The Patriot Post® · Molders of Young Minds

By Burt Prelutsky ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/74076-molders-of-young-minds-2020-10-19

We have long been told how wonderful school teachers are and how woefully underpaid, and I’m still shocked by how many people believe it.

There may be a great many teachers who are fine people, people you’d love to have as neighbors, even as best friends. But as a profession, they are probably doing as much or more as the mainstream media to ruin this country.

Far from being molders of minds, they are the mold that destroys the brains of their young charges, changing them from organs capable of critical thinking and flights of imagination into soggy lumps of gray matter only capable of parroting tripe about climate change, toxic masculinity, white privilege, systemic racism and America’s evil history.

As a rule, it’s only when very well-paid and well-pensioned teachers go on strike at the end of a contract that we hear them yammering about how when they demand higher wages and fewer hours, they’re only doing it for the children. Their own children, perhaps, certainly not other people’s.

Today, as teachers around the country refuse to go back to the classroom, their excuse is that they don’t want to risk the health of the students. Safety, the teachers’ unions claim, is their number one concern. Inasmuch as there is no evidence that the kids are at any real health risk and that they’re more likely to catch the virus at home than at school, that is obviously a lie.

But in case you’re a skeptic and require more evidence, consider that their list of demands includes “Medicare for All,” wealth taxes on the rich, the banning of new charter schools and, oh yes, an influx of more federal funds.

During the “National Day of Resistance,” 10 teachers unions, the Democratic Socialists of America and the racial activist group “Journey for Justice Alliance,” called for the feds “to provide for communities and working families through transformational Common Good demands.”

It may sound like Joe Biden’s agenda, but they insist it’s all for the kids.


While President Trump was being transported from Water Reed Hospital to the White House aboard Marine One, it was being televised live from a WTTG news helicopter.

It threw me because I had never seen a shot of a plane carrying a president except when it was taking off or landing. I thought that all nearby air traffic was stopped whenever a president was airborne.

Is there an exception when it’s a helicopter? If so, why?

Considering the media’s hatred of Donald J. Trump, I would have regarded it as an enemy aircraft and taken swift and decisive action.


During the pandemic, someone somewhere decided that there are essential members of society and there are non-essential. You can tell the difference because the essential ones – doctors, nurses, cops, firemen, grocery clerks, pharmacists, trash collectors – keep showing up for work.

Then there are the non-essential ones, like, for instance, Democratic senators who claimed it was too dangerous to show up and conduct a confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett.

At least, for future reference, the Democrats have confirmed what we always believed. They’re about as essential as termites and mosquitoes.


In Tacoma, Washington, a 10-year-old boy was kicked out of his virtual classroom by his virtual teacher for replying, when questioned as to a man he admired, “President Trump.”

Is it possible that in Tacoma, they have five-year-olds teaching 10-year-olds?

Do guys like the boy’s teacher actually have wives and girlfriends? Are women’s current standards so low that even nerds and nebbishes with the testosterone levels of eunuchs are in demand?


One Democrat who can’t get away with condemning President Trump for not wearing a mask 24/7 is Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam. Shortly after making mask-wearing mandatory in his state, he showed up at an event in Virginia Beach without a mask. He soon tested positive for the virus.

There is such a thing as divine justice, after all.


Recently released documents confirm that the CIA under James Clapper, along with John Brennan, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, all knew that the Dossier which was used to fraudulently obtain FISA warrants in order to spy on and harass the Trump campaign, was a work of Russian fiction that rivaled “War and Peace” and “Crime and Punishment.”

What’s more, the reason that Clinton’s campaign and the DNC paid millions to obtain the Dossier was to deflect attention away from Hillary’s use of an unsecure server. You recall, that was the server from which she scrubbed over 30,000 messages, which she swore all dealt with personal matters like baby showers and yoga classes.


Some people insist that Democrats have no use for the truth. That’s not true. To those on the Left, truth is a precious commodity. That’s why they use it so sparingly.


After seeing Heather Graham in an old movie, I realize I hadn’t seen her in anything in quite a while. But, then, I haven’t gone to the movies very often since my wife died nearly two years ago.

Ms. Graham, for people who go to movies even less often than I do, is a very attractive blonde actress who first came to my attention in 1999 when she appeared in a movie I liked a lot, “Swingers.”

Just to find out what she’s been up to, I looked her up on imdb. For those unfamiliar with the site, it is set up to answer all your movie questions. For instance, when I went looking for her, I discovered that she is now 50 years old and had appeared in 104 movies or TV shows. Her better known movies were, in addition to “Swingers,” “Boogie Nights,” “Bowfinger,” “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me,” “Lost in Space” and “Drugstore Cowboy.”

For more personal information, you click on More.

It was there that I discovered that she had “dated” half the men in SAG. Sometimes, imdb will list a few romantic connections, especially if the actor or actress was engaged to or lived with some other well-known person. But in Ms. Graham’s case, they listed 23 actors, the better known of whom included Corey Feldman, Matt Damon, Kyle MacLachlan, James Woods, Jon Favreau, Ed Burns, Heath Ledger, Russell Crowe, Benicio Del Toro, Adam Ant, Matthew Perry, Christopher Weitz and Leonardo Di Caprio.

The wonder is how she found the time to make all those movies.

As if all that wasn’t enough, she was also one of 80 women who accused Harvey Weinstein with sexual harassment and assault.

I can hear Harvey now: “How was I supposed to know where the cows were when she said: ‘I’ll have sex with you when the cows come home’?”


The next evening, I saw a movie from the 1930s starring Kay Francis. I was reminded once again of the foibles of Hollywood.

Although she was one of the biggest and highest paid stars of the decade, her career pretty much came to a stop in the 40s.

She was better-looking than Joan Crawford, a better actress than the over-rated Bette Davis and knew how to deliver a humorous throwaway line nearly as well as Eve Arden and Rosalind Russell.

Perhaps her problem was that she was generally cast as intelligent, sophisticated women who wore expensive clothes. With the advent of World War II, roles for women who wore evening gowns and could convey something besides dewy-eyed devotion to soldiers simply disappeared.

It’s too bad that such a fine actress was yet another casualty of war.


Nils Bohr, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, observed, perhaps about himself, that “An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.”