Many people have pointed out—since the brutal massacre of little children and their teachers in Uvalde—the absurdity of the anti-critical race theory campaign and of the efforts to frighten parents about “pedophile teachers” grooming children to be transgender. These are phony propaganda ploys meant to undermine public schools, where dedicated teachers are doing their best to educate children every day. Someone is paying to frighten parents, and we can guess who.
Just when you thought that the attack on public schools couldn’t get more bizarre and extreme, along comes rightwing provocateur Glenn Beck with an outrageous slander against the public schools of North Carolina.
In this linked video, Beck asserts that public schools are “grooming” little children to become transgender. You will see him present “documents,” but the pieces of paper do not identify any school or district. They supposedly ask children as young as kindergarten to identify their gender and to check which gender they were assigned at birth.
Leaving aside the inconvenient fact that most children in kindergarten could not read the “documents,” they appear to be a fraud.
I contacted a friend in North Carolina who is a statewide parent leader and asked her if she knew of any district that used such a survey. She had never seen it before, never heard of it, but said that Glen Beck’s video is being distributed widely among concerned parents.
If you are a parent in North Carolina, ask for evidence. Speak to your child’s teacher. Speak to the principal. Determine whether this video is true or a hoax. Given the source, I’ll bet it’s a hoax.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
For heaven’s sake ‘grown ups’…accept the children as they were created without causing misery so early in their lives.
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ruskycheera
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This just in: Report indicates Uvalde shooter did not act alone but was abetted by a governor, two Senators, various state and federal representatives, and justices of the Supreme Court.
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two television networks, and one new, failing social media network started by a loser
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And by Russian foreign intelligence
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If Glenn Beck were a snack, he’d be a Tide pod.
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Please explain the psychology of mass ignorance.
Over these past few weeks there is a constant: “A majority of Americans believe… want… support… one thing yet they still elect politicians who stand firmly against the majority. Even knowing the kool-aid will kill them, they still elect Jim Jones.
A majority of Americans in an array of polls cite again and again favor for limits on gun purchases, restrictions on purchasing assault weapons, background checks, red-flag laws.
The majority supports Roe as it stands or some version of reasonable limits but not a complete ban.
They support their public schools. And, rural and urban schools are getting slammed by every isolationist bill proposed that takes money from them.
They want kids in poverty to have access to healthy food – any food – and health care. (In Missouri, the voter voted overwhelmingly to expand medicaid – the state legislature ignored it and with governor slashed the budget)
They want kids to have access to books and trust teachers and parents to guide student choices.
They know the schools are not teaching white kids to feel guilty about slavery. and are not grooming children.
They believe and trust bi-partisan supervision of elections and that 2020 was the most fraud-free election in history.
They know Biden won, that the ice caps are melting, and masks work.
Poll after poll after poll supports the theory of reason, common sense, and trust knowing full well there are anomalies.
How then do these fools get center stage and elected?
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“Please explain the psychology of mass ignorance.”
It all starts with the absurd, insane, mythological teachings of the three Abrahamic religions in which children are indoctrinated to blindly accept such things. From the get go, religious faith beliefs are predicated on believing the unbelievable, the absurd, the insanities of those faith beliefs.
Were there a hell, to hell with faith beliefs.
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I’ve often thought, Duane, of writing a short story about an atheist or agnostic who dies only to find out that this whole ludicrous story is true. Satan. Demons. Magic wafers. Babies with Original Sin. Oh my Lord. Funny. Ofc, Mark Twain beat me to it with “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” and “The Diary of Adam and Eve.” Though neither has exactly the same premise, they both get a lot of comic mileage out of saying, “OK. Let’s assume that this wacko stuff is actually true.” What would then be the case? A hilarious premise for writing. See also John Steinbeck’s Saint Katy the Virgin.
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Or perhaps one about a Liberty University or Gordon College professor who dies and finds out that he or she should have been worshipping White Buffalo Goddess all along.
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Reality is much weirder than even the most creative humans are capable of imagining..
The problem with the religious stories is not that they are too strange to be true but that they are not strange enough.
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Ohfergodsake, Duane and Bob, why even bring religion into it. This is just plain old fraudulent lies, designed to stir up anyone whether religious or not into believing your public schools — the whole system, nationwide– is bent on warping your little 5yos’ natural development by introducing absolutely age-inappropriate concepts. Based on absolutamente nada.
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Because religious faith beliefs drilled into children, a more thorough indoctrination that any thing else, sets the individual up to believe the unbelievable.
To hell, if there were such a place (and there isn’t), with religious faith beliefs.
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Re lion. n. A religion is a cult that has survived long enough to achieve political power and to institutionalize indoctrination of the young in ideas that most people wouldn’t believe if they first encountered them as adults.
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Exactly!
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The name of Dana Milbank’s book on Glenn Beck: Tears of a Clown
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No, the name is Tears of a Clown: Glen Beck and the [subtitle partially redacted on this public forum, lol]
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Yikes. Glenn. Glenn Beck.
Two n’s. No brain
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I think we know why lunatics are becoming mass murderers slaughtering children and teachers in public schools.
Thanks to greedy liars like Glen Beck and Tucker Carlson that are paid to spread hate, beating the extreme right’s war drums to HATE, alleging with fake evidence that public school teachers are pedophiles grooming children to be transgender.
According to Ballotpedia, there are 98,590 public school teachers in North Carolina.
Every time one of the extreme right’s voices of hate slanders and labels that many people in the same profession, they should be dragged into court via a class action lawsuit just like Alex Jones has been. Sue them into poverty.
“Fox News uses the word ‘hate’ much more than MSNBC or CNN”
“Hate Speech on Social Media: Global Comparisons
Violence attributed to online hate speech has increased worldwide. Societies confronting the trend must deal with questions of free speech and censorship on widely used tech platforms.”
Guess what country has the most support for hate speech.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/hate-speech-social-media-global-comparisons
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Carlson’s first name is spelled with an F, Lloyd.
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Tuffer?
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The name is actually [ ]ucker Swanson McNear Thurston Lannister Cabot Lodge Powers Montgomery Burns Artemis Fowl Topham Hatt Lex Luthor Scrooge McDuck Pennybags Windsor Carlson. The voice of the Everyman.
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But his friends call him [ ]ucky.
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Puffer Carlson
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Fluffer Carlson?
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Fluffer Nutter Carlson?
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LL, you are usually too over-the-top for me, but I was thinking the exact same thing. NC pubschsys should bring a lawsuit for slander against this clown. Don’t care if it loses. Just to show some spine. Make him put his $ where his mouth is.
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Preemptive anti-troll comment:
No, sex reassignment surgeries aren’t being done in the United States on people under the age of 18, although sex assignment surgeries are still occasionally being done on intersex newborns.
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Glenn Beck is the poster boy for hoax-mongering and right wing bovine detritus. People like Beck hate public schools and point to the school massacres as reasons to home school or send their kids to charter and private schools. It is so despicable.
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LOL. He almost destroyed his empire when he misread the Trump phenomenon, expecting Trump (as Trump and Melania themselves reportedly did) to lose in 2016. Created a great opening for [ ]ucker Carlson.
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Anywhere the mal-aria blows Beck
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So he had to pretty much sit out the whole Trump Basket[case]ball game. Beck on the Bench. It must have been hard watching a loaf of white Wonder Bread (Hannity), an irate puffer fish (Carlson), and a couple screech owls (Ingram, Pirro) take all the glory during those years.
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Psychological projection is sometimes behind this sort of thing.
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LOL
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Another right wing monster spreading hate and misinformation against public schools is a lesser known jerk, Steven Crowder.
As reported in media matters dot org., 5-25-22: STEVEN CROWDER (HOST): And you know what? We have evil at play right now. Look, I think that’s what we need to acknowledge. There is evil in this world that will always be amongst you. And you know what? I think that our public schools are a breeding ground for evil. I’ll say that. I really do. I really do.
When you look at – you can’t just silo everything. When you look at the conversations, when you look at trying to uninvolve and detach the parents from these children’s lives, when you’re looking at transitioning children, when you’re looking at browbeating young white boys for something they’ve never done.
Look, I think it’s a breeding ground for evil. Ok? I think t’s long before you get to the point of, you know, a bunch of policies that won’t work on an inanimate object, let’s understand human nature. End quote
These right wing propagandists are just horrible. Some maniac shoots up a school and slaughters little children and he claims it’s the school’s fault??!!!!? A gun is an inanimate object? So what, a toaster is an inanimate object but it was not designed to kill or maim people.
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I know this maybe of little importance but I do think it might be interesting to know where Beck received his education from birth to the present day. I would imagine that he went to public school but was bullied and/or was one of the kids that others could not tolerate because of his weird ways. I image he really did not fit in with the rest of the children and was excluded, probably rightly so, for all the activities of his peers.
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Before Linda jumps in, Beck attended two Catholic schools and then got his highest degree from a public high school. He got an honorary degree from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and once took a few classes as a nondegree student at Yale. This extensive educational background doubtless explains the chalkboard.
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From wikipedia: Beck was raised as a Roman Catholic and attended Immaculate Conception Catholic School in Mount Vernon.
Glenn and his older sister moved with their mother to Sumner, Washington, attending a Jesuit school[24] in Puyallup. On May 15, 1979, while out on a small boat with a male companion, Beck’s mother drowned just west of Tacoma, Washington, in Puget Sound. The man who had taken her out in the boat also drowned. A Tacoma police report stated that Mary Beck “appeared to be a classic drowning victim”,[25] but a Coast Guard investigator speculated that she could have intentionally jumped overboard. Beck has described his mother’s death as a suicide in interviews during television and radio broadcasts.[25]
After their mother’s death, Beck and his older sister moved to their father’s home in Bellingham, Washington,[25] where Beck graduated from Sehome High School in June 1982: END QUOTE
The wikipedia bio also said he took some courses at Yale. Wow, this guy had some heavy duty addiction to alcohol and a whole range of drugs but he is sober (sic) today. Today he is addicted to right wing nuttiness.
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Ah, you caught me, Glenn! All those years, in my American Lit classes, I got away with teaching my students about men who wore wigs and stockings. Subtle, huh?
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In my Brit Lit classes, too!
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Beck exaggerates, but crazy ideas about gender are proliferating amongst our youth. As usual, Bill Maher offers centrist sanity:
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Irreversable Damage is total garbage. A book written by an idiot consisting of wacko moral panic. What an utter POS.
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In a spirit of ecumenicalism, I ordered and read this piece of garbage at the suggestion of a transphobe who showed up here in exchange for a promise from him to order Joan Roughgarten’s superb Evolution’s Rainbow. The book could serve as to provide models of lousy argument in a rhetoric class, I suppose. This logical fallacy. This propaganda technique. It’s a compendium of these.
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Joke was on me. That guy didn’t show up on the blog again. Not sure why. Perhaps he did order the book and try to read it. But it was written by a scientist and is sometimes a bit technical and might have gone WHOOSH over his head.
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Mahr seems to be under the impression that homoerotic behavior is a condition afflicting some small percentage of the population. LMAO. Clueless. In every culture where there has not been microconditioning against homoeroticism from an early age, it has been the norm. Yes, there will likely be a lot of bisexual people in the future. And again, Irreversable Damage is junk. If he has read this and thinks it sensible, then he is incapable of discernment and judgment. If he hasn’t read it, he shouldn’t be plugging its “ideas.” He’s just another tv shyster reading cue cards designed to increase ratings.
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I don’t get your comment on Maher, Bob. I thought it was perspicacious of him, as a cultural commentator, to note that “being gay”—now that has a fair amount of social approbation—no longer necessarily checks the box for a teen who feels ‘different.’ The possibility that society is opening its mind to a spectrum, rather than a binary choice [in terms of orientation] opens that teen’s mind to the possibility of finding what feels comfortable, without the crushing peer-pressure to choose one extreme or the other. Perhaps I’m reading too much into Maher’s message. It is expressed in a brutish, un-nuanced way, and—in his slyly political way– leaves room for a far more rigid interpretation. Nevertheless I found it refreshing.
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However, I find myself skeptical of the book “Irreversible Damage”—at least what I can read of it via Amazon “Look Inside” and reader comments. The first two sentences alone of the review were utterly without credibility: “Until just a few years ago, gender dysphoria—severe discomfort in one’s biological sex—was vanishingly rare. It was typically found in less than .01 percent of the population, emerged in early childhood, and afflicted males almost exclusively.” What total crap. “Until just a few years ago”? Nearly 50 yrs ago, I witnessed my sis– who ended up very comfortable as a lesbian—severely distressed and angry about early/ pre-pubertal body changes. Nor does she strike me as particularly unusual in that, extrapolating from various friends I grew up with.
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Well said, Ginny!!! Extremely well said!
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Anyone who reads this book and thinks that it presents strong arguments has total mush in his or her head. It’s weird watching someone like this author attempt to make arguments. It’s like watching an improv class trying to be a butterfly–it’s all levels of failure. And often the failure isn’t subtle. It will tell you for example, that x is common and then not give any examples of x. It will mention y’s story and then use it for an extended rant about things not in y’s story. It purports without evidence that extreme cases are common. It misuses terms, even basic terms related to its topic. It makes totally unsubstantiated claims. It’s full of nonsequiturs. It’s thinly veiled disgust, basically, at the whole notion of their being trans people.
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cx: there being
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Are little children “groomed” to be transgender in your school? Why do I think this is all nonsense?
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Glenn Beck is a bloviating idiot and “groom/ed/ing” has been so overused lately that it has no meaning anymore, but there is something that doesn’t smell right and parents have gotten a good whiff of it.
Have you ever heard of the NSES (National Sex Education Standards) that have hit some states this year? Well, the CDC and HHS has doled out millions in tax dollars for 3 “advocacy groups” to develop the standards and write a curriculum for NSES: SIECUS, Advocates for Youth and ANSWER/Rutgers University (where oh where have we seen this before???!!!). Where are the teachers and child psychologists in all of this? States are signing on without reviewing or giving any thought to what is in the standards/curriculum. This is exactly how 3rd party vendors gain access to public schools/children/data with little to no parental consent. This is how to disregard parental rights.
Now we all know how much everyone “loves” the CCSS/testing and how they were developed and imposed upon public schools. None of us are too fond of the NGSS and how they just appeared on the scene. We all complain about how they are useless and age inappropriate yet we can’t get rid of them no matter how hard we try. NSES are the next CCSS that we will be stuck with. You want to save public education? You don’t want vouchers/ESA bills passed?….then get rid of the stuff that causes parents to flee public education.
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Why do I think this is all nonsense?
Because you have a brain
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Reblogged this on What's Gneiss for Education.
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Oh, is Glenn Beck still alive? Hm. Must have been thinking of Limbaugh. Beck is apparently that rare creature, a living zombie. Somebody must have tapped his coffin during daylight:
“Glenn”?
“Go away, I’m sleeping.”
“Glenn, we need you for the anti-public school campaign. Looks like a winner for the mid-term elections.”
“Talk to me after sundown…”
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Yeah, he went from No. 1 right-wing crazy to somewhere off the map because he made the mistake of not backing Trump in 2015 because, of course, he thought Trump was going to lose. Thus his fall from grace during the Trump Deified years.
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