Groomers And Their Agendas

     Considering the imperative nature of this subject, it surprises me that it took so long to become a subject of national discussion. But perhaps it shouldn’t. We dislike to discuss our own failures, and the explosion of groomers and grooming in our schools constitutes a failure of our responsibilities toward the weakest and most vulnerable persons in our care.

     Let’s start with this article by Natalie Argyle:

     In an effort to educate the public on the signs of sexual grooming of children, RAINN, or the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, explains that while “grooming can take many different forms, it often follows a similar pattern.” Some of those identifiable patterns are:

• Groomers selecting targets who are emotionally and socially vulnerable.
• Groomers seeking out positions which give them easy access to and contact with potential targets.
• Groomers building trust with targets through special attention and shared secrets.
• Groomers desensitizing targets through discussion of and engagement in age-inappropriate sexual content.
• Groomers attempting to normalize the above behaviors to avoid suspicion.

     Terrifyingly, every single one of these is rampant in schools and classrooms today.

     There’s a “red thread” running through those behaviors. Each of them has the effect of creating a quasi-parental relationship between the groomer and his victim. The matter of “shared secrets” is particularly significant, as those secrets tend to separate and distance the victim from his parents. That separation is critically important to the grooming process for reasons I’m sure require no explanation by me.

     It should be equally evident why groomers target schools. Who is more emotionally and socially vulnerable than a child? And who has more situational authority over children than a teacher, whom the law invests with in loco parentis status?

     The discussion of grooming and groomers has focused on preadolescent children, and on sexual vulnerability and perversion. As important as those things are, if we ponder the critical separation-from-parents aspect for a while, it becomes plain that the groomer opens his victim to an enormous range of deviances. Among those is the inculcation of hatred as a dominant force in the victim’s psyche. In consequence, hatred and the actions it fuels have become threats to virtually everyone and everything in our nation.

     Many of us who’ve raised children through adolescence and sent them off to college will know the terror that comes from having sent a child away to school and getting back a virtual stranger. In many cases, the parent isn’t able to cope. The changes in his child are so great, and so savage, that there’s no possibility of them conversing normally. It’s baffling as well as enraging – and it’s a consequence of a grooming process.

     Have you wondered why America’s colleges and universities have turned into cesspools of anti-Americanism? Given that groomers in our children’s early years have been at work for longer than we were aware, our “institutions of higher learning” have turned into finishing schools. They complete the process of detachment from American values that the primary and secondary schools began.

     The process was already at work decades ago, when Boomer children went away to college. However, back then our primary and secondary schools hadn’t yet been completely conquered by the Left’s groomers. American kids still received a substantial education before going off to college. Collegiate groomers had a tougher row to hoe. In consequence, their results were spotty.

     It was not until the “colleges of education” had been thoroughly corrupted that the extension of grooming-as-schooling to the lower grades began. That appears to have occurred some time in the Sixties, when unprecedented numbers of college graduates started hunting for jobs. A significant fraction thereof became teachers. For many, it was a “least bad choice,” rather than a deep desire to educate the young.

     Thomas Sowell has noted that it is the bottom twenty percent of college graduates who go on to become “educators.” These are not typically persons who admire intellect, initiative, or the fruits of serious effort. Many of them are beset by envy and resentment of more able others, and of a society whose rewards flow heavily toward the able and energetic. That renders them susceptible to anti-American propagandization. They bring those attitudes to the classrooms they later rule…and they pass them on to students bound for college in due course.

     Thus have America’s colleges produced the bumper crop of groomers that now infest the lower grades.

     A diffuse and inchoate hatred tends naturally to target those things that express normality. Normality is an aggregate of customs, conventions, traditions, and patterns, each one of which is largely independent of other “normal” things. Yet together they constitute a culture, which unites those who ascribe to it into a cohesive polity: a nation. When a significant fraction of those within its nominal bounds disaffiliate from normality, the nation becomes unstable. While such instability manifests in many ways, the most prominent manifestation is violence.

     I posit that the mushrooming violence that’s disassembled our great cities these past few years requires little other explanation. Had it not been “the environment,” “inequality,” or “black lives matter,” the tides of thoroughly groomed young adults pouring out of American colleges would have latched onto some other rationale. The absurd “Occupy” demonstrations during Michael Bloomberg’s mayoralty make that clear.

     The sexual aspects of grooming are vitally important, doubt it not. My aim today was to widen the discussion, such that the grooming dynamic’s application to other social abnormalities might become more visible. I hope the above has provided a start, though I haven’t exhausted the subject.

     Keep the central element of the grooming phenomenon – separation of young people from their parents’ norms and values — at the front of the discussion. It will prove applicable far more often than we’d like to think.