BPR | November 19, 2021 | Joshua Nybo | Print Article
An alarming new report has come out regarding the recruitment of students into LGBT clubs by the California Teachers Association (CTA).
The report comes from Abigail Shrier, author of the controversial book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” which made a splash in June of 2020. On her blog, “The Truth Fairy,” Shrier claims that leaked audio of a CTA meeting in October makes plain the agenda of the largest teacher’s union in California: to promote homosexual exploration.
Shrier wrote that the documents of the meeting show teachers being encouraged to recruit students into LGBT clubs, and encourage them to “have the courage to create a safe environment that fosters bravery to explore sexual orientation.” One teacher allegedly cracked a smug joke about their own students, saying “we’re going to do just a little mind-trick on our sixth graders.”
The plan seemed to be targeted at 6th graders, and allegedly involves widespread monitoring of student habits and collection of their internet data. According to Shrier, attendees bragged of their surveillance of Google searches and internet activity and listening in on hallway conversations, all towards better identifying which students to target for personal invites to LGBT clubs. At the same time, teachers allegedly spoke of their activities to conceal membership of said groups from parents:
“Because we are not official—we have no club rosters, we keep no records. In fact, sometimes we don’t really want to keep records because if parents get upset that their kids are coming? We’re like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe they came?’ You know, we would never want a kid to get in trouble for attending if their parents are upset,” said one woman who is said to be Lori Caldeira, a teacher at Buena Vista Middle School, and leader of the LGBT club there.
Some allegedly used name changes to fool parents, and Shrier says another teacher, Kelly Baraki partnered with Caldeira to create a workshop for the conference entitled “How we run a ‘GSA’ in Conservative Communities.” The term “GSA” refers to “Genders & Sexualities Alliance,” another name for LGBT clubs. According to Shrier, Baraki also renamed various LGBT clubs to things like “The Equity Club” and “You be You,” in an effort to evade parents wise to the terminology of “GSA.”
Caldeira was allegedly recorded saying that there are sometimes issues with kids staying within the supervision of the club, because they “go hang with their friends at lunch. And they do their things. And we love them for that, but we miss them when they don’t join us. So we saw our membership numbers start to decline.”
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Baraki then allegedly chimed in with the thought process to maintain numbers and target individuals for indoctrination:
“So we started to brainstorm at the end of the 2020 school year, what are we going to do? We got to see some kids in-person at the end of last year, not many but a few. So we started to try and identify kids. When we were doing our virtual learning – we totally stalked what they were doing on Google, when they weren’t doing school work. One of them was googling ‘Trans Day of Visibility.’ And we’re like, ‘Check.’ We’re going to invite that kid when we get back on campus. Whenever they follow the Google Doodle links or whatever, right, we make note of those kids and the things that they bring up with each other in chats or email or whatever … we use our observations of kids in the classroom—conversations that we hear—to personally invite students. Because that’s really the way we kinda get the bodies in the door. Right? They need sort of a little bit of an invitation.”
Shrier even alleges that Caldeira very bluntly stated one of her tactics for staying in control of who knows what:
“I’m the teacher who runs our morning announcements. That’s another type of strategy I can give you. I’m the one who controls the messaging. Everybody says, ‘Oh, Ms. Caldeira, you’re so sweet, you volunteered to do that.’ Of course I’m so sweet that I volunteered to do that. Because then I control the information that goes home.”
Speaking on how to prevent students from listening to parent’s objections, Baraki allegedly chimed in with her “little trick” comment, talking about how to slowly indoctrinate the sixth graders in order to inoculate them against parental teachings:
“They were last to go through this presentation and the gender stuff was the last thing we talked about. So next year, they’ll be going first with this presentation and the gender stuff will be the first thing they are about. Hopefully to mitigate, you know, these kind of responses, right?”
One teacher, interviewed by Shrier, told Shrier that she had been mocked by Baraki for raising her discomfort in being forced to talk about sexual orientation and gender identity with her young child: “I know, so sad, right? Sorry for you, you had to do something hard! Honestly, your twelve-year-old probably knew all that, right?”