Remember when people said, "As goes California, so goes the nation?" I seem to remember first hearing that saying back in the '70s, when California was still a pretty groovy place to go. Plenty of my friends back in the day cast ambitious eyes on Southern California. The palm trees, the beaches, the pretty girls; all of that was pretty attractive to a bunch of farm-country and small-town kids from the Midwest. I've had occasion to work in California in my previous career. On two long-term projects, I even maintained a second home there, once in Valencia (the Los Angeles area) and once in Silicon Valley. I can see the appeal; the scenery is varied and beautiful, and the climate is salubrious. But by then, in the early 2000s, the rot was already well underway.
California isn't like that anymore, and it's no longer the groovy place it was then. And we can hope - and work diligently - to make sure that the rest of the nation doesn't go down the lunatic path that California's Governor Newsom and the Democrat supermajority in Sacramento seem to want to take it.
Case in point: Parents of high school kids in Carlsbad, California, are outraged - rightly - that a self-professed "Satanic BSDM Expert" was allowed to speak at their kids' school without the parents being notified.
Parents are demanding answers after a self-described “science of BDSM” expert from a clinic providing trans surgeries and representatives from organizations that help facilitate gender transitions were scheduled to speak at a California high school during a recent week of events supporting LGBTQ students.
In late March, parents started speaking out against a decision to allow Mita Beach, a self-described BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism) expert, and representative of DAP Health, a medical clinic that provides gender transition surgeries, to deliver remarks at Sage Creek High School in Carlsbad, California. during a lunchtime event in the cafeteria open to all students.
Parents learned that Beach, who lists his pronouns as “they/them” on his LinkedIn account, planned to speak as part of the Gender Sexuality Alliance club’s “Ally Week” of events promoting the LGBTQ community and anti-bullying messaging.
What is up with the idiotic claim of "they/them" as pronouns, anyway? Are they employing a weird version of the "royal we?" If so, we are not amused.
It gets worse. The author of the article linked above, RealClearPolitics National Political Correspondent Susan Crabtree, took to her X account and posted a photo of the... person in question. Thankfully, the photo is from the rear. I don't want to imagine what this person's face looks like.
🚨🚨 #BREAKING and EXCLUSIVE: New details about a public California high school allowing this self-described satanist “science of BDSM” expert (photo below) from a clinic providing trans surgeries and representatives from organizations that help facilitate gender transitions (one… pic.twitter.com/zre2OPiQX7
— Susan Crabtree (@susancrabtree) May 28, 2025
Here's the actual agenda item from the school's LGBTQ "club."
Here's the social media post from the high school's Gender Sexualities Alliance Club (formerly the Gay-Straight Alliance) showing that Beach was invited to be a "special guest" speaker during their "Ally Week" of pride events in late March.
— Susan Crabtree (@susancrabtree) May 28, 2025
Also notice the "Ga(y)me Day" that… pic.twitter.com/7i4VusgOub
Decorum and editorial standards do not allow me to fully express my disgust here.
Here's the thing: While we may be (and are) disgusted and horrified at the notion of a self-described "Satanic BDSM master" who works in a clinic that performs transgender surgeries to speak to young skulls full of mush, another speaker, one less visibly disgusting but perhaps even worse for that, has the potential to cause even more damage to these impressionable minds. As Susan Crabtree informs us:
The other speaker was Dr. Karl Pongyingpis, a psychologist affiliated with the Navy Medical Center in San Diego who assisted servicemembers with their gender transitions before the Trump administration banned trans individuals from serving in the military and put a halt to all military-assisted gender transition surgeries and other gender-transition medical care. In early May the Supreme Court upheld the ban on trans individuals in the military.
A source who attended Pongyingpis’ remarks to the high school students said he coached them on buzzwords to use with doctors and psychologists to attain a gender dysphoria diagnosis and receive gender-transitioning care. Pongyingpis also complained about the Trump administration’s ban on trans people serving in the military and gave his cell phone number to the students, suggesting they call him directly with any questions.
This person, a psychologist, provided advice to children - children - on how to employ buzzwords to use to receive treatment that would forever scar their minds and bodies; treatments that are permanent, irreversible, sterilizing, and in almost every case remove the victim's ability to enjoy a normal sex life, or indeed, a normal life at all. And, again, these kids' parents were not notified. Were I the parent of one of these high school students, I would have been not only outraged but enraged, and the school administration and the local school board would have gotten one sockdologer of an earful.
See Also: Trump Slams Newsom Over Boy in Girls' Sports: Not Fair and Unsafe
Here's CA’s Puzzling Response to Trump's Pledge to Cut Title IX Funding
Our nation's schools have a narrowly defined mission: To produce young adults with marketable skills, among them reading, writing, mathematics, science, and some knowledge of civics and our history. This serves none of those purposes. But the worst part is that inviting this person and not notifying parents is a gross violation of parental rights. That's unforgivable.
There may be a hopeful note in all this. I have friends and colleagues in California. These are people of good sense and conservative leanings, who abhor what's being done to their state and who are working to bring California back. Crap like this helps, not hinders, those efforts; if out of every three parents disgusted by a display like this, one thinks hard and ends up changing their voting patterns, California may yet be redeemed from lunacy.
