The MAGA/QAnon Cult Turns to Book Burning

Just like Hitler Youth back in the day.

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

Asked and answered.

The Washington Post reports, ‘I think we should throw those books in a fire’: Movement builds on right to target books:

Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin (R) attacked Terry McAuliffe for, as governor, vetoing a bill to allow parents to opt their children out of reading assignments they deem to be explicit. The impetus was a famous book from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, “Beloved,” about an enslaved Black woman who kills her 2-year-old daughter to prevent her from being enslaved herself.

While that effort took place years ago, it was rekindled as a political issue at a telling time. Not only are conservatives increasingly targeting school curriculums surrounding race, but there’s also a building and often-related effort to rid school libraries of certain books.

The effort has been varied in the degree of its fervor and the books it has targeted, but one particular episode this week showed just what can happen when it’s taken to its extremes. Shortly after the election result in Virginia, a pair of conservative school board members in the same state proposed not just banning certain books deemed to be sexually explicit, but burning them.

As the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star reported Tuesday:

Two board members, Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg, said they would like to see the removed books burned.
“I think we should throw those books in a fire,” Abuismail said, and Twigg said he wants to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”

Abuismail reportedly added that allowing one particular book to remain on the shelves even briefly meant the schools “would rather have our kids reading gay pornography than about Christ.”

I smell a white Christian Nationalist in this comment. The Christian theocracy “morality police” can’t be far behind, no different from the Islamic theocracy “morality police” in Iran.

It’s easy to caricature a particular movement with some of its most extreme promoters. And there is a demonstrated history of efforts to ban books in schools, including by liberals. Such efforts have often involved classics such as “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Of Mice and Men” for their depictions of race and use of racist language more commonly used at the time the books were written. More recently, conservatives have often challenged books teaching kids about LGBTQ issues.

But advocates say what’s happening now is more pronounced.

“What has taken us aback this year is the intensity with which school libraries are under attack,” said Nora Pelizzari, a spokeswoman at the National Coalition Against Censorship.

She added that the apparent coordination of the effort sets it apart: “Particularly when taken in concert with the legislative attempts to control school curricula, this feels like a more overarching attempt to purge schools of materials that people disagree with. It feels different than what we’ve seen in recent years.”

Even as the news broke Tuesday in Virginia, another school board just outside Wichita, announced that it was removing 29 books from circulation. Among them were another Morrison book, “The Bluest Eye,” and writings about racism in America including August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Fences,” as well as “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.,” a history of the white supremacist group. The books haven’t technically been banned, but rather aren’t available for checking out pending a review.

“At this time, the district is not in a position to know if the books contained on this list meet our educational goals or not,” a school official said in an email.

The day before, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued an executive order calling on state education officials to review the books available to students for “pornography and other obscene content.” Abbott indicated before the order that such content needed to be examined and removed if it was found. He reportedly did not specify what the “obscene content” standard for books should be.

Ah, the old “I know when I see it” subjective standard.

From Justice Potter Stewart’s concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio, a pornography case decided by the Supreme Court in 1964:

I have reached the conclusion, which I think is confirmed at least by negative implication in the Court’s decisions since Roth and Alberts, that under the First and Fourteenth Amendments criminal laws in this area are constitutionally limited to hard-core pornography. I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

Abbott added Wednesday that the Texas Education Agency should report any instances of pornography being made available to minors “for prosecution to the fullest extent of the law.”

The effort builds upon a review launched last month by state Rep. Michael Krause (R), who is running for state attorney general. Krause is targeting books that “contain material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

This would be the “Snowflake” standard. I’m sure this extremist is running as an “anti-CRT” candidate, but what we are really talking about here is anti-critical thought and anti-empathy for the life experiences of others different from your own as described in literature, or portrayed in film.

Krause doesn’t say what he intends to recommend about such books, but he accompanied his inquiry with a list of more than 800 of them, including two Pulitzer Prize winner “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by William Styron and Pulitzer finalist “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Remember when the television miniseries adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots in 1977 enjoyed unprecedented success and critical acclaim?

The MAGA/QAnon cult snowflakes of today would have banned this historical docudrama about slavery and racism in America from airing because their cracker ass fee-fees would be hurt. And they would have removed Alex Haley’s book from library shelves for kindling at their Klan book burning.

[State Rep. Chuck] Wichgers (R), who represents Muskego in the legislature, attached an addendum to his legislation that included a list of “terms and concepts” that would violate the bill if it became law.

Among those words: “Woke,” “whiteness,” “White supremacy,” “structural bias,” “structural racism,” “systemic bias” and “systemic racism.” The bill would also bar “abolitionist teaching,” in a state that sent more than 91,000 soldiers to fight with the Union Army in the Civil War.

The list of barred words or concepts includes “equity,” “inclusivity education,” “multiculturalism” and “patriarchy,” as well as “social justice” and “cultural awareness.”

So we going to ban the dictionary now? Are we also going to ban history books? Are we also going to ban the social sciences from sociology to political science as well? Just to be clear, this ignoramus is trying to ban First Amendment protected free speech.

Back in September, a school district in Pennsylvania reversed a year-long freeze on certain books almost exclusively by or about people of color. A similar thing happened in Katy, Tex., near Houston, where graphic novels about Black children struggling to fit in were removed and quickly reinstated last month. Many such fights have been concentrated in Texas.

Oh, so now we can’t even explore the Black experience in America from their life perspective? Whitey appropriates their music innovations, and fashions, and popular culture, but we can’t discuss the Black Americans who deserve credit for the innovations that whitey appropriated (often without just compensation or proper credit).

There has also been a recent effort by a conservative group in Tennessee to ban books written for young readers about the civil rights struggle. [Does this include David Halberstam’s “The Children,” a histoy of the nonviolence civil rights movement? And Children’s Books About Civil Rights Hero John Lewis?]  Supporters cite the anti-critical race theory law the state passed earlier this year. And school officials in Virginia Beach recently announced they’d review books, including ones about LGBTQ issues and Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” after complaints from school board members.

Indeed, oftentimes the books involved are the same.

As the Los Angeles Times reported this week, such battles are part of a much larger debate over excluding books that has been injected with new intensity amid the anti-critical race theory push and now, apparently, with the demonstrated electoral success of that approach.

The Spotsylvania County, Va., example is an important one to pick out. While the two members floating burning books have aligned with conservatives, the vote was unanimous. It was 6-0 in favor of reviewing the books for sexually explicit content. School officials expressed confidence in their vetting process but acknowledged it’s possible certain books with objectionable content got through that process.

The question, as with critical race theory, is in how wide a net is cast. Sexually explicit content is one thing; targeting books that make students uncomfortable or deal in sensitive but very real subjects like racial discrimination is another.

There is clearly an audience in the conservative movement for more broadly excluding subjects involving the history of racism and how it might impact modern life. And while it’s difficult to capture the targeting of books on a quantitative level nationwide, this is an undersold subplot in the conservative effort to raise concerns about what children might learn in school.

It is a racist appeal to white identity politics. 4 in 10 Republicans don’t like schools teaching about history of racism:

Republicans are all-in on making banning critical race theory a campaign issue in the 2022 elections, after Virginia Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin (R) used it to rally the GOP base and make education a major issue in his upset win.

[N]ew polling suggests a large chunk of that GOP base would indeed like to stop teaching about the history of racism at all. And it reflects both the potency of the issue for that base and how it could spill over into something more corrosive.

The Monmouth University poll shows 78 percent of Republicans oppose public schools teaching about critical race theory. Schools generally don’t actually teach it, but advocates have effectively used the phrase to refer to teaching about the ongoing impacts of racism.

Before the poll asked that question, though, it asked a broader one: “Do you approve or disapprove of public schools teaching about the history of racism?” More than 4 in 10 Republicans — 43 percent — opposed schools even broaching the subject. And about one-third — 34 percent — said they disapproved of it “strongly.”

Only a slight majority of 54 percent agreed that schools should teach about the history of racism. Among Democrats, 5 percent opposed schools teaching about the history of racism, including 2 percent “strongly.”

The survey is merely the latest to suggest that a very significant number of Republicans would like to take the history of racism and/or the impacts of slavery out of classrooms altogether.

* * *

In September, the USA Today/Ipsos poll found that a majority of Republicans did not agree with teaching about the ongoing effects of slavery; just 38 percent supported doing so.

This creeps a little closer to the actual critical race theory-branded objections, in that it’s about how that history lingers today. But it’s incontrovertible that hundreds of years of slavery 150 years ago still has lingering effects — however pronounced you think they remain.

And that’s the point here. Republicans are wading into this territory while emphasizing that their objection is to the way these things are taught and not necessarily that they are taught at all. But significant portions of their base are indeed saying they don’t want them taught at all — and particularly as pertains to how much the ugly history might apply to today.

Perhaps these Republicans don’t want schools to teach about them at all because they simply don’t trust them to do so properly. But it’s contrary to the assurances provided by Youngkin and others that this won’t devolve into some kind of jingoistic effort to ignore our country’s past, warts and all.

It also speaks to how motivating this issue is for a certain subset of the base. As analyses of the Virginia race noted, Youngkin’s anti-critical race theory efforts were geared toward mobilizing conservative voters and not so much appealing to the broader electorate.

What these polls show is that this base is very much prepared to pick up that ball and run with it — going further than Youngkin insisted he wanted to, which raises questions about just how much a base that has often pulled the party to the extremes might influence the future of this debate. As much as 4 in 10 Republicans or even a majority of that base, depending upon the poll, is very much receptive not just to banning critical race theory, but to going significantly further than that in restricting discussions or racism and slavery in the classroom.

White Christian Nationalists want to eliminate any concern for the “others” in society who are not like them. The “others” are dehumanized and to be erased from a white supremacist society. You do not count.