The Big Truth, Part 3

Censoring the reality that hurts your feelings.

About This Series

I am not a Democrat. Haven’t been since 1980. If I had a political affiliation, it would be Despising the GOP, which has become the American Fascist Party. As such, I have, for practical purposes, come to rely on Democratic victories to save the republic from Nazis, demagogues and the Christian Taliban.

Which is why for years I’ve been utterly infuriated by the Democrats’ inability to communicate the stakes (and the truth), while the opposing Party of Lies endlessly dwells in thirst traps of reactionary unreality.

Why the Dems refuse to message systematically until the cusp of Election Day is an ongoing mystery, though they have often claimed the voters care only about pocketbook issues — and now, finally, abortion rights — versus the jagged noise of the 24-hour campaign. There may be truth in that, but the upshot is ceding the Great Political Message Board to the GOP, which beams a steady flow of disinformation into a near-total vacuum of dis-disinformation.

That’s insane. First of all, policy and legislation do not wait for the three months before the polls open every two years. Secondly, while the Democrats sit on their hands, repugnant lies take hold. As we saw in the debt-ceiling clusterfuck, once again the GOP was holding hostage the full faith and credit of the United States while blaming the administration for the crisis, when objectively the opposite was true.

And so, for what little it matters, I’m stepping in. This will be the third of eight columns examining crucial issues long since clouded by laughably dishonest Republican propaganda in the service of authoritarianism, racism, toxic antisemitism, anti-secularism, nationalism and pandering-to-the-stupidism. My mission: to distill GOP depravity to its essence, one spurious lie at a time.

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Let us first discuss an assortment of banned books, literature deemed antithetical to the values of a society and thus certain to corrupt the citizenry with depraved and dangerous ideas.

1984, by George Orwell; Dr. Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak; the Koran. Banned in the Soviet Union.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll; The Private Life of Chairman Mao, by Li Zhisui; the Bible. Banned in the People’s Republic of China.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X; Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver; Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. Banned in apartheid South Africa.

Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott; Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens; The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx; and every work of Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig, Jack London, H.G. Wells and Sigmund Freud. Banned in Nazi Germany.

The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie; The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and (obviously) The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown are among 40 books banned in Iran.

Then there’s tiny Lebanon, which banned Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s Ark and the irredeemably obscene Grover’s Eight Nights of Light, a Sesame Street book about Muppets celebrating Hanukkah. All were deemed pro-Jew propaganda.

Denmark is not on this list. Even Grover’s Hanukkah somehow sneaked through.That’s because Denmark, home of Hans Christian Anderson and Søren Kierkegaard, is not an authoritarian nation that shits itself in the presence of a challenging idea. Whereas, by contrast, in addition to the above-mentioned Axis of Evil, Singapore is such a country. Saudi Arabia is such a country. North Korea is such a country.

And the United States of America is such a country. For it is only in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave that an Arkansas law can prosecute library and bookstore employees for shelving supposedly “adult” material in anything other than an adults-only section. Or that a Florida school can remove from its library the graphic-novel adaptation of the Diary of Anne Frank — because one of the illustrations, of classical statues, depicts marble breasts. As the Apostle Paul wrote in his Letter to the Ephesians, “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

The convergence of Christian Nationalism and galloping fascism has created a dramatic surge of book banning in schools and libraries so that, ostensibly, the Puritans and Patriots can cleanse the shelves of filthy pornography and political propaganda. In the words of one the leading book-banning organizations, the Center for Renewing America:

YES, AMERICA’S INSTITUTIONS ARE GROOMING YOUR CHILDREN

To renew a consensus of America as a nation under God with unique interests worthy of defending that flow from its people, institutions, and history, where individuals’ enjoyment of freedom is predicated on just laws and healthy communities. The claim is not that all teachers are engaged in child predation. Rather, the claim is that as woke activists attempt to turn young kids and minors into political leftists to groom the next generation of activists, essential and longstanding boundaries that protect children from inappropriate sexual behavior are eroded. In other words, the process of grooming students or children creates conditions that circumvent established safeguards that are used to ensure appropriate behavior which leaves children vulnerable to predation.

Don’t be fooled by the anodyne name. The Center for Renewing America is a hard-right interest group stuffed with MAGA reactionaries, including Trump appointees Ken Cuccinelli, Kash Patel and Jeffery Clark, the last two of whom are in the sights of prosecutors over the conspiracy to overturn the 2016 election.

Also, don’t think this is just about the woke conspiracy to groom children into LGBTQ+ freaks and sinners. No, there is also the goal of revisionist history: the erasure in the teaching of American history of its most grotesque chapters — namely slavery, the Trail of Tears, Jim Crow, CIA overthrows of leftist regimes around the world, domestic spying  and the ruinous, fabricated wars in Vietnam and Iraq. The following op-ed about sums up the moral panic surrounding the teaching of uncomfortable truths.

Public schools are teaching our children to hate America
- NY Post February 2020

Now, I would argue that understanding a nation’s past is a prerequisite for true Patriotism, which means contextualizing progress, achievements, redresses and other triumphs of democracy. Christians call this “redemption.” But Christian Nationalists and their fascist fellow-travelers have instead embraced denialism, like the Soviet texts that erased Stalin’s Reign of Terror. Covid was a hoax. Racism is a relic. Jan. 6 was a tourist visit. Trump was robbed. Obama was born in Kenya. America isn’t secular. The planet isn’t warming. Evolution is an unproven “theory.” But it is not merely denying truth. These people are also hellbent on repealing democracy itself. The consequence of this culture-wars hysteria is a spate of laws through Red America — in Texas, Missouri, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Iowa and especially Florida, where Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is building his presidential ambitions around eradicating 78 years of codified human rights and social progress of liberal democracies throughout the world.

“I will be able to destroy leftism in this country,” he said on Fox News last week, “and leave woke ideology on the dustbin of history.” Wow. Has the ring of Khrushchev vowing to bury us, and Arafat’s threat to drive Israel into the sea. I mean, who says shit like that? Who would promise:

… to overpower the spirit of liberalism and false democracy … . [W]e have realized that the false belief in the equality of man is the deadly threat with which liberalism destroys people and nation, culture and morals, violating the deepest levels of our being!

We have to reject with fanatical zeal the frequent lie that people are basically equal and equal in regard to their influence in the state and their share of power! People are unequal, they are unequal from birth, become more unequal in life and are therefore to be valued unequally in their positions in society and in the state!

Oh, wait. Those above paragraphs weren’t DeSantis. My bad. They were that other guy. Gregor Strasser, of the German Nazi Party, back when destroying leftism was a highly deadly art. The point being that democracy is under attack from authoritarian demagogues and their bigoted cult of “traditional values.” But these are not mavericks or outsiders. They are the voice of the Republican Party, whose congressional majority passed its own “Parents Bill of Rights” to put the torch-bearing villagers in charge of public education.

Needless to say, this isn’t your grandfather’s GOP. Back in the day, another national leader said this:

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book ... .

That wasn’t Voltaire or Karl Marx or Barbra Streisand. It was  Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The times, they are a changin’. Herewith I offer a frightening roster of censorship, verbatim from a New York Times piece from February. Things have gotten worse since, but writer Claire Moses did too splendid a job to ignore:

• Collierville Schools in Tennessee has pulled over 300 books from school libraries. Nearly all of them are LGBTQ+.

• An English teacher in Norman Public Schools (OK) gave students a QR code that allowed access to the Brooklyn Public Library’s free censored books. She was suspended and has left her position.

• In Bonners Ferry, Idaho, right-wing conservatives are demanding the removal of 400 titles, most of which are not even in the library. This same library drove their director to resignation last week.

• Several Pennsylvania Congress members have sent a letter to the governor and state secretary of education demanding an investigation into books at schools in the states. The book they use as an example is Gender Queer, and letters like this are where above-listed laws get their start.

• “A Katy ISD police officer temporarily removed a copy of a book from a high school library last month as part of an investigation after a woman filed a criminal complaint alleging the district was providing “harmful” material to minors.” The book was Flamer.

• Fort Bend ISD in Texas has removed Gender Queer.

• For all that Moms For Liberty claims they speak on behalf of all parents, only about 160 parents in Polk County schools (FL), a district serving 110,000, decided to opt their students out of controversial books. #Winning?

• “Out of the nearly 100 people who testified in-person Wednesday or submitted comments to the board directly, just 15 demanded these books be pulled from shelves.” This is in Meridian Public Library (Idaho). Of course, the loudest and most ill informed individuals are not the majority.

• In Chiliwack schools (British Columbia, Canada), some school trustees are suggesting that filing police reports against fellow trustees who support queer books is a solid solution.

• ““It’s actually being taught in school … and it’s being sanctioned by ‘porn peddlers,’” said one parent, referring to Superintendent Dr. Aaron Spence.” It was a productive meeting at the Virginia Beach, Virginia, school board. The rhetoric they use isn’t even interesting. It’s cut-and-paste.

• The Mead, Washington, school board member who suggested banning critical race theory and books on gender identity did not think it would be a big deal.

• A city council member in St. Marys, Kansas, wants the public library to remove LGBTQ+ books.

• “Before the end of the 2021-22 school year, the district’s Media and Technology Advisory Committee reviewed eight of the 24 challenged books. Three of the eight books were removed from middle school libraries.” This is Catawba County Schools in North Carolina. The pastor believes that books in schools go against the rights of born-again Christians.

• There’s a group in Dayton, Washington, trying to get books removed from their public library.

• A former US Senate Candidate in Nebraska talked on a radio show this week about inappropriate books in school libraries, to which Kearney School District responded by saying they serve a whole community and will not be removing the titles they own. All of the books are LGBTQ+.

• Gender Queer and It’s Perfectly Normal are under fire in Buxton, Maine, schools.

None of these censors seem to be up on the thinking of noted trans Marxist Benjamin Franklin, who sagely remarked:

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

Or John F. Kennedy, in 1962:

The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

As MAGA foot soldiers storm school board meetings, dox and otherwise harass principals and librarians and assert “parental rights” in the name of traditional values, anti-“wokeism” and God, actually neither Kennedy nor Eisenhower come to mind. 

Joseph Goebbels comes to mind:

Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.

Let us put to the side, for just a moment, the horrifying reality that fascism has captured the Republican Party and is sweeping like climate-sparked wildfire across Red America. The folly of this censorship and naked repression is obvious for wholly different reasons.

1. If you wish to protect children from sexual content, you’d better smash their smartphones with a ball peen hammer. Right now. Because the internet is a sex shop of infinite variety and a venue for acts so explicit as to educate you, the caring parent, in a world you may not know exists. You don’t have to delve into the Dark Web. Pornhub.com will do the trick. If you are still confused about how to view this stuff, just ask your third grader. He’s already been there. Probably a lot. Even if the grade-school library shelves featured Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, culling them would be a fool’s errand.

2. Are you one of those concerned parents who doesn’t mind if your teenager is sadistically bullied, or crippled with depression and self-loathing, or on the verge of suicide? Great! Because the books, and the sex-ed and the school counseling, and the candid discussion of homosexuality and the rest of the LGBTQ+ spectrum are often the difference between a happy, adjusted child and a fucking funeral. So by all means protect children from the literature that might possibly make them feel human, or feel empathy for their friends and classmates struggling for equilibrium. That’s exactly what Jesus wants you to do, asshole.

None of this rightwing activism is new. From the Ku Klux Klan to the Daughters of the American Revolution, to the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to the John Birch Society to Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, puritanical populist movements — all aligned with the political right — have tried throughout American history to impose their values system on American Society. And they have, as with Prohibition, sometimes succeeded.

In 1925, school teacher John Scopes was tried for violation of Tennessee’s Butler Act, for the crime of teaching evolution in public school. If you’ve seen the movie Inherit the Wind, you may recall the stirring, eloquent defense by Spencer Tracy in the role of a lawyer patterned after Clarence Darrow. What you may forget is that Scopes was convicted. Small-mindedness and religious zealotry are as old as the republic. But never before has a minority of shrill, bigoted voices so influenced the law in so many jurisdictions. The repression resides no longer in the whacko fringe but in the mainstream.

The model for legislation around conservative America is Florida’s House Bill 1557, known officially as the Parental Rights in Education Bill. Add-on laws, HB 1069, HB 1223 and (pending) HB 1320 are now collectively known as the “Don’t Say Gay” laws. Among their provisions is prohibiting the use of non-traditional gender pronouns and discussion of sexual orientation before 9th grade and permitting parents to sue schools for alleged violations. Though intentionally vague in its language, the legislation has triggered an onslaught in Florida libraries, lest the students be groomed and corrupted by the Great Pedophilia Conspiracy and globalist gay agenda. The Vero Beach High School principal is clearly not up on his Salman Rushdie. But you should be:

An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship — it is a crime against our nature as human beings.