I’m sure you’re heard all about the right’s latest crusade to ban books. They’re really going to town:
[School libraries are] a battleground in an unprecedented effort by parents and conservative politicians in Texas to ban books dealing with race, sexuality and gender from schools, an NBC News investigation has found. Hundreds of titles have been pulled from libraries across the state for review, sometimes over the objections of school librarians, several of whom told NBC News they face increasingly hostile work environments and mounting pressure to pre-emptively pull books that might draw complaints.
Records requests to nearly 100 school districts in the Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin regions — a small sampling of the state’s 1,250 public school systems — revealed 75 formal requests by parents or community members to ban books from libraries during the first four months of this school year. In comparison, only one library book challenge was filed at those districts during the same time period a year earlier, records show. A handful of the districts reported more challenges this year than in the past two decades combined.
I’m sure you’ve also heard that the right wing is hostile to China and is pushing for confrontation. You have no doubt noticed that they routinely refer to them as the “Chinese Communist Party” nowadays, just as if it was 1952 all over again.
As usual, they have become what they purport to abhor:
As the Chinese government tightened its grip over its ethnic Uyghur population, it sentenced one man to death and three others to life in prison last year for textbooks drawn in part from historical resistance movements that had once been sanctioned by the ruling Communist Party.
The Uyghers are Muslims, so I think it’s fair to say that book banning isn’t the only thing the American right has in common with the “Chinese Communist Party.” Imagine that.