“Psychotic” Fox News Amplifies Call to Jail Non-Binary Pre-School Teacher
A preschool teacher who used a doll to talk about non-binary identities is under attack on social media, and Fox News is amplifying Republican calls to jail them.
by Evan Urquhart
It feels like decades ago when conservatives last presented themselves as free speech absolutists, doesn’t it? Nowadays, they’re all about banning books and threatening to jail people who say things they don’t like.
That’s what’s happening as part of a transphobic furor sparked by a video of a nonbinary preschool teacher, Maddie Piper, who introduced a nonbinary doll named Nash to a group of children as part of a training for daycare owners in North Carolina. The video has gone viral after it was posted by the social media director for the right-wing Washington Free Beacon.
In a story about the drama on Fox News, one post from an outraged conservative stands out as a particularly dangerous one for the right-wing propaganda network to have chosen to amplify. Brent Feher, a small business owner from Kentucky who has announced his intention to challenge sitting Republican congressman Brett Guthrie in the primary, said that the teacher and anyone else instructing kids on nonbinary identities should “rot in jail.”
screenshot from Fox News
This call to jail transgender people for talking about trans identities with children, amplified by a major conservative news network, comes at a moment where well over a 100 laws have been introduced to restrict transgender people in healthcare, speech, entertainment, and athletics, and violent rhetoric on the right continues to escalate.