At the Texas Tribune event in Austin, Texas on Saturday afternoon, California Governor Gavin Newsom took aim at far-right Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for his anti-freedom stances, which span from his treatment of asylum seekers, the banning of books, the rollback of reproductive rights and beyond. Francis Maxwell reports.
Radical MAGA Senator Mike Lee accused the Department of Justice of “overreach” after forced-birther Mark Houck was indicted. What he failed to mention was that the man had been terrorizing patients at a Planned Parenthood and physically assaulted a 72-year-old man who was escorting patients into the Planned Parenthood—twice. The Republican Party has become a lawless party of crime and never ending gaslighting. Texas Paul breaks it down.
Pen America says Central York school district banned the books but officials strongly deny it in statement
Demonstrators gather to protest against banning books in Dearborn, Michigan; Pen America reports that school districts across 32 states have banned books. Photograph: Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty Images
A school district in Pennsylvania has banned the Girls Who Code book series for young readers, according to an index of banned books compiled by the free expression non-profit Pen America.
The books are four of more than 1,500 unique book titles that have been banned by schools across the country after conservative pushes to censor books. According to a report released by Pen America in April, 138 school districts across 32 states have banned books from their classrooms and school libraries.
A recent update to Pen America’s banned book index said the Central York school district last year banned the books The Friendship Code, Team BFF: Race to the Finish!, Lights, Music, Code! and Spotlight on Coding Club!. The school district has over 400 banned titles on the index.
A statement from officials in that district on Monday strongly denied that they had banned the book series.
“The information published in this article is categorically false,” the district’s statement said while linking to a Business Insider interview with the founder of Girls Who Code which reported the ban. “This book series not been banned, and they remain available in our libraries.”
Pen America couldn’t immediately be reached for comment about the Central York school district’s statement.
The district last year received national attention after it banned resource materials listed in 2020 by its diversity committee, including children’s books and documentaries. A coalition of students and parents successfully pushed the district to rescind its ban after public pressure.
In a statement explaining the ban of the diverse resources, the school district’s board president at the time, Jane Johnson, said: “What we are attempting to do is balance legitimate academic freedom with what could be literature/materials that are too activist in nature, and may lean more toward indoctrination rather than age-appropriate academic content.”
The Central York school district did not immediately respond to request for comment on its ban of the Girls Who Code series.
The series features a group of girls who become friends in their school’s coding club. The series is in partnership with Girls Who Code, a non-profit that runs computer coding clubs and programming in schools for girls.
How to beat a book ban: students, parents and librarians fight back
Read more
The CEO and founder of Girls Who Code, Reshma Saujani, expressed her anger over the series being banned.
“We use these stories to teach kids to code,” Saujani told Business Insider. “It felt very much like a direct attack on the movement we’ve been building to get girls coding.
“This is an opportunity to realize how big this movement is against our kids and how much we need to fight.”
Saujani said that the group Moms for Liberty, a conservative non-profit formed in 2021 that has been pushing book bans through local chapters across the country, was responsible for the Central York district’s ban on the series. The organization has advocated for banning books on race – including ones on the civil rights movement – and on LGBTQ+ themes, saying the volumes are “sexually explicit”, according to media watchdog Media Matters.
Aggressive campaigns to ban books in schools and libraries across the country have flared up over the culture wars of the last two years. While campaigns to ban books have always existed in the US, the movement gained momentum in 2021 when conservatives took aim at the academic “critical race” theory and turned it into a buzzword to stoke fears of liberal ideals being taught in classrooms.
According to Pen America’s banned books report, many of the titles being banned deal with LGBTQ+ themes or have non-white characters. The organization estimates that more than 300 groups, including local chapters of national organizations like Moms for Liberty, have been pushing for book bans. The groups have gained large traction through social media, where lists of titles have circulated.
The campaigns try to deflect accusations of racism and bigotry by claiming they are targeting material that is offensive or inappropriate for children.
Pen America estimates that 41% of banned books deal with LGBTQ+ themes while 40% have protagonists or secondary characters who are people of color.
An author of one of the Girls Who Code books, Jo Whittemore, said on Twitter: “Some people choose not to focus on how awesome and empowering and inspiring these books are but instead choose fear.”
This series was our labor of love, our commitment to our community to make sure that girls — all girls — see themselves as coders. You cannot be what you cannot see, and this was our effort to get more girls, girls of color interested in coding.@jowhittemore@GirlsWhoCodepic.twitter.com/C23VTgKyxZ
Hey @GOP book-banning asshats: I get it that you ban Handmaids Tale as it *gives a roadmap to your strategy*, but banning Girls Who Code is just embarrassing for you.
The first programmer, and the person who coined the term Software Engineering were WOMEN, a fact you can’t ban. pic.twitter.com/qLrF8NjBpv
“We are out here to push back on things that society knows is wrong”. Wrong society has said that drag dressing up is fine and has for decades. It is only recently that the rabid republican elected office holders made it a sexual thing claiming it was orgies that kids were taken to. The religious leaders have decried it as sin and against the word of god and they jumped on the republican hate language. Dressing in drag has been done forever, from early theater to the advent of TV, to Flip Wilson in the 1970s to even Rudy Giuliani. It is done on Halloween and has been done in drag shows for as long as I can remember. It was done at schools. It is only the last year that these assholes that want everyone to live, act, and be just like they demand that everyone be some kind of fictionalized 1950s. But even in the 1950s you had drag. This is a made up outrage to try to force the minority view that the LGBTQ+ must be removed from society, that anyone who doesn’t follow a traditional male / female role must be removed from society, and any religion not approved by this minority must be removed from society. These groups at the US Taliban. The Proud Boys and Patriot Front are the Nazi loving brownshirt enforcers of the curreent rabid republican party. Hugs
A Drag Bingo night at a Katy Church stirred up controversy on Saturday evening. The event, meant to raise money for the church’s clothing boutique for trans-youth, sparked heated demonstrations.
KPRC 2′s cameras were rolling as demonstrators clashed outside the First Christian Church on Morton Ranch Road. A number of groups were there supporting the LGBTQ+ community and other groups against the event said they wanted to make sure their voices were heard.
“We are out here to push back on things that society knows is wrong. They are having an event, welcoming children to drag queen bingo hour. This is unacceptable,” Founder of Urban Conservatives of America Jonathan McCullough said.
“That is nonsense, because drag in itself is just a costume,” said one person supporting the event. “It’s no different than someone dressed up like a superhero at a comic convention or someone who puts on a Halloween costume.”
Heavily armed officers formed a line in the median in an effort to keep the two sides separate. As the crowds grew bigger and bigger, more officers arrived. Despite the chaos, a pastor told KHOU 11 the event was a sold-out success.
“We know that not everyone will agree with us, so we create a place for people to feel welcomed and understand there will always be people who don’t agree with us,” the pastor said.
Under the blazing sun outside, the scene at First Christian Church in Katy felt chaotic– and angry. More than 100 people traded insults for hours with counter-protesters. Some on both sides hid their faces. Some on both sides displayed big guns. https://t.co/7Ho3djT9id
Proud Boys and Kelly Neidert’s Protect Texas Kids are in Katy, Texas, protesting a drag bingo fundraiser at First Christian Church. PB and Houston antifascists just clashed. Heavy police presence dividing the two groups now pic.twitter.com/5p4EgD88mT
The group of Nazis appear to be leaving the protest, sporting for the first time today a flag with a swastika. Proud Boys and Patriot Front have also left pic.twitter.com/hJFBhgPAC6
I’m glad no one was hurt, and I’m glad they didn’t cancel the event, or back down.
Grown-ass men getting their undies bunched because they don’t like someone else’s wardrobe, and they think that entitles them to threaten violence. If there’s a better definition of toxic masculinity, I can’t think of it.
How can they even breathe in those masks? I mean, haven’t they seen the studies that show that masks reduce oxygen in the body. I am really concerned for their health.
Must be some kind of really boring life when all one does is search the internet for drag queen events that can be harrassed. I guess since all the abortion clinics were closed, there’s nothing else to entertain the nazis
I hope someone had a sign “Americans defeated Nazis once, we can do it again.” With some American flags on it. Why can’t liberals use the American flag too? We want America to be a great place to live for everyone. (Well, except Nazis)
Didn’t some right wing nut write a book about how the Nazi were really all gay? Should make a sign promoting that book. (I was going to say to hand out copies of the book, but that would be supporting the author.)
They are just trying to make their numbers much higher than those numbers are and pretend they are not just uneducated rural militia folks. I always ask crazy “conservatives” in central Ohio where their parents and/or grandparents were born.
“Sparked heated demonstrations … other groups against the event said they wanted to make sure their voices were heard“
One of the reasons we’re hurtling toward theocratic fascism in this country is because the media keep describing what’s happening with sanitizing, normalizing language like this.
Have they tried praying? They claim that prayer can solve any problem, but when they actually care about something they show up. Dead kids in school,? Nothing but prayer. Kids at a show? Threats and intimidation. They need to actually act like they believe their own religious bullshit on occasion.
If you are going to events, probably a good idea to bring something like pepper spray to defend yourself if these knuckledraggers show up. They have been given permission to act like this by the GQP.
“That is nonsense, because drag in itself is just a costume,” said one person supporting the event. “It’s no different than someone dressed up like a superhero at a comic convention or someone who puts on a Halloween costume.”
One might also suggest proud boy and oath keepers drag as costumes.
Several years ago religious bigots got into the highest levels of the school education system in the state of Texas. I remember posting of Aron Ra and others going to testify against the rewriting of the textbooks to bring history, biology, and other subjects in line with the bible as much as possible. Including the stressing that the US was established as a Christian nation under Christian policies and that the constitution was given to the founding fathers by Moses. Then recently it was to get rid of any negative connotations of slavery and the horrors of that institution to calling slaves unwilling immigrants and unpaid workers. The drive was fueled by that CRT which is a advanced degree course taught in law schools was being taught to little kids and that white kids were being made to feel bad about being white. Then it became the drive to remove anything LGBTQ+ from schools. Don’t say gay bills. And now we are up to a total rewrite of history to prove how great and exceptionally honorable Texas is, just as god intended it to be. Hugs
The Texas Tribune reviewed the 15-page document, which will be handed out to new drivers, and asked historians to comment on how accurately and thoroughly it chronicles the state’s history.
The 1836 Project, an advisory committee created by the Texas Legislature last year to promote “patriotic education” about the state’s history, approved a 15-page pamphlet last month that will be shared with Texans when they get a new driver’s license. Credit: Miguel Gutierrez Jr./The Texas Tribune
A committee charged with producing a “patriotic” telling of Texas history approved a 15-page pamphlet last month that will now be distributed to new Texas drivers.
The advisory committee — named the 1836 Project after the year Texas gained its independence from Mexico — was created last year with the passing of House Bill 2497. The legislation required the committee to tell a story of “a legacy of economic prosperity” and the “abundant opportunities for businesses and families, among other requirements.”
“We must never forget why Texas became so exceptional in the first place,” Gov. Greg Abbott said when he signed the bill. Abbott, along with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan, later selected a nine-member, largely conservative group to head the 1836 Project.
The creation of the committee was largely a conservative backlash to The New York Times’ publication of “The 1619 Project,” which was named after the year enslaved people first arrived on American soil and aimed to center slavery in conversations about U.S. history. The pamphlet, which will be distributed at driver’s license offices, comes at a time when the state is increasingly trying to regulate how race, sexuality and history are taught in public schools.
The Texas Tribune reviewed the 1836 Project committee’s final pamphlet and asked historians to comment on how accurately and thoroughly the document chronicles the state’s history.
The historians acknowledged that the committee had a difficult assignment; Donald Frazier, the chair of the subcommittee in charge of drafting the pamphlet, called squeezing the entirety of the state’s history into little more than a dozen pages a “herculean task.”
But the historians also noted that condensing the state’s history and painting it in a mostly celebratory light came at a cost. The pamphlet, they said, fails to fully hold institutions accountable for slavery and other forms of oppression and shortchanged Indigenous Texans, Tejanos, Black Texans and women.
The pamphlet engages with contemporary research — like literature about the lasting impact of the Confederacy — but also tries to fulfill state lawmakers’ wish to promote “patriotic education” and avoid disturbing Texas’ myths, said Raúl A. Ramos, a history professor at the University of Houston.
“The traditional mythic version of Texas history, it’s about the heroes of the Alamo having pure intentions of liberty and freedom in the abstract rather than the liberty to conquer Indigenous and Mexican lands and freedom to own enslaved people,” Ramos said. “It’s that abstract idea that is attractive and powerful and [that’s what] people gravitate towards, and I think that’s what people associate with patriotism.”
Below is a look at how the Project 1836 advisory committee’s pamphlet discusses four areas of Texas’ history — early settlements, the oil and cotton industries, the Alamo and slavery — and the historians’ notes on what the document’s authors chose to play up, play down or omit.
Early settlements
Trinidad Gonzalez, a history professor at South Texas College, said the pamphlet aggrandizes Manifest Destiny, the belief that American settlers had the God-given right to expand across North America. It’s an idea about early settlements that was driven by 19th century nationalism and exceptionalism.
In the opening paragraph, the pamphlet says the land of Texas seemed like “an inhospitable zone to many,” but Americans “with fortitude and nerve” saw the opportunities and made the region productive.
“It wasn’t just the Americans who thought it was boundless opportunities. [The pamphlet’s authors] are trying to create the simplified Manifest Destiny story that fits this older myth of white Americans coming in and basically building Texas,” Gonzalez said. “And when you do that, then you silence everybody else that participated in the history of Texas.”
Historians told the Tribune that the pamphlet glosses over the Indigenous, Spanish and Mexican populations that resided before, saying Texas was “nearly depopulated” before American settlers migrated to the land.
However, the Indigenous population significantly outnumbered American settlers in 1836, Gonzalez said. The stretch of land from the Rio Grande Valley to Laredo was also once one of the most economically successful Spanish settlements, he added.
Emilio Zamora, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, called the pamphlet’s interpretation of early settlements in Texas “very unsettling.”
The document “speaks very negatively about the Mexicans and the colonial settlers that preceded them,” Zamora said.
Oil, not cotton
When it comes to the state’s economy, the pamphlet zeros in on the oil industry. The discovery of oil “ushered in a period of remarkable transformation,” the pamphlet says. It characterizes the wildcatter and oil derrick as “Texas icons.”
Nowadays, West Texas’ Permian Basin is the nation’s most productive oil region. The Permian produces more than 5 million barrels of the nation’s daily output of 11.6 million barrels of oil per day.
But before oil, there was cotton. Texas still leads the nation in cotton production. Cotton continues to be the state’s largest agricultural export and is responsible for thousands of jobs across sectors, such as ginning companies, warehouses and oil mill processing plants.
The 1836 Project pamphlet mentions oil five times. It never mentions cotton.
The pamphlet highlights Houston’s title as “energy capital of the world,” but cotton used to be so essential to the city that it would celebrate the crop with festivals, naming a symbolic leader for the carnival King Nottoc (“cotton” spelled backwards).
The pamphlet “ignores the reality that cotton production and poverty long characterized much of the Texas economy after the Civil War and through 1940. Instead it glamorizes the oil industry,” said Walter Buenger, a history professor at UT-Austin.
Buenger said that the state’s dependence on cotton made Texas one of the poorest states in the country.
The cotton market had globalized and become increasingly competitive, but the state delayed mechanizing cotton production to continue offering low-skilled jobs that had low returns. It resulted in an unequal distribution of income: While a handful of cotton traders got “fabulously wealthy,” most Texans struggled to survive, Buenger said.
“Through 1940, Texas was, for the most part, very poor. And they were poor because they were wrapped up in this cotton production business,” Buenger explained.
The Alamo
The Alamo, the Spanish mission founded in the 18th century in what is now San Antonio, has long been enshrined as “the cradle of Texas liberty.” The men who died as Mexican troops laid siege on the Alamo are often remembered as heroic martyrs who valued liberty over their lives.
“Only Texas could turn defeat into a legend — and a song, and a tourist attraction, and a major motion picture,” author Rosemary Kent famously said of the Alamo.
But the 1836 Project pamphlet does not dwell on the Alamo. Of the document’s 4,517 words, just 87 are spent on the siege.
Gene Preuss, an associate professor of history at the University of Houston-Downtown, called that a notable move away from traditionalist history in a state where the Alamo has often been at the center of Texas politics and history.
“There really isn’t much discussion of the Alamo in the pamphlet,” he said. “And I find that interesting because a lot of traditional histories would focus on the Alamo.”
In fitting the Battle of the Alamo into one abridged paragraph, the pamphlet’s authors appear to acknowledge the recent efforts to reexamine the historic event.
“For a long time, Texas history has been taught from one perspective,” Preuss said. “I think [the pamphlet] does enough to open some cracks, which I as a professor can open further for my students so that when they come into class, they don’t say things like ‘I didn’t know [Black Texans] participated in the Texas revolution’ [or] ‘I didn’t know Tejanos were on the side of Texians and died at the Alamo.’”
But the pamphlet also avoids going into that reexamination. It doesn’t mention, for instance, the issues brought up in the book “Forget the Alamo,” which was published last year and prompted the lieutenant governor to push for the cancellation of an event featuring the title at the Bullock Texas State History Museum. The book highlights how the defense of slavery played a key role in the conflict with Mexico and questions the garrison defenders’ military strategy.
Slavery
When the 1836 Project committee was established, Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of “The 1619 Project,” feared that the 1836 Project was another attempt to veil the nation’s history of slavery.
“When it comes to slavery, some people have never wanted open debate and honesty. They seek to bury and prohibit instead,” Hannah-Jones said on Twitter.
The pamphlet does mention slavery, acknowledging that it became an economic engine for the state. Republican lawmakers also required that the document mention how on June 19, 1865, the date that became the basis for Juneteenth, Union soldiers in Galveston announced the liberation of all enslaved people.
“We wanted to reemphasize and make dang true that everybody understands that slavery was a bad thing and Texas participated,” Frazier, the chair of the subcommittee in charge of drafting the pamphlet, said at the August committee meeting.
But many of the historians the Tribune spoke with said the pamphlet doesn’t go far enough, noting that it omits how central defending slavery was in the Texas war of secession from Mexico and the Civil War. They say it airbrushes gruesome accounts of how enslaved people were treated.
“Slavery is mentioned only as a complication that delayed annexation by the United States. The pamphlet never names any enslaved individuals, nor does it describe their fight for freedom,” historians Leah LaGrone and Michael Phillips wrote in a Texas Monthly column.
Ramos, the history professor at the University of Houston, said the pamphlet’s treatment of slavery is an example of how the document takes a passive, ambiguous approach to inequity and oppression that doesn’t hold Americans who participated in institutions accountable.
The pamphlet, he said, is a document birthed out of a political process and should be read as such.
“Sometimes people interpret history as being political, as being a way people might signal their politics,” Ramos said. “But it’s also political in that way that is part of how we view ourselves as people, as a community, and how we continue to either build community or divide community.”
Disclosure: Bullock Texas State History Museum, Texas Monthly, The New York Times, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Houston and the University of Houston-Downtown have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
In recent speech Radical Right Republican Matt Gaetz stated that if the Republicans regain the majority in the House of Representatives he and other republicans will push to remove the seniority leadership system and instead promote the most radical republicans to positions of leadership. Meidas Contributor Texas Paul reacts to this craziness.
Well the party supporting Putin and loving fascist strongman dictators who rule their country’s people rather than listening to them is using Russian footage for the advertisements in the US saying they should be put in charge here so they can rule over all of us. This is them telling you who they are. Hugs
Kevin McCarthy, insurrectionist leader of the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene, announced his new Contract For Cruelty, which he refers to as the Commitment for America, a plan that seeks to ban abortion nationwide, eliminate social security and medicare, raise prescription drug prices, and put extremists into power. During the announcement video shown by the McCarthy, a Huffington Post reporter quickly realized that much of the stock footage was not from America — but rather from Russia.
This is what happens when red state republican governors, right wing media hosts, and religious hate preachers make wild untrue accusations and targe the LGBTQ+. They put targets on the LGBTQ+ people and their organizations. While the police have not released the full context of the notes, one phone shows a note blaming the LBTQ+ for ” … holding get homosexual togethers for middle schoolers”. You know where that rhetoric comes from. It energizes the maga thug base to commit act of violence against those the republican governors like DeathSantis claim harm kids. About that harming kids, DeathSantis used taxpayer funds of hundreds of thousands of dollars to ship Venezuelan legal asylum seekers from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard and one of those was a month old baby. DeathSantis rants about saving kids by the don’t say gay bills and tough abortion bills, but he did not care he was sending a one month old baby all across the country with no warning to those where they landed and no way the mother could get help. Lucky the community there rallied to do they could for the asylum seekers that were being used as pawns and it really pissed the right wing off that the left was not assholes like the right is. Hugs
On Saturday morning, members of the Pride Community Center in Gainesville received a call from a real estate office in the same complex about their building being vandalized.
“She told me that she was just informed by somebody that came to her office that the pride center had been vandalized and that the windows were all smashed,” said board member Debbie Lewis. “The reason it’s being investigated as a hate crime is because of the notes that were left.”
Members didn’t want to share the messages due to the ongoing investigation and the community joined in helping board up the windows.
The attack came just weeks before the highly anticipated return of the Gainesville Pride Festival on Oct. 22, which was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic. Those who showed up at the center helped clean the mess left behind, sweeping up glass and rocks.
“Later I will be angry about this vicious hate crime but right now I’m incredibly sad for every vulnerable person in my community,” County Commission candidate Mary Alford said, adding that she faults some elected Republicans who have shared anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.
The attack came just weeks before the highly anticipated return of the Gainesville Pride Festival on Oct. 22. https://t.co/hWDKiOlDRh
For me, the hate that has been generated by the likes of DeSantis, Trump, Abbott, Youngkin, Green and their likes has turned into sadness for our country and her citizens. I cannot understand what is going on anymore and why citizens cannot have some peace and reprieve from Republicans.
A teacher in Texas reported one of her own students' families to child welfare services after stalking their Instagram page and identifying them as transgender. Luckily the family had already left Texas for Colorado after Governor Abbott ordered the state to persecute them. pic.twitter.com/rO5mAZ82lB
Beginning to understand how the Nazis did it now. Just ordinary people, thinking it’s their civic duty to do what the government tells them, and if it aligns with their own prejudices even better.
My Lyft driver on Friday that took me home from the airport was brand new here in Palm Springs, just arrived from Fort Lauderdale 2 months ago, with the cutest little dog who slept in the front seat. I welcomed him to California and gave him a big tip.
God I wish I could afford to get out. if i had the money I would be gone. The place is a human cess pool and getting worse by the minute. But alas Im poor, all my friends live here, have dogs and cats so its hard to leave right now.
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Scottie's Playtime 