Sympathy for the Midwit

In August 2022 I stumbled upon this video of a young female teacher in Utah. She is what we would once have called an SJW. She describes how she has equipped her fourth-grade classroom in a way that she expects will annoy the parents of her (aged 9-10) pupils: all of the materials have been vetted by her to ensure that they include no images whatsoever of White people - “not a single White face there”.

Even though she knows the school is majority White (over 85%), she has designed her classroom, in her own words, “for non-white students”. To be fair, this could be simply because she is bringing materials from her previous school, which was much more diverse. But even then, you would think the sensible thing would be to buy materials more fitting for her new school. She does not.

So the woke attitude goes far beyond merely accommodating non-white people, and beyond even the absurdity of giving them equal prominence in our ancestral society, but actually to giving them precedence over us there.

What I found striking about this video, apart from the mindboggling fact that this is someone presumably vocated to help people yet doing something that will clearly harm her pupils, is how she delights in the fact that what she has done will annoy parents. To be precise, it will annoy parents who, whether conscious of it or not, are “racist”. After all, if they really “don’t see race”, then how can they possibly care about this? Thus, they cannot argue that their kids should see representations of their racial kin without outing themselves as “racist”, which in turn will make them very vulnerable. So this younger teacher feels not just morally sound, but bulletproof against reprisals, and very clever.

There is also a social class element to this. She specifies that these will be “posh White parents”. Despite appearing to be all of 23 and only having taught in very diverse schools, she alludes to experience in dealing with such upper-class White parents before. She is hoping to disturb them in their privilege and veiled racism.

She also clearly assumes that, if any parents do complain, she will be safe. The institution - not just her school but the entire education sector, including all of the academics and every university department that sustains them - will be on her side. If and when the parents complain (having navigated their way through the minefield of realising they are “racist” and painstakingly forming some lame argument to hopefully avoid that accusation) they will find that she is protected not just by her employer but by an entire segment of society. They, the parents, might get some small local newspaper to back them, or more likely to report the story impartially, but in all likelihood they will find themselves shamed by some much bigger newspaper. That is what she was clearly expecting when she made this video.

I think, if she had posted her video two years earlier, during the Summer of Floyd, that is probably how things would have played out. The school board would have been terrified to reprimand her, lest armies of BLM rioters and crazed antifa lay siege to their buildings and the national media destroy their little town’s reputation. By mid 2022, however, things had changed.

What actually happened was a small media furore followed by a statement from the school principal condemning her video. Then she was put on paid leave while the authorities “investigated”. After a month, they announced they had found no evidence of “any policy or legal violations” or “instances of discrimination [against White children] of any kind within the employee’s classroom”. She was reprimanded for her silly video but allowed back into the classroom. The school published an apology from her which clearly contradicted what she had said in her video. As it turned out, this smug SJW was startled by the blowback and said whatever was necessary to keep her job.

However, there was an assumption that she would soon be transferred to some other school, for her own safety since threats had been made against her. (Miraculously, nobody ever obtained her name and she remains anonymous to this day, four years on.)

What I find troubling about this story is that it illuminates both the viciousness and the vulnerability of the midwit. It wouldn’t be worth fretting over, except that there are many millions of these people about. Every one of them is bright enough to grasp the drivel at teacher training college, but not bright enough to realise that it is drivel. Every one of them is vicious enough to harm children and take pleasure in disturbing the parents and sadistically putting them in an impossible position… but every one of them is literally just doing what they have been told to do, and is spreading the ideas they have been trained to believe are good, healthy, and crucially needed.

It is almost pointless to be angry with that girl (a patronising word that I use deliberately) because, as smug as she is in her video, she isn’t very clever and she isn’t thinking for herself. She is “just following orders”. You’ve really got to be angry with the institutions that made her this way, that sent her out into the world with a head packed full of poison. She is their useful idiot, their canary which will sometimes flourish and sometimes suffocate. If she had been fired in disgrace, they would have some new drone fresh off the brainwashing line ready to take her place.

Indeed, why did she feel so safe putting out that video? Because she has heard countless senior figures advocating exactly the same things. She just didn’t realise that, being less senior than them, and being subject to the whims of parents in a small town, and with a media frantically rowing back from its 2020 excesses, she was much more vulnerable than those academics. They can spout their nonsense from an ivory tower, but when it gets to “ground level”, things are much more visceral, and parents will protect their children. That young teacher misjudged things, but I can see why she thought she was safe.

What should we do with people like her, the preachy sadists who think themselves above us and are quite happy to harm us in the name of “good”? I think the answer is the same as for all midwits. We must not give them the credence they so desperately want. We must circumvent them. Tackling them head on is pointless; they are not bright enough to recognise good arguments, nor humble enough to accept that they have been wrong. Always assert dominance. Talk down to them, brook none of their nonsense, never seek their approval, make them seek yours, reject their premises, put up obstacles to their proposals. Give them no more than the most basic respect. Talk to them as if you are addressing an errant child; to all intents and purposes (despite their paper medals), you are. But the best option is to avoid them entirely, if that is possible.

Of course, in another world, the very same person would be a fascist. Perhaps that is the ultimate irony. They are so smug, so sure of themselves, but the truth is they have no idea… of anything at all.