In a blatant attempt to play to his right-wing Republican base, Governor Abbott has announced a criminal probe into whether there is pornography in high school libraries in Texas. Real pornography doesn't exist in those school libraries, but you can bet he'll find some. That's because the definition of pornography for right-wingers is anything that doesn't agree with their view of the world (anything that doesn't promote their views on race, science, history, government, or sexuality).
They don't want to teach students to think. They want to propagandize the students into accepting the right-wing version of the world. They want a whitewashed version of history, a religious version of science, an unrealistic version of government, and a prudish version of sexuality (or nothing about it) taught.
They seem to think students are not very smart, and will just accept whatever they are told in school. They are wrong!
What they want has already been tried. In the 1950's, this same kind of propaganda was fed to students. But it only resulted in a student backlash in the 1960's. It started with the Free Speech movement, and then spread to all aspects of our society. An underground culture was born and the spread throughout society.
With the internet so easily available to almost everyone in the U.S., the effort to propagandize young people has even less a chance to succeed. The truth is available to anyone -- whether you teach it in the schools or not. And today's youth -- already more liberal than the youth of the 1950's -- are not about to return to a time when white men ruled and everyone else was a second-class citizen.
The effort to return to a society of white privilege and patriarchy is doomed to fail. This is just the dying gasp of the white patriarchy -- the final effort of a failed system to survive.
