“We don’t want kids in Portland learning material courtesy of the fossil fuel industry”, said Bill Bigelow. More on who he is in a moment. For now, yes, Bigelow said “we don’t want kids in Portland learning”.
That’s why Bigelow helped spearhead Portland’s (Oregon) ban on school textbooks that dare question the new religion that is climate change.
Bill Bigelow is a former Portland public school teacher. While the dates of his employment with Portland’s schools and the reason he isn’t employed there any longer are unclear, it’s noteworthy that his ideology for some period of time informed the developing young minds of Portland’s children. “It takes a village”, remember?
Such an overt instance of book burning – albeit in this case climate-change-worshipping Portlandistas avoided the actual dousing of books in flammable fluid and setting alight, praise be to Gaia – hasn’t happened since Elvis was laying the groundwork for Beyoncé, and when “hybrid” in the automotive sense meant a Chevy El Camino or Ford Ranchero.
Yes, Portland’s public schools have joined that illustrious cortege of historical movements that checked intellectual thought at the door, and then made certain their ideological chastity remained intact through repression of “deviant” thoughts. Salem’s witch burners, those who thought Chuck Berry was Satan incarnate, flat-earthers, eugenicists, North Korean history books that say Kim was the first man on the moon, ISIS, and all the rest can now count Portland as their soulmates.
In some places (ISIS controlled territory for example), that repression is of the “hard” variety. Immolation. Drownings. Decapitation. Brute force employed to squash any idea that might challenge the ruminations of society’s upper crust. In ‘merica, it’s a “soft” repression the upper crust uses to get rid of ideological non-conformists. “Soft” repression, such as banning books from public schools.
That’s what happens when a most contemptible form of false academia is permitted to fester within a culture. Were Portlandistas comfortable in their belief that all climate change is man caused, and were Portlandistas something other than 21st Century brown shirts, they’d invite all sides of the climate change debate into their classrooms and let the facts win out. But they aren’t and they know the facts don’t bode well for their belief system, so thus in 2016 they’ve reverted to a book ban in order make sure their point of view remains an unchallenged, unvarnished, and unverified truth.
Lost in all this:
– No doubt the Bill Bigelow’s of the Portland book ban love their lap tops, cell phones, I-this and I-that. Those things are made of plastic. Plastic is a product of the fossil fuel industry. No oil means no plastic. Hey, Bill Bigelow, your phone’s ringing, it’s hypocrisy calling to ask why your phone isn’t made out of pine or maple.
– The fossil fuel industry employs hundreds of thousands of Americans. Sure, it’s convenient to imagine ‘big oil’ as a cabal of rich, white guys sitting around deciding the fate of the free world as casually as Portland might ban a text book. The reality is, a whole bunch of those “little guys” people like Bernie Sanders pretend to care about constitute “big oil”.
– While the fossil fuel industry is pilloried for – GASP – the sin of earning a profit, the fact is that your average oil company earns a fraction of what “big internet” rakes in. Oil companies make about $0.08 on the dollar. Google, Apple, Fakebook, and all the others people on the left adore make several times that. (Some make $0.54 on the dollar). Windfall profiteering called, wanted to know how many “likes” they had.
These, though, are pesky facts. Remember, people like the Portlandistas “don’t want” people “learning” things. They want everyone to accept whatever they decree and then conform to it without question.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Book_burning_(3).jpg; CC license 2.0
