Sanford, NC – At least 22 teachers and staff members at Southern Lee High School received an anonymous email over the weekend using white nationalist and antisemitic language to criticize an educational controversy taking place several states away.
The author of the email is not yet known, nor is the reason why these recipients at Southern Lee were singled out to receive the communication. The statements contained within the five paragraphs and signed by “ANGRY WHITE MAN” attempt to express the writer’s “disdain for the condition of the modern-day educational system (or ‘ed-jew-cational’ system).”
The writer claims to be a white male “from another state” who reached out to the “Lee District” because one of its teachers allegedly objected to the firing earlier this month of an assistant principal at an elementary school in Mississippi after he read the book “I Need a New Butt!” to a second-grade class. The writer of the email does not identify the teacher he claims objected to the firing of Toby Price of Gary Road Elementary School in Mississippi.
Written by New Zealander Dawn McMillan, “I Need a New Butt!” is a children’s book in which a young child sets out to find a new butt when he discovers that his “has a huge crack.”
The email writer says “the ‘book about the butt’ might seem like a petty issue to get so angry about, but in actuality it’s just another symbol of the frightening degradation of education, the shameful sexualization of young children, and the power of the state to continue doing this, often stealthily and without parental consent.”
The author also refers to “Zog-bots” he claims run public educational systems in America. “Zog-bot” is a term popular among some conspiracy theorists to reference persons who work on behalf of the “Zionist occupation government” they claim secretly control the government of the United States and other Western democracies.
The email says “even the most cursory glance at the (Zog-bots), anywhere online, will show that they are mostly haggard, homely, and often obese man-hating women and effeminate gay eunuchs, with a few other types thrown into the mix for good measure.” The email also includes homophobic slurs.
The email does not contain a direct threat against any one person or group of people, or a threat of potential violence. But in saying that “we, the Disenfranchised White Males (sic), are rising as we have never risen before,” the email concludes with a disgusting promise to the Southern Lee teachers that “if I could line you all up and spit in your teacherly faces, I would.”
As soon as the email was received Saturday, Superintendent of Schools Dr. Andy Bryan turned it over to the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. But again, in the absence of a specific or direct threat against a person or group and because no laws appear to have been broken, there seems to be little that can be done by law enforcement.
The email was sent from an anonymous person using a ProtonMail account, an email service that was developed in 2013 by scientists who met while working on the CERN Supercollider project in Switzerland. It is popular, particularly among political extremists, because it provides end-to-end encryption and some of the highest levels of email security of any system on the market.
But no system provides absolute invisibility. Because subject lines of emails and IP addresses are still visible, emails sent through ProtonMail can still be traced back to an individual account.
