It is strange how free speech advocates seem to worry a lot more about “cancel culture” than the literal banning of books as part of the fight against “critical race theory” or some other fabricated boogeyman.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
These proposals were so widespread in some GOP circles that they actually became state law in 2 states (Florida and Texas) before being struck down as being a blatantly unconstitutional violation of the first amendment for being compelled speech. Note that in both contexts "struck down" does not refer to a final ruling, but rather an injunction that will remain in place until the final disposition of the case.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/12/01/texas-social-media-l...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/30/florida...
And the interpretation of the law as "compelling speech" is not just mine alone. The federal judge that issued the preliminary injunction in Florida described it this way:
> The legislation compels providers to host speech that violates their standards—speech they otherwise would not host—and forbids providers from speaking as they otherwise would.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flnd.37...
Every single person who says YouTube isn't allowed to remove videos is advocating compelled publication.
Every single person who says Facebook isn't allowed to remove anti-vax misinformation is demanding compelled publication.
The list goes on and on. And there are a whole lot of them who claim to be doing it because they're free speech advocates.
> their real complaint is that some community won't let them come in
The "community" is usually a giant multinational corporation like Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Amazon. I'm sure you can find some "free speech advocates" that complain when a neighborhood association denies them a protest permit, or an admin on a small forum bans them, but that's not exactly steel-manning their cause, is it?
*While schools have a legitimate right to decide which books they'll stock in their libraries, this book is both already in their library, and important enough, that the shorthand of calling it a "ban" seems appropriate. They do claim they'll replace it with a book providing equivalent lessons, but that doesn't mean that this book isn't getting banned, just that (taking them at their word) their motives aren't anti-semitic.
Freedom looks simple on paper but remember that we live in a society where everyone has to get along. And screwing with people's childhood sets them back for life. You can never get it back.
I can think of a few opportunists who have latched onto him and dabbled in the cane l culture backlash stuff in the past, but they’re opportunists so of course they’re also hypocrites.
Who do you mean specifically?
[edit] it seems some people disagree. I’d be happy to hear what people think I’m missing, maybe I have the wrong read on this.
The fight against CRT is now a mainstream conservative mission. These are the same people who have spent years advocating for free speech when it comes to tech companies but are fine censoring the schools. It is completely hypocritical.
I guess I’m just not sure which specific people you mean.
Certainly there exist conservatives who hate being censored but love playing censor, that’s nothing new. I’m not sure it’s even hypocritical, they just have values I find to be pretty awful.
Of the people you’ve named below only Paul has any history of arguing for the freedom to say things he doesn’t personally like. The rest just complain when speech they like is curtailed, and they may use the phrase.
I can call a pizza salad, and sing its praises all day, but that doesn’t mean I like salad, or advocate for it.
You’re right that Paul is being hypocritical though.
Most of these people glommed onto the issue after it was made popular with the base by folks like Hawley and Rufo. It’s important to make distinctions when talking about where ideas come from.
A very good test of peoples' sincerity in this territory is to first see how well what they claim of others applies to the speaker themselves. You will frequently find that their accusations serve equally well as admissions of guilt.
Did you read the minutes of the meeting? The content that is against school board policy is enumerated and there is a request to replace the material with something that can teach equivalent lessons.
> I've got enough faith from the Director of Schools down to the newest hire in this building, that you can take that module and rewrite it and make it do the same thing. Our children need to know about the Holocaust, they need to understand that there are several pieces of history, Mr. Bennett, that shows depression or suppression of certain ethnicities. It's not acceptable today. We've got to accept people for who and what they are… But Rob, the wording in this book is in direct conflict of some of our policies… I move that we remove this book from the reading series and challenge our instructional staff to come with an alternative method of teaching the Holocaust.
Believing that it’s more important to protect middle schoolers from mice that say "god damn" than it is to convey the horrors of the camps is white fragility politics in action. Infantilization to serve fascist ends.
1. https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1486732376369631234?s=2...
Did you read the minutes or are you assuming these are just dumb, racist, country-bumpkins? They literally address exactly this point.
From the minutes (regarding removing this book):
> My bigger concern is that this is probably the tip of the iceberg of what is out there.
1) I ask you to refrain from personal attacks if you want me to continue to engage.
2) I feel no moral compunction to read a twenty page supporting document to make a one-line comment about not trusting people's claims uncritically.
3) Having now read that document, my opinion hasn't changed. One person tries a couple of times to address the bigger picture about what problematic books are in the curriculum. In both cases he is almost immediately shut down by the rest of the committee who want to discuss this particular book.
I don't expect you or anyone else on HN to read the supporting text, but I do expect some level of empathy, assumption of good faith, and seeing past sensationalism. Instead I see a lot of cargo culting, demonizing, and propagation of incorrect information.
Having listened to an agonizing number of school board meetings, and having family that is involved in school administration, there are reasons to not let a topic expand past the original scope for the sake of the board, the parents, and everyone else involved.
The right has taken on "free speech" as a cause lately. Big Tech needs to be defunded because Twitter kicked out Trump, etc. It pushes a narrative that the left is against free speech and the right is for it, but as usual, both sides agree they are happy when their tribe wins.
>Regardless of why this decision was made, we’re in a climate where a sustained attack is being made on our schools, our teachers, and the truth. The anti-Critical Race Theory furor ginned up by Republican think tanks for political gain morphed into an excuse for right wing folks to try to cancel diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and things they don’t agree with in general — and now Conservative book-banning is really having a moment.
Of course I explicitly remember listening to Limbaugh in the 90s or so as he made fun of the “liberal fad” of listening to kids feelings and “protecting them from harm” or having to deal with anything that might be hard or painful. Can’t punish Bobby it might hurt his self esteem.
Isn’t that where the term liberal snowflake came from? That they were so fragile they had to be coddled and couldn’t handle the real world?
And here we are now. What’s good for the goose, I guess.
Well I guess the kids can't see the phrase "god damn" or see a drawing of a naked woman when they are learning about the industrialized murder of millions of people. Do you not see how crazy that is? These these kids aren't eight. They are teenagers. They are old enough to learn about these things. This policy is asinine.
The discussion at the meeting was literally about keeping the same lessons but using a source that didn't contain specific words and images that violated board policy. They weren't trying to censor violence or descriptions thereof.
> Now that I have provided that do you still feel what I said was a "straw man"?
I don't see any concrete examples provided, so yes, I still feel it's a straw man.
>The discussion at the meeting was literally about keeping the same lessons but using a source that didn't contain specific words and images that violated board policy.
Some states and boards have used the exact same method to include language in lessons to say slaves in the South had it better before they got freed and that slavery wasn't always evil. It is a common tactic to downplay events from the past that make people uncomfortable but humanity has shown that we tend to repeat such events so teaching them is important.
>I don't see any concrete examples provided, so yes, I still feel it's a straw man.
You could have asked for examples and I would have provided them but I do find it interesting that you didn't provide examples in your own post, you did exactly what I did and posted your opinion. Holding others to a standard you do not follow yourself isn't a productive way to have a discussion.
I hope you have a pleasant reset of your day.
The board specifically doesn’t want to change the lessons being taught, just the material chosen to teach it because it violates board policies.
Just because a work covers an important topic doesn’t mean it’s appropriate in all contexts, regardless of the quality of that work (e.g. I wouldn’t want my children watching Schindler’s List at their current age, but they should watch it when they are at the appropriate level of maturity).
This will be my last response on this topic but, in the future please review what you have previously written as you appear to have misremembered what you wrote previously.
Sources: Zinn; Loewen
Fancy-sounding principles about government don't matter in this debate. Look at the lack of right-wing outcry over the canceling of Colin Kaepernick. It's just about power, and doing whatever it takes to make sure the "right people" have it.
If you don't think there's a problem with the government banning books from school curriculum for political reasons -- if you don't think that has anything to do with freedom of speech, then I don't see how you have a free speech problem with anything at all. None of the cancel culture that people complain about is illegal or unconstitutional. That doesn't mean it can't be harmful to free expression, but in contrast, "representation with taxation" can actually be unconstitutional if the "representation" people ask for is suppression of political speech.
It is not my job to tell people whether or not they should be concerned with cancel culture. But anyone who is concerned about cancel culture and not concerned with educational book bans, or laws that restrict what topics teachers can talk to students about, or restrictions on conversations about sexual orientations/identities at school or with medical professionals, or any of the other speech laws being floated by Republican governments right now -- that person clearly is not interested in free speech itself, they just have an agenda and are using free speech as a convenient narrative tool in pursuit of that agenda.
People can be legitimately concerned about cancel culture as a free speech issue, but I'm not going to take anyone seriously who says that cancel culture is real and actual government censorship isn't.
It's not banned for political reasons, at least from my reading of it. It's banned for the language and the illustrations of nudity. Nobody is asking for the Holocaust to not be taught in schools, so I fail to see where there is a political bend to this.
Do I think they're being up-tight and prudish? Yes, probably (but I haven't seen the book itself). Do I think it's politically motivated? No. The author of the article even defers that they don't know the motivation: "Regardless of why this decision was made..."
> So can we take it, as far as it needs to go, because I don’t know that it is going to end with one book. I think the process needs to include a bigger plan to holistically redact things that we don’t want in there. We hope we have good employees, like minded culture, centric folks that fit with McMinn County, that they’re going to make the right discretionary decisions to redact that literature in an appropriate way for the age related presentation.
It is very hard for me not to read this as political censorship in nature.
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And second, given the teachers were planning to inform parents and censor the nudity/profanity, it is hard for me not to read this as an objection over students being taught about any subject that borders sex or sexual content. I think the "inappropriate" objection takes on a different tone when people are saying that it's inappropriate to teach literature even after the swear words have been whited out -- at that point we're talking about subject-matter, not profanity.
I view that as both unrealistic in general (I wonder if parents have the same objections to mature topics in To Kill a Mockingbird or Shakespeare), but I also view it as explicitly political. It is a political statement to say that sex as a topic should not ever be mentioned in middleschool.
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But last but not least, even if this were only a discussion about profanity (which I don't think is the case), government censorship of profanity in schools is still a heck of a lot closer to a 1st Amendment violation on the sliding scale of censorship than people ganging up on each other on Twitter is.
I still don't really accept that someone could legitimately find the first to be irrelevant to free speech conversations, but the second to be critically important.
You and I have different views on sexual content being political or not, and that's fine. I can see both sides, but I just don't think it is inherently political.
Wrt 1st Amendment violations, teachers are government employees representing the local government. Saying teachers can't teach something in school as a representative of the government is different than restricting a student's speech.
Eh... there is a lot of history of LGBTQ+ censorship that should be taken into account when making a statement like this. "It's fine for adults but we need to protect the young from it," is historically a very common phrase that has popped up in discussions about sex education and sexual orientation being expressed in schools.
I also want to kind of align the conversation with the specifics of what people objected to in this book. We're talking about 8 swear words and a single cartoon picture of a naked mouse -- all of which were censored from the book. So at this point we are talking about a topic, not specific instances of profanity. We're talking about a view that 8th graders are not mature enough to know that nakedness exists or that sometimes people swear.
I just don't understand how that could be seen as a non-political view. There's a difference between someone saying that 8th graders shouldn't be exposed to the words "bitch" or "damn", and someone saying that 8th graders shouldn't be taught that anyone in any context might use those words.
From the minutes again:
> I understand that on TV and maybe at home these kids hear worse, but we are talking about things that if a student went down the hallway and said this, our disciplinary policy says they can be disciplined, and rightfully so. And we are teaching this and going against policy?
Is the objection that someone in a book did something that was against school policy? Because that seems really political in nature to me as an objection.
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> Saying teachers can't teach something in school as a representative of the government is different than restricting a student's speech.
100% agreed. I don't like what the school is doing here, but I doubt in this case it's a 1st Amendment violation.
However, it's still very clearly closer to a 1st Amendment violation than anything happening on Twitter. Government restrictions on school curriculum can be ruled unconstitutional. Of course not all restrictions are unconstitutional, but it is within the realm of things we would talk about. How kids get taught and what topics teachers can bring up to them is a huge battleground in the fight over the government's ability to define what students are and aren't allowed to learn.
"Big tech," consisting of private companies, banning people and content creators from publishing misleading, harmful, calls-to-violence, racist or otherwise untrue information on their platforms
A county School board choosing to reduce the accessibility of a piece of literature that may have been used to educate children about the history of the Holocaust
If the latter is a government run or funded school, I'd say this is wrong. If it is a private school, then I would say it is just stupid, and poor kids for having such ignorant adults in charge of their education.