I got up early this morning to do what guys in their late 60’s do at that hour, and then took a look at what passes for news on my phone.  I came across an article in the New York Times about how book-banning is back with a vengeance.

Parents, activists, school board officials and lawmakers around the country are challenging books at a pace not seen in decades. The American Library Association said in a preliminary report that it received an “unprecedented” 330 reports of book challenges, each of which can include multiple books, last fall.

“It’s a pretty startling phenomenon here in the United States to see book bans back in style, to see efforts to press criminal charges against school librarians,” said Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of the free-speech organization PEN America, even if efforts to press charges have so far failed.

Such challenges have long been a staple of school board meetings, but it isn’t just their frequency that has changed, according to educators, librarians and free-speech advocates — it is also the tactics behind them and the venues where they play out. Conservative groups in particular, fueled by social media, are now pushing the challenges into statehouses, law enforcement and political races.

The activists are groups with such ironic names as “Moms For Liberty” and who say they are the ones who should decide what their children should read, and while they’re at it, tell every other parent how to raise their kids, which makes a mockery of themselves. (In my own experience, parents who protest against books are doing a lousy job of raising their own kids, but that’s another rant.) What they’re really saying is that they don’t want their children to hear about the history that their own parents and grandparents created such as segregation and patriarchy. As for sex education, the parents who want to ban books that discuss being gay or trans while adding their ten-year-old to their family plan from Verizon are looking in the wrong place. Kids don’t need books to learn about that; check their back pocket. Or learn it the way I did: lurid stories told while smoking behind the neighbor’s garage.

Tangentially of the discussion about free speech — or rather the way the snowflakes on the right and the anti-vaxxers are framing it as an assault on their right to spread bullshit — I came across this epic call-out at Balloon Juice, where Annie Laurie found it. Here’s a bit of it. And I make no excuse for the salty language, and if it gives you the vapors, go and look at cat videos.

… Hey, I believe in open debate. Sure. Absolutely. Your anti-vaccine newsletter sucks. That guy on TV telling grandparents to be afraid of everything? He’s a vain asshole. The popular podcast dude who gets off beating up on trans people just for fun? I mean, he’s a moron who regularly fucks up Google searches.

I’d have more respect for conservative bloggers and talking heads and fussy millionaire comedians if they just said what they were thinking: fuck the old and the sick and anyone, really, who catches COVID-19 because I want to go to brunch. Fancy brunch.

I’d have more respect if they were honest and didn’t hide behind falsehoods. I would still think they were pieces of shit, though.

Feel free to disagree with me. It’s your right. I have the right to say or print whatever I want without interference from Johnny Law. So do you, and you, and yes, even you. This is why I can publish the following sentence: selling paid subscriptions to newsletters that knowingly peddle the low-hanging fruit of misinformation is immoral. Sure, to write is to manipulate a reader, sometimes for a paycheck or pleasure or to educate, and sometimes for political gain. That’s the game.

But there are too many right-wing political opportunists with giant bullhorns who have decided there is nothing but upside in telling whoever will listen that 2 + 2 equals whatever they tell you that day. Even if 2+2 equals die in an ICU with a tube down your throat because some evil jabroni told you to trust him about the COVID-19 vaccine…

… No one’s inalienable rights are compromised by little ol’ me pointing out that it is fucked-up to publish dishonest information that hurts people, even if that strategy is lucrative. You are not a free speech hero if you knowingly go into business with people who are either unfathomably cynical or simply out of thair minds and give them a platform from which they can announce that vaccines are dangerous, despite centuries of evidence to the contrary. That’s not free speech. It’s snake oil for the brain…

The freedom for free speech martyrs to shout “freedom!” is one of this country’s greatest pleasures. In a truly totalitarian regime, free speech martyrs don’t make any noises, except for whimpering in dungeon cells. I will never say “it can’t happen here” but not only can it happen here, it has also happened here, and it can happen again. But until such a tragic moment, the USA remains the home of the brave and the habitual whiner. Complain all you want, it’s your right. You’re not a victim, nor a martyr. You’re just an average Joe, making millions.

As a writer, it is my fervent hope that I write something powerful enough to get it banned from some jerkwater school district in Missitucky.

The Sounds of Silencing: Amanda Marcotte in Salon on the Republicans’ race to erase racist history.

When Republicans across the nation started storming school board meetings, in full-blown hysterics about something called “critical race theory,” the initial reaction of the non-Fox News-watcher was confusion. Very few even know what critical race theory is. It is not being taught to the vast majority of public school children, as it’s a high level academic theory used by legal scholars and sociologists, not 8th graders. But soon it became clear that “critical race theory” was being invoked as a scare term, exploiting this multisyllabic academic jargon as cover for what was, in actuality, an effort to censor any curricula or educational materials that taught kids unpleasant truths about the history of fascism, the struggle for civil rights, or the existence of LGBTQ people.

Republicans, unsurprisingly, faked umbrage at this claim, insisting repeatedly that they had no intention of removing standard classroom lessons on matters like the Holocaust, Brown vs. the Board of Education, or the March on Washington. Instead, their talking points were a jumbled, bad faith explosion of claims that they were actually against racism and just worried about “divisive” lessons. They kept this patter of nonsense up, even as Virginia’s successful GOP gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin ran ads celebrating a right-wing mother who tried to keep her son from reading “Beloved” by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, a book that was clearly only objectionable because it portrayed slavery in a bad light.

It turns out that liberal critics were right and conservatives were lying. “Critical race theory” was, in fact, just a scare term the right was using as cover for what is an all-out, nationwide war on teaching very basic lessons to kids about important historical events — including the civil rights movement and the Holocaust.

A national scandal erupted this week when it was discovered that a Tennessee school board pulled the famous graphic novel “Maus,” by Art Spiegelman, from their curriculum. The book is rightly regarded as a classic for its depiction not just of the brutalities of the Holocaust, but the lingering impacts on the survivors and their families. In response to the criticism, right-wing activist Christopher Rufo — who has bragged about inventing the use of “critical race theory” as a scare term for exactly this purpose — tried to deny that the book was being yanked for Holocaust denialism reasons. He insisted they just wanted a “better book” to teach.

Rufo’s dishonesty should be apparent to anyone who has read “Maus,” as there really is no better book to teach. But reading the minutes of the meeting erases all doubt that the objections to the book were rooted in a belief that the truth of the Holocaust should remain hidden. One board member, Tony Allman, explicitly said educators “don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff,” because it “shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids,” and “it is not wise or healthy.” Another member complained that the book showed a suicide caused by survivor’s guilt, claiming it somehow undermined efforts to teach “ethics to our kids.”

Needless to say, “Maus” does not “promote” killing kids or suicide. Insofar as it “promotes” anything, it’s an understanding of the dangers of fascism, and the inhumanity that racism breeds. And it’s those truths that clearly rattled the school board members. That’s what they don’t want young people exposed to.

The “Maus” scandal is just the tip of the iceberg, of course.

In Florida, the legislature is pushing through a ban of history education that causes “discomfort,” and despite claims to the contrary, there’s simply no way to teach about the history of lynching or slavery or Jim Crow without said discomfort. As Kathryn Joyce reported for Salon, one of the most immediate results was a school district in central Florida canceling a training seminar for teachers on how to teach subjects such as the March on Washington, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Montgomery bus boycott.

The behavior of Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, makes quite clear that the intent here is to make it too fraught for teachers to discuss any history of race in America at all. He’s been pushing for a law that would allow parents to comb over school curricula and sue school districts if they find anything they don’t like. That may sound “empowering” initially, but, as the fight over “Maus” demonstrates, the reality is that there are always people out there who simply don’t think any unpleasant facts about history should be taught. And giving parents this level of veto power would mean erasing any history but the occasional lesson about George Washington and the cherry tree. (Which didn’t actually happen.)

As Jon Skolnik reports for Salon, a Missouri school district banned “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, using the usual bad faith claims that the objections were somehow about graphic sex. But, of course, this fits the larger pattern of white parents throwing fits about books and lessons that tell the truth about racism, and especially about books like Morrison’s, which humanize the victims of racism.

In Williamson County, Tennessee, Moms for Liberty — a laughably false name for this pro-censorship group — tried to ban 31 books. It’s not hard to detect the history they’re trying to erase. Books that were targeted include “Martin Luther King, Jr. and the March on Washington,” “We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball,” and “Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation.” A couple of books about Greek mythology were also tossed on the list because heaven forbid kids learn about lost religions and start to ask hard questions about existing ones. Of the challenged books, one was outright banned — Newberry winner “Walk Two Moons,” which clearly offends by humanizing Native Americans. Seven other books are being hobbled with “restrictions” on what parts of the book kids are allowed to read. Targeted for censorship: Admitting that male seahorses nurture their young, a book that says it’s okay to have feelings, a book about the fight to desegregate schools, a book about how it’s okay for boys to like poetry, and a book that features interracial relationships.

So now the truth is out: Republicans weren’t upset about “critical race theory” or anything like it. It was a fake panic, propped up to cover for what they really want to do: Erase the history of racism from schools. As a side bonus, they also wish to force extremely rigid gender roles on children. It’s not just about attacking LGBTQ kids. This hysteria has reached the point of refusing to admit boys can like poetry or that fathers can care for babies.

Still, this exposure isn’t slowing Republicans down one bit.

Youngkin, who won by pretending to be a moderate who was opposed to fictional leftist extremism, is already showing his true colors as a Virginia governor. He’s calling on right-wing parents to report teachers for any lessons they deem “divisive.” As these previous reports show, that’s an expansive ask, as many parents clearly think it’s “divisive” to admit segregation happened, slavery was real, or the Holocaust was horrific. Youngkin’s intent is quite clearly to scare teachers into simply not teaching history, at least not in any way that’s truthful or remotely educational. Or to scare teachers into not teaching literature that humanizes people of color or LGBTQ people, or men who like poetry for that matter. As usual, despite their denials, Republicans really are behaving like the deplorables their critics say they are.

Doonesbury — Tweets from the twit.

The Wild World of School Board Meetings — Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker on the whackos storming the palaces of learning.

Late last month, the National School Boards Association, a group that has represented school boards since 1940, made an unusual request of the federal government. “Threats of violence and acts of intimidation” directed at school officials were escalating across the country, the association said, and it asked the Biden Administration to investigate and use “existing statutes, executive authority,” and “other extraordinary measures” to combat a phenomenon it likened to domestic terrorism. On Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland decried such incidents and ordered the F.B.I. to monitor them.

If you want some evidence of what the association and Garland were responding to, it’s easy to find in YouTube videos, and local news reports by the score—protesters fairly vibrating with January 6th energy as they disrupt school-board meetings, raging against mask mandates and other COVID precautions, or that favorite spectral horror, critical race theory. (The N.S.B.A. letter wearily explains that “critical race theory is not taught in public schools and remains a complex law school and graduate school subject well beyond the scope of a K-12 class.”) Since the summer, these confrontations have become social-media staples, familiar enough for “Saturday Night Live” to do a spot-on parody of them for its season opener.

After a school-board meeting in Williamson County, Tennessee, a group of protesters surrounded a doctor who had testified in favor of students wearing masks, shouting,“You’re a child abuser,” “We know who you are,” and “You’ll never be allowed in public again.” In San Diego County, California, in September, anti-mask protesters forced their way into a school-board meeting and tried to swear themselves in as the new, unelected members. At a chaotic meeting in Buncombe, North Carolina, parents opposed to a mask mandate announced that they, too, had “overthrown” the school board. Members of the far-right Proud Boys showed up twice, faces covered, at school-board meetings in Nashua, New Hampshire; in Vancouver, Oregon, Proud Boys gained access to school grounds during anti-mask protests, leading to a lockdown of the schools. At a Loudoun County, Virginia, school-board meeting, which was considering the district’s policies for transgender students and racial equity, riled-up conservatives got so out of hand that the board chair halted the proceedings while the police cleared the room.

Writing in the Washington Post recently, Adam Laats, a professor of education at Binghamton University SUNY, suggested that these outbursts can “be understood as a politics of petulance. At moments when American culture has taken some progressive turn, conservatives have consistently blamed a single culprit for indoctrinating vulnerable youth with radical ideas: public schools.” The attraction of school-board meetings for such displays of frustration, Laats told me, is “that they are generally so accessible; there’s an open-mike aspect to them.”

Laats has written a book, “The Other School Reformers,” about the history of conservative agitation around public schools, which makes clear that there are precedents for the current eruptions. Perhaps the most salient is a parents’ uprising in Kanawha County, West Virginia, in 1974, against the adoption of a new series of literature textbooks that some people thought promoted anti-American sentiments. The protests evolved into a boycott of the district’s schools, attracting national media attention, and soon turned violent. Textbook opponents shot up empty school buses and classrooms, bombed the school-board building, and threw rocks at parents who were still taking their children to school. Though the textbooks were ultimately adopted, and the rage over them seemed to fade, the West Virginia parents’ revolt had a wider impact on social conservatism. It helped launch the modern homeschooling and Christian-school movements, Heath Brown, a political scientist at John Jay College who has studied homeschooling activists, says, because some parents peeled away from public schools altogether in the aftermath of the boycott. The West Virginia textbook battle propelled the Heritage Foundation, then a small upstart organization, now a conservative-policy behemoth, onto the national stage. Heritage, Laats shows, provided free legal counsel to the protesters and drew connections between their local crusade and the broader defense of parental rights and liberties.

Conservative groups, including Heritage, are clearly hoping for a similar outcome today. In a piece on the Heritage Web site, Katharine Cornell Gorka points out what she saw as a bright side to all the at-home schooling that kids had been doing during the pandemic: “Whether it’s age-inappropriate sex education, critical race theory, or anti-American history, parents are seeing more of what their children are learning–thanks to COVID’s virtual learning–and they don’t like it.” And parental ire over masks and anti-racism education, stoked by national figures such as Tucker Carlson, on Fox, and Charlie Kirk, of Turning Point USA, has helped galvanize school-board recall efforts, promote new candidates for the boards and for other local offices, and push legislative bills. (Twenty-eight states have restricted the teaching of critical race theory, according to the education-news Web site Chalkbeat.) The rage has also spurred the growth of new organizations, with names like Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. An account of the movement in Politico notes that “tapping into the trickle-up anger over racism education is now a unifying force in campaigns for Congress, governor and among Republicans with presidential ambitions.”

Yet what’s most striking about so many of these school-board spectacles is not their political valence but the sense they exude of an anonymous comments section coming to life. They seem to represent the trollification of real-life local politics. There might be legitimate, even passionate, debate to be had about the wearing of masks. (In the United Kingdom, for instance, schoolchildren are not required to wear them, and even here not all public-health experts agree with the C.D.C. that they are necessary.) But, in so many cases, legitimate debate is not what’s on offer. Online, the thinking usually goes, people sometimes say the kinds of venomous things they wouldn’t in person; but, in these public forums, they seem all too ready to. They boo and jeer at people who express an opinion different from theirs. They find ways to bring up and rant about child-trafficking conspiracies. In one notorious case, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, audience members laughed as a high-school junior, Grady Knox, described losing his grandmother to COVID. A woman behind him held a sign that read “Let our Kids Smile.” The “kids,” or, more often in this kind of rhetoric, “the children,” are usually props and symbols in these scenes; this is a parents’ war, and they mostly don’t want to hear the students speak. “At these school-board meetings, students have tried a lot to get on the docket,” Laats told me. “They’ve been on the agenda at some points, but they’re being frozen out of the discussion because parents are shouting and yelling and cops have to clear them out.”

Amy Evans, a pediatrician who practices near the sparsely vaccinated Grundy County, Tennessee, told the Washington Post this week that “she has seen more infections in the last two months than the rest of the pandemic combined.” (Just seventeen per cent of young people aged twelve to seventeen have been immunized in that state; nationwide, the figure is fifty-two per cent.) Some of her patients wanted to wear masks to school, she said, but were scared. “They were more concerned about the backlash from parents who would be opposed to masks,” she said. “The adults aren’t making it easy for kids to do the right thing.” The Justice Department’s efforts may help, though they could also provoke more fury against a familiar target: the federal government. The onus is on the adults in the room to give up on dreams of going viral and act better.

Doonesbury — Where are we?