A former Minnesota special education teacher is speaking out, claiming he was the original casualty of what he calls the “woke” movement — and that the same ideology nearly cost him his life. In a first-person essay published by The Daily Wire, Theodore Olson details how a single Facebook post in 2016 triggered a cascade of professional and personal ruin, and he accuses Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the media elite of rewriting history to absolve themselves of the destruction wrought by that era.
Olson, who describes himself as a “storyteller and SpEd teacher” in St. Paul, says he was not trying to make a political statement when he posted about safety concerns at Como Park High School on February 29, 2016. He says he was fed up with administrators cutting programming for vulnerable students while violence and exploitation spread on campus. In the post, he referenced school-issued iPads being used for “bullying, drugs, fights, and whoring” — language that he says panicked parents and ultimately ended his career.
“I was patient zero in the oncoming race-plague that peaked with George Floyd’s death and the Summer of Love,” he writes, referring to the racial justice protests of 2020, which Ocasio-Cortez memorably called “Woke 1” in a recent interview.
A Teacher’s Growing Frustration
Olson says his grievances were years in the making. Since he began teaching in 1999, he claims, the district poured money into programs that didn’t work. He alleges that his boss called students “scholars” while cutting their instructional minutes — including life skills like learning Social Security numbers, using deodorant, and riding the bus. He says administrators placed special education students in algebra and literature classes they weren’t equipped to handle, leaving them bullied, scared, and crying to him for help.
In 2014, he wrote to his supervisor about what he saw as illegal placements and bullying. The response, he says, was a threat: “Get with it, or I will find someone who would” — in other words, fire him. He also wrote to the union and school board in 2015, but he says no one listened. “There was a forest fire coming, and no one smelled the smoke,” he writes.
His breaking point came in December 2015, when he says he overheard a colleague tell another that the entire Como Park football team had lined up “in a train” for $10 blowjobs on school property. That conversation, he says, came amid a period when the school was frequently in the news for police calls, guns in lockers, and riots.
The Facebook Post That Changed Everything
On Facebook, Olson asked if someone could show him the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline.” He warned parents that there was no recourse for the fights, drugs, and “whoring” he said were happening. The response was immediate and brutal. Instead of confronting his questions, he says, parents and colleagues labeled him a racist and a white supremacist.
School security confiscated his laptop, keys, and badge, and escorted him out to the parking lot. His life, he says, unraveled from there.
Television, radio, and social media erupted. Fox and CBS called. Radio stations reached out to his brother. Friends in Italy sent messages asking if he was okay. At home, he shut off the lights and closed the shades. His union lawyer, Meg Luger, he says, called his fiction stories racist and imposed a gag order. Police offered protection after cars began slow-rolling past his house. His wife left to care for her dying mother, and he took to shopping only at midnight to avoid being recognized.
“Friends and family who first supported me have long since unfriended and blocked me,” he writes. “The only leftist friends remaining I can count on one hand.”
A Career Destroyed
Despite submitting 250 job applications, Olson says he landed only three teaching positions — and was fired from all of them. The last time, he claims, a state union leader spotted him in Grand Marais, 250 miles from home, squinted, and said, “I know you from somewhere.” Three weeks later, he was terminated despite good reviews.
Minnesota pulled his teaching license in 2019. He fought and won reinstatement, but says he could no longer work. “I was dead,” he writes.
He admits he did not intend to desert the teaching profession. But he says he left the Left. Then came a dark period in which he wandered the woods eyeing tree branches for rope — and might have used one, he says, were it not for a reticent therapist and a job counselor who mentioned she had placed paroled murderers and pedophiles in work.
AOC and the ‘Woke 1’ Reckoning
Olson’s essay directly targets Ocasio-Cortez’s recent dismissive remarks about the 2020 racial justice protests. On ABC’s “This Week,” the New York Democrat laughed off the era, calling it “Woke 1” and saying it was “crazy.” Olson says that is no laughing matter, pointing to the millions of dollars in destruction, thousands of ruined reputations, and deaths that followed Floyd’s murder and the subsequent protests.
He cites two specific cases: Kike Ojo-Thompson, an antiracist lecturer who repeatedly mocked Toronto principal Richard Bilkszto before Bilkszto leaped to his death, and Al Ditty, a Minneapolis worker who was fired after NBC affiliate Kare 11 News leaked an email and later hanged himself.
“It was not funny when I looked for the right tree branch to hang myself neatly,” Olson writes.
Confronting a School Board Member
Olson also recounts a confrontation last month with Chauntyll Allen, the Black Lives Matter leader and school board member who called him racist in 2016. Allen now faces federal felony charges for storming Cities Church during an ICE surge in January, and in June called for dogs to “piss on white corpses” in “white Christian cemeteries,” according to Olson. When he confronted her, she invoked the memories of Melissa Hortman, the former DFL Speaker of the Minnesota House, and her husband Mark — asking if Olson had harassed them too before they were murdered. Hortman and her husband were killed in a car crash in 2023, according to local reports.
Olson suggests his experience is part of a broader pattern of lives destroyed by the ideology of that period — and he warns against collective amnesia.
“In the blink of an eye, my life and the lives of countless others were destroyed by a season of horror and destruction,” he writes. “It bears remembering how ‘crazy’ that time was, and only the foolish or the cruel would rewrite that history to absolve themselves of responsibility.”
He closes with a pointed jab at Ocasio-Cortez: “In 2016 I lost my job, reputation, livelihood, and for a time, my will to live. In 2016, AOC was 26 and pouring drinks. She still should be.”
Olson is now a writer living in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/i-was-patient-zero-of-woke-1-and-it-nearly-ended-my-life