Your kids are (finally!) reading on their own . . . Now what?
Well, now is when we parents face the often-herculean task of trying to verify which books are safe and fit for our kids to read—not to mention supportive of traditional values!
Read More
New internal emails from Amazon reveal that the tech giant ultimately censored books discussing the topic of Chinese Coronavirus vaccines after being pressured to do so by the Biden Administration.
As reported by the New York Post, the emails and other documents were released by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Monday in a series of posts on X, which Jordan referred to as “The Amazon Files.” The communications were obtained by a subpoena from the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which was established with the purpose of exposing abuse of federal powers to target political opponents, including collusion between the government and private sector entities such as Big Tech.
Read More
The House Judiciary Committee and the Weaponization subpanel on Monday revealed internal documents secured via the subpoena of Amazon, highlighting the Biden administration’s efforts to address “propaganda” and “misinformation” in books the online retailer sold.
Read More
“Aletheia!” A 7-year-old girl grabs my hands and pulls me through the playing kids toward my church’s stash of books. “Will you read us a story?”
The kids at my church enjoy picture books year-round, but—during the holiday season—the stories begin to revolve distinctly around Christmas. Several of these stories are ones I enjoyed when I was young; others contain lessons and art that I’ve grown to appreciate over the years.
Read More
Democratic lawmakers privately negotiated with the nation’s largest teachers union to craft a bill intended to combat bans of sexually explicit books in schools, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Right To Read Act was reintroduced by Democratic Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva and Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed in April 2023, and is intended to rebuff efforts by parents and Republican lawmakers to remove sexually explicit content from school libraries, according to a press release from the lawmakers. The bill also authorized $500 million in funding for school libraries and provides liability protections to school librarians and educators providing sexually explicit books to students.
Read More
One of the best things parents can do for their children is read with them. Even reading a few minutes a day makes a world of difference.
Literacy is not only the key skill required by almost all education formats but also one of the most influential factors in any learning endeavor. Even children too young to read independently garner an incredible amount from listening to books read aloud. They significantly increase their language skills, attention span, memory, visual awareness, and emotional response and regulation. And, of course, reading together offers children time to cuddle up with parents for quality bonding time.
Read More
The former president of the American Library Association (ALA) said the organization helped “develop” legislation intended to combat attempts to remove sexually explicit books from school libraries, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Right To Read Act, reintroduced by Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed and Democratic Arizona Rep. Raúl Grijalva in April, ensures students can access “culturally diverse and inclusive materials,” including sexually explicit books, as well as granting liability protections for librarians who curate these materials. The bill is explicitly intended to rebuff efforts by parents and Republican lawmakers to remove sexually explicit content from school libraries, according to a press release from the lawmakers.
Read More
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill Monday that will ban school boards from removing books that teach racial or LGBTQ topics in the classroom.
School boards around the U.S. are removing books and materials from classrooms that parents have deemed inappropriate, causing books with overtly racial or sexual material to become a flashpoint in the culture wars. A.B. 1078, which Newsom signed, will prevent school boards from banning instructional materials or library books that include information teaching about racial or LGBTQ topics, and will allow the county superintendent to take unilateral action to include these materials, according to the bill.
Read More
In an effort to promote “inclusivity,” a Canadian school district has removed all books published before the year 2008 from all of its libraries.
According to the Daily Caller, the actions taken by the Peel School District in Mississauga, Ontario were in response to a provincial directive from the minister of education ordering a greater focus on “equity.”
Read MoreNBC News For colleges and libraries seeking a boldfaced name for a guest lecturer, few come bigger than Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court justice who rose from poverty in the Bronx to the nation’s highest court. She has benefited, too — from schools’ purchases of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of the books she…
Read More
Democratic Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards signed a bill into law Wednesday that will limit minors’ access to sexually explicit materials in libraries.
Senate Bill 7, authored by Republican Louisiana state Sen. Heather Cloud, will become effective Aug. 1, 2023, according to Louisiana’s legislative website. The act requires public libraries in the state to create a system for classifying what materials are sexually explicit, and then giving parents the final say in whether their children can access those materials.
Read More
A Catholic organization is launching a campaign through the month of June that encourages parents to revolt against books containing sexually explicit and transgenderism content offered to children in public libraries as a part of Pride Month.
CatholicVote, a nonprofit conservative advocacy group, is promoting its second annual “Hide the Pride” campaign, which encourages parents to visit their local libraries and check out as many books as they can that “push eroticism, glorify LGBTQ identities, undermine parental rights and are 100% contrary to the Church’s teaching on love and sexuality” in an effort to prevent others from accessing them, the organization told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Parents joining the campaign are encouraged to participate in groups and request that librarians take their Pride Month display down, the campaign information stated.
Read More
The graphic novel Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe was the most challenged book of 2022, according to an annual list of the most controversial books as assessed by the American Library Association.
The list was published Monday during the start of National Library Week. The American Library Association said 2022 was a record year for books “targeted for censorship.” There were 2,571 unique titles challenged, of which 58 percent were in school libraries, classroom libraries or school curricula.
Read More
The Ann Arbor public school district has a book available in its pre-kindergarten library called “Introducing Teddy: a gentle story about gender and friendship.” The book is about a boy’s best friend and teddy, Thomas, who is sad because “he wishes he were a girl, not a boy teddy, but what only matters to both of them is that they are friends.”
School districts across the country purchased books in 2022 that cover controversial topics such as critical race theory, white supremacy and gender dysphoria.
Read More
In his work The Western Canon, Harold Bloom wrote that a “reader does not read for easy pleasure or to expiate social guilt, but to enlarge a solitary existence.” The apparent message in Bloom’s flourish is that a reader ought to be after something more difficult to attain than mere pleasure. Passive consumption of entertainment will simply not do. Instead, readers are to be fully engaged with the work in front of them, especially when the process is difficult. It’s through this difficulty that a reader inevitably enlarges what Bloom refers to as a “solitary existence,” or, put another way, an existential engagement with the human condition.
Read More
At Intellectual Takeout, we strive to offer not only commentary on current events but also tangible advice for engaging with our increasingly chaotic world. That’s why we’re proud to present this ongoing series of literature recommendations.
This week’s entries include fictional stories with timeless themes and insight into reality, in addition to being enjoyable tales in their own right.
Read More
House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy captured the House speakership in dramatic fashion early Saturday, winning enough votes on a historic 15th ballot that saw 20 renegade Republicans changing their votes under enormous pressure after winning significant concessions about how Congress will operate going forward.
The final vote was 216-212-6.
Read More
At Intellectual Takeout, we strive to offer not only commentary on current events but also tangible advice for engaging with our increasingly chaotic world. That’s why we’re proud to present this new, biweekly series of literature recommendations.
These works have helped us and many others deepen their understanding of both the state of the world today and how it got there. We hope they prove engaging and informative for you as well.
This week’s recommendations cover current and recent world events.
Read More
A Wyoming library board has cut its ties with the American Library Association (ALA) and its state affiliate over support of sexually explicit books in the children’s sections of local libraries that include indoctrination in gender ideology and other aspects of radical LGBTQ activism.
The Campbell County Library Board in Gillette, Wyoming, voted 4-1 to break ties with the ALA after months of parental outcry about the books, promoted by the national organization, that have been viewed as pornographic and an attempt to normalize a transgender lifestyle, The Epoch Times reported last week.
Read More
A South Carolina school district has removed 97 books from its libraries following complaints of “adult content,” according to WSAV News.
A parent of the Beaufort County School District complained about books in the school libraries featuring sexual explicit content such as “Tricks” and “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” causing the books to be removed, according to WSAV News. The books have been pulled from the district and are currently under review by a material reconsideration committee.
“Tricks” by Ellen Hopkins is about several teen prostitutes and “All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George M. Johnson is a graphic memoir about the experiences of a queer black boy, according to each book review.
Read More
A Michigan school board suspended its Monday night meeting after members of the Muslim community called for the removal of sexually explicit books from the school district.
Dearborn School Board in Dearborn, Michigan, will resume its meeting Thursday after members of the local Muslim community attended the meeting to protest sexually explicit books in the school libraries that are currently under review. Meeting attendees also pushed back against the board’s book review policy implemented on Oct. 5 which requires parents to state why they are concerned about a book in the library before it is reviewed by media specialists.
Read More
A California school district is offering books with pornographic scenes in its school websites, and parents are planning to take action.
Poway Unified School District in Poway, California, is giving students access to several books that feature pornographic scenes, according to the library databases. Several parents have compiled a database of age-inappropriate content in the district libraries and brought it to the attention of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, a group that focuses on equal rights in education, the Executive Director of the group, Wenyuan Wu told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Read More
A Texas school board approved a policy which requires educators to only recognize a student’s gender assigned at birth and bans the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) from the classroom during an Aug. 22 board meeting.
The Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District Board in Grapevine, Texas, voted 4-3 to implement a policy which advises educators to only use students’ pronouns that correspond with their gender at birth. The policy also bans the teaching of CRT in the classrooms and requires books to be reviewed before entering the school library.
Read More
A school district near Fort Worth, Texas is having staff remove and review dozens of books that were challenged last year, including the Bible and a graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary.
Read More
Virginia Beach School Board Chair Carolyn Rye is directing staff to remove Gender Queer: a Memoir from school libraries, following the recommendation of a work group.
“I think the removal of this book is a win for parents and students,” Board Member Victoria Manning told The Virginia Star.
Read More
COLUMBUS, Ohio – The Ohio Elections Commission (OEC) found probable cause to further investigate and decide two complaints filed against Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Joe Blystone’s campaign and booked a full-panel hearing for May 2, one day before the primary election.
Thursday, a Probable Cause panel comprised of commissioners D. Michael Crites (R), Charleta B. Tavares (D) and Ernest C. Knight (I) voted unanimously on an expedited investigation into cases that allege the Canal Winchester farmer and restauranteur improperly reported campaign contributions and expenditures and spent campaign funds for personal use.
Read More
Books will remain in Bedford County Public School high school libraries after concern expressed in November public comment. Committees determined that one of the 12 books, ‘Two Boys Kissing,’ was not in school libraries. Parents can ask school librarians to keep their children from checking out the books.
“In December, the committee reviewed one book, “Beloved.” That was the first book that was challenged, and so we looked at that book, and the decision of the committee at that time was to keep the book in all of our libraries and continue to use it for AP coursework at the high school level. The committee felt it had instructional value, and was on the list of AP-recommended books for the course,” Chief Learning Officer Dr. Karen Woodford told the school board at its March 10 meeting.
Read More
A former Title X family planning instructor who was trained by Planned Parenthood and then taught at sex ed conferences for teens told The Star News Network parents who are outraged to hear about sexualized curricula in schools should plan an organized grassroots effort that involves sound research and documentation.
In an extensive interview with The Star News Network, Monica Cline stressed parents with concerns about sexualized books available to their children in school should join with other like-minded parents and approach the situation with logic and sufficient research to make sound arguments to school boards.
Read More
An Oklahoma bill introduced on Dec. 16 may allow parents to seek the removal of books that they deem inappropriate from school libraries.
The bill, Senate Bill 1142, would give parents a right to ask for the removal of “books that are of a sexual nature that a reasonable parent or legal guardian would want to know of or approve of prior to their child being exposed to it,” according to the bill’s language.
Read More
Amazon stopped offering customer ratings and reviews of books sold in China at the request of the Chinese Communist Party, according to a Reuters investigation.
The Chinese government ordered Amazon to stop allowing customers to review books following less-than-perfect ratings of a collection of President Xi Jinping’s writings, Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the matter. Amazon partnered with a state-owned firm called China International Book Trading Corp (CIBTC) and created a portal, which it called China Books, that promotes Chinese Communist Party material and forbids negative reviews.
Read More
Virginia Beach School Board Member Victoria Manning has challenged four books in the district’s libraries over sexually explicit content.
“I’ve been accused of wanting to ban books, burn books, etc.,” she told The Virginia Star in an email. “However, I am NOT asking for a ban on these books. I’m simply asking for sexually explicit and pornographic materials to not be made available to minors through our schools. If adults want to purchase these books or borrow them from the library then that is their business and their right. At the very least, parents should be made aware in advance of sexually explicit material and be required to OPT-IN for their children to be able to be provided these materials.”
Read More
The Spotsylvania County School Board has rescinded a vote to begin removing explicit books from its libraries just a week after unanimously passing the motion. The 5-2 vote came after public outcry and an hours-long public comment period.
“I admit that we may have made a hasty vote to remove sexually explicit materials without the appropriate discussions about what was already in our policy,” member Lisa Phelps said in WFVA video of the meeting.
Read More
MSNBC host Joy Reid, steadily losing viewership since former President Donald J. Trump exited the White House, has found a new boogeyman in Virginia’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin.
The homophobic former blogger set her sights on Younkin during Thursday night’s episode of “The ReidOut.”
Read More
A mother of a student at Fairfax County Public Schools called out the school board for indirectly making accessible to students two books featuring child pornography and pedophilia in school libraries at Thursday night’s school board meeting.
Stacy Langton opened by explaining that she watched what had happened at a Texas school board meeting after parents discovered two books accessible to their children, Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison and Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe. Langton looked for and found the books at her own child’s school, Fairfax High School, as well as other places in the county, including Robinson Secondary School where students as young as 12 could access the books.
Parents Defending Education’s VP for Strategy & Investigations Asra Q. Nomani captured Langton’s comments to the school board on video and reported the exchange on her Substack, Asra Investigates.
Read More
The bomb that detonated at Scripps College on the afternoon of February 26, 1969, didn’t injure anyone, but an innocent young woman was badly maimed when another device exploded almost simultaneously in Carnegie Hall at adjacent Pomona College. Hidden inside a shoebox wrapped in brown paper, the second bomb left 20-year-old Mary Ann Keatley blind in one eye and ripped two fingers from her right hand. Keatley, married just five months earlier to an undergraduate at Claremont Men’s College, worked as the secretary for the Pomona political science department. These two explosions, and a third two weeks later, shattered windows, and wrecked buildings.
Read More
Rider University is promoting a book in their online library that, according to the publication description, “Argues that homophobia will not be eradicated in the United States until religion is ended.”
“Slouching Towards Gaytheism: Christianity and Queer Survival in America,” written by W.C. Harris, a professor at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, can be found in Rider’s library research guide for “Christian and Religious Privilege.”
The “Christian and Religious Privilege” guide is a subcategory of Rider’s “Privilege and Intersectionality” web page.
Read More
The University of Pennsylvania’s Carey Law School hosted a panel event called “Decolonizing the Stacks,” which provided examples of eliminating bias and discrimination from its library systems.
The event was part of Penn Carey Law’s thirteenth annual public interest week, dubbed “Reforming the Nation: Working Towards Racial Justice.”
Amanda Runyon — moderator of the panel and Associate Dean and Director of Biddle Law Library — opened the discussion by defining “decolonizing libraries” as “the process of de-centering whiteness and being more inclusive to voices of color and voices representing diverse perspectives.” She encouraged fellow librarians to consider the impact of their “centering of White, Western norms.”
Read More
The publisher of the popular Dr. Seuss children’s books said Tuesday it will stop publishing six of the books because of their racist and hurtful imagery, according to the publishing company.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises said the books including “And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street” and “If I Ran the Zoo.”
Read More
The United States Navy’s official curriculum is set to include new books on “anti-racism” and “gender politics” that will further push the message of social justice in America’s military ranks, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
Of the 37 books included in the full reading list, 16 books are listed under the category of “personal and leadership development.” Of these 16, four of them deal directly with social justice; among the titles are How to be an Anti-Racist, The New Jim Crow, and Sexual Minorities and Politics. These four stand out in particular against the other 33, which focus on the more traditional subjects such as military strategy and the history of the Navy.
Read More
A recent Washington Post article lamented the fact that biology textbooks contain a disproportionate number of mentions of “white men.”
The article’s author, Bethany Brookshire, begins by referencing three of the most recognized contributors to modern biology, Charles Darwin, Carolus Linnaeus, and Gregor Mendel.
Four of the country’s biggest publishers have sued a digital library for copyright infringement, alleging that the Internet Archive has illegally offered more than a million scanned works to the public, including such favorites as Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon,” Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.”
Read More
by Mark Metcalf A recent Justice Department report on U.S. immigration courts provides a rare glimpse into the difficulties faced by the Trump administration as it repairs the damages inflicted on these tribunals over the last 20 years. But give credit to the courts’ new executive, James McHenry. Early on,…
Read More
Jury selection has begun in the New York City “hush money” trial of Donald Trump, who is charged in a 34-count indictment with falsifying business records of the Trump Organization. This case is part of a Democrat-led effort to engage in lawfare on various Progressive battlefields.
Read More
California disciplinary court Judge Yvette Roland (pictured above), who disbarred Trump’s former attorney and constitutional legal scholar John Eastman last month, contributed to a Democratic PAC last year which funneled all of the contributions to a Super PAC that seeks to stop “undermining the most basic tenet of our democracy, the right to vote.” Despite the fact that the charges against Eastman were all related to his efforts investigating and stopping election corruption in the 2020 election, Roland did not recuse herself.
Read More
Leaders in the pro-life community are warning Americans about the pro-abortion industry’s deceptive ways, as over 20 percent of states face the possibility of voting on an abortion-related ballot measure in November.
The states that may see these ballot measures are Florida, Maryland, New York, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, and South Dakota.
Read More
I have written about the death and rebirth of socialism periodically over the years. But as André Gide said in another context, “Toutes choses sont dites déjà, mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer”: everything has already been said, but since no one was listening, it is necessary to say it again.
Really, the socialist impulse is a hardy perennial. How could something so frequently and thoroughly discredited persist in the hearts of men? Some think it has something to do with the gullibility of the human animal, some (but I repeat myself) with the persistence of the utopian dream. I suspect there are many explanations, of which the raw desire for power plays an unedifying but also underrated role. I also favor the explanatory power of original sin, which has profound psychological as well as theological application to many of the more farcical aspects of human experience and what is more farcical than socialism?
Read More
Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, died 30 years ago this week—on April 22, 1994. And while it may be hard to remember a Republican the left despised more than Donald J. Trump—Nixon probably takes the cake.
It was not so much how the former California Congressman and two-term Vice President governed or his introverted personality but rather his adversarial relationship with a hostile media, his sheer determination, intelligence, lawyerly command of the facts, exceptional understanding of both foreign and domestic policy, and his effectiveness as commander in chief that caused the left to view Nixon as persona non grata.
Read More
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares wants the Biden administration to act on “the missing migrant children crisis,” claiming the administration ignores the problem.
In a letter addressed to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, Miyares raised concerns over the “welfare and safety” of unaccompanied minors that he argues are not being “prioritized” by the Biden administration.
Read More