The MAGA/QAnon Cult Turns to Book Banning – Can Book Burning Be Far Behind?

A number of years ago, I used to present a one hour seminar on “Things they didn’t teach you in your high school history class” – the unsanitized version of our history that is not included in the hagiographic myth making in virtually every high school text book.

The white nationalist MAGA/QAnon cult freakout over Critical Race Theory (which is only taught in law schools and graduate level college courses, not in K-12 classes) would no doubt have their white privilege fee-fees hurt over the true American history I would discuss in this seminar. I’m not sure why they would be attending my seminar, other than to disrupt the class and to make death threats. Oddly enough, nothing even remotely like this ever occurred at the time I was doing this seminar.

Critical Race Theory has now become right-wing code for anything that makes white supremacists feel uncomfortable in discussions about race and white privilege in America thanks to Fox News.

The Washington Post recently reported on the culture war propaganda machine of the Republicans Party trying to gin up white rage over largely non-existent and manufactured culture war issues, to distract from the fact that the GQP is now an anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian authoritarian quasi-religious political cult that wants to end American democracy, and almost succeeded with its violent seditious insurrection and failed coup d’etat on January 6. This slow-motion insurrection to end American democracy is still ongoing, and is the central tenant of the Party of Trump.

The Post reported, Republicans are testing messages to reverse their suburban slide, and education is a winner:

The National Republican Senatorial Committee has been testing dozens of potential messages that might claw back suburban voters who drifted toward Democrats during Donald Trump’s presidency, and lines of attack related to education show as much potential for the midterms as inflation, immigration and crime.

I obtained a 45-slide PowerPoint recently presented to Republican senators that summarizes findings from a previously unreported internal poll of 1,200 likely voters in 2022 suburban battlegrounds. Notable results included:

• • • Seventy-eight percent agreed that “many public-school systems in America are failing and children are falling behind the rest of the world.”
    • Sixty-five percent agreed that “allowing biological males to compete against women in high school and college sports is hugely unfair and will erase many of the gains women have made in athletics over the last 50 years.”
    • Fifty-eight percent agreed that “critical race theory should not be taught in schools” because “children should not be told they are inherently racist simply because of the color of their skin.”

Republican Glenn Youngkin has been road-testing all three arguments in the Virginia governor’s race. Although Joe Biden carried the commonwealth by 10 points last year — and is scheduled to campaign Tuesday with Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe — the latest poll, from Monmouth University, shows a tie. That survey found that schooling has surpassed covid to become the second-most-important issue, behind the economy. And after previously trailing, Youngkin has edged McAuliffe as being more trusted to handle education.

Democrats traditionally hold advantages on education, but parental anger at learning loss caused by school closures has shifted the landscape. [Hello! Schools shut down during previous guy’s gross mismanagement of the Coronavirus pandemic, and the Biden administration has made it possible for children to return to school.] Many moms and dads blame recalcitrant teachers unions, to whom the Democratic Party is beholden, for slow reopenings. Mask mandates in the classroom poll well but have added to tensions. [GQP tribalism and its alternate reality.]

UPDATE: Birx testifies that Trump’s White House failed to take steps to prevent more virus deaths. “Dr. Deborah Birx testified “that tens of thousands of deaths could have been prevented after the initial phase of the pandemic if Mr. Trump had pushed mask-wearing, social distancing and other efforts to slow the spread of the virus.” On Tuesday, the FDA advisory panel OKs Pfizer vaccine for children 5 to 11. “The 17-0 vote, with one abstention, will now go to the FDA, which is expected to make a final ruling in the coming days. If authorized, the move would make nearly the entire U.S. population eligible for a Covid shot.” “Within days of regulators clearing the nation’s first coronavirus vaccine for younger children, federal officials say they will begin pushing out as many as 20 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech pediatric vaccine to immunize school-age kids across the United States in a bid to control the coronavirus pandemic.” Millions of kids’ coronavirus shots ‘ready’ to go; initial doses to be shared on a population basis (as soon as next week).

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), the chairman of the NRSC, intends to surf the wave of backlash. Senate challengers plan to emphasize support for “school choice” and “parental involvement” in commercials and on the stump next year, he said.

“We can make sure that it’s a big focus distraction,” Scott said in an interview. “People are seeing this work, and they’re going to follow it, whether Youngkin wins or not, which I’m optimistic that he can.”

Sedition co-conspirator Scott voted to reject Pennsylvania’s electors on Jan. 6. This traitor should be expelled from the Senate and permanently barred from running for political office. See, 18 U.S. Code § 2383.

One reason Republican strategists are so high on the education messages is that they also play well with Latinos. The NRSC plan to win back the Senate involves retaining support from rural and non-college-educated Whites who moved toward the GOP under Trump, continuing to make inroads among Hispanics, and reversing the suburban slide among college-educated Whites. The three-pronged approach means Republicans do not need to recapture all the suburban voters who backed Mitt Romney in 2012 but shifted to Biden in 2020 in order to regain control of the Senate, which is currently divided 50-50. “It’s ours to lose,” Scott told me.

The NRSC poll was conducted across 192 battleground counties from Sept. 27 to Sept. 30 by Wes Anderson — not the filmmaker but a partner at OnMessage, the GOP consultancy that has worked for Scott since 2010, when he first ran for Florida governor. [So a GQP-bias poll.] Anderson excluded suburbs in 13 deep-blue states represented by two Democratic senators, as well as counties that technically count as suburban but broke for Trump by more than two points.

Glenn Trumpkin, er, Youngkin is closing his campaign with an ad about “Critical Race Theory,” i.e, right-wing code for anything that makes white supremacists feel uncomfortable in discussions about race and their white privilege in America. The ad strikes me as more about appealing to pro-fascism white supremacist book burners.

The ReidOut Blog reports, Glenn Youngkin’s new ad shamelessly panders to white parents:

A new ad from Virginia’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, Glenn Youngkin, features a white woman who tried to ban Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Beloved,” from her son’s school curriculum because it allegedly gave him nightmares.

With Election Day quickly approaching, the ad is just the latest indicator Youngkin is leaning on white anger over school lesson plans — and some white voters’ desire to ignore history they don’t like — to propel him to office.

In the ad, we meet Laura Murphy, who spoke over somber piano music as she described her unsuccessful effort in 2013 to remove the book she deemed “some of the most explicit material you can imagine.”

Murphy left out a number of crucial details from her dramatic retelling.

For one, she didn’t mention the book she tried to ban by its name. “Beloved” is Morrison’s harrowing novel that addresses slavery’s impact on Black families. The “explicit material” she appeared to reference are scenes of sexual assault, bestiality and other forms of abuse that occur in the context of humans living in human bondage under the threat of racist violence.

Murphy also failed to mention that her son, Blake, was a high school senior taking a college-level English course when the book was assigned in class.

Back when his mother was pushing the local school board to change its curriculum, Blake Murphy told The Washington Post that “Beloved” was “disgusting and gross.”

“It was hard for me to handle,” he said. “I gave up on it.” [Suck it up, Snowflake.]

But Black and brown children living through racist trauma from the past and present don’t have the ability to turn away from history they don’t like, and white children don’t deserve to be able to, either. The ability to “give up” on grappling with uncomfortable, historically accurate lessons is a distinctly white privilege. And it’s a privilege white parents like Murphy and Youngkin are desperately trying to uphold.

“Teaching our children about racism in our schools is a real challenge,” Youngkin said in his final debate with Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe last month. “I think we recognize that Virginia and America have chapters that are abhorrent. We also have great chapters. We need to teach our children real history.”

I can teach this Blake Murphy “the real history” of America, and send him home crying to his book burning momma.

It’s ironic that these parents’ mission is undermined by their behavior. The vigor they use in trying to stamp out anti-racist education only demonstrates how necessary such lesson plans truly are.

This book burning momma reminds me of the “Nazi cow” from this scene in Field of Dreams. (link). You rock, Annie! We need more Americans like her.

The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump adds, The perfect distillation of 2021 politics is a banned-book controversy from 2013:

A few weeks ago, someone shared an image of the top-10 best-selling “politics and government” books on Amazon. It included what you’d expect: books about the Trump administration from journalists, politicians and right-wing writers, books about the pandemic and the economy. But then, at No. 3, there was an unexpected entry. Somehow, Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Beloved” had earned a spot in the mix.

It was a mystery that remains unsolved, except in a metaphorical sense. The universe was simply doing a bit of foreshadowing.

On Monday, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican nominee for Virginia governor, released an ad attacking his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe, for having muffled a parent’s concerns about their child.

You’ll notice, if you watch the ad, that it’s pretty vague. The woman in the ad, Laura Murphy, simply describes how her son showed her “reading material” that she found unacceptably explicit. She criticizes McAuliffe, the state’s former governor, for having vetoed legislation that would have notified parents about explicit content being used in school curriculums.

“It gave parents a say,” she explains. “The option to choose an alternative for my children.”

It didn’t take long to dig up the incident to which Murphy was referring. In 2013, she objected to the inclusion of “Beloved” in a high school Advanced Placement English class. Her son, Blake Murphy, told The Washington Post at the time that he found the book “disgusting and gross.”

“It was hard for me to handle,” he said. “I gave up on it.”

The context of the assignment seems important here. This was not a student in fifth grade being asked to read something with horrifying content. It was a young man — either 17 or 18 when the book was assigned — being asked as part of an advanced curriculum to consider an award-winning novel. It’s a challenging book, certainly, about the life of an enslaved woman who murders her infant to save her from the same fate. It contains explicit material, unquestionably. But that’s part of the point: presenting a challenging circumstance for readers to grapple with. The Murphys declined.

The ad accurately depicts what came next. Legislation that would allow parents to keep their children from reading material to which they objected, vetoed by McAuliffe. The issue has come up before on the campaign trail this year, with McAuliffe at times misrepresenting what the legislation would have done. But it also seems almost to have been mystically predestined to emerge in a close political race in 2021, given the groundwork that’s been laid for exactly the sort of pitch that Youngkin’s ad is making. Little did McAuliffe know that vetoing that bill was the functional equivalent of Chekhov’s gun. [“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.“— Anton Chekhov.]

During the spring, Fox News and other right-wing media were consumed with the overlapping questions of “cancel culture” (which people of a certain age will remember as the “political correctness” debate) and what they called “critical race theory,” an identifier for a specific academic regimen that quickly ballooned into describing most efforts to discuss or consider race in schools. Fox News’s coverage was saturated with stories about “critical race theory” appearing in classrooms and the outrage of parents at its arrival.

Over time, that furor was redirected at school boards more broadly. Angry parents — including some who also happened to be Republican Party officials— denounced school officials for race-centered curriculums and for mask mandates aimed at limiting the spread of the coronavirus. Earlier this month, responding to concerns from an advocacy organization for school officials, the Justice Department encouraged local law enforcement to take seriously violent threats against those officials. This was unfairly and inaccurately recast as the Biden administration calling parents terrorists — and interest in the subject surged. In recent weeks, Fox News’s discussion of school boards has focused heavily on Virginia, where polling suggests the issue of education has emerged as a central consideration of voters. [Propaganda works.]

The Youngkin ad alludes to a comment made by McAuliffe during a gubernatorial debate when the subject of education came up.

“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” the Democrat said, opening the door for his opponent to more readily cast him as siding with bureaucrats over parents. Allowing Youngkin, in essence, to better leverage the national conversation about parents and schools.

But that quote was barely needed. In a year in which the political right has successfully stoked anger at educators, often in the context of learning about issues of race, a years-old fight over a book about slavery fits neatly into the conversation.

If you step back and consider the broader context, though, the lesson is somewhat different. “Beloved” has long been a target of concern from parents, making the American Library Association’s list of most-challenged books on multiple occasions (including in 2012). It is nonetheless included in educational curriculums because of the historical subject matter and the power of the prose. It viscerally conveys the horrors of slavery in a way that is hard to replicate.

This is an important point, too. Had the Virginia law survived, what alternative material could be provided to a student whose mother didn’t want him to read the book? How could he then participate in a class discussion? The book is not necessarily something that a parent would recommend their child read, but teachers have a different motivation than do parents.

At its heart, much of the recent debate over how race is taught centers on concern about how White Americans are cast. The term “critical race theory” is often presented as saying that all White people are racist, which is not what the theory actually argues. Complaints from parents often are about the fear that children will be told that they are to blame for toxic elements of American history. There’s this emergent, palpable concern about how young Americans understand the country’s history, a fear that is obviously intertwined with concerns on the right (where fear of anti-White discrimination is much higher) [White Power Hour with Tucker Carlson] that younger Americans are more liberal than their elders. Given all of that, it’s almost surprising that the Youngkin ad didn’t specify the subject matter of the book that Blake Murphy struggled with. But it is fitting for 2021 that the book at the heart of the 2013 effort had slavery and race as a central theme.

Given that we’re elevating mystical elements in this article — again befitting the nature of “Beloved” — it’s worth pointing out one other weird overlap with the current political discussion. Blake Murphy chose not to read “Beloved” when assigned it in high school. In his 2020 New York Times wedding profile, we learned that he is now associate general counsel for the National Republican Congressional Committee. I, too, was assigned “Beloved” in high school and read it. I am now a correspondent for The Post.

Make of that what you will.