​Liberty or Stupidity?

By Ed Raymond

fargogadly@gmail.com

A Critical Fact: To Fully Understand a Country, One Must Know Its History

We have state legislatures attempting to prevent pre-schools through universities from teaching the real history of our country. We have school boards firing librarians and banning books that may provide students critical historical perspectives about where they live. Some conservatives want to “protect” their “sensitive” children from feelings of guilt about being White.

One of the most effective organizations lobbying legislators and congressmen is Moms for Liberty (MLB). In tribute to their political power about race, religion, and “freedom” I have written the following haiku, a Japanese poem construction of 5-7-5 syllables:

“Stupidity / Is a stupendous disease / Stealing Liberty.”

Moms for Liberty is funded with dark money active in many Trumplican states and in more than 900 school districts—so far. It’s mainly concerned about keeping children virtuous, innocent, guilt-free, virginal—and cisgender. It suggests this by banning books, avoiding historical facts, and following teaching materials prepared by religions, conservative colleges and universities such as Hillsdale College and the University of Mississippi.

Many Trumplican states have adopted the American Legislative Exchange Council’s model legislation word-for-word. Many organizations, including Moms for Liberty, have swallowed Kool-Aid by the barrel.

Steve Bannon, who takes turns being Donald Trump’s brain, continues his crusade: “The path to save the nation from progressives is very simple—it’s going to go through school boards” It’s a huge fertile field of 90,000 board members of every conceivable political philosophy serving 13,500 school districts.

I wrote the haiku after listening to a Moms for Liberty’s representative say she wanted to keep her 16-year-old son free from temptation by banning sexy books and historical facts from public schools. Why, even the Murdoch Wall Street Journal printed this line this past week: “History’s what people are trying to hide from you, not what they’re trying to show you.”

The Moms for Liberty Nave Morphed to Moms for Stupidity

The mom trying to keep her son pure and simple no doubt voted for Trump and lived in a three-car garage ghetto in a gated community. It might shock momma to know that half the teenagers her son’s age have had sex or types of sex. Should her son learn in school that it was at conception he was determined a male, that sonagrams cannot determine the sex of the fetus until about the 11th week of pregnancy, that at 16 years he has had four years of wet dreams to enjoy, that perhaps at first grade he played doctor and found out what the girl across the street had between her legs, that he can discover many fascinating and “dirty” things about sex by smartphone and laptop with his friends, and even send sex-texts and nude pictures to girls?

Well, momma, can you really “keep them pure, simple, and stupid after they’ve seen Paris?”

The November 7 New Yorker has an excellent 12-page article about Moms for Liberty called “Class Warfare: School Boards are Being Attacked by Partisan Saboteurs,” by Paige Williams, that should be read by every school board member in the Divided States of America. Three Florida women who had lost school board elections incorporated Moms for Liberty, Inc. so it could use untraceable “dark” money to finance the effort “to fight for parental rights to choose what education was best for children.”

With billions in dark money available to buy governments and their employees or pay opposition forces to wrest power from the “people,” we have no idea how much money is spent just in politics. Lots of people make lots of under-the-table money when free speech is expensive, when freedom itself is available for cash, and liberty has a big price.

Leaders of Moms for Liberty -- or Stupidity -- do not have to reveal their fees because of campaign cash loopholes. There is very little doubt in my mind that the Fargo School Board was facing members of Moms for Liberty when anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, anti-gender fluidity, and anti-critical race theorists joined the debate over the pledge of allegiance kerfuffle and lobbied the board or ran for school board.

One board member seemed to be very familiar with positions taken by MFL around the country. The most important position taken by MLB involved how White children must feel when they are exposed to “real” history: do not teach any material that would make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other psychological distress on the basis of her or his race or sex.

In other words, if you teach about slavery, just teach that Blacks from Africa were much better off being slaves here because they were fed well, had better homes, could raise families, have weekends off, and could buy their freedom by saving their salaries.

Do not mention that sharks followed slave ships across the ocean because dead slaves were dumped over the side by the hundreds and provided lunch and dinner. Do not mention that more than 4,000 Blacks were lynched during the 100 years of Jim Crow. Do not mention that Black girls and women gave birth to children every year that were sold in hundreds of slave markets scattered throughout the South. One prominent slave had 13 children for her master, all sold on the “free” market for thousands of dollars.

A psychologist who works in a Tennessee county evaluated the Moms for Liberty demand to ban teaching the history of racism because it was too traumatic: “I’ve yet to see a child in my practice who’s been traumatized by our county’s curriculum choices. I have, however, seen many students experiencing trauma due to being discriminated against and bullied within our schools, related to race, religion, gender, and sex.”

An Asian woman backed this up by stating: “I’ve heard people say that teaching these parts of our history is ‘racist’ or ‘traumatic. What’s traumatic is Black, Latino, Asian, and LBGTQ+ kids going to schools where they face discrimination and don’t feel safe.”

BREAKING NEWS! Eighteen Million Americans Went Bonkers in 2022!

I thought I would take a break here and cover some of the people who went off the mental cliffs this year according to a survey of the American Psychiatric Association. No doubt some of them are heavily involved in Moms for Liberty and other organizations attacking public schools, teachers, school boards, and administrators.

A blurb in The Week magazine: “At least 20 Republican candidates and elected officials are falsely claiming that K-12 schools are providing litter boxes for students who ‘identify’ as animals.” Of course, these would have to be the children of progressive parents who manage to piss on everything “conservative” anyway.

One of the charter members of the “furries” club is AR-15 and Glock packing Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert who “carried” while serving customers in her restaurant until it closed because all of her litter boxes were filled.

I see Republican Minnesota governor candidate Dr. Scott Jensen, who got thoroughly pissed on by Democratic Governor Tim Walz on November 8th, also saw students pushing litter around in boxes strategically placed in public school halls. (Has anyone checked private schools for litter boxes?)

Scientists just announced that little shrews survive hibernation in the winter by “eating” about three-fourths of their brains while sleeping. I hope they immediately start testing organizations such as Moms for Liberty and the MAGA group to see if this is happening to members. Perhaps the loss of brains results in Moms for Stupidity and Herschel Walker supporters.

One might think that Congress would consider the following facts in determining whether we have economic inequality in the richest country in the world. Between April 2020 and April 2021 Elon Musk of Tesla, Space-X Rockets, Boring Company, and Twitter fame made $740 billion or $383,000,000 per day--while the average annual income was close to $75,000. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Meta fame made $28,538 a minute. He could pay eight billion people now living in the world $100 each and he would still have more than half of his fortune left. Jeff Bezos, now retired from Amazon, is still making $3,715 a second. He could pay $5,000 a day in taxes since 1493 and still have money for his retirement. Now, back to Moms for Liberty who are lobbying to keep their children stupid.

Of the 50 million K-12 DSA Students, 3.5 million Are LBGTQ+ Members

As we have been around for 300,000 years, shouldn’t we want to know as much as possible about an important part of our Divided States of America history that would now fill North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia with LBGTQ+ members?

As part of the White provinces of Trumpisstan, Moms for Liberty is desperately trying to hide the fact we are of different colors but bleed red, that Whites enslaved other colors, raping them and making huge profits selling the product to pick cotton for millionaire plantation owners. (Remember: Jackson, Mississippi had more millionaires in the 19th century than the financial capital of the world, New York City.)

To remain in power, more than 50 groups fight to maintain “individual good” over those liberals who believe that societies must establish “collective good” so all citizens may prosper and enjoy life.

Founded only two years ago, Moms for Liberty has exploded to 100,000 members in 38 states in order to keep their kids stupid. How do you keep them stupid? You ban books, films, music, and movies that may reveal facts about history, race, sex, religions, and the universe. You try to destroy truths by telling Big and Little Lies. You fill school board and town meetings with angry exchanges and threats. You keep TVs on Fox News and surf the Internet for verbal garbage.

In 2021 Moms for Liberty and other groups sponsored 2,532 book-ban proceedings in 32 states trying to ban 1,600 books on important subjects necessary to keep the public informed.

One in five challenged books covers subjects of race. Two in five cover the LBGTQ+ community. About 17% of our population are people of color and about 7% are gay. That leaves 60% of the challenges for other sensitive subjects or for books which contain “objectionable” material.

Some books popular with teenagers include passages about masturbation, oral and anal sex, and sexual assaults. I read six newspapers a day which often include these subjects: The Fargo Forum, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Star-Tribune, and the best read, The Guardian. How many children have been ruined by a magazine, newspaper, or book because they knew too much?

One Texas Republican state representative has a list of 850 books he doesn’t want in school libraries. Only idiots vote for him, but Texas has several million. Texas school librarians have been fired, harassed, threatened with death, or have left the state for saner pastures over that list often provided by Moms for Liberty. That’s funny.

What happens if you take away the liberty of reading? You end up being stupid. Reminds me of the Florida attorney who had spent a decade of his professional life fighting the helmet laws. He and his girlfriend were killed in a motorcycle accident last week. He died of head trauma.