August 11, 2023

Progressives have succeeded in draining all semblance of common sense and morality from the Democrat Party.  They have also been hammering away at free speech for decades, using college campuses as havens for restrictive speech codes to turn three generations of faculty into critical race pedagogues and their students into ideological neurotics.  What emerged as an annoying political correctness in the late twentieth century has blossomed into a full-blown assault on all five rights of the First Amendment.

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Higher education now seems adrift of its moorings and without a moral compass to bring it back.  That has inspired progressives to turn their guns on the youngest classroom cohort of American society.  The motivation is always Machiavellian, but hardly breaks new ground when viewed through the lens of Marxism.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was not simply waxing philosophic in pronouncing, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” That belief was built upon the tenets of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who advocated for the abolition of the family and surrendering a child’s education to the state, where teachers become in loco parentis.  Uncoupling children from their parents may have seemed a bit farfetched in the pre-COVID era but is now doctrinal to hyperpartisan educational associations and teachers unions.  Joe Biden has personally fanned the flames of this crusade by his public utterings that children belong to the teachers and the nation.

A recent article appearing in People’s World, latter-day scion of the CPUSA’s early twentieth-century propaganda newsletter, Daily Worker, tipped off the hard left’s strategy to turn adolescents against their families and ancestors by shaming them with a variety of dubious injustices — misogyny, racial supremacy, transphobia, and a whole panoply of -isms.  This stratagem is vintage Marxism, with the goal of breaking down the family by labeling parents as cultural culprits who should have little more than a disposable role in the lives of their children.  Just leave it to the educators to muster an army of youngsters programmed through a bogus curricula of deconstructed history and literature.

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The Biden administration’s enthusiasm to cram critical race and gender theory down the throats of schoolchildren has brought about severe parental rebuke.  Local challenges to sexually-oriented classroom curricula and reading lists have spiked forty percent year over year in 2022.  According to Pen America, more than forty percent of those book disputes now involve titles and content that relate to various gender identities and orientations, many of which are recommended for grades kindergarten through 5th grade.

In the past, book boycotts and embargoes typically centered on internecine grievances between local school districts and parent groups.  Of late, Joe Biden has hijacked the issue to pin blame on MAGA extremists, turning grade-school education into a Marxist battlefield and making combatants out of school boards, parents, library systems, political associations, and advocacy groups. Biden has also turned identity politics, political polarization, and transgenderism into a mandate on what children should read and think, putting certain books out front or behind the battle lines of cultural Marxism.

Starting with children’s literature but now enveloping the literary classics, a cleansing is underway to turn books into safe spaces.  The job of recasting book characters and language to mirror contemporary woke sensibilities has been handed over to a cottage industry of perceived victims.  While not as heavy-handed as burning a book, unpublishing, or delisting it on e-commerce sites, it is intrusive by its actions to silence, dilute, or distort the creativity of the author.

Called sensitivity readers, beta readers, or inclusion ambassadors, they range in age from adolescent to adult and hail from so-called marginalized communities.  With publishers under their spell, recently submitted or already published writings might end up in the hands of an eight-year-old boy or girl who, simply by their age or short-lived experience, gives them jurisdiction over a writer’s style and manner of portraying similarly-affected fictional characters.

Before going out of business in 2022, Inclusive Minds offered readers of all ages, genders, and ethnicities to publishers and aspiring and established authors.  They focused exclusively upon clearinghouses of children’s books, persuading twenty-six British and five international publishers of children’s fiction to put their new books through the political sieve of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.  That opened the spigot for book editors to scrutinize their vintage stock of literary classics.

Take the case of Mark Twain.  In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and his more labored literary effort, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain relied heavily upon his Missouri slave-state upbringing to acquaint the reader with the colloquial language and peccadilloes of those who lived and toiled on the gritty steamboats and steamers along the riverbanks of the Upper Mississippi.  His storytelling captivated the urban population serving the industrialized expansion of the Gilded Age back East.