[Spiked] People are bemused that the man who allegedly rushed the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with all guns blazing was a teacher. Why? It should be common knowledge by now that a not insignificant number of American teachers go weak-kneed for a spot of political violence. In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September last year, teachers all over America were sacked or placed on leave for dancing on his grave before it had even been dug.
Public educators ’across the US’ cheered the slaying of the Turning Point USA activist and father of two. In no fewer than 12 states, teachers were given the heave-ho for ’implying approval of Kirk’s death’. One said his death was ’karma’ for his ugly views. A teacher in Iowa posted ’1 Nazi down’ on his Facebook page. In Texas, dozens of teachers were given a dressing down for celebrating the slaying of this man for his beliefs.
After the first major assassination attempt on President Trump — in Pennsylvania in July 2024 — educators swarmed social media to vent some variant of ’Better luck next time’. University professors and schoolteachers were reprimanded over their public praying for the death of the president. As recently as January this year, two teachers in Pittsburgh were let go for cheering on the Islamic Republic after it threatened to bump off Trump. ’Why are so many educators prone to violent rhetoric?’, wondered one newspaper.
It’s a good question, and one that’s been turbo-charged by the events of Saturday night. The suspect is one Cole Allen. He’s alleged to have opened fire at the annual get-together of the president and the press. No one was injured, though that small mercy should not detract from the fact that this was the third attempt on the life of the president. And Allen’s a teacher. A ’teacher of the month’, in fact. He was given that accolade in December 2024 by C2 Education, the tutoring outfit he worked for. You just know there are teachers across America sitting on their hands to stop themselves from posting: ’He’s teacher of the decade now!’
This is not to diss all teachers. America has many fine educators who are as repulsed by the Stalinist urge to violently silence one’s opponents as you and I are. Yet it would be a grave moral folly to deny there’s a problem. There seems to be a terrifyingly high tolerance for political violence in polite society. Among educators, influencers and moneyed poseurs in their mandatory keffiyehs, the dream of violence against ’the other side’ comes naturally now. We seem to be witnessing the normalisation of savagery among the most learned and lettered in our society. The most shocking thing about Saturday’s alleged shooter being a teacher is that it isn’t shocking.
...But there is a broader backdrop to the malady of TDS: the inculcation of hyper-intolerance into a whole new generation. One of the most sobering polls of recent years was produced by the American Political Perspectives Survey last year. It found that Americans with a graduate degree are twice as likely to support political violence as Americans who finished their education at high school. Thirty-six per cent of grads said damaging property is justified as part of a protest, compared with just 18 per cent of Americans with a high-school diploma. Forty per cent of grads said ’violence is often necessary’ to effect social change — only 23 per cent of non-grads agreed.
We now have an extraordinary situation where the university campus, once the great refiner of minds, seems to be indoctrinating the young with a fancy for violence. It seems that if you teach people that their self-esteem is the most sacred thing on Earth, and anyone who dents it deserves instant cancellation, then you will give rise to an army of the intolerant. That’s what we are witnessing, in the UK too: a style of politics that feels haughty, dogmatic and tinged with violence. From the trans lobby (’Kill all TERFs’) to the orgy of Israelophobia that followed 7 October (’Globalise the intifada’), silence through violence is the dream of those who LARP as progressive. A society where the educated openly clamour for the death of women and Jews is a society that is ill indeed. This is the jagged debris of cancel culture.
Posted by: Grom the Affective ||
04/29/2026 00:00 ||
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’Why are so many educators prone to violent rhetoric?’
Posted by: Matt ||
04/29/2026 8:36 Comments ||
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#3
Maybe they just don't like democracy. They don't seem to remember the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution or Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. Somebody should tell them that when the shit starts flying, nobody knows who it will hit.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/29/2026 12:03 Comments ||
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[IsraelTimes] Experts assess it’s the Revolutionary Guards, not Mojtaba Khamenei, who dominate deliberations, as ‘painfully slow’ process yields uncompromising stance
Two months into a war with the US and Israel, Iran ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate JewsZionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol... no longer has a single, undisputed holy manal arbiter at the pinnacle of power — an abrupt break with the past that may be hardening Tehran’s stance as it weighs renewed talks with Washington.
Since its creation in 1979, the Islamic Theocratic Republic has revolved around a supreme leader with final authority on all key matters of state. But the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ...the very aged actual dictator of Iran, successor to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini...> on the first day of the war, and the elevation of his maimed son, Mojtaba, have ushered in a different order dominated by commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and marked by the absence of a decisive, authoritative referee.
Mojtaba Khamenei remains at the apex of the system, but three people familiar with internal deliberations say his role is largely to legitimize decisions made by his generals rather than issue directives himself.
Wartime pressure has concentrated power into a narrower, harder-line inner circle rooted in the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), the Supreme Leader’s office and the IRGC, which now dominates both military strategy and key political decisions, Iranian officials and analysts say.
"The Iranians are painfully slow in their response," said a senior Pak government official briefed on peace talks between Iran and the United States that Islamabad has been mediating. "There is apparently no one decision-making command structure. At times, it takes them 2 to 3 days to respond."
Analysts said the obstacle to a deal is not internal infighting in Tehran, but the gap between what Washington is prepared to offer and what Iran’s hardline Guards are willing to accept.
The diplomatic face of Iran at the talks with the US has been Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, more recently joined by parliament speaker Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf — a former Guards commander, Tehran mayor and presidential candidate — who has emerged during the war as a key conduit between Iran’s political, security and holy manal elites.
On the ground, however, the central interlocutor has been IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi, according to a Pak and two Iranian sources who identified him weeks ago as Iran’s pivotal figure, including on the night a ceasefire was announced.
Mojtaba, who was severely injured in the opening Israeli and US strike that killed his father and other relatives and left him disfigured with serious leg wounds, has not appeared publicly and communicates through IRGC aides or limited audio links because of security constraints, two people close to his inner circle said.
There was no immediate reply from the Iranian foreign ministry to a request for comment on the issues raised in this article. Iranian officials have previously denied any divisions over negotiations with the United States.
REAL POWER WIELDED BY WARTIME LEADERSHIP
Iran submitted a new proposal to Washington on Monday, which, according to senior Iranian sources, envisions staged talks, with the nuclear issue to be set aside at the start until the war ends and disputes over Gulf shipping are resolved.
Though Iran, whose leaders are sworn to destroy Israel, denies seeking nuclear arms, it has enriched uranium to levels with no peaceful application and obstructed international oversight of nuclear facilities. Washington has said nuclear issues must be dealt with from the outset.
"Neither side wants to negotiate," said Alan Eyre, an Iran expert and former US diplomat, adding that both believed time would weaken the other — Iran through leverage over Hormuz and Washington through economic pressure and a blockade.
For now, neither side can afford to bend, Eyre said: Iran’s IRGC is wary of appearing weak to Washington, while US President Donald Trump ...Perhaps no man has ever had as much fun being president of the US... faces midterm election pressure and little room for flexibility without political cost.
"For either, flexibility would be seen as weakness," Eyre said.
That caution reflects not just the pressures of the moment, but the way power is now exercised inside Iran. While Mojtaba is formally Iran’s ultimate authority, he is a figure of assent rather than command, insiders say, endorsing outcomes forged through institutional consensus, rather than imposing authority. Real power, they say, has moved to a unified wartime leadership centered on the SNSC.
"Important deals probably pass through him," Iranian analyst Arash Azizi said, "but I can’t see him overruling the National Security Council. How could he go against those running the war effort?"
Hardline figures such as former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and a cluster of radical MPs have raised their profile using forceful rhetoric during the war, but they lack the institutional clout to derail decisions or shape outcomes.
Mojtaba owes his elevation to the Guards, who sidelined pragmatists and backed him as a reliable guardian of their hardline agenda. Already strengthened by war, the Guards’ growing dominance signals a more aggressive foreign policy and tighter domestic repression, sources familiar with the country’s inner policy-making circles told Rooters.
Driven by revolutionary Islamism and a security‑first worldview, the Guards see their mission as preserving the Islamic Theocratic Republic at home while projecting deterrence abroad.
That outlook, often shared with hardliners across the judiciary and the holy manal establishment, prioritizes rigid centralized control and resistance to Western pressure, particularly on nuclear policy and Iran’s regional reach.
POWER SHIFTS FROM CLERICS TO SECURITY SECTOR
In practice, the Guards’ ideology shapes strategy and decision‑making rests firmly in their hands. With the country at war and Ali Khamenei gone, no actor inside the system has the power or scope to resist them, even if they wished to, the people close to internal discussions said.
The choice facing Iran’s leadership is no longer between moderate and hardline policy, but between hardline and even harder line. A small faction may argue for pushing further still, two Iranian sources close to power circles said, but even that impulse has so far been kept in check by the Guards.
The shift marks a decisive reordering of power from holy manal primacy to security dominance. "We’ve gone from divine power to hard power," said Aaron David Miller, a former US negotiator. "From the influence of the holy mans to the influence of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. This is how Iran is being governed."
While differences of opinion exist, decision‑making has consolidated around security institutions, with Mojtaba acting as a central convening figure rather than a lone decider, added Alex Vatanka, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.
Despite sustained military and economic pressure from the United States and Israel, Iran has shown no signs of fracture or capitulation nearly nine weeks into the war.
Nor, as Miller noted, is there evidence of fundamental rifts within the system or meaningful opposition on the streets.
That cohesion suggests that command now sits with the Guards and security services, which appear to be driving the war rather than merely executing it. A strategic consensus has emerged — avoid a return to full‑scale war, preserve leverage, especially over the Strait of Hormuz, and emerge from the conflict politically, economically and militarily stronger, Miller said.
#1
At a frozen yogurt shop the flavoring changes but the underlying medium is consistent. In the Iranian regime, the underlying medium is psychopaths. The Mullahs declared a policy that women who protested should be raped so that they don’t go to heaven. The IRGC implemented that policy. None of them are good guys working within a bad system. They all need to be exterminated. They know that as well. They have to hold on to power. They have committed too many atrocities.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
04/29/2026 6:08 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for 
