TN: Culture War Site Puts a Target on K-12 Grade School

via Elaine Gunthorpe for Campus Reform, a right wing news website focused on campus outrage stories.

I don’t want to alarm you, but this right wing website written largely by college Republicans seems to be putting target sights around a K-12 grade school. In doing so, they’re amplifying extremist commentator Matt Walsh who is also champing at the bit to broaden a smear campaign that’s already resulted in harassment aimed at Vanderbilt Hospital in Tennessee (and worse elsewhere). The direction of that broading, apparently, aims to encompass a grade school for children. The charge against the school, run by the University School of Nashville, is that it has a GSA, and that at one time the GSA linked to materials including the website for Vanderbilt’s gender clinic. These materials have since been removed by Vanderbilt due to the aforementioned harassment campain.

Fueling a fire of hateful rhetoric, moral panic, and paranoia that has already shown it’s capacity to lead to threats of violence is very bad. In fact, it’s so bad that I’m not sure what word to use to describe widening that campaign out to encompass a school for young children.

The only mitigating factor here is the likely youth of the writer, Elaine Gunthorpe, who is listed as being a member of the class of 2024. This would make her a college sophomore, meaning Gunthorpe is barely out of adolescence herself, and perhaps not experienced enough in the world to fully appreciate the gravity of amplifying an ongoing stochastic terror movement by making a grade school her primary target.

The same can not be said for the publishers of Campus Reform, who one presumes are at least 21 or older. I wouldn’t hold out much hope for the adults to reign in young Gunthorpe, however, because according to a 2015 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (a mainstream news source covering colleges and universities), the site’s been stoking culture war conflagrations for many years now.