Defund reading. Fire the teachers. DeSantis 451.
Ray Bradbury, one of my favorite writers when I was as a kid, wrote Fahrenheit 451 in 1953.
Often regarded as one of his best works, Fahrenheit 451 presents an American society where books have been outlawed and "firemen" burn any that are found.
Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature books burn.
The novel follows Guy Montag, a fireman who becomes disillusioned with his role of censoring literature and destroying knowledge, eventually quitting his job and committing himself to the preservation of writings.
Fahrenheit 451 was written by Bradbury during the McCarthy era.
In 1966, the year I graduated high school, the great French director Francois Truffaut turned the novel into a distopian film starring Oskar Werner and Julie Christie.
In Ron DeSantis’ Florida today Fahrenheit 451 could be considered a documentary.
DeSantis and the state’s Republican legislature have passed a law censoring what books students can read and they can only read books that follow the MAGA political line.
Lists of book titles are being collected and scoured to find any reference to what the bureaucrats consider Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory.
Teachers who complain are being fired and threatened with criminal charges.
Today the Washington Post reports on the firing of Florida teacher Brian Covey.
Brian Covey, a substitute teacher at Mandarin Middle School in Jacksonville, posted a video to Twitter last month showing rows of empty bookshelves at the school’s library. Covey is one of several teachers in Duval and Manatee counties who’ve posted photos or videos in recent weeks showing how school districts are responding to new Florida laws regarding books and materials available to children in classrooms and libraries. Duval County Public Schools, the district for Mandarin Middle School, urged educators last month to follow the new laws and “err on the side of caution” to determine whether a book “is developmentally appropriate for student use.”
“They removed every single book from my children’s classrooms …” he wrote on Jan. 27. “I read books about the consequences of this when I was in school …”
DeSantis claimed the videos of empty book shelves in classrooms and libraries were fake news.
Then DeSantis moved to have the teacher, Brian Covey, fired.
Kate Ruane, a director at the free-speech nonprofit organization PEN America, said in an interview that Duval’s termination of Covey may have violated the teacher’s First Amendment rights.
“What the district has done is clearly an attempt to chill the speech of public school teachers,” Ruane said.
Covey admitted that it was “not in my list of goals this week to announce that I was fired,” saying he mostly tweets about the National Football League’s Jacksonville Jaguars. Covey, who said he had not received termination documents or his final paycheck as of Saturday, guessed he would not return to teaching amid what’s unfolding in Florida.
“My kids are being used as pawns in a political game,” he told The Post. “I’m just hoping my kids’ reality is not a blueprint for something that can happen across the nation.”