An absolutely shocking story out of a middle school in Ventura, California, has me thinking back to my own days as a preteen. I attended a public school and while we were assigned debates on pre-selected issues, we weren’t really supposed to talk about the big event dominating the news at the time: invading Afghanistan. This meant (of course) that all that my classmates and I wanted to know was where our teachers stood politically. I distinctly remember essentially goading my social studies teacher into admitting, to our horror, that he backed Bush and supported invading Afghanistan (making him perhaps the least surprised of anyone who ever taught me that I ended up working at Daily Kos decades later). All of this to say: I understand teachers, like everyone, are imperfect, and I don’t necessarily think all “political” topics should be off-limits in the classroom. But this incident out of Anacapa Middle School is so wildly inappropriate, offensive, and downright concerning, it’s not even in the same stratosphere. A history teacher at the school was recorded ranting about Hunter Biden, claiming that Biden had sex with his niece and had child pornography on his laptop. The teacher topped off the diatribe by, you guessed it, bringing up Ukraine, as reported by CBS Los Angeles. They also ranted about—you guessed it—vaccines. The teacher has not been publicly identified at the time of writing. Read more