Digital Book Burning by Republican Politicians

The State of Oklahoma is now lighting the match on digital book burning.

Much of this anti-intellectual quackery is fueled by Christian bigots and screamers who show up regularly to badger and verbally terrorize school boards into an all-too strict and stifling cultural conformity.

The State of Oklahoma is now lighting the match on digital book burning.

There’s a teacher in Oklahoma who lost her job and is about to lose her license for — (brace yourselves) — encouraging her students to read.

Yes, it’s true.

For those unfamiliar with the Summer Boismier case in Norman, OK, she is/was a popular high school English teacher. She was recently forced to resign, instead of being fired (by the way, this is despite a well-documented national teacher shortage). She was pressured to resign as a teacher for (now get this) sharing a QR code for students to access digital books for free from the Brooklyn Public Library.

I’m not kidding.

An English teacher gave her students a code to read more books (including some books deemed objectionable by the high priests of Norman Oklahoma). The horror!

Now, Oklahoma’s backwater good old boy Republican right-wing conservative Secretary of Education (a slug named Ryan Walters) has decided that causing this teacher to lose her job isn’t enough. So, he’s attempting to have her teaching license revoked to keep her from any future employment in her field of study. Oklahoma’s Secretary of Education is trying to RUIN someone’s career.

READ MORE HERE

The facts of this case show (please Google “Summer Boismier”) that this is a preposterous reaction by a state-elected official that deserves to be met with ridicule and removed from office. The teacher didn’t give any specific books to her students nor did she assign any controversial books to the class. Fact: She merely provided access to books, and, for that, she is about to be censured by the State of Oklahoma. This amounts to digital book burning and a witch hunt determined to punish anyone who steps outside of the state’s strict far-Right cultural hegemon.

All too often, when we think of political transformation and even cultural revolution, we incite macro-level thinking. We go big. Presidential elections. National politics. A big-bold agenda.

But all politics is local. The things that often affect us the most are things we see and experience each day — like the conditions of roads, the bus arriving on time, public schools, and other happenings all at the local level.

What’s horrifying is just how many local political leaders have gone off the cliff of sanity and into the abyss of extremity. Much of this anti-intellectual quackery is fueled by Christian bigots and screamers who show up regularly to badger and verbally terrorize school boards into an all-too strict and stifling cultural conformity.

The Oklahoma teacher case is just one of the hundreds if not thousands of crazed crackpot local Republicanisms which have come to infect America.

This is the kind of shit that is happening everywhere. THIS is just as dangerous as Trump and his MAGA goons. They must be exposed. They must be stopped.

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