’t happen.
The “I didn’t know” remark was about not knowing that Rufo started the hysteria about CRT. Isn’t there some kind of law against people who make up accusations against an institution (public schools) and a class of people (teachers)?
On more than one occasion, Rufo explicitly states that he is willing to make up stuff just to destroy public education. His agressive response to Weringarten might have been an expression of Rufo’s fear that he may be held accountable for his lies.
Rufo called me a liar for saying out loud that he longed for the values of 1776–and I pointed out that in 1776, most black people were enslaved, women had no rights, plantation owners (including some of the Founders) enjoyed conjugal rights to their enslaved women. He is very slick but does a good job of feigning a wealth of knowledge. In reality, he is ignorant of history and is full of bull.
It seems that the video link didn’t work. I try it one more time. https://youtu.be/EICp1vGlh_U
Manhattan Institute is the Koch network.
Mississippi- alleged Republican corruption- links to a charter school and a Christian evangelist-
Huffpo’s story today about those ensnared in the Fed’s accusations of misspent money from welfare funds include Brett Favre (endorsed Trump in 2020), a former head of the Dept. of Human Services (appointed by a GOP governor in 2016), leaders of the New Summit private school and, Ted D. DiBiase Sr. (a Christian evangelist).
From Mississippi Today (3-18-2021), “Feds accuse New Summit private school leaders of bilking $2 mil. in Miss. Public School Dollars.” The article cites accusations of fraudulent claims for students who didn’t attend the school, people wo didn’t work at the school and teachers who claimed certification levels higher than they actually had.