Looks like conservative attempts to ban books that don't fit into the right-wing narrative have backfired yet again.
Moms and dads stormed into the Spotsylvania County town hall, in Virginia, in early November, hell-bent on purging all “objectionable” books from in the scholastic jurisdiction. Novels containing any commentary about race, sexuality and sexual content was put under the microscope, as a fresh reactionary panic takes aim at the stacks in high school libraries. “Results for gay, 172. Results for heterosexual, two,” said Christina Burris, one of the attending parents, who used the district’s literature search function to make her point.
Apparently, it hadn't occurred to Ms. Burris that "heterosexual literature" doesn't usually identify as such, since "heterosexual" is the default type of relationship in our society. That's why you don't see too many "Heterosexual Romance Novels" or "Heterosexual Romantic Movies" advertised as such.
A local bookseller, Paul Cymrot, took advantage of the furor over one particular novel, 33 Snowfish, a book about teenage runaways living in poverty:
The moral militancy immediately backfired, because Cymrot knows a good business opportunity when he sees one. He’s owned the Spotsylvania-area Riverby Books for 25 years, and possesses a shrewd nose for the ebbs and flows of the publishing market. One bookselling truth remains eternally undefeated, explains Cymrot. When a censorious zeitgeist swallows up a novel, a lot of people will want to buy it.
“It was not easy to find a box full of 33 Snowfish, but we did,” he continues. “We sold all that we bought, and we kept a couple as loaners because we wanted to make sure any students in the community could see what the fuss was about. There will always be some around.”
It’s now easier than ever to read 33 Snowfish in Spotsylvania county, subverting the rightwing siege on the supposed woke conspiracy infecting school libraries.
Glenn Youngkin, while running for Governor of Virginia, spent time complaining about Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which he linked to the right-wing boogeyman of Critical Race Theory. The result? All that free publicity put the 1987 book on the Amazon bestseller list.
Note to aspiring authors: If you want to write a best-selling novel, call it something like "Woke Critical Race Theory Brings Radical Socialism to America," send copies to Fox News and Newsmax, wait for the outraged news stories to appear, then watch those sweet, sweet profits roll in!
Charles Koch Wants Americans to Die for Profits
Democracy Now has released an explosive new report detailing how a shadowy network of organizations sponsored by Charles Koch has been instrumental in the anti-lockdown movement. According to one of the report's authors, the motive was simple: "to maintain corporate profit at the expense of human life." When you're a greedy slimeball like Charles Koch, killing thousands of Americans seems to be an acceptable price to pay, to reopen the economy so he can continue to reap huge profits:
So, as early as April 2020, you see groups like FreedomWorks, which was instrumental in the tea party protests in 2009, begin promoting protests against lockdowns. Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council were calling on Trump to keep the country open. AFP started in March 2020, like really shortly after the virus arrived stateside. And Trump was receptive to those messages. On March 24th, he said that he was going to — that he wanted to reopen America by Easter.
Trump was seduced by the reopen-the economy-at-any-cost message, which he saw as a quick fix to the pandemic and a sure-fire path to re-election:
...you know, we’ve seen this strategy sort of play out and fail everywhere where it’s been implemented, here in the U.S., in the U.K. Boris Johnson was — Prime Minister Boris Johnson was really slow to react to the virus. That has been attributed to his support for herd immunity through infection. Sweden adopted a herd-immunity-through-infection strategy. And in all of these places, they have seen extreme numbers of deaths and cases. Florida and Texas, two states in particular that pushed reopening very quickly, accounted for one-third of all U.S. COVID deaths this summer. A new report out of the U.K. Parliament found that Boris Johnson’s sluggish response to COVID caused thousands of unnecessary deaths. Sweden has seen more deaths and cases than its immediate neighbors. In August, 11 out of — as of August, 11 out of every hundred people in Sweden have been infected with the virus.
This is what happens when rich assholes are allowed to put money over human lives, and when greedy billionaires are allowed to manipulate the public for their personal gain, without any fear of consequences.
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