Leftists will tell you: patriots are a bunch of book-burning neo-Nazis who are busy even now trying to control what people think by taking books out of the hands of our young people who are thirsting for knowledge. And so the headline of the Wednesday report from Tampa Bay’s WFLA was downright ominous: “Florida school district removes book about Anne Frank from libraries.” Heavens to betsy! Even Anne Frank! Do these right-wingers want another Holocaust? Will they stop at nothing? But the truth, as is usually the case with establishment media reports, was quite a different matter.
WFLA’s lead paragraph is just as misleading as its headline: “A book about Anne Frank was removed from a Florida school library after a new policy was approved.” What was removed was not her famous diary, but a graphic novel entitled Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation. In this case, “graphic” is used in both senses of the word.
“In one graphic scene in the book,” WFLA informs us, “Frank asks a friend to expose themselves to one another.” And in another, “Frank walks along nude statues that are sexually explicit.” The book also portrays Anne Frank as a budding lesbian; the caption on the page where she walks among the nude statues is: “I must admit, every time I see a female nude, I go into ecstasy. If only I had a girlfriend!” It was this marginally pornographic book that “was removed from school libraries in Indian River County” after complaints from a group of parents.
The parents’ group in question, Moms For Liberty, of course has no problem with the real Anne Frank book. Jennifer Pippin of Moms For Liberty explained, “We think true history absolutely needs to be taught, the Holocaust, the Anne Frank diary.” And Dr. Kyra Schafte of the Indian River County school district pointed out that the real Diary of Anne Frank is still available in school libraries there. Cristen Maddux, a spokesperson for the district, said that the graphic novel, on the other hand, was “not age appropriate.” She added: “That’s not the actual diary of Anne Frank. It’s a fictional novel that has some inappropriate content in it.” It was removed, she said, “due to minimization of the Holocaust.” Echoing Schafte, Maddux concluded, “Library spaces in the district currently have factual accounts of The Diary of Anne Frank.”
So this is the pass to which our rancid culture has brought us. Parents who are trying to stem the tide against drag queens in primary schools, pornography in libraries, and the overall sexualization of the youngest children are demonized as anti-intellectual yahoos, book-burners, neo-Nazis, and worse. To insist that Anne Frank actually wrote those words is not an adequate justification for presenting them to young children; she herself was not writing for publication and had no idea that later generations would read and study what she wrote. Nor is there any indication that she herself would have thought it appropriate or acceptable to expose the youngest children to such considerations.
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Nonetheless, Leftists are hacking away at patriots for trying to protect their children from having their innocence destroyed by predators. A rabbi named Jeffrey Salkin wrote in the far-Left Religion News Service about the dastardly efforts to censor Anne Frank and declared, “For this has been the right wing’s playbook all along. This has been their strategy. They have started with small and local offices — with library boards and school boards — contenting themselves with the stifling of young minds and their imaginations.” Yeah, sure, buddy, that’s what this is all about. Trying to stop the grooming that is increasingly ubiquitous — it’s just an endeavor to stifle young minds and imaginations!
Leftists are once again trying to maneuver patriots into what for the Left would be a win-win situation. They’re doing this on multiple fronts, as is explained in detail in The Sumter Gambit: How the Left Is Trying to Foment A Civil War. Either we acquiesce and accept the physical and psychological ruination of our children, or we get branded “book burners” and “neo-Nazis.” They’re banking on the likelihood that most people will not have the stomach for such abuse, and will instead just go along silently. The terrorizing of the people into submission is a hallmark of totalitarian regimes. And here we are.
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