In maybe the most high profile example of the “leopards ate my face” phenomenon, Vice-President-In-Name-Only J. David Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy is being pulled from the shelves at at least one Department of Defense school for being “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics.”
The American military operates schools that serve 66,000 children of service members, and they recently received a memo pushing them to pull certain books. The memo is “gives officials broad descriptions but does not provide specific names of books that are banned from the 161 elementary, middle and high schools for children of American service members in the U.S. and abroad,” according to Task & Purpose, which got a copy of the memo.
This move comes as a part of the broader campaign of repression by Don Trump and his coterie of soy right weirdos, who are sweatily forcing their way into our libraries, schools, and bathrooms to enforce their own strange definitions of normal.
The librarians who are supposed to enact this policy seem confused, and interpretations of the memo are varying widely. One librarian told Task & Purpose, “I think there will be some schools that move hundreds of books and some that will move maybe a dozen or single digits.”
One high school in Europe, for example, pulled The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Well-Read Black Girl by Glory Edim.
The same school also pulled Hillbilly Elegy, written by Vice President Vance, the menacing skinsuit trying to make having a stick up your ass look fun. The 2016 memoir was behind Vance’s rise to prominence, and was especially popular with West-Wing-fetishists and skittish op-ed page types. You probably shouldn’t read it, but if you’re curious, I recommend the Know Your Enemy episode dissecting the book.
Like with so many instances of this administration’s cruel flailing, it’s not clear what this memo is really supposed to do. The Department of Defense Education Activity regulations already requires schools to have a “Challenged Materials Review Committee” to respond to complaints, so the memo seems redundant. It leaves enough leeway for someone brave to stand up and not comply, as this is clearly intended to scare and destabilize the Americans who Republicans hate. It’s ugly, stupid, and mean; it’s also very confusing for these school administrators.
One group that is not confused are the students at these military schools, who have already started to protest. Kids at a school in Germany walked out on new Secretary of Defense and the highest-ranking government employee you’re likely to run into at a dive bar, Pete Hegseth. Good for them!
In the meantime, I wonder if Vance, who puts the sad sack in sycophant, is going to try to get his book taken off this banned list, or if he’ll once again roll over and accept humiliation from the hog-men he’s hitched his wagon to.
