Students rally against furry invasion at their school

Let’s try to follow the winding contours of this bizarre story.

It begins earlier this week with students at Mt. Nebo Middle School in Utah staging a walk out in protest of all the furries that administrators have allowed to infest the school. It began with a petition, which gained over 500 signatures in a few days, calling for the school to start enforcing its dress codes and stop allowing students to come to class dressed in their furry costumes.

Then came the walk out. Adam Bartholomew, a local commentator in Utah, captured footage of the event. Watch:

So the furries have gone feral, it seems. They are biting and scratching and pouncing on people. Some of the students have had enough of this behavior. They want to go to school at a school, not a petting zoo. And that’s why they walked out.

But then the fact checkers leapt into action to throw cold water on this whole story. Or to try, at least. Here’s the Salt Lake Tribune:

Fact check: Nebo School District responds to claims about student protest over ‘furries.’ A district spokesperson said the protest seemed to be organized after a message sent to families was misinterpreted.

What kind of misinterpretation can lead these students to think that there are a bunch of furries in the school when there really aren’t? What could you have said in an email that people would mistranslate as a reference to furries? Let’s keep reading:

Video of middle schoolers walking out of a Nebo School District school in Payson on Wednesday quickly spread in conservative social media circles, with posts claiming the students were protesting because the district was allowing student “furries” to “terrorize” other students… Nebo School District spokesperson Seth Sorenson said that claim was false. He also said students at the middle school are not wearing full-body animal costumes to class, as “furries” — part of a subculture of people who sometimes dress up like animal characters but act like humans — are known to do… Dismissing the claims, Sorenson said the Wednesday protest seemed to be organized after a message the school sent to families last week was misinterpreted. The message was sent after a group of students had been targeting another group of students, saying things “that were overheard by others that the administration felt were inappropriate and shouldn’t be said,” Sorenson said. The group of students being targeted, he added, were students who sometimes come to school wearing headbands “that may have ears on them.” He said doesn’t think the targeted students necessarily refer to themselves as “furries.”

So the spokesman says there are no furries. The kids are lying, or somehow confused. There aren’t any furries, but there might be some kids wearing animal ears to class. Those kids, he says, may or may not identify as furries. It’s all a big misunderstanding.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

But then he goes on to admit that there have been altercations over people “dressing differently:”

In one specific instance, the targeted students “were sitting in a corner of the lunchroom, eating as a group of friends” when others began calling them names and throwing food at them “because they were dressed differently,” Sorenson told The Salt Lake Tribune on Thursday, providing more details about the situation. After word of the altercation spread, the school sent an initial message to families last Friday, stating, “We expect ALL students to be respectful towards each other while we are here at school.” “We hope you will treat others how you would like to be treated,” the message stated. “Outstanding behavior might demonstrate curiosity, understanding, patience and tolerance.”… But Sorenson said he thinks some parents misinterpreted the note, incorrectly taking it as a message that the school was “taking the side of a single group, saying, ‘We want you to be kind to this group, but they don’t have to be kind to anyone else.’” “Nobody was taking the side of one group or another,” he said. “What we were saying is everyone needs to treat everyone else with respect.”

Wait a second — he says the school isn’t taking the side of “a single group.” What group? I thought he said there weren’t any furries. Which group is he referring to? I thought the group in question doesn’t exist at the school? What is the fact check here? Is he saying that there are furries at school but he’s not taking their side? Is he confirming that there are indeed kids coming to class dressed like animals?

This “fact check,” and the dozens of others published by various outlets over the last couple of days, have made it seem like the reports of furries were pure unfounded rumor. But that’s not quite what I’m getting from the spokesman’s own words. And then there’s this:

On Tuesday, the school sent another message to parents, trying to clarify its original note. “We have had several parents reach out to us over the past few days, regarding rumors that are being spread about behaviors of a small group of students at our school,” the message read. “We hoped our efforts to clarify misconceptions would be sufficient, but it seems we still have some misunderstandings.”The note went on to quote the Friday message, and concluded with an acknowledgement of rumored plans of a walkout protest Wednesday.”

There’s again a reference to this group of students who, according to the fact checkers, don’t exist. How can a non-existent group of furries exhibit any behaviors at all, given that they don’t exist? Or do they? And if they don’t exist then why did we see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears kids from that school, on camera, saying explicitly that their classmates are being permitted to come to class dressed like animals, and act like animals too?

Here’s a video from a guy named Eric Moutsos with more insight from people who work at the school:

Okay, well that confirms it. The furries in school is not a rumor, it’s not misinformation.

The Left has been denying that this sort of thing is happening for years. But here you have a teacher who is on the side of the furries — a teacher who doesn’t like the kids who were protesting — admitting, publicly, that “a few kids dress as pets.” She says that like it’s completely normal, like she sees no problem with it. She doesn’t, and that IS the problem.

We can have debates over dress codes and how strict they should be. But any halfway sane person should agree that the dress code should at least require every student to dress like a human being, at a minimum. Dressing as a pet is not something that a child of any age should be doing on a regular basis. Especially not a middle school aged child — during school hours.

By the way, the same guy, Eric Moutsos, has also obtained these photos of kids at this school dressed in their animal costumes.

So we’ve got some kind of velociraptor-lion hybrid, and then a bunch of variations of cats. Kids are dressing like this for school. Their parents are letting them leave the house in animal masks. For school. This is happening. It hasn’t been debunked. It is real.

But we haven’t gotten to the weirdest part of this story, somehow. The local ABC affiliate decided to provide more context by interviewing a furry in costume, and referring to the woman as her fictional character’s name. Watch:

Yes, she doesn’t want these kids to “muddy the name” of the furries. They must not sully the reputation of the furries. They shouldn’t do anything that gives the public the impression that people who walk around in animal costumes are —I don’t know — weird, bizarre, deranged, mentally unbalanced. That’s according to “Strudel,” who the reporter refers to as Strudel, while also respecting the non-binary pronouns of the fictional character that the woman in the costume is pretending to be.

You may like to think that this is the media’s low point. That it has finally hit rock bottom. That it cannot possibly get any more embarrassing than this. But there is no bottom, I’m afraid. Searching for the media’s lowest point is like searching for the end of a black hole. It just keeps going and going, and it gets darker and darker all the while.

This — as many of us have warned for years — is the result of emphasizing tolerance and acceptance above all. I don’t say it’s the end result. It is not the final result. As I said, there is no end. There is no finality. It can always get weirder and more disturbing. But this is a result. This is an inevitable stop along the way once you board the crazy train.

When you start telling people — especially kids — that they can be whatever they want to be, and identify as whatever they want to identify as, of course some of them choose to be animals.

And since you’ve elevated tolerance and “personal expression” as the highest virtues, you now have no way of telling these kids not to behave this way. How can you? They’re expressing themselves; they’re being who they feel they are, deep inside. The school can’t put a stop to this without backtracking on the entire woke program. That’s clearly how they see it and they’re right.

There’s an interesting segment from that ABC affiliate’s written report on this issue. It also quotes Strudel, and calls her that in the report, but then it says this:

According to WebMD, a furry is someone who has an interest in animals with human qualities, and who sometimes dresses up as a cartoon-like version of an animal. “I really like the idea of animals that walk and talk, so I’m going to dress up as one, as kind of a fun sort of cosplay thing,” Strudel said… WebMD said people are often interested in becoming furries to find a sense of community, though some of the drawbacks they may face are negative stereotypes and social stigmas.

Now, I have no idea why WebMD is being consulted for furry information, but in any event, it implies that the “negative stereotypes” and “social stigmas” against this “community” are wrong. But they aren’t. There should be a social stigma attached to walking around in a ridiculous costume. It is normal for a person to treat such behavior as bizarre and antisocial, because it is bizarre and antisocial behavior.

A lot of what we now refer to as “bullying” among children is really just children acting normal and responding to weird, unhealthy things in a way that conveys that the things are weird and unhealthy. The schools want to condition children out of that natural, normal response. They want your child to treat the furry as normal, and then eventually see the furry as normal, and then eventually become one himself, or something just as, or more, bizarre.

That’s the process and the agenda. And it’s playing out at schools all across the country right now.