John Klar: A study of ‘doxxing’ (or, Balint’s bugaboo)

A recent spat between Sens. Becca Balint and Russ Ingalls exposes the progressive hypocrisy, incivility, and single-minded ideological pathology that results in a dishonest thuggery, most recently inflicted on school children.

Senate President Pro Tempore Becca Balint, D-Windham

The current dispute arose because an Irasburg Middle School teacher invited students to declare their desired gender pronouns to the class, and a parent complained. Sen. Russ Ingalls posted concerns for his constituents on Facebook, which included the offending teacher’s email address. Then the histrionic crocodile tears flowed.

Balint launched an attack on Ingalls because “by sharing a constituent’s email, it appeared that Ingalls was using his elected position to target a constituent.” She also stated “no constituent or private citizen should ever feel targeted by us through our actions or words. … Our actions and words matter.” Balint wants to “reexamine and update” Senate rules to address this problem. Meanwhile, the alleged victim, teacher Sam Carbonetti, whined on social media:

I am getting doxxed by a VT State Senator for giving my students the OPTION to introduce themselves to me and the class (with) their preferred name, pronouns, favorite subject and hobbies.”

Oh, poor baby Sam.

Teachers do not have the unilateral right to grandstand their social justice enlightenment by confusing Vermont schoolchildren. Sam Carbonetti might as well have complained, “Gee, I just asked them to state their favorite sexual position, as a way to get to know each other.” There is no scientific, psychological, political, or parental consensus that young children get to decide their gender, let alone have it physically altered — will Victim Sam be advising his young charges to seek liberating transgender surgeries, hormone suppression and gender-affirming hormonal therapy for children of all ages, and fertility preservation options [when] the patient is at pubertal age at UVM? Perhaps just to provide them the option?

Nothing in this teacher’s benign Linkedin page gives parents notice that he will insinuate his personal political bias into the classroom, or make gender selection a top priority option in his curriculum.

Using Balint/Carbonetti logic, if Sen. Ingalls provided Gov. Phil Scott’s email address to constituents he’d be “doxxing” the governor. Mr. Carbonetti is a public school teacher, answerable to the public, and his email is posted at the school’s web site as public knowledge.  Mr. Carbonetti is also an outspoken proponent of displaying the overtly ideological BLM flag. Sen. Ingalls has a duty to represent constituents who have concerns about ideologically zealous teachers who play victim while experimenting on others’ minor children. In this instance, there was a specific parental complaint that instigated the senator’s involvement. But Balint pounced.

Advocating for transgender ideology to be imposed on children regardless of parental opposition, ex-teacher Becca Balint rushed to defend Carbonetti and his inappropriate ideology. Within a few hours of Carbonetti’s tweet going viral, Balint weighed in via Twitter, calling Ingalls’ behavior “abhorrent.”

https://twitter.com/BeccaBalintVT/status/1431984076668477447

Balint also said she had “spent the last 48 hours gathering information from the teacher, from townspeople, from educators” and from Ingalls. Reportedly, she discussed possible rules violations by Ingalls in a consultation with Senate Secretary John Bloomer, and also said she is OK with letting Carbonetti have the choice to ask students what are their preferred pronouns.

Senator Balint is unconcerned that this brouhaha started because a student did not feel comfortable — namely, the student she is dismissing by supporting Carbonetti and shifting attention to Ingalls. She is actively promoting student discomfort, while claiming the opposite. She wants every transgender minor child to “feel comfortable” and the rest of the kids can pound sand. And in order to feel comfortable, first the kids must be taught what transgenderism is, and asked if they want to become another gender — then they can be comforted.

But “disclosing an email address for a public school teacher” defies even a stretched definition of doxxing:

Doxxing refers to gathering an individual’s Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and disclosing or posting it publicly, usually for malicious purposes such as public humiliation, stalking, identity theft, or targeting an individual for harassment.

The emphasis is on the intent of doxxing: “Doxxing is done with malicious intent, usually targeting a celebrity, social-media influencer, journalist, politician, or anyone the doxxer is seeking revenge on.”

This reveals the bizarre parody being displayed by Balint and other ideological zealots: they are attacking Sen. Ingalls (a politician), with malicious intent, when he lacked any such intent in referring parents to the teacher involved, and merely publicly posted public information. It is not “doxxing” to try to educate the public and challenge a teacher who is potentially harming children and violating parental trust — it is doing one’s job. This is quintessential free speech. The histrionic caterwauling of Balint, Carbonetti, and others is in plain view. It is laughably absurd.

Unsurprisingly, the school superintendent responded, “I am not interested in keeping this thread going with the media.” The ideological thugs indoctrinating Vermont’s children object to public discussion of what is being done, so they relabel the informing of parents as “doxxing,” and suddenly those who spew toxic hate and cause anxiety in young children are the victims. The underlying parental concern has been eviscerated.

Balint pounced quickly on the offending Ingalls.

As reported by VTDigger, Balint said she doesn’t support parents posting online or speaking for a student “without talking to either the teacher, the school or the district.” She added that she would investigate if someone in the Senate chamber was “encouraging people to basically reach out in a threatening way to a constituent — he may be a teacher in school, but also a constituent.”

Parents and voters may see things differently than this warped senator — this all began because a student felt uncomfortable by Sam’s “enlightened” politicization of the classroom. What does “basically reach out in a threatening way” mean, when the issue is a teacher’s conduct toward students and the “uncomfortable conversations” that has prompted? In a flash, the conversation was diverted from whether young students should be the playthings of bureaucrat ideologues, to the “abhorrent” crime of referencing a teacher’s already-public email contact (not his home phone). The effect and apparent purpose of this charade was to shield social justice agitators from accountability to parents and students.

It has also shifted from telling the truth to warping the very definitions of doxxing, and perverting the relationships between the parties, so that Ingalls’ criticism of a public servant is twisted to be a betrayal of constituent Carbonetti rather than an appropriate accountability of teacher Sam.

John Klar is an attorney and farmer residing in Brookfield, and the former pastor of the First Congregational Church of Westfield. © Copyright True North Reports 2021. All rights reserved.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

15 thoughts on “John Klar: A study of ‘doxxing’ (or, Balint’s bugaboo)

  1. Oh and here is another point about the Senator’s flimsy argument.

    Back in the Obama years, Rahm Emmanuel and the president adopted a policy of making available to the public email addresses of private citizens who for one reason or another had to interact with the government. In other words, they determined that an email address given to the government is public information. This was obviously a flawed decision, but it points out that the matter of email addresses as public information is an open issue.

    So your agreeing with the plaintiffs “doxing” claim has no basis unless of course you believe that the US government is doxing millions of citizens too.

  2. Senator Balint, you say ” She also stated “no constituent or private citizen should ever feel targeted by us through our actions or words. … Our actions and words matter.”

    Are you serious ?????

    I feel targeted and threatened every day the legislature is in session. You should follow you own advice since you and your colleagues like to isolate and deliberately hurt certain subgroups of VT citizens. You should be ashamed peddling this crap and get on with YOUR job !

  3. I’m a parent with school aged children and we are dealing with this ourselves, like we all are, it’s being forced upon us against our Will in the schools.
    Being gay, being a Transgender.. this is largely talks about sex, genitalia, plumbing issues. Why in the heck are we talking about what young KIDS are attracted too? they should be playing outside on the swings being kids not thinking of all this government forced psychobabble.
    Have we lost our minds?
    Why on earth is this entire subject being discussed with young children, this in not age appropriate conversations at all.
    Guess what.
    I have a friend that has a 17 year old daughter right now and she got sucked into this agenda.
    The little girls name is Alexandra, they call her Alex. We all know that Alex can be a boy or a girls name.
    This topic what brought upon this child when she was so young and innocent that she thought that perhaps she should be a boy simply because her name could be a boys name.
    She thought perhaps she was meant to be a boy.
    Can you get over this??
    This entire disaster was a giant mess that the school brought into the world of this family.
    It caused a great deal of trouble and stress.. like any family today needs this.
    Today, she is 17 years old and has had a boyfriend for years, they talk about getting married.
    She is now deeply embarrassed that she felt that way as a young child and she is angry this was done to her.
    She feels her own innocence was exploited, she was used and taken advantage of..her family was deeply hurt by it all.
    THIS is what The Left is doing to our kids!! And why is the *ELECTED RIGHT* Allowing This???

    • keep fighting this agenda it is so wrong and the left has no right to push it in the schools. go to school board meetings even run for school committee you need to be active in this situation you are fighting for your children. pray and ask God to help you and pray for His wisdom in handling this situation.

  4. My seventh & eighth grade English teacher thoroughly taught me the proper use of pronouns.
    Why is Carbonetti promoting the use of improper grammar? Will the preferred pronouns be
    “fluid”? How will teachers remember all the different preferred pronouns? Will teachers be fired for not using the preferred pronoun? Why allow this foolishness to continue in our schools? Students at BFA St. Albans are allowed to identify as animals. Its sad that parents and grandparents no longer trust the public schools.

  5. It appears that based on what Sen Balint read on Twitter, she came to an immediate knee jerk conclusion on the merits of what had occurred leading to a condemnation and attack on Sen Ingalls. Sen Balint’s public reaction in this case was apparently based on what she learned on Twitter, an outlet well known for the spreading of questionable opinion plus incomplete and inaccurate so called information.

    Is this the type of behavior that Vermonters expect from the head of its State Senate? Is this the way Sen Balint makes decisions on a daily basis when running the Senate? Well we don’t know, but her reaction in this matter certainly does raise questions about her judgement and behavior in general.

  6. Yes – these comic-book evil thugs need to be exposed. Senator Ingalls is the caped crusader – rest of the motley crew are villains intent on corrupting our youth. The issue here is who is hiding what – we now know. Prioritization of “constituent” above the safety and well being of our youth speaks volumes Becca.

    Teachers everywhere need to be on notice their evil deeds will be frontpaged.

  7. It’s really hard to soar with eagles while being led by turkeys! These people have no shame. The ideological indoctrination of the leftist/progressive political propaganda has infected our institutions here in Vermont and training young minds is part of the mission. Leave the children alone and teach, do not indoctrinate. There should be no political flags in any classrooms or flying on taxpayer paid schools, other than flags representing the USA and Vermont!. The schools do not belong to one political party, they belong to all of us. These teachers need to be forced to leave their politics out of their classrooms and called out when they seek to coerce their beliefs on their students while hiding their agenda from the parents.

    • High time school boards and teachers are responsible to the parents, not for “indoctrination” but education. Politics, social issues and sexual preferences have no place in the classrooms of our state. Personal proclivities of educators should not determine any relationship to the classroom message. Parents, to what are your children being exposed. You have a right to know and to intervene should anything inappropriate be forthcoming. Time has come when all classrooms should be subject to coverage by cameras if we can no longer trust the school systems to be appropriate with our children. Why should anything being taught to our children be hidden behind closed doors!

  8. Our children have been and are weapons used indiscriminately by politicians (globally) and oligarchs who think they have a right in our lives and our homes and our bedrooms, having been given that right by US, who accepted their growing tyrannical superiority to ignore what we want in our lives – to restore sanity, safety and the peace we all used to knew here in Vermont before this imported domestic terrorism became the way Vermonters treat each other now…its a script. And we learned our lines well.

    Vermont’s hills used to be dotted with sheep.
    I’m pretty sure it still is.

    You stop this crap by not complying with it, and creating a go round that excludes anyone supporting this false and divisive narrative that pits children against children, and parents against children, and vice versa. Everything we are living now is because this is what we accepted to get to this place.
    If we want to change it, we need to be honest about how we are supporting this system.
    And what the definition of insanity is: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The Chinese are taking advantage of our inability to break out of that cycle as we speak, chortling with joy.

    As long as we accept our chains, we will live in chains.

  9. There is nothing these progressive loons love more than positioning themselves as victims and underdogs so they can leverage their faux outrage to promote their amoral agenda. The fact that they have no compunction about dragging innocent schoolchildren into their sick political and psychological drama shows they will stop at nothing to get their way.

    • 3d graders don’t know what sex is, how we identify, how to choose whether
      their sex parts are appropriate or not.
      They are there, and they work for 3d graders every need.

  10. becca’s pronouns should be ego/idiot cause she’s filled full of both of them..

    A tax payer paid position has every right to be called out for abnormal behavior
    against children she’s charged with Teaching. It’s not her job to promote her agenda on the kiddies… agree with down posters, school choice is the only cure. Take the power away from the union will also take it away from leftist demowhacks..

  11. Frankly Becca, This is the height of hypocrisy: ——She also stated “no constituent or private citizen should ever feel targeted by us through our actions or words. … Our actions and words matter.’ I certainly DO feel targeted and am targeted by you et al by your words and actions promoting terror and medical tyranny.

  12. School Choice Tution Vouchers (SCTV) will end this charade in one fell swoop. That citizens on both sides of the aisle don’t insist that SCTV be made available to all Vermont parents tells me they’d all rather use these divisive issues to support their political causes. Dox this. Shame on all of you.

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