The Passion of the Sinclairs

Where does one begin with Leighton Woodhouse's widely read piece for Common Sense: "They Questioned Gender-Affirming Care. Then Their Kids Were Kicked Out of School?

If you haven't read it, the Sinclairs (residents of Marin county, California, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco) discovered that their first-grade daughter was being introduced to Ibram Kendi's "Antiracist Baby" and asked for her pronouns in the private school to which they sent her at a cost of $40,000 per year. When they pushed back, they found themselves ostracised from polite society: their children were expelled, their acceptance at a new private school was rescinded, and they eventually wound-up moving out of the community.

The entire experience was clearly unpleasant for the Sinclairs, and I am trying to cultivate compassion for them… but the truth is that while this piece seems to be intended as an expose of the horrors being perpetuated by "woke" educators, I found myself laughing uproriously throughout the article.

This is a chronicle of ridiculous people, plagued by the problems of affluent credential-holders– slaves to fashion, and reminiscent of the Tom Wolfe article Radical Chic. Marin is one of the wealthiest enclaves in one of the wealthiest areas on the planet (the sort of place where parents spend $40,000 per year for private school). I suppose my first observation is: how on earth could a couple this successful be simultaneously so feckless? If you are unhappy with the curriculum of your children's private school, admit that you made a bad purchase & move on. Who on earth cares what the Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion committee thinks of you (I spell it out because I suspect that in eighteen months no one will remember what DEI stood for)?

"In these elite social circles, there's so much social capital placed into getting into these elite schools," said Sinclare mére– as succinct an explanation as I've found as to how the term "elite" has become a pejorative in America today. I am a "techie", the sort of techie who actually builds things, and no one has ever asked me what elementary school(s) I attended. That's because my work is judged by emprical reality, not credentials. What a sad way to live, dependent upon the approval of your peers!

Another observation: how the sort of nonsense that concerned them flourishes in secrecy. When their concerns were not addressed by the school, they reached out to to Undercover Mothers, apparently a sort of muckraking site for parents struggling with "woke" school faculty. Undercover Mothers started raising a ruckus, and the school set out to figure out who had "leaked": "The investigation revealed that Paul had leaked the [school] emails to Undercover Mothers. Administrators had made subtle changes to emails sent to different parents, and it was clear that the emails Undercover Mothers was [sic] reprinting could only have come from him." Good God– that's the sort of security measure one reads about in Tom Clancy novels (the "canary trap" devised by his hero, CIA analyst Jack Ryan). How often have we seen these sorts of programs dropped by corporations dropped once a whistleblower leaks to someone like Christofer Rufo?

Finally: "The Sinclairs recently went into escrow on a home in Newport Beach." Newport Beach is another wealthy enclave, this time in southern California. I was about to make a snarky remark regarding my hope that the Sinclairs don't stumble across anyone who might think poorly of them there, but I stopped myself. I would instead say to the Sinclairs: decide who you want to be & go be it, regardless of what anyone else thinks. There are principles for a human life well-lived that transcend time, place & political fashion. Connect with them– it seems you intuitively have started to already, given your revulsion at the nonsense you encountered at your daughters' school in Marin. You might consider the idea that other humans have thought about these problems before you & learn from them. From Aristotle to Aerulius to Aquinas to today, you do not need the approval of others, or to have attended a particular elementary school, to live life well.