A Nationwide Book Ban Bill Has Been Introduced in the House of Representatives | Hacker News Reader

A Nationwide Book Ban Bill Has Been Introduced in the House of Representatives

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This is creepily similar to Russia circa 10+ years ago with its "gay propaganda" and "child protection" laws, and strong government support for the church.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/11/russia-law-ban...

MAGA is just United Russia with a different supreme leader. The end-game is the same - a vaguely lipservice-Christian[1] autocracy.

When they tell you of all the insane shit they want, believe them. They are an existential threat to the republic, because they don't place any value any of the immutable principles of the republic, and will sell all of them up the river to see their guy win.

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[1] Their actual behavior is incredibly un-Christ-like.

They're fast tracking.

I hope they don't start a youth movement like the scouts and name it after their leader.

Doesn't have the same ring to it in English.

Where is a safe place to go for this

Safety is an illusion.

Build up yourself

The Trumpets?

ICE Scouts? :)

You’re gonna want to look at today’s news out of the Boy Scouts.

Short version: the US military provides some funding to the scouts. Hegseth threatened that funding to push the scouts to roll back LGBT-friendly policies, and they’ve caved. Along with that, other changes include waiving fees for children of members of the military, dropping a citizenship merit badge, and adding a military merit badge.

They don’t appear to be planning a new organization, they’ll just co-opt the BSA.

Didnt Kirks org already do this, to an extent?

Almost anti-Christ like, wouldn't you say?

It has similarity in that there is a form of alliance between predominantly white fundamentalist catholics and evangelical christians and Trump which is embodied by Vance which could be seen as mimicking Putin proximity with the Orthodox church. They both use their churches to justify a civilizational agenda and frame autocracy as protection.

Still, there are several major differences one bieng the patriarch supporting Putin while the Catholic church mostly opposes Trump.

Catholics are a minority denomination in America, and an especially small minority in the relevant states.

Russian Orthodoxy, on the other hand, encompasses ~95% of Russian Christians, and there is no organized alternative to it.

... Also, Trump 2024 won Catholics by 12 points (While 2020 and 2016 was a 50/50 split.)

Whatever the church's views are, unlike the evangelicals, it's not dictating to its members how they should vote.

The interesting part has more to do with the ideological fundation than with the electoral reality. It's not about winning a few percentage points, it's about the ground work for their political vision.

Like the Great Rus and Kirill give a cultural justification for Putin war and anchors them in an historical framework where they make sense, Trump (I mean Vance really) is using the evangelists and the threat of a perceived shift in what makes America America has a justification for his policies.

It's pervasive throughout Project 2025.

Just as a side note, there is no Orthodox Pope since Eastern Orthodoxy is kind of a federation of national churches. Other Orthodox patriarchs disagree with Patriarch Kirill to varying degrees, even to the point where the Russian Orthodox Church is currently out of communion with Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the "mother church" and seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Moscow–Constantinople_sch...

Not at all, the Russian ban was an outright speech restriction (I'm originally from Russia). This only applies to schools taking federal money. This is much more similar to pressuring institutions taking federal money to do things, by both parties, like adding or removing diversity programs, mandating wage levels, curtailing due process for sexual assault investigations, investigating alleged fraud, etc. There are actually colleges that are very careful about not taking federal money where it would affect them.

The approach that most people in the US seem to favor is "this is totally fine that the right-thinking government can do this, the problem is that the other guys occasionally get to rule".

The real solution is to remove the levers, or the federal spending, so that neither side can do it.

> This only applies to schools taking federal money.

Which means all poor public school districts (free breakfast programs are funded with federal money) and most other public schools districts (special needs programs are funded with federal money). So the “only” here is basically “all” public school districts.

So? That is exactly how every other lever like this applies, by both parties. It has absolutely nothing in common with Russian arbitrary draconian speech repression and to suggest that it is insulting. It's like, technically wage tax is like forced labor so it's basically similar to slavery, right? Somehow very few people would make this argument.

Now, the reason the admin can do that is because every district in the country is yoked to federal funds. This gives them a massive power lever. As far as massive power goes, it's strange that HN understands this well with surveillance but not with anything else. Surveillance is really great, if you could magically make it only usable by people you agree with, say to find lost pets or catch armed robbers and nothing else.

However if you create a power, it will also be used by people you disagree with, for the purposes you abhor. The only solution is to remove the power.

If not, what is your other solution, never allow people who disagree with you to win elections?

I commented on just one thing — that this book ban effectively impacts all public school districts. My comment says nothing about Russia, elections, or anything else you mention. I’m only making the point that this ban is not just about “some” public schools; it’s virtually all of them.

Age verification (porn bans), VPN bans, restrictions on 3D printing - all of these are other policies, both proposed and already in law, that make additional violations of individual rights easier to pass, because these things have been normalized. It’s why the slippery slope isn’t always a logical fallacy.

There are always going to be fights about what gets taught in schools, and what isn't. It's an inevitable consequence of government run schools. I don't agree that it is a free speech issue.

Children do not have the full set of adult rights.

No need to emphasize "government" -- It's an inevitable consequence of schools.

Private secular schools have fights about what gets taught.

Private religious schools have fights about what gets taught.

Children have more rights in public schools than they have in private schools. Tinker v. Des Moines: "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."

> No need to emphasize "government"

There are truancy laws. Private schools can have speech rules, but parents are free to choose such schools, and so free speech rights are not an issue.

I still don't see how qualifying it as "government" schools is at all relevant to the topic.

This bill would also apply to private schools receiving money under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

People are forced to attend government schools if they cannot afford private schools.

Nobody is forced to attend private schools.

It's a fundamental difference.

Looks like you've got an axe you decided to grind.

These policies are symptoms of the authoritarian zeitgeist, not its causes. We will keep getting more and more of them until people start believing in democracy again. In that sense, I don't think it's a slippery slope, since one policy doesn't automatically lead to another.

And we're finally here on the national stage.

1. Ban exposing minors to "sexual material." Who would be against that? Surely only weirdos would push to expose kids to sex and pornography. Make sure this gets challenged in court and that it's found constitutional under 1A.

2. Define things we don't like as sexual material. Obviously being gay is entirely about sex, just like being trans is about genitals. You don't even have to speculate that this is the motive—it's defined explicitly in the bill.

3. Boom, you found a legal way to ban what would otherwise be a pretty obvious 1A violation.

This is the public institutions half, it's harder to swing a bill like this for private institutions which is why that's handled with age verification bills. That way it's not technically a ban.

Could you claim any book with boys being different to girls breaches the sex talk rules? I'm just wondering how you could use this law to show how ridiculous it is.

It’s honestly terrifying that efforts to ban books and restrict what teachers can teach have made such a big comeback in the US. When I was in school, we always discussed banned books from the perspective of “we used to ban things that made people uncomfortable in the bad old days, but that could never happen in the 21st century”. Obviously that glossed over a lot of nuance, but it still shocks me as an adult seeing repression we discussed only from a historical perspective make its way back into the legislature.

Part of the purpose of education is exposing students to strange, uncomfortable, and even frightening ideas and giving them the tools to critically think about and even empathize with such ideas. They don’t have to even be “useful” ideas, since it’s important that students are given the tools to grow and become anything they want. It seems like a lot of groups around the country just want students to grow up to become drones working to prop up the economy. Anything that might make people question the nature of society or their role in it must be suppressed according to them.

A lot of your argument presupposes a distinct lack of parental authority in the education of a child.

The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught to their children on their dime. They called their legislators to make the changes and, in a rare event, the legislators listened and are acting upon it.

The system, for once, seems to be working. Both sides should see the objective value in at least that.

>The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught ...

Can you elaborate?

>The system, for once, seems to be working.

Interesting worldview.

> The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught to their children on their dime.

This variation of the origin story gets a lot of play. However it doesn't address the outside book-ban groups who provide titles to parents - or who just appear at school board meetings themselves.

    Eleven "super requesters" — those who raised concerns about or challenged
    15 or more titles at a time — accounted for 73% of the targeted books. 
    They often referred to lists of books originating in other districts 
    or from online forums. Some had no children in the district. 
    In nearly 60 cases, the school district didn’t own the book 
    the requester sought to remove.

ref: https://wisconsinwatch.org/2024/07/wisconsin-book-ban-school...

it’s a manufactured and coordinated from the top down moral panic that you have fallen for, or are content to cynically exploit.

> The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught to their children on their dime.

That’s definitely not how this is playing out.

I struggle with the federal government's power over all this. Let the states and local jurisdictions decide. Put in guardrails so that those local jurisdictions don't become corrupted, but at the same time we should empower people to place their children in education systems that don't ultimately falter to who's empowered in the fed.

You may be okay with your children reading some books. That's great, and you should be able to find the right school districts for them, and I should be able to do the same to ensure my children don't read through explicit material without any form of parental oversight.

> I struggle with the federal government's power over all this.

From the TFA, the proposed bill "would modify the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 by prohibiting use of funds under the act". This is hardly a case of the federal government running roughshod over sates and local jurisdictions.

This is a wild exaggeration to call this a national book ban.

I mean, it's an act of power to restrict funding (which is why I didn't call it a ban)

> act of power to restrict funding

Federal funding. States and districts are free to fund whatever they want.

"Federal funding" is a misnomer. All of the funding comes from the taxpayers, and they're the same taxpayers. So when the federal government takes your money and then says "you can only have it back if you do X" they are not actually funding something, they are imposing a fine for not doing it.

This only works if you pretend fiscal transfers aren't a thing.

If you want to paint an abstraction layer on top of it then all you have to do is make it symmetrical. The federal government is extracting money from the state's tax base that would otherwise be available to the state and conditioning its return on doing something, which is a financial penalty against the state for not doing it.

Ok, and when they take money from my paycheck and give it to a strung-out, unemployed junkie who paid 0 federal taxes, what are they fining me for?

It's a fairly simple equation: What's the thing you'd have to do (or stop doing) in order to receive (or not pay) the money?

You can argue about whether imposing a financial disincentive on working is a good or bad policy but there isn't really any case to be made for it not being what they're doing.

My point was your initial premise is wrong: “All of the funding comes from the taxpayers, and they're the same taxpayers”. There’s plenty of instances where the federal government takes and redistributes tax dollars, from person to person, or state to state. Calling this particular instance a fine, but not every other instance, is wrong.

They're all fines. The person receiving something while paying nothing isn't the one being fined. They're doing the thing you have to do in order to not be fined. Indeed, that's where the financial penalties being paid by everyone else are going.

Go ahead and try to distinguish this from de jure financial penalties. If you get cited for speeding, that's definitely a fine, right? But the money then goes into the same general fund as other tax revenue. We're not even consistent in what we call this. The "tax" on cigarettes is clearly a penalty intended to deter usage, the proponents openly admit to it. The federal tax code is absolutely riddled with rules that cause you to pay a different amount based on whether you do or don't do something. The debates about which forms of taxation to use are fundamentally about which activities we want or don't want to be disincentivizing -- witness the people who openly express the intention to tax the rich specifically as a penalty for having too much money. Meanwhile the Georgists think we should use Land Value Tax instead of penalizing people for working.

The penalties for doing something look like you paying them when you do it. The penalties for not doing something look like them paying you when you do it. But because they don't actually have any of their own money, it's never actually them who is paying you, which means that everyone who "gets paid" (i.e. isn't penalized) is extracting that money from the penalties paid by everyone else. Who wouldn't have had to pay that both in the case where they did the thing required to avoid the penalty and where the government offered no such disincentive for not doing it by not collecting the money in taxes and other fines.

You're trying to make an exception out of the person who is actually paying $0 in all taxes, but to begin with that is extremely uncommon, e.g. good luck directly and indirectly avoiding property tax if you live indoors, or avoiding indirectly paying federal income tax if you eat food or consume any other goods or services. It's pretty plausible that such people don't really exist, and even if some did, the penalty still applies to everyone else.

And even for the hypothetical person who somehow directly and indirectly paid actual zero in all taxes, if they stop doing the thing, their personal finances still see the same disincentive as everyone else -- they still get penalized for not doing it. If we had a UBI and then someone got cited for speeding but the speeding fine was less than the UBI, would you say that they aren't being penalized for speeding? No, because if they hadn't gotten the citation they would have gotten more. And so it is with not doing something.

The reason this is important is that there are things the government isn't supposed to punish you for doing, meaning they're not to give you any disincentive of any kind. Offering you money -- which for substantially everyone in real life is actually their own money -- and then taking it away if you do the thing they're not allowed to punish you for doing, is punishing you for doing it.

In the real world each and every one of us has to function at a workplace with people from every race and religion.

My recollection is discussing banned books from the perspective of "people have done and still do this elsewhere in the US, but we don't do it here".

I deeply oppose MAGA but the idea of winning through the take over of the cultural institution - school, universities, the media - has been theorized by Gramsci followers like Marcuse and Horkheimer.

In a lot of way, what we are witnessing in a counter movement swinging opposite to the heavy push for critical theory in the public sphere. Critical theory is not neutral. It is teleological in nature.

Schools have been a battle ground for decades I fear.

> prohibiting use of funds under the act “to develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials to, children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material, and for other purposes.

"For other purposes" is going to be doing a Herculean effort of carrying for the next few years if this passes. for example:

>This bill includes “lewd” and “lascivious” dancing as prohibited topics or themes.

I guess we learned nothing from Footloose.

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And yes, for a TLDR on the article and the general situation of this the last decease or so: such book bans tends to be a roundabout way to associate "sexually oriented" topics with the trans community. Sometimes the entire LGBT umbrella is hit.

Pre-epstien, I'd be surprised that such people care much more about what goes on with a person's state of being than the person themselves. But it really seems like every accusation is a confession.

> such book bans tends to be a roundabout way to associate "sexually oriented" topics with the trans community

Yup. When books get banned for containing actual sexual content, that gets reverted https://www.newsweek.com/bible-banned-texas-schools-over-sex...

Republicans keep telling everyone who they are. But a good chunk of folks keep denying it.

No, a good chunk of folks like this and knowingly support this.

You're both right.

It's good to remind Americans that like 20-30% of us blindly support trump and not much will change that(sunk cost). Another 10-20% support him cuz he might hurt the correct people and that's worth it. Another few percent support him cuz he's a rich guy and to a lot of Americans $$$=good person.

Good. Hopefully we can get a government contract with Boston Dynamics robot dogs wielding flamethrowers to enforce it too.

Not a book ban, but not using public funds to push a hotly contested culture war point.

Man, anything to distract people from the files.

What files?

The pedo ones

huh? Could you link me to some news stories, and perhaps some recent analyses of these files? Maybe list any prominent Americans who are involved?

The rep who introduced the bill quoted Hitler in a speech 2 days into her term. And then she spent the next 5 years advocating for horrible, repressive legislation. Disgusting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Miller_(politician)#:~:te...

And in other news, the Trump appointed ambassador in Belgium, Bill White, is fine with adult men sucking the blood from a baby penis.

And if you think I'm kidding, no I'm not.

Some of those boys end up with herpes, but it's all fine in MAGA land.

Source, straight from the horses mouth: https://youtu.be/KolvU5m0CZI?si=KMnq_y8KfGuhXkDY&t=410

Didn't a bunch of kids in NYC get STIs cuz of this like a decade or two ago? A bunch of rabbis were biting baby dicks, oh sorry I mean performing a religious ceremony, and giving kids STIs.

That is likely indeed, because in the interview, she explicitly mentions that New York is also questioning that practice.

Doesn't look like a ban, a mere withholding of federal funds.

I can't tell if this is just trolling or a genuine take. I'm any case, it's too simplistic.

... by any other name

Sorry, the toothpaste doesn't go back into the tube with social issues. Interracial marriage isn't going away either lol.

This is a naive take. The clock can be rewound far back.

Have your seen the 60s/70s photos from Iran? https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/iran-before-revolution-phot...

It just depends how much the government wants to go fundamental and how much people allow it.

Or Kabul in the 60's vs today, even more extreme change, with no hope to going back in the near future.

Trying to parse this comparison. Are you comparing the withholding of federal funds for certain classes of books to a revolution that installed an Islamic theocracy in Iran?

Can you elaborate on how you think these two things are comparable?

The former is "tax dollars can't be spent on books that depict certain content". The latter is "a revolution lead by Islamic theocrats installs a brutally repressive islamist regime that transformed an otherwise western country into a hellscape". You think these things are the same?

I was addressing:

> Interracial marriage isn't going away either

But more generally, all those little book bans in various forms, explicit anti-diversity and xenophobic rules, undermining the right to vote for the specific groups of citizens, etc. add up and point in a specific direction. There are quite a few popular people who would be up for a theocracy, and a lot of openly fascist people down with the brutally repressive part. Consider how the sexual content in the Bible doesn't normally get included in those laws - like it's not the sexual content that's actually the target here...

Nothing happens out of nowhere. We're at "concentration camps are accepted by many people" level at the moment. The direction of government is obvious, the speed and possible success are still up for debate.

Okay but this isn't a book ban. I'm not understanding what you're saying. This bill doesn't prohibit these books from being printed or sold or possessed. Did you even read it? Seems like you're pivoting to "prison camps for people in the country illegally means we'll have a theocracy soon". I'm not sure you've actually thought this through.

I know it doesn't prohibit printing and selling them... yet. It doesn't really matter, because this proposal for ban in schools doesn't exist in vacuum. This specific change in itself is not that important. But on the background of what's happening in general, what's not happening in terms of kids sexual safety, and which group is mostly involved in the whole issue - that's important.

And you somehow changed the "concentration camps" to "prison camps for people in the country illegally". I meant exactly what I wrote.

Weimar Germany was very socially liberal, homosexuality was socially accepted, legal rights for women were the same as for men, and all of that definitely went away quite quickly.

They revoked driver's licenses of transgender individuals in Kansas giving only 3 days notice.

> Sorry, the toothpaste doesn't go back into the tube with social issues. Interracial marriage isn't going away either lol.

Sorry, that's just naive, overconfident liberalism. There is no mandatory "direction" to social change. Given enough time, every bit of that toothpaste will go back in that tube, and enough more time it will come out again, only to go back in after a spell. And it won't be an oscillation. It'll be some weird path none of us can predict.

You are either completely uneducated on world history or willfully ignorant.

There is no limit on how far back the clock is allowed to turn.

Things that will be targeted:

* homosexuals (often the first)

* non whites

* interracial marriage

* voting rights

* voting right for women

* women’s suffrage

* education for girls

* no fault divorce

* freedom of speech

* freedom of mobility (like to leave the country)

* trade unions / labor unions

* Freemasons (Oddfellows, etc)

* practicing a religion other than Christianity

* environmental regulations

* public lands, federal parks

* etc etc etc

Look not to China or North Korea for the operating model but East Germany during the Cold War. There was a massive surveillance operation in place then and technology has only improved.

Freedom is not guaranteed and for most of human history was not a goal.

Your list is missing Nazi parties somewhere between the non whites and voting rights. And for most of the countries in the world - gun owners at the top of the list. Just speaking from historical perspective.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but are you saying that banning Nazi Parties and gun regulation are the first steps toward fascism and autocracy?

I'm saying the list above carefully includes a bunch of more or less universally recognized good things, with the subject added on top, implying that the "left" views on sexuality are also good things. But that form of argument is lying to you because this list omits bad things and other things in grey area.

To be fair, that depends on what the poster meant by "to be targeted". The list looks like it implies banning or criminalizing, but again, no one is being banned or criminalized under the legislation we are discussing.

Nazis can fuck off.

PS. Damn son, you put your LinkedIn out there for everyone to see too? https://www.linkedin.com/in/victor-msu

re: LinkedIn: well yeah. I strongly believe nobody should have "одни слова для кухонь, другие — для улиц".

I'll give you credit for at least putting a name and face to completely retarded beliefs. Here's hoping you get a clue, cheers.

> Things that will be targeted:

Wonder how far down the agenda slavery appears.

Given enough tyranny, the toothpaste absolutely can be made to go back into the tube. And it better enjoy every second of it or else.

If you can buy the book on Amazon or find it at your local library is the book really "banned"?

If it can't really be banned, then why waste all the time and energy passing this law?

Control. Virtue signalling. Because they can... [0]

[0] Why does a dog lick his balls?

Why is there a federal department of education, anyway? Shouldn't the states be fully responsible for educating their population?

We should make Mein Kampf available, too? Anarchist Cookbook?

Finally, some politicians had some sense.

Unfortunately, some of them is going to abuse that.

But that what politics is - only trade-offs, no perfect decisions. Only brain ded radicals of all sides think there are simple solutions.

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