In the latest example of “rules for thee but not for me,” our political aristocrats are now throwing their weight around in the phony “banned books” battle of the culture war. In this particular battle, leftists smear conservatives or even just apolitical parents as fascist book burners for asking schools and libraries not to push books depicting pornography, oral sex, rape, or gender dysphoria.
A memo must have made its way to the top this week, as both President Barack Obama and Chelsea Clinton both tweeted Monday about books “being challenged by people who disagree with certain ideas or perspectives.” This all comes just a month after President Joe Biden announced he would be appointing a “banned-book” czar, whose job is to push trans-obsessed young adult novels and race-obsessed pseudohistories on local libraries.
The “Unite Against Book Book Bans” website that Clinton and Obama both link to includes many flashy and shareable infographics about the number of attempted bans and titles targeted, but does not share or even link to a list of books allegedly being banned, or even name a single title of a banned book. That’s because they want you to assume racist Republicans are banning titles like “To Kill A Mockingbird,” not, you know, graphic novels like “Gender Queer,” whose author uses e/em/eir pronouns, and which includes illustrations of oral sex between teen boys.
Much has been written about the left’s lies on the topic, but when elites like Obama and Clinton pipe up, it’s worth calling out their continued hypocrisy on how your children should be raised, but not theirs. Do you think the prestigious Sidwell Friends School where the Obama children attended offers pornographic graphic novels in their library? Of course not. Sure, Chelsea Clinton reads her children plenty of her own feminist propaganda children’s books, but is she really reading a best-selling LGBT book featuring a “bumming instruction manual” discussing “tops and bottoms” with her children? Doubtful. But it’s OK in your kid’s middle school classroom.
It’s further evidence of a phenomenon that writer Tim Carney recognized years ago, that “liberal elites’ secret weapon is conservative family values.” In short, their real privilege is not the ungodly wealth or class — although those certainly help — but the ability to keep “their children away from drugs, early death, violence, dropping out of high school, [or] dropping out of the labor force,” which is typically achieved by raising children in a traditional two-parent family with an intact marriage.
I would argue the updated version of this privilege now includes the ability to scrutinize and monitor the media, and thus the political and social indoctrination, your child consumes.
As The Federalist’s Senior Editor David Harsanyi writes about the “banned book” racket, “for the most part, ‘book ban’ is just a euphemism for progressive administrators and teachers losing some of their power over your kids.” Not theirs.
