Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet has sparked outrage by claiming that many male teachers are paedophiles.
“We have to take back control,” he told Fox News on Sunday. “If there’s no community control of the schools, what we have is kids being not only indoctrinated but groomed in a very real sense by people who are, whether they know it or not, sexual predators.”
“Are they abusing the kids physically? No, I don’t think so. But they’re abusing them mentally and using sex to do so,” he added.
“This has always been the problem with education – teachers are inclined, typically men because men are predators, to paedophilia,” he said.
Mr Mamet argued that parents should teach their children certain topics instead of teachers.
“People have gone nuts and people are frightened because there’s huge changes in society, that are brought about by the people in power,” Mr Mamet said. “The people in power, as always, are to a large extent, parasites who are feeding off of the decaying flesh.”
He added that society “needs to get pruned and we need to cut off the diseased parts and go back to individual control of our own destiny. That’s called freedom”.
The comments caused social media users to push back.
“So we already grossly underpay teachers and now we’re just openly saying they’re inclined to be pedophiles. At the same time, we also are like uhhh blugghhuh why is China better at math?” Twitter user Chuck Stevens wrote.
“I had no idea he was a right wing homophobe. Did he get hit in the head recently or has he always been this way?” Kipp Matalucci tweeted.
Bernie Sanders foreign policy adviser Matt Duss wrote that “the main takeaway from that despicable David Mamet clip about teachers is that Rupert Murdoch remains the world’s most dangerous oligarch and it’s not close”.
“Following David Mamet’s career has been like talking to a guy at a party who seems normal until at a certain point he says ‘But y’know, a LOT of harassment allegations are made up,’ and then you say ‘Huh...’ and try to change the subject but then it just keeps going,” Will Sloan added. “You’re having a good time with House of Games and Glengarry Glenn Ross and then all of a sudden you hit Oleanna and you think, ‘Oh, that’s weird. We’ll surely he’s actually approaching this from the angle of…’ and then soon enough you’ve hit his Phil Spector movie.”
“David Mamet, the playwright who gave us ‘American Buffalo,’ is now giving us American bulls***,” Mark Jacob tweeted.
“One reason for David Mamet’s lurch to the right in the last few years was it’s very easy to be the smartest guy in the room if you surround yourself with the dumbest possible people,” Jesse Hawken added.
