Rankled writing

Sometimes we write because we’re rankled

I want this a place for creative writing, but I am doing this today.

We take swings and potshots, sometimes, writing when we’re rankled. There are other impetuses for writing, but losing our temper is one of them.

If you are pushed by the kid in the cafeteria who’s behind you in line — if you are a whistleblower teacher wrongfully terminated and they make you go away, and the school district is subjected to ten times the racial harassment and indoctrination — and a lawyer you’ve asked to sue rejects your case, but comes along and helps your friend collect half a million, then continues on and litigates another case for wrongful termination — yes, you write, mad — if you listen discreetly to a friend who’s fiery pissed because white women did not elect her candidate, a candidate she has advised and given her shoulder to for ten years — if family or friends think you are toxic and should go away, but you have gone away from a profession that cost you nine years, and half a million in salary, and now you live on a shriveled pension — you write, rankled.

As a teacher watching the cafeteria, it was my job to stop bullies who pushed the kids in front of them in line. It was also my job to protect disabled kids’ individual education plans from being screwed over. St. Paul schools special education assistant director Alecia Mobley defied federal law by forcing disabled kids into regular classes; she, our St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter’s ex-wife; former assistant superintendent Theresa Battle who axed numbers of teachers and administrators caught up in struggles with students, former superintendent Valeria Silva (whose case my whistleblowing writing was used by a newly elected squad of four school board members to fire her), then replaced her with superintendent Joe Gothard — they have all have moved up the career ladder. Silva took an $800,000 settlement and became a leadership consultant. She might have been the richest loser, her final contract before firing pushed through by former board member Keith Hardy, who, back channeling with St. Paul Pioneer Press reporter Josh Verges, connected Black Lives Matter leader Rashad Turner to expose copies of my writing to get me fired.

Here, BLM’s Rashad Turner threatened the school board to fire me, using my published blog as evidence. He says, “You all going to do your job ? Or do we need to do it for you?”

Mobley has bounced up from Minnesota districts St. Paul, where she was an OT (occupational therapist) to Roseville to Richfield and St. Louis Park, where she is assistant superintendent. She wrote her dissertation to correct disparate outcomes of black children, assuming racism is a cause. It begins noting incarceration of black males, and looks to equity (critical theory) to solve it.

Theresa Battle began as a teacher, became an assistant superintendent in Minneapolis, then St. Paul, and is now the superintendent of Burnsville, Eagan, Savage schools. These leaders have disproportionately discliplined white teachers and admins, by deploying racist policies embraced in the now-rescinded Barack Obama’s Dear Colleague letter of 2014, and by critical “theorist” Kimberlé Crenshaw’s “theory” of intersectionality. By constantly dividing and favoring black students and disciplining white teachers, they have violated federal anti-discrimination policies, and have bounced up the ladder of education command in salary and benefits.

If any person benefits from preferential racial, or discriminatory sexual or gender identity treatment, I am going to call attention to it.

After 20 years of teaching, then moving to care for elders with dementia for two years, then to adolescent psychiatric care in 2019 for the next five years, I watched transgender affirmation become the model based on a notion that affirmation prevents suicide. The Cass Report in England helped correct this in 2024. But gender transition affirmation continues across Minnesota, not just at my Abbott Northwestern Hospital, but next door at Children’s Minnesota, led by award winning gender doc Angela Kade Goepferd.

Our Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the failed Vice President candidate under Kamala Harris, ensconced Minnesota as a “trans refuge state.” His lieutenant governor Peggy Flanagan said the same thing,

Flanagan: “Gender affirming health care is safe, scientifically proven, and lifesaving. When our friends and neighbors tell us that this care will help them feel safer, happier, and more themselves, it is our job to listen and to believe them,” said Lieutenant Governor Flanagan.” By the way, I’ve met Flanagan a couple times, and I find her friendly and empathetic. Not sure if that empathy is weaponized, but that is a legitimate question. I’ve also met Walz twice, and he has a damp handshake.

In case one suspects I pay too much attention to the trans affirmation subject, I probably do, but for some time we’ve been inundated with it in psychiatric care, and prior, in my teaching career, I suspect it was coming on strong. I think it’s infiltrated every aspect of K12 education in Minnesota. Below you will find parental consent is not needed to transition your child in St. Paul schools.

How to transition children without parental consent.

Below your child can change his name and gender in St. Paul without parent consent.

Theo, this is too much! you may say. It is. It’s way too much. Here in 2020 my hospital eliminated boy-girl hallways. This resulted in increasing staff difficulties of managing adolescent interactions, and giving boys much easier and quicker access to girls’ bedrooms, a sexual assault, police visit, and investigation by the Minnesota Department of Health. It might have happened anyway. The boy and girl were motivated, but the boy was seventeen, the girl was only 14, and she was already a victim of sex trafficking.

So, when I have a friend in high-up places (that’s all I’ll say) who tells me she’s angry because Tim Walz was not elected to U.S. Vice President, and blames some of it on white women, and others of it on Trump’s “rape conviction” and allegations of his appointments’ sexual behavior, all of which may pan out, and I admit that — allegations were made on Matt Gaetz, and Pete Hegseth — they may be found factual — I’m nevertheless stunned by the disconnect with common people seen throughout the short Harris-Walz campaign season. White women may not have helped out the democrats enough. Latinos certainly did not. They went for Trump. Even in the deep blue Twin Cities, the poorest neighborhoods shaded towards Trump. Which is not to say they didn’t vote for Kamala and Tim. They did, but the poorest neighborhoods of north Minneapolis, the near-south Phillips, and St. Paul’s “Frogtown” and Asian eastside, they moved slightly toward Republican. Why? Why are they so beyond the reach of the Democrats?

They’re beyond the reach of the Democrats because, (here’s how I put it): the poor are eating food from gas stations like knock-off cheese curls, or buying generic boneless chicken wings at the cheapest supermarkets. They’re barely getting by. They don’t care to vote, but if they did vote, they thought Walz and Harris were nonsense liars, letting in immigrants and giving them driver licenses, which is all they needed to vote. They thought Walz and Harris were immoral, letting children get puberty blockers behind their parents’ backs.

This is what killed the Harris Walz campaign: phoniness and fake joy.

If you’re mad about it, be mad. Join the crowd. I’m a little surprised at the rise of Blue Sky as a safe haven for the “right speech” away from the fears of X’s “Herr Elon Musk.” It’s only been four years since the FBI used Mark Zuckerberg, who admitted it, and Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde’s Twitter, to try to rig the 2020 election by kicking thousands of accounts, including the nation’s oldest newspaper, the New York Post, off Twitter. I believe the Democratic Party is finished, and cannot rise from the ashes of this loss to a narcissistic, selfish sociopath. If it rises again, none of its power brokers should be allowed a management role. Our Keith Ellison failed to win the DNC before due to ties to Farrakhan, but now our DFL chair Ken Martin is trying. Will they ever learn? Minnesota should be vaccinated against all future panics and hysterias.

“Calm down, Theo. You get way too bent out of shape.” I can hear my friends and family telling me this. I think I’ve been muzzled or overwhelmed since a small child in a big family, so I am bent towards tearing off imaginary gags put on me.

Oh, and if Attorney Ashwin Madia (of the lawsuits against the district) would like to revisit my case that he declined, and help me vacate my plea agreement, which I made under hella duress, to open a new-old whistleblower suit, that’d be cool. I’d stop being rankled. Maybe!