As the theme of this year's Pride Month — "We're coming for your children" — echoes, more and more parents are speaking out against their kids' exposure to divisive Critical Race Theory, pornographic materials in school libraries, and exploring with six-year-olds how they can change their sex.  By this spring, more than half of U.S. states had passed laws prohibiting curricula promoting radical ideologies, including Florida, New Hampshire, and Tennessee.  Because the strategy of the progressive education establishment depends on forming today's captive schoolkids into tomorrow's leftist foot soldiers, they've moved to DEFCON 1.

Moms for Liberty is one of the more effective, and rapidly growing, grassroots parent organizations.  Their mission: "educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government." 

But they and similar organizations are David fighting Goliath, normal moms and dads facing down radical school boards and Democrat-owning teachers' unions.  Last summer, the National School Boards Association colluded with the Biden administration on a letter urging the DOJ to treat protesting parents as "domestic terrorists."  Attorney General Merrick Garland hopped to it, and "at least dozens" of parents were investigated by the FBI. 

This June, the Southern Poverty Law Center, in its own right a hate group and "highly profitable scam," hung the "extremist" label on Moms for Liberty.

On the SPLC's cue, Svante Myrick, president of People For the American Way, published his own piece attacking the group, "Fighting censorship is a proud American tradition."  In it, he slurs Moms for Liberty as "un-American," equating them with Nazi book-burners.  Because Moms for Liberty supports removal of prurient and age-inappropriate sexual — in fact, pornographic — material from school libraries, Myrick, citing the "early and foreboding event" of the May 1933 book-burning in Berlin, falsely charges that the organization "embraces book banning as a centerpiece of its activism,"

As Philadelphia writer Kyle Sammin wrote last summer, dispelling the book-ban falsehood, "no one anywhere in America is banning books."  That a book has been excluded from a library's collection doesn't constitute a "ban," especially if it's still "available for purchase anywhere in America!"  All libraries have limits, and "deciding which books to include, a library — especially a school library — must impose some sort of standards."

Sammin recounts last summer's "fake firestorm" in Central Bucks, Pennsylvania over the controversial book Gender Queer: A Memoir — a book, she points out, readily available for "$8.99 on Kindle, delivered immediately."  A "graphic novel with pictures, among other things, of teenagers performing oral sex [sic] on each other," Gender Queer includes images "so graphic that school boards refused to allow them to be shown — in the very meetings where the book was discussed!"  Because a "standard that excludes graphic descriptions of sexual activity seems like a pretty commonsense rule," Sammin concludes that school libraries excluding Gender Queer: A Memoir is "a no-brainer, really."

But, brains or no brains, progressives can never see more than one degree of separation between any conservative viewpoint and the Third Reich.  So, since no one has accused any parents of burning books, Svante Myrick fabricates the missing link: "[b]ook burning and banning, while not invented by the Nazis, became closely associated with them — and with authoritarian repression more generally."  By conflating "burning" and "banning" (which isn't happening, either), it's easy to cast objections to deviant pornography in grade schools as "closely associated with ... authoritarian repression."

Myrick's conclusion, "[f]ighting censorship is as pro-liberty as you can get," tells us who he sees as the real patriots battling censorship: they're the progressive school boards and K–12 teachers who, with mindless uniformity, impart woke dogma premised on racial divisiveness and gender questioning.  They're heroes saving public education from Christian zealots who want to ban the word "gay" and deny "our nation's full history."  

But some distinctions are in order with Myrick's allusion to Nazi book-burning.  For instance, in 1933, it wasn't grassroots Germans, let alone concerned parents, who were burning books in anticipation of a future authoritarian regime.  It was university students, acting with the guidance of a fully established Reich dictatorship.

According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, it was "Nazi-dominated student groups [who] carried out public burnings ... in 34 university towns and cities."  It was the Nazi plan "to synchronize professional and cultural organizations with Nazi ideology and policy (Gleichschaltung)."  Nazi beliefs were imposed everywhere from town councils to glee clubs.  It was the Nazi Students' Association, in cooperation with Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry, who proclaimed a "nationwide Action against the Un-German Spirit,'" the climax of which was public book-burnings.

Yet, while students stoked the bonfires, their willing conformity to the Reich is why the event was a "presage [of] an era of state censorship and control of culture."

Or does anyone imagine typical American parents control the culture?

Hardly.  Hollywood, mainstream media, academia, and Democrat policies leave no doubt progressives have controlled the culture for decades, and still do.  

This is especially evident on university campuses, the virtual Forward Operating Bases of intolerance, speech codes, and groupthink.  Three out of five college students self-censor their views on politics, religion, or race.  Polls show as many as half of college students would "punish" free speech, 41% agree "physical violence can be justified to prevent [a] person from espousing" hateful views, and an astounding 48% agree "some kinds of expression are so offensive they deserve extremely harsh punishment — like the death penalty."  Conservative speakers on campus are routinely shouted down, attacked, or disinvited lest their presence on campus "harm" students.  In April, a mob of elite Stanford law students, "egged on by an administrator," shouted down a sitting federal judge, completely preventing his lecture.

Meanwhile, evidence of the federal government's systematic censorship, particularly the Biden administration, piles up.  The Censorship Industrial Complex described by journalist Michael Schellenberger "consists of government agencies, government-funded NGOs, corporate news media, and advertisers working together to censor independent media."  It's been a willing tool of the administration for controlling what Americans can say, hear, or even think, all on the ludicrous pretext that "disinformation" is an existential threat to "democracy."

Now the July 4 federal court ruling in Missouri v. Biden has "exposed the incredible lengths to which the Biden White House and its federal agencies have gone to bully social media platforms into removing political views they dislike."  Judge Terry A. Doughty, in a 155-page memorandum painfully detailing federal agencies' vast, systematic violations of the First Amendment, concluded, "The United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth.'"

This anti–free speech culture, "synchronized" with the government, constitutes our own American Gleichschaltung.  That's why the same rainbow flag the White House flies is mandatory on corporate flagpoles and pro team uniforms and, sadly, ubiquitous in public classrooms.

Propaganda is censorship's flip side — both tools of mind control, "protecting ... our cognitive infrastructure," as one of Biden's "disinformation experts" put it.

Gender Queer: A Memoir, and drag queens teaching first graders to twerk, are propaganda in its most insidious form: deployed to groom small children's still developing minds.  And without mommy or daddy finding out.   

Could it be more liberty-loving than standing up against that?  Moms for Liberty are heroes in the real American tradition. 

T.R. Clancy looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan.  You can email him at trclancy@yahoo.com.

Image via Max Pixel.