Guest Post by Mark Crispin Miller
She’s deeply hostile to free speech, and so are they
Of all the current “liberal” insults to intelligence and common sense (the list is long), maybe the most astounding (and they’re all astounding) is the “liberal” cry against the censorship of books. That stand has been a liberal mainstay since long before one had to put that word in scare quotes, with yearly “Banned Books Weeks” defending many books that were not “banned,” except in some provincial schools and libraries—Grapes of Wrath, The Catcher in the Rye, Fahrenheit 451, Lolita, The Bluest Eye, The Diary of Anne Frank, (increasingly) The Bible, and many other titles readily available and widely read.
Such pre-COVID shows of “anti-censorship” might just as well have been (or maybe were) mere PR for the book publishing industry, since claiming that a certain title has been “banned” is likely to get people interested in reading it. Meanwhile, such promotions of “banned books” have not included countless books that really have been “banned,” albeit covertly, and so successfully that no one’s ever heard of them—books not openly proscribed, and/or thrown into bonfires, but variously killed at birth (“privished”), or that have quietly slipped out of print, because some powers don’t want anybody reading them. Such disappeared books have included Gerald Colby’s Behind the Nylon Curtain—an epic history of the DuPonts, first killed by its own publisher; Deborah Davis’s Katherine the Great—a thorough, fair biography of sainted Washington Post owner Katherine Graham, who, abetted by its publisher, destroyed it; Philip Agee’s Inside the Company: A CIA Diary—one of several honest memoirs savaged by the Agency; Moshe Menuhin’s The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time—a devastating history of Zionism that no publisher would touch in 1965, so that it came out, imperceptibly, from the Institute for Palestine Studies; and James Stewart Martin’s All Honorable Men—a frank account of the deliberate subversion of the US effort to break up the cartels that served the Nazi war machine: a must-read memoir that the CIA killed by buying up every copy in the bookstores, then Little, Brown, the publisher, would not reprint it, even though the New York Times had run a very positive review. (Most of those titles, and a few dozen more, are available as e-books from my Forbidden Bookshelf series, at https://openroadmedia.com/forbidden-bookshelf.)
Limited though they were, those (seeming) affirmations of free speech—a yearly ritual since long before the “COVID measures” trashed the world—seem like libertarian perfection by contrast with the current “liberal” stance against book censorship; for “liberals” now have no right to condemn the censorship of books, since they are now demanding just such censorship as fiercely as the right did during the so-called “McCarthy era.” (For just one example, check out the pre-emptive purges of US-funded libraries all over Europe in 1953, before the coming of McCarthy adjutants Roy Cohn and David Schine.) Whereas it used to be just Huckleberry Finn that was (absurdly) bowdlerized by certain irony-deficient “liberal” readers, so that the epithet which everybody used back in the time and places about which Mark Twain wrote his novel would be replaced with “negro” (or “negroes”), though it was used by no one in that ancient milieu.
Today, such “woke” revision is just one way to censor books that “liberals” might deem terrifyingly passé. Thus the (British) publishers of Roald Dahl, and Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, are now producing them in woke-speak versions (all racist/sexist bits excised, along with horrid words like “fat”), while R.L. Stine—“the Stephen King of children’s literature”—has himself overseen the “sensitivity edit” of his own Goosebumps series. “Among the changes [ordered by the author] are removals of references to having ‘at least six chins,’ a magic spell replacing a ‘love tap,’ [and] the deletion of overt references to race and gender-specific terminology.”
Nor is it only books that have been censored in the name of “sensitivity.” Last June, when Criterion streamed The French Connection, viewers familiar with the film were startled by the disappearance of that moment, early on, when “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) speaks a “racial slur.” That cut was surely made not by Criterion but Disney, owner of the rights, since Disney had, in March, already informed Don Rosa, co-creator of Scrooge McDuck, that Disney would no longer publish “two of your classic stories, ‘The Richest Duck in the World’ and ‘The Dream of a Lifetime’”—a stroke of censorship dictated by Disney’s “ongoing commitment to inclusion and diversity.”
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/21/1158347261/roald-dahl-books-changed-offensive-words
https://www.nme.com/news/film/the-french-connection-censored-fans-furious-34
https://www.disneyfanatic.com/disney-erases-scrooge-stories-sc1/
Meanwhile, countless classics that can’t be thus “edited” for “sensitivity” (at least not yet) have been variously slapped with “trigger warnings” that bespeak the same (let’s call it what it is) totalitarian aversion to whatever “liberals” deem “offensive.” This repressive practice is especially egregious and widespread in, of all places, Britain, whose government and leading cultural institutions are now thereby attacking Britain’s peerless literary heritage, as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—which, reportedly, now has a “trigger warning” on it, along with works by Shakespeare, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley, Edmund Burke and Joseph Conrad, and movies like The Great Escape and Bridge Over the River Kwai, and the British TV miniseries House of Cards. Such works are (somehow) dangerous because of their (alleged) popularity way out on the “far right,” or so the British government avers—in partnership with British “higher education,” certain of whose commissars have now slapped “trigger warnings” on Shakespeare’s Hamlet in particular, along with Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Jane Austen’s Persuasion, any one of which might overwhelm the students reading it with feelings of “trauma” and “distress.” English majors at the University of Greenwich have been warned that Northanger Abbey—Austen’s satire of the Gothic novel, published in 1817—contains “gender stereotyping,” and “toxic relationships and friendships.”
https://www.rt.com/news/571736-uk-shakespeare-far-right/
Of course, such sissy stuff (if I may call it that; although I probably may not) is also commonplace in the United States, applied to literary classics British and American—such as this recent (all-female) production of Richard III:
Much the same hysterical forewarning prefaces the new edition of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, published by Pan Macmillan (which elected not to bowdlerize the text, as they’ve done with Roald Dahl):
Gone with the Wind is a novel which includes problematic elements including the romanticisation of a shocking era in our history and the horrors of slavery.
The novel includes the representation of unacceptable practices, racist and stereotypical depictions and troubling themes, characterisation, language and imagery.
The text of this book remains true to the original in every way and is reflective of the language and period in which it was originally written.
We want to alert readers that there may be hurtful or indeed harmful phrases and terminology that were prevalent at the time this novel was written and which are true to the context of the historical setting of this novel.
Pan Macmillan believes changing the text to reflect today’s world would undermine the authenticity of the original, so has chosen to leave the text in its entirety.
This does not, however, constitute an endorsement of the characterisation, content or language used.”
Of course, Richard III is not the only play that “contains scenes of death, violence and threat [sic]” (how many classic dramas don’t “contain” them?), nor is Gone with the Wind the only work whose dated take on race requires a “warning.” With its “harmful language” and retro depictions of black people, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is now increasingly taboo, four “liberal” teachers, in Miskilteo, Washington, having lately sought not only to stop teaching it, but to ban it from the school curriculum, so that no teacher ever may assign it. (The school district refused the latter change.) In Belfast, Northern Ireland, a schoolgirl and her mother want John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men dropped from the curriculum, because the “racist slurs and comments” (by Steinbeck’s racist characters) make her “really uncomfortable,” and feeling “weak.” “I understand the history behind it and stuff,” she added, “but you can learn that in history about slavery.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-65700288.amp
If students can’t, or won’t, read any work whose author would, today, be canceled for producing it, it’s not just some few works that must be (let us call it) reconsidered, but many worthy works—and, moreover, works by writers who, like Mark Twain, John Steinbeck and Harper Lee, were anti-racist; though some racist works are also well worth reading (like, say, Mein Kampf), or viewing (like, say, Birth of a Nation). Indeed, so many are the works that students ought to know, in spite of the discomfort that it causes them (or, in fact, because of it), that the quickest, most efficient way to solve the problem certainly is not to try to “edit” all of them for “sensitivity,” or slap endless “trigger warnings” on them all. The quickest, cleanest way to solve this problem (of the past) is just to wipe it out, by simply getting rid of every title published over some few years ago—as “liberals” in Ontario have done.
School Libraries Removed All Books Published Before 2009 Over Inclusivity Concerns: Report
One 10th-grader took photos of half-empty shelves, explaining that many popular titles had vanished without explanation
September 13, 2023
Nor, surely, is it only schools that “liberals” want to see completely “safe” from any contradiction of, or deviation from, their line, with nothing else allowed on those library shelves, or on the teacher’s lips, or inside his/her mind. What “liberals” now demand—unlike those true liberals who once (barely) held the line against such warlike groupthink—is for all the world to be as “safe” as those “woke” training sites in Canada; and what “safe” means is not just that everyone fanatically observes the crackpot etiquette of “social justice,” but, no less, that no one ever questions the Official Stories pounded out by “our free press”—since “liberals” now (unlike the true ones long ago) regard it as the highest virtue never to disbelieve the state-and-media. Thus Sen. Liz Warren wrote to Amazon last year, demanding that they not sell The Real Anthony Fauci, because “it perpetuates dangerous conspiracies [sic] about COVID-19.” Sued by the book’s author, Warren won in May, the court finding that her letter “was not an unlawful attempt to coerce Amazon to stifle their speech,” nor, evidently, an attempt to “stifle” Kennedy’s, and also make it harder for the rest of us to read the book ourselves, and make up our own minds about it—as Sen. Warren, no doubt, never did, because the book is “dangerous” (unlike the “vaccines” that she’s pushed relentlessly).
December 19, 2021
With such a record of hostility to deviant expression, especially in books, it is, to say the least, remarkable that “liberals” are now riding their high horse against the censorship of books—a posture somewhat reminiscent of the CP’s loud post-war campaign defending “free speech” from Congressional inquisitors, after having gleefully approved the US government’s attack on the Socialist Workers Party, under the Smith Act, back in 1941 (not to mention the status of “free speech” under Stalin). And yet this “liberal” shift is scarier than that one, since the CP was, by 1947, very small, and getting smaller all the time, whereas the “liberals” are the shock troops of the World Economic Forum, and all the latter’s huge US adjuncts atop the state, and all throughout the upper corporate realm, along with academia and the professions. Moreover, this new “liberal” drive against book censorship is also scarier than that Red pose in 1947 because the CP was, however hypocritically, defending an inarguable good—free speech—whereas the “liberals” are defending something indefensible.
What has “liberals” now on fire as champions of free expression is, of course, the recent nationwide attempts by parents, and the politicians heeding them, to keep (mostly) grade schools free of sexually inappropriate material: soft porn for kids, and “gender theory”—an academic euphemism for transgenderist indoctrination. Although piously (and typically) misrepresented as a civil rights campaign, rolled out to “foster tolerance” or “combat hate,” the push for “gender theory” in the elementary schools is actually a bio-fascist propaganda drive, to enable the routine manipulation of young children (and, if possible, their parents) into getting them to “question” their own “gender,” so as to further normalize the radical idea that one’s sex can and, often, should be changed, through such profitable torments as puberty blockers, hormone therapies and surgeries. Thus it’s surely no coincidence that this decadent invasion of our children’s schools has coincided with the “COVID crisis,” which, of course, has normalized, for all too many people, the radical idea that, without endless “vaccinations,” you can’t be a “loving” person, and you’ll die.
Of course, it isn’t only books like, say, The Lovely Bones and Gender Queer that parents don’t want in their children’s schools. Since they tend right, they often agitate against black history, memoirs of immigrant experience, and other works that they decry on racist and/or xenophobic grounds, in stout defense of the American-Exceptionalist Dream. (On the other hand, their animus against such—please excuse me—bullshit “history” as The 1619 Project, and other CRT propaganda, is pedagogically correct.) Such bias is (to say the least) unfortunate, not just because it would rule out some valid reading, but also because it helps the “liberals” pose as tolerant and open-minded—when what they’re really pushing for (unwittingly) is an enormous program of indoctrination, undertaken not to open children’s minds but to mess with them, in pursuit of a calamitous elite agenda. It is the sexualization of the innocent, and (yet, as well) their sexual mutilation, that’s at the heart of the assault that those much-mocked (and even persecuted) “moms” are trying to stop (now under FBI surveillance). Far from promoting “love,” “inclusion” or “diversity,” this psy-op has meant still more billions for the medical colossus, and, beyond such corporate profits, one more giant step toward world depopulation, and a transhumanist utopia without the drag and mess of human families, human beings. Just like “COVID vaccination” (and childhood vaccination overall), this bio-fascist project has depended on a criminal denial of informed consent, since children cannot grasp what “gender theory” means; yet “liberals” want it pushed on them in schools. (Someone should ask Liz Warren how it is that little children can learn “gender theory,” while grown-ups should not be allowed to read The Real Anthony Fauci.)
So much for those “liberals” sounding off against the censorship of books. What about the right? Since “the virus” cast its shadow on the world, we’ve come to look rightward for some truth about it, since “liberals” have been the most fanatical Covidians, the “liberal media” attacking any scientist or doctor who dared tell the truth, or even question the Gospel according to St. Anthony. But this exception, crucial though it’s been, does not mean that, otherwise, the right is, by and large, any more receptive to free speech (with which they disagree) than they were in 1956, or 1968, or any more than “liberals” are today. As we’ve seen here, many of those insurgent rightist parents want to have their children see America, and all the world, as it appears in most of John Wayne’s movies, and in US history textbooks back when Ike was in the White House.
And then there’s Marjorie Taylor Greene. Although we should, of course, applaud her current effort to reveal “the truth” about mRNA “vaccines,” this surely does not make her any more receptive to free speech than her fierce detractors on “the left.” As we see here, that fiery congresswoman has now made her own hypocrisy around the First Amendment just as flagrant as it is across the aisle.
Here’s how Greene has recently responded to free speech that she (and most Republicans, and Democrats) dislikes:
Marjorie Taylor Greene Wants Professors to Fail Anti-Israel Students
October 25, 2023
https://www.newsweek.com/greene-calls-anti-israel-students-fail-1837927
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene files censure resolution accusing Rep. Rashida Tlaib of inciting an insurrection
Greene’s resolution cites a number of statements Tlaib has tweeted or retweeted supporting Palestinians and criticizing the Israeli government
October 26, 2023
(To give her party its due, a number of Republicans opposed this censure effort, and helped push Greene to drop it.)
Greene feels differently, of course, about her own free speech (and note too how the “liberal” Independent jeers her, not for cracking down on pro-Palestinian expression, but for trying to keep “sexually explicit materials” out of schools):
Marjorie Taylor Greene furious as major store refuses to stock her book
November 9, 2023
Ahead of Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green’s tell-all book’s release, Hudson Booksellers revealed that it would not be selling the Georgia Republican’s book.
Ms Greene’s debut book, MTG is scheduled to be released on 21 November, according to the congresswoman. But eager readers won’t be able to find it at Hudson Booksellers’ locations, which are typically found in airports and train stations.
“CENSORSHIP!” Donald Trump Jr. wrote in a Wednesday tweet that Ms Greene reposted. “Hudson Books refuses to carry AMERICA FIRST authors!” He wrote that the bookseller is refusing to offer Rep Greene’s new book “at airport bookstores!”
Hudson explained that its “selection is highly subjective” and based on “sales history,” adding, “Our stores are small and our shelf space is limited so we have to make tough decisions about our title mix.”
In his tweet, the former president’s son also noted that books by failed 2022 Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and Fox News’ The Five cohost Judge Jeanine Pirro. “Why are they ignoring the silent majority?” he wrote.
Although Ms Greene has yet to comment on the matter in her own words, she reposted Donald Trump Jr’s post, which accused the bookseller of censorship. The move is ironic, given her own attempts to ban books.
Ms Greene cosponsored legislation in February that proposed prohibiting publishing houses from providing books containing “sexually explicit material” to schools.
Now available from Amazon:
And so we must remember, always, that our free speech rights are inalienable, since neither side in Washington, or nationwide, believes in them.
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
-----------------------------------------------------
To donate via Stripe, click here.
-----------------------------------------------------
Use promo code ILMF2, and save up to 66% on all MyPillow purchases. (The Burning Platform benefits when you use this promo code.)
She’s doing it with Kevin McCarthy I hear….
When I was a teen, anything that was “prohibited” was usually a big draw for me.
Hopefully there is some of that same since of risk taking and adventure in kids today.
Ever see a picture of McCarthy’s wife? Explains a lot.
All these prancing pussies are about to get a diaper filling wake up call that will make their obsession with censorship as irrelevant as my concern for their feelings…todays snowflake pronoun people don’t have safe spaces big enough to hide from what’s coming…the financial SHTF…it’s real and it’s beginning.
I supported MTG when she stood up for the Jan 6 political prisoners, she lost my support when she supported Israel.
There are no such things as good politician’s. They are all the enemy of the people.
She is part of Operation: Cool Off The Mark.
Look how little they are spending on the “investigation”
Looks like it was filmed in a storage room somewhere….as an afterthought.