Progressives have succeeded in draining all semblance of common sense and morality from the Democrat Party.  They have also been hammering away at free speech for decades, using college campuses as havens for restrictive speech codes to turn three generations of faculty into critical race pedagogues and their students into ideological neurotics.  What emerged as an annoying political correctness in the late twentieth century has blossomed into a full-blown assault on all five rights of the First Amendment.

Higher education now seems adrift of its moorings and without a moral compass to bring it back.  That has inspired progressives to turn their guns on the youngest classroom cohort of American society.  The motivation is always Machiavellian, but hardly breaks new ground when viewed through the lens of Marxism.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was not simply waxing philosophic in pronouncing, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” That belief was built upon the tenets of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who advocated for the abolition of the family and surrendering a child’s education to the state, where teachers become in loco parentis.  Uncoupling children from their parents may have seemed a bit farfetched in the pre-COVID era but is now doctrinal to hyperpartisan educational associations and teachers unions.  Joe Biden has personally fanned the flames of this crusade by his public utterings that children belong to the teachers and the nation.

A recent article appearing in People’s World, latter-day scion of the CPUSA’s early twentieth-century propaganda newsletter, Daily Worker, tipped off the hard left’s strategy to turn adolescents against their families and ancestors by shaming them with a variety of dubious injustices -- misogyny, racial supremacy, transphobia, and a whole panoply of -isms.  This stratagem is vintage Marxism, with the goal of breaking down the family by labeling parents as cultural culprits who should have little more than a disposable role in the lives of their children.  Just leave it to the educators to muster an army of youngsters programmed through a bogus curricula of deconstructed history and literature.

The Biden administration’s enthusiasm to cram critical race and gender theory down the throats of schoolchildren has brought about severe parental rebuke.  Local challenges to sexually-oriented classroom curricula and reading lists have spiked forty percent year over year in 2022.  According to Pen America, more than forty percent of those book disputes now involve titles and content that relate to various gender identities and orientations, many of which are recommended for grades kindergarten through 5^th grade.

In the past, book boycotts and embargoes typically centered on internecine grievances between local school districts and parent groups.  Of late, Joe Biden has hijacked the issue to pin blame on MAGA extremists, turning grade-school education into a Marxist battlefield and making combatants out of school boards, parents, library systems, political associations, and advocacy groups. Biden has also turned identity politics, political polarization, and transgenderism into a mandate on what children should read and think, putting certain books out front or behind the battle lines of cultural Marxism.

Starting with children’s literature but now enveloping the literary classics, a cleansing is underway to turn books into safe spaces.  The job of recasting book characters and language to mirror contemporary woke sensibilities has been handed over to a cottage industry of perceived victims.  While not as heavy-handed as burning a book, unpublishing, or delisting it on e-commerce sites, it is intrusive by its actions to silence, dilute, or distort the creativity of the author.

Called sensitivity readers, beta readers, or inclusion ambassadors, they range in age from adolescent to adult and hail from so-called marginalized communities.  With publishers under their spell, recently submitted or already published writings might end up in the hands of an eight-year-old boy or girl who, simply by their age or short-lived experience, gives them jurisdiction over a writer’s style and manner of portraying similarly-affected fictional characters.

Before going out of business in 2022, Inclusive Minds offered readers of all ages, genders, and ethnicities to publishers and aspiring and established authors.  They focused exclusively upon clearinghouses of children’s books, persuading twenty-six British and five international publishers of children’s fiction to put their new books through the political sieve of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.  That opened the spigot for book editors to scrutinize their vintage stock of literary classics.

Take the case of Mark Twain.  In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and his more labored literary effort, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain relied heavily upon his Missouri slave-state upbringing to acquaint the reader with the colloquial language and peccadilloes of those who lived and toiled on the gritty steamboats and steamers along the riverbanks of the Upper Mississippi.  His storytelling captivated the urban population serving the industrialized expansion of the Gilded Age back East.

Post mortem, Twain offends woke publishers and their hired guns by his liberal use of the N-word and other racial epithets common to the kinsfolk with whom he shared his childhood.  He imputed crude jargon in his protagonists, wherein Jim was dehumanized because of his race and Sawyer branded as “po’ white trash.” Masterfully spinning the gritty yarn of two street friends, an orphaned boy and fugitive slave who wash away racial differences while rafting down the Mississippi River, Twain injected antebellum speech and culture into fiction, offering readers historical insights into a flawed society that publishing houses are now airbrushing for future generations.

Bestselling authors of young adult and adult literature are not above the effort to dumb down or sanitize works of literary acclaim.  Particularly vulnerable are those writers who have passed on and cannot mount a defense.  John Steinbeck’s acclaimed works, The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men have been hauled back to the garage for a tune-up.  So it goes for Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, the works of Anthony Horowitz, Aldous Huxley’s 1984, the Doctor Doolittle series, Dr. Seuss, all six novels of Jane Austen, and on and on ad nauseum.

Several of the big five publishing companies have been quick to take a knee.  HarperCollins farmed out the writings of Agatha Christie to readers hired to harmonize them with far Left sentiments.  All perceived insults or descriptions of ethnicity that gave context and cultural dissimilarity to her characters have been swept from her entire republished inventory of novels.  Penguin Random House, holding a majority share of children’s books, admitted to reinventing the classics and looking for new ways to “tell the world’s favorite stories” using a “fresh and innovative approach.” Penguin subsidiary, Puffin, dispatched a platoon of readers to censor Roald Dahl’s beloved repertoire of children’s fiction and to remove references to gender.

Biden is now fighting the tidal wave of resistance to classroom books that sexually groom schoolkids. Slamming the door on parent-teacher disputes, he is designating a ‘book ban coordinator’ within the Education Department.  Progressive school boards and teachers’ unions will now have a federal remedy to crack down on these challenges by simply asserting that certain book bans are transphobic, create a hostile classroom environment, and constitute a federal violation of a child’s civil rights.

This putsch to reimagine an early education fixed upon race, identity, equity, and social justice gives a backseat to reading proficiency and launches attacks upon traditional math instruction and grammar as racially supremacist.  This catechization of socialist dogma for the purpose of exerting government power and control over elementary education has accelerated during the Biden administration from a grade-school inoculation of critical race and gender theory to an inquisition of many childhood book classics and bedtime fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Hans Christian Andersen.

A White House hellbent on putting the country into a Marxist nosedive can’t ignore the hearts and minds of the youngest and most susceptible.  After two years of pushing children into the path of unnecessary and ineffective COVID vaccines, some have the scarred little hearts to prove that claim.

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