 So, does anyone remember what conservatives were hyper-focused on back in 2021? I mean, obviously, it was cancel culture, right? It got so absurd that I think it peaked when they claimed that Mr. Potato Head was canceled because he was rebranded, so rather than the brand being Mr. Potato Head, it was just Potato Head. They still offered Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, but because the name itself was more gender-neutral, referring to a line of products, that was cancel culture. Another standout to me was when they claimed that Dr. Seuss was canceled because the estate of Dr. Seuss decided to pull several books from publication because they didn't think that they aged particularly well. That was cancel culture. I think that the Muppets were canceled according to conservatives, as well as Coke. Maybe it was Pepsi. No, I think that Coke was the cancel culture, or in that instance, either way, like they talked about cancel culture. This year it's flipped. Now they're all in on cancel culture, baby, but I don't want to be too flippant about my discussion here because I'd rather them talk about cancel culture because them being the cancelers, so they always have been to be clear, but them going in this new direction is actually genuinely disturbing because it speaks to a trend towards authoritarianism that is a real threat to US democracy. So Jake Johnson of Common Dreams explains, the GOP's nationwide war on public education, specifically the teaching of race, US history and LGBTQ plus identities, has led to a 250% spike in state-level educational gag order bills this year according to a report published by the Free Expression Group, Penn America titled America's Sensored Classrooms. The new report finds that lawmakers in 36 different US states have introduced 137 gag order measures in 2022, up from 54 such bills last year, with the exception of a single Democratic bill in Arizona all of the gag order proposals unveiled this year have been led by Republican legislators. The analysis defines educational gag orders as state legislative efforts to restrict teaching about topics such as race, gender, American history and LGBTQ plus identities in K through 12 and higher education. Now keep in mind that one of the main critiques from conservatives of universities is that they're not intellectually diverse enough. They censor voices from conservatives and they're essentially liberal brainwashing factories. This is the whole reason why Turning Point USA was created and why so many right wing billionaires are funding that organization. But now what are they trying to do? Homogenize all schools so they fit their theocratic way of thinking. Interesting. So they went from thinking, oh intellectual diversity, good to thinking maybe not so much if, you know, we shut out the voices that we don't like. Like everything that they say, everything that they accuse the left and liberals of doing is pure projection. I feel like that's true nine times out of 10 with every single policy that they support. Now what is an educational gag order? So it's relatively broad, right? But the article kind of points it out. But we have a couple of concrete examples for it is don't say gay is certainly one of them where school administrators in one district at least were instructed to not display, you know, their photo of their spouse if they're in a same sex relationship to not have a, you know, rainbow lanyard that the district itself gave out to them. Basically, you have to hide that you're gay. It's it's a modern version of don't ask, don't ask, don't tell. Do you remember that when military members were forced into the closet if they wanted to remain in the military? Well, now we're doing that with teachers. Another one is bands on CRT, certain bands for books and things like this, which happened in the GCI district in North Texas, where they effectively banned the word transgender throughout the district. And they placed restrictions on pronouns. So I mean, you're not supposed to bring up pronouns. I don't know how you do that because, you know, everyone uses pronouns. They also placed restrictions on additional books. And while more bills were introduced this year, more bills were actually passed last year, believe it or not. But the trend is still worrying because the bills are increasing. In terms of quantity and when it comes to the quality of these bills, they are demonstrably more punitive. So they are trying to really punish people who aren't in line with their theocratic worldview. Now, this is disturbing because when you start to engage in book banning and silencing your critics, silencing alternate voices as they claim they don't want to do, this is where you start to devolve as a society. Now, I want to play a clip from OAN, which thankfully is a network that's on their deathbed. But one of their hosts, Karen McKinney, she decided to defend book banning. She's just saying it. And listen to what she says because her argument here is very Nazi-esque. And I don't think that I'm being too uncharitable. You know, this whole controversy over book banning is something similar. Democrats see the poll numbers and they try to use their outsized media influence to redirect the anger of voters over the idea of book banning to Republicans in the same way that when most low info voters think about political corruption, they now think Trump instead of more accurately Biden or Hillary. It's the classic Saul Alinsky rules for radicals tactic of accusing your political opponent of what of what you're doing yourself so that you can hide in plain sight. However, even with that being said, there is a more important reason as to why I want to leave the show off tonight with this seemingly minor, even unimportant story. Now, I say seemingly because obviously I think it's important. That's why I'm talking about it. Now, oftentimes many of us on the right get so upset with the left that we end up digging ourselves into a hole by just trying to argue the exact opposite of what they are. For example, in something like this, a typical response you might hear from someone on the right is that, of course, Weingarten's tweet was wrong because only the left wants to ban books. The right doesn't want to, but it's not entirely accurate. I think banning pornographic books from school libraries is not only justifiable, it's the only moral option. It's our duty, in fact, to purge our schools of such filth. So what is the difference between the types of so-called book bans that the right advocates for as opposed to what the left demands? Why is one good and the other bad? Now, one might pause here and say that both are wrong because you can't legislate morality, which is hilarious and flat out wrong because every law for murder all the way down to what's a fair share to pay in taxes or all moral questions at their heart. Now, look, nobody thinks that children in their elementary school should have access to porn, even if they are going to have access to porn on their smartphones, right? But what these fascists are doing is they're designating anything that they don't like as pornographic materials. So if there's a book about, you know, gay parents, they'll claim that that's pornography. Anything that they don't like, they'll conflate with pornography. This is what they do. I mean, do you actually believe that there's porn in schools where you can like check out a book from your school library and see somebody get pounded? That's not happening. They know that that's not happening, but they have to be hyperbolic because that's how you sell this policy to people. Now, the reason why I said before we watched this clip that her argument was Nazi-esque wasn't just because Nazis also were in support of banning books, but because she used a literal photo of Nazis burning books to make the case for burning books. As Bobby Lewis pointed out on Twitter, one of the Nazis' first book burnings took place at the Institute for Sex Research where 20,000 books on homosexuality and transgender identity were destroyed for the exact reasons the OAN host faithfully repeats here. And he's absolutely right about that. Now, I wanna point your attention towards an article published in May of 2021 by Scientific American. This article gets into the history of this particular subject. And we're not gonna read the article, but I do kind of wanna give you the TLDR version and hope that you'll read it. So they describe how Berlin's Institute for Sexual Research was the world's first transgender clinic where Dr. Magnus Hirschfield specialized in sexual health and he was really ahead of his time in many ways. So he posited that homosexuality wasn't a mental illness, but instead was innate and believed in non-binary people weren't unnatural, rather they were just acting in accordance with their nature. And he also wanted science to be used to help trans people become themselves and thus became one of the first clinics to reform gender-affirming surgeries in the world in 1930. I mean, think about that, 1930, this institute was doing groundbreaking research, cataloging data, examining the lives of queer people. And this doctor saw people in Germany and their lives because they were queer. So what he wanted to do was put forward this message that queer lives were worth living. If you're transgender, your life is valuable. If you're gay, your life is valuable. And at the time, this was mind-blowing to people. They never considered that way. Maybe these people actually do deserve to live. Maybe they're not freaks, but when Hitler came to power, all of that research, thousands and thousands of books, studies, data, articles, documentation of queer people, it was put into the street and burned so everyone could see it. Now that research, unfortunately, was never recovered. But as new studies are conducted on gender and sexuality, they're basically confirming all of Hirschfield's hypotheses. Like for him to say, yeah, homosexuality is innate. I mean, we haven't discovered a gay gene, but more and more there's evidence that that is indeed the case. When it comes to trans people, there's evidence that this is not something that they flippantly choose. This is innate within them. It's their nature. He found this out in the 1930s. And now, as we progress once again in society, these fascists wanna do the same thing, following Hitler's footsteps, ban these books, hide these facts, these statistics about queer people away from the public. This is why it's no laughing matter. You can dunk on conservatives for saying that they're hypocrites because all of a sudden they support cancel culture when they were bemoaning cancel culture all of last year. But this is a dangerous trend. The censorship of this data, censorship of studies, the erasure of people, queer people, isn't just an unfortunate phenomenon that is the product of our era. It is a trajectory towards full-blown fascism. And I want people to take this threat seriously because I don't think anyone in Germany before Hitler came to power thought that the Holocaust was possible. And I'm not saying that that's gonna be the fate in the United States, but I'm saying because we've learned from history or should have learned from history, we can't just lap this off. We have to take it seriously. So whenever conservatives talk about banning certain words, banning certain people from being themselves, that should be a giant warning sign to every single person in society that things are going to get worse if you don't address this.