Tit for Tat(iana)

Mahopac native son Jeff Pearlman hoping for collective pushback on toxicity at Carmel schools.

By Jeff Pearlman

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Tatiana Ibrahim’s name comes up fairly regularly in my life these days. This is a somewhat bewildering phenomenon, because:

A.  Tatiana’s name is Tanya.

B.  I haven’t lived in Putnam County for 25 years.

So, yeah, it’s a bit strange, being a long-ago Mahopac resident and having this cretin evoked. But as a veteran journalist, an outspoken lover/loather of the old turf, and one who has written extensively of his roots, I also get it. Because Tanya Ibraham — wife, mother, con-woman, ignoramus, bully, and inarguably the worst speller in Facebook’s 18-year history — has devoted her time and energies to stomping out the righteous.

Even here — 3,000 miles away on the west coast — that sort of tumor metastasizes.

In case you are unaware of her existence (and if you are, consider yourself eternally blessed), Ibrahim is the exhaustingly loud spore sample whose petri dish cracked open last June after she browbeat the Carmel School Board in an 11-minute rant now viewed more than 100,000 times online. The focus of her lecture was the alleged teaching of Critical Race Theory, and within the first three minutes, it became clear that Ibraham had no remote idea how to accurately define or explain CRT. It appears, to her, to be the teaching of anything that makes whites look bad, or shows that American history is pocked by endless examples of racism, or might make a young child say, “Wow, the Black Panthers distributed free shoes to poor people? I never knew that.”

And, because we have — as a nation — collectively set aside logic and reason for berating and demanding, Ibraham’s message caught fire. Before long, she was appearing on hard-right news networks, a hero to every dunderhead who feels threatened by Affirmative Action and kneeling athletes and Black Lives Matter and J. Cole replacing Lynyrd Skynyrd as the preferred music de jure. Before Kyle Rittenhouse stole her time slots, Ibraham was jumping from show to show, letting loose on a country in decline and an educational system run amuck by rapists and libtards.

And, truth be told, that would have been OK. Not amazing, but OK. Not only is our nation’s history filled with unrepentant attention-seekers, but Putnam County is, too. Why, 50 years before Ibrahim came along with her spray tan and Uggs, Chester Henschel, a member of the Mahopac school board, was whipping locals into a frenzy with calls to dismiss Kathleen Marcato, a high school teacher whose crime was refusing to remove a peace poster that hung in a hallway display case. After enough fire and brimstone, Henschel actually got his way — the board fired the 34-year-old former nun, only to have the move overturned by the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court.

In his 15 years on the school board, Henschel — like Ibrahim now — was known for being rude and stubborn. As opposed to Tanya, however, he was also intelligent. A dentist by trade, in the late 1940s Henschel developed a tooth powder containing carbamide that reduced cavities in adults by 35 percent. He founded the Civic Associations of the Mahopacs and donated $60,000 for the construction of a balcony in the auditorium of Mahopac High. In other words, there was authentic civicism behind his outbursts. And even if you disagreed (and many did disagree), the man knew whereof he spoke.

Ibraham, on the other hand, is here to unapologetically piss you off, punch you in the face, and absorb the fleeting sugar rush of applause. Her Facebook feed — largely fueled by anti-CRT paranoia aimed toward local school boards — is an ode to suggestions and allusions and David Duke-esque talking points. The same woman who routinely dismisses “fake news” had no problem recently identifying a Carmel High teacher by name, loosely suggesting pedophilia and calling him, “dangerous and angry.” The same woman who insists we need to respect authority calls out (again, by name) an African-American Yorktown High guidance counselor for supporting Black Lives Matter (Tanya: “We know you’re out there. We know that you are indoctrinating our children! We know that you are pushing Black Lives Matter on them!”). The same woman who says conservative voices are being suppressed wants books like Rita Williams Garcia’s One Crazy Summer (a highly-regarded novel about three African-American sisters and their travels to Oakland in the 1960s) to be banned from school libraries. Again, the irony is thicker than phlegm: A person unable to grasp the difference between “your” and “you’re” is informing educators which texts pass muster.

There is, of course, nothing new here. In our country’s more recent days, many — from Joseph McCarthy and James Colescott to George Wallace and Donald Trump — have turned toward dog whistles and sinisterism to sway folks toward their darkest impulses. It doesn’t take wisdom or even smarts to rally the uninformed. It only takes volume. And, in 2021-22, a solid social media game (Not for nothing, Tanya’s website includes a page where supporters can donate money. Where do the funds go? Well, um … eh — it doesn’t say.)

But what gets me — what truly gets me — is the unwillingness of schools and school boards and school officials to fight back. I wrote a blog post about Tanya roughly six months ago, and since that time I have received a stream of e-mails and Facebook messages from Putnam County teachers, parents, and administrators begging for … some kind of help. Thanks to Tanya and Co., there have been repeated threats of violence (including a handful of death threats). She has convinced the lemmings at her disposal that the schools are indoctrinating their children; that any book discussing race or gender is not merely a piece of literature, but an instructional manual meant to transform precious little MAGA minds into a Marxist-Socialist stew (Memo to Tanya: I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X as a Mahopac High senior. I have yet to join the Nation of Islam.) In all the generated anger, simple truths seem forgotten: Being a teacher is extraordinarily hard. The pay isn’t making anyone rich. The expressions of appreciation are few and far between. No one signed up for this expecting to face violence from adults.

Scroll through Tanya’s feed, and you’ll see the name of one educator after another, oftentimes accompanied by unfounded accusations and ugly damnations. For celebrities like, oh, George Clooney or Taylor Swift, libel is a tricky thing to prove. Private citizens, however, only have to show the existence of print defamation that is false and “injurious to a person’s reputation, exposes a person to public hatred, contempt or ridicule, or injures a person in his/her business or profession.”

If I’m Tanya Ibrahim, famed seeker of truth, I think about that.

A lot.

And then — maybe, just maybe — I try reading a book.

Jeff Pearlman is a Mahopac native and the New York Times best-selling author of nine books.

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