Crooked Media - What A Day: Book worms

As the right-wing culture wars have intensified over the last decade, their effects have been felt the most acutely in American schools, and we should all be extremely fucking concerned! 
 

• According to the nonprofit American Library Association, Republicans attempted a record 1,269 library-book bans and restrictions in 2022. Another record, 2,571 individual book titles were targeted for censorship in 2022, up from 1,858 in 2021. Attempts to ban materials were directed at school or classroom libraries and public libraries alike. In an op-ed in the Tampa Bay Times, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona stressed the Biden administration’s opposition to book bans as Florida becomes ground zero for censorship and counterfactual curriculum. 
   

• Last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed legislation requiring Florida schools to seek community input on the materials available to children in their libraries. In many ways, Florida has become a sort of sanctuary state for right-wing parents and reactionaries who believe that they, not scholars or education experts, know best when it comes to curriculum in every subject, don’t want their children to learn the truth about the world, and take a particularly censorious view of education. Last summer, the DeSantis administration led an overhaul of the state’s civics curriculum, stressing American exceptionalism, “patriotism,” and downplaying the shameful history of the Founding Fathers’ own role as slave owners and slavery supporters. 
   

• This week, the principal at Tallahassee Classical charter school  was forced out after an art teacher showed Michaelangelo’s “David” statue to sixth-grade students. Yes, an art teacher showed one of the most famous pieces of art in human history during…an art class. The horror! The outcry from parents was swift, one of them called the nude statue “pornographic” (lol). It’s also worth noting that although this particular charter school is notably conservative, it’s explicitly a “classical” school whose mission is to provide “a content-rich classical education in the liberal arts” and requires teaching of the Renaissance to sixth graders. You cannot remove Michaelangelo’s “Creation of Man” or Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” or da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” and claim you’re teaching a complete Renaissance curriculum. But boy are they trying!

Unfortunately, what happens in Florida doesn’t stay in Florida, and conservatives are hoping the Sunshine State becomes a model for sweeping changes all the way up to the federal level.
 

• The House GOP narrowly passed legislation today called the Parents’ Bill of Rights Act (eyes roll up atop my brain, an early priority of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The bill would require schools to publish course studies and a list of all books kept in libraries, as well as underscore parental prerogatives to meet with educators, speak at school board meetings, and examine school budgets. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) successfully added an amendment that would require schools to report when transgender girls join girls’ athletic teams and denote which bathrooms they are allowed to use. 

• The bill is DOA in the Senate, but it’s a clear harbinger of what’s to come if and when the Republican Party regains majorities again. It also exposes the core of what they’re after. Members of the House Freedom Caucus, the furthest-right lunatics in Congress, tried unsuccessfully to add provisions to the Parental Bill of Rights Act that called for abolishing Department of Education programs in schools and giving vouchers for parents to send their children to private schools with public funds. That amendment may have failed for now, but it’s a clear shot across the bow that was ultimately supported by over 100 House Republicans. 
   

All of these efforts—from book bans, to nationalistic curriculum changes, to the campaign for “parental rights” to supersede all other learning objectives—have the same goal: the complete eradication of public education. Cardona said in his op-ed on the subject, “What we teach in our nation’s classrooms speaks to the essence of who we are as Americans.” Conservative efforts to erase certain parts of our history and entire demographics of Americans from our national narrative shows exactly who they are.

Get ready to be transported back to 1973 New York City with STIFFED, the new podcast from Crooked Media and iHeartRadio. 
 

Less than a week after trolling the world into believing he would be arrested this week (and using it to raise $1.5 million from his swarms of loyal followers), disgraced former president Donald Trump is using his deranged social media platform Truth Social once again to warn that “potential death and destruction” would result if he’s charged by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for his crimes related to the hush-money payments he arranged for adult-film actress Stormy Daniels in 2016. Just hours later, the D.A.’s office discovered a threatening letter addressed to Bragg containing white powder in its mailroom. New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection determined that the substance was not dangerous, but the DA’s office remains on high alert, as along with the powder, the envelope contained a single piece of paper with the typewritten words, “ALVIN: I AM GOING TO KILL YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!” How subtle.

One of Trump’s innumerable lawyers Evan Corcoran sat before a grand jury today and was forced to answer questions related to the former president’s “alleged” “mishandling” of classified documents that he took to and hid at Mar-a-Lago. 

Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News “weak,” contradicting most other legal experts, but we’re sure his motives are pure!

Gov. Brad Little (R-ID) will make the final decision as to whether to add firing squad as a method of execution in Idaho after both of the state’s legislative chambers approved it. We speak for everyone when we say: What the actual fuck?

Spain, the world’s largest producer of olive oil, is likely to halve its output this year due to drought, which will drive up prices worldwide. 

President Biden’s approval rating has taken a significant hit, maybe it has something to do with him tacking to the right on crime, drilling in the arctic, and immigration?

A right-wing federal appeals court blocked President Biden’s order that federal employees must be vaccinated against Covid. Conservative jurisprudence is clear on the fact that all the authority of the executive branch is vested in the president of the United States (unless the president is a Democrat).

The United States Senate confirmed Gary Gensler to head the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 14, 2021, the same day that cryptocurrency company Coinbase went public on the U.S. stock market. Gensler has been critical of the crypto sector from the beginning, (rightly) characterizing it as bursting with fraud (hi, Sam Bankman-Fried), and his agency has been embroiled in a series of skirmishes with crypto executives even as the industry continues to fall in on itself. On Wednesday, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong posted that after an investigation of the company’s assets, the SEC delivered a formal notice to prepare for enforcement actions. Cryptocurrency companies believe they operate in a regulatory gray-area, and Gensler has thus questioned whether crypto firms rely on a business model that is fundamentally illegal. Coinbase is prepared to go to court with the SEC, in a case that will almost certainly determine the fate of the whole crypto industry.

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Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) vetoed a sweeping Republican bill that would ban transgender-youths’ access to gender-affirming care and restrict the bathrooms they can use. Props to Gov. Beshear for not backing down to these freaks even in an election year.

The National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel issued a memo that all non-disparagement clauses in severance packages have been retroactively voided after a ruling in February invalidating them. 

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) officially repealed Michigan’s right-to-work law. Unions and fair wages for all!!

The Illinois House of Representatives passed a bill this week that would prohibit banning books or other materials from libraries in response to partisan or doctrinal pressure.