So, McMinn County School Board in Tennessee decided to remove Maus - Art Spiegelman's classic graphic novel about the Nazi Holocaust and historical memory - from their syllabus, on the grounds that some simply sketched mouse nudity and a few very mild swears would upset and corrupt their pupils, which is obviously very reasonable and evidence of extremely well balanced priorities. Actually, alongside the epidemic of attempts across the US to remove certain sorts of books from school libraries and curricula, it is evidence that an insidious reactionary agenda is gaining traction. In this episode we talk about the decision of the school board, and look through the minutes of the meeting. Daniel even gives an impromptu dramatic reading. We talk about where the appalling decision comes from, and what it really means both for the students and in terms of the wider culture. Along the way we consider the lies of slimy propagandist Christopher Rufo and the spluttering fanaticism of the increasingly unhinged James Lindsay. Content very much warnings. Podcast Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 * Episode Notes/Links Judd Legum tweet about the banning of Maus MCMINN COUNTY BANS “MAUS”, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING HOLOCAUST BOOK – THE TENNESSEE HOLLER (tnholler.com) "Continuing the recent spate of conservative book-banning initiatives, The Mcminn County School board just voted to ban the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “MAUS” by Art Spiegelman from all of its schools, citing the inclusion of words like “God Damn” and “naked pictures” (illustrations) of women." Official Statment from the McMinn County School Board CNN, "Maus" author reacts to his book being banned Exposed by CMD, ALEC Inspires Lawmakers to File Anti-Critical Race Theory Bills The December ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) workshop was led by the Heritage Foundation’s Bridget Weisenberg and featured Heritage’s Jonathan Butcher and Angela Sailor, Discovery Institute’s Christopher Rufo, American Enterprise Institute’s Ian Rowe, and Woodson Center’s Robert Woodson. Thirty-one state legislators from 20 states attended, along with corporate representatives from Guarantee Life Insurance, EDP Renewables, and State Farm Insurance. In order to combat the alleged threat that critical race theory poses, speakers promoted curriculum materials from Trump’s failed 1776 project and a Goldwater Institute model bill to make curriculum materials transparent. They also discussed school privatization measures such as education savings accounts and charter schools. ALEC highlighted a New York Post opinion piece written by Heritage Foundation staff that argued, “The goals of the Black Lives Matter organization go far beyond what most people think. But they are hiding in plain sight, there for the world to see, if only we read beyond the slogans and the innocuous-sounding media accounts of the movement.” Several ALEC lawmakers in attendance got the message. GOP state Rep. Beryl Amedee of Louisiana attended the workshop and later co-authored an op-ed arguing that critical race theory: “is an outgrowth, and little more than a new version of, the Marxist ideology of class warfare with the end goal of societal collapse and the re-making of society. If you know history, it’s easy to both spot and identify. The problem for those confronting this potential catastrophe is how they are explaining their end goals for dealing with it.” James Lindsay at New Discourses, Groomer Schools 2: Queer Futurity and the Sexual Abuse of Your Children Dyer, Hannah, Queer futurity and childhood innocence: Beyond the injury of development Abstract: Because it is so often said that children are the future, queer theory’s attention to (and searing debates on) queer futurity offers something new and important to studies of childhood. Drawing on and deepening recent attempts to meld the fields of childhood studies and queer theory, I dwell on the contradiction that results from the synchronous assumptions of the child’s a-sexuality and proto-heterosexuality to show how emphasizing sexuality within a discussion of children’s education is constructive. In the service of my interest in the renewal of thought concerning children’s psychosexual development, I offer a critical reading of the It Gets Better social media campaign (particularly, its consequent critiques and revisions). I begin with engagement of Eve Sedgwick’s 1991 seminal essay on queer childhood “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” and then, from there, trace contemporary queer theory’s use of the figure of the child and consideration of the impact of “innocence” on childhood. In an effort to consider the contemporary residues of historical violence on theories of “healthy” child development, I also consider how histories of colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery extend into the future and leave traces on contemporary theories of child development. McMinn TN school board minutes for January 10, 2022 The Advocate, Mississippi Mayor Withholds $110k in Library Funds Over LGBTQ+ Books Maia Kobabe, The Washington Post, Schools are banning my book. But queer kids need queer stories. Distribute the Wealth Worksheet Image of the school board members who voted to ban Maus Mike Cochran- It doesn’t matter, it’s in the curriculum, all this stuff keeps popping up. So, I want to read it, you guys can fire me later, I guess. “I’m just wild about Harry, and Harry’s wild about meThe heavenly blisses of his kisses, fill me with ecstasyHe’s sweet just like chocolate candyJust like honey from the beeOh I am just wild about Harry, and he’s just wild about me.” One of the discussion questions is define what this word “ecstasy” means. My problem is, all the way through this literature we expose these kids to nakedness, we expose them to vulgarity. You go all the way back to first grade, second grade and they are reading books that have a picture of a naked man riding a bull. It’s not vulgar, it’s something you would see in an art gallery, but it’s unnecessary. So, teachers have gone back and put tape over the guys butts so the kids aren’t exposed to it. So, myproblem is, it looks like the entire curriculum is developed to normalize sexuality, normalize nudity and normalize vulgar language. If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, this is how I would do it. You put this stuff just enough on the edges, so the parents don’t catch it but the kids, they soak it in. I think we need to relook at the entire curriculum. Rufo's New York Post piece: https://nypost.com/2021/05/06/what-critical-race-theory-is-really-about/ Christopher Rufo and the Critical Race Theory Moral Panic (nymag.com) How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory | The New Yorker Rufo tweet about Maus/McMinn https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1486711700283740169 Judd Legum responds https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1486736150295420939 Tennessee pastor held a "witchcraft" book burning where followers were encouraged to bring Harry Potter and Twilight books to hurl into the flames: Right-Wing Pastor Greg Locke Holds 'Witchcraft' Book Burning (newsweek.com) Book bans in schools are catching fire. Black authors say uproar isn’t about students. (nbcnews.com) Book banning in Texas schools: Titles are pulled off library shelves in record numbers (nbcnews.com) The critics were right: "Critical race theory" panic is just a cover for silencing educators | Salon.com Calls to Ban Books by Black Authors Are Increasing Amid Critical Race Theory Debates (edweek.org) Moms for Liberty has turned ‘parental rights’ into a rallying cry for conservative parents - The Washington Post Unmasking Moms for Liberty | Media Matters for America Friend of the pod Talia Lavin: Brownshirts vs. the Board of Education - by Talia Lavin (substack.com) & How To Report Subversive Books And Teachers in YOUR School (substack.com) A. R. Moxon: Profanity and Obscenity | Revue (getrevue.co) Southlake school leader tells teachers to balance Holocaust books with 'opposing' views (nbcnews.com)
What do you worry is on the horizon if there is a part of this country that cannot be learning about the Holocaust in the way it happened?
Well, I think it's already started happening.
Like I said, the dog whistles abound.
You know, I think there's a moment in there where I thought Jews were honorary white people, but it seems that after coming against critical race theory as the accusation against books that deal with our history, never facing up to studying the genocide of Indians.
It seems that we're back in a category of, and I say that not as a religious Jew, but as clearly a Jew of some kind, even though I don't subscribe to that notion of, anyway, just, I'm sorry, I warned people that it was eight o'clock anyway, just, I'm sorry, I warned people that it was eight o'clock and I wouldn't be This is I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, who spent years tracking the far right in their In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic podcast.
And this is that podcast, and you're listening to it.
And it's called I Don't Speak German.
And I'm Jack Graham.
I'm the only one who matters in this show.
There is another guy.
What's his name again?
Here he is now.
I'm Daniel, and I agree.
I don't matter.
And by the standards of the last two, my intro will turn out to be surprisingly relevant to what Daniel will want to talk about as we go on.
Unfortunately so.
Didn't you make a Kafka reference in one of the most recent episodes?
I did, yes.
I made a joke about Ronan, Dylan, Merkle, whatever his name is, being like Kafka, which I regretted the moment I said it.
But yes, there was a Kafka reference.
And it is actually kind of relevant because, you know, Kafka had the quote-unquote good luck to die before the Nazis took power and took over Europe.
of tuberculosis and Max Brod had taken, I think it was Max Brod that took all his manuscripts away and took them to Israel and, you know, against Kafka's express wishes that they be burned and went ahead and published them.
But he did leave some behind in Czechoslovakia and they were burned by the Nazis.
So, yes.
Would have been interesting to see what kind of darkness he would have gotten up to had he lived to 1947 or 1948.
Well, all his sisters died in Ravensbrück, so that's nice.
Yeah, the history of the 20th century is just a garden of delights, ultimately.
Yeah, yeah.
All right, but we're here, and guess what we're talking about?
Book banning.
Holocaust narrative.
Yes.
We're talking this time about, well, I was going to say we were talking about Maus, the graphic novel by Arch Spiegelman.
I don't, I mean, you will have heard Arch Spiegelman in the cold open responding to the new story, which is what we're really going to be talking about.
We're not going to be talking so much about his text, his classic text in this episode.
We're planning to do a bonus episode.
for Patreon subscribers, in which we talk about mouse itself as a text, because that is very interesting.
There's all sorts of interesting stuff to talk about with that, but it's not going to be our main subject in this episode.
Our main subject in this episode, obviously, is going to be the fact that That, uh, what are these people called?
I've got it here in my notes.
The McMinn County School Board in Tennessee, comprising Bill Irvin, Mike Lowry, Jonathan Pierce, Rob Shamblin, Tony Allman, Lee Parkinson, Mike Cochran, Donna Castile, Sharon Brown, Denise Cunningham, Quinton Howard, name and shame, And I don't know, you might notice something about those names.
They have a certain quality in common, don't they?
Those people decided to take Maus by Arch Beagleman, classic text about the Holocaust, about the Nazi elimination, attempted elimination of Europe's Jews, out of the school curriculum.
And that's, of course, I mean, you know all this, and that's what we're going to be talking about.
Indeed.
There is a photo of this, of the school board.
I'm looking at it now.
Yes.
Yes.
All right.
So the names were a clue and the solution is in the picture.
Yes.
McMinn County, Tennessee, I checked on Wikipedia, is currently 92% white and 39% vaccinated.
So, you know, that kind of speaks volumes, right?
You know, that kind of big volumes, right?
Yeah.
So we are going to be talking about the banning and about some of the kind of undercurrents that led to this.
And we are going to be going through some of the minutes of this meeting, which is fascinating and kind of talking about some of the larger context here.
And so this is the third time we have attempted to record this podcast because I tried to prep too fast and then just was like, I am not ready for this.
And now here we are.
Mouse, Band, and McMinnville in Tennessee.
McMinnville is one of the major cities there.
McMinn, for anybody who doesn't know, is slightly outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
It's like one county over.
It's part of the Chattanooga metropolitan area.
Pardon me, boy, is that the Chattanooga choo-choo?
Yes.
Is it going to though?
That's the question.
It's probably worth noting just briefly because we are going to be talking about a school board, an American school board, just how like American public education works for Our audience, I don't know what percentage of our audience does not live in the United States or doesn't remember public schooling here, but public schooling are the state schools.
These are state-run institutions of learning.
Typically your, you know, K-4 is elementary school, or K-3 is elementary school, 4-6 is called middle school, 7-8 is junior high school, and then 9-12 is high school, and then you move on into either university or community college or some form of higher education.
So that's your kind of like 12 years of schooling.
The book was on the eighth grade curriculum for this county, and we are going to kind of talk about some of the context around that.
Just one thing, just for non-US listeners, eighth grade is what sort of age range?
Yeah, I was about to, this is like 13, like 12, 13, 14, somewhere in that range.
So we're not talking about little kids, we're talking about 13, 14 year olds.
Right.
And the reason that this detail matters particularly is that, you know, over and over again, when we start talking about these issues and about corruption of the youth, the actual age range of how this material is being used gets smeared and alighted.
And suddenly saying that, you know, hey, maybe 15-year-olds can be trusted to take hormones if they feel gender dysphoria gets turned into, you're trying to cut the dick off of my four-year-old child.
You know, these are very, very different things.
And this is an intentional strategy by people on the right.
Yes.
You know, you and we're going to get into that in some detail here in the future, here in the near future in this episode.
But I did want to highlight that this is a very specific thing that's been done.
This hasn't been like taken off of like shelves necessarily.
It's not like they're this is like a banned book in the sense of, you know, is no longer allowed to be Read in the school or anything like this.
It was on the curriculum.
It was on the eighth grade English and language arts curriculum.
So it wasn't being studied as history.
It was being studied as an English text, as a literature text, as a language arts text.
And we're going to get into exactly how it was taught in a minute.
But Because the actual nature of the curriculum is that the mouse was a part of and how much of a part of it it was is, or the module anyway in the curriculum is the term we might use, is very interesting and very important, particularly for what it reveals about the veracity or otherwise of what certain people have been saying about this as they've defended this decision.
Right.
And I feel like there's been a lot of conversation around this and a lot of news articles and a lot of bad takes.
And I did just want to highlight Corey Robbins' bad take.
Yes, yes.
Which is bad, which is bad.
People ask me sometimes how I feel about Corey Rubin.
Now, I have not read his book The Reactionary Mind, but I follow him on Twitter and I find him often kind of contrarian, but interesting.
This was a case in which every factual statement he said in his Twitter thread was accurate.
And yet, he came to the exact wrong conclusion, because... He has, if I may just interrupt briefly... No, no, please, please, go ahead.
I have read The Reactionary Mind.
It is, on the whole, a good book, but it is plagued by this problem.
He gets loads of individual facts right.
He gets loads of basic analysis right.
Like, I would say, his capsule definition of reactionary thinking, you know, or the right As a coalition around the defense of established privilege.
That's a pretty good capsule definition.
That'll do for most circumstances.
It's got a lot of truth to it.
But there are big problems with the book, as I've come to see, as I've read it more than once.
And I think it got worse with Trump, because there is such a thing as Trump derangement syndrome on both sides.
And I think Corey Robin, for all that I have a lot of respect for him, I think Corey Robin is one of the people on the left that has suffered from it because he got entrenched in this Trump is not a fascist, Trumpism is not fascism position.
And again, his argument was made of lots of individual observations that were on their own reasonable or correct, but he came to the wrong analytical conclusion, as I would hope in the wake of, you know, a year on from January the 6th.
You know, everybody would would acknowledge, although, of course, they don't.
But there you go.
That's my piece.
Sure.
Sure.
One day I do want to read the reactionary mind.
Maybe we'll do it as a bonus episode or maybe as a full episode.
Who knows?
It's not a bad book.
Yeah.
No, I mean, I've been wanting to do some more like book club kind of kind of books and like talk about some of the issues, some of this stuff, and just give me a chance to read more.
But, you know, we'll see.
So anyway, in order to really kind of get started and understand like how this happened.
You have to talk about critical race theory, not because there's anything about critical race theory in Maus.
I mean, obviously, it's a text you could use to examine critical race theory.
You know, you could apply a lens through of critical race theory to Maus, but it is not a text of critical race theory.
But alongside a text like Hitler's American model, for instance.
Exactly.
Exactly.
That would be a fascinating text to examine through that lens.
But it is about the long-term effects of Mr. Christopher Rufo and, by extension, James Lindsay.
I find one of the things frustrating, in terms of trying to do an analysis of the CRT wars, in Twitter and on mainstream media, and even in people whom I very much respect.
In terms of, it feels like the thing you have to do is say, well, you're not actually talking about critical race theory.
Critical race theory is this abstract set of ideas, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that doesn't have anything to do with this.
And you can completely own the ignorant conservative, the ignorant right-winger, the ignorant Nazi by doing that.
But it makes no fucking difference whatsoever.
Yeah, we're not really talking about critical race theory in any meaningful sense.
It is important that that we have that understanding out there that no, this is not actually that it is important that those counter debunkings exist.
They are necessary, but not sufficient.
Right.
And I'm not saying this podcast is sufficient, but I want to explain why.
Because Christopher Ruffo has been very, very open about the fact that he is lying about this.
There is no doubt in anyone's mind that he was using this as a political tool and that he does not give a single solitary fuck what critical race theory really is.
There's a famous tweet that he gets screenshotted all over the place.
I have a screenshot in the show notes.
I'm going to read it to you now.
We have successfully frozen their brand, Critical Race Theory, into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions.
We will eventually turn it toxic, as we will put all of the various cultural insanities under that broad category.
The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think, Critical Race Theory.
We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
There's so much coded language in there, right?
Like, unpopular with Americans, he means uncomfortable with white Americans, uncomfortable with right-wing Republicans, you know, that's really what he's talking about.
But ultimately, what the thing is, is like, most of the texts for their examining, it's like, you can't talk about slavery as if it's like a bad thing that has long-term effects in society.
Right?
You can't talk about, you know, you have to talk about, like, how heroic our founding fathers were, and how great they were, and they were men, flawed men at their time, because they owned slaves, but that has certainly no, like, lasting counter-effects, and everything is great now because we live in this, you know, freedom capitalist society, etc, etc, etc.
That's the goal of this kind of political activism, not to Attack, not to have any kind of good faith conversation about the nature of pedagogy, or the nature of, you know, education, or the nature of history, the nature of historiography, the nature, you know, there's no good faith effort here.
And I don't think that our audience is going to You know, argue with us too hard on that.
Like, I think we have made that point very clearly in previous episodes.
But just just just to add briefly, Rufo is very honest about this in in other places.
He's very honest about it in an article that he wrote for the New York Post, which I believe is called What is Critical Race Theory or something like that.
And, you know, if you read that article, he goes through, you know, he connects, you know, he goes through the whole theory that it's reformulated or recoded Marxism, Neo-Marxism, you know, the whole Red Scare stuff.
And he makes it clear that the tactic that he's engaging in is a kind of turnabout.
And Ruffo says in this article for the New York Post, We've needed new language for these issues.
Critical race theory is the perfect villain.
Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans.
Again, code.
Including racial minorities.
That's lampshading.
Who see the world as creative rather than critical.
Individual rather than racial.
Practical rather than theoretical.
So, I mean, again, our audience is going to pick up on the dog whistles in there.
And also all the James Lindsay-isms that are seeping into that as well.
Lindsay does the more pseudo-intellectual version.
Theoretical might as well be in three parentheses.
Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.
So I think our audience understands all of this.
You know, implicitly, but I think it is important to highlight that we must lay that it has to be called out in the moment at the time, and that the more people understand this is a bad faith attack, and it is always going to be a bad faith attack, and that we need to start if we are going to argue with people, we need to argue on the actual grounds of the thing being discussed.
And there's no clearer example of that than in the minutes of this meeting where they banned Mouse from the curriculum.
Don't worry, we're gonna get there.
First, I thought...
You might not believe this tweet is like a real thing.
Like, you know, maybe somebody else wrote that tweet.
I didn't want to play just a little bit of Chris Ruffo and the many, many places where Ruffo admits that this is a political goal.
I did think I would just play a little bit of audio just so you get to hear it in Ruffo's own words.
This is only one of At least a dozen places I've seen him like have this conversation.
And this is in a friendly place for him, right?
This is on a podcast called The Fifth Column, which is sort of this like, I don't think it's actually affiliated with Reason Magazine, but it's like one of the couple of guys who do it are part of Reason.
Like, these are very like anti-CRT, you know, kind of right-leaning libertarian bro types, right?
Who don't have any truck with this idea that like, you know, the long term after effects of, you know, the, you know, degradation of civil rights have any kind of influence on policy or should mean something to the modern world, you know, like, they absolutely agree with Rufo's kind of larger political goal.
But, well, They're not big fans of the way that he chooses to enact his, to do his, to do his politics.
And I think that's interesting that he does get these critiques, even from people who broadly agree with him in the same way that Lindsay does, you know, in the same way, like people, you know, I'm not giving it to the fifth column guys, they're complete douchebags, but It is fascinating to hear Rufo, you know, have to like stumble and explain this stuff to people who largely agree with him.
So let's just listen.
When presented with the mildest bit of largely friendly questioning.
Yeah, exactly.
And as you were describing it to me, I mean, you were doing the things that reporters do, you know, you were getting documents.
You were framing them, you were writing them, you were promoting them, etc.
And now when, you know, I ask you that question and I hear that you're, you know, people are lifting your language directly, you're talking to legislators and kind of helping shape policy.
Why should I trust you as a reporter?
Considering that, you know, what you're doing is activism, and what you're accusing other people of doing is activism, too.
So you're doing the same thing, but from a different angle.
So can I actually trust you as a reporter in the sense that if you find something that is not true, or you see, you know, a bill that is written that you think is You know, this is a little too far.
It actually, this actually does threaten academic freedom, etc.
That you will speak out against that?
Or does that, you know, run up against your stated goal of actually, you know, scaring the hell out of Americans with a critical race theory and getting this stuff kind of overturned?
Yeah, so a couple things.
I think that, you know, I mean, the New York Times reporters and the Washington Post reporters are activists that claim to be kind of objective and neutral reporters.
I'm very, the reason you should trust me is I'm actually very honest about it.
I use journalistic techniques to produce stories.
I'm also an activist with an agenda and political goals.
I'm very transparent about it.
So the difference between me and a New York Times reporter is that they're lying and obfuscating and hiding their intentions, while I'm very clearly stating my intentions with high levels of transparency and honesty.
I don't think we have to stand too hard for the New York Times and the Washington Post and BuzzFeed and other mainstream American journalistic outfits to recognize that there's a very different thing from what the front page of the New York Times is doing and what Christopher Rufo is doing.
Yeah, this is again part of that same strategy of like, well, look, they're not being honest.
Look at them.
They're telling you that masks are effective against COVID-19.
And I'm telling you that there's a neo-Marxist infestation in every school board and the evil, evil people with three parentheses around their names are out to, you know, destroy your children's lives with critical race theory.
These are the same thing, you understand.
It's the same process.
I'm just being honest with you.
I'm telling you, I'm a political actor, the same way the writers of the New York Times are.
They are as far to the left as I am to the right.
That's how this works.
Oh my God, this is infuriating.
It is absolutely infuriating to hear Christopher Rufo claim transparency and absolute honesty.
I mean, this guy is a serial, shameless liar.
And the argument, you know, you should trust me to be honest with you about facts in my reportage because I openly admit to you that I'm a right-wing propagandist, that is...
You know, on one level I can admit to a certain degree of basic sympathy with the argument that he makes, which is that yes, the liberal capitalist media has an ideology.
Neutrality, the idea of neutrality, the idea of balance, these are all ideological ideas and, you know, everybody comes from somewhere, everybody has ideological assumptions and there's a lot of Literature on the ideological assumptions of the people running the media and how it shapes what you get in the supposedly neutral media.
Yeah, absolutely.
That doesn't mean that what you get in mainstream news sources is somehow equivalent in trustworthiness to what you get from very well funded Very determined and openly biased right-wing propagandists who spout conspiracy theories.
Right.
And and conspiracy theories built on like the the most like the most tenacious readings of, you know, of actual text.
Imagine.
Yeah.
And I know exactly what, you know, Glenn Greenwald would say where he were here.
He would say something.
Oh, well, you know, the mainstream media give you conspiracy theories as well.
WMD, you know.
Yeah.
It's still not the fucking same because we're talking about we're talking essentially about fascist propaganda.
Right.
Exactly.
And, you know, yes, of course.
Like, you know, like Obviously, there's also just sort of the basic point of view here that, you know, I agree.
The New York Times is an incredibly biased organization.
It is a very right-leaning organization.
Very right, in real terms.
In real terms, it is very, very right.
Rufo is trying to pretend that, like, he exists on one end of a spectrum, and the New York Times exists on the other end of that spectrum.
But of course, there's an entire, like, universe that isn't even within the purview of that, you know, thought, right?
You know?
And so, like, we criticize the New York Times very much from the left of the New York Times.
And when we, like, accept its basic reporting as mostly accurate, it is within, like, that framework of, like, of course it is biased.
It is biased to the right, right?
It is biased towards capitalism.
It is biased towards billionaires.
It is biased in favor of the police.
It is biased in favor of... And even when it, you know, creates journalism that kind of, like, pushes against some of these issues, it does so in often a very milquetoast, even if well-reported way, right?
And so this is a very different thing, again, from what Christopher Rufo was doing, which is actively pulling out documents and just lying about their contents.
Like, this is just... Yes.
Yeah, exactly.
The mainstream capitalist media sets the agenda through what it chooses to include within the range of the reportable, and the way it frames stories, and the language that it uses, etc.
etc.
etc.
You know, go and read Manufacturing Consent for God's sake.
That's not the same thing as making shit up to support neo-Nazi conspiracy theories.
Right.
And you may have bristled a little bit, audience, at me implying that Rufo is actively anti-Semitic when I refer to the people with three parentheses, because Rufo is not a neo-Nazi in the sense that the I-Don't-Speak-German audience would understand.
But, well, The thing that, you know, Robin's tweet thread that we mentioned at the beginning was really saying is, well, look, the minutes of the meeting indicate that there's in no sense are they actually like attacking the book as a portrait of the Holocaust, that they're Holocaust deniers, that they're openly anti-Semitic and, you know, kind of pushing that kind of agenda.
Instead, it's built on this kind of like purience around, you know, some of the language and some of the imagery in the book.
All of which is completely accurate.
You were correct, Corey Rubin.
Maus was not banned because the people in charge of its banning were actively encouraging a diminution of the Holocaust, the Holocaust narrative, quote unquote, in public schools.
It was banned because they thought it was a piece of degenerate art made by a Jewish person whose ideas of what reality is, conflicted with certain kinds of old school nationalist, jingoistic agendas and the Christian faith.
So very different thing, obviously.
I submit to you that the Holocaust happened for various complex reasons, but one of the reasons is that there was actually quite a lot of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, and it was operating on several different levels, you know, one of which was the very, very conscious and vociferous anti-Semitism one of which was the very, very conscious and vociferous anti-Semitism of somebody like Joseph Goebbels and the people that organized the Degenerate Art
And a lot of it was to do with the anti-Semitism of ordinary people, who might not themselves have thought of themselves as anti-Semitic, they might not have thought of themselves as hating Jews, etc, etc, but they might have gone to that exhibition and they might have been shocked by it because they found it in some sense shocking and outrageous and obscene and degenerate, and that all contributed towards the situation where something like the Holocaust could happen.
Exactly, exactly.
And it is this kind of diminution.
And I don't want to de-emphasize the Jewish nature of that in 1930s Germany, right?
There's no sense in which I'm trying to diminish the fact that the Holocaust was something that happened to Jewish people.
And, you know, as a Gentile, I feel like I need to emphasize that and that, like, this is not ultimately, like, my story to tell or my narrative to make.
At the same time, the charges of degeneracy, the charges of a degenerate culture, the charges of, you know, pornography and, you know, like, it goes far beyond just You know, the sort of like the Jewish influence in German society and Weimar Germany, etc.
It's it's it has a more.
It has a more general sense.
And it is that sense that tends to overtake the American version of this.
These things do come in different flavors.
And while many of the artists who get smeared with these kinds of labels of degeneracy in the U.S.
sense and in the broader Western sense are Jewish themselves, it's certainly not universal.
And I don't think that, you know, you necessarily have to kind of lead to that same, it doesn't necessarily have to lead to the same conclusion to in order to, you know, like the two ideas rhyme here, right?
And so the truth is that Mouse was banned or Mouse was taken out of the curriculum.
The stated purpose of this was because it was this degenerate, you know, They don't use the word degenerate, but they use, you know, it's over sexualized.
It's over, you know, it's got some swear words in it.
It's got some, it's got some things that are just uncomfortable for children to be examining in their classrooms, right?
Yeah.
And I submit to you that passively, To prioritise the depiction of nudity, the depiction of suicide, the depiction of use of cuss words or foul language or whatever you want to call it, to prioritise that as an issue over The enormous pedagogical value that teaching, reading, talking about, thinking about, considering, pondering, etc.
An issue like the Holocaust, through the medium of a great work of art, a work of art, you know, Written by somebody who is the son of survivors of this horrific event.
That is itself passively an act of anti-Semitism.
To prioritize those things over the other is an act of... And I want to just gesture back to this because that summary that Rufo gave in his New York Post article about, you know, critical race theory is beyond the pale to those who see the world as creative rather than critical.
Individual rather than racial.
Practical rather than theoretical.
Maus is not just a historical document.
It's not actually a historical document at all.
Spiegelman doesn't pretend that it is.
It is a work of art.
And it is inherently a critical work of art.
It examines critically memory, survivors' memories, the viewpoints of survivors.
And, you know, aside from the fact that it examines critically the crimes of the Nazi regime, etc., It is inherently a book that is racial in the sense that it looks at race.
It is intensely about, you know, how we construct and navigate and live race.
And it is theoretical in that sense as well.
And this is, you know, Rufo says in that article, these are the worldviews that he is against.
And there it all is in Maus.
That is exactly what these people hate.
That is exactly what these people are afraid of.
And to prioritize, well, there's rude words in it.
Over an issue like that.
Right.
And I think it's like it wouldn't, we're going to get into this in a little more detail here in a minute, but I think it's important to note that like Malice is not a text that is, you know, this isn't Fritz the cat, right?
No.
This isn't, you know, R. Crumb.
It isn't American Splendor.
It's a Harvey P. Carr.
You know, it's not it's not like the, you know, the bad language is a handful of examples of what I consider pretty mild swearing.
It's like a little bit of it's like a goddamn here and there.
It's got the word bitch in it.
There are a couple of there like, you know, people are hung.
Our mice are hung in the in the book, you know, but, you know, and that's horrifying.
But that's, you know, you know, reality.
And that's not really what's being objected to.
You know, there are mentions of, you know, that, you know, Vladek, Spiegelman's father, lost his virginity.
And, you know, there's a mention of it early in the book.
Oh, my goodness.
No 13 year old has ever heard of the term losing their virginity before, you know, like this is this is very, very, very mild stuff.
And I think, you know, not that I think there would be a question, like if they were teaching Fritz the cat, I think you could very easily make the argument that, like, this is probably not OK to teach in classrooms to 13 year olds.
Yes, that's right.
But they wouldn't be teaching that in the module that they were teaching.
That's right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
But even if Mouse was like, you know, the way the way it's kind of portrayed in some of these news stories is like, oh, yeah, it was just like it was this really aggressive, gritty, gritty book, you know, that like it's just it's just it just doesn't represent the nature of the text.
Again, we'll talk more about the text in a bonus episode coming up shortly.
But I think it is worth noting here that You know, the degree to which this is bad faith is only heightened by the act of actually reading the text.
If you've actually read the text, it is very, very mild on those grounds.
It is, for the most part, a very talky, contemplative text.
And I want to suggest
I want to at least, you know, ask the question that if an equivalent text, in some way, an equivalent text about, say, the crimes of the Soviet regime in the USSR, the Holodomor, something like that, or a text that was about the American Revolution, you know, the patriots seeing off the redcoats and King George, etc., etc., that also contained comparable levels of bad language and sex and so on and so forth, which, as you pointed out, not really very much.
I think I want to at least ask the question.
I think it might have been received and treated a little bit differently.
Oh, yes, definitely.
So, you know, you know, when it when it's, you know, when it's a good, good, good, good hearted American boys going out to fight the Redcoats and, you know, talking about, you know, talking about the the blushing cheeks of the brides they hope to gain when they end this battle.
That's just boys being boys, of course, you know, not that I have a I don't have a particular image in mind of that, but like, you know, any kind of narrative like that would be, you know, it just it tends to be much more acceptable when it's when it's when it's in a case that makes us feel comfortable, you know, if that if that makes sense.
Or when it's not about structural oppression and racial, you know, structural oppression of an oppressed minority.
Exactly, exactly.
I think, you know, like, and I go through this to kind of talk about how it is like they're actively kind of using Empyreans.
They're actually using this kind of faux indignance over some language and, you know, some implied sexuality and, you know, a little bit of nudity.
They are using that as an attack vector on the book and on kind of larger pedagogical And I think at this point it's worth noting that James Lindsay has been all the fuck over this lately.
And this is much bigger than mouse.
This is a horrifying example, and that's kind of why we're using this as the lens through which to do this.
There have been a number of, you know, like queer texts.
There's a particular, I've got a, I've got a, in the show notes here, I've got a piece of the Washington Post written by Maya Kobabe, I believe.
I may be mispronouncing her name, but it says, schools are banning my book, but queer kids need queer stories.
And it is a piece, it is a piece that she wrote a book called, or they, I believe they're non-binary, and I My apologies for the misgender there.
So they're the author of a book called Genderqueer, a Memoir, which is another graphic novel, which includes them as a young person, as a young teenager, experimenting and kind of thinking about how they might use various toys.
In their hypothetical sex life.
And so there are, you know, like images, like drawn images of, you know, sucking on a strap on, you know, and those kinds of, it's very, I mean, it's fairly chaste, but it is very much like, It's a coming-of-age story.
It is intended for, I mean, in the piece, Kibabe actually says, you know, like, this was really intended to explain my own non-binaryness to my friends and family who didn't understand when I first came out to them originally and to provide a voice for, you know, kind of queer young people.
But it's certainly not meant for small children.
It's not even meant necessarily for, like, 13-year-olds.
It's meant for, you know, people queer people who are coming into that understanding and to have this like portrait of themselves and in a very different way Spiegelman, Art Spiegelman describes the writing of Mouse as being about like trying to like not trying to tell a story and not trying to impart a message but trying to Well, trying to tell the story of his father and of his feelings about being Jewish and coming up in this post-Holocaust world.
And then, you know, struggling with his own feelings about what it meant to be a Jew in this world, in this way.
His own relationship with his father.
These coming of age stories are often powerful because they come from this place of an intense self-honesty.
And that self-honesty is almost by definition uncomfortable.
Particularly when it's coming from people who exist outside of what we consider the The mainstreams of white American society.
And so if it's a straight boy describing his first experience of jerking off to a Cindy Crawford poster or something, it's just considered, oh, that's just kind of normal, healthy male sexuality.
But if it's a non-binary kid saying, I just didn't feel right in my body.
And I fantasized about like certain things that becomes uncomfortable and that becomes disgusting and degenerate and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And this is being openly weaponized, you know, by, by James Lindsay.
And if you've been following his Twitter for the last few months, he has a, he has a new he has a new thing that he's doing.
And that is whenever someone disagrees with him or whenever someone points out that when he is attacking, you know, queer literature or queer education as being degenerate and awful and, you know, he just quote tweets and says, OK, groomer.
And when I say groomer, I mean, he's literally accusing anyone who thinks that queer kids should have educational material available to them.
Any adult, any person in any position of authority who is providing those materials, or who considers those materials valuable, is actively trying to pervert and molest children, and deserves the absolute You know, worst excesses of the carceral system in the United States, to begin with.
So, in fire of the traditional homophobic trope of conflating homosexuality or any kind of non-heterosexuality with paedophilia, he is going full Pizzagate Frazzle Drip QAnon.
Yeah, it's not.
I mean, it's it's not even that he's going full Nazi.
Like, yeah, this this is literally like the language used by the literal Nazis, you know, that the sexual that the Jews were like sexualizing children and that this was all meant to, you know, like purify the white race by kind of getting rid of these degenerate influences, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
This is not I mean, when I say James Lindsay is a fascist, I mean that literally I am not being figurative in this.
And Again, in case you doubt me, I have a couple of clips from an episode of the new Discourses podcast he does called Groomer Schools 2 because it was the second in I think now a three-part series of the Groomer Schools series in which he talks about these issues.
And this is part of the thing that he's been doing of like going into an academic paper
reading it through the lens of like what he thinks certain words mean, by connecting everything to Hegel and Marcuse, and reading it through the most terrible lens he can imagine, which, you know, basic, you know, basic terms like equity, and inequality, and you know, etc, are referring to like actual like gulags and communist revolution.
Well, equity is one of Rufo's.
Oh, yeah.
No, it's the same.
I mean, it's the same.
You know, they cross the streams constantly.
It is.
They are using very similar.
They use very similar language because they are obviously in clear communication with one another.
Rufo is speaking more to active political bodies.
I have a thing in the show notes I'm not going to go through it now where He was actually at the American Legislative Exchange Conference, the ALEC Conference in late 2020, and outlined this in a series of presentations as to, here's how we're going to attack, here's how we're going to gain Republican dominance in the 2022 elections.
And it is very, very clear.
This is a very clear legislative agenda.
It is meant to put Republicans in power, period.
It is an attack on You know, partisan political process, you know, this is not in good faith, right?
Whereas Lindsey is doing more the like, again, the highfalutin pseudo intellectual stuff, because he can throw these names around.
And, you know, he's complete.
It's completely incoherent.
If anyone who knows anything at all about this stuff, but he is very effective within the world in which he lives in, because nobody's ever going to check him on this.
But I think it is worth highlighting This now, because when we get into the minutes of this meeting, it becomes very clear that what Rufo and Lindsay have been doing, and what the larger political project about the anti-CRT movement has been doing, on the national scale, on this pseudo-intellectual and socio-political scale, is being enacted in the minutes of that meeting.
And I really want to put this here now, so that when we then go through some of this, You know what to look for and you know what I see when I read through this.
So let's play this.
Set up and pay off.
Yeah, first he's responding to this book or this paper by Hannah Dyer called Queer Futurity and Childhood Innocence Beyond the Injury of Development.
I'm going to go ahead and just read the abstract to you just so you get a sense of what this paper is.
Because it is so often said that children are the future, queer theory's attention to and searing debates on queer futurity offers something new and important to the studies of childhood.
Drawing on and deepening recent attempts to meld the fields of childhood studies and queer theory, I dwell on the contradiction that results from the synchronous assumptions of a child's asexuality and proto-heterosexuality to show how emphasizing sexuality within a discussion of children's education is constructive.
In the service of my interest in the renewal of thought concerning children's psychosexual development, I offer a critical reading of the It Gets Better social media campaign, particularly its consequent critiques and revisions.
I begin with engagement of Eve Sedgwick's 1991 seminal essay on queer childhood, How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay, and then, from there, trace contemporary queer theory's use of the figure of the child in consideration of the impact of innocence on childhood.
In an effort to consider the contemporary residues of historical violence and the theories of healthy child development and also consider how histories of colonialism and transatlantic slavery extend into the future and leave traces on contemporary theories of child development.
There's a lot there, right?
There's a lot of this.
There's some kind of historical stuff.
There's some contextual stuff.
I'm not sure the connection to, like, colonialism, etc.
was necessary in this paper, but it's a paper.
There's no indication that this has been, like, widely accepted by You know, pedagogy in middle schools in the United States.
There's no sense that this has been, like, this hugely influential, groundbreaking paper.
And if there is, I would love to hear it.
This is an academic talking to other academics about the way that academics consider childhood and, you know, kind of child sexuality.
Because, like, obviously, You know, anyone who, you know, who has, you know, sexual desires.
I'm not, I'm not referring to people who are asexual or people who don't, who don't have those desires.
This is not meant to be critical of that, but you know, everyone who, you know, there is, there is a spectrum, you know, that you start getting sexual feelings and sexual urges much earlier than in our culture.
We typically admit that people do so.
And that acknowledging that feeling wrongness by being a gay or lesbian or transgender or queer or non-binary, acknowledging these things in that children may be these things earlier than we expect them to be capable of doing it is a way of giving them comfort in a way of presenting a more positive future to all children and to give everyone a more fuller understanding of their sexuality when they do become adults.
Because there is a spectrum here.
Lindsay in no way thinks this is like this is this is this is all any conception that, you know, we should consider a six year old as a presexual being as someone who will very likely have sex at some point in their future or at least want to is grooming children.
You know, that's that's Lindsay's.
And anyone doing so deserves to go to prison.
That's that's literally what he says.
And again, even in talking about, you know, child sexual abuse and, you know, those sorts of obviously horrific issues like those things get covered up in these in the larger culture because we cannot talk honestly about Legitimate, you know, like sexual feelings that children might have or that, you know, like suddenly any kind of discussion about those kinds of topics ends up being used as a cudgel.
You suddenly you're a, you know, you're talking about, you know, doing, defending child sexual abuse and that sort of thing.
Like, Obviously, that's not true.
We would have better tools to combat child sexual abuse if we had at least some understanding that like children were, you know, that there is the spectrum of sexuality and that we need to, you know, have an honest conversation about that.
And again, in no way to defend, you know, actual child abuse, that's not what we're doing here.
Nobody in good faith could listen to what we've said and come to that conclusion.
Right, but of course we're not talking about people in good faith, so it's worth highlighting it again.
We are not defending any form of child sexual abuse, or we are not doing the Ibephilophile thing.
Like, that's not what we're doing here.
We are having an honest adult conversation about honest sexuality that people have.
We're talking about people who are too young to have sex having the right to, you know, think about these things and have these feelings, including people who are becoming gay or bi or lesbian or whatever.
Exactly.
So here's how our good friend James Lindsay talks about these issues.
So, beyond referencing LGBTQ identity in children, queer childhood can rupture conventional schemas of growing up as it undoes the anticipated congruency, thus alienating them, of course.
The enforcement of strict borders between childhood and adulthood.
Hello, minor attracted person grooming pedophiles.
We're going to rupture conventional schemas of growing up, undo anticipated congruency, the enforcement of strict borders between childhood and adulthood, and forms affinities convened on grounds of mutual feelings of shame and difference.
Queer growth does not always promise a teleological guarantee of progress, but may find success.
pleasure in delaying the finitude and predictable foreclosures of developmental stages.
This is identity crises in a box.
God, it's horrible.
It's so horrible.
And it's dressed up in this language where if you read it, you don't, and you don't know a lot of stuff about this, the way they talk, you don't see how horrible it is.
This is what they are doing to your children in government schools under brand names like Get that out of schools.
Put people in prison who bring this crap in.
This is unbelievable child abuse.
Unbelievable grooming.
We even see the invitation to pedophiles right there.
We're going to complicate the difference between adults and children.
Yeah, why?
So that gross grooming adults can have sex with children.
To sexualize them.
To bring them into a queer identity that they didn't know was latent by abusing them sexually.
Freaking unbelievable that we've allowed this to take place because we're not willing to do the work to understand what these freaks are writing in their complicated critical theory language.
I don't want to go in for psychobabble.
You know, I'm not trained to psychoanalyze anybody.
I don't know.
I don't know about somebody that can read what he just read and take that from it, you know, who can project what he finds there into that, you know, who can find such significance in the word complicate.
Right.
He extrapolates an entire conspiracy theory about predatory pedophiles, et cetera, et cetera, based on a couple of words.
Because he's like, well, this connects back to Marcuse.
And Marcuse was all about revolution and all about perpetual power dynamics.
And therefore, you can't just be happy with the world you live in.
And things can't just get better.
You see, things can't just be working along in the standard liberal democratic way.
You need revolution.
And the only way you're going to get the proper revolution is if no one has a firm identity.
That's why they must sexualize your children and turn them trans and turn them queer so that they will be loyal foot soldiers for the revolution, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Like this is effectively his argument.
Because to be a little bit more serious about it, in my response, he's reading this through the lens of what is essentially the cultural Marxism conspiracy theory.
Exactly.
Absolutely.
He's He is essentially reading it through the Nazi conspiracy theory that the Nazis called Kulturbolshevismus when they started it back in the 30s, which was the idea that respectable, decent German culture, gentile middle class they meant, German culture, was being undermined through degenerate art and degenerate theory, etc., etc., and we all know where that came from.
And that is filtering back into the conversation.
It's been doing that for several years.
And this is the lens that this man uses.
This paranoid, essentially fascist conspiracy theory lens.
This is the lens through which he reads these texts.
And of course he's looking.
He's looking for material to misconstrue and misrepresent in order to further that conspiracy theory.
I guarantee you he got on JSTOR and just started looking for, you know, child sexuality or, you know, Marcuse child or something like that.
And just, you know, he's just reading all these papers.
He's looking for things to misinterpret with that lens, as you as you as you aptly say, you know, absolutely.
It's it's this is very intentional on his part.
And I believe he believes this.
I don't think this is opposed.
I think Rufo is largely opposed.
I think he's got a political agenda.
I think he knows that he's bullshitting.
I mean, he's pretty open about the fact that he's just You know, this is this is what we have to do in order to, you know, elect more Republicans next year.
You know, that's that's that's just I mean, you know, I I don't think he goes much deeper than that for him.
I think he is a committed right wing reactionary dipshit.
And believe me, we'll do a full roof episode and I will demonstrate that to to to to to a nauseating degree.
But I think Lindsey actually believes this shit.
I think I don't think Lindsey I think Lindsey has drunk his own Kool-Aid to this point because he is way off on the deep end on this.
Yeah.
There is no connection to reality at all in the work that Lindsay is producing at this point.
No, exactly.
There's no actual internal connections between his argument as he states it.
I was listening there, and things were just popping out out of nowhere.
You know, hello, minor attracted persons.
And I'm like, where the fuck did that come from?
By just, you know, introducing something into your account, that's not a connection in itself.
It needs to come from somewhere, you know?
So yeah, to be a bit crude about it, Rufo comes across as essentially a slimeball, whereas Lindsay comes across as essentially a fanatic.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I got to the end of that clip and I went, there we go.
That's my James Lindsay clip for this episode.
I have demonstrated that, you know, and I, that is not like clipped out of context or anything.
He does that, like, this is what they're doing to your children in government schools.
This is what they're doing to your children!
He says that probably a hundred times in this two and a half hour episode and says these people belong in prison probably 20 times.
Yes, they do it.
They do that because it works.
Yeah, it does.
It appeals to their audience because their audience, you know, their audience is into this stuff.
Their audience is into the fear and the outrage and the vengeful sadism.
So they pander to them.
They give them what they want.
And you know better than anybody.
So I started, I kept listening to like the next couple of minutes of this and I thought, let's throw this in too.
Just usually when I have two clips from the same episode, it's, you know, separated in time by some sense, but this is, he just got even more batshit.
And so I thought like, let's just, let's just play this one too.
And I did separate them as two clips because I thought it was funnier to do it that way.
Uh, let's let's let's play let's let's continue for another minute or minute and change.
My notion of queer childhood borrows heavily from Catherine Bond Stockton's 2009 The Queer Child or Growing Sideways in the 20th Century.
Stockton shows how the belief that children are void of sexuality endures while at the same time children are assumed to be growing up and toward futures defined through heteronormative sexualities.
She's actually already said this, right?
And so these papers are such garbage they just say the same thing over and over again.
Stockton care.
The fact that James Lindsay is complaining that anyone is repeating their points too often.
So I just had to just had to call that out in the moment.
That's that's.
Yeah.
Characterizes the queer child as a subject that hovers above and outside of histories of childhood.
Troubling assumptions that the child does not have.
Sorry.
Troubling assumptions that the child does not and has never fantasized queerly.
Groomers.
Stockton's work demonstrates that in many renditions of the child there exists.
And by the way, this, this grooming is exactly the argument given when we call out these books on social media and say that these are grooming books and education, they're inappropriate.
How many thousands of people on Twitter have replied to the people fighting back against us?
The parents fighting back, the normal parents fighting back is how many of them have replied and say, if you think kids aren't sexually active, you don't even know what's going on.
What?
Like, what?
That's exactly what we're seeing here, though.
Well, I could, you know, I can counter that with my own what.
Do you not remember being a child, Mr. Lindsay?
And the use of the use of the word normal, by the way, is very telling.
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
But, you know, look, whatever ordinary or normal comes up in these kinds of conversations.
Think about what work that word is doing just in general.
But yes.
Yeah.
Continue.
But, you know, groomers, groomers, groomers, that comes from literally nowhere.
It does not connect with what he's reading.
I do not know the source text he's reading there.
I can tell from the tiny, contextless snapshot he gives me.
In his hostile manner, I can tell what is being said there.
What is being said there is that we erase queer people right from the start, before they're even adults, by having this idea of children as fundamentally, you know, sexless and heterosexual, just inherently.
Which is obviously true, and it's got nothing to do with grooming children to be.
In fact, it's the opposite, because what is being talked about there is the fact that we as a culture groom children to be heterosexual or to think that they have to be.
It's almost as if he's a complete bad faith actor who has no interest in actually understanding these papers that he claims to be obsessed with and that he has spent so many hours complaining about in every media and that he has built his career on at this point.
It's almost as if he has no desire to actually engage with that material in any kind of honest way and instead is just using it as a sociopolitical tool.
In order to bash on the woke, the left, the, you know, the communists who are coming to destroy everything that anyone loves in American society.
Yeah.
That's almost as if he's also a completely dishonest, fanatical, philistine, homophobic, fascist bigot.
In fact, you know what?
I think he is.
I think he might be.
Go back and listen to 87.
Anyway, we should.
So I put the minutes to this meeting in the show notes, and we're not going to go through all this.
It's about 22 pages.
Highly recommend, if you're interested at all in this topic, reading through these minutes, because what you find is...
The school board members.
So basically, so in these school boards, these are these are elected school boards.
It does not take a genius to get on these boards as will become very apparent very quickly.
But they typically are, you know, people who are sort of like local political figures on some level.
It's usually not like a full time gig.
It's a few hours a week.
It's maybe 15, 20 hours a week.
And they're advised by, you know, people who actually have, you know, like education in pedigree, who have like bachelor's degrees in education and who actually like design curricula based on, you know, texts that they get from usually from commercial places like, you know, Pearson and, texts that they get from usually from commercial places like, you know, Pearson and, you know, Scholastic and, you know,
Essentially produce materials that is an aid of, you know, kind of building lesson plans and building units, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And so that so what you find here is these boards are typically kind of split between like kind of a conservative wing and a liberal wing.
Certainly no leftist wing, just to be clear, but there's a conservative wing and a liberal wing.
And the conservatives are going to bring up the most.
Sorry, you mean there isn't a powerful Marxist presence on the school boards of American state schools?
I've obviously been misinformed.
Maybe in San Francisco, but in McMinn County, Tennessee.
None that I saw, you know, but so you get the conservatives spouting the most ignorant bullshit imaginable.
Um, about like basic facts about things that are within their purview.
Like at one point, one of these guys, I believe it was Tony Allman.
Although I'd have to, I'd have to go back and look through the transcript, but he's one of the members.
He's one of the Republican state, state of Tennessee representatives.
And he's on this local school board.
And at one point he says, well, wait a minute, is this for eighth grade or is this for third grade?
Because the book has a big number three on it.
So that's for third grade, right?
And it has to be very patiently explained to him that like, no, it's in like this third class of a certain kind of, you know, three letter organization.
of like how the standards are being written.
It has nothing to do with being for the third grade or eighth grade, etc, etc.
It's part of I don't understand exactly what the three means on that on that textbook, but I'm not on the fucking Maine County School Board.
You know, this is basic fundamental knowledge, and he has no fucking clue about it.
All right.
This is again in the transcript.
The kind of liberals on the board are actually bringing on the people who wrote the pedagogy, who wrote these technical experts to explain exactly how these texts are chosen and exactly how these standards are being met.
And it becomes important because Mouse isn't just like, when I went to, when I went through public schools, not too far from McMinn County, Tennessee, you know, just a few hours away, A lot of my eighth grade education in language arts was you'd read a little bit from a book, you'd read from like a reader, right?
You'd read like a bit of Shakespeare, you'd read a bit of, you know, whatever.
And you would get, you would basically do like a test, which would be like largely like fill in the blank, maybe some short answer questions, you know, that were, you know, sort of about like factual accuracy and your ability to just like parse the text accurately.
With maybe a slight bit of interpretation here and there.
There was no, like, sense of, you know, actual, like, learning how to interpret text.
And so, in that mindset, you know, to say, like, well, look, this book has some objectionable elements.
We can just lift it out and put something else there.
And, like, it's just, like, it's just a reader, right?
It's just, like, a thing that we're using to teach kids how to read, essentially.
And no, that's not actually what happens.
At one point in the minutes, it is described that like, well, we wanted to discuss the Holocaust here in the 8th grade standards because we'd already done like a bit of like, you know, we only get up to the Civil War, typically in like the 6th grade history standards.
And yet we know when they get to high school, we're going to, like, dump them in the deep end on, like, all the horrors of World War II and that whole deal.
And so we wanted to, here, right before you get to high school, to have a moment to actually, like, examine this in its own context, to have, like, its own, you know, unit, this really kind of in-depth unit in terms of, like, actually exploring this topic in particular.
That's only one, you know, aspect of like, yes, this was chosen very deliberately.
But these texts are not like, it's not like just sort of a drop in drop out.
It's not like just a single text that gets used, you know, for three days out of the year, whatever that we can drop in, you know, some other Holocaust narrative or some other story, you know.
It is the foundation of a unit, and I'm going to read a bit here from the actual minutes, although it's not actually from the minutes.
I want to highlight just how central this is to, like, how the pedagogy works, and how If Rufo doesn't know this, he doesn't know shit about anything, because this is fundamental to his point, and it shows that he's absolutely lying.
So, one of the guys who's talking about this from the technical expertise point is a guy named Stephen Brady.
And he says, you know, the part of understanding the book's place in the curriculum is understanding how the curriculum is built anyway.
When we were in school, we would hop from one book to the next.
We would study one book for a few days, do a test, and then move on to the next book.
I want to tell you why curriculum is important and how the pieces of it are designed, and how we have an opportunity to teach more than standards.
And then he pulls up a slide and the slide is a passage from this book, Dairyman by Horde.
And it's about carbohydrates and they make up 60% of the ration dry matter provides 70% of the counts of energy needs.
It uses terms like carbohydrates, salivary buffering, rumen acid production.
It's about pH, short chain fatty acids.
It uses all these like terms, right?
And then Brady commenting on this says, so the question here, what feed should I use as their dietary supplement?
What does this have to do with anything?
My dad can answer this.
He can go to the co-op and they would know exactly what all those words meant.
I don't have a clue what I just read.
And I would say many of you don't either.
I mean, this text actually gets into like elementary biochemistry.
So, you know, it's, it's pretty, pretty advanced.
I mean, it's, it's not super advanced, but it's, it's hard.
It's, it's, it's real stuff.
So here's the problem.
What we're finding is that students can't have rigorous learning on topics they know little to nothing about.
When we jump from one topic to the next, all our time is spent just figuring out words and what they meant.
If I go back to that article, we are going to focus on what's a rumen, what's a dietary starch.
So the way curriculums are designed now is that we build background knowledge Centered around some kind of engaging topics that's worthy of our time.
So the citizen can then move on beyond just figuring out what vocabulary is.
Now we can answer questions like, what's the main idea?
What are the details?
How does this compare to that?
Now have these more rigorous conversations.
What does that have to do with curriculum?
Why is curriculum important?
There is a balance here between building the background knowledge and using grade level text.
I can pull out a picture book of cows, but is that really at the level I need to make me have those deeper conversations about cows?
He goes on to talk about the Holocaust, to talk about Maus, and he says, the task that students do at the end of this module, the one about Maus, after they spend a couple months talking about the Holocaust, studying this project, what they do that shows they understand what went on, they will write their own narrative and pretend that they have interviewed a Holocaust upstander.
Probably survivor, I think, is the actual word that's meant to be used there.
They're going to create graphic novel panels to visually represent a section of their narrative and they will present that to their peers.
You have all these standards that we saw earlier addressed through this project.
How do we get there?
Well, here's our text.
Our anchor text is mouse and we have all these supplemental things that we look at throughout this module that builds that anchor text.
We look at interviews from Holocaust survivors, news articles from BBC, Los Angeles Times, Guardian survivor stories, and excerpts from some other books.
There's even a section where we go to the Jewish Virtual Library and look at some selections from that.
All of these go to build that background knowledge.
It's grade level appropriate for our students.
For example, we wouldn't bring in the Diary of Anne Frank book at this point because that is written in a roughly fourth, fifth grade level.
Beyond what we do in the module, beyond just addressing the standards of teaching that, there's one more piece of this curriculum that we forget about, that we brush over, but it's really important.
There's opportunity in this curriculum for us to teach habits of character.
Again, this is an incredibly sophisticated module built around the book that they then use to bring in other outside historical texts in order to describe what's actually happening and to engage students in actual consideration of these events from their own perspective, and really giving them what sounds to me like a phenomenal education.
Like, I can't imagine doing this.
I mean, like, like this, this is practically I mean, I don't want to say university level work.
Obviously, they're not held to that standard.
But this is the sort of thing that like I do for this podcast, frankly, you know, it sounds it sounds like a conscious attempt to to absolutely ground these kids in a subject so that when they go on to look at World War Two later on in their education, They will be able to look at it with a foundational context that they've been given.
Exactly.
Which is, it's so, you know, that is it, isn't it?
And as you say, the context involves interviews with Holocaust survivors, other historical documents, and, you know, and getting them to be creative as well in terms of their engagement with this subject matter.
It sounds Sounds really good.
I know you had the Rufo exchange there with Judd Legum, who's a tweet thread, who was kind of the initial person who made this go viral on Twitter.
So his tweet thread is available in the show notes.
But I believe you had some tweets to explore with us for the audience.
Yeah, this is just me kind of bringing the conversation back down to the level of pure spite, you know, but I want to make it clear... That is a very good level to be at at this point, so yes, please.
I do think that sort of ideological and class spite is absolutely the right way to approach specimens like Rufo, yeah.
So yeah, I just want to make it clear that this guy is a An absolutely shameless, outrageous, and established fucking liar, you know?
And that is just demonstrated very clearly by Judd Legum in this exchange, because Christopher F. Rufo, at Real Chris Rufo, responds to Judd Legum's reportage with, this story is fake news.
I'm quoting him now.
This story is fake news.
The book was swapped out from the eighth grade curriculum, not quote-unquote banned.
The board voted to find a better book for the Holocaust and said they'd even use Maus again if they don't find a good replacement.
Judd Legum is the Jesse, he actually says Jussie, but that's a typo, Jesse Smollett of journalism.
Now, this tweet is just so packed with stuff.
I mean, firstly, the outrageous use of the phrase swapped out.
Like, you know, in this context, in the context of talking about Nazi Germany, he goes in for that kind of Orwellian bullshit.
He puts Band in quotes.
Now, look, it's possible that Band isn't the perfect or the best word to use to describe what happened.
It's a bit emotive.
It does overstate things a little bit, but there isn't, you know, it's nowhere near the level of problematic as just every other word in Rufo's tweet here.
Right, exactly.
The board voted to find a better book for the Holocaust.
Where, I mean, literally, where is the better book for what they're trying to do with the age range they're trying to do it for the reasons they're trying to do it?
They said they'd use Mao's again.
Yeah, okay.
They said, okay, we take it out.
We might use it again.
That's all right, then.
If they don't find a good replacement.
And then the dog whistle about Jesse Smollett as well.
Anyway, Legham responds with, let's go over the facts.
Ruffo claims the book has been, quote, swapped out.
It has not.
The board does not have a replacement.
And the result, according to the board, is the entire module on the Holocaust will be skipped because Maus is the anchor text.
He goes on to quote loads of the stuff that you just quoted, and then there's another bit where he quotes Rob Shamblin, one of the school boards, saying, I don't know what it's going to take to find an alternative, to which Sharon Brown responds, it would probably mean we would have to move on to another module.
There it is.
Exactly, exactly.
And that's exactly what happened at the end of this meeting.
All that good stuff Daniel just read out from the minutes, all that amazing curriculum, gone.
Yeah, not part of Rufo's conception, not part of like, that is completely irrelevant to this, because ultimately the book wasn't banned, it was merely swapped out.
You see, you just, you know, one book about the Holly, you know, you just put another book in there, put Johnny Tremaine in there.
That's, you can teach, you can teach things from Johnny Tremaine, just do it that way.
The boy in the striped pajamas maybe, let's put that in, that'll be fine.
You know, I do.
I do respond like to some of this like completely like in the in the text.
And again, please go read this.
It's it's it's phenomenal.
Like they're literally sitting and arguing about like, well, if if this book has the word God damn it, and like one of our 13 year olds is sitting in the cafeteria, And they start reading this book aloud to their peers.
Are we going to be allowed to discipline them for doing that?
Because after all, it's in their text materials.
And like, this just seems very inappropriate.
Like they get like this real Like obsession with the naughty words, you know, with like the just just that, like that's the attack strategy.
And the thing is that, like, for me in this perspective, not being on a school board and not having to answer to, you know, the school board, I'm like, yeah, I think it's perfectly fine if a 13 year old says the word goddamn.
Like, yeah, no, I don't know.
I think that's fine.
You know, like, yeah, it's good.
I think it's possible they might be saying goddamn when you're not around.
Yeah.
I think it's impossible.
I think it's possible they might have seen the word bitch before.
I think, you know, and I think there are contexts in which you should not say such things.
But, yeah, it turns out, you know, these are not six-year-olds, right?
I also think that if you had the most chaste-minded, you know, kid and they'd never heard the phrase goddamn or bitch, I think, you know, acquainting them with the existence of phrases like that In return for also giving them a quite impressive grounding in one of the most important historical events in history, with also very decided relevance still.
I think that's a worthy, that's a worthwhile swap.
You know, I'll take that.
There's a cost-benefit analysis there and, you know, I'm firmly in favor of, okay, well, the cost is worth the benefit on that one.
Exactly.
And the argument then becomes, you know, this highly abstracted thing because the other, you know, kind of the liberals on the school board have to say, Well, I agree that this is inappropriate language.
You know, I agree that this is, you know, this is not the best thing.
We have censored the book.
There's a long conversation about how they have, you know, what are the limits of their fair use guidelines in terms of being able to, you know, like, you know, bleep out certain things, like white out certain words in the text and white out some of the, some of the objectionable stuff.
And apparently, It was unclear to me like my understanding is this was done to that text previously so all of the like the fact the word goddamn doesn't actually occur in the text it's g you know that dash d dash dash dash you know it's it's it's it's already valorized to a certain degree They're arguing about, well, can we do more?
Can we make this less gritty?
Can we make this more family friendly?
Can we make this more of a thing?
And can we make the Holocaust less upsetting for people?
Exactly.
We should teach the Holocaust, but is there like a, is there a more like, you know, family friendly way to teach the Holocaust?
Can we do it that way?
You know?
And again, I do want to again, just highlighting again, this text is not like that aggressive, like it is not like this is certainly this is nowhere close to the most, you know, aggressive thing I've seen about the Holocaust.
And it's certainly not the most aggressive piece of, you know, like in the art from the 80s and the 70s and 80s that's out there.
I mean, there's a there's a lot other there's a lot of other stuff out there, you know, the but the conversation on the book makes it kind of inherently problematic because it has these naughty words in it.
Right.
And therefore, it was very easy at the end of the meeting when they're trying to vote, well, should we keep this or not?
Well, we've got angry parents.
We've got angry people talking.
We've got emails where this has become a point of contention.
And any contentious book, unless it's got a strong basis for it, because they've already kind of acknowledged, everyone in the room seems to have acknowledged that this book is problematic.
Well, let's table it.
Let's not teach it.
If we can find another book, we will bring the unit back in, but we just won't teach that unit this year.
And that's the way this process works.
They're not burning the books in a bonfire, although there was a book burning near there.
There was.
Pastor Greg Locke encouraged people to burn their copies of Harry Potter and Twilight.
It was quite sparsely But even so, but there's there's video.
I will include that link in the show notes so you can go watch that.
It's it is a thing, you know.
But.
That's that's how it happens.
That's how this happens.
It is absolutely it is not.
We're throwing all the copies of Maus at a big bonfire.
It is.
It's just quietly not being taught anymore.
We're going to bring in something else.
And from this kind of conversation, like if a handful of dams and bitch And like one scene, you know, a couple, a little bit of like some nipples, you know, and mention of, you know, someone losing their virginity before they were buried is enough to take a book out of contention to that degree.
What text survives that?
You know, I mentioned Johnny Tremaine, but like that's kind of the level of stuff, you know, it is like this desire to come back to this era in which we're teaching these like old dusty classics, you know, the stuff that we read back in the 1890s, these very clean cut white American kids
On their, on their bicycles, and their, you know, and the playing cards, and the spokes, and they all have a paper route, and like, that's the, that's like the world that seems to be envisioned here, which is just not, it was not, it wasn't real in the 50s, but it's certainly not real today, you know, and no text that deals at all with any kind of, you know, queer sexuality, however obliquely, is going to pass this test ultimately, you know, and that's,
Christopher Ruffo and James Lindsay and these, you know, school board members, that's what they want.
They want to remove anything that smacks of a difference, anything that smacks of this kind of minority population that is not comfortable with heteropatriarchal normativity, you know, that is not comfortable with the wages of capitalism.
There's no discussion of anything critical of those concepts that is going to be allowed in these texts, so long as these school board members have their way about it.
Yeah.
And the liberals did nothing.
The liberals did nothing to stand in the way of this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this is this is how it's going to happen this way around or this way around, or at least this this is how it's going to start.
It's going to start with, you know, we just want everybody to get along.
Let's make it non confrontational.
You know, we won't we won't take any drastic action.
We'll just we'll table it essentially.
That's that's the phrase you use.
And that's that's what will happen.
It will just end up being tabled and tabled and taped.
And it's the old thing about the the demands of the oppressed constantly being, well, you know, maybe next year.
You know, maybe we'll do something about it after the midterms, etc.
It's just that forever.
It's just a more aggressive version of that.
But yeah, I mean, it's been well documented.
There's this epidemic of books being removed from libraries, books being removed from schools and school courses, etc.
And you have your very well-funded, very well-organized, GOP-affiliated AstroTurf Red Scare stuff, you know, you have Moms for Liberty, you have other organizations.
I'm trying to think of the name of the organization.
Oh, Fight for Schools in Loudon, etc.
But this is, in a way, this is almost more insidious because it's kind of, to use Barry Weiss's phrase, it's bottom-up authoritarianism, isn't it?
Well, it's not even bottom-up.
I mean, these are like high-up members within this local community, for sure.
Well, that's true.
Middle-up.
Yeah and and routinely and look look let's not let's not like kind of parse the well you're not really a parent you're not really an act you know you're not if you have a like strong political agenda but whenever you find these like clips that go viral of like the angry parent demanding that some book get removed because their daughter doesn't want to see this or you know yada yada yada
Whenever you look into that, it's routinely some, like, high-up Republican operative who put on the, like, you know, the schoolmarm kind of, you know, she put on her sweatpants and the ugly sweater and came in and, you know, acted a fool.
Like, that's, you know, this is routine.
Very likely the petrol for the bus that brought her in was paid for at some stage by Parents Defending Education or the Heritage Foundation or the Koch Brothers or These are AstroTurf organizations.
I mean, right now, the thing that's happening right now is the truckers' strike in Ottawa, Canada, and I believe there's one going on in your country as well.
We haven't seen one in the U.S.
yet, but oh, you just wait.
Before November, I guarantee you, we're going to see a truckers' revolt over mask mandates.
I did see a very nice piece that talked about the truckers in Canada, of which 90% of truckers in Canada are vaccinated, and about 50% of them are of South Asian extraction.
And yeah, that is not the demographic that is going out to this mandate.
These are the people who own the trucking companies.
This is about the truckers, just to be clear.
This dynamic happens over and over and over again.
It is absolutely Indicative of fascism and the way that like fascism spreads itself and the way that it sells itself.
You know, it's sorry.
That's, that's a side note.
That's not directly relevant, but it absolutely is part of a piece like this, how this kind of political organization does its dirty work, you know, is by, you know, Coding itself in this like we're not actually doing this thing that we're doing or pretending to be this kind of marginalized class when in reality we are, you know, like local bigwigs and that's just that's just the truth.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And it depends upon, at the level we've been talking about, you know, the Mao school board thing, it depends upon weaponizing through, you know, spreading this kind of ideology, weaponizing this kind of bourgeois respectability, comfort politics, you know.
They're uncomfortable with a text like Maus.
They might think of it as being uncomfortable with, you know, the use of a phrase like goddamn or the sight of mouse nipples or whatever.
I suspect the discomfort comes from somewhere else.
They're uncomfortable with loads of texts that talk about the civil rights movement.
They might consciously think, some of them at least, that what they're uncomfortable with is the idea that it's going to cause feelings of discomfort and division and guilt and so on in white students, or feelings of self-consciousness in black students.
Some of them might genuinely think that!
They're uncomfortable with young adult books about young people exploring sexuality, including maybe gay or trans or bisexuality or non-binary, etc.
And they might think it's because, you know, well, children that age, they shouldn't be exposed to this sort of explicit material.
Some of them might genuinely think that.
But I think that actually the discomfort comes from the fact that people, you know, that subjects like structural oppression, of racial minorities and the, you know, sexually oppressed people oppressed along grounds of sexuality and gender and so on.
You know, it's bringing up that subject and it's bringing up the fight against it and it's bringing up Subjects that might help people like that self-actualize and self-activate and stuff like that.
And this is just anathema to people of that mindset and that class position.
That is the fundamental basis of it, which is why so much of the narrative about this result revolves around, you know, my feelings, my fee-fees, my feelings, my children's feelings.
And the feelings of my children.
How do I explain this to my children?
That's always the way and I do have I do have a couple of other things I want to read from this set of minutes and then we can start to wrap up here because I do want to like I mentioned the like Harold Sterryman example like on the slide and you know like the comparison to the way that mouse is taught right.
And this just is indicative of like the response to that concern for the curriculum and for pedagogy on the part of the designers who have designed this curriculum and who work hard to really respond to their community.
Jonathan Pierce, one of the conservative members of the school board.
Yes, I believe I heard Miss Knight say a moment ago, there's not a book that can replace this one.
And then Stephen Brady, who is the guy who shared the thing earlier, I says, not without redoing the whole module.
Pierce, I asked that you go back to your horde's dairy example.
Not one time do I see a vulgar word and hold on, I'm going to, I'm going to, I don't know what this guy sounds like, but I'm going to, I'm going to do this.
I ask that you go back to your Hordes Diary example.
Not one time do I see a vulgar word in that paragraph there.
My objection, and I apologize to everyone sitting here, is that my standard no matter, and I am probably the biggest sinner and crudest person in this room, can I lay that in front of a child and say, read it, or this is part of your reading assignment.
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 in 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.
I'm just an old country school board member and I think he literally, yes he does, I'm just an old country hyper chicken, and I think in our policy it says that the decision stops at this board.
Unfortunately, Mr. Parkinson, we did not go through the complaint process.
It's also in our board policies.
Yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada.
I was just amazed that, like, I'm just an old country school board member.
I'm just a simple country lawyer.
I say, I say, I'm just a simple country lawyer.
Very much so.
All right.
All right.
One more.
And this just plugs back into back into Lindsay there.
So I've got to find the text here.
One second here, because this is worth it.
And this really is.
um okay so Mike Cochran same guy uh he First of all, he says, so there's this poem, he's going on to another example of something that's taught, this poem that's taught in the seventh grade.
No, we're talking about the 8th grade curriculum today, sir.
Well, it's the 7th grade, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter.
But this other poem, this poem that we're teaching in the 7th grade.
This poem, Teachers Help Me Out, is this poem in the 8th grade book?
No ma'am, it is in the 7th grade and it's a poem we don't even do.
So it's not even a poem they're teaching.
But Mike Cochran, he has opinions about this, right?
It's mere existence in the same world where children might read it, yeah.
It doesn't matter.
It's in the curriculum.
All this stuff keeps popping up.
So I want to read it.
You guys can fire me later, I guess.
I'm just wild about Harry, and Harry's wild about me.
The heavenly blisses of his kisses fill me with ecstasy.
He's sweet just like chocolate candy, just like honey from the bee.
Oh, I am just wild about Harry, and he's just wild about me.
One of the discussion questions is to find what this word ecstasy means.
My problem is, all the way through this literature, we expose these kids to nakedness.
We expose them to vulgarity.
You go all the way back to first grade, second grade, and they are reading books that have a picture of a naked man riding a bull.
What?
I don't, like, okay, um, It's not vulgar.
It's something you would see in an art gallery, but it's unnecessary.
So teachers have gone back and put tape over the guys' butts so the kids aren't exposed to it.
So my problem is, it looks like the entire curriculum is developed to normalize sexuality, normalize nudity, and normalize vulgar language.
If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody's kids, this is how I would do it.
You put this stuff just enough on the edges so the parents don't catch it, but the kids, they soak it in.
I think we need to relook at the entire curriculum.
Groomers!
James Lindsay is just yelling in the background.
It's the same fucking language.
It's the same thing.
It's the same idea.
First of all, I don't even, I couldn't, there's no reference.
I can't, I couldn't, nobody brings this up again.
It sounds like everybody else on the board is listening to this guy and going like, what the ever loving fuck are you talking about?
Because they're just like, get back to the eighth grade standards.
We're getting back, we're discussing this book, but he's literally going, we need to relook at everything because.
Yeah.
There's some pictures of naked butts and like a picture book for the first grade.
I am very doubtful that that's true.
Like, I am extremely doubtful, you know?
Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, I do wonder about that.
But it's interesting, isn't it?
Because this guy, this guy who I picture in like a great big white 10 gallon hat, like Boss Hogg from Dukes of Hazzard, you know, he's there actually at the meeting and he's trying to use this as a wedge He's trying to use it as a wedge strategy himself in the fucking meeting.
Exactly.
To get to other things that he thinks children shouldn't be allowed to see.
He's trying.
It's not about mouse, necessarily.
I mean, it is because obviously it is.
But it's also about the process.
It's about challenging the very idea that the people who are experts in pedagogy, the very idea that we should be looking at some of these more complex texts in public schools.
It's about just annihilating that entire concept.
And returning us to some idealized past in which we have, you know, again, like the great canon, but not even the great canon.
It's just, it's like the most, like, simplistic, boring, dusty, like, bullshit ever.
Yeah, this is it.
They don't want, you know, the great canon of Western literature taught.
What they want is English classes to be Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, basically.
Exactly.
They want everything removed that makes them, not children, them, uncomfortable.
And it just so happens, for some strange reason, that the stuff that makes them uncomfortable is all, you know, anything that's a bit gay or a bit black or, you know, anything to do with, like, structural oppression of racial or sexual minorities.
It's funny that, isn't it?
But that's all it is.
It's just about wanting the stuff that's uncomfortable taken out.
It just so happens that all that stuff has a kind of common thread running through it.
So I do want to I do want to just like just just to put a bow in this.
First of all, the I'm just wild about Harry poem.
It's a song.
It's actually a show tune.
Julie Garland did a famous version of it.
Oh, yes.
No.
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was Harry Truman's big theme song.
He in his 1948 election bid.
Uh, they used to play it at his, uh, on his, on, on the campaign trail.
So it has a legitimate historical place in American history.
Like this, this, like it, this, you know, like, this isn't just some random poem or whatever.
Like, this is like, even by the standards of like, great man wig ish, we're going to teach the history of the presidency of the United States.
This song deserves its place in that, in that story.
Right.
It has a legitimate place.
It gets worse.
It always gets worse on this show, right?
If that was all we had.
I probably would have left this a little bit out of it.
Although it is funny to listen to this guy go, how do you teach a 13 year old what ecstasy means?
What do you mean between there?
You know, this is the thing that infuriates me because you're worried about them seeing like this stuff.
And, you know, between lessons, they're looking at their phone and the YouTube algorithm is taking them to, you know, gamer videos where they're being indoctrinated into fascism, you know?
Like, Andrew Anglin is targeting these kids.
Adam Woffin of Vision is targeting these kids, you know?
One of the white people who was recently arrested from, you know, one of these terrorgram groups, currently 18, got into this when he was 12.
Like, let's, you know, giving the victims, I mean, without even, sorry, I'm off on my hobby horse now, but giving the victims of these fucking Nazi kids the intellectual tools to understand their oppression Is absolutely essential in the 21st is absolutely essential in this moment.
There is absolutely no question in my mind beyond any conversation about like kind of overall issues of pedagogy.
Like I, you know, we, you know, I write the show.
I prep the show for adults.
And this is this is an adult audience.
I am not going to say I hope 13 year olds are listening, but I hope the parents of 13 year olds are fucking listening to this show.
Here's the really bad part here.
Again, not to read the Wikipedia article, but this is from the Wikipedia article.
I'm Just Wild About Harry is a song written in 1921 with lyrics by Noble Sissel and music by Eubie Blake for the Broadway show Shuffle Along.
I'm Just Wild About Harry was the most popular number of the production, which was the first financially successful Broadway play to have African-American writers in an all African-American cast.
The song broke what had been a taboo against musical and stage depictions of romantic love between African-Americans.
Every single fucking time.
Their examples are There's something a little bit too queer or a little bit too black or a little bit too Jewish or a little bit too something about this.
It makes me uncomfortable.
It's just amazing that literally, like, he's just bringing up this thing.
I had to Google the lyrics.
I didn't know the song.
Once I was like, Judy Garland, Harry Truman, and then like, oh, it was the very first Broadway stage production that was successful with a majority black cast and written by an African-American.
And that's the one that you're calling out in public as being too vulgar for your 13-year-old to look at.
I don't think that's intentional.
I don't think this guy is smart enough to go there.
But it is really, really indicative of the mindset here.
In a way, it's more damning that it's not intentional, isn't it?
On some level, it's picked up on and it triggers the disgust reflex, the anxiety reflex, the read something dirty and threatening into it reflex.
Exactly. 100%.
I'm not racist, it's just that I'm anxious and upset and scared and disturbed by anything to do with black people or Jews or gay people and I don't want my children learning about it, that's all.
How dare you impute any sort of agenda to me for that?
I'm just protecting children.
Save the children!
Just protecting children from this 100 year old show tune that has the word ecstasy in it.
Yeah, that's, yeah, that's, you know, celebrating black romantic relationships.
Yeah, no, that's nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing coded here.
For sure.
This is how you get from, you know, from comedy book burnings like Pastor Locke telling people to bring their copies of Twilight and burn them.
This is how you get from that to people piling up copies of Marx and Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld in the street and burning them.
That's how you get there.
A bit at a time.
Yep.
Every one, every bit of it.
And these kinds of actual institutional measures to like remove this from education.
Kids could learn about that in school.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, book burnings are like, God, so much here.
Book burnings are always taught as this like kind of generic thing that just sort of happened.
You know, the Nazis were bad because they were burning books.
Right.
And the actual like, well, what books were they burning is really never You know, like it's never brought up.
It's just like, well, they're burning books.
Well, no, they were burning, you know, Magnus Hirschfeld's library, you know, like decades, the transgender rights and transgender education was in science was set back decades by the, by those book burnings.
And that was intentional, intentional.
Anyway, we've discussed this before.
I have one more clip, and I actually do want to leave on a light note today.
And I have, like, no reason, like, this episode, like, it would have been nice to just end on the book burnings and be like, yes, this is, you know, the end on the serious note.
That's a great, like, pin in the episode.
I've been wanting to share this clip with people for years at this point.
It's from 2014.
It's from The Five, which is an old Fox News early evening show in which five Fox News pundits sat around a table and discussed elements of the news.
It turns out that Fox News pundits cannot do fifth grade math.
Because one of the one of the school put out a worksheet, a math worksheet, which is doing the distributive property, the distributive property of arithmetic.
And it's a worksheet.
And at the top of the worksheet, it has a little cartoon of a woman with a bag of money and handing out dollar bills.
And the title is Distribute the Wealth.
And look, they put these little cartoons on as a way of like, Just to give it a little bit of visual interest, like this, this means nothing.
It has nothing to do with the actual lesson.
It's just a cartoon there.
And when you use the word distribute, distribute, the wealth is a thing that like, it's not even has to be like socialist.
I mean, you know, like distribute the wealth to the needy, distribute, like, like it's, it's, it's complete, it's completely sort of, I don't want to say apolitical, but it's certainly like a partisan, you know, this is, this is literally a math worksheet.
You know, it's a cartoon on the top of the math worksheet.
Distribute is value neutral.
I give you one, I give myself 178, I've distributed some stuff.
Capitalism distributes wealth.
So I found an image of this worksheet and I have put it in the show notes so you can look at it for yourself.
And determine how difficult this, the mathematics required in this fifth grade math worksheet are.
And also you can examine this cartoon for yourself.
But I've got a little, I've got a little spoiler here when we get to the end of this, because I thought I'd include some of the commentary on this from the, from the Fox five, which this, I swear, this is one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life.
The whole clip will be in the show notes.
It's worth it.
It is worth your time.
But even worse is the subtle way some textbooks are pushing the liberal agenda.
Take, for example, Scholastic Books.
They call themselves the world's leading publisher of children's books, so it's likely that your kid is learning from one of their textbooks.
Check out the wording of this algebra lesson.
Can you get this?
Which camera?
You want a number six?
Distribute the wealth for a distributed property of addition and multiplication.
This is for grades 3 through 6.
Distribute the wealth with the lovely rich girl with a big old bag of money handing some money out.
So as you folks, I do it every year at Parent Teacher Night.
You have to read your kids' textbooks.
Find out what's being taught.
If you see a bias, make sure you explain it to your kids.
And by all means, tell your teachers you're on it.
Kimberly.
This isn't that easy.
I'm asking you exactly right.
Do you read Ronan's textbooks?
Yes, but he really doesn't have any textbooks.
He's in kindergarten.
And so he just has like little worksheets and cute stuff.
But yes, every night he gets homework.
Yes, every night I do it with him and go through these little sheets.
So far, so good.
We're on high alert, though, especially after this inappropriateness.
Barack Hussein Obama.
You know, I read my kids for the first three years and after that I didn't understand them.
And I couldn't pass any of the quizzes, so it didn't matter.
You know, this... You can't pass this!
No, I couldn't do this anyway.
In third or sixth grade?
Are you kidding me?
I tried to do this!
Actually, you're good at numbers.
You make sure to say that.
You know, one thing I will say about this.
You know, we've got five examples here of teachers doing things that you don't like, but there are three Plus million public school teachers in America.
I don't want to leave the impression that they're all doing this stuff.
So, hey, the idea that this is like group of like the woman speaking there, we're going to identify her in a second.
I think some people already know where I'm going with this.
Has a law degree from the University of San Francisco School of Law.
Graduated in 1994.
The fact that a group of five Fox News pundits look at a third grade worksheet of basic arithmetic and go, how do you do this?
This is impossible.
My kid turned seven and I was just completely unable to follow anything they were doing in their school anymore.
Allow me to talk about politics now.
It really speaks to Fox News.
It's no surprise that guy can't follow his kid's textbooks because he can barely talk.
He he's got this he's got the you should see the clip sometime.
He's definitely he's got this like he's got the belt and suspenders kind of like the the pinstripes.
And he's kind of sitting there and he's got like that that old newsroom, you know, old Chicago newsroom type, you know, where you just you think of him like pecking away on a typewriter and chewing on a pipe.
He's trying to establish that aesthetic with a press ticket in his hat.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
The woman there speaking, who was singing the Barack Hussein Obama song and used the word kindergarten.
He's in kindergarten, you know?
Yeah.
Hey, the Barack Hussein Obama song.
I could have cut that out.
But like previously, there are other like horrible example of something that was being done to indoctrinate your kids was they found a video of like his majority African-American, you know, elementary school.
Where they were singing a song about the current president of the United States and they were singing a song about Barack Obama.
Now, I think the problems, I mean, you know, I'm not going to, you know, good leftist here, you know, like, you know, not something I would like to see people doing.
I think for the first African American president to, you know, get a place of honor and, you know, for small children who might grow up to think they could be more than, you know, what the Fox News audience thinks they should be.
I think that's important.
And, you know, look, I'm not going to argue with it, but she's singing the little song that the children were singing because, like, that's obviously her role here.
It's horrific indoctrination, you know, mentioning to the children that the president is a certain person, you know?
Right.
Exactly.
And he's singing songs about how he overcame and how he became president of the United States.
And, you know, again, there's it's American hagiography, but like I get every fucking social studies school classroom in the United States of America has the same The list of the 45 presidents or 46 presidents now on the wall, it is absolutely ubiquitous where growing up in every single classroom, they've got their list of presidents.
You learn them all.
You talk about how great George Washington was.
It's absolutely a thing.
It's absolutely a thing.
It's not unique to Barack Obama.
No, the president is presented as a neutral figure.
He's just a president.
Ergo, you know, he's this nice man that you need to know about, you know.
Trump went and delivered an insane rant to the Boy Scouts of America, you know.
Yes, exactly, exactly.
But that woman was Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is currently Mrs. Donald Trump Jr.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And was an advisor and I like a speechwriter for for Donald Trump.
You know, like, let's not like we're not going to do the bimbo hate here and let that.
But again, this woman has an eye has not an Ivy League law degree, but she has a law degree.
She has she has an education.
She is a she is like 50 years old.
She was in her 40s at this point.
She is not like she's not acting that way because that's Legitimately how she thinks you should act on a television program.
This is an act.
This is what Fox News does.
It's hashtag.
Yeah.
Right.
And this is the pattern.
Like, again, pulling this from 2014 and kind of going, they weren't calling it critical race theory, but it's the same thing.
You got to look at your kids' educational supplies.
You got to look at what they're doing.
And they got to keep any mention of wealth distribution out of their heads because it's just the commies coming in and trying to And destroy their minds, you know, they've just brought it to a much new level of sophistication in 2022.
And that's it.
Yes.
Okay.
Oh my God.
We did it.
I'm so glad we're done with this one.
I thought like, let's do an easy one.
Let's talk.
Not an easy one, but you know, like this is a news event.
We just cover the news event.
And then I read this transcript and went, Oh God.
Holy shit.
And then I read this transcript and went, oh God.
Yeah.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Read the transcript.
It's in the show notes.
Totally worth your time.
Read the transcript for sure.
Yeah, very revealing.
The one thing we didn't really get to, but we are going to do a Rufo episode proper at some point in the relatively near future, is the fact that Rufo kind of got his start, or one of his start, or part of his start, at the good old Discovery Institute.
Oh, yeah, well, he did.
He did work on homelessness.
Apparently, I'm sure that's oh, oh, I've been holding that back because it's even more horrifying than you think it is.
Yeah, it's like it's going to be as horrifying as you think it is, but it's real bad.
It's real bad.
It's going to be everything you think, but worse, because everything about Rufo is.
But yeah, I was interested to see that this is basically just the, I mean, you and I kind of got our start, you know, in some senses talking about, you know, in the creationism wars of the early 2000s.
And this is really just the intelligent design wedge strategy all over again, isn't it?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And I want to get into school boards and shit like that.
No, no.
And it's absolutely this it's an attack on, you know, this current educational standards in order to put reactionary like counterfactual bullshit.
And frankly, you know, like banning, you know, sorry, I'm just going to use like a banning mouse is not the exact same thing as teaching creationism or even teaching intelligent design.
Like, it is a different thing.
But the idea of, like, banning certain kinds of concepts that go against a far-right, you know, worldview is absolutely one in the same.
It is part of the same overall political project.
And that's been going on since, you know, the 60s in the United States in terms of the, you know, even the Scopes Monkey Trial is a more complicated thing, and it doesn't quite fit into that same It rhymes, but it doesn't fit quite into that same political project.
But it is absolutely part and parcel of something that's been going on for decades in this country.
And this is just the newest iteration of it.
But it's so much more effective because of the power of social media and just the way that movement conservatism has managed to just move the needle on what is considered to be centrist material these days.
They just push back on everything.
I saw, sorry, we're just going on and on.
I saw a tweet that was like, it had this clip.
I don't know if you remember the film, the movie Field of Dreams.
But there's a scene in which, you know, Holly Hunter, Holly Hunter?
I think so.
I don't remember Holly Hunter being in it.
Oh, no, it's Amy Madigan, Amy Madigan, Amy Madigan plays Kevin Costner's wife.
And there's a scene in which they're trying to ban, I think it's Catcher in the Rye, and like the children's school, right?
Yeah.
You know, these are like in the movie, like these are old hippies.
These are, you know, these, you know, they got their they got their start in the 60s and the movies from what, 1991 or something.
So, you know, this is very, you know, boomer nostalgia kind of thing.
But there was like that time in America, you could just make a movie and have people trying to ban a book in in public schools.
And they were just automatically the bad guys.
You know, it was just assumed it could just be assumed on the part of a filmmaker.
Uh, you know, a very kind of moderate, you know, like, certainly no, like, not even really like flaming liberal.
Although, I mean, I think, you know, it has its moments, but, you know, certainly not like a leftist, you know, communist plot.
I mean, it was just like, you're trying to be in catch on the right.
You're the bad guy.
And if you're trying to be on mouse, you're the bad guy.
And if you're trying to teach creation of the schools, you're the bad guy.
And it's not because you're a conservative and I'm not, it's because you're a liar and I'm not.
Yeah.
Yeah, and we have incidents like late last year, I think it was October, we have this woman, Gina Petty, Executive Director of Curriculum and Instruction at Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, saying, well, if you're going to teach the Holocaust, then you also need to have opposing perspectives.
In class.
And you can point at something like that, and you can say, well, that's just one person who said a stupid thing, and undoubtedly, yes.
But the fact that that even happened, and the context in which it happened, that tells you what time it is.
It shouldn't happen.
Right.
And I don't think that this woman is actually a Holocaust denier.
I don't think she's sitting and going like, and now we're going to teach a bunch of IHR materials or, you know, David Irving is now in the, but I mean, No, but it speaks to profound political ignorance and disorientation.
This, this centrism, this like both sides ism is just such a part of, you know, reality that suddenly we can't say unequivocally, the Holocaust happened, and it was really bad, and it was really bad for like this set of very obvious reasons.
You just, you can't, you can't do that anymore, you know?
But the thing about her remark, it was kind of, I mean, it was reported, but it was kind of underemphasized because of the more shocking context of talking about the Holocaust, was that she was saying, you know, when you talk about controversial subjects in class, you should have opposing perspectives, you know, which is, Teach the Controversy, which is the old Intelligent Design Discovery Institute devised wedge strategy slogan.
The Discovery Institute has moved on slightly from the Intelligent Design thing, like that's all most people know them for, but pretty soon after they lost their big court case in the 2000s, they moved right on into questioning climate change.
And then what a surprise.
And you know, that sort of thing.
Christopher Ruffo, I mean, in interviews, he has said like, no, I never worked on the, you know, intelligent design stuff.
Like I knew that that was part of their history, but that wasn't something that I ever did.
You know, I was working on these homelessness projects.
Like that's what I did for the Discovery Institute.
The Discovery Institute does a whole lot of reactionary shit.
They've gotten money from Bill Gates.
Anyway.
Yeah, no, I I didn't I didn't work on any of the crackpot reactionary stuff at the Discovery Institute.
I was just focused on explaining why homelessness is caused entirely by poor moral character.
That's all I was doing.
Poor moral character.
And if these people wanted to be healthy, they would get off drugs.
And yeah, that's that's that's right.
Yeah.
So, you know, his propaganda around homelessness is exactly the same as the critical race theory propaganda.
It's the, it's the same, it's the same strategy.
It's just applying it to a different place.
Anyway, we're going to do the Christopher Rufo origin story.
We'll probably do two or three episodes.
I promise.
Just Other things come up.
So we'll do that probably another time.
OK, well, that's the episode.
Thanks, Daniel.
So do we know what's our next one going to be?
I think we're doing Patriot Front next, which will connect us back into the NJP and the Daily Show of Boys as well.
So I think I think the Patriot Front links give me enough material to dig into for for a full Patriot Front episode.
So that's the plan.
Whenever we announce it at all, it never happens.
So.
That's it.
Yeah.
The next one will be about something completely different.
Yeah.
There's going to be some horrifying news story that we don't have to cover.
Of course.
Of course.
It goes without saying.
And in the meantime, if you want to help us out, we both have Patreons.
If you give us as little as $1, either of us or both, if you like, you can have access to our entire back catalogue of bonus IDSG episodes in which we talk about new stories, films, or sometimes we just shoot the breeze.
I have lots of other stuff on my Patreon.
Daniel doesn't because he's crap.
So give me the money, not him.
That's a joke.
I don't do anything to deserve the dollar a month.
I just show up.
That's all I do here.
That's all he does.
Yeah.
I actually secretly write it all as well.
I let him pretend that he writes it.
It's a thing.
Okay.
But if you can't afford to give us money, then just tell everybody all over the world about how brilliant we are.
That will do.
That'll be barely satisfactory instead.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
If you enjoyed the show or found it useful, please spread the word.
If you want to contact me, I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore, Daniel is at Daniel E Harper, and the show's Twitter is at IDSGpod.
If you want to help us make the show and stay 100% editorially independent, we both have Patreons.
I Don't Speak German is hosted at idonspeakgerman.libsyn.com, and we're also on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, and we show up in all podcast apps.
This show is associated with Eruditorum Press, where you can find more details about it.
