Middleton, Wisconsin is a medium-sized (21,800 people) suburb of Madison.  Its residents are mostly affluent, white-collar workers.  Although the town is growing fairly rapidly, if you leave the window open at night, and the wind is blowing in the right direction, you can smell the cow pastures on the outskirts of town.  In many ways, it feels like classic, small-town America.  That is, it feels the way right up until the moment you read about the drag show a departing teacher put on for high school students.  If nothing else, the show reveals the narcissism that lies at the heart of so much LGBTQ+++ instruction at school.

If you visit the home page for Middleton High School ("Home of the Cardinals"), it doesn't boast about academic excellence.  Instead, the first word you see is "inclusive," followed by "innovative. inspiring."  On the "mission and beliefs" page, the commitment to academic excellence is again missing.  Instead, we read the mission, which states:

Middleton High School is a learning community that fosters intellectual growth and habits of commitment, reflection, wellness and wonderment, developing citizens who make a living, a life and a difference.

The beliefs themselves make a nod to learning and thinking, but, again, excellence isn't part of the picture.  The school's report card is illuminating.

Asians outperform all the other students by a mile, followed by White and mixed-race students, with Blacks barely ahead of English learners and Students with Disabilities.  Academically, the school lost significant ground because of COVID, with an increase in students who are merely "basic" in both English Language Arts and Mathematics and a corresponding decrease in students who are "advanced."

While the school's ability to teach its students over the past two years degraded, the school was busy with other things.  As part of a "fine arts show," Matthew Kashdan, a French teacher, entertained (a word I use very loosely) students with a drag show.  The video shows a stocky man in a shoulder-length blond wig, a low-cut dress with a short skirt, and high-heeled red boots, strutting around the stage lip-syncing to "Rain on Me," a Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande tune.

The performance is appallingly bad and puts entirely to rest the belief that any man who tromps around as a drag queen must be flamboyantly talented.  Kashdan is entirely devoid of talent.

Many parents weren't pleased.  One mother wrote to talk show host Vicki McKenna:

I send my children to school and entrust them to teachers that I have to believe are professionals who won't destroy their innocence for their own pleasure. If MATTHEW KASHDAN makes a decision to perform his drag show at school, what else does he do in his classroom with a roomful of children? What kind of educators thought this was appropriate? Drag shows are "fine arts"?  If a teacher is a pole dancer or stripper, can they also perform for my children?

I don't care what MATTHEW KASHDAN does outside of school. I DO CARE what he does at Middleton High School.

Watching Kashdan stomp across the stage like a demented circus bear, it occurred to me that much of the LGBTQ+++ indoctrination at the school occurs on two different levels.  There is absolutely no doubt that the dominant purpose is to create a generation of children who have, at best, a shaky sense of their biological sex.  This insecurity about their core self creates a cohort of young people who are alienated from their parents, dependent on the government to fulfill their needs (including mutilating surgery and hormones), and vulnerable to sexual exploitation.

However, at the individual level, many of these teachers appear to be merely lazy, self-centered narcissists.  Given the choice between the hard work of educating children in reading, writing, and arithmetic, or talking endlessly about themselves and their sex lives and sexual orientation, they will always choose the latter.  "Hmm.  Shall I force this roomful of nine-year-olds to memorize the multiplication table, or shall I tell them all about how the doctors were mistaken when they looked at my baby body and 'assigned' to be a girl?  And then we can talk about pronouns."

Moreover, right until Governor DeSantis and the Florida Legislature led the way by banning such classroom talk, at least until the kids are past third grade, these narcissists in the front of the room could get away with this scam.  All they had to do if a parent confronted them was to claim that the parent was "homophobic" or "transphobic," and the teachers won, every time.

COVID may prove to have a huge silver lining insofar as it enabled parents to see what was going on in their children's classrooms.  They send their children to school to learn, not to be forced to watch Miss Chunky strut his stuff.  Schools needed to be reined in, and now, perhaps, they finally will be.

Image: High school drag teacher.  Rumble screen grab.