Feelz Leadership, Gold Medal Edition

The arrest of the Des Moines school superintendent by ICE throws open a window onto an entire glorious universe of AWFL empathy-speak “leadership” and the laugh-out-loud funny emptying of institutions by woke moronification. And it’s still pretty early, so there’s lots of room for this story to get better. It’s going to ripen like a peach on a tree.

Start with the reporting in the local newspaper, which is all about how mean ICE is being by arresting this wonderful man.

It’s just paragraph after paragraph of the same thing, so take these two paragraphs as representative:

Angie McKinley, a 27-year-old Des Moines Public Schools teacher who lives in West Des Moines, called his arrest “disgusting” and “heartbreaking.”

“When they do something like this, it really does send a message to our community and to our students and to our families, and I honestly think that this is mostly a tactic by higher people in government to make our community not safe, so I really want our students and our community to know that we are here with them, just like they are for Dr. Roberts,” McKinley said.

The Department of Homeland Security says that Dr. Ian Andre Roberts is an illegal alien with a removal order from an immigration judge….

…but arresting him is a tactic to “make our community not safe.” Why? Because shut up, obviously. The sudden attention that Dr. Roberts is getting is….interesting. Interesting. He’s led quite a colorful life. He has many, many graduate degrees, and he’s been a leading police detective and a top soldier in an elite unit, and he led a personal security detail for Queen Elizabeth II, and and and….

On social media, a bunch of alert people are tearing down this dude’s amazing life story, and it’s remarkable how quickly it all falls apart. But if you just look at the way Roberts has told that story himself, you can’t possibly avoid laughing out loud.

Oh yes, I served in the “most dangerous combat situations,” while earning my many graduate degrees and leading many schools as an administrator. I was an assassin-vice principal-grad student, you see.

He wrote a book, and you can preview it on Amazon. You should, because it’s magnificent.

We’ve all met this person, in some form or another, frequently in a bar. And then I became a top secret agent for the Queen of China, and I flew fighter jets for the French Foreign Legion while I completed my neurosurgery residen— hey, can I get another Pabst? But the Des Moines school board looked at this person and said that wow, your life story is so amazing, when can you start? Clearly this man is a hardened combat veteran who used his deep well of personal discipline to force himself to develop an empathetic character:

You can see the combat experience written in the deep lines on his face. This man has been in The Shit. It’s that thousand-yard stare that always gives it away.

The chair of the Des Moines school board is the absolutely flawless cut-and-paste AWFL, a just perfect representation of a ubiquitous social type:

And so, as the whole story falls apart, the Des Moines school district is warning the community to be empathetic and warm and to avoid negative feelings. The opening three minutes of this press conference need to be seen to be believed:

Screenshot, with captions:

Second screenshot, interim superintendent:

We hired a crushingly obvious con artist who’s an illegal alien. What’s important now is that we….feel things. A lot. We have to feel a lot of things. They held an entire press conference about their feelings, which is remarkably on-brand.

Remember when institutions were generally run by adults? They were flawed, but they were generally kind of normal, or knew how to fake it. We’ve evolved a whole institutional culture of “I’ll have another bellini” ladies, and of the kind of men who flatter and pamper them. Ohh, empathy empathy empathy / swoon.

Anyway, that’s what I learned when I was in combat with Queen Elizabeth.