The Rude Pundit: They Once Blew Up a Classroom Over Textbooks, So, Yeah, There Will Be Violence

The Rude Pundit
Proudly lowering the level of political discourse
10/28/2022
They Once Blew Up a Classroom Over Textbooks, So, Yeah, There Will Be Violence


In 1974, in West Virginia, protesters used dynamite and Molotov cocktails against the buildings of their enemies. The protesters were upset that the Board of Education of Kanawha County voted to update the textbooks in the district's language arts classes to include more modern authors in an effort to be more inclusive and multiracial. Kanawha County is the biggest in the state, and it includes the capital, Charleston. A fundamentalist Christian member of the board, Alice Moore, discovered that some of the new books included profanity, sex, evolution, and Freud. Oh, they also contained works by Black activists like Malcom X. Moore said that she was upset that the new books would teach American history in a way that "unduly favoring Blacks." Yeah, the connections to the current fuckery over curriculum in schools are that blatant.

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Right now, Republicans are telling MAGA cretins and other assorted shitheels and scumfucks that they are going to win back the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate. They are saying that there is no way they can legitimately lose, and, in fact, if they do lose, it must be because of Democratic fraud, cheating, and theft. Tucker Carlson, who has the laugh of someone having a great time fucking a corpse, has proclaimed as much to his millions of Nazi and Nazi-adjacent viewers. GOP candidates like Kari Lake, who you know masturbates with a Trump-shaped dildo, and Blake Masters, who you know masturbates with a Peter Thiel-shaped dildo, are refusing to say they'll accept the results of the election if they lose.

How do you think those armed and ready assholes are gonna react if Democrats end up winning? Hell, the GOP could win both houses, but if there's an election where they think they should have won, like with Herschel Walker in Georgia, that's gonna tell the locked and loaded crowd it's go time. Christ, speaking of Georgia, I don't wanna think about how insane the state's gonna get if Stacey Abrams wins the governorship. If you tell gullible motherfuckers that those who oppose you are satanic baby murderers who steal elections so they can murder more babies, more than a few of those motherfuckers are gonna react as if that's true.

It's fucking madness that we're even living through this, that we're not just talking about it, but fully expecting it and preparing for it.

And the point of the story I started with, about what became known as the "Textbook Wars," is not just that violence can happen over the stupidest goddamn things. No, the point is about what came after, when the violence was over and the protests ended and people went to jail for the worst acts and everyone went back to their lives and the books were allowed to be used.

Yeah, that's right. But the Board of Education gave each school the right to say whether or not they used them. And a good many of the schools did not. After a few years, in some schools, thousands of unused books were burned just to dispose of them to open up storage space. And Alice Moore got the school board to pass a new regulation that prohibited any books that "pry into home life; teach racial hatred; undermine religious, ethnic, or racial groups; encourage sedition; insult patriotism; teach that an alien form of government is acceptable; use the name of God in vain; or use offensive language."

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https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2022/10/they-once-blew-up-classroom-over.html