WILLIAMSON WRONGED
HOW TO NUKE YOUR TEACHING CAREER IN ONE POST
📍WILLIAMSON WRONGED — HOW TO NUKE YOUR TEACHING CAREER IN ONE POST
Want to send your career into orbit — and into unemployment — in one lousy post? Welcome to Keyboard Self-Destruction 101, featuring a guest lecture from Williamson County Schools. Follow these five easy steps and you, too, can be an object lesson in poor judgment.
Here’s what allegedly happened: Last week, local public school teacher Emily Orbison posted on Instagram calling Charlie Kirk a “POS” and adding “Don’t mourn his death. It’s just the price of doing business. Completely rational.” One swipe. One career-sized grenade. One county-wide headache.
Class is now in session. Open your textbooks to Chapter 1: How to Ruin Everything in Five Easy Steps.
THE FIVE-STEP CAREER SUICIDE GUIDE
Insult the dead. Start with calling a man whose bloody and gruesome murder played up close on all your students’ IG feeds a “POS.” That’s bold, no doubt. Tasteless. And that’s also Exhibit A in every disciplinary packet.
Mock mourning. “Don’t mourn his death” — clever? Not really. But it’s the fast track to “conduct unbecoming;” less hot take and more blowtorch.
Rationalize murder. Tacking on “it’s rational” is the sort of line that turns a bad post into a legal and moral problem. Teachers don’t rationalize homicide in public posts. They grade papers — and maybe suffer the occasional paper cut.
Post it publicly. Instagram is not private. Screenshots are forever. Headlines are merciless. Congratulations — you just handed your national media outlet a gift basket. You get to keep the banana.
Dare the school board. Tennessee law lists “immorality,” “unprofessional conduct,” and “conduct unbecoming” as fireable offenses. Treat this as a challenge. Don’t simply test these waters; cannonball into them.
BUT OF COURSE — THIS WASN’T A SOLO PERFORMANCE
Here’s where it stops being a one-woman disaster and turns into a full community theater production. Orbison didn’t just stumble into cruelty on her keyboard — she had a pep squad of bad ideas, complete with local “thought leaders” waving the pom-poms.
Enter the Excuse Choir:
Emily Delikat — The Parent Novelist. She arrived with a casserole of excuses big enough to feed the whole PTA. Her script: “We all say dumb things when we’re grieving.” She even listed other questionable classroom incidents as moral equalizers, as if a buffet of bad behavior makes this one okay. Sympathy theater, closing act of hand-wringing.
Laura Coons —The Constitutional Crusader. Caped up, waving a pocket Constitution like it’s a wand. “Teachers have First Amendment protections!” she cries. Translation: private Facebook posts are now diplomatic immunity — even when they look like a career bonfire to everyone else. Subtext: disagree, and you’ll get sued.
Jeni Davis & Claire Tri Jones — The “Just Using His Own Words” Duo. Their defense? Orbison wasn’t mocking Kirk; she was “recycling his comments.” Cute theory. Except Kirk’s words were about policy tradeoffs, not a license to call a murdered man a “piece of s***.” That part? 100% Orbison’s. They plucked a soundbite out of context and tried to alibi her into innocence. It’s like quoting Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and then adding, “Also, Abe thought you were human sewage.”
They all have their angle — the parent, the constitutional defender, and the revisionists — and together they form the perfect excuse machine. But it’s not just these unfortunate posters. There’s a whole cabal of blue-no-matter-who zealots, including former school board members, would-be politicians, and party organizers. They will deploy grief, law, and civility to paper over the content of any errant post, while insisting, with polished calm, that the problem isn’t the thing said — it’s that it was made visible… and that you were offended.
That’s gaslighting: speak loud enough, long enough, and you hope the public stops listening to the original words and starts listening to your cleaned-up version instead.
THE IRONY IS DELICIOUS (AND IT BURNS)
As they sit up on a moral podium preaching “hope, pray, do the right thing” — like a choir of sanctimony — they simultaneously condone rhetoric that breaches the teacher code they claim to protect.
For anyone new to this circus: “Be Nice” has been Williamson County Schools’ long-running kindness campaign — posters, T-shirts, assemblies, even floated as a license plate. Respect. Inclusion. Empathy. None of what we’ve shown you here lines up with that. Yet these defenders insist it somehow does, and that you’re wrong for pointing it out.
Because the real standard isn’t kindness; it’s control. And from this perch, the corpse-cold calculus beneath it is this: they would rather see you dead than give you power. If you rise, if you influence, if you succeed, their preference isn’t coexistence — it’s erasure. Snuffed out like Charlie Kirk.
And no amount of “hope and pray” polish will ever buff that out.
THE HUMBLING FINALE
And now for the curtain call: when it came time to actually defend Orbison in public — to stand at the Williamson County School Board meeting, face the board, the administrators, and other parents — who showed up?
A single person.
One.
All the armchair courage, the posts and emails, the long lectures about civility and constitutional law — gone in the daylight when accountability queued up and the mic went live. Loud in DMs, invisible at the podium. Brave in shadows, cowardly in crowds.
So, Ms. Orbison: you weren’t left behind by strangers. You were left holding the bag by people who will nod along in the group chat but vanish when the lights come on. When the stakes turned real, your cavalry turned into spectators.
And now the accountability train is pulling into the station. For those who cheered from the shadows while pretending to be saints, there are plenty of window seats on this life lesson.
ALL ABOARD!