— medit8now (@medit8now) January 30, 2022
Thanks for making us an international embarrassment, Minn County!
Graphic novel Maus tops Amazon best-sellers after school ban https://t.co/dQIur4UGgI
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) January 31, 2022
This has gone beyond "traditional values" or rube ignorance or "Moral Majority" stuff, which all sounds quaint now. This is just *panic* by white people who will destroy their children's libraries because they're hopped up on cortisol and don't know how to stop it being 2022. https://t.co/ODVmJf3OKF
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) February 1, 2022
Wise commentor Kay:
When you read about the book bannings and state laws banning discussions of civil rights, be aware that this is the context:
@RonBrownstein ·17h
Kids of color now 55% of all public K-12 students nationwide & a majority in 23 states and 93/100 largest school districts. No coincidence this push to ban books & control what schools can teach about historic & current racial inequity is unfolding now.It’s white people directing what is taught in majority non-white public schools. The majority of the public school population is non-white now. Makes sense that the schools that serve mostly non-white kids and families would move toward incorporating civil rights history and discussions of diversity, right? Seems less like an attempt to indoctrinate/shame white kids and more like an attempt to serve the kids who are actually in these schools?
i'd say the single biggest reason that people believe white supremacism is deeply embedded in american society is probably all of the evidence https://t.co/y370N0hlF5
— World Famous Art Thief (@CalmSporting) February 1, 2022
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich claims her group doesn’t want to ban an MLK book, but does want to ban schools from teaching that Ruby Bridges encountered the N-word.
Tina says, “parents need to have that conversation” about the N-word, not “the school district.” pic.twitter.com/YzFhhalpf0
— PatriotTakes ???? (@patriottakes) January 31, 2022
Simply unreal: A GOP bill in New Hampshire targets "negative" depictions of US history. Its explicit goal: To ensure teachers retain "loyalty" and don't push "subversive doctrines."
This McCarthyite effort could be a model for more to come.
My latest:https://t.co/8aVf9cY2cb
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) January 31, 2022
dexwood
These proudly ignorant bigots never learn that banning books always makes people want to buy them, read them, know them.
dm
Art Cullen, Pulitzer winning columnist of the Storm Lake, Iowa Weekly Times writes of Iowa’s Republican legislature: “Bridges are failing in Iowa, but the legislature wants to ban books”:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/01/what-book-banning-tells-us-about-politics-in-iowa/
Percysowner
@dexwood: True, but once the hoopla is over, the books are less available, or no longer available and people move on and forget. It’s great that people are buying the books, but it’s short term gain, long term loss.
RSA
Somehow the people who vilify participation trophies for children also argue that presenting the good and bad of U.S. history will be deeply harmful to children.
debbie
Are there any reports of kids pushing back against the parents?
japa21
@Percysowner: Not sure that is correct. Specially since these are not universal bannings. Books banned in the past are readily available now.
debbie
@RSA:
Isn’t protecting their delicate children the ultimate participation trophy?
Mathguy
“Deplorables.” Hillary had it right.
Sure Lurkalot
@debbie: Yet they are not concerned about active shooter drills?
dexwood
@Percysowner: People move on about everything these days. Books endure. Book lovers are hard core.
Kay
Here’s the New Hampshire ‘loyalty’ bill, backed by their “libertarians”:
They updated a Cold War-era law by adding some additional speech bans.
japa21
I would like to think that the GOP is going too far. Apparently some OK Republicans have introduced a bill where parents can sue a teacher for teaching something that goes against deep seated religious beliefs. I doubt it will pass, but the mere thought they think this way should doom the party for all time.
But the GOP is crafty. They will hit all sort of hot buttons, be it sex education, CRT, religion, etc. A person might think most of the buttons are ridiculous but that one item on the GOP agenda makes sense to them. A biggie is trans bathroom rights. Sure, to us it is ridiculous, but a sizable part of the country is concerned about it and will make it the one issue they will vote on. Same with every other item on the GOP hit list.
That is what makes this whole process so insidious and potentially successful for the GOP.
NotMax
McMinn County.
laura
I want to know who’s funding this American apartheid movement and until I hear different, I’ll presume the usual domestic suspects and a couple few foreign interests. Hope Adam Silverman weighs in.
bbleh
Anyone want to bet against some form of updated Un-American Activities Committee if the Reps take the House in the midterms?
Kay
Any. Nothing negative in the whole history. Every historical event was fabulous.
dm
@debbie: Kids are starting “Banned Book Clubs”:
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/national-international/how-some-students-are-responding-to-book-bans-in-their-schools/3529622/
Book bans “make reading cool again”:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/dec/23/us-book-bans-conservative-parents-reading
laura
@bbleh: wwouldn’t be me…
Sure Lurkalot
@laura: I believe the Koch sucker still alive and the DeVos family are funding a lot of the moral panic about books and CRT. Dismantling the public education system has been their goal for decades.
Anne Laurie
Yes, the worry is (has always been) that a ‘banned’ book simply becomes invisible to kids ten years or a generation from now. They can’t know what to look for, because they don’t know it exists!
Honestly, I see this as one advantage to our New! Ever-Connected! Social Media Age. Today’s kids don’t have to try sneaking a banned book out of the public library — or reading a copy of Playboy at the drug store — they can access links to EVERYTHING on their phones. (Or their school-sponsored laptops, probably, since I have more faith in kids’ control-hacking skillz than I do in the public schools’.)
Even when the kids don’t read the whole book — most won’t — they can scan tweets / instagram / tiktok / whatevs and see the ‘controversial’ bits for themselves. It won’t make them respect their elders any more than they already do, which of course is NOT VERY MUCH…
Omnes Omnibus
@dexwood:
Weren’t there bands who wanted to get the Parental Warning label because it boosted sales? Hoist petard etc.
Kay
The same people who want to put cameras in every room and record every interaction are fighting public records requests on the snitch lines they set up.
The governor’s claim is the snitches are writing to him personally, so no one may view the allegations.
NotMax
History interlude.
dexwood
@Omnes Omnibus: Probably. I went out of my way to buy warning label CDs. And Zappa refuted Tipper Gore’s desire for censorship pretty effectively.
Baud
Do any BJ authors want us to get their books banned? Maybe a special Authors in our midst thread to coordinate?
Baud
@Kay:
My dog’s day care has a live stream. I like spying on them.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: I don’t want to kink shame, but damn!
dexwood
@Baud: Everyone needs a hobby.
NotMax
Tennessee, also home to the Scopes trial, lest we forget.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
@dexwood:
You jest, but now it occurs to me that I doubt parents would like the idea that videos of their kids in school are being broadcast over the internet.
Raven
@RSA: thank you
Kay
@Baud:
I would have so hated it as a child. This is their thing! Can they leave them alone for a second?
I would protest this. Turn it around on them. “I’ll need a room apart from the monitoring for my child. Police states make her cry – she said that the other night ‘mommy, the veritable police state atmosphere at my school makes me cry’.
VOR
@Omnes Omnibus: years ago I saw a presentation by someone involved in the early days of Red Bull. Some government demanded they put a warning label on the cans. They asked if there was a size limit for the warning label – the bigger, the better it worked for their target market.
dexwood
@Baud: It was bad enough for me as a student when all the nuns kept reminding me that God was watching. Cameras, too!
Sure Lurkalot
@Baud: The kids would hate it too. A lot of kids wouldn’t turn the video on their Zoom classrooms.
StringOnAStick
My oldest sister is a hard core southern Baptist and would not let her kids attend the local college (now U) because “they teach evolution!!!!!” . All 3 kids moved on to other religions after being forced to get their undergraduate degrees at Bob Jones U, and one came out and married his partner last year.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
I miss the old days when Karens would freak out over Judy Blume’s books and Judas Priest albums
NotMax
@dexwood
Cosmic voyeur.
//
mrmoshpotato
Someone with a Twitter account should inform Tommy about his Rethuglican party over the past 40 years.
James E Powell
@Omnes Omnibus:
Not sure about the bands, some might have considered it a joke more than an insult, but record companies liked the sticker to promote sales.
NWA had a song “Parental Discretioon Iz Advised.”
mrmoshpotato
@Kay: Creepers.
GregMulka
An always on livestream of children is an abusive parent’s wet-dream. Your wife left and took out the protective order against you? Went through all the hoops to make sure you never know where she or the kids you abused are? Now you can just scan the live feeds until you find the kids again and do whatever you were going to do.
Or, in our country that bans books but not guns, a shooter is streaming the classroom to his phone to make damn sure he got everyone.
Mallard Filmore
@Kay:
When I was in grade school, learning about the history of Virginia, the day the first slaves arrived was called a “Red Letter Day”. Is this day still considered a positive? Did it change to negative? Up in the air and dangerous to teach?
Kay
@mrmoshpotato:
Agree. They are creepy. I also never want to hear another word about “helicopter parents” or “raising independent and self sufficient kids” from these people.
Covid was tough on public schools. They’re attacking them now with renewed vigor because they know they’re weakened and they think they can reach their lifetime ideological goal of taking them out. I guess we’ll see which side wins. I’m betting they overreach and there’s a backlash.
Kay
@Mallard Filmore:
I also think it’s weird that all of their kids (allegedly) immediately identify exclusively with the historical bad guys. When you saw a picture of a Klan rally as a kid were you “yup- that’s where I’d be, with them”.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Does that mean you have a dog again now?
Gvg
@debbie: there is a comic book store owner that heard about the ban and knew it would increase demand in kids in that county. He thought that was one of the greatest graphic novels ever and always had it on sale. Anyway he ordered a 100 and offered it free to any kid with an address in that county who wanted one. When I read about it about 60 were claimed. In many cases, the parents were telling him it was ok with them. He was paying postage too.
I have never read them and checked to see if I could get some. There is a weeks long back order so I haven’t. My nephew is 14, dyslexic, and prefers graphic novels anyway. I wanted to pass it on to him.
Subsole
@dexwood:
“What does the diary tell you that it doesn’t tell us?”
“It tells me that goose-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books, instead of burning them.”
danielx
Yep. Joe Hill never existed, the Ludlow Massacre never happened, Henry Ford was a humanitarian who never would have dreamed of having Harry Bennett in charge of beating and shooting strikers, and the list of negative history to be wiped from memory could go on forever.
Bill Arnold
@Baud:
Oh yes, absolutely. Dark(hidden/anonymous) markets of hackers selling video feed credentials for cameras pointed at children to pedophiles (or other interested adults) would quickly develop, as would markets for recordings of the same. (With imperfect countermeasures like blocking known proxies/tor exit nodes, ensuring unending outrage and scandal, and providing a continuous income stream for surveillance vendors and for the public officials that they bribe.)
These bills could probably be killed by propagating plausible scare scenarios like this.
Subsole
@Mathguy:
No. She was too kind.
I would call these people white trash, but they are far, FAR beneath any white trash I ever knew.
Scout211
When our youngest was in grade school, the school district chose a literature series that included stories that had themes with fantasy and magic. The local evangelical churches went nuts and protested all over the media. It was shocking to me, actually. This is California and these evangelical leaders could not fathom that school age children could read a story with fantasy and magic without becoming blasphemous heathens.
One of my colleagues in the mental health field was actually filmed for a television segment supporting the claims that fantasy and magic are harmful to a child’s mental health. That really disappointed me.
It finally blew over and the district finished out the year with the snowflake parents being allowed to remove their children from the reading program. But I often wondered if these people will ever see the forest for the trees.
But I’m sure they took their kids to every new Disney movie release. No fantasy or magic there. Sigh.
Leto
The Imgur community has been wonderful in this regard, showing tons of support not just for Maus but shedding light on what state legislatures are doing wrt trying to ban books. One of the posts a user put up was a series of tweets about the specific importance of Maus within the Jewish community, and also the broader message that Maus was Jewish centered first and foremost. It wasn’t designed to have a happy ending, or to make people feel good about themselves at the end of the story. I believe that some of the BJ community have spoken about this previously, but I thought these series of tweets were invaluable. (For those that don’t use Imgur, it’s a site designed to share images. So it’s not taking you to Twitter, it’s essentially screen shots of the Tweet thread.)
Why Maus Matters
Subsole
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
Oh, I’m sure they’re still ass-fractured over those, too.
I truly cannot imagine living like them. Such a miserable, empty, narrow little husk of an existence. Just darkness ahead and whips behind, as Mr Pratchett once observed.
Redshift
@japa21:
Readily available doesn’t solve the problem of kids being introduced to them and made aware so they know to look for them. There’s a reason books are taught in class and we have school libraries.
It’ll be harder than it used to be to keep “objectionable” materials away from kids who want to find them. But it won’t help the kids who don’t yet know what they’re missing.
debbie
@Gvg:
The Maus books are great.
SFAW
@japa21:
Yes, it’s really a doubleplusgood situation to ban various concepts and ideas (and the artifacts/objects which address/discuss them), because that shit will never take hold. Just like Citizens United, etc.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Subsole:
My old college friend from Missouri has the word for them: shitbirds. Pithy yet encompassing.
Redshift
@Kay: Our Gov/Lt gov/AG in Virginia are such assholes. The AG has a spokeswoman who’s reminiscent of the foxbot spokespersons Betty talks about with DeSantis’ people.
The AG fired the counsels for UVA (which everyone has heard about) and also George Mason University. The spokeswoman insisted it wasn’t political, insisted the two had been “controversial appointments” (they weren’t) and said the AG “wants the university counsel to return to giving legal advice based on law, and not the philosophy of a university” while providing no examples. (One is probably advising the university they could mandate vaccines, which is based on law, just not on wingnut doctrine.) Then for GMU, he appointed a replacement who’s the wife of a major GOP donor who works for the Koch brothers. Yeah, totally non-political.
Subsole
@Scout211: Y’know what this kiiind of reminds me of, just a little?
Me and my friends used to play D&D growing up. We all got to endure a couple of ridiculous moral panics in the 80s and 90s. Somehow, people got it into their heads that this role playing game was a Satanic programming manual.
Like, grown-ass people genuinely thought these were some sort of devil-flavored MKULTRA trigger program for their kids. Preachers were preaching against it and there were stupid daytime made for tv specials about teens murdering their parents because ‘they thought the game was real’. It was like the inbred bastard clubfoot offspring of the death metal panics from back in the 70s.
For all their hyperventilating, our habits changed not a whit. We snuck books to each other (or got grandma to take us to the comics store and just bought them direct! :) ).
All because our folks were afraid we were gonna fail our roll vs Satan and go try and be necromancers, or some shit, I guess.
Exasperating did not begin to cover it.
I mean, we knew they were worried because they loved us. And that was kind of sweet. But on the other hand, it was REALLY insulting that they thought we couldn’t tell the difference between playing pretend and, y’know, actual physical reality.
These folks – whether they realize it or not – are basically telling their children that they are too weak to handle the honest truth. Which is…um…probably not going to produce the attitude they are aiming for in young Mopsy and Flopsy.
Subsole
@Steeplejack (phone): A fine descriptor.
The committee would also have accepted the term ‘peckerwoods’.
SFAW
@Subsole:
Can’t see that term without thinking of this
Leto
@laura: You’re not wrong:
US conservatives linked to rich donors wage campaign to ban books from schools
*this took me way too long to find again
Juju
@Percysowner: When I did my teaching internship, my mentor teacher used “Maus” and “Number the Stars” when we covered WWII in social studies and linked that subject matter with those two books in her language arts class. Number the Stars” was the primary book and “Maus” was a bonus read. If you actually read either of those books, you will not forget them. I don’t see how the sale of the graphic novel “Maus” could have a downside like you described. It is an unforgettable novel. It’s not a loss.
Sebastian
Every banned booked becomes mandatory for college admission, military service, federal contracts.
Sebastian
@Sebastian:
College degree requires having read all banned books.
Eligibility for federal office requires passing of test for banned books.
Man, I could go on.
Ambassadorships require passing test for banned books.
One or more Presidential debates, or any election for Federal office, is solely about banned books.
Holding any public office or function, say election worker, requires having read (and tested) on x# of banned books.
Sebastian
@Sebastian:
Every fucking judge in this great country of ours must read all banned books.
Anne Laurie
And now I have acquaintances in their 20s reminiscing about how much fun it was when their dad — or grandad — taught them to play D&D as a wholesome family activity!
First time this happened, I was delighted to come home & share the news with my OG, hex-paper dungeon-master Spousal Unit. He forgave me… eventually.