Hey, “Teacher Robi,” you’re not “non-binary.” What you are is validation-seeking from literal children… Who needs children to validate your identity? Why do you need a child to make you feel secure in yourself, to validate yourself? If you were truly a secure adult, a mature adult, you wouldn’t seek validation from other people’s children. It’s really weird. 

I’m a gay woman living in a conservative city in the south and, let me be honest with you, the only people who have had problems with me being a gay woman in a conservative city in the south are the liberals. 

In terms of ideology, “diversity” seems to be the belief that the less we have in common, and feel we have in common, the happier we will be. An unobvious proposition, to say the least. Yet the word is mouthed as if it were a self-evident good, a “strength,” a moral imperative, a thing of which one could never have enough.

It seems to me we’ve strayed very far from the idea that an attractively developed society should – and must – be discerning about which kinds of newcomers it welcomes, lest it be flooded with incompatible tribes and the trash of the world. The idea that the locals, the voting citizens, might want a good deal and ask, “What’s in it for us?” seems anathema to Our Betters. Likewise, the notion of a civilised society implying, quite strongly, “You’re lucky to be here. Behave accordingly.”

And so, instead, we get the routine airbrushing of crime news, and instructional videos in which ludicrous progressive women film themselves performing please-don’t-rape-me dances.

One might think that gangs of masked misfits following elderly and disabled people to their cars, then obstructing their attempts to leave, while generally menacing them and muttering vivid threats, might constitute a breach of the peace, to say the least. Causing fear and alarm is the obvious intention.

And remember, the targets in the videos above – the unimposing, the elderly, the disabled – are chosen deliberately and with glee. Because that’s who they are, these mighty warriors of the Cluster B Tendency. Malevolence is their aphrodisiac, their euphoria. It’s how they feel important. It’s how they process the buzzing noise inside their own heads…

The threat of catastrophic injury would, I suspect, be the only language such creatures are likely to heed. It’s certainly hard to imagine them being swayed by appeals to logic, reciprocation, or basic decency. I see no evidence of a better nature to which one might appeal. I mean, once you’ve chosen to spend your afternoon menacing the elderly and disabled precisely because they’re unlikely to give you the vigorous kicking you deserve, you’re pretty much beyond any negotiation or genteel outreach project.

Sharp-eyed readers may have registered the seeming absence of curiosity, of enquiry – say, regarding very common causes of the phenomenon in question. Readers may also wish to ponder the inevitable tensions between affirmation and investigation – and to place bets on which will be dispensed with in favour of the other. In this Yes, You Are Napoleon school of psychotherapy, where the unwell must always be told whatever they want to hear. Possibly before being steered towards irreversible mutilation and lifelong pain.

In this supposedly therapeutic context, the words affirmation and validation translate as a willingness to lie. A willingness to indulge obvious bollocks and play along. And so, one might wonder how Dr Tess Kilwein – PhD, pronouns “she/they” – might affirm and validate some of the chaps seen here. Or this merry bedlamite, who violates women’s toilets and pushes his phone camera under the doors of occupied stalls in order to livestream to his admirers, all those affirming fans, the protests of his latest victim.

I suppose we could see the dubious story above – in which an innocuous expression of politeness is proof of “creeping Christian nationalism” – as a new spin on the woke eight-year-old phenomenon from 2016, in which countless progressives, including MSNBC “analysts” and editors of leftist magazines – and including Ms Jeffery herself – started tweeting, competitively, about their small children, all aged eight, supposedly saying Oddly Precocious And Terribly Progressive Things.

The phenomenon was seemingly contagious and quite bizarre, a collective fit of transparent fabrication, and soon became a mocking meme. But I think we’re seeing much the same psychology. The same telling of tall tales in order to assert status and to fuel some progressive psychodrama.

The urge to inflate grievances, and indeed to fabricate them, to balance umbrage and chest-puffing on the merest mote, is a progressive credential. Theirs is a hamster-wheel world of competitive indignation. But when you’re very publicly complaining about a flight attendant using the word blessed, as if this one word signalled some impending theocracy – and when you’re using your eight-year-old child as a political ventriloquist’s doll – then we’re in the land of make-believe. And possibly, anti-psychotic medication.

[Urban Studies lecturer, Peter Matthews] also thinks that “deprived” and “marginalised” communities can be elevated, made less dysfunctional, by “the provision of services… such as… street cleaners.” Meaning more street cleaners, cleaning more frequently. He links to a report fretting about how to “narrow the gap” in litter, how to, “achieve fairer outcomes in street cleanliness.”

But neither he nor the authors of said report explore an obvious factor. The words “drop” and “littering” simply don’t appear anywhere in the report, thereby suggesting that the food-smeared detritus and other unsightly objects just fall from the clouds mysteriously when the locals are asleep.

The report that Mr Matthews cites, supposedly as evidence of unfairness, actually states that council cleaning resources are “skewed towards deprived neighbourhoods” – with councils spending up to five times more on those areas than they spend on cleaning more respectable neighbourhoods. And yet even this is insufficient to overcome the locals’ antisocial behaviour.

A regular visit by a council cleaning team, even one equipped with military hardware, won’t compensate for a dysfunctional attitude towards littering among both children and their parents. And fretting about inequalities in litter density is a little odd if you don’t consider how the litter gets there in the first place. Yet this detail isn’t investigated and the report can “neither confirm nor reject the idea that resident attitudes and behaviours are significant drivers of environmental problems.”

And Mr Matthews, our Urban Studies lecturer, is educating teenagers. Telling them how it is.