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Scholastic’s “bigot button” Judd Legum
Scholastic, the popular publisher of children’s books, is a big business. It is a publicly-traded company with a market capitalization of $1.15 billion. Its CEO, Peter Warwick, collected a total compensation of $3,300,361 in 2023, and at least four other executives were paid over $1.3 million. Since 1981, Scholastic has hosted book fairs inside of schools. Today, according to the company, it puts on “120,000 book sale events in partnership with schools across the country, giving more than 35 million students and their families access to thousands of affordable books.”
But this year, facing pressure from right-wing ideologues, Scholastic is facilitating the exclusion of books that feature people of color and/or LGBTQ characters. Scholastic has grouped many of these titles in a collection called “Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice.” School officials are then given the option to exclude the entire set of books from the book fair. Scholastic has, in the words of one librarian, given schools a “bigot button” to exclude these books and mollify intolerant pressure groups.
Scholastic declined to provide a list of the titles included in the “Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice” collection. But Popular Information was able to identify many of the titles through photographs of the collection, including those shared by activist Kelly Jensen and others posted publicly by librarians.
Among the books Scholastic is giving schools the opportunity to exclude is Justice Ketanji, a short biography of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. According to Scholastic, the book tells the story of how “Ketanji refused to let naysayers stop her from rising to the top, whether it was participating in her high school debate team, applying to her dream college, or excelling at Harvard.”
Also designated for the collection is Because of You, John Lewis: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship. The book is the story of a boy, Tybre Faw, who learns of John Lewis’ historic fight for voting rights and becomes determined to meet him.
Also targeted are books that suggest acceptance or tolerance for LGBTQ people. The book All Are Welcome encourages the acceptance of all types of people and families. On one page, same-sex couples are depicted walking happily among many other couples.
Another book in the “Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice” collection, Picture Day, is about a middle school student who cuts her hair before picture day. The book has a passage where a girl asks another girl to go to a dance.
Other books in the collection include:
Alma and How She Got Her Name. The award-winning story of the origins of a Latina girl’s name.
Rez Dogs. “[A] powerful story of a girl who learns more about her Penacook heritage while sheltering in place with her grandparents during the coronavirus pandemic.”
Change Sings. A story about how everyone has the power to make change in the world by National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman.
Even schools that opt-in to receive these books are given another reminder from Scholastic that the books can be set aside and excluded.
In a statement posted online Friday evening, Scholastic said it was necessary to segregate these titles because “[t]here is now enacted or pending legislation in more than 30 U.S. states prohibiting certain kinds of books from being in schools – mostly LGBTQIA+ titles and books that engage with the presence of racism in our country.” According to Scholastic, “these laws create an almost impossible dilemma: back away from these titles or risk making teachers, librarians, and volunteers vulnerable to being fired, sued, or prosecuted.” Scholastic’s “solution” is to make it as easy as possible for school officials to exclude these books.
What laws Scholastic believes would expose schools to liability for offering these books? Scholastic declined to answer the question.
According to a database maintained by PEN America, 15 states have banned K-12 schools from offering instruction on Critical Race Theory and related concepts. But a biography of John Lewis that includes his efforts to overcome racially discriminatory voting restrictions is not “Critical Race Theory.” It is history. The same can be said for the story of how Justice Jackson overcame barriers, including racial discrimination, to join the Supreme Court. Scholastic, by suggesting school officials who include these books in a book fair could be successfully prosecuted, is going far beyond the text of these laws.
According to the PEN America database, a handful of states — including Florida, Iowa, and Indiana — restrict instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity. But the most expansive of these, Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, applies only to instructional materials, not library books. This is not an argument advanced by critics of the law. Attorneys representing Florida in litigation state the law “does not even arguably restrict library books.”
Scholastic’s contention that it must facilitate the censorship of books because of “pending legislation” is particularly mystifying. There are countless bills filed at the state level each year. And there are many reasons those bills are not enacted into law. Some proposed legislation, for example, is unconstitutional.
The right-wing war on Scholastic
In recent months, Scholastic has faced sustained criticism from Brave Books, a publisher created to counter “the progressive agenda in so many of today’s children’s books.” Brave Books has a section of its website dedicated to “The Dangerous Truth Behind Scholastic.” According to Brave Books, “like Disney, Target & Bud Light, Scholastic has succumbed to an agenda that has led them to flood our schools and libraries with books that promote dangerous and anti-Biblical ideas.” The “solution” is “Brave Book Fairs” which will “offer schools a catalog of children’s books that are engaging and age-appropriate without all the junk.”
Brave Books publishes authors such as Kirk Cameron, the former child star now known for his anti-LGBTQ views. “As Bibles are literally being removed from schools and libraries — and as Christianity, and faith, and the Ten Commandments are being taken out of schools and replaced with toxic ideas like transgenderism, CRT and the 1619 project, I’m looking to fight back,” Cameron said in 2022. “I’m putting my new book — along with other books by Brave Books — into America’s schools.”
The books offered at Brave Book Fairs “protect and foster children’s innocence which gives kids the freedom to JUST BE KIDS.” Among the titles that Brave Books will offer at their fairs, according to the company, is Tom Sawyer — a classic book that includes the n-word.
Previously, Scholastic has taken a strong stand on behalf of marginalized communities. “Scholastic believes that all people, including unequivocally those in the trans community, deserve to live free of prejudice and intolerance, and our company actions support these beliefs in respect to our employees, authors, and the books and materials we publish,” the company’s former CEO, Dick Robinson, said in 2020. The company released a similar statement condemning racial discrimination.
Today, Scholastic appears to be charting a different course.
Substacks
November 11, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson
The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Afghanistan’s Taliban offered its congratulations to the American people for “not handing leadership of their great country to a woman.”
Taliban leaders expressed optimism that Trump’s election would enable a new chapter in the history of U.S-Taliban relations. They noted that it was Trump who suggested a new international order when he inked the February 29, 2020, Doha Agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban. That deal cut out the Afghan government and committed the U.S. to leave Afghanistan by May 2021, closing five military bases and ending economic sanctions on the Taliban. This paved the way for the U.S. evacuation of the country in August 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power.
The Taliban prohibits girls’ education past the sixth grade and recently banned the sound of women’s voices outside their homes.
In Russia, Russian thinker Alexander Dugin explained the dramatic global impact of Trump’s win. “We have won,” Dugin said. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat.” Dugin has made his reputation on his calls for an “anti-American revolution” and a new Russian empire built on “the rejection of [alliances of democratic nations surrounding the Atlantic], strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values,” as well as reestablishing traditional family structures with strict gender roles.
Maxim Trudolyubov of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign affairs think tank, suggested Friday that Putin’s long-term goal of weakening the U.S. has made him more interested in dividing Americans than in any one candidate.
Indeed, rather than backing Trump wholeheartedly, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undercutting him. He did not comment on Trump’s election until Thursday, when he said that the power of liberal democracies over world affairs is “irrevocably disappearing.” Although Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin had spoken on Thursday, Putin denied such a call as “pure fiction.”
Exacerbating America’s internal divisions and demonstrating dominance over both the U.S. and Trump might explain why after Trump became president-elect, laughing Russian media figures showed viewers nude pictures of Trump’s third wife, Melania, taken during her modeling career.
In an interview, Putin’s presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev said today: “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.” Meanwhile, U.S. and Ukrainian officials report that Russia has massed 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean soldiers, to reclaim territory in the Kursk region of Russia taken this year by Ukrainian forces.
Trump claims to have talked to about seventy world leaders since his reelection but has declined to go through the usual channels of the State Department. This illustrates his determination to reorganize the federal government around himself rather than its normal operations but leaves him—and the United States—vulnerable to misstatements and misunderstandings.
The domestic effects of Trump’s victory also reveal confusion, both within the Republican Party and within national politics. Voters elected Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, but it’s hard to miss that billionaire Elon Musk, who backed Trump’s 2024 campaign financially, seems to be “Trump’s shadow vice-president,” as Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian put it. Sources told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago since the election, sitting in on phone calls with foreign leaders and weighing in on staffing decisions. Yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, Musk met with the chief executive officer of the right-wing media channel Newsmax.
Exactly who is in control of the party is unclear, and in the short term that question is playing out over the Senate’s choice of a successor to minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). In the new Congress, this Republican leader will become Senate majority leader, thereby gaining the power to control the Senate calendar and decide which bills get taken up and which do not.
Trump controls the majority of Republicans in the House, but he did not control Senate Republicans when McConnell led them. Now he wants to put Florida senator Rick Scott into the leadership role, but Republicans aligned with McConnell and the pre-2016 party want John Thune (R-SD) or John Cornyn (R-TX). There are major struggles taking place over the choice. Today Musk posted on social media his support for Scott. Other MAGA leaders fell in line, with media figure Benny Johnson—recently revealed to be on Russia’s payroll—urging his followers to target senators backing Thune or Cornyn.
Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels of Politico Playbook suggested that this pressure would backfire, especially since many senators dislike Scott for his unsuccessful leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee that works to elect Republicans to the Senate.
Trump has also tried to sideline senators by demanding they abandon one of their key constitutional roles: that of advice and consent to a president’s appointment of top administration figures. Although Republicans will command a majority in the Senate, Trump is evidently concerned he cannot get some of his appointees through, so has demanded that Republicans agree to let him make recess appointments without going through the usual process of constitutionally mandated advice and consent.
Trump has also demanded that Republicans stop Democrats from making any judicial appointments in the next months, although Republicans continued to approve his nominees after voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020. Indeed, Judge Aileen Cannon, who let Trump off the hook for his retention of classified documents, was approved after Trump had lost the election.
All this jockeying comes amid the fact that while Trump is claiming a mandate from his election, in fact the vote was anything but a landslide. While votes are still being counted, Trump seems to have won by fewer than two percentage points in a cycle where incumbents across the globe lost. This appears to be the smallest popular vote margin for a winning candidate since Richard Nixon won in 1968.
While voters elected Trump, they also backed Democratic policies. In seven states, voters enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions. Two Republican-dominated states raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour; three enshrined mandated paid leave. In exit polls last week, sixty-five percent of voters said they want abortion to remain legal, and fifty-six percent said they want undocumented immigrants to have a chance to apply for legal status.
The gap between what Trump has promised MAGA supporters and what voters want is creating confusion in national politics. How can Trump deliver the national abortion ban MAGAs want when sixty-five percent of voters want abortion rights? How can he deport all undocumented immigrants, including those who have been here for decades and integrated into their communities, while his own voters say they want undocumented immigrants to have a path to citizenship?
Trump’s people have repeatedly expressed their opinion that Trump was stopped from putting the full MAGA agenda into place because he did not move quickly enough in his first term. They have vowed they will not make that mistake again. But the fast imposition of their extremist policies runs the risk of alienating the more moderate voters who just put them in power.
In September, as the Taliban enforced new rules on women in Afghanistan, they also began to target Afghan men. New laws mandated that men stop wearing western jeans, stop cutting their hair and beards in western ways, and stop looking at women other than their wives or female relatives. Religious morality officers are knocking on the doors of those who haven’t recently attended mosque to remind them they can be tried and sentenced for repeated nonattendance, and government employees are afraid they’ll be fired if they don’t grow their beards. According to Rick Noack of the Washington Post, such restrictions surprised men, who were accustomed to enjoying power in their society. Some have been wondering if they should have spoken up to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.
One man who had supported the Taliban said he now feels bullied. “We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us,” he said. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared drawing the attention of the regime, another man from Kabul said: “If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now.”
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Notes:
https://www.distractify.com/p/did-the-taliban-congratulate-trump
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/16/afghanistan-child-brides/
https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/us-right-wing-media-embrace-russias-far-right-ideologue
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/11/07/russia-putin-reaction-us-election/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/11/10/trump-putin-phone-call-ukraine/
https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/kremlin-was-hoping-division-america-not-victory-one-candidate
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/09/elon-musk-trump-administration
https://www.politico.com/playbook
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/10/trump-rick-scott-senate-cornyn-thune-mcconnell/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/us/politics/russia-north-korea-troops-ukraine.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/22/afghanistan-taliban-restrictions-men-beards/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/11/trump-victory-red-wave/
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The Five Things President Trump Should Do on Day One Santi Ruiz
In a few short weeks, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president. His transition team will be in charge of a federal government that, in many rudimentary ways, doesn’t work.
Let’s leave aside partisan gridlock in Congress and turmoil in the judicial branch, and just focus on the executive branch: National Public Data, which aggregates personal information for background checks, was hacked this year, meaning your Social Security number is now floating around on the internet. The IRS is built on mainframes from 1965 and relies on code from JFK’s administration that no one’s learning anymore. The pandemic highlighted our broken systems: In January 2020, the Food and Drug Administration effectively banned private companies from rolling out their own Covid tests because the CDC was developing their own. But the CDC tests turned out to be defective, leaving the U.S. flying blind until private companies could rush in and pick up the slack.
For the past year, I’ve run an interview series called Statecraft where I talk with civil servants to understand how the federal sausage actually gets made. These men and women serve in a variety of roles, such as running a CIA base in Afghanistan, investigating Soviet anthrax leaks, and redesigning Department of Labor job centers. The best of them have managed to deliver good outcomes for the American people by working around the worst ingrained practices of the federal bureaucracy, and they have lessons for reformers eager to make the federal government go.
But changing the culture of a machine this size takes time. Despite the fact he will have a Republican House and Senate, and the allyship of Elon Musk, who seems eager to head his own Department of Government Efficiency, Trump faces the same broken federal machinery—and will face many of the same problems, and the shot clock to solve them—that Biden did.
To help make the government more efficient and effective instantly, the Trump team should prioritize the following:
Hire Bureaucrats, Just Make Them the Right Ones
Progressives fear Trump’s vision for civil service reform, Schedule F, which would reclassify many civil servants to make them easier to fire. They worry Schedule F would gut executive branch agencies—which includes the Environmental Protection Agency, the Departments of Education, State, Justice, et al.—of their talent, and consolidate power in the White House.
But even liberals like Jen Pahlka, former deputy chief technology officer of America under President Obama, have pointed out that “managing out” a poor performer can be a full-time job for political appointees. Firing an executive branch civil servant requires extensive documentation. Additionally, many employees are unionized, and all can appeal their firings internally. Partially as a result, the government cans bad employees about four times less often than the private sector does. It takes a lot more than saying “you’re fired” to get people out the door.
It’s also impossible to hire new, better civil servants. Our systems for sourcing are shattered. Take Jack Cable, 17, who won the Department of Defense’s “Hack the Air Force” contest against 600 other contestants by identifying weaknesses in Pentagon software. But when Cable applied for a DoD role, his résumé was graded “not minimally qualified” because the hiring manager didn’t know anything about the coding languages he listed himself proficient in. Or take the Federal Aviation Administration, which has been screening prospective air traffic controllers for how many sports they played in high school in an effort to meet its racial quotas.
A strategic administration will encourage agencies to find creative ways to bring in top talent. It could try using new tools to assess technically talented applicants in bulk, or it could increase the number of academic rotations through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act, which allows academics to contribute part-time to special federal agency projects. The Office of Personnel Management can and should encourage more aggressive use of Direct Hire Authority, allowing agencies to avoid certain procedural steps of the federal hiring process.
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Could a Trump Presidency Cost Columbia University $3.5 Billion? Frannie Block
A group of alumni and former professors of Columbia University warn in a new report that the university could stand to lose up to $3.5 billion a year—or up to 55 percent of the university’s annual operating budget—if Columbia doesn’t start enforcing its rules and cracking down on campus rule-breaking.
The report, published by Stand Columbia Society, a “politically neutral” collective working to restore Columbia’s “rightful pre-eminence in American—and global—higher education,” states the potential financial risks to the university are rooted in Trump and other Republican officials’ “enmity for elite institutions in general, and our alma mater in particular.”
Alexandra Zubko, a 1999 graduate of Columbia and member of Stand Columbia, told The Free Press that the group published the Institutional Risk Exposure report because “we don’t want Columbia to be made an example of.”
The report estimates what might happen if the incoming Trump administration were to accuse universities like Columbia of violating Title VI, the section of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination of “race, color, or national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance,” which would allow the administration to withhold federal funding.
At present, Columbia has at least three active Title VI investigations into antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment on campus. Since October 7, 2023, Columbia’s campus has been embroiled in chaotic demonstrations against the State of Israel, prompting the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to conclude in a recent report that the university was “the site of some of the most disturbing and extreme antisemitic conduct violations in the country.”
Put another way, Stand Columbia Society predicts that Republicans may force “an uncomfortable reckoning that we can no longer wish away.” That reckoning—which Stand Columbia believes is possible, if not probable—could potentially cost the university up to $1.33 billion in government grants and contracts that it currently receives, including around $800 million dedicated solely for research.
And it’s not only federal grants that the university could lose if it is found in violation of Title VI.
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