Tag: literature

The Death of Reading

Picture it. You’re lucky enough to live in the late 19th century. Van Gogh is wandering around the Netherlands painting haystacks and stars. Spiritualism is everywhere: séances, mediums, table-turning, and seers who communicate with the dead. Some dude named PT Barnum is criss-crossing America with this crazy melange of traveling circus and sly hoaxes. There are side shows and peep shows, theatrical extravaganzas in every town. Ragtime is just taking hold.

And for the first time in the history of man, books are available to the everyone with a few ha’penneys to rub together. The print industry has exploded, becoming more systematized, and better at shipping. Suddenly, even ordinary people can read – in their parlors, at saloons and libraries, and after dinner, once the harpsichord recital is done. Novels are everywhere: Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot. In France, Victor Hugo. The Russians? They’re producing metric tons of pages. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. People are inhaling these stories, 900 pages at a time.

Academics refer to this period as the “reading revolution.” Reading was as much an indulgence as carnivals and music halls. People didn’t HAVE to read, they GOT to read. They did it ostentatiously and with zeal. And this habit lasted, in one form or another, until recently when reading for enjoyment started to tank. Blame the Internet and social media and our fractured attention span. Blame Oprah, who in her quest to ‘get people reading’ promoted one title and focused every English-speaking woman’s attention on it, to the exclusion of every other book on the planet. 

But the real culprit, if you ask me, is politics. When identity and partisanship become your defining feature, when you adhere to rigid ideas and philosophies – and fear anything that challenges your beliefs – reading becomes dangerous. All those random ideas floating around? Problems that have no easy answers? Bah! Who needs that?

So here’s where we are: reading for enjoyment has fallen by 40% in the past 20 years. And despite bullshit feel-good essays about how we’re not really reading less, it just seems that way – and online influencers who hawk the classics without a single specific detail about plot, theme, or character – literacy in every single cohort is falling off a cliff. Publishing is becoming narrower, more ideological, and preachy. The books that face out in shop windows reinforce pat answers instead of asking hard questions. And the world seems smaller, because it is.

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The Most Direct Social Engineering Propaganda You’ll EVER See

A new Channel 5 drama series has delivered what many are calling peak social conditioning: a classroom scene where a teacher is berated by students for failing to instantly adopt preferred pronouns and for daring to stage Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

A clip, shared widely on social media, shows an old-school drama teacher clashing with pupils over basic biology, literature, and “respecting identities.”

In the footage, a student corrects the teacher when she uses the wrong name for a student who has decided to swap genders and adopt new pronouns: “Their name is Dee now actually,” one student explains, adding “you just deadnamed them Miss.”

The teacher responds: “I’m sorry. I’ve known you as Daphne for two years and can’t click a switch. I am trying.”

Another insufferable student fires back: “You shouldn’t have to try. You either see them or you don’t. I think you should apologise.”

The teacher then puts her foot in it again and states: “I just did, and am sure she can fight her own battles!”

“It’s they not she… It’s about respecting other people’s identity,” the student lectures.

Later, students challenge the Shakespeare choice, with one suggesting “There’s a consent issue. Titania is drugged before sleeping with Bottom… It’s also anti-feminist portraying women as submissive and dependent on men… to a modern audience it could be quite triggering.”

The scene perfectly captures the absurdity: instant language policing, classic literature deemed harmful for not meeting 2020s standards, and virtue-signalling students demanding deference.

This isn’t subtle. It’s overt social engineering dressed as entertainment.

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North Carolina superintendent defends children’s Pride book featuring BDSM gear because children may see it ‘in their community’

A North Carolina school superintendent of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school district was grilled by state lawmakers in the legislature after being accused of breaking state law having to do with parents’ rights and the inclusion of sexually inappropriate material in school libraries. When he was asked about a book that contained men dressed in BDSM, he didn’t take any issue with it and said that children may see it “in their community.”

Dr. Rodney Trice, superintendent of Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, was being grilled by North Carolina Republican Majority Leader Brenden Jones in a viral clip that has spread on X.

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BUSTED: Gavin Newsom’s New Book is a Best Seller Because His Own Political Action Committee Spent $1.5 Million Buying Thousands of Copies

Everything about California Governor Gavin Newsom is fake. Even the numbers on his book sales.

His new book is being touted by his allies as a best seller, but the main reason it’s selling so well is because his own political action committee has spent upwards of $1.5 million buying thousands of copies of it.

That’s one way to get on the New York Times best seller list. It’s not honest, but it’ll probably work.

Not a single thing about this man is genuine.

FOX News reports:

Newsom PAC bought thousands of memoir copies about his hardships, juicing sales

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political action committee spent more than $1.5 million buying thousands of copies of his new memoir — accounting for about two-thirds of all copies sold nationwide — according to campaign finance filings.

The PAC spending helped propel Newsom’s memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry,” onto the New York Times bestseller list and is raising new scrutiny as his national profile builds ahead of a possible 2028 presidential run.

In November, the Campaign for Democracy Committee launched a book campaign asking donors to contribute any amount to the PAC to receive the memoir when it was released on Feb. 24. Newsom spokesperson Nathan Click told the New York Times that the PAC bought about 67,000 copies—representing a substantial portion of the 97,400 total sold.

“We were thrilled with the response,” Click told the New York Times. “Our goal was to deepen the relationship between him and the millions of folks who have already expressed support for Governor Newsom’s work.”

The PAC made two payments totaling over $1.5 million to Porchlight Book Company, according to a FEC filing posted on Wednesday and reviewed by Fox News Digital.

Newsom probably sees nothing wrong with this. He is a member of the same party that busses in paid supporters for rallies and [rotests, after all.

Will Democrats really nominate this faker in 2028?

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Author Brags About Hiding LGBTQ Messaging in Children’s Book Cover

Rebecca Bendheim, author of a Young Adult book for teenage readers, recently took to Instagram where she bragged that she deliberately designed her book cover to hide the LGBT agenda of the story contained within its pages from parents, while still advertising to kids. This is the kind of sick and twisted ideology the left embraces. They undermine parents who don’t want their kids exposed to sexual perversion, while they normalize deviancy.

Bendheim, who also works as a middle school teacher, said in her video, “When Penguin [Random House] asked me what I wanted for my cover, I said I wanted it to be gay enough for queer kids and teens to clock it, but for homophobic parents to just think it’s a friendship story.” Apparently, children of the same sex can no longer just be friends. Nope. If they hang out together, they must probably feel attracted to each other sexually.

These people try to sexualize everything. The progressive movement ultimately wants complete and total control over the population of the country. They cannot achieve that goal as long as the nuclear family exists. Sexual deviancy destroys the family. This explains why they so desperately try to normalize their lifestyles. None of the LGBT agenda pushers truly believe what they participate in is normal. Otherwise, they would not need outside validation and acceptance. It would just exist.

The author will publish her book, When You’re Brave Enough, on April 7, 2026. The publisher recommends it for kids between the ages of 10–14. They want your 10-year-old children to see content that could lead them into unnecessary sexual confusion. Parents should decide when their kids are ready to talk about complex issues like sexuality. Not authors. Not school teachers. Not politicians.

“So I said, no holding hands, make my character look gay,” she said as she pointed out the small details she and the cover artist agreed on, including flowers growing between the pair on the cover to indicate a crush is “growing.” Seriously. This is diabolical.

“So what do you think? Would you guess this was a queer book?” Bendheim asked her viewers. Well, to be fair, I have seen Hollywood and other parts of the entertainment industry push the LGBT agenda in everything so often that I just assume there’s probably gay content in it and would look through it or research the book before buying it for my children.

And that’s what all parents need to start doing. It’s sad, but true.

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Ukraine Moves To Purge Dostoevsky & Tolstoy From Public Mention

In the latest escalation of Ukraine’s cultural purge and targeting of all things Russian, Ukraine’s Institute of National Memory has this month formally branded the famed classic Russian authors Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy as vectors of “Russian imperial propaganda”.

This has included a call from the body which operates under the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine for all streets, monuments, and public institutions bearing their names be wiped from the map.

According to Interfax, commenting on the ruling, “the assignment of their names to geographical objects, names of legal entities and objects of property rights, objects of toponymy, as well as the establishment of monuments and memorial signs in their honor in Ukraine was the embodiment of Russification – Russian imperial policy aimed at imposing the use of the Russian language, promoting Russian culture as superior compared to other national languages ​​and cultures, displacing the Ukrainian language from use, and narrowing the Ukrainian cultural and information space.”

In a January 20 statement, the Institute of National Memory’s ‘expert commission’ claimed the literary legacy of both writers is “directly connected to the glorification of Russian imperial policy.” The Ukrainian officials also asserted there are signs of “Ukrainophobia” in their books.

The move was met with complete silence in Western media, and the story has gone almost completely overlooked, despite Dostoevsky and Tolstoy having long been widely studied and appreciated across the globe, and in American colleges, literary programs, theaters – and among common avid readers.

Their works, from The Brothers Karamazov to the massive War and Peace have done much to shape Western culture and higher education in the 150 years of the works’ existence. 

And yet the Ukrainian government-linked institute now claims the historic prominence of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy across Ukraine was not because it is literary art with universal appeal, but somehow part of a long-running Russification campaign designed to marginalize the Ukrainian language and culture.

Ukraine has in essence just labeled two of the world’s greatest historical authors, which far pre-date both the modern Russian Federation and Soviet Union of the 20th century, as ‘propaganda’.

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Too On Brand: School Purges 1984, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, and Others to Promote ‘Diversity’

You really can’t make things like this up. 

Seriously. Liberals may want to purge libraries of “wrongthink,” but you would expect that anybody with an IQ above room temperature could have figured out that tossing out more than half your books in a school library, including 1984 and Animal Farm, would be a bad look. 

But no. Not in Canada, apparently. And certainly not at the Thames Valley School District in London, Ontario. Out of a High School library of 18,000 books, 10,000 were “deselected” and tossed into the trash because they didn’t fit the vision of having an “inclusive” library. Presumably, that explains why they tossed out books by J.K. Rowling, which I assume were quite popular with the kids; she engages in wrongthink about gender, and needs to be purged. 

A London, Ontario, secondary school binned more than 10,000 library books between January and March this year under the Thames Valley District School Board’s “inclusive libraries revitalization project,” eliminating more than half of the school’s 18,000-book collection.

H.B. Beal’s library once held one of the largest collections in the board. Today, fewer than 8,300 books remain. The estimated value of the discarded materials exceeds $180,000.

Education Minister Paul Calandra moved quickly to halt further library culls while the ministry investigates the Beal revitalization project. A spokesperson for the ministry confirmed last week that “the minister has directed that all current and future library collection reviews be paused, pending further evaluation.”

According to board documentation, the project aims “to revitalize the collections of Thames Valley schools to ensure they are culturally responsive, reflect our diverse student population, and contain accurate and up-to-date information.” The project adds that it will focus on “deselecting texts with harmful images, messaging, slurs, and racial epithets to facilitate the safety and well-being of all students.”

Some of the books “deselected” blow your mind, not because it would surprise you that radical leftists would want to hide them, but because it makes their goals of purging the library of any ideological diversity so blatant. They literally purged books about…book banning. 

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Insanity: Loyola University Maryland’s Department of English Claims Literature Promotes “White Supremacy”

In the latest insanity from liberal education, according to The College Fix, “Loyola University Maryland’s Department of English recently announced its commitment to ‘anti-racism,’ claiming literature promotes ‘white supremacy.”

The department of English proclaims on its website, “Literature and the literary canons have been used to validate “white supremacy.”

It’s clear that DEI and Woke ideology remain the dominant ideology at Loyola.

The department is even considering renaming the website.

The department also echoes Woke slogans like “black lives matter,” “racism is based in white supremacy,” and “confronting racism requires that we actively facilitate conversations about it in the classroom.”

This department is biased and has an anti-Western civilization bent in that it views Western and English literature as inherently bad.

The English department even made the absurd promise to “acknowledge the centrality of whiteness in the history and evolution of literary canons.”

The department pledges to “hire a professor of African American literature and include more authors of color in their curriculum. It will examine all classes and commit to “making anti-racist teaching central in each one.”

This sounds more like a struggle session than anything else.

They went even further than that, absurdly saying they would “avoid centering the experiences of white students” in the classroom by “interrogating the presumed invisibility of whiteness in the classroom and the concept of the ‘universal reader’ as always being white and male.”

Loyola University in Maryland was founded by the Jesuits, a Catholic order.

According to The College Fix, “The school’s English department sees that Jesuit mission as a “commitment to serving an urban, majority-Black city with a history of racial injustice.”

Even a Professor at Emory called out this Woke direction the school’s English department is headed in.

Prof. Bauerlein rightly argued, “The position of the Loyola department gives neat evidence for why English has become such a marginal discipline.”

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University adds ‘trigger warning’ to James Bond novel ‘Dr. No’

An entertainment staple for over 50 years, the suave British spy James Bond has been featured in numerous novels and 26 films, the most recent being “No Time to Die,” actor Daniel Craig’s last as Agent 007.

News broke this past week that the film franchise’s new owner, Amazon Studios, digitally removed 007’s handgun from various Bond actors’ poses. But after fan outrage, Amazon put the guns back … and offered no explanation, according to OutKick.

The Pierce Brosnan pose for “Goldeneye” looked particularly stupid.

Now the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. has included the Bond novel “Dr. No” on a list of 50 books that have trigger warnings, according to The Telegraph.

“Please note: James Bond films and novels are popular to this day but contain many problematic issues such as racism, misogyny and xenophobia,” the university said. “We will be discussing the problems with this text in all of our seminars.”

The school said it “encourages students ‘to engage with teaching texts in an informed way’ through content notes.”

Content warnings recognise the diverse lived experience of students and that there can be content they will find challenging or potentially distressing as a result of their experiences. It is our duty of care to our students to do so. The warning enables students to prepare emotionally, engage more deeply and discuss the issues raised by the content critically and constructively.

Ian Kinane, a lecturer at the University of Roehampton and editor of the International Journal of James Bond Studies, defended the trigger warning.

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Kamala’s Memoir Is So Bad, It’s Hard To Believe She Read It

The reviews are in for former Vice President Kamala Harris’ memoir, “107 Days.” The book is bad on its own merits. And worse for what’s left of Harris’ reputation. 

First, an unforgivably tardy critique of former President Joe Biden’s decision to stay in the presidential race. Harris never managed to artfully separate from Biden after she took his place as Democratic nominee. 

“‘It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Harris writes, according to a screenshot. “Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”

An honest Democrat strategist might say the same of Harris’ decision to run in Biden’s stead. 

But Harris isn’t done complaining. 

“I shouldered the blame for the porous border, an issue that had proved intractable for Democratic and Republican administrations alike,” Harris whines. Note: President Donald Trump’s second administration has proved the issue is more than tractable. 

Harris spins securing the border as an utter impossibility. 

“No one around the president advocated, Give her something she can win with.”

What would that be? Third grade math? Slurring her words during interviews?

Harris claims she was “castigated for, apparently, delivering [a speech] too well.” 

The Biden White House’s “thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed. None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him.” 

If Harris managed to speak with half the lucidity she mustered for this book, she might’ve had different presidential odds. 

Instead, Harris blames “a series of mistakes, committed over years, mostly by other people,” according to a review of the memoir from Semafor. 

“I didn’t have enough time,” she writes, according to The New York Times (NYT). 

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