Recently I read an article about the measures that the GOP has introduced at attacks the culture of education in the US….
The right-wing campaign to censor what is read and taught at public schools, colleges, universities, and libraries across the United States is only growing more intense, as state lawmakers introduced dozens of educational gag orders in the first six weeks of 2023.
From the start of the new year through February 13, Republican lawmakers proposed 84 educational censorship bills and their Democratic counterparts unveiled two, according to an analysis published Thursday by PEN America, which updates its “Index of Educational Gag Orders” on a weekly basis.
As the free speech organization previously documented, more than 190 bills aimed at limiting the ability of educators and students to discuss the production of and resistance to myriad inequalities throughout U.S. history—including several proposals to establish so-called “tip lines” that would enable parents to punish school districts or individual teachers—were introduced in dozens of states in 2021 and 2022, with all but one authored by Republicans. In the past two years, 19 laws restricting the teaching of racism, gender, and sexuality were enacted in more than a dozen GOP-controlled states, plus eight measures imposed without legislation.
“The early returns from the 2023 legislative sessions suggest that lawmakers’ fervor to censor and ban content from educational institutions has not abated. Far from it,” four PEN America experts wrote Thursday. “They have outdone one another in a race to the bottom, finding new, more extreme, and more conspiratorial ways to impose censorious government dictates on teaching and learning.”
The analysis highlights trends in educational gag orders across four major categories: efforts to prohibit teaching about race, racism, and U.S. history; expanding censorship of sexuality and gender; legislation targeting higher education institutions; and particularly extreme proposals motivated by the growing influence of conspiracy theories.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/gop-educational-gag-orders-2023
The term ‘cultural war’ has been batted around as a political tactic….it came about when the GOP started attacking everything in the US culture.
A wave of Republican enthusiasm for banning concepts, authors and books is sweeping across the United States. Forty-four states have proposed bans on the teaching of “divisive concepts”, and 18 states have passed them.
Florida’s Stop Woke Act bans the teaching of eight categories of concepts, including concepts that suggest that “a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex”. Many of the laws also target Nikole Hannah-Jones’s influential 1619 Project.
These laws have already started to take effect. Administrators and teachers have been forced out of their positions on the suspicion of violating these laws, and what has started as a trickle may soon become a flood.
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/13/african-american-studies-republican-ban-florida
All these attacks on education smacks of something that happened in Germany all those years ago.
Any thoughts?
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
In Saner Thought 
As I have stated many times (Or as I have implied) the current crop of right-wing extremists embedded in our government show many of the tendencies of the old German Nazi-ism. There must be Gobbels somewhere in their mix. This reshaping of a generation was supposed to be subtle and ongoing. Ongoing it will be but as the American People get more comfortable with their brainwash, it will accelerate exponentially until somebody symbolically burns down the Reichstag or until they can justify some form of a Night of Broken Glass …Of course, the American People will be given notice that all this perversion of democracy is “For the good of the country” or for the good of the children … it is always the children — until the day those children are marching around in short pants uniforms, wearing maga hats and shouting slogans participate in torchlight parades and the strong-man leader calls Nuremberg-style rallies and proclaims war on the world.
I believe that that war on the world has already begun and by multiple players…..chuq
The politcally-correct nonsense has finally arrived at children’s books here. Roald Dahl books are now being ‘altered’, so as to not cause offence. Words like ‘fat’, ‘black’, and ‘ugly’ are being changed. I wonder when they wil start censoring Dickens and Shakespeare?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-64702224
Best wishes, Pete.
You will have nothing to worry about until they start re-writing the Bible to conflate all things evil with democracy… and when that idea becomes public discourse, then you can worry.
PC is a really monster that will destroy everything it touches. chuq
Ah, this is the third time I think we agree on something.
Every know and then there is that singularity. LOL chuq
You wrote, “A wave of Republican enthusiasm for banning concepts, authors and books is sweeping across the United States.” — What they want to do is to ban everything except the stuff that they wrote or that upholds their ideology. As soon as they can accomplish this they will have control of the American dialogue and the paradigm will change from democratic to authoritarian and it will happen like a thief in the night… suddenly people will awaken to what has happened to them but it will be too late for them to do anything about it because they will have trapped themselves by their own apathy and their obsession with self-gratification above all other concerns. Welcome to the Third Reich. The pattern for democratization has always been the same and those who have adopted the mantra, “Never Again” are going to learn the hard lessons that History does, indeed, repeat itself .. because human nature never changes.
The GOP is goose stepping it’s way into the history books. chuq
I wish everyone would stop calling the other side Nazis. Can anyone give examples of republican or democrat Nazi-like horrors? Oh, wait. There’s that extermination of the unborn by democrats , about 65,000,000 since Roe. Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot and Putin are envious.
The GOP attacks on individual rights, banning books, assault on education….there is more to Nazi ideology than the holocaust but that is all anyone wants to talk about….chuq
Besides Carl ‘Nazi” is used because most cannot spell authoritarian and the ‘S’ and ‘C’ totally confuses them….path of least resistance. chuq
Oh gee….brain fart…the ‘S’ and ‘C’ in Fascist….sorry about that early mental pause. chuq
You wrote — “Besides Carl ‘Nazi” is used because most cannot spell authoritarian and the ‘S’ and ‘C’ totally confuses them….path of least resistance. chuq” — I CONTEND that the use of Nazi when talking about current Republican doctrine has nothing to do with the spelling of the word, authoritarian, but has everything to do with the fact that the Nazi regime had a well-defined playbook (Or script if you prefer) and the current Republican extremists are in the process of tailoring that playbook to their own agendas and it is very stark and in your face so it does them little good to deny it.
The term is an easy way out for some…..I agree it does not look good for sanity for the GOP chuq
I would not call it Republican censorship. It is to stop the filth spewed out re Hollywood agenda and their ridicule of everything wholesome. I fully support unions and I belonged as a teacher but I would never associate myself with the twisted culture minds of today’s unions that are bent on contaminating everything and calling those who resist Nazis and racists. They think their mission is to redesign children not to educate them.
Dr. Sues is not a Hollywood agenda and it is banned….I was a union organizer and the tactics by some to subvert unions is definitely Nazi tactics. Education is not redesigning….banning and pretending it is for the best is just what I said….out of the pages of history. chuq
I lament the war against unions. But isn’t Biden subverting unions with open borders and millions of workers who’ll work for peanuts? That gives management reason to ignore union wage demands and lowers salaries across the board. They’ll all soon have work permits. They say republicans are for big business. Importing millions of illegals is the biggest and most severe union busting in history.
The Dems are no friend to union….most illegals are usual unskilled workers that do crap jobs and unions are all about money….immigrants are killing unions….unions are killing unions. chuq
It don’t matter who is in poweer, Carl — whether it be the righties or the leftists –no matter who it is, their agenda always includes brainwashing the children because “Nits Make Lice.” Hitler had his “Youth” corps anid I am sure that the dems and the repukeds must have their own versionms of that thing somewhere.
Yes, this seems true.
Redesigning Children is very much on the minds of the Republican book banners or the textbook censors .. or the attempts by the right-wing to control the education process to make it less amenable to liberal thinking and more acceptable to the twisted minds of conservatives who Iive in their own little alternate universe .. thanks to the work of the prominent conspiracy nuts who have managed to take control of the conservative dialogue in this country in the past few years. (Limbaughism, Hannityism and Carlsonism are examples.)
Is it republicans or concerned parents? Of course, republicans have attached “text book” and “curriculum-minded” moms and dads to their base.
Parents are astonished at what’s going on. I suppose it started some time ago when they either removed the pledge of allegiance from morning announcements or at least excused kids from standing. That was a HUGE impetus for the left’s avalanche into the classroom today. I think some states are giving pre-sex change drugs to teens without parental consent or even notification and there are teachers and school counselors preaching this mutilation as normal. They think it’s their mission to put it as Chuck and Cliborn put it “change America”. Seems the left has been successful in labeling parents who object to these atrocities as Nazis and racists and oppressors. They are not these things. They are just normal, decent and wholesome human beings. Oh, and if anyone happens to stop by in Greensboro, NC, I’d love to invite you to the monthly covered dish over at Faith Presbyterian Church on West Friendly Avenue.
I liked it when we could pray in school. I do not hear much about that anymore. The education system has been traditionally liberal in this country –it is that system that made this country great –the right wing dream of a democracy driven by evangelical craziness is the problem — that idea is far too invasive for a group of people who claim they want less government in their lives but then do everything in their power to make themselves into big government …
Agree, evangelical craziness is a turn-off and destructive to common sense Christianity. Jesus never went before the Roman senate or Jewish Sanhedrin and other bodies to lobby or legislate for anything.