At the heart of wokeness is a lie – the Marxist lie that human society is reducible to power imbalances between the oppressor and the oppressed. Thus wokeness depends on false narratives to sell itself and smear its opponents.

Below is the next in a series of the Top Ten Woke Lies subverting American politics and culture. To see the first two, numbers 10 and 9, Click HERE.

8) The Right is Banning Books

A lie the Left never tires of exploiting is the claim that the authoritarian mullahs of the Right are censorship-happy.

The reliably propagandist New York Times, for example, fear-mongered last year about “A Fast-Growing Network of Conservative Groups Is Fueling a Surge in Book Bans.” The equally left-wing Los Angeles Times claimed that “Republicans are banning books about historical truths,” referring to the false narratives of Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project. National Public Radio, the taxpayer-funded propaganda outlet, warned of Republican leaders trying to ban books on race and LGBTQ issues. The George Soros-created think tank Center for American Progress impressively managed to hit Republicans with two smears in a single headline, complaining that they “have made it easier for shooters to access guns, but they’ve made it harder for students to access books.”

The left-leaning American Library Association (ALA) reported a record number of attempts to ban or restrict library books and resources in 2022: 2,571 unique book titles, up from 1,858 the previous year. The ALA fretted about “organized censorship groups” (by which they mean parental rights groups) and bills facilitating the restriction of books that have been proposed or passed in a number of states, including Arizona, Iowa, Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma – and especially in Florida, run by the Left’s bete noire, Governor Ron DeSantis.

“A book challenge is a demand to remove a book from a library’s collection so that no one else can read it,” wrote Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the library organization’s Orwellian-sounding Office for Intellectual Freedom, in a release. This is a lie; what she and the ALA and the leftist media want to obscure is that a “challenge” is not the same as a “ban.” A book can be challenged for many reasons, most often that it contains sexuality or violence or themes that are not appropriate for young readers. A “challenge” is many times simply about allowing the parents to decide when, if ever, their own children are mature enough to be exposed to such material.

Another thing the Left doesn’t admit is that they themselves often seek to ban books or intimidate authors that trigger their politically correct sensibilities: witness their stealth editing of such books as those by beloved children’s writer Roald Dahl or James Bond creator Ian Fleming, or the outright refusal to sell books questioning trans ideology, such as When Harry Became Sally, or their cancel culture threats of violence and death against Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

The ALA’s Caldwell-Stone went on to sniff hypocritically that “[t]he choice of what to read must be left to the reader or, in the case of children, to parents. That choice does not belong to self-appointed book police.”

Exactly. Indeed it should be the parents’ choice, and that’s precisely what the hysterical claims of a conservative book-banning frenzy are all about: the elite Left’s belief that they are more educated (“I have a master’s degree!”) and therefore more qualified than the parents to decide what children should read. And since the agenda of leftist educators who dominate the public school system (and most private schools as well) is not education but the indoctrination of children into a woke worldview, they resist parental attempts to have any say in what is or is not appropriate for their children to read. It is these radicals, not the parents, who are the “self-appointed book police.”

As David Harsanyi wrote recently at The Federalist, “For the left, the banned book claim is a political racket, allowing them to feign indignation over the alleged ‘authoritarianism’ of Republicans who don’t want kids reading identitarian pseudohistories or books depicting oral sex, rape, violence, or gender dysphoria in their schools.”

The scare term “book ban,” Harsanyi concluded, is “just a euphemism for progressive administrators and teachers losing some of their power over your kids.”

This lie that Republicans are book burners like the “firemen” of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 comes not just from the left, but even from RINO party infiltrators like former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney. In the wake of last week’s school shooting in Nashville in which a woman who “identified” as a male shot six little children and staff members dead, Cheney took a cheap shot at “fellow” conservatives instead of decrying the growing violence of the trans community and its allies: “If we really want to keep our children safe, we need to spend less time banning books and more time stopping the horrific gun violence in our schools.”

Governor DeSantis, again at the center of culture war controversy (see the previous two of the Top Ten Woke Lies), decried this false narrative as “a hoax” in a February press conference:

And they’re trying to say that because we have parental rights and because we have curriculum transparency — if you have a book that has hardcore pornography in the library that 10-year-olds can access, a parent objects to that, that does not satisfy Florida standards. It should not be in the library with those young kids. And I think 99 percent of parents agree with that… If it’s explicit and pornographic, parents have the right to object and it should be taken off [the school reading list].

DeSantis went on to outline, during his State of the State address last month, his initiative to remove these books sexualizing children from public grade schools. “We’re gonna expose exactly the books that parents are concerned about. You guys will not even be able to put it on your air because it’s gonna be so, so graphic,” he told reporters afterward.

Graphic indeed. Prior to a later press conference, DeSantis’ team played for the gathered media a video detailing some of the imagery DeSantis rightfully declared pornographic, from books found in Florida classrooms. Many of the reporters present turned off their news feeds, making DeSantis’ point about the explicit nature of the books. “I just think parents, when they’re sending their kids to school, they should not have to worry about this garbage being in the schools,” he said in the conference, emphasizing that taxpayers shouldn’t be funding such inappropriate material.

Any sensible grownup would find the content of such books shocking, but leftists aren’t sensible grownups but groomers literally hell-bent on inculcating a sexual consciousness in children to drive a wedge between them and their parents. The only thing Hollywood soap actress Nancy Lee Grahn, for example, found objectionable about the video DeSantis shared was not the graphic sexuality in books made available to children, but the fact that the governor wanted the books removed from school libraries. Grahn tweeted to her large social media following the hysterical warning that DeSantis is a “twisted sadist” who “will end up making Hitler seem nice.”

Imagine being so passionate about wanting little schoolchildren exposed to graphic images of group masturbation and anal sex that you deem your political opponent to be more evil than Hitler. That is today’s Democrat Party.

Stay tuned for more of the Top Ten Woke Lies.