The Classroom Panic Over ‘Trump Boys’: The ideological bias of NZ educators

My New Zealand readers have likely seen the breathless, panicked piece recently published in The Press: “Trump boys’ in NZ classrooms: Teachers warn of rising student extremism”. It was instantly picked by almost every other NZ media outlet, receiving what Sean Plunket rightly described as a “coordinated, full-court media push”.

It’s worth pausing before mindlessly buying these headlines warning of “rising” extremism in NZ classrooms, and questioning the claims that young men are spiraling under some new wave of “toxic masculinity”. We need to actually look into these claims, and ask “is there any evidence of this?”.

Spoiler: There’s not.

As I have said before, you CAN NOT take any mainstream commentary on topics like this at face value.

The Press article simply represents Institutionalized Progressivism’s last ditch attempt to control the narrative (or “The Message”), which they have so carefully attempted to astroturf among the youth, by simply presenting a list of spooky keywords, to which we have been trained to responds like Pavlov’s dogs.

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The Press article tearfully wails: “Trump”, “extreme”, “trad”, “toxic masculinity”—and we’re all supposed to uncritically *GASP!* and clutch our chest. “I knew boys are the problem!”, “we have to do something about these toxic boys!”. As if modern institutions aren’t already actively hostile to boys and men.

The claims in panicked press articles are based on a report called Responding to Extremism in the Classroom: Online Lies and Real World Harm written by the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA), which is a Teacher’s Union here in New Zealand. Based on my first-hand experience with another educator’s union, I barely have to bother with the research required to confirm just how thoroughly captured and ideologically biased the PPTA is.

I managed to get my hands on the Responding to Extremism report, and it’s even dumber than I expected1.

It makes a whole host of claims, for which it provides absolutely no evidence whatsoever, about the rise on misinformation, disinformation, xenophobia, toxic masculinity, etc., among our young people, especially young men.

The only “evidence” it provides for these claims are statements like:

As educators, we are witnessing firsthand the disruptive impact of these harms on classroom dynamics, students’ ability to think critically, student mental health, and teacher workload.

No citation, no data, no actual quotes. Nothing.

Or

Anecdotally, many members have spoken about the impact of disinformation on their classrooms

That doesn’t even require a response.

Or

Anecdotally, teachers in Aotearoa too are seeing more and more young men being drawn into the toxic world of the ‘manosphere’… this is showing up in the classroom… as blatant disrespect or outright dismissal of teachers simply because of their gender. and the reality is, there’s little to no support for schools or teachers on how to respond to this kind of behaviour.

There is not a shred of data here.

Nor is there an actual explanation of specifically what sort of behaviour they are witnessing, what they take as disrespect, whether it differs from the usual kind of disrespect adolescents tend to express, nor how frequently it is occurring.

The certainty with which such baseless claims are made is a great example of pious fraud:

In fairness, the report does cite literally 2 empirical pieces of evidence (wow!)—from other countries. And even that evidence likely arises from concept creep and the ever-expanding definitions of “extremism” and “hate speech” as whatever deviates from the hyper-progressive orthodoxy.

But the only actually relevant piece of data they cite, about a “rise” in extremism (again, not from NZ), uses the well-known tactic of reporting a percentage increase rather than raw numbers, as it allows you to make increases seem much larger. For example, I could report an increase from a single occurrence to 4 occurrences as a 300% increase, which sounds very scary!

There is absolutely zero justification for the conclusion that extremism is an “escalating threat” in our schoolboys. The report leans heavily on the most unserious evidence possible: a single teacher reporting that a few boys in her class called themselves “Trump boys.”

That’s it. That’s the smoking gun. Anecdotal, unverifiable, contextless information. They are really hoping the word “Trump” there is enough to convince and scare you. As if a positive inclination towards Trump, a democratically elected leader who received over 70 million votes, is ipso facto sufficient evidence of “extremism”.

All the mainstream articles conveniently fail to mention that the PPTA report contains no actual empirical data whatsoever.

As a perfect—and hilarious—example of how poor this report is, one of the points in Section 3 literally just says the words “we should all be nervous”. What the hell is this?

In all likelihood, saying that you like Trump is simply the easiest (and funniest) way for adolescents to pushback against the smothering longhouse of modern education, in which people like the PPTA chairperson, Paul Stevens, are the new Den Mothers.

It’s probably hilarious to be a young guy, bored in class, listening to your Den Mother teacher ramble on, forcing their socio-political worldview onto you instead of teaching you math, telling you that you’re an oppressor and that Trump’s a literal Nazi; and to just be like “nah, Trump’s cool” and then watch the teacher literally shake in horror and struggle to self-soothe. It’s really not that deep.

They say that male students use “dog whistles” and “hate speech”, though again they provide no examples (hate speech, as we know, is a term they love to play fast-and-loose with; the concept of “dog whistles” is just used as a way to claim that something which you can’t reasonably label hate speech, is actually secret, coded hate speech).

Apparently students are making arguments that even a few years ago “society would’ve utterly rejected”. But again (repeating this is getting tiresome) no evidence is presented and no description of what these beliefs actually are; we’re supposed to just take their word for it.

There is no actual detail, just vague scaries.

These “extreme arguments” are likely not described because they are actually relatively benign and mainstream centre-right beliefs which are indeed becoming more popular as progressives lose their grip on the culture.

But—oh no! These kids are (supposedly) also “pushing back on feminism”!

“Pushing back on feminism” is an intentionally broad category of beliefs. It’s a category that could entail anything from saying that women should be literally chained to the oven and whipped if they talk back to their husbands, to the idea that, due to inherent human differences, men are better suited (or more inclined) on average to certain roles and women to others, and that actually most people would be happier living in alignment with these general differences.

I suspect these “extreme” boys’ opinions were closer to the latter kind of “pushback” than the former. Which is why they didn’t actually specify the beliefs beyond the vague and fear-mongering statement about a “pushback against feminism”.

Just as the police recently tried to recategorize free speech as hate speech, there is no evidence presented that these young boys are expressing anything other than centre-right beliefs which have simply been recategorized as “extreme”.

A whole, largely moderate worldview has been thrown so far out of the modern Overton window that it’s return to the mainstream strikes cold fear into the tender hearts of these so-called “educators”.

The Press article goes on to say, unsupported by any data, that:

“Some female students had also embraced ‘trad-wife’ ideologies that promoted limiting women’s roles to homemaking and child-rearing” (emphasis mine)

I am highly dubious that these girls support “limiting” women to certain roles; the authors snuck that “limiting” in there to give the impression that these girls literally want government-enforced Trad-ness. Embracing and advocating for a voluntarily trad lifestyle (by modern standards anyway) because it’s more aligned with your evolved psychology, and because you think it’ll make you and your friends happier, is very different to endorsing the stripping of all women’s rights and “limiting” them to certain spheres of life.

But the PPTA and the Press authors are working very hard to conflate the two.

It’s more of the Disinformation Project style propagandizing, propped up by shitty “research” and poorly executed attempts to stigmatize and outlaw any healthy, semi-traditional beliefs (remember when they tried to say that making your own food and wearing blond hair in braids was a sign of extremism?)

This whole PPTA report, and the subsequent coordinated media push, is a big nothing-burger. One blogger hilariously described the PPTA report as a “graphic” read, which is insane. It’s all simply another attempt by progressives to defenestrate from the Overton window even moderately “conservative” beliefs, and to push many of our young people (especially our young men) out that window, too.

Of course, the PPTA report calls for the government to step in, for “urgent action”, which will just be more of the same: treating our boys (and anyone who doesn’t buy into hyper-progressivism) as guilty of “extremism” until proven innocent.

They want a Big Brother bureaucrat to be installed in every school, by calling for a:

dedicated Digital Citizenship and Wellbeing Lead in every secondary school, responsible for staff training, curriculum integration and student support, who can work alongside classroom teachers and pastoral teams.

In practice this will simply further embed a smothering, progressive managerial orthodoxy in our schools. One that stifles critical thinking, actively suppresses viewpoint diversity, is actively hostile to even moderate non-progressive viewpoints, and one that scapegoats our boys and labels masculinity toxic.

And so we’ll continue to lose more and more of our boys, as they drop out (or more accurately, are pushed out) of school, society, and institutions.

And they will call this “equality”:

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